“We’ll get out when the storm’s over!” Macklin shouted. “We’re going to live!” And then tears did come to his eyes, but he laughed so the kid wouldn’t know it.
A cold hand touched his shoulder. Macklin’s laughter stopped.
The Shadow Soldier’s voice was very close to his ear. “Right, Jimbo. We’re going to live.”
Roland shivered. The wind was cold, and he pushed his body against the King’s for warmth. The King hesitated—and then laid his handless arm across Roland’s shoulder.
Sooner or later the storm would stop, Roland knew. The world would wait. But it would be a different world. A different game. He knew it would be nothing like the one that had just ended. In the new game, the possibilities for a King’s Knight might be endless.
He didn’t know where they would go, or what they would do; he didn’t know how much remained of the old world—but even if all the cities had been nuked, there must be packs of survivors, roaming the wastelands or huddled in basements, waiting. Waiting for a new leader. Waiting for someone strong enough to bend them to his will and make them dance in the new game that had already begun.
Yes. It would be the greatest game of King’s Knight ever. The game board would stretch across ruined cities, ghost towns, blackened forests and deserts where meadows used to be. Roland would learn the rules as he went along, just like everybody else. But he was already one step ahead, because he recognized that there was great power to be grabbed up by the smartest and strongest. Grabbed up and used like a holy axe, poised over the heads of the weak.
And maybe—just maybe—his would be the hand that held it. Alongside the King, of course.
He listened to the roar of the wind and imagined that it spoke his name in a mighty voice and carried that name over the devastated land like a promise of power yet to be.
He smiled in the dark, his face splattered with the blood of the man he’d shot, and waited for the future.
FIVE
Wheel of Fortune Turning
Black circle
The hurting sound
Strange new flower
Tupperware bowls
Big fist a-knockin’
Citizen of the world
Paper and paints
27
SHEETS OF FREEZING RAIN the color of nicotine swirled over the ruins of East Hanover, New Jersey, driven before sixty-mile-an-hour winds. The storm hung filthy icicles from sagging roofs and crumbling walls, broke leafless trees and glazed all surfaces with contaminated ice.
The house that sheltered Sister, Artie Wisco, Beth Phelps, Julia Castillo and Doyle Halland trembled on its foundations. For the third day since the storm had hit they huddled before the fire, which boomed and leaped as wind shot down the chimney. Almost all the furniture was gone, broken up and fed to the flames in return for life-sustaining heat. Every so often they heard the walls pop and crack over the incessant shriek of the wind, and Sister flinched, thinking that at any minute the entire flimsy house would go up like cardboard—but the little bastard was tough and hung together. They heard noises like trees toppling, and Sister realized it must be the sound of other houses blowing apart around them and scattering before the storm. Sister asked Doyle Halland to lead them in prayer, but he looked at her through bitter eyes and crawled into a corner to smoke the last cigarette and stare grimly at the fire.
They were out of food and had nothing more to drink. Beth Phelps had begun to cough up blood, fever glistening in her eyes. As the fire ebbed Beth’s body grew hotter—and, admit it or not, the others sat closer around her to absorb the warmth.
Beth leaned her head against Sister’s shoulder. “Sister?” she asked, in a soft, exhausted voice. “Can I ... can I hold it? Please?”
Sister knew what she meant. The glass thing. She took it from her bag, and the jewels glowed in the low orange firelight. Sister looked into its depths for a few seconds, remembering her experience of dreamwalking across a barren field strewn with burned cornstalks. It had seemed so real! What is this thing? she wondered. And why do I have it? She put the glass ring into Beth’s hands. The others were watching, the reflection of the jewels scattered across their faces like the rainbow lamps of a faraway paradise.
Beth clutched it to her. She stared into the ring and whispered, “I’m thirsty. I’m so very, very thirsty.” Then she was silent, just holding the glass and staring, with the colors slowly pulsating.
“There’s nothing left to drink,” Sister replied. “I’m sorry.”
