“I thought this would be a hoot, give you a laugh.”
Shakily, Roman said, “Dear Jesus.”
“You’re a Satanist,” Corky reminded him.
“Idiot.”
“Listen, Roman, where exactly are you? How do I get to you from here? We need to do some business.”
“Stay right where you are.”
“I don’t know. I’m getting a little claustrophobic. This place is beginning to spook me.”
“Stay right where you are! I’ll be there in two minutes.”
“I just heard something weird. I think one of these corpses might be alive.”
“None of them is alive.”
“I’m sure this one guy, over toward the corner, just said something.”
“Then he said you’re an idiot.”
“Maybe you’ve got a live one in here by mistake. I’m really starting to get creeped out.”
“Two minutes,” Roman insisted. “You wait right where you are. Don’t come blundering out of there, drawing attention to yourself, or I’ll harvest your foreskin.”
Roman terminated the call.
In the vault of the unknown and penniless dead, Corky hung up the phone.
Surveying his shrouded audience, he said, “With all humility, I could teach Channing Manheim a thing or two about acting.”
He expected and needed no applause. A perfect performance was its own reward.
CHAPTER 25
SNOW FELL ON THE CITY OF ANGELS.
Unprecedented, the shepherd wind drove white flocks out of the dark meadows above the world, gently harried them between ficus trees and palms, along avenues that had never known a snowy Christmas.
Dazzled, Ethan gazed up into the fleecy night.
Abed in his room, he realized that the roof must have been lifted off the house by a prying wind. Snowdrifts would bury the furniture, ruin the carpet.
Soon he would have to rise, go along the hall to his parents’ room. Dad would know what to do about the missing roof.
First, however, Ethan wanted to enjoy this spectacle: Above him, the snowfall hung an infinite crystal chandelier, its beautiful swags of cut beads and beveled pendants in perpetual glittering movement.
His eyelashes were frosted.
Flakes delivered cold kisses to his face, melted on his cheeks.
When his vision fully focused, he discovered that in truth the December night was full of raindrops, to which his troubled eyes had imparted crystalline structures and mysterious hieroglyphic forms.
Once soft, his bed had been spellcast into blacktop.
He felt no discomfort, except that his feather pillow pressed like hard pavement against the back of his head.
The rain on his face fell as cold as snow, imparting an equal chill to his upturned left hand.
His right hand lay exposed, as well, but with it he could not feel the cold or the tap-and-trickle of the rain.
He couldn’t feel his legs, either. Couldn’t move them. Could not move anything other than his head and left hand.
If his roofless room filled with rain, and if he were unable to move, he might drown.
In the pool of dreamy speculation on which Ethan had been drifting, sudden terror darted sharklike through the depths beneath him, rising.
He closed his eyes to avoid seeing a bigger and more terrible truth than that the snowflakes were actually raindrops.
Voices approached. Dad and Mom must be coming to put the roof back where it belonged, to fluff his stone pillow into comfortable plumpness once more, and to set all wrongness right.
He surrendered himself to their loving care, and like a feather, he drifted down into darkness, toward the Land of Nod, not the Nod to which Cain had fled after killing Abel, but the Nod to which dreaming children journeyed to find adventure and from which they woke safely in the golden dawn.
Still descending through the darkness north of Nod, he heard the words “spinal injury.”
Opening his eyes a minute or ten minutes later, he discovered the night aswarm with pulsing-revolving red and yellow lights, and blue, as if he were in an open-air discotheque, and he knew that he would never dance again, or walk.
To the tuneless broken songs of police-radio crackle, flanked by paramedics, Ethan glided through the rain on a gurney toward an ambulance.
On the white van, in red letters trimmed in gold, under the bold word AMBULANCE, glowed the smaller words OUR LADY OF ANGELS HOSPITAL.
Maybe they would give him a bed in Dunny’s old room.
That prospect filled him with a choking dread.
