Desperation

  A part of Mary cried out in alarm at the idea, told her that something here did not compute, but when Ellen held up her good arm and Mary saw the dirt and blood smeared on it, and the way it was trembling with exhaustion, her fundamentally kind heart overruled the wary lizard of instinct living far back in her brain. This woman had lost her young daughter to a madman, had been in a car-wreck on the way to what would have most likely been her own murder, had suffered a broken arm, and walked through a howling windstorm back to a town filled mostly with corpses. And the first person she meets suddenly succumbs to a bad case of the jimjams and refuses to let her in?

  Uh-uh, Mary thought. No way. And, perhaps absurdly: That's not how I was raised.

  "You can't come in this window. There's a lot of broken glass. Something ... an animal jumped through it. Go a little farther along the back of the theater. You'll come to the ladies' room. That's better. There are even some boxes to stand on. I'll help you in. Okay?"

  "Yes. Thank you, Mary. Thank God I found you." Ellen gave her a horrible, grimacing smile--gratitude, shoe-licking humility, and what might have been terror all mixed together--and then shuffled on, head down, back bent. Twelve hours ago she had been Mrs. Suburban Wifemom, on her way to a nice middle-class vacation in Lake Tahoe, where she had probably planned to wear her new resort clothes from Talbot's over her new underwear from Victoria's Secret. Daytime sun with the kids, nighttime sex with the comfy, known partner, postcards home to the friends--having a great time, the air is so clean, wish you were here. Now she looked and acted like a refugee, a no-age warhag fleeing some ugly desert bloodbath.

  And Mary Jackson, that sweet little princess--votes Democratic, gives blood every two months, writes poetry--had actually considered leaving her out there to moan in the dark until she could consult with the men. And what did that mean? That she had been in the same war, Mary supposed. This was how you thought, how you behaved, when it happened to you. Except she wouldn't. Be damned if she would.

  Mary crossed the hall, listening for any further shouts from the theater. There were none. Then, just as she pushed open the ladies'-room door, three gunshots rang out. They were muffled by walls and distance, but there was no doubt about what they were. Shouts followed them. Mary froze in place, pulled in two different directions with equal force. What decided her was the soft sound of weeping from beyond the unlatched ladies'-room window.

  "Ellen? What is it? What's wrong?"

  "I'm stupid, that's all, stupid! I bumped my bad arm putting up another crate to stand on!" The woman outside the window--she was just a blur of shadow on the frosted glass--began sobbing harder.

  "Hold on, you'll be inside in a jiffy," Mary said, and hurried across the room. She set aside the beer-bottles Billingsley had put up on the windowledge and was lifting the hinged window, trying to think how best to help Ellen into the room without hurting her further, when she remembered what Billingsley had said about the cop: that he was taller. Dear God, David's father had said, a look of thunderstruck understanding on his face. She's like Entragian? Like the cop?

  Maybe she's got a broken arm, Mary thought coldly, maybe she really does. On the other hand--

  On the other hand, hunching over like that was actually a very good way to disguise one's true height, wasn't it?

  The lizard which usually kept its place on the back wall of her brain suddenly leaped forward, chirping in terror. Mary decided to pull back, take a moment or two and think things over ... but before she could, her arm was seized by a strong hot hand. Another one banged open the window, and all of Mary's strength ran out of her like water as she looked into the grinning face staring up at her. It was Ellen's face, but the badge pinned below it (I see you're an organ donor)

  belonged to Entragian.

  It was Entragian. Collie Entragian somehow living in Ellen Carver's body.

  "No!" she screamed, yanking backward, heedless of the pain as Ellen's fingernails punched into her arms and brought blood. "No, let go of me!"

  "Not until I hear you sing 'Leavin' on a Jet Plane,' you cunt," the Ellen-thing said, and as it yanked Mary forward through the window it was still holding open, blood burst from both of Ellen's nostrils in a gush. More blood trickled from Ellen's left eye like gummy tears. "Oh the dawn is breakin', it's early morn . . ."

  Mary had a confused sensation of flying toward the board fence on the other side of the lane.

  "The taxi-driver is blowin' his horn . . ."

