More Horror from Graham Masterton
BLACK ANGEL
DEATH MASK
DEATH TRANCE
EDGEWISE
HEIRLOOM
PREY
RITUAL
SPIRIT
TENGU
THE CHOSEN CHILD
THE SPHINX
UNSPEAKABLE
WALKERS
MANITOU BLOOD
REVENGE OF THE MANITOU
IKON
SACRIFICE
THE SWEETMAN CURVE
The Katie Maguire Series
WHITE BONES
BROKEN ANGELS
RED LIGHT
TAKEN FOR DEAD
BLOOD SISTERS
BURIED
LIVING DEATH
DEAD GIRLS DANCING
DEAD MEN WHISTLING
THE LAST DROP OF BLOOD
The Scarlet Widow Series
SCARLET WIDOW
THE COVEN
Standalones
GHOST VIRUS
First published in the United Kingdom in 1981 by Sphere Books
This edition first published in the United Kingdom in 2020 by Head of Zeus Ltd
Copyright © Graham Masterton, 1981
The moral right of Graham Masterton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781838935757
Head of Zeus
First Floor East
5–8 Hardwick Street
London EC1R 4RG
www.headofzeus.com
Welcome Page
Copyright
Dedication
Book One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Book Two
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
About the author
An Invitation from the Publisher
WHAT MAKES A MAN TURN INTO A MURDERER OVERNIGHT?
FAMINE
The Greek-looking man said: ‘This food in here—you think that you’re going to keep it all to yourself? All of it? Just because you’re a storekeeper you think you’ve got some God-given right to survive while everybody else starves?’
Nicolas didn’t even want to think about it. He said: ‘I’m giving you three. You understand me? Three, and then I shoot.’
The first shot missed. The revolver bucked in his hands, and he heard the bang of broken glass at the back of the store, followed by a sudden rush of green olives from three broken jars. He fired again before he could allow himself to think, and the Greek’s shoulder burst apart in a spray of gory catsup. And then there was a deep, deafening bavvooom! and Nicolas realized with strange slow horror that the Greek had fired back at him with his shotgun, and that he’d been hit, badly hit, in the belly and the thighs…
‘They are as sick that surfeit with too much.
As they that starve with nothing.’
—Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice
He was crossing the red-asphalt yard in front of the farmhouse when he heard a car-horn blaring from the direction of the north-west gate. He shifted the saddle he was carrying to his right arm and raised his hand to shield his eyes from the dazzling scarlet glare of the setting sun. A Jeep Wagoneer was bouncing along the track towards him, stirring up a high trail of shining dust, and whoever was driving it was in enough of a panic to ignore South Burlington Farm’s strict 5 mph speed limit.
He laid the saddle down on the ground as the Jeep squealed and bucked to a stop in front of him. The door swung open and out scrambled his cereal-crop manager, Willard Noakes, as quickly as if the Jeep were about to explode. He was one of those skinny, awkward, jerky kind of people, Willard Noakes, and Season had once compared him to a Swiss army knife. ‘He seems to have so many arms and legs. He can open a door, and light a cigarette, and knock over a mug of coffee, and scratch his head, all at one time,’ she had laughed.
But there was nothing funny or awkward about the way Willard hurried across to him now. Willard’s bony, sun-leathered face was smudged with dirt and there was dust in his walrus moustache. He said: ‘Ed, you’d best come quick. And I mean quick. It’s something real serious.’
‘What’s wrong, Willard?’ Ed asked him. ‘You came down that track like Evel Knievel.’
‘I’m sorry, Ed. But it’s something you got to see.’
‘An accident? Someone hurt?’
‘Well, you could call it some kind of accident, although I’m darned if I know what sort. And if anybody’s going to get themselves hurt, it’s going to be you.’
‘Okay.’ Ed raised his arm and beckoned to one of his engineering hands, who was hunkered outside of the garage, cleaning out a fuel-oil pump. The man laid down his tools and came across the yard, wiping his hands on a rag.
‘You wanted something, Mr Hardesty?’
‘Yes, please, Ben. Take this saddle into the house for me, would you, and make sure it’s hung up right. And tell Mrs Hardesty I might be a half-hour late.’
‘Sure thing, Mr Hardesty.’
Ed climbed up into the Jeep’s passenger seat while Willard started the engine. They swung around the yard and then headed back towards the north-west gate, past the stables and the garages, and out through the white-painted fence.
The Jeep’s FM radio was playing Coward of the County, almost inaudibly. Ed reached across and switched it off.
‘You want to tell me what’s wrong?’ he asked Willard.
Willard glanced at him. They were driving along the wide dusty track that ran beside one of their finest stands of shellbark hickories, and then out across the twenty-three thousand acre expanse of South Burlington’s northern wheatfields. The sun was almost melted away now, except for one smouldering crimson crescent and the miles of ripening wheat appeared to be an odd bright pink.
‘I don’t know,’ said Willard, unhappily. ‘I think maybe you’d better see it for yourself. I don’t drink I’m competent to judge.’
‘You’re not competent? How competent do you think I am?’ demanded Ed. ‘You’ve been growing wheat for nearly forty years, and all I’ve been doing is sitting on my butt in a stuffy New York office, telling little old ladies how to salt away their surplus dollars for a rainy day.’
