The Great And Secret Show Part 30

"Don't bother to try," Tesla murmured. "It won't stop him."

"What will?"

"Christ knows."

"Going to shoot me down in cold blood in front of all these nice people?" Tommy-Ray said to Howie. "Go on, I dare you. Blow me away. I'm not afraid. I like death and death likes me. Pull the trigger, Katz. If you've got the b.a.l.l.s."

As he spoke he slowly walked towards Howie, who was barely keeping himself upright. But he kept the gun pointed at Tommy-Ray.

It was the Jaff who brought the impa.s.se to an end, seizing hold of Jo-Beth. His grip brought a cry. Howie looked towards her, and Tommy-Ray charged him, knife raised. It took only a push from Tommy-Ray to throw Howie down. The gun flew from his hand. Tommy-Ray kicked Howie hard between the legs then threw himself upon his victim.

"Don't kill him!" the Jaff commanded.

He let Jo-Beth go, and advanced towards Fletcher. From the fingers in which he'd claimed he could already feel the Art quickening beads of power oozed like ectoplasm, bursting in the air. He had reached the fighters, and seemed about to intervene, but instead simply cast a glance down at them, as at two brawling dogs, then stepped past them to continue his advance upon Fletcher.

"We'd better back off," Tesla murmured to Grillo and Hotchkiss. "It's out of our hands now."

Proof of that came seconds later, as Fletcher reached into his pocket, and pulled out a book of matches, marked Martin's Food and Drug. What was about to happen could not have been lost on any of the spectators. They'd smelled the gasoline. They knew its source. Now here were the matches. An immolation was imminent. But there were no further retreats. Though none of them comprehended much, if any, of the exchange between the protagonists there were few among the crowd who didn't know in their guts that they were witnessing events of consequence. How could they look away, when for the first time they had a chance of peeking at the G.o.ds?

Fletcher opened the book; pulled a match from it. He was in the act of striking when fresh darts of power broke from the Jaff's hand and flew at Fletcher. They struck his fingers like bullets, their violence carrying match and matchbook out of Fletcher's hands.

"Don't waste your time with tricks," the Jaff said. "You know fire's not going to do me any harm. Nor you, unless you want it to. And if you want extinction then all you have to do is ask."

This time he took his poison to Fletcher rather than letting it fly from his hand. He approached his enemy, and touched him. A shudder went through Fletcher. With agonizing slowness he turned his head far enough around to be able to see Tesla. In his eyes she saw so much vulnerability; he'd opened himself up to perform whatever end-game he had in mind, and the Jaff's malice had direct access to his essence. The appeal in his expression was unambiguous. A message of chaos was spreading through his system from the Jaff's touch. The only way he sought to be saved from it was death.

She had no matches, but she had Hotchkiss's gun. Without a word she s.n.a.t.c.hed it from his hand. Her motion drew the Jaff's glance, and for a chilling moment she met his mad eyes-saw a phantom head swelling around them; another Jaff in hiding behind the first.

Then she aimed the gun at the ground behind Fletcher, and fired. There was no spark, as she'd hoped there'd be. She aimed again, emptying her head of all thoughts but the will for ignition. She'd made fires before. On the page, to catch the mind. Now one for the flesh.

She exhaled slowly through her mouth, the way she did when she first sat down at her typewriter in the morning, and pulled the trigger.

It seemed she saw the fire coming before it actually ignited. Like a bright storm; the spark the lightning that ran before. The air around Fletcher turned yellow. Then it sprang into flame.

The heat was sudden, and intense. She dropped the gun and ran to where she could better see what followed. Fletcher caught her gaze through the blistering conflagration, and there was a sweetness in his expression that she'd carry through the adventures the future had planned for her as a reminder of how little she understood the workings of the world. That a man might enjoy to burn; might profit by it, might come to fruition in fire, that was a lesson no schoolmarm had come close to teaching. But here was the fact, made true by her own hand.

Beyond the fire she saw the Jaff stepping away with a shrug of ridicule. The fire had caught his fingers, where they'd touched Fletcher. It blew them out, like five candles. Behind him, Howie and Tommy-Ray were backing off before the heat, their hatred postponed. These sights held her only a beat, however, before she returned to the spectacle of the burning Fletcher. Even in that brief time his status had changed. The fire, which raged around him like a pillar, was not consuming him but transforming, the process throwing out flashes of bright matter.

