He’d had enough of that. It was time they were man and wife again, instead of shy strangers who happened to share the same bed. He turned off the shower, roughly dried himself, then wrapped the towel around his waist and went into the bedroom.
Thunder was rolling in, low and cracked, but it hadn’t woken Jo-Beth. She lay fully dressed on top of the bed, her pale face silvery with sweat in the gloom. He went to the window, and opened it a crack. The clouds were bruised and fat with rain; it would only be minutes before they loosed their waters on the dusty yard and the dusty roof.
Behind him, Jo-Beth murmured in her sleep. He went back to the bed, and gently sat down beside her. Again, she murmured something—he couldn’t make out what—and raised her hand from her side, grazing his shoulder with her fingers as she did so. Her hand moved on to touch her mouth, and then, as though her sleeping self had realized somebody was sitting beside her, returned to his arm.
He was certain she’d awaken, but she didn’t. The faintest of smiles appeared on her face, and her hand went from his arm to his chest. Her touch was feather-light but intensely erotic. All the more so, perhaps, because her unconscious was allowing her to do what her waking self could, or would not. He let her hand dally on his chest, and while it did so he gingerly pulled at the tuck of his towel. His erection had raised its head, eager to be touched. He didn’t move; didn’t breathe. Just watched while her hand wandered down his hard belly until it found his dick.
He exhaled as quietly as he could, luxuriating in her attention. She didn’t linger at his sex any longer than she had at chest and belly, but by the time her fingers had moved over his balls and on down his thigh he was so aroused he feared if she returned there he’d lose control. He looked away from her fingers to her face, but the sight of her troubled beauty only heated him further. He closed his eyes, tight, and tried to picture the street outside, the storm clouds, the engine he’d been working on yesterday, but her face kept finding him in his refuge.
And now he heard her murmuring again, the words still incomprehensible, and without planning to do so he opened his eyes to watch her lips.
It was too much. He gasped out loud, and as if in response the murmurs grew a little more urgent, and her hand, which had been trailing on his leg, began to move back up towards his groin. He felt the first spasm behind his balls, and reached down to take tight hold of his dick in the hope of delaying the inevitable a moment longer. But it seemed she sensed the motion, because her hand went to his sex, reaching it before he could stop her, and at her touch he overflowed.
“Oh God,” he gasped, and threw back his head. He could hear her words for the first time—
“It’s all right,” she was saying. He could only gasp. “It’s all right, Tommy. It is. It is. It’s all right—”
“Tommy?”
He kept spurting, as her slickened hand worked his dick, but the pleasure was already gone.
“No,” he said. “Stop.”
She didn’t obey him because she didn’t hear him. She was gabbling deliriously: “ItisitisitisallrightTommyallrightitis.”
He pulled his hand off her, sick to his stomach, and started to get up off the bed. But she caught hold of his hand as he rose, her aim good despite her closed eyes. The gabbling ceased.
“Wait,” she said.
His dick dribbled on, mindlessly. He was sorely tempted to straddle her right now; let her open her eyes and see it there, raw and wet. To say: It’s me, Howie. Remember me? You married me.
But he was too ashamed of his vulnerability, of his sweat, and of the fear in him, tickling away in his belly even now. The fear that Tommy-Ray McGuire was close, and getting closer. Before reason could stop him he scanned the murky room, looking for some sign, any sign, of the Death-Boy. There was none, of course. He wasn’t here in the flesh. At least not yet. He was in Jo-Beth’s mind. And that in its way was a far more terrible place for him to be.
Snatching up his towel to cover his nakedness, Howie pulled his hand away and retreated to the door, the rage in him gone already, become ash and nausea.
Before he could reach for the handle Jo-Beth opened her eyes.
“Howie?” she said.
“Who were you expecting?”
She raised her sticky hand, sitting up as she did so. “What’s been going on?” she said, her tone accusatory.
He wasn’t going to let her turn this around. “You were dreaming of Tommy-Ray,” he said.
She swung her legs off the bed, scraping his semen off her fingers onto the sheet as she did so. “What are you talking about?” she said. There were red blotches on her neck and upper chest; sure signs that she too had been aroused. Still was, probably.
“You kept saying his name,” Howie replied.
“No, I didn’t.”
“You think I’d make a thing like that up?” he said, his volume rising.
“Yeah, probably!” she yelled.
He knew by the way she came back at him she was fully aware that he was telling the truth (she was only ever this vehement if she was concealing something), which meant she had some waking knowledge of her brother. The thought made Howie want to weep, or puke, or both. He hauled open the door and stumbled out onto the landing. As he did so the rain began—a sudden tattoo against the window. He looked up: saw the purple black clouds through the streaming glass, felt thunder rattle the house.
Amy had woken and was sobbing in the spare room. He wanted to go to her, but heard Jo-Beth at the bedroom door, and couldn’t bear to be seen in the light the way he was now, with fear on his face. She’d tell Tommy-Ray, for certain, next time she saw him in her dreams. She’d say: Come get me. You’ve got no opposition here.
