They Thirst

by Robert R. McCammon

  Now the Voice was speaking to him again, whispering softly in the rush of the wind, calling his name. Benefield smiled, tears of joy in his eyes. “I’m coming!” he called out. “I’m coming!” A gust of wind hit the car’s side and rocked it slightly. The girl whimpered once, something in Spanish, and then was silent.

  The car’s headlights glinted off a new chain strung across the road from tree to tree. There was a metal sign: PRIVATE PROPERTY—NO TRESPASSING. Benefield, his heart pounding, pulled the car to the side of the road, cut the headlights and waited. The Voice was like a cooling balm on the fever blister of his brain; it came to him almost every night now as he lay in that gray place between sleep and wakefulness on the mattress of his efficiency apartment near MacArthur Park. On those terrible anguished nights when he dreamed of his mother lifting her head from that man’s lap, the throbbing penis as big as a python in her grip, her mouth opening to shout drunkenly, “YOU GET OUTTA HERE!”, the Voice whispered like a sea-breeze around his head, enveloping him, protecting him. But some nights even the Voice of God couldn’t stop the garish unreeling of the nightmare through his brain: the stranger grinning and saying, “The little bastard wants to watch, Bev. Come ’ere, Waltie, look what I got!” And the child Walter, standing transfixed in the doorway as if nailed there by hands and feet, his head thrashing in agony while the stranger pushed his mother’s face down until her laughter was muffled. He had watched it all, his stomach and groin tied into one huge knot, and when they were through his mother—Good old Bev never says no, never says no, never says no—swigged from the bottle of Four Roses that sat on the floor beside the sofa and, hugging the stranger, said in a thick slur, “Now you take care of me, honey.” Her dress, the one with the white dots on it, had been pushed up over her large, pale thighs, and she wore no underwear. The child Walter could not tear his gaze away from the secret place that seemed to wink like a wicked eye. His hands had dropped to his crotch, and after another moment the stranger laughed like a snorting bull. “The little bastard’s got a hard-on! Little Waltie’s carryin’ a load! Come ’ere, Waltie. COME HERE, I SAID!”

  His mother had lifted her head and smiled through swollen, glazed eyes. “Whozzat? Frank? Is it Frank?” His father’s name, old Frank. Out the door and gone so long ago all Waltie could remember of him was how hard he swung his belt. “Frank?” she said, smiling. “You come home, baby? Come gimme a great big kiss…”

  The stranger’s eyes had glittered like dark bits of glass. “Come ’ere, Waltie. No. Frank. Come ’ere, Frank. It’s Frank, baby. It’s your man come home.” He laughed softly, his gaze bloodshot and mean. “Drop your drawers, Frank.”

  “Honey?” his mother had whispered, grinning at him. “I got something needs you soooooo bad…”

  “Come give your baby a great big kiss, Frank,” the stranger had said quietly. “Oh, Jesus, this I gotta see!”

  When those dreams came, even the Voice of God couldn’t calm the fever. And he was grateful, so grateful, when the Voice told him it was all right for him to go out into the night in search of another laughing Bev, to take her away from the dark-grinning strangers and bring her to the holy mountain.

  He winced as those bad things danced through his head. His temples were aching, and he wished he had a Bufferin. Sometimes when the Voice spoke to him he felt as if a cauldron was being stirred in his brain, a thick mixture of magic that had changed his life into something with real purpose and meaning—service in the Master’s name. Turning his head to the left, Benefield could look down upon the shimmering city. He wondered if there were any others down there who were part of the cauldron brew, who were ingredients in the magic that now rippled through his soul and his being and set him aflame with sweet, cold fire. Of course, it was magic—the way of God is righteous, and He shall brighten the City of Night with magic and kill all the Bevs in that bubbling cauldron brew—because what else could it be?

  A car was coming. Benefield could see the flicker of headlights off in the distance, coming down the mountain toward him. He got out of his car, went around to the other side, and opened the passenger door. The dazed girl almost tumbled out, but Benefield reached down and picked her up in his arms like so much deadwood. Then he turned to face the approaching car.