The Jaff's response to these lights-which was to retreat like a rabid dog before thrown water-gave her a clue to their nature. They were to Fletcher what the beads that had s.n.a.t.c.hed the matches were to the Jaff: some essential power released. The Jaff hated them. Their brightness made the face behind his face come clear. The sight of it, and of the miraculous change in Fletcher, drew her closer to the fire than was safe. She could smell her hair singeing. But she was too intrigued to be driven back. This was her doing, after all. She was the creator. Like the first ape to nurture a flame, and so transform the tribe.

That, she understood, was Fletcher's hope: the transformation of the tribe. This was not simply spectacle. The burning motes coming off Fletcher's body had their progenitor's intention in them. They went out from the column like bright seeds, weaving through the air in search of fertile ground. The Grovers were that ground, and the fireflies found them waiting. What struck her as miraculous was that n.o.body fled. Perhaps the previous violence had frightened off the weak-hearted. The rest were game for the magic, some actually breaking rank and walking to greet the lights, like communicants to an altar rail. Children went first, s.n.a.t.c.hing at the motes, proving them innocent of harm. The light broke against their open hands, or against their welcoming faces, the fire echoed momentarily in their eyes. The parents of these adventurers were next to be touched. Some, having been struck, called back to their spouses: "It's OK. It doesn't hurt. It's just...light!"

It was more than that, Tesla knew. It was Fletcher. And in giving himself away in this fas.h.i.+on his physical self was gradually deteriorating. Already his chest, hands and groin had all but disappeared, his head and neck attached to his shoulders and his shoulders to his lower torso by strands of dusty matter that were prey to every whim of the flames. As she watched they too broke, and went to become light. Watching, a childhood hymn tripped into her head. Her mind sang Jesus wants me for a sunbeam. An old song for a new age.

The opening act of that age was already coming to a conclusion. Fletcher's self was almost used up, his face eaten away at the eyes and the mouth, the skull fragmenting, his brain melted to brightness and being blown from its pan like a dandelion head in an August wind.

With its going the pieces of Fletcher that remained simply vanished in the fire. Bereft of fuel, the flame went out. There was no dwindling; no ashes; not even smoke. One moment brightness, heat and wonders. The next, nothing.

She had been watching Fletcher too closely to count how many of the witnesses had been touched by his light. Many, certainly. Possibly all. Perhaps it was their sheer numbers that prevented the Jaff from any attempt at reprisal. He had an army waiting in the night, after all. But he chose not to summon it. Instead, with the minimum of show, he left. Tommy-Ray went with him. Jo-Beth did not. Howie had positioned himself beside her during Fletcher's dissolution, gun in hand. All Tommy-Ray could do was offer a few barely coherent threats, then follow in his father's footsteps.

That, in essence, was the Shaman Fletcher's last performance. There would be repercussions of course, but not until the recipients of his light had slept on their gift for a few hours. There were some more immediate consequences. For Grillo and Hotchkiss the satisfaction of knowing their senses hadn't deceived them at the caves; for Jo-Beth and Howie, reunion after events that had brought them close to death; and for Tesla, the knowledge that with Fletcher's going a great weight of responsibility had pa.s.sed to her.

It was the Grove itself, however, which had borne the brunt of the night's magic. Its streets had seen horrors. Its citizens had been touched by spirits.

Soon, war.

PART FIVE:.

SLAVES AND LOVERS.

I.

--------------i-------------- Any alcoholic would have recognized the behavior of the Grove the following morning. It was that of a man who'd been on a bender the night before and had to get up early the day after and pretend that nothing untoward had happened. He'd stand under a cold shower for a few minutes to shock his system into wakefulness, breakfast on Alka-Seltzer and black coffee, then step out into the day with a gait more purposeful than usual, and the permafrost smile of an actress who'd just lost an Oscar. There were more h.e.l.los and how-are-yous? that morning, more neighbors waving cheerily to each other as they backed out their cars, more radios playing weather reports (sun! sun! sun!) through windows thrown wide to prove that there were no secrets in this house. To a stranger, coming to the Grove that morning for the first time, it would have seemed as though the town were auditioning for Perfectsville, USA. The general air of enforced bonhomie would have curdled his stomach.

