“Come on,” Butts said. “Let’s get the girl up in the car. I hear a chopper. I don’t want the cops shining a searchlight in my eyes, not right about now.”
Karl nodded. The sound of the helicopter was growing louder. They ran to the girl. Together they lifted her and scrambled up the sandy dunes. Karl opened the back door of the sedan, and Butts hauled her in. He climbed out past her and shut the door.
“Let’s go,” Karl said.
Neither of them noticed the small, dark monkey that leapt to the meager ledge of bumper and managed, incredibly, to stay there, hugging a taillight, as the car accelerated in a whiplash scream.
“Where we taking her?” Butts asked.
“Blaine’s got a room for her. I got to say, Peake is behind on this one. He isn’t showing me much. Blaine’s been thinking all along, getting his ducks in a row.”
“Where’s this room?”
“Just down the block.” Karl pointed to the hotel directly in front of them. “The classy but economical St. Petersburg Arms.”
“How we gonna get her in without someone noticing she’s conked out?”
Karl laughed. “Hell, half the people in this city are conked out. You think that’s gonna raise an eyebrow? If this hotel’s lobby doesn’t have wheelchairs, than Detroit doesn’t have automobiles. We wrap her up in a coat, she’ll look like grandma-goes-on-a-trip. Trust me.”
Rene was alone and discouraged. Maybe she shouldn’t have jumped out of the car and run off like that. Her daddy always said, “It’s your impulses that won’t let you go,” and he was right; she’d never been one to think things through.
Still, Rene thought, they weren’t doing any good, driving in circles, and the sound of that old guy’s voice, stuffy and pleased with himself—she’d had to bolt.
She let her legs go, flopping down on her butt, bang, like that, and glared at the headlights on the road above her.
Allan gone. Emily gone—up and ran off; Emily who you wouldn’t have figured to have an impulse in her, not in a hundred million years—and Rene alone, the way it always shook down.
Maybe alone wasn’t so bad for some people; they didn’t need drugs or booze to forget being alone. Maybe they even liked being alone, cozy with all their private thoughts, amazed and delighted, fat and sassy.
Alone was being smashed and scattered and not even forgotten because what was there to remember?
Rene watched the headlights slow and stop on the road above her. The twin orbs died and the light inside the car came on as the door was opened and that wink of the light was all she needed because she was skilled in seeing him whole in a glance and then remembering at leisure.
“Allan!” she shouted, jumping on tiptoe. “Allan.”
Her man ran toward her, like one of those corny-assed commercials, long, passionate strides because he had to get to his woman—so they could go have a beer or something—but this wasn’t corny because it really was Allan and she wondered why she had never told him she loved him. Well, that was over now.
“Bitch!” Allan screamed, and he hit her. Her eyes widened just before his fist connected with her stomach. She bent over but did not fall, wobbling on bent legs, head down and holding up a hand as though to say, “Just a second. Be right with you.”
Then she turned and ran. Allan hadn’t been expecting that, but it was fine with him. He watched her run for a couple of beats and then screamed and raced after her.
She ran through the tide, arms crazy, water flaring in her footfalls.
He caught her and hurled her to the sand. “Run into the ocean!” he shouted. “All right, you can have your ocean.”
He grabbed her foot when she tried to kick him and flipped her and dragged her, belly down, into the water. She turned over, opened her mouth to scream, and he grabbed her shoulders and pushed her under the night-dark water. He watched her drown, as though it were a dream. Her hair fanned gracefully behind her head. She was frowning, a pinch of flesh between her perfect brows, but her expression was one of pale irritation more than pain. Her thin white blouse lost all its color revealing her perfect breasts, the pale flesh of her shoulders, the red and yellow rainbow.
The rainbow tattoo. “Because it’s my name,” she had said. “Gold. Rene Gold. You know, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.”
Allan stumbled backward and Rene, hands foaming the water as she yelled herself upright, fell forward, and clawed her way up the beach. She rolled over on her back and coughed.
Allan crawled to her. “Oh God, Jesus.”
