3
The Darker Heart
MARY TERROR AWAKENED IN the dark, after the dream had passed. In it, she had walked toward a two-storied wooden house painted sky-blue, with gables and chimneys and a widow’s walk. She knew that house, and where it stood: at the beginning. She had walked up the steps and across the porch into the house as the rays of white sunlight burned through the windows upon the pinewood floor. She had found him, in the room with bay windows that looked toward the sea. Lord Jack was wrapped in snowy robes, his blond hair down around his shoulders and his eyes keen and thoughtful as he watched her approach. She stopped just short of him, and in his presence she trembled.
“I called you,” he told her. “I wanted you to come, because I need you.”
“I heard you call,” she said, her voice soft and whispery. It echoed in the large room, and she could smell the salt air in the walls. “I need you, too.”
“We’re going to do it again, Mary. All of it, again. We’re going to raise the dead ones and bring the lost into the fold, and we’re going to make sure that this time we win.”
“This time we win,” she repeated, and she reached out for his hand.
“Where’s my child?” Lord Jack asked.
Mary’s hand stopped in midair.
“My son,” he said. “Where’s my son?”
“I…I don’t…know…”
“You were carrying my son,” he said. “Where is he?”
For a moment Mary couldn’t speak. She heard the crash of surf against rocks, and she pressed her hands against her stomach. “I…got hurt,” she told him. “You know I got hurt. The baby…I lost the baby.”
Lord Jack closed his eyes. “I want a son.” His head rocked back, and she could see the tears creeping down his cheeks. “You know I want a son, to carry my seed. Where’s my son, Mary? Where’s my son?”
The two words were the hardest she’d ever spoken: “He’s dead.”
Lord Jack’s eyes opened, and looking into them was like peering into the center of the universe. Stars and constellations roamed in Jack’s head, all the signs and symbols of the Age of Aquarius. “My son has to be alive,” he said, his voice silken and pained. “Has to be. My seed has to go on. Don’t you understand that? I gave you a great gift, Mary. And you lost that gift. You killed it, didn’t you?”
“No! I didn’t! The baby died! I got hurt, and the baby died!”
He lifted a thin finger and placed it against his lips. “When I called you, I wanted you to bring my son to me. That’s part of all this. A very important part, if we’re going to raise the dead and bring the lost ones back. Oh, Mary; you’ve hurt me so much.”
“No!” Her voice cracked, and she heard dark laughter in the walls. “We can make another baby! Right now! Right now, okay? We can make another baby, just as good as the last one!”
He looked at her with his universe-filled eyes. Through her, into another dimension. “I want you to bring my son to me, Mary. The baby you and I made. If you can’t bring me my son, you can’t stay here.”
As he said it, the walls began to fade. Lord Jack began to fade, too, like a dimming light. She tried to grasp his hand, but it whirled away from her like mist. “I don’t…I don’t…” Her throat was closing up with fear. “I don’t have anywhere else to go!”
“You can’t stay here,” he repeated, a ghost in white. “Come to me with my son, or don’t come at all.”
The house went away. Lord Jack vanished. She was left with the smell of the sea and the noise of surf on rugged rocks, and that was when she awakened.
The baby was crying, a high, thin sound that drilled into her brain. Sweat glistened on her face, and she could hear the thunder of trucks on the highway. “Stop crying,” she said listlessly. “Stop it right now.” But Jackie wouldn’t stop, and Mary Terror got out of bed and went to the cardboard-box crib where the baby lay. She touched the infant’s skin. It was cold and rubbery, and the feel of it made the rage begin to beat within her like a second, darker heart. Babies were killers of dreams, she thought. They promised the future, and then they died.
Mary grasped the baby’s hand and put her finger in it. Jackie wouldn’t grip her finger like the baby in the shopping cart had done. “Hold me,” she said. “Hold me.” Her voice was getting louder, swelling with anger. “Hold me, I said!” The baby was still crying, a desperate sound, but he wouldn’t grip her finger. His skin was cold, so very cold. Something was wrong with this baby, she realized. This was not Lord Jack’s son. This was a crying, cold mass of flesh that was not of her loins. “Stop it!” she shouted, and she picked the baby up and shook him. “I mean it!”
