She waited. Cold sweat slicked her palms. She was shaking like a girl on her first date. She pressed the buzzer again, miserable in her impatience. Oh God, let it be him, she thought. Let it be…let it be…let it—
Footsteps.
A latch was slipped back.
She saw the doorknob start to turn.
Oh God…let it be him…
The door opened, and a man with sleep-swollen eyes peered around its edge.
“Yes?” he asked.
She couldn’t speak. He was a rugged-looking, handsome man, but he had a froth of curly white hair and he was probably in his mid-sixties. “Can I help you, miss?” Irritation had sharpened his voice.
“Uh…uh…” Her brainwheels were jammed. “Uh…are you…Nick Hudley?”
“Yes.” His brown eyes narrowed, and she saw them tick toward the Smiley Face button.
“I’m…lost,” Mary said. “I’m looking for Muir Road.”
“That way.” He motioned to his right, farther along Overhill, with an uptilting of his chin. “Do I know you?”
“No.” She turned away, began hurrying to the Cherokee.
“Hey!” Hudley called, coming out. He wore pajamas and a green robe with sailboats on it. “Hey, how do you know my name?”
Mary slid behind the wheel, closed the door, and backed onto Overhill Road. Nick Hudley was standing in his yard, and two birds were fighting for dominion in the birdbath. Dogs howled, finding the alarm’s note. Mary drove on, following her star.
A quarter of a mile from Hudley’s house, Muir Road branched to the right. Mary took the curve. Marching toward the hazy ocean were green hills dotted with redwood houses spaced far apart and set back from the winding road. Mary looked for names or numbers on the mailboxes. She came around a long curve where pampas grass grew wild, and she saw the name on a box that had a blue whale painted on it: Cavanaugh.
A crushed-gravel driveway led twenty yards uphill to a redwood house with a balcony looking toward the Pacific. In front of the house was a copper-colored pickup truck. Mary guided the Cherokee up behind the truck and stopped. Drummer had started bawling, upset about something. She looked at the house, her hands clenched on the wheel. She would not know for sure until she knocked at the door. But if he answered, she wanted him to see their son. She put the bag over her shoulder, picked up Drummer, and got out.
It was a pretty, well-kept house. A lot of labor had gone into it. A sundial stood on a pedestal in the yard, and red flowers that looked like shaving brushes grew in beds around it. The air was chilly, a breeze blowing from the distant sea, but the sun warmed Mary’s face and its heat calmed Drummer’s crying. She saw a sign painted on the driver’s door of the pickup: YE OLDE HERITAGE, INC. Below that, in script, were the Cavanaughs’ names and the telephone number.
Mary held the baby tightly, like a dream she feared losing, and she climbed the redwood steps to the front door.
There was a brass door knocker in the shape of an ancient, bearded face. Mary used her fist.
Her guts pulsed with tension, the muscles like iron bands across the back of her neck. Sweat sparkled on her cheeks, and she stared fixedly at the doorknob as Drummer’s hand found her Smiley Face button and plucked at it.
Before she could knock again, she heard the door being unlocked.
It opened, so fast the movement made her jump.
“Hi!” A slim, attractive woman with long, light brown hair and hazel eyes stood there. She smiled, lines bracketing her mouth. “We’ve been looking for you! Come on in!”
“I’m…here to…”
“Right, it’s ready. Come in.” She moved back from the doorway, and Mary Terror stepped across the threshold. The woman closed the door and motioned Mary into a large den that had a vaulted ceiling, a rock fireplace, and a grandfather clock. “Here it is.” The woman, who wore a pink sweatsuit and pale blue jogging shoes, unzipped a satchel that was sitting on the den’s beige sofa. Inside was something in a lustrous wooden frame. “We wanted you to see it before we wrapped it,” the woman explained.
It was a coat of arms, two stone towers on either side of what resembled a half horse, half lion against a field of flames. Across the bottom, in the same ornate handwriting as was on the pickup truck’s door, was scrolled a name: Michelhof.
“The colors came out very well, don’t you think?” the woman asked.
