“Maybe both,” Barney said mysteriously. “And I’m counting on you, Billy, to help.”
Billy snapped his fingers. “The cellar,” he said. “I saw a maintenance guy come out of the celler with a toolbox once.”
Good old Billy the Kidney. He knew almost everything about the Complex except when he was going to die.
He had never been in the cellar before, had had no reason for visiting it, so he stumbled around the place like an explorer invading foreign territory. The cellar reminded him of a haunted house, white sheets covering assorted pieces of furniture. Barney gingerly lifted a sheet off a chair, afraid he might find a ghost sitting in it. And chuckled when he saw nobody, not even a ghost, was under the sheet.
Just as Billy had reported, the cellar was neat, everything seemed in place. An array of paint cans lined one wall. Lawn mowers and other pieces of equipment, along with shovels and hoes and rakes, hung from pegs on a long board at the far end. The cellar was divided into small alcoves. Peeking into them, Barney saw that most were empty or contained more furniture, shaped like desks and chairs, also covered with sheets.
There had to be a workbench somewhere. And a workbench always had tools, among them the tools he needed—a screwdriver, a hammer, maybe a chisel.
The dust tickled Barney’s nostrils and he almost sneezed. He tried not to sneeze, although nobody was here except him. Nobody but us chickens, he thought, feeling light and bright and adventurous.
At the next alcove he saw the green workbench, loaded with tools of all kinds. Thanks, Billy the Kidney.
In the drawers of the workbench he found a variety of tools, all kinds of hammers and chisels and drills and screwdrivers and stuff he didn’t know the names of. He took a medium-size screwdriver and a small hammer. He could always come back if he found that he needed more tools.
Best of all, he discovered a room at the far end of the cellar that was completely isolated from the rest of the place. Not an alcove but a room with a door. The room was dusty and dirty, old newspapers piled in a corner, rags tossed here and there. A sagging table, covered with cheap oilcloth, stood in the middle of the room. A few straight-backed chairs, some with missing legs or backs or seats, stood around like crippled beings from another planet.
Barney giggled with delight.
A perfect place to work.
Private and untouched by human hands for God knows how long.
Giggling again—he couldn’t remember ever giggling before in his life—and still pleasantly light-headed, he stood at the doorway of the room, grinning happily.
Next item on the agenda:
Car theft.
But first, Allie Roon.
Billy the Kidney had protested when Barney had said that he wanted to make Allie part of the plan for stealing the car.
Disappointed, he had said: “He’s no use, Barney. He won’t even make a good lookout with all his twitchings. You wouldn’t know whether he was trying to give you a signal somebody was coming or whether he was just twitching like he always does.”
“Look, Billy,” Barney had explained. “He’s going to see us coming and going. He’ll wonder what’s going on. He might start asking questions or nosing around. He could screw it up nice and easy.”
Billy’s lips formed a childish pout. “I thought we were partners, just you and me, Barney.”
“We are partners, Billy. Think of Allie Roon as our assistant.”
“He’ll have to take orders from me?” Billy asked, getting interested again.
Barney sighed; he got tired sometimes of Billy’s childish behavior. Actually, he didn’t know why he was insisting on Allie Roon’s participation in the event. He wasn’t really worried that Allie would blunder and probably ruin the plan. Somehow it seemed proper to have Allie join in the conspiracy.
“Yes,” Barney said, “Allie Roon will have to take orders from you.”
“Gee, I don’t know,” Billy said, still reluctant, shaking his head dolefully but giving in finally. “But I guess it will be okay.”
Barney stole his way along the fence, crouched low as if he were a moving target, looking for loose slats. But there were no loose slats. Whoever had built the fence had built it to last, to resist anyone trying to break through the fence. Which seemed ridiculous, of course. Why would anyone want to break into a junkyard? But I’m breaking into it, Barney thought.
