Desperation (44 page)

3

All the doors leading into
the auditorium had been chocked open, and the lobby was hazed with dust from the fallen balcony. They carried David over to one of the street-doors, where a draft from the outside pushed the worst of the drifting dust away.

“Put him down,” Cynthia said. She was trying to think what to do next—hell, what to do
first
—but her thoughts kept junking up on her. “And lay him straight. Let's turn his airways into freeways.”

Ralph looked at her hopefully as he and Steve lowered David to the threadbare carpet. “Do you know anything about . . . this?”

“Depends on what you mean,” she said. “Some first aid—including artificial respiration—from when I was back at Daughters and Sisters, yeah. But if you're asking if I know anything about ladies who turn into homicidal maniacs and then decay, no.”

“He's all I got, miss,” Ralph said. “All that's left of my family.”

Cynthia closed her eyes and bent toward David. What she felt relieved her enormously—the faint but clear touch of breath on her face. “He's alive. I can feel him breathing.” She looked up at Ralph and smiled. “I'm not surprised you couldn't. Your face is swelled up like an inner tube.”

“Yeah. Maybe that was it. But mostly I was just so afraid . . .” He tried to smile back at her and failed. He let out a gusty sigh and groped backward to lean against the boarded-over candy counter.

“I'm going to help him now,” Cynthia said. She looked down at the boy's pale face and closed eyes. “I'm just going to help you along, David. Speed things up. Let me help you, okay? Let me help you.”

She turned his head gently to one side, wincing at the fingermarks on his neck. In the auditorium, a hanging piece of the balcony gave up the ghost and fell with a crash. The others looked that way, but Cynthia's concentration remained on David. She used the fingers of her left hand to open his mouth, leaned forward, and gently pinched his nostrils shut with her right hand. Then she put her mouth on his and exhaled. His chest rose more steeply, then settled as she released his nose and pulled away from him. She bent to one side and spoke into his ear in a low voice. “Come back to us, David. We need you. And you need us.”

She breathed deep into his mouth again, and said, “Come back to us, David,” as he exhaled a mixture of his air and hers. She looked into his face. His unassisted breathing was a little stronger now, she thought, and she could see his eyeballs moving beneath his blue-tinged lids, but he showed no signs of waking up.

“Come back to us, David. Come back.”

Johnny looked around, blinking like someone just back from the further reaches of his thoughts. “Where's Mary? You don't suppose the goddam balcony fell on her, do you?”

“Why would it have?” Steve asked. “She was with the old guy.”

“And you think she's
still
with the old guy? After all the yelling? After the goddam
balcony
fell off the goddam
wall
?”

“You've got a point,” Steve said.

“Here we go again,” Johnny said, “I knew it. Come on, I guess we better go look for her.”

Cynthia took no notice. She knelt with her face in front of David's, searching it earnestly with her eyes. “I dunno where you are, kid, but get your ass back here. It's time to saddle up and get out of Dodge.”

Johnny picked up the shotgun and the rifle. He handed the latter to Ralph. “Stay here with your boy and the young lady,” he said. “We'll be back.”

“Yeah? What if you're not?”

Johnny looked at him uncertainly for a moment, then broke into a sunny grin. “Burn the documents, trash the radio, and swallow your death capsule.”

“Huh?”

“How the fuck should
I
know? Use your judgement. I can tell you this much, Ralph: as soon as we've collected Ms. Jackson, we're totally historical. Come on, Steve. Down the far lefthand aisle, unless you've an urge to climb Mount Balcony.”

Ralph watched them through the door, then turned back to Cynthia and his son. “What's wrong with David, do you have any idea? Did that bitch choke him into a coma? He had a friend who was in a coma once, David did. He came out of it—it was a miracle, everyone said—but I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy. Is that what's wrong with him, do you think?”

“I don't think he's unconscious at all, let alone in a coma. Do you see the way his eyelids are moving? It's more like he's asleep and dreaming . . . or in a trance.”

