The Great and Secret Show

  The Jaff's response to these lights—which was to retreat like a rabid dog before thrown water—gave her a clue to their nature. They were to Fletcher what the beads that had snatched the matches were to the Jaff: some essential power released. The Jaff hated them. Their brightness made the face behind his face come clear. The sight of it, and of the miraculous change in Fletcher, drew her closer to the fire than was safe. She could smell her hair singeing. But she was too intrigued to be driven back. This was her doing, after all. She was the creator. Like the first ape to nurture a flame, and so transform the tribe.

  That, she understood, was Fletcher's hope: the transformation of the tribe. This was not simply spectacle. The burning motes coming off Fletcher's body had their progenitor's intention in them. They went out from the column like bright seeds, weaving through the air in search of fertile ground. The Grovers were that ground, and the fireflies found them waiting. What struck her as miraculous was that nobody fled. Perhaps the previous violence had frightened off the weak-hearted. The rest were game for the magic, some actually breaking rank and walking to greet the lights, like communicants to an altar rail. Children went first, snatching at the motes, proving them innocent of harm. The light broke against their open hands, or against their welcoming faces, the fire echoed momentarily in their eyes. The parents of these adventurers were next to be touched. Some, having been struck, called back to their spouses: "It's OK. It doesn't hurt. It's just . . . light!"

  It was more than that, Tesla knew. It was Fletcher. And in giving himself away in this fashion his physical self was gradually deteriorating. Already his chest, hands and groin had all but disappeared, his head and neck attached to his shoulders and his shoulders to his lower torso by strands of dusty matter that were prey to every whim of the flames. As she watched they too broke, and went to become light. Watching, a childhood hymn tripped into her head. Her mind sang Jesus wants me for a sunbeam. An old song for a new age.

  The opening act of that age was already coming to a conclusion. Fletcher's self was almost used up, his face eaten away at the eyes and the mouth, the skull fragmenting, his brain melted to brightness and being blown from its pan like a dandelion head in an August wind.

  With its going the pieces of Fletcher that remained simply vanished in the fire. Bereft of fuel, the flame went out. There was no dwindling; no ashes; not even smoke. One moment brightness, heat and wonders. The next, nothing.

  She had been watching Fletcher too closely to count how many of the witnesses had been touched by his light. Many, certainly. Possibly all. Perhaps it was their sheer numbers that prevented the Jaff from any attempt at reprisal. He had an army waiting in the night, after all. But he chose not to summon it. Instead, with the minimum of show, he left. Tommy-Ray went with him. Jo-Beth did not. Howie had positioned himself beside her during Fletcher's dissolution, gun in hand. All Tommy-Ray could do was offer a few barely coherent threats, then follow in his father's footsteps.

  That, in essence, was the Shaman Fletcher's last performance. There would be repercussions of course, but not until the recipients of his light had slept on their gift for a few hours. There were some more immediate consequences. For Grillo and Hotchkiss the satisfaction of knowing their senses hadn't deceived them at the caves; for Jo-Beth and Howie, reunion after events that had brought them close to death; and for Tesla, the knowledge that with Fletcher's going a great weight of responsibility had passed to her.

  It was the Grove itself, however, which had borne the brunt of the night's magic. Its streets had seen horrors. Its citizens had been touched by spirits.

  Soon, war.

  PART FIVE

  Slaves and

  Lovers

  I

  ____________ i ____________

  ANY alcoholic would have recognized the behavior of the Grove the following morning. It was that of a man who'd been on a bender the night before and had to get up early the day after and pretend that nothing untoward had happened. He'd stand under a cold Shower for a few minutes to shock his system into wakefulness, breakfast on Alka-Seltzer and black coffee, then step out into the day with a gait more purposeful than usual, and the permafrost smile of an actress who'd just lost an Oscar. There were more hellos and how-are-yous? that morning, more neighbors waving cheerily to each other as they backed out their cars, more radios playing weather reports (sun! sun! sun!) through windows thrown wide to prove that there were no secrets in this house. To a stranger, coming to the Grove that morning for the first time, it would have seemed as though the town were auditioning for Perfectsville, USA. The general air of enforced bonhomie would have curdled his stomach.

