by Ray Garton
“It’s standard procedure here,” Hester told him smilingly. “You’re both going to be doing a lot of studying, and you can’t possibly study on the same level, so you’ll be separated. Then you’ll see him whenever you like.”
“But … couldn’t I at least see him for a little while each day?” Mark asked hopefully.
“Not during the initial courses. It’s a very concentrated period of study and training. You’ll see what I mean when you begin. You won’t have time to think about anything but your work. But when you’re done, you’ll be glad because you’ll be a different person. A completely different person.”
Mark was uncomfortable with the separation, but he trusted Hester. He had to; he’d left behind everything to go with her and immerse himself and his son in the spiritual belief that he felt was the final truth. Mark thought of people he’d known in the past who had been converted to Christianity; their lives had gone through drastic, and quite sudden changes, which made perfect sense. So why shouldn’t his life go through some changes? It made perfect sense … didn’t it?
And as Mark and Nathan were initiated into the Universal Enlightened Alliance, Lizzie Murphy was spending the better part of her nights with eyes open and mind alert. It wasn’t just because she was afraid of having the nightmare again—although she admitted to herself quite readily that was certainly part of it—but because she was not tired. By the time she got to bed lately, she felt like she’d just drunk a whole pot of coffee—and not her usual decaf.
Instead of sleeping, Lizzie would sit up in bed, sip tea, read her Bible and pray. Eventually, she would fall asleep for a few hours, but when she awoke, she would feel refreshed, as if she’d gotten a full night’s sleep. She would be able to go about her work at the shelter without feeling tired. In fact, odd as it seemed, she’d been feeling better than usual, more energetic and somehow … cleaner.
Then, at night, she would go to bed and, once again, spend hours sitting up, reading her bible and praying.
It was as if she were being compelled to study for a test. Perhaps it was more appropriate to say that she was in training. Yes … she liked that idea: in training. She was getting in shape, not physically but emotionally. It was her soul, not her body, that needed to be fit, because the battle that was coming would not be a physical one.
And Lizzie Dayton had no doubt in her mind that there would be a battle.
TWO
GROVER
1.
Bill Coogan sat up in his bed, tangled in sweat-dampened sheets, and tried to drag himself up from sleep, but the nightmare that had jolted him off his pillow clutched at him tenaciously, sank its thorny claws into the gelatinous tissue of his brain, and pulled down hard and he swung his legs off the bed and stood, gasping for breath as he staggered toward his bedroom window to scream for—
—what?
He couldn’t remember, but it was important, desperately urgent; he could feel that even as the nightmare dispersed in dying ripples from his memory.
Screaming. There had been screaming, he remembered that. It was the first time he could remember anything from the nightmare and he’d been having it every night for weeks. He knew it was the same each night even though he remembered none of it, because it held onto him when he woke, pulling, trying to drag him back to its center, and it always left him with the same empty feeling, as if he’d been sucked hollow and hung by his neck in a hot dry wind. The feeling usually left him after an hour or so, but Coogan suspected that today, it would stick with him awhile.
The screaming would, anyway, because the voices had been familiar ones. Dear ones.
Putting his big hands on the sill, Coogan pressed his sweaty forehead to the cool windowpane, closed his eyes tightly and whispered, “Gettin’ too old for these damned nightmares.”
Daylight was spreading in the sky, glowing on the undersides of a few white summer clouds that hovered like fat puffs of whipped cream high above the tall pines. It was going to be a warm clear day, and a busy one. The Fourth of July tourists would start pulling into town today. A few early birds had come in yesterday to beat the rush. In the winter, the town was overrun with skiers, and during this week every summer the area was flooded with partiers. Normally, they would come in their campers and trailers and motor homes and fill the hotels and motels and bed-and-breakfasts.
