And then I was there. It was a tight squeeze, and then a tight fit, but I was against the ropes ten feet from the coffin.
Suddenly my palms were sweating and my throat was dry. I clutched the staff I carried, leaned my weight on it, and breathed heavily through my mouth.
It was five minutes till three. Five minutes until the time of the resurrection.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Until this moment I'd been moving, going forward. But now I had time to think. And my thoughts suddenly changed.
What had seemed funny a few minutes ago didn't seem a bit funny now. The moment when I'd first thrust my staff at the fat man and he'd leaped aside had been amusing then; now I thought of what it really meant: that these people all around me were in a mood to believe anything, conditioned to it and ready for it.
I raised my head and looked past the rim of the cliff to my left, at the flat earth and the dirt road slicing through it. Then I turned, looked farther left and behind me, up the slanting ground. I could see the bushy shrub I'd marked in my mind yesterday. It would have been completely hidden by men and women now except that it was at the very edge of the cliff and most of the people stood a few feet away from it.
Lyn would be below there in her car, parked on the far side of the reservoir, the only place where the car could be hidden except for the quarry, a mile farther away. I glanced over the men between there and where I stood, then turned to look inside the square—at the Guardians.
I had become so accustomed to the continual clamor of voices that it was like the withdrawal of a physical pressure when it slowed and got fainter, then suddenly stopped. I knew that men here must have heard the sound momentarily grow fainter and, in a natural enough reaction, themselves stopped speaking. But it was almost as if they had all become silent after an unheard signal. Then the murmur began again.
And suddenly a thought jarred me. I had forgotten one thing, at least one thing. When I moved I would have to move quickly and surely. And I was still wearing the clumsy extensions on my feet.
It was four minutes till three.
Before I took even one step, I had to get the stilts off my feet, but there wasn't any way to bend down and unstrap them, take them off and stand up nine inches shorter than before—not with all these men around me. Even if those closest to me failed to notice, the Guardians wouldn't miss it.
All of them stood on my left, facing the coffin and the crowd, the nearest man only four or five feet from me. None of the Guardians stared fixedly at the coffin; they all let their eyes shift over the crowd, sizing us up, noting the rapt expressions. Anger grew in me at the thought that this one thing might stop me—and then I had the answer.
At least, I'd thought of a way that might work. But even though many faiths were here—and thus the lack of many faiths—I hesitated. Because I meant to kneel as though in prayer and under cover of that movement get rid of those stilts, get ready to move.
Three minutes till three.
I raised my arms high slowly, pressed their palms together, and brought my hands down to my chest, bowed my head. Then I knelt, fumbled beneath my robe, trying to keep my movements hidden. I found the leather straps and pulled them free of the buckles; in seconds I had the aluminum stilts off my feet. I let out my breath in a sigh, and it seemed the entire crowd sighed with me; there was movement on my left and right.
It took me a few seconds to understand what was happening; then I got it. Once I had unconsciously led the way, my movement entered all the other minds here as a suggestion, perhaps for some as a command. The man on my right dropped to his knees beside me. He was the first, but then the man beyond him knelt too. In moments there was motion all around me as men and women moved back and to the side, in quietness and without apparent haste, finding room to kneel. The rest followed like sheep.
In less than half a minute, every one of them was kneeling. Anyone still on his feet would have been far more obvious than I had been before, and of all those men and women, not one was standing. I looked at every part of the crowd, hoping I'd see at least one man standing alone, but each of the fifty thousand was on his knees.
Two minutes till three.
I looked to my left, over the bowed heads near me and past the cliff's edge, at that plain below. For a moment it seemed a bare, level plain I had seen before in a dream, through the shimmering outlines of a dead woman's face.
And in that moment I saw in a different way the mass of bodies packed around and near me. It was a wall of men, and I had forgotten this part, too, in my plan. I had known that if I should manage to unmask the fake here, the crowd might turn on me. But I'd planned what I would do, thinking that even then, in the moment of shock, I might have a chance to run and get away. But I'd forgotten how tightly packed the bodies around this square would be.
Silence had fallen again. I looked at my watch, saw the second hand moving; I could hear each separate tick as the hand moved steadily closer to the hour.
One minute till three.
It was dimmer suddenly. A new coldness in the air chilled my skin. I couldn't understand. And then, on my knees, I raised my eyes and looked at the sky above me. The sun had gone behind a cloud. That was all; a normal and ordinary thing that had happened many times before this. I'd noticed it now only because it had happened so close to three.