Willard thought about that and then shrugged. ‘All I can say is. I’ve never seen anything like it before. I’ve never even heard about anything like it before. But I’m not asking you to take a look at it because I think you might know what it is. I’m sine you won’t. I’m asking you to take a look at it because it’s your farm.’
‘Is it the crops?’
Willard nodded. ‘I can’t even describe it, Ed. I’ve never seen anything like it before. I mean that. Forty years or not.’
The Jeep sped them across the flat, early-evening landscape. The sky faded gradually from a florid rose-colour to a dusky ceramic blue and a cold and creamy moon hung above the horizon. Ed sat sideways in his seat, his arm slung over the back, watching his fields revolve slowly around him.
His fields. He still couldn’t quite believe it. The idea that he actually owned all eighty-five thousand acres of South Burlington Farm – the idea that each handful of dirt he could dig his fingers into for more than ten miles was his own personal property – it all seemed like a strange waking fantasy.
South Burlington had always been his father’s, by ownership and by deed and by that special kind of title that only a lifetime of sweat and pain and sheer arrogance can earn. His father, Dan Hardesty, had been short, stocky, and pugnacious, a tough little bustling pig in Levis. He had built his farm by aggressive mechanisation, shrewd marketing, ruthless buying of agricultural real-estate, and by never sleeping for more than four hours a night.
To Ed, and to Ed’s mother, and to Ed’s older brother Michael, the old man had seemed to be immortal and indestructible and it was only when he had collapsed from a stroke in the middle of last year’s harvesting, felled in one of his own fields under a sky like boiling blue ink, that the family had come to understand at last that he wasn’t going to live for ever. Dan Hardesty, the creator of South Burlington Farm, the wealthiest, toughest man in Kingman County, Kansas, was only days away from death, and someone was going to have to take over.
Michael, as stubby and proud as his father, had been the legal and natural successor. During his teenage years, Michael had stayed on the farm, learning the modem and computerised business of growing wheat, while Ed, who was tall and wiry and thoughtful, like his maternal grandfather, gravitated away from the farm, and then the county, and eventually, the state. In the years of Kennedy and Johnson, flower-power and Vietnam, Ed had gone to Kansas University in Manhattan, Kansas, on a financial study course and then to Columbia Business College, and eventually made his way to New York, where he had been taken on by a smart new investment corporation called Blyth, Thalberg & Wong.
As a boy, Ed had always disliked the farm – maybe for no other reason than he knew it was never going to be his. The farm was all dust and heat and just like his father had been demanding of his mother, he had been equally demanding of Ed, as if he was trying to test him, and maybe break him. Whenever Ed had tried to slip out on a date with one of the girls from the neighbouring farms, or from town, his father had invariably caught him at the gate and given him some last-minute chore like folding sacks or sweeping up dust, so that if he ever made it to the girl’s house, he was always at least an hour late and perspiring, and prickly as a scarecrow with wheat chaff. One pretty and unkind young girl had nicknamed him Li’l Abner.
On the day before Dan Hardesty’s funeral, however, as the family were solemnly gathered on the farm to pay their last respects to the man who had built their lives for them, Ed’s whole existence had been turned upside down. Michael had been obliged to drive over to Wichita late in the afternoon for an urgent meeting with the bank. On the way back, just after midnight, he had tried to overtake a truck on route 54 where it crossed the South Ninnescah River, and he had failed to see another car coming towards him in the mist. The Kansas Highway Patrol had estimated the collision speed to be 125 mph, head-on.
Henry Pollock, the bald and breathy family accountant, had taken Ed aside after his father’s burial and said: ‘If you want South Burlington, son, it’s all yours. You only have to say the word.’
He remembered glancing across towards Season, who had been standing a little way away from the family crowd in her black veil and her black suit like a beautiful and elegant raven; and he remembered thinking – she knows that Pollock’s offering me the farm, and she knows that I’m going to have to say yes. Why doesn’t she come across and support me? Why doesn’t she take my arm and say it’s all right?
Well, he knew now why she hadn’t, he thought to himself, as Willard drove the Jeep across the pale reaches of ripening wheat. He sure knew now.
Willard switched on the Jeep’s headlights. ‘The worst of it’s just about a half-mile up ahead, right over there, to the left. Do you mind if I take her staight across the wheat?’
‘If you have to,’ Ed told him. His father had always gone apoplectic with fury if he found tyre-tracks across the fields, and Ed had tried to keep the same rule about respecting the crops. There was only one way to run a farm like South Burlington, and that was efficient and hard, and with no favours to anyone. He sat uncomfortably in his seat, while Willard veered off the road and drove through the tall, rustling crops.
‘I don’t make a habit of this, Ed, I can tell you,’ said Willard, as if he sensed his employer’s discomfort.
Ed didn’t answer, and for a short while there was nothing but the whining sound of the Jeep’s transmission, the pattering of wheat ears on the bodywork and the occasional tap of a moth on the windshield. Ed thought: if you could drive a car into the ocean, this is what it would be like.
Willard was leaning forward in his seat now and straining his eyes to see where he was. Eventually, a white marker stick appeared through the twilight and a flashlight was waved at them. Willard turned the Jeep in a semi-circle and stopped it. They climbed out into the warm, breezy night.
‘Hi, Mr Hardesty,’ said the man with the flashlight. ‘Glad you could make it so quick.’
‘Hi, Jack,’ said Ed. ‘Willard just caught me going into supper. What goes on here?’
