“I can tell you what it means, you don’t have to go look it up on the Internet.”
Cowboy paused, thought about it, almost went anyway because his horses were restless, and then he sat down again, smoothed the page out on the table and stared across at Apollyon.
“I am the destroyer,” said the pale young man. “I am everything you fear, and I am everything you would like to be.”
“That so?” Cowboy asked, and he looked down at his piece of paper.
“That is so,” said Apollyon.
“Would I like to be in jail facing a very serious charge of attempted murder, Connor?” Radio rumbled.
Apollyon looked up again at the camera, and his battered face beamed. “They need their ears checked here.”
“Okay, then. Apollyon.” The way Radio said that, he could be announcing an ’80s hair band. “You wanted to talk, so we’re listening.” His chair creaked as he leaned back. He spread his arms out, palms open. “Let’s hear it.”
“I’d like a candy bar. Something sweet.”
“After you talk to us. Let me start you out a little bit, with a question. Why did you intend to commit murder on Thursday afternoon? That was your intention, correct? To shoot as many people on that stage as you could?”
“That’s three questions,” said Apollyon.
“Answer the first one, how ’bout it?” Cowboy directed.
“I’d like a Snickers. Really, anything chocolate.”
“Okay, let’s stop this foolishness.” Radio stood up. “Come on, we’re through here.”
Apollyon didn’t move. After a few seconds, he said, “The seventh mansion the Furies possess.”
“What?” Cowboy asked, straining to understand.
“I was told to go to Stone Church,” said the young man. He folded his arms around himself, around that thin body bearing the savage multitude of scars and burns. “I saw the ads on TV. I saw who was going to be there. That band the sniper’s after. Playing on Thursday afternoon, at three o’clock. One show. I looked them up on their website. I looked up the website for Stone Church.” Then he stopped speaking.
“Go ahead,” said Radio. He sat down once more, but he perched on the edge of his chair ready to jump up and rattle the sword again if he needed to.
Apollyon remained silent.
Cowboy tried his hand: “Who was it told you to go to Stone Church?”
Apollyon began to very slightly rock himself back and forth. He had a fixed smile on his face. Looking at it, even from this distance of time and space, made Ariel’s flesh crawl.
“Who was it told you to go to Stone Church, Apollyon?” Cowboy repeated.
The young man said something. It was so soft they couldn’t make it out.
“What was that?” Radio asked. “Who?”
Apollyon spoke a little louder. A name, spoken quickly. Spoken like something that even a destroyer should be afraid of.
A girl’s name.
True froze the video.
“Bethy was—” he began, but Ariel interrupted him because she already knew.
“His sister,” she said. “His raped and murdered sister.”
True stared at her as if seeing something in her face he’d never seen before, or hearing in her voice a firm certainty that he didn’t quite understand, and Ariel was aware of the others staring at her too, and she didn’t fully understand her own feeling either, but watching this video—seeing this young man’s sick smile and hearing his eerily soft voice speaking the name of a dead little girl—made her aware of places in this very room where the light did not completely settle, and where a shadow seemed to shift and shudder at the edge of the corner of the eye.
“This kid’s a lunatic,” Nomad said. “A fucking nutbag.” Even as he made that statement, he was wondering about the lunatics and fucking nutbags who’d decorated Apollyon’s body with fire and blood.
“There’s more,” True told him.
“Show it,” Ariel said.
True clicked on the small circle with the Play arrow in it.
“Who’s Bethy?” Cowboy asked, proving he hadn’t fully done his homework, but as Apollyon sat silent and motionless Radio wrote something on the pad. He slid it in front of his partner, and Cowboy read it and gave a brief nod.
“Bethy told you to go to Stone Church and kill people. Is that correct?” Radio asked.
Apollyon didn’t reply and it looked like he wasn’t going to, as the time counter displayed the passage of twelve seconds. Then he answered, “She told me to find a gun, to steal one if I needed to from Cal Holland’s house, and go kill the girl.”
