Tom O'Bedlam

  Green.

  Green sky, green air, green clouds. The landscape was shades of green. Hillside, river far down below, meadows unrolling to the horizon. Everything looked soft and friendly, a gentle tropical landscape. Elegant trees without leaves, slender green trunks, green scaly branches coiling outward, bending back toward the ground. The sun faintly visible behind the veil of fog. The sun was green too, maybe, though it was hard to tell for sure, the way the light came blurrily through all that thick swirling fleecy fog.

  Something was beckoning her.

  Crystalline creatures, supple, almost delicate. Their long-limbed bodies glistened. Their dark eyes were bright and glittering, a row of three on each of the four sides of their heads. They were moving toward a shimmering pavilion on the hill just beyond her, and they were inviting her to come with them, calling her by name, Elszabet, Elszabet. But the way they were saying it was unearthly and awesome, a hushed reverberating whisper that resonated against itself again and again, an echo-chamber whisper that had in it an eerie whistling quality and an undertone like the roaring of distant winds. Elszabet, Elszabet.

  I’m coming, she told them. And put her hand in their cool crystalline hands and let them carry her along. She floated just above the ground. Occasionally a strand of thick fleshy grass brushed her toes: when it did, she felt a sharp but not unpleasant tingling and heard the sound of bells.

  She was entering the pavilion now. It seemed to be made of glass, but glass of a peculiarly yielding sort, warm and rubbery to the touch, like congealed teardrops. All about her moved the delicate crystalline people, bowing, smiling, stroking her. Telling her their names. The prince of this, the countess of that. A crystalline cat sauntered among them. It rubbed its crystalline ears against her leg; and when she looked down she saw that her leg was crystal too, that in fact she had a body just like theirs, shining and wondrous. Someone put a drink in her hand. It tasted like flowers; it erupted in a thousand brilliant colors as it made its journey through her body. Do you like it, they asked? Will you have another? Elszabet, Elszabet. There is the duke of something. Beside him are the duchess and the duke-other of something and the marquis of something else. Look, look, there is the city, coming into view now below! Will you have it? We will give the city your name if you like. There, it is done: Elszabet. Elszabet. They all congratulated her. They clustered close and she heard the faint tinkling of their arms and legs as they moved, a little silvery whispering sound, like Christmas-tree ornaments swayed by a breeze. Do you like it here, Elszabet? Do you like us? We have a poem for you. Where is the poem? Where is the poet? Ah: here. Here. Make way for the poem. Make way for the poet.

  A crystalline she had not seen before, taller than any of the others, came up to her, smiling shyly. Come, he said. I have a poem for you. They stepped outside the pavilion and greenness descended on them like emerald rain. He put something in her hands, an intricate little object that looked like a puzzle-box of glass, layer within layer, transparent to the core with a meshwork of dazzling glassy gears going round and round at the center. This is your poem, he said. I call it Elszabet. She touched it and a green flare of light sprang up from it and leaped across the sky, and from the pavilion came the tinkling sound of applause. Elszabet, they all said. Elszabet, Elszabet.

  The green light deepened and thickened around her. She was swathed in it, now. The air seemed almost tangible. So warm, so woolly. So green, green, green.

  Suddenly restless, she stirred, turned, sighed. Through the greenness she was able to glimpse a distant beacon of hard yellow light, and that bright beam aroused dismay in her and a kind of vague fear. A voice within her urged her to pull back, and after a moment she recognized the voice as her own. You must be careful, she told herself. Do you know where you are going? Do you know what will happen to you there? How tempting this is. How seductive. But be careful, Elszabet. If you get too far in, there may be no coming out again.

  Or has that already happened? Perhaps you are already in too deep. Perhaps there will be no coming forth. She touched the poem again, and again green light leaped from it, and the poet smiled, and the crystallines applauded and whispered her name. How green everything is, Elszabet thought. How beautiful. How green, how green, how green.

  2

  SO now they were going to kill again.

