Someone had left the gas on in Norm Bruett’s house, and the day before, a spark from the air conditioner had blown the whole place sky-high, rattling lumber and shingles and Fisher-Price toys all over Laurel Street. On Main Street, dogs and soldiers lay dead together in the gutter. In Randy’s Sooperette a man in pj’s lay draped over the meat counter, his arms hanging down. One of the dogs now lying in the gutter had been at this man’s face before losing its appetite. Cats did not catch the flu, and dozens of them wove in and out of the twilit stillness like smoky shades. From several houses the sound of television snow ran on and on. A random shutter banged back and forth. A red wagon, old and faded and rusty, the words SPEEDAWAY EXPRESS barely legible on its sides, stood in the middle of Durgin Street in front of the Indian Head Tavern. There were a number of returnable beer and soda bottles in the wagon. On Logan Lane, in Arnette’s best neighborhood, wind chimes played on the porch of Tony Leominster’s house. Tony’s Scout stood in the driveway, its windows open. A family of squirrels had nested in the back seat. The sun deserted Arnette; the town grew dark under the wing of the night. The town was, except for the chirr and whisper of small animals and the tinkle of Tony Leominster’s wind chimes, silent. And silent. And silent.
Chapter 31
Christopher Bradenton struggled out of delirium like a man struggling out of quicksand. He ached all over. His face felt alien, as if someone had injected it with silicone in a dozen places and it was now the size of a blimp. His throat was raw pain, and more frightening, the opening there seemed to have closed from ordinary throat-size to something no larger than the bore of a boy’s air pistol. His breath whistled in and out through this horribly tiny connection he needed to maintain contact with the world. Still it wasn’t enough, and worse than the steady, throbbing soreness there was a feeling like drowning. Worst of all, he was hot. He could not remember ever having been this hot, not even two years ago when he had been driving two political prisoners who had jumped bail in Texas west to Los Angeles. Their ancient Pontiac Tempest had died on Route 190 in Death Valley and he had been hot then, but this was worse. This was aninsidehot, as if he had swallowed the sun.
He moaned and tried to kick the covers off, but he had no strength. Had he put himself to bed? He didn’t think so. Someone or something had been in the house with him. Someone or something… he should remember, but he couldn’t. All Bradenton could remember was that he had been afraid even before he got sick, because he knew someone (or something) was coming and he would have to… what?
He moaned again and rocked his head from side to side on the pillow. Delirium was all he remembered. Hot phantoms with sticky eyes. His mother had come into this plain log bedroom, his mother who had died in 1969, and she had talked to him: “Kit, oh Kit, I tole you, ‘Don’t get mixed up with those people,’ I said. ‘I don’t care nothing about politics,’ I said, ‘but those men you hang around with are crazy as mad dogs and those girls are nothing but hoors.’ I tole you, Kit…” And then her face had broken apart, letting through a horde of grave beetles from the splitting yellow parchment fissures and he had screamed until blackness wavered and there was confused shouting, the slap of shoe-leather as people ran… lights, flashing lights, the smell of gas, and he was back in Chicago, the year was 1968, somewhere voices were chantingThe whole world is watching! The whole world is watching! The whole world…and there was a girl lying in the gutter by the entrance to the park, her body clad in overall jeans, her feet bare, her long hair full of glass-fragments, her face a glittering mask of blood that was black in the heartless white glow of the streetlights, the mask of a crushed insect. He helped her to her feet and she screamed and shrank against him because an outer-space monster was advancing out of the drifting gas, a creature clad in shining black boots and a flak-jacket and a walleyed gas mask, holding a truncheon in one hand, a can of Mace in the other, and grinning. And when the outer-space monster pushed its mask back, revealing its grinning, flaming face, they had both screamed because it was the somebody or something he had been waiting for, the man Kit Bradenton had always been terrified of. It had been the Walkin Dude. Bradenton’s screams