CHAPTER 24
They would never go away.
They would be here forever, would outlive him by centuries. Even worse, he would become one of them, become what had killed him.
Tom Markley, Merridale’s mayor, looked in the bathroom mirror at his own pale face, held his fingers to his neck. He could feel the artery pulsing with his blood. Sweat wetted his skin as he tried to feel a regular rhythm, tried to beat out bump-bump-bump-bump-bump. But although he heard the strict, solid, disciplined drumbeat in his head, he did not feel it with his fingers.
Bump.
Then a pause.
Bump-bump.
Then another, so long that he wondered if he would die then and there. But no.
Bump.
(So light, how can that keep me alive?)
BUMP-bump.
A hiccup, he thought. His heart had the hiccups, that was all. Maybe if he cut himself open and put a bag over it, or if he yelled boo to his chest in the mirror, maybe it would stop.
And maybe what had started it hiccupping would go away. Sure. Sure.
He’d noticed it a week or so ago, a slight irregularity somewhere within him. He’d sensed it as he lay awake in bed in the black hours before dawn, that bad time when he was most alone with his thoughts, when it was just him and Merridale and Mim, and Clyde Thornton and the ghoulies taking it all away. At first he thought it was his stomach growling, but quickly discovered that it was not. Something inside. Something inside.
His heart.
He touched it, and found the source of the odd sensation. He shook the shoulder of his sleeping wife.
“What?” she said sleepily, irritated.
“Feel this,” he said. “Put your hand here.” Taking her hand and placing it on his chest, he found himself praying that she wouldn’t feel it, would notice nothing irregular, that it was only temporary, or his imagination.
“It’s not steady,” she said after only a few seconds, forever shattering his feeble rationalization.
“My heart.”
“Mmm.” She felt for a while longer, then moved her hand to his wrist. “Maybe a muscle spasm. In your chest …
“No,” she said after a moment. “I feel it in your wrist too, I think.”
“Should I … should I go to the hospital?”
“Does your chest hurt at all?”
“Are you numb? In your arm or anywhere?”
He flexed the muscles in his left arm, then his right.
“You could go now,” she said, “or maybe wait. I don’t know.”
“I’ll go in the morning.” He felt all right, dammit—it was just that damn heartbeat, out of cadence. Mim went back to sleep in a few minutes, but Tom Markley stayed awake until dawn, when he got up and made coffee.
It’s killing me, he thought. Sons of bitches are killing me.
He had never before had any trouble with his heart. Then, just after Christmas he’d had a checkup and found his blood pressure elevated—160 over 100. Under a lot of pressure, he’d told Doc Barnes, who had smiled gently, given him some expensive medication, and told him to try to relax. And now this.
He didn’t go to the doctor’s the next morning. Part of him wanted to, knew that he should, but a greater part didn’t care. Maybe his body was wiser than he was. Maybe it knew that it was time for him to die. Besides, it might be too expensive. He wasn’t old enough for Medicare, and he’d let his hospitalization lapse a month before. He simply couldn’t afford it.
When he arrived home that evening, he told Mim that he had seen the doctor and had received a clean bill of health. Just an irregularity, nothing to worry about.
She only nodded and smiled briefly, the kind of smile she gave when he told her that the shower faucet just needed a new washer, or the wiring in the hutch was fine, and it was just the bulb that had burned out. She didn’t say, “Oh, thank God, I was so worried,” or “I’m going to have to start taking better care of you,” or “It’s no wonder—you’ve been worrying too much. We’ll be just fine as long as we’re together,” or half a hundred other things that she could have said. And because she had said none of those things, he knew for certain that she no longer loved him, and the heartbeat grew more erratic, having less reason to keep the man alive.
Now he stood in front of the mirror, sensing his heart’s tripping patterns while Mim watched TV in the rec room. I’m going to die, he thought for the thousandth time since it had begun. I am going to die. He was as certain of it as he was sure of the loss of Mim’s love, the lack of the town’s respect, the stark glare of red with which this month’s accounts had been written.