  Tom stayed calm about that. You travel with killers, you have to expect them to do some killing. Still and all, he didn’t particularly like it. Thou shalt not kill, the Bible said, right out front. Thou shalt do no murder, said Jesus. You couldn’t argue with commandments like that. Of course in wartime those commandments were suspended. You could make out a pretty fair case, Tom told himself, that these days it’s a kind of wartime, every man’s hand lifted against all others. Maybe.

  He sat hunched up in the front of the van, looking at Rupe’s body on the back seat. Rupe seemed to be asleep. His eyes were closed; his big meaty face was peaceful. His head lolled forward a little. You could practically hear him snoring. Mujer and Charley had propped him up in a sitting position back there, and Stidge had draped an old blanket across his lap to hide the laser burn that went through his shirt and his gut and out through his back. You looked at him, you thought he was asleep. Well, Rupe had never had much to say even when he was alive.

  And now they were going off to kill again. A life for a life: two for one, in fact. No, it wasn’t that, Tom thought. Not just revenge. They were going to kill because that was the only way they could feel safe: with those two gone. In wartime you have to eliminate your enemies.

  Maybe they won’t be able to find them, the two farm kids, Tom thought. The city has a million alleyways, a million basements. Those two kids could be hiding anywhere. They had a five-minute head start, didn’t they? Well, two or three minutes, anyway. So maybe they’ll get away. It was a shame to have more killing now, when the Last Days were so near, when the Crossing was almost about to begin. You die now, you miss out on the Crossing. What a pity that would be, to have to rot here in the soil of Earth with all the other dead ones from before, when everyone else was setting out on his way across the heavens. To miss out, right at the last minute. Those poor kids.

  “Rupe?” Tom said. “Hey, you, Rupe?”

  Very quiet back there. Tom took out his finger-piano, played a few random notes up and down the scale, hunting around for a tune.

  “You mind if I sing, Rupe?”

  Rupe didn’t seem to mind.

  “Okay,” Tom said. And he sang:

  Up the airy mountain,

  Down the rushy glen,

  We daren’t go a-hunting,

  For fear of little men.

  “You ever hear that one, Rupe? I guess you never did. I guess you never will.”

  Wee folk, good folk,

  Trooping all together;

  Green jacket, white cap,

  And white owl’s feather.

  He heard what sounded like someone rapping on the far side of the van. He didn’t bother to look. Back so soon, Charley? Tom shrugged and went on singing:

  High on the hilltop

  The old King sits.

  He is now so old and gray

  He’s nigh lost his wits.

  The rapping again, louder. A voice, angry. “Open the goddamned window, will you? You hear me, open up!”

  Frowning, Tom leaned over and peered out. He saw a stranger out there, a short man with curling golden hair and a short frizzy golden beard and cold blue eyes. The stranger looked bothered about something. Tom wondered what to do. You stay here with the van, Charley had said. Don’t open it for nobody.

  Tom smiled and nodded and moved away from the window. He started to feel a vision coming on. The usual roaring sound deep down in his mind, the whistling of the wind. The light of strange suns was kindled in his mind, blue, white, orange.

  He still could hear the angry voice, though. “You move this van or I’ll blow it away,” the golden-haired man was saying. He pounded on the metal door, hard. “Who the
hell said you could park here? Where’s your goddamn permit? Hey, you ain’t even got a license, this van. Will you open the fuck up?”

  “Here is the Magister of the Imperium now,” Tom said sweetly. “That shining, that glow hovering there. You can’t see him, can you? Them, really. He’s a corporate entity, three souls in one. Can you feel the power? A Magister like that, he has the power to loose and bind. They tell the tale among the Sorgaz warriors that at the time of the Theluvara withdrawal, the Great Abdication, a Magister of the Imperium was all that stood between the Sorgaz and the Fount of Force, and they would have been engulfed except for—oh, look at the colors, will you? Look there!”

  “I can’t hear what you’re saying, you fucking idiot. Open the goddamn window, you want to talk to me.”

  Tom smiled. Tom said nothing. Tom was moving farther and farther away every moment. The angry voice went on and on.

