His grandfather had taken Jim's small hands in his huge and work-gnarled hands. He held them up so that the faint whitish marks on Jim's fingernails shone in the light. Jim was keenly aware of them and somewhat shy about people seeing them. But Ragnar said, "Those are the marks the Vikings called Nomaspor. They've been given to you by the Noms as a special sign of their favor. You're lucky. If the marks'd been dark, you'd be cursed with bad luck all your life. But they're white, and that means you're going to have good fortune most of your life."
Destiny. Mister Lum had said more than once in English class, " 'Character determines destiny.' That's a quote from Heraclitus, ancient Greek philosopher. Remember that, and live by that. 'Character determines destiny.' "
That had deeply impressed Jim. On the other hand his grandfather thought that character was given you by destiny. Whatever the truth, Jim knew that he had been doomed to be a loser. Never mind what old Ragnar had said about Nomaspor. Jim Grimson was a hopeless case, everything a hero was not. As the school psychologist had told him, he had low self-esteem, could get along only with a few of his peers, all as messed up as he was, couldn't relate to his superiors, hated authority in whatever form it took, had no drive to succeed, and was, in short, without brakes and on the steep road to hell. Having said that, the psychologist had added that Jim did have great potential even if his character was chaotic and self-defeating. He could pull himself up by his bootstraps. And then the psychologist really piled on the crap.
Jim sighed. For the first time, he became aware of something wrong with his surroundings, something maybe not so wrong as missing. It took him a minute to realize that he was enveloped in silence. No wonder he had been feeling uneasy.
He went to the kitchen and turned the radio on. WYEK was into "The Hour of Golden Oldies" and was playing "Freak Out," the 1966 album in which Frank Zappa made his debut with the Mothers of Invention. Jim had been four then, ages ago.
Before the album was finished, Eric Grimson came home. And the gates of hell opened.
Chapter 10
AT 6:19, AN HOUR after sunset, Jim raised his bedroom window and crawled out. Thirty minutes ago, he had eaten the supper stealthily given him by his mother.
Eva Grimson had arrived a few minutes before her husband came home and had started cooking supper. She had asked Jim to turn the radio down, and he had done it. He had said nothing about his troubles that afternoon. Eric Grimson had reeled in at half past five, red-faced and breathing fumes that would've floored a dragon. The first thing he had done was to turn the radio off, yelling that he didn't want that damn crap on when he was in the house. Then, of course, he had started in on Jim. Eva had been confused about it all until her husband told her of the telephone call he had gotten from the police about Jim's fight with the Freehoffer kid and the pukey mess on his clothes.
One thing led to another -- didn't it always? -- and very quickly father and son were shouting at each other. His mother, facing the stove, her back to them, her shoulders slumped, said nothing. Now and then she quivered as if something inside her had bitten her. Finally, Eric had commanded his son to go to his room. He sure as hell wasn't going to get supper, he added.
Presently, silence settled throughout the house. Jim took a tattered and yellow-paged paperback, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, from a shelf and tried to read it. Reread, rather. He was in the mood for this story about the monster made of dead human parts, the doomed outsider hated by all humans and hating all humans, the rejected, the killer of the natural-born and the would-be killer of his maker, a man who was in a sense his father.
But the godawful old-fashioned prose style had always tended to throw him off. It certainly did now. He dropped the book on the floor and roamed around the narrow room. After a while, the TV in the living room began blaring. Eric Grimson was sitting there, a beer in his hand, watching the boob tube. A few minutes later, Jim heard a knock on the door. He opened it and saw his mother holding a tray with supper on it.
"I can't let you go hungry," she whispered. "Here. When you're done, put it under the bed. I'll get it. . . you know."
He said, "I know. Thanks, Mom," and he leaned over the tray as he took it and kissed her sweaty forehead.
"I wish," she said, "I wish. . ."
"I know. Mom," he said. "I wish, too. But. . ."
"Things could be. . ."
"Maybe, someday. . ."
When they did talk to each other, they usually spoke in fragments. Jim did not know why. Perhaps it was because the pressures on them broke off their sentences. But he just did not know.
