Desperation

  2

  Audrey seemed unaware of what had happened to her. One-armed, the right side of her dress now darkening with blood, she made for the carvings, gibbering in that strange language. Steve was frozen in place, looking at what he held--a lightly freckled human arm with a Casio watch on the wrist. The boss was equally frozen. If it hadn't been for Cynthia, Steve later thought, Audrey would have gotten to the carvings again. God knew what would have happened if she had; even when she had been obviously focusing the power of the stones on the boss, Steve had felt the backwash. There had been nothing sexual about it this time. This time it had been about murder and nothing else.

  Before Audrey could fall on her knees in the corner and grab her toys, Cynthia kicked them deftly away, sending them skittering along the wall with the cutouts in it. Audrey howled again, and this time a spray of blood came out of her mouth along with the sound. She turned her head to them, and Steve staggered backward, actually raising a hand, as if to block the sight of her from his vision.

  Audrey's formerly pretty face now drooped from the front of her skull in sweating wrinkles. Her staring eyeballs hung from widening sockets. Her skin was blackening and splitting. Yet none of this was the worst; the worst came as Steve dropped the hideously warm thing he was holding and she lurched to her feet.

  "I'm very sorry," she said, and in her choked and failing voice Steve heard a real woman, not this decaying monstrosity. "I never meant to hurt anyone. Don't touch the can tahs. Whatever else you do, don't touch the can tahs!"

  Steve looked at Cynthia. She stared back, and he could read her mind in her wide eyes: I touched one. Twice. How lucky was I?

  Very, Steve thought. I think you were very lucky. I think we both were.

  Audrey staggered toward them and away from the pitted gray stones. Steve could smell a rich odor of blood and decay. He reached out but couldn't bring himself to actually put a restraining hand on her shoulder, even though she was headed for the stairs and the hallway ... headed in the direction Ralph had taken his boy. He couldn't bring himself to do it because he knew his fingers would sink in.

  Now he could hear a plopping, pattering sound as parts of her began to liquefy and fall off in a kind of flesh rain. She mounted the steps and lurched out through the door. Cynthia looked up at Steve for a moment, her faced pinched and white. He put his arm around her waist and followed Johnny up the stairs.

  Audrey made it about halfway down the short but steep flight of stairs leading to the second-floor hall, then fell. The sound of her inside her blood-soaked dress was grisly--a splashing sound, almost. Yet she was still alive. She began to crawl, her hair hanging in strings, mercifully obscuring most of her dangling face. At the far end, by the stairs leading down to the lobby, Ralph stood with David in his arms, staring at the oncoming creature.

  "Shoot her!" Johnny roared. "For God's sake, somebody shoot her!"

  "Can't," Steve said. "No guns up here but the kid's, and that one's empty."

  "Ralph, get downstairs with David," Johnny said. He started carefully down the hall. "Get down before ..."

  But the thing which had been Audrey Wyler had no further interest in David, it seemed. It reached the arched entrance to the balcony, then crawled through it. Almost at once the support timbers, dried out by the desert climate and dined upon by generations of termites, began to groan. Steve hurried after Johnny, his arm still around Cynthia. Ralph came toward them from the other end of the hall. They met just in time to see the thing in the soaked dress reach the balcony railing. Audrey had crawled over the mostly deflated sex-doll, leaving a broad streak of blood and less identifiable fluids across its plastic midsection. Frieda's pursed mouth might have been expressing outrage at such treatment.

  What remained of Audrey Wyler was still clutching the railing, still attempting to pull itself up enough to dive over the side when the supports let go and the balcony tore away from the wall with a large, dusty roar. At first it slipped outward on a level, like a tray or a floating platform, tearing away boards from the edge of the hallway and forcing Steve and the others back as the old carpet first tore open and then gaped like a seismic fault. Laths snapped; nails squealed as they divorced the boards to which they had been wedded. Then, at last, the balcony began to tilt. Audrey tumbled over the side. For just a moment Steve saw her feet sticking out of the dust, and then she was gone. A moment later and the balcony was gone, too, falling like a stone and hitting the seats below with a tremendous crash. Dust boiled up in a miniature mushroom cloud.

