crack the glass, crossing the porch, Tom took the beauty of the day like a fist in the gut. It was too blue and too bright and too gorgeous to harbor death, and yet it did, birth and death, alpha and omega, woven in a design that flaunted meaning but defied understanding. It was a blow, this day, a hard blow, brutal in its beauty, in its simultaneous promises of transcendence and loss.
The car stood in the driveway. As dead as the phone.
Lord, help me here. Give me this one, just this one, and I’ll follow thereafter where I’m led. I’ll always thereafter be your instrument, but please, please, GIVE ME THIS CRAZY EVIL SONOFABITCH!
Three minutes by car, maybe two without stop signs. He could just about run it as fast as drive it. He had a bit of a gut on him. He wasn’t the man he used to be. Ironically, however, after the coma and the rehab, he wasn’t as heavy as he had been before Cain sunk him in Quarry Lake.
I see all the ways you are.
The girl was creepy, no doubt about it, and Junior felt now precisely as he had felt on the night of Celestina’s exhibition at the Greenbaum Gallery, when he had come out of the alleyway after disposing of Neddy Gnathic in the Dumpster and had checked his watch only to discover his bare wrist. He was missing something here, too, but it wasn’t merely a Rolex, wasn’t a thing at all, but an insight, a profound truth.
He let go of the girl’s chin, and at once she scrunched into the corner of the window seat, as far away from him as she could get. The knowing look in her eye wasn’t that of an ordinary child, not that of a child at all. Not his imagination, either. Terror, yes, but also defiance, and this knowing expression, as though she could see right through him, knew things about him that she had no way of knowing.
He fished the sound-suppressor from a jacket pocket, drew the pistol from his shoulder holster, and began to screw the former to the latter. He misthreaded it at first because his hands had begun to shake.
Sklent came to mind, perhaps because of the strange drawing on the girl’s sketch pad. Sklent at that Christmas Eve party, only a few months ago but a lifetime away. The theory of spiritual afterlife without a need for God. Prickly-bur spirits. Some hang around, haunting out of sheer mean stubbornness. Some fade away. Others reincarnate.
His precious wife had fallen from the tower and died only hours before this girl was born. This girl…this vessel.
He remembered standing in the cemetery, downhill from Seraphim’s grave—although at the time he’d known only that it was a Negro being buried, not that it was his former lover—and thinking that the rains would over time carry the juices of the decomposing Negro corpse into the lower grave that contained Naomi’s remains. Had that been a half-psychic moment on his part, a dim awareness that another and far more dangerous connection between dead Naomi and dead Seraphim had already been formed?
When the sound-suppressor was properly attached to the pistol, Junior Cain leaned closer to the girl, peered into her eyes, and whispered, “Naomi, are you in there?”
Near the top of the stairs, Barty thought he heard voices in his bedroom. Soft and indistinct. When he stopped to listen, the voices fell silent, or maybe he only imagined them.
Of course, Angel might have been playing around with the talking book. Or, even though she’d left the dolls downstairs, she might have been filling the time until Barty’s return by having a nice chat with Miss Pixie and Miss Velveeta. She had other voices, too, for other dolls, and one for a sock puppet named Smelly.
Granted that he was only three going on four, nevertheless Barty had never met anyone with as much cheerful imagination as Angel. He intended to marry her in, oh, maybe twenty years.
Even prodigies didn’t marry at three.
Meanwhile, before they needed to plan the wedding, there was time for an orange soda and a root beer, and more of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
He reached the top of the stairs and proceeded toward his room.
After two years of rehabilitation, Tom had been pronounced as fit as ever, a miracle of modern medicine and willpower. But right now he seemed to have been put back together with spit and string and Scotch tape. Arms pumping, legs stretching, he felt every one of those eight months of coma in his withered-and-rebuilt muscles, in his calcium-depleted-and-rebuilt bones.
He ran gasping, praying, feet slapping the concrete sidewalk, frightening birds out of the purple brightness of blossom-laden jacarandas and out of Indian laurels, terrorizing a tree rat into a lightning sprint up the bole of a phoenix palm. The few people he encountered reeled out of his way. Brakes shrieked as he crossed intersections without looking both ways, risking cars and trucks and rhinoceroses.
