by Clive Barker
“My God—” she said, “were you in Palomo Grove?”
“Regrettably no,” Rare Utu told her. “We missed that one.”
“That was the beginning of our discontent with Owen, truth to tell,” Haheh said. “We were growing tired of the same old slaughters. We had an appetite for something more—how shall I put it?”
“Apocalyptic,” Yie prompted.
“So he arranged this?” Tesla said.
“So it seems,” said Haheh. “But his genius has deserted him. This afternoon, for instance. It should have been a triumph, but it just fizzled out. We were very disappointed. That’s why we came after you. We want another Palomo Grove. People driven mad by their own nightmares.”
“Have you no sympathy?” Tesla said.
“Of course,” said Rare Utu. “We suffer a great deal at the sight of your suffering. If we didn’t why would we seek it out?”
“Give me that again,” Tesla said.
“Better to show her,” Haheh said.
“Are you sure that’s wise?” Yie said. His beady eyes had narrowed to slits.
“I trust her,” Haheh replied, descending the shadows and bypassing Yie to stand a few yards from Tesla. As he did so his cocooning robes unfolded. They were more magnificent inside than out, the garments freighted with gems whose colors she could put no name to. Some were the size of fruits—peaches and pears—all overripe, all oozing liquid light.
“This one,” Haheh said, gesturing to a jewel the size of an egg with his vestigial arm, “I got it in Des Moines, watching the most terrible tragedy. Three generations, or was it four—?”
“Four,” Rare Utu said.
“Four generations killed in one night in a gas main explosion. An entire family name, wiped out. Oh, it was pitiful. And this one”—he said, indicating a gem that had more shades of amber than a Key West sunset—“I got in Arkansas, at the execution of a man who’d been wrongly convicted of murder. We were watching him fry, in the knowledge that the true culprit was smothering infants at that very moment. That was hard, very hard. Sometimes I see a milkiness in the blebs, you know, and I think it’s there to remind me of the babes—” While he maundered on, Tesla realized that the finery he’d unfurled was not a garment at all: It was his body. The gems, the blebs as he’d called them, were indeed a kind of fruit, grown from flesh and sorrow. Part remembrance, part decoration, part trophy, they were gorgeous scabs, marking the places where he’d been pierced by feeling.
“I see you’re amazed,” Rare Utu said.
“And revolted, I think,” Yie said.
“A little,” Tesla said.
“Well,” Rare Utu replied appreciatively, “that’s something to savor.” She stared hard at Tesla. “Buddenbaum was always very careful never to let us know what he felt. It’s a consequence of his inversion, I think, the ease with which he conceals himself.”
“Whereas you—” Haheh said.
“You are so naked, Tesla,” Utu said. “Simply being with you is a show unto itself.”
“We could have such times,” Haheh cooed.
“Aren’t you forgetting something?” Tesla said.
“What’s that?”
“When you first met me, you said you knew I was going to die. And as it happens I know for a fact that’s true.”
“Details, details,” Rare Utu replied. “Life is in our gift, Tesla. Why you’ve seen for yourself how Buddenbaum outruns death. He took a bullet to the head this very afternoon, and by now he’ll be nearly mended.”
“We can’t confer immortality upon you,” Haheh said.
“Nor would we want to,” Yie pointed out.
“But we can offer you our extended lifespan. Considerably extended, if we find our relationship productive.”
“So—if I say yes, I get to live, as long as I create experiences for you?”
“Precisely. Make us feel, Tesla Bombeck. Give us stories to wring our hearts.”
While Rare Utu was speaking, two contrary voices raged in Tesla’s head. “Take it!” one yelled. “It’s what you were born to do! This isn’t churning out movies for popcorn-gobbling imbeciles! You’ll be writing life!” The other voice was equally adamant. “It’s grotesque. They’re emotional leeches! Work for them and you throw you humanity to the wind!”
“We need an answer, Tesla,” Haheh said.
“Explain one thing to me,” she said. “Why don’t you just do this yourselves?”
