Chariot - [Millennium Quartet 03]

by Charles L. Grant

  “It won’t last long.”

  He closed his eyes. “Shit.”

  “Not to worry,” Harp said from the front seat. “You won’t need it. Aspirin, though. You will definitely need a bottle or two of aspirin.”

  “He’s lost a lot of blood, John.”

  “Well, he would, wouldn’t he, dear?”

  I’m supposed to be mad, Trey thought; why aren’t I furious? Why can’t I think?

  Surgical tape slapdash over the gauze pads.

  “That’s going to fall off,” he complained. Then, when he wasn’t sure his thick tongue and swollen lips had pronounced the words clearly enough, he said it again.

  “Can you take your shirt off by yourself?” she said by way of an answer. “I’ll give you a hand if you can’t.”

  “No thank you,” he said stiffly. “You’ve done enough already.” He shoved with his hands until he was propped against the door, then took off his shirt, but not without an effort that made the sweat break over his face again.

  At the same time, she pushed his feet aside so she could sit, and when he moaned automatically, she said, “Oh, do stop, Mr. Falkirk, it isn’t that bad now.”

  When he looked, ready now to kill her, the suitcase was at her feet and open. She was right—it didn’t hurt all that much anymore, but that didn’t mean she had to be so casual about it.

  “You’ll need these fresh clothes before we get you home.”

  “What for? To cover the fact you two tried to murder me?”

  “You’ll need a good wash, too, when you get there.” She held out the shirt until, scowling, he snatched it out of her hand and put it on, again struggling, again biting back an anticipated reaction to the fire that didn’t quite break into flames this time. “I must confess,” she added as she laid a clean pair of jeans primly across his lap, “I do not understand why men wear boxers. Too short to be shorts, long enough to be silly.”

  “I’ve said this before, but I don’t care,” he told her. “You’re crazy. No, you’re sick.”

  She snapped the suitcase shut and dropped it into the passenger seat. “John, when are we getting back on the road? I’m getting carsick back here.”

  “Just ahead, dear,” Harp answered, glancing at the rearview mirror. “Just a few minutes.”

  With his bare left foot pushing against her thigh, his right foot on the floor, Trey manuevered himself into the corner, left hand once again gripping his leg above the wound. “Did I pass your damn test?” he said, shaking his head to clear it, realizing the drug had already begun to wear off.

  “Oh,” Harp said, looking at him in the mirror, “it wasn’t a test. There’s no time for tests.”

  “Then what the hell was it?”

  Sunset filled the interior. The blood tint was gone; it was pale gold now, with dust that floated and sometimes sparkled. The ride leveled smooth somewhat; they, had reached the dirt road, heading for the highway.

  “What do you make it, dear?” Harp asked to the mirror.

  Trey demanded at the top of his voice that he keep his goddamn eyes on the goddamn road before he goddamn killed them all.

  “Ten minutes? Fifteen?”

  Harp nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, I believe that’s about right.”

  I’m invisible, Trey thought, feeling the first familiar stir of hysteria; these people act like I’m invisible.

  He tried kicking Beatrice with his bad leg, and succeeded only in nudging her.

  She sighed, and pushed a fall of hair away from her face. “All right, Mr. Falkirk, all right.” She faced forward, hands in her lap. “To coin an old cliche, desperate times make for desperate measures. It wasn’t a test, Mr. Falkirk.” She looked at him sideways. “It was proof.”

  “Oh, right,” he said. “Of what? That I can survive the nasty old desert with a couple of holes in me? That I can listen to you two yammer without going insane?”

  “No, Mr. Falkirk,” she said calmly. “Of this.” She reached over and took hold of the gauze patch on the front of his leg. Watching him. Not smiling. Then yanking it free, along with the tape.

  He yelled a “Jesus Christ,” and grabbed the leg with both hands. “Let me out. Let me the hell out of here, I’ll walk back in my underwear, just let me the hell out!”

  She snapped her fingers in front of his eyes, and before he could grab her hand, pointed downward. “Proof, Mr. Falkirk. Proof that you are what we say you are.”

  At first he wasn’t sure what she wanted him to see; he was too mad to focus until she snapped her fingers again, and pointed again.

  When he saw it, he began to pant.

  By all rights, there should have been blood; by all rights there should have been a ragged gap in his flesh; by all rights he should be gasping in agony, but all he felt was the fading sting of the tape’s abrupt removal.

  He began to shiver.

  “When you returned from your last trip,” she said, a sympathetic smile in her voice and on her lips, “you were no doubt far too bitter and much too tired to notice how your injuries healed substantially faster than they would have otherwise. I would imagine you healed completely in only a couple of weeks, rather than the month or so it ought to have taken. This,” and she poked at the vivid red scar where the bullet had entered his leg, “is rather a special case, I should think. A combination of fear and anger, a determination to be rid of us which, somewhere in that thick skull of yours, you knew wouldn’t happen until you could walk.