Sometimes, in his mind, Tom wasn’t running along the residential streets of Bright Beach, but along the corridor of the dormitory wing over which he had served as prefect. He was cast back in time, to that dreadful night. A sound wakes him. A fragile cry. Thinking it a voice from his dream, he nevertheless gets out of bed, takes up a flashlight, and checks on his charges, his boys. Low-wattage emergency lamps barely relieve the gloom in the corridor. The rooms are dark, doors ajar according to the rules, to guard against the danger of stubborn locks in the event of fire. He listens. Nothing. Then into the first room—and into a Hell on earth. Two small boys per room, easily and silently overcome by a grown man with the strength of madness. In the sweep of the flashlight beam: the dead eyes, the wrenched faces, the blood. Another room, the flashlight jittering, jumping, and the carnage worse. Then in the hall again, movement in the shadows. Josef Krepp captured by the flashlight. Josef Krepp, the quiet custodian, meek by all appearances, employed at St. Anselmo’s for the past six months with nary a problem, with only good employee reviews attached to his record. Josef Krepp, here in the corridor of the past, grinning and capering in the flashlight, wearing a dripping necklace of souvenirs.
In the present, long after the execution of Josef Krepp, half a block ahead, lay the Lipscomb house. Beyond it, the Lampion place.
A calico cat appeared at Tom’s side, running, pacing him. Cats were witches’ familiars. Good luck or bad, this cat?
Here, now, the Pie Lady’s house, the battleground.
“Naomi, are you in there?” Junior whispered again, peering into the windows of the girl’s soul.
She wouldn’t answer him, but he was as convinced by her silence as he would have been by a blurted confession—or by a denial, for that matter. Her wild eyes convinced him, too, and her trembling mouth. Naomi had come back to be with him, and it could be argued that Seraphim had returned in a sense, too, for this girl was the flesh of Seraphim’s flesh, born out of her death.
Junior was flattered, he really was. Women couldn’t get enough of him. The story of his life. They never let go gracefully. He was wanted, needed, adored, worshiped. Women kept calling after they should have taken the hint and gone away, insisted on sending him notes and gifts even after he told them it was over. Junior wasn’t surprised that women would return from the dead for him, nor was he surprised that women he’d killed would try to find a route back to him from Beyond, without malice, without vengeance in their hearts, merely yearning to be with him again, to hold him and to fulfill his needs. As gratified as he was by this tribute to his desirability, he simply didn’t have any romantic feelings left for Naomi and Seraphim. They were the past, and he loathed the past, and if they wouldn’t let him alone, he would never be able to live in the future.
He pressed the muzzle of the weapon against the girl’s forehead and said, “Naomi, Seraphim, you were exquisite lovers, but you’ve got to be realistic. There’s no way we can have a life together.”
“Hey, who’s there?” said the blind boy, whom Junior had nearly forgotten.
He turned from the cowering girl and studied the boy, who stood a few steps inside the room, holding a can of soda in each hand. The artificial eyes were convincing, but they didn’t possess the knowing look that so troubled him in the strange girl.
Junior pointed the pistol at the boy. “Simon says
your name’s Bartholomew.”
“Simon who?”
“You don’t look very threatening to me, blind boy.”
The child didn’t reply.
“Is your name Bartholomew?”
“Yes.”
Junior took two steps toward him, sighting the gun on his face. “Why should I be afraid of a stumbling blind boy no bigger than a midget?”
“I don’t stumble. Not much, anyway.” To the girl, Bartholomew said, “Angel, are you okay?”
“I’m gonna have the trots,” she said.
“Why should I be afraid of a stumbling blind boy?” asked Junior again. But this time the words issued from him in a different tone of voice, because suddenly he sensed something knowing in this boy’s attitude, if not in his manufactured eyes, a quality similar to what the girl exhibited.
“Because I’m a prodigy,” Bartholomew said, and he threw the can of root beer.
The can struck Junior hard in the face, breaking his nose, before he could duck.
Furious, he squeezed off two shots.
Passing the living-room archway, Tom saw Jacob in the armchair, under the reading lamp, slumped as if asleep over the book. His crimson bib confirmed that he wasn’t just sleeping.
Drawn by voices on the second floor, Tom took the stairs two at a time. A man and a boy. Barty and Cain. To the left in the hallway, and then to a room on the right.
Heedless of the rules of standard police procedure, Tom raced to the doorway, crossed the threshold, and saw Barty throw a can of soda at the shaved head and pocked face of a transformed Enoch Cain.
The boy fell and rolled even as he pitched the can, anticipating the shots that Cain fired, which cracked into the doorframe inches from Tom’s knees.
Raising his revolver, Tom squeezed off two shots, but the gun didn’t discharge.
“Frozen firing pin,” Cain said. His smile was venomous. “I worked on it. I hoped you’d get here in time to see the consequences of your stupid games.”
