She produced more tears, a raining volume. They splashed into her glass.
“What the hell is the matter with you?” Childermass said, walking toward her.
“Just crying the blues, I guess.”
“You goddamn Hippy queen. We’ve got a problem here. Get yourself together.”
Granny Sig nodded, then sniveled and sniffed until control and tranquility were restored.
Childermass lifted up his eyes.
“He’s like a young goat up there. Sixty feet off the ground in a howling blizzard. Can anyone get through to him? I’d like a professional opinion, care to take a hack at it? What’s his mental condition? Is he stable or deteriorating?”
“He’s quite insane.”
“Don’t give me the bad news all at once. What do you mean, insane?”
“Haven’t you had a close look at Gwyneth?” Granny Sig said in a fulminating rage. “Don’t you realize what he did to her? Given his disposition and unique abilities, still it took concentration. It was an act of premeditated murder. Those two smashed men were pushed off the roof. He’s turned into a homicidal maniac.”
“Is that treatable? Well, what the hell am I supposed to know! I’m not a psychiatrist. Sane or insane, Robin is still incredibly valuable. I’ll leave it to you to deal with him once we get him in.”
Ken entered the study. “The cars from Shadowdown are here.”
“Where the devil have they been, on the scenic route?”
“Bad roads tonight,” Ken said.
“Get ’em up here,” Childermass said, and Ken withdrew.
On Childermass’s face there was a naked look of anticipation and savage hunger that made Granny Sig feel squeamish and vulnerable, and, when he went all glassy-eyed and groped his aching stump, she wanted to vomit. Didn’t, quite. Childermass’s breath whistled like doom through his teeth.
“Get me a neat Scotch,” he said, eyes on the open door.
He didn’t move or speak after that, just stared at the door, waiting. Granny Sig had to put the glass in his hand. They both heard voices. Then Peter Sandza and Gillian Bellaver were brought into the study by a cadre of tough young MORGs.
Peter wasn’t standing too well on his own. He looked to be in mild shock. One side of his jaw had been burned by the Taser current. His left arm hung badly. But his eyes were steady as he faced Childermass, and he had his other arm protectively around the frightened girl.
Childermass approached them. For the moment all his attention focused on Gillian. He had a smile for her. That was a kindness she hadn’t anticipated; she bit her lip and bowed her head.
Then his eyes slid past her to Peter.
No one else in the room moved or spoke. It was like a wake, for someone who wasn’t quite dead yet. Premature feasting would have been tacky. They all watched Childermass for a clue as to how to behave.
Childermass smiled at Peter too: because his smile was so unexpected it seemed ghastly as a gunshot.
“Welcome back, Ace,” Childermass said. “Maybe you could give us a hand with something.”
Robin was disgruntled. It had all begun to seem pointless to him.
Apparently they didn’t want to play anymore. He hadn’t heard the bullhorn’s urgings for a long time. They’d stopped beaming lights at the roof, trying to illuminate his hideaways. No matter how boldly he exposed himself now, he just couldn’t get anyone’s attention.
And his feet were cold. He hadn’t wanted to think about it, but they were really cold. He couldn’t remember when he’d last felt his toes. Toelessness made him a little clumsy, and clumsiness upset him.
“Rob-in!”
Oh, shit. Now who was that?
He had to do something to keep from being bored, so he conceived the idea of racing from one end of the long L-shaped roof to the other, just to see how fast he could get there. Skipping over dormers and running that risky high pitch, the icy spine of the roof—probably even a squirrel couldn’t do it at night without falling.
Might be fun at that, to fall and fall, float down into a drift for a deep tidy nap. He felt as if he could sleep now, oh really sleep if he—
Later. First he would run. But he had to do something about his feet.
He uncorked the Wild Turkey bottle and drank the last mouthful of bourbon, leaning against a chimney that had been hot earlier, but which now had cooled off. He imagined fires going out one by one down below. They’d had the brilliant idea of trying to freeze him into submission. They wanted him begging at the attic window where he’d had glimpses of faces watching. Let me in, let me in. Like a little kid. I’m thorny. Bullshit. He wasn’t going in yet, and when he did he would pick his own window.
“Robin! Robin!”