  Down at the Mall, where the evidence of a Dionysian night could scarcely be ignored, the talk was of anything but the truth. Hell's Angels had ridden in from L.A., one story went, their sole purpose to wreak havoc. The explanation gained credibility with repetition. Some claimed to have heard the bikes. A few even decided to have seen them, embroidering the collective fiction knowing nobody would raise a doubting voice. By mid-morning the glass had been entirely swept away, and boards nailed up over the smashed panes. By noon, fresh windows had been ordered. By two, they were in. Not since the days of the League of Virgins had the Grove been so single-minded in its pursuit of equilibrium; nor so hypocritical. For behind closed doors, in bathrooms and bedrooms and dens, it was a different story entirely. Here the smiles dropped, and the intent gait gave way to nervous pacing, and weeping, and the swallowing of pills searched for with the passion of gold-diggers. Here people confessed to themselves—not even to their partners or their dogs—that something was awry today and would never be quite right again. Here people tried to remember tales they'd been told as children—the old, fanciful stories adulthood had all but shamed from their memories—in the hope of countering their present fears. Some tried to drink away their anxiety. Some took to eating. Some contemplated the priesthood.

  It was, all in all, a damn strange day.

  Less strange, perhaps, for those who had hard facts to juggle, however much those facts flew in the face of what yesterday would have passed for reality. For these few, blessed now with the certain knowledge that there were monsters and divinities loosed in the Grove, the question was not: is it true? Rather: what does it mean?

  For William Witt, the answer was a shrug of surrender. He had no way to comprehend the horrors he'd been terrorized by at the house in Wild Cherry Glade. His subsequent conversation with Spilmont, dismissing his story as fabrication, had made him paranoid. Either there was a conspiracy afoot to keep the Jaff's machinations secret, or else he, William Witt, was losing his mind. Nor were these memories mutually exclusive, which was doubly chilling. In the face of such bitter blasts he'd kept himself locked up at home, with the exception of his brief trip down to the Mall the previous night. He'd been a late attender, and today he remembered very little of it, but he did recall getting home and the night of video Babylon that followed. Usually he was quite sparing with his porno sessions, preferring to select one or two films to view rather than pig out on a dozen. But last night's viewing had turned into a binge. When the Robinsons next door were taking their kids off to the playground the following morning he was still sitting in front of the television, the blinds drawn, the beer cans a small city at his feet, watching and watching. He had his collection organized with the precision of a master librarian, referenced and cross-referenced. He knew the stars of these sweaty epics by all their aliases; he knew their breast and cock sizes; their early histories; their specialities. He had the narratives, crude as they were, by heart; his favorite scenes memorized down to each grunt and spurt.

  But today the parade did not arouse him. He went from film to film like an addict among pillaged peddlers, looking for a fix no one could supply, until the videos were piled high around his television. Two-ways, three-ways, oral, anal, golden showers, bondage, discipline, lesbian scenes, dildo scenes, rape and romance scenes—he went through them all but none provided the release he neede
d. His search became a kind of pursuit of himself. What will rouse me will be me, was his half-finished thought.

  It was a desperate situation. This was the first time in his life—excluding events with the League—that voyeurism had failed to excite. The first time he wanted the performers sharing his reality as he shared theirs. He'd always been happy to turn them off when he'd shot his wad; even been faintly contemptuous of their charms once their hold on him had been mopped up. Now he mourned them, like lovers he'd lost without ever knowing them properly, whose every orifice he'd sight of, but whose intimacy was denied him.

  Yet, some time after dawn, his spirits as low as he'd known them, the strangest thought occurred: that perhaps he could bring them to him; by the sheer heat of his desire foment them into being. Dreams could be made real. Artists did it all the time, and didn't everyone have a little art in them? It was that thought, barely formed, that kept him watching the screen, through The Last Lays of Pompeii and Born to Be Made and Secrets of a Women's Prison; films he knew as well as his own history, but which, unlike his history, might yet live in the present tense.