And when I die, I’ll stay here forever. And she’ll see me dead, and her lovers will see me too, and they’ll laugh at me, laugh at me naked and lying there, and maybe, I don’t know, but maybe I’ll know about it because maybe these things do know and can see and can think.
He frowned at his image in the glass, and grew angry at the tear he saw in one eye’s corner.
I don’t want to know. I don’t want to see it.
There was one logical, inescapable answer, and he accepted it. On the way out, he stopped in the doorway to the rec room. “I’m going out, hon,” he said.
“Oh. All right. When’ll you be back?”
“I’m not sure.” He paused, then said, “I love you, Mim.”
“I love you too.” She didn’t look at him as she said it, but kept her gaze fixed on the TV screen. At that moment a glance from her would have saved him.
He drove out of Merridale, northeast on a rough two-lane that wove past farmers’ fields, through state game lands. Miles beyond the phenomenon’s sphere of influence he stopped, and walked several hundred yards back on a trail he’d used to hike with his father, and, when he’d been still younger, his grandfather. At last he stopped and chambered a cartridge into the ancient P.38 he’d brought home from the war. Afraid that if he held the weapon to his head for too long a time he might weaken, he brought it up and pulled the trigger in one motion.
Flame exploded, a roar cut through the forest’s stillness, and the birds leaped shrieking from the trees. The echoes died away, the birds resumed their perches, and the trees grew silent again. The flare from the pistol had faded, and everything was dark. There was not a patch of light, not a glimmer, not a spark.
By the next weekend the rain had washed away the blood, and the birds had finished what bits of tissue remained after Tom Markley had been lifted and placed into the ambulance. Bob Craven’s three children ran far ahead, the way they always did on walks, leaving him and Joan behind, hand in hand.
“It must have been right around here,” Craven said.
“I’m surprised the children aren’t looking for the exact spot.” Joan shook her head. “Poor Tom.”
“I wish he would have talked to me. I gave him the chance. I could tell something was wrong.” Craven kicked at a stone and sent it rolling into the brush.
“I wish you’d talk to me,” Joan said quietly, her eyes on the dirt path before them.
“What?”
“Something’s wrong with you. Something’s been wrong. Ever since this all started.”
He laughed self-consciously. “It’s … the situation,” he said with a sad smile. “None of us can be expected to be perfectly normal, not even after—what is it now?—four months?”
“I’m not talking about normality. I’m thinking of something else. Something that makes you who you are.” She stopped, ignoring the shouts of the children far up the trail. “When did you lose it, Bob? Your faith.”
“What do you mean? Faith in what?” He could feel himself start to sweat under the down vest.
“In what you believe in.” She shook her head. “You know I’ve never been a … a holy roller. I mean, I believe in God, but I’ve never been a fanatic about it. Sometimes, when I think back on it, I think I married you in spite of what you are, not because of it, and though I do believe, it’s just never been all that … ‘important’ isn�
��t the word … ‘compulsive.’ ” She smiled and nodded. “I’ve never been compulsive or obsessive about it.”
“And I have?”
“In a way. I mean, doing what you do, you have to be demonstrative, don’t you? But lately I get the feeling that it’s just been … all show, like you’re playing a role.” He turned away from her and looked into the woods, not wanting her to see the truth. “Am I right?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I really don’t know.”
“You don’t really believe what you’re telling everyone, do you?”
“What am I telling everyone?”
“That there’s a purpose behind what’s happened. That God’s behind it.”
“I … I don’t—”
“What?”
“I don’t know why.”
She laughed, not unkindly. “Who does?”
“No! I mean what’s it all accomplished? We’ve got a town full of scared and crazy people, Joan. Marie Snyder gets murdered, Fred Hibbs nearly kills Eddie Karl, Tom blows his brains out! Nobody’s learning anything.”