He closed his eyes for what seemed a blink, heard men warning one another “careful” and “easy, easy,” and when he looked again, he had blinked himself into the ambulance.
He became aware that a needle already pierced his right arm, served by an IV tube and a dangling bag of plasma.
For the first time, he heard his breathing—full of wheeze and rush and rattle—whereupon he knew that more than his legs had been crushed. He suspected that one or both of his lungs struggled against the confinement of a partially collapsed rib cage.
He wished for pain. Anything but this terrible lack of feeling.
The paramedic at Ethan’s side spoke urgently to his teammate, who stood in the rain, beyond the open doors: “We’re gonna need speed.”
“I’ll burn asphalt,” the rain-lashed medic promised, and he slammed shut the doors.
Along both side walls, near the ceiling, taut garlands of red tinsel sparkled. At the ends and in the middle of each garland, small silver bells, three per set, dangled brightly. Christmas decorations.
The bells in each group were strung concentrically on the same string. The top bell, also the largest, overhung the middle bell, which overhung the third—which was also the smallest—in the set.
When the door slammed, the tiny bells on each string jiggled against one another, producing a silvery ringing as faint as fairy music.
The paramedic fitted Ethan with an oxygen mask.
As cool as autumn, as sweet as springtime, a rich blend of air soothed his hot throat, but his wheezing did not in the least abate.
Having climbed behind the steering wheel in the front of the ambulance, the driver slammed his door, again causing the red tinsel to shimmer and the bells to ring.
“Bells,” Ethan said, but the oxygen mask muffled the word.
In the process of fitting the binaurals of a stethoscope to his ears, the paramedic paused. “What did you say?”
The sight of the stethoscope inspired in Ethan the realization that he could hear his heartbeat, and that what he heard was ragged, uneven, alarming.
Listening, he knew that he was hearing not just his heart, but also the knock-hoofed canter of Death’s horse approaching.
“Bells,” he repeated, as throughout his mind the doors to a thousand fears flew open.
The ambulance began to move, and as it rolled, the siren found its shrill voice.
Ethan couldn’t hear the bells above the banshee wail, but he could see the nearest three trembling on their string. Trembling.
He raised his left hand toward the dangling cluster but couldn’t reach that far. His hand grasped at empty air.
This terrible intensity of fear brought with it a clouding confusion, and perhaps he was utterly delirious; nevertheless, the bells seemed to be more than mere decorations, seemed mystical in their shiny smoothness, in their glimmering curves, the embodiment of hope, and he desperately needed to hold them.
Apparently the paramedic understood the urgency of Ethan’s need to have the bells, if not the reason for it. He plucked a small pair of scissors from a kit, and swaying with the movement of the vehicle, he clipped the knot that secured the nearest cluster to the garland of tinsel.
Given the string of bells, Ethan clutched them in his left hand with a grip both tender and ferocious.
He was exhausted, but he dared not close his eyes again, for he feared that when he opened them, darkness wou
ld remain and never go away, that he would henceforth see nothing of this world.
The paramedic picked up the stethoscope once more. He inserted the binaural tips in his ears.
With the fingers of his left hand, Ethan counted the bells on the string, from tiniest to largest, to tiniest again.
He realized that he held these ornaments as he’d held a rosary in the hushed hospital room during the last few nights of Hannah’s life: with equal measures of despair and hope, with an unexpected awe that sustained the heart and with a stoicism that armored it. His hope had been unrealized, his stoicism essential, when he had found it necessary to survive her loss.
Between thumb and forefinger, he had tried to pinch mercy from the rosary beads. Now he smoothed the curvatures of bell, bell, and bell, seeking mercy less than understanding, seeking a revelation deaf to the ear but resonant in the heart.
Although Ethan did not close his eyes and bring the darkness down, seeping shadows encroached from the periphery of vision, like ink spreading through the fibers of a blotter.
