Gunny gets up close, cheek-to-cheek in the mirror, and he says that there is one more thing Jeremy should know. That the new police advancements in computer and forensic science make it possible for them to cut open a victim’s eyeballs and see the face of a killer burned on the retina by the inflamed optic nerves, and maybe it would be wise if Jeremy did something about that.
Jeremy thinks about it, and then he agrees with that too.
Time to get way fucking serious.
FIVE
This Seat is Saved
TWENTY-ONE.
Ariel had lost her way.
She was wandering in a place unfamiliar. It was a hot thicket of leafy green vines that nearly blotted out the sun. What she could see of the sky was a white glare. She knew only that she had to get from where she was to some other place, that she couldn’t stay where she stood, and so she pushed onward through the wall of vegetation ahead as another closed at her back.
There were thorns in here. They were stabbing her and cutting across her skin whenever and wherever she moved. It was treacherous, this going forward. It was painful and almost unbearable, but she had no choice; she must bear it, to reach the other side.
She smelled earth, and heat, and the raw green growth that surrounded her. She was aware also of another smell, a sweet aroma, a rich scent nearly like wine, perfuming the air. She saw small dark berries hanging from the thorned vines by the hundreds, some wholly black and others touched with red, and she realized she stood in a dense thicket of blackberry brambles that went on in all directions.
The question was: which way led out? Or, another question, and more troubling: was there any way out?
She continued onward, in the direction she had chosen though she couldn’t remember making such a decision. It had been made for her, it seemed. She could always stop, turn and go another way, but it seemed to her that sometimes in this world you just have to trust something.
She had not gone very far when the man came through the brambles, and stood before her as if to block her path.
Ariel knew him. She knew his face, from a driver’s license picture. She knew what he’d done to two friends of hers, and she knew now what he wanted to do to her.
As she backed away, he followed. He wore no expression. Fear tightened around her heart and hobbled her legs. He came on unhurriedly, with a supreme and terrifying confidence, and as he closed the distance between them his face began to change.
Ariel saw the flesh ripple and move, like clay being reshaped by a phantom hand. The bones began to shift beneath it. With a series of cracking noises the features distorted and destroyed themselves as one cheek swelled outward and the other caved in, as the nose collapsed into a widening fissure and the forehead lengthened like a slab of veined stone. One eye retreated into the dark while the other burst out like the eye of a fish popped by a hook.
All this, while his lower jaw slid forward. Then with a sound like sticks being broken it began to unhinge itself from the upper jaw, and as Ariel backed away through the slashing thorns she put her hand up before her own face to push aside the image of a reptilian mouth yawning open, stretching itself to impossible size, dwarfing even the misshapen head upon which it had grown. The grotesque body lurched toward her, staggering through the brambles, its arms at its side and hands gripped into fists, its single eye wet and gleaming on the edge of the voracious mouth.
Something dark flew out of that gaping hole. It was followed by another, and another still, and then three at a time and five at a time, ten and then twenty, a vomiting forth of dark sleek projectiles that in an instant grew wings and black feathers and spun around Ariel like a living whirlwind.
The crows flew in black swarms from Jeremy Pett’s straining mouth. Some of them came at Ariel, jabbing and clawing, their small red eyes ticking this way and that, but most of them fell upon the fruit, and this they tore from the vines and swallowed in dripping beaks as they fought each other for the next swallow. They tumbled through the black-stained air in vicious struggling knots, their shrill cries nearly human in their expressions of greed, triumph and frustrated anguish.
