Desperation (41 page)

He began coughing again and wasn't able to finish, but he didn't need to. A startled look passed among them, and Cynthia turned around. Audrey wasn't there.

Neither was David Carver.

Chapter 4

1

The thing which had been
Ellen Carver, taller now, still wearing the badge but not the Sam Browne belt, stood on the steps of the Municipal Building, staring north along the sand-drifted street, past the dancing blinker-light. It couldn't see the movie theater, but knew where it was. More, it knew what was going on
inside
the movie theater. Not all, but enough to anger it. The cougar hadn't been able to shut the drunk up in time, but at least she had drawn the rest of them away from the boy. That would have been fine, except the boy had eluded its other emissary as well, at least temporarily.

Where had he gone? It didn't know, couldn't see, and that was the source of its anger and fear.
He
was the source. David Carver. The goddamned shitting
prayboy.
It should have killed him when it had been inside the cop and had had the chance—should have shot him right on the steps of his own damned motor home and left him for the buzzards. But it hadn't, and it knew
why
it hadn't. There was a blankness about Master Carver, a shielded quality. That was what had saved Little Prayboy earlier.

Its hands clenched at its sides. The wind gusted, blowing Ellen Carver's short, red-gold hair out like a flag.
Why is he even here, someone like him? Is it an accident? Or was he sent?

Why are
you
here? Are
you
an accident? Were
you
sent?

Such questions were useless. It knew its purpose,
tak ah lah,
and that was enough. It closed its Ellen-eyes, focusing inward at first, but only for a second—it was unpleasant. This body had already begun to fail. It wasn't a matter of decay so much as
intensity;
the force inside it—
can de lach,
heart of the unformed—was literally pounding it to pieces . . . and its replacements had escaped the pantry.

Because of Prayboy.

Shitting Prayboy.

It turned its gaze outward, not wanting to think about the blood trickling down this body's thighs, or the way its throat had begun to throb, or the way that, when it scratched Ellen's head, large clumps of Ellen's red hair had begun to come away under its nails.

It sent its gaze into the theater instead.

What it saw, it perceived in overlapping, sometimes contradictory images, all fragmentary. It was like watching multiple TV screens reflected in a heap of broken glass. Primarily the eyes of the infiltrating spiders were what it was looking through, but there were also flies, cockroaches, rats peering out of holes in the plaster, and bats hanging from the auditorium's high ceiling. These latter were projecting strange cool images that were actually echoes.

It saw the man from the truck, the one who had come into town on his own, and his skinny little girlfriend leading the others back to the stage. The father was shouting for the boy, but the boy wasn't answering. The writer walked to the edge of the stage, cupped his hands around his mouth, and screamed Audrey's name. And Audrey, where was she? No way of telling for sure. It couldn't see through her eyes as it saw through the eyes of the lesser creatures. She'd gone after the boy, certainly. Or had she already found him? It thought not. Not yet, anyway. That it would have sensed.

It pounded one hand against Ellen's thigh in anxiety and frustration, leaving an instant bruise like a rotten place on the skin of an apple, then shifted focus once more. No, it saw, they were
not
all onstage; the prismatic quality of what it was seeing had misled it.

Mary was still with old Tom. If Ellen could get to her while the others were preoccupied with Audrey and David, it might solve all sorts of problems later on. It didn't need her now, this current body was still serviceable and would continue so for awhile, but it wouldn't do to have it fail at a crucial moment. It would be better, safer, if . . .

The image that came was of a spiderweb with many silk-wrapped flies dangling from it. Flies that were drugged but not dead.

“Emergency rations,” the old one whispered in Ellen Carver's voice, in Ellen Carver's language. “Knick-knack paddywhack, give the dog a bone.”

And Mary's disappearance would demoralize the rest, take away any confidence they might have gained from escaping, finding shelter, and killing the cougar. It had thought they might manage that last; they were armed, after all, and the cougar was a physical being,
sarx
and
soma
and
pneuma,
not some goblin from the metaphysical wastes. But who could have imagined that pretentious old windbag doing it?

He called the other one on a phone he had. You didn't guess that, either. You didn't know until the yellow truck came.

Yes, and missing the phone had been a lapse, something right in the front of Marinville's mind that it should have picked up easily, but it didn't hold that against itself. At that point its main goals had been to get the old fool jugged and replace Entragian's body before it could fall apart completely. It had been sorry to lose Entragian, too. Entragian had been
strong.

If it meant to take Mary, there would never be a better time than now. And perhaps while it did that, Audrey would find the boy and kill him. That would be wonderful. No worries then. No sneaking around. It could replace Ellen with Mary and pick the rest off at its leisure.

