Who Made Stevie Crye?

by Michael Bishop

  Stolid in her chemise, Sister Celestial appeared beside the piano. “Your friend’s taking care of your children, Stevie. They’re all right. That machine’s having you on.”

  “My house is on fire, Sister. My children will burn.” Stevie yanked the inner storm door open and pushed the outer pine-panel door into the cold. Beside Highway 27, the Sister’s winking signboard played its colors across the ebony sheen of the asphalt. “Thank you for listening. I’ve got to go. It’s my kids—my darling kids.”

  She stumbled off the porch and over the buried stepping-stones to the makeshift parking lot where her van awaited.

  “Drive careful!” the Sister shouted after her. “You drive careful ’cause I’m gonna call you, child! I’m gonna call you!”

  XXXIV

  Like some hotshot teen-age drugstore daredevil, Stevie scratched off. She rammed the microbus up the gravel slope to the highway and tore along the gloomy corridor north of Button City. Her heater whined a hollow remonstrance. Her heart winked on and off with the colored bulbs on the Sister’s signboard. In fact, she did not begin to feel that she would survive the five-mile trip to Kudzu Valley, last rinky-dink community on the road to Barclay, until the van swung hard to the left and a curtain of midnight-black foliage obscured the reflection of the signboard in her rearview mirror. Then, there in the inky wilderness, she was alone with her worries.

  Ladybug, Ladybug, fly away home. Your house is on fire, and your children will burn.

  She was the ladybug. What had she said before the Remington relayed the Exceleriter’s upsetting message? “It’ll drive me buggy—absolutely buggy.” Ladybuggy, apparently. Anyway, those were her words, and the Exceleriter—tripewriter, psyche-scriber, demon machine—had echoed them in order to panic her, to add one more cruel fear to the pack already weighing her down. Even fourteen miles away, that modern instrument of torture was still with her, and Stevie could hear it typing YOURHOUSEISONFIREANDYOURCHILDRENWILLBURN, YOURHOUSEISONFIREANDYOURCHILDRENWILLBURN in the lub-dupping syllables of her blood. She could almost see her dead husband’s old family house aflame against the February night, angel wings of incandescence rippling toward the stars, gables collapsing, balusters charring like kitchen matches. In that blue-vermilion inferno, tiny bodies writhed, the burnt-match-stick bodies of her children. . . .

  They’re with Dr. Elsa, Stevie. They’re not at the Crye place, they’re at the Kensingtons’ lakeside bungalow.

  Maybe . . .

  Kudzu Valley was dead. Stevie hated going through this little hamlet. On April 30, 1976, almost two and a half years before Jonestown, Guyana, several elderly residents of Kudzu Valley had committed suicide on the post-office lawn to protest the construction of the Cusseta Dam a mile or two above their town. Few people in the region fully twigged the details of this bizarre incident, but, through anonymous local intermediaries, the Carter administration had urged the state to cancel this vast engineering project and the dam had never been built. Otherwise Stevie would be riding a motor launch over the subaqueous ruins of Kudzu Valley or skirting them in her VW via two or three dike-top causeways.

  As it was, she cruised into the moribund business district at 7:13 P.M. (by the digital display board on the branch office of the Farmers and Merchants Bank) and, about two minutes later (by the lighted face of her own Lady Timex), past the infamous lawn of the red-brick post office, her fear of what she might find in Barclay perplexingly mixed up with her incomplete knowledge of what had once happened here. There were no ghosts on the lawn, thank God, and the people of Kudzu Valley had had the good sense to resist commissioning an abstract bronze statue to commemorate the dramatic self-sacrifice of their saviors. All they had built in the interval was a brand-new city hall, funded to the tune of $162,000 by an Economic Development Administration grant in the palmy days before the election of Reagan.

  Stevie drove past this angular modern building, with its darkened churchlike windows, into a corridor of winter-blasted kudzu; a thousand leafless vines lay tangled at roadside, as if by a band of incompetent electricians. Wilderness was taking over again, the wastes of February. At the strange town’s northern city limits Stevie’s headlights picked out a gigantic red torii, or Shinto gateway, spanning the road—but once through this landmark, her van freed itself of Kudzu Valley’s sinister influence and sped up the mountain’s passing lane like Phaethon’s reckless chariot. Home was only a few miles away.

