58
Hillary began to feel unwell during her third-period social studies class. Cramps had her white-knuckled and hunched over her desk when Mr. Rauscher noticed and dropped by to ask her quietly if she wanted to be excused to go to the infirmary. Hillary could only nod.
He gave the rest of the class a pop quiz, which earned Hillary some dirty looks as she went out the door with the teacher's arm around her. On the fourth floor the school nurse, Mrs. Groveman, took over and had Hillary lie down on the couch. She drew the shades over the windows. Hillary couldn't straighten her legs.
"Do you think you might throw up?" Mrs. Groveman asked her. She positioned a wastebasket with a garbage can liner near the couch.
"Don't know," Hillary said.
"You're not menstruating yet, are you, Hillary?"
"No'm."
"This could be it," the nurse said cheerfully. "Do you want to go home?"
"Yes'm."
"Let me get a cold cloth for your head, and I'll just call your mother."
Groveman wrung out a cloth at the washbasin and covered Hillary's eyes and forehead with it: Hillary's hands were clenched over her belly, and she hissed at a particularly prolonged pain, a couple of tears squeezing from beneath her pressed-down lids. Groveman produced a thermometer and cautioned her not to bite down. "I'll just be gone a few minutes," she said.
"Okay."
The last cramp had been the worst, but there weren't any more. Hillary straightened carefully on the couch and breathed easier. She felt wan and sleepy, barely aware of the slender tube between her lips, the silvery bulb nestled under her tongue. Mrs. Groveman had returned, silently; at least Hillary thought she heard the school nurse moving around in the room. The cloth, no longer cool, was plucked from her face. Hillary sighed, took the thermometer out of her mouth, and opened her eyes.
"Hello, Hillary," Polly Windross said, leaning over her with a smile.
Hillary almost leaped off the couch. Her eyes were goggled. A smattering of freckles darkened against the drained pallor of her skin.
Polly's blond hair fanned down across one cheek, and curled up like a pretend-mustache under her pert nose. She was wearing her familiar red tam, the light green cape with the dark green border. She held the washcloth in her left hand. Her right hand was out of sight beneath the cape.
"What's the matter? You're so jumpy. It's only me." Polly dropped the washcloth in the wastebasket and held out her hand, a sweeping imperious gesture. "Come on. We have to get going."
"Mrs. Grovemannnnn ..." Hillary croaked; she had almost no voice. She edged backward on the leatherette couch, away from Polly's languidly beckoning fingers, the plaid skirt of her jumper riding up around her hips. She looked yearningly at the door to the infirmary, which was closed. The room was dark in contrast to the brilliant yellow rectangles of the shades over the windows.
"Oh, you can be such a baby," Polly said, a little wise twist to her child's shapely mouth. "I told you. It's time to go."
"Where?"
"Outside. All our friends are waiting."
"Who's . . . waiting?"
"Our friends, Hillary. Come see."
Hillary couldn't move. She was rigid from panic, backed up against a wall. Polly just stared at her, a touch of sharpness in the blue eyes. Tiny lights there, too, that played all around the pupils; Hillary felt something that might have been her own faint shadow enlarging on the wall behind her, becoming black and muscular, strong enough to give her a little push and stand her, unwillingly, alongside Polly, who strode off toward the windows in red boots, not a backward glance as Hillary was propelled, tentative and stumbling, a couple of steps behind her. Whenever she tried to resist, the flourishing blackness rubbed against her persuasively like a very thin, eager dog, pushing her forward. She had to keep moving despite the stoned awkward weight of her feet, the sensation of being pleasantly paralyzed at the base of her spine, the nape of her neck.
Polly reached down to release one of the window shades. It rolled up quick as a blink. The sky outside was gray with faint blooms of cloud. Hillary heard through the window a clamor, an uproar. Polly stepped aside.
"There they are."
Hillary took the last two steps to the window. She looked down at the asphalt play yard of Blessed Sacrament School, which also served as a parking lot for the church. A black iron picket fence surrounded the school and the rectory. No one was in the yard, but the street beyond was filled with young people. Dozens of them, shuffling through a kind of pathetic dance. Some played crude, homemade musical instruments that whined and whanged and twittered. Either they wore motley costumes and makeup (the touches of fresh blood were ingenious) or else, astonishingly, they were naked. Hillary saw shaved scarred heads, missing ears; others were more dismayingly deformed. They had the snouts of crocodiles, or squib arms like thalidomide cherubs.
Hillary felt a shudder which was quieted by the spreading numbness down her back. She looked slowly around at Polly.
"Is it Halloween already?"
"You poor dummy."
"Don't make me go," she sobbed. "I don't want anything to do with them."
"Too bad. Your father can't learn to leave well enough alone. He's a troublemaker. So you're going with us to teach him a lesson. And that's all there is to it."
Behind Hillary the window was unlocked and began to slide up. She heard it but was afraid to look back, to take her hot blurred eyes off Polly.
"No. No."
"There you go again. Listen, baby, you'll like it— once you get there. Hear them? They're having fun."
But Hillary heard only cries of torment, of degradation and woe. She was flooded with a fierce Irish rage.
"I won't go!"
"Oh yes you will!"
Polly's other hand shot out from beneath her cape. There was no flesh on it. Sharp, fire-cured bone struck Hillary in the forehead, a ringing slap as Polly's cape billowed in a gust of wind from the open window, obscuring her face. Hillary felt the low sill strike the backs of her thighs, felt herself curving outward into the air. Her upflung hands reached for something, anything, to hold onto. A scream of pure demented pleasure arose from the throats of the lostlings who paraded obscenely in the street. Above their cries she heard a man's voice call out urgently to her. Hilllary, poised in space, willed herself not to fall. But her feet slipped and she was diving backwards, head down; she had a streaky blurred impression of the sooty stones of the school building and the thick gray sky. Then a violent light exploded behind her eyes and she knew nothing more.
59
By two o'clock in the afternoon of the twelfth of March heavy fog rolling in from Boston Harbor had forced the closing of Logan International Airport to all traffic for the second time that day. The captains of inbound aircraft, including Alitalia's flight 60 from Rome, which was then 125 miles northeast of Boston over the Atlantic and descending for the final leg of its approach, were notified of a potentially long delay and given their options. The Alitalia jet, a Boeing 747, could be diverted to the nearest field large enough to handle the jumbos, which was Bradley International in Windsor Locks, Connecticut. But there was a fifty-fifty chance the wind would change and sweep away most of the fog in a matter of minutes. The captain estimated his fuel reserves at a comfortable two hours of flying time and reported his desire to hold for a favorable break in the weather. He was assigned a pattern some forty miles north of Logan at twelve thousand feet.
The captain then informed his passengers, among them Father James Merlo, of the delay. Merlo had been napping in a bulkhead seat of the no-smoking section in coach, where he had a little more room for his long legs. He half heard the news that the long flight was still far from over, grunted, rearranged the nest of little pillows that kept slipping away from beneath his head, and went back to sleep.
In the international terminal building Conor Devon saw a blinking green message on a TV screen that said ***ALL FLIGHTS DELAYED BY FOG*** CONSULT AIRLINES FOR FURTHER INFORMATION*** Conor spoke to a slender Neapolitan girl with a short haircut, who told him that flight 60 was holding and they hoped it would be able to land soon.
He bought a bag of peanuts, checked the time, and made a credit card call to One Pearl Place boutique. Kay Finlay answered the phone.
"Oh, Conor, she isn't here. The school called about eleven thirty, quarter to twelve, something to do with Hillary. Gina went down there right away."
"What about Hillary? Is she sick?"
"There was an accident of some kind. But they said she's going to be all right."
"Thanks, Kay."
The word accident filled his mind big as a blimp. Conor hung up, leafed through his telephone book for the number of the principal's office and placed the call.
"Irene Wimbledon."
"Mrs. Wimbledon, it's Conor Devon. I just heard Hillary was in an accident."
"Oh— oh, but she's perfectly all right, Mr. Devon. Nothing to worry about. She twisted her knee going down the stairs between classes. The nurse put an icebag on it, and by the time your wife arrived the swelling was almost gone."
"Is Gina there?"
"No, they left about half an hour ago. Mrs. Devon was taking Hillary to lunch, and then I believe they were going to do some shopping."
"Well, she must be okay if Gina was taking her shopping."
"Oh, yes. She may have a slight limp for a couple of days."
"That's a relief. How are the boys?"
"The boys are fine, Mr. Devon. A credit to the school. I do have another call waiting, so if you'll excuse me— "
"Sure." Conor hung up and checked the time on one of the monitors. Two eighteen. No change in the weather that he could see. If Father Merlo had to deplane in Connecticut, then he would meet the priest there and drive him to Vermont. No sense waiting for him to be bussed all the way back to Boston. But as long as there was a chance Logan would reopen, he had to wait.