  It was a long, black Lincoln polished so highly the sides and hood shone like glass. It stopped ten feet from the chain, its headlights centered like greedy eyes on Benefield and the offering he held in his arms.

  He smiled, his eyes filling with tears.

  The driver left the limousine and approached him, followed by a young girl that Benefield immediately recognized. Her long hair was blond and wind-tossed, and her dress was dirty. Benefield saw that the driver was the Servant of God—an old man in a brown suit and white shirt, his long, white hair flowing in the wind, his darting, ferret eyes sunken deep in a pale, wrinkled face. He limped as he walked and was slightly stooped, as if shouldering a backbreaking burden. When he reached the chain, he said to Benefield in a halting, weary voice, “Hand her over.”

  Benefield lifted her up. The blond-haired girl grinned and took her effortlessly, crooning like a mother to her child.

  “Go home,” the old man told Benefield. “Your work is done for tonight.”

  Suddenly the blond girl’s eyes flashed. She stared at Benefield’s injured hand, then lifted her gaze to his face. His smile cracked like a mirror. He blinked and started to lift his hand toward her.

  “NO!” the old man said and held his arm back as if about to strike her. She flinched and scurried toward the car with her prize. “Go home,” he told Benefield and turned away.

  The limousine backed up to a wide spot, made a tight turn, and disappeared up the mountain.

  Benefield longed to follow, but the Voice was whispering softly to him now, making him feel warm and needed and protected, taking his headache away. He stood where he was for a moment, the wind whipping and shrilling all around him, then walked back to his car. Driving down the mountain, he turned the radio to a station playing religious songs and began to sing along, happy and confident that the Master’s will would be done.

  2

  * * *

  Saturday, October 26

  THE RESTLESS

  ONE

  The sun came up over the San Gabriel Mountains like a reddish-orange explosion, turning the sky a steely gray that would slowly strengthen to bright blue as the morning progressed. Tendrils of yellowish smog hovered low to the ground, clinging like some huge octopus between the glass and steel skyscrapers, throbbing concrete-walled factories, and serpentine meanderings of half-a-dozen freeways already clogged with traffic. Chilly shadows, remnants of the night, scurried away before the marching sunlight like an army in retreat.

  Andy Palatazin stood before the open closet in his bedroom and deliberated over which tie to choose. He was wearing dark blue slacks, slightly tight around the midsection, and a light blue shirt with a neatly ironed but fraying collar; he chose a green tie with little flecks of blue and red in it, then walked out into the hallway and leaned slightly over the stairway railing. He could hear Joanna down in the kitchen, and the mouth-watering aroma of frying sausages and potatoes drifted up to him. He Called out, “Jo! Come look at this!”

  She came in another moment, her graying hair pulled up into a tight bun. She was wearing a dark green robe and slippers. “Let’s see it,” she said.

  He held up the tie and raised his eyebrows.

  “Iszonyu!” she said. “It’s hideous with that shirt. Wear the dark blue tie today.”

  “That has a spot on it.”

  “Then the red-and-blue striped one.”

  “I don’t like that tie.”

  “Because my brother gave it to you!” she muttered and shook her head.

  “What’s wrong with this one?” He held out the green tie and made it wiggle like a snake.

  “Nothing—if you want to look like a clown. Go on, wear it! Look like a clown! But…it…does…not…go!” Sh
e sniffed the air. “The potatoes are burning! See what you’ve made me do!” She whirled toward the kitchen and disappeared.