Jack Marowitz was one of Ed’s senior farm managers. He was young – only twenty-eight – but he had a silo-full of honours from the Iowa State University of Science and Technology in the agricultural uses of advanced chemistry, automation and computer techniques. It was Jack’s job to make sure that what grew in the fields came out of those fields in optimum condition and was delivered to the right place at exactly the right moment Jack could plan the harvesting of ten thousand acres down to the last half-hour.
He was quiet, almost diffident, with a thick brown head of hair and Coke-bottle glasses, but Ed liked him because he didn’t rant and rave and he did his job well.
Jack held up an ear of wheat in the palm of his hand and directed his flashlight on it.
‘What do you make of this?’ he asked Ed. Ed peered at it closely, arid then poked it with his finger.
‘It’s rotten,’ he said. ‘The whole damned thing’s rotten.’
The ear of wheat was blackened and every grain inside it was dark and slimy with decay. Ed took it out of Jack’s hand and sniffed it, and he could smell a distinctly sour odour, like whisky mash.
‘It appears to me like some kind of blight,’ said Jack. ‘The only trouble is, what kind? It certainly isn’t rust, arid it sure as hell isn’t smut.’
Ed stood straight and looked around. ‘How much of the crop’s been affected?’ he asked. ‘Maybe it’s just some localised soil complaint. Maybe these seeds weren’t dressed.’
‘Well, that’s the problem,’ put in Willard. ‘And that’s why I wanted you to come take a look for yourself. It covers something like five acres at the moment, but it’s spreading.’
Ed took the flashlight from Jack and walked a little way out into the wheat. He shone the beam this way and that, quickly, and every way he shone it, he saw the same thing. The ears of wheat were drooping on their stalks and they were all dark brown with decay. The smell of sourness was carried on the breeze, and under the light of that pale and emotionless moon, silently suspended on the horizon, Ed felt as if the world had subtly changed position on its axis, as if things would never be quite the same again.
‘You never saw anything like this at Ames?’ he asked Jack, switching off the flashlight and walking back.
‘Nothing at all. And, believe me, I saw some pretty grotesque stuff.’
‘When did you spot it?’
‘Round about two this afternoon,’ Willard explained. ‘We were making out the harvesting rota, just along the track there-a-ways. I was standing on the roof of the Jeep, looking around to see how the crops were lying, what with all those winds we’ve been having and all – and I could see a dark patch from the road. At first I thought it was the shadow from a cloud. But when it didn’t move, like the other shadows did – well, then I knew there was something wrong.’
Two this afternoon?’ asked Ed. ‘It’s only eight now. How can you tell if it’s spreading?’
Jack cleared his throat. ‘At two this afternoon, it was only covering two to three acres.’
‘What do you mean? You mean it’s spread two acres in six hours? That’s crazy.’
Willard’s expression was indistinguishable in the dusk, but Ed could tell from the tone of his voice that he was embarrassed. ‘I’m afraid it’s true, Ed. We didn’t measure exactly, or nothing like that. But it seems like it’s going through the wheat like some kind of a slow fire.’
Ed stood silent for a while, his hand over his mouth, staring at the dark patch of decaying wheat in the middle of his field. If the blight could spread at the rate of two acres in six hours, that meant it could eat up eight acres a day at the very least. The danger was that as the circumference of the blighted area increased, so the speed at which the disease burned up his crops would increase. Willard was right. It was just like a slow fire.
‘Let’s get in the Jeep,’ Ed suggested at last. ‘Then let’s circle the affected wheat and see how much of a problem we’ve got on our hands. I want to watch this blight in action. I want to see it actually spreading.’
They climbed into the Wagoneer, and Willard started up the engine.
‘Make sure you only drive over unblighted wheat,’ Ed told him. ‘If it’s any kind of a fungus, I don’t want it spread around the farm on the tyres of your Jeep.’
Willard nodded and backed up a few feet before turning the wheel and taking the Jeep in a slow, bumpy circle around the darkened edge of the crops. Ed reached into the pocket of his red plaid shirt and took out a pack of small cigars. He stuck one between his lips without offering them around. He knew that neither Willard nor Jack smoked, although Willard had been known to make short work of a half-bottle of Old Grandad.
Jack said, ‘It must be some kind of airborne fungus. Otherwise, it couldn’t spread so damned fast. But the question is – what made it start here? And where did it come from?’
‘You haven’t had any reports of it elsewhere on the farm, have you?’ asked Ed.
‘Not so far. But I’ve been kind of incommunicado today. My walkie-talkie’s been on the fritz for a week, and I put it in for repair.’
‘I think we’d better take the chopper out at first light, and see if there’s any more of it,’ said Ed. ‘If it’s spreading as fast as you say it is, we could finish up with only half a crop, or maybe no crop at all.’
He turned around to Jack, who was sitting in the back seat. Jack gave him an uneasy grin, almost as if the blight was his fault.
‘You’ve taken samples, I suppose?’ said Ed.
Jack nodded. ‘I took about twenty or thirty while Willard was going down to the farm to get you. I’ll try to analyse some of them myself, but the rest of them can go to Dr Benson, down at the State Agricultural Laboratory.’
‘You think Benson’s capable of finding out what it is?’
‘He’s as capable as anyone. I mean, sure, he’s a little eccentric, but there’s nothing wrong with his technique. He isolated that seed fungus way before the Federal people came up with anything.’
