Unassigned Territory (45 page)

Harlan looked up. She was a middle-aged woman with too much makeup on her face and a stiff-looking red wig perched upon her head. She reminded him of the woman he had seen at the junction after the fight, the one wearing the black wig. “What are these?” he asked. He was pointing at the rack.

“They’re hands.”

“Yes,” Harlan replied, “I was wondering about the fingers and the eyes.”

“The fingers and the eyes?”

“The hands have six fingers.”

The woman leaned toward the rack and looked at the medallions. “So they do,” she said “Probably seconds. That’s why they’re on sale.”

Harlan paid for his gum and went back outside, into what was left of the afternoon. He kept thinking about the cheap medallions that might or might not have been seconds, about how easily Sarge Hummer might have picked up such a thing. One could, of course, wonder why Sarge Hummer would have picked up such a thing. Harlan declined the gambit. He then found that he was troubled by the fact that the woman in the red wig had reminded him of the woman in the black wig he had seen through the window of a car after the fight at the junction. But then he declined that gambit as well. They were only marginally tempting, anyway. Perhaps it was the heat, or the alcohol. He understood there would be others. Even when he had their number. But he knew what he would say. He would say it was the desert.

He was thinking about one more Jack Daniel’s just to clear the slate, as it were, when he glanced at his watch and realized that the wedding of Obadiah Wheeler was about to commence. The act of love indeed. Maybe it was his fault. The blind leading the blind in classic fashion. He would, he promised himself, be more careful in the future, would try to remember what he had begun to tell the boy with that business from Paul—though he’d been cut short by the wedding announcement—that it was, in the end, one’s self one had the chance of seeing most clearly—he who peers into the perfect law of freedom and all of that—a little self-knowledge. That was about what one could hope for; the chance to make of oneself someone one could live with. He allowed himself a moment in which to marvel at how easily this might be forgotten. It didn’t take much. A change of climate, an atmospheric disturbance. He was still on the sidewalk in front of the entrance to the hospital where there was a lot of glass, and he found that he could indeed see himself just now, reflected among the glossy tinted panes. He noticed that he looked like a fool. He noticed as well that he was grinning. “Well, what the hell,” he said to the fellow in the glass. “I paid for the lousy ring; I may as well watch it.”

I
n the tunnel at the foot of the wooden stairs there were messages in Day-Glo paint sprayed on the wooden shoring which lined the walls. One of the messages informed Rex that he had entered the tunnel of space and time. Other messages were less distinct, or appeared to have been written in another language. “Though I speak in the tongues of angels...” one began, but it trailed off into the nothingness of a wall of earth. In other places there were spray-painted figures.

The figures were more or less humanoid with insectlike bodies and large heads which were all eyes.

Beneath one of the drawings, a skeletal creature with bat wings and the horns of a cow, there was a rather lengthy inscription which read:

And I saw a star that had fallen from heaven to the earth, and the key of the pit of the abyss was given him. And he opened the pit of the abyss and smoke ascended out of the pit and out of the smoke locusts came forth upon the earth. And the likeness of the locusts resembled horses prepared for battle; and their faces were as men’s faces, but they had hair as women’s hair. And the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots of many horses running into battle.

Beneath the words there was an old mattress and a lot of litter—beer cans, filter tips, plastic pill bottles together with half a dozen empty aerosol paint cans.

Rex sat down on the mattress beneath the red devilish figure and the words about the pit. The thought which occurred to him was that he himself was that star. He thought once more about certain things the girl had told him, the stuff about the Indian gods, the part about how the Old Ones had entered through a secret tunnel which led upward from the center of the earth.

At last he got to his feet and began to inspect his sled. He found that the thing had been broken in half, but that the instrument was still tied to it. The Hum-A-Phone was what held it together now; but it was still workable. He pulled the rope up and over one shoulder—the position in which he had moved thus far. He didn’t start out just yet, however, but stood listening for sounds above him. Once he thought he heard a scraping at the top of the ladder—something like the way an animal will scratch at a door. Then the sound went away and he heard nothing. He started down the second tunnel. The greenish light grew brighter. There was more trash, and more of the Day-Glo writing, more strange creatures peering out at him from the sides of the mountain.

Verity’s tunnel was a good deal shorter than the one dug by the Frenchman. The light seemed to help. Soon he had reached an oval doorway which opened out into a large circular room wherein the walls were lined with something that looked like aluminum foil.

The light came from the circular room. It emanated from what looked to be a plastic box about one foot square. The box was attached to the floor in the same way a light fixture might ordinarily be attached to a ceiling. Above him, there was a mass of gridwork. The gridwork had been built to support what looked to be at least two additional floors. The floors, like the dirt floor upon which Rex stood, were circular. The first was like a doughnut, with a hole in the center. The second was smaller and solid. It looked, in fact, to be about the same size as the hole in the first, as if the two floors could be fitted together. High above the gridwork, the catwalks, and the floors, there was darkness and tiny pinpoints of light so that for a moment Rex imagined what he saw was the sky, that the structure he had entered was without a roof. Then it occurred to him that there was something wrong with this observation. At first he thought it was only that there were not enough stars. But as he looked longer and harder he began to be able to discern a curve in the space above him and he understood that he had in fact entered the Electro-Magnetron, that what rose high above him was the domed room which had been painted black and upon whose interior stars had been painted as well. Or perhaps the stars were tiny light fixtures. He was too far from them to tell. It also occurred to him at this point that the stars were arranged in a more orderly fashion than those one actually saw at night. These were a perfectly delineated series of constellations following one another across the black arc of painted sky and he remembered what the girl had said to him about the stars being right. He got the idea that the stars had always been right inside the Electro-Magnetron.

