The Follower

by Nicholas Bowling

  “Still looking for him?” said Mr Blucas from the other side of the shelves.

  “Mr Blucas?” she said.

  “Well he’s not here, I can tell you that!” he said.

  He cackled. She couldn’t see him through the bags, but she heard the sound of his saliva and his missing teeth.

  She went to the end of the aisle, where the desk and the mattress were. On the desk was an ancient shotgun, too rusted to be of any use, a rabbit carcass and the remains of a can of dog food with a spoon sticking out of it. The mattress was crawling with lice. She shut her eyes and turned away as if faced with a crime scene. In the next aisle she opened them and saw Mr Blucas swapping bits of paper in and out of different bags. So there was a system, apparently.

  He took out a newspaper and tied the plastic bag’s handles in a knot. He shuffled towards her and thrust the front page in her face.

  “This country is going straight to the garbage heap!” he said. “See that?”

  It was an article about an arson attack, dated March 1988. The paper was a local one, the typesetting so inexpert that it looked like it had been made on a home computer. There was a photo of a burned-out house and a headline that simply read: We Got Him! Vivian didn’t know if that referred to the arsonist or the victim.

  “What is that?” she asked.

  “I tried to help, I asked to help, but they wouldn’t listen, and now look.” He stuffed the newspaper back in the bag before she could read more of it and gestured around the warehouse. “What’s the point, huh? Just a lot of garbage.”

  He laughed loudly and Vivian smelled the dog food on him. She looked at his face in the darkness, saw the ruined mirror-image of the man who’d taken her in on the mountain.

  “Excuse me, Mr Blucas,” she said. “I think you took something that was mine from the motel. Well, not mine. My brother’s.”

  “You still looking for him?” he said again, in an identical cadence to the last time. “I told you, I don’t have him. I collect a lot of things, but I don’t collect people no more! Too damn hard!”

  “I’m not looking for him, I’m just looking for his notes.”

  “That garbage from the room?”

  “Yes. Someone said you… tidied it.”

  “Had to tidy it. It’s my room. Where am I meant to stay if the room’s all full of dirt? I’m not paying full price for a room full of dirt, don’t care how good the breakfast is.”

  “Do you have them?”

  “Do I have what now?”

  “They’re just pieces of paper with some writing on. And some posters. Of my brother.”

  He frowned and looked very serious for a moment.

  “Oh they’ll be here somewhere, sure, sure.”

  “Do you know where?”

  He shrugged.

  “You don’t know?” said Vivian.

  “Haven’t got around to archiving them yet. There’s a lot of backlog, see? Got to do it properly. If I’m going to work it all out. Got to do it properly. See, people nowadays, they cut corners. I’m out to do a good job. Going to work it all out.” He tapped the side of his head, then stopped and wagged his finger at her. “You know, you look a lot like a guy I used to work with…”

  Vivian held in a sigh. She looked up through the hole in the roof. The tide of the evening had turned, now – the sky was pink and the earth was giving back its warmth and the air had turned cool and damp. She thought of the Sanctuary again, with a certain amount of longing.

  There was something else she had to ask before she plotted her escape.

  “Mr Blucas,” she said.

  He was looking at the front page of the paper again and tutting.

  “Mr Blucas, you’ve got a brother, haven’t you?”

  He looked up sharply and his eyes were wild and frightening. He said nothing.

  “When you were in the cafe. You said you had a brother. And you said my brother and your brother might be together somewhere. In the big house. Or wherever.”

  “I don’t have a brother,” he said.

  Vivian paused.

  “Are you sure? You said you did… and I think I met him. I met someone who looked a lot like you. Maybe a twin. Like Jesse.”

  “Son of a bitch.”

  “He was living up the mountain—”

  “I don’t have a brother.”

  “Then why—”

  “If I say I haven’t got a brother, I haven’t got a brother!” roared Mr Blucas. Vivian felt his spittle fizzing on her cheek. “Dumb son of a bitch is dead to me! And good riddance!”