  She managed to get one blocking arm up, but not enough; she took most of the impact with her forehead and went to her knees, head ringing. She could feel warmth spreading over her lips and chin. Join the nose-bleed club, babe, she thought, and staggered to her feet.

  "Already I'm so lonesome I could cryyyyy . . ."

  Mary took two large, lunging strides, and then the cop (she couldn't stop thinking of it as the cop, only now wearing a wig and falsies) grabbed her by the shoulder, almost tearing one arm off her shirt as it whirled Mary around.

  "Let g--" Mary began, and then the Ellen-thing clipped her on the point of the chin, a crisp and elementary blow that put out the lights. It caught Mary under the arms on her way down and pulled her close. When it felt Mary's breath on Ellen's skin, the faint anxiety which had been on Ellen's face cleared. ,

  "Gosh, I love that song," it said, and slung Mary over her shoulder like a sack of grain. "It turns me all gooshy inside. Tak!"

  She disappeared around the corner with her burden. Five minutes later, Collie Entragian's dusty Caprice was once more on its way out to the China Pit, headlights cutting through the swirls of sand driven by the dying wind. As it drove past Harvey's Small Engine Repair and the bodega beyond it, a thin blue-white sickle of moon appeared in the sky overhead.

  CHAPTER 5

  1

  Even in the boozy, druggy days, Johnny Marinville's recall had been pretty relentless. In 1986, while riding in the back seat of Sean Hutter's so-called Partymobile (Sean had been doing the Friday-night East Hampton rounds with Johnny and three others in the big old '65 Caddy), he had been involved in a fatal accident. Sean, who had been too drunk to walk, let alone drive, had rolled the Partymobile over twice, trying to make the turn from Eggamoggin Lane onto Route B without slowing down. The girl sitting next to Hutter had been killed. Sean's spine had been pulverized. The only Partymobile he ran these days was a motorized Cadding wheelchair, the kind you steered with your chin. The others had suffered minor injuries; Johnny had considered himself lucky to get off with a bruised spleen and a broken foot. But the thing was, he was the only one who remembered what had happened. Johnny found this so curious that he had questioned the survivors carefully, even Sean, who kept crying and telling him to go away (Johnny hadn't obliged until he'd gotten what he wanted; what the hell, he figured, Sean owed him). Patti Nickerson said she had a vague memory of Sean saying Hold on, we're going for a ride just before it happened, but that was it. With the others, recall simply stopped short of the accident and then picked up again at some point after it, as if their memories had been squirted with some amnesia-producing ink. Sean himself claimed to remember nothing after getting out of the shower that afternoon and wiping the steam off the mirror so he could see to shave. After that, he said, everything was black until he'd awakened in the hospital. He might have been lying about that, but Johnny didn't think so. Yet he himself remembered everything. Sean hadn't said Hold on, we're going for a ride; he had said Hang on, we're going wide. And laughing as he said it. He went on laughing even when the Partymobile had started to roll. Johnny remembered Patti screaming "My hair! Oh shit, my hair!," and how she had landed on his crotch with a ball-numbing thud when the car went over. He remembered Bruno Gartner bellowing. And the sound of the Partymobile's collapsing roof driving Rachel Timorov's head down into her neck, splitting her skull open like a bone flower. A tight crunching sound it had been, the sound you hear in your head when you smash an icecube between your teeth. He remembered shit. He knew that was part of being a write
r, but he didn't know if it was nature or nurture, cause or effect. He supposed it didn't matter. The thing was, he remembered shit even when it was as confusing as the final thirty seconds of a big fireworks display. Stuff that overlapped seemed to automatically separate and fall into line even as it was happening, like iron filings lining up under the pull of a magnet. Until the night Sean Hutter had rolled his Partymobile, Johnny had never wished for anything different. He had never wished for anything different since ... until now. Right now a little ink squirted into the old memory cells might be just fine.

  He saw splinters jump from the jamb of the projection-booth door and land in Cynthia's hair when Audrey fired the pistol. He felt one of the slugs drone past his right ear. He saw Steve, down on one knee but apparently okay, bat away the revolver when the woman hucked it at him. She lifted her upper lip, snarled at Steve like a cornered dog, then turned back and clamped her hands around the kid's throat again.

  Go on! Johnny shouted at himself. Go on and help him! Like you did before, when you shot the cat!