Apparently the stethoscope captured rhythms that alarmed the paramedic. He loomed close, but his voice came from a distance, and though his face was a mask of calm professionalism, he spoke with an urgency that revealed the depth of his concern for his patient. “Ethan, don’t leave us here. Hang tight. Hold on, damn it.”
Cinched by a knot of darkness, Ethan’s vision narrowed as the cords pulled tighter, tighter.
He detected the astringent scent of rubbing alcohol. A coolness below the crook of his left arm preceded the sting of a needle.
Within him, the knocking hooves of one-horse Death gave way to the thunder of an apocalyptic herd in chaotic gallop.
The ambulance still rocketed toward Our Lady of Angels, but the driver gave the siren a rest, evidently trusting to the swiveling beacons on the roof.
In the absence of the banshee shriek, Ethan thought he heard bells again.
These were not the worry-bead bells that in his hand he smoothed and smoothed, nor were they the strings of ornamental bells suspended from the red sparkling tinsel. These chimes arose at some distance, calling him with a silvery insistence.
His vision irised to a dim spot of light, and then the mortal knot drew tighter still, blinding him completely. Accepting the inevitability of death and endless darkness, at last he closed his eyelids.
He opened the door, then opened his eyes.
In a growl of wind and a jingle of overhead bells, he stepped out of Forever Roses into the cold teeth of the December night, and drew the door shut behind him.
In shock to find himself alive, in disbelief that he stood on legs unbroken, he waited in the entry alcove, between the display windows, as a young couple in raincoats and hoods strolled by on the sidewalk, led by a golden retriever on a leash.
The dog looked up at Ethan, its eyes as wise as they were liquid and dark.
“Good evening,” the couple said.
Unable to speak, Ethan nodded.
“Tink, let’s go,” the woman urged, and then repeated the command when the dog hesitated.
The soaked retriever pranced away, snout lifted to savor the chilly air, followed by its companions.
Ethan turned to peer at the florist who still stood behind the counter, past the glass coffins full of roses.
Rowena had been staring after him. Now she quickly looked down as though attending to a task.
On legs as shaky as his reason, Ethan retraced the route that he had taken to this place, under the sheltering awnings of shops and restaurants, toward the Expedition in the red zone.
Ahead, Tink twice glanced back, but didn’t stop.
Passing a restaurant bejeweled with candlelight and sparkling tableware, breathing in the yeasty fragrance of freshly baked bread, Ethan thought, The staff of life.
At the end of the block, the dog looked back once more. Then the trio disappeared around the corner.
In the street, the traffic was lighter than usual at this hour, moving faster than the weather warranted.
Arriving at the red zone near the end of the block, Ethan stood under the last awning—and thought that he might stand there, well and safely back from the street, until dawn reclaimed the city from the night.
A long gap appeared in the approaching traffic.
With his trembling right hand, he fished his keys from a jacket pocket and thumbed the lock-release button on the fob. The Expedition chirruped at him, but he didn’t approach it.
Turning his attention toward the intersection, Ethan saw the headlights of the PT Cruiser as the vehicle approached at far too high a speed on the cross street.
The Cruiser fishtailed in the intersection, and its wheels locked. In the spinout, the car rotated past the parked Expedition, mere inches from a collision.
Had Ethan stood there, he would have been battered between the vehicles, like a pinball between warring flippers.
Here came the crushing truck, the shrill blast of air brakes.
With a sharp stuttering bark of tires against wet blacktop, the Cruiser spun into the far lanes where it belonged.
Parting the rain where the Cruiser had just whipped through it, the truck shook and shuddered to a stop.
When the driver of the Cruiser regained control, he raced away, at a lower but still reckless speed.
The agitated trucker blew his horn. Then he continued on the route that he’d been following before the near miss, toward whatever destination unhindered fate had planned for him.
In the wake of the truck, the gap in traffic had closed.
The signal light changed at the intersection. In two directions, traffic came to a halt, but in two others, it began to move again.