Beth didn’t answer. The storm made the house shake for a few seconds. Sister felt someone staring a hole through her, and she looked up at Doyle Halland. He was sitting a few feet away, his legs outstretched toward the fire and the sliver through his thigh catching a glint of light.
“That’s going to have to come out sooner or later,” Sister told him. “Ever heard of gangrene?”
“It’ll keep,” he said, and his attention drifted to the circle of glass.
“Oh,” Beth whispered dreamily. Her body shivered, and then she said, “Did you see it? It was there. Did you see it?”
“See what?” Artie asked.
“The stream. Flowing between my fingers. I was thirsty, and I drank. Didn’t anybody else see it?”
The fever’s got her, Sister thought. Or maybe ... maybe she had gone dreamwalking, too.
“I put my hands in,” Beth continued, “and it was so cool. So cool. Oh, there’s a wonderful place inside that glass....”
“My God!” Artie said suddenly. “Listen, I ... I didn’t say anything before, because I thought I was going nuts. But...” He looked around at all of them, finally stopped at Sister. “I want to tell you about something I saw, when I looked into that thing.” He told them about the picnic with his wife. “It was weird! I mean, it was so real I could taste what I’d eaten after I came back. My stomach was full, and I wasn’t hungry anymore!”
Sister nodded, listening intently. “Well,” she said, “let me tell you where I went when I looked into it.” When she was finished, the others remained silent. Julia Castillo was watching Sister, her head cocked to one side; she couldn’t understand a word that was being said, but she saw them all looking at the glass thing, and she knew what they were discussing.
“My experience was pretty real, too,” Sister went on. “I don’t know what it means. Most likely it doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it’s a picture that just floated out of my head, I don’t know.”
“The stream is real,” Beth said. “I know it is. I can feel it, and I can taste it.”
“That food filled my belly,” Artie told them. “It kept me from being hungry for a while. And what about being able to talk to her”—he motioned toward Julia—”with that thing? I mean, that’s damned strange, isn’t it?”
“This is something very special. I know it is. It gives you what you want when you need it. Maybe it’s ...” Beth straightened up and peered into Sister’s eyes. Sister felt the fever rolling off her in waves. “Maybe it is magic. A kind of magic that’s never been before. Maybe ... maybe the blast made it magic. Something with the radiation, or s—”
Doyle Halland laughed. They all jumped, startled by the harshness of that laugh, and looked at him. He grinned in the firelight. “This is about the craziest thing I’ve ever heard in my life, folks! Magic! Maybe the blast made it magic!” He shook his head. “Come on! It’s just a piece of glass with some jewels stuck in it. Yes, it’s pretty. Okay. Maybe it’s sensitive, like a tuning fork or something. But I say it hypnotizes you. I say the colors do something to your mind; maybe they trigger the pictures in your mind, and you think you’re eating a picnic lunch, or drinking from a stream, or walking on a burned-up field.”
“What about my being able to understand Spanish, and her understanding English?” Sister asked him. “That’s a hell of a hypnosis, isn’t it?”
“Ever heard of mass hypnosis?” he asked pointedly. “This thing comes under the same heading as bleeding statues, visions and f
aith-healing. Everybody wants to believe, so it comes true. Listen, I know. I’ve seen a wooden door that a hundred people swear holds a picture of Jesus in the grain. I’ve seen a window glass that a whole block sees as an image of the Virgin Mary—and do you know what it was? A mistake. An imperfection in the glass, that’s all. There’s nothing magic about a mistake. People see what they want to see, and they hear what they want to hear.”
“You don’t want to believe,” Artie countered defiantly. “Why? Are you afraid?”
“No, I’m just a realist. I think, instead of jabbering about a piece of junk, we ought to be finding some more wood for that fire before it goes out.”