  Foot to floorboard, Stevie took the curves, dips, and inclines. She met no other traffic, and when she came swinging into Barclay parallel to the naked mound of the railroad tracks, the Temperature & Time clock on her hometown bank said 38° (Fahrenheit) and a split second later 7:24 (P.M.). For some sign of the fire devouring her house and children Stevie looked to her left—over the tall common cornice of the pharmacy, the five-and-dime, and the Barclay Restaurant.

  Nothing; no fire.

  After cornering at the traffic light north of these establishments, she could see her house clearly, a pagodalike shadow fronted by elms and dogwoods. Unless the fire smoldered in the set-apart garage or the canning-bottle boxes in the storm cellar, no part of her property was burning. The Exceleriter, through the Sister’s Remington, had lied.

  Again.

  Oh, but I’m glad it lied, Stevie thought. Not glad, of course, but thankful I didn’t come rushing home to disaster.

  She parked in the unpaved drive near the kitchen and slumped in relief over the steering wheel. Her headlights lit the clutter of garden implements, plywood scraps, broken furniture, paint cans, and storage trunks in the open garage. It wanted cleaning out. She could not even get the microbus in there, and neighborhood dogs sometimes lay down amid the disarray for long winter naps. What the hell? Teddy and Marella were still with the Kensingtons and her house had escaped destruction. Stevie lifted her head and depressed the button controlling the headlights. Immediately the interior of the garage was plunged into darkness, and the chill night air began to refrigerate the van. Time to go in and turn on a space heater.

  As Stevie reached for the door handle, a weird thumping sounded behind her. She twisted about in her seat. The passenger section was empty, and the rear window revealed only the street behind her and the formless shrubs standing sentinel in front of Mrs. Hinman’s screened-in porch. What had she heard? Maybe the sudden contraction of the van’s gasoline tank or a lump of caked-on dirt falling from the chassis to the ground. Nothing more. Stevie turned about and reached again for the door handle.

  This time the thump was louder.

  When she whirled in annoyance to find its cause, a miniature white skull was peering at her through the rear window, its bottomless eyes drinking in her sanity like powerful vacuums. Tiny hands scrabbled at the glass beside the eerie face, while the horizontal slash of its mouth bowed into a threatening rictus. Stunned, Stevie gripped the lapels of her coat and screamed. Inside the bucketlike interior of the microbus, her scream rang and reverberated.

  Instead of dropping to the driveway, however, the ghoul clinging to the rear of the van found handholds and foot purchase and clambered up the window glass to the roof. It was ’Crets, Seaton Benecke’s evil little capuchin.

  Stevie stopped screaming, opened the driver’s door only to slam it shut again, and, after emphatically locking it, leaned away from the window breathing rapidly and holding her eyes tightly closed.

  What do I do now? Sit here until help arrives? Break for the kitchen door? Get out and negotiate? What?

  The capuchin was skittering back and forth above her, dashing from one end of the van to the other. His claws—toenails? fingernails?—sounded like the noise the kids’ guinea pigs had made running across the wire mesh in their cage. That was hardly an intimidating sound. Why was she cowering inside a locked vehicle while a creature less than two-feet-tall did a jig to keep from freezing its furry fanny off? Well, partly because of the way ’Crets looked, partly because she still did not understand how he had managed to travel all the way from Columbus
to Barclay outside her Volkswagen, and partly because he belonged to Seaton Benecke. It might be possible to leap into the yard and brain the imp with a rock, and so escape this ludicrous captivity—but the monkey had arrived here by some supernatural agency, underwritten in a menacing way by the misbehavior of the Exceleriter, and Stevie felt safer in the van. That afternoon she had imagined ’Crets growing to King-Kong proportions in order to dismantle her vehicle, and tonight she could easily imagine the monkey sprouting wings and swooping violently upon her as soon as she opened the door and bolted for the house. ’Crets did not have to obey the petty statutes of empirical reality, for the typewriter in her study had given him a terrifying carte blanche.

  “Come on, Elsa,” Stevie said. “Bring my kids home and get me out of this. My delusions don’t affect you. ’Crets’ll vanish as soon as you get here.”