  “Mr Blucas—”

  “Get out of here, stupid girl. Go on, git!”

  He tried to hustle her out of the warehouse but didn’t need to. She’d seen his long nails and dirty fingers and didn’t want them touching her. She backed away and hurried around the end of the aisle, and he continued to yell at her, about brothers, and garbage, and sons of bitches. She ran for the door and just before she reached the outside world she tripped on her own too-large feet and tumbled onto the dirt floor of the warehouse.

  She didn’t get up at once, even though Mr Blucas was still coming at her with his thunderous limp. She stayed on the ground on all fours, looking at something she’d seen on the very lowest shelf. There, in a shaft of evening light that shone through the broken roof, were hundreds of mouldering copies of The Violet Path.

  12

  IT WAS nearly dark by the time she got back to the Sanctuary. She met Forrest coming down the steps and braced herself for a torrent of questions. Forrest pushed past her and said nothing, though. She was holding her rod in one hand and seemed purposeful. Vivian watched her small, ghostlike form disappear into the evening, and even after she’d turned her back could still hear the slap of the girl’s bare feet on the concrete as she hurried down to the highway.

  Vivian showered and slipped into freshly laundered robes and felt glad to be back. Glenn wasn’t there but the other initiates were happy to see her. They’d been worried about her. They plied her with tea and stew and offered her a tincture to help her relax, because her energy seemed all askew. They were right about that. They lay her down and administered drops of the stuff to her forehead and her palms and her tongue. One of the girls crouched down, pursed her lips, and blew up Vivian’s nose. Wasn’t that what you did with horses? Whether it was the tincture or the blowing or just the gentleness of her fellow initiates, Vivian was ready for bed before it was even nine p.m. She wasn’t thinking about Blucas. She wasn’t even thinking about Jesse. Forrest’s futon was still empty when she crawled into hers.

  The following morning there were raised voices from the main room of the Sanctuary. The light seeping into her bedroom was a watery, dawn grey. It was the first time she’d been awake before midday in months. She got to her feet and put on her robes. They were lavender scented and very soft. She zipped up her coat over the top of everything and went out to see what was happening.

  Forrest was in the main room, and the centre of a scene. Vivian could hear her but not see her, since she was so much smaller than everyone else in the Sanctuary. There was a wildness to her voice that sounded like she was about to laugh or cry or some combination of the two.

  She came to the edge of the crowd and stood next to a young man with shoulder-length hair who called himself Peace, but who Vivian had been calling “Pete” for the last two days after mishearing him when they were introduced. Peace turned to look at her. He was beaming.

  “She saw him,” he said.

  “Saw who?”

  “John of Telos. She actually saw him.”

  He was looking at Vivian’s face but his eyes were focused somewhere beyond that. Peace had come to the Sanctuary from Colorado, via a tribe in Brazil. He’d undergone dozens of Kambo toad cleanses while he was there, and had the wide, black, bottomless pupils to prove it.

  Vivian frowned and raised herself on tiptoes. Forrest was regaling the rest of the initiates with her story. Her feet were filthy, and her robes ha
d the telltale mixture of leaves and pine needles stuck to them.

  “I just remember the clouds over the mountain,” she was saying, “and they parted, and I saw the two moons, the earthly moon and the Telurian moon—”

  Her audience gasped and clasped their hands over their hearts.

  “—and I heard this beautiful sound, like a choir of angels, and there was this warmth, like a wave—”

  “And it was him?” said one of the other girls at the front of the crowd.

  Forrest nodded. “I looked down the mountain and there he was, praise be to God, just taking a walk among the trees, and there was an incredible light, a beautiful light—” she was starting to cry, now, and the girl put an arm around her and her eyes started shining too “—and I understood, you know? I knew, I just knew that all would be well, that we would all find our way to Telos in the end, and we would be one, and all would be well.”

