Desperation (43 page)

Chapter 5

1

Even in the boozy, druggy
days, Johnny Marinville's recall had been pretty relentless. In 1986, while riding in the back seat of Sean Hutter's so-called Party-mobile (Sean had been doing the Friday-night East Hampton rounds with Johnny and three others in the big old '65 Caddy), he had been involved in a fatal accident. Sean, who had been too drunk to
walk,
let alone drive, had rolled the Partymobile over twice, trying to make the turn from Eggamoggin Lane onto Route B without slowing down. The girl sitting next to Hutter had been killed. Sean's spine had been pulverized. The only Party-mobile he ran these days was a motorized Cadding wheelchair, the kind you steered with your chin. The others had suffered minor injuries; Johnny had considered himself lucky to get off with a bruised spleen and a broken foot. But the thing was,
he was the only one who remembered what had happened.
Johnny found this so curious that he had questioned the survivors carefully, even Sean, who kept crying and telling him to go away (Johnny hadn't obliged until he'd gotten what he wanted; what the hell, he figured, Sean
owed
him). Patti Nickerson said she had a vague memory of Sean saying
Hold on, we're going for a ride
just before it happened, but that was it. With the others, recall simply stopped short of the accident and then picked up again at some point after it, as if their memories had been squirted with some amnesia-producing ink. Sean himself claimed to remember nothing after getting out of the shower that afternoon and wiping the steam off the mirror so he could see to shave. After that, he said, everything was black until he'd awakened in the hospital. He might have been lying about that, but Johnny didn't think so. Yet he himself remembered everything. Sean hadn't said
Hold on, we're going for a ride;
he had said
Hang on, we're going wide.
And laughing as he said it. He went on laughing even when the Partymobile had started to roll. Johnny remembered Patti screaming “My hair! Oh shit, my
hair
!,” and how she had landed on his crotch with a ball-numbing thud when the car went over. He remembered Bruno Gartner bellowing. And the sound of the Partymobile's collapsing roof driving Rachel Timorov's head down into her neck, splitting her skull open like a bone flower. A tight crunching sound it had been, the sound you hear in your head when you smash an icecube between your teeth. He remembered shit. He knew that was part of being a writer, but he didn't know if it was nature or nurture, cause or effect. He supposed it didn't matter. The thing was, he remembered shit even when it was as confusing as the final thirty seconds of a big fireworks display. Stuff that overlapped seemed to automatically separate and fall into line even as it was happening, like iron filings lining up under the pull of a magnet. Until the night Sean Hutter had rolled his Partymobile, Johnny had never wished for anything different. He had never wished for anything different since . . . until now. Right now a little ink squirted into the old memory cells might be just fine.

He saw splinters jump from the jamb of the projection-booth door and land in Cynthia's hair when Audrey fired the pistol. He felt one of the slugs drone past his right ear. He saw Steve, down on one knee but apparently okay, bat away the revolver when the woman hucked it at him. She lifted her upper lip, snarled at Steve like a cornered dog, then turned back and clamped her hands around the kid's throat again.

Go on!
Johnny shouted at himself.
Go on and help him! Like you did before, when you shot the cat!

But he couldn't. He could see everything, but he couldn't move.

Things began to overlap then, but his mind insisted on sequencing them, neatening them, giving them a coherent shape, like a narrative. He saw Steve leap at Audrey, telling her to quit it, to let the boy go, cupping her neck with one hand and grabbing her wrists with the other. At this same moment, Johnny was slammed past the skinny girl and into the room with the force of a stuntman shot from a cannon. It was Ralph, of course, hitting him from behind and bawling his son's name at the top of his lungs.

Johnny flew out over the two-step drop, knees bent, convinced he was going to sustain multiple fractures at the very least, convinced that the boy was dying or already dead, convinced that Audrey Wyler's mind had snapped under the strain and she had fallen under the delusion that David Carver was either the cop or a minion of the cop . . . and all the time his eyes went on recording and his brain kept on receiving the images and storing them. He saw the way Audrey's muscular legs were spread, the material of her skirt strained taut between them. He also saw he was going to touch down near her.