This year, however, would be different because along with the Independence Day crowd would come the followers of Hester Thorne to attend the New World Festival. This would be bigger than most Alliance events; people were coming from all over the country—even from other countries—for this one. It was going to be busier and more crowded than ever … so crowded, in fact, that Coogan expected more tempers to rise than spirits.
Coogan had no complaints. Like all of Grover, he thrived on the business of outsiders. He sold them gas and snacks and cigarettes; he gave them directions and answered their questions about the area. In fact, he supposed his voice would be hoarse by the time the partiers and festival goers left.
Some, though, would not leave. Some might stay because they found Grover to be a quaint and inviting little town and they might imagine their lives to be simpler and more serene if they settled down there with visions of Mayberry and Currier and Ives winters in their minds. Those people were few and far between and didn’t stay long; if the boredom didn’t run them out first, the icy-cold winter would. No, the reason that usually kept them in Grover was just outside of town in a big white castle of a hotel: the Universal Enlightened Alliance. Coogan couldn’t figure for the life of him what it was about it that made some of them stay. There were more each year, and those who didn’t give in to the temptation right away sometimes came back later, with their bags packed. Sometimes an entire family, sometimes a single person passing through. And sometimes, a husband or a wife would come back alone and leave the other behind. Something about it grabbed them, embraced them, and changed them.
When Hester Thorne came to Grover and started the Alliance, Coogan paid her no attention. He saw her as the purveyor of just another crackpot philosophy. But when she began to get statewide, then national attention, and when she began to appear on television and obtained the endorsement of Sheila Bennett—someone he’d always admired—Coogan felt he had to cock an ear and listen to what Hester Thorne had to say.
He was not a religious man, Bill Coogan. Oh, he and his wife used to go to church before she died, but they did not go there because they thought the church was their end-all answer. They went to be with others who had feelings similar to theirs and because Sunday was just about the dullest day of the week in Grover.
They believed in god and they put great stock in the bible as a source of good sense; but to the Coogans, organized religion was just another man-made institution that had countless branches, each of which interpreted the bible in such a way as to back its own particular theory. It worked for some, they granted that much, but not for them. Coogan was saddened to see, as he grew older, that many of those for whom religion did not work were rejecting god because of it, rejecting the very possibility of his existence.
He condemned none of them because the world was nothing if not a flurry of confusion; he even looked into some of the various new churches with curiosity and an open mind. But to Bill Coogan, they ultimately made no sense, because they all turned out to be the invention of leaders just as confused and desperate as their followers or, at their worst, the invention of leaders out to make a quick and easy buck.
Of them all, the Universal Enlightened Alliance—and the so-called New Age movement in general—was the most confusing. And the most disturbing. After he’d examined its beliefs as closely as he could, it seemed to him to have no focus, no center …
… except self. To Coogan, that was unsettling.
As if the Alliance itself were not disturbing enough, it had embraced, like so many other people, his daughter. Now he almost wished tha
t she’d gone to the city like she’d planned, just taken the kids and moved into some hellhole apartment with a dozen locks on the door and done whatever it was she thought she’d be able to do better in San Francisco than in Grover.
As Paul Kragen, a writer for the Grover Sentinel, had written several weeks ago in one of his scathing articles about the Alliance, “What it comes down to is this: the Alliance is hip and therefore it is big, and these days, anything that is big only gets bigger, because it is hip.” Paul made no secret of his feelings about the Alliance and wrote about them often, so often that no one seemed to pay him any attention anymore. He was right, but Coogan sometimes questioned the man’s judgment in being right so loudly, especially with the Alliance getting bigger all the time. …
Coogan walked back to his bedside, round and white-skinned in nothing but a baggy pair of boxers; his bones ached and his arthritic fingers threatened mutiny as he tried to fish a Camel out of its pack. He stuck it beneath his walrus-like mustache and lit it with an old chrome lighter dulled with age and speckled with dings. His lungs went through their usual morning convulsions and hacked and wheezed as he slipped on his old brown terrycloth robe and his wire-rim glasses, then shuffled barefoot through the cramped bedroom, down the hall and into the kitchen. He put on some coffee, put a couple eggs in a pot of water on the stove, then went through the curtained doorway in the living room to the store in front. He turned on the pumps and flipped the switch that started the Chevron sign rotating outside, coughing and harrumphing all the way, the Camel dangling from the corner of his mouth. He went to the side window and looked out at the town.
