“But you’re here for the long pull, aren’t you?”
“You’d deny me my respite? You don’t know what this is like!”
“I’m going to be leaving soon. Just passing through.”
“You’ve been here a million years already. The world’s gone. It ended. The sun blew up thousands of years ago!” She rasped and swirled, crazed by her passion to escape. “Hell is being condemned to time for all eternity. It never ends and it is never pleasant. Of the two of us, you committed me greater sin, and you must pay the greater price.”
Bonnie tried to back away. George had told her this would be like sleep! How arrogant of him, how absurd.
It is not what the mind thinks that creates the afterlife, but what the unconscious believes.
And the unconscious never lies.
“George, where are you? George!”
Mother Star of the Sea reappeared out of the snickering, jabbing swarm of needles. “Yes, George, I want my vacation and I want it now!”
As if behind the screen of the cat’s eyes Bonnie saw George tinkering in the lab. “Hurry, hurry.”
“Oh, yes, George, I’ve got my valise packed. Ah, what fun!” The electric wind of George’s device shattered into the nothingness, negating for a moment the whole primacy of death.
Somebody was carried back into Bonnie’s body on that wind. But it wasn’t Bonnie. No, Bonnie went down deeper, to a charming place centered by a certain gingerbread cottage with a particularly vile stove inside. Yes, indeed. Hansel and Gretel aren’t the only ones to have visited there.
It was somebody else who reinhabited her body, fitting into the glimmers and flickers between the nerves where the soul is hidden. She came to do the will of her tremendous master.
The cat had a use for her. Just for a little while, she would slip through the weave of life, doing the bidding of the gods.
It was not Bonnie who returned to that lovely body on the lab table. No, it was Mother Star of the Sea, of course. And she had not come back for fun.
Chapter 13
George stood over her, looking down at Bonnie. As the last of her living flush faded, he touched her face.
When she was this still, he could really see her beauty. His body stirred as it had not since Kate. Kitten Kate.
“George?”
Bonnie’s hair was golden, very beautiful.
“George, she’s been down long enough.”
Bonnie, Bonnie. Pretty Bonnie. How cool her skin was becoming, how like alabaster. How perfect.
“The blood’s going to pool.”
George bent down between the gleaming black coils, drawing closer and closer to her face. He inhaled the fading sweetness of her skin, then kissed her cheek, lingering his lips against the softness. Bonnie had the nicest down on her cheek. He laid his lips on hers.
“For God’s sake, George, we’ve got to bring her back. There’s going to be irreversible brain damage in a minute.”
Bonnie was perfection.
“George! It’ll be murder, I swear!”
Clark could be a hell of a bitch. George went back to his instrument panel. “I’m going to go with a slowly ascending level rather than the quick jump we used on Tess. I think maybe we’ll get a more stable electrical response from the brain that way.”
“Just do it. Right now!”
He began raising the voltage levels in the brain.
“Am I supposed to get a reading?” Clark called from his station.
“Of course.”
“I’m not getting a thing.”
“Christ.” George glanced over at her. What on earth had made him wait so long? She had been unexpectedly beautiful dead. He had not been prepared for that. He raised the voltages to their full output levels. “Now?”
“Leave it on! Try artificial fibrillation. Maybe if the heart would restart—”
George rushed to the lab bench, pulled the fibrillator out of the wooden case on the floor. The thing wasn’t even plugged in. He had been that careless. He felt like a criminal. Shaking, fumbling, he got the piug into the socket and held the electrodes against Bonnie’s chest. “Give it a shot, Clark!”
The device snapped and jerked in George’s hands. Bonnie’s lungs expanded with a whoosh.
“No heartbeat!”
“Hit it again. Oh, Jesus’.”
The fibrillator snapped again. This time there was a gargling sound from Bonnie’s throat, “Clark?”
“I think I got—yeah, there’s one. There’s another! She’s starting! We have a heartbeat.”
“Bonnie! Bonnie!”
