Waiting for the Galactic Bus (12 page)

“Me?”

“Listen.” The voice trailed off in speaker hiss. “Lis-sen...”

Under the sobbing wind, the strange deep music resolved to a descending motif of three notes in the strings. Long, short, long under a haunting human voice.

Charity. Char-i-tee...

“This also is reality,” the speaker voice informed her.

“It’s not real!” Charity wailed. “I’m supposed to be in hell, punished. This is crazy.”

“I didn’t say whose reality. The popcorn always suited you. You never asked for anything better.”

“Who’s following me? Tell me that much, will you?”

“In this place,” said the TV creature, “most likely the last person you’d want to meet. Unless you care to remain for my editorial — public service, carefully laundered of damaging inference, station not responsible for content — you’d better run like hell.”

Amid swirling fog, ominous music and the inane cackling of the true believer, Charity Stovall fled away.

    12   

Prometheus in Dolby

The pursuing voice faded, but she heard another just ahead. A man’s voice like a clear trumpet, like Richard Burton in
The Robe.
One fearful glance over her shoulder, then Charity found the courage to call out.

“Hey! You out there, where are you?”

“Here!” the voice summoned. “Here, come to me, whoever you are. Now, you nighted ranks, you host of villainous shades, do I yet defy you! Time and again, though you pursue and yet I strive, and to your darkness give the lie — it is not the winning but the quest that raises me anew from your defeats.”

She didn’t know what he was saying, but the quality of that voice galvanized Charity in a place untouched before: powerful and heroic, yet vulnerable, racked with anguish of spirit.

The mist shifted slightly and she saw him, spread-eagled against a huge boulder by chains spiked into the rock. Not embarrassingly bare like herself, but his black tights and sheepskin vest set off a body heroic as the voice: slender, tight-muscled, smooth chest heaving under an open linen shirt, the finely shaped head crowned with unruly black curls.

“Come, child. Free me.”

With her hands a poor makeshift for modesty, Charity approached the pinioned hero. Black eyes pierced her through out of the pain-drawn face. Under that gaze Charity knew, dead or not, she was still female.

“Uh... hi.”

“Take the hammer, girl. Free me.”

“Hammer?”

“Even there by your foot.” He laughed bitterly. “That with which they pinned me

to this rock thinking none would have the heart to help.”

Groping under the carpet of fog, Charity found the heavy sledgehammer. “Batter at the spikes,” he directed. “If my arms are free I can loose myself from the manacles. Haste you.”

As Charity lifted the heavy hammer, the ground trembled and shifted beneath her feet with an ominous rumble.

“Quickly,” he urged. “This ground is perilous.”

She could barely lift the sledge at first, but spurred by fear and the quaking underfoot, Charity drove it faster and faster at the prisoning spikes. The first of them came loose with a hollow clang. The earth shifted sickeningly. Not far away a great gout of flame shot up through the mist, showering them with fiery needles of pain.

“Hurry, girl!”

His voice drove her to pound maniacally at the remaining pinion until it fell away. The young man brought his lacerated hands together with a concentrated energy fierce enough for Charity to feel. The entire charisma of tension and conflict in him focused in the hands as he grasped one manacle and writhed his wrist through it. The skin tore and bled; his lips drew back in a grimace from the effort.

“Careful, you’re cutting yourself.”

“The blood will — ease — the — passage.” One lacerated hand sprang free as the ground beneath them palpably sank and heaved again. “Hold the chain, girl, it’s coming... there!”

He stood a moment, flexing the torn hands, then allowed her a fleeting, distracted smile. Considering their plight, Charity could still find it devastating.

“Dane.” He bowed his head briefly. “Once heir to a crown, now but a poor, tormented shade like yourself. Though not so poor that I lack thanks, nor so dull” — his smile turned wanner — “as to overlook your dire need of costume. Allow me.”

Dane shed the sheepskin vest and draped it about Charity’s shoulders. With considerable gratitude, she found it large enough to cover the conventions.

“Th-thank you.” The ground surged again, throwing her against him. “My name is Charity Mae Stovall from Plattsville,’n’ can we please get out of here?”

“The wish is the act.” He grasped her hand. “Come.”

They set off at a jolting trot across the dreary landscape, Charity clinging for dear life to Dane. The rumble of the treacherous ground grew to a roar. To their left and right the earth ripped apart, belching flame and ash into the sooty air, pushing back the mist in hissing retreat from blackened heath. Charity caught a glimpse of some hapless creature disappearing into the flaming maw.

