Irrational Fears
Page 16
“I wouldn’t mind stopping myself,” Eunice said.
Hubert turned in, and they all got out.
Jack had no desire for a soda. He considered getting an ice cream cone. But studying the various cones and chocolate frosted bars made him feel low, somehow, as though the rest of his life would be a series of halfhearted decisions (celery or a carrot, an apple or an orange, bran flakes or puffed rice). What he really wanted was a beer. He pressed his face up against a glass door and stared at the siren shapes within. Then he deliberately turned away, leaving his hand prints behind, each finger an exclamation of yearning.
Eunice, escorted by Hubert, was looking at a rack of postcards. Her new enlightenment had brought forgiveness, and she wanted to send her children a postcard, assuring them that she was well and held no grudges and was praying to Jesus that they would be happy and not mired in sin and complaint. She considered getting a postcard of the Glad Whiz convenience store.
“What do you think?” she asked Hubert, showing him the card.
“Well, it will get the job done,” he said.
Eunice settled on a postcard of a gypsum mine (located considerably to the west of Harken, in a different state actually). This postcard was very informative, explaining that gypsum (hydrated calcium sulfate) was a common mineral used in the making of plaster of paris, fertilizer, et cetera. The card explained the mining procedure, with historical dates and a chemical formula.
Eunice read the card to Hubert as they drifted toward the Glad Whiz counter where a robbery was in progress.
Eunice stopped reading when she looked up and saw what was occurring.
The same skinny clerk was behind the register and, again, he was drunk. He was smoking a cigarette, the smoke snaking up the side of his cheek, making his left eye squint shut. His arms were raised in the air. He was undulating some, a kind of slo-mo hip roll, like someone full of heroin doing the hula.
“Don’t do nothing rash,” he was saying.
“Open da rejish,” the robber said, sounding chemically challenged himself, wobbling back on his heels. He wore a black hooded jacket, the gun poking the pocket forward in tumescent threat.
Everyone was silent. Jack could see Eunice and Hubert in front of him, Ed and Martin to his right by the sodas.
Jack felt his heart beating faster, thought that images of his past might crowd through his mind. Instead, he remembered a Glad Whiz television commercial in which four singing nuns (polar bears in nun habits, to be precise) sang about the merits of really, really cold beer.
If he were gunned down in a Glad Whiz, these ecumenical mammals might attend the funeral, might sing.
Jack was not happy with this thought. It would be undignified. It made the prospect of dying less attractive.
The Glad Whiz clerk was talking. “I’m telling you, it’s not worth it.” The clerk suddenly leaned forward, shouted, giggled. “They’ll catch you, man!”
He crushed his cigarette in an ashtray, jabbing angrily, snatched the beer bottle from the counter and took a long pull. “I saw on TV that they are sending all prisoners, every fucking felon, to Texas, yeah, because Texas got a shitload of prisons, everything is a prison, they got like prison franchises, and you don’t want to be in the slammer in the Lone Star State, no sir. You—”
“Just give me the fucking money, limp dick!” the robber shouted, and he yanked the gun out.
It wasn’t a gun though, just a finger pointed forward, thumb cocked rigidly.
“Easy!” the clerk shouted. “Okay. I’m getting the cash.”
The clerk began to wrestle with the cash register, shook it, cursed—and leapt/scrambled over the counter, grabbing the robber’s simulated-gun arm.
“Muther!” the robber shouted.
They rolled on the floor, grunting. Jack felt that something was missing from this tussle. Of course. Music, he thought. A frenzy of overwrought instruments was required. The wrestling-for-the-gun scene was such a staple in movies and television that it was hard to accept this unadorned show. No music. No gun for that matter, although the robber gamely held his index finger stiffly pointed forward, thumb up.
The clerk had the upper hand, though, drunk and self-righteous. He was on top of the robber now, slamming his gun hand against the floor, screaming, “Drop it!”
The robber sighed, went slack. His fingers unfurled, releasing the imaginary gun to the ether.
“Okay then,” the clerk finally said, lurching to his feet. “I guess that’s that.”
