Always Leave ’Em Dying (20 page)

When I pulled my eyes from the coffin I saw two blue-uniformed policemen five yards away, and barely managed to keep from breaking into a run. Dozens of other uniformed men were all around the perimeter of the crowd; the place was loaded with cops. Probably more were down in the crowd itself, but these were away from its edge, where they could see anybody who came here.

Both cops were staring at me curiously, their mouths slowly closing, which was just as good as their telling me that I was a very odd sight indeed. So I waved my arms at them and shook my staff at them and said, with my voice as low as I could get it, "Sinners! Oh, you dirty sinners. You have had it." Or something like that, which was about as close as I could get to prophet talk. Then I turned and walked slowly down the hill, leaning on my staff.

I managed ten steps before glancing over my shoulder. One of the men was making circular motions with his index finger near his temple.

As I neared the edge of the crowd, I tried to estimate its number. People were scattered in small bunches on the slopes, and only farther down, around the square, were they massed tight. I guessed that fifty thousand wouldn't be any exaggeration. Farther down it didn't look like people at all, but like a vat-dyed ant heap, a blob of squirming animals in all colors of the rainbow. As I walked closer, the sun slid from behind a cloud and in brighter light the colors became more intense, surprisingly varied and vivid.

And now, entering the fringe of the crowd and gathering many, many glances from wide-eyed men and women, I noted something that I had expected here but had not imagined would be present in such wild and staggering profusion: There were more strange forms of life about than I had believed existed.

Not even counting the piles of blankets and bedrolls, the fires and coffee and sandwiches and tents, this was the goddamnedest, goofiest vista of cuckoos I had ever laid eyes on in my life. There were more robes and turbans and crowns and gowns than you could shake a wizard's wand at. There were guys dressed in gold and pink and polka dots, guys in sheets and shrouds and very little; there were dolls in Mother Hubbards, and what appeared to be bras and diapers, and even one babe in grass skirt and beret.

And, of course, it figured. It was sheer inevitability. Not just because this was so close to Hollywood, though that probably helped a lot, but because this was L.A., the Land of the Abnormal. Nobody even tries to deny it any more; L.A. is the magnet for meatballs. It seems that as soon as a citizen from elsewhere loses his stability, he heads for the land where more people are nowhere: Southern California.

We've got, you can count them, over three hundred separate cults. Their membership totals from up in the thousands down to one, and, without doubt, every member was here. It couldn't have been otherwise. This was the Rising of Trammel, the Big Day.

That meant, too, that over three hundred cult leaders were present—worrying, sweating, biting off fingernails. Their leadership was threatened. If this boy came up today, so would their lunches; they'd lose not only prestige, but their flocks, which would be flocking to Trammel.

So this was an eerie sight indeed. Undoubtedly some here were just curious, and there would surely be reporters and photographers and more cops, but this was primarily a cultists' convention, a crackpot ball. Even for me, after living thirty years in L.A., and knowing that cults and peculiar sects abound from Main Street to the Hollywood hills, seeing all of them in one place at one time was a revelation. It made me think maybe all us people should be in cages, with the animals outside peering in at us, feeding us peanuts and bananas and getting a good laugh.

I went striding downhill through that panorama of paranoia, and everybody eyeballed me. Even in this bunch, I stood out. Every once in a while some peculiarly decked-out cat, probably a leader surrounded by his followers, would make a strange sign at me or speak as I passed. I ignored them all.

At fifteen minutes of three I had worked my way around to Coffin Square's west side. I could see people in the square, six of them, all dressed in black and lined up facing away from the cliff's edge. And I began wondering seriously how in hell I was going to get up there. Already the going was tough, and there remained a hundred feet between the square and me. It would be anticlimactic indeed if, after all my sweat and preparation, Joe Smith leaped up laughing and waving and I could only wave back at him.

