He came very close to being thrashed by a usually nonviolent man. Instead he got a fundamentalist lecture on the nature of man’s relationship to a wrathful God and the everlasting torments of the hell that awaited atheists, and for better than two weeks Ellis Tidrow thought seriously of putting Robin out of his house. But this would have meant surrendering a soul that might be saved, and it also meant the loss of four hundred dollars a month which Robin’s father paid for his keeping, a sum which allowed Ellis to tithe generously and enjoy increased stature in Lambeth Sanctuary. So he reconsidered and Robin stayed; but thereafter he kept a closer eye on Robin’s studies, and Robin was forced to smuggle into the house the books which Franny checked out of the adult section of the public library for him.
Robin’s bedroom, on the third floor of the old house, was furnished with a sagging bed, a chifferobe with doors that wouldn’t stay closed unless they were tied with string, a study desk and a wooden chair, but he was permitted to decorate according to his enthusiasms. A Cincinnati Reds pennant was tacked over the bed. Next to a framed photo of one of his heroes, personally inscribed by Johnny himself, were several photos of his father: graduation day at Annapolis, in action as a member of an elite UD team. There was a recent Polaroid shot of Robin, standing on tip-toe, holding up a big barracuda he’d hauled in almost single-handedly off the Montezuma Shoals. His father had written across the top of the photo Skipper’s big ’un—Bequia, Christmas, 1971. Robin also owned a single small photo of his father and mother together, taken before he was born. His mother had died when he was two, and Robin retained only vague impressions of her. The Commander seldom said anything about her. She’d been a fashion model. She’d died, of complications from an infected tooth, while The Commander was on sea duty. It seemed a strange way to die.
The occult books Robin kept well hidden, because he knew that Ellis Tidrow made a habit of searching his room for conclusive evidence that Robin was a communicant of Satan.
There was a loose soap dish mounted on the tile wall above the claw-foot tub in the bathroom; the tile cement had cracked in a big square, and by being careful Robin could pull out both the dish and the tiles to which it was attached. The tile wall was cemented to wood joists, and between joists there was storage space for three or four books. Robin did a lot of reading in the tub, certain that he would never be interrupted behind his bathroom door.
In the books he had first encountered the theory of reincarnation, which confirmed his own hunches about the immortality of the soul and led to his rash decision to try out the idea on Tidrow. He learned that what he called Visiting was a form of astral projection, also known as an out-of-the-body experience, or OBE. There were few reported cases, but Robin already knew that all souls traveled, or Visited, from time to time, mostly at night while the body rested. It wasn’t usual to remember Visits as clearly as Robin always remembered them: for the well-being of the entity (as it was often called), Visits were distorted and recast as dreams.
It was rarer still to Visit as he Visited with Brian Marshall. And Robin discovered that almost nothing had been written about some of the other talents he exhibited intermittently and sometimes involuntarily. Once while waiting at the Little League park for his battery-mate Harkaday to show up, he had idly run two fingers along the chain-link backstop, leaving a three-foot gap which people had puzzled over for days. Robin was tempted to try it again, but he didn’t want to cause any more talk.
As far as he knew, nobody else could do his tennis ball trick. He would take a ball in his two hands and clasp it hard against the solar plexus, bending over as he did so. This turned the ball inside out, but he could just as easily restore the fuzzy side without losing any of the bounce. He showed the trick to Bob Brownell, who was in the seventh grade and did magic at little kids’ birthday parties. Bob pestered him for weeks to tell him how the illusion worked. Eventually Robin got bored and made up a lie, explaining to Bob that he had had two balls all the time. Bob still thought it was a hell of a good trick, and he was probably practicing right this minute.
What else? On those days Robin felt the obligation to get cracking and really polish up his skills he could make his alarm clock ring by staring at it, and on the Fourth of July he’d caused the clock in the Lambeth courthouse to toll twenty-six times at ten minutes after two in the afternoon, a feat which required so much energy it nearly knocked him out, and left him feeling sort of nauseated for a couple of days. Again in one of the books he’d found a word to describe this phenomenon: psychotronics. His mind had an affinity for machines.