The robber sat up. He was gasping for breath. The hood of his jacket had fallen back. A black tie was tied around his right arm. His pants were torn, his shoes scuffed.
“That guy’s a member of The Clear!” Jack shouted.
Martin moved quickly, Tilman right behind.
“You’re coming with us,” Martin said, dragging him roughly to his feet.
On the way back to New Way, the failed robber sat between Tilman and Martin. When asked, he said that his name was Monk. He said that he also had a Clear name, given him by the Gatemaster-in-Waiting, Dorian Greenway. “I can’t tell it to you though, so don’t ask. It’s a secret name, and if I was to tell you, it would call down the wrath of the Otherness that sits at the door of the Flickering Abyss.”
He fell asleep then and snored loudly.
Hubert coughed. “That fellow’s got some potent drugs floating inside him. We won’t learn anything helpful from him in his present state, might as well let him sleep it off.”
Hubert spent the rest of the drive to New Way relating the last of what he knew about Dorian Greenway and his uncle Ezra Coldwell.
He didn’t know much, only that the boy came to live with Ezra right after Anitas death. Some folks said Ezra had hired an investigator to track Eulalia Green way (Ezra’s sister) and induce her to send the boy. Others said that Eulalia (a resident of Fergus, Montana) had written Ezra herself, saying she was no match for the boy, that since her husband had been killed (by a wolverine according to later, embellished accounts), Dorian had been wild.
No one really knew just how Dorian came to live with Ezra. They suited each other, though. You might think that a bitter old man like Ezra would be a bad influence on a young boy, but, in truth, it often seemed that Dorian was the corrupting force, Ezra simply a muddled, beaten fool, broken forever by the loss of his wife.
It was young Dorian who would stagger out onto the porch and scream at A A members when they came to the house. “You stupid fucks!” he would scream. “Damn you all! Get out of here. We don’t need your goddam slogans and your steps and your stinking blue book!”
On such occasions, the boy was deemed drunk or (another theory) so psychically linked to his uncle that he manifested the symptoms of inebriation.
Other times, a sullen Dorian would accompany a sick and shaky Ezra to AA meetings where the old man would mumble that he had not killed his wife, that an evil spirit had been responsible. Everyone would listen politely; they’d heard it before. Dorian, silent and seething, would scowl at them all.
When Dorian began attending Harken High, he impressed the other students with his personal style (at this time he was wearing all black, a black jumpsuit, what appeared to be a black bathing cap, black sunglasses, a black cape). The school was not academically rigorous, and, without much effort, Dorian graduated near the top of his class. He could make friends, and did, but he would sever these ties with some act of cruelty that suggested the relationship’s goal had always been betrayal. He was a voracious reader of science fiction and horror, speaking in an arcane tongue decipherable only to other geeky, fast-talking SF freaks (at Harken, this group never comprised more than half a dozen students). He never talked to girls, shunned them, in fact, and there was some speculation that he was gay (based almost entirely on the cape).
It was probably Dorian who talked Ezra into buying the gothic mansion when the horror film folk were done with it.
It was Dorian who saw the old man’s mind receding into a dim, in
accessible realm and convinced Ezra to hand over the financial reins while he could. It was Dorian who summoned the lawyers to draw up the necessary documents for Ezra to sign.
In a small town, such prudent legal planning is always seen as sinister, but, in truth, Ezra had no one else to assign his fortune to. His only other relative, Eulalia, had died four years after Dorian came to Ezra. She had been found frozen in a snowdrift (in what was, most folks believed, an alcohol-related death; she’d been drinking all night at the local tavern).
Ezra’s mind did, inevitably, crumble, and Dorian blamed it on AA. Grieving, he entered an AA meeting and hurled a balloon filled with pig’s blood at a guy named Mort Sedders. Mort ducked, and the balloon burst against an EASY DOES IT plaque. A woman attending her first meeting fainted.