He ran his hand over the weather-beaten wood. Weather-beaten but sturdy. Glancing back at the Complex, he saw Billy the Kidney in his wheelchair acting as lookout near the doorway. He knew that Allie Roon stood inside near the freight elevator also performing lookout duties. Unnecessary, of course. But they’d been so eager to be a part of the car theft that Barney had pretended that lookouts were needed at this point. Maybe later, but not now.
He frowned at the fence. Problem: getting the car into the Complex. Impossible to lift it over the fence. Probably impossible to cut an opening in the fence wide enough to get it through. Even if it were possible, he didn’t want to risk sneaking a car into the complex. Better to smuggle it in piece by piece, a little at a time, and then reassemble the car later. Slower, maybe, but safer.
What he needed was a section of fence, away from the street or the windows of the Complex, in which he could loosen some of the slats. He became discouraged as he moved along the fence, testing the sturdiness of it, looking for weaknesses and finding none. Maybe he’d have to return to the cellar and find a saw. But how the hell would he go about sawing his way through a fence?
Finally, a hundred feet or so from the Complex, almost at the spot where the fence turned a corner, he noticed a section with boards that were not joined as tightly together as the rest of the fence. Two loose slats with a bit of daylight between them. Enough daylight to admit a hammer or screwdriver or even a crowbar if he could find one back in the Complex. Might as well give it a try with the tools at hand. Taking the hammer from his pocket, Barney pried the boards apart. Without having to exert himself too much, he pulled two boards loose from their nails, creating a small opening less than a foot wide. He would have to loosen another slat. But the third board proved tougher, resisting his efforts. The board was newer than the others, evidently installed during a recent repair job. Finally the slat yielded to him, drawing loose from its hold. Barney peered through the opening, then measured it with his hands. Wide enough to pass the sections of the car through. Beautiful. He spent another ten minutes at the fence, nailing the boards back into position but not hammering the nails too tightly so that they’d be easy to remove. Tomorrow he’d begin the actual theft.
The sun was slanting low in the sky when he returned to the Complex. Billy greeted him with professional courtesy, formal in his questions, which reflected how seriously he was taking the conspiracy. What was the condition of the fence? Had it been hard taking the nails out? Was he sure the opening was wide enough for both him and the sections of the car? Barney answered his questions with equal seriousness, playing the game, going along with the act. Although he knew that Billy didn’t consider it an act.
Inside, Allie Roon greeted him juicily, spitting and twitching. “H … h … h … o … o … o … o … ow … ow … ow … how … d … di … di … did … I … I … I … d … do … do?”
Barney thought: How the hell do I know? You were inside, I was outside.
But he told Allie Roon that he had done fine, real fine.
He was impatient to get away from Billy and Allie Roon. He wanted to get back to his room, wash up and change his clothes, get ready for his meeting with Cassie. He hadn’t seen her since the wooziness, three long days ago, and hoped she would show up today. His desire to see her was like a wound in his heart.
That day she told him about the Thing.
“It happened when I was just a kid, oh, twelve years old. Actually, I remember exactly when it happened. A Saturday afternoon, July, Alberto away at summer camp in Maine. Papa and I came out of McDonald’s. I’d just pigged out on a quarter pounder with a
large order of fries. On the way to the car this weird feeling hit me. Like the sun had disappeared, although I could feel its warmth on my face. It was like I was ready to drop through the earth, my breath coming fast. Dizzy, but more than that, as if I was floating in space. And this terrible feeling that I was going to die …”
She shuddered and Barney, stunned at her words, listened raptly, afraid to breathe, afraid to distract her and stop the flow of words.
“Papa came around the car and helped me. The light dazzled my eyes. My head whirled. And then, suddenly, nothing. As if all the clocks in the world had stopped. And my heart along with them. And then the Thing ended as abruptly as it had started. Bingo. Everything normal again. Sun shining, heart beating, stomach bulging with all that food and the taste of the fries in my mouth again. That was the first time.…”
“And the second?” Barney said, barely knowing that he was speaking the words but knowing the question was exactly right.
