The Border

by Robert McCammon

  Ethan began to cry, silently. He was lost, even as he guided Olivia onward. He was lost, and somehow…someway…

  …he must find out who and what he was, or die trying.

  TWO.

  THE

  ANT FARM

  ELEVEN.

  EVEN THOUGH THEY SLEPT IN SEPARATE BEDS, SHE KNEW WHEN HE got up. She knew why, without looking at the clock. She heard him draw a long, shuddering breath that spoke volumes. She kept her eyes closed, because she did not want to look at him, did not want him to know she was awake. She hated him. He was on his own.

  The man who was known as Jefferson Jericho walked into the bathroom and closed the door before he turned on the light. His wife, Regina, remained exactly where she was. Maybe she squeezed her eyes shut a little tighter. She was remembering that morning in April, two years ago, when she decided she could take no more of it, not a minute more. He was out sitting in his blue Adirondack chair on the lawn, under the big oak, with his mug of coffee that had GOD IS A HIGH ROLLER imprinted upon it. He drank his coffee black, with a half-spoonful of sugar. As always, he was sitting in that same place where the shadows cooled the Tennessee pasture. Horses pranced for him beyond the fence. She watched him stretch his legs out and grin at the sun and she thought I can’t take this anymore, not a minute, not a second.

  So she left the porch that wound around the big English-styled manor of a house and she went to his office and opened the drawer where he kept his Smith & Wesson .38. She had watched him at his target practice, and she knew where the safety was and how to load the cylinder. She had been born on a farm, had come up the hard way into these riches that now tormented her, and by Christ she could fire a pistol if she had to.

  And now Regina figured she had to.

  With the gun loaded and ready and her yellow silk nightgown flagging around her in the morning’s sweet breeze, she walked off the porch and along the flagstone path that led past the decorative well and the gazebo. She dimly remembered that it was the third day of April and she had some dry cleaning to pick up, but fuck that.

  Today was the day she was going to kill the preacherman.

  The liar. The bastard. The twister of truth until you thought yourself a liar, and that your eyes and ears were no more than broken tools. She hated the way he grinned, hated the way he won everything, hated his luck and his handsomeness and his hand always outstretched to make some wayward young girl into a better Christian. And if she was pretty enough and pliable enough he could show her a glimpse of Heaven, but she had to be a High Roller, just like himself. Had to be a Dreamer and a Dare Taker and all those other buzzing buzz words and names and phrases meant to make people feel more important so they could be controlled just that much more easily.

  Preacherman, Regina thought, and realized she was maybe crazy and maybe a little drunk still from the bourbon binge last night, my loyal husband and lover, companion and fiend of the night…it’s time for you to pack that fucking grin away.

  But most of all she was disappointed and destroyed, and she could not live like this or let him live another day. It was right, maybe, that they went together. The sixteen-year-old girl, the one who had the meth problem and had committed suicide, was the worst. That sad tear-stained piece of notebook paper Regina had found when she’d been gathering his suits for the dry cleaning. Had he wanted her to find that? Had he placed it there in the inner pocket so she would find it and realize how little she meant to him, and that she had better keep her mouth shut or all these High Roller riches would turn into smoke and ashes? And to find out he had been looting those girls and women, the ones who came to him burdened and life-beaten and begging his help? The ones from the drug program, and the unwed mothers, and the abused girls with the bruised eyes and the bleeding hearts that needed love?

  Regina had known that girls who had trouble with their fathers were always looking for love, wherever they could find it. They were starved for it, and they needed to be filled. She knew, because she was one of them. And there grinning at the morning and all he surveyed from his favorite blue Adirondack chair sat the oh-so-handsome and oh-so-holy and oh-how-fucking-fatherly Jefferson Jericho, whose walls were about to fall because his farmgirl wife—older now, in her late thirties, ridden hard and put to bed wet—had suddenly found religion.

  These walls were diseased. They were tainted and ugly, they were riddled with cracks and infested with vile creeping things.