Fuck off, mister. Or fall off.
No feeling in his feet, the strangest feeling of all. Robin suppressed a giggle and belched instead.
Probably he shouldn’t have thrown his shoes away, but he never could have made the vertical climb to the roof in a pair of Guccis. The wool socks had protected his feet for a while, even when they became wet and then stiff as chainmail. Now he had to find another way to warm his turned-off toes.
“Robbbbinnnnnn!”
The man’s voice was nearer still, and spookily familiar though distorted by the wind. Wind, shut up! Robin listened. He didn’t hear the man again. Well, right now he didn’t care to be bothered. Keep coming, Robin thought; see what you get. Walk right on by this chimney and step down. Way down.
Robin set the bottle carefully on the slate behind him (might have missed a drop or two), and laboriously peeled the frozen socks from his feet. He unzipped his pants. He pissed jerkily at first, then produced a satisfying flood backed by the nearly full quart of bourbon he’d drunk during the last two hours. Pissed hard on his frozen feet, which he couldn’t distinguish from the pieces of slate he was standing on. Flashlight, its snow-crazed beam just touching him.
When the beam flicked away Robin wedged himself deeper in the waist of the chimney.
“Robin? Where are you? Please answer me!”
I’ll kill you, Robin thought. Don’t think I can’t do it.
The room to which Gillian had been escorted by Granny Sig and Lana, the black-haired girl with the yellow headband and the deadly Taser, was a spacious end bedroom on the third floor. East-west windows and a big north fireplace wall. A fire on the hearth was burning low. Granny Sig turned on lights. Gillian stood shivering.
“O-open the windows,” she begged.
“Lamb, you’re shaking to pieces already,” said Granny Sig.
“He’s up there! Right up there!” Gillian pointed to a corner of the ceiling. “Please open the—”
Granny Sig looked at Lana, who moved her tough little jaw over a wad of gum. Lana shrugged.
“It’s only your ass,” she said. “Freeze it off it you want to.” Gillian snatched at the drapes of the east-facing windows.
Peter slipped and fell to his hands and knees. The steel flashlight he’d tied to his right wrist banged against the slate roof, but the faceplate was unbreakable glass and the light didn’t go out.
Jesus, he thought, sweating inside his clothes despite the cold.
He stood up cautiously, a hand going to the nylon cord looped around his chest and waist. The line to the attic window he had climbed out of minutes ago was taut. He signaled curtly for slack. Just as he got it the wind, reversing abruptly, almost picked him off again. Snow felt like ground glass on his face. He crooked his left arm with difficulty and cleaned his lashes with the gloved back of one hand.
“Robin?”
But maybe the watchers had been mistaken, and hadn’t seen him on this end of the roof after all. Robin could be a hundred and ninety feet away on the other side of the house, crouched in the lee of another chimney, unable to hear him. Certainly he wouldn’t be able to see much better than Peter, and Peter felt nearly blind up here.
Or Robin might have fallen, soundless and unseen, some time ago. In the morning, sun
breaking orange over the vast white fields, they’d find him half-buried in a drift gone hard as rock during the subzero night.
The wind changed again and Peter smelled something unmistakably human: urine.
He brought his light to bear on the big chimney ahead. There was nothing beyond it but the dark and the streaming snow. Nothing in front of the chimney, either. But he moved closer, playing the light back and forth over the several facings of the double-octagon chimney.
Something was reflecting light in the deep dividing niche—it reflected high as lurking eyes. Oh God. He took another step.
Another.
“R-Robin?”
A face emerged warily from deep shadow. He was wedged in there sideways, although the niche scarcely afforded room for an average-sized boy. Peter could see that Robin was far from average. He’d grown tall, taller than his father. Peter doted on the red, snow-encrusted sprawl of curls on the manly forehead. Oh beautiful! Peter sobbed aloud. So familiar a face, yet dauntingly strange. He lowered the light so it wouldn’t blind his son.
“Robin—Robin!”
Robin bared his teeth like a dog. Peter came up short and signaled impatiently for slack in the nylon line. They gave him another two feet. “It’s Dad, Robin.”
Robin remained very still, but his eyes narrowed.
