Zod Wallop

by William Browning Spencer

  She filled a plastic tumbler with tap water and counted the pills. Ten. The last of the Ecknazine. She threw the lot of them into her mouth, washing them down with the water, and then returned to her bedroom where she lay down on the wide, canopied bed.

  All right, she thought, closing her eyes. Where is my son?

  Jeanne sat up in the bed and clicked the light on. Mark was leaning over her. He had the handcuffs again, and the playful smirk that accompanied these games. He was naked.

  “Hey babe. You are under arrest,” he said. “House arrest.”

  He had taken a shower and gargled something minty, but the primary effluvia was beer, and not the summer bouquet of a cold one being popped at a barbecue, but rather the dank, gut-puking reek of a cheap roadhouse.

  Jeanne deftly slid out of bed. “Gotta go to the bathroom,” she said.

  He caught her ankle; she wasn’t expecting it, and she fell forward instantly, the side of her face banging the bare carpet hard, her left hand coming up reflexively but not fast enough, twisting her wrist.

  He helped her to her feet. “Sorry,” he said, wobbling slightly, the handcuffs stupidly waving in his hand, his lips puffed out in an expression of remorse that never seemed genuine, something learned as a child and dragged into adulthood.

  She stared at him, rubbed the flame of her wrist, said okay or was about to say okay or it’s all right or any of the hundred things that came in the wake of Mark’s drunken moments. She said nothing, walked quickly by him and into the bathroom.

  She sat on the toilet, urinated, considered crying but didn’t, discovered, indeed, that no profound emotion was under the surface of her disgust.

  She went to the sink and splashed water in her face. There was a small thread of blood she could taste with her tongue, but she could detect no real damage. She thought that she might even have sex with Mark, sex being, after all, a pleasurable way of passing time. And time had to be passed.

  Pass that time, please.

  Her reflection in the mirror showed a pale woman with tightly curled dark hair and large eyes, a woman who looked like she had intended to say something but had decided to let it go, had decided, in fact, that words were worthless, really. This woman turned away now, casting a cold, sad eye on the bathroom as though biding it farewell forever. And before Jeanne could do more than jerk back, startled by her reflection’s desertion, a hotel shimmered into being.

  It was a large, pink hotel on the edge of the ocean, and she knew it immediately for the hotel of the enigmatic postcard. Jeanne watched as the doors to the hotel swung open and a tiny figure emerged. The figure paused for a moment and then skipped down the steps and ran across the dunes toward the water.

  Amy. She was too far away for any feature to clearly identify her, but Jeanne knew it was Amy. She wore Amy’s green bathing suit. She ran, barefoot and wild, through the tide with Amy’s style, an off balance, clownish run. Her flying hair was Amy’s tangled summer mane.

  Amy.

  As Jeanne watched, the girl halted abruptly and looked up at the hotel. The stillness of her attitude suggested she was listening. The call must have come again. Amy turned and ran back toward the hotel, water exploding brightly under her feet.

  Jeanne gasped. Amy, head down, racing full tilt, was rapidly closing the distance between herself and the hotel. Only the hotel had undergone a transformation.

  The hotel was now bloodred and black, a mountain of sharp needle-spires and crenelated parapets and blind, ancient towers. The seagulls that had wheeled above the hotel had suffered a corresponding change, and now swooped through the air in batlike arcs, their long necks stretching and turning as they maintained their baleful scrutiny of the ground.

  Jeanne recognized the world. She had never liked the book, perhaps because Harry had written it after Amy’s death and she knew it lacked real joy, but she had read it through. She recognized the castle and these airborne, fire-spitting serpents. The castle was more horrible, shimmering in the mirror, than it had ever been in the gaily drawn children’s book. It was palpably evil, nothing whimsical here, the kind of nightmare that would strengthen a suicide’s resolve.

  Amy took the steps two at a time and ran toward the black, yawning doors.

  “No!” Jeanne gasped. Too late. Amy leapt into the darkness and the vast doors swung shut.

  Jeanne touched the mirror. And it was empty, a silvery surface that reflected nothing, not even her hand, nothing, a mirror that had gone blind somehow.

