The actors on the screen suddenly exploded in laughter, and another sound crashed almost at Tate’s feet. He squinted down. He could make out a darker square almost against the back wall. After a second, he realized a trapdoor had been thrown open. His hand on the rough brick for balance, he walked over to it. He hunkered at the edge. “Are you there?” he called, but softly.
No answer.
“Give me some light,” he said.
A response came in the form of light. True, it was dim, orange light, the light of a low-watt bulb almost swallowed in the large space, but it was enough to illuminate a run of steps going down. Tate stood up, muttered a prayer, and stepped into the opening.
The cellar of the theater gaped before him. He felt his heart in his chest, beating too strongly but not really very fast, as he descended. It was a wide room, fifty feet at least, and perhaps half again that long. Rows of brick pillars held up a heavily beamed ceiling — actually the floor of the theater, Tate realized — swagged with ancient dusty cobwebs. The dirt floor was littered with cast-off coils of wire, stacks of film canisters rusted to the color of strong tea, a tumble of discarded seats painted green with mildew. A small bulb burned from a porcelain socket set about eye level on the back wall. On either side of that were windows looking out into an alley and into night.
“Where are you?” Tate asked, stepping onto the ground.
Here. I am here.
He stared, at first believing he had heard the voice; but then he knew it was inside his head, and yet not of him. “Serpent,” Tate said.
Dark laughter. Yes. I have been called that.
“I know you.”
Do you, old man?
“The angel of the pit.”
Angel. I like that.
“Show yourself.”
No. Though it was only in his mind, the voice had an indulgent quality, patronizing, regretful. No. You do not know me as well as you believe, and yet you know me too well. I do not think you could bear to see me as I really am, and you know just too much to see me any other way.
Overhead the trapdoor slammed. A second later a fine snow of gritty dust sifted against Tate’s neck. “God stands with me,” Tate said.
Does he. I don’t see him. I haven’t seen him for, oh, years and years.
“Satan.”
Hollow unheard laughter. No. That is some figure of man’s own making. I am the face behind the mask, the reality behind the shadow.
“Liar.”
Yes. You are correct there. I am a liar. We are liars.
The light flickered and went out. Tate said into the darkness, “I carry with me the light of the world.”
In his mind he heard a quick, scalded hiss. Fool.
“That hurt you.”
You hate sin.
“I do.”
Then join me. Join me. You do not know what sins I expose, what punishments I bring. You say you serve your God. Do I not serve him as well? “Lead us not into temptation,” you pray. Do I not provide the temptation, the trial? Wherewith shall the gold be known as pure, except it be tried in the furnace?
Tate licked his lips, aware suddenly that they were dry and cracked. He closed his eyes. “You’re afraid of me,” he said.
No.
“Yes, you are. I don’t know why, but you are afraid of me.”
And light burst inside his closed eyes, illumination from beyond and from within. For an ecstatic moment his soul was gone, not there, not in the smothering cellar of a theater building, but free, at a great height. He laughed aloud, and in a dim far corner of his mind he heard a scream of pain.
“Why, you’re nothing,” he said in wonderment. “You are born in fear and agony, and without them you die. You can harm us only as we let you harm us. You’re our creation, not God’s.”
No. You are wrong, old man. I am spirit. Yes, your fears make me strong, and your blood gives me form; but I am eternal, and you are born to die.
“Then come and get me,” Tate said, opening his eyes.
The cellar was full of light, blinding and pure, the light of a thunderbolt frozen and made to last, and it flowed from — From Tate himself.
Every darkness stood revealed in that light, every shadow faded. “Come and get me!” he yelled again, a fierce joy in his throat. “Show yourself, you God-damned coward!”
The ground began to seethe.
Tate stumbled back. The earthen floor was swelling, rising like monstrous dough, pressing toward the ceiling. He saw it, felt it, and realized that it would crush him. Rusted film canisters clattered against the wall, discarded stinking seats rolled off the belly of that monstrous pregnancy.