‘All right,’ said Ed. ‘But I don’t want to have to wait for a week while he fiddles around with crackpot theories, the way we had to with that boosted fertiliser.’
‘I’ll tell him to play it straight.’
‘And sober, I hope.’
‘Sure.’
They had reached the crest of a gentle rise in the ground, and now, by the light of the moon, they were looking down on the five-mile slope that took the northern wheatfields of South Burlington as far as the Mystic River, a tributary of the South River, itself a tributary of the South Ninnescah. Ed felt the skin on the back of his neck tingle at what he saw. Across the silvery wheat, a dark corroded stain had already spread for a mile in each direction, and westwards it reached as far as he could see.
He touched Willard’s arm and whispered, ‘Stop.’ Then, when the Jeep was halted, he climbed down into the wheat and stood there silent, unmoving, like the witness to an accident which he was helpless to prevent.
Willard and Jack watched him as he knelt down and studied the ears of wheat all around him. Some were blighted, some were still clear. But even as he watched them, the clear wheat gradually began to darken, and within minutes it was as rotten as the rest. He stayed where he was for a while, and then he stood up and came back to the Jeep.
‘What do you think if we burn a circle around it?’ he asked Willard. ‘Isolate it, like a fire with a firebreak?’
‘We could try,’ said Willard. ‘Do you want to go back to the farm and round up the men?’
Jack said: ‘If the blight is airborne, which I think it is, then clearing a firebreak really isn’t going to do much good. The wind’s erratic tonight, west to north-west. It’s going to spread the fungus all over the farm before you can do anything worthwhile about it.’
Ed looked at him. ‘Have you got a better idea?’ he asked. He tried to control the sharpness in his voice, but it was difficult. His father had always taught him that it was better to do something than nothing, and he knew just what Jack would have suggested. Sitting on their backsides waiting for the laboratory report, while the whole eighty-five thousand acres turned black all around them.
‘We could try spraying,’ said Jack. ‘Maybe a dose of Twenty-four D would do it.’
‘Oh yes, and who’s going to fly a crop-duster at night? And what are we going to say to the health authorities, when they find that the fungicide levels in our grain are ten per cent higher than anybody else’s? We might just as well set fire to the whole damned farm, or let it go rot.’
‘Ed – there’s no need to lose your cool,’ said Willard, gently. ‘I’ll try anything you say. But even if we wait until morning, we’re only going to lose a fraction of the total crop. I think the best answer is to leave it alone until we have some reasonable idea of what it is.’
‘And supposing nobody can find out? Even you, Jack, or your eccentric Dr Benson?’
Willard tugged at his moustache. ‘They’re just darn well going to have to find out. That’s all. I’ve put too much of my life into South Burlington Farm to see a whole year’s wheat harvest go bad, and Jack knows that. Don’t you. Jack?’
‘We’ll isolate this blight, don’t you worry,’ said Jack. ‘I know it’s serious, but I’m going to take it back to the farm right now and spend some time on it and Kerry can run some samples over to Wichita first thing in the morning.’ Ed stared out at the acres and acres of drooping black wheat. ‘You really don’t believe that a firebreak would hold it back?’ he asked, almost as if he was speaking to himself.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Jack. ‘I just think you’d be using up energy and manpower and money for no good reason.’ Ed rubbed his eyes. ‘Okay, then,’ he said, ‘Let’s get back. I’d like to put a call in to Charlie Warburg and see if we can claim some compensation for any profits we lose. Henry Pollock ought to be told, too.’
They climbed back into the Jeep and made their way back across the fields to the track. The moon was higher now, and the light that fell across South Burlington Farm was alien and cold. Ed smoked his cigar half-way down, then stubbed it out in the ashtray. Nobody who worked on a wheat farm ever tossed a glowing butt out of the window.
As they approached the farm buildings, they could see the pattern of lighted windows in the farmhouse and the outbuildings which meant that all twenty of South Burlington’s John Deere tractors were in for refuelling and maintenance, that all the Jeeps and all the trailers were parked away for the night, and that Season Hardesty was waiting at home for her husband to come back and eat.
Willard halted the Wagoneer on the red-asphalt yard. ‘I’ll call you later,’ he told Ed. ‘Maybe ten or eleven o’clock. I’d like to know what Charlie has to say.’
‘Okay,’ said Ed, and then he turned around to Jack. ‘I want you to call, too, just as soon as you’ve made up your mind what that blight could be. Or even if you can’t decide what it is at all.’
‘I sure will,’ said Jack.
‘Whatever happens,’ said Jack, ‘I want us all here by six o’clock sharp tomorrow morning, with Dyson Kane if he can make it, and I want us to make a complete chopper tour of the whole spread.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Willard.
Ed climbed down from the Jeep and closed the door. He looked at Jack for a moment and then he said, ‘Good luck.’ Willard released the Jeep’s handbrake and drove out of the yard and Ed stood with his hands on his hips watching its red tail-lights disappear along the eastbound track. Then he walked slowly across to the house and climbed the verandah steps to the front door.
Season was sitting with her feet up in the living-room, reading a copy of Vogue. The television was tuned to a special programme about Mid-Eastern oil, but the volume was turned down to a mutter. She didn’t even look up as Ed came into the room, unzipped his tan leather jacket, and sat down in the big library chair that had once been his father’s. Season always called this chair ‘the witness stand’, and she had wanted to throw it out when they first moved in; but to Ed, sitting in his father’s once-sacrosanct seat was one of those small but important parts of taking over South Burlington. It was no fun being an emperor if you didn’t have the throne that went with the job.