He closed the door and devoured the mashed potatoes and gravy, the fried ham, the beans, the celery, and the black Hungarian bread. After hiding the tray under the bed, he sneaked down the hall and used the bathroom. And, about an hour after sunset, he crawled out of the window. If his father discovered that he was gone, too bad.
The air temperature had warmed up to the seventies in the late afternoon but had by now plunged into the upper fifties. Though the stiff western breeze had softened somewhat, it was still strong enough to make the air nippy. Clouds had begun to form. The half-moon was draped in thin fleece. It was a good night for Halloween.
He ducked down when he passed the living room window. The TV was still blaring. When he got to the sidewalk, which was well lit by a streetlamp, he saw that the cracks in the cement had widened. He did not know when this had occurred, but it seemed to him that they were broader and more numerous than when he had entered the house. However, he had been too agitated then to pay heed to them.
Here came a group of trick-or-treaters, children costumed as witches, demons, Klingons, skeletons, ghosts, Draculas, Frankenstein's monsters, robots, Darth Vaders, and a single punk-painted face, earrings, and Mohawk, probably his parents' idea of a real monster. One kid, however, wore a giant naked brain. That seemed right-on to Jim. The true horrors of this world were spawned in the human mind.
Since the group was heading toward his house, Jim walked faster. Though his father would not be answering the doorbell, his mother might see him when she came out to the porch to drop a Hershey's Kiss apiece into the sacks held out by the kids. (This neighborhood was slim pickings.) She would not say a word to her husband about it unless he asked her if she'd seen their son. Then she'd feel compelled to tell the truth. Otherwise, the saints, not to mention the bogeymen, might get her.
Sam Wyzak was waiting for him on the front porch of his house. He was smoking a cigarette, which meant that his mother must be busy in the back of the house and wouldn't see him. Sam's father, unlike Eric Grimson, would be dropping candy into the kids' sacks. He'd be bitching because it interfered with his TV-watching, but he'd do it. He didn't give a damn if his son smoked as long as it didn't make any trouble for him.
Sam gave Jim a cigarette, and they walked down the street talking about the fight with The Blob and his buddies. Then Sam slipped Jim an upper. Jim felt more than just an upsurge of spirits and nerves. The drug hit him in the center of his brain like an atomic missile striking dead on target. He had never been hit so suddenly or with so much force by so little. He was abnormally wide open, the walls broken, the army in the castle sound asleep.
He was able a few days later to recall slices of what happened in the next six hours. The rest of the nightmare pie was gone, eaten up by the black beauties, marijuana joints, beer, whiskey, and angel dust his friends had given him. Until then, no matter how tempted, he had always refused even to try dust. It had sent three of his friends into convulsions and then fatal comas. But the deluge of the lesser drugs and the booze had washed away his fear.
Jim and Sam went first to Bob Pellegrino's house. Here they waited until Steve Larsen and Gizzy Dillard came, then drove away in Bob's 1962 Plymouth, which, for a wonder, was running. On the way to Rodfetter's Drive-in, Bob opened a fifth of moonshine "white mule." Steve provided a six-pack of Budweiser he had gotten his older brother to buy for him. Half of the liquor and all of the beer was consumed by the time that, whooping and y
elling, they got to the drive-in. A joint was half gone by then, and each had swallowed a black beauty.
Rodfetter's was the hanging-out place, the "in" site, for the Central crowd whose parents were blue-collar workers. Jim and his friends did a lot of horseplay and monkeying around there for several hours. They did not, unlike the other students there, do much carhopping. Outside of their small group, they had no friends or even close acquaintances. They were the pariahs, the untouchables, and the unbearables, and they claimed to be proud of it.
Jim did not remember just how long they were there. During this somewhat hazy time, he had smoked more joints and drunk the warm beer Pellegrino produced from the trunk. Then Veronica Pappas, Sandra Melton, and Maria Tumbrille had shown up with some LSD. Veronica was the lead female singer for the Hot Water Eskimos; Maria, her understudy. Sandra was the rock group's manager. Her nickname was "Bugs," but her close friends used it only when she was not present. Sandy took offense when she heard it. Unless, that is, she was in one of her deep-blue, very deep and blue, depressions, lower than the mud at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, farther out than the cold and dead planet, Pluto.