“Because we must not become involved,” Rare Utu replied. “It would dirty us. Taint us.”
“Ruin us,” said Yie.
“I see.”
“Well?” said Haheh. “Do you have an answer?”
Tesla pondered a moment. Then she said, “Yes, I have an answer.”
“What?” said Rare Utu.
She thought a moment longer. “Maybe,” she replied.
When she got back inside the house she found Seth had taken Amy into the living room, and was sitting on the sofa, gently rocking her.
“Did she eat anything?”
“Yeah,” he said quietly. “She’s okay.” He looked down at Amy fondly. “Sweet little face,” he said. “I heard you talking to them out there. What do they want?”
“My services,” Tesla said.
“In place of Owen?” Tesla nodded. “He figured that’s what they were up to.”
“Where is he now?”
“He’d said he’d wait for you at the Nook. It’s a little restaurant off Main Street.”
“Then I shouldn’t keep him waiting any longer,” Tesla said.
Seth got to his feet very slowly, so as not to disturb Amy. “I’ll come with you. I’ll watch over the baby while you deal with Owen.”
“You should know something about Amy—”
“She’s not yours, is she?”
“No. Her mother and the man I thought was her father are dead. And the guy who may be her real father will be coming looking for her.”
“Who is he?”
“His name’s Tommy-Ray McGuire, but he prefers to be called the Death-Boy.” While she was explaining this her eyes went to the cards spread out on the coffee table. “Are these yours?” she asked.
“No, I thought they were yours.” She knew at a glance what they represented, of course. Lightning, cloud, ape, cell: all stations of Quiddity’s cross. “Must be Harry’s,” she said, and sweeping them into a little pack pocketed them and headed for the door.
* * *
II
Two-thirds of the way down the mountain slope, passing through a patch of trees more thinly spaced than elsewhere, the woman on Harry’s back said, “Stop a moment will you?” She surveyed the terrain. “I swear—this is where my daddy was murdered.”
“Was he lynched too?” Raul replied.
“No,” she said. “Shot by a man who thought my daddy was a servant of the Devil.”
“Why’d he think that?”
“It’s a long story, and a bitter one,” the O’Connell woman said. “But I found a way to keep his memory alive.”
“How did you do that?” said Harry.
“His name was Harmon,” she replied, and as they moved on away from the place she told Harry and Raul the whole bitter story. She told it without melodrama and without rancor. It was simply a sorrowful account of her father’s last hours, and of how he had passed his vision of Everville to his daughter.
“I knew it was my duty to build a city, and call it Everville, but it was hard. Towns don’t just spring up because people dream them—well, not in this world, at least. There has to be a reason. A good reason. Maybe there’s a place on a river where it’s easy to cross. Maybe there’s gold in the ground. But my valley just had a piddling little creek, and nobody ever found gold here. So I had to find some other reason for people to come here, and build houses and raise families. That wasn’t easy even at the best of times, and these weren’t the best of times. See, the man who killed my daddy became a preacher in Silverton, and he used the pulpit to sprea
d all kinds of rumors about how there was a hole to Hell right here on Harmon’s Heights, and devils flew out of it at night.
“So, after a couple of years of being almost alone here, I decided to take myself off to Salem, where maybe I’d find some people who hadn’t heard what the preacher Whitney was saying. And one day, I’m talking to this man in a feed store, and I’m telling him about my valley, my sweet valley, and how he should come look at it for himself, and suddenly he digs out a silver dollar and slaps it on the counter and says to me: Show me. And I say to him: It’s quite a ways from here. And he puts his hand on my leg, and starts to pull up my skirt and he says: No, it’s real near.
“Then I realized what he was talking about, and I called him every kind of name under the sun and I took myself off in a high old fury. But as I was walking home, I got to thinking about what he’d said, and I thought maybe the best way to bring men to my valley was first to bring women—”
“Clever,” said Raul.