Cain turned the pistol on Barty, but when Tom charged, Cain swung toward him once more. The round that he fired would have been a crippler, maybe a killer, except that Angel launched herself off the window seat behind Cain and gave him a hard shove, spoiling his aim. The killer stumbled and then shimmered.
Gone.
He vanished through some hole, some slit, some tear bigger than anything through which Tom flipped his quarters.
Barty couldn’t see, but somehow he knew. “Whooooaa, Angel.”
“I sent him someplace where we aren’t,” the girl explained. “He was rude.”
Tom was stunned. “So…when did you learn you could do that?”
“Just now.” Although Angel tried to sound nonchalant, she was trembling. “I’m not sure I can do it again.”
“Until you are sure…be careful.”
“Okay.”
“Will he come back?”
She shook her head. “No way back.” She pointed to the sketch pad on the floor. “I pushed him there.”
Tom stared at the girl’s drawing—quite a good one for a child her age, rough in style, but with convincing detail—and if skin could be said to crawl, his must have moved all the way around his body two or three times before settling down again where it belonged. “Are these…?”
“Big bugs,” the girl said.
“Lots of them.”
“Yeah. It’s a bad place.”
Getting to his feet, Barty said, “Hey, Angel?”
“Yeah?”
“You threw the pig yourself.”
“I guess I did.”
Shaking with a fear that had nothing to do with Junior Cain and flying bullets, or even with memories of Josef Krepp and his vile necklace, Tom Vanadium closed the sketch pad and put it on the window seat. He opened the window, and in rushed the susurration of breeze-stirred oak leaves.
He picked up Angel, picked up Barty. “Hold on.” He carried them out of the room, down the stairs, out of the house, to the yard under the great tree, where they would wait for the police, and where they would not see Jacob’s body when the coroner removed it by way of the front door.
Their story would be that Cain’s gun had jammed just as Tom had entered Barty’s bedroom. Too cowardly for hand-to-hand combat, the Shamefaced Slayer had fled through the open window. He was loose once more in an unsuspecting world.
That last part was true. He just wasn’t loose in this world anymore. And in the world to which he’d gone, he would not find easy victims.
Leaving the children under the tree, Tom returned to the house to phone the police.
According to his wristwatch, the time was 9:05 in the morning on this momentous day.
Chapter 82
AS MEANINGFUL AS Jacob’s death had been within the small world of his family, Agnes Lampion never lost sight of the fact that there were more resonant deaths in the larger world before 1968 ended and the Year of the Rooster followed. On the fourth of April, James Earl Ray gunned down Martin Luther King on a motel balcony in Memphis, but the assassin’s hopes were foiled when, because of this murder, freedom grew more vigorously from the richness of a martyr’s blood. On June 1, Helen Keller died peacefully at eighty-seven. Blind and deaf since early childhood, mute until her adolescence, Miss Keller led a life of astonishing accomplishment; she learned to speak, to ride horses, to waltz; she graduated cum laude from Radcliffe, an inspiration to millions and a testament to the potential in even the most blighted life. On June 5, Senator Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Unknown numbers died when Soviet tanks invaded Czechoslovakia, and hundreds of thousands perished in the final days of the Cultural Revolution in China, many eaten in acts of cannibalism sanctioned by Chairman Mao as acceptable political action. John Steinbeck, novelist, and Tallulah Bankhead, actress, came to the end of their journeys in this world, if not yet in all others. But James Lovell, William Anders, and Frank Borman—the first men to orbit the moon—traveled 250,000 miles into space, and all returned alive.
Of all the kindnesses that we can do for one another, the most precious of all gifts—time—is not ours to give. Bearing this in mind, Agnes did her best to guide her extended family through its grieving for Harrison and for Jacob, into happier days. Respect must be paid, precious memories nurtured, but life also must go on.
In July, she went for a walk on the shore with Paul Damascus, expecting to do a little beachcombing, to watch the comical scurrying crabs. Somewhere between the seashells and the crustaceans, however, he asked her if she could ever love him.
Paul was a dear man, different from Joey in appearance but so like him at heart. She shocked him by insisting they go at once to his house, to his bedroom. Red-faced as no pulp hero ever had been, Paul stammered out that he wasn’t expecting intimacy of her so soon, and she assured him that he wasn’t going to get it so soon, either.
Alone with Paul, as he stood abashed, she removed her blouse and bra and, with arms crossed over her breasts, revealed to him her savaged back. Whereas her father had used open-hand slaps and hard fists to teach his twin sons the lessons of God, he preferred canes and lashes as the instruments of education for his daughter, because he believed that his direct touch might have invited sin. Scars disfigured Agnes from shoulders to buttocks, pale scars and others dark, cross-hatched and whorled.