He settled down in a seat that was too small for him, opened his bag of peanuts, and munched as he leafed through a tattered copy of a wrestling fan magazine someone had abandoned on an adjacent seat. He looked at mediocre black and white "action" photos of men whom he knew almost as intimately as his own wife. He failed to find his own scowling face anywhere and cast the magazine aside. Thoughts of Hillary came to mind and he smiled, loving her. He had no inkling that he had not reached the Blessed Sacrament School at all, and that the voice on the telephone, so plausible and reassuring, had not been that of the principal.
60
Gina had arrived at the school a few minutes past noon, and found a parking place on the street beside the rectory. It was lunchtime, and the asphalt schoolyard was crowded with children running around shrilly and aimlessly, many of them in shirtsleeves despite the thirty-degree temperature.
As Gina crossed the yard, passing the grotto of the Virgin beside the rectory, she searched quickly through the mob of playing children but didn't see Dean or Charles. But all of the grades had hobby options during the free period following lunch; the boys were probably inside with computers or small animals.
Up a flight of steps and through double doors past the kindergarten, closed for the day. The lay principal, Irene Wimbledon, was waiting for her in the school offices opposite the first-floor auditorium. She was a small, plump, pigeonlike woman who nodded and becked and smiled; unlikely as it seemed at first glance she was a tough administrator who had survived five years under a hard-driving, bad-tempered parish priest who disliked all women but the Virgin Mary, to whom he was favorably disposed on the basis of her references.
"Where is she?" Gina cried, out of breath. "Is she hurt badly? What happened?"
Wimbledon laid a firm, soothing hand on Gina's arm. "Hillary had a very narrow escape from what surely would have been a fatal fall; she has some bumps and bruises, but she's not seriously hurt. She is badly frightened by the experience. Father Toomey is with her now in the sanctuary. I know you're anxious to see her, but please come into my office for a few moments."
Gina allowed herself to be led past a row of glass-fronted cubicles into a room of rosewood paneling and beige carpeting. Mrs. Wimbledon closed the door and they sat down together in facing leather chairs that bristled with metal studs.
"I've called Dr. Wersheba. Unfortunately he's in surgery at St. Anthony's, but another doctor will come as soon as possible."
"Why does she need a doctor?" Gina said; her face felt as if she were wearing a hard coat of glue and she could scarcely move her lips. But the rest of her was shaking.
"Hillary is in a— highly agitated condition. I don't think I should sugarcoat it for you— she's hysterical and must be sedated, then examined. There is a possibility that she was assaulted."
"Here? In the school?"
"I'm afraid so."
"I'll take her to the hospital myself!"
"I doubt that Hillary will go with you. She won't leave the sanctuary. She feels it's the only place that is safe for her right now."
"Well, what happened?"
"We know that she suffered abdominal cramps during her third-period class. Mr. Rauscher accompanied her upstairs to the infirmary, where Mrs. Groveman had her lie on the couch. Mrs. Groveman left Hillary alone for a few minutes to come down to the office to call you. The line was busy at first. When third period ended, Mr. Rauscher went back upstairs to see how Hillary was. As soon as he opened the infirmary door he saw Hillary standing very near a window which, we assume, she opened herself. She was pressed against the sill, leaning backwards, and Mr. Rauscher says she had a look of utter terror on her face."
"Did she— have her uniform on?"
Wimbledon nodded. "She was fully dressed. Mr. Rauscher had only a moment to take in everything. A sixth sense told him she was about to fall— or jump— from the window. You know Mr. Rauscher, don't you? He was an outstanding athlete in college, and has very quick reactions for someone of his size and strength. He got to Hillary just as she fell and managed to catch her by one leg and pull her back into the room. It was a close call."
Gina sat staring at the principal with tears streaming down her face.
"Why do you think— someone raped her?"
"But I didn't say rape, I said assaulted. The condition of her face— well, you have to see for yourself."
"Wait— wait just a minute." Gina dug into her big purse for a tissue, pushing aside the Colt Python revolver she was licensed to carry. She wiped her cheeks and looked at her eyes in a compact mirror; she decided they weren't too streaky. She nodded. "Okay, I'm ready."
Gina could hear her daughter as soon as she opened the side door to the sanctuary. Hillary's voice was fiercely high-pitched.
"BLESSED ART THOU AMONG WOMEN AND BLESSED IS THE FRUIT OF THY WOMB JESUS!"
Hillary was crouched low in the first pew on the left-hand side of the sanctuary. The Jesuit recently assigned to Blessed Sacrament, whose name was Toomey, sat beside her. The lights above the altar had been turned on.
"HOLY MARY MOTHER OF GOD ..."
She gasped for breath; her body trembled in an agony of complex emotion. She had a rosary in one fist.
"PRAY FOR US SINNERS NOW AND AT THE HOUR OF OUR DEATH AMEN!"
Gina ran across the sanctuary. Hillary and the priest heard her coming. Hillary looked up wildly and then cringed, as if she refused to recognize her mother. Her face was wet, from perspiration or tears. There was a bony handprint on her forehead. It looked hot as a sunburn.
Gina, shocked, stopped short of the pew and put her hands to her mouth. Father Toomey, a reedy young man, stood up, scratching perplexedly at a fuzzy receding hairline.
"Mrs. Devon?"
"I CAN'T TALK TO YOU! I HAVE TO PRAY!"
Gina had never seen such sick and tortured eyes. Feeling a seductive desire to faint, Gina braced herself instead. Hillary turned her head, looking at the statue on one side of the altar. A gray Lenten shroud had been partially torn away, perhaps by Hillary, revealing an enameled Virgin with opulent skin tones and shapely sorrowing eyes.
"HOLY MARY MOTHER OF GOD ..." The silvery beads rattled in her unsteady hands.
"What happened to Hillary's face?" Gina demanded of the priest.
"We don't know."
"We don't know." Mrs. Wimbledon repeated, appeas-ingly, behind her. Gina turned.
"Can't you get a doctor here?"
"... NOW AND AT THE HOUR OF OUR DEATH AMEN!"
Gina kneeled in front of her daughter.
"Hillary."
Hillary stopped her litany and panted; her eyes rolled in her head, ecstatically.
"Go away. Go away. I only want to talk to the Blessed Mother." She had bitten her tongue and there was blood on her lower lip. She looked up at the tall Jesuit; so did Gina. His smile seemed heartless, under the circumstances, but he was merely nervous. "She hears me, doesn't she? She'll protect me! She won't let them have me!"
"Won't let who have you?" Gina said. She tried with motherly firmness to take hold of her daughter's cold rosary-chained hands. Hillary rose screaming to her feet, jerking away from Gina.
"NOOOOOO!"
She scrambled bumpingly over the front of the pew and ran up to the altar, where she prostrated herself before the shrouded crucified Christ on the wall. As Gina was getting slowly to her feet a narthex door opened with a sound of cavernous thunder. She looked up the long aisle at a shadowy figure carrying what looked like a physician's bag in one hand.
"Hellloo! It's Dr. Richards."
"Oh, thank God," Gina murmured. She raised her voice. "This way, Doctor!"
Hillary was groveling and shrieking again. Gina held her stomach, feeling her daughter as a long-forgotten weight there, fetal but serene. It amplified her horror; she felt sickly from grief.
The doctor walked loose-jointedly down the center aisle. He wore a pin-striped gray suit and large rose-tinted glasses. He couldn't have been any older than Father Toomey. He very nearly lacked features: sketchy pimpled nose, thin pale eyebrows. By contrast his eyes were too intensely black and seemed to skitter like buttons around the inside surfaces of the curved and tinted lenses. Gina was reminded of certain Muppets, but this one wasn't cuddly or endearing; she felt repelled by Richards, by what she instinctively felt was an essentially frigid nature. Still, he was a doctor.
He glanced at Hillary, who was on her knees and elbows now, swaying, shrill. He looked at the adults.
"What seems to be the trouble here?"
Gina explained. "It's my daughter. Someone must have attacked her. She acts like she doesn't even know me. Can you do something?"
"What's her name?"
"Hillary Devon."
The doctor nodded and opened his bag. He took out a packaged disposable syringe and a small sealed bottle.
"First we'd better calm her down."
"What's that?"
"Tranquilizer. I'll need some help— you'll have to distract Hillary for a few seconds. And she'll be hard to hold. Be sure you get a good grip on her.''
He went to his bag again for a small bottle of alcohol and a sterile package of cotton, which he handed to Wimbledon.
"I'll want you to swab down a spot just above the elbow, as soon as Mrs. Devon has Hillary under control. The one thing we don't want to do is frighten her more than she's frightened already."
"I'll help hold her," Father Toomey said.
"Oh, no, Father; I think that's just too many of us crowding around her. But if you could bring a pitcher of cold water it would be helpful."
"I'll get it from the school cafeteria."
Richards looked thoughtfully at the priest as he walked to the side door of the sanctuary; then he smiled at the women, tightlipped, as if it hurt his asshole to smile. They went up to the tiled and carpeted altar together, where Hillary was praying at the top of her voice.
"What's that in her hand?" the doctor said, pausing as he was about to bend over the distraught girl.