She didn’t know what to say. Obviously the woman—Sandy Cavanaugh, Mary presumed—had been expecting someone to come pick up the coat of arms that morning. “Yes,” Mary decided. “They did.”
“Oh, I’m glad you’re pleased! Of course, the family history’s included in the information packet.” She turned the frame around to show an envelope taped to the back, and Mary caught the glint of her wedding and engagement rings. “Your brother’s going to love this, Mrs. Hunter.”
“I’m sure he will.”
“I’ll get it wrapped for you.” She returned the coat of arms to the satchel and zipped it up. “You know, I have to say I expected an older woman. You sounded older on the phone.”
“Did I?”
“Uh-huh.” The woman looked at Drummer. “What a precious baby! How old?”
“Almost a month.”
“How many children do you have?”
“Just him,” Mary said, and smiled thinly.
“My husband’s a fool for babies. Well, if you’ll make out the check to Ye Olde Heritage, Inc., I’ll go downstairs and get this wrapped. Okay?”
“Okay,” Mary said.
Sandy Cavanaugh left the den. Mary heard a door open momentarily, and the woman’s voice: “Mrs. Hunter’s brought her baby. Go say hello while I wrap this.”
A man cleared his throat. “Is it all right?”
“Yes, she likes it.”
“That’s good,” he said. There was the noise of footsteps descending stairs. Mary felt dizzy, and she placed a hand against the wall in case her knees buckled. A TV set was on somewhere at the back of the house, showing cartoons from the sound of it. Mary limped toward the foyer. Before she could get there, a man suddenly walked around the corner into the room and stopped just short of running into her.
“Hi, Mrs. Hunter,” he said, summoning a smile. He offered his hand. “I’m Keith Cava—”
His smile cracked.
8
Castle on a Cloud
UNDER THE BLUE MORNING sky, an alarm was shrieking in Freestone.
Laura followed the noise. She turned the Cutlass onto a street named Meacham, and found a green and gray police car parked in front of a brick building whose sign brought a gasp from her. A garbage truck was nearby, two men talking to a policeman. One of them pointed along Meacham, in the opposite direction. There were a few other onlookers: a trim elderly couple in sweatsuits, a teenaged girl wearing an MTV jacket, and a young man who wore a Day-Glo orange jersey and skin-tight black bicyclist shorts, his bike leaning on its kickstand as he talked to the girl. Laura could see that the front door of Dean Walker’s foreign car dealership had been shattered, and a second policeman was walking around inside.
Laura stopped the car across the street, got out, and walked to the group of bystanders. “What’s going on?” she asked the young man, the alarm echoing across town.
“Somebody broke in,” he answered. “Just happened about ten minutes ago.”
She nodded, and then she drew the piece of Liberty Motor Lodge notepad paper from her pocket. “Do you know where I can find these men?” She showed him the three names, and the teenage girl looked too.
“This is Mr. Walker’s place,” the young man reminded her.
“I know that. Can you tell me where he lives?”
“He’s got the biggest house on Nautica Point,” the girl said, and she pushed her long, lank hair away from her face. “That’s where.”
“What about the other two?”
“I know Keith. He lives on Muir Road.” The young man pointed toward the northwest. “It’s over that way, maybe five mil
es.”
“Addresses,” Laura urged. “Do you know the addresses?”
They shook their heads. The elderly couple were looking at her, so she moved to them. “I’m trying to find these three men!” she told them. “Can you help me?”
The man peered at the list, looked at her bandaged hand and then into her face. “And who might you be?”
“My name’s Laura Clayborne. Please…it’s very important that I find these men.”
“Is that so? Why?”
She was about to burst into tears. “Would you at least tell me how to get to Muir Road and Nautica Point?”
“Are you from around here?” the man inquired.
“Tommy doesn’t know how to be nice to strangers!” the elderly woman spoke up. “Dear, Muir Road’s off Overhill. The second street that way is Overhill.” She jabbed a finger toward it. “Turn left and keep going about three miles. Muir Road goes off to the right, you can’t miss it.” The alarm suddenly ceased, dogs barking in its wake. “Nautica Point is back the other way, off McGill. Turn right at the caution light and you go eight or nine miles.” She grasped Laura’s hand and angled it so she could look at the piece of paper. “Oh, Nick’s a town councilman! He lives on Overhill. It’s a house with a birdbath in front.”