Coogan’s Fuel Stop was perched atop an incline on Grover Street, the main thoroughfare, and the town was nestled below. New sunlight glared off some of the windows and Coogan could see a couple people ambling into the Lemurian Diner. It was named after the little people who supposedly lived inside Mount Shasta; the owner, Chelsea Darmont, a round little widow who’d read too many of those Tolkien books, had decorated the place with paintings of the little folks she claimed to have seen more than a few times. They were her own paintings, of course. She had a table at the crafts fair every spring, selling little Lemurian figurines made of clay and Lemurians painted on everything from velvet to tree bark. She’d sell a couple items with a good turnout, but usually didn’t move much at all.
The sidewalk on that side of the street was still wooden. Back in seventy-nine, the town fathers had decided to replace the old wooden sidewalks with concrete, but after completing one side of the street, a lot of people began complaining that the new walk looked too modern for the old town, that they were tearing up the town’s roots and should let it be. If tourists wanted to see concrete sidewalks, the citizens protested, they could stay in the city; they came to Grover to see old red-brick buildings—like the town hall and the Methodist church—and soda fountains with marble counters and the Swiss-style storefronts and, dammit-all wooden sidewalks. At a town council meeting, Wilma Jeeter, who was then Grover’s oldest citizen—she turned ninety-four that year—had stood from her wheelchair in the middle of the sheriff’s speech supporting the new sidewalks and, shaking a gnarled fist in the air, had shouted in a surprisingly strong voice, “Next thing you know, you’ll wanna level the mountain and put in a goddamned shopping mall!” The roaring ovation that followed was the last sound Wilma ever heard; she plopped back into her wheelchair and promptly stopped breathing, fist still clenched.
The parking lot of the Mountain Motor Inn on the far side of town was full and a few travelers were loading suitcases and garment bags back into their cars. They would have breakfast at the diner, then come up to Coogan’s to fill their tank before they started out for wherever they were going.
“And if you don’t get the lead outta your ass, old man,” Coogan muttered around his cigarette, jarring a long finger of ash from the tip, “you’re gonna lose their business.” He slipped his hands into the pockets of his robe and focused his eyes on his own hazy reflection in the windowpane.
His silver hair, yellowed on the tips from nicotine, was still full on the sides and in back and was tangled from a night’s sleep, but only a thin tuft remained on top. A film of perspiration still glistened on his creased forehead. The ghost of the nightmare still lingered in his eyes; it stayed with him longer each morning as the weeks passed, even though it was little more than a fog in his memory. The details weren’t there, but the feeling was … the feeling that something was wrong, that someone was in trouble, or would be soon.
He thought of his little granddaughter, Katie, as he had at that very moment the previous morning, and the morning before that, and Bill Coogan closed his eyes, plucked the cigarette from his lips and exhaled smoke.
“Oh, please, god,” he breathed as he walked back through the store, “let me be senile. …”
The bell over the door was seldom silent that morning and Coogan had no time to pay attention to the brittle ache in his knuckles and wrists. A few regulars dropped in after breakfast—Wally Schumacher, Amos Haas, Chuck “Flash” Gordon—and stood around the register drinking coffee from Styrofoam cups, smoking cigarettes, and talking about the upcoming Independence Day dance and spaghetti feed. Coogan nodded and said “uh-huh” at all the appropriate times, dividing his attention between the men, the customers, and the gas pumps, which he had to clear after each sale. But his mind was on none of it.