  "David!" Steve shouted. "What about David? Is he alive?"

  "I don't know," Ralph said. He looked at them with dazed and teary eyes. "I'm sure he was when I brought him out of the projection-booth, but now I don't know. I can't feel him breathing at all."

  3

  All the doors leading into the auditorium had been chocked open, and the lobby was hazed with dust from the fallen balcony. They carried David over to one of the street-doors, where a draft from the outside pushed the worst of the drifting dust away.

  "Put him down," Cynthia said. She was trying to think what to do next--hell, what to do first--but her thoughts kept junking up on her. "And lay him straight. Let's turn his airways into freeways."

  Ralph looked at her hopefully as he and Steve lowered David to the threadbare carpet. "Do you know anything about . . . this?"

  "Depends on what you mean," she said. "Some first aid--including artificial respiration--from when I was back at Daughters and Sisters, yeah. But if you're asking if I know anything about ladies who turn into homicidal maniacs and then decay, no."

  "He's all I got, miss," Ralph said. "All that's left of my family."

  Cynthia closed her eyes and bent toward David. What she felt relieved her enormously--the faint but clear touch of breath on her face. "He's alive. I can feel him breathing." She looked up at Ralph and smiled. "I'm not surprised you couldn't. Your face is swelled up like an inner tube."

  "Yeah. Maybe that was it. But mostly I was just so afraid . . ." He tried to smile back at her and failed. He let out a gusty sigh and groped backward to lean against the boarded-over candy counter.

  "I'm going to help him now," Cynthia said. She looked down at the boy's pale face and closed eyes. "I'm just going to help you along, David. Speed things up. Let me help you, okay? Let me help you."

  She turned his head gently to one side, wincing at the fingermarks on his neck. In the auditorium, a hanging piece of the balcony gave up the ghost and fell with a crash. The others looked that way, but Cynthia's concentration remained on David. She used the fingers of her left hand to open his mouth, leaned forward, and gently pinched his nostrils shut with her right hand. Then she put her mouth on his and exhaled. His chest rose more steeply, then settled as she released his nose and pulled away from him. She bent to one side and spoke into his ear in a low voice. "Come back to us, David. We need you. And you need us."

  She breathed deep into his mouth again, and said, "Come back to us, David," as he exhaled a mixture of his air and hers. She looked into his face. His unassisted breathing was a little stronger now, she thought, and she could see his eyeballs moving beneath his blue-tinged lids, but he showed no signs of waking up.

  "Come back to us, David. Come back."

  Johnny looked around, blinking like someone just back from the further reaches of his thoughts. "Where's Mary? You don't suppose the goddam balcony fell on her, do you?"

  "Why would it have?" Steve asked. "She was with the old guy."

  "And you think she's still with the old guy? After all the yelling? After the goddam balcony fell off the goddam wall?"

  "You've got a point," Steve said.

  "Here we go again," Johnny said, "I knew it. Come on, I guess we better go look for her."

  Cynthia took no notice. She knelt with her face in front of David's, searching it earnestly with her eyes. "I dunno where you are, kid, but get your ass back here. It's time to saddle up and get out of Dodge."

  Johnny picked up
the shotgun and the rifle. He handed the latter to Ralph. "Stay here with your boy and the young lady," he said. "We'll be back."

  "Yeah? What if you're not?"

  Johnny looked at him uncertainly for a moment, then broke into a sunny grin. "Burn the documents, trash the radio, and swallow your death capsule."

  "Huh?"

  "How the fuck should I know? Use your judgement. I can tell you this much, Ralph: as soon as we've collected Ms. Jackson, we're totally historical. Come on, Steve. Down the far lefthand aisle, unless you've an urge to climb Mount Balcony."

  Ralph watched them through the door, then turned back to Cynthia and his son. "What's wrong with David, do you have any idea? Did that bitch choke him into a coma? He had a friend who was in a coma once, David did. He came out of it--it was a miracle, everyone said--but I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy. Is that what's wrong with him, do you think?"

  "I don't think he's unconscious at all, let alone in a coma. Do you see the way his eyelids are moving? It's more like he's asleep and dreaming ... or in a trance."

