Desperation (34 page)

5

The dark shape of a
car, one with lightbars on the roof, rolled slowly north through the windscreaming dark, away from the rampart that marked China Pit at the south end of Desperation. It rolled with its lights off; the thing behind the wheel saw quite well in the dark, even when that darkness was stuffed with flying grit.

The car passed the bodega at the town's south end. The fallen sign reading
MEXICAN FOOD'S
was now mostly covered by blowing sand; all that still showed in the weak glow of the porch bulb was
CAN FOO.
The cruiser drove slowly on up the street to the Municipal Building, turned into the lot, and parked where it had before. Behind the wheel, the large, slumped figure wearing the Sam Browne belt with the badge on the cross-strap was singing an old song in a tuneless, droning voice:
“And we'll go dancin, baby, then you
'll see . . . How the magic's in the music and the music's in me . . .”

The creature in the driver's seat killed the Caprice's engine and then just sat there, head down, fingers tapping at the wheel. A buzzard flapped out of the flying dirt, made a last-minute course adjustment as the wind gusted, then landed on the hood of the cruiser. A second followed, and a third. This latest arrival squalled at his mates, then squirted a thick stream of guano onto the car's hood.

They lined up, looking in through the dirty windshield.

“Jews,” the driver said, “must die. And Catholics. Mormons, too.
Tak.
”

The door opened. One foot swung out, then another. The figure in the Sam Browne belt stood up, slammed the door shut. It held its new hat under its arm for the time being. In its other hand it held the shotgun the woman, Mary, had grabbed off the desk. It walked around to the front door. Here, flanking the steps, were two coyotes. They whined uneasily and shrank down on their haunches, grinning sycophantic doggy grins at the approaching figure, which passed them with no acknowledgement at all.

It reached for the door, and then its hand froze. The door was ajar. A vagary of the wind had sucked it most of the way shut . . . but not
completely.

“What the fuck?” it muttered, and opened the door. It went upstairs fast, first putting the hat on (jamming it down hard; it didn't fit so well now) and then shifting the shotgun to both hands.

A coyote lay dead at the top of the stairs. The door which led into the holding area was also standing open. The thing with the shotgun in its hands stepped in, knowing already what it would see, but the knowing did not stop the angry roar which came out of its chest. Outside, at the foot of the steps, the coyotes whined and cringed and squirted urine. On the police-cruiser, the buzzards also heard the cry of the thing upstairs and fluttered their wings uneasily, almost lifting off and then settling back, darting their heads restlessly at each other, as if to peck.

In the holding area, all the cells which had been occupied were now standing open and empty.

“That boy,” the figure in the doorway whispered. Its hands were white on the stock of the shotgun. “That nasty little drug user.”

It stood there a moment longer, then stepped slowly into the room. Its eyes shifted back and forth in its expressionless face. Its hat—a Smokey-style with a flat brim—was slowly rising again as the thing's hair pushed it up. It had a great deal more hair than the hat's previous owner. The woman Collie Entragian had taken from the detention area and down the stairs had been five-six, a hundred and thirty pounds. This thing looked like that woman's very big sister: six-three, broad-shouldered, probably two hundred pounds. It was wearing a coverall it had taken from the supply shed before driving back out of what the mining company called Rattlesnake Number Two and the townspeople had for over a hundred years called the China Pit. The coverall was a bit tight in the breast and the hip, but still better than this body's old clothes; they were as useless to it now as Ellen Carver's old concerns and desires. As for Entragian, it had his belt, badge, and hat; it wore his pistol on her hip.

Of course it did. After all, Ellen Carver was the only law west of the Pecos now. It was her job, and God help anyone who tried to keep her from doing a good one.

Her former son, for instance.

From the breast pocket of the coverall it took a small piece of sculpture. A spider carved from gray stone. It canted drunkenly to the left on Ellen's palm (one of its legs on that side was broken off), but that in no way dissipated its ugliness or its malevolence. Pitted stone eyes, purple with iron that had been volcano-cooked millennia ago, bulged from above its mandible, which gaped to show a tongue that was not a tongue but the grinning head of a tiny coyote. On the spider's back was a shape which vaguely resembled a country fiddle.

“Tak!”
the creature standing by the desk said. Its face was slack and doughy, a cruel parody of the face of the woman who, ten hours before, had been reading her daughter a
Curious George
book and sharing a cup of cocoa with her. Yet the eyes in that face were alive and aware and venomous, hideously like the eyes of the thing resting on her palm. Now she took it in her other hand and raised it over her head, into the light of the hanging glass globe over the desk.
“Tak ah wan! Tak ah lah! Mi him, en tow! En tow!”