Mort had been Ezra’s sponsor at the time of Ezra’s last, mind-blowing debauch. Ezra had gone through many sponsors (firing some, being fired by others), and Mort just happened to be the one there when Ezra went blank, his condition diagnosed as Korsakoff’s syndrome. The alcohol had tunneled holes in Ezra’s gray matter, had finally routed all signs of sentience. The doctors convinced Dorian that there was nothing reversible about this condition, and Ezra was shipped off to Western State.
Dorian blamed AA for his uncle’s transformation into a mute and withered husk. He specifically blamed Mort. Six days after the pig’s blood incident, Mort didn’t show up at Happy Roads, and when folks went to his apartment, he wasn’t there. He never was anywhere else again that anyone knew of, and the sheriff had a talk with Dorian. Dorian said he didn’t know anything. “Maybe his sponsor knows where he’s gone,” Dorian said.
Mort’s sponsor, a salty curmudgeon who attended an old-timers’ meeting once a month (and always said the same thing: “Clean house, pray, help another alcoholic, and keep that rascal in your pants”), was, it turned out, also missing. Dorian’s remark seemed fraught with significance in retrospect, but there wasn’t a shred of evidence to link him to any crime.
Dorian Greenway left Harken and did not return for almost ten years, finally showing up at Happy Roads with his entourage of white-shirted disciples and his crazy, infectious theories. It’s likely that Ezra Coldwell returned with Dorian, retrieved by Dorian from the state mental hospital in Staunton, Virginia.
Rumor had it that Dorian Greenway had acquired a medical degree, had tripled his fortune developing computer-game software, had spent the years in prison, and had been hospitalized for mental illness.
There was, Hubert said, probably some truth in all these rumors.
The next morning, Martin gathered everyone in the day room. Hubert was there too—he’d stayed over—and Jack guessed that the millionaire was fighting his natural urge to take charge, deferring to Martin (New Way was, after all, Martin’s turf).
“I don’t need to be deprogrammed,” the Clear member, Monk, said. He was, in the light of day, a lanky kid with a goofy, self-deprecating air, ducking his head, rubbing the back of his neck. “I don’t need to be electroshocked or prozacked or nothing. I come to my senses. Anyway, they all just packed up and left. World’s supposed to be coming to an end, big what they call Unraveling, and off they go, fuck it, can’t be bothered.”
“Do you know where Dorian Greenway is?” Martin asked, pulling a folding chair up and sitting directly in front of Monk.
“No, sir, I don’t. Our leader slid off without us, not even a farewell speech. Maybe he took a few of his generals with him; I can’t say. We got burned out and that was it, done. You can stop calling us The Clear; you can call us The Street, that’s where we are living. There’s a bunch of us hanging downtown, promoting loose change, sleeping in doorways. We’re pretty fucked-up, but that’s not our fault. We weren’t responsible for our actions, because we were all in a trance state, dressing up like Jehovah’s Witnesses, that sort of thing.”
“Do you recognize this woman?” Martin asked. He leaned forward, showing the polaroid. It was Kerry’s intake ID. Gretchen, New Way’s secretary, had taken the photo.
“Don’t be expecting something flattering,” Gretchen had said. “I’m not a photographer, and this camera takes a kind of greenish, fuzzy snap. I can’t help that, and this was never part of my job description.”
Kerry’s photo looked, nonetheless, radiant, her glow unsullied by the cheap equipment (which did, however, render a portrait of Jack that could have been entitled: Dead, decomposing indigent, city morgue).
“Yeah, I recognize her,” Monk said. “I heard she was around, that she had returned as was written, but I never did see her.” Monk frowned. “Oh, I saw her in the dreams, sure, we all saw her in the dreams. But there was supposed to be other stuff, too. Promises, promises...” Monk’s lower lip stuck out. “They kept telling us stuff, and nothing ever come of it. Like, the women. We were supposed to have this end-of-the-world orgy that was gonna get things charged up, ready for the Gate to open. Well, ask me did it happen?” Monk waited, blinking at Martin who glared back, no hint of asking in his demeanor.
Monk spread his hands, palms up, displaying emptiness. “Nope. Didn’t happen.”
Al leaned forward, his teenage libido instantly alert. “You were gonna have a big orgy for the end of the world?”