Sister glanced at it. The flames were gnawing away the last of a broken chair. She gently took the glass ring back from Beth; it was hot from the other woman’s palms. Maybe the colors and pulsations did trigger pictures in the mind, she thought. She was suddenly reminded of an object from a distant childhood: a glass ball filled with black ink, made to look like a pool-table eight-ball. You were supposed to make a wish, think about it real hard, and then turn it upside down. At the bottom of the eight-ball a little white polyhedron surfaced with different things written on each side, such as Your Wish Will Be Granted, It’s a Certainty, It Appears Doubtful, and the aggravating Ask Again Later. They were all-purpose answers to the questions of a child who desperately wanted to believe in magic; you could make whatever you wanted to out of those answers. And maybe this was what the glass thing was, too: a cryptic eight-ball that made you see what you wanted to see. Still, she thought, she’d had no desire to go dreamwalking across a burned prairie. The image had just appeared and carried her along. So what was this thing—cryptic eight-ball or doorway to dreams?
Dream food and dream water might be good enough to soothe desire for such things, Sister knew, but they needed the real stuff. Plus wood for that fire. And the only place to get any of that was outside, in one of the other houses. She put the glass thing back into her bag. “I’ve got to go out,” she said. “Maybe I can find us some food and something to drink in the next house. Artie, will you go with me? You can help me break up a chair or whatever for some more wood. Okay?”
He nodded. “Okay. I’m not afraid of a little wind and rain.”
Sister looked at Doyle Halland. His gaze skittered up from the Gucci bag. “How about you? Will you go with us?”
Halland shrugged. “Why not? But if you and he go in one direction, I ought to go in another. I can look through the house to the right, if you go to the one on the left.”
“Right. Good idea.” She stood up. “We need to find some sheets that we can wrap wood and stuff up in to carry it. I think we’d be safer crawling than walking. If we stay close to the ground, maybe the wind won’t be so bad.”
Artie and Halland found sheets and clutched them under their arms to keep them from opening like parachutes in the wind. Sister made Beth comfortable and motioned for Julia to stay with her.
“Be careful,” Beth said. “It doesn’t sound too nice out there.”
“We’ll be back,” Sister promised, and she went across the room to the front door—which was about the only wooden thing that hadn’t gone into the fire. She pushed against the door, and immediately the room was full of cold, spinning wind and icy rain. Sister dropped to her knees and crawled out onto the slick porch, holding her leather bag. The light was the color of graveyard dirt, and the wind-blasted houses around them were as crooked as neglected tombstones. Followed closely by Artie, Sister began to crawl slowly down the front steps to the frosted-over lawn. She looked back, squinting against the stinging whipstrike of ice, and saw Doyle Halland inching toward the house on the right, drawing his injured leg carefully after him.
It took them almost ten freezing minutes to reach the next house. The roof had been torn almost off, and ice coated everything. Artie went to work, finding a crevice in which to tie the sheet into a bag and then gathering up the shards of timbers that lay everywhere. In the remains of the kitchen, Sister slipped on ice and fell hard on her rear end. But she found some cans of vegetables in the pantry, some frozen apples, onions and potatoes, and in the refrigerator some rock-hard TV dinners. All that could be stuffed into her bag went in, and by that time her hands were stiff claws. Lugging her bundle of booty, she found Artie with a bulging sheet-bagful of bits and pieces of wood. “You ready?” she shouted against the wind, and he nodded that he was.
The trip back was more treacherous, because they were holding their treasures so tightly. The wind thrust against them, even though they crawled on their bellies, and Sister thought that if she didn’t get to a fire soon her hands and face would fall off.
Slowly they covered the territory between houses. There was no sign of Doyle Halland, and Sister knew that if he’d fallen and hurt himself he could freeze to death; if he didn’t return in five minutes, she’d have to go looking for him. They crawled up the ice-coated steps to the front porch and through the door into the blessed warmth.
When Artie was in, Sister pushed the door shut and latched it. The wind beat and howled outside like something monstrous deprived of playthings. A skin of ice had begun to melt from Sister’s face, and little icicles dangled from Artie’s earlobes.
“We made it!” Artie’s jaws were stiff with cold. “We got some—”
He stopped speaking. He was staring past Sister, and his eyes with their icy lashes were widening in horror.
Sister whirled around.
She went cold. Colder than she’d been in the storm.