  “Your brother has nothing to do with it!” he called down to her; he could hear her mumbling but couldn’t tell what she was saying, so he shrugged and stepped back into the bedroom. His gaze fell upon the rocking chair over by the window, and he stood looking at it for a moment. Then he walked over to it, placed a thick finger against one of the arms, and pushed. The chair creaked softly as it moved back and forth. Was that a dream I had last night, he asked himself, or did I really see a megjelenes, an apparition, sitting here in this chair? No, a dream, of course! Mama is dead and buried and at peace. Finally. He gave out a long sigh, looked down at the green tie in his hand, and stepped back to the closet. He hung it back on the rack and looked at the striped one Jo’s brother, a lawyer who lived in Washington, D.C., had given him on St. Stephen’s Day. Never! he thought stubbornly. He sighted a tie he hadn’t worn in several months; it was bright red with big, blue polka dots, and it was buried so deeply on the rack he thought that Jo must’ve surely hidden it on purpose. Someday, he thought grimly, she’s going to burn them all up like she’s been threatening! As he slipped it on, he looked up at the top shelf and saw a flat box half hidden under a couple of battered hats with small, sad feathers glued to their bands. He quickly looked away and closed the closet door.

  In the small, cozy kitchen at the rear of the house, Jo was putting the breakfast plates on the little table that overlooked her backyard garden when her husband came in, smelling of Vitalis and Old Spice shaving lotion. She looked up, started to smile, and winced instead when she saw what was hanging around his neck. “Eat your sausages,” she said. “You might have a hard day at the circus.”

  “Gladly. Ah, this looks delicious!” He sat down at the table and started to eat, taking in huge, sloppy mouthfuls of sausage and potatoes. Jo set a cup of hot, black coffee beside him and took her seat on the other side of the table. “It’s good,” he said with food in his mouth. “Very good.”

  “Slow down,” Jo said. “You’ll have an attack.”

  He nodded and kept eating. When he stopped to drink some coffee, she said, “Andy, you should take a Saturday off once in a while. You should relax, all this working and worrying isn’t good for you. Why don’t you call and tell them you’re staying home today? We can go for a nice drive to the beach.”

  “I can’t,” he said, washing potatoes down his throat “Maybe next Saturday.”

  “You said that last week.”

  “Oh. Well, I meant it, but…” He lifted his gaze to hers. “You know why I have to go in. Someone might turn up something.”

  “They’ll call you if they do.” She watched him, her eyes bright and blue and alert. She was also worried about the dark hollows that had now appeared beneath Andy’s eyes, about the new lines that had begun to snake across his face. He didn’t sleep so well lately either, and she wondered if even in his dreams he thought of stalking that awful killer through the dark canyons of the city. She reached out and touched his rough bear’s paw of a hand. “Please,” she said softly. “I’ll make a picnic lunch for us today.”

  “They expect me to be there,” he said and patted her hand. “Next Saturday we’ll have a nice picnic. Okay?”

  “No, it’s not okay. They’re working you to death! You leave early in the morning and don’t come home until late at night. You work Saturdays and most Sundays, too! How long is it going to go on?”

  He wiped his mouth with a napkin and dug his fork into a mound of potatoes. “Until we find him,” he said quietly.

  “That may be never. He may be out of the city now, out of the country even. So why are you the one who has to work like a dog and answer all the questions and be on the front page of all the newspapers? I don’t like what some people are saying about you.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “What are they saying?”

  “You know. That you don’t know what you’re doing, that you don’t really care about finding that man, that you’re not a good policeman even.”

  “Oh, those things.” He nodded and drank down the rest of his coffee.

  “You should tell them all to go to the devil!” she said fiercely, her eyes shining. “What do those people know about how hard you’ve been working, day and night like a Trojan! They should give you a medal! You’ve spilled coffee on your tie.” She leaned forward with her napkin and dabbed at it. “If you keep your coat buttoned, it won’t show.”

  “All right,” Palatazin said. “I’ll try to.” He pushed his plate away and put a hand on his expanded stomach. “I’ve got to go in a few minutes. That Clarke girl from the Tattler is coming to the office this morning.”

  Jo made a disgusted face. “What—to write more slime? Why do you even talk to that woman?”

  “I do my job, she does her job. Sometimes she gets carried away, but she’s harmless.”

  “Harmless? Ha! It’s stories like hers that make people so afraid. Describing what that awful gyilkos did to those poor girls in such terrible detail, and then making out that you don’t have sense enough to find him and stop him! She makes me sick!” Jo stood up and took his plate over to the sink; she was shaking inwardly and trying to control it, trying not to let her husband see. Her blood, the Hungarian gypsy blood of a hundred generations, was singing with anger.