And later? When its current (and limited) supply of bodies ran out? Snatch more travellers from the highway? Perhaps. And when people, curious people, came to town to see what the hell was going on in Desperation, what then? It would cross that bridge when it got to the river; it had little memory and even less interest in the future. For now, getting Mary up to China Pit would be enough.

Tak went down the steps of the Municipal Building, glanced at the police-car, then crossed the street on foot. No driving, not for this errand. Once it reached the far sidewalk, it began to run in long strides, sand spurting up from beneath sneakers which had been sprung out to the sides by feet which were now too big for them.

2

Onstage, Audrey could hear them
still calling David's name . . . and hers. Soon they would spread out and begin to search. They had guns, which made them dangerous. The idea of being killed didn't bother her—not much, anyway, not as it had at first—but the idea that it might happen before she was able to kill the boy did. To the cougar, the voice of the thing from the earth had been like a fishhook; in Audrey Wyler's mind it was like an acid-coated snake, winding its way into her, melting the personality of the woman who had been here before it even as it enfolded her. This melting sensation was extremely pleasant, like eating some sweet soft food. It hadn't been at first, at first it had been dismaying, like being overwhelmed by a fever, but as she collected more of the
can tahs
(like a child participating in a scavenger hunt), that feeling had passed. Now she only cared about finding the boy. Tak, the unformed one, did not dare approach him, so she must do it in Tak's place.

At the top of the stairs, the woman who had been five-feet-seven on the day Tom Billingsley had first glimpsed her stopped, looking around. She should have been able to see nothing—there was only one window, and the only light that fell through its filthy panes came from the blinker and a single weak streetlamp in front of Bud's Suds—but her vision had improved greatly with each
can tah
she had found or been given. Now she had almost the vision of a cat, and the littered hallway was no mystery to her.

The people who had hung out in this part of the building had been far less neatness-minded than Billingsley and his crew. They had smashed their bottles in the corners instead of collecting them, and instead of fantasy fish or smoke-breathing horses, the walls were decorated with broad Magic Marker pictographs. One of these, as primitive as any cave-drawing, showed a horned and misshapen child hanging from a gigantic breast. Beneath it was scrawled a little couplet:
LITTLE BITTY BABY SMITTY, I SEEN YOU BITE YOUR MOMMY'S TITTY.
Paper trash—fast-food sacks, candy wrappers, potato-chip bags, empty cigarette packs and condom envelopes—had drifted along both sides of the hall. A used rubber hung from the knob of the door marked
MANAGER
, pasted there in its own long-dried fluids like a dead snail.

The door to the manager's office was on her right. Across from it was one marked
JANITOR.
Up ahead on the left was another door, this one unmarked, and then an arch with a word written on it in ancient black paint half flaked away. Even her eyes couldn't make out what the word was, at least from this distance, but a step or two closer and it came clear:
BALCONY.
The archway had been boarded up, but at some point the boards had been pulled away and heaped to either side of it. Hanging from the top of the arch was a mostly deflated sex-doll with blond Arnel hair, a red-ringed hole of a mouth, and a bald rudimentary vagina. There was a noose around its neck, the coils dark with age. Also around its neck, hanging against the doll's sagging plastic bosom, was a hand-lettered sign which looked as if it might have been made by a hardworking first-grader. It was decorated with a red-eyed skull and crossbones at the top.
DON'T COME OUT HERE
, it said,
REDY TO FALL DOWN, IM SERIAS.
Across from the balcony was an alcove which had once probably held a snackbar. At the far end of the hall were more steps going up into darkness. To the projectionist's booth, she assumed.

Audrey went to the door marked
MANAGER
, grasped the knob, and leaned her brow against the wood. Outside, the wind moaned like a dying thing.

“David?” she asked gently. She paused, listened. “David, do you hear me? It's Audrey, David. Audrey Wyler. I want to help you.”

No answer. She opened the door and saw an empty room with an ancient poster for
Bonnie and Clyde
on the wall and a torn mattress on the floor. In the same Magic Marker, someone had written
I'M A MIDNIGHT CREEPER, ALL-DAY SLEEPER
below the poster.

She tried the janitor's cubby next. It wasn't much bigger than a closet and completely empty. The unmarked door gave on a room that had probably once been a supply closet. Her nose (keener now, like her eyesight) picked up the aroma of long-ago popcorn. There were a lot of dead flies and a fair scattering of mouseshit, but nothing else.

She went to the archway, swept aside the dangling dolly with her forearm, and peered out. She couldn't see the stage from back here, just the top half of the screen. The skinny girl was still yelling for David, but the others were silent. That might not mean anything, but she didn't like not knowing where they were.