Down at the Mall, where the evidence of a Dionysian night could scarcely be ignored, the talk was of anything but the truth. h.e.l.l's Angels had ridden in from L.A., one story went, their sole purpose to wreak havoc. The explanation gained credibility with repet.i.tion. Some claimed to have heard the bikes. A few even decided to have seen them, embroidering the collective fiction knowing n.o.body would raise a doubting voice. By mid-morning the gla.s.s had been entirely swept away, and boards nailed up over the smashed panes. By noon, fresh windows had been ordered. By two, they were in. Not since the days of the League of Virgins had the Grove been so single-minded in its pursuit of equilibrium; nor so hypocritical. For behind closed doors, in bathrooms and bedrooms and dens, it was a different story entirely. Here the smiles dropped, and the intent gait gave way to nervous pacing, and weeping, and the swallowing of pills searched for with the pa.s.sion of gold-diggers. Here people confessed to themselves-not even to their partners or their dogs-that something was awry today and would never be quite right again. Here people tried to remember tales they'd been told as children-the old, fanciful stories adulthood had all but shamed from their memories-in the hope of countering their present fears. Some tried to drink away their anxiety. Some took to eating. Some contemplated the priesthood.

It was, all in all, a d.a.m.n strange day.

Less strange, perhaps, for those who had hard facts to juggle, however much those facts flew in the face of what yesterday would have pa.s.sed for reality. For these few, blessed now with the certain knowledge that there were monsters and divinities loosed in the Grove, the question was not: is it true? Rather: what does it mean?

For William Witt, the answer was a shrug of surrender. He had no way to comprehend the horrors he'd been terrorized by at the house in Wild Cherry Glade. His subsequent conversation with Spilmont, dismissing his story as fabrication, had made him paranoid. Either there was a conspiracy afoot to keep the Jaff's machinations secret, or else he, William Witt, was losing his mind. Nor were these memories mutually exclusive, which was doubly chilling. In the face of such bitter blasts he'd kept himself locked up at home, with the exception of his brief trip down to the Mall the previous night. He'd been a late attender, and today he remembered very little of it, but he did recall getting home and the night of video Babylon that followed. Usually he was quite sparing with his p.o.r.no sessions, preferring to select one or two films to view rather than pig out on a dozen. But last night's viewing had turned into a binge. When the Robinsons next door were taking their kids off to the playground the following morning he was still sitting in front of the television, the blinds drawn, the beer cans a small city at his feet, watching and watching. He had his collection organized with the precision of a master librarian, referenced and cross-referenced. He knew the stars of these sweaty epics by all their aliases; he knew their breast and c.o.c.k sizes; their early histories; their specialities. He had the narratives, crude as they were, by heart; his favorite scenes memorized down to each grunt and spurt But today the parade did not arouse him. He went from film to film like an addict among pillaged peddlers, looking for a fix no one could supply, until the videos were piled high around his television. Two-ways, three-ways, oral, a.n.a.l, golden showers, bondage, discipline, lesbian scenes, d.i.l.d.o scenes, rape and romance scenes-he went through them all but none provided the release he needed. His search became a kind of pursuit of himself. What will rouse me will be me, was his half-finished thought.

It was a desperate situation. This was the first time in his life-excluding events with the League-that voyeurism had failed to excite. The first time he wanted the performers sharing his reality as he shared theirs. He'd always been happy to turn them off when he'd shot his wad; even been faintly contemptuous of their charms once their hold on him had been mopped up. Now he mourned them, like lovers he'd lost without ever knowing them properly, whose every orifice he'd sight of, but whose intimacy was denied him.

Yet, some time after dawn, his spirits as low as he'd known them, the strangest thought occurred: that perhaps he could bring them to him; by the sheer heat of his desire foment them into being. Dreams could be made real. Artists did it all the time, and didn't everyone have a little art in them? It was that thought, barely formed, that kept him watching the screen, through The Last Lays of Pompeii and Bom to Be Made and Secrets of a Women's Prison; films he knew as well as his own history, but which, unlike his history, might yet live in the present tense.