The living-room was decorated in soft blues – stylish, tasteful, with antique French furniture upholstered in ultramarine velvet. There were tall vases of flowers all around and a marble bust of Ralph Waldo Emerson on a slender mahogany torchère. The room was a perfect reflection of Season’s personality – cool, ordered, stylish, and discreetly expensive.
‘You’re late,’ said Season, turning over a page.
Ed unlaced his boots. ‘Didn’t Ben tell you I was going to be held up?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But the fact that I was told doesn’t alter the fact that you’re late. It was a fish souffle, and I’ve had to throw it away.’
‘You threw away my supper?’
She turned another page. ‘You don’t really care for flat fish soufflé, do you? I wish you’d told me. I would have kept it for you.’
‘Season—’ he said.
She looked up at last. She was a tall girl of thirty, with a thin oval face and alarmingly wide blue eyes. Her blonde hair was scraped back on her head and held with a tortoiseshell comb. In her silk Japanese pants suit, all pastel colours and loose pleats, she looked as if she was all wrists and ankles. She was pretty, and sharp, and Ed had loved her from only about three minutes after meeting her.
Some men found Season intimidating, both physically and conversationally. But Ed was a good four inches taller, and he had a slow dark masculine assurance about him – thick black hair, dense black eyebrows, deepset eyes of refreshing green – and the warm seriousness of whatever he said had always seemed to be able to enfold itself around her prickliest comments and render them harmless.
‘I’ve asked Dilys to make you an omelette,’ she said. ‘What about you?’
‘I don’t feel hungry any more. The act of cooking was enough to satisfy me.’
‘What about the act of throwing it all away?’
‘That satisfied me too.’
‘So I’ve come home to a satisfied wife?’
‘If you like.’
‘We’ve got a serious problem out there in the fields.’
‘Oh, yes?’ she asked. ‘Don’t tell me the computers are striking for more off-time. Or is it a human problem?’
‘It’s a crop problem. There’s a kind of blight. The wheat’s rotting right in front of our eyes. So far it’s spread over fifteen or twenty acres, and it’s still spreading.’
‘What are you going to do about it?’
‘I’m not sure yet. I don’t even know what kind of a blight it is.’
‘It’s probably a curse from your father.’
‘Season – we’ve got twenty acres of rotten wheat out there and that isn’t funny.’
Season uncurled herself from the sofa, stood up and walked across to the inlaid French drinks cabinet. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I’ve drunk enough yet to be funny. Do you want one?’
‘Scotch,’ said Ed. He pulled off his boots and laid them down beside his chair. Season glanced at them as if she was expecting them to start tap-dancing on their own. She mixed herself a strong daiquiri and pineapple juice and poured out a Chivas Regal on the rocks for Ed.
‘There you are, my lord and master,’ she said, handing him his glass.
‘Sally in bed?’ asked Ed, drinking, and then wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
‘She went up about a half-hour ago. She despaired of her father, just like I did.’
Ed let out a short, testy breath. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry about the soufflé. Willard came down like a bat out of hell and wanted me to go take a look at this blight. It’s very serious. Jack’s doing some tests on it tonight and tomorrow we’re going to send some samples across to Wichita. I had to go. I didn’t have any choice.’
Season sat down again. ‘All right,’ she said, more softly. ‘Abject apology accepted. I just don’t think I’m ever going to get used to the way I went through a wedding ceremony with an actuary in New York City and wound up married to a wheat farmer in Kansas. What do they call it? Not culture shock. Maybe horticulture shock.’
‘I’m just hoping this blight doesn’t spread in a compound ratio,’ said Ed.
‘What do you mean by that?’ asked Season, trying to look interested.
‘Compound growth means that the wider it spreads, the wider it spreads. It starts off by blighting two acres, then six, then ten, and so on. If it goes on like that, we won’t have a farm by the middle of next week.’
‘I hope you really don’t believe what you’re saying,’ said Season, wearily. She stirred her cocktail with her finger, and then licked it.
‘I don’t know,’ said Ed. ‘I’ve seen samples of rust, and the rot you get when you don’t dress your seeds with fungicide, but America has fewer wheat-disease problems than almost any other country in the world. What America spends on crop fungicides in any one year wouldn’t keep the town of Emporia in hotdogs. The only real problem we get is drought.’
‘Well, Farmer Hardesty, you should know,’ said Season, sipping her drink and looking at the television.
Ed stood up. ‘I guess I’ll go say good night to Sally. Do you want to tell Dilys to start my omelette?’
‘What did you say?’ asked Season, her attention momentarily distracted by a television picture of running camels.
‘I said I’m going up to say good night to Sally.’
‘Well, don’t. She’ll be asleep by now.’
He ignored her and went all the same. When he was halfway up the curving staircase, he heard her call, ‘Your seven-league boots are squealing because you left them behind.’
He paused, and said, ‘Tell them I’ll send my magic socks down to pick them up later.’
Season appeared in the doorway, holding his boots in her hand. ‘Take the goddamned things now!’ she snapped, and hurled them after him, one at a time. ‘Every time you come home you make the living-room look like a goddamned thrift store!’