  Jeanne turned away and stumbled out into the bedroom. She marched to the dresser, opened a drawer, and found a blouse.

  “Hey,” Mark said. He grabbed her from behind. “It’s the dead of night. What are you getting dressed for?”

  Jeanne struggled out of his grip, turned, holding the blouse. “I’ve got to get to the airport. I’ve— I can’t explain it, but I’ve got to go. I’ll call.”

  “Fuck that.” His voice was suddenly cold, strange, something he’d been hiding. He hit her, a quick blow that caught the side of her face, sent her back against the dresser then tumbling forward. He caught her by the hair, dragged her to the bed.

  He held her arms, pined under his knees.

  She fought to get out from under him, considered sinking her teeth into his bare thigh. He spoke again. “I’m sorry, okay. I got a little out of control there, because”—she hated the way his voice shifted into a whine—”because there’s just no making you happy. It was an accident, okay. I didn’t mean to trip you, okay. But you never give, not even a little, you don’t try to understand me.”

  The stale beer smell seemed the perfect olfactory accompaniment to self-pity.

  “Okay,” Jeanne said. “Let’s just lie here for a little while, let’s just rest.” She realized he thought she had wanted to leave because she was mad at him for tripping her.

  No, actually (she could say) I was inured to escalating violence. It was something else, a vision.

  “Let’s just lie here quietly for a moment, okay. A little time out, okay?”

  “Okay. Sure.”

  He got off her arms and lay beside her. “I don’t ever mean to hurt you, babe. You know that.”

  She lay quietly on her side, waiting, watching the bedside clock, listening to his breathing. Five after four. It took hours for the clock to read four-twenty.

  The weight of the beer had pulled Mark down into sleep. She rolled away from his weight and softly left the bed.

  She was tying her tennis shoes when she heard his voice. “Going somewhere, sweetheart? Thought you could cruise while I snooze?”

  She looked up. “I’ve got to go, Mark. The phone’s right there. If you get lonesome, you can call a friend.”

  “You’re not going anywhere,” he said and he started to come out of the bed in a rush and his left arm straightened and he screamed. He blinked stupidly at the silver bracelet around his wrist, its mate locked between rungs of the brass bed.

  “I’ve got to run,” she said, and she left the bedroom, walked quickly across the living room to the door, and let herself out.

  She locked the door and then she did, indeed, run, feeling a heady exhilaration that stayed with her on the cab trip to the airport and caused her to shout “Wonderful!” when the airline reservationist informed her that there was an available flight to St. Petersburg at six-fifteen that morning.

  Chapter 22

  THE ST. PETERSBURG ARMS was large, pink, and in a state of genteel decay—as were its long-time inhabitants, elderly men and women who dressed rather formally and who sat, during the day, in folding chairs on the beach. Protected from the sun by large yellow umbrellas and layers of clothing, they regarded the ocean with weak but vigilant eyes, like the last of some religious sect, their faith failing with their memories, awaiting the fulfillment of some ancient prophecy.

  Half a dozen of them were already turning away from the dying sun and following their long shadows back to the hotel, a journey of approximately fifty yards. One man passed
them on his way to the ocean: a thin, brisk man wearing a white suit jacket, baggy pants (both articles of apparel so wrinkled as to suggest some personal antipathy toward ironing), and a Panama hat. He strode purposefully toward the waves. His feet were bare, and his right arm was held straight against his side (shoulder raised a bit, something military in his bearing) and in his right hand he held a small, dark revolver pointed at the sand.

  The ocean was rough, the Gulf taunted by gusts of wind, and the man raised his arms, perhaps for balance, as he broached the first waves. He was up to his waist when a white-crested wave rocked him viciously so that he faltered and lost ground. He moved forward with new resolve, however, and stopped with the waters slapping his chest and raised the revolver, pointing it at his temple.

  “Land,” a woman onshore said, leaning over to shout in her companion’s ear. “What on earth is he up to now?”