  “What did he say?” said the man standing next to Vivian.

  “Oh, he didn’t speak,” said Forrest, wiping one cheek with her palm. “He didn’t need to. Why would he?”

  Lots of the initiates nodded in agreement.

  “Did you see his face? What did he look like?”

  “It was just pure light, and Lord have mercy it was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my life. And he just looked at me, and turned his head, and he went into the woods. I thought we’d been together for hours, days, but it wasn’t even dawn, and my heart, my heart, it was just full of joy and peace and I just know that we will be together again when I have reached the threshold of the Thirteenth Stone.”

  She made a triangle shape over her chest and then, inexplicably, the sign of the cross. Vivian looked around and noticed Glenn standing on the opposite side of the crowd, an inscrutable expression on his face.

  She didn’t know what to think. Forrest’s vision of the violet man was virtually identical to hers. The girl seemed more deeply touched by the experience, certainly, but everything else was the same. What was it, then, that made them both see and feel these things? Group delusion? The tea? Everyone else at the Sanctuary gulped down gallons of it. And if it was a delusion, or a hallucination, or whatever, did it even matter, if it gave people joy?

  “I just can’t wait for y’all to meet him,” Forrest was saying. “I can’t wait for you to feel that energy. Praise be! What a blessing. What a deep, deep blessing. Maybe we can all go up the mountain together? Maybe he will come unto us? Glenn?” She turned to him. “Can we go up the mountain tonight? The Telurian moon is still ascendant, isn’t it?”

  Glenn’s look of disappointment was chilling.

  “Did you go up the mountain on your own?” he said to Forrest.

  Forrest wrung her skinny hands.

  “I did,” she said. “I was called. It called to me, Glenn.”

  “It’s dangerous up the mountain,” said Glenn. “None of you should really be going up there on your own. I don’t think any of you are ready. I’m certainly not ready.”

  For reasons she didn’t understand, Vivian suddenly said, “I saw him, too.”

  The group turned to her.

  “Saw who?” said Glenn.

  “The guy. The violet… John, whatever.”

  Forrest’s eyes lit up and then immediately dimmed. Her mouth went to a pinprick.

  “You weren’t there,” she said.

  “Not last night. But a few nights ago. I thought I imagined it, but…”

  But what? She looked at Glenn. He still seemed disappointed by something. Angry, even. She felt suddenly ashamed, for reasons she couldn’t explain. He was about to speak when there was the sound of shattering glass and his head jerked sideways and something heavy clattered onto the floorboards. He staggered sideways and put a hand to his temple, then fell to the floor himself. His glasses were broken, and where he lay sprawled on the floor his robe had opened to reveal a thigh the colour and consistency of soft cheese.

  While the others yelped and cowered or went to help him, Vivian bent down and picked up the object that had struck him. It was a black and red crystal. She examined its surface and a second one came flying through the broken triangular window, and the initiates scattered again. Then came a third, and a fourth, followed by a stream of profanities from outside in the street.

  Vivian went to the window and looked down. It was Shelley.

  “Glenn Schultz you fucking bastard! You come down here if you want to talk Telos! Fucking coward! Send your fucking lackies round to intimidate me, then grass me up to your boss!”

  She’d been drinking and was wearing the same sweatpants she’d had on when Vivian had first visited her. She had Chason suspended from her neck in a kind of papoose, and his legs and arms drooped out on either side and his head was so big and so high he was getting the full force of his mother’s tirade. He was crying uncontrollably.

  Shelley drew her arm back to launch another missile at the Sanctuary, but stopped when she saw Vivian in the window.

  “Well,” she shouted, “there she is. Thanks a fucking bunch, Vivian. I was trying to help you, and you come here and stab me in the back. I’ve got nothing, Vivian! Nothing!”

  She hurled another crystal and Vivian had to duck to avoid yet another head wound.