The boots clumped on the stairs and then rolled back down again. Season kicked them across the hallway and then stalked back into the living-room. Ed slowly descended the staircase, collected them up, and went up to see Sally with an expression that Season had once described as his ‘Grant Wood face’.
Sally was lying curled up in her old-fashioned carved oak bed, under the early-American patchwork comforter that Season had bought for her at a fashionable store on Lexington Avenue in the eighties. She was almost asleep, but not quite, and when Ed looked in at the door, she stirred and raised her head from the pillow and smiled at him.
‘Hi, Daddy,’ she said, sleepily.
‘Hi yourself.’
‘I waited for you but you didn’t come home. Mommy threw your supper down the sink-disposal.’
‘I know,’ said Ed, sitting on the edge of the bed and running his hand through his daughter’s long blonde curls. ‘Dilys is going to fix me an omelette.’
‘You’ll have indigestion if you don’t eat regular. My teacher told me.’
‘Your teacher’s quite right. I was busy on the farm, that’s all. Some of the wheat went bad.’
Sally looked up at him. Although she was only six years old, she looked exactly like her mother. Fair-haired and leggy, with those wide blue eyes like some startled character out of a Disney cartoon. Ed leaned over her and kissed her, and she had that childish smell of soap and cookies and clean clothes.
‘I love you,’ he said, with a grin.
‘I love you, too,’ she told him.
They were silent for a moment. Then Sally said, ‘Is this a darned farm?’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘I don’t know. Mommy was talking on the telephone to Auntie Vee today and she kept saying “this darned farm”.’ Ed touched the tip of her nose with his finger. ‘Darned is one of those words that grown-ups use when they mean pesky.’
‘What does pesky mean?’
‘It means something that irritates you. Something that gets on your nerves.’
‘Does the farm get on Mommy’s nerves?’
‘Sure it does. It gets on my nerves sometimes. But it’s important. It’s what people call a heritage. It’s something that’s been handed down from father to son, something that belongs to one family, and stands for everything that family is. You’re a Hardesty, see, and this is the Hardesty farm. When people meet you, they think – aha, that’s the little girl who lives on the big wheat farm in Kingman County, Kansas.’
Sally thought about that and then she said, ‘Will you come with us?’
Ed frowned. ‘Will I come with you where?’
‘To Los Angeles. To visit Auntie Vee.’
‘I didn’t know you were going to Los Angeles to visit Auntie Vee.’
‘Well, Mommy said so on the telephone. She said we’d try to get away some time this week.’
Ed sat up straight. ‘Did she? Well… I guess if she said so, then you must be. I don’t know if I’ll be able to come with you, though. August is a pretty busy time on the farm.’
‘Try to come, won’t you? I want you to come.’
Ed kissed her again and then stood up. ‘Sure, I’ll try to come. Now why don’t you get yourself some sleep?’
He tucked her in tight, and then closed her door and crossed the landing to the master bedroom. Once more, Season’s taste and stylishness was all around. The rugs were rich pink and there was white-and-gold rococo furniture everywhere, chairs and commodes and side-tables all genuine eighteenth-century French. The bed was a half-tester, draped with pink velour and covered with a gold-embroidered bedspread. Ed watched himself thoughtfully in the gilt cheval mirror as he stripped off his plaid riding-shirt, his faded blue jeans, and his undershorts. Naked, he was lean and muscular, with a crucifix of black hair across his chest. Since he’d taken over South Burlington, he’d lost twenty pounds.
He was tying up his bathrobe when Season walked in. ‘Dilys is just beating your eggs now,’ she said.
He turned around. ‘That’s good. Sally’s teacher thinks I’m going to suffer from indigestion if I don’t eat regular.’
‘Is Sally still awake?’
‘Only just.’
Season went to her dressing-table and began to take off her diamond earrings. ‘You haven’t asked me how my day went yet,’ she said.
He stood behind her, so that she could see his face in the mirror. ‘I don’t have to ask. I know you were bored stiff.’
She put her earrings away, and then she started unbuttoning her silk suit. Underneath it, she was nude, except for a small pair of white backless panties. She had a skinny, fashion-model’s figure, with small wide-nippled breasts and long, lean thighs. She took the comb out of her hair and began to brush it. She left her pants suit on the floor for Dilys to pick up later.
‘Actually,’ she said, ‘I wasn’t totally bored. The day did have its moments.’
‘Like when?’
‘A man came to steam-clean the rug in the hall. He was quite good-looking in an artisan kind of way. He told me he had eight children.’
‘Anything else?’ he asked her. His face was expressionless.
‘Mrs Lydia Hope Caldwell phoned. She wants me to join the Daughters of Kansas. She spent twenty minutes telling me what a great privilege it was and how it was hardly ever accorded to newcomers.’
‘What did you tell her?’
‘I told her I was overwhelmed, of course.’
He watched her naked body in the mirror. He wondered if it was just her nudity he found so desirable, or whether it was her nudity combined with her sharp and critical personality. He stepped closer to her and laid his hand on her shoulder and kissed the side of her forehead. She kept on brushing her hair as if he wasn’t there.
‘Then, of course, you called your sister in LA,’ he told her.
‘That’s right.’
He ran his hand down the soft curves of her back, and slipped it under the elastic of her pants, so that he was cupping the cheek of her bottom. The tips of his fingers were almost touching her vulva, but not quite.
‘You called your sister in LA and told her how sick you were of this darned farm. All these tedious acres of wheat, all these simple, honest farming folk. All these tractors and all these crop-dusters.’