Thousands of crows blighted the air. They battered themselves into Ariel’s face, they battered into each other and, still fighting and tearing at each other over the sweet pulp, flapped on broken wings in their death spirals. Through chinks in the black walls that circled her, Ariel saw Jeremy Pett spinning around and around, his arms outstretched wide like the cylinders of a bizarre machine, the engine of a carnival ride that has popped its rivets and burned out its regulators and now must spin and spin until it spins itself to pieces or shatters itself in a blast and roar. As the crows streamed out of him, he had shriveled. His clothes had fallen away, revealing a body that had become an emaciated horror of gray flesh. The hideous head with its gaping mouth had darkened like an old wart and was flagging back and forth, boneless, on the spindly neck. It began to implode, and as the last few black feathered things struggled out blinking their red eyes and already tearing at each other, the head collapsed like an airless balloon.
In all this shrieking noise, in all this flurry of feathers and chaos of claws, Ariel watched the skeletal body fall, still locked in its spinning circle, and she thought, He is a vessel.
The crows came at her. They tangled in her hair and jammed against her nostrils. They squirmed against her eyes and thrashed across her mouth. But as she staggered back, seeking some place to protect herself in this field of life that had become the province of hell, she realized that they were only coming at her because she was between them and the few vines of fruit that remained unseized, and they would not stop until they had it all, every last bit of it.
Look at me, someone said.
Ariel turned her head. Standing beside her was the girl.
She looked exactly as Ariel remembered her. She wore the same clothes and the same raggedy straw hat, and she stared at Ariel through ebony eyes that were both serene and impassioned. Her cheeks were marred by scatters of teenaged acne, the same as before.
Walk with me, the girl said. Her voice had no accent yet it reminded Ariel of a voice she had once heard and trusted, somewhere in the long-ago.
When the girl held out her hand Ariel took it.
The crows continued to swirl around them, but none penetrated the space between.
Whether the girl moved first or she herself did, Ariel didn’t know. But they were walking together side-by-side through the brambles, hand holding hand, as the black curtains of crows flapped in their faces and hissed at their backs. Still, not one entered the space they occupied, and as Ariel and the girl walked forward the crows retreated before them. Speaking in shrill tongues of indignation, the solid walls of feathers and glinting crimson eyes began to break apart like so many crumbling leaves shaken off a dead tree.
Ariel awakened and lay staring at the ceiling. A fan was lazily turning up there, creaking very softly. The sunlight was bright through the pale yellow window curtains. A dog barked somewhere along Benton Place, and a motorcycle went past. She turned her head on the pillow in search of a clock. The one on the bedside table said it was about ten minutes after ten, the hands in a pleasing symmetry. She stretched and heard her backbone pop, and she started to push aside the sheet but she decided she would lie there until ten-fifteen and try to absorb her dream.
She was in bed in the guest bedroom at Berke’s mother’s house, in an area of small but neatly-kept homes in the northeast section of San Diego, perched on a hill above Interstate 15. They’d gotten here last night, after a two-hundred-and-eighty mile drive from Stone Church. When they’d reached the house, they were so wrung out by their experience that all they could do was mumble some pleasantries to Mrs. Fisk and find a place to stow their bags before they crashed. Truitt Allen, though he’d driven the whole distance, had gone into the den with his laptop, cellphone and a cup of coffee and shut the door. Ariel assumed the white GMC Yukon with dark-tinted windows that had trailed them up through the winding stre
ets and parked in front of the house was still there; she would check, just out of curiosity, when she got out of bed.
It was interesting, she thought, how they handled the gas situation. Last night when they needed to fill up, True had given some kind of code over his cellphone. When the Scumbucket had pulled up to the pumps at a Texaco station, the white Yukon and another Yukon, this one a metallic gray, had stopped on either side of The Five’s van and trailer. From each SUV two men dressed like True, in casual slacks and shirts, had gotten out to stand facing the darkness on the far side of I-8. They would have looked like ordinary business travellers stretching their legs except for the weirdly-shaped pairs of binoculars they were using as they scanned back and forth. “Night vision,” Nomad had told her. “Either that, or thermal.”