had shattered the fabric of that dream like high C shatters fine crystal and he was in Boulder, Colorado, an apartment on Canyon Boulevard, summer and hot, so hot that even in your skivvy shorts your body was trickling sweat, and across from you stands the most beautiful boy in the world, tall and tanned and straight, he is wearing lemon-yellow bikini briefs which cling lovingly to every ridge and hollow of his precious buttocks and you know if he turns his face will be like a Raphael angel and he will be hung like the Lone Ranger’s horse. Hiyo Silver, away. Where did you pick him up? A meeting to discuss racism on the CU campus, or in the cafeteria? Hitchhiking? Does it matter? Oh, it’s so hot, but there’s water, a pitcher of water, an urn of water carved with strange figures which stand out in bas-relief, and beside it the pill, no—! THE PILL! The one that will send him off to what this angel in the light yellow briefs calls Huxleyland, the place where the moving finger writes and doesn’t move on, the place where flowers grow on dead oak trees, and boy, what an erection is tenting out your skivvies! Has Kit Bradenton ever been so horny, so ready for love? “Come to bed,” you say to that smooth brown back, “come to bed and do me and then I’ll do you. Just the way you like.” “Take your pill first,” he says without turning. “Then we’ll see.” You take the pill, the water is cool in your throat, and little by little the strangeness comes over your sight, the weirdness that makes every angle in the place a little more or a little less than ninety degrees. For some time you find yourself looking at the fan on the cheap Grand Rapids bureau and then you’re looking at your own reflection in the wavy looking glass above it.
Your face looks black and swelled but you don’t let it worry you because it’s just the pill, only !!!THE PILL!! “Trips,” you murmur, “oh boy, Captain Trips and I am sooo horny…” He begins to run and at first you have to look at those smooth hips where the elastic of his briefs rides so low, and then your gaze moves up the flat, tanned belly, then to the beautiful hairless chest, and finally from the slimly corded neck to the face… and it ishisface, sunken and happy and ferociously grinning, not the face of a Raphael angel but of a Goya devil and from each blank eyesocket there peers the reptilian face of an adder; he is coming toward you as you scream, he is whispering:Trips, baby, Captain Trips…
Then murkiness, faces and voices that he didn’t remember, and at last he had surfaced here, in the small house he had built with his own hands on the outskirts of Mountain City. Because now was now, and the great wave of revolt which had engulfed the country had long since withdrawn, the young Turks were now mostly old lags with gray in their beards and big coke-burned holes where their septa used to be, and this was the wreckage, baby. The boy in the yellow briefs had been long ago, and in Boulder Kit Bradenton had been little more than a boy himself.
My God, am I dying?
He beat at the thought with agonized horror, the heat rolling and billowing in his head like a sandstorm. And suddenly his short, quick respiration stopped as a sound began to rise from somewhere beyond and below the closed bedroom door.
At first Bradenton thought it was a fire-siren, or a police-car siren. It rose and grew louder as it grew closer; beneath it he could hear the jagged pounding of footfalls clocking along his downstairs hall and then through his living room and then battering up the stairs in a Goth’s stampede.
He pushed himself back against his pillow, his face drawing down in a rictus of terror even as his eyes widened to circles in his puffy, blackish face and the sound neared. Not a siren any more but a scream, high and ululating, a scream that no human throat could make or sustain, surely the scream of a banshee or of some black Charon, come to take him across the river that separates the land of the living from that of the dead.
Now the running footsteps clattered straight toward him along the upstairs hall, boards groaning and creaking and protesting under the weight of those merciless rundown bootheels and suddenly Kit Bradenton knew who it was and he shrieked as the door burst inward and the man in the faded jeans jacket ran in, his murderer’s grin flashing on his face like a whirring white circle of knives, his face as jolly as that of a lunatic Santa Claus, carrying a galvanized steel bucket high over his right shoulder.