  But he couldn't. He could see everything, but he couldn't move.

  Things began to overlap then, but his mind insisted on sequencing them, neatening them, giving them a coherent shape, like a narrative. He saw Steve leap at Audrey, telling her to quit it, to let the boy go, cupping her neck with one hand and grabbing her wrists with the other. At this same moment, Johnny was slammed past the skinny girl and into the room with the force of a stuntman shot from a cannon. It was Ralph, of course, hitting him from behind and bawling his son's name at the top of his lungs.

  Johnny flew out over the two-step drop, knees bent, convinced he was going to sustain multiple fractures at the very least, convinced that the boy was dying or already dead, convinced that Audrey Wyler's mind had snapped under the strain and she had fallen under the delusion that David Carver was either the cop or a minion of the cop ... and all the time his eyes went on recording and his brain kept on receiving the images and storing them. He saw the way Audrey's muscular legs were spread, the material of her skirt strained taut between them. He also saw he was going to touch down near her.

  He landed on one foot, like a skater who has forgotten his skates. His knee buckled. He let it, throwing himself forward into the woman, grabbing her hair. She pulled her head back and snapped at his fingers. At the same instant (except Johnny's mind insisted it was the next instant, even now wanting to reduce this madness to something coherent, a narrative which would flow in train), Steve tore her hands away from the kid's throat. Johnny saw the white marks of her palms and fingers there, and then his momentum was carrying him by. She missed biting him, which was the good news, but he missed his grip on her hair, which was the bad.

  She voiced a guttural cry as he collided with the wall. His left arm shot out through one of the projection-slots up to the shoulder, and for one awful moment he was sure that the rest of him was going to follow it--out, down, goodbye. It was impossible, the hole was nowhere near big enough for that, but he thought it anyway.

  At this same moment (his mind once more insisting it was the next moment, the next thing, the new sentence) Ralph Carver yelled: "Get your hands off my boy, bitch!"

  Johnny retrieved his arm and turned around, putting his back to the wall. He saw Steve and Ralph drag the screaming woman off David. He saw the boy collapse against the wall and slide slowly down it, the marks on his throat standing out brutally. He saw Cynthia come down the steps and into the room, trying to look everywhere at once.

  "Grab the kid, boss!" Steve panted. He was struggling with Audrey, one hand still clamped on her wrists and the other now around her waist. She bucked under him like a canyon mustang. "Grab him and get him out of h--"

  Audrey screamed and pulled free. When Ralph made a clumsy attempt to get his arms around her neck and put her in a headlock, she shoved the heel of one hand under his chin and pushed him back. She retreated a step, saw David, and snarled again, her lips drawing away from her teeth. She made a move to go in his direction and Ralph said, "Touch him again and I'll kill you. Promise."

  Ah, fuck this, Johnny thought, and snatched the boy up. He was warm and limp and heavy in his arms. Johnny's back, already outraged by nearly a continent's worth of motorcycling, gave a warning twinge.

  Audrey glanced at Ralph, as if daring him to try and make good on his promise, then tensed to leap at Johnny. Before she could, Steve was on her once more. He grabbed her around the waist again, then pivoted on his heels, the two of them face to face. She was uttering a long and continuous caterwauling that made Johnny's fillings ache.

  Halfway through his second spin, Steve let her go. Audrey flew backward like a stone cast out of a sling, her feet stuttering on the floor, still caterwauling. Cynthia, who was behind her, dropped to her hands and knees with the speed of a born playground survivor. Audrey collided with her shin-high and went over backward, sprawling on the lighter-colored rectangle where the second projector had rested. She stared up at them through the tumble of her hair, momentarily dazed.

  "Get him out of here, boss!" Steve waved his hand at the steps leading up to the projection-booth door. "There's something wrong with her, she's like the animals!"

  What do you mean, like them? Johnny thought. She fucking well is one. He heard what Steve was telling him, but he didn't start toward the door. Once again he seemed incapable of movement.