He was not the only Grover visited by such thoughts, though none were as fixated on the erotic as William. The same idea-that some precious, essential person, or persons, might be called up from the mind and made a boon companion- occurred to every member of the crowd that had gathered in the Mall the evening before. Soap-opera stars, game-show hosts, dead or lost relations, divorced spouses, missing children, comic-book characters: there were as many names as there were minds to summon them.

For some, like William Witt, the face of their desire gathered momentum at such speed (fuelled in several cases by obsession, in others by longing or envy) that by dawn the following day there were already clots in corners of their rooms where the air had thickened in preparation for the miracle.

In the bedroom of Shuna Melkin, who was the daughter of Christine and Larry Melkin, a fabled rock princess-dead of an overdose several years past but Shuna Melkin's sole and obsessive idol, was making herself known with croonings so subtle it could have pa.s.sed for the breeze in the eaves but that Shuna knew the tune.

In Ossie Larton's loft there were scratchings he knew with an inward smile were the birth pangs of the werewolf he'd kept secret company with since he'd first known that such creatures were imaginable. His name was Eugene, this werewolf, which-at the tender age of six, when Ossie had first created his companion-had seemed an appropriate name for a man who grew fur under the full moon.

For Karen Conroy the three leads of her favorite movie, Love Knows Your Name, a little-seen romance she'd wept through six days running during a long-past trip to Paris, could be sensed as a delicate European perfume in the lounge.

And so on, and so forth.

By noon that day there wasn't any one of the crowd who hadn't had an intimation-many of which were dismissed or ignored of course-that they had unexpected visitors. The population of Palomo Grove, which had swelled by a hundred horrors at the Jaff's summons, was about to swell again.

--------------ii-------------- "You've already admitted you don't really understand what happened last night-"

"It's not a question of admitting anything, Grillo."

"OK. Let's not get mad at each other. Why do we always end up shouting?"

"We're not shouting."

"OK. We're not shouting. All I'm saying is, please consider the possibility that this errand he's sending you on-"

"Errand?"

"Now you're shouting. I'm just saying, think a minute. This could be the last trip you ever make."

"Possibility accepted."

"So let me come with you. You've never been south of Tijuana."

"Neither have you."

"It's rough-"

"Listen, I've pitched art movies to men perplexed by Dumbo. I know rough. If you want to do something really useful, stay here and get well."

"I'm well already. I never felt better."

"I need you here, Grillo. Watching. It's not over, by a long way."

"What am I supposed to be watching for?" Grillo asked, conceding the argument by no longer pursuing it.

"You've always had an eye for the hidden agenda. When the Jaff makes his move, however quietly, you'll know it. By the way, did you see Ellen last night? She was in the crowd, with her kid. You might start by seeing how she feels the morning after..."

It wasn't that Grillo's fears for her safety weren't legitimate, nor indeed that she wouldn't have taken pleasure in his company on the journey ahead. But for reasons she could find no gentle way of stating, and so didn't state at all, his presence would be an intrusion she had no right to risk, either for his good or for the good of the task ahead. It had been one of Fletcher's last acts to choose her to go to the Mission; he'd even indicated that it had somehow been preordained. Not so long ago she'd have dismissed such mysticism; but after last night she was obliged to be more open-minded. The world of mysteries she'd made light of in her spook and s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p screenplays was not to be so easily mocked. It had come looking for her, found her, and pitched her-cynicism and all- among its heavens and its h.e.l.ls. The latter in the shape of the Jaff's army, the former's presence in Fletcher's transformation: flesh to light.

Charged with being the dead man's agent on earth she felt a curious relaxation, despite the jeopardy that lay ahead. She no longer had to keep her cynicism polished; no longer had to divide her imaginings from moment to moment into the real (solid, sensible) and the fanciful (vaporous, valueless). If (when) she got back to her typewriter she'd begin these tongue-in-cheek screenplays over from the top, telling them with faith in the tale, not because every fantasy was absolutely true but because no reality ever was.

Mid-morning she left the Grove, choosing a route that took her out of the town past the Mall, where the status quo was well on its way to being restored. With speed she'd be over the border by nightfall; and at the Mision de Santa Catrina, or-if Fletcher's hope was well founded-on the empty ground where it had stood, before dawn.