And as Tate’s heart thumped hard again, his light faded.
He felt himself thrown back against the brick wall, felt himself rolled over and over as the ground rose, an inflating balloon, pressing against him, trying to smash him like an insect. His flailing elbow struck glass, and he dimly realized the floor had raised him to the level of the windows. He turned on his belly, his feet higher than his head, and pushed the Bible ahead of him.
It broke more glass and dropped out into the alley. He got his hands on either side of the frame and pulled, even as a heave of the rising floor raised him almost vertical, head down. Tate dragged himself through the window, an aged child in a wretched parody of birth, with blood spilling around him from hands cut by shards of glass. He stuck for a moment and then burst through, tumbled onto pavement.
He lay there, hurting.
When he opened his eyes, he saw the great Bible spread open and facedown in the dirt. He could smell the raw ripe scent of garbage.
We can beat him, he thought to himself.
The light came from a street lamp down at the mouth of the alley. In it he saw his hands were lacerated. His cheek burned, too, and he knew he had cut himself there. He got to his feet and retrieved the Bible.
We can beat him, he said to himself again. Badon can do nothing to us that we don’t allow him to do. He’s not strong enough yet. And the dead are not ghosts, they’re puppets, with his hands on the strings.
Tate staggered toward the mouth of the alley. Why, he’s not even alive, not really. Something allows him to have a kind of form and shape — blood, he said — but he’s more shadow than substance.
He stepped under the light and looked at his hands. Not too bad: he’d had worse from splinters at the lumberyard.
The sound of a car made him look up. To his right, toward the Square, an old black car began to roll forward.
With an unnatural clarity he saw, even at this distance, Andy McCory’s face behind the wheel.
With an unnatural certainty he knew, in the second before the fender struck him, that Badon might himself be impotent, that the dead might be puppets, but that the driver of the car was as real as himself.
And then the world exploded in a flash of red pain.
Fourteen
1
It took John Kirby another day and night to learn what had happened. By that time Mr. Tate was in intensive care in the Frye County Hospital, slipping in and out of a coma, in grave condition, and not expected to recover. Efforts were being made, John was told, to locate the next of kin.
That was Friday morning. The three of them, Ann, John, and Alan, kept vigil that night and Saturday morning. Dr. Smith, making his rounds at ten A.M., finally got them in to see Tate.
Alan, already sick at heart, felt a wave of nausea as he stood in the doorway of the hospital room. The sight of Tate, bandaged, pale, a tube running into his nose and another into his arm, made him weep. The old face was bloodless, the lips even thinner, the cheeks hollow under sharp outcrops of bone, the nose all cartilage and waxy flesh. Tate’s chest heaved with each intake of breath, and the air whistled in his mouth.
He’s going to die, Alan thought.
Ann Lewis took Tate’s left hand in hers. “We’re here,” she said. Then she, too, burst into tears. John Kirby put an arm around her shoulders, awkwardly, like a boy on a
first date, and she leaned against him.
Alan looked away. The window, shaded and darkened by half-closed blinds, gave a view of treetops rolling away and up to Ransom Ridge. The air in the room smelled of disinfectant and disease, a heavy odor that lay oppressive in the lungs. From the bed came a drawn-out sigh.
“Mr. Tate?” John Kirby said, his voice hushed.
Alan looked back. Tate’s eyes were partly open. His lips moved. John stooped low. “What?” he asked. The old man on the bed murmured something more. Then the eyelids fluttered and closed again.
Dr. Smith opened the door. “That’s probably enough,” he said. “He’s not very strong.”
They went back to the waiting room. Others were there: a man of fifty-five or sixty in green dungarees and a faded, patched, but clean work-shirt, smoking cigarette after cigarette and staring at nothing; a young woman, plump, brown-haired, weeping silently as she chewed the side of her right forefinger. The two were separate, in individual compartments of worry; Alan, his father, and Miss Lewis shared another.
“What did he tell you?” Ann asked.
Alan’s father shook his head. “He said to tell Alan to resist temptation.”