  “Well, you can walk, Mr. Falkirk. You can walk.”

  “You . . .” Hesitantly he ran a finger around the scar, pushing down, daring the pain. “You did this?”

  “No.”

  “I did this?”

  “In a way, yes.”

  “That protection?”

  She nodded, and Sir John whispered, “Good man.”

  “Yours?”

  “I wish it were, Mr. Falkirk. I truly, honestly wish it were.” She fussed with her hair, looked out at the window. “If you want someone to thank, Trey, you can thank Eula Korrey. She’s the one who’s been keeping you alive.”

  * * * *

  4

  1

  W

  hen sunset turned to bronze and the dragon began to glow, to push against the flow of night, they came to her door one by one, all asking the same question, none of them really believing, none of them really daring not to.

  They had no real idea why it was she they had to talk to, only a feeling they’d been nurturing since she first moved to Emerald City. One thought it was the smile and that face. Another, because it felt right; it just felt right. The others thought it had something to do with the music—make a joyful noise and let your heart do the rest.

  She received them with a smile wide and white, listened to the question, nodding, humming a little if someone stumbled and couldn’t find the right words that didn’t sound too foolish. When they were finished, she held out her gloved hands, fragile lace at the cuffs, and assured them they only had to take the first step, understand what would be expected of them in return, and she would do the rest.

  “Don’t make any difference, child, how you do it. Don’t care how you take the path, honey. Like that song back there is saying, out there in the kitchen—walk, talk, sing, shout, it makes no difference how you do it. All you got to do is come on along, drop on in when the sun goes down, we see what we can do.

  “Just be sure, though. Be sure in your heart what you ask is what you want. No turning back, you know. Ain’t never no turning back.

  “Thing is, you got to believe. Don’t really matter in what, long as you believe. It’s like...well, darlin’, you never know, you could be on what that song says. My friends and I, we sometimes call it the King’s Highway. Ain’t always made of gold, ain’t always straight. Sometimes it’s just a dirt road like the one you just come up on. You take it how you want. You tell me what you want. Then I see what I can do.

  “When the sun goes down, y’hear? You come back and see me when
the sun goes down.”

  * * * *

  2

  walking

  * * * *

  It was the frustration more than anything. Forgetting once in a while that one leg wouldn’t bend and the other wouldn’t always do what she wanted. The therapy helped, she could see that, but she could also see that Muriel was right, too—it wasn’t ever going to get back the way it used to be. Kidding herself for so long had grown into a belief that threatened to shatter every time she visited her old friends in the stables beneath the hotel and saw the horses, saw her friends in their costumes, saw them leading the animals from their stalls to the hall where they’d mount and ride out.

  “You’re killing yourself, Lillian,” Muriel told her a hundred times a month. “You keep going there, you’re going to kill yourself.” No self-consciousness there about the times she really did try. Just, “You’re killing yourself.” Another way of saying she was being a damn fool.

  The crutches, too, didn’t help. People saw her with her forearms braced in those metal cuffs, and assumed a disease had stricken her or something. There had been a time when she’d corrected those dumb enough to ask; now she just grunted and let them believe what they wanted.

  She stood at her front door.

  She wore brand-new jeans too stiff and clean for honest comfort, a plaid shirt open at the throat, all that thick rich hair yanked back into a hasty ponytail, and despite everything her mind told her about the fall from the precipice of too much dreaming, she had struggled into her riding boots, kept in the back of her closet so Muriel wouldn’t find them.

  Tonight Muriel didn’t say anything, couldn’t even come up with a complaint about her choice of clothes.

  Lil cleared her throat. “I... I guess I’m going,” she called, staring at the door.

  Muriel, sitting at the kitchen table, staring at her uneaten meal, nodded. “Okay, dear.”

  “Any last words of wisdom?”

  She didn’t look around, but she thought she heard her mother trap a sob before it got out. Other than that, there was no answer.

  “All right, then.” She opened the door. “Guess I’ll see you later.”

  No answer again.

  Pushing the screen door open with one crutch, she sidled onto the porch, looked to her left and saw Eula’s porch light on, a soft white glow that seemed to glitter in the night’s soft warm air. In fact, she realized, it was almost the only light burning anywhere.

  The moon was tucked behind an opaque cloud, and she could see only a handful of stars up there.

  But the night didn’t feel like rain; it just felt dark.

  Another look around, and there was no sign of anyone else, so she moved quickly to the steps, jumping when the door slammed behind her. She shook her head at her nerves and descended to the front walk, decided to do it right, and walked to the street. She looked around in case someone wanted to stop her, wondered why no one wanted to stop her from doing this damn fool thing. Not even Trey was down on his porch, drinking his damn beer, looking like he knew everything and everyone else was too stupid to ask so he could tell them.

