by Clive Barker
She had no doubt as to which of the three she was. Too old to be a baby, too crazy to be a lover, there was only one reason why her soul was journeying here tonight. Miss Perfection had been right. Death was imminent. This was the last time she would sleep before her span as Tesla Bombeck was over.
Even if she’d been distressed at this, she had no time to feel it. The adventure at hand demanded too much of her attention. Rising and falling, on shoulder and in trough, she was carried on towards a place where the waters, for some reason she could not comprehend, grew so utterly calm they made an almost perfect mirror for the busy sky.
She thought at first she was alone in these doldrums, and was about to test her powers of self-propulsion in order to escape them, when she realized that a light was flickering beneath her. She looked down into the water, and saw that some species of fish with luminous flesh had congregated in the deep, and was now steadily rising towards the surface. When she raised her head from the water again she found that she was not alone. A long-haired, bearded man was casually crouching on the water as though it were as solid as a rock, idly creating ripples in the glassy surface. He had been there all along, she assumed, and she’d missed him. But now, as if roused from some reverie by her gaze, he looked up.
His face was scrawny—his bones sharp, his black eyes sharper—but the smile he offered was so sweetly tentative, as though he was a little embarrassed to have been caught unawares, that she was instantly charmed. He rose, the water dancing around his feet, and ambled over to her. His water-soaked robes were in tatters, and she could see that his torso was covered with small, pale scars, as though he’d been wrestling in broken glass.
She sympathized with his condition. She too was scarred, inside and out; she too had been stripped of all she’d worn in the world: her profession, her self-esteem, her certainty.
“Do we know each other?” he said to her as he approached. His voice lacked music, but she liked the sound of it nevertheless.
“No,” she said, suddenly tongue-tied. “I don’t believe so.”
“Somebody spoke of you to me, I’m certain. Was it Fletcher perhaps?”
“You know Fletcher?”
“Then it was,” the man said, smiling again. “You’re the one who martyred him.”
“I hadn’t thought of it that way—but yes, I guess that was me.”
“You see?” he said. He went down on his haunches beside her, while the water buoyed her up. “You wanted connections, and they’re there to be found. But you have to look in the terrible places, Tesla. The places where death comes to take love away, where we lose each other and lose ourselves; that’s where the connections begin. It takes a brave soul to look there and not despair.”
“I’ve tried to be brave,” she said.
“I know,” he said softly. “I know.”
“But I wasn’t brave enough, is that what you’re saying? The thing is, I didn’t ask to be part of this. I wasn’t ready for it. I was just going to write movies, you know, and get rich and smug. I guess that sounds pathetic to you.”
“Why?”
“Well, I don’t suppose you get to see a lot of movies.”
“You’d be surprised,” the man said with a little smile. “Anyway, it’s the stories that matter, however they’re told.”
She thought of the child at the crossroads—
We saw your face, and we said: She knows about the story tree.
“What’s the big deal about stories?” she said.
“You love them,” he said, his gaze leaving her face and slipping down to the water. The glowing forms she’d seen rising from below were within a few fathoms of the surface now. The water was beginning to simmer with their presence. “You do, don’t you?” he said.
“I suppose I do,” she said.
“That’s what the connections are, Tesla.”
“Stories?”
“Stories. And every life, however short, however meaningless it seems, is a leaf—”
“A leaf.”
“Yes, a leaf.” He looked up at her again, and waited, unspeaking, until she grasped the sense of what he was saying.
“On the story tree,” she said. He smiled. “Lives are leaves on the story tree.”
“Simple, isn’t it?” he said. The bubbles were breaking all around them now, and the surface was no longer glacial enough to bear him up. He started to sink into the water; slowly, slowly. “I’m afraid I have to go,” he said. “The ’shu have come for me. Why do you look so unhappy?”
“Because it’s too late,” she said. “Why did I have to wait until now to know what I was supposed to do?”
“You didn’t need to know. You were doing it.”
“No I wasn’t,” she said, distressed now. “I never got to tell a story I gave a damn about.”
“Oh but you did,” he said. He was almost gone from sight now.
“What story was that?” she begged him, determined to get an answer before he disappeared. “What?”
“Your own,” he told her, slipping from sight. “Your own.”
Then he was gone.
She stared down into the bubbling water, and saw that the creatures he’d called the ’shu—which resembled cuttlefish as far as she could see, and were congregated below her in their many millions—were describing a vast spiral around the sinking man, as though drawing him down into their midst. The vortex made no claim on her spirit stuff, however. She felt a pang of loss, watching him disappear into the bright depths. He had seemed wise, and she had wanted to speak to him longer. As it was, she had something to take back with her: the observation that the story she’d told was her own. It meant little to her right now, but perhaps if she succeeded in carrying it into the waking world it would comfort her.
And now, as the spiral of ’shu faded into the depths, there was news from that world. A telephone ringing, and then the sound of footsteps on the stairs.
“Tesla?”