Alan’s cheeks burned. The other two looked at him. “I don’t know what it means,” he whispered. “I don’t!”
But he did.
To live forever, the woman on the screen had said. To have the troublesome part, the thinking part, cut out of you. To do only what you felt like doing....
Ye shall not surely die. It was the ancient lie, bitter poison but seeming honey-sweet: you will never gasp out your life in a bed, riddled by tubes, racked by pain. No, there is another way.
To live forever....
Oh, Alan knew what the preacher’s words meant.
They saw him twice more, but on neither occasion did Tate come out of his coma. Alan was frightened of him, lying there, his black hair suddenly seeming thin, what showed from under the cap of bandages, his skin slack, his face empty. He remembered the way the preacher had frightened him at their first meeting, but this was different, a sensation more of dread than fright, and it was even harder for Alan to confront.
He tried to pray, remembering Tate’s implicit trust in prayer, but he felt no relief from his attempts. He touched Tate’s hand and found no current flowing there, no indication of the other’s presence in that battered and dying body.
The attending doctor, not Dr. Smith but a Dr. Nesheim, only shook his head when they asked about his chances. Tate had suffered brain damage, broken bones, bleeding, and now had pneumonia, they were told. It would take a miracle.
During those long hours at the hospital, Alan overheard his father talking over the case with a sheriff’s deputy and with the doctor, and he pieced together what had happened: Mr. Tate had stepped out of the alley behind the ShadowShow onto Oglethorpe Street, not far across the street from Mr. Kirby’s shop, and a car had hit him. He had been slammed against the side of the Dugan Hardware Store, had collapsed to the sidewalk, and there he was found late Wednesday night by “Deke” Dugan, who just came back because he wasn’t sure he had locked the side door of the shop.
Tate carried no identification other than the Bible, which was intact, resting closed on the sidewalk not three feet from his head. The hospital admitted him as a John Doe, and what with slow work on the part of the police department, he wasn’t identified until Thursday night — by which time his friends had grown frantic with worry.
But Thursday night a patrolman driving toward the Square had noticed some kids in a huddle against the side wall of the ShadowShow. They had found a wallet, with very little money in it, but with Tate’s ID. The cop collected the wallet, carried it around with him until the next morning, and then turned it in. And only then did the hospital realize that the old John Doe up in the IC wing was the same person that John Kirby had called about.
By that time it was almost too late. The nurses attending him had heard Tate’s whispered words from time to time as he rose from coma and sedation, but they heard them without registering them. They had heard worse from other dying patients.
“Kill the head,” he had said once.
“Puppets, puppets,” he had groaned another time.
Only his third and last speech, to John Kirby, was attended to.
After that, Tate never awakened again.
2
He was gone.
Andy McCory felt the absence from the theater, felt the vacuum left behind. Athaniel Badon simply was not there, in body or — in spirit?
Saturday morning Andy walked the ShadowShow inch by inch, seeking him. He had not felt Badon’s presence since the old man had come into the building. Andy had the uneasy feeling that he had been left alone to take the blame for all the things that he (Badon!) had made him do. Even running the old man down had been his (Badon’s!) idea. In fact, he (Badon! It was Badon!) had all but done the deed himself.
But now Badon had absented himself. Or so it seemed during the half hour Andy took to pace the auditorium, the offices, even the rest rooms.
But finally he caught the trail on stage behind the screen, like a lingering odor. He heaved the trapdoor open and gasped, for the atmosphere came boiling, spilling, out from there. And then, knowing where Badon was at last, Andy lowered himself down the ladder and turned on the light.
The scent of earth was strong and musty here, earth and decay. One of the windows was broken, the other bleared with grime. Beneath his feet was a hard dirt floor, dark and oily in the weak glow of the one light. Andy took a deep breath and a long look around.
He was alone in the brick-columned basement.
But the other was here.
“Where are you?” Andy called, his voice coming back at him flat an instant later. “Where are you now?”
Here. Inside his head.