"It's her rosary," Gina said. Every time she looked at the doctor's face he appeared subtly different to her, as if it were an image on the surface of water and not flesh she was seeing. Nerves, she thought.
"You'll have to take it from her." His tone was a little sharp, and Gina frowned. Richards backed off a step and smiled; his hardshell eyes ran aimlessly around the inside of his glasses. "She might hurt herself, or one of us, with it," he explained. "Put out an eye. You just don't know what can happen when they're like this. So— would you mind— ?"
"Yes, Doctor." Gina kneeled once more beside her daughter. Hillary yelled at this intrusion and tried to crawl away from her.
"Honey, honey . . . it's mom. Everything's going to be all right. Nobody's going to hurt you."
Hillary was motionless for several moments, and rigid, her head down. Then she toppled over into her mother's lap and Gina deftly removed the rosary from her right hand. She placed it in a pocket of her jacket while continuing to stroke her daughter's face. Hillary's eyes had closed. She felt very hot, especially where the imprint of a small hand, skeletal in its thinness, lay across her forehead. Her body twitched and she moaned.
"Could you just push her sleeve up, Mrs. Devon?" Hillary was wearing a short-sleeved light blue blouse with her plaid school jumper. "There, that's fine." Richards looked at the principal. "Now, then, if you'll wipe her arm down with the alcohol . . . ready, Mrs. Devon?"
Hillary's eyelids fluttered; Gina put an arm around her and held both hands at the wrist. The doctor popped in the needle of the syringe. Hillary gasped and arched her back, but in seconds it was done.
"The tranquilizer will be a few minutes taking effect. Just keep talking to her, Mrs. Devon, while I look her over."
"Doctor, her forehead— "
"Yes, she was hit very hard. A bruise on her leg here, but it looks like an old one. Let me have a look at the back of her head. Uh-huh. She may have a concussion. Something raised a heck of a lump. . . . Hillary. Hillary! Open your eyes, please."
Hillary responded slowly. She looked dazed. She was trying to speak, or to pray, but the words were unintelligible. Her lips were cracked and swollen.
Richards had taken a penlight from his bag, and he flicked it on.
"Look right here at me, Hillary. You're a very pretty girl, you know that? By the way, I'm Dr. Richards, but everybody has called me 'Pud' all my life. Kind of a funny name, isn't it? You can laugh if you want to."
Hillary didn't laugh. She stared dully at him, still twitching spasmodically, while he shone his light first into one eye, then the other.
"Pupils are equal and reactive. That's a good sign, but we'll want some skull shots regardless. I wonder if one of you good ladies would call an ambulance?" Gina looked scared; he put a hand reassuringly on her shoulder. "I don't want Hillary to be moved any more than necessary; it's only a precaution, Mrs. Devon."
"All of our phones have been out of order," Wimbledon said.
"Could you try again?"
"Surely." The principal looked at Gina. "There's a pay phone at the Exxon station. It's just two blocks ... in case I don't get through."
Gina nodded. "All right. I'll try from there."
Hillary, holding her hand, said in a toneless voice, "Mom."
At the point of tears, Gina kissed her daughter. "I won't be gone long. The doctor will stay with you."
"She'll be just fine, Mrs. Devon. The tranquilizer's starting to work now."
Gina followed Mrs. Wimbledon out the side door and ran for her Ford station wagon in the street. She felt, as she got in behind the wheel and reached into the wrong pocket for her car keys, finding Hillary's rosary instead, that this was a mistake, that she ought to remain with her daughter, although it would take her less than five minutes to make the call and return. It was a very bad time for the school's telephones to be out of order.
She hesitated, breathing hard, a hand on the ignition key, thinking of how helpless Hillary had looked lying on her back on the carpeted floor of the altar, her eyes so glassy. Get the ambulance. She turned the engine over and pulled screechingly away from the curb, flung the Ford around corners, and pulled up on the apron of the Exxon station, leaving the motor running and the door open. Gina had committed a lot of local phone numbers to memory, among them police, fire department, and volunteer ambulance service. She dialed and spoke to them. Hurry. Then back into the Ford, roaring into reverse, she returned to the school. No time to park. Gina zoomed in through the open gates and cut across the asphalt play yard to the rear door of the sanctuary, ran inside and found the altar, the entire church empty.
Gina screamed Hillary's name.
"Mrs. Devon?"
She turned to find Father Toomey standing in the chancel doorway.
"Where is she?"
The priest looked startled. "Hillary? Dr. Richards took her with him in his car. He said he didn't think he should wait for the ambulance, and you could meet him at— "
"Did you see him leave? What kind of car is he driving?"
"A— one of those Japanese imports. Toyota, I think. Four-door, dark blue."
"Which way did he go?"
"East on Oxendine."
As Gina hurried down the steps to her station wagon she heard the sound of the ambulance on its way. She was sick with dread. He wouldn't touch her while she had the rosary in her hand. Why? Where is he taking my daughter?
61
Oxendine was a wide residential street as far as the Watkins Mill Shopping Center, a four-corner sprawl of discount stores, fast-food outlets, and a supermarket, where the major intersection was with Massachusetts 38, here named Chopick Pond Road. The shopping center was three quarters of a mile from Blessed Sacrament parish, and the wrong way to go if one was en route to St. Anthony's Hospital.
Gina covered the distance to the shopping center at sixty miles an hour, eyes flicking to each side road for some sign of the car Richards was driving.
A block before the shopping center Oxendine became three lanes in each direction, with one lane for left turns only onto Route 38. It was a three-stage light in each direction, and the wait could be long: there was always a lot of traffic north and southbound. About three dozen cars had come to a stop in front of her, waiting on the red; one of them, third in line for a left turn, was a dark blue Toyota.
Gina stopped sharply in the left lane, the seventh car back. Leaving the engine running, she got out of the station wagon and ran to the Toyota along the raised snow-encrusted median strip, past several startled drivers. The wind whipped her hair into her eyes.
The blond man with the rose-colored glasses and the acne-stippled nose didn't look at her when she pounded on the driver's window of the Toyota. All of the windows of the sedan were rather darkly tinted; his youthful face behind glass was as pale and indistinct as a fish belly-up in a murky tank, and Gina couldn't see into the back seat. She tried the door; it was locked.
"Where's Hillary?" she screamed.
The green arrow flashed on the traffic signal ahead. The man who called himself Dr. Richards was oblivious of Gina, his hands motionless on the wheel, his eyes fixed straight ahead. He appeared to be sealed in a capsule without atmosphere, without life, as if breathing was no longer one of his requirements.
She looked around in desperation for something with which to break the glass of the window. The two cars in front of the Toyota began to move.
Richards turned suddenly and stared at her. His pudgy lips were pursed in a soulless kiss of contempt; the steel-framed lenses of his glasses glowed redly. Gina saw, momentarily, images of her daughter in those heated lenses, her eyes closed as if in eternal sleep, her hair in flames.
Gina knew then exactly what she was faced with, had been subconsciously trying to prepare herself for since the night Conor had returned from Chadbury with his nose broken and Hillary had fallen into an unexplained fit: she now had two choices, a split second to decide. She could surrender her daughter and go mad; or, on this windy suburban corner, under a sunless sky, she could fight.
Richards's face turned back toward the windshield, one hand slipping an inch on the wheel as he prepared to drive away. Gina reached into her purse, pulled out the Colt Python revolver, and, unconsciously assuming the two-handed grip and stance she'd been taught on the firing range of the Joshua Police Department, shot him in the head.
The .357 magnum slug took out a small piece of the window; the impact of bullet against bone knocked his head forward and down against the steering wheel. The left front windshield exploded in bloody crumbs of glass, his brains were on the dashboard and the hood of the car. Gina, jolted back one step by the recoil of the revolver, went suddenly deaf from shock. The day turned even grayer. Her field of vision narrowed to include only the nickel-plated revolver in her two hands, the dead man slumped over the wheel of the Toyota, the briny sparkle of pulverized glass. The red red flooding inside the Toyota.
On the other side of the divider strip a man in a delivery van had stopped to gawk at her; at least a dozen other people had seen her draw the revolver and fire into the Toyota, but she didn't know they were there. She was alone in the world with a man whom she had killed.
Then she was totally alone, because Richards straightened himself slowly behind the wheel, his shattered head erect, and drove away without a backward glance, making a left turn onto Chopick Pond Road.
Gina, finding this no more difficult to believe than the fact that she had killed him in the first place, ran after the Toyota, gun in hand, and was nearly struck down by a gasoline tanker as she crossed the highway. The Toyota pulled steadily away from her. She looked up at the astonished face of the tanker's driver, then turned and ran whimpering back to her station wagon.
She had left the engine running. It had died. She couldn't restart it as she kept her eyes on the blue Toyota, which was almost out of sight northbound.
"NO NO NO NO!"
Gina picked up the revolver from beside her on the seat and jumped out of the station wagon; she ran across Oxendine Road, dodging oncoming traffic, to the parking lot of Grand Union. Looking for a car, any car, to take up the chase. She was nearly hit in the stomach by a shopping cart as she crossed from one yellow-striped aisle to another.