True had pumped their gas. A third man from both the SUVs had filled those tanks as well. There’d been a brief discussion among the agents and a pair of them went into the gas station and came out each carrying two bags of popcorn and four cups of coffee in a styrofoam tray. True had asked if anybody needed to use the restrooms, and when all the band members said they did, they got an FBI escort who waited outside the doors. Never was there a time when two of the agents did not keep watch with their night vision or thermal or whatever it was. Ariel had the impression that there was a fourth man in each Yukon, riding in the back, just from some movement she thought she detected and from the fourth coffee. Nine men on duty, including True. Ariel figured that had to be a lot of taxpayer money being spent, to safeguard the lives of four musicians whose deodorant had worn off a long time ago. Plus True had put their gasoline on his own—or his agency’s—credit card. No wonder this country was so deep in debt.
Ariel lifted her head and looked at the other single bed in the room. John Charles was still asleep, tangled up in his sheet as if he too had dreamed of blackberry brambles and the striding specter of Jeremy Pett. His face was turned away from her, toward the window. She hated to see what his right eye looked like today, because last night it had been swollen shut as tight as an oyster and colored a curious mingled palette of black with purple edges and olive-green highlights. The icepack they’d given him at the medical trailer had helped some, she guessed, and so had the supply of Excedrin Extra Strength.
He had saved her life.
She still couldn’t get her mind around yesterday afternoon. It had been just like the cliché: everything happened so fast. When John had stopped singing and the music had faltered, and then John had stage-dived like a lunatic…it was too much to handle. And later learning that the young man—nineteen years old on his California driver’s license, True had told them—had been aiming that gun at her…too much to handle.
The shooter had been taken away very quickly and efficiently. After The Five had gotten offstage and the techs had cleared their gear, Monster Ripper had started setting up about an hour later, but soon after that—past a visit to the medical trailer and brief interviews with reporters from the Tucson TV stations and Brad Lowell from The Daily Star—the Scumbucket had pulled out of that particular circus with True behind the wheel. On I-8 West, the two Yukons had gotten into position, the metallic gray in front and the white behind them, and that was how they rolled.
He had saved her life.
It was going to take her a long time to put this gift on a shelf, if ever.
He snorted a little bit, as if reading her thoughts. His hand came up to touch his eye, but even in sleep his brain figured he probably shouldn’t do that and his hand sank back down again across his chest.
True hadn’t told them the young man’s name yet, though he’d certainly seen it on the license. He’d said he would let them know what developed, and that was last night before he’d secluded himself in the den.
Ariel allowed herself to return to the dream, and play it back again. It was so bright and sunny and cheerful in the bedroom. There was the spicy odor of air fragrance, which maybe Mrs. Fisk had sprayed around this morning to counter their need for showers. It was difficult to think of dark things, in here, but now she must.
He is a vessel.
She remembered thinking that. What did it mean, exactly? She retained the vivid image of the crows, swarming at the fruit and tearing it from the vines. And she retained the vivid image of the girl.
The girl.
Walk with me.
Ariel was struck with a desire—a need—to see the song. The Kumbaya song, Berke had called it. She leaned over to the floor, where her fringed-leather bag was parked next to her blue suitcase. She opened the bag, removed from it her notebook with its glued-on gemstones of a dozen colors, and then turned to the page upon which she’d written what they had of the communal song. The last song, it was supposed to be. Performed at the last show in Austin, on Saturday the 16th of August. The song that was a testament to The Five, that was written by all of them together, that held a little of their souls in its words and music.
Welcome to the world, and everything that’s in it.
Write a song about it, just keep it under four minutes.
Got to figure what to keep, and what to leave behind, and like life it’s never easy.
I wish you safe travel and courage when you need it.
And that was it, so far.
Unremarkable.
A song in progress.
Something in progress.
Ariel scanned the lines again. What she’d written down, she realized, began and ended—to this point, at least—with words spoken by the girl at the well.