  “—under powers vested in me, City and County of San Francisco, Vigilante Street Authority, I declare this van in violation of Civic Code article 117 and I herewith—”

  Then another voice, a familiar one.

  “All right, fellow. We was just about to move along. My friend in here, he’s not permitted to drive, medical reasons. Neither of them.”

  Charley.

  Tom struggled back to awareness of the world about him. The pulsing blue sun faded, the white, the orange.

  “It’s okay,” Charley said. “You can let us in, Tom.”

  Tom saw Mujer and Stidge standing next to Charley. Across the street were Nicholas, Choke, Tamale, Buffalo. They had two other men with them, young-looking ones, pale, frightened-looking ones. The kids from the farm. Too bad, Tom thought. Too bad.

  Uncertainly Tom said, “This man, he was banging on the van. I wasn’t sure—”

  “It’s okay,” Charley said. “Just open up.”

  Tom wondered why Charley didn’t open the door himself. He had the key, didn’t he? But Charley was starting to look impatient. Tom reached across and threw the latch, and when the door slid back Charley jumped out of the way and Mujer and Stidge grabbed the golden-haired man quickly under his arms and pushed him inside, throwing him face down on the floor. “What the hell,” the golden-haired man said, his voice muffled. “I’m an officer of the San Francisco Vig—”

  Stidge hit him on the back of the head with something and he was quiet.

  Then the others were piling into the van too, Charley and Nicholas and Choke, Tamale and Buffalo, and the two boys from the farm. “Okay, come on, move it, Mujer!” Charley snapped. “We can’t stay here.” Mujer jumped behind the wheel and the van went floating off quickly down the middle of the street.

  “What did he want?” Charley asked Tom. “What was he trying to tell you?”

  “I’m not sure,” Tom said. “Something about parking here. And not having a license. He was banging on the door, but you said not to let anyone in, and then you came back and—”

  Charley muttered, “He really is a cop, then. A damned vigilante.” He reached into the policeman’s pocket, found a small shining computery-looking machine there, put it to his ear and listened a moment and nodded. Then he stepped on it and ground it to pieces. “Now he’s out of contact,” Charley said. “But now we got to get rid of him. Getting rid of a cop: sheesh!”

  “You leave the looney in charge of the van, that’s what you get,” Stidge said.

  “All right,” said Charley.

  “Wasn’t such a good idea parking the van there neither,” Stidge said.

  “All right. All right”

  “Where you want me to drive?” Mujer asked.

  Charley said, “Turn left here. Then keep going straight. When you see signs to the Golden Gate Bridge, you get on it, head north, get out of the city. And take it easy driving. Last thing we need now, stopped by highway patrol.” He shook his head. “God damn, what a mess.”

  “We leaving San Francisco so fast?” Tamale said.

  Charley swung around. “You feel like staying? We got a dead man on board, we got a kidnapped cop, we got two guys we got to get rid of, you want to stay? Check into a hotel and give a tea party for the mayor? Jesus, Tamale. Jesus Christ.”

  “That’s the bridge sign there, right?” Mujer said.

  “What you think that says?” Charley asked. “Golden Gate Bridge, big as life.”

  “I wasn’t sure that was what it said,” Mujer replied.

  “Mujer, he got a little trouble reading,” said Stidge. “He didn’t learn how so good, huh? Huh?”

  “Chinga tu madre,” Mujer said. “Pija! Hijo de puta!”

  “What’s he saying?” Stidge asked.

  “Telling you how much he likes your nice red hair,” said Choke.

  Buffalo said, “We not staying in San Francisco, then where we going to go, Charley?”

  “I’ll tell you later, okay?” Charley said. “Mujer, when you get off the bridge, you take the first exit and follow on down until you hit a country road. Then go out toward the beach.” He shook his head again and slapped his hand against the side of it. “Dumb, dumb, dumb, this whole thing. We could’ve stayed in San Francisco all summer, and now look. Dumb. I don’t remember ever screwing anything up this bad.”