She looked up at him. Their eyes met for a moment, and then Ralph knelt down across from her. He brushed his son's hair off his brow and then kissed him gently between the eyes, where the skin was puckered in a faint frown. “Come back, David,” he said. “Please come back.”

David breathed quietly through pursed lips. Behind his bruised eyelids, his eyes moved and moved.

4

In the men's room they
found one dead cougar, its head mostly blown off, and one dead veterinarian with his eyes open. In the ladies' room, they found nothing . . . or so it seemed to Steve.

“Shine your light back over there,” Johnny told him. When Steve retrained the flashlight on the window he said, “No, not the window. The floor underneath it.”

Steve dropped the beam and ran it along half a dozen beer-bottles standing against the wall just to the right of the window.

“The doc's booby-trap,” Johnny said. “Not broken but neatly set aside. Interesting.”

“I didn't even notice they were gone from the window-ledge. That's good on you, boss.”

“Come on over here.” Johnny crossed to the window, held it up, peeked out, then moved aside enough for Steve to join him. “Cast your mind back to your arrival at this bucolic palace of dreams, Steven. What's the last thing you did before sliding all the way into this room? Can you remember?”

Steve nodded. “Sure. We stacked two crates to make it easier to climb in the window. I pushed the top one off, because I figured if the cop came back here and saw them piled up that way, it would be like a pointing arrow.”

“Right. But what do you see now?”

Steve used his flashlight, although he didn't really need to; the wind had died almost completely, and all but the most errant skims of dust had dropped. There was even a scantling of moon.

“They're stacked again,” he said, and turned to Johnny with an alarmed look. “Oh shit! Entragian came while we were occupied with David. Came and . . .”
took her
was how he meant to finish, but he saw the boss shaking his head and stopped.

“That's not what this says.” Johnny took the flashlight and ran it along the row of bottles again. “Not smashed; set neatly aside in a row. Who did that? Audrey? No, she went the other way—after David. Billingsley? Not possible, considering the shape he was in before he died. That leaves Mary, but would she have done it for the cop?”

“I doubt it,” Steve said.

“Me too. I think that if the cop had shown up back here, she would have come running to us, screaming bloody murder. And why the stacked crates? I've got some personal experience of Collie Entragian; he's six-six at least, probably more. He wouldn't have needed a step up to get in the window. To me those stacked crates suggest either a shorter person, a ruse to get Mary into a position where she could be grabbed, or maybe both. I could be over-deducing, I suppose, but—”

“So there could be more of them. More like Audrey.”

“Maybe, but I don't think you can conclude
that
out of what we see here. I just don't think she would have put those beer-bottles aside for any stranger. Not even a bawling little kid. You know? I think she would have come to get us.”

Steve took the flashlight and shone it on Billingsley's tile fish, so joyful and funky here in the dark. He wasn't surprised to find that he no longer liked it much. Now it was like laughter in a haunted house, or a clown at midnight. He snapped the light off.

“What are you thinking, boss?”

“Don't call me that anymore, Steve. I never liked it that much to begin with.”

“All right. What are you thinking, Johnny?”

Johnny looked around to make sure they were still alone. His face, dominated by his swelled and leaning nose, looked both tired and intent. As he shook out another three aspirin and dry-swallowed them, Steve realized an amazing thing: Marinville looked younger. In spite of everything he'd been through, he looked younger.

He swallowed again, grimacing at the taste of the old pills, and said: “David's mom.”

“What?”

“It could have been. Take a second. Think about it. You'll see how pretty it is, in a ghastly kind of way.”

Steve did. And saw how completely it made sense of the situation. He didn't know where Audrey Wyler's story had parted company from the truth, but he
did
know that at some point she had been gotten to . . . changed by the stones she had called the
can tahs.
Changed? Afflicted with a kind of horrible, degenerative rabies. What had happened to her could have happened to Ellen Carver, as well.

Steve suddenly found himself hoping Mary Jackson was dead. That was awful, but in a case like this, dead might be better, mightn't it? Better than being under the spell of the
can tahs.
Better than what apparently happened when the
can tahs
were taken away.

“What do we do now?” he asked.