  A bullet would clean things right up. And then Regina would go back into the house, sit at the master’s desk and write the story of why she had done this and every dirty thing the detective agency had told her after their investigation, and at the end she would write down Jefferson’s real name so the world would know how the sins of Leon Kushman had taken him to a slab in the morgue.

  She walked barefoot across the emerald Bermuda grass and came up silently behind him. She saw the vista he was seeing: below the hillock on which the Jericho house sat and beyond the pasture where the horses played was the town. His town, the one he’d envisioned and built. It was bathed this morning in sunlight and its copper-accented roofs glowed like heavenly gold. The town was named—appropriately for the woman who was about to cast the man out—New Eden. It was built to resemble an American town of the 1950s, though hardly anyone remembered what they had looked like anymore; it was a fantasy state of mind, if anything. The houses came in several different styles and sedate colors. They sat on small but expensive lots on streets that made radials all leading to the central, largest and most elaborate building, the Church of the High Rollers. From here, it seemed to Regina that the building was made not of milk-white stone but of milk-white wax, and to her it was worth about as much as a puddle of goo.

  New Eden sat on what had been rolling hills and farmland thirty-six miles south of Nashville, Tennessee. Occasionally an entertainer who had been paid big bucks to embrace the High Roller doctrine came to give a concert on the equally big stage. That usually pulled in more of the artist’s fans. There was a waiting list to get into New Eden as long as a country road. There was even a waiting list to be hired as part of the groundskeeping service or the security patrols. Everybody, it seemed, wanted in through the gilded gates.

  Today, Regina thought, there would be a vacancy in a very high place.

  She started to speak, to say something like You greedy bastard, or I know everything, or I’m not letting you do this any longer, but she decided to let the gun do the talking. As soon as the shot was heard down below, the security men in their golden Segway chariots would be racing up the long curving drive. So she wouldn’t have a lot of time to write her letter and finish herself off. It was time. Time time time…way past time.

  She aimed the revolver at the top of Leon Kushman’s head of thick mink-brown hair and her finger started to squeeze the trigger. Her heart was beating very hard. She wondered if she should shield her face with her other hand, because she didn’t want any of his brains on her. No, no, she decided; she needed both hands to steady the gun.

  Do it, she told herself.

  Yes.

  Now.

  But just as Regina Jericho, the former Regina Clanton, began to put some strength into the trigger pull the sky blew up.

  The noise was not the solemn voice of God speaking out to save the life of Jefferson Jericho. It was more like the ear-splitting blast of a thousand demonic voices shouting at once in harsh and unknown tongues, an explosion at the zenith of a Tower of Babel in Hell, and then it turned into the low dark mutterings of a madman in a basement, speaking in riddles.

  Jefferson had fallen out of his chair. The entire chair had gone over. The noise had made Regina whirl around in time to see a fiery red flash in the sky to the west, maybe twelve thousand feet up over the green fields and rolling pastures. And from the center of this flash, as if making itself whole as it slid out of nothingness, was a huge triangular monster mottled with yellow, black, and brown. Staring at it, transfixed by this scene that froze her with a horror s
he had never known, not even when her father in his Baptist rages locked her in a dark closet while he beat his wife—her mother—with the buckle end of a belt, Regina felt the gun fall from her fingers into the yielding Bermuda grass.

  And Jefferson’s voice rose up, the voice that thousands upon thousands depended on for wisdom, sustenance and wealth. Except now he spoke in what was almost a whimper. He said, “God save us.” Then he first looked into Regina’s face and next saw the gun on the ground. He reached for it with a shaky hand, and when he picked it up he gave her an expression that made her think of a closet door shutting in her face. And click went the lock.

  Now, in her bed in that same English manor house overlooking the same yet terribly changed New Eden, Regina Jericho pressed her hand against her mouth because she wanted to scream. It would be daylight soon; the new gods would make it daylight, except it would be like the light Jefferson had just switched on in the bathroom. It would be a little too bright and a little too blue, and it would offer no real comfort or warmth. But the citizens of New Eden were alive, and they were well taken care of. They were accepted, in the new order of things. And now Regina heard the water running in the bathroom sink, and she knew also that the water was different; it was clean and clear, yes, but it left an oily texture on the skin that could not be toweled or wiped or scrubbed away. The water was running, and Jefferson was splashing his face before he shaved with his electric razor.