Tonight, she was in a way-out talkative and jumping-up-and-down mood.
Sometime during the evening, while they were sitting on the Plymouth's hood or leaning against it, Steve Larsen brought out some LSD in sugar cubes.
"I been hoarding this," he said. "Saving it for the right time. Tonight's the night, Halloween. We can go ride broomsticks with the witches, ride all the way to the moon."
Jim later remembered that he had said something about it being hallucinogenic, though he had trouble pronouncing it.
"I mean, it gives you visions, makes you see the fourth-dimensional worlds, things that aren't there, scary things, all of space and time at once. I don't need that. I get visions naturally, and I don't like them. No, thanks."
"It ain't like heroin and cocaine," Steve said. "It don't hook you, ain't habit-forming. Anyway, you ain't had them visions for years."
"Oh, well, why not?" Jim had said. "What've I got to lose besides my mind, and I don't have one, anyway."
"It's a ticket to heaven," Steve said. "I never been there, but this shit'll take you to a place even better."
"All the way around the universe faster'n light, so they say," Pellegrino said. "Coming back you meet yourself going."
Jim ate the cube and then inhaled deeply from a brown stick. They passed it around until it was a short butt. Steve put it in his jacket pocket.
It must have been after that that someone suggested they drive out to old man Dumski's apple orchard and push over his outhouse. It was an old Halloween tradition that the ramshackle wooden crapper be turned over. Or that an attempt be made to do so since not many had succeeded. The orchard farm had been in the county. But, as Belmont City spread out, it had annexed the area around it.
Dumski's was at the end of a dirt road that led for half a mile from the main highway. It was surrounded by a barbed wire fence. The house had burned down years ago. Dumski lived alone in the barn. The city had been trying for some time to make him build a house, one which would have indoor plumbing and a flush toilet. But the old recluse had defied the city authorities and taken them to court.
He had a huge dog, a rottweiler, one of that black-and-tan, huge-headed, sinister-looking, and terrifying breed used in the film The Omen. The brute roamed the farm area day and night and was only tied up when harvest time came. Since Dumski had gotten the dog, nobody had trespassed on his land.
"Anybody got downers?" Jim had said. "Put a bunch in a hamburger and feed it to the dog. He falls asleep, then we go in."
Those were the last words of good sense uttered that night. Bob Pellegrino purchased a big hamburger, hold the onions. He put a dozen downers in the bun, rewrapped it, and they were off, eight jammed into the Plymouth like circus clowns in a trick car, giggling and screaming while WYEK lobbed the barrage of "A Day in the Life" throughout the car, its quicksilver shrapnel shells exploding inside their young souls. The Beatles had sung that twelve years ago, shook the world with it in the primeval rock-dawn when Jim had been only five years old. Bob "Guru" Hinman, the ancient disc jockey who loved the hoary old stuff (so did Jim) would be playing next Chuck Berry's "Maybellene," which Guru claimed had started rock 'n roll.
Veronica sat on Jim's lap in the back seat. He was to remember vaguely that she was messing around with his fly but not what happened when she opened it. Probably nothing. He had not had a hard-on for two weeks, that's how depressed he had been. And he was supposed, at seventeen, to be at the peak of his sexual drive.
Dumski's apple farm was on the other side of Gold Hill. It took about twenty minutes to get there because of all the red lights they hit, though Bob went through some. Then they were on the highway. The headlights showed trees on both sides. There was no oncoming or passing traffic. Jim kept waiting for the hallucinations, but they did not come. Or were they already here? Maybe this mundane Earth was the basic hallucination?
Bob slowed the car down but not quickly enough. They had passed the tumoff road to Dumski's. After Bob had backed the car up and got it heading down the dirt road, Sandy said, "Hadn't we better turn the radio off? It's loud enough to wake up the dead!"