Beth Phelps was lying on her back before the guttering fire. Her eyes were open, and a pool of blood was spreading around her head. There was a hideous wound in her temple, as if a knife had been driven right through her brain. One hand was upraised, frozen in the air.
“Oh ... Jesus.” Artie’s hand pressed to his mouth.
In a corner of the room Julia Castillo lay curled up and contorted. Between her sightless eyes there was a similar wound, and blood had sprayed like a Chinese fan over the wall behind her.
Sister clenched her teeth to trap a scream.
And then a figure stirred, in a corner beyond the fire’s faint glow.
“Come in,” Doyle Halland said. “Excuse the mess.”
He stood to his full height, his eyes catching a glint of orange light like the reflecting pupils of a cat. “Got your goodies, didn’t you?” His voice was lazy, the voice of a man who’d stuffed himself at dinner but couldn’t refuse dessert. “I got mine, too.”
“My God ... my God, what’s happened here?” Artie held onto Sister’s arm for support.
Doyle Halland lifted a finger into the air and slowly aimed it at Sister. “I remembered you,” he said softly. “You were the woman who came into the theater. The woman with the necklace. See, I met a friend of yours back in the city. He was a policeman. I ran into him while I was wandering.” Sister saw his teeth gleam as he grinned, and her knees almost buckled. “We had a nice chat.”
Jack Tomachek. Jack Tomachek couldn’t go through the Holland Tunnel. He’d turned back, and somewhere in the ruins he’d come face to face with—
“He told me some others had gotten out,” Doyle Halland continued. “He said one of them was a woman, and do you know what he remembered most about her? That she had a wound on her neck, in the shape of ... well, you know. He told me she was leading a group of people west.” His hand with the extended finger jiggled back and forth. “Naughty, naughty. No fair sneaking when my back’s turned.”
“You killed them.” Her voice quavered.
“I freed them. One of them was dying, and the other was half dead. What did they have to hope for? I mean, really?”
“You ... followed me? Why?”
“You got out. You were leading others out. That’s not very fair, either. You ought to let the dead lie where they fall. But I’m glad I followed you ... because you have something that interests me very much.” His finger pointed to the floor. “You can put it at my feet now.”
“What?”
“You know what. It. The glass thing. Come on, don’t make a scene.”
He waited. Sister realized she hadn’t sensed his cold spoor, as she had on Forty-second Street and in the theater, because everything was cold. And now here he was, and he wanted the only thing of beauty that remained. “How did you find me?” she asked him, trying des-perately to think of a way out. Beyond the latched door at her back, the wind keened and shrieked.
“I knew if you got through the Holland Tunnel, you’d have to cross Jersey City. I followed the path of least resistance, and I saw your fire. I stood listening to you, and watching. And then I found a piece of stained glass, and I realized what the place had been. I found a body, too, and I took the clothes off it. I can make any size fit. See?” His shoulders suddenly rippled with muscle, his spine lengthening. The priest’s jacket split along the seams. Now he stood about two inches taller than he had a second before.
Artie moaned, shaking his head from side to side. “I don’t ... I don’t understand.”
“You don’t have to, cupcakes. This is between the lady and me.”
“What ... are you?” She resisted the urge to retreat before him, because she feared that one backward step would bring him on her like a dark whirlwind.
“I’m the winner,” he said. “And you know what? I didn’t even have to work up a sweat. I just laid back and it all came to me.” His grin turned savage. “It’s party time, lady! And my party’s going to go on for a long, long time.”
Sister did step back. The Doyle Halland–thing glided forward. “That glass circle is pretty. Do you know what it is?”
She shook her head.
“I don’t either—but I know I don’t like it.”
“Why? What’s it to you?”
He stopped, his eyes narrowing. “It’s dangerous. For you, I mean. It gives you false hope. I listened to all that bullshit about beauty and hope and sand a few nights ago. I had to bite my tongue or I would’ve laughed in your face. Now ... tell me you don’t really believe in that crap and make my day, won’t you?”
Swan Song Page 25