‘All these down-home actuaries,’ she put in.
‘That’s right,’ he nodded. ‘And then you invited yourself to spend a few weeks in Beverly Hills, along with Sally, totally ignoring the fact that Sally has to go back to school, and that I’m going to need you this month more than I’ve ever needed you before.’
Season stood utterly still, as if she was pretending to be a statue. Their two faces were reflected side by side in the mirror, and neither face betrayed anything at all. They were playing their usual game of testing, questioning, and teasing, to see whose façade cracked first. In New York, they had played it in fun, and only occasionally. Here in Kansas, it had started to become much more than an amusement, and much more to do with the survival of their relationship.
Ed’s fingers stayed where they were.
Season said, ‘I haven’t rushed into this, you know. I’ve had plenty of time to think about it.’
‘You didn’t mention it to me.’
‘Of course I mentioned it. What do you think we’ve been doing, every single night since we came here? Butting our heads together just to see how much it hurts? Ed, my darling. I’m bored with South Burlington, I’m bored with Wichita, I’m bored with the entire state of Kansas, God bless it, and I have to escape for a while.’
‘Is that it? You’re bored?’
She gently reached behind her back and took his hand away. Then she went over to the bed and sat down. There was a silver cigarette box on her bedside table and she took out a Kool and perched it at the side of her pale-lipsticked mouth as if she was Humphrey Bogart.
‘Isn’t it enough?’ she asked him. ‘I used to be a magazine editor. Now I’m like something out of an A. B. Frost drawing.’
‘Who the hell’s A. B. Frost?’ he demanded. ‘For Christ’s sake, isn’t that typical of you? You complain that you’re discontented, and when I ask you why, you say that it’s because I’ve condemned you to live like some person in some picture by some goddamned obscure artist I’ve never even heard of. A. B. Frost, for Christ’s sake.’
‘A. B. Frost was very well known,’ said Season, lighting her cigarette. ‘He travelled through Kansas and Iowa in the eighteen-nineties, sketching fanners. Good, devout. Godfearing, crop-loving farmers.’
‘You make that sound like a disease.’
She blew out smoke. ‘I don’t mean to. But this bucolic existence is just about driving me crazy. I have to get away.’
‘You knew what it was going to be like. We talked about it for long enough.’
‘Of course I knew what it was going to be like. Well, I had a fair idea. But it was what you wanted, wasn’t it? Even if I’d told you that wild mules wouldn’t have dragged me to South Burlington, you still would have found a way to get me here.’
He looked at her for a long time. The way the bedside lamp shone on her long blonde hair, and cast those curving shadows from her breasts. ‘Do you really hate it that much?’ he asked her.
She tapped ash from her cigarette and shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Maybe I’ll get used to it.’
‘Do you want me to give it up?’
‘How can you give it up? You’ve signed all the papers, you’ve taken out all the loans, you’ve made yourself responsible for the lives and jobs of hundreds of people.’
‘I could sell it,’ he said.
‘Oh, sure, you could sell it. And then you’d spend the rest of your life complaining because I made you give up the only thing you ever really wanted to do. Face it, Ed, that’s been your destiny since you were born. To reap and to sow, to plough and to mow, and to be a farmer’s boy.’
He sat down next to her. She didn’t look at him, but smoked her cigarette as if she was racing to finish it.
‘It’s me, too, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘It’s not just South Burlington.’
She still didn’t look at him. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘These days, I find it hard to separate one from the other. It’s just like you’re always telling Sally. The Hardestys are South Burlington, and South Burlington is the Hardestys. It’s one of those homespun equations that don’t make any logical sense, or even any genetic sense, but which people believe in like E equals me squared.’
‘I love you, you know,’ he said simply.
‘You love the idea of me. I don’t know whether you actually love me. Not me, as a person. Not me, as an educated and independent person who suddenly finds herself isolated by her husband’s chosen way of life – cut off from friends and style and civilisation. I’m getting neurotic, do you know that? I have fantasies of shopping at Gimbel’s. I wake up in the night with unnatural cravings for one of Stars’ pastrami sandwiches.’
He took her hand. Her Tiffany engagement ring winked a tiny rainbow at him. ‘Listen,’ he said, hoarsely, ‘you can go to New York whenever you want. Fly tomorrow, if you feel like it.’
‘Ed,’ she said, slowly shaking her head, ‘that just isn’t the point. I want New York but I want you, too. New York on its own isn’t enough. I’m your wife, I happen to love you, but I also happen to have mental energies and psychological requirements which aren’t being fulfilled. At the moment, the two most important needs in my life are totally incompatible, and that’s the problem.’
He stared down at the shaggy pink rug. ‘I don’t know what to suggest,’ he said. ‘You don’t want to stay here and yet you don’t think it’s a good idea if I sell the place.’
‘I think if you sold the place it would gradually destroy our marriage,’ she said. ‘Not straight away, but gradually and very effectively.’
‘So going to Los Angeles for a while is going to hold it together?’
‘I don’t know. But it’s going to give me some time to think. You too.’
He said, unhappily, ‘I don’t think I feel like thinking. Not about us.’
Season leaned over and kissed him, twice, very gently and lovingly. ‘We have to,’ she said. ‘And if I were you, I’d go down to the kitchen and see if that omelette’s ready, otherwise you’re going to feel like you’re eating a window-cleaner’s leather.’