He landed on one foot, like a skater who has forgotten his skates. His knee buckled. He let it, throwing himself forward into the woman, grabbing her hair. She pulled her head back and snapped at his fingers. At the same instant (except Johnny's mind insisted it was the
next
instant, even now wanting to reduce this madness to something coherent, a narrative which would flow in train), Steve tore her hands away from the kid's throat. Johnny saw the white marks of her palms and fingers there, and then his momentum was carrying him by. She missed biting him, which was the good news, but he missed his grip on her hair, which was the bad.

She voiced a guttural cry as he collided with the wall. His left arm shot out through one of the projection-slots up to the shoulder, and for one awful moment he was sure that the rest of him was going to follow it—out, down, goodbye. It was impossible, the hole was nowhere near big enough for that, but he thought it anyway.

At this same moment (his mind once more insisting it was the
next
moment, the
next
thing, the
new
sentence) Ralph Carver yelled:
“Get your hands off my boy, bitch!”

Johnny retrieved his arm and turned around, putting his back to the wall. He saw Steve and Ralph drag the screaming woman off David. He saw the boy collapse against the wall and slide slowly down it, the marks on his throat standing out brutally. He saw Cynthia come down the steps and into the room, trying to look everywhere at once.

“Grab the kid, boss!” Steve panted. He was struggling with Audrey, one hand still clamped on her wrists and the other now around her waist. She bucked under him like a canyon mustang. “Grab him and get him out of h—”

Audrey screamed and pulled free. When Ralph made a clumsy attempt to get his arms around her neck and put her in a headlock, she shoved the heel of one hand under his chin and pushed him back. She retreated a step, saw David, and snarled again, her lips drawing away from her teeth. She made a move to go in his direction and Ralph said, “Touch him again and I'll kill you. Promise.”

Ah, fuck this,
Johnny thought, and snatched the boy up. He was warm and limp and heavy in his arms. Johnny's back, already outraged by nearly a continent's worth of motorcycling, gave a warning twinge.

Audrey glanced at Ralph, as if daring him to try and make good on his promise, then tensed to leap at Johnny. Before she could, Steve was on her once more. He grabbed her around the waist again, then pivoted on his heels, the two of them face to face. She was uttering a long and continuous caterwauling that made Johnny's fillings ache.

Halfway through his second spin, Steve let her go. Audrey flew backward like a stone cast out of a sling, her feet stuttering on the floor, still caterwauling. Cynthia, who was behind her, dropped to her hands and knees with the speed of a born playground survivor. Audrey collided with her shin-high and went over backward, sprawling on the lighter-colored rectangle where the second projector had rested. She stared up at them through the tumble of her hair, momentarily dazed.

“Get him out of here, boss!” Steve waved his hand at the steps leading up to the projection-booth door. “There's something wrong with her, she's like the animals!”

What do you mean,
like
them?
Johnny thought.
She fucking well
is
one.
He heard what Steve was telling him, but he didn't start toward the door. Once again he seemed incapable of movement.

Audrey scrambled to her feet, sliding up the corner of the room. Her upper lip was still rising and falling in a jagged snarl, eyes moving from Johnny and the unconscious boy cradled in his arms to Ralph, and then to Cynthia, who had now also gotten to her feet and was pressing against Steve's side. Johnny thought briefly and longingly of the Rossi shotgun and the Ruger .44. Both were in the lobby, leaning against the ticket-booth. The booth had offered a good view of the street, but it had been easier to leave the guns outside it, given the limited space. And neither he nor Ralph had thought to bring them up here. He now believed that one of the scariest lessons this nightmare had to offer was how lethally unprepared for survival they all were. Yet they
had
survived. Most of them, anyway. So far.

“Tak ah lah!”

The woman spoke in a voice that was both frightening and powerful, nothing like her earlier one, her storytelling voice—that one had been low and often hesitant. To Johnny, this one seemed only a step or two above a dog's bark. And was she
laughing
? He thought that at least part of her was. And what of that strange, swimming darkness just below the surface of her skin? Was he really seeing that?