She opened her eyes. Harry had his head around the door. “It’s Grillo,” he said. “He needs to talk to you. He’s called once already.” She vaguely remembered hearing a telephone ring as she’d wandered the snowy shore. “Sounds like he’s in bad shape.”
She got up and went downstairs. There was a stub of pencil beside the telephone. Before she spoke to Grillo she wrote I told my own story on the telephone directory, in case the conversation drove the dream from her head. Then she picked up the receiver.
Just as Harry had said, Grillo sounded to be in bad shape; terrible shape, in fact. Like her, like D’Amour, like the water-walker in her dream. It was as though everybody around her was winding down.
“I’m at a place called the Sturgis Motel,” he explained, “with Howie, Jo-Beth, and their kid Amy.”
“Where?”
“A few miles outside Everville.”
“What the hell are you doing there?”
“We had no choice. We had to move quickly, and I knew we were going to need serious help.”
“To do what?”
“Tommy-Ray’s coming after Jo-Beth.”
“Tommy-Ray?”
Grillo began to relate to her the events of the last few days. She gave all but five percent of her attention to the account, the remaining portion dedicated to holding onto the dream from which she’d awaken. But the images of terror and flight that spilled from Grillo steadily supplanted her memories of the becalmed sea, and of the man who had known Fletcher.
“I need your help, Tes—” Grillo was saying. She clung to the memory of the water-walker’s face for a few desperate moments. “Tes, are you there?” Then she had no choice but to let it go.
“Yeah, I’m here—”
“I said I need some help.”
“You don’t sound so good, Nathan. Did you get hurt?”
“It’s a long story. Look, give me your address. We’ll drive into town.”
She flashed on the swathe Tommy-Ray the Death-Boy—along with his army of phantoms—had cut through Palomo G
rove. Hadn’t he brought down his own house in his enthusiasm for destruction, with his mother inside it? If he was unleashed in Everville, especially at a time of mass exodus (which couldn’t be far off) the death toll would be appalling.
“Stay where you are,” she said. “I’ll come to you.”
Grillo didn’t argue. He was clearly too desperate to have her with him as soon as possible. He gave her the motel’s whereabouts and urged her to be quick. That was that.
Harry was in the kitchen, burning toast. She told him all that Grillo had said. He listened without comment, until she got to the part about her leaving.
“So Everville’s my baby now?” he said.
“It looks that way.”
She wanted to tell him that she’d dreamed her final dream, and that he should not expect her to return, but that sounded hopelessly melodramatic. What she needed was something pithier; a throwaway line that would seem blasé and wise when she was gone. But nothing came to mind. As it was, Harry had a farewell of his own to offer.
“I’m thinking I might go back up the mountain after dark,” he said. “If the Iad’s coming through I may as well get a ringside view. Which means . . . we probably won’t be seeing each other again.”
“No. I suppose not.”
“We’ve had quite a time of it, haven’t we? I mean, our lives, they’ve been—”
“Weird.”
“Extraordinary,” Harry said. She shrugged. It was true, of course. “I’m sure we’ve both wished it could have been different. But I guess somewhere deep down we must have wanted it this way.”
“I guess.”
The exchange faltered there. Tesla looked up and saw that Harry was staring straight at her, his lips pinched together as though to keep from weeping.
“Enjoy the sights,” she said.
“I will,” he replied.
“You take care.”
She broke the look between them, went to pick up her jacket, and headed outside. As she reached the front door she almost turned round and went back to embrace him, but she resisted. To do so would only extend the agony. Better be gone, now, and off on the open road.
The parade-watching crowds had long since vacated Main Street, but there were still plenty of people out and about, shopping for souvenirs, or looking for somewhere to eat. The evening was balmy, the sky still cloudless; the party atmosphere a little subdued by the fiasco of the afternoon but not vanquished altogether.
An earlier Tesla might have brought her Harley to a screeching halt in the middle of Main Street and yelled herself hoarse trying to get people to leave before the Iad came. But she knew better than to waste her breath. They’d shrug, laugh, and turn their backs on her, and in truth she could scarcely blame them. She’d caught her reflection in the bathroom mirror just before she’d left Phoebe’s house. The lean woman she’d admired a few days before—the woman marked by her journey, the woman proud of her scars—was now a bag of bones and despair.
Besides, what use would such warnings be, even if they were attended to? If the Iad was indeed all it had been promised to be, then there was no escape from it. Perhaps these people, celebrating in the shadow of death and snuffed out before they even knew what force had snuffed them, would be thought the lucky ones in time. Gone too quickly to fear or hope. Worst of all, hope.
Though it was a detour to return to the crossroads, she did so, just to see what clues, if any, remained to the mysteries of the afternoon. Though the streets had been given back to traffic, there were very few cars passing in either direction. There was foot traffic however, and plenty of it. People lingering outside the diner, and in front of the crossroads. A few even had their cameras out to immortalize the spot. Of the people Tesla had last seen on their knees here, praying to the visions they were witnessing, there was now no sign. They’d gone home, or been taken.
As she was putting her helmet back on, she heard a shout from the opposite side of the street, and turned to see her nemesis from Kitty’s Diner, Bosley the Righteous, striding towards her.