“Get out of this town. By any means possible.”

“All right. If David's still unconscious, we'll carry him. Let's do it.”

They started back to the lobby.

5

David Carver walked down Anderson
Avenue past West Wentworth Middle School. Written on the side of the school-building in yellow spray-paint were the words
IN THESE SILENCES SOMETHING MAY RISE
. Then he turned an Ohio corner and began walking down Bear Street. That was pretty funny, since Bear Street and the Bear Street Woods were nine big suburban blocks from the junior high, but that's the way things worked in dreams. Soon he would wake up in his own bedroom and the whole thing would fall apart, anyway.

Ahead of him were three bikes in the middle of the street. They had been turned upside down, and their wheels were spinning in the air.

“And Pharaoh said unto Joseph, I have dreamed a dream,” someone said, “and I have heard say of thee, that thou canst understand a dream to interpret it.”

David looked across the street and saw Reverend Martin. He was drunk and he needed a shave. In one hand he held a bottle of Seagram's Seven whiskey. Between his feet was a yellow puddle of puke. David could barely stand to look at him. His eyes were empty and dead.

“And Joseph answered Pharaoh, saying, It is not in me: God shall give Pharaoh an answer of peace.” Reverend Martin toasted him with the bottle and then drank. “Go get em,” he said. “Now we're going to discover if you know where Moses was when the lights went out.”

David walked on. He thought of turning around; then a queer but strangely persuasive idea came to him: if he
did
turn around, he would see the mummy tottering after him in a cloud of ancient wrappings and spices.

He walked a little faster.

As he passed the bikes in the street, he noted that one of the turning wheels made a piercing and unpleasant sound:
Reek-reek-reek.
It made him think of the weathervane on top of Bud's Suds, the leprechaun with the pot of gold under his arm. The one in—

Desperation! I'm in Desperation, and this
is
a dream! I fell asleep while I was trying to pray, I'm upstairs in the old movie theater!

“There shall arise among you a prophet, and a dreamer of dreams,” someone said.

David looked across the street and saw a dead cat—a cougar—hanging from a speed-limit sign. The cougar had a human head. Audrey Wyler's head. Her eyes rolled at him tiredly and he thought she was trying to smile. “But if he should say to you, Let us seek other gods, you shalt not hearken unto him.”

He looked away, grimacing, and here, on his own side of Bear Street, was sweet Pie standing on the porch of his friend Brian's house (Brian's house had never been on Bear Street before, but now the rules had apparently changed). She was holding Melissa Sweetheart clasped in her arms. “He was Mr. Big Boogeyman after all,” she said. “You know that now, don't you?”

“Yes. I know, Pie.”

“Walk a little faster, David. Mr. Big Boogeyman's after you.”

The desert-smell of wrappings and old spices was stronger in his nose now, and David walked faster still. Up ahead was the break in the bushes which marked the entrance to the Ho Chi Minh Trail. There had never been anything there before but the occasional hopscotch grid or
KATHI LOVES RUSSELL
chalked on the sidewalk, but today the entrance to the path was guarded by an ancient stone statue, one much too big to be a
can tah,
little god; this was a
can tak,
big god. It was a jackal with a cocked head, an open, snarling mouth, and buggy cartoon eyes that were full of fury. One of its ears had been either chipped away or eroded away. The tongue in its mouth was not a tongue at all but a human head—Collie Entragian's head, Smokey Bear hat and all.

“Fear me and turn aside from this path,” the cop in the mouth of the jackal said as David approached.
“Mi tow, can de lach:
fear the unformed. There are other gods than yours—
can tah, can tak.
You know I speak the truth.”

“Yes, but my God is strong,” David said in a conversational voice. He reached into the jackal's open mouth and seized its psychotic tongue. He heard Entragian scream—and
felt
it, a scream that vibrated against his palm like a joy-buzzer. A moment later, the jackal's entire head exploded in a soundless shardless flash of light. What remained was a stone hulk that stopped short at the shoulders.