"Can't you watch where you're— Gina!"
Gina pushed herself up off the front end of the cart laden with shopping bags and tossed her hair from her eyes; she looked at the face of an acquaintance from Blessed Sacrament parish, Louise Briggens. They had served on committees together. Louise was inclined to be high-handed. She had six kids and a butt like the beam of a tugboat.
"Hello, Louise."
"What— what are you doing with that gun?" Louise said, her artificially blond eyebrows arching nearly to the top of her forehead.
"Louise, is this your car?"
"No, mine's the Cutlass Supreme over there. Gina, are you— "
"I need to borrow your car, Louise. Mine won't start, and he's getting away. Give me the keys to your car."
"THE KEYS TO MY— "
Gina leveled the revolver at her.
"I don't have time to argue with you, Louise. My daughter has been kidnapped and he's still able to drive, I don't know how, I shot him in the head. That means he's not human; you see what I'm up against? And there's no one to help me." She had begun to whine; she got her voice under control and squared her shoulders. "Are the keys in your purse? Give me your purse, Louise. I'm going to get my daughter back and I swear before God I'll shoot you, too, if you don't do what I tell you."
Louise Briggens's eyebrows waggled up and down, like birds born in cages trying vainly to fly; she trembled and made gagging sounds and, abruptly, vomited all over a head of cauliflower at the top of one of her grocery sacks.
While the woman was thus distracted Gina snatched her drawstring purse from her right wrist and ran with it to the cream-colored Cutlass Supreme which Louise thoughtfully had pointed out before she became so ill. Gina found the keys and tossed the purse aside, unlocked the Cutlass, and climbed in. Louise had fallen to her knees beside her shopping cart; she was being gaudily hysterical. Gina paid no attention to her. There was a film of perspiration on her upper lip, emphasizing the pale growth of hair she had there. Her eyes behind her driving glasses were bleak, but the red could rise in them, terrifyingly, in an instant, as Louise Briggens had observed.
Gina put her revolver down again where it would be handy and backed out of the space, went zipping across the parking lot to the Route 38 exit on the other side of the building, heedless of lane markings. The car radio was on, blasting FM rock from four speakers. Iron Maiden. Black Sabbath. Death Freak. Louise Briggens revealed as a secret heavy-metal addict. The shrill music suited Gina's sense of urgency, the doom in her mood.
Gina paid no attention to the flow of traffic against her, just leaned on the horn and let fly across three lanes and the bumpy median.
She was up to sixty in a matter of seconds, weaving perilously in and out past slow movers in the nearly-new car as the road curved uphill away from the commercial area and the land became semirural, a mix of small orchards, shabby roadside businesses and woodlots, housing developments of one or two streets carved into the hillsides. It was four miles to Chopick Pond, no major intersections along the way. Gina called aloud to the patron saints of both sides of the family, and stood on it.
62
The bullet that Gina had fired into the head of Richards had scarcely been slowed by thicknesses of skull and the plump package of brain tissue in between. It had been deflected twice, first by bone and then by the steering wheel, deforming each time until it resembled a chunk of metallic mushroom. The enlarged slug passed through the thin plastic shield of the instrument panel just to the left of the odometer and the 40 KPH marking and then through the firewall, ending up in the fuel pump, where it began to cause trouble almost immediately for the partly brainless driver. But Richards needed neither brain nor central nervous system to continue to function until he had fulfilled the purpose for which he had been created: he needed only hands and feet, which could be guided rather easily by the controlling entity.
The blue Toyota was another matter. Unlike the body of Richards, it was not a realistic and highly detailed materialization. Its riddled fuel pump spurted gas prodigiously; the car began to labor and smoke and slow down short of the intended rendezvous on the isolated east shore of Chopick Pond. Richards was made to pull the car off Route 38 immediately. But by then Gina had caught up and was right behind it, honking her horn, her view obscured by the billowing smoke coming from beneath the hood of the Toyota as both cars bumped along a narrow unpaved lane with walls of dirty snow on either side.
The lane meandered for two and a half miles down to the icebound shore of the pond with only a few summer cottages and one structure of any size along the way: a rambling wooden building constructed by enthusiastic but amateur carpenters with no sense of proportion. There was a snow-clogged parking lot in front of it, a stone gateway. This was the summer retreat of the Right Way Gospel and True Testimony Pentecostal Church. An imposing but somewhat road-weary green tractor-trailer truck was parked sideways behind the gate, its cab tilted forward over the front axle. A lanky mechanic wearing an arc-welder's mask and wielding a blue-tongued torch failed to look up as the two cars passed by on the lonely lane; but other eyes observed them.
63
"Buddy Buck," Zipporah said, pausing to take a peek through the curtained porthole above the bunk which she shared with her lover, "I believe that car went by us just now was on fire!"
"Zipporah," Buddy Buck Mayhew groaned, "what difference does it make at a time like this? Now you gone and lost the stroke."
"Well, I'm sorry; but I think it's our Christian duty to help our neighbors when they're in trouble."
"We don't have no neighbors up here, Zipporah. We just borrowed the church parking lot long enough for Sedalia to fix them rods."
"Jesus said— "
"Zipporah, now don't talk to me about Jesus when I'm fixin' to come. It makes me feel nasty."
"All right," she murmured, subdued. Her trim little bottom had ceased to waggle in ecstasy; Buddy Buck paused and said imploringly, "Ain't I doin' you no good, honey?"
"Well, you were, but then you touched me with your fingers and, you know, your fingers are always s'cold lately. Toes too. That's a real turn-off."
"I can't help it if my fingers get cold. We are for sure in a cold climate."
"I don't know why we had to come all the way up here to Massachusetts this time the year. I just can't get used to all the snow and the ice. And my throat's been sore for a week, no lie. I'm afraid I'll lose my voice. I wish we could just forget about it and go on back to Alabama. We were doin' s'good down home."
"Forget it? Forger it? Honey, I realize it's colder 'n polar bear poop, but you got to remember one thing: the devil don't sleep and he don't hibernate neither. And he ain't gonna hide way up here from Buddy Buck Mayhew. God's Warrior on Wheels. Hallelujah!"
"Couldn't we just a gone coast to coast through Louisianner and Texas?"
"This is the ideal place to start our First Annual Interstate Crusade. The devil come over to this country on the Mayflower with the Pilgrims, and he ain't left yet. Didn't you never read about the Salem witch trials?"
"Oh, yes, believe I did. That all happened around here?" Zipporah shivered dramatically.
"Sure it did. I may have done a little time at the crossbar hotel before I come to be washed in the Blood of the Lamb, but that don't mean I'm ignorant. I know there's plenty of souls to be saved in Massachusetts, if we can just get 'em to come outdoors. Besides, if folks don't see me they ain't gonna want to listen to me on the radio. And if I don't have no national radio exposure, I'll spend the rest of my life tryin' to get more'n forty miles from Sylacauga."
"Why Buddy Buck, you just shrunk down to a nubbin."
He said disconsolately, "You know I like it without a lot of conversation, Zipporah."
"I'm sorry. Why don't we rest awhile. We already done it twice before breakfast."
"No, it's too cold to lay around. I'll put some clothes on and give Sedalia a hand with them repairs. We got to be at the Motorama Top Wheels and Deals lot no later 'n four thirty."
"It just don't seem right to me to be preachin' the gospel while all around us they is sellin' used cars at the same time."
"All of Cousin Bob Pike's used cars got good warranties on 'em, and besides we're gonna be seen live on TV during the commercial interruptions. You know how many people still watch them Starsky and Hutch reruns in these parts? It's what they call in show business a big media break. Praise God."
Zipporah had stepped down from the low bunk in the little stateroom of their Peterbilt trailer, her fair skin all goosebumps, her big brown eyes wide with a kind of apprehension. Her hands were joined supportively under stupendous breasts, which, should she choose to stand naked beneath a high-noon sun, would cast enough shade to cover all of her lower body and a couple of dogs snoozing at her feet.
"Buck, you know what?"
"I know," he said affectionately, "if Dolly Parton could get a good look at you standin' sideways she'd just waller right down into a big puddle a envy."
"No, no. I heard somethin', way off yonder. Like a dynamite explosion. You didn't hear that?"
"How could I, when I'm partial deaf in my right ear?" He gave her a generous pat on the rump as he reached for his long underwear.
64
The blue Toyota was burning fiercely under the hood when it finally jolted off the road and sank up to the front bumper at the edge of a meadow brimming with crusty snow.
Gina slammed her borrowed Cutlass to a stop a few yards away and got out, the revolver in her hand.
She saw the door on the driver's side of the burning car open and the figure of Richards back out from behind the wheel. His shattered head was beclouded with dark smoke. He opened the rear door, jerkily, and reached inside with both arms. He reappeared holding the unconscious form of Hillary.
"Stop! Put her down!"