He stood for some time contemplating what had been done here. It was not, he thought, unlike something he might have done himself. The foil extended to eye level. After that, there was a ring of stonework, and above that a ring of bare earth. The bare earth ended at what he took to be ground level—some thirty feet perhaps from where he stood. After the earth came the gridwork and the domed roof, which probably rose another thirty feet so that all in all he was perhaps sixty feet from the stars. At the base of the structure, at the edges of the floor upon which he stood, a number of smooth round stones had been placed in a circle, following the edge of the floor as it curved beneath the foil. He counted the stones. There were twelve in all. Farther up, set in what appeared to be a narrow ring of metal above the ring of brick, there were twelve electrodes. The stones had been positioned so that each had an electrode above it. The stones were like the sacred stones he had seen in the trailer of the Buffalo Woman.

There was more writing in the room. Some of it had been done upon a large oval piece of wood or metal—it was hard to say which. The letters, neatly stenciled across the softly shining surface, had been done in a style he associated with knights in armor and biblical texts. The inscription read:

Of such great powers of beings there may be conceivably a survival; of a hugely remote period when consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity, forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds.

Beneath the plaque there was more writing, but of an inferior quality. One phrase in particular caught his attention. It was a single line of Day-Glo pink which began at the bottom of the wood and dribbled down across the brick until it reached the foil. The message in pink said: Fuck Me Harder.

There was more writing, at various heights above the foil-covered portion of the wall, but Rex was done with it. There wasn’t time. He could no longer use his sled, not for moving the Hum-A-Phone up into the gridwork, and yet that was where he intended to take it, as far as he could, up into the rarified heights of Verity’s dome.

O
badiah met his best man at the entrance to the court building. Bug House was late, of course, but this was to be expected and he was only off by an hour. Still, Obadiah had been pacing the stone steps when at last he’d seen the green Plymouth approaching the parking lot and had swung off on his crutches to meet it, lest the man miss him and make once more for the highway, believing it had all been some sort of plot.

Obadiah shouted and waved a crutch. He saw Bug House nod at him and then maneuver the large four-door car into a parking space behind the building. “Almost didn’t make it,” Bug House said as he climbed from the car. And he went on to enumerate a list of catastrophes and near catastrophes which had plagued him since leaving Pomona. Someone had removed water from his radiator, causing the car to overheat near Fontana. Richard Nixon had chased him for several miles on the freeway but Bug House had managed to lose him in Riverside. A tire had fallen off his car in San Bernardino and the cops had tried to bust him.

“Tried?” Obadiah asked.

Bug House grinned in a sly way, as if to imply that strings too complex for Obadiah to ever understand had been pulled on his behalf, or as if to imply that Bug House himself knew none of it was true but knew as well that some sort of outlandish story would be expected of him. It was always hard to tell. The man worried constantly about his image. On the eastern edge of San Bernardino, Bug House said, he had picked up a young girl who told him to stay out of the desert because the world was about to end.

“If the whole world is going to end, what difference will it make if you are in the desert or not?” Obadiah asked. They were by now on their way to the Rose Hotel to meet Delandra Hummer. Bug House produced the sly smile once more; it was a difficult thing to look at. “She give you a date?” Obadiah asked.

“Soon,” Bug House said. “Real soon.”

Bug House had arrived in Ridgecrest for Obadiah’s wedding dressed as Doc Potty. It was one of his more conservative costumes, consisting of black jeans, a black T-shirt, a black cowboy hat, and a white doctor’s jacket upon which someone had stenciled DOC POTTY in large black letters across the back, except that the DOC came out looking more like DOG, so that the jacket actually read DOG POTTY, which was what Delandra started calling him right away.

She was waiting for them in the lobby of the hotel. There was no furniture in the lobby, so she sat on one of the steps. She wanted to be someplace where she could see the street. No sense making them pay three dollars apiece to get past the Mexican at the door. When she saw them she got up and went outside. She took Bug House by the shoulders and turned him this way and that to get a good look at him. “Funny,” she said, “he doesn’t look like a best man.”

They went to a coffee shop for hamburgers and then to the Chapel of Eternal Love to await the appointed time. The sun was low in the west and the sky was filled with the makings of one more desert sunset. Obadiah looked into the gathering orange light. He sucked down the fresh, dry air and leaned upon a lamppost. He looked both ways, up and down the street. He was looking for Harlan Low. The man had loaned him the money but had been unclear as to whether or not he would attend the ceremony. Obadiah hoped that he would. He believed Harlan’s presence might bring a note of dignity to the affair. And it was, all things considered, an affair which could use all the dignity that could be managed. He knew this, but he was doing it anyway, and standing at the edge of the street he was by turns embarrassed, proud, sad, and happy. At his back he could hear Delandra chatting with Doc Potty. She didn’t seem able to leave him alone.

“You need black boots to go with that outfit,” she said. Bug House was wearing what looked like a pair of red bedroom slippers.

“You’re right,” he said. “I had a pair.”

“What happened?”

“Can’t say,” Bug House told her. Soon he began to talk to her about the girl he had picked up in San Bernardino and the end of the world. “You see there’s this secret cult,” he told her. “They worship ancient gods from the center of the earth. Actually the gods have been trapped in another dimension or something.”

“The other dimension is in the center of the earth?”

“Oh, I think so. I was a little confused about all of that.” He paused to scratch an armpit. “What happens, though, or what is going to happen, is that the cult is going to bring these gods back to life and that’s when the world ends. She left this book in my car.” Bug House produced a battered blue paperback from his pocket and began to thumb through it. When he had found an appropriate passage he began to read. He read something about a huge shapeless thing which had come from the stars. There were a lot of words like
nameless, horrible, foul, monstrous,
and so on. Between adjectives Bug House would pause to make sure Delandra was paying attention.

“You had to listen to this from San Bernardino to Victorville?” she asked.