He walked down the path, aware that he was glimpsing plants he had never seen anywhere in Ohio before—spiny cactuses and drum cactuses, winter fat, squaw tea, Russian thistle . . . also known as tumbleweed. From the bushes at the side of the path stepped his mother. Her face was black and wrinkled, an ancient bag of dough. Her eyes drooped. The sight of her in this state filled him with sorrow and horror.

“Yes, yes, your God is strong,” she said, “no argument there. But look what he's done to me. Is this strength worth admiring? Is this a God worth having?” She held her hands out to him, displaying her rotting palms.

“
God
didn't do that,” David said, and began to cry. “The policeman did it!”

“But God
let
it happen,” she countered, and one of her eyeballs dropped out of her head. “The same God who let Entragian push Kirsten downstairs and then hang her body on a hook for you to find. What God is this? Turn aside from him and embrace mine. Mine is at least honest about his cruelty.”

But this whole conversation—not just the petitioning but the haughty, threatening tone of it—was so foreign to David's memory of his mother that he began to walk forward again.
Had
to walk forward again. The mummy was behind him, and the mummy was slow, yes, but he reckoned that this was one of the ways in which the mummy caught up with his victims: by using his ancient Egyptian magic to put obstacles in their path.

“Stay away from me!” the rotting mother-thing screamed. “Stay away or I'll turn you to stone in the mouth of a god! You'll be
can tah
in
can tak
!”

“You can't do that,” David said patiently, “and you're not my mother. My mother's with my sister, in heaven, with God.”

“What a joke!” the rotting thing cried indignantly. Its voice was gargly now, like the cop's voice. It was spitting blood and teeth as it talked. “Heaven's a
joke
, the kind of thing your Reverend Martin would spiel happily on about for hours, if you kept buying him shots and beers—it's no more real than Tom Billingsley's fishes and horses! You won't tell me you swallowed it, will you? A smart boy like you?
Did
you? Oh Davey! I don't know whether to laugh or cry!” What she did was smile furiously. “There's no heaven, no afterlife at all . . . not for such as us. Only the gods—
can taks, can tahs,
can—”

He suddenly realized what this confused sermon was about: holding him here. Holding him so the mummy could catch up and choke him to death. He stepped forward, seized the raving head, and squeezed it between his hands. He surprised himself by laughing as he did it, because it was so much like the stuff the crazy cable-TV preachers did; they grabbed their victims upside the head and bellowed stuff like
“Sickness come
owwt
! Tumors come
owwt
! Rheumatiz come
owwwt
! In the name of Jeeeesus!”
There was another of those soundless flashes, and this time not even the body was left; he was alone on the path again.

He walked on, sorrow working at his heart and mind, thinking of what the mother-thing had said.
No heaven, no afterlife at all, not for such as us.
That might be true or it might not be; he had no way of knowing. But the thing had also said that God had allowed his mother and sister to be killed, and that
was
true . . . wasn't it?

Well, maybe. How's a kid supposed to know about stuff like that?

Ahead was the oak tree with the Viet Cong Lookout in it. At the base of the tree was a piece of red-and-silver paper—a 3 Muskies wrapper. David bent over, picked it up, and stuck it in his mouth, sucking the smears of sweet chocolate off the inside with his eyes closed.
Take, eat,
he heard Reverend Martin say—this was a memory and not a voice, which was something of a relief.
This is my body, broken for you and for many.
He opened his eyes, fearing he might nevertheless see Reverend Martin's drunken face and dead eyes, but Reverend Martin wasn't there.

David spat the wrapper out and climbed to the Viet Cong Lookout with the sweet taste of chocolate in his mouth. He climbed into the sound of rock-and-roll music.

Someone was sitting cross-legged on the platform and looking out at the Bear Street Woods. His posture was so similar to Brian's—legs crossed, chin propped on the palms of his hands—that for a moment David was sure it
was
his old friend, only grown to young adulthood. David thought he could handle that. It wouldn't be any stranger than the rotting effigy of his mother or the cougar with Audrey Wyler's head, and a hell of a lot less distressing.