Monk grinned, sensing a peer. “Sure. Beer, party favors, a live band, naked women, the works.”
Hubert gasped. “This is Anita Coldwell,” he said.
Jack turned, as did everyone else. Hubert was holding the photo—he had reached down and plucked it from Martin’s hand. His voice was low, thick with incredulity and an earnestness that was like a shout.
“This is Anita Coldwell.”
Martin squinted at Hubert. “No, that’s one of our patients, the one that Dorian Greenway kidnapped. Her name is Kerry Beckett.”
Hubert raised his eyes from the photo. His expression, dazed, faintly annoyed, was one Jack recognized: that of a man surprised by a flurry of memories (a covey of quail breaking cover, right under your feet, making your heart stammer in shock).
“The hair is different here, curlier, wilder,” Hubert said. “But... this is the spitting image of Anita, when she was young, high school.”
“That would explain Dorian’s interest in her. I heard him say, ‘It’s you,’ like he recognized her. I remember that,” Martin said.
“I never did see her except in the dreams,” Monk said, still complaining. He remembered something, pulled the frayed paperback from his back pocket. He flipped pages, found one he’d turned down; squinted his eyes at the type and followed a sentence with his finger. “Says, ‘She will return to stand by the new Gatekeeper, and all her handmaidens will offer succor to the faithful and’... That’s it right there, that ‘offer succor’ that’s the orgy part, and what? I guess it’s canceled, that’s what, and I quit a job at Video Vendor for what?” Monk shrugged his shoulders, disgusted, and tossed the book on the end table.
Jack picked it up. Alcoholism and the Pnakotic Pentagon, by Dorian Greenway. It was, obviously, a self-publishing venture: Old English lettering on a blue background, a pentagram with pen-and-ink sketches of winged snakes and gargoyles menacing the perimeter and, within, a woman, blindfolded, her arms raised toward a star that radiated squiggly lines. Like many self-published books, this cover promised an unbalanced intensity, the self-absorption of the insane, the incoherence of the unedited.
“What dreams?” Martin asked, leaning forward. He clutched Monk’s shoulder. “You saw this woman in your dreams?”
Monk nodded. “Sure. Everybody did. It was what you call a communal dream.” Monk was looking nervous. “Should I have a lawyer or something and you say that stuff about anything I’m saying could be held against me in a court of law?”
“We aren’t police,” Martin said. “We are looking for a girl. We need your help. Tell us about the dreams.”
Monk nodded. “Okay. I was gonna leave out about the drugs, but I guess it’s cool, huh?”
Martin nodded. “It’s cool.”
“People would be talking, shouting and shit, but their voices would be too big to hear, you know how that can be in a dream, and then we’d see this big knife on the table, and the knife would fill up the room. It would always start to move, to spin, and it would become this white disk, and the kitchen would fade away, just the white disk spinning and then it would be her face and someone would shout, “Run!” just the one word, like a gunshot, and—well, we’d wake up, like that, all of us thrashing around, sick, puking. They had these metal buckets by each mat, because the fuckers knew we were gonna heave. I tell you, the sound of a couple of hundred people emptying their guts is one you don’t forget.”
Monk was quiet, thinking, then said, “I sort of miss that sound. I know, that sounds crazy, maybe disgusting, but... Well, there we were, all together, you know. I never had a family, hung with Dad some between foster cares, but I was mostly on my own. And the dreams were good, until the last part, when you’d see her face and she’d start to bleed, blood coming out of her nose, her mouth. We knew it was gonna end bad, but it was a whole package, and the part that rocked was worth the rest and besides, it wasn’t always gonna be that way.”
Monk said there were other dreams too, bad dreams some of them. It had to be that way, according to Dorian. You couldn’t go around the bad dreams, you had to go through them to get to the Gateway Monk said he thought people died during some of those dreams. The dreams were like real places (a luxury hotel, a foreign city, an office building, a strange, many-roomed hospital), and some people didn’t come back, or they came back different, maybe missing something like an arm or maybe just a couple of fingers—no blood (as though the maiming accident were in a distant past and long healed, long forgotten).