  Then she remembered what Teddy had said that morning about feeling better about himself. Maybe her delusions had a wider range of application than she wanted to believe. Maybe they grew progressively stronger and more influential. After all, Sister Celestial had seen her Remington operate by itself, apparently at the bidding of Stevie’s Exceleriter; and her acknowledgment of the typewriter’s uncanny behavior represented a breakthrough of sorts—human corroboration that Stevie was not merely hallucinating these episodes. Of course, she had dreamed a couple of episodes that her machine had tried to pass off as genuine.

  “Shit,” she said. (Silly biddies screamed; resolute heroines cursed. She disapproved of her own acquiescence in this convention, but that was the rule nowadays, and Stevie observed it because she was made that way.)

  ’Crets, meanwhile, continued to hold her hostage in the van, skittering, leaping, pausing. The roof pinged and popped but only occasionally bubbled inward at the conclusion of a supercapuchin leap. It was like enduring a manic-depressive hailstorm. Stevie kept wondering about the pads on ’Crets’s feet, if they weren’t totally frozen by now and bruised to boot. If you put your mind to it, you could almost feel sorry for the nefarious hellion.

  Suddenly the monkey’s scampering was interrupted by a deep-throated baying. Cyrano, the Cochrans’ basset hound, stood bandy-legged and crimson-eyed in her drive, his muzzle contorted into a sousaphone bell for the bugling of his bafflement and outrage. He was barking steadily, as he did on winter’s nights when disturbed by a passing stranger or a bout of boredom. The Cochrans seldom seemed to hear him, but to Stevie Cyrano’s mournful baritone always sounded like twelve drunks yodeling in a barrel and she frequently awoke marveling at his stamina. Now he had sighted ’Crets, and if someone—anyone—took note of Cyrano’s baying, her ordeal might soon end.

  On his big splayed feet, the basset trotted to the VW’s rear bumper and then, barking continuously, circled to his left. Cyrano was moving as ’Crets moved, tracking the monkey’s zigzaggy progress across the roof. Stevie could hear the capuchin screeching simian obscenities at the dog. She stared as if hypnotized into the basset hound’s eyes, which were red-rimmed, always bloodshot. The lambent overspill of the arc lamp on the corner made the bottom crescents of Cyrano’s eyes gleam like broken coals. The dog looked insane, possessed. Saliva whipped from his mouth as he blew his built-in sousaphone, and his squat forelegs came off the ground every time he toodled. He was an engine of indefatigable retribution, his bark Great Gabriel’s trump.

  Even ’Crets seemed to think so. The capuchin rappelled on either air or willpower down Stevie’s passenger window, his death’s-head face leering in at her as he shinnied by. A moment later, a streak of silver-white luminosity, the monkey jackrabbited away from the house through a patch of exhausted ground that Ted had once liked to garden. ’Crets’s escape was concealed from Cyrano by the body of the van. Stevie tried to see where the capuchin was going, but he leapt into the shrubbery on the far edge of the lawn.

  What kind of eyesight did Cyrano have? None too good, Stevie feared. He had registered the monkey’s descent from the roof and mistakenly deduced that ’Crets was now inside the vehicle with Stevie. Ferociously snapping his jaws, Cyrano continued to bay at the microbus, and his eyes had the ruthless demented look of a serial killer or a rush-hour commuter. He wanted the monkey, and he had taken the fatuous doggy notion that Stevie was harboring the white-faced specter in the VW. Stevie had never seen the basset hound in such a temper. He was possessed for sure.

  “Enough’s enough.” Stevie tried to open her door.

  Instantly Cyrano hurled his tubular body forward. (He was so long that he reminded Stevie of those hook-and-ladder fire trucks that require a second steering wheel midway along their span.) He was too short to hit the door very high up, but he thudded against its base, drove it back on Stevie’s shoe, and caught the silken flap of his right ear in the jamb. Howling in pain, he pulled his ear free and tumbled away from the Volkswagen even angrier. It was then that Stevie got her shoe loose and pushed the door wide open so that she could extend her hurt foot into the night air. It did not hurt badly, but she was as angry with the basset as he was with the door that had clipped his ear.

  “Damn it, Cyrano. The monkey’s gone. You’re wasting your time. How about letting me limp into the house, okay?”