  Years of watching television daytime soaps had created in the inhabitants of the St. Petersburg Arms a sense of themselves as passive observers, and not one of them thought of shouting out or acting upon what was happening. There was a sense of something unpleasant occurring, and were the scene in fact a television show it would have been summarily flipped, via the remote, to something nicer.

  The man raised the gun and then the big brother to the wave that had rocked him came rushing up and swallowed him. The next wave spit the Panama hat into the air and that was the last of it. The ocean pretended that nothing had happened.

  But someone had seen. Now someone shouted, and two young men, a lifeguard and a teenager who had been walking the beach with his dog, raced into the waves.

  They were both fearless athletic swimmers, plunging headlong into waves and plowing the troughs with long, powerful strokes.

  On the shore, the drama could be observed from a godlike vantage point that excluded the uglier elements of chaos and panic.

  “Look there,” a man in a lawn chair said, pointing a liver-spotted finger. “He’s surfaced.”

  The man in the white suit had, indeed, surfaced, the floundering action of his arms indicating that he had not lost consciousness. The teenager reached him first, but the lifeguard was only a moment behind. Together they brought the man back to shore.

  His white suit was now a translucent gray as he lay on his back on the sand. His face was very white with grainy black stubble surrounding his open mouth, like silt that had failed to wash down a drain. His eyes were closed—tightly so that he appeared to be angry—and his beaklike nose pointed skyward imperiously, causing several of the onlookers to look up nervously.

  “He had a gun,” someone said.

  “They are calling an ambulance,” someone else said.

  “Looks too late for that,” a third party observed.

  “What’s this?” Raymond Story shouted, climbing out of the parked car and racing over the dunes toward the crowd on the beach.

  Harry didn’t bother shouting “Stop” this time, but simply followed at a reasonable pace.

  The man lying on the sand was coming to when Harry arrived. The man was not coherent, however. He rolled on his side and vomited salt water.

  Someone touched Harry’s shoulder. “It’s the Duke,” Raymond said. Harry blinked at the old man, whose thinning hair was plastered to his pale skull, patches of wet sand adhering to wet flesh. Their hope: the Duke.

  Then Helen was next to Harry, leaning forward. Harry heard a siren in the distance, saw flashing lights coming down the darkened beach.

  He heard Helen’s voice in his ears. “My God,” she said. “I know this man.”

  “Robert Furman,” Helen said. “That was Robert Furman.”

  Harry recognized the name, one of the once-famous, but couldn’t remember the who, what, or where of it.

  Harry and Helen were sitting in the lounge of the St. Petersburg Arms. Helen was sipping a glass of hot tea, Harry a beer. Raymond, Emily, Rene, and Arbus were lodged in two adjoining suites on the third floor.

  “You remember,” Helen said, “Robert Furman wrote Liar’s Kisses, that poetry collection that all the college kids were reading in the early seventies. It was actually pretty good too, which is not what you expect from best-selling poetry. I knew him. I mean, I met him. Once, at a party in the Hamptons. His agent was Lori Ives, and we were friends then—that was a long, long time ago—and she introduced us. He was very handsome and very drunk—but charming. Later, he ceased being charming, did the entire alcoholic deranged-author thing including that famous moment on Carson when he slugged that rock star.”

  It was coming back. Harry did have some recollection of the event, talk television’s scandals being, sadly, more memorable than lines of metric poetry.

  Robert Furman had taught poetry at a small, eastern college, refusing to be wooed away by larger, more prestigious institutions. The students had loved him and he had loved them back—literally on occasion (at least if rumor were based on fact)—and then, as his alcoholism increased, he had stopped teaching and disappeared from public view.

  “And now he’s trying to kill himself,” Harry said. They had heard the story of the gun.

  “Perhaps he was drunk,” Helen said. “People will do strange, irrational, melodramatic things when they are drunk and repent them in the morning. That is, of course, if they are alive to repent.”

  Harry finished the beer and ordered another from a hovering waiter. He noticed Helen’s look, interpreted it as one of censure, and said, “I’m not planning on getting drunk and shooting myself if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “I wasn’t thinking that at all. I wasn’t—if you’ll believe it—thinking of you. I was thinking of Emily. I was thinking that, if there is any meaning to all this, then Emily must be its center. Our arriving here now, today—surely that can’t be a coincidence.”

