Always Leave ’Em Dying (22 page)

In Southern California a man calling himself the Great Wun walked into the Pacific Ocean after speaking to his followers and declaring he was going to convert the fish; he floated ashore several hours later, not speaking to anybody. One Yogajondo, Father of the Common People, headed a march of three hundred Common People on Washington, their avowed goal being a guaranteed minimum luxury, including Cadillacs. One King Ramaud jumped from the spot where Lovable and I had flown, landed on his head, and splashed his brains out; it didn't make much of a splash in the newspapers. As for Prophet Lovable, Chief Arbiter for the Lovables of the Sun Kingdom, it was authoritatively reported that he had actually flown. His white-robed followers had seen him soar into space. Soon he would return from the sun, bringing light and gladness.

A thousand other things happened, some crazy, some silly, all frightening, but they were as nothing compared to the furor over Trammel—and over me. Here at the lodge, we'd covered almost everything and come up with nothing that was any help to me.

"I can't shrink or grow taller, either," I said to Lyn. "From now on they'll be looking for a guy between one foot and ten feet tall, with black, red, white, or green hair."

"There must be something . . ."

"Yeah, sure. That Trammel is a damned smart tricky dog. I went out there to unmask him and he unmasked me. Now that I look back, I remember when he pointed at me I saw a watch on his wrist. Didn't mean anything to me then, but that explains how he timed his move so nicely. And he was still lying when he climbed out of that coffin. He said that I was the man who'd murdered him. Hell, I was maybe the one man in the world who really wanted him alive."

"Well, he is now," Lyn said.

"That's the one sure thing, that Trammel is now alive and kicking. Kicking about damn near everything, if I know him."

Randy said, "Hell, son, ain't it better than if he was dead?"

"Yeah—if I knew what to do about it. But I'll never convince his flock that he wasn't resurrected, and as long as they believe that, they won't believe anything against him. They won't say anything against him, either. I know enough about him right now to ruin him if I could tell it, get it believed. Ordering Felicity's death is plenty, but his murdering Dixon would get him the gas chamber all by itself."

Randy said, "I never did get the straight of how you knowed he killed Dixie."

"Simple enough, Randy. I saw Dixon about midnight, minutes before I killed Wolfe. Within an hour or so after that, I found her body. Obviously, someone besides Wolfe had killed her and buried her. For it to have happened so fast it almost had to mean she'd got in touch with somebody, who then killed her; or somebody got in touch with her. Makes no difference. The fact that Dixon was in the same grave where Wolfe had just buried Felicity meant that whoever killed Dixon knew what Wolfe had done. He couldn't have just happened to stumble onto that same grave."

I got up and started pacing the floor. "Hell, we know now that it was Trammel. Wolfe and Dixon were the two people taking care of Trammel's pregnant Trammelites, and with Wolfe dead, Dixon was the only one of them left alive to spill what he'd been doing. If that came out, he'd be ruined, down goes the empire, everybody sneers at Trammel. So he bashes her head in and he's in the clear—until wham, he learns I'd found Felicity's body. Naturally he knew I'd found Dixon's first. I knew all about him then—and he knew I did by that time. Dammit, there's enough to hang him, but I haven't any proof really. If I could just get him to spill, get my hands on him and work him over—but you can imagine what would happen to me. And who'd accept my word against the risen Trammel's?"

Lyn was frowning. "Shell, there are about three hundred of those other cult leaders in town, dying for any good reason to discredit Trammel. They're on your side."

"True enough. They hate Trammel more than they hate me, at least," I said slowly. "Damn near every cultist in the area has switched over to Trammel, and those sad three hundred are really sad. If I could only think of something good enough, if I knew how he pulled off his miracle . . . But I'm stumped. I have been practically all . . ."

An idea exploded like white rockets inside my brain and I said softly, "I'll be damned. How could I have missed it? And me an ex-marine. I'll be damned." I looked from Randy to Lyn and grinned. "Wouldn't this kill you?" I said. "I know how he did it."

 

Chapter Twenty-Five

It was nearly nine o'clock Wednesday night and I lay flat on my stomach between the Truth Room and the Trammelite tent, on the spot where Arthur Trammel had died. He was on stage now and I couldn't see him, but I could hear him raving.