Fran was good about not asking questions, and she and Whit didn’t go around talking about how weird he was just because he could influence Brian. But Fran was more than just a close friend. He really loved her, and she had to have deep feelings for him too. On an afternoon in late winter she’d been nursing Bernice in the rocker on the sun porch; when he got tired of whittling he climbed into her lap to be rocked too, and after a drowsy warm time with all three of them drifting off to sleep he’d raised his head and asked if he could taste her milk. Fran was quick to expose the other breast to him.
Mother’s milk was hot, sticky and sweet, and he’d had plenty of it long before he tired of the excitement of suckling her, feeling her own aimless rocking excitement as she stroked the back of his head. In a couple of years, then, he’d be grown up enough and taking care of Fran … once the thing that was going to happen at the bridge happened to Whit because of his drinking.
Robin’s favorite toy of the moment was a limberjack, or dancin’ doll, which Whit had made for him. The featureless doll, about ten inches high, was jointed at shoulders, hips and knees, the pieces held together with small nails. A turn of the wooden rod attached to the middle of the doll’s back made him jiggle and dance, the clumsy oversized wooden feet rapping on the surface of Robin’s desk. Tonight, though, he was depressed rather than amused: the limberjack reminded him too much of Brian.
He put it away and went to bed, yearning, for the first time in months, to Visit with his own kind, to be able to talk of chain links neatly separated without cutting or melting, of the Fourth of July bell-tolling and of the new talent that was slowly developing, the ability to see, merely by touching another, bits and pieces of his past and earthly future.
Robin knew that there were hundreds and maybe thousands like himself, not through actual contact but through wave-fronts, a non-Visiting mental seismograph. But he couldn’t just pick up and go Visiting without knowing who he intended to see, knowing exactly where to find him. There was a hard and fast rule: once out of the body you didn’t go wandering aimlessly around. That was much more dangerous than hitchhiking on a lonely road in the middle of the night, and it could lead to terrible trouble. Ellis Tidrow thought he could imagine the horrors of all the demons of hell, but one look at the creatures who swarmed in the ether (which was both space and the source of life itself), just beyond the reach of the normal range of the senses, would have sent Tidrow into a state of permanent screaming insanity.
They scared Robin, and he was used to them. During his first, tentative short-range Visits he had learned to ignore the creatures. It was fatal to be intimidated by their cries and swoopings, or their seductive protestations of friendship. Instinctively he had realized they could not physically harm or sever the cord of scintillating blue light that connected him to his physical self, but if they could weaken him with fear or seduce him with flattery then they might invite themselves back to the sleeping body. Once in residence they never left voluntarily. And they made appalling houseguests.
Although he’d been disappointed in many previous Visits, he knew where he wanted to go tonight. And so he rose, marvelously, as something drowned; trapped; dangling upward in the swift-drawing flue of the moon, poised—hands floating—weighted only at the heels by the thought of flesh, not flesh itself, clubfooted with desire to be loose above the stressful earth. He kicked once and rose again beyond the sleepers of this house, one quiet and slow-b
reathing, another shaking in his night of Pentecostal fevers; he rose through roof and branch and hovering leaf and traveled eastward, past night-clinging crow and covert owl, airborne like a blaze of static over the half-stoned torrent of a river, the last blue fall of the mountain. He passed through levels of ghost-dancing and places of screams, where wolf-like creatures leapt at the moon’s off-eye and fell back in a blood bath of frustration.
The hag-dogs studied him with fang and lolling tongue. Black magicians with bloodstream wings and languid claws solicited in whispers rarified as adders’ tongues. He saw incuba and succuba. He saw a goblin ugly as a fried kidney.
Robin found peace in endless fathoms of light, felt the throbbing sense of his twin, like a heavy vein pulsing on the outside of the unborn corpus of summer. When he was close he went straight down to her, asleep in her bed in the house by the bridge.