Still Dane hurried her on, dragging her over rocks, guiding her surely toward some distant goal she could only guess at, and always the music under the roar of laboring nature. In a lull between quakes they stopped to rest. Charity wilted to her knees, panting. Dane knelt beside her; even through the sheepskin his hands were a comforting human warmth in the middle of chill horror.

“Just a jot further, Charity.” He pronounced her name in a way that made it sound noble, full of meaning.

“Someone’s following me, Dane.”

“And me,” he said. “There’s always someone. And he will find me. Come, the ground’s not safe.”

“Not yet,” she protested. “I can’t even get up. Where are we going?”

“Where I must.” Dane paced forward alone. Blinking through her fear and exhaustion, Charity saw something about him that escaped her before. Dane moved in a definite light that defined him from his drearier surroundings. It must be his goodness, she thought. Just like a spotlight on Bruce Springsteen.
Gol-lee, he must be important.

“We go to all that should have been precious to me.” His sadness was audible. “All I should have clung to, honored, but never did.” He swung about to Charity. The mist swirled between them, and the poignant music. “And you? What condemned you to this place, child?”

“I wish you wouldn’t call me child. You’re not all that much older than me.”

“Hurrying the pleasures of wedlock?”

Charity found she could still blush. “That’s kind of personal.”

“Be not amazed that I can so divine; your namesake virtue’s written in your eyes. No sins I find but they were writ by love.”

A little hard to understand, but he certainly said it real nice. “Well, I guess modesty don’t cut much here. That was it. Just... I wish I could’ve enjoyed it more. I mean, long as I had to get a heart attack. Boy, who could’ve figured on that? Is that your sin, too?”

“No.” Dane’s sorrow emanated from a great distance with an underlying rage that drew it taut. “Far worse, Charity. In the terms of the world, you only crossed a boundary without the passport of Grace. I... ran from all meaning. So now I must ever run toward it, fight and lose. In the matter of
hell”
 
—
the
magnificent voice hurled the word like a missile at a dull gray sky. “Demons, you lack imagination!”

The organ tones thundered away, mocked with echoes and the growing roar of the earth itself Charity was flung backwards as the heath writhed up under her and opened in a great rift between her and Dane, belching fire and black smoke to dirty the mist.

Dane held out his arms. “Jump, girl. I’ll catch you.”

“I can’t, it’s too far.”

“Try.”

She scrambled to her feet, moved back from the yawing chasm already widening as she crouched for a running start.

“Now, ere it’s too far.”

With a quick prayer — not certain to whom under the circumstances — Charity churned toward the rift. She leaped, felt empty, scorching air on her bare legs — then nothing, no solid ground to meet her descent, hands scrabbling in panic at the lip of the rift, the rest of her dangling over searing void. Her fingers lost their grip, clawed, slipped, then Dane caught her and drew her up onto solid ground

“The whole moor’s sinking,” he shouted over the thunder of chaos. “Tearing itself to pieces. Come on.”

He dragged Charity after him toward a barren promontory rising high over the mist. “Take heart: even surviving is an action. To choose and act, even in hell, we are alive.”

“How can we be alive?” Charity ran a dirty hand through her hair stringy with damp and singed ends. “We’re as dead as you can get.”

“Life’s not state but quality. Here, this will help.” Dane drew the lace from the front of his shirt and tied back Charity’s hair. “In the far kingdom of Plattsville, would you ever know a day like this?”

No, Charity reflected honestly. I’d be working in the kitchen or just riding around with Roy or watching dumb old TV. Scary as this place is, and for all his weird talk, Dane is the beautifulest man I ever saw.

“Now you get down to it,” she allowed, “things could be a lot worse.”

“So they could.” Dane swept her clear off her feet and kissed her. Charity’s heart definitely missed a few beats. She felt his kiss down to her dangling toes.

“Just a little further now.”

At the summit only a vast blanket of white fog lay before them, dirtied with smoke and reddish ash. The rock beneath them trembled. When Charity looked back, she saw the earth convulse once more in a scream of sundered stone. The last spasm subsided in echoes that stumbled away across leaden skies like fading timpani. “Is the weather always this bad here?”

“No. Quite oft it turns truly foul.” Dane touched her cheek, “You’re a brave lass, Charity Stovall. And very lovely.”

Charity gulped. He said it easily enough, as if a little surprised at the discovery. No one had ever called her lovely. Now, suddenly, she felt that way. But Dane was pointing, a gesture weighted with more doom than hope.

“There. My father’s keep.”

    13   

Yonder lies the castle
of my father

From somewhere, dry strings swept up to be capped by a single piano note from which a chilly figure shuddered away in woodwinds. The mist eddied and parted to reveal a brooding castle of black stone rising from the heath. Over the single tower a banner turned in the wind.