The Book of Joby (117 page)

“Joby, what’s really going on? I have to know.”

“I just told you,” his father said crossly. “I’m not sleeping. Is that so hard to fathom given everything they’ve put me through?”

“
Who’s
put you through?” Hawk asked, thinking of the boy in town.

“Who do you
think
?” his father snapped. “Are you the only one in Taubolt who hasn’t heard I lost my job?”

Hawk found a chair to sit in, feeling cold and numb. This was definitely not his father talking, unless Joby really had gone crackers in the week that
he’d been gone. He knew he ought to smile and nod and go straight to Jake about it now, but Hawk’s need to know what was happening, to confront and fix it, was too urgent to suppress.

“I was just stopped by a kid in town who wanted me to know that he’s helping my father make the demons pay for everything,” Hawk said grimly.

“I have no idea what he meant,” Joby said, but Hawk had seen him flinch.

“What is it that you’re too afraid to tell even
me
?” Hawk asked fearfully.

“I don’t like being called a liar by my own son!” Joby snapped.

“I don’t like being lied to by my father,” Hawk said levelly, terrified and angry all at once at what might be clinging to Joby’s back right now. “If you won’t tell me what that kid was talking about,” Hawk said, already rising to head for the door, “I’m going straight to Jake and asking him if he knows.”

“Stay out of it!” Joby exclaimed. “GB’s life could be at stake!”

“GB?”
Hawk said, whirling back even more angrily. “What’s he got to do with—”

“I
asked
you to stay out of it,” Joby said, trying belatedly to curb his temper.

“Just tell me what you’re tangled up in!” Hawk demanded, no longer curbing his.

Joby raised his head at last and gazed hard at Hawk. “I appreciate your concern, but I don’t want you involved.”

Hawk found it suddenly harder to breath, terrified of all Joby’s answer implied. “You’re my father,” he said fiercely. “That makes me
involved
.”

“That’s right,” Joby said with sudden, steely calm. “And you’re my son. I won’t put you in harm’s way.”

“But it’s supposed to be okay with me if
you
get hurt?” Hawk parried. “Dad, you’ve been trusting the wrong people.”

“Who else should I have trusted?” Joby demanded.

“The Council, for one, Dad. Have you even tried to—”

“The
Council
?” Joby cut him off. “What have they ever done about anything?”

“What have they done?” Hawk said in disbelief. “They’ve worked day and night to defend this town! Ever since the night Jupiter and Sky died, they’ve done more than anyone else to protect the kids you care so much about—including me! Jake saved my friggin’ life, Dad! How can you ask what they’ve done?”

“Like they protected Rose?” Joby pressed, clearly unswayed. “Have you forgotten her already?”

The question was so offensive that it might have sent Hawk from the
house had he not schooled himself to remember that the person he was listening to was almost certainly not entirely his father, if it was his father at all. “Rose’s death was an accident,” he said painfully. “The Council had no—”

“An
accident,
” Joby cut in derisively. “If that’s what they told you, they lied! Demons killed her, son. Just like all the others.”

“How do you know that?” Hawk protested. “Who told you that Rose was—” But he didn’t need to finish the question.
“GB,”
he said through gritted teeth. “Why are you so ready to trust
him
instead of me, Dad? I’m your son, remember? Who’s GB?”

“He’s the one who’s been
right
again and again,” said Joby sadly. “About my aptitude for magic, about the Council’s lies . . . and about the kind of coward I’ve been.”

“Okay,” Hawk said, fighting tears, “so let GB tell you what to do, but can’t you trust me enough to tell me what that is? Just tell me what you’re going to do.”

“I’m going to give them
justice
!” said Joby. “That’s all I’ll say about it. I’m sorry, but I won’t . . . I
can’t
just let us all keep dying, one by one.”

“What kind of
justice
is GB peddling?” Hawk asked hopelessly. “I’d give up
lots
of
justice
to have you back the way you were . . . when we went hiking all the time. When we laughed, and ran, and fed the deer. When everybody didn’t hate and fear and kill—for
justice
. . . . Can you remember? We had peace here once, and love and joy. We had
beauty,
Dad.
That’s
the only kind of justice I want now.”

“Things can never be the way they were,” Joby said, looking despondently at Hawk. “Time doesn’t work that way. It just moves forward.”

Forward,
Hawk thought dismally,
toward some looming disaster that could not be stopped.
What was he to do? Unable to think of any other way past Joby’s defenses, Hawk played the last desperate card he possessed.

“I love you, Dad,” Hawk said quietly. “I’ve loved you since way before I knew you were my father. But I know, in every cell of my body, that you’re about to make a terrible mistake. I don’t know what it is, but I can feel it coming to destroy you, and . . .” His eyes were swimming, and his throat had grown almost too tight to speak, but he had to get this out. “And I can’t stay to watch that happen, ’cause watching will destroy me too. I’m sorry, but you’ve got to choose now: me, or this thing you’re set on doing, whatever it is.” He couldn’t keep his tears in check. “I’ll go now and give you time to think about it, but I’m coming back at ten tonight to get my stuff. Then I’m
getting out of Taubolt. You can come with
me,
or you can stay and do . . .
your thing.
But if you let me go, I will not . . .” He turned and walked to the door, too torn up to stay another minute. “You’ve got to choose. That’s all. No second chances,” he said roughly, and walked out, terrified by what he’d done, and praying,
Please choose me, Dad. Please choose me.