Audrey decided that the sign around the dolly's neck was probably a true warning. The seats had been taken out, making it easy to see the way the balcony floor heaved and twisted; it made her think of a poem she'd read in college, something about a painted ship on a painted ocean. If the brat wasn't out on the balcony, he was somewhere else. Somewhere close. He couldn't have gone far. And he
wasn't
on the balcony, that much was for sure. With the seats gone, there was nowhere to hide, not so much as a drape or a velvet swag on the wall.

Audrey dropped the arm which had been holding the half-deflated doll aside. It swung back and forth, the noose around its neck making a slow rubbing sound. Its blank eyes stared at Audrey. Its hole of a mouth, a mouth with only one purpose, seemed to leer at her, to laugh at her.
Look at what you're doing,
Frieda Fuckdolly seemed to be saying.
You were going to become the most highly paid woman geologist in the country, own your own consulting firm by the time you were thirty-five, maybe win the Nobel Prize by the time you were fifty . . . weren't those the dreams? The Devonian Era scholar, the
summa cum laude
whose paper on tectonic plates was published in
Geology Review,
is chasing after little boys in crumbling old movie theaters. And no ordinary little boy, either. He's special, the way you always assumed
you
were special. And if you do find him, Aud, what then? He's strong.

She grabbed the hangman's noose and yanked hard, snapping the old rope and pulling out a pretty country-fair bunch of Arnel hair at the same time. The doll landed face-down at Audrey's feet, and she drop-kicked it onto the balcony. It floated high, then settled.
Not stronger than Tak,
she thought.
I don't care what he is, he's not stronger than Tak. Not stronger than the
can tahs,
either. It's
our
town, now. Never mind the past and the dreams of the past; this is the present, and it's sweet. Sweet to kill, to take, to own. Sweet to rule, even in the desert. The boy is just a boy. The others are only food. Tak is here now, and he speaks with the voice of the older age; with the voice of the unformed.

She looked up the hall toward the stairs. She nodded, her right hand slipping into the pocket of her dress to touch the things that were there, to fondle them against her thigh. He was in the projection booth. There was a big padlock hanging on the door which led into the basement, so where else
could
he be?

“Him en tow,”
she whispered, starting forward. Her eyes were wide, the fingers of her right hand moving ceaselessly in the pocket of her dress. From beneath them came small, stony clicking sounds.

3

The kids who partied hearty
upstairs in The American West until the fire escape fell down had been slobs, but they had mostly used the hall and the manager's office for their revels; the other rooms were relatively untouched, and the projectionist's little suite—the booth, the office cubicle, the closet-sized toilet-stall—was almost exactly as it had been on the day in 1979 when five cigarette-smoking men from Nevada Sunlite Entertainment had come in, dismantled the carbon-filament projectors, and taken them to Reno, where they still languished, in a warehouse filled with similar equipment, like fallen idols.

David was on his knees, head down, eyes closed, hands pressed together in front of his chin. The dusty linoleum beneath him was lighter than that which surrounded him. Straight ahead was a second lighter rectangle. It was here that the old projectors—clattery, baking-hot dinosaurs that raised the temperature in this room as high as a hundred and twenty on some summer nights—had stood. To his left were the cut-outs through which they had shone their swords of light and projected their larger-than-life shadows: Gregory Peck and Kirk Douglas, Sophia Loren and Jayne Mansfield, a young Paul Newman hustling pool, an old but still vital Bette Davis torturing her wheelchair-bound sister.

Dusty coils of film lay here and there on the floor like dead snakes. There were old stills and posters on the walls. One of the latter showed Marilyn Monroe standing on a subway grating and trying to hold down her flaring skirt. Beneath a hand-drawn arrow pointing at her panties, some wit had printed
Carefully insert Shaft A in Slot B, making sure tool is seated firmly & cannot slip out.
There was an odd, decayed smell in here, not quite mildew, not quite dry-rot, either. It smelled curdled, like something that had gone spectacularly bad before finally drying up.

David didn't notice the smell any more than he heard Audrey softly calling his name from the hall which ran past the balcony. He had come here when the others had run to Billingsley—even Audrey had gone as far as stage-left at first, perhaps to make sure they were all going down the hall—because he had been nearly overwhelmed by a need to pray. He had an idea that this time it would just be a matter of getting to someplace quiet and opening the door—this time God wanted to talk to him, not the other way around. And this was a good place to do it. Pray in your closet and not in the street, the Bible said, and David thought that was excellent advice. Now that he had a closed door between him and the rest of them, he could open the one inside him.