“What are they supposed to learn?”
“How to live, damn it!” Craven slammed his right fist into his left palm. “I thought, when this all started, I thought that we’d learn more, that we were lucky, we were chosen, that by, by staring death in the face so openly, we’d learn to live better. Knowing, you see, knowing that death’s waiting would make us value living so much more that we’d be better, be kinder to each other. But we weren’t. And I wanted to say that, to make them see that, to tell them not to be scared, to love each other.”
“But you have,” Joan said. “You’ve calmed them, held them together.”
“I haven’t done a thing,” he said grimly. “I haven’t done a thing except stop believing myself.”
“I haven’t, Bob.” There was a challenge in her tone. “I never thought I had as strong a faith as yours, but maybe I have. Maybe because yours came so easily to you and I had to work at it. “
“I don’t want to argue about—”
“It isn’t something you get and keep forever, you know. It’s something you do have to work at.”
His words were pinched, angry. “Well, maybe I could be born again.”
“Born again, bullshit! You’re not just born once or twice—you’ve got to be born over and over again every day of your life. “
“Not in Merridale! Every day is a new death around here, not a new birth!”
“So it depends on where you are? I can just hear Jesus now—’Sorry, folks, I’m not myself today. Must be the Jerusalem blues.’ ”
“Don’t talk like that.”
“What do you care? I thought you’d lost it.”
“Look! What’s wrong with me is what’s wrong with everybody in town. We don’t feel blessed, we feel cursed!”
“Why?”
“Because we’re the only ones!” His face changed as he cried out, and she recoiled from him, not in fear, but in sudden awe of the understanding that seemed to have overtaken him.
“We’re the only ones,” he repeated quietly. “You said … you said it depends on where you are. And maybe you’re right.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Anyone, any single one of us would have had the Jerusalem blues. Even Jesus did—’Let this cup pass from me,’ remember? Because he was alone. And Merridale’s alone too. We’re a freak—our town’s a freak, and we’re part of it. But if it were—I don’t know—more widespread maybe, then … then we’d be blessed. Because we were the first, because we had a chance to get ready.”
“ ‘Prepare ye the way of the Lord,’ ” Joan quoted, and Craven’s face brightened.
“Exactly,” he said. “Then it would make some sense. But to have this happen just to our town—that’s what’s so confusing, so damn frightening. We’re too busy feeling like lepers to grasp the significance of what’s happened to us.”
“Wait, wait. You think … there’ll be more of this?”
“I don’t know!” His face glowed like a child’s at Christmas. “But if there is, then we’ll know.”
“Know what?”
“Know why. Then the whole world will know.”
She hugged her husband. “Do you know you sound half crazy?”
He laughed. “I can believe that.”
“But what if it stays the same?”
“I don’t know that either. But I hope it won’t.” He pursed his lips and corrected himself. “I pray it won’t.”
Far ahead their children were calling to them. They walked faster, turning their backs on the darkness that was stealing over the trees from the east.
Brad and Jim
Watchman, what of the night? Watchman, what of the night?
The watchman said, The morning cometh, and also the night.
—Isaiah 21:11-12
CHAPTER 25
“Ted Knotts asked me over for poker tonight.”
Christine looked up. Her face was little more than a gaunt mask stretched over bone. Brad had finally made her go to the doctor, who could find no physical problem. He’d given her the card of a psychiatric therapist in Lansford, which she tossed into the gutter upon leaving the doctor’s office.
“Did you hear me?” Brad asked. “I said I might play poker tonight.”
“So what? Are you asking for permission or something?”
“Not really. I just thought you’d want to know.”
“Well, I don’t. Don’t care.”
His lips formed a thin line. “Fine. Then you won’t miss me.”
“No way.” She didn’t care anymore. Let him hit her, let him see how much good it would do. She was past fearing him now, having no room left for him. There was no fear left in her for anyone human. But there was hate.