“What did you do?” he yelled, his face blotchy with rage.
“About what?” she said.
“You had a hand in this abomination,” he said. “I saw you, right in the middle of it.” He halted a couple of yards from her, as though fearful she might infect him with her godlessness. “I know what you’re up to.”
“You want to explain it to me?” she snapped. “And don’t give me some shit about the Devil’s work, Bosley, because you don’t believe that any more than I do. Not really.”
He flinched. And she saw such fear in him, such a profundity of dread that the rage went out of her, drained away from her all at once. “You know what?” she said. “I think I met Jesus this afternoon.” Bosley looked at her warily. “At least, he was walking on water, and he had a lot of scars, so . . . it could have been him, right?” Still Bosley said nothing. “I’m sorry, we didn’t get round to talking about you, but if we had I’d have said He should drop by your place sometime. Have a piece of pie.”
“You’re crazy—” Bosley said.
“You and me both,” Tesla said. “Take care of yourself, Bosley.” And with that she put on her helmet and drove off.
Once she was outside the town limits she gunned the bike, certain that the chief of police and his awestruck deputies would not be watching out for speed freaks tonight. She was right. With an empty road and no law keepers to flag her down she roared on her way as though to meet with Grillo, though the embrace that awaited her at the end of this ride was colder and more permanent than human arms could ever offer.
NINE
I
There would be other years, Dorothy Bullard thought as she sat in a mildly sedated haze beside her living room window. Other festivals, other parades, other chances for things to be perfect. She had a mercifully confused memory of what had happened at the crossroads, but she’d been assured by a number of kind folks that it had not been her fault; no, not at all. She’d been under a lot of pressure, and she’d done a fine job, a wonderful job, and next year, oh next year—
“It’ll be perfect.”
“What did you say, dear?” Maisie had just come in with some fluffy scrambled eggs and a little bran muffin.
“Next year, everything’ll be perfect, you’ll see.”
“Let’s not even think about next year,” Maisie said. “Let’s just take things as they come, shall we?”
For Larry Glodoski, it was not pills that were keeping the memories hazy, it was beer, and plenty of it. He had been propped up at Hamrick’s Bar for two and a half hours now, and he was finally getting to feel a little better. It was not what he’d seen at the crossroads he was dulling with alcohol, it was the pain of their departure. The women on the stairs had given him a glimpse of bliss; he’d thought his heart would crack with loss when they faded and disappeared.
“You want another of those?” Will Hamrick asked him.
“Keep ’em coming.”
“You want to talk about it?”
Larry shook his head. “None of it makes much sense,” he said.
Will passed another bottle down the bar. “I had a guy in here day before yesterday, really spooked me,” he said.
“Like how?”
“It was just after Morton Cobb died. He was saying how it was better that he’d been killed that way, ’cause it was a better story.”
“A better story?”
“Yeah. An’ I was a—what the fuck did he call me?—a disseminator, I think that was it, yeah, a disseminator, and people liked to hear really brutal stories . . . ” He lost his way in the midst of his recollections, and threw up his hands. “I don’t know, he just seemed like a sick sonof-abitch. He had this voice—it was kinda like a hypnotist or something.”
The notion rang a bell. “What did he look like?” Larry asked.
“ ’Bout sixty, maybe. Had a beard.”
“Broad guy? Wearing black?”
“That’s him,” Will said.
“You know him?”
“He was there this afternoon,” Larry said, quickly. “I think he was the one who fucked everything up.”
“Somebody should talk to Jed about him.”
“Jed—” Larry growled, “he’s no damn good to anyone.” He chugged on his beer. “I’m going to talk to some of the band. They were really pissed with what happened this afternoon.”
“Be careful, Larry,” Will advised. “You don’t want Jed on your back for taking the law into your own hands.”
Larry leaned over the bar until he was almost nose to nose with Will. “I don’t give a shit,” he slurred. “Something’s goin’ on in this city, Hamrick, and Jed’s not got a handle on it.”
“And you have?”
Larry dug in his pocket and tossed three tens over the counter. “I will have soon enough,” he said, pushing off from the bar and heading for the door. “I’ll give you a call, tell you when we’re ready for action.”
* * *
Elsewhere in town, a fair appearance of normality had been reestablished. In the town hall the first partners for the Waltz-a-thon were already warming up. At the library annex, which had only been completed two months ago, Jerry Totland, a local author who’d made a nice reputation for himself penning mysteries set in Portland, was reading from his newest opus. In the little Italian restaurant on Blasemont Street there was a line of twenty customers waiting to taste the glories of Neapolitan cuisine.
There were mutterings, of course; rumors and gossip about what had brought the parade to a halt that afternoon, but by and large they simply added a little piquancy to the evening’s exchanges. There was little genuine unease, more a mild amusement, especially among the visitors, that the event had gone so hopelessly awry. It would be a story to dine out on, wouldn’t it, when they got back home? How Everville had overstepped itself and fallen flat on its ambitious face?