Recluse spiders came hurrying toward it from the darkness of the stairwell, from cracks in the baseboard, from the dark corners of the empty cells. They gathered around it in a circle. Slowly, it lowered the stone spider to the desk.

“Tak!”
it cried softly.
“Mi him, en tow.”

A ripple went through the attentive circle of spiders. There were maybe fifty in all, most no bigger than plump raisins. Then the circle broke up, streaming toward the door in two lines. The thing that had been Ellen Carver before Collie Entragian took her down into the China Pit stood watching them go. Then it put the carving back into its pocket.

“Jews must die,” it told the empty room. “Catholics must die. Mormons must die. Grateful Dead fans must die.” It paused. “Little prayboys must also die.”

It raised Ellen Carver's hands and began tapping Ellen Carver's fingers meditatively against Ellen Carver's collarbones.

PART III

THE AMERICAN WEST:

LEGENDARY SHADOWS

Chapter 1

1

“Holy shit!” Steve said. “This
is amazing.”

“Fucking weird is what it is,” Cynthia replied, then looked around to see if she had offended the old man. Billingsley was nowhere in sight.

“Young lady,” Johnny said. “Weird is the mosh pit, the only invention for which your generation can so far take credit. This is not weird. This is rather nice, in fact.”

“Weird,” Cynthia repeated, but she was smiling.

Johnny guessed that The American West had been built in the decade following World War II, when movie theaters were no longer the overblown Xanadus they had been in the twenties and thirties, but long before malling and multiplexing turned them into Dolby-equipped shoe-boxes. Billingsley had turned on the pinspots above the screen and those in what once would have been called the orchestra-pit, and Johnny had no trouble seeing the place. The auditorium was big but bland. There were vaguely art-deco electric wall-sconces, but no other grace-notes. Most of the seats were still in place, but the red plush was faded and threadbare and smelled powerfully of mildew. The screen was a huge white rectangle upon which Rock Hudson had once clinched with Doris Day, across which Charlton Heston had once matched chariots with Stephen Boyd. It had to be at least forty feet long and twenty feet high; from where Johnny stood, it looked the size of a drive-in screen.

There was a stage area in front of the screen—a kind of architectural holdover, Johnny assumed, since vaudeville must have been dead by the time this place was built. Had it
ever
been used? He supposed so; for political speeches, or high school graduations, maybe for the final round of the Cowshit County Spelling Bee. Whatever purposes it had served in the past, surely none of the people who had attended those quaint country ceremonies could have predicted this stage's final function.

He glanced around, a little worried about Billingsley now, and saw the old man coming down the short, narrow corridor which led from the bathrooms to the backstage area, where the rest of them were clustered.
Old fella's got a bottle stashed, he went back for a quick snort, that's all,
Johnny thought, but he couldn't smell fresh booze on the old guy when he brushed past, and that was a smell he never missed now that he had quit drinking himself.

They followed Billingsley out onto the stage, the group of people Johnny was coming to think of (and not entirely without affection) as The Collie Entragian Survival Society, their feet clumping and echoing, their shadows long and pallid in the orchestra sidelights. Billingsley had turned these on from a box in the electrical closet by the stage-left entrance. Above the tatty red plush seats, the weak light petered out in a hurry and there was only darkness ascending to some unseen height. Above that—and on all sides as well—the desert wind howled. It was a sound that cooled Johnny's blood . . . but he could not deny the fact that there was also something strangely attractive about it . . . although what that attraction might be, he didn't know.

Oh, don't lie. You know. Billingsley and his friends knew as well, that's why they came here. God made you to hear that sound, and a room like this is a natural amplifier for it. You can hear it even better when you sit in the front of the screen with your old pals, throwing legendary shadows and drinking to the past. That sound says quitting is okay, that quitting is in fact the only choice that makes any sense. That sound is about the lure of emptiness and the pleasures of zero.

In the middle of the dusty stage and in front of the curtainless screen was a living room—easy chairs, sofas, standing lamps, a coffee-table, even a TV. The furniture stood on a big piece of carpet. It was a little like a display in the Home Living section of a department store, but what Johnny kept coming back to was the idea that if Eugène Ionesco had ever written an episode of
The Twilight Zone
, the set would probably have looked a lot like this. Dominating the decor was a fumed-oak bar. Johnny ran a hand over it as Billingsley snapped on the standing lamps, one after the other. The electrical cords, Johnny saw, ran through small slits in the lower part of the screen. The edges of these rips had then been mended with electrical tape to keep them from widening.