“Thank you,” Laura said. “Thank you so much!” She turned away and ran to the Cutlass, and she heard the elderly man say, “Why didn’t you just tell her where we live so she can go rob us, too?”
Laura backed up to Parkway and drove toward Overhill. Nick Hudley’s house seemed to be the nearest. She picked up speed, looking for a dark blue Jeep wagon, the automatic pistol on the floorboard under her seat.
Keith Cavanaugh’s mouth worked. Nothing came out.
Mary Terror could find no words either. The baby gurgled happily.
Shock settled between them like a purple haze.
The man who stood before Mary did not wear white robes. He was dressed in a plaid shirt with a button-down collar, a charcoal gray sweater with a little red polo player on the breast, and khaki pants. On his feet were scuffed loafers instead of Birkenstocks. His hair was more gray than golden, and it didn’t flow down to his shoulders. There wasn’t enough of it to cover his scalp. His face—ah, there was the treachery of time—was still Lord Jack’s, but grown softer, shaved beardless, loose at the jowls. A padding of fat encircled his waist, a little mound of it bulging his sweater at the belly.
But his eyes…those blue-crystal, cunning, beautiful eyes…
Lord Jack was still behind them, deep in that man who called himself Keith Cavanaugh and made coats of arms in lustrous frames.
“Jesus,” he whispered, his face bleached of blood.
“Jack?” Mary took a step forward. He retreated two. There were tears in her eyes, her flesh and soul fevered. “I brought you…” She lifted Drummer toward him, like a holy offering. “I brought you our son.”
His back met the wall, his mouth opening in a stunned gasp.
“Take him,” Mary said. “Take him. He belongs to us now.”
The telephone rang. From downstairs, the woman who did not know her husband’s true name called, “Jenny, would you get that?”
“Okay!” the voice of a little girl replied. The phone stopped ringing. The noise of TV cartoons went on.
“Take him,” Mary urged. Tears streaked down her cheeks, ruining her makeup.
“Daddy, it’s Mrs. Hunter!” the little girl said. “She can’t come until this afternoon!”
Three heartbeats passed. Then, from downstairs: “Keith?”
“Take him,” Mary whispered. “Take him. Take me, Jack. Please…” A sob welled up like a groan, because she could see that her one true love, her savior, her reason for living and the man who had caressed her in her dreams and beckoned her across three thousand miles, had wet his pants. “We’re together now,” she said. “Like we used to be, only more groovy because we’ve got Drummer. He’s ours, Jack. I took him for us.”
He slid away from her, stumbled in his retreat, and almost went down. Mary limped after him, through the foyer and toward a hallway. “I did it all for us, Jack. See? I did it so we can be together like we used to—”
“You’re crazy,” he said, his voice strangled. “Oh my God…you…stole that baby…for me?”
“For you.” Her heart was growing wings again. “Because I love you sooooo much.”
“No. No.” He shook his head. Jack had seen the story on the newscasts and in the papers, had followed its progress until more important matters had pushed it from the lead position. He had seen all the old pictures of the Storm Front, all the faces young in their years and ancient in their passions. He had relived those days a thousand times, and now the past had come through his door carrying a kidnapped infant. “Oh God, no! You were always dumb, Mary…but I didn’t know you were out of your mind!”
Always dumb, he’d said. Out of your mind.
“I…did it all for us…”
“GET AWAY FROM ME!” he shouted. Red flared in his pudgy cheeks. “GET AWAY FROM ME, GODDAMN YOU!”
Sandy Cavanaugh came through a doorway and stopped when she saw the big woman holding her baby out to Keith. He looked at her and yelled, “Get out! Get Jenny and get out! She’s crazy!” A pretty girl maybe ten or eleven years old, her hair blond and her eyes bright blue, peered into the corridor next to her mother. “Get out!” Jack Gardiner shouted again, and the woman grabbed up their child and ran toward the back of the house.