Raving to a helluva crowd, too. There must have been close to ten thousand old and new customers present. At the rear and on both sides of the tent the canvas was raised and people overflowed onto the grounds. None of them had spotted me yet, but when the meeting ended and the lights came up for Trammel's customary walk to the Truth Room, I would be plainly visible. Especially since I'd be inside the tent.

There were no half-dozen guards around tonight, as there'd been when Trammel had been caught in his explosion. I realized now that guards had been present primarily to assure the success of Trammel's "death," make sure nobody wandered into the danger area before Trammel did. The one man who'd been out here earlier when I'd run in from the shadows was now lying unconscious fifty yards away with a large lump on his skull.

When I'd had my brain-blow yesterday I'd spent another hour figuring out the rest of it. Trammel would have needed help of a certain kind, and though there was no way of knowing who had helped him and the Guardians, I'd known where I could get the same kind of help for myself. I'd gone to an old friend, Irving Feldspen, head wheel of Magna Studios in Hollywood. He'd got in touch with a guy who could fix me up with what I needed, had him come to Feldspen's home. After ten minutes of explanation, I'd been able to put away my gun. The guy's name was Bill Grange, he was Feldspen's top special-effects man, and when we'd understood each other, I'd told him exactly what I wanted. He'd thought he could handle it. He did.

Everything was ready. Grange had helped me, in this last half hour while Trammel spoke, but he was gone now. There was nobody here but me and Trammelites, all of whom, thanks to Trammel, knew exactly what I looked like. He had shown them photographs of me, just in case one or two didn't already know about me. At the moment he was talking about me, inciting his flock to murder, literally, bringing their hate for me to fever pitch—and he had been doing that ever since he came back. They wouldn't have any trouble recognizing me. My hair wasn't dyed, but short-cropped and white as usual. I wore a brown sports jacket, and ripped copper-colored slacks; under the coat was part of a white shirt and an explosive red-and-yellow tie. In a way, I had my boots on.

It was time to start, I got my feet under me and walked forward, carefully lifting my leg over the thin wire Grange had strung there; I couldn't afford to have this deal literally blow up in my face, not yet. I got almost to the tent before the lights came up and anybody saw me. All eyes were on Trammel, but then one woman inside the tent turned her head and stared at me. As she poked a man on her left, Trammel started to walk across the platform—and I sprinted forward into the tent, stopped in front of the crowd.

There was a moment of shocked silence as hundreds of heads turned toward me. They knew immediately who I was. As sound began to rise from the crowd, as I turned to look at Trammel, he saw me. He didn't hesitate, didn't wait. With the mike on his chest amplifying his words, he shouted. "Kill him!"

The crowd surged toward me, yelling, shrieking. I whirled and ran toward the Truth Room, taking the same path Trammel had taken that night when he had died.

Right where Trammel had done it, right where he had died, I kicked the wire Grange had strung there—and for the second time here the night erupted in sound and color as an explosion boomed around me, as smoke swirled and flashlight powder went off in a blinding flare. There was a crash of sound, a whirlwind of smoke and light and fire. I wasn't hurt, but hot winds spun around me, licked at my skin; and though my eyes had been squeezed tight, even my sight was dimmed when I opened them—and looked at carnage.

Those behind me, blinded by that giant flare, wouldn't yet be able to see anything. Smoke and dust billowed as I leaped forward, ripping off my coat and throwing it from me in the same way that Trammel must have ripped off his black outer robe one week ago. Everything was ready and in place. My left leg was ten yards away, near my left arm, and my right leg from the knee down was at my feet, artistically placed. They were disgustingly realistic limbs, though they were only moulages, and would be eminently satisfactory as long as nobody picked them up. But people just don't pick up dismembered arms and legs.

The moulage angle was what had amazed me yesterday: that I, an ex-marine who had seen hundreds of such gory-looking, bloodstained rubber imitations of mayhem, shouldn't have realized before how Trammel had pulled himself together. I'd seen many plaster moulages used for preserving evidence of a crime, but the marine items had been almost identical with the real thing—what men would see after a mortar fell or a bomb burst among soldiers on a battlefield. And my legs and arm were works of art, on which Bill Grange had lovingly labored.