  But Cyrano was not appeased. Either he held Stevie responsible for his injury or he believed that ’Crets was huddled in the passenger’s seat, for he picked himself up and came yodeling toward the microbus on a dead run. His leap carried him scarcely higher than the door’s metal sill, but Stevie positioned her unhurt foot so that the dog’s nose struck it in the instep. Cyrano gasped, did half a barrel roll, and landed on his side next to the van. He lay stunned for a moment, breathing heavily, and then struggled to his feet again. Once up, he waddled away from Stevie toward his own house, occasionally throwing reproachful looks over his shoulder.

  Stevie climbed out. “Yeah, I know. You save me from that furry vampire, and I kick you in the nose. Come back tomorrow, Cyrano, and I’ll give you some table scraps.”

  Cyrano’s waddle turned into a trot, and he disappeared into the drainage ditch on the other side of the street. A moment later he was a grotesque shadow hitching its way up the Cochrans’ lawn. Well, that was why people let their dogs run loose in small towns—to scare off suspicious organ-grinder monkeys and eat their neighbors’ kids’ pet guinea pigs. The prevention of other folks’ crimes absolved the dogs of their own.

  A cynical thought, maybe, but Stevie felt sorry for that put-upon canine Pavarotti, Meistersinger of her Gelid Midnights. She had bruised his ego as well as his eponymous proboscis.

  Just then, from the little avenue behind the house, Dr. Elsa’s gunmetal-blue Lincoln Continental turned into Stevie’s drive, crunching gravel as its headlights framed her against the clutter of the garage. Not quite in the nick of time. The battle was over. She had won it without the doctor’s or the kids’ frantic aid, and she realized with a shudder of lonely capitulation that they would not be likely to believe her story about ’Crets and Cyrano. It was too outlandish. Nor could she risk telling them about her visit to Sister Celestial on the outskirts of Button City. Even if she said she had gone there to interview the woman for a story, they would upbraid her for using part of her one-day vacation for business purposes.

  The headlights died, and Marella rushed into Stevie’s arms. Teddy was coming toward her, and Dr. Elsa stood beside the Lincoln’s open front door. “You home already?” she asked. “We thought you might stay out scooter-poopin’ till midnight or so.”

  “On a Sunday? In Columbus?”

  Dr. Elsa shrugged. “There’s places, kiddo. You just have to know where they are.”

  “Like Victory Drive? That’s where you get picked up by MPs for trying to pick up soldiers.” She hugged Teddy and asked Dr. Elsa if the kids had behaved that afternoon.

  “They were angels,” said Dr. Elsa seriously. “Sam played pool with them, let them feed the ducks, and took Ted for a little fishing trip on the lake. Around six he built a campfire for a weenie and marshma
llow roast. They had a good time, Stevie, and so did we. They couldn’t’ve been better.”

  “I burnt my finger.” Marella lifted a bandaged finger for her mother to see. “Roasting marshmallows.”

  “It’s nothing,” Dr. Elsa said. “I put a bactericide on it and bandaged it. Just scared her, I reckon. Our only mishap.” She ducked back into the big automobile and rolled down her window. “Got to get home to Sam. Call me this week, Stevie, and we’ll talk.”

  “Thanks, Elsa. You’re a brick.”

  “A brick?” said Marella.

  Dr. Elsa waved off Stevie’s thanks, backed the hearselike Lincoln into the street, and gunned it away from the house toward Alabama Road.

  “A brick?” Marella asked again.

  “A pillar of friendship,” said Stevie, squeezing the girl’s shoulder. “A buttress and a support.” She did not deserve such a friend. Her own contributions to Dr. Elsa were minimal. Shaking off this mild self-criticism, she beamed on Teddy and Marella. Teddy had had a field day, and Little Sister had suffered only a minor finger burn. So much for the soothsaying abilities of the Exceleriter. “You kids glad to be home?”

  “I’ll be gladder when we’re inside,” Teddy said. “It’s cold.”

  “Me, too,” Marella agreed.

  “What would you have done if I hadn’t been here when Dr. Elsa brought you home?” Stevie asked. “I only just got here, you know.”

  Teddy said, “Warmed up the kitchen. We knew you weren’t home because Dr. Elsa called a coupla times. But I said we needed to turn on a heater before you got here, or we’d freeze the rest of the evening. We’d’ve been okay. We really would.”