  “This the right road?” Mujer asked.

  “Yeah. Yeah. Stop here.”

  Tom said, “The Last Days are almost upon us. It will be the Time of the Crossing soon. Spare them, Charley. Don’t deprive them of the Crossing.”

  Looking at him sadly, Charley said, “I wish I could, Tom. But we don’t have no choice.” He gestured to the others. “All right, get them out of the van. By the side of the road.”

  The San Francisco policeman was still lying face down, moaning a little. Stidge dragged him out. Nicholas and Buffalo hustled the two farm boys after him. They huddled together, trembling. One of them had wet his pants. They were eighteen, nineteen years old, Tom guessed.

  Tom said, “And He had in His right hand seven stars, and out of His mouth went a sharp two-edged sword, and His countenance was as the sun shineth in His strength. And when I saw Him, I fell at His feet as dead. And He laid His right hand upon me, saying unto me, Fear not; I am the first and the last. I am He that liveth, and was dead; and beyond, I am alive for evermore, and have the keys of hell and death.”

  “That’s enough for now, Tom,” Charley said. “Line them up by the edge of the ravine. That’s right. Okay, step back.” He cocked his laser bracelet and fired three quick bursts, the policeman first, the older farm boy, the other one. None of them made a sound as they died. “Son of a bitch,” Charley murmured. “What a lousy unnecessary mess. All right, throw them down the ravine. Far down.”

  Choke and Buffalo threw the vigilante cop. Nicholas and Mujer and Tamale and Stidge took care of the other two.

  “Now Rupe,” Charley said. “Take him a little way down the road; throw him over too.”

  Choke looked up in surprise. “God’s sake, Charley—!”

  “What do you want to do, carry him along with us for a keepsake? Or give him a Christian burial? Come on. Throw him over. And then let’s get the hell out of here.”

  “You tell us where we’re going?” Buffalo said.

  “Yeah. I can tell you, now that we don’t have to worry about them overhearing. We going north, up to Mendocino County. Lots of woods around there, lots of good places to hide. Because that’s what we need to do, now. We need to hide real good.” He paused, watching as Nicholas and Tamale and Stidge dragged Rupe’s heavy body from the van and hauled it to the edge of the ravine and sent it tumbling down into the dense underbrush far below. “Okay,” Charley said. “Let’s get moving.”

  “We taking the looney?” Stidge asked. “Ain’t that a risk now that he’s seen what he just seen?”

  “He goes with us,” Charley said. “Wherever we go. Right, Tom? You stay with us.”

  “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord,” Tom said, shivering a little, though it was
much warmer on this side of the bridge than it had been in San Francisco. “Which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty.”

  “That’s right, Tom,” Charley said softly. “That’s right. Come on, now. Into the van. Everybody into the van.”

  3

  “JESUS, the heat!” Jaspin said, amazed, as the tumbondé caravan started to flow down out of the mountains into the broad flat expanse of the San Joaquin Valley. He found himself smothered in a great stagnant apocalyptic mass of sizzling air that was almost too hot to breathe. Jaspin’s battered old car was third in the long straggling procession, just behind the pair of creaky buses that housed the Senhor and the Senhora and the Inner Host. “I don’t believe it. It’s incredible, that heat. Where the hell are we going, into the Sahara?”

  “Toward Bakersfield,” Jill said. “We’re just a little way south of Bakersfield.”

  “I know. But it’s like the Sahara here. Like two Saharas piled one on top of the other. Christ, if we’re really heading for the North Pole I wish we were a little closer to it now.”

  He thought the sky was about to break into flames. It was as though all the heat in the whole Valley had come rolling south like a white-hot bowling ball and had banged up against the wall of the Tehachapi Mountains and now was lying here waiting to engulf them.

  “I think we’re stopping for the night,” Jill said. “You see? The flags are going up.”

  “It’s only three o’clock,” Jaspin pointed out.

  “Nevertheless. Look at the Senhor’s bus. The flags are up.”