“Min! Min! Min en tow!”

Cynthia cast a bewildered glance at Steve. “What's she saying?” Steve shook his head. She looked at Johnny.

“It's the cop's language,” he said. He cast his peculiarly efficient recollection back to the moment when the cop had apparently sicced a buzzard on him.
“Timoh!”
he snapped at Audrey Wyler.
“Candy-latch!”

That wasn't quite right, but it must have at least been close; Audrey recoiled, and for a moment there was a very human look of surprise on her face. Then the lip lifted again, and the lunatic smile reappeared in her eyes.

“What did you say to her?” Cynthia asked Johnny.

“I have no idea.”

“Boss, you gotta get the kid out. Now.”

Johnny took a step backward, meaning to do just that. Audrey reached into the pocket of her dress as he did and brought it out curled around a fistful of something. She stared at him—only at
him,
now, John Edward Marinville, Distinguished Novelist and Extraordinary Thinker—with her snarling beast's eyes. She held her hand out, wrist up.
“Can tah!”
she cried . . . laughed. “
Can tah, can tak!
What you take is what you are! Of course!
Can tah, can tak, mi tow!
Take this!
So tah!
”

When she opened her hand and showed him her offering, the emotional weather inside his head changed at once . . . and yet he still saw everything and sequenced it, just as he had when Sean Hutter's goddamned Party-mobile had rolled over. He had kept on recording everything then, when he had been sure he was going to die, and he went on recording everything now, when he was suddenly consumed with hate for the boy in his arms and overwhelmed by a desire to put something—his motorcycle key would do nicely—into the interfering little prayboy's throat and open him like a can of beer.

He thought at first that there were three odd-looking charms lying on her open palm—the sort of thing girls sometimes wore dangling from their bracelets. But they were too big, too heavy. Not charms but carvings, stone carvings, each about two inches long. One was a snake. The second was a buzzard with one wing chipped off. Mad, bulging eyes stared out at him from beneath its bald dome. The third was a rat on its hind legs. They all looked pitted and ancient.

“Can tah!”
she screamed. “
Can
tah,
can
tak,
kill the
boy,
kill him now, kill him!
”

Steve stepped forward. With her attention and concentration fully fixed on Johnny, she saw him only at the last instant. He slapped the stones from her hand and they flew into the corner of the room. One—it was the snake—broke in two. Audrey screamed with horror and vexation.

The murderous fury which had come over Johnny's mind dissipated but didn't depart completely. He could feel his eyes wanting to turn toward the corner, where the carvings lay. Waiting for him. All he had to do was pick them up.

“Get him the fuck
out
of here!”
Steve yelled. Audrey lunged for the carvings. Steve seized her arm and yanked her back. Her skin was darkening and sagging. Johnny thought that the process which had changed her was now trying to reverse itself . . . without much success. She was . . . what? Shrinking? Diminishing? He didn't know the right word, but—

“
GET HIM OUT
!”
Steve yelled again, and smacked Johnny on the shoulder. That woke him up. He began to turn and then Ralph was there. He had snatched David from Johnny's arms almost before Johnny knew it was happening. Ralph bounded up the stairs, clumsy but powerful, and was gone from the projection-booth without a single look back.

Audrey saw him go. She howled—it was despair Johnny heard in that howl now—and lunged for the stones again. Steve yanked her back. There was a peculiar ripping sound as Audrey's right arm pulled off at the shoulder. Steve was left holding it in his hand like the drumstick of an overcooked chicken.

2

Audrey seemed unaware of what
had happened to her. One-armed, the right side of her dress now darkening with blood, she made for the carvings, gibbering in that strange language. Steve was frozen in place, looking at what he held—a lightly freckled human arm with a Casio watch on the wrist. The boss was equally frozen. If it hadn't been for Cynthia, Steve later thought, Audrey would have gotten to the carvings again. God knew what would have happened if she had; even when she had been obviously focusing the power of the stones on the boss, Steve had felt the backwash. There had been nothing sexual about it this time. This time it had been about murder and nothing else.