“D-d-d—”
“Bonnie, come back to us! Come back!”
“Heart rate 45. Blood pressure 55 over 30. She’s responding, George. I hope to God there’s no brain damage.”
Her eyes were fluttering, her mouth working. She coughed, gasped, jerked her head from side to side.
“Bonnie, baby, Bonnie, baby.”
“I’m gonna—” She tried to lift herself, failed, then made a mess all over George’s beautiful equipment. He groaned to see it.
“Bonnie?”
“Yeah?”
“Come on, honey, let’s get you out of there. Clark, give me a hand.” While Clark removed her electrodes George got some paper towels and cleaned her up as best he could. Together they sat her up. She swayed, dangling her legs over the edge of the bench.
“My feet are asleep,” she said.
Had George heard correctly? Was that Bonnie’s voice?
“My dear,” he said, “what a low voice you have.”
When she looked up at them, George was confused. In a way that was hard to define, her face was not right. Her cheeks, which had been rounded, were now drawn inward by a tension that had not been there before. Her lips were held in a prim, angry line. And her eyes—she had a predatory look.
“Oh, my God,” Clark whispered.
“Bonnie—what strange eyes you have. Do you fee) all right?”
“I’m a little woozy, but I think my circulation’s getting better.” She stepped to the floor. “There! See, I’m okay.”
Something was not right here. The voice was radically different. And her face, her eyes… he didn’t understand.
“George,” Clark said, “come in here.” He nodded toward the animal room.
“What about that cat?”
“Never mind the damn cat, just get in here!” Clark closed the door behind them. “What’s wrong with her?”
“I don’t know.”
“Something’s terribly wrong with her.”
“I—what can I say?”
“Look, man, we’re getting in trouble here, you and me. Careers are on the line.” He paused. “The whole damn thing is videotaped.”
George saw where he was leading. “We’ve got to help her. She’s the main consideration.”
“I’m a biologist. I can’t help her. George, I’m telling you right now I’m pulling out of the project. Right out.
I don’t care what happens with my degree. I don’t care what Constance thinks. In fact, I’m reporting to her that the whole experiment is a failure and we’ve got to shut down. If you ask me, you’re going to end up in jail or sued by outraged relatives before this is all over.”
“Clark, just take it easy. It isn’t that bad.”
“That isn’t Bonnie in there, you know it as well as I do. It’s something else—something we’ve unleashed.”
“That’s an unsupported value judgment. The only thing that’s definite is that there is a change of expression.”
“A change of expression? The woman has another face, somebody else’s, voice. She sounds like an older woman. A different woman.”
“There’s no proof that these effects are related to the experiment. They might have happened anyway.”
“What a load of—you can’t seriously advocate that! The girl was fine before we did this to her. Normal in every way!”
“There was nothing in the experiment that could hav
e caused the effect we’re apparently seeing. And I must stress that we’ve hardly had a chance to evaluate her. Probably we’re dealing with minor sequelae to the blood pressure changes. My guess is they’ll pass off—”
A scream pealed in the lab. When George threw open the door, Bonnie was reeling around the center of the room with the cat on her head. Its claws were in her hair, and it was trying to reach her throat with its teeth. “My God!”
George was revolted. A human being touched by a cat. And yet the suffering involved in being bitten by those teeth would be so extreme that it would be fascinating. He fought to get his hands under control enough to grab at the loathsome thing.
At last he did it, felt muscles pulsing beneath its skin, heard its hissing, smelled its breath like an electrical fire. He got the head and pulled it back away from Bonnie’s neck. Claws savaged his hands as he dragged the cat off her. It writhed furiously, screaming, its head turning and twisting, claws slashing.
Clutching the scruff of its neck, he took it into the animal room and tossed it into the empty monkey cage.
“This is crazy!”
He returned to the lab to find Clark standing at the door, staring down the hall. Bonnie was gone.
Mother Star of the Sea had to get moving. The damned cat was going berserk with impatience. There was no time to waste, not a single second. You took hell with you, even on vacation.