He stayed where he was for a while. He felt tired, and trapped, and he wasn’t sure which way to move. Somehow, in New York, he had found it much easier to be positive, much easier to make clear-cut decisions. But on a farm like South Burlington, clear-cut decisions weren’t called for. You needed to sniff the wind, and make guesses, and alter your guesses to suit the changing weather. Farming was a life of constant compromise, and somehow the compromises were beginning to creep into his marriage.
Maybe Season was right. Maybe if she took a short vacation in Los Angeles it would help them both. But on the other hand, maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe it would take them even further apart. After all, once Season began to mix with those Hollywood types, all those BPs and would-be movie stars, life at South Burlington would probably seem even duller than ever.
Maybe she would begin to think of Ed as nothing more than a stolid farmer. Something out of A. B. Frost.
‘Are you going to bed now?’ he asked Season.
‘I was considering it,’ she said. ‘But I won’t if you can think of something else to do around here.’
He shook his head.
‘That’s what I told Vee,’ she remarked. ‘Farming in Kansas is nothing but fertilising, furrowing, fooling-around and fornication.’
He got up. ‘I won’t be too long,’ he said. ‘I have to call Charlie Warburg.’
‘Charlie Warburg? From the finance company?’
‘That’s right.’
She frowned as she watched him walk across the room to the door. ‘He’s in charge of losses, isn’t he?’
‘Kind of.’
‘So what you were saying about that wheat blight – you were serious about that? Is it really so bad?’
‘I don’t know yet. It could be.’
‘Ed—’ she began.
He paused by the bedroom door. She looked as if she was about to say something, but it was plain that she couldn’t find the words. She sat there, with her arms crossed over her bare breasts, and looked at him with an expression that could have meant I’m sorry, or I wish we’d never met, or anything at all. Ed waited a moment longer, and when she didn’t say anything, he closed the door and went downstairs.
It was a quarter after six the next morning when the Hughes helicopter rose from the small pasture at the back of the South Burlington farmhouse and tilted its way north-westwards into the bright, snappy sky. The rotor blades flashed in the sunlight as it headed out past the hickory stand, and the flack-flack-flack of its engine was echoed by the outbuildings and the fences.
Dyson Kane was at the controls. He was South Burlington’s most experienced flyer – a small, lightweight, white-haired man as sprightly as a jockey, with a pinched face and eyes that could have punched holes in leather. Dyson had smoked a huge briar pipe, with a bowl as big as a coffee-cup, but three years ago his doctor had warned him of lung-cancer, and now he sucked butterscotch Life Savers as if his life depended on them, and it probably did.
Ed sat next to Dyson in the front seat, and behind them sat Willard and Jack. From the dark smudges under his eyes, it didn’t look as if Jack had slept too well.
‘Keep following the track,’ Ed told Dyson. ‘I’ll tell you when to turn off.’
‘Sure thing, Ed,’ said Dyson. ‘You’re the boss.’
Ed turned around to Jack and said, ‘I don’t suppose you’ve had any more ideas since you called me last night?’ Jack shook his head. ‘I tested for everything. It sure isn’t rust, and it isn’t smut, and it’s no kind of mildew that I’ve heard of. But I’m keeping an open mind. We’ve had some pretty humid weather lately and mildew thrives in humid conditions.’
‘Is it worth spraying for mildew?’ asked Ed.
‘I suppose we could try dusting with sulphur, although I’ve never known sulphur do much for really serious cases.’
‘Any other options?’
‘Well, there’s a compound called Bayleton, but that’s not registered for use in the United States and we’d have to seek emergency exemption to dust with that. The same goes for that British stuff from ICI, Vigil.’
‘Would either of those do any good, even if we were allowed to use them?’
‘I don’t know. Until we get an exact analysis of what we’re up against, we’re only guessing. Kerry’s taken the samples over to Wichita, but there’s no telling how long they’re going to take to decide what it is.’
Willard said, ‘I can’t believe it’s mildew. Mildew looks kind of greyish-green, you know and it usually breaks out before the grain forms. It affects the leaves so that photosynthesis can’t occur properly. But I can’t believe it’s that. We haven’t had an outbreak of mildew on South Burlington for fifteen, maybe sixteen years.’
Dyson Kane suddenly said, ‘Jee-sus! Take a look at that!’ He angled the helicopter away from the track without waiting for Ed’s instructions, and took it out across the same stretch of field that Ed and Willard had visited the previous evening. Below them, Ed could make out the tracks of their Jeep through the wheat – but instead of the tracks running around the edge of the dark and blighted crops, they had now been overtaken by the darkness and swallowed up. Everywhere around, like a company of sad, arthritic widows, the rotting stalks hung their heads in the morning wind.
‘It’s spread,’ whispered Jack. ‘Fifty or sixty acres at least. Maybe more.’
Dyson took them low over the field, so that their down draught left a flurrying trail in the wheat. They were flying at sixty or seventy knots, but as Ed peered through the purple-tinted plexiglass ahead of them, it seemed as if the ocean of crops had been stained by the blight as far as he could see, and as far as they could fly. He opened the air-vent, and the cockpit of the helicopter was filled with the warm, sour stench of decaying wheat.
Willard said, ‘This disease sure knows how to eat up a crop, and that’s no mistake.’
Ed told Dyson, ‘Higher. Take her up higher. I want to see how far this stretches.’