He wasn't afraid of being observed by spiders or snakes or rats; if God wanted this to be a private meeting, it would be a private meeting. The woman Steve and Cynthia had found was the real problem—she for some reason made him nervous, and he had a feeling she felt the same about him. He had wanted to get away from her, so he had slipped over the edge of the stage and run up the center aisle. He was under the sagging balcony and into the lobby before Audrey turned back from the stage-left side of the movie screen, looking for him. From the lobby he had come up to the second floor, and then had simply let some interior compass—or maybe it was Reverend Martin's “still, small voice”—lead him up here.

He had walked across the room, barely seeing the old curls of film and the remaining posters, barely smelling the odor which might or might not have been celluloid fantasies stewed by the desert sun until they fell apart. He had stopped on this patch of linoleum, considering for a moment the large holes at the corners of the lighter rectangle shape, holes where the kingbolts which held the projector firmly in place had once gone. They reminded him

(I see holes like eyes)

of something, something which fluttered briefly in his mind and then was gone. False memory, real memory, intuition? All of the above? None of the above? He hadn't known, hadn't really cared. His priority then had been to get in touch with God, if he could. He had never needed to more than now.

Yes,
Reverend Martin said calmly inside his head.
And this is where your work is supposed to pay off. You keep in touch with God when the cupboard's full so you can reach out to him when it's empty. How many times did I tell you that last winter and this spring?

A lot. He just hoped that Martin, who drank more than he should and maybe couldn't be entirely trusted, had been telling the truth instead of just mouthing what David's dad called “the company line.” He hoped that with all his mind and heart.

Because there were other gods in Desperation.

He was sure of it.

He began his prayer as he always did, not aloud but in his mind, sending words out in clear, even pulses of thought:
See in me, God. Be in me. And speak in me, if you mean to, if it's your will.

As always at these times when he felt really in need of God, the front of his mind was serene, but the deeper part, where faith did constant battle with doubt, was terrified that there would be no answer. The problem was simple enough. Even now, after all his reading and praying and instruction, even after what had happened to his friend, he doubted God's existence.
Had
God used him, David Carver, to save Brian Ross's life? Why would God do a wild and crazy thing like that? Wasn't it more likely that what Dr. Waslewski had called a clinical miracle and what David himself had thought of as an answered prayer had actually been nothing more than a clinical coincidence? People could make shadows that looked like animals, but they were still only shadows, minor tricks of light and projection. Wasn't it likely that God was the same kind of thing? Just another legendary shadow?

David closed his eyes tighter, concentrating on the mantra and trying to clear his mind.

See in me. Be in me. Speak in me if it's your will.

And a kind of darkness came down. It was like nothing he had ever known or experienced before. He sagged side-ways against the wall between two of the projection-cutouts, eyes rolling up to whites, hands falling into his lap. A low, guttural sound came from his throat. It was followed by sleeptalk which perhaps only David's mother could have understood.

“Shit,” he muttered. “The mummy's after us.”

Then he fell silent, leaning against the wall, a silver runner of drool almost as fine as a spider's thread slipping from one corner of what was, essentially, still a child's mouth. Outside the door which he had shut in order to be alone with his God (there had once been a bolt on it, but that was long gone), approaching footsteps could now be heard. They stopped outside the door. There was a long, listening pause, and then the knob turned. The door opened. Audrey Wyler stood there. Her eyes widened when they happened on the unconscious boy.

She came into the fuggy little room, closed the door behind her, and looked for something, anything, to tilt and prop under the knob. A board, a chair. It wouldn't hold them off for long if they came up here, but even a thin margin might mean the difference between success and failure at this stage. But there was nothing.

“Fuck,” she whispered. She looked at the boy, realizing without much surprise that she was afraid of him. Afraid even to go near him.

Tak ah wan!
The voice in her head.

“Tak ah wan!”
This time out of her mouth. Assent. Both helpless and heartfelt.

She went down the two steps into the projection-booth proper and crossed, wincing at each gritting step, to where David leaned on his knees against the wall with the cut-outs in it. She kept expecting his eyes to fly open—eyes that would be filled with an electric-blue power. The right hand in her pocket squeezed the
can tahs
together once more, drawing strength, then—reluctantly—left them.

She dropped to her own knees in front of David, her cold and shaking fingers clasped before her. How ugly he was! And the smell coming from him was even more offensive to her. Of
course
she had stayed away from him; he looked like a gorgon and stank like a stew of spoiled meat and sour milk.

“Prayboy,” she said. “Ugly little prayboy.” Her voice had changed into something that was neither male nor female. Black shapes had begun to move vaguely beneath the skin of her cheeks and forehead, like the beating, membranous wings of small insects. “Here's what I should have done the first time I saw your toad's face.”

Audrey's hands—strong and tanned, chipped here and there with scabs from her work—settled around David Carver's throat. His eyelids fluttered when those hands shut off his windpipe and stopped his breath, but just once.

Just once.