She did exactly what she was supposed to do—she ran. She did not know where she was going or even why she was here. That wasn’t her business. She Just had to run. It that had brought her here would direct her movements.
There was one thing, though, she wanted to do on her own, and she wanted it so desperately that she risked the wrath of the cat for it.
For all the time she had been dead, she had been longing for one simple thing that was only available in life. Her last one had been stolen by a nurse’s aide on the cancer ward at Perpetual Light Hospital. Her very last one, and she had done her terminal suffocation without even the small pleasure it would have brought.
Mother Star of the Sea fumbled in the pockets of Bonnie’s jeans for some change. Thirty cents. Good.
She crossed a two-lane highway and went down into the familiar old town, looking for the right kind of store.
Bixter’s. Of course. She went in. At the counter was a display so beautiful she almost wept to see it. With a trembling hand she picked out from among the stacks of M&Ms and Herseys and Oh Henry!’s a lovely, fat, fresh Snickers bar. She shook as she held her coins out to the girl at the register.
“Thirty-two.”
“Excuse me?”
“Thirty-two cents. A Snickers is thirty-two cents.”
Mother Star of the Sea wasn’t really surprised. Her guilt didn’t miss a trick. She was here, sure, but she had no intention of letting up on herself. Her suffering would stay with her. She knew better than to try and steal the candy. What would happen then she couldn’t even guess, but it would certainly be worse than not getting the damn Snickers at all. “Too bad,” she croaked. She put it back and left the store.
As she walked down the street, a little bit of hell amid all these happy souls, she found she hated them.
They ate, they slept, they fornicated—and she couldn’t even have a goddamn candy bar. Mother Star of the Sea begrudged them their silly, complacent lives. What a joke it all was. They thought they’d die, most of them, and face some sort of judgment. Saint Peter or whoever.
You could say not guilty, but it didn’t matter a bit if you knew otherwise.
I am now walking around in a body I once hated with a passion so great it drew tears to my eyes. She looked down at the hands. They were smooth and pretty now, but in 1973 they had been plump, warty little things. Had she ever rulered them? She didn’t recall, but she certainly hoped so. She raised one to wipe her nose. The arm was stronger than she had thought it would be, and she almost knocked herself out. Staggering, she recovered.
She was in here and she couldn’t get out! How horrible. How funny.
Maybe I’m crazy. Perhaps I’m really Bonnie, but I think I’m the old dead nun. I’m Bonnie, and I’ve become my own guilt.
This speculation made her hate the people around her even more. In a few minutes the distance between her and her fellow human beings had become as wide as the black eternal pit into which she had fallen.
How she hated them, those bright faces, those innocent eyes, those sexy curves and jutting trousers. Two children passed. Their faces were smeared with chocolate. She smelled the aroma of Snickers on their sour children’s breath. She would have gleefully roasted them over a slow fire.
As she walked along she noticed a trail of ants winding its way across the sidewalk. They were helpless.
Unlike the people, they could be hurt. She pranced up and down, stomping them to ant butter.
“Are you all right, miss?”
A cop. “Yeah. I just don’t like ants.”
“We got a lot of ‘em this year. I been puttin’ out them ant motels at my place all fall.”
She crossed the street. Wherever was she going, anyway? Hell if she knew. Let the cat take care of it.
The cat always knew just what it wanted. If you refused or hesitated in hell, The damn thing became a real tiger.
Something buzzed in her left ear like an enormous wasp, perhaps a cat struggling to make human sounds.
The words were clear enough, though. They told her just what was next. Cross Ames and walk a block farther on. Then take a left on North Street, down a block, and there it would be, huddled up against the back of the Tabernacle, Brother Pierce’s shabby old Airstream trailer with “God Is Love” painted down the sides. She arrived panting.
“Brother Pierce? Brother Pierce, are you in there?”