The baby gurgled and choked, then came back to the high-pitched shriek. Mary’s head was killing her, and the infant’s crying was driving her crazy. She shook the baby harder, and saw his head loll in the darkness. “Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!”
Jackie wouldn’t mind her. Mary felt the blood rush into her face. This baby was broken, something was wrong with him. His skin was cold, he wouldn’t hold her finger, and his crying was strangled. None of the babies ever minded her, and that loss of control was what drove her into a frenzy. She gave them birth and love, fed them even when they didn’t want to be fed, and she wiped the food from their mouths and changed their diapers, and still the babies were untrue. It was clear to her why that was, in the aftermath of the dream: none of them was Lord Jack’s son, and none of them deserved to live. “Stop crying, goddamn it!” Mary shouted, but this infant wailed and thrashed in her hands, his rubbery body inching toward destruction. Jack wouldn’t accept this child, she thought. No, no; he wouldn’t let her stay with him if she brought this baby to him. This baby was wrong. Terribly wrong. Cold, rubbery, and in need of death. The crying made her temples pound. A scream batted around in her mouth. She reached her breaking point, and with an animalish moan she held Jackie by the heels and swung him against the wall. The crying stuttered, came back again full force. “SHUT UP!” she roared, and bashed his head against the wall once more. “SHUT UP!” Against the wall. “SHUT UP!” The wall again, and this time she heard something break. The crying ceased. Mary swung the cold baby against the wall a last time, could feel the little body twitching and quivering in her hands. A banging. A banging. Someone’s fist whamming the wall. “Shut up, you crazy bitch! I’m gonna call the cops!” The old man next door. Shecklett. Mary dropped the cold infant to the floor, and despair went through her like a floodtide. In a second it hissed and steamed and roared into rage as Shecklett kept hammering on the wall. “You’re crazy, you hear me? Crazy!” He stopped, and Mary crossed the room to the dresser, opened the bottom drawer, and took out the .38 with which she’d executed Cory Peterson. There was only one bullet in the cylinder, and Mary fumbled with a box of shells and fed them into their chambers. She clicked the cylinder shut, and she walked to the wall between her apartment and Shecklett’s and put her ear to the cheap paneling. She could hear Shecklett moving around the room. A door slammed. Water running. In the bathroom? Mary pressed the .38’s muzzle against the wall, aimed toward where she thought the sound of running water was. Her heartbeat was slow and steady, her nerves calm, but she had had her fill of the old man’s taunts and threats. She had killed another baby tonight; his body lay just a few feet away, his skull broken. Lord Jack would not let her come if she didn’t bring a baby—his son—but none of the babies would let her love them. “Come on out,” Mary whispered, waiting for the noise of the door opening. The water stopped. She heard Shecklett cough several times and spit, and a moment later the toilet flushed. Mary eased back the Colt’s hammer. She was going to empty the cylinder through the wall, and then she was going to reload and empty another cylinder except for a single bullet. If she couldn’t go to Lord Jack, she had nowhere else to go. She had no home, no country, no identity; she was no one, a walking blank, and she was ready to end the charade.
“Come on out,” Mary said again, and she heard the hinges of the bathroom door squeak.
Her finger tightened on the trigger.
Bang bang.
It was not the noise of gunfire. It was the noise of a fist knocking on a door. Mary took her finger off the trigger. The knock came again, louder and more insistent. Her front door, she realized. She walked into the other room, the Colt still in her hand, and she peered furtively out the window. Two pigs stood there, and a pig car was out in the parking lot. She stood at the door, and she steeled her voice and said, “What is it?”
“Police. Would you open your door, please?”
Take it easy, she thought. Control. Control. The pigs are at the door. Control. Mary turned the lock and unhooked the chain. She kept her gun hand out of sight as she opened the door, and she peered out through the crack at the two pigs, one black and one white. “What’s the problem?”
“We’ve had a call about a disturbance of the peace,” the black one said. He clicked on a penlight and shone it into Mary’s face. “Everything all right here, ma’am?”
“Yes. Fine.”