  He was not the only Grover visited by such thoughts, though none were as fixated on the erotic as William. The same idea—that some precious, essential person, or persons, might be called up from the mind and made a boon companion— occurred to every member of the crowd that had gathered in the Mall the evening before. Soap-opera stars, game-show hosts, dead or lost relations, divorced spouses, missing children, comic-book characters: there were as many names as there were minds to summon them.

  For some, like William Witt, the face of their desire gathered momentum at such speed (fuelled in several cases by obsession, in others by longing or envy) that by dawn the following day there were already clots in corners of their rooms where the air had thickened in preparation for the miracle.

  In the bedroom of Shuna Melkin, who was the daughter of Christine and Larry Melkin, a fabled rock princess—dead of an overdose several years past but Shuna Melkin's sole and obsessive idol, was making herself known with croonings so subtle it could have passed for the breeze in the eaves but that Shuna knew the tune.

  In Ossie Larton's loft there were scratchings he knew with an inward smile were the birth pangs of the werewolf he'd kept secret company with since he'd first known that such creatures were imaginable. His name was Eugene, this werewolf, which—at the tender age of six, when Ossie had first created his companion—had seemed an appropriate name for a man who grew fur under the full moon.

  For Karen Conroy the three leads of her favorite movie, Love Knows Your Name, a little-seen romance she'd wept through six days running during a long-past trip to Paris, could be sensed as a delicate European perfume in the lounge.

  And so on, and so forth.

  By noon that day there wasn't any one of the crowd who hadn't had an intimation—many of which were dismissed or ignored of course—that they had unexpected visitors. The population of Palomo Grove, which had swelled by a hundred horrors at the Jaff's summons, was about to swell again.

  ____________ ii ____________

  "You've already admitted you don't really understand what happened last night—"

  "It's not a question of admitting anything, Grillo."

  "OK. Let's not get mad at each other. Why do we always end up shouting?"

  "We're not shouting."

  "OK. We're not shouting. All I'm saying is, please consider the possibility that this errand he's sending you on—"

  "Errand?"

  "Now you're shouting. I'm just saying, think a minute. This could be the last trip you ever make."

  "Possibility accepted."

  "So let me come with you. You've never been south of Tijuana."

  "Neither have you."

  "It's rough—"

  "Listen, I've pitched art movies to men perplexed by Dumbo. I know rough. If you want to do something really useful, stay here and get well."

  "I'm well already. I never felt better."

  "I need you here, Grillo. Watching. It's not over, by a long way."

  "What am I supposed to be watching for?" Grillo asked, conceding the argument by no longer pursuing it.

  "You've always had an eye for the hidden agenda. When the Jaff makes his move, however quietly, you'll know it. By the way, did you see Ellen last night? She was in the crowd, with her kid. You might start by seeing how she feels the morning after . . ."

  It wasn't that Grillo's fears for her safety weren't legitimate, nor indeed that she wouldn't have taken pleasure in his company on the journey ahead. But for reasons she could find no gentle way of stating, and so didn't state at all, his presence would be an intrusion she had no right to risk, either for his good or for the good of the task ahead. It had been one of Fletcher's last acts to choose her to go to the Mission; he'd even indicated that it had somehow been preordained. Not so long ago she'd have dismissed such mysticism; but after last night she was obliged to be more open-minded. The world of mysteries she'd made light of in her spook and spaceship screenplays was not to be so easily mocked. It had come looking for her, found her, and pitched her—cynicism and all— among its heavens and its hells. The latter in the shape of the Jaff's army, the former's presence in Fletcher's transformation: flesh to light.