Billingsley nodded at the bar. “That come from the old Circle Ranch. Part of the Clayton Loving auction, it was. Buzz Hansen n me teamed together and knocked it down for seventeen bucks. Can you b'lieve it?”

“Frankly, no,” Johnny said, trying to imagine what an item like this might go for in one of those precious little shops down in SoHo. He opened the double doors and saw the bar was fully stocked. Good stuff, too. Not primo, but good. He closed the doors again in a hurry. The bottles inside called to him in a way the bottle of Beam he'd taken out of the Owl's had not.

Ralph Carver sat down in a wing-chair and looked out over the empty seats with the dazed hopefulness of a man who dares to think he may be dreaming after all. David went over to the television. “Do you get anything on this—oh, I see.” He had spotted the VCR underneath. He squatted down to look at the cassettes stacked on top of it.

“Son—” Billingsley began, then gave up.

David shuffled through the boxes quickly—
Sex-Starved Co-eds, Dirty Debutantes, Cockpit Honeys, Part 3
—and then put them back. “You guys watch these?”

Billingsley shrugged. He looked both tired and embarrassed. “We're too old to rodeo, son. Someday maybe you'll understand.”

“Hey, it's your business,” David said, standing up. “I was just asking.”

“Steve, look at this,” Cynthia said. She stepped back, raised her arms over her head, crossed them at the wrists, and wiggled them. A huge dark shape flapped lazily on the screen, which was dingy with several decades' worth of accumulated dust. “A crow. Not bad, huh?”

He grinned, stepped next to her, and placed his hands together out in front of him with one finger jutting down.

“An elephant!” Cynthia laughed. “Too cool!”

David laughed with her. It was an easy sound, cheerful and free. His father turned his head toward it and smiled himself.

“Not bad for a kid from Lubbock!” Cynthia said.

“Better watch that, unless you want me to start in calling you cookie again.”

She stuck her tongue out, eyes closed, fingers twiddling in her ears, reminding Johnny so strongly of Terry that he laughed out loud. The sound startled, almost frightened him. He supposed that, somewhere between Entragian and sundown, he had pretty much decided that he would never laugh again . . . not at the funny stuff, anyway.

Mary Jackson, who had been walking around the onstage living room and looking at everything, now glanced up at Steve's elephant. “I can make the New York City skyline,” she announced.

“My ass!” Cynthia said, although she looked intrigued by the concept.

“Let's see!” David said. He was looking up at the screen as expectantly as a kid waiting for the start of the newest
Ace Ventura
movie.

“Okay,” Mary said, and raised her hands with the fingers pointing up. “Now, let's see . . . give me a second . . . I learned this in summer camp, and that was a long time ago—”

“What the
fuck
are you people
doing
?”

The strident voice startled Johnny badly, and he wasn't the only one. Mary gave a little scream. The city skyline which had begun to form on the old movie screen went out of focus and disappeared.

Audrey Wyler was standing halfway between the stage-left entrance and the living-room grouping, her face pale, her eyes wide and hot. Her shadow loomed on the screen behind her, making its own image, all unknown to its creator: Batman's cloak.

“You guys're as insane as he is, you must be. He's out there somewhere, looking for us.
Right now.
Don't you remember the car you heard, Steve? That was him, coming back! But you stand here . . .
with the lights on
 . . . playing party-games!”

“The lights wouldn't show from the outside even if we had all of them on,” Billingsley said. He was looking at Audrey in a way that was both thoughtful and intense . . . as if, Johnny thought, he had the idea he'd seen her somewhere before. Possibly in
Dirty Debutantes.
“It's a movie theater, remember. Pretty much soundproof and light-proof. That's what we liked about it, my gang.”

“But he'll come looking. And if he looks long enough and hard enough, he'll find us. When you're in Desperation, there aren't that many places to hide.”

“Let him,” Ralph Carver said hollowly, and raised the Ruger .44. “He killed my little girl and took my wife away. I saw what he's like as much as you did, lady. So let him come. I got some Express Mail for him.”