  He had told Regina, in one of his hollow-eyed confessions of the thing, that she liked him to be clean-shaven when he arrived. After she called him, and that little tingling began at the back of his neck. Of course no one had any of those fancy razors with four or five blades anymore. Not even a razor with a single blade. There were knives in the kitchen, yes; but when Regina had tried to cut her throat with one last December, it had turned to something as soft as rubber and couldn’t have cut a chunk of melting ice cream. Then it had turned back to a sharp blade again when she’d returned it to the drawer.

  They’re watching us, Jefferson had told her. Always watching. They won’t let us hurt ourselves.

  But why? she’d asked, in one of her panic states. Why? What do they want with us?

  They like us, Jefferson had answered. She likes us.

  And then he’d given the grin that might be a ghost of itself because his soulful dark brown eyes were so haunted, but it was still the grin of a High Roller who wanted always to be on the winning side, and he’d said quietly She likes me. And everything and everyone else is like…a child with an ant farm, I guess. Just watch the ants and see what they do. The ants go round and round and think they’re going somewhere. Think they have freedom. Or whatever that means to an ant. Baby, I think I’m going crazy.

  No, Regina had said, with the fire of hatred and disgust in her eyes. I am not your baby anymore.

  She kept her eyes closed and lay as still as death. It was the only way to keep on living, if this was really life. The citizens of New Eden had no choice. They were all ants, and the ant farm was in its own little box somewhere far away from all that had been known before. Somewhere that made the mind want to stop thinking, because there was no answer to the question of where.

  She heard Jefferson suddenly choke and throw up into the toilet. After a minute or so he flushed it and the fouled artificial water went to…where? He was afraid, she knew. Deathly afraid. If she reached over and touched his bed, she would feel the dampness of the sweat that had leaped from his pores as soon as he had heard—felt—the call. But he would go, because if he did not the pain would start at the back of his neck until it felt as if his skull might shatter. He’d told her this, as if she cared.

  Go on, get dressed, she told him mentally. Get dressed and get the fuck out of here and go to the arms of your ultimate mistress…

  She assumed the thing had arms. She had never asked, and Jefferson had never said. But when he got back—and that might be days, because he said time was messed up in that place beyond knowing—he would be sick again and cry like a little boy curled up in a corner, a little boy in a big man’s skin and suit. Regina would have no sympathy for him. Not an iota, because the real God of this Universe had decided to bring down the house on the High Rollers, and all of New Eden had been cast from the garden in the shadow of the snake.

  Just let me sleep, she thought. Please…God…let me sleep.

  But Regina would not sleep until her husband had emerged from the bathroom, had gotten himself dressed in a dark blue suit, white shirt, and tastefully-patterned tie—which he had a hell of a lot of trouble tying, as usual—and then left the room to go downstairs. He walked heavily in his shiny black wingtips, as if on the way to his own hanging.

  Go to hell, she thought. You deserve it.

  Then he was gone, and she did go back to sleep after a few long minutes of silent weeping, because the ant farm was a cruel, cruel place.

  Jefferson Jericho opened the glass doors that led out to the rear terrace. He walked out upon the terrace and then down the stone steps to the backyard, which seemed to go on forever. Looking up into the dark, he saw no stars. There were never any stars. He continued to walk out further and further across the lawn, his heart racing, his mouth dry, his boyishly handsome face drawn into a tight mask and his teeth gritted so hard they might crack under the pressure. Several already had. His front teeth had broken into jagged edges, but in a few days they were just fine again.

  He kept walking, and waiting for it to happen.

  Then, with a single step, he walked into another world.