She hammered on the screen door that had been attached by coat hanger wires to the frame. The interior of the trailer was dark and quiet, warm from the sun despite the chilly day.
“Brother Pierce?”
She opened the screen door and stepped in. The trailer was not large. One side of it consisted of a reeking, unmade bed, the other of a desk and plastic-covered table littered with dishes.
She was careful to close and latch the door. The places where the cat’s claws had penetrated her scalp burned like fire. She didn’t care to encounter that creature again.
This was certainly a dreary little hole. Hot. Stinky. She cast around for some cigarettes, found a stale-looking pack of Saratoga 100s, put one in her mouth. Amazingly enough, she also located a book of matches. At least she would be allowed some small pleasure. But when she saw that there were just two matches left in the book, their phosphorus tips crumbling, she didn’t even try to light one. What was the point? Without further ado she tossed cigarette and matches over her shoulder.
The voice had not told her what she was supposed to do here, so she stood, as inert as an undirected zombie.
As the minutes passed, Mother Star of the Sea came to seem less a self and more a memory. Bonnie was returning, the old nun dissolving away. It occurred to the reappearing woman that the Mother Star of the Sea delusion could be an unexpected consequence of her temporary death.
It made her feel cold and clammy to realize that she had memories from the time she had been dead.
Death hadn’t been blackness or emptiness, not at all.
It had been Mother Star of the Sea and… oh, dear.
That problem. But she hadn’t—or had she—ruined Mother Star of the Sea’s life?
She certainly had. And she had gone to hell for doing it. In a little while she was going back. Forever.
Mother Star of the Sea was standing in the back of the trailer, her habit billowing like great wings. There was a great pile of whiskey bottles behind her.
Bonnie rushed wildly from the grim apparition—and into the arms of a short, fat gasping man who was on his way in the door. “I got to see Brother Pierce,” the man wailed.
“He’s not here.”
> The man wrung his hands. “I got to see him!”
“You’ll have to wait.”
“I can’t wait! No time.” She heard brakes squeal around the side of the trailer. “Oh, Jesus! Tell him there’s gonna be a witch ride through the town tonight. Big secret, we ain’t supposed to know! Tell him!”
Three more men hurried around the trailer. Then fatso was off, puffing and blowing, his pursuers close behind. Their car came swinging around the corner raising dust, driven by a fourth man.
A witch ride? She could never say that!
“May I help you, daughter?”
“Oh.”
“I am Simon Pierce.” He did not smile so much as reveal his teeth.
“I—” She wanted to tell him she was just leaving, but she couldn’t very well do that. This was his home and she was standing right in the middle of it.
“I ask that members of the congregation never come in here.” He chuckled. “I am an inveterate bottle collector and some of my prizes are very delicate. Worthless, of course, except to me.” He stared at her, his eyes full of calculation. “Who are you, daughter?”
“I’m—a messenger! I have a message for you from, from—” She waited for the buzzing voice in her ear.
There was only silence.
“Bill Peters? Bill sent you?”
She had to think up something. “That’s it,” she babbled. “Bill sent me. He said to tell you there’s going to be a witch ride tonight.” It had burst from her on its own.
“Bill said that? Where is he?”
“Some men were after him—”
“Say no more. Bless you, daughter! You have brought me gold. Gold!”
So this was why she had been sent here. The cat of hell wanted to be certain that Brother Pierce knew about the witch ride.
He strode past her and got on the phone. Her last sight of him was of his back as he bent over the instrument, talking with excitement and relish. She had to get to the lab right now. She was remembering an incredible wealth of detail, and she had to tell George. Mother Star of the Sea, indeed. Guilty secrets of the dead.
She hurried up North Street to the place where it forms a triangle with Meecham and the Morris Stage Road. Bonnie was a careful girl. She negotiated the Meecham part of the crossing and paused on the pedestrian island, waiting for a break in the MSR traffic. She waited for some time. This was the commuter hour, and there was a steady stream of cars coming back to town from their day’s journeys.