“The second was pain. Unbearable. Never knew such pain. What I called my first migraine, although I knew it wasn’t a migraine. The doctor knew it wasn’t either. But he couldn’t tell what it was. Doctor Langley, our family doctor. He did all sorts of tests. Sent me off to a clinic in Boston. Brain scan, all that stuff. But they found nothing. Like an old joke: They X-rayed my head and found nothing in it … but the pain was in it. It hit me like lightning, my head almost spinning off my body. God, it hurt. So much that I guess I must have screamed and Papa came running. Rushed me to the hospital. And then it subsided, became not so bad. But it stuck around for quite a while.…”
She fell silent then. And Barney waited. He had never seen her like this before, never heard her talk like this before. She had arrived early for the visit, was waiting for him in the reception room when he came ambling along the corridor. She seemed tired, eyes shining almost with fever, said she hadn’t been sleeping well, worrying about Alberto all the time. Instead of sitting across from him as usual, she paced the room, like a trapped thing looking for a means of escape but not sure whether escape was the answer. He gave his usual report about Mazzo, watching her closely as she paced up and down nodding her head. Finally she collapsed in the chair, blowing air out of the corner of her mouth with the little-girl aspect she displayed on occasion.
“Anything I can do?” Barney asked. “You look so …” He groped for the word. Unhappy? Hurting? Another migraine?
She supplied the word. “Rotten,” she said. “I feel rotten and look rotten.”
She could never look rotten, of course. Tired sometimes, face drawn, as if she hadn’t been sleeping well. But always lovely, even when the loveliness was tattered. Like at this moment.
“Poor Barney Snow,” she said, looking at him with the tenderness that melted his bones and muscles. “Heaping you with my burdens.”
“You haven’t heaped me with anything,” he said. Gathering his thoughts, not wanting to say too much, scare her away. “I look forward to these meetings with you.”
Her appraising eyes measured him. “It must be this place, Barney Snow, and what it does to me. I tell you things I’ve never told anybody.”
Thrilled, he hugged his silence.
“Like the migraines you’re always asking about,” she said. “They’re not migraines at all.”
“What are they then?”
“The Thing.”
“What thing?”
“I didn’t know myself for a long time. That’s why I called it the Thing. For want of a better name.”
And that was when she began her recitation, her history of the Thing that had haunted her through the years. Made her a prisoner of phantom aches and pains and depressions that no doctor could trace or diagnose.
“I’m quite a case, right, Barney?” she asked, smiling ruefully. “I should probably be in this place instead of all you guys.” She closed her eyes for a moment, her head resting now on the back of the chair. “And yet … and yet …”
She told him then that she was grateful for the Thing, after all. It had led her to the Hacienda, made her realize there was more to life than the clothes you wore or the food you ate or wanting nice things. Something beyond all that.
Barney felt the chill of dread as she spoke. Cassie locked up in a convent, dressed in the nun’s costume of black and white? All that brightness shut away, the blond hidden under a veil.
“Ever hear of stigmata, Barney?” she asked.
The word was vaguely familiar to him, but he couldn’t pin down its meaning.
“It’s a manifestation. I looked it up. The wounds of Christ or the saints appear on people’s bodies. Along with the pain.”
The question he wanted to ask was in his eyes, because she laughed a bit, shaking her head. “No. I didn’t have stigmata. Although I thought I did. It’s a long story.…”
It wasn’t really a long story, and anyway, he could have listened forever to this strange and lovely girl with the blues-singer voice who had entered his life at a time when he was empty, barren, his emotions as blank as his lost sense of taste. She had filled the emptiness with her visits here to this room. He wanted to keep her talking, keep her here as long as possible. And he concentrated furiously on what she was saying, absorbing her words into his being, so that they’d become a part of him when she wasn’t there.