“I know—they told you I was dead. They lied! I’ve spent the last eighteen months looking for you. I never gave up, I—what’s the trouble, Skipper? Don’t you recognize me? Can’t you say hello to your old man?”
He realized, belatedly, how stupid that sounded. Because he was standing behind the flashlight, Robin couldn’t possibly make him out. To Robin’s dazzled eyes he was just a vague shape in the near-dark.
Smiling, Peter turned the light on himself.
“Here I am, Skipper. It’s no joke. I’m not a—”
Robin’s charge took him completely by surprise, but at the perimeter of light he was casting on himself he saw the flash of a bottle aimed at his head and jerked his left shoulder high to take the crippling blow. It ended what little feeling he still had in the length of his arm. Slipping, falling, he clutched at Robin with his right hand and pulled the boy off balance. Then they both stepped off the flat of the roof and onto the slant, which was twelve feet of greased lightning.
They plummeted in a tangle to the gutter shelf and hung there. The two men at the other end of the nylon rope were jerked up against the inside of the attic window by the combined weight of Peter and Robin, and they lost valuable line, which branded their hands smoking hot and deep as the bone.
Outside, Robin went over the edge, hand in hand with Peter. He dangled face-up in the biting wind, eyes wide and a clean, celestial blue in the light from the swinging flashlight, his mouth almost a perfect O of surprise. Peter, with the lower half of his body on the roof and the looped cord strangling him at the waist, tried to reach out with his left hand to reinforce the precarious hold he had on his son.
There was no response at all. His left hand lay cramped and useless beneath him.
“PULL US UP! FOR GOD’S SAKE PULL US UP!” It took all the breath he had, but the wind shrieked louder.
Peter felt a sawing on the line; they slipped another two inches. Robin, still gazing at him in rapt attention, gasped but didn’t struggle.
“Reach up,” Peter said. “With your other hand. Get hold of the shoulder of my parka. Climb up over me. I’m—God—tied down, I can’t fall. Come on, now. Do it. Before I pass out.”
Robin reached up slowly, very slowly. His left hand touched the down-filled parka. He looked deeply into Peter’s eyes. His hand moved on, touched Peter’s face. Tears fell on the back of his hand.
“Oh, Skipper,” Peter mumbled. “Come on; just come on. Grab hold.”
Something joyous broke through the rigidly neutral expression on Robin’s face.
“Ahhhhh—” he said, secure in that moment of vital recognition. “Help me, Commander!”
He smiled.
Then he fell, released by Peter.
Fell down and down, twisting in the air like a cat. He smashed into piled snow and the rocks at the edge of the lake.
The wind prowled over him. Men ran and lifted his body, and there was a dark blot where his head had split open. Peter, hanging head down from the edge of the roof, looked on with somber inquiring eyes, betraying no understanding of the sudden tragedy. His expression of earnest inquiry didn’t change when the one-armed man appeared in the snow to rant and curse him. It didn’t change when the rope squeaked and slackened and he was lowered off the roof. Easier for him to go down than up. He momentarily lost consciousness when his legs swung down and the blood rushed from his head.
Peter was lowered another ten feet. When he lifted his head he saw Gillian’s stunned face at a window. Grief took him by the throat.
“Oh, girl,” he said—or thought he said. “How did it go so wrong?”
Peter wondered if she’d heard him. But he couldn’t bear to go on looking at her. His eyes filmed over and he slumped, his head nodding forward. He swayed in the wind at the end of the crushing rope.
Childermass ran through the bedroom and pulled Gillian away from the window. He leaned out, batting the snow from his eyes.
“Peter! Peter, you son of a bitch!”
Peter’s head was caked with snow. It drifted down his silent, closed face.
“You let him go! I saw it! You killed your own son! Why! Goddamn you, Peter, I know you’re not dead! Give me an answer.”
He seemed to have seriously misjudged Peter for the last time. But then slowly, very slowly, Peter lifted his head until he was staring into Childermass’s furious eyes. Granny Sig, looking on, thought she saw Peter smile. Perhaps not. But the gesture he made was unmistakable. Right hand lifted, rigid index finger extended.
Childermass turned away from the window, seized the nearest MORG agent and said, “Give me your piece.”