He was thinking about little Katie. He hadn’t seen her in—what was it, a week, now? Two weeks? Paula used to come in nearly every day, usually for no more than a few minutes, but at least she’d come. Better yet, she’d bring Katie with her. She’d bring Jake, too—Katie’s nine-year-old brother—but he wasn’t too fond of his grandpa, not like little Katie; he was quiet, fidgeted a lot, and gave Coogan the feeling he couldn’t wait to get away from this fat old man. It didn’t bother Coogan, mostly because what Jake lacked in affection and respect, Katie made up for twice over. But he hadn’t seen her in …
… how long?
That, he was almost certain—
—Dead certain, he thought, you just don’t want to admit it—
—was the cause of his anxiety, perhaps even the root of his nightmares. But—and this irked him—he didn’t know why. Paula came in less often now, hardly ever, really; she was usually alone, sometimes with Jake, but never with Katie. Worse yet, she seemed to skirt any questions Coogan asked about his granddaughter.
A stunning young woman—blond, tanned, wearing short denim cut-offs and a T-shirt with the bottom half torn off—came in, bought a bag of Doritos and a six-pack of Coors and left without saying a word or tossing so much as a glance at the three old men standing around the end of the counter sipping coffee and staring at her as if they hadn’t seen a woman in years. As they watched her leave, Coogan noticed their eyes were locked onto the firm half-moons of flesh below the frayed edge of the cut-offs; even after she was out the glass door, they watched her.
A few moments after the bell had stopped jangling, Flash smacked his lips and said, “Used to date a girl when I was in school looked like that.”
Wally, still watching her outside as she eased into a red Camaro, said, “Flash, you didn’t stay in school long enough to date nobody,” and, almost simultaneously, Amos, whose stained lower lip bulged with chew, mumbled, “You never said hi to a girl looked like that.”
Smiling, Coogan leaned on the register and watched her himself as she pulled her long dark legs into the car. But his smile shrank when he saw Paula’s blue Ford pick-up pull into the parking lot. He squinted to look through the dirty windshield; she was alone.
“Fellas,” he said, “whatta you say I meet you all later for coffee and a roll at the diner after my boy comes in and takes over?”
They saw her, too, and exchanged nodding glances. Wally patted the counter and said, “Catch you in a while, Billy,” and they filed out the door, their voices mingling as they all spoke at on
ce, as they always did. As they went out, they passed a couple coming in, a man and woman, obviously tourists, probably from the city, judging by their dress.
But Coogan’s eyes looked beyond them at his daughter as she got out of the pick-up.
She’d gotten her mama’s build and face—tiny, thin, with a squarish jaw and big brown eyes—and she used to have her mama’s odd mixture of gentleness and irreverent humor. Not anymore.
Paula looked determined as she slung her purse over her shoulder and pushed through the door. She wore a white camisole that exposed her midriff, a pea-green skirt that fell just below her knees, and sandals.
“Hi, Pop,” she said, smiling. A small cylindrical crystal sparkled on a chain around her neck.
“Hey, baby.” He tried to relax his eyes and loosen the knot in his gut, but could do neither successfully. “Where’s the kids?”
“Home.”
Home was no longer home—the little house she’d moved into with her ex-husband when they were married almost eight years ago—now she and the children lived in a cottage behind the Sleeping Woman. She called it a cottage, anyway. But visitors were not allowed back there, so Coogan had never seen it.
“How’s business?” she asked.
“The Fourth pulls ’em in.”
She put her purse on the counter, leaned over and pecked his cheek, her lips barely touching him. “Looked like you were having a rush when I passed by earlier.”
“Yeah,” he nodded. “You haven’t left those kids alone all day, have you?”
“They’re never alone there, I’ve told you that before.”
“Yeah,” he nodded again. “How’s my little girl?”
“I’m fine, Pop. I need some aspirin.”
Coogan chuckled. “You’re not my little girl no more. Not dressed like that, you ain’t. You’re my little woman. Look mighty pretty today, Paula.”