Richards, holding Hillary slack and lengthwise at the level of his stomach, turned toward her. Gina saw him better, and wished she hadn't. He had no forehead, only a fist-sized pit in the cranium from his eyebrows to his temples. The rose-tinted glasses hung to one side from a single temple bar, an intact ear. So much blood had poured down his face— and continued to hang from the jawline in cooling strings and gobbets— that his head suggested a jellyfish hobbling in a hazy sea. An eye incapable of focus jiggled in that red mass. The other eye had disappeared.
Richards turned around and around, floundering in the deep snow, as if trying to get his bearings, as if he were homing in on a supernatural signal of some kind. Gina appraised all this horror with lunatic coolness, her mind on the Toyota, which she was afraid would explode, drenching the walking dead man and her daughter in flames.
But perhaps Hillary, too, was dead: she seemed so drained and lifeless.
"Hillary!" Gina screamed, her voice echoing, rebounding from the hard gray pavement of the sky, the frozen lake and deserted woods that enclosed them.
Gina thought she saw the child's eyelids and pale lashes flutter. It was enough for her.
She plunged through the packed snow at the side of the road, not knowing what she could do, how she could stop this. But not to move, now, was to be frozen eternally, eclipsed by the evil that was trying to steal the girl. She raised the shiny revolver, but couldn't fire. What impression would another bullet make? In her anxiety she might hit Hillary.
He was walking away now, across the meadow, taking big strides, sinking down into drifts, rising up again with a surreal buoyancy, bearing Hillary on across the open meadow toward a hillock above the pond, a big stone barnlike structure surrounded by black trees that looked like worn-out paintbrushes standing bristles-up against the sky.
Gina, shorter by inches, had real problems wading after him through a winter's depth of snow. She was, very quickly, short of breath, no competition for the unbreathing thing that was putting distance between them, despite the weight he carried. There were scrappy birds in the air above the line of trees, the barn roof; Gina heard their raucous cries as expressions of triumph, of giddy welcome.
Fifty yards behind her the Toyota exploded with a dull whump; the day brightened momentarily and she felt a sear of heat against the back of her neck. She struggled on.
"OH, GOD! HELP ME!"
The shrieks of the wheeling birds intensified; some of them were flying out over the meadow. They looked larger, and threatening. Gina felt faint from exertion, from terror. She was losing ground rapidly. She had the feeling that if she lost sight of Hillary now she would never see her again.
He could move without his brains; but could he go anywhere with both knees shot out from under him?
Gina came to a stop beside a barkless frozen mass of windfall and leveled her revolver, using a jutting branch as a benchrest.
He was twenty yards directly ahead of her, moving slightly uphill. She fretted about a possible ricochet from a rock just beneath the snow, then shut her mind to thoughts of failure and aimed carefully, concentrating on squeezing the trigger slowly and evenly. She had been a good pupil, the best shot in her class. Don't jerk it, don't. . .
Gina fired. Missed.
Fired again. And missed. The difficulty of a moving target was new to her.
Trembling, dismayed, she broke down her stance, lowered the revolver, then started over.
Shot him in the left leg behind the knee.
The high-velocity slug nearly tore his lower leg off. He sprawled forward and Hillary was dumped, face down, in the snow.
Gina ran as fast as she could, tears of cold streaming from her eyes. The tears partially obscured her glimpses of a woman, dressed all in dark clothing, who stood motionless on the hill near the barn with her hair streaming long, like a black banner in the wind. Her eyes held all the darkness of a terrifying eternity.
This ominous figure, and the hue and cry of birds roosting in the leafless trees, flying up like bits of paper from a hot chimney, distracted Gina. Streaks of blood on the snow in front of her. The dead man clawing with both hands, trying to reach Hillary. His loathsome, acquisitive hand falling on an exposed thigh. With her lips bared to the gums in a grimace Gina fell to her knees beside her daughter, pulling Hillary away from his clutches. Hillary was breathing. Out of breath herself, Gina sat down for a few precious moments. She felt as if she were being watched, from behind, with curiosity and mounting displeasure. She didn't turn her head. She concentrated on praying for the strength to get Hillary away from there. Her prayers were curtly interrupted, washed from her mind by a black tide of hate.
She is ours now.
"No!" Now Gina turned, finger on the trigger of her revolver.
This time she saw nothing but the flocks of dark birds knitting themselves, wing to wing, into a huge shroud in the trees. Suddenly the dead man's hand was on her ankle, groping, tugging at the soaked suede boot. She kicked violently, pushed herself to her feet and pocketed the "revolver. She needed both hands for Hillary. The snow was stained all around them where the dead man crawled laboriously, and eerily without sound. Where had that hostile voice come from? The back of her neck felt frozen, not from the cold but from dread.
Gina, somehow, lifted Hillary. Once she could have sat her in the palm of her outstretched hand. Gina bawled. Her daughter was across her shoulders, bulky; she had a grip on her arms and legs. Fireman's carry, which she had learned in a paramedic course. She had carried a full-grown man across the gym and back. Applause. No snow then. No added weight of fear. The car seemingly a lifetime's journey across the meadow, and no way to go except back the way she had come. The snow broken down some, a path of sorts to follow. Otherwise impossible.
Give her to us.
"FUCK YOU!" Gina howled, and choked on tears. She looked quickly back to where the woman had been standing by the barn, almost unbalanced herself. The woman had reappeared, and now she had a companion. A young nubile blond girl in a green cap. A hand of bone absently caressing one cheek. Others like them— nominally human, but each with his own appalling disfiguration of evil— seemed to be emerging, more or less boldly, in the gloom of the woodlot.
Gina paused, unzipped her jacket, tore open her shirt to expose the little gold cross between her breasts. Then she staggered on weary legs down the incline, Hillary riding uneasily on her stooped shoulders and bent back.
"I'm going to make it going to make it going— "
Behind her, screams. It gave her an unexpected jolt of confidence, she almost laughed at their childish outpouring of pique.
Thank God she had been to confession only two nights ago. She was strong in her faith and without sin, she was not weak where they could get at her.
Only Hillary remained vulnerable.
A shadow appeared ahead of them on the snow, faint at first. She heard the whirring frenzy of small wings.
"Yea though I walk through the valley ... of the shadow of death I will . . . fear no evil. ..."
But she couldn't move quickly enough, the fuming large shadow was everywhere. Gina had a glimpse of the almost incandescent handprint on Hillary's forehead, looked past her face in dismay and amazement and saw them coming, a flickering mass of quick little birds, a dusky cloud of wings. The birds whirled in all around her, beaky and screeching, and then Hillary was gone, snatched from Gina's shoulders; they flew with her as if she were as weightless as a bit of string toward the hilltop, the barn, the cheering haunters.
All of this Gina witnessed with diminishing sharpness of mind before she staggered a final time and toppled sideways into the snow.
65
"My Lorddd! If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn't be near believin' it! Hey! Don't close your eyes again. You got to get up, you'll freeze to death lyin' here like this. Wake up!"
Gina was dimly aware of being spoken to, of the impact of a firm little hand against one cold raw cheek. She flinched away from an anticipated second blow, and brought the face in front of her slowly into focus. Pretty. If her eyes hadn't been spaced a little too close together, her small white teeth too far apart, she would have been a knockout. Her face was framed by a fur-lined parka. The tip of her pert nose was red. Even with this diabolical touch she didn't look anything like Satan, or one of his kind. Her eyes were as unsullied as rainwater.
Gina tried to speak. "Who . . . you?"
"I'm Zipporah Honeycutt, and I seen what happened to that little girl you was carryin'. It was like a big old black tornado cloud just whipped her up the hill to where those others was waitin'. Who was she?"
"Hillary. My. . . daughter." Gina tried to get up, and fell forward against Zipporah's large bosom. "Oh, God!" she wept. "They took her again!"
"Some kinda devil cult? You know what else I seen? That body, or whatever it was over there, it just melted away like a popsicle on a hot sidewalk, and there ain't nary trace of it left. Phew!" Zipporah exhaled explosively. "Buddy Buck was right. The devil's here in Massachusetts, and he's spoiled for a fight."
Gina was struggling to rise again. Zipporah said, in a more gentle tone of voice, "Easy, now. I seen where it was they all went. They're in that big barn up on the hill."
"Hillary."
"Don't you worry. We'll get her back. But we need a fightin' man on our side, a man who standeth four-square and righteous in the sight of the Lord, Amen! Come on, we got to get ourselves back to God's Big Green Machine this minute,'fort those devils take a notion to light out after us. I told you my name; what's yours?"
"Gina."
"Gina, can you answer me one question? Have you been born again?"
"Uh ... no, I'm Catholic."
Zipporah stood back, jerking her hands away from Gina's body as if suddenly she was too hot to handle.
"Holy cats! A papist. I don't know how Buddy Buck's gonna feel about that."
Gina looked hurt and annoyed. "I don't want to argue religion with anybody. I just want my daughter. I'll go by myself."
"Oh, no, you can't do that! Just have a look up there."
Gina turned her face slowly to the barn on the hill. An aura surrounded it, a festering, simmering blackness. She was so appalled and intimidated that she was ready to give up. Her head ached ferociously.