  “People know what that newspaper is,” Palatazin said, licking a forefinger and rubbing the coffee stain. Defeated, he let the tie drop. “They don’t believe those stories.”

  Jo grunted but did not turn from the sink. A new mental picture was forming in her brain, something that had gradually grown there over the past few weeks: Andy, armed with a gun, moving through the dark corridors of some unknown building, seeking the Roach all alone; and then huge, grasping hands reaching for him from behind, clamping around his throat, and squeezing until the eyeballs popped out and the face turned purplish blue. She shook her head to rid herself of the nagging thought and said softly, “God have mercy!”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “I’m thinking out loud.” She turned back to him and saw that his face was not purplish blue, nor were his eyeballs popping out. His face, on the contrary, reminded her of that dog in the Hush Puppies ads, all jowls and sad eyes under bushy, gray-flecked brows. She said, “You’re not going to do anything dangerous today, are you?”

  “Of course not.” He thought, Am I? How can I know? This was a question she asked him every morning and an answer he gave in kind. He wondered how many wives of policemen asked that question, how many cops replied as he had, and how many ended up dead from the burglar’s or the rapist’s or the junkie’s gun. Far too many, he was sure. He wondered how George Greene had answered that question on a July sixth morning over twelve years ago. Greene had been Palatazin’s first partner, and on that terrible day he was shot four times in the face while Palatazin watched it all through the window of a pizza parlor, buying a twelve-inch mushroom and black olive to carry back across the street to the car. They’d been staking out a suspect in the robbery-murder of a black heroin dealer, and much later, after the shooting was all over and Palatazin had vomited the last stink of gunpowder from his nostrils, he realized that the man must’ve figured out he was being watched and panicked, shoving his stolen .45 right through the passenger window into George’s face. Palatazin had chased him over five blocks, and finally on a tenement stairway, the man had turned to make his stand. Palatazin had blasted him away with a pizza-smeared trigger finger.

  His mother had cried for a long time when he’d told her that he thought he’d felt a bullet hiss past his head. She’d said she was going to the commissioner to have him given safer duty, but of course that didn’t happen. The next day she’d forgotten everything he’d told her, and she was talking about how beautiful the summer flowers must be along the streets of Budapest.

  Now Palatazin found himself staring at the hand that had held the gun that July 6. A
nya, he thought: the Magyar word for mother. I saw my mother’s ghost last night. He looked up into Jo’s eyes. “I had a strange dream last night,” he said and smiled slightly. “I thought I saw Mama sitting in her rocking chair in our bedroom. I haven’t dreamed about her for a long time. That’s strange, isn’t it?”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing. She…motioned with her hand. Pointed, I think. I’m not sure.”

  “Pointed? At what?”

  He shrugged, “Who knows? I can’t read dreams.” He stood up from the table and looked at his wristwatch; it was time to go. “I have an idea,” he said, putting his arms around his wife’s waist. “I’ll come home early and take you to The Budapest for dinner. Would you like that?”

  “I’d like for you to stay home today, that’s what I’d like.” She thrust out her lower lip for a moment and then reached up to brush the half-halo of gray hair at the crest of his head. “But The Budapest would be nice, I think.”

  “Good. And music! Fine ciganyzene! Yes?”

  She smiled. “Yes.”

  “We have a date then.” He patted her rear affectionately and then pinched it. She made a mock clucking noise with her tongue and followed him out to the living room where from a closet he took his dark blue coat and a black hat that had seen its day years before. She held his coat for him while he strapped on a black leather shoulder-holster, all the time staring distastefully at the .38 Police Special it held. Struggling into the coat and crowning himself with the ragged-looking hat, he was ready to go. “Have a good day,” he said on the front porch steps and kissed her cheek.

  “Be careful!” Jo called to him as he walked to the old white Ford Falcon at the curb. “I love you!”

  He raised a hand and slid into the car. In another moment it was rattling away down Romaine Street. A brown mongrel darted out from a hedge to chase it until it was out of sight.