They all protested because Bob Dylan was in the middle of "Desolation Row," and they wanted to hear it to its end. They compromised by turning the volume down. As soon as the classic song was over. Bob turned the set off. A moment later, he turned the headlights off. The moonbeams coming through gauzy clouds and gaps between them were enough to show them their way.
The car moved slowly out of the tree-lined and shadowy roadway and stopped in front of the gate in the barbed wire fence.
Chapter 11
JIM DID NOT remember much of what had happened since they had been at the drive-in. Many details were long afterward given by Bob Pellegrino, who had not boozed and drugged it up as much as the others because he was driving. But he was not in what could be called a chemically unsaturated state.
The barn loomed dark and sinister in the intermittent moonlight. If Dumski was inside, he either had no lights on or the shutters fit tightly over the windows. There was neither sight nor sound of the rottweiler. The outhouse, said to be a three-holer, was an indistinct shape about eighty feet from the barn and to the left of the group. It had been somewhat distant from the house, the remains of which were a tumulus. Old Dumski had to trudge a long way to use the outhouse.
They piled out of the car. Bob had cautioned them to be quiet, but Gizzy slammed the door after getting out of the car. Before he could be reprimanded by Bob, Gizzy got sick. He went back down the road and into the woods so that the sounds of his vomiting would be muffled. Even so, they were too loud for Pellegrino, now the mother hen of the group. Just after he started to walk after Gizzy to tell him to pipe down, he stopped. A deep growl came from the darkness on the other side of the fence. That hushed the youths.
After a few seconds of looking around frantically, they saw the huge dog behind the gate. That it only growled and that it was such a shadowy shape made it more menacing. Pellegrino, murmuring, "Here, doggie! Nice doggie!" approached it slowly. When he got close to the gate, he threw the hamburger over it. It landed with a plop. A few seconds later, he turned and whispered, "He bolted it down."
Sandy Melton had added acid to the hamburger while they were on the highway. She had said something about wondering what kind of hallucinations a dog would have. Jim remembered that later because it had struck him as very funny. The dog kept on growling. Then, after a few minutes, the growls began to get weak. Presently, it started to wander away, staggering. Before it was thirty feet away, it collapsed.
The gate was bound with a heavy chain, the ends of which were secured by a big lock. Jim went over the gate, the top of which bore strands of barbed wire. He helped Pellegrino over, and they assisted Sam Wyzak and Steve Larsen over. All of them had bloodied hands but did not feel pain.
Sam s
aid, "Holy Mother! The barn just turned into a castle! It's made of glass and diamonds, and it's shimmering in the moonlight!"
Nobody thought to tell him that there was, at that moment, no moonlight.
Jim was having no visual hallucinations, but he did feel as if his legs had stretched out, like the kid in the fairy story with the seven-league boots, and that he could reach the outhouse in one stride. He was distracted, though, because the girls refused to go over the gate. They could feel the barbs, and they had seen the rips in the boys' clothes. "Besides," Sandy Melton said, "who's going to take care of Gizzy? We might have to run like hell. We don't want to leave Gizzy behind."
"You're right," Bob said. "OK. This won't take long; we don't need you, anyway. You get Gizzy into the car."
The three boys walked along the gravel road running from the gate to the heap that had been the farmhouse. Before they got to it, they angled across toward the outhouse. Just as they reached the stench-emitting crapper, a break in the clouds flooded moonlight around them. They could even see the crescent carved in the door.
Jim was surprised that Bob, Sam, and Steve also had reached the structure with only one stride. They did not look as if their legs were elongated. Then Bob said, "Where's Sam?"
Jim turned to indicate Sam, who had been by his side. But Sam was no longer there. He was standing at a point halfway between the gate and the outhouse and was staring fixedly at the barn. Later, Jim would figure that he had just thought that Sam had walked all the way with him. Or had someone else, someone unknown, been at his side?
"OK," Bob said. "We don't need him. But don't forget to bring him along when we go back."
They went to the north side of the outhouse, and all three began pushing on it. The structure rocked back and forth but would not tip over.
"Man, it's heavier than my mother's doughnuts!" Bob said. "Listen up. We gotta get it oscillating, get it into the right frequency, then, when I give the word, all shove together hard as hell!"