  She looked up at him. Their eyes met for a moment, and then Ralph knelt down across from her. He brushed his son's hair off his brow and then kissed him gently between the eyes, where the skin was puckered in a faint frown. "Come back, David," he said. "Please come back."

  David breathed quietly through pursed lips. Behind his bruised eyelids, his eyes moved and moved.

  4

  In the men's room they found one dead cougar, its head mostly blown off, and one dead veterinarian with his eyes open. In the ladies' room, they found nothing ... or so it seemed to Steve.

  "Shine your light back over there," Johnny told him. When Steve retrained the flashlight on the window he said, "No, not the window. The floor underneath it."

  Steve dropped the beam and ran it along half a dozen beer-bottles standing against the wall just to the right of the window.

  "The doc's booby-trap," Johnny said. "Not broken but neatly set aside. Interesting."

  "I didn't even notice they were gone from the windowledge. That's good on you, boss."

  "Come on over here." Johnny crossed to the window, held it up, peeked out, then moved aside enough for Steve to join him. "Cast your mind back to your arrival at this bucolic palace of dreams, Steven. What's the last thing you did before sliding all the way into this room? Can you remember?"

  Steve nodded. "Sure. We stacked two crates to make it easier to climb in the window. I pushed the top one off, because I figured if the cop came back here and saw them piled up that way, it would be like a pointing arrow."

  "Right. But what do you see now?"

  Steve used his flashlight, although he didn't really need to; the wind had died almost completely, and all but the most errant skims of dust had dropped. There was even a scantling of moon.

  "They're stacked again," he said, and turned to Johnny with an alarmed look. "Oh shit! Entragian came while we were occupied with David. Came and ..." took her was how he meant to finish, but he saw the boss shaking his head and stopped.

  "That's not what this says." Johnny took the flashlight and ran it along the row of bottles again. "Not smashed; set neatly aside in a row. Who did that? Audrey? No, she went the other way--after David. Billingsley? Not possible, considering the shape he was in before he died. That leaves Mary, but would she have done it for the cop?"

  "I doubt it," Steve said.

  "Me too. I think that if the cop had shown up back here, she would have come running to us, screaming bloody murder. And why the stacked crates? I've got some personal experience of Collie Entragian; he's six-six at least, probably more. He wouldn't have needed a step up to get in the window. To me those stacked crates suggest either a shorter person, a ruse to get Mary into a position where she could be grabbed, or maybe both. I could be over-deducing, I suppose, but--"

  "So there could be more of them. More like Audrey."

  "Maybe, but I don't think you can conclude that out of what we see here. I just don't think she would have put those beer-bottles aside for any stranger. Not even a bawling little kid. You know? I think she would have come to get us."

  Steve took the flashlight and shone it on Billingsley's tile fish, so joyful and funky here in the dark. He wasn't surprised to find that he no longer liked it much. Now it was like laughter in a haunted house, or a clown at midnight. He snapped the light off.

  "What are you thinking, boss?"

  "Don't call me that anymore, Steve. I never liked it that much to begin with."

  "All right. What are you thinking, Johnny?"

  Johnny looked around to make sure they were still alone. His face, dominated by his swelled and leaning nose, looked both tired and intent. As he shook out another three aspirin and dry-swallowed them, Steve realized an amazing thing: Marinville looked younger. In spite of everything he'd been through, he looked younger.

  He swallowed again, grimacing at the taste of the old pills, and said: "David's mom."

  "What?"

  "It could have been. Take a second. Think about it. You'll see how pretty it is, in a ghastly kind of way."

  Steve did. And saw how completely it made sense of the situation. He didn't know where Audrey Wyler's story had parted company from the truth, but he did know that at some point she had been gotten to ... changed by the stones she had called the can tahs. Changed? Afflicted with a kind of horrible, degenerative rabies. What had happened to her could have happened to Ellen Carver, as well.

  Steve suddenly found himself hoping Mary Jackson was dead. That was awful, but in a case like this, dead might be better, mightn't it? Better than being under the spell of the can tahs. Better than what apparently happened when the can tahs were taken away.

  "What do we do now?" he asked.

  "Get out of this town. By any means possible."

  "All right. If David's still unconscious, we'll carry him. Let's do it."

  They started back to the lobby.

