The crowd was fighting itself, screaming, biting, kicking, a beast devouring itself, harried by devils.
Ed Tilman shouted into Jack’s ear. “They’re setting it off. God willing we—”
The explosion made the tent buckle. Supporting beams leaned forward, ripped from their moorings. The great canvas, shrieking like some winged monster nailed to the earth, too brutal and vast to be so easily crucified, roared and rose. Folding chairs skittered across the stage like crippled insects, and Jack was thrown backward, knocked from his feet by a wall of wind. He lay on his back, still dragged by the wind as though he were a doll dragged by a dog, splinters sliding into his shoulders and back, the pain unremarked in a body filled with a terror so large it might have been wonder, joy, enlightenment.
He saw, above him, the canvas rise, a blue jellyfish jerking toward the stars, wheeling away.
The wind tore the serpents to pieces, flinging them like rags. Jack saw a small serpent’s body ripped from its head. The head clung briefly to a wooden pole and then flipped away, rising into the sky.
The crowd was running, breaking in all directions, fleeing their release from madness.
The judges were gone, their table overturned. Dorian Greenway was gone. Eunice was up on stage, kneeling next to Hubert. “You are going to be all right, honey!” she was shouting. Amazingly, Hubert was saying something in response.
Jack ran across the stage, saw the overturned wheelchair and righted it and the man within.
Ezra Coldwell’s eyes were white, blind, barely visible between swollen eyelids. “Where’s Dorian?” Jack screamed. “Where’s Kerry?”
Ezra Coldwell might as well have been dead—a dull, mummified husk.
“Help if you can, you poor sonofabitch,” Jack said. Jack reached in his pocket, pulled out the crumpled tissue with its shard of mirror. He took the silver shard and placed it in the old man’s hand, gently closing the fingers around it. The hand slumped open, the mirror falling to the ground. Jack picked it up and replaced it in the mans hand. Jack moved the hand to the man’s lap. This time the fingers remained closed.
“Anita says...” Can you hear me, old man? “Anita says you’ve spent so long manipulating the world that you have forgotten. She says, ‘If you can move mountains, you can move yourself. It doesn’t matter if your mind is imprisoned, if all the connections are cut, if you are crouched in a dark corner of your own ruined body. If that body were a dead dog, you know you could make it walk. Animate yourself.”’
J ack might have been talking to dust, to a hole in the darkness of space. He had no time for this. He had to find Kerry. He stood up.
Blood was leaking from Ezra Coldwell’s clenched fist.
“Over there!”
Jack turned, saw Ed Tilman pointing. Jack followed the line of Ed’s finger. He saw the two small figures, hand in hand, enter the long white two-story building.
Jack and Tilman leapt from the stage and raced in pursuit of Dorian and Kerry.
Jack pushed the swinging doors open warily. The room, one single long, football field of a room, was filled with seated people. In the far distance, some people were seated alone on a stage. A large banner across the back wall read, AA MARATHON CLOSED MEETING.
An usher came up to Jack and Tilman. “You just made it,” he said. “This way.”
Jack and Tilman were led to two empty folding chairs on the end of a back row. Jack sat, looking around, hoping to catch a glimpse of Kerry and Dorian. They were in here somewhere.
A woman toward the front of the meeting was standing up, speaking. “So I said to my mom, ‘No way am I coming up there for Christmas and engaging in dysfunctional behavior now that I am clean and sober. I don’t see why I have to come there to get the money so I can pay my rent anyway; we got the postal system, you know.’” She folded her arms and looked around the room, pleased with this response. The room was silent except for someone coughing as though he’d swallowed a kazoo.
The woman continued. “That night, when I went to sleep, I had a dream. I dreamed that I was dancing topless at a PTA meeting. This guy came up to me that I knew from high school and he said, ‘Wanda, I would sure like to have sex with you, what do you think?’ He was kind of cute, but I told him that I had discovered a new way of life and wasn’t interested in cheap thrills. Well, I saw that he had turned into a bear, that bear with the little hat, the one that puts out fires, Moses, Henry, Toby, you know the one. Anyway, he said...”