Zipporah put an arm around her. "Don't know about you, but my heart's in my throat. Buddy Buck will know what to do. Let's go."
The two women struggled, Zipporah in the lead, back to the road. On the way Zipporah felt obliged to fill Gina in on her recent history. She seemed to be one of those women who worked faster, moved more purposefully, when her motormouth was going at full RPM.
"I only been with Buddy Buck about the last eight months, but some glorious things done happened since we teamed up to bring the good news of the gospel to those folks who are perishin' everywhere for lack of Jesus. He preaches, and I sing. Anyway, Buddy Buck's cousin Bardahl Tillman from Opelika crashed his stock car at the Firecracker 400 trials and needed a couple major operations, which just about put him out of the racin' business for good. He had only two payments to go on the Peterbilt and Joyzell, that's Bardahl's wife, didn't have no use for it; the truck was just a eyesore standin' day and night in the driveway of that nice subdivision where they live, and a couple of the neighbors already done smarted off to her about it. So one night Buddy Buck had this inspiration while we was waitin' to go on at the Evangelistic All-Stars Prayer-a-thon and Miracle Revival Picnic. Well, he just turned to me in his new seersucker suit and I seen this expression come over his face like the crack a dawn; it is some kind of a eerie sight when you know somebody standin' next to you has been touched by the hand of God. He said, 'Zipporah, God wants me to go forth in that old Peterbilt of Bardahl's and preach from coast to coast, bustin' the devil ever mile of the way.' After we was done rejoicin', well it occurred to me to ask him: Buddy Buck, where you gonna get that kind a money, because you know Joyzell is tighter'n the skin on a grape. He said, beamish-like, 'God's gonna point a benefactor our way.' And you know? Somethin' like that did happen. Two weeks later Buddy Buck's uncle, Clemson Hobbie— those are the Georgia Hobbies I'm talkin' about, not the ones from Muscle Shoals— choked on a gob of chicken-fried steak he was eatin' on his regular Friday night out at the L and N cafe, and as luck would have it not one of the other customers knew beans about the Heimlich maneuver. So he died, poor old soul. Never owned a decent pair a coveralls in his life, and smell? There are those folks, you know, that's got all the money in the world, but can't be bothered to spend a nickel on deodorant or clean socks. Clemson was one of them, but our blessed Lord in His wisdom seen to it that Clemson had a up-to-date ironclad will, and Buddy Buck got six thousand dollars out of the tragedy. Just enough to pay off the loan company on the Peterbilt and fit it out for the Crusade. Buddy Buck signed a contract to pay Joyzell another three hundred a month for sixteen months to own the rig free and clear. He ain't missed a payment yet, but there's 'nother one due next Thursday and right now I don't know where we're gonna get the money. This your car? The Cutlass? I am so out of breath. Come on, gotta keep movin', you want me to drive?"
Gina nodded and handed over the car keys, sank hollow-eyed and blank of face into the front seat.
"No room to turn around, I'll just back on up to the churchyard. It's a small miracle I come along when I did. But I been cooped up the livelong day in that stuffy trailer, and I just had to get me a breath a clean air. Besides, I heard the explosion, and when I got down the road a little ways I saw that other car burnin' up, and that crowd a evil-lookin' people on the hill."
Zipporah, looking back over one shoulder, zoomed the Cutlass recklessly uphill and through blind turns. Gina held her face in her hands.
"It's kinda lonely on the road with Buddy Buck. Shoot, I come from a big family and I'm used to havin' whole lots a company. When I was sixteen I joined up with two of my sisters, Moxie Ann and Zelda Fem Honeycutt, and we did a country music act. Like the Mandrell sisters? Called ourselves 'The Honeycats.' Ain't that good? But you know we just got farted on by all the bigshot record producers in Nashville. And talk about horny. It's all they got on their minds up there. I don't mind tellin' you I have strayed off the straight'n narrow a couple times in my life, it's all a part a growin' up, I guess; but I am not about to go down on a man I only just met just because he's got him a little ole recordin' studio and a slick haircut and knows Merle Haggard to say hello to. Here we are."
Zipporah began to lean on the horn as she backed through the gates toward the Peterbilt tractor and the rig behind it. She jammed on the brakes and jumped out, waving her hands frantically.
"Buddddddyyyy Buccckkkkk!"
He came out from behind the trailer, bowlegged in faded Levi's jeans, wiping his hands on a piece of mechanic's wastepaper. The lanky black man with the Welder's mask perched horizontally atop his head was behind him.
"What are you carryin' on about, sugar?"
"This here is Gina, and her only daughter was snatched by Satan and his minions! Just down the road there! I seen it all myself. It wasn't ten minutes ago! We got to do somethin' fast!"
"Hold on." Buddy Buck's eyes shifted from one face to another, and his lips crimped in a skeptical smile. "Satan? Did I hear you right?"
"Buddy Buck, I swear! There's a whole nest of 'em holed up in a barn, and then there's flocks a dirty-lookin' birds in the trees all around. I guess they're birds, but I never got close enough to take a good look at 'em. I did see when they got hold of Gina's innocent daughter, and God only knows what they are plannin' to do with her."
Buddy Buck, looking into Zipporah's truthful eyes, began to turn a sickly pea-soup color. He licked his lips and hunched his shoulders, and the ball of wastepaper fell at his feet. He smacked his hands together, fist into palm.
"Satan, huh? You don't say. Well well. So it's him. I might a known he'd come up with somethin' to try to block the start of the First Annual Interstate Crusade." Buddy Buck's eyes all but disappeared into his head. He panted grandly for breath, then threw back his head and mop of peroxided hair and shouted, "Gonna let the devil stop me, Lord? Can't let him stop me now, can we?"
Zipporah turned to Gina and put a hand on her shoulder. She said in a calm but thrilled voice, "There he goes. And when he gets worked up like this, he's a powerhouse."
"But what are we going to do?"
"Shh, let him talk it out with God first off."
Buddy Buck's knees were shaking. He pounded on his muscular chest, then threw his hands imploringly toward heaven. His lips trembled; he muttered something in a low, unintelligible voice, and burst out: "M'hubla mempsa shabeth. O sho lo wolla coshra dullabublum!"
"It's the Unknown Tongue!" Zipporah exulted. She began to bob and weave, pawing the air with fierce little fists. "Boy, we're gonna get some action now! Go, Buddy Buck!"
"Sholum boshra aketh. Wassakallah settai condai!"
Buddy Buck's knees gave way and he fell right down on the ice skin of the parking lot, flivvering and quivering. Then he was absolutely still for a few moments; the wind stirred his hair to the brownish roots, his fingernails looked purple. Suddenly his back arched; he leaped to his feet and, crouching, his eyes burning with zeal, turned three hundred sixty degrees before straightening, his chest swelling up, hands planted contemptuously on his hips. He began to strut, dangerously, his eyes staring off into space. He looked, at that moment, like the warrior he claimed to be.
"Sedalia," he said, "reckon God's Big Green Machine is ready to roll?"
"She's ready to roll!"
"Everybody in the truck! Sedalia, you work the light board!"
"YAHOOO!"
Zipporah grabbed the dumbfounded Gina by the sleeve of her jacket and pulled her toward the cab of the Peterbilt. Gina took a good look at the truck and the green-painted trailer rig for the first time. There was a rack of three loudspeakers mounted on the roof of the cab, and the trailer body was studded with numerous shallow cabinets, some only inches deep, of varying sizes. In the center of the trailer on the left side there were two big doors.
"What does this thing do?" Gina asked, as Zipporah stuffed her into the cab.
Buddy Buck settled down behind the wheel, reached for a headset suspended on a hook above his head, and put it on. Zipporah did the same. There were two big reel-to-reel tape recorders on a shelf in the compartment behind them. Zipporah began to check them out. The tape recorders were connected to the speakers mounted on the roof of the cab above their heads. She picked up a hand microphone and sang softly into it; her voice reverberated from the front wall of the church. "This little light gonna shine. . . ." The truck's engine came to life with a rackety roar.
Gina thought they were both crazed, and groaned in despair.
Buddy Buck put the truck in gear and dropped a hand briefly onto Gina's left knee. "You just leave everythin' to us. We'll get your little girl back in a jiffy. What did you say her name was, now?"
"H-Hillary."
"Here we go!"
Whatever else Buddy Buck Mayhew might have been, he was a good driver. He jockeyed the rig expertly through a not very wide gate and turned onto the road— which was scarcely wider than the body of the truck itself— without first having to stop and then inch his way cautiously forward.
"How far's this barn you're talkin' about?" he inquired of Zipporah.
"Maybe a mile on down the road. You'll see a burned-up Toyota automobile first."
"Play 'Onward, Christian Soldiers,' " he said.
"Comin' right up. You fixin' to hit 'em with everythin' we got right off the bat?"
"We'll see what it takes, what it takes," the preacher muttered. "Get ready with my 'Return to Parchman Prison Revival Hour' sermon."
"I don't recall which one that is."