“No!” Gillian screamed. She was dragged to the floor before she could place herself between Childermass and Peter.
Childermass was handed a .44 Magnum revolver. Six rounds of high-velocity, hollow-nosed ammunition. Taking up his shooting stance at the window, Childermass blew a great deal of Peter away with the six shots. Set him twirling fiercely in a lull. He had the decency to pull the drapes immediately after.
Lana was sitting on Gillian in order to keep her under control. Gillian’s eyes rolled hysterically as Childermass kneeled beside her.
“Well, I don’t have Robin anymore,” he said. “You’ll have to do.” He threw the hot revolver on the bed and left the room.
Chapter Twenty
The thing that killed was in the mind.
In her dream Gillian opened windows wide as the world and looked out at Peter, who was suspended in a void on a child’s swing. Feet together, pumping rhythmically—successive arcs carried Peter higher and higher. He laughed and waved at her as he swung past the windows. Such good spirits.
/The doll, he called.
Gillian looked reluctantly at the Skipper doll in her hands. She’d always had Skipper, and she didn’t want to share him. But Peter insisted. He had a right to Skipper too.
/Give him to me, Gillian, Peter said on his next slow pass at the windows. /Hand him over. His mood had changed. He wasn’t laughing any more. She knew she’d better do what he said.
All she needed to do was lean out and Peter would swoopingly gather Skipper in his arms. But she couldn’t be brave about the void she faced. Nothingness terrified her. She wanted to close her eyes and hold Skipper at arm’s length for Peter to snatch away. But she had no eyelids. No matter which way she turned her head she was forced to see. Endlessly she went on seeing.
Skipper’s head was in her hands. Skipper hung down dancing within reach of Peter, but Peter missed him. When Peter stretched out backwards, making a second effort to get his hands on Skipper, he lost his seat. He took Skipper down with him, they dwindled in the lonesome void. Gillian at the win
dows, hands outstretched, seeing, seeing. She was cursed with eternal vision. The eye dictated to the mind. It was a strange form of insanity, and the horrors had just begun.
She was still holding Skipper’s head.
It rolled woodenly on her flattened palms, winking and giggling, sticking its tongue out at her. The head rolled up one arm and perched on her shoulder. There it turned into a toucan, a bird with a tyrannical eye and a fierce horn beak that gleamed like polished boots. The toucan picked up an ear and ate it. Gillian tolerated this. Peckishly it dismantled the bones of her head. Then it paused, gloating over the throb of blue uncovered brains. Now this is too much, Gillian thought tearfully. What’s mine is mine. You miserable bird!
She awoke with a quiet shudder, blinking, instantly reassured that she was not doomed to a lidless existence. The mind despised the all-seeing eye, and did its best to shroud reality for the sake of the vulnerable organism. Her dream dissolved slowly. There was a glaze of firelight on the ceiling of the cold room in which she was bedded. She heard someone else breathing, through a stuffy nose, heard the pages of a magazine turning. Gillian moved her head carefully on the pillow, not wanting to rustle the crisp sheets.
The girl with the yellow headband was sitting in a chair near the fire with a magazine in her lap, rubbing her nose on the back of one hand. A high-intensity lamp beamed down on her. Gillian heard a clock ticking and wondered what time it was, and why she wasn’t sleeping. Granny Sig had insisted that she take the capsules that would bomb her out for a day or more. Granny Sig had been kind of tough about it.
But her mind, despite the awful dreams, was sharp and clear. She was wide awake and, she hoped, able to think rationally. She even remembered the name of the girl with the yellow headband. Lana had been a constant companion since Shadowdown.
So if she wasn’t sleeping, then the pills she had swallowed were nothing but sugar.
There was a point to that.
Granny Sig was the only one who seemed to care about her. As far as she knew, Gillian had never met a real transvestite before, although some of her mother’s acquaintances.… She’d always considered transvestites to be woebegone, ridiculous creatures, but Granny Sig was forthright and intelligent and very easy to talk to. They’d spent nearly two hours discussing the tragedy, talking over Robin’s many accomplishments and his ultimate failure to cope with his powers: the powers which she and Robin had in common. It was not difficult then for Gillian to unburden herself. Granny Sig understood.
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