“What girl?”
“The girl in the band.” Apollyon’s bruised mouth showed the faintest curl of annoyance. “The girl singer. Bethy told me to kill her, because if she dies they won’t finish it.”
“Finish what, Apollyon?” Cowboy asked.
“What they’re doing.” He continued to rock himself back and forth. “Bethy says they don’t even know.”
“Hm,” Radio said. “So…did Bethy tell you what it is?”
“Oh, no.” Apollyon shook his head. He gave a sad smile, the smile of an intelligent but nerdy high school kid who has been snubbed by the cool dudes at the cool table, and who finally and forever knows his role. “I’m not allowed.”
“Stop it!” Nomad commanded. True’s finger was slow. “Stop it now!”
The video froze.
True looked at Nomad, his dark eyebrows upraised.
“How do you figure this is helpful to us?” Nomad’s face was fearsome with its angry mouth and swollen sick-green eye. “You think this is helping us go out to the sound check, meet-and-greet the news people, do interviews and keep ourselves together? This is supposed to pick us up for what we have to do?”
“John?” Ariel said softly. “We need to watch this.”
“No, we don’t.” He pointed at the video frame. “This is a crazy, pain-addicted Satan freak. Nothing else. Okay?”
“What else would he be, John?” asked Terry, and in that question Ariel realized Terry was sitting next to her again, in that seat she’d saved for him on the bench under the eucalyptus tree, but now he was listening to her. He was listening to every single word.
Nomad was unable to answer. He looked from Ariel to Terry and back again, and then to Berke for her caustic acid that dripped upon every unmanagable thought or uncomfortable idea and melted them down to Silly Putty.
This time, it didn’t drip. This time, Berke chewed on her lower lip, and she gave a small nervous laugh and shook her head as if to say she had nothing to say.
“Finish what?” True asked, directing the question to all of them. “Just for interest’s sake. Do you think that’s a reference to your tour, or—”
“The dead don’t speak!” Nomad had nearly shouted it. “Ghosts don’t come back and tell people to do things! The dead are dead! They’re nothing!”
But as he said it, he heard his own ghost tell him that Johnny, there was no roadmap.
No, that was different, he thought. That was a memory. His father was not a ghost telling him to steal a gun and kill a girl because if she was dead, a song would not be finished.
Oh, yeah. Here we go, he thought. Here we go. The communal song. And that girl at the well. That girl in her raggedy straw hat with her ladle of water, trying to stuff him into her sack of buttholes. The angel of life, George had said. God’s voice speaking to Terry in church, and Heaven and Hell and all that garbage for people who were afraid to think for themselves. Oh, yeah; here we go.
“Set it up,” he told them, “so I can knock it down.”
Ariel’s eyes were dark gray with hints of sapphire blue, like gleams of something mysterious in motion just beneath the surface of a sea. “You know what this is about, John. You know best of all, because it was your idea.”
“It’s a song,” he said, almost pleadingly. “Not even finished yet. No music to it. It’s just some words strung out in lines. There are no hidden
meanings. No big flash of light. It was just…a way to keep…”
“Us together,” Ariel said, helping him. “I know that’s how it began, but now I think it’s more.”
“A new song?” True asked. “You’re writing a new song? Is there mention of it on your website?”
“No,” Terry said. “We just started thinking about it when we left Austin.”
“How would Connor Addison know about it, then? And according to him…according to his sister…you don’t know what you’re doing. So how can that be?”
“That freak’s sister is dead! Stop talking about his sister!” Nomad feared he was about to blow his circuits; they were going to have to load him into an ambulance and take him to the Hollywood ICU, and maybe the girl would come to him in his room and say I believe in you and he could shout back, Fuck you, I don’t believe in you!
True said, as calmly as he could, “There are just a few more minutes of the video. I’d like to show you the rest of it.”
“Berke!” Nomad said. “Come on, let’s go find us a fucking bar!”