“Men don’t always follow religion. They don’t always follow common sense. But women, they follow. Women they’ll suffer every kind of privation for. This has been proved, over and over.” She tapped Harry on the shoulder. “You’ve been stupid for women, have you not?”
“It’s been known,” said Harry.
“So, you see, I had my method. I knew how I would bring men to fill up my valley. And once they were there, they’d start to build my daddy’s dream city for me.”
“I get the theory of it,” Raul said. “But how did it work?”
“Well, my father had been given a cross, by a man called Buddenbaum—”
“Buddenbaum?” Harry said. “It can’t be the same man—”
“You’ve heard of him?”
“Heard of him? I shot him this afternoon.”
“Dead?”
“No. He was very much alive when I saw him last. But like I said, it can’t be the same Buddenbaum.”
“Oh I think it could,” Maeve said. “And if it is—oh, if it is—I have some questions I want that bastard to answer.”
* * *
III
Larry Glodoski and his soldiers had staggered out of Hamrick’s Bar feeling ready to take on anything that crossed their path. They had guns, they had God, and they could all whistle Sousa: What more did an army need?
The civilian population was not so sanguine, however. A lot of people—particularly the tourists—had decided that whatever was happening on the mountain, they’d prefer to see it on tomorrow’s news than experience it in the flesh, and they were beating a hasty and disorderly retreat. More than once, as the men made their way down Main Street, they had to step aside to let a carload of vacationers careen by.
“Cowards!” Waits yelled after one such vehicle had almost mounted the sidewalk to avoid them.
“Let them go,” Glodoski slurred. “We don’t need bystanders. They’ll only get in the way.”
“You know what?” Reidlinger said, seeing a sobbing woman bundling her kids into a RV, “I’m going to have to leave you guys to it. I’m sorry Larry, but I got kids at home, and if anything happened to them—”
Glodoski gave him the fish-eye. “Okay,” he said. “So what are you waiting for?” Reidlinger started to apologize again, but Glodoski cut him short. “Just go,” he said. “We don’t need you.” Reidlinger made a shamefaced departure. “Anybody else want to go, while the going’s good?” Larry asked.
Alstead cleared his throat, and said, “You know, Larry, we’ve all of us got responsibilities. I mean, maybe we’re better leaving this to the authorities.”
“Are you deserting too?” Glodoski wanted to know.
“No, Larry, I’m just saying—”
Bosley interrupted him. “Well now . . . ” he said, and pointed down the block at the two people coming in their direction. He knew and despised them both. The woman for her foul mouth, the youth at her side for his sodomitic ways.
“These two are dangerous,” he said. “They’re accomplices of Buddenbaum’s.”
“There’s not two of them,” Bill Waits observed, “there’s three. Lundy’s carrying a baby.”
“Stealing children now,” said Bosley. “How low will they stoop?”
“Wasn’t she the one at the crossroads?” Larry said.
“She was.”
“Gentleman, we’ve got work to do,” Larry declared, stepping past Bosley. “I’ll front this. You just keep your eyes open.”
Tesla and Seth had seen the quartet by now, and were crossing the street to avoid them. Glodoski stepped off the sidewalk to intercept them, demanding as he approached, “Whose kid is that?” His inquiry was ignored. “I’m not going to ask again,” he said. “Whose baby have you got there?”
“It’s none of your damn business,” Tesla said.
“What are you going to do with it?” Bosley said, his voice shrill.
“Shut up, Bosley,” Larry said.
“They’re going to murder it!”
“You heard him, Bosley,” said Tesla. “Shut the fuck up.”
Now Bosley overtook Larry, pulling out his gun as he did so. “Put the baby down,” he squealed.
“I said I’d deal with this,” Glodoski snapped.
Bosley ignored him. He strode on towards Tesla, leveling his gun at her as he did so.
“Jesus,” Tesla said. “Haven’t you got anything better to do?” She jabbed her finger in the direction of the Heights. “There’s something coming down that mountain, and you don’t want to be here when it arrives.”
As if to punctuate her warning, the streetlamps began to flicker, and then went out. There were cries of alarm from all directions. “Do we run?” Seth murmured to Tesla.
