“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 fault 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 desperately to think of a way out. Beyond t
he 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?”
“Yes,” Sister said firmly. Her voice only trembled a little bit. “I do believe.”
“I was afraid of that.” Still grinning, he reached down to the metal splinter in his leg. Its point was smeared with gore. He began to draw it out, and Sister knew what had made those wounds. He pulled the dagger free and straightened up. His leg did not bleed.
“Bring it to me,” he said, in a voice as smooth as black velvet.
Sister’s body jerked. The willpower seemed to drain out of her as if her soul had become a sieve. Dazed and floating, she wanted to go to him, wanted to reach into the bag and draw out the circle of glass, wanted to place it in his hand and offer her throat to the dagger. That would be the easy thing to do, and all resistance seemed incredibly, insufferably difficult.
Shivering, her eyes round and wet, she winnowed her hand into the bag, past the cans and the hard-frozen TV dinners, and touched the circle.
Diamond-white light flared under her fingers. Its brilliance startled her to her senses, the willpower flooding back into her mind. She stiffened her legs as if rooting them to the floor.
“Come to papa,” he said—but there was a tense, rough edge in his voice. He wasn’t used to being disobeyed, and he could feel her resisting him. She was tougher by far than the kid in the theater, who had resisted about as much as a marshmallow pie against a buzz saw. He could peer behind her eyes, and he saw leaping, shadowy images: a spinning blue light, a rainy highway, the figures of women drifting through dim corridors, the feel of harsh concrete and brutal blows. This woman, he reasoned, had learned to make suffering her companion.
“I said… bring it to me. Now.”
And he won, after a few more seconds of struggle. He won, as he knew he must.
Sister tried to prevent her legs from moving forward, but they continued on as if they might snap off at the knees and keep going without her torso. His voice licked at her senses, drew her steadily onward: “That’s right. Come on, bring it here.”
“Good girl,” he said when she got within a few feet. Behind her, Artie Wisco still cringed near the door.
The Doyle Halland-thing reached slowly out to take the glowing glass circle. His hand paused, inches from touching it. The jewels pulsed rapidly. He cocked his head to one side. Such a thing should not be. He would feel much better about it when it was ground to bits under his shoe.
He snatched it from her fingers.
“Thank you,” he whispered.
The ring of glass changed.
It happened in an instant: The rainbow lights faded, became murky and ugly, turning swamp-mud brown, pus-gray, coal-mine black. The glass circle did not pulse; it lay dead in his grip.
“Shit,” he said, amazed and confounded, and one of his gray eyes bleached pale blue.
Sister blinked, felt cold chills running down her spine. The blood tingled in her legs again. Her heart labored like an engine straining to kick over after a night in the cold.
His attention was directed to the black circle, and she knew she only had a second or two to save her life.
She braced her legs and swung the leather bag right at the side of his skull. His head jerked up, his lips twisting into a grimace; he started to juke aside, but the Gucci bag full of cans and frozen dinners hit him with every ounce of strength Sister could summon. She expected him to take it like a stone wall and scream like hellfire, so she was astounded when he grunted and staggered back against the wall as if his bones were made of papier-mâché.
Sister’s free hand shot out and grabbed the ring, and they held it between them. Something akin to an electric shock rippled through her arm, and she had the mental vision of a face studded with a hundred noses and mouths and blinking eyes of all shapes and colors; she thought it must be his true face, a face of masks and changes, tricks and chameleonic evil.
Her half of the circle erupted into light, even brighter than before. The other half, in his grasp, remained black and cold.
Sister ripped it away from him, and the rest of the ring blossomed into incandescent fire. She saw the Doyle Halland-thing squint in its glare and throw a hand over his face to avoid the light. Her heartbeat was making the ring pulse wildly, and the creature before her recoiled from that fiery light as if he was stunned by both its strength and her own. She saw what might have been fear in his eyes.
But it was only there for an instant—because suddenly his eyes were sucked down into hoods of flesh, his entire face shifting. The nose collapsed, the mouth slithered away; a black eye opened at the center of his forehead, and a green eye blinked on his cheek. A sharklike mouth yawned over the point of the chin, and exposed within the cavity were small yellow fangs.
“Let’s panrrrty, bitch!” the mouth howled, and the metal splinter flashed with light as he lifted it over his head to strike.
The dagger came down like vengeance.
But Sister’s bag was there like a shield, and the dagger punched through but couldn’t penetrate a frozen turkey dinner. He reached for her throat with his other hand, and what she did next she did from street fighting, down-and-dirty ball-kicking experience: She swung the glass circle at his face and buried one of the spikes in the black eye at the center of his forehead.
A scream like a cat being skinned came from that gaping mouth, and the Doyle Halland-thing’s head thrashed so quickly that the glass spike broke off, still full of light and imbedded in the eye like Ulysses’s spear in the orb of the Cyclops. He flailed wildly with his dagger, the other eye rolling in its socket and percolating through the flesh. Sister shouted, “Run!” to Artie Wisco and then turned and fled herself.
He fumbled with the latch and almost took the door with him as he ran from the house; the wind caught him, knocked his legs out from under him. He slid on his belly, still gripping the bagful of wood shards, down the steps to the icy curb.
Sister followed him, also lost her balance on the steps and went down. She shoved the glass ring deep into her bag and crawled along the ice, skimming away from the house on her belly like a human sled. Artie scrabbled after her.
And from behind them, tattered by the wind’s scream, came his maddened roar: “I’ll find you! I’ll find you, bitch! You can’t get away!” She looked back, saw him through the storm; he was trying to pull the black spike out of his eye, and suddenl
y his feet went out from under him and he fell on the front porch. “I’ll find you!” he promised, struggling to get up. “You can’t get a—” The noise of the storm took his voice, and Sister realized she was sliding faster, going downhill over the tea-colored ice.
An ice-covered car loomed in front of her. There was no way to avoid it. She scrunched herself down and went under it, something snagging and ripping her fur coat as she shot beneath the car and continued down the incline, out of control. She looked back and saw Artie spinning like a saucer, but his course took him around the car and out of danger.
They sped down the hill, two human toboggans passing along a street lined with dead and crumpled houses, the wind thrusting them onward and sleet stinging their faces.
They would find shelter somewhere, Sister thought. Maybe another house. And they had plenty of food. Wood to start a fire. No matches or lighter, but surely the looters and fleeing survivors hadn’t carried off everything that would throw a spark.
She still had the glass ring. The Doyle Halland-thing had been right. It was hope, and she would never let it go. Never.
But it was something else, too. Something special. Something, as Beth Phelps had said, magic. But what the purpose of that magic was, she couldn’t yet fathom.
They were going to live, and they were skidding further and further away from the monster who wore a priest’s suit. I’ll find you! she heard it bellowing in her mind. I’ll find you!
And she feared that someday—somehow—it just might.
They skidded down to the end of the hill, past more abandoned cars, and continued along the thoroughfare about forty more yards before they bumped the curb.
Their ride was over, but their journey had just begun.
1987 - Swan Song v4 Page 26
