Tom O'Bedlam

“No,” Charley said. “Nothing like that, Stidge.” To Elszabet he said, “We don’t mean no trouble. We’re going to move along. You see our friend Tom, you give him our regards, okay?” He was gesturing to the others, and they were starting to slip away toward the woods, the scar-faced one first, then Stidge. Charley remained where he was another moment, until the other two were out of sight in the trees. “Hope we didn’t trouble you any, ma’am,” he said. “We’re just passing through, on our way. All right?” He was edging away as he spoke. “You tell Tom that Charley and the boys were looking for him, okay?”

  Then he was gone too. Elszabet realized that she was shivering: soaked through and more than a little shaken up. A delayed reaction was sweeping over her. Her teeth chattered. Some flickering fragments of space visions were dancing at the outer reaches of her mind, like pale transparent flames dancing on the embers of a bonfire.

  Dante came running toward her, Teddy Lansford just behind.

  “Everything all right?” Dante asked.

  Elszabet brushed at the rain streaming across her forehead and fought back a shudder. “I’ll be okay. I’m a little wobbly, I guess.”

  “Who were they?”

  “I think they were the scratchers Tom used to travel with. Looking for him. They want to get out of the neighborhood before the tumbondé people pass through, and they want to take Tom with them wherever they’re going.”

  “Grubby bastards,” Dante said. “As if we didn’t have enough problems to deal with today, we have to have scratchers too.”

  “Should we call the police?” Lansford asked.

  Dante laughed. “Police? What police? Any police this county has, they’re down by Mendo trying to control the tumbondé mob this morning. No, we’ll have to watch out for those three ourselves. In our spare time.” She looked at Elszabet. “You’re still pretty shaky, aren’t you?”

  “I was trying to sidetrack a space vision. And then I turned around and there were three scary-looking strangers standing right behind me. Yeah, I’m still shaky.”

  “Maybe this’ll help,” said Dante. She stepped closer and put her hands on Elszabet’s back and shoulders, and began to move things around in there, rearranging bones and muscles and ligaments as though she were shuffling papers on a desk. Elszabet gasped in surprise and pain at first, but then she felt the tension and distress beginning to leave her, and she swayed back against Dante, letting it happen. Gradually a sense of some balance returned to her. “There,” Dante said finally. “That a little better now?”

  “Oh, my. Absolutely tremendous.”

  “Loosen up the back, it loosens up the mind. Hey, did you ever find out where April and Ferguson were?”

  Elszabet put her hand to her lips. “God. I forgot all about them. I was on my way over to the dorm when the vision started to hit and then—”

  Suddenly the voice of Lew Arcidiacono said out of the speaker just back of her right ear, “Elszabet? I think it’s starting now. We’ve got the word that there’s a whole mess of tumbondé people not very far down the road and they’re probably going to be heading smack in our direction very soon.”

  Elszabet switched to A frequency. “Terrific. How are you doing with the energy walls?”

  “We’ve got a solid line of defense up all along the probable line of approach. But if the march gets sloppy they may begin to come at us from one of the unshielded sides. I can use all the extra personnel you can send down here now.”

  “Right. I’ll have Dante head out your way with everyone she has. Stay in touch, Lew.”

  “What’s happening?” Dante asked.

  “They’re getting near us,” Elszabet said. “The tumbondé crowd, just a little way down the road.”

  “Here we go, huh?”

  “We’ll be able to handle it. But Lew’s calling for help on the front line. Take everybody from the gym and go on down there pronto, okay? I’ll look in at the dorm for April and Ferguson and meet you there in five minutes.”

  “I’m on my way,” Dante said.

  Elszabet summoned up a fragile grin. “Thanks for the backrub,” she said.

  The dormitory building lay twenty paces to her right. She trotted over, slipping and sliding on the muddied path and rain-slicked grass. The storm was getting worse all the time. Half-stumbling, Elszabet pulled herself up onto the dorm porch and went clomping into the building, leaving big muddy tracks. “Hello?” she called. “Anybody here?”