Slung over the young man's shoulder was a radio on a strap. Not a Walkman or a boombox; it looked older than either. There were two circular decals pasted to its leather case, one a yellow smile-guy, the other the peace sign. The music was coming from a small exterior speaker. The sound was tinny but still way cool, hot drums, killer rhythm guitar, and a somehow perfect rock-and-roll vocal:
“
I was feelin' . . . so bad . . . asked my family doctor just what I had . . .”

“Bri?” he asked, grabbing the bottom of the platform and pulling himself up. “That you?”

The man turned. He was slim, dark-haired under a Yankees baseball cap, wearing jeans, a plain gray tee-shirt, and big reflector shades—David could see his own face in them. He was the first person David had seen in this . . . whatever-it-was . . . that he didn't know. “Brian's not here, David,” he said.

“Who are you, then?” If the guy in the reflector sunglasses started to rot or to bleed out like Entragian, David was vacating this tree in a hurry, and never mind the mummy that might be lurking somewhere in the woods below. “This is our place. Mine and Bri's.”

“Brian
can't
be here,” the dark-haired man said pleasantly. “Brian's alive, you see.”

“I don't get you.” But he was afraid he did.

“What did you tell Marinville when he tried to talk to the coyotes?”

It took David a moment to remember, and that wasn't surprising, because what he'd said hadn't seemed to come
from
him but
through
him. “I said not to speak to them in the language of the dead. Except it wasn't really me who—”

The man in the sunglasses waved this off. “The way Marinville tried to speak to the coyotes is sort of the way we're speaking now:
si em, tow en can de lach.
Do you understand?”

“Yes. ‘We speak the language of the unformed.' The language of the dead.” David began to shiver. “
I'm
dead, too, then . . . aren't I? I'm dead, too.”

“Nope. Wrong. Lose one turn.” The man turned up the volume on his radio—
“I said doctor . . . Mr. M.D. . . .”
—and smiled. “The Rascals,” he said. “Felix Cavaliere on vocals. Cool?”

“Yes,” David said, and meant it. He felt he could listen to the song all day. It made him think of the beach, and cute girls in two-piece bathing suits.

The man in the Yankees cap listened a moment longer, then turned the radio off. When he did, David saw a ragged scar on the underside of his right wrist, as if at some point he had tried to kill himself. Then it occurred to him that the man might have done a lot more than just try; wasn't this a place of the dead?

He suppressed a shiver.

The man took off his Yankees cap, wiped the back of his neck with it, put it back on, and looked at David seriously. “This is the Land of the Dead, but you're an exception. You're special.
Very.
”

“Who are you?”

“It doesn't matter. Just another member of the Young Rascals-Felix Cavaliere Fan Club, if it comes to that,” the man said. He looked around, sighed, grimaced a little. “But I'll tell you one thing, young man: it doesn't surprise me at all that the Land of the Dead should turn out to be located in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio.” He looked back at David, his faint smile fading. “I guess it's time we got down to business. Time is short. You're going to have a bit of a sore throat when you wake up, by the way, and you may feel disoriented at first; they're moving you to the back of the truck Steve Ames drove into town. They feel a strong urge to vacate The American West—take it any way you want—and I can't say I blame them.”

“Why are you here?”

“To make sure you know why
you're
here, David . . . to begin with, at least. So tell me: why
are
you here?”

“I don't know what you're—”

“Oh please,” the man with the radio said. His mirror shades flashed in the sun. “If you don't, you're in deep shit. Why are you on
earth
? Why did God
make
you?”

David looked at him in consternation.

“Come on, come on!” the man said impatiently. “These are easy questions. Why did God make you? Why did God make me? Why did God make anyone?”

“To love and serve him,” David said slowly.

“Okay, good. It's a start, anyway. And what is God? What's your experience of the nature of God?”

“I don't want to say.” David looked down at his hands, then up at the grave, intent man—the strangely
familiar
man—in the sunglasses. “I'm scared I'll get in dutch.” He hesitated, then dragged out what he was really afraid of: “I'm scared
you're
God.”