Rene launched herself at him, clawed his face, bit his ear, would have scratched his eyes out but realized, then, that he would have let her. He had gone limp. She rolled onto her back. “What the fuck is the matter with you?”
“I thought you were untrue to me,” he said.
She rolled on her side to look at him. “Untrue? Where do you get off? We aren’t even dating, you asshole.”
Allan produced the photograph.
They both stared at it for a long time. Finally, Rene said, “You are a total moron. First of all, Harry’s not my type; I mean, he’s like a dentist or something, and second, that’s not my body. Forget the missing tattoo, that body is just plain different. And third, how come this Harry has twice as much hair? Don’t even try to figure that out. I’ll tell you. This is no doubt a picture of him and his ex, taken way back in the good old days, and they stuck my head on his old lady. They probably said, ‘Nobody’s stupid enough to fall for this, but what’s the harm in trying?’”
“Can they do that?” Allan felt a hole inside him bigger than the sky. He had hurt, almost killed, his beloved because he was a jealous fool, an angry, vicious monster.
“Can they do that?” Rene sighed. She flopped on her back again. “Fucker almost kills me and he wants to know, ‘Can they do that?’ Shit. You moron,” she sighed. “I love you. Don’t you know anything?”
“What?”
“I was going to tell you I love you.”
Allan didn’t know what to say to that. He lay silent. Finally, Rene spoke again. “Look, it’s Arbus.”
The monkey scampered up to Rene, clutched her hand and tugged.
“I think he wants us to come with him.”
Jeanne sat on the edge of the bed. She picked up the phone and tried Harry’s room again. Still no answer. She was right to come here, every energized cell said as much. But to what purpose?
Impatient, crazy for something to happen, Jeanne picked up the television remote and punched the power button. A cartoon was in progress, some poorly animated crap with a laugh track. She punched through the channels: a documentary on endangered owls, an infomercial, a Charlie Chan movie, people in small torpedolike cars (racing apparently), a jeans commercial, a sitcom about a nursing home—and there was Amy.
Her daughter’s face was pressed close to the screen, and when the electric crackle ushered her in, her eyes widened and she backed away from the screen. “Mommy!” she shouted.
Jeanne stood up, dropping the remote.
“Amy?”
Her daughter leaned forward again. She pressed her hands and face against the glass and spoke. “Don’t let Daddy change it back!” she said. “Doooooon’t…” Her mouth was a round howl, and her small fists began to thump the glass and the television began to rock on its stand.
“Honey,” Jeanne said. “It will be all right. I’ll tell—”
The television fell forward, yanking its cord from the wall socket with an urgent pock and white sparks.
Jeanne ran to the television, turned it upright. The tube had not shattered. She fumbled for the cord. “Amy, Amy, Amy!” she was saying. There were tears in her eyes and her hands were shaking as she pushed the plug back into the socket.
“Please.”
No picture. She saw the round O of moisture where Amy’s lips had pressed against the inside of the glass.
She stood up, found the door, and stumbled into the hall. She heard her name called and, looking
up, she saw Harry running toward her.
Chapter 26
”THIS IS REALLY splendid,” Gloria Gill said.
The hotel suite had been transformed into a laboratory. The arrangement, being temporary and established in mere hours, was not perfect. One had to be careful not to trip over the tangle of electrical cords or to step on the hoses bringing water from the bathroom, and there was a certain incongruity to all this porcelain and stainless steel amid the hotel’s dowdy armchairs and faded rugs. Surely the St. Petersburg Arms had never seen a coffee table like the one that now resided in the center of the room and which could be used for serving drinks and snacks but was more commonly employed in the dissecting of cadavers.
Andrew Blaine smiled indulgently as Gloria, dressed in black tights and skirt and blouse, skipped to the gurney and spoke to the girl. “All this for you.”
Emily Engel made no response. She lay, strapped firmly on her back, her eyes closed. A faint trickle of saliva leaked from her mouth.