She was lying on her back and breathing with a whisper through her lips, one straight-out hand clutching her shabby panda. Her pajama tops were half unbuttoned and twisted. No boldness in the ten-year-old body, only the mild cruciality of youth, nipples flat and trivial as vaccination marks. He rejoiced in the ear-pretty and protectionless look of her. But she didn’t know he was there, although the cat on the window seat had raised its head, eyes like glassy gold in the light from the hall. Robin formed demanding thoughts to test her forgetfulness.
Gillian!
She stirred and clutched her panda tighter and murmured peevishly, but she wouldn’t open her eyes or acknowledge him. Robin looked around the familiar room, where he’d played often a few years ago—before they inexplicably grew apart. She had a lot of things he admired, particularly the solid brass mailbox salvaged from the demolition of the old Pennsylvania Railroad Station. He liked the marionette theatre and the comfortable bentwood rocker. The rare dolls in display cases didn’t interest him, of course. By contrast his own room had always been so barren. When Gillian Visited they preferred to play out of doors, in the flowery dells and hollows around Lambeth, Virginia.
Gillian, stop pretending! You know it’s Robin. I just want to talk, that’s all. There’s a lot I need to tell you.
He was getting through, in a limited way. But she flopped over on her stomach, sleep unbroken, hugging the panda. Robin was angry enough to wish he was there in the flesh; he would smack her butt so hard she’d jump straight up out of the bed.
Why don’t you Visit any more, or let me Visit? Come on, Gillian, this is dumb. What I can do you can do. You’re my sister.…
But she wasn’t, quite, and maybe that was the trouble. He had married and fathered and otherwise loved her through many past lives and the plan this time was to be brother and sister, only heartbeats apart at the time of their birth, a mirror oneness. But something had gone wrong with the fetus in the crowded womb. The umbilical wrapped chokingly tight around the neck and Robin was forced, just an hour before birth, to locate another body so that he and Gillian could be born while the conjunctions and the solar eclipse were in full force.
Therefore they were psychic rather than blood twins, but it seemed to make little difference during the first three years of their lives. Through constant Visiting they were nearly inseparable. Then Gillian had begun to deny the powers she was born with, and deny him as well.
It isn’t right for you to act like this, he thought petulantly. I need you. There’s nobody else I can tell … things. He gave in to a final burst of anger. Damn you anyway, Gillian! I won’t hang around all night. I’m going!
If she knew or cared she showed no sign. Robin thought imparting: You’re going to need me some day, wait and see, and then he was grimly gone, returning in two slow blinks of an eye to his cold and lumpy mountain bed.
Gillian sighed and stirred and changed sides in her own bed, flinging the eyeless panda to the floor, pawing at the rumpled sheet with a slim tanned foot, all skin-deep dreaming now, too young to be aware that she could break anyone’s heart.
Chapter Six
At ten minutes past four on a sullen Christmas Eve the last of the workmen got into a station wagon and drove away from the town of Bradbury, Maryland. Whitecaps were visible a couple of miles distant on Chesapeake Bay, and the wind from the southeast was spitting particles of snow, although the weatherman had not predicted a white Christmas for Bradbury. The overly green artificial Christmas tree in the square shuddered with each of the wind gusts. One of the metal ornaments blew away and went bouncing through the square, ending up in front of the railroad station, where three new cars of a commuter train awaited a four thirty-seven departure.
The grapefruit-sized iridescent ornament attracted the eye of a great bald eagle floating high above the station. They were rare in these haunts; this one was old and forgetful. Faulty reckoning had brought him again to what had been acres of piney roost and good hunting ground. The eagle circled lower, alighting on the cupola of the station. Closer inspection satisfied him that here was nothing good to eat. The streets looked remarkably free of the usual edible debris that attracted the small birds and rodents which the eagle fed on when black duck was scarce on the northern estuary.
He took wing again and flew over a blue taxicab, marking it in passing with a chalky dropping. He flew low past department store, pharmacy, bank and cinema, seeing nothing but his own stylish reflection in the window glass. But it was getting almost too dark to see much of anything, and still there was not a light showing anywhere in town. The eagle soared, over the silent municipal generating plant, the firehouse and the consolidated school, where the school bus was waiting with opened doors. Then he was out of Bradbury, out beyond the railroad tracks and the ten-foot-high fence topped with barbed wire.