She, who had once loved him mindlessly, possessively, had begun to hate him with an overwhelming intensity. He had kept her there in Merridale until inertia had claimed her.
She knew that she could not leave now, not ever, that she was there until she died. He had made her this way. It was his fault, his and the boy’s. They had done other things to her too. To her body. Her hand went up to the wasted pits of her cheeks and above, to her eyes that had grown wide and large and luminous, her tangled hair, the pale temples where the muscles stiffened in constant tension, borne by the perpetual set of her jaw.
And her body, oh, her poor, poor body … gone beyond slenderness now to a wretched thinness, ribs easily visible, diaphragm slowly eroding into a hollow cave. Only the breasts remained in all their former fullness, absurdly huge on the withered body, as if refusing to surrender the last bastion of femininity, of motherhood.
It was a futile gesture on the body’s part, for both sexuality and the maternal instinct had fled before the onslaught of mounting death-fear. She loathed her lover, hated her natural son. In her fantasies, she had gone a step beyond Medea.
“I’ll probably be back around midnight,” he said. Receiving no answer, he went down the hall into Wally’s room. The boy was trying to teach Fluffy to sit up. Fluffy was uncooperative. “Hi, kiddo.”
“Hi, Uncle Brad.”
“Listen, I’m going out tonight, so I won’t be able to tuck you in.”
Wally’s face fell. “Okay.”
“Mommy can do it, can’t she?”
“Sure. I guess.”
Brad sat on the bed next to the boy. “Listen, kiddo,” he said, “I know Mommy isn’t … as much fun as she used to be. But I think she will be in time.”
“She’s just scared,” Wally said. “She’s still scared of all the dead people.”
“Yeah, pal. I know she is.”
“I’m not. Not anymore. Fluffy isn’t either.”
“I know you’re not. You’re a brave boy. But not everybody’s as brave as you.”
“You are.”
“Well … I don’t know.”
“You think she really will?”
“Will what?”
�
��Get used to it?”
Brad sucked his lower lip. “Yeah. I think so.”
“I don’t. I don’t think she ever will. She doesn’t know any better. “
“Yeah, well, maybe she’ll learn.” He rubbed the little dog’s ears. “Fluffy learned, right?”
“Right. Will you be back late?”
“Probably.” The child’s face contracted, as though he’d just tasted vinegar. “What’s the matter?”
“Are you coming back?”
Brad’s stomach tightened for a moment, as he realized the depth of affection that he had reached with the boy. “Of course. Sure I’m coming back. Did you think I wasn’t?”
Wally spoke with the honesty of innocence. “If I went away, I don’t think I’d come back. Not to Mommy. Not if I was you. And, and before, if I was Mommy I woulda gone away and not come back to you.” The boy frowned. “Is that funny?”
“That’s … kind of funny, yeah.”
“It’s like you and Mommy traded being nice. I wish you could both be nice at the same time.”
He patted the boy’s head, smoothing down the spot where an antenna of hair stuck up. “Well, maybe someday we will, huh? Give me a hug.”
They had their usual Saturday night supper—a frozen pizza and canned fruit salad, a Coke for Wally, water for Chris, a beer for Brad. Christine served as though gauging the strength of the table, and did not speak throughout the meal. Afterward, when Wally was playing in his room, Brad and Christine cleaned up together.
“Look,” he said, “do you want me not to go out tonight?”
“Since when has what I wanted ever stopped you?”
“I just asked. If you want me to stay home, I will.”
She gave a short laugh. “It’s too late, Brad. It’s too late for little … uh … whaddyacallems, gestures on your part. You don’t love me, you never did love me, so do me a favor and don’t start to fuck with my head now, okay? I don’t care if you go out, I really don’t. I don’t care if you lose money, I don’t care if you get laid, I don’t care—”
“About a damn thing,” he broke in. “You don’t care about me or your son or even yourself anymore, do you?”
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