  All quiet. She wandered down the hallway, peering into this room, and that, the little dens where her unhappy patients passed their unhappy days. No sign of anyone around. At the far end of the hall she paused at number seven, Ed Ferguson’s room. As she touched her hand to the doorplate she heard odd crooning sounds coming from inside, deep, heavy, slow.

  April squatted crosslegged in the middle of the floor, rocking steadily back and forth, singing tonelessly to herself, sobbing a little. Behind her, half-obscured by the big woman’s bulk, Ed Ferguson was sitting motionless on the floor, leaning against one of the beds, his head thrown back and his arms dangling alongside his hips. He looked drugged.

  Elszabet went first to April and dug her fingers into the soft flesh of the big woman’s shoulder, trying to slow her rocking.

  “April? April, it’s me, Elszabet. It’s all right. Don’t be afraid. What’s the matter, April?”

  “Nothing. There isn’t anything the matter.” Thick husky voice, heavy with emotion. “I’m fine, Elszabet.” Tears running down her face. She would not look up. Rocking even harder now, she began to sing again. “It’s raining, it’s pouring, the old man is snoring—”

  The song gave way to the sort of rhythmic humming a woman who was holding a baby might make, and then to unintelligible crooning. But April seemed calm, at least. She seemed lost in some private world. Elszabet rose and walked over to Ferguson. He didn’t move at all. The look on his face was unfamiliar, a strangely benign expression that completely altered his normal tense and sour appearance; at a quick glance she might not have been able to recognize this man as the grim, bitter, gloomy Ed Ferguson. He was transfigured. His eyes were wide and shining with some ineffable bliss; his face was relaxed, almost slack; his mouth was drawn back in a broad smile of the deepest happiness.

  So extraordinary was that beatific expression of Ferguson’s that it was another moment before Elszabet realized that his eyes were remaining open without blinking, that he didn’t seem to be drawing breath.

  She knelt beside him, alarmed. “Ed?” she said sharply, shaking him. “Ed? Can you hear me?” She put her hand to his chest and felt for a heartbeat. She listened for the sounds of breathing. She grasped his limp cool wrist and searched as best she knew how for a pulse. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing at all.

  She looked across at April, who was rocking harder and harder. She was singing another children’s song, one that seemed almost familiar, but her voice was so blurred and indistinct that Elszabet was unable to make out any of the words. “April, what happened to Ed Ferguson?”

  “To Ed Ferguson,” April repeated very carefully, as if examining those sounds to discover some possible meaning in them.

  “To Ed, yes. I want to know what happened to Ed.”

  “To Ed. To Ed. Oh, Ed” April giggled. “He made the Crossing. Tom helped him do it. We all held hands, and Tom sent him to the Double Kingdom.”

  “He what?”

  “It was very easy, very smooth. Ed just let go. He just dropped the body, that’s all he did. And off he went to the Double Kingdom.”

  Good God, Elszabet thought.

  “Who was here with you then?”

  “Oh, everybody.”

  “Who?”

  “Well, there was Tom, and Father Christie, and Tomás and…” April’s voice trailed off. She disappeared once more into gibberish and began rocking again. In the middle of it she became still and turned to Elszabet and said in a completely lucid voice, “I’m scared, Elszabet. Tom said that we’re all going to be going over there s
oon. To the stars. Is that right, Elszabet? It’s the time, he said. He has the full power now, and he’s going to send us all, one by one, just like he sent Ed. I suppose I’ll go soon. Isn’t that so? I don’t know where I’ll be going, though. I don’t know what it’ll be like for me there. It can’t be any worse than it’s been for me here, can it? But even so, I’m scared. I’m so scared, Elszabet.” And she began to sob again, and then to sing once more.

  Elszabet shook Ferguson again. His head lolled over.

  Dead? Really? The idea stunned her. She felt her cheeks flush hot with guilt. Ferguson, dead? One of my patients, dead? That lolling head, those sightless eyes. Elszabet shivered. All this talk of Crossings, of shining alien worlds, seemed bizarre and absurd to her now against this ugly unanswerable reality. Over and over again she heard herself thinking. One of my patients is dead. No patient had ever died at the Center before. Suddenly—with all the chaos swirling outside, the riot and the skulking scratchers and Tom going around doing God only knew what kind of witchcraft—there was just one thought in Elszabet’s head, which was that someone who had been entrusted to her care had died. All the work she had done this year with Ferguson, the elaborate tests, the closely watched charts, the counselling, the carefully monitored pick program—and there he was. Dead.

