The Two Dead Girls Page 6

  'I got you, don't worry.' He gripped my calves firmly, and I went up one more step. Now the top of my head was less than a foot from the ceiling, and I could see the cobwebs a few enterprising spiders had spun in the crotches where the roof beams came together. I shone the light around but didn't see anything worth the risk of being up here.

  'No,' Brutal said. 'You're looking too far away, Paul. Look to your left, where those two beams come together. You see them? One's a little discolored.'

  'I see.'

  'Shine the light on the join.'

  I did, and saw what he wanted me to see almost right away. The beams had been pegged together with dowels, half a dozen of them, and one was gone, leaving a black, circular hole the size of a quarter. I looked at it, then looked doubtfully back over my shoulder at Brutal. 'It was a small mouse,' I said, 'but that small? Man, I don't think so.'

  'But that's where he went,' Brutal said. 'I'm just as sure as houses.'

  'I don't see how you can be.'

  'Lean closer — don't worry I got you — and take a whiff.'

  I did as he asked, groping with my left hand for one of the other beams, and feeling a little better when I had hold of it. The wind outside gusted again; air puffed out of that hole and into my face. I could smell the keen breath of a winter night in the border South . . . and something else, as well.

  The smell of peppermint.

  Don't let nothing happen to Mr. Jingles, I could hear Delacroix saying in a voice that wouldn't stay steady I could hear that, and I could feel the warmth of Mr. Jingles as the Frenchman handed it to me, just a mouse, smarter than most of the species, no doubt, but still just a mouse for a' that and a' that. Don't let that bad 'un hurt my mouse, he'd said, and I had promised, as I always promised them at the end when walking the Green Mile was no longer a myth or a hypothesis but something they really had to do. Mail this letter to my brother, who I haven't seen for twenty years? I promise. Say fifteen Hail Marys for my soul? I promise. Let me die under my spirit-name and see that it goes on my tombstone? I promise. It was the way you got them to go and be good about it, the way you saw them into the chair sitting at the end of the Green Mile with their sanity intact. I couldn't keep all of those promises, of course, but I kept the one I made to Delacroix. As for the Frenchman himself, there had been hell to pay. The bad 'un had hurt Delacroix, hurt him plenty. Oh, I know what he did, all right, but no one deserved what happened to Eduard Delacroix when he fell into Old Sparky's savage embrace.

  A smell of peppermint.

  And something else. Something back inside that hole.

  I took a pen out of my breast pocket with my right hand, still holding onto the beam with my left, not worried anymore about Brutal inadvertently tickling my sensitive knees. I unscrewed the pen's cap onehanded, then poked the nib in and teased something out. It was a tiny splinter of wood which had been tinted a bright yellow, and I heard Delacroix's voice again, so clearly this time that his ghost might have been lurking in that room with us — the one where William Wharton spent so much of his time.

  Hey, you guys! the voice said this time-the laughing, amazed voice of a man who has forgotten, at least for a little while, where he is and what awaits him. Come and see what Mr. Jingles can do!

  'Christ,' I whispered. I felt as if the wind had been knocked out of me.

  'You found another one, didn't you?' Brutal asked. 'I found three or four.'

  I came down and shone the light on his big, outstretched palm. Several splinters of wood were scattered there, like jackstraws for elves. Two were yellow, like the one I had found. One was green and one was red. They hadn't been painted but colored, with wax Crayola crayons.

  'Oh, boy,' I said in a low, shaky voice. 'Oh, hey. It's pieces of that spool, isn't it? But why? Why up there?'

  'When I was a kid I wasn't big like I am now,' Brutal said. 'I got most of my growth between fifteen and seventeen. Until then I was a shrimp. And when I went off to school the first time, I felt as small as . . . why, as small as a mouse, I guess you'd say. I was scared to death. So you know what I did?'

  I shook my head. Outside, the wind gusted again. In the angles formed by the beams, cobwebs shook in feathery drafts, like rotted lace. Never had I been in a place that felt so nakedly haunted, and it was right then, as we stood there looking down at the splintered remains of the spool which had caused so much trouble, that my head began to know what my heart had understood ever since John Coffey had walked the Green Mile: I couldn't do this job much longer. Depression, or no Depression, I couldn't watch many more men walk through my office to their deaths. Even one more might be too many.

  'I asked my mother for one of her hankies,' Brutal said. 'So when I felt weepy and small, I could sneak it out and smell her perfume and not feel so bad.'

  'You think — what? — that mouse chewed off some of that colored spool to remember Delacroix by? That a mouse — '

  He looked up. I thought for a moment I saw tears in his eyes, but I guess I was probably wrong about that. 'I ain't saying nothing, Paul. But I found them up there, and I smelled peppermint, same as you — you know you did. And I can't do this no more. I won't do this no more. Seeing one more man in that chair'd just about kill me. I'm going to put in for a transfer to Boys' Correctional on Monday. If I get it before the next one, that's fine. If I don't, I'll resign and go back to farming.'

  'What did you ever farm, besides rocks?'

  'It don't matter.'

  'I know it doesn't,' I said. 'I think I'll put in with you.'

  He looked at me close, making sure I wasn't just having some sport with him, then nodded as if it was a settled thing. The wind gusted again, strong enough this time to make the beams creak and settle, and we both looked around uneasily at the padded walls. I think for a moment we could hear William Wharton — not Billy the Kid, not him, he had been "Wild Bill" to us from his first day on the block — screaming and laughing, telling us we were going to be damned glad to be rid of him, telling us we would never forget him. About those things he was right.

  As for what Brutal and I agreed on that night in the restraint room, it turned out just that way It was almost as if we had taken a solemn oath on those tiny bits of colored, wood. Neither of us ever took part in another execution. John Coffey was the last.