My God there are a lot of people in this room, Jack thought. Could Dorian and Kerry have slipped back out the door? No, there was the one aisle and he would have seen them.
The woman went on and on. Jack fidgeted.
When the woman finally sat down, a short, dark-haired man immediately jumped up. “I’m Bob, and I’m an alcoholic. Mr. Chairperson, I timed Wanda. She went on for sixteen minutes. We have approximately two thousand people and, as I understand it, the plan here is for every one of us to share. Well, if everyone goes on as long as Wanda, that’s going to take, by my reckoning, over twenty-two days. We have got to speed things up, maybe have a time limit of two, three minutes each.”
This statement stirred the whole room, a noisy ripple of controversy.
A big man stood up, “Mr. Chairman, I don’t go for people timing me when I talk. If you gotta talk for sixteen minutes to stay sober, I say do it.”
An even bigger man stood. “I agree, but I say, let’s leave out telling dreams. I mean, telling your dreams or the plot of a television show you have seen, that should be ruled out. That kind of thing has no end to it, and it’s not real experience.”
“It is if you go and drink over it!” someone shouted.
People were interrupting each other now. There were about twenty people standing, trying to get the chairperson’s attention.
Ed Tilman clutched Jack’s shoulder. “There.” Jack turned as directed and saw Dorian and Kerry sliding out a door on the left at the end of the room.
“Let’s go.”
The last words Jack heard before the door shut out the marathon meeting were “...if a dream has drinking in it, I say...” The door closed and Jack found himself in a narrow stairwell that smelled like stale cigarettes and coffee made from dishwater.
He climbed the stairs quickly, catching the door that Tilman had flung open before it banged shut.
They were in a narrow, dimly lit hallway. The wallpaper was some ancient, faded print (butterflies or female genitalia). Tilman was trying the first door. Jack ran on, flung open a second door.
Dorian Greenway stood there, smiling, elegant in his emcee outfit, although some of the white face paint was gone, revealing pink flesh. The red of his lips was smeared. “Yes? I think we already gave at the office. Or are you here to save my soul? Whatever.” He raised his hand, slowly—Jack thought, later, that he had had plenty of time to jump back if only he could have abandoned his role of avenger. There was an aerosol can in Greenway’s hand, and it released a green mist that became the world, a world of green wonder, green confusion, green arguments and green rebuttals.
“I am the boss here,” the man said, smoothing his black hair. “I am Dr. Azzam Freud. I am the professional one, and you are the patient.” Jack could see his own feet, enclosed in tennis shoes. He was lying on a sofa. The dark-complected Dr. Freud sat in an armchair, his attitude casual, the ankle of his right foot resting on his left knee. His pants were sharply pressed, and he held a blue-black revolver in his right hand. The room was comfortably overfurnished, a sort of Victorian study with framed diplomas, glass-enclosed bookcases, potted plants, a brass lamp.
Jack felt a sense of urgency, but he could not seem to move. “I have to leave,” he said.
“Hah!” the man said. “You always want to leave. Hello good-bye as your Beatle Boys say. Well, time is the thing that it takes to get well. No way of getting there otherwise.” He smiled, perfect white teeth. He stood up. Behind him was an ornately framed mirror. Jack could see himself in the mirror
, blinking stupidly past the shrink’s shoulder. He lay on the sofa like an invalid, something comfortably defeated in the limpness of his body, the fey angle of his neck. He was suffused with self-loathing.
“I’m dreaming,” Jack said. “You are a dream. I know because I’ve had it before. I think.”
The man nodded. “Good, good. Dreams are very important, very expensive, very full of the insights.” He pointed the gun at Jack. “Did you know that when a man dies in his sleep it is because he has died in his dream?”
Jack didn’t say anything, but he knew that he was frightened, realized that he did believe dreams could kill.