“… so I looked down at my leg, just under my knee, and saw this stain spreading on my skin, just below the surface. The pain was fierce, a burning pain, and as I looked I saw the stain become deeper, an angry red, an oozing kind of pain as if blood was actually flowing from a wound. Crazy, right? What wound? I’d been sitting in the den, doing my homework, being a good little high-school student, when it happened. I watched the stain grow deeper and winced as the pain grew worse. The stain was about four inches long, jagged, the shape of a crocodile. I limped upstairs, slipped into bed, felt safe there, hoped no one would come in and find me, although Alberto was away at Stanley Prep and Papa was on one of his business trips and my mother was at the monthly meeting of some club or other. I prayed. Prayed for the first time in a long time. Not like the going-through-the-motions prayers of Sunday school. Really prayed. And as I prayed I thought, crazily, stigmata.” She laughed, the laughter a small whoop of self-mockery. “It wasn’t stigmata. People like me don’t get stigmata. The saints do. But those prayers I said, they opened doors for me. I’d never done any praying like that before. I’d always prayed the way you recite lessons in class. But not that time. I really felt as though I’d … communicated. With something, someone. Anyway, when I heard about the Hacienda a few weeks later, I talked Papa and Mother into letting me enroll. Even though I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. And still don’t.…”
Silence in the room then, and Barney let it gather, afraid to say or do anything to break the spell. He had been allowed to enter Cassie’s private world for a little while, and although he was dismayed by the pain she had endured—was the whole world sick, was there no safe place on earth?—he cherished the intimacy they had shared.
“I talk too much,” she said, breaking the silence. “It’s this place, I think.”
He plunged, letting his curiosity get the upper hand. Not curiosity but concern for her. “Did you ever find out what the Thing was?”
“No,” she said. But too quick and too loud in her response. Then settling back in the chair. “It doesn’t bother me as much anymore. Mostly small headaches now. I can live with that.”
He didn’t know whether to believe her or not. Had no choice, really. Had to believe her.
“Hey, Barney,” she said, bright now, eyes glowing again. “Don’t look so glum. It’s not that bad.”
“But you looked so sad.”
She scoffed, shaking her head in that way she had. “Okay, it gets me down once in a while. But that’s life, isn’t it? Don’t be sad for me.” Her voice husky and vibrant, her chin tilted challengingly. “Let’s not talk about it anymore. How about you? Tell me about you.…”
But there was nothing he wanted to say, nothing he could say. He was afraid that if he began talking he would tell her about the car and his grand design. And it might sound crazy to her. She might laugh. And he would be unable to bear being laughed at by her.
Angrily she kicked at the accelerator, sent the wheels of the car spinning, spitting gravel onto the pavement. Angry at herself. For letting down before that poor kid, Barney Snow, telling him about the Thing, for God’s sake. She’d always feared something like that happening during one of her visits, feared that a visit would coincide with one of her vulnerable moments, when she was defenseless, without any protection at all.
Damn it: She had not wanted that to happen. She had hidden the Thing and its ravages from dozens of people—including Papa and her mother and Alberto, as well as all the doctors, and now she had confessed it all to that boy, responding maybe to that hopeless helpless adoration in his eyes. She was sorry that she had begun those visits to the clinic. She’d found no comfort in them, only corroboration. And corroboration was the last thing she wanted.
The street stretched before her like a tunnel, old maple and oak trees forming an arch, and she slackened the speed of the car. She was reluctant to return home, needed some time to prepare herself for her mother, to calm down a bit. Like an actress preparing for a role. Had to be light and bright, cheerful, hopeful. Had to hide the panic that came upon her at odd moments when her guard was down.
I will not let it get me down, she vowed. I will fight it to the end. This thing that threatened everything.
Still angry, angry as much at the Thing as her confession to Barney Snow, she pressed down on the accelerator again and grinned as the car surged forward. Cassie Mazzofono, demon driver. Outracing the moon above and the sun tomorrow. How she wished she could outrace the Thing.
14
HE looked at the car, resplendent in its crimson beauty but grotesque in its fakery, and felt defeated before he began. The screwdriver was in his hand and the hammer in his back pocket. But the whole plan struck him now as ludicrous and impossible.