At the spot where I'd earlier dug three carefully spaced holes, I flopped to the ground. With my coat off, my chest was bare under my already shredded shirt, except for another particularly gruesome moulage of thin rubber, appropriately twisted and red-painted on one side, and as I turned and slid my left leg into one of the holes I ripped my thread-tacked trousers, exposing more gory horror beneath the cloth. In moments, both legs were thrust deep into the holes, left leg clear up to my thigh and right leg to the knee; then I added the finishing touches, the two unkindest cuts of all.

On the ground, a foot from me, alongside a gallon bag of chicken blood, lay the final moulage, the ultimate artistry of Bill Grange. I slipped it over my head, adjusted it rapidly with my hands, being especially careful of the eye. The thin rubber went on easily, a red-and-black puckered patch fitting beneath my left brow, and dangling on thin rubber stalks from that puckered spot hung an eye. I could feel the cold round ball bouncing on my cheek as I picked up the bag of blood.

I had estimated that I'd have about five seconds before the crowd recovered its sense and sight. I counted two as I thrust my legs into their holes, three as I put on the facial moulage, four as I burst the bag of blood and splashed it over my face and hair and chest, and on the "stumps" of my legs and left arm. At five, I hurled the bag from me and lay back, thrusting my left arm up to the elbow into the third hole. I lay quietly, holding my breath and staring upward at the swirling dust and smoke above me. Then, the most horribly dead dead man that these people would ever see, I waited.

Several more seconds passed before the crowd began gathering around me. Through my right eye, I watched horror and disgust and sickness grow on their faces, and all the time I was aware that Trammel knew what was happening. He continued to shout at those still in the tent, but as soon as he'd heard the explosion, immediately after seeing me, he would have known what I was trying to do. He was screaming to the crowd that they must kill me.

And here I was already dead.

Very bloodily dead, at that. I must have been the bloodiest thing in the world. Arms and legs all over. And I was still bleeding pretty well, just as well as Trammel had. Voices stopped and all were solemn in the presence of death.

But in the faces of a few around me, there was, with the sickness, a kind of puzzled expression. It would seem strange to some of those who had watched Trammel die that this same odd sequence of events should be happening again. The only difference this time was that nobody was handy to toss a blanket over my corpse, as somebody had for Trammel—at least, that was the only difference you could notice so far.

Even though I knew I might get my real limbs yanked off in the next minute, I was beginning to enjoy this drawn-out moment of anticipation at what I was going to do to these idiots who, a few seconds before, had been ready to drink my blood.

I might even have let my death sink deeper into their brains if I hadn't been afraid Trammel would come tripping out here and shoot the corpse. So I decided to give it a try.

Softly, very softly, barely moving my mashed and bleeding lips, I said, "Hello, you cats."

In the silence around me the words were quite audible. "Hello," I said. "No, not up there. Down here."

Several people got even more sick looking. Nobody could figure out where that sepulchral voice was coming from. I pushed it a little farther.

"This is me. You think I'm dead, don't you? Well, I'm not. Ha-ha, I'm fooling you."

No one could understand this. One woman was gawking at me, squarely at me, and she was a perfect picture of one who is not believing what she is seeing. I stared right back at her from my one good eye, and for all I knew, the other eye was staring at her from my cheek, and on an impulse, I twitched my lips and winked at her.

She let out a short "Ack-k-k!" and her eyes rolled up as she fell kerplop on the ground.

I said, more loudly, so that none of those around me would miss it—and there must have been at least a thousand massed behind those closest to me—"Nope, I'm just about to spring up at you. Man, I bet you scatter. I'm gonna arise, kids! This is the Shell Scott resurrection!" And with that, while faces blanched and became puttylike, I yanked my legs and arm from the ground and sat up straight, surrounded by the goddamnedest collection of expressions imaginable. Then I jumped up and yelled at them.

"Now, you bloody believers," I shouted, "now you know how Trammel did it!"

 

Chapter Twenty-Six

At least three or four more people fainted, including one frail man close to me, and then there was the wildest shrieking and wailing and gnashing of teeth imaginable.