He stepped into the bathroom, and slammed the door behind him. After a time, Amy’s crying subsided. And a little while after that, the storm passed, but it left the air uncleansed, and the heat as smothering as ever.
* * *
II
Grillo? It’s Howie.”
“I didn’t expect to hear—”
“Have you heard anything m-m-m-more about Tommy-Ray?”
“Something happened?”
“Sort of.”
“Want to tell me what?”
“Not right now, no, I j-j-just have to k-k-know where he is. He’s coming f-f-for her—”
“Calm down, Howie.”
“I k-k-know he’s coming for her.”
“He doesn’t know where you live, Howie.”
“He’s inside her head, Grillo. He was right. I—f-f-fuck!—haven’t stuttered in f-five years.” He paused to draw a ragged breath. “I thought it was over. At least w-w-with him.”
“We all did.”
“I th-th-thought he was gone and it was over. But he’s s-s-still there, inside her. So d-d-don’t tell me he doesn’t know where w-w-we live. He knows exactly.”
“Where are you right now?”
“At a gas station half a mile from the house. I didn’t want to c-c-call from there.”
“You’d better get back there. Have you got any weapons?”
“I got a handgun. But what the fuck use is th-th-th-that g-g-going, going to be? I mean, if he’s alive—”
“He’s cheated death.”
“And a handgun ain’t goin’ to be a h-h-hell of a lot of good.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah, man, right. Shit. Right. That’s what it, what it, what it is. It’s fucking shit!” Grillo heard him slam his fist against the phone. Then there was a muffled sound. It took him a moment to realize Katz was weeping.
“Listen, Howie—” The muffled sound went on. He’d put his hand over the phone, to keep Grillo from hearing. I know that feeling, Grillo thought to himself. If I cry and nobody hears, maybe I didn’t cry at all. Except that it didn’t work that way. “Howie? Are you there?” There was a moment or two of silence, then Howie came back on the line. The tears had calmed him a little.
“I’m here,” he said.
“I’m going to drive
up there. We’ll work this out, somehow.”
“Yeah?”
“Meantime, I want you to stay put. Understand me?”
“What if he . . . I mean, what if h-h-he comes for her?”
“Do what you have to do. Move if you have to move. But I’ll keep checking in, okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Anything else?”
“He’s not going to get her, Grillo.”
“I know that.”
“Whatever the f-f-fuck it takes, he’s not going to get her.”
What have I done? That was all Grillo could think when he’d put the phone down: What have I done volunteering for this? He couldn’t help Howie. Jesus, he could barely help himself.
He sat in front of the screens—which were filling up like barrels in a cloudburst: news coming in from every state, all of it bad—and tried to work out some way to withdraw the offer, but he knew he’d not be able to live with himself if he turned his back and something happened.
The fact was, something would happen. If not tonight, tomorrow night. If not tomorrow night, the night after. The world was losing its wits. The evidence was right there on the screens in front of him. What better time for the resurrected to settle their scores? He had to do what he could, however little, however meaningless, or else never meet his gaze in the mirror again.
He turned off the screens and went up to pack an overnight bag. He was just about finished, when the telephone rang. This time it was Tesla, calling from Everville.
“I’m going to be staying with a woman I met here. She needs some company right how. Have you got a pen?” Grillo took the number, then gave her a brief update on the Katz situation. She didn’t sound all that surprised. “There’s a lot of endgames going to get played this weekend,” she said. He told her he was going to drive up to Howie’s. Then the conversation turned to the subject of D’Amour.
“I always thought his totems and his tattoos were so much shit,” Grillo said, “but right now—”
“You wish you had one of them?”
“I wish I had something I believed in,” Grillo said. “Something that’d actually do some good if Tommy-Ray is on the loose.”
“Oh he’s probably loose,” Tesla said grimly. “Just about everything that could be loose is loose right now.”
Grillo chewed on this for a moment. Then he said, “What the fuck did we do to deserve this, Tes?”
“Just lucky, I guess.”
* * *
III
The storm that had broken over the Katzes’ house moved steadily southwest, unloading its burden of rain as it went. There were a number of collisions on the slickened streets and highways, all but one of them inconsequential. The exception occurred one hundred and fifty-five miles from the house, on Interstate 84. An RV carrying a family of six, on their way home from a vacation in Cedar City, swerved on the treacherous asphalt, struck a car in the adjacent lane, and crossed the divide, taking out half a dozen vehicles traveling south before it plunged off the side of the highway.
The police, medics, and fire crews were at the scene with remarkable speed given that the highway was blocked in both directions, and the rain so torrential it reduced visibility to fifteen yards, but by the time they arrived, five lives had already ebbed away, and another three people—including the driver of the RV—were dead before they could be cut from the wreckage.
Almost as though it was intrigued by the chaos it had wrought, the storm slowed its progress and lingered over the accident scene for the better part of half an hour, its deluge weighing down the smoke that poured from the burning vehicles. In a bitter, blinding soup of smoke and rain, rescued and rescuers alike moved like phantoms, stinking and stained with blood and gasoline. Some of the survivors were lucky enough to weep; most simply stumbled from fire to fire, body to body, as if looking for their wits.