  Maybe he wasn’t, not really. Maybe he was just in some kind of deep trance. She was no doctor. She had never seen a dead person this close. There were states of consciousness, she knew, that seemed just like death but were merely suspended animation. Maybe he was in one of those. She said to April, “What exactly did Tom do to him, can you tell me? When he made the Crossing. What was it like?”

  But April was far away. Elszabet crouched beside Ferguson, feeling numb. Rain drummed hard on the rooftop. Somewhere down near the main road a huge mob of cultists was wandering around just outside the Center, and on the other side in the woods three sinister-looking scratchers were lurking about, and Tom had gone God knew where, and here was Ferguson dead or maybe in a trance, and April—

  She heard footsteps in the hall. Jesus, what now?

  Someone out there calling her name. “Elszabet? Elszabet?” Bill Waldstein, it sounded like.

  “I’m in room seven.”

  Waldstein came running in at full tilt, nearly tripped over April, and brought himself to an abrupt skidding halt. “Dante was worried about you and sent me over to see how you were doing,” he said, then noticed Ferguson. “What the hell—?”

  “I think he’s dead, Bill. But you’d know better. Please take a look at him…”

  Waldstein stared. “Dead?”

  “I think so. But check it. You’re a doctor, not me.”

  Waldstein bent over Ferguson, probing him here and there. “Like an empty sack,” he said. “There’s nobody here.”

  “Dead, you mean?”

  “Sometimes it’s hard to be completely sure just by looking. But he seems plenty dead to me. Nobody home at all. Christ, look at that empty grin on his face.”

  “April says that Tom showed him how to make the Crossing.”

  “The Crossing?”

  “He’s gone off to some star, April says. They all held hands and sent him somewhere.”

  Waldstein glanced at April: rocking, crooning, sobbing. He turned his head slowly from side to side. “Ferguson went to another star, you’re telling me? To another star? Jesus, Elszabet!”

  “I don’t know where he is. I’ve told you what April told me. He’s dead, isn’t he? What from? If he didn’t make the Crossing, what did he die of, a man in apparent perfect health? She said they all held hands, Tom, Father Christie, Tomás—”

  “And you believe this?”

  “I believe they did what April says they did, yes. That they joined hands and performed some sort of rite. And I even half-believe that Tom really did send him off to one of the star worlds…more than half-believe, maybe. Look at his face, Bill. Look at his face. Have you ever seen such a blissful expression? It’s the way somebody would look who knows he’s going straight to heaven. But Ferguson didn’t believe in heaven.”

  “And now he’s on some star?”

  “Maybe he is,” Elszabet said. “How would I know?”

  Waldstein stared at her. “We ought to find Tom and kill him right this minute.”

  “What are you saying, Bill?”

  “Listen, there are no two ways about this. Are you going to let him wander around this place murdering people?”

  Elszabet gestured helplessly. She didn’t know what answer to make. Murder? That wasn’t the right word, she thought. Tom wouldn’t murder anyone. But yet—but yet—if Tom had touched Ferguson as April had said, and Ferguson had died—

  Waldstein said, “If Tom is for real, if he’s genuinely able to lift people out of their bodies and ship them who knows where and leave nothing but an empty shell behind, then he’s the most dangerous man in the world. He’s a one-man horror show. He can just walk around from place to place, making Crossings or whatever for people until there’s nobody left alive. Just snap his fingers and send people to the goddamn stars—you think that’s a good thing? You think that’s something we should allow him to do?” She looked at him but still couldn’t find anything to say. He went on, “That’s if you believe any of this crazy garbage. And if you don’t, well, we still have the problem of finding out how he managed to kill Ferguson and—”

  There was a sudden crackling noise out of the speaker taped behind Elszabet’s ear. She heard Arcidiacono’s voice, ragged, muffled, almost hysterical.