“Why you want to go on living anyway, Mister?” the psychiatrist said. “You are full of the complaints and the unhappiness. ‘Fix me!’ you holler, but who are you kidding? You like the wallowing and the sighing and the slumping in the chair. Ha! There are plenty of peoples in the world, and just so much of the medicares and the insurance. The medicares and the insurance are peoples too, and it is not right to take their monies for nothing, for moping and crying the spilled milk! Ha!” He stood up, keeping the gun pointed at Jack, and backed away (anticipating, perhaps, some cat-quick leap, some desperate, last defense). Stopped by the wall, his back against the mirror, the psychiatrist stretched out his arm, closed his left eye, took aim.
“If you have the final insight, make it now,” the man said.
Jack could think of nothing.
The man nodded slowly, as though Jack’s silence confirmed a diagnosis. “Then—”
Azzam Freud’s head slammed back against the mirror, jerked by a glittering forearm that had pierced the mirror to encircle his neck. He gagged, fired the gun into the air, the report bigger than the room. The shrink struggled to break free. He dropped the gun and clutched his assailant’s arm with both hands. The arm jerked him back again. The shrink’s skull whacked against the glass, sending ragged white lines shivering to the edges of the mirror The man lurched forward, was yanked back again, harder, glass suddenly exploding outward, the man sliding to the floor, blood streaking the wall as he collapsed, the room filling with glass, a snow storm, a whiteout of fat, flying needles.
Jack tried to stand, throwing his arm in front of his face, fell backwards.
Ed Tilman was helping Jack to his feet. Tilman’s sleeve was rolled up, his arm red with blood.
“Thought I lost you there,” he said. The room was empty, nothing but shattered glass covering the floor.
Leaning against each other, they staggered back into the hall.
Dorian Greenway (and Kerry) were gone. A search of the other upstairs rooms showed them all to be empty. The fugitives had obviously sidestepped their pursuers, slipped into that alternate refuge, the labyrinth that Dorian Greenway had made his home.
Jack and Ed sat on the steps outside the marathon A A meeting and welcomed the cold air into their lungs.
“I heard you holler,” Tilman said. “Found nothing but an empty room with a mirror on the wall. I don’t care much for mirrors these days, but I thought I’d try the trick of looking with the palm of my hand. There you were.”
“Thanks,” Jack said.
They sat there on the steps. The cold was leaking into Jack’s bones, and, with it, that despair, that moping and wallowing (as Azzam Freud so aptly put it), that crying the spilled milk. Dorian had eluded them, had stolen Kerry back and would certainly rise again to create new havoc.
Jack heard the wail of sirens, watched two fire engines and an ambulance, all festive with flashing lights, bounce across a field. Well, Jack thought, what’s a Whole Addiction Expo without a few emergency vehicles? He could see a thick column of smoke billowing from the basement of the ruined mansion. Thanks to Ed Tilman, the machines that would have—Jack was convinced of this—goaded thousands into killing each other... those death machines were silenced.
If the Whole Addiction Expo had ended in a frenzy of killing, that carnage (in combination with the church bombings and the attack on A As General Service Office) could have, quite possibly, expanded into a civil war, recovering faction against recovering faction, America burning.
Jack closed his eyes and envisioned such a horror. He trembled at the thought. The images possessed such power, such an authority of dread.
He opened his eyes, turned and looked at Tilman. They both felt it, that thundering, earthquake roll, a subterranean dissent.
“What the hell?” Tilman said, standing up.
Jack stood too.
“He’s turned them back on,” Jack said.
Tilman shook his head. “No, not back on. Those babies are finished.” Tilman nodded at the column of smoke. “The sonofabitch had something in reserve.”
Tilman began to move quickly down the hill. Jack followed, the ground humming through the soles of his feet.
“Wait!” Jack said.
Tilman turned, and Jack pointed.
A tiny figure was limping toward the pond, its progress clumsy but rapid, falling toward its destination with convulsive, obscene purpose.
“Come on,” Jack said, breaking into a run.
When they reached Ezra Coldwell, he was standing in front of a thicket of pines and smaller evergreen shrubs, a clump of vegetation perhaps twenty feet in diameter. A cold wind sent leaves scudding across the nearby pond and riffled his thinning white hair with invisible fingers.