On his father's instructions Tommy-Ray had crept back to the Mall the previous night, long after the crowd had dispersed. The police had arrived by that point but he had no difficulty in achieving his purpose, which was the retrieval of the terata which he had attached with his own hands to Katz's flesh. The Jaff had other reasons for wanting the creature back than keeping it from being found by the police. It was not dead, and once returned to the hands of its creator it regurgitated all it had seen and heard, the Jaff laying his hands on the beast like a faith-healer and drawing the report from the terata's system.

When he'd heard what he needed to hear, he killed the messenger.

"Well now..." he said to Tommy-Ray, "...it seems you'll have the journey I told you about sooner than I planned."

"What about Jo-Beth? That b.a.s.t.a.r.d Katz has got her."

"We wasted effort last night trying to persuade her to join our family. She rejected us. We'll waste no more time. Let her take her chance in the maelstrom."

"But..."

"No more on this," the Jaff said. "Your obsession with her really is ludicrous. And don't sulk! You've been indulged for too long. You think that smile of yours can get you whatever you want. Well it won't get you her."

"You're wrong. And I'll prove it."

"Not now you won't. You've got some travelling to do."

"First, Jo-Beth," Tommy-Ray said, and made to move away from his father. But the Jaff's hand was on his shoulder before he'd moved more than a step. His touch made Tommy-Ray yelp.

"Shut the f.u.c.k up!"

"You're hurting me!"

"I meant to!"

"No...I mean really hurting. Stop it."

"You're the one death loves, right, son?"

Tommy-Ray could feel his legs start to give out beneath him. He began to leak from d.i.c.k, nose and eyes.

"I don't think you 're half the man you say you are," the Jaff told him. "Not half."

"I'm sorry...don't hurt me any more, please..."

"I don't think men sniff after their sisters all the time. They find other women. And they don't talk about death like it was easy stuff then snivel if they start to hurt a little."

"OK! OK! I get the point! Just stop, will you? Stop!"

The Jaff released him. He fell to the ground.

"It's been a bad night for us both," his father said. "We've both had something taken from us...you, your sister...me, the satisfaction of destroying Fletcher. But there are fine times ahead. Trust me."

He reached down to pick Tommy-Ray up. The boy flinched, seeing the fingers at his shoulder. But this time the contact proved benign; even soothing.

"There's a place I want you to go for me," the Jaff said. "It's called the Mision de Santa Catrina..."

II.

Howie hadn't realized until Fletcher had gone out of his life just how many questions he had left unanswered; problems only his father might have helped him solve. They didn't vex him through the night. He slept too soundly. It was only the next morning that he began to regret his refusal to learn from Fletcher. The only solution available to Jo-Beth and himself was to try to piece the story in which they clearly played such a vital role together from clues, and from the testimony of Jo-Beth's mother.

The previous night's invasion had brought about a change in Joyce McGuire. After years of attempting to hold the evil that had entered her house at bay, her failure, in the end, to do so had somehow freed her. The worst had happened: what more was there to fear? She had seen her personal h.e.l.l created in front of her, and survived. G.o.d's agency-in the form of the Pastor-had been valueless. It had been Howie who had gone out in search of her daughter, and finally-both of them ragged, and bloodied-brought her back. She'd welcomed him into the house; even insisted he stay the night. The following morning she went about the house with the air of a woman who had been told a tumor in her body was benign, and she could expect a few more years of life.

When, in the early afternoon, all three of them sat down to talk, it took a little time to persuade her to unburden herself of the past, but the stories came, one by one. Sometimes, especially when she talked about Arleen, Carolyn and Trudi, she cried as she talked, but as the events she was describing became more tragic she told them more and more dispa.s.sionately. On occasion she'd go back to offer details she'd missed, or to praise somebody who'd helped her through the difficult years, when she was bringing up Jo-Beth and Tommy-Ray alone knowing she was talked about as the hussy who'd survived.

"The number of times I thought about leaving the Grove," she said. "Like Trudi."

"I don't think it saved her any pain," Howie said. "She was always unhappy."

"I remember her a different way. Always in love with somebody or other."

"Do you know...who she was in love with before she had me?"

"Are you asking me do I know who your father is?"