"You know, where I talk about the devil and his legions like they was a plague a cockroaches. 'There's only one thing that's better than Raid and Real-Kill and Roach-Prufe put together, and that's the Word-a-God!' " He said in an aside to Gina, as she was nearly jolted into his lap by the potholes in the road, "Jimmy Swaggart himself was so taken with that sermon when he heard about it, he wrote and asked me for a copy. I wasn't flattered too much."
"Who is— " Gina started to say, but they hit another bump so hard her teeth almost struck sparks. She didn't try to say anything else, just stared through the windshield looking for the barn.
"Sometimes I wish I'd been born with a extra pair of hands," Zipporah said, mildly complaining. She was very busy. She had cued up "Onward, Christian Soldiers" on one of the tape recorders while simultaneously searching through a rack of taped and boxed sermons for the one Buddy Buck had requested. "Can't make out my own writin' sometimes. . . . Here it is."
"Sedalia," the preacher said into his headset microphone, speaking to the black man in the trailer, "you copy me?"
"I copy you, Buddy Buck." His voice was clear in the cab over a small dash-mounted speaker.
"Let's light up. Display number one, number two."
"You got it."
Twinkling lights, like those used to decorate miniature Christmas trees, came on all over the trailer. They spelled out, fore and aft, BUDDY BUCK MAYHEW and GOD'S WARRIOR ON WHEELS.
"I ain't got my own name in lights yet," Zipporah confided, "but I'm gonna have. That'll be my next birthday present."
"Onwardddd Chris-chun So-hol-jurs, marching as to warrrr. . ."
"That's me," Zipporah said. "Me and the New Damascus Consolidated High School marchin' band." She shivered and smiled shyly. "Always gives me ducky bumps when I hear myself sing."
"The car's not there!"
Zipporah glanced out the side window of the cab. "Sure ain't," she said, as if the absence of the Toyota hulk was nothing extraordinary. "And all the tracks we made through the snow, they're gone too. Now look up there, Buddy Buck: you see that barn sittin' on the drop edge of yonder? Looks all peaceful around it now, but a few minutes ago the black fires of hell was ashootin' out everywhere."
"My God, my God, they've all gone! Hillary's gone too!"
"I ain't so sure," Zipporah said quietly, intent on the barn. "You know, Gina, I was the seventh child in my family, and like they say, oft times it's the seventh got special powers. I don't claim to go around seein' the supernatural all the time, but just the same I do get feelings. What I feel now is that they are all layin' low waitin' for us to get frustrated and just go away. Because you see, your daughter ain't one of them yet, not by a long shot. To be one of them she's got to surrender her faith and want to be in league with the devil. She may be, like, susceptible to certain influences, but I can't believe you raised that sort of a child. So then they got to work really hard on her, do a job of brainwashing, and— ohhhhhh, Buddy Buck, I am gettin' kind of a crawly feelin' now, like hate rainin' down on my skin the closer we come. You feel any of that, honey?"
"Yeah," he said, shifting down to compound low and gripping the steering wheel tightly. "I feel a whole lot of resistance to God's Big Green Machine."
"Don't let it stop us."
"Huh. I'm gonna bag me a whole mess of devils before this day is done. Key up the cockroach sermon, Zipporah, and keep play in' the hymn too."
"Right."
They had reached a rusted pipe-and-wire gate, hinged on one side to a thick wooden post partly buried in snow. On the other side of the gate was a discernible passage— it couldn't be called a road— through trees to the barn, only the roof of which could be seen from where they were.
"Sedalia," the preacher said into the headset microphone, "ready with display number eight, Washed in the Blood"
"We gonna have everything on full power at once; I don't know if the genny can handle it."
"It'll hold up."
"What're you gonna do about the gate?" Zipporah said.
"Ride right over it. Let's go."
"Wonder where all them birds went to. Well, they wasn't real birds, I guess. Gina, you just hang on and be ready for anythin' to happen, 'cause it probably will."
The bumper of the Peterbilt nudged up against the wide gate. It looked flimsy, but when Buddy Buck pushed his foot down on the accelerator the gate stood firm: the truck couldn't move.
"FRIENDS, YOU KNOW WHAT SATAN IS? SATAN AIN'T NOTHIN' BUT A COCKROACH IN THE KITCHEN OF GOD, STEALIN' THE CRUMBS OF THE ALMIGHTY IN THE EVERLASTIN' DARK TO WHICH HE HAS BEEN CONFINED. THAT'S RIGHT, I SAID CONFINED, BECAUSE ALTHOUGH SATAN AND
ALL HIS DEVILS THINK THEY ARE SO IMPORTANT, MUCKY-MUCKS IN THE COSMIC SCHEME OF THINGS, WELL, I WANT YOU HERE TONIGHT TO REALIZE ONE THING: ALL THE TROUBLE THAT THEY HAVE CAUSED SINCE THE DAWN OF RECORDED HISTORY IS NOT EQUAL TO THE GOOD THAT EVEN ONE BORN-AGAIN BELIEVER CAN DO WHEN HE SETS HIS MIND TO IT. AMEN!"
"Jimmy asked for a autographed picture of me in my suit of lights too," Buddy Buck said, gritting his teeth then as the front end of the Peterbilt continued to labor against the impregnable fence. "Sedalia, give us number twelve."
"Number twelve?"
"Do it!"
"Here go."
"Zipporah? 'How Great Thou Art.' "
"Comin' right up!"
The preacher began blasting away with a siren. There was a whistle of skyrockets and mortars, crumpling explosions overhead, lush falling blossoms of light over the barnlot, which was tinted in green and rose and amber. At the same time two side panels on the trailer opened; one depicted the Last Supper, stunningly painted in a full range of Day-Glo colors on black velvet. The other showed, in rippling neon, a pair of praying hands and the legend I AM THE WAY.
Buddy Buck Mayhew pushed the accelerator of the Peterbilt to the floor. The fence flew apart and they roared toward the barn. Instantly they were greeted by Sturm und Drang; by chaos. A black storm swept over them, debris thudded against the cab and the trailer, the windshield was starred in a dozen places by small stones. A smell arose that turned everyone's stomach.
From the trailer Sedalia complained, "I can't draw breath back here!"
"Hang on, we'll be through this in a second!"
And, miraculously, they were— only to be confronted by a horror of such magnitude that Buddy Buck came to a precarious panic stop, almost causing the trailer to tip over.
"What is that?" Gina gasped.
The barn lay another two hundred yards from them. But between the truck and the barn there was something in the way, a barrier like a suspended tidal wave twelve to fifteen feet high, trembling with latent power. The wave was composed entirely of flesh— living human beings twisted and tumbled agonizingly together. In this press of humanity was everyone the three of them had known and loved in their lifetimes: Gina picked out the faces of her boys, Dean and Charley-chuck, her husband Conor. Buddy Buck saw his mother and father and a host of his kin; his second, fourth, and fifth wives. Zipporah recognized her sisters Moxie Ann and Zelda Fern, her brothers, the lovers whom she had cherished from the age of fifteen. All cried out tormentedly to them: Stop. Go back. Go away.
Tears streamed down the preacher's face. The sight was so ghastly, and so heartrending. "I can't drive through that," he told them huskily.
"Buddy Buck, you got to! Because it's a lie, a trick! Can't you see? There ain't nobody real in that heap of people."
But Buddy Buck had shifted into reverse.
"I tell you I can't do it!" he blubbered. "Mama's there. And little Tommy, rest his beautiful soul!"
"Now listen to me, darlin'. It's time to use Display Number 22. It's the only thing that's gonna work anymore."
"Number 22? That's for the big finale of our crusade up on top of Lookout Mountain! And we ain't even tested it one time. Sedalia says it could melt the back end right out of this cab, maybe touch off the fuel tanks. God knows what the heat would do to all of us."
"Just keep backin' her on up, and take a good run at that— that— whatever it is."
The pleading shrieks from the victims making up the human wave before them rose to a sickening crescendo.
"That's my daddy's voice! Hear him? How can I drive straight through my own daddy's flesh and bones?"
"You ain't gonna hit nothin'. That's the truth I'm tellin' you." When he didn't respond, Zipporah took over. "Sedalia, you copy me? I'm gonna count down now from ten to zero, and when you hear zero I want you to fire off Display 22." To the preacher she said, "Buddy Buck, if you ever hope for me to be lucky Wife Number Seven, you better stand on it and I mean right now! Bust that devil where it hurts!"
With a yowl of pain the preacher shifted gears, and the big truck rumbled forward over the frozen ground. He saw eyes and ears and tongues and frantically waggling fingers and shut his own eyes tightly.
"Seven . . . six . . . five," Zipporah counted, as they hurtled toward the human wave in their path. "Don't mess up now."
A hatch on top of the trailer toward the front slid back. A large cross appeared, rising like a periscope from the conning tower of a submarine.
"Three . . . two . . . one . . ."
"Mama!" Charley-chuck screamed at Gina, "make him stop! You'll kill us!"