“One of your neighbors called in to complain,” the white pig told her. “Said there was a lot of yellin’ comin’ out of your apartment.”
“I…was having a nightmare. I got loud, I guess.”
“Would you open the door a little wider, please?” the black pig asked. Mary did, without hesitation; her gun hand was still hidden. The black pig played his penlight over her face. “What’s your name, ma’am?”
“Ginger Coles.”
“That’s her!” Shecklett shouted from the doorway of his apartment. “She’s crazy as hell, I’m tellin’ you! You oughta lock her up before she hurts somebody!”
“Sir? Would you keep your voice down, please?” The black pig said something quietly to the white one, and the white pig walked over to Shecklett’s door. Mary could hear Shecklett muttering and cursing, and she kept her gaze fixed on the black pig’s eyes. He took a pack of Doublemint gum from his jacket pocket and offered her a stick, but she shook her head. He popped one into his mouth and began to chew. “Nightmares can be weird, huh?” he asked. “They’re so real, I mean.”
Testing me, Mary thought. “Yeah, you’re right about that. I have really bad nightmares sometimes.”
“They must be bad if they make you shout so loudly.” The penlight drifted across her face again.
“I was a nurse in Vietnam,” Mary said.
The penlight stopped. Hung splashed across her right cheek for a few seconds. Then it went off with a small click.
“Sorry,” the black pig said. “I was too young to go, but I saw Platoon. Must’ve been hell over there, huh?”
“Every day.”
He nodded, and put his penlight away. “We’re finished here, Phil,” he said to the white pig. “Sorry to have bothered you, ma’am,” he told Mary. “But I hope you can understand why your neighbor called this in.”
“I can, yes. I usually take sleeping pills, but I didn’t get my prescription refilled yet.”
“She’s crazy!” Shecklett insisted, his voice getting strident again. “Allatime hollerin’ and raisin’ the devil!”
“Sir?” The black pig walked to Shecklett’s door. “Sir? I asked you to stop shouting, didn’t I? This woman is a Vietnam veteran, and you ought to have some consideration for that fact.”
“Is that what she told you? Shit! Make her prove it!”
“You going to settle down, sir, or are we going to take a ride in our car?”
There was a long silence. Mary waited, her hand tight around the .38’s grip. She heard the black pig talking to Shecklett, but she couldn’t make out the words. Then his door closed hard, and the two pigs came back to her door. “I think everything’s understood now,” the black one told her. “Good night, ma’am.”
“Good night. And thank you so much, Officers,” she said, and she closed the door, relatched it, and put the chain on. Behind the door, she said through clenched teeth, “Fuck you fuck you fuck you.” She waited, watching out the window until the pigs had driven away, and then she went to the wall between her apartment and Shecklett’s and she put her mouth against the paneling and said, “I’m going to fix you when I go. Going to fix you, hear me? Going to cut your eyeballs out and make you choke on them. Hear me, you old shit?”
She heard Shecklett coughing back in his bedroom. He made a ragged, gasping sound, and the toilet flushed again. Mary walked back to her own bedroom, and she switched on the light and stood looking down at the dead baby on the floor.
Its head was cracked and dented in, but there was no blood, no brains leaking from the skull. A doll, she thought. It’s a doll. She picked the doll up by one leg, and she took it to the Heaven Box in the closet. Then she stood for a long time staring down at the other broken dolls, a pulse beating at her right temple and her eyes glazed over like pond ice.
All of them. Dolls. Not flesh and blood. Rubber and plastic, with painted eyes. They couldn’t love her because they weren’t real. That was the answer, and it stunned her that she hadn’t seen it before. As much as she wanted them to be real, as much as she birthed them and fed them and gave them love, they were not real. She could see them as being flesh and blood in her mind, yes, but she eventually put them to death because she knew all along they were only rubber and plastic.
Lord Jack wanted a baby. A son. He had given her a baby, and she had lost the gift. If she did not go to Lord Jack with a baby, he would turn her away. That was the message of the dream. But there was a dangerous flaw here, like a crack in time. Jack’s baby was dead. She had squeezed the corpse out of her body in a gas station bathroom near Baltimore, her stomach lacerated with glass and metal. She had wrapped the little mass of tissue in the swaddling clothes of paper towels and sailed it off into the current. It had been a boy. That’s what Jack had hoped it would be. A boy, to carry his seed into the future. But how could she go to Jack with his son when his son was dead and washed away?