  “Say that again?” she told him.

  Waldstein began to speak. She held up her hand to shush him. “Not you, Bill.” Into her microphone she said, “I didn’t hear what you were just saying, Lew. Slow down. Give it to me clearly.”

  “I said Tomás Menendez just switched off one of the energy walls and the tumbondés are pouring through our line.”

  “Oh, Lew, no. No.”

  “We had everything under control. Colossal mob of them out there, but they couldn’t get in. Menendez was carrying generators around. Working as hard as anybody. Then he seemed to spot someone he knew out there in that mob, and he yelled that he was the opener of the gate, or something. And he opened it. He turned the wall right off. We’ve got thousands of them coming into the Center right this minute, Elszabet. Millions of them. I don’t know. They’re all over the place. Another two minutes, they’ll be down your way.”

  “Oh, my God,” she said. A strange tranquility began to come over her. She felt almost like laughing.

  “What’s he telling you?” Waldstein asked.

  Elszabet closed her eyes and shook her head. “The wall is down, the tumbondé people are coming in. Oh, Jesus, Bill. That’s the finish. Here we go. Jesus, here we go.”

  * * *

  Eight

  With a heart of furious fancies

  Whereof I am commander,

  With a burning spear and a horse of air

  To the wilderness I wander.

  By a knight of ghosts and shadows

  I summoned am to tourney

  Ten leagues beyond the wide world’s end

  Methinks it is no journey.

  Yet will I sing, “Any food, any feeding,

  Feeding, drink or clothing?

  Come, dame or maid

  Be not afraid,

  Poor Tom will injure nothing.”

  —Tom O’ Bedlam’s Song

  JASPIN hunched forward, gripping the stick as tightly as he could, using body English to keep the car from flipping over or skidding into a tree. There was no road any more. They were driving across slick slippery sodden grass, some sort of lawn churned into a quagmire by the wheels of the vehicles ahead of him. The rain was coming down so hard it flowed across the windshield in thick streams.

  Jill said, “I’m sure this is where my sister is. Find a place to park and I’m going to get out and look for her.”

  “Park? With umpteen thousand cars coming right behind me
?”

  “I don’t care. You pull up by one of those buildings. I’m going to go in there and get her. She isn’t right in the head. If I don’t protect her, somebody’s going to find her and rape her or maybe kill her. This isn’t a procession any more, Barry. It’s a crazy mob now.”

  “So I notice.”

  “Well, you stop and let me go find April.”

  “Sure,” he said, nudging the brake panel. “You can get out right here and go find her.”

  The car squiggled over the oozing mud and slid to a stop practically up against some big leafy bush. He kept the engine running.

  “Park by one of the buildings,” Jill said. “Not here.”

  “I’m not parking anywhere,” Jaspin told her. “I’m going to try to circle around and find some road out of here up that way. But you go on. You go look for your sister.”

  “You’re not going to stop?”

  “Look,” he said, “this is a dead end, you see? Christ only knows why the Senhor turned in this way, but what we have is some buildings right in front of us and a goddamned redwood forest behind the buildings, and in back of us we’ve got the whole tumbondé pilgrimage rumbling forward like a herd of maddened dinosaurs. I stay in here, I’m going to get squeezed flat up against those buildings or those trees. So you go look for your sister. I’m going to make a left turn up that dirt road and keep on going as far as I can, and if the road gives out I’m going to get out of my car and go on foot. Because what’s going to happen in here this morning is the Black Hole of Calcutta. People are going to get trampled by the thousands. Now you get out and you go look for your sister, if that’s what you want. Come on. Out.”

  She gave him a venomous look. “How will I find you again?”

  “That’s your problem.” Jaspin pointed off to the left. “You head that way, and maybe when things calm down a little I’ll come back and look for you. Maybe. Go on, now.”

  “You bastard,” she said. She glared at him again. Then she shook her head and got out of the car. He watched her for a moment, running off toward the old weatherbeaten gray wooden buildings just ahead. Instantly she was soaked through. She looked like a giant half-drowned chicken sprinting through the rain.