  Harry sighed. The beer had made him groggy. “I’m not following this,” he said.

  “No. I’m not making myself clear, of course. I don’t believe I ever told you—everything has been such a rush—but I know some of Emily’s history. I went to great pains to discover it when I thought…” Helen waved a hand in the air. “Emily has always had to have a caretaker. Her condition, whatever diagnosis you accept, has been with her since birth. Her parents were killed in a car accident, and after their death, she was adopted by her uncle who cared for her until…well, until that task proved too much for him, I suppose. He then turned her over to the care of private institutions.”

  Harry waited, but Helen’s eyes suggested she had drifted into another revery.

  “And…” Harry said.

  “Oh,” Helen said. “Well, that’s it, that’s the story. Poor Emily shunted from one posh caretaker to another, an expensive china doll. But the uncle… Emily’s uncle is Robert Furman.”

  Harry fell asleep as soon as he crawled under the covers of the big, old-fashioned four-poster. In the early hours of the morning, he woke, feeling feverish, his heart beating in his temples. Raymond’s bed was empty, and the room was silent. The bathroom door was open on a dark rectangle. Harry was alone in the hotel room. A small night-light a foot above the baseboard cast pale shadows on the ceiling. Harry tugged on his pants and shirt. He found his tennis shoes, pulled them on over bare feet, and walked out into the hall. He took the elevator to the lobby.

  Outside the ocean was lively under the moonlight. It didn’t accuse him, as he thought it might, but seemed simply strange and alien, nothing to do with anything human.

  Harry thought of Robert Furman walking into the ocean to kill himself. Didn’t the man know that that wouldn’t be the end of it? At least, not in that damnable kingdom of Zod Wallop. In Zod Wallop, the dead were thrown into the Ocean of Responsibility and they returned, the Less-Than, to swell the ghastly armies under Lord Draining’s command.

  Why did I write that book? Harry wondered. If writing it was supposed to rid him of despair and loss, it had failed. The wound was raw and incapable of healing. His daughter was still dead.

/>   He saw Raymond’s unmistakable silhouette then, out on the pier, pushing Emily in her wheelchair.

  Harry ran down the boardwalk toward them.

  “Well met, my Lord,” Raymond shouted.

  They walked out to the edge of the pier and stood in silence as the wind harried them. Emily, bundled up against the night chill, showed no signs of life. Her eyes were closed.

  “So Raymond,” Harry said. “What now?”

  Raymond turned and frowned. “I am not a Diviner, my Lord. I am a humble wizard.”

  “Is there something we must do? We have come here for a reason, certainly?”

  “Reasons and more reasons, my Lord,” Raymond said, nodding vigorously. “We must do what all men must do. We must do our best.”

  Harry thought he might have something to say about that, but time passed and he didn’t. Eventually, they turned and retraced their steps to the hotel.

  “I don’t know if I’m up to my best,” Harry said. “I haven’t felt tip-top for some time.”

  Chapter 23

  ALLAN DROVE ACROSS the long, high bridge, squinting at the dimpled sea. Sunlight sprawled everywhere, an over-abundance of pure light that made Allan itch inside. He didn’t want it; couldn’t use it.

  He was in St. Petersburg—the sign had told him as much—but he still had to find them. He hoped it wouldn’t take long.

  He came off the bridge and drove for another mile. He stopped at a gas station, filled the car up, and realized he was empty himself. He lost track of his body sometimes, and he was always surprised when it announced its demands.

  He found a vending machine and shoved change into it. A couple of Snickers and he’d be all right for a while. The machine did nothing. He thumped it; hit the coin return. Nothing.

  He went up to the man at the register and told him, “I lost sixty cents in the vending machine.”

  The man behind the counter was a longhair with bad teeth and a ferrety look. He grinned. “Don’t tell me. Come around here next Tuesday and tell it to Walt. He comes in about ten to freshen up the machine, likely he would be sympathetic to your troubles.”