“Jack?” Mary Terror’s voice had a broken sound, the tears streaming from her eyes and all but blinding her. You were always dumb, he’d said. “I love you.”
“YOU CRAZY BITCH!” Spittle spewed from his mouth and hit both her and Drummer in their faces. “YOU’RE RUINING EVERYTHING!”
“Police!” Mary heard the woman cry out on the telephone. “Operator, get me the police!”
“Take him,” Mary urged. “Please…take our baby.”
“That’s all over!” he shouted. “It was a game! A play! I was so high on acid all the time I didn’t even know what I was doing! We all were!” Realization hit him, and rocked his head back. “My God…you mean…you still believe?”
“My…life…was yours,” Mary whispered. “It is yours!”
“Police? This is…this is…Sandy Cavanaugh! We’ve got…somebody’s in our house!”
“I don’t want you!” he said. “I don’t want that baby! That was a long time ago, and it’s all over and gone!”
Mary stood very still. Drummer was crying, too. Jack pressed his back against the wall in front of her, his hands up as if to ward off something filthy.
She saw him, in that awful moment.
There had never been a Lord Jack. There had been only a puppet master, pulling heartstrings and triggers. Lord Jack had been a fiction; before her stood the real Jack Gardiner, a trembling, terrified bag of guts and blood. His power had always been a lie, a deft juggling of counterculture slogans, acid dreams, and war games. He had lost the faith because he had had no faith to lose. He had sewn the Storm Front together with deceitful hands, built towers of clay and painted them as stone, merged horses with lions, called them freedom fighters, and thrown them to the flames. He had created a coat of many arms whose purpose was to clothe himself in the threads of glory. And now he stood there in the uniform of the Mindfuck State, while Gary and Akitta and Janette and CinCin and all the rest of the faithful were ghosts. He was allowing a woman who knew nothing of fire and torment to call the pigs. And Mary knew why. It crushed her soul, but she knew. He loved the woman and the child.
Lord Jack was dead.
Jack Gardiner was about to die.
She would save him from the pigs as her last act of love.
She held Drummer in the crook of one arm, and she drew the revolver from her shoulder bag and aimed it at point-blank range.
Jack jammed himself into a corner. Next to him on the wall there was a framed coat of arms: a castle on a cloud, bordered by
stags and swords. Beneath it was the name Cavanaugh.
Mary gritted her teeth, her eyes dark with death. Jack made a whimpering sound, like a whipped dog.
She pulled the trigger.
The noise was terrible in the hallway. Sandy Cavanaugh screamed. Mary fired a second time. Then a third shot rang out, all the rich red love gushing from the punctured body as Jack lay crumpled and twitching. Mary pressed the barrel against his balding scalp and delivered a fourth bullet that burst his head open and flung brains all over the wall and her sweater. Blood and tissue flecked her cheeks and clung to the Smiley Face.
Two bullets left. The woman and the child.
She started after them, but paused in the doorway.
Two bullets. For a woman and child. But not the ones who cowered and cried in that room. And not in this house where the pigs would leer and pick at the corpses like hunters with big-game trophies.
As Mary limped to the front door, she passed God skulking in a corner. “You know where,” he said under his floppy-brimmed hat, and she answered, “Yes.”
She left the house with Drummer, the two of them against the world. She got into the Cherokee and reached for her roadmap as she backed along the driveway in a storm of gravel.
Her finger marked the route and the place. It wasn’t far, maybe twenty miles along the coast road. She knew the way. She wondered if Jack had ever gone there, to sit and dream of yesterday.
No, she decided. He never had.
A police car, its lights flashing, passed her as she turned onto Overhill. It took the curve to Muir Road and kept going. She drove on, heading home.
The door opened, and a white-haired man in a green robe with sailboats on it said, “Yes?” as if he resented the intrusion.
“Nick Hudley?” Laura asked, her nerves jangling.
“I am. Who are you?”
“My name is Laura Clayborne.” She searched his face. He was too old to be Jack Gardiner. No, this wasn’t him. “Have you seen a woman—a big woman, stands about six feet tall—with a baby? She might’ve been driving a—”
The Monster Novels: Stinger, the Wolf's Hour, and Mine Page 162