Audrey looked at him uncertainly for a moment. He looked back at her with dead eyes. She glanced at Mary, found nothing there to interest her, and looked at Billingsley again. “He could sneak up. A place like this must have half a dozen ways in. Maybe more.”

“Yup, and every one locked except for the ladies'-room window,” Billingsley said. “I went back there just now and set up a line of beer-bottles on the windowledge inside. If he opens the window, it'll swing in, hit the bottles, knock em over, smash em on the floor. We'll hear him, ma'am, and when he walks out here we'll fill him so full of lead you could cut im up and use im for sinkers.” He was looking at her closely as he uttered this grandiosity, eyes alternating between her face, which was okay, and her legs, which were, in John Edward Marinville's 'umble opinion, pretty fooking spectacular.

She continued to look at Billingsley as if she had never seen a bigger fool. “Ever heard of keys, oldtimer? The cops have keys to
all
the businesses in these little towns.”

“To the
open
ones, that's so,” Billingsley replied quietly. “But The American West hasn't been open for a long time. The doors ain't just locked, they're boarded shut. The kids used the fire escape to get in up front, but that ended last March, when it fell down. Nope, I reckon we're as safe here as anywhere.”

“Probably safer than out on the street,” Johnny said.

Audrey turned to him, hands on her hips. “Well, what do you intend to do? Stay here and amuse yourselves by making shadow-animals on the goddam movie screen?”

“Take it easy,” Steve said.

“
You
take it easy!” she almost snarled.
“I want to get out of here!
”

“We all do, but this isn't the time,” Johnny said. He looked around at the others. “Does anyone disagree?”

“It'd be insanity to go out there in the dark,” Mary said. “The wind's got to be blowing fifty miles an hour, and with the sand flying the way it is, he'd be apt to pick us off one by one.”

“What do you think's going to change tomorrow, when the storm ends and the sun comes out?” Audrey asked. It was Johnny she was asking, not Mary.

“I think that friend Entragian may be dead by the time the storm ends,” he said. “If he's not already.”

Ralph looked over and nodded. David hunkered by the TV, hands loosely clasped between his knees, looking at Johnny with deep concentration.

“Why?” Audrey asked. “How?”

“You haven't seen him?” Mary asked her.

“Of course I have. Just not today. Today I only heard him driving around . . . walking around . . . and
talking
to himself. I haven't actually
seen
him since yesterday.”

“Is there anything radioactive around here, ma'am?” Ralph asked Audrey. “Was it ever, like, some sort of dumping ground for nuclear waste, or maybe old weapons? Missile warheads, or something? Because the cop looked like he was falling apart.”

“I don't think it was radiation sickness,” Mary said. “I've seen pictures of that, and—”

“Whoa,” Johnny said, raising his hands. “I want to make a suggestion. I think we should sit down and talk this out. Okay? It'll pass the time, if nothing else, and an idea of what we should do next may come out of it.” He looked at Audrey, gave her his most winning smile, and was delighted to see her relax a little, if not exactly melt. Maybe not all of the old charm had departed after all. “At the very least, it will be more constructive than making shadows on the movie screen.”

His smile faded a little and he turned to look at them: Audrey, standing on the edge of the rug in her gawky-sexy dress; David, squatting by the TV; Steve and Cynthia, now sitting on the arms of an overstuffed easy chair that looked like it might also have come from the old Circle Ranch; Mary, standing by the screen and looking schoolteacherly with her arms folded under her breasts; Tom Billingsley, now inspecting the open upper cabinet of the bar, with his hands tightly clasped behind his back; Ralph in the wing-chair at the edge of the light, with his left eye now puffed almost completely shut. The Collie Entragian Survival Society, all present and accounted for.

What a crew,
Johnny thought. Manhattan Transfer
in the desert.

“There's another reason we have to talk,” he said. He glanced at their shadows bobbing on the curtainless movie screen. For a moment they all looked to him like the shadows of giant birds. He thought of Entragian, telling him buzzards farted, they were the only birds that did. Of Entragian saying
Oh shit, we're all beyond why,
you
know that.
Johnny thought that might well be the scariest thing anyone had said to him in his whole life. Mostly because it rang true.

Johnny nodded slowly, as if in agreement with some interior speaker, then went on.

“I've seen some extraordinary things in my life, but I've never had what I could in any way characterize as a supernatural experience. Until—maybe—today. And what scares me the most about it is that the experience may be ongoing. I don't know. All I can say for sure is that things have happened to me in the last few hours that I can't explain.”