  Charged with being the dead man's agent on earth she felt a curious relaxation, despite the jeopardy that lay ahead. She no longer had to keep her cynicism polished; no longer had to divide her imaginings from moment to moment into the real (solid, sensible) and the fanciful (vaporous, valueless). If (when) she got back to her typewriter she'd begin these tongue-in-cheek screenplays over from the top, telling them with faith in the tale, not because every fantasy was absolutely true but because no reality ever was.

  Mid-morning she left the Grove, choosing a route that took her out of the town past the Mall, where the status quo was well on its way to being restored. With speed she'd be over the border by nightfall; and at the Misión de Santa Catrina, or—if Fletcher's hope was well founded—on the empty ground where it had stood, before dawn.

  On his father's instructions Tommy-Ray had crept back to the Mall the previous night, long after the crowd had dispersed. The police had arrived by that point but he had no difficulty in achieving his purpose, which was the retrieval of the terata which he had attached with his own hands to Katz's flesh. The Jaff had other reasons for wanting the creature back than keeping it from being found by the police. It was not dead, and once returned to the hands of its creator it regurgitated all it had seen and heard, the Jaff laying his hands on the beast like a faith-healer and drawing the report from the terata's system.

  When he'd heard what he needed to hear, he killed the messenger.

  "Well now . . ." he said to Tommy-Ray, ". . . it seems you 'll have the journey I told you about sooner than I planned. "

  "What about Jo-Beth? That bastard Katz has got her."

  "We wasted effort last night trying to persuade her to join our family. She rejected us. We 'll waste no more time. Let her take her chance in the maelstrom. "

  "But . . "

  "No more on this," the Jaff said. "Your obsession with her really is ludicrous. And don't sulk! You've been indulged for too long. You think that smile of yours can get you whatever you want. Well it won't get you her. "

  "You're wrong. And I'll prove it."

  "Not now you won't. You've got some travelling to do. "

  "First, Jo-Beth," Tommy-Ray said, and made to move away from his father. But the Jaff's hand was on his shoulder before he'd moved more than a step. His touch made Tommy-Ray yelp.

  "Shut the fuck up!"

  "You're hurting me!"

  "I meant to!"

  "No . . . I mean really hurting. Stop it."

  "You're the one death loves, right, son?"

  Tommy-Ray could feel his legs start to give out beneath him. He began to leak from dick, nose and eyes.

  "I don't think you 're half the man you say you are, " the Jaff told him. "Not ha
lf. "

  "I'm sorry . . . don't hurt me any more, please . . ."

  "I don't think men sniff after their sisters all the time. They find other women. And they don't talk about death like it was easy stuff then snivel if they start to hurt a little. "

  "OK! OK! I get the point! Just stop, will you? Stop!"

  The Jaff released him. He fell to the ground.

  "It's been a bad night for us both," his father said. "We've both had something taken from us .. . you, your sister. . . me, the satisfaction of destroying Fletcher. But there are fine times ahead. Trust me. "

  He reached down to pick Tommy-Ray up. The boy flinched, seeing the fingers at his shoulder. But this time the contact proved benign; even soothing.

  "There's a place I want you to go for me," the Jaff said. "It's called the Misión de Santa Catrina . . ."

  II

  HOWIE hadn't realized until Fletcher had gone out of his life just how many questions he had left unanswered; problems only his father might have helped him solve. They didn't vex him through the night. He slept too soundly. It was only the next morning that he began to regret his refusal to learn from Fletcher. The only solution available to Jo-Beth and himself was to try to piece the story in which they clearly played such a vital role together from clues, and from the testimony of Jo-Beth's mother.

  The previous night's invasion had brought about a change in Joyce McGuire. After years of attempting to hold the evil that had entered her house at bay, her failure, in the end, to do so had somehow freed her. The worst had happened: what more was there to fear? She had seen her personal hell created in front of her, and survived. God's agency—in the form of the Pastor—had been valueless. It had been Howie who had gone out in search of her daughter, and finally—both of them ragged, and bloodied—brought her back. She'd welcomed him into the house; even insisted he stay the night. The following morning she went about the house with the air of a woman who had been told a tumor in her body was benign, and she could expect a few more years of life.