Gloria glared at Karl, who was sitting on the sofa next to Al Butts. “Really. A girl in a wheelchair and you have to bring her down with a tranquilizer gun. Two grown men.”
“We keep telling you,” Karl said, “she wasn’t in any wheelchair. She was walking down the beach. Anyway, you’re going to grind her up in a fine powder, what do you care if she’s even alive?”
Gloria Gill rolled her eyes and turned to Blaine for moral support. “Andrew, I am glad there are men like you in the world or I would despair of the sex. I would say they had no soul at all, none.” Gloria walked over to the laser scalpel and ran her hands over the polished machinery.
“Ms. Engel may not have the intellect to contribute to the body of scientific knowledge with her insights, but we all do her an injustice if we assume that she can’t appreciate the very real contribution she will be making. I think she deserves to participate fully in the historic moment.”
She plucked the laser scalpel from its clip and clicked it on. A small red beam of light speared the carpet. She clicked it off, instantly, and stared as a thread of gray smoke rose up from the floor. She giggled. “Andrew Blaine, come here and let me give you a hug. I ask you to do the impossible, and you trump it. This is just the thing. And Revel makes these! The gods have got to be smiling on us.”
Andrew Blaine walked across the room and took her in his arms and hugged her. He bit her ear and she squealed in merriment and the scalpel leapt out of her hand, bobbing lazily in the air on its long, stalked neck like some indulgent serpent.
“Please,” Gloria said, pushing him away, grabbing the scalpel, returning it to its clip, and brushing her dress demurely, “We aren’t alone.”
“You guys can go,” Blaine said, turning to Karl and Al.
“No problem,” Karl said, standing up. “You give us the money, we are on our way to the bank.”
Blaine’s eyes narrowed, sensing insubordination.
Karl kept grinning. “That was the understanding. I’m strictly contract. Me and Butts, we don’t get benefits or nothing.”
Gloria interrupted. “You all have to leave,” she said. “I’ve got work to do now. You menfolks will just be in the way.” She pointed imperiously at the door to the adjoining suite. “Adieu.”
“Come on,” Blaine said, returned to good humor by his paramour’s saucy manner. “You gentlemen do have to get your money, and Dr. Gill does have business to attend to.”
They walked through the door into the other room.
Gloria turned away and was pleasantly surprised to discover the girl staring at her. “Well, Emily Engel, you’re awake,” Gloria said. “About time, sleepyhead. I guess we can get started then.”
On the other side of room 317, a man, a woman, and a monkey crouched, listening.
“This is the room,” Rene whispered. “She just said Emily’s name.” Rene reached up and gripped the doorknob.
“It’s locked,” she said.
Allan stood up. “They’ll have another key at the desk,” he said.
Rene frowned. “They won’t give it to you.”
“Yes they will,” Allan said.
Rene smiled at her champion. “Yeah. Maybe they will.”
Gloria Gill approached the girl. “This won’t hurt at all,” she said. “First, I am going to drain your blood, which, of course, will be where we part company, as it were. It will be like falling asleep. I’m sorry, but I don’t have time for torture.” She giggled. “What’s that?”
The girl was opening her mouth.
Dr. Gloria Gill leaned closer. “Are you trying to say something, dear? I wasn’t aware that you spoke, but if you do, by all means share your thoughts with Dr. Gill.”
Gloria Gill jerked back. “Goodness,” she said. She laughed, a good sport. “I guess I asked for that. You nasty little cat.” The girl had spit in Gloria’s eye.
“I’ll just have to be careful, I guess, just…dear me.” She couldn’t see out of her left eye. Well, perhaps… She darted into the bathroom, jerked the tap on, and splashed water into the blind eye. Then she looked up in the mirror.
Her left eye had turned gray, gray with small, blue-black flecks. She could still make out the etched lines of pupil and iris…it was remarkably like an eye carved from stone. She touched her eye: slightly gritty, cold, heavy in the socket of her skull, and unmoored. She was struck with the queasy conviction that it could move, could roll…elsewhere.
No, the girl had tricked her mind. This was a trick of the mind, that’s all, and when the girl was dead the trick would collapse like a tent without poles.