Mary sat on the edge of the bed, the pistol still in her hand, and she struck a Thinker pose. What if. She stared at a dead roach on the floor, lying on its back against the baseboard. What if.
What if she did have a baby boy to take to Jack?
A real baby boy. Flesh and blood. What if?
Mary stood up and paced around the room, the Colt in her grip. She walked from one wall to the other and back again, thinking. A real baby boy. Where would she get one of those? She could see herself going to an adoption agency, and filling out the application forms. Killed six pigs that I know of, she would say. Killed a college professor and a dude who thought he was going to make a movie about the Storm Front. Killed a kid out in the woods, too. But I sure do want a baby boy, sure do.
That was out. Where else could you get a baby?
She stopped pacing. You could get a baby at the same place any mother did, she realized. You could get a baby at a hospital.
Right, she thought sarcastically. Sure. Just go in, shoot up a hospital, and take a kid out of the maternity ward.
Hold it.
I was a nurse in Vietnam.
It was a lie, of course. She’d used it before, and it always worked with the pigs. They were suckers when you mentioned Vietnam. She began pacing again, her mind roaming in fertile fields. A nurse. A nurse.
Costume stores rented nurse uniforms, didn’t they?
Yes, but did the nurses at all hospitals wear the same color uniforms? She didn’t know. If she was going to do this, the first thing would be to find a hospital and check it out. She got the telephone book, and looked up Hospitals. There were a lot of them, when you added in the health centers and clinics, as the directory did. There was a clinic near Mableton. Not big enough, Mary decided. Another hospital, Atlanta West, was maybe a mile or two away. That might do, she thought. But then her gaze fell upon another listing, and she said, “That’s it.”
It was St. James Hospital. An omen of good karma, Mary thought. A hospital named after Jim Morrison. She checked the address. St. James was over in Buckhead, the rit
zy area of the city. It was a good distance from her apartment, but she thought that might work to her advantage: no one would possibly recognize her over there, and those rich people didn’t eat Whoppers. She took a pen and circled the St. James Hospital listing. She had a metallic taste in her mouth; the taste of danger. This was like making plans in the old days, and the thought of taking a baby boy from the maternity ward of St. James Hospital—a rich bitch’s kid, which made it even sweeter—caused her heart to pound and warm dampness to pulse between her thighs.
But she didn’t know if it could be done or not. First she’d have to go to the hospital and check out the maternity ward. Check out the security, where the stairwells were, where the nurses’ station was relative to the exits. Find out what the uniforms looked like, and how many nurses worked on the ward. There were other things that she wouldn’t think of until she was there to see it for herself, and if it wouldn’t work she’d find somewhere else.
It would not be Jack’s son. That baby was dead. But if she went to Lord Jack with the offering of a new baby boy, wouldn’t he be just as pleased? More pleased, she decided. She would tell him that the baby who’d died in her ripped-up belly had been a girl.
Mary put the pistol away. She lay down and tried to sleep, but she was too excited. Twenty days remained before her rendezvous at the weeping lady. She got up, put on her gray sweatsuit, and she went out into the midnight cold to run a mile and think.
4
Thursday’s Child
ON THURSDAY NIGHT AFTER DINNER, THE FIRST OF FEBRUARY, Doug put the newspaper aside and said, “I’ve got some work to do at the office.”
Laura watched him stand up and walk back to the bedroom. Their dinner had been eaten in silence of the stoniest kind. It had been Monday afternoon when she’d driven out to the Hillandale Apartments, and since that day she had seen Doug’s guilt in every movement and heard it in every word. Doug had asked her what was bothering her; and she’d said she didn’t feel well, that she was ready to be unbloated again. That was partly true, but of course only partly; Doug, acting on instincts that had begun to beep like a radar alarm the last few days, did not pursue the point. Laura immersed herself in reading or watching movies on the VCR, her body gathering strength for the rite ahead.