Andy’s mind reeled with an impression of utter weariness, of pain too deep for groans. He staggered a little, coughed, and croaked, “What’s wrong?”
I reached beyond my strength. My need and my anger betrayed me.
Andy thrust out a hand, braced it against the rough brickwork. “Are you — okay?”
I will be.
The voice was thin. Andy swallowed hard and licked his lips. “Do you need — blood?”
No. Rest.
The imagined voice had no direction, but Andy caught sight of a deeper shadow behind a pile of discarded theater seats. He edged toward it, at last stood over it. It was man-sized, man-shaped, a slumped figure sitting with back against the brick wall. Andy reached in his front pocket, pulled out the neat rectangular Ronson lighter he had given himself not long before. He thumbed the friction wheel and the yellow light of the flame fell on the slumping form. “God!”
It was Badon, or Badon’s dummy. Empty sockets stared at him, hollow, clotted with darkness no light could lift. Flesh gone the mellow color of old leather split across temple and forehead, peeled back from ivory bone. Teeth showed through ripped chaps, through black lips shrunken, cracked, and curled away from the underlying skull. Green mold splashed the remaining skin of the forehead, the corrugated flesh of the throat, and mildew sprinkled the white shirtfront. The black suit was a ruin of rot and fungus, dead-looking fleshy fingers sprouting from chest, from thighs, ugly thrusting blind white talons of toadstool.
Andy felt the hair on the back of his neck stirring. The mouth of the dead thing opened and closed, once, very slowly.
I am better than I was, the mute reproachful voice said in Andy’s head. Not so long ago I was dust and bone. Already I am this. The right hand, little more than bone, clenched and unclenched with the soft sound of distant castanets.
Andy snapped the lid of his lighter shut, blacking out the vision, though it lingered in vivid memory. Bitter gall surged in his throat; he gagged. After a long while, he drew a deep, shivering breath. “What can I do?”
Run the ShadowShow. Wait. I grow stronger with the turning of the moon. I grow stronger with the coming of each
night. Soon I will stir abroad, moving in the bodies of our friends. In the turning of two weeks my flesh will be whole again. Then will come the time for blood.
In the dimness Andy’s eyes grew smaller, crafty. “The woman. Can I have her?”
A cosmic sigh, resigned and edged with anger that seemed old and dull. Yes. But not tonight. Soon. I promise.
“To keep, I mean. Instead of the other one, my wife.”
Yes, to keep.
“All right.” Andy laughed aloud. “Guess we can’t shake hands on it, huh?”
Inside his head there was a kind of watchful silence.
“Guess if I wanted to I could haul your old bones off now. Throw them in the furnace. Bury them right here in the dirt. If I wanted to.”
It would not matter.
“Yeah? Wouldn’t matter a bit.”
I would grow again.
“But I’m saying that if I wanted to, I could test that out, now, couldn’t I?”
If you wanted to betray yourself as well. But if you want life, life everlasting — if you want the soft flesh of the black-haired woman —
Andy groaned.
I thought so. You will not hinder me, will you, Andy?
“No.” But it was a reluctant word.
Good. You shall be rewarded, I promise. Rewarded most — fittingly. Go now. Leave me. I will grow strong again.
“All right.”
So Andy took charge of the kiddie matinee himself, and things ran fairly smoothly. As Andy began to issue orders during the next days, the others griped a little — who did Andy think he was? — but since Andy controlled the payroll box, they did not gripe too much, or too loudly. And as the days went by, things settled into a routine for them. Each one did his or her job and no one gave much of a thought for Badon.
Except Andy.
Andy could feel him down there, resting, growing stronger.
Waiting.
3
Odum Tate died quietly at five P.M. Sunday. He had not spoken again.
Sam Quarles talked with John Kirby at about five-thirty, in an empty hospital room, Quarles perched on the foot of the bed, Kirby sitting in a chair shoved against the wall beside the window. “So he didn’t tell you anything about who might have hit him?” Quarles asked again.
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