The eagle sensed, before he saw, the fleet of helicopters flying in low from the west, and he gained altitude immediately, heading back to the uninhabited inlets where he made his home. Men lived for years along the Chesapeake without having a glimpse of him or his kind. Few of the bald eagles were born here anymore; the tons of pesticides and other inorganic phosphates washed into the west bay by Agnes in ’72 had made their nesting situation all the more critical. Too many flawed eggs were laid. Young were born deformed, unable to survive more than a few days.
The lead helicopter flew in over the barbed wire at an altitude of one hundred feet. The helicopter had plush accommodations for a dozen passengers, but only five men besides the crew were aboard. Two of the men were responsible for the design and construction of Bradbury, Maryland, a job which had been accomplished in almost exactly a year’s time.
Two other men were bodyguards for the fifth passenger, a one-armed man named Childermass, who stared out the window by his leather chair as four helicopters, big and booming, made a slow circuit above the town. There were rollercoaster lines on his forehead. One gray eye was larger than the other, and his mouth was the size of a buttonhole. His backswept blondish hair looked as stiff as the crest of a furious kingfisher. Altogether it was a strange, disordered face, round and desolate as the moon.
He was watched closely by the designer and the builder. When the helicopter had gone around once Childermass sat back in the seat and groped the stump of his left arm. After eight months it refused to heal properly, and minor surgery was again required. The arm had been blown off on a rainy night in Washington after a carefully conceived plan had gone awry. Its absence caused him frequent pain, but not as much pain as the memory of the humiliation he’d suffered.
“Well,” he said, holding out his hand, “let’s see how clever you boys are.”
A machine like a desk-top digital calculator was passed to Childermass; he placed it in his lap, picked out a code with two fingers and looked out the window again. It was almost fully dark now. For ten seconds nothing happened, but in a concrete bunker below Bradbury an idling computer came to life and began to issue commands. Wheels turned slowly at the generating station, then accelerated to a blur.
All over Bradbury the lights came on. The Christmas tree in the square was suddenl
y gorgeous; it could be seen for miles across the flatlands of the Aberdeen Proving Grounds. Four traffic lights turned red to green and back to red again. Television sets in the window of the appliance store flickered with cabled images. In the cinema a 16millimeter projector began to show Marlon Brando in The Godfather.
The four thirty-seven commuter train left the station on time and began its mile and a half circuit inside the barbed wire, with two other scheduled stops before it arrived back at the station on the square. The school bus closed its doors and proceeded east until it reached a grade crossing, pausing there while the train went by at twenty miles an hour. The blue taxi drove to the bank, the laundromat and then to the firehouse, passing the town police car and a delivery truck, which were also making driverless programmed circuits of Bradbury, Maryland. Christmas music filled the air, but anyone standing in the streets below would have had a difficult time hearing it because of the reverberating racket from the four helicopters circling overhead.
In the lead helicopter the two men who had worn themselves to a frazzle during the past year broke out the champagne and whooped it up. Childermass smiled a tight, elliptical smile.
“It’s the biggest toy train set a boy ever had,” he said.
Not being movie buffs, they were polite but puzzled. Childermass didn’t bother to explain.
For a couple of days while she cooled out from the high fevers and slept almost constantly, Gillian was aware in her wakeful moments that everyone who came near her wore hospital gowns, caps and masks, and those who touched her did so with gloved hands. Even her mother and father appeared in masks—although she couldn’t be certain she’d actually seen them; her eyes wouldn’t focus part of the time and she seemed to be gazing at all the faces through an annoying thickness of polyethylene.
Oxygen tent. It was also difficult to hear; voices were obscured by the soft aspiration of oxygen into the bulky tent and by a persistent vibrato ringing in her ears, like the sound of gut string on a mountain fiddle when it’s bowed a certain way; it was loud but not unmusical.
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