“No,” she told him, and she glanced quickly at him and then away. “I think I’ll stick here. Anyway…it wouldn’t be safe, just walking around.”
True clicked the Play arrow. Nomad did not leave.
Cowboy tap-tap-tapped his pen on the edge of the table. Radio rubbed his mouth, readying it for another rumble.
“Who gave you those marks, Apollyon?” Radio asked. “They’re Satanist symbols, aren’t they?”
“Two questions, one answer: the seventh mansion the Furies possess.”
“Yeah, we heard that already. Is there a meaning to it, or is it gibberish?”
“It has a meaning to me,” said Apollyon.
“Enlighten us.”
“Would I ever like to,” came the reply, “but you wouldn’t understand the game.”
Cowboy jumped in with both boots. “Game? What game would that be?”
Silence from the destroyer.
Tap-tap-tap went Cowboy’s pen. Radio cleared his throat like a burst of static. “Your father told me yesterday that you used to be a model student—”
“I’m still a model student, but I’ve changed schools.”
“We’ll get to that. He said you were active in the chess club. Is that the game you’re talking about?”
“You wish,” said Apollyon, with a crimped smile. “Am I ever going to get my candy? I would talk so much better with something sweet in my mouth.”
“Uh-huh.” For a few seconds Radio searched the young man’s bandaged face, and then he said with the resigned air of a weary soul who really, really wants to go home. “Billy, would you go get him something? What do you want? A Snickers bar?”
“Anything chocolate,” Apollyon said.
Billy the Cowboy got up, dug for change in his pocket and left the room.
“Bad idea,” Nomad heard True say under his breath.
No one spoke on the video until Cowboy returned. “This suit you?” He put a small bag of M&Ms down in front of Apollyon.
“Fine, thanks.” Apollyon delicately tore open the bag and dumped its contents into a pile. He began to separate the candies into areas of blue, green, yellow, red, brown and orange. He took a yellow and a green and chewed them.
“Would you tell us,” said Radio, “how Bethy told you to go to Stone Church?”
Apollyon kept arranging the colors, eating a candy or two or three.
“Did you hear that question?” Cowboy asked, his patience growing thinner than a snake on a dust diet.
When Radio spoke again, his bass voice was dangerous. He was done playing. “Your sister is not among the living. So how can you sit there and tell us—and try to make us believe—that she told you to steal a gun and kill someone? That just kind of defies logic, don’t you think?”
Apollyon ate a few more candies, and then he met the cop’s gaze. “Logic,” he said. “is a creation of men. It’s a narrow door to a very large house. In that house are lots of rooms. Some you’d want to live in, others…not so much. Logic is a shirt that’s been dried too hot, so when it comes out of the machine it’s too tight around your neck, it chokes you and it binds your shoulders, and your mom tells you you’re going to wear it no matter what, because you were wearing it that night and she’s never going to let you throw it away. Then when you do outgrow it, and there’s no way you can fit it on you, she makes a pillowcase out of it for your bed. Is that logical? To make a pillowcase from a shirt?”
Neither cop said anything for a few seconds. Cowboy shifted his weight in his chair. Radio rubbed his fingers together, his elbows supported by the table. He said, “We’re talking about your sister. How did she come tell you to do this? Did she…like…materialize? Out of the air?”
“She just comes. She’s there and then she’s not.” Apollyon continued to eat the M&Ms, as if he had all the time in the world.
“And you do whatever she’s tellin’ you to do, right?” Cowboy asked. “This is her fault, is that it?”
Apollyon stopped chewing.
He did not move nor speak, as the seconds ticked past.
The two cops looked at each other, as if they suspected a trigger had been pulled, or a rope twisted, or a shirt tightened enough to make a person scream.
“Her fault,” said Apollyon, staring at nothing. And again: “Her fault.”
They waited, and in the Days Inn Motel room the viewers could see that the young man’s face had become shiny with sweat, and his smile flickered on and off with erratic speed, and he had placed his index fingers on two M&M candies like they were the opposite poles of the battery that was keeping him alive.