“ HEEEEEEEOOOOOOWWWWWWWW! ”
“No!” Bradenton screamed, crossing his arms weakly across his face. “ No! Noo—! ”
The bucket tipped forward and the water flew out, all of it seeming to hang suspended for a moment in the yellow lamplight like the largest uncut diamond in the universe, and he saw the dark man’s face through it, reflected and refracted into the face of a supremely grinning troll who had just made its way up from hell’s darkest shit-impacted bowels to rampage on the earth; then the water fell on him, so cold that his swelled throat sprang momentarily open again, squeezing blood from its walls in big beads, shocking breath into him and making him kick the covers all the way over the foot of the bed in one convulsive spasm so that his body would be free to jackknife and sunfish as bitter cramps from these involuntary struggles whipped through him like greyhounds biting on the run.
He screamed. He screamed again. Then lay trembling, his feverish body soaked from toe to crown, his head thumping, his eyes bulging. His throat closed to a raw slit and he began to struggle for breath miserably again. His body began to shake and shiver.
“Iknewthat’d cool you off!” the man he knew as Richard Fry cried cheerily. He set the bucket down with a clang. “Ah say, Ah say Ahknewdat wuz goan do de trick, Kingfish! Thanks are in order, my good man, thanks from you tendered to me. Do you thank me? Can’t talk? No? Yet in your heart I know you do.”
“ Yeee-GAAAHHH! ”
He sprang into the air like Bruce Lee in a Run Run Shaw kung-fu epic, knees spread, for a moment seeming to hang suspended directly over Kit Bradenton as the water had done, his shadow a blob on the chest of Bradenton’s soaked pajamas, and Bradenton screamed weakly. Then one knee came down on either side of his ribcage and Richard Fry’s bluejeaned groin was the crotch of a fork suspended above his chest by inches, and his face burned down at Bradenton’s like a cellar torch in a gothic novel.
“Had to wake you up, man,” Fry said. “I didn’t want you to boogie off without a chance for us to talk a bit.”
“… off… off… off me…”
“I’m notonyou, man, come on. I’m just hanging suspended above you. Like the great invisible world.”
Bradenton, in an agony of fear, could only pant and shake and roll his trapped eyeballs away from that jolly, fuming face.
“We got to talk about ships and seals and sailing wax, and whether bees have stings. Also about the papers you’re supposed to have for me, and the car, and the keys to the car. Now all I see in your gay-radge is a Chevy pickup, and I know that’s yours, Kitty-Kitty, so how bout it?”
“… they… papers… can’t… can’t talk…” He gasped harshly for air. His teeth chittered together like small birds in a tree.
“Youbetterbe able to talk,” Fry said, and stuck out his thumbs. They were both double-jointed (as were all his fingers), and he wiggled them back and forth at angles that seemed to deny biology and physics. “Cause if you aren’t, I’m going to have your baby blues for my keychain and you’re going to have to trot around hell with a seeing-eye dog.” He jammed his thumbs at Bradenton’s eyes and Bradenton jerked back against the pillow helplessly.
“You tell me,” Fry said, “and I’ll leave you the right pills. In fact, I’ll hold you up so you can swallow them. Make you well, man. Pills to take care of everything.”
Bradenton, now trembling with fear as much as with cold, forced the words out through his clacking teeth. “Papers… in the name of Randall Flagg. Welsh dresser downstairs. Under the… contact paper.”
“Car?”
Bradenton tried desperately to think. Had he gotten this man a car? It was so far away, all the flames of delirium were in between, and the delirium seemed to have done something to his thought processes, burned out whole banks of memory. Whole sections of his past were scorched cabinets filled with smoldering wires and blackened relays. Instead of the car this awful man wanted to know about, an image of the first car he’d ever owned drifted up, a 1953 Studebaker with a bullet nose that he had painted pink.
Gently, Fry put one hand over Bradenton’s mouth and pinched his nostrils shut with the other.