I figured I could press ahead through and around people all right except for the last five or six yards, where bodies were shoulder to shoulder and thigh to thigh and no telling; but from that point on I'd need a disintegrator. A short fat man facing away from me blocked my path and I was about to step around him when he glanced over his shoulder and saw me. I kept forgetting, momentarily, what I looked like, but he got the full impact of me all at once, and it seemed likely he'd never forget.

He must have seen several things today that were peculiar, but there was no doubt at all that he had not yet seen anything as horrible as me. You'd have thought his two eyes were attached to his mouth, the way all three of them sprang open. The rapidity of the change and the gruesome fixity of his new expression came close to being the funniest thing I'd seen up here—and all of a sudden I realized that around me were not beings from another world, but just people.

People like me, some of them nearer the edge than others. About the only really tough ones were down in that ring; and if the rest were anything like this joe, I might have it made. With that thought, inspiration blossomed.

From where I stood, the ground slanted downward all the way to the square. So not only was I horrendously tall to begin with; I towered even farther above those ahead of me simply because I was on somewhat higher ground. The guy was still anchored there, gawping up at me as if he were trying to break his neck with his chin.

I swung my staff forward, clutching it back of center, and pointed it at him, mumbling gurgling gibberish deep in my throat. He sprang back from the point of my staff as if it were loaded. I had my disintegrator. I kept walking forward, gargling my tonsils, not too vigorously, but loud enough so those closest could hear me.

With their eyes pointed toward the coffin, naturally none of the people were, at first, looking in my direction. Ah, but afterward they were. One or two before me would hear an odd snuffling noise and turn casually to see a bearded giant, face contorted and eyes glittering, bearing down on them and aiming a wicked gadget at their chops. And then they would not be before me. I did it about twenty times, and I got quite good at it.

And then I was there. It was a tight squeeze, and then a tight fit, but I was against the ropes ten feet from the coffin.

Suddenly my palms were sweating and my throat was dry. I clutched the staff I carried, leaned my weight on it, and breathed heavily through my mouth.

It was five minutes till three. Five minutes until the time of the resurrection.

 

Chapter Twenty-Two

Until this moment I'd been moving, going forward. But now I had time to think. And my thoughts suddenly changed.

What had seemed funny a few minutes ago didn't seem a bit funny now. The moment when I'd first thrust my staff at the fat man and he'd leaped aside had been amusing then; now I thought of what it really meant: that these people all around me were in a mood to believe anything, conditioned to it and ready for it.

I raised my head and looked past the rim of the cliff to my left, at the flat earth and the dirt road slicing through it. Then I turned, looked farther left and behind me, up the slanting ground. I could see the bushy shrub I'd marked in my mind yesterday. It would have been completely hidden by men and women now except that it was at the very edge of the cliff and most of the people stood a few feet away from it.

Lyn would be below there in her car, parked on the far side of the reservoir, the only place where the car could be hidden except for the quarry, a mile farther away. I glanced over the men between there and where I stood, then turned to look inside the square—at the Guardians.

I had become so accustomed to the continual clamor of voices that it was like the withdrawal of a physical pressure when it slowed and got fainter, then suddenly stopped. I knew that men here must have heard the sound momentarily grow fainter and, in a natural enough reaction, themselves stopped speaking. But it was almost as if they had all become silent after an unheard signal. Then the murmur began again.

And suddenly a thought jarred me. I had forgotten one thing, at least one thing. When I moved I would have to move quickly and surely. And I was still wearing the clumsy extensions on my feet.

It was four minutes till three.

Before I took even one step, I had to get the stilts off my feet, but there wasn't any way to bend down and unstrap them, take them off and stand up nine inches shorter than before—not with all these men around me. Even if those closest to me failed to notice, the Guardians wouldn't miss it.

All of them stood on my left, facing the coffin and the crowd, the nearest man only four or five feet from me. None of the Guardians stared fixedly at the coffin; they all let their eyes shift over the crowd, sizing us up, noting the rapt expressions. Anger grew in me at the thought that this one thing might stop me—and then I had the answer.

At least, I'd thought of a way that might work. But even though many faiths were here—and thus the lack of many faiths—I hesitated. Because I meant to kneel as though in prayer and under cover of that movement get rid of those stilts, get ready to move.