“Some men,” she said, “wouldn’t be able to sustain desire when their hands touched my back. I’ll understand if you’re one of them. It’s not beautiful to the eye, and rough as oak bark to the touch. That’s why I brought you here, so you’d know this before you consider where you want to go from…where we are now.”
The dear man cried and kissed her scars and told her that she was as beautiful as any woman alive. They stood then for a while, embracing, his hands upon her back, her breasts against his chest, and twice they kissed, but almost chastely, before she put on her blouse again.
“My scar,” he confessed, “is inexperience. For a
man my age, Agnes, I’m in some ways unbelievably innocent. I wouldn’t trade the years with Perri for anything or anyone, but intense as it was, our love didn’t include…Well, I mean, you may find me inadequate.”
“I find you more than adequate in all ways that count. Besides, Joey was a generous and good lover. What he taught me, I can share.” She smiled. “You’ll find that I’m a darn good teacher, and I sense in you a star pupil.”
They were married in September of that year, much later than even Grace White’s wager date. As Grace’s guess had been closer than her daughter’s, however, Celestina paid with a month of kitchen duty.
When Agnes and Paul returned from a honeymoon in Carmel, they discovered that Edom had finally cleared out Jacob’s apartment. He donated his twin’s extensive files and books to a university library that was building a collection to satisfy a growing professorial and student interest in apocalyptic studies and paranoid philosophy.
Surprising himself more than anyone, Edom also presented his collection to the university. Out with tornadoes, hurricanes, tidal waves, earthquakes, and volcanoes; bring in the roses. He lightly renovated his small apartment, painted it in brighter colors, and throughout the autumn, he stocked his bookshelves with volumes on horticulture, excitedly planning a substantial expansion of the rosarium come spring.
He was nearly forty years old, and a life spent fearing nature could not be turned easily into a romance with her. Some nights he still stared at the ceiling, unable to sleep, waiting for the Big One, and he avoided walks on the shore in respect of deadly tsunamis. From time to time, he visited his brother’s grave and sat on the grass by the headstone, reciting aloud the gruesome details of deadly storms and catastrophic geological events, but he found that he had also absorbed from Jacob some of the statistics related to serial killers and to the disastrous failures of man-made structures and machines. These visits were pleasantly nostalgic. But he always came with roses, too, and brought news of Barty, Angel, and other members of the family.
When Paul sold his house to move in with Agnes, Tom Vanadium settled into Jacob’s former apartment, now a fully retired cop but not yet ready to return to a life of the cloth. He assumed the management chores of the family’s expanding community work, and he oversaw the establishment of a tax-advantaged charitable foundation. Agnes provided a list of fine-sounding and self-effacing names for this organization, but a majority vote rejected all her suggestions and, in spite of her embarrassment, settled on Pie Lady Services.
Simon Magusson, lacking family, had left his estate to Tom. This came as a surprise. The sum was so considerable that even though Tom was on a dispensation from his vows, which included his vow of poverty, he was uncomfortable with his fortune. His comfort was quickly restored by contributing the entire inheritance to Pie Lady Services.
They had been brought together by two extraordinary children, by the conviction that Barty and Angel were part of some design of enormous consequence. But more often than not, God weaves patterns that become perceptible to us only over long periods of time, if at all. After the past three eventful years, there were now no weekly miracles, no signs in the earth or sky, no revelations from burning bushes or from more mundane forms of communication. Neither Barty nor Angel revealed any new astonishing talents, and in fact they were as ordinary as any two young prodigies can be, except that he was blind and she served as his eyes upon the world.
The family didn’t exist in anticipation of developments with Barty and Angel, didn’t put the pair at the center of their world. Instead, they did the good work, shared the satisfactions that came daily with being part of Pie Lady Services, and got on with life.
Things happened.
Celestina painted more brilliantly than ever—and became pregnant in October.
In November, Edom asked Maria Gonzalez to dinner and a movie. Although he was only six years older than Maria, both agreed that this was a date between friends, not really a boy-girl thing.
Also in November, Grace found a lump on her breast. It proved to be benign.
Tom bought a new Sunday-best suit. It looked like his old suit.
Thanksgiving dinner was a fine affair, and Christmas was even better. On New Year’s Eve, Wally downed one drink too many and more than once offered to perform surgery on any member of the family, free of charge “right here, right now,” as long as the procedure was within his area of expertise.
On New Year’s Day, the town learned that it had lost its first son in Vietnam. Agnes had known the parents all her life, and she despaired that even with her willingness to help, with all her good intentions, there was nothing she