But there was one phantom here who was neither a rescuer nor in need of rescue; who moved through the hellish confusion with an ease that would inspire nightmares in all who saw him.
He was young, this phantom, and by all accounts indecently handsome: blond, tanned and smiling a wide, white smile. And he was singing. It was this, more than his easy saunter, more than his easy smile, that distressed those who spoke of him later. That he went from wreck to wreck with this bland, nameless jingle on his lips was nothing short of demoniacal.
He did not go unchallenged, however. A police officer found him reaching into the backseat of one of the wrecked vehicles and demanded he instantly desist. The phantom ignored the order and smashed the back window, reaching in for something he’d seen on the seat. Again, the officer ordered that he stop, and drew his gun to enforce his order. By way of response the phantom ceased his singing long enough to say, “I got business here.”
Then, resuming the melody where he’d left off, he pulled the body of a child, her pitiful corpse overlooked in the chaos, out through the broken window. The officer leveled his weapon at the thief’s heart, and ordered him to put the child down, but this, like the rest of the orders, was ignored. Slinging the body around his shoulders like a shepherd carrying a lamb, the phantom made to depart.
What followed was witnessed by five individuals, including the officer, all of them in highly agitated states, but none so traumatized as to be hallucinating. Their testimonies, however, were outlandish. Turning his back on the officer, the corpse-stealer started to amble off towards the embankment, and as he did so a convulsion ran through the smoke around him, and for a moment or two it seemed to the witnesses there were human forms in the billows—their faces long and wretched, their bodies sinewy but softened, as though they’d had their bones sucked out of them—forms that were plainly in the thief’s employ, because they closed around him in a moaning cloud which no one, not even the officer, was willing to breach.
Five hours later, the body of the child—a three year old called Lorena Hernandez—was discovered less than a mile from the highway, in a small copse of birch trees. She had been stripped of her blood-stained clothing and her body carefully, even lovingly, washed in rain water. Then her little corpse had been arranged on the wet ground in a fetal position: legs tucked up snug against her belly, chin against her chest. There was no sign of any sexual molestation. The eyes, however, had gone from her head.
Of the singing beauty who’d taken her, and gone to considerable trouble to lay her out this way, there was no sign. Literally none. No foot marks in the grass, no fingerprints on her body, nothing. It was as though the abductor had floated as he’d gone about his grim and inexplicable ritual.
A report of these events was added to the Reef that very night, but there was nobody there to read it. Grillo was on his way to Idaho, leaving the reports to accrue behind him at an unprecedented rate. Strange, terrible stories.
In Minnesota, a man undergoing heart surgery had woken on the operating table and despite the anaesthetists’ desperate attempts to return him to a comatose state, had warned his surgeons that the tail-eaters were coming, the tail-eaters were coming, and nothing could stop them. Then he’d died.
On the campus of Austin College in Texas, a woman in white, accompanied by what witnesses described as six large albino dogs, was seen disappearing into the ground as though descending a flight of stairs. There was sobbing heard from the earth, so sorrowful one of those who heard it attempted suicide an hour later.
In Atlanta, the Reverend Donald Merrill, midway through a sermon of particular ferocity, suddenly veered from his subject—There is one love, God’s love—and began to speak about Imminence. His words were being broadcast across the nation live, and the cameras stayed on him as he pounded and paraded, his vocabulary becoming more obscure with every sentence. Then the subject veered again, on to the subject of human anatomy. The answer is here, he said, starting to undress in front of his astonished flock: in the breast, in the belly, in the groin. By the time he was down to his underwear and socks, the broadcast had been blacked out, but he continued to harangue h
is assembly anyway, instructing his appalled and fascinated congregation to go home, find a large mirror, and study themselves naked, until—as he put it—Imminence was over, and time stood still.
There was one report among those swelling the Reef that would have been of particular interest to Tesla, had she known about it; indeed might have changed the course of events to come significantly.
It came from the Baja. Two visitors from England, parapsychologists writing a book on the mysteries of mind and matter, had gone in search of a nearly mythical spot where rumor had it great and terrible events had taken place some years before. This had of course brought them to the spot where Fletcher had first created the Nuncio, the Misión de Santa Catrina. There, on a headland overlooking the blue Pacific, they’d been in the midst of photographing the ruins when one of the number who still tended the little shrine that nestled in the rubble came running up to them, tears streaming down her face, and told them that a fire had walked in the misión the night before, a fire in the form of a man.
Fletcher, she said, Fletcher, Fletcher . . .
But this tale, like so many others, was soon buried beneath the hundreds that were flooding in every hour from every state. Tales of the freakish and the unfathomable, of the grotesque, the filthy, and the frankly ludicrous. Unminded, unwatched, and now uncared for, the Reef grew in ignorance of itself, a body of knowledge without a head wise to its nature.
EIGHT