  Audrey scrambled to her feet, sliding up the corner of the room. Her upper lip was still rising and falling in a jagged snarl, eyes moving from Johnny and the unconscious boy cradled in his arms to Ralph, and then to Cynthia, who had now also gotten to her feet and was pressing against Steve's side. Johnny thought briefly and longingly of the Rossi shotgun and the Ruger .44. Both were in the lobby, leaning against the ticket-booth. The booth had offered a good view of the street, but it had been easier to leave the guns outside it, given the limited space. And neither he nor Ralph had thought to bring them up here. He now believed that one of the scariest lessons this nightmare had to offer was how lethally unprepared for survival they all were. Yet they had survived. Most of them, anyway. So far.

  "Tak ah lah!"

  The woman spoke in a voice that was both frightening and powerful, nothing like her earlier one, her storytelling voice--that one had been low and often hesitant. To Johnny, this one seemed only a step or two above a dog's bark. And was she laughing? He thought that at least part of her was. And what of that strange, swimming darkness just below the surface of her skin? Was he really seeing that?

  "Min! Min! Min en tow!"

  Cynthia cast a bewildered glance at Steve. "What's she saying?" Steve shook his head. She looked at Johnny.

  "It's the cop's language," he said. He cast his peculiarly efficient recollection back to the moment when the cop had apparently sicced a buzzard on him. "Timoh!" he snapped at Audrey Wyler. "Candy-latch!"

  That wasn't quite right, but it must have at least been close; Audrey recoiled, and for a moment there was a very human look of surprise on her face. Then the lip lifted again, and the lunatic smile reappeared in her eyes.

  "What did you say to her?" Cynthia asked Johnny.

  "I have no idea."

  "Boss, you gotta get the kid out. Now."

  Johnny took a step backward, meaning to do just that. Audrey reached into the pocket of her dress as he did and brought it out curled around a fistful of something. She stared at him--only at him, now, John Edward Marinville, Distinguished Novelist and Extraordinary Thinker--with her snarling beast's eyes. She held her hand out, wrist up. "Can tah!" she cried ... laughed. "Can tah, can tak! What you take is what you are! Of course! Can tah, can tak, mi tow! Take this! So tah!"

  When she opened her hand and showed him her offering, the emotional weather inside his head changed at once ... and yet he still saw everything and sequenced it, just as he had when Sean Hutter's goddamned Partymobile had rolled over. He had kept on recording everything then, when he had been sure he was going to die, and he went on recording ev
erything now, when he was suddenly consumed with hate for the boy in his arms and overwhelmed by a desire to put something--his motorcycle key would do nicely--into the interfering little prayboy's throat and open him like a can of beer.

  He thought at first that there were three odd-looking charms lying on her open palm--the sort of thing girls sometimes wore dangling from their bracelets. But they were too big, too heavy. Not charms but carvings, stone carvings, each about two inches long. One was a snake. The second was a buzzard with one wing chipped off. Mad, bulging eyes stared out at him from beneath its bald dome. The third was a rat on its hind legs. They all looked pitted and ancient.

  "Can tah!" she screamed. "Can tah, can tak, kill the boy, kill him now, kill him!"

  Steve stepped forward. With her attention and concentration fully fixed on Johnny, she saw him only at the last instant. He slapped the stones from her hand and they flew into the comer of the room. One--it was the snake--broke in two. Audrey screamed with horror and vexation.

  The murderous fury which had come over Johnny's mind dissipated but didn't depart completely. He could feel his eyes wanting to turn toward the corner, where the carvings lay. Waiting for him. All he had to do was pick them up.

  "Get him the fuck out of here!" Steve yelled. Audrey lunged for the carvings. Steve seized her arm and yanked her back. Her skin was darkening and sagging. Johnny thought that the process which had changed her was now trying to reverse itself... without much success. She was ... what? Shrinking? Diminishing? He didn't know the right word, but--

  "GET HIM OUT!" Steve yelled again, and smacked Johnny on the shoulder. That woke him up. He began to turn and then Ralph was there. He had snatched David from Johnny's arms almost before Johnny knew it was happening. Ralph bounded up the stairs, clumsy but powerful, and was gone from the projection-booth without a single look back.

  Audrey saw him go. She howled--it was despair Johnny heard in that howl now--and lunged for the stones again. Steve yanked her back. There was a peculiar ripping sound as Audrey's right arm pulled off at the shoulder. Steve was left holding it in his hand like the drumstick of an overcooked chicken.