“I was about to hang myself,” he said hollowly, “when she came the first time. I was about to step off the chair. And then Bethy was sitting on my bed looking up at me, and she said, ‘Connor, don’t do that.’ She said, ‘Someone likes you a whole lot, Connor, and they want you to know how much. But you have to show them how strong you are, Connor. They don’t like weak.’ So she told me to go to a place in front of a carwash and wait and somebody would pick me up, and it was a man who gave me a drink from a water bottle and then he drove, and I got sleepy. When I woke up… I was in a room in a house, and the people there asked me if they could do things to me. They were very polite. They were smart people, I could tell that. At first I had to drink a lot from the bottle, but…after a few times, it was all right. When my mom and dad saw, they were going to go to the police but I told them what Bethy said to me, that if they didn’t test my strength here, they were going to test hers there. And she told me all of it. She told me how much that man had hurt her, and what he’d done, and she was afraid they would find out she wasn’t strong enough and they would cast her out where the weak things walked, and she begged, ‘Connor, would you please please pretty please take it for me?’”
“I said I would,” the young man told them. “And she said, for that, she would try to forgive me.” His eyes moved from Radio to Cowboy and back. His smile flickered: on, off, on, off. “They gave me a new name, and they birthed me. They told me why I was born. They made sense out of everything. And when you finally, finally see the sense of things…you know a power that is beyond…” He paused, searching. “Logic,” he said.
Apollyon continued eating his M&Ms, crunching them a few at the time.
When Radio spoke again, some of his bass presence had been muted. “Why’d you say Bethy told you to go kill that girl?”
“She was upset. Bethy was. Early Wednesday morning, when she came. She said it was something I had to do to show I was strong. She said Connor had died, and Apollyon had been born. Born in pain. I was the destroyer now, and that was my job. To destroy.” He frowned, with a red M&M held to his lips. “I think I fucked up, though.” He slowly eased the candy into his mouth. “I was going to shoot the lead singer first. I hated his voice. Then… I thought I’d better do what Bethy wanted, or they might get mad at her. They might hurt her, and I couldn’t?
?? I couldn’t take that. Because…you know…she’s such a little girl. So I think I fucked up.”
“I think I fucked up,” he repeated.
“I think I fucked up,” he said again.
“I think I—”
With sudden terrible speed he grasped a handful of M&Ms, threw them into his mouth, crunched down and inhaled with a hideous rasping howl. He took hold of his own throat and squeezed with both hands. He went sideways off his chair and the two cops scrambled around and over the table to get at him before his airway was blocked. Cowboy started trying to get the hands loosened as the body kicked and writhed beneath him, and Radio ran out the door shouting a garbled unintelligible shout that sounded like he was hollering through a boom box.
True clicked the video off.
Nomad suddenly realized where he was.
He was nearly in the corner. He’d been backing up, a few inches at a time, until the corner was right behind him and there was nowhere else to go.
He felt an incredible pressure, as if he was in one of those centrifuge things the astronauts use, he was spinning around faster and faster and the flesh was being pushed back from his skull. He thought of a crazy thing. The thing that musicians shouted when everything went wrong, when the fuses blew, when the speakers made everything sound like muddy shit, when the lights malfunctioned, when half the CDs were broken in their cases, when the crowd lost their patience and hollered for blood or refunds, when every note you hit was a clam and every word you sang was lost in a looping shriek of feedback.
He thought: More cowbell.
But down below that, down deep in a horrible place, he was thinking that he had never dared to consider the possibility of an afterlife, the possibility of something human beings called in their limited knowledge Heaven and Hell, never dared to, because if he considered those things, if he let them in, then he would have to believe that his hero…his idol…that man…would be called upon to suffer for the pain he had inflicted on a woman who’d loved only him.
And John Charles would remember that when they told him in the Louisville hospital his father had died from a trinity of gunshot wounds, his first silent judgement and ever to remain silent had been: He deserved it.