He was so cunningly real, every detail of his face clearly rendered down to the precious little mole near his right eye, that Gina cringed in agony and bit her tongue. She threw her arms up around her head.
"ZERO!" Zipporah clapped her hands over her own eyes.
For an instant the sun seemed to shine upon the barnlot with a midsummer fierceness as the large cross atop the trailer was touched off. A total of sixty-four small bulbs outlined the cross. Each bulb cost six dollars and fifty cents and fired 25,000 lumens for one scant second before burning out. There had never been anything quite like the power of this cross seen on earth. A single bulb was enough to blind anyone exposed to it for several minutes. Sixty-four of them obliterated the barrier facing the truck, scoured the barnlot, reached into the barn itself with thousands of brilliant needles. A number of shadowy figures gathered there vanished instantly into perdition.
"Stop, Buddy Buck, we'll crash up 'longside the barn!"
The preacher opened his eyes and applied the brakes at the same time. The truck slid a hundred and fifty feet and came to an unsteady sideways stop near the stone front wall.
They looked all around them in blessed silence. Only the myriad windshield cracks remained as testimony to the trials they had suffered.
"I feel. . . I feel a sense of peace, y'all! I think they must be all gone from this place."
"We did it! We did it!" Buddy Buck crowed.
"But we don't have Hillary! She must be in the barn! Let me out!"
"Wait," Zipporah cautioned Gina, and frowned.
"What's wrong now?"
"I don't know. I can't be sure. Just sit tight, hear?"
"Zipporah, that barn door's opening up," Buddy Buck said.
"Can I get out of this trailer now?" Sedalia inquired a bit peevishly.
"Stay put," the preacher told him. "It may not be over yet."
They saw the front end of an old black Cadillac emerging, with unpleasant slowness, from the dark interior of the barn. The broad curved windshield was dirty and they couldn't see anyone behind the wheel. Gina put a hand on the butt of the Colt Python in her pocket, and held her breath.
The Cadillac, Stegosaurus of pleasure machines, turned creepingly toward them. As it rolled along Buddy Buck put the Peterbilt into reverse, and backed up slowly.
"You gonna run over it?"
"I ain't gonna let it run over me," he said, almost whimsically.
But then they saw that the Cadillac was creating its own junkyard as, piece by piece, it fell apart, the tires unspooling in ragged streamers of rubber, the body taking on a rusty hue until the metal was like see-through lace. The car ended up no more than fifty feet outside the barn in an untidy heap of rubber, glass, plastic, pitted chrome, cast iron, metal oxide, and little steaming puddles of vital fluids.
And in the midst of this wreckage, stretched out on a dilapidated seat cushion in her Blessed Sacrament School jumper, Hillary Devon lay in oblivious repose, face to the sky. Even from where she was sitting, Gina could see, as her throat clogged from gratitude, that the possessive handprint had vanished from her daughter's forehead. All was well, for now.
"Thank you, Lord," Zipporah Honeycutt said humbly beside her; and all three bowed their heads.
66
When Conor Devon drove up to his house, at four thirty in the afternoon, with Father James Merlo beside him in the Lincoln, there was a police car parked at the base of his driveway, blocking it. He pulled up in front of the cruiser and they got out, to be met by two cops. Conor, panicky, glanced at the house. Gina's station wagon wasn't in the driveway. There were no lights on in the house, although it was swiftly growing dark.
"What's up?" Conor said to the older of the two policemen, a man with short gray hair and worry wrinkles.
"Are you Mr. Devon?"
"Yes. Has something happened?"
"Sir, I'll ask the questions if you don't mind. Have you seen your wife this afternoon?"
"No, I haven't. I've been at Logan Airport waiting for Father Merlo's flight to land. Now will you please tell me— "
"Mr. Devon, it appears that your wife may be in some serious trouble." He glanced at a page of a notebook in one hand. "She's accused of taking a car belonging to Louise D. Briggens of 984 Judson Lane, Joshua, at gunpoint, from the parking lot of the Grand Union in the Watkins Mill Shopping Center at approximately twelve forty-five this afternoon. If you have any information regarding the whereabouts— "
"At gunpoint? Gina? What the hell is this all about? Where are my kids?"
"I wouldn't know anything about your children, Mr. Devon. There's also an unverified report of a shooting that took place in the same area at approximately the same time; a woman answering your wife's description allegedly fired a shot into a blue Toyota waiting for a light change at— "
"This is crazy. You're not talking about my wife."
"Yes, sir, Mrs. Briggens positively identified her, said she knows her from the school your children attend, they're on the PTA board together."
Conor just shook his head in frustration and denial. For several seconds there was an uneasy silence, punctuated by the low tones of the dispatcher on the police radio.
"Does your wife own a Colt Python .357 magnum revolver?"
Conor's attention was focused on something else: a hymn, distant against the wind.
"He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored. ..."
Three voices, amplified, singing a capella. The sound of it growing stronger. Conor and Merlo looked around, puzzled, for the source of the singing. Far down the street they saw a big Peterbilt truck, lights blazing in the dusk like a traveling carnival.
"Glory, glory, hallelujah. . . ."
Conor turned to face the oncoming truck. Its air horn was hooting madly, disturbing the peace of Revere Park, bringing neighbors to their windows and front porches.
"Who is Buddy Buck Mayhew?" Merlo said wonderingly. "Another wrestler?"
"Never heard of him. But whatever he does, he's got a hell of a gimmick."
"Conor! Conor!"
Gina was leaning out the window, waving. Conor stared in disbelief for a couple of moments, then ran down the street toward God's Big Green Machine. Behind it came the Olds Cutlass which Gina had "borrowed" from Louise Briggens with Zipporah Honeycutt at the wheel.
As soon as the little procession had stopped in the middle of the block Gina scrambled down from the cab of the Peterbilt and jumped into Conor's arms, kissing him wildly. Conor had a glimpse of Buddy Buck, all smiles, and beside him, a wan-looking but happy Hillary Devon, wrapped in a blanket. Hillary waved to her father. The police car came lurching down the street, siren burping.
"Oh-oh, the cops," Gina said, vaguely contrite.
"What the hell have you been doing? They want you for attempted murder and car theft!"
"They can't hang anything on me," Gina said toughly; then, downcast, swallowing hard and blinking back tears: "I guess I do have some explaining to do. Conor, would you mind if we took everybody out to Pizza Hut tonight? There's company for dinner, and I'm just too tired to cook."
67
When Merlo heard a sketchy account of what had happened to Hillary over the past few weeks, he made immediate arrangements for her safekeeping in a convent twenty miles away in rural New Hampshire, where she could be protected day and night from future, possibly even stronger, attacks. Gina pointed out that she hadn't been very safe in the sanctuary of Blessed Sacrament, supposedly holy ground and invulnerable to penetration by an agent of the devil.
"Holy ground is not in itself a shield against evil; nor is the sign of the cross, as Conor found out. Mystic power has always been associated with the cross, and there is both virtue and good in that. But against a devil like Zaraeh', more concentrated power is needed. Constant, directed prayer will create a web of white light that will surround Hillary for as long as necessary. The Sisters of Mysala have had centuries of experience in neutralizing evil, I can tell you that. Hillary will be safe now."
"A convent?" Hillary said, thoroughly outraged.
"It's not much different from boarding school," Merlo explained.
"MOTHER!"
"Hillary," Gina said, gritting her teeth, "did you enjoy what almost happened to you today? Because I damn well didn't enjoy it. And we're all very fortunate to be alive."
Gina's problems with the law had lasted only a little longer than her argument with her daughter. Conor got on the phone immediately to Louise Briggens, who came, looked her car over, heard Gina's account of Hillary's ordeal, and decided not to press charges. Gina, Buddy
Buck Mayhew, and Zipporah were interrogated for an hour and a half at police headquarters. They had rehearsed a story carefully, leaving out any reference to the supernatural, which would only have confused and probably antagonized the investigating officers. Buddy Buck said that he had seen Gina in frantic pursuit of the Toyota and had joined in the chase, eventually forcing the blue car off the road. Confronted by superior numbers, "Richards" had fled on foot, leaving Hillary unharmed but groggy in the back seat. The appearance and subsequent disappearance of "Richards" from the church with Hillary was vouched for by Father Toomey. The cops couldn't find a trace of background for the supposed physician. Nor could they find the blue Toyota. Descriptions of suspect and vehicle went into the computers at the National Crime Information Center in Washington. Gina was relieved of her Colt Python revolver and her carry permit was suspended, subject to review. She was not charged with violating any statutes.
At two-thirty in the morning, with everyone fed and accommodated for the night (Dean and Charley-chuck, having found no one at home upon their arrival from school, had gone directly to a neighbor's home, a contingency Gina had worked out long ago, and they were rather amazed by all the excitement and the novelty of God's Big Green Machine), Gina rose from the side of her snoring husband, with whom she had made vigorous love, walked into the bathroom, sat on the john, one bare foot overlapping the other, pressed a folded bath towel against her face, and had hysterics for a quarter of an hour. Then, at long last, she, too, was able to sleep.