Gloria left the bathroom. Her eye didn’t hurt, actually. She smiled at the girl whose ragamuffin head was turned to stare at her. A prideful bitch, Gloria thought. “I’m not impressed,” she said. “Although I am a little upset. I do believe that this sort of disrespect for science cannot go unpunished.” Gloria unhooked the scalpel. “No pain, no gain.”
The door swung open and a giant entered the room. Someone ran toward the gurney where Emily Engel lay.
Gloria recognized the giant now. One of the Ecknazine set. She clicked the laser beam on and swung it in a wide arc. She’d disembowel the bastard; he’d trip over his own steaming guts. Just watch this baby work.
Some creature leapt up to meet the burning beam, howled as it flayed the air, and seemed to explode in blood and burning fur, tumbling into Gill, knocking her back. The scalpel slipped through her fingers, spun away.
The dead monkey embraced her chest, its grinning death mask savagely triumphant.
She thrust the corpse from her and turned to flee.
“Andrew!” she screamed. Where were they? Surely— She saw the girl Emily Engel, freed from the gurney, standing with her back against the door to the adjoining room, her arms raised like a kid’s crossing guard, just a frail, teenage girl, her expression one of concentration, as might befit such an office, quietly holding the door against the hurled bodies of the men on the other side.
Then someone caught Dr. Gloria Gill by the arm and lifted her, and she looked down as she flowed smoothly through the air and saw herself plummeting headfirst toward the steel dissecting table.
Allan turned away from her crumpled body and saw Rene coming toward him.
“Allan,” she said, “you are the—Allan!” She was screaming now, running toward him with her hands out. Allan saw it: a red blur of neon, it drifted by once, twice, three times, mosquito bites. She came rushing at him and pushed him down, an easy task for his legs had turned to liquid and there was blood in his mouth and he was going to…
Rene grabbed the bobbing scalpel and shut it off. She dropped to her knees again. Allan’s throat seemed a scarf of blood. There was a dreamy look in his eyes, as though he still didn’t get it, didn’t fucking get it. The moron.
Rene screamed at the ceiling.
Downstairs in the lobby, the desk clerk looked up, not realizing that he was the last link between two very tentative realities. He was preparing to call the police.
Some big jerk had leaned over the counter, grabbed the key to room 317, and said, “Emergency” like you could say “Emergency” and do something illegal, it was some magic password or something. The desk clerk had his hand on the phone when he saw the man and woman enter the lobby. The woman was expensively dressed but wore no shoes. The man was tall and moved with an odd, jointed gait that was disconcerting. He seemed to be wrapped in a cloud of smoke, and one hand did, in fact, hold three burning cigarettes.
They approached the desk.
“We are returned,” the man said.
The desk clerk said his last words. “I’m sorry, but there is no smoking in this building.”
Roald Peake picked up the letter opener that lay just the other side of the counter, and stabbed the man through the eye, killing him instantly. The lobby of the St. Petersburg Arms disappeared and Castle Grimfast shivered into focus, apocalypse lizards skittering across the damp stone floor that stretched into gray shadows. In the distance, three of the Less-Than tortured a Wire Kitten with sharp sticks. Their laughter echoed hollowly through the moist air, the sound you’d get from beating a rusty oil drum.
“Oh, it’s good to be home,” Lord Draining said, inhaling the scent of Mal Ganvern.
Gabriel was not to be distracted. “Where is my son?” she demanded.
Castle Grimfast took possession upstairs too, and Rene watched the walls turn to dirty gray. Her beloved’s blood now leaked into a faded rug of some ancient design. All the gleaming lab equipment was gone and Gloria Gill lay prone on the floor, garbed in layers of black—the dowager, of course, she was the Black Dowager—and in the tarlike shadows, steel, razor-clawed creatures rattled fitfully.
Emily Engel, with no reason to bar a door that no longer existed, moved away from the wall and looked at her surroundings with grim satisfaction.
“All the Believers are here,” she said.
Chapter 27
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