He stood perfectly still in baggy brown pants and a red flannel shirt (also too large). The wind slapped at his pants; there was a dark stain in the region of his crotch. He wore black socks, no shoes. The question of whether or not he was comfortable seemed, to Jack, a moot one, since he looked as dead as any of the brown leaves floating on the pond, as dead as the belly-up flies on a farmhouse windowsill.
There was one sign of life; blood dripped from his clenched fist.
Neither Jack nor Tilman called his name.
They stood beside him, towering over him, and Jack had the thought that they might, the three of them, stand there the rest of the night, stand there, indeed, until something terrible jarred them into motion again.
Jack wondered if the rest of the world had this fear of a blank patch, a silence or mental smoothness that would stretch out and swallow them. Did the rest of the world fear, for instance, that a lull in a dinner party’s conversation might freeze into an icy stillness, and that, once frozen, inertia might prevail and no one would be able to summon the scream that would set them in motion again?
Probably not, although it was the sort of thing which wasn’t helped by thinking about it. Jack felt panic shift in his chest.
Ezra Coldwell lurched forward. He plunged into the thicket, making no attempt to duck the branches and thorny leaves that tore at his face and blind eyes.
Animate yourself. That had been Anita’s message to Ezra Coldwell, and it did seem as though some invisible, brutal hand were shoving the old man forward.
Ezra Coldwell tumbled to his knees, clawed the dirt, and stumbled backwards. The metal door fell open with a heavy thunk.
“Are you claustrophobic?” Jack asked.
“No, why do you ask?” Ed Tilman said.
They were in a small elevator, the floor perhaps eight by eight feet, the light above them blinking fitfully as they descended. Ezra Coldwell, giving no indication that he was aware of their presence, had pushed a button and turned back into stone. The rumble of machinery was growing louder, filled with its resonance of fear The tiny chamber reeked of sour earth and coppery fire. They had been descending for perhaps fifteen minutes.
“Just making conversation,” Jack said—and trying to distract himself from a disorienting phenomenon (i.e., the way the dirty sheet-metal walls kept shifting into something else). Jack thought he saw an old-fashioned refrigerator (small, round-shouldered), a kitchen stove, kitchen cupboards, yellow walls splattered with red spaghetti sauce and noodles.
Jack closed his eyes, and when he opened them, the walls belonged, again, to an elevator. He breathed deeply, studied his sho
es. You are just fine, he told himself.
Something gleamed on the floor, a knife with a wooden handle and a big, shining blade. As Jack watched, it began to spin.
Jack closed his eyes again. The elevator car howled as it slowed and came to a groaning, rocking stop. Jack opened his eyes. The knife was gone.
The din of the machines was like an explosion that did not end. Jack and Tilman followed the stumbling, broken dwarf as he moved rapidly down a narrow hall. Walls of cinder block surrounded them. Ed Tilman, ever resourceful, had produced a gun which he held in his good hand. His other arm had ceased to bleed, but it swung limply at his side as though it were a prosthesis made of clear plastic.
Ezra Coldwell paused before a metal door, reached up, turned the knob, and entered, Jack and Tilman right behind him.
The door closed behind them and, incredibly, the machines were reduced to a distant rumble.
They had entered a movie theater, rows of empty red chairs curving in wide arcs, row after row. On the screen in front of them, in garish, primary colors, half a dozen figures in large, yellow, moon-walk space suits were leaping slowly in zero gravity, waving red pom-poms. Jack recognized the scene, the movie: Revenge of the Cheerleader Space Zombies.
The scene shifted. The music rose in dissonant waves. The hero, last of the surviving teenagers, was carrying his girlfriend up the mansion’s curving stairs. The camera angle was low; you could see the girl’s white cotton underpants, but she was dead, dismally dead, and this twinge of eroticism was, consequently, poignant rather than provocative. Who said that B-movie horror flicks did not have their moments of high art?
Jack recognized the carpet’s ornate design. That staircase was the one that Dorian Greenway had walked down to enter Kerry’s life.
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