  One second he was in the darkness of his own backyard, and the next…

  Tonight it was a bedroom from what might have been a French mansion. It was maybe from around the year 1890 or so, he thought. But he was no student of historical furnishings; it just looked like something from a movie set…French mansion, 1890, white candles of many sizes burning all around, heavy purple drapes at the window, an opulent canopied bed also purple, on the wall a large tapestry of a woman offering an apple to a unicorn, about eight feet above his head a chandelier with a dozen more lighted candles in it. Under his shiny shoes, a thick, red rug, had been thrown down upon a hardwood floor. The walls were made of polished wood and across the room was a single door.

  The summons at the back of his neck was still throbbing a little. His body felt as if it had been stretched and then compressed. His bones ached. His clothes smelled faintly burnt, as did his flesh. At the pit of his stomach was the same queasiness, and he was sweating again. He looked at the drapes that hid the window and wondered what he would see if he moved them aside. The last time, the room had been all-white, futuristic, with pulsing rays of light crisscrossing the ceiling. He wondered if they had somehow captured old movies and were watching them for ideas, or if they were reading minds or if…whatever they were doing, they were very good at creating these elaborate fantasies.

  Jefferson Jericho stood waiting. He decided to take a backward step, to see if he would return from whence he came. He took the step but no, he did not return. God was punishing him big time, he thought. Big time for putting New Eden together in a series of Ponzi schemes. Big time for his calculations and deceptions and desires. If he saw something—or someone—he wanted, he took it. That was his way. And if God had wanted to punish him for that, he thought, then why had God given him the tongue and personality to talk anyone into doing anything he wanted, and why had God given him the will to find an outlet for his raging sexual fevers at every opportunity, and why had God given him this firm body and handsome face that could cause investors to open their wallets without question and teenage virgins to open their legs as if hypnotized by his glowing male persona?

  The thing was, he was good. Good at every damned thing he did. Good at planning, at money management, at public speaking, at persuasion, at sex. Very good at that. Very inventive, and always wanting to experiment on new flesh. And if God was punishing him for all this, then why had God made so many frustrated women who were looking
for the kind of thrills he enjoyed giving? Why had God made so many gullible people who listened, but did not hear, and so gave Jefferson Jericho just the challenge he desired to pick their pockets clean?

  And everything had been so easy. Since the rainy Monday fourteen years ago at the car lot in Little Rock, Arkansas, when the shimmering rainbow had come out and the thirty-year-old Number One Salesman Of The Month Leon Kushman had stared at it from the window in his cramped little office and had a revelation.

  To Hell with selling cars. If a man wants to make himself some real money, he gives the people rainbows.

  What he does is…he creates a religion.

  He rolls the dice for high stakes, and he gets people to believe in the words that flow from his mouth like a torrent of sweet wine.

  I can do that, Leon Kushman decided. Me, the son of a failed furniture salesman who wrecked our family and went out feet first on a week-long alcohol binge in a cheap little motel.

  By God, I can rise above. I can give them rainbows…I can make them high rollers, masters of their own destinies. Well…let’s say they will think of themselves in that way…but isn’t that what a good leader does?

  Yes. Yes. Regina will go for it, and she might have some good ideas too.

  Yes!

  The door across the room slowly opened, like a tease.

  Jefferson Jericho felt the sweat bead on his forehead. He felt a cold shiver travel the length of his spine. He couldn’t help it; his six-foot-two-inch, husky body trembled with fear.

  She had come to play with her toy.

  TWELVE.

  SHE CAME INTO THE ROOM ELEGANTLY, DRESSED IN A GOWN OF black and gold. Tonight she was a brunette…long black hair in curly ringlets, her eyes pale blue under arched brows, her full, lush lips wet with a promising smile. She had been blonde last time, except she had had Asiatic almond-shaped brown eyes and heavy breasts. The time before that…brown hair in a ponytail, tawny flesh, petite, something between a Brazilian beach girl and a California Gidget. He understood that she was trying on different skins just as he might try on different clothes to match his mood. But surely they were watching movies, in some strange theater in the sky, and their inspiration came from the world’s shadowplays.