  5

  David Carver walked down Anderson Avenue past West Wentworth Middle School. Written on the side of the school-building in yellow spray-paint were the words IN THESE SILENCES SOMETHING MAY RISE. Then he turned an Ohio corner and began walking down Bear Street. That was pretty funny, since Bear Street and the Bear Street Woods were nine big suburban blocks from the junior high, but that's the way things worked in dreams. Soon he would wake up in his own bedroom and the whole thing would fall apart, anyway.

  Ahead of him were three bikes in the middle of the street. They had been turned upside down, and their wheels were spinning in the air.

  "And Pharaoh said unto Joseph, I have dreamed a dream," someone said, "and I have heard say of thee, that thou canst understand a dream to interpret it."

  David looked across the street and saw Reverend Martin. He was drunk and he needed a shave. In one hand he held a bottle of Seagram's Seven whiskey. Between his feet was a yellow puddle of puke. David could barely stand to look at him. His eyes were empty and dead.

  "And Joseph answered Pharaoh, saying, It is not in me: God shall give Pharaoh an answer of peace." Reverend Martin toasted him with the bottle and then drank. "Go get em," he said. "Now we're going to discover if you know where Moses was when the lights went out."

  David walked on. He thought of turning around; then a queer but strangely persuasive idea came to him: if he did turn around, he would see the mummy tottering after him in a cloud of ancient wrappings and spices.

  He walked a little faster.

  As he passed the bikes in the street, he noted that one of the turning wheels made a piercing and unpleasant sound: Reek-reek-reek. It made him think of the weathervane on top of Bud's Suds, the leprechaun with the pot of gold under his arm. The one in--

  Desperation! I'm in Desperation, and this is a dream! I fell asleep while I was trying to pray, I'm upstairs in the old movie theater!

  "There shall arise among you a prophet, and a dreamer of dreams," someone said.

  David looked across the street and sa
w a dead cat--a cougar--hanging from a speed-limit sign. The cougar had a human head. Audrey Wyler's head. Her eyes rolled at him tiredly and he thought she was trying to smile. "But if he should say to you, Let us seek other gods, you shalt not hearken unto him."

  He looked away, grimacing, and here, on his own side of Bear Street, was sweet Pie standing on the porch of his friend Brian's house (Brian's house had never been on Bear Street before, but now the rules had apparently changed). She was holding Melissa Sweetheart clasped in her arms. "He was Mr. Big Boogeyman after all," she said. "You know that now, don't you?"

  "Yes. I know, Pie."

  "Walk a little faster, David. Mr. Big Boogeyman's after you."

  The desert-smell of wrappings and old spices was stronger in his nose now, and David walked faster still. Up ahead was the break in the bushes which marked the entrance to the Ho Chi Minh Trail. There had never been anything there before but the occasional hopscotch grid or KATHI LOVES RUSSELL chalked on the sidewalk, but today the entrance to the path was guarded by an ancient stone statue, one much too big to be a can tah, little god; this was a can tak, big god. It was a jackal with a cocked head, an open, snarling mouth, and buggy cartoon eyes that were full of fury. One of its ears had been either chipped away or eroded away. The tongue in its mouth was not a tongue at all but a human head--Collie Entragian's head, Smokey Bear hat and all.

  "Fear me and turn aside from this path," the cop in the mouth of the jackal said as David approached. "Mi tow, can de lach: fear the unformed. There are other gods than yours--can tah, can tak. You know I speak the truth."

  "Yes, but my God is strong," David said in a conversational voice. He reached into the jackal's open mouth and seized its psychotic tongue. He heard Entragian scream--and felt it, a scream that vibrated against his palm like a joy-buzzer. A moment later, the jackal's entire head exploded in a soundless shardless flash of light. What remained was a stone hulk that stopped short at the shoulders.

  He walked down the path, aware that he was glimpsing plants he had never seen anywhere in Ohio before--spiny cactuses and drum cactuses, winter fat, squaw tea, Russian thistle ... also known as tumbleweed. From the bushes at the side of the path stepped his mother. Her face was black and wrinkled, an ancient bag of dough. Her eyes drooped. The sight of her in this state filled him with sorrow and horror.