Before Audrey could fall on her knees in the corner and grab her toys, Cynthia kicked them deftly away, sending them skittering along the wall with the cutouts in it. Audrey howled again, and this time a spray of blood came out of her mouth along with the sound. She turned her head to them, and Steve staggered backward, actually raising a hand, as if to block the sight of her from his vision.

Audrey's formerly pretty face now drooped from the front of her skull in sweating wrinkles. Her staring eyeballs hung from widening sockets. Her skin was blackening and splitting. Yet none of this was the worst; the worst came as Steve dropped the hideously warm thing he was holding and she lurched to her feet.

“I'm very sorry,” she said, and in her choked and failing voice Steve heard a real woman, not this decaying monstrosity. “I never meant to hurt anyone. Don't touch the
can tahs.
Whatever else you do, don't touch the
can tahs
!”

Steve looked at Cynthia. She stared back, and he could read her mind in her wide eyes:
I touched one.
Twice.
How lucky was I?

Very,
Steve thought.
I think you were very lucky. I think we both were.

Audrey staggered toward them and away from the pitted gray stones. Steve could smell a rich odor of blood and decay. He reached out but couldn't bring himself to actually put a restraining hand on her shoulder, even though she was headed for the stairs and the hallway . . . headed in the direction Ralph had taken his boy. He couldn't bring himself to do it because he knew his fingers would sink in.

Now he could hear a plopping, pattering sound as parts of her began to liquefy and fall off in a kind of flesh rain. She mounted the steps and lurched out through the door. Cynthia looked up at Steve for a moment, her faced pinched and white. He put his arm around her waist and followed Johnny up the stairs.

Audrey made it about halfway down the short but steep flight of stairs leading to the second-floor hall, then fell. The sound of her inside her blood-soaked dress was grisly—a
splashing
sound, almost. Yet she was still alive. She began to crawl, her hair hanging in strings, mercifully obscuring most of her dangling face. At the far end, by the stairs leading down to the lobby, Ralph stood with David in his arms, staring at the oncoming creature.

“Shoot her!” Johnny roared. “For God's sake, somebody shoot her!”

“Can't,” Steve said. “No guns up here but the kid's, and that one's empty.”

“Ralph, get downstairs with David,” Johnny said. He started carefully down the hall. “Get down before . . .”

But the thing which had been Audrey Wyler had no further interest in David, it seemed. It reached the arched entrance to the balcony, then crawled through it. Almost at once the support timbers, dried out by the desert climate and dined upon by generations of termites, began to groan. Steve hurried after Johnny, his arm still around Cynthia. Ralph came toward them from the other end of the hall. They met just in time to see the thing in the soaked dress reach the balcony railing. Audrey had crawled over the mostly deflated sex-doll, leaving a broad streak of blood and less identifiable fluids across its plastic midsection. Frieda's pursed mouth might have been expressing outrage at such treatment.

What remained of Audrey Wyler was still clutching the railing, still attempting to pull itself up enough to dive over the side when the supports let go and the balcony tore away from the wall with a large, dusty roar. At first it slipped outward on a level, like a tray or a floating platform, tearing away boards from the edge of the hallway and forcing Steve and the others back as the old carpet first tore open and then gaped like a seismic fault. Laths snapped; nails squealed as they divorced the boards to which they had been wedded. Then, at last, the balcony began to tilt. Audrey tumbled over the side. For just a moment Steve saw her feet sticking out of the dust, and then she was gone. A moment later and the balcony was gone, too, falling like a stone and hitting the seats below with a tremendous crash. Dust boiled up in a miniature mushroom cloud.

“David!” Steve shouted. “What about David? Is he alive?”

“I don't know,” Ralph said. He looked at them with dazed and teary eyes. “I'm sure he was when I brought him out of the projection-booth, but now I don't know. I can't feel him breathing at all.”