Drenching the night: the delicious aroma of baking bread.
Golden lamplight spending doubloons upon the pavement.
The rush and rustle of the rain.
Perhaps the signal light changed twice again or even three times before Ethan became aware of an aching in his left hand. The cramping pain had begun to spread into the muscles of his forearm.
Tangled through the fiercely clenched fingers of his fist was the string of three small silvery bells clipped from the ambulance tinsel and given to him by a compassionate paramedic.
CHAPTER 26
AS IF THEY WERE THE DEGENERATE ELITE OF ancient Rome, reclining in midbacchanal, their togas scandalously disarranged, the nameless dead revealed here a smooth and creamy shoulder, here the pale curve of a breast, here a blue-veined thigh, here a hand with the fingers curled in a subtle obscene gesture, here a delicate foot and slender ankle, and here half a profile in which one open eye stared with milky lust.
The least-superstitious witness to this grotesque display might be inclined to suspect that in the absence of a living observer, these unidentified vagrants and teenage runaways would visit bunk to bunk. In the most lonely hours after midnight, might not the restless dead pair up in a cold and hideous parody of passion?
If Corky Laputa had believed in a moral code or even if he had believed that good taste required certain universal rules of social conduct, he might have passed his two-minute wait by rearranging these carelessly draped shrouds, insisting upon modesty even among the deceased.
Instead, he enjoyed the scene because in this chamber was the ultimate fruit of anarchy. Besides, with considerable excitement, he anticipated the arrival of the usually unflappable Roman Castevet, who would be fully flapped on this occasion.
Almost two minutes to the tick, the lever-action door handle clicked, creaked, and eased down. The door cracked open, but only an inch.
As though he expected to discover that Corky awaited him with a camera crew and a pack of muckraking reporters, Roman peered through the gap, his one revealed eye as wide as that of a startled owl.
“Come in, come, come,” Corky encouraged. “You’re among friends here, even though it is your intention eventually to dissect some of them.”
Opening the door only wide enough to accom
modate his thin frame, Roman slipped into the cadaver vault, pausing to peer back worriedly at the hallway before closing himself in with Corky and the twenty naughty members of the toga party.
“What the hell are you wearing?” asked the nervous pathologist.
Corky turned in place, flaring the skirt of his yellow slicker. “Fashionable rain gear. Do you like the hat?”
“How did you slip by security in that ludicrous outfit? How did you slip by security at all?”
“No slipping necessary. I presented my credentials.”
“What credentials? You teach empty-calorie modern fiction to a bunch of self-important sluts and brain-dead, snot-nosed wonderboys.”
Like many in the sciences, Roman Castevet held a dim view of the liberal-arts departments in contemporary universities and of those students who sought, first, truth through literature and, second, a delayed entry into the job market.
Taking no offense, in fact approving of Roman’s nasty antisocial vitriol, Corky explained: “The pleasant fellows at your security desk think I’m a visiting pathologist from Indianapolis, here to discuss with you certain deeply puzzling entomological details related to the victims of a serial killer operating throughout the Midwest.”
“Huh? Why would they think that?”
“I have a source for excellent forged documents.”
Roman boggled. “You?”
“Frequently, it’s advisable for me to carry first-rate false identification.”
“Are you delusional or merely stupid?”
“As I’ve explained previously, I’m not just an effete professor who gets a thrill from hanging out with anarchists.”
“Yeah, right,” Roman said scornfully.
“I promote anarchy at every opportunity in my daily life, often at the risk of arrest and imprisonment.”
“You’re a regular Che Guevara.”
“Many of my operations are as clever and shocking as they are unconventional. You didn’t think I wanted those ten foreskins just for some sick personal use, did you?”
“Yeah, that’s exactly what I thought. When we met at that boring university mixer, you seemed like the grand pooh-bah of the demented, a moral and mental mutant of classic proportions.”