Three minutes till three.

I raised my arms high slowly, pressed their palms together, and brought my hands down to my chest, bowed my head. Then I knelt, fumbled beneath my robe, trying to keep my movements hidden. I found the leather straps and pulled them free of the buckles; in seconds I had the aluminum stilts off my feet. I let out my breath in a sigh, and it seemed the entire crowd sighed with me; there was movement on my left and right.

It took me a few seconds to understand what was happening; then I got it. Once I had unconsciously led the way, my movement entered all the other minds here as a suggestion, perhaps for some as a command. The man on my right dropped to his knees beside me. He was the first, but then the man beyond him knelt too. In moments there was motion all around me as men and women moved back and to the side, in quietness and without apparent haste, finding room to kneel. The rest followed like sheep.

In less than half a minute, every one of them was kneeling. Anyone still on his feet would have been far more obvious than I had been before, and of all those men and women, not one was standing. I looked at every part of the crowd, hoping I'd see at least one man standing alone, but each of the fifty thousand was on his knees.

Two minutes till three.

I looked to my left, over the bowed heads near me and past the cliff's edge, at that plain below. For a moment it seemed a bare, level plain I had seen before in a dream, through the shimmering outlines of a dead woman's face.

And in that moment I saw in a different way the mass of bodies packed around and near me. It was a wall of men, and I had forgotten this part, too, in my plan. I had known that if I should manage to unmask the fake here, the crowd might turn on me. But I'd planned what I would do, thinking that even then, in the moment of shock, I might have a chance to run and get away. But I'd forgotten how tightly packed the bodies around this square would be.

Silence had fallen again. I looked at my watch, saw the second hand moving; I could hear each separate tick as the hand moved steadily closer to the hour.

One minute till three.

It was dimmer suddenly. A new coldness in the air chilled my skin. I couldn't understand. And then, on my knees, I raised my eyes and looked at the sky above me. The sun had gone behind a cloud. That was all; a normal and ordinary thing that had happened many times before this. I'd noticed it now only because it had happened so close to three.

But a ripple, a rising and falling sigh swept over the crowd and then quickly died. The six in black stood immobile now, staring at the coffin's lid. I looked at the coffin. For it was time; it was three o'clock. It was the moment of resurrection.

And the lid of the coffin moved.

An audible sigh went up from the crowd, billowing out of silence. I stared, myself caught in the emotion that stretched almost tangibly through the crowd.

Gnarled fingers, a white bony hand, appeared beneath the coffin's lid. The giant whisper died. The coffin lid moved upward, through its entire arc, fell outward with a creak that was piercingly loud in the silence.

A white hand gripped each of the coffin's wooden walls.

The man pulled himself to a sitting position within the coffin, his face frozen into immobility, white and calm, the appearance of death upon it.

And the crowd stirred. There was a rushing sound, a gasp of breath, a rising wind from which the first faint voices came. Women sobbed and wailed and men cried out as the man inside the coffin moved.

I shook my head, felt my heart pounding in my chest. I had been almost hypnotized by what I'd seen—and I had been ready for it, expected this to happen. I got my feet beneath me, tensed my leg muscles.

The man was thin, his skin white. I had known that even before this suggestible, hopeful crowd, even with all the careful preparation, the likeness would have to be almost perfect if the Guardians hoped for success. While the crowd shrieked and sobbed around me, I made myself stare coldly at the man's face.

He climbed from the low coffin and stood upon the ground. And I moved. All around me there was smashing sound, a booming roar of unintelligible words and phrases, of shouts and screams; and women moved, turned, fell to the ground, moaned and shrieked and sobbed.

My legs uncoiled as I slid between the ropes, stood half erect, and leaped toward the man.

He whirled around, shock staining the whiteness of his face, and as I jumped toward him he shrank back. I slammed my foot against the ground and jerked to a stop inches from him, reached for him, clawing for his face—and in that instant all sound stopped.