  “I didn’t realise…” she said weakly, but there was no chance Shelley could hear her over the crying of her child.

  “You hear that, Glenn?” she shouted. “You hear my boy crying? That’s all on you. When he starts crying because I can’t put food on the table, or he’s crying because his mom’s working her second fucking job and won’t be home till midnight, that’s your fault. What am I going to do? Huh? Glenn? It wasn’t enough taking all my students from me?”

  Vivian turned round. Glenn was still on the floor and couldn’t hear any of this. The man called Carl came to the window carrying the black crystals and threw them, one by one, so they landed just at Shelley’s feet.

  “Go home, Shelley,” he said. “You knew the rules.”

  He was about to throw the last one when Vivian held his arm.

  “Don’t,” she said.

  “What?” said Carl. He looked at her. He had the face of a male model, with very precisely buzzed hair and sideburns. His eyebrows were perfect. He looked like he’d just come from a photoshoot.

  “Don’t do that.”

  “Why not? Look what she did.”

  He pulled his hand from hers and lobbed the last crystal at the woman and her child. Shelley had to hop back, and in her drunken state she staggered slightly and went to one knee, clutching Chason in his sling like he was a priceless vase.

  “That’s right, Glenn! Stay up there in your Sanctuary, get your kid to do all the dirty work, as usual!”

  She came up the steps into the peace garden just in front of the door and splashed into the shallow, circular pond. There she began kicking at the totem pole at its centre until it fell over. Then she marched back down the steps into the street, found a garbage can, hauled it with one arm into the garden, and emptied it into the pool.

  Another five or six initiates, including Forrest, had gathered at the window to watch her ploughing her trail of destruction.

  “She’s going to come inside,” said Carl.

  “Do we call the police?” someone said, and everyone else looked daggers at her.

  “I’ll deal with her,” said Carl.

  “No,” said Vivian, “I’ll go.”

  Vivian ran downstairs and through the lobby and into the peace garden. Shelley was by now throwing the remains of the totem pole through the windows on the ground floor. Vivian held up her hands in surrender, and Shelley frisbeed the picture of John of Telos in its golden frame at her head. It arced past Vivian’s ear and skittered across the floor of the lobby.

  “Come on, Shelley,” said Vivian.

  “Don’t touch me!” Shelley swatted away her hand. There was the sweet and sour smell of cheap liquor.

  “You’re going to get yourself in more trou
ble.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Yes, you do. Think about your kids.”

  “These bastards. They ruined me! You ruined me!”

  The other members of the Sanctuary had started jeering at Shelley from up in the triangular window. “Telos is ashamed of you!” screamed Forrest. The man called Peace or Pete was making the inverted triangle sign with his fingers and humming loudly.

  The fight seemed to have gone out of Shelley now. She sat on the edge of the pond and rocked back and forth slightly, though whether this was for Chason’s benefit, Vivian wasn’t sure. Vivian went and stood awkwardly next to her while the insults continued to rain down from above.

  “Let me take you home.”

  “I don’t want you to take me home.”

  Chason cried and cried.

  “What about Troy?” said Vivian. “Shall I get Troy?”

  Shelley continued gently rocking her child and seemed to be considering this. Then she reached beneath the papoose and into the pocket of her hoodie and took out her phone. She handed it wordlessly to Vivian.

  “You want me to call him?”

  Shelley didn’t reply, which Vivian took to mean yes.

  Vivian hadn’t held a phone for almost a week, and after so long without one it felt like an artefact of immense power. The screen was mesmerising. Shelley had chosen a predictable image as her background – John of Telos, robed and bearded and, in this particular artist’s impression, surrounded by woodland creatures like a Disney princess. Vivian had to swipe up into his crotch to open the phone. She went to the address book and found Troy and called him three times before he picked up.

  “I’m at work, Mom,” he said.

  “It’s Vivian,” said Vivian.

  “Who?”

  “Vivian.”

  “You? How come?”