  God, she thought, moistened her lips, and walked as best and straight as she could.

  Just another night in Emerald City, going next door to have a few words of pleasant conversation, listen to some music, have a cigarette without Muriel jumping all over her.

  Just another night as she made her way up to Eula’s door and didn’t even have to knock, because Eula was there, waiting, hands folded at her stomach.

  “Child!” she said, as if she hadn’t seen Lillian in ages. “Come on in, come on in.”

  She stepped aside to allow Lillian easy entrance, then touched her elbow. “How you feeling, honey?”

  Lil shrugged. “Strange, I guess.”

  Eula laughed, then snapped her fingers a couple of times to the beat of a song that filled the house, the same song she’d played earlier that evening. When she realized what she was doing, she laughed, even harder and winked. “Sometimes,” she said, “I just get carried away, even when I’m standing still.” She walked toward the kitchen. “Now come on here, girl, I got something to show you.”

  Lil didn’t move. “Eula?”

  Eula waggled her fingers over her shoulder. “No time for talk, honey. You just follow old Eula, I think she’s got just what you want.”

  There was no furniture in the front room, nothing on the walls, nothing to indicate anyone lived here at all. She had seen it many times, but this was the first time it struck her how plain the old woman lived. What was the word . . . spartan?

  “Lillian,” Eula said from the kitchen doorway, “you coming, you change your mind?”

  I’ve changed my mind, she thought; this is nuts, and I’ve changed my mind.

  Her arms shifted to turn her around, but instead she moved forward, watching Eula mouth the words to the song, dancing a little in place, grinning and beckoning and laughing and nodding and taking her elbow when she reached the threshold and guiding her around the tiny table in the center of floor.

  “Right out there,” Eula said. “Right out in back, I got something for you.”

  “Look, Eula . . .” but there was no stopping the old woman, and she had to admit she was curious. Praying that when she got back home, Muriel wouldn’t curl those fat lips and say something like, I told you so.

  Eula opened the back door.

  Lil couldn’t see anything out there, and frowned.

  “Thing is,” Eula said, leaning close, smelling warm, smelling as if the sun’s heat radiated from her skin. “Thing is, child, before you go out, I got to know—are you ready?”

  “Eula, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Eula looked at her sternly. “You do, child. You know exactly what I’m talking about, and I got to know if you’re ready. ‘Cause if you ain’t, we stop right here, we talk a little, you have a smoke, you go on home, get a good night’s sleep, wake up in the morning, read the Sunday papers and shake your head at all the bad that’s in the world.”

  Lil felt the tears that instantly filled and stung her eyes. She blinked until they were gone, but the stinging remained. “I don’t want to go,” she said quietly, “but honest to God, I don’t know what you want me to do.”

  Eula studied her face intently, then snapped a finger against a crutch. “You want them gone? You want that fool knee to bend again? You want to do what you used to?”

  “You know I do.”

  “Answer’s simple, then, child. I am distressed at the presence of a man who has no right to be here. No right at all. Does nothing, says nonsense, stirs people up, and makes them miserable.” She snapped the crutch again. “You hear me, child? You hear?”

  “You’re talking about Trey.”

  “I don’t talk his name,” Eula said acidly.

  “So . . . what? You want me to . . . what?”

  Eula’s gaze was steady. Hard.

  Lil looked out at the night. Then, slowly: “If you give me what I want... I have to hurt him.” She shook her head to erase the words. “I have to kill him.” A laugh, nervous, too loud. “Man, it sounds like you want me to make a deal with the Devil.”

  “No!” Eula said sharply. “Not the Devil, child. Never the Devil.”

  Lil took an awkward step back. “Even if I said yes, Eula, look at me. Healthy and in one piece, I’m almost as short as you and I’d never be able to do it. Not alone.”

  “Won’t be,” she answered. “Won’t be alone.”

  The song ended.

  The house was silent.

  Eula took her arm and gently, almost tenderly, pulled her onto the back stoop. She pointed into the yard.

  Lil didn’t know what she was supposed to be looking at, because there was nothing out there but what was behind everyone else’s house—sand and cacti and ...

  Her eyes widened. “Oh my God.”

  No moonlight, no starlight, but she saw it anyway.

  “Oh, my God.”


  Eula stood so close their arms touched. “Now,” she said. “Tell me now, child.”

  Lil laughed, quickly, deeply in her throat. “My God, for that, I’d say yes.”

  She couldn’t look away, and barely heard Eula murmuring, barely felt it when the old woman eased Lil’s grip on the crutches and took them away. Barely felt it when the old woman bent over and ran a palm over her fused knee. Barely felt it when the old woman touched her shoulder.