Joby stumbled, half-blind with grief, down a wooded trail toward the ocean, needing to move, perhaps just for the illusion of escape, and wishing that a sudden aneurysm would make all his choices for him. He’d thought the night before that there’d been no one left to fail, but he’d overlooked one after all. Now Hawk could not abide him either. Joby was nothing but a loathsome pitfall to everyone who tried to love him. He’d have to get a sign to wear:
UNCLEAN! UNCLEAN! DON’T GET TOO NEAR!

After GB’s departure, Joby had managed only one brief lapse of consciousness just long enough to afford him a nightmare like the ones he’d suffered after Ben’s death. It seemed so obvious now what his guilty mind had been shouting at him for so many weeks back then. How had he failed to see it? And if he’d killed his best friend just to steal Laura, why pretend he couldn’t do what needed doing for much better reasons now? This really was war after all. Soldiers had to kill people all the time, and that didn’t make them murderers. Swami, wherever he was now, had begged Joby to help them on this day. Joby was out of excuses.

By now GB’s list of unknown names had acquired the faces of every grasping, vicious entrepreneur and self-serving yuppie loafer who had overrun and fouled his once-beloved Taubolt. They were to blame for this! They’d forced this hateful choice upon him the minute they’d started shoveling all their filth into his home! If someone had to die now because of it, why shouldn’t it be them?

Greed, Joby thought, should be a virus; the kind that killed whoever caught it swiftly. Then maybe people wouldn’t rush to embrace it so, and soon there’d be no more greedy people. The same for lies, and theft, and every other kind of hurtful satisfaction!

When Joby reached the cliff tops, he headed south along a deer trail in the knee-deep grass until he came upon a weathered stack of stone half-overgrown in ancient Cypress trees. There he slumped against a rough gray trunk and stared out at the water. The sun had just begun to set behind a narrow band of fog far out to sea, throwing pastel rays of color up into the sky. The scene nagged at him somehow, as if he were remembering what he saw
instead of merely viewing it. His mind was clearly going, but who could be surprised at that? Where was that aneurysm? What was taking it so long?

“What is it that I haven’t done?” he cried. “All my life I’ve tried, and tried. . . . But everything I touch . . . just turns to ash. . . . Why?”

He began to weep, and hated himself for that as well, and willed the tears to stop.

“Just show me what to do!” he whispered at the sky, watching in vain for any kind of sign.
“I’ve tried,”
he groaned, weeping once again. “But the world just withdraws, and withdraws. . . . Please! . . . Just once . . . just answer me! I need to know . . . what I should
do
!” He looked up in anguish at the clouds, turned salmon in the darkening air. “Please,” he whispered one more time. “What have I not given?”

There was no answer but the wind, soughing through the brittle grass and cypress boughs around him. Only wind.

“It’s costing me my
son
!” Joby shouted at the air.
“I’ve sacrificed my son! Isn’t that enough? Don’t you care at all?”
Receiving only silence still, he left the trees, breathing hard, slicked with sweat, and filled with fury. “Well,
I
will care then!
I
will act!” he raged. “
I
will give them all the
justice
that you’ve
never
given
me
!”

Joby stalked away then, not back up toward his house, but north, toward town, to find GB and tell him he had made his choice. The boy had been right all along. Empty faith was impotent. Only action changed things.

Merlin didn’t bother watching anything the TV screens portrayed now. There wasn’t time. The storm was breaking, and he had to be there when it did.

He was so close,
so close.
And even as he thought this, the last knot slipped away, and he simply
was
! The mall whirled around him and dissolved as those few, by now barely perceptible, particles of blood drew his spirit back to Joby’s empty former room at Gladys Lindsay’s inn. Merlin gazed about him in stunned elation, returned at last to space and time, if not yet to his body, which was, of course, no longer here. Having come this far, however, that last step would not be hard. Urgently, he called out to find his flesh, and followed its reply to Santa Rosa.

Lucifer sat beside their little fire in exaltation, watching Joby practice the spell by which he’d kill half of Taubolt’s children in the morning, including their five teenage channels, who would be consumed as well by the darkness they’d be there to amplify. GB had even managed to convince Joby that their ritual must be performed up on the Garden Coast, at last giving Lucifer access to that offensive refuge too.

It had all come off so perfectly! Like clockwork, in a single year! Whatever had his troop of morons done with all that other time? Lucifer could only shake his head, suspecting they just hadn’t any sense of timing. Timing, after all, had been the key.

He should just have faced the unpleasant task of coming here to do the job himself far sooner. There was so much blah, blah, blah in Hell about how domineering, unsupportive, and untrusting he was, but look what delegation had gotten him! If not for his misguided urge to nurture all their botched attempts, who knew what Joby might have been by now? Dictator of all America, quite possibly, doing evil of historic significance, instead of just some paltry wickedness like murdering numbers of anonymous
children—
again.
Alas, that would have to satisfy at this late date, though there were still enough years left for Joby to do at least a few worse things afterward. That’s how it always worked, of course. Get a man to do something so unendurably shameful that he’d do any number of even worse things to hide what he’d become, until he’d gladly burn the entire world just to hide his dirty laundry—from no one but himself, of course, by then.