“We can’t risk it,” she said. “Not with Amy.”
A few lights came back on again, but they were dim and fitful. Bosley, meanwhile, had stepped in to claim the baby from Seth’s arms.
“You’ve got no right to do this,” Seth protested.
“You’re a cocksucker, Lundy,” Alstead said. “That gives us all the right we need.”
Bosley had a grip on the baby now, but Seth refused to relinquish her.
“Alstead!” Bosley hollered, “give me a hand here.”
Alstead didn’t need a second invitation. He came around the back of Seth, and grabbed hold of his arms. Larry, meanwhile, had taken out his own gun and had it leveled at Tesla, to keep her from intervening.
“What’s going on up there?” he said to her, nodding in the direction of the Heights.
“I don’t know. But I do know we’re all in deep shit when it gets here. If you want to do some good why don’t you evacuate the people who need help, instead of baby snatching?”
“She’s got a point, Larry,” said Waits. “There’s a lot of old folks—”
“We’ll get to them!” Glodoski blustered. “I got it all planned.”
Amy began bawling now, as Bosley wrested her from Seth’s arms. “She’s missing your tits, Lundy,” Alstead leered, reaching out to paw his captive’s chest.
Seth responded by jabbing his elbow in Alstead’s belly, hard enough to drive the wind from him. Cursing, Alstead spun Seth around and punched him in the face, twice, three times, solid blows to nose and mouth. Seth stumbled backwards, his legs betraying him, and fell to the ground. Alstead moved in to kick the youth, but Waits held him back.
“C’mon. Enough!”
“Little cocksucker!”
“Leave him alone, for Christ’s sake!” Waits hollered. “We didn’t come out here to beat up kids. Larry—?”
Glodoski glanced over at Waits, and as he did so Tesla ducked beneath his arm and flew at him, intending to disarm him. She failed. There was a brief, ragged struggle—the gun twice discharged into the air—before he caught her a backhanded blow. She reeled before it.
Waits, meanwhile, was hauling the bloodied Seth to his feet, while yelling at Alstead to keep his distance, and Bosley was fumbling for his own gun, which he’d pocketed befo
re snatching the child.
“Tesla—” Seth hollered, “look out!”
She shook the blotches from in front of her eyes in time to see not one but two weapons being leveled at her.
“Run!” Seth told her.
She had a moment only in which to decide, and her instinct carried the day. Before Glodoski or Bosley could get a bead on her she was away, pelting down the block. Behind her she heard Glodoski yelling. Then he fired. The bullet carved a niche in the sidewalk a yard to her right.
“Larry, stop!” Waits was shouting. “Are you crazy?”
Glodoski simply fired again. This time the bullet shattered a store window behind her. She made the corner without a third shot being fired, and glanced round to see that Waits had caught hold of Glodoski and was attempting to wrest the weapon from him. She didn’t wait for the outcome, but darted out of sight and range.
She bitterly regretted losing Seth and Amy, but the encounter had served a purpose Glodoski and his bully-boys would regret. If there was power to be begged, stolen, or borrowed from Buddenbaum then she’d have it, and damn the niceties.
* * *
IV
As Harry, Maeve, and Raul crossed Unger’s Creek the lights in the streets ahead, which had been flickering for a quarter of an hour, gave up completely. The trio halted for a moment, their other senses attenuated in the sudden darkness. There was no comfort to be had from them, however. They heard only panicked cries from the city, and from the thicket and trees silence, as though every nightbird and insect knew what Sapas Humana did not: that death was coming, and the loudest would be found first. As for the other senses, their news was no better. For all the balm of the summer air, it carried that tang Harry had nosed entering the building at Ninth and Thirteenth: rotten fish and smoking spice. It was on the tongue too, tempting the stomach to rebellion.
“They’re coming,” Raul said.
“It had to happen.”
“Will you hurry yourself, then?” Maeve said. “I want to see my city before we all go to Hell.”