Sitting up on the bed with a pillow at her back, with a dog barking down the street and the sunlight streaming through the yellow curtains, Ariel felt a transcendent truth come upon her, a sense of wonder that had some fear mixed in with it too, yes, but it was like being locked in a tight and exhilarating groove of rhythm and tempo, the knowledge that everything was right, was flowing as it should, and that to break this rhythm, this strange and somewhat frightening connection, this forward motion that led to an unknown counterpoint, would not only be unprofessional, it would be tragic.
Ariel thought that the girl—whoever and whatever she might be—was helping them write this song.
“John?” she said. And again: “John?”
“No,” he mumbled, “I don’t want any.”
She was relieved, in a way. What was she going to tell him? How was she going to explain what she felt? And it was just a feeling, that’s all it was.
Walk with me, the girl had said.
Ariel decided she needed to get up. Like right now. She needed to take a shower and wash the red dust of Stone Church out of her hair, and then she needed to get dressed and find a quiet place to work on this song.
It was time to get serious.
Terry was still asleep on the floor, in his sleeping bag. Berke had taken the sofa in the basement’s little junkroom. It’s good enough for me, Ariel had heard Berke tell her mother before she’d carried her suitcase down the steps. Ariel figured Berke had wanted to sleep as far as possible from the room where her mother and stepfather had lain together for nearly ten years. As Ariel understood the story, Berke had been fourteen when her mother and father had divorced, and later her mother had sold the house where Berke had been born and she and her daughter had moved in with Floyd Fisk, the divorced father of a twenty-year-old nursing student, after the wedding.
Ariel took her shower, washed her hair and got dressed in jeans and a purple long-sleeved peasant blouse with a floral print and ruffles of white lace at the cuffs and neck. One of her many finds from vintage clothes shops, though now these were nearly as expensive as the newer items. When she emerged from the bathroom she ran into a bleary-eyed Terry, who just grunted a greeting and shambled past in his tatty gray bathrobe.
Ariel saw that John was still conked out. Maybe that was for the best. She took her notebook and her purple-inked pen and walked through the hallway into the kitchen, where she found Berke’s mother monitoring a crockpot while she was watching a soap op
era on a small TV.
“Good morning!” Berke’s mother had been born Kim Chapman, but somewhere in her days as a thespian and cheerleader at Patrick Henry High School she’d been called ‘Chappie’, and it had stuck. Her face lit up with the presence of someone else in the room. She was an attractive woman, tall and lean with her daughter’s strong bone structure. But her brown eyes, many shades lighter than Berke’s, were sad. Ariel had met Chappie on several occasions when they’d played San Diego but had never been to this house. She knew that Chappie was forty-nine, that she was the middle child between two brothers, that her own father was a retired technical worker for Northrup Grumman who had once shaken the hand of Howard Hughes, and that she used Clairol Medium Brown to cover up the creeping gray in her long, still-silky hair. She was wearing a pair of beige slacks and a black sleeveless blouse.
“Morning,” Ariel replied. “Smells good.”
“Veggie stew for lunch. Do you want breakfast? I can make just about anything.”
“Really, all I’d like is a glass of orange juice.” She reconsidered. “Maybe some toast would be nice. And some jam?”
“Juice, two slices of whole-wheat toast and some strawberry jam. Does that sound all right?”
“Great. I’ll get the juice.” Ariel made a move toward the refrigerator, which was covered with bright little flowery magnets in different hues holding a variety of color photos, some faded with age. She saw glimpses of a different world: a smiling, balding heavy-set man wearing horn-rimmed glasses and sitting amid piles of books; a slim girl about sixteen years old with thick, curly black hair pounding away at a drum set with her eyes closed; a terrier of some kind, head cocked and looking quizzically at the camera; a scene in a bar with maybe a dozen people, most of them long-haired and gray-haired, lifting their beer bottles; the balding heavy-set man, now in sunglasses, standing with his arm around a happier Chappie Fisk and behind them the natural wonder of the Grand Canyon.