But a ripple, a rising and falling sigh swept over the crowd and then quickly died. The six in black stood immobile now, staring at the coffin's lid. I looked at the coffin. For it was time; it was three o'clock. It was the moment of resurrection.
And the lid of the coffin moved.
An audible sigh went up from the crowd, billowing out of silence. I stared, myself caught in the emotion that stretched almost tangibly through the crowd.
Gnarled fingers, a white bony hand, appeared beneath the coffin's lid. The giant whisper died. The coffin lid moved upward, through its entire arc, fell outward with a creak that was piercingly loud in the silence.
A white hand gripped each of the coffin's wooden walls.
The man pulled himself to a sitting position within the coffin, his face frozen into immobility, white and calm, the appearance of death upon it.
And the crowd stirred. There was a rushing sound, a gasp of breath, a rising wind from which the first faint voices came. Women sobbed and wailed and men cried out as the man inside the coffin moved.
I shook my head, felt my heart pounding in my chest. I had been almost hypnotized by what I'd seen—and I had been ready for it, expected this to happen. I got my feet beneath me, tensed my leg muscles.
The man was thin, his skin white. I had known that even before this suggestible, hopeful crowd, even with all the careful preparation, the likeness would have to be almost perfect if the Guardians hoped for success. While the crowd shrieked and sobbed around me, I made myself stare coldly at the man's face.
He climbed from the low coffin and stood upon the ground. And I moved. All around me there was smashing sound, a booming roar of unintelligible words and phrases, of shouts and screams; and women moved, turned, fell to the ground, moaned and shrieked and sobbed.
My legs uncoiled as I slid between the ropes, stood half erect, and leaped toward the man.
He whirled around, shock staining the whiteness of his face, and as I jumped toward him he shrank back. I slammed my foot against the ground and jerked to a stop inches from him, reached for him, clawing for his face—and in that instant all sound stopped.
My hand froze, almost upon his face. I couldn't move. I was stunned, my mind reeling and shock smashing into my brain. For there was no doubt at all, not the slightest question about the man before me.
It was Arthur Trammel!
Chapter Twenty-Three
I couldn't think. I knew that Arthur Trammel had been dead, that I had seen his torn, bleeding body, his dead body. But I knew that this man was Arthur Trammel.
I stared at him, at his thin skull and close-set eyes, his teeth and chin and hair and lips. And then
I pawed at his face, ripped at the long nose and squeezed his flesh, knowing I wouldn't rip false parts of his face away, that he would still be a dead man come to life.
Only seconds had passed, and through it all the crowd had been numbed by silence. I felt Trammel's hands rip at my own face, pull off my false hair and beard, saw the motion and felt his hands; from the corners of my eyes I saw movement about us, a frantic milling as men and women cringed in fright and horror, some turning away.
Then Arthur Trammel stepped back, raised his left hand, and pointed a long gnarled finger at me. In a voice like the crack of doom, loud and booming in the silence, he cried, "There stands the man who murdered me!"
As his words died away there was a low mutter from five thousand, ten, then fifty thousand throats. It was muted at first, for a long second a nearly constant rumble—and then, with a sudden, incredible violence, the crowd exploded. It was a scream, a throat-ripping cry of fright and hate, like nothing I'd ever heard before.
From the moment when Trammel had pointed at me and spoken till this moment with sound crashing against my ears, no one had made a move toward me. The movement, when it came, wasn't from the crowd, but from within this square. One of the Guardians, a square chunky man, leaped toward me. His hand clutched at my robe and spun me around—and snapped me out of my own shock.
The square and chunky Guardian had spun me around, but long before I'd turned halfway my left arm was swinging from across my middle, hand stretched open. The hard thick edge of my palm thudded into his mouth and I felt his teeth snap beneath his mashed lips.
All around me was a blur of color and movement; no others were yet inside the square, but I knew they'd soon be rushing in. I figured I was dead already, anyway, and what the hell, I'd bat these beggars with my dismembered limbs as long as I could. So I did the one thing that might shock all these bloodthirsty screechers, if they were still capable of shock. One jump took me to him, to the risen Arthur Trammel, and I hit him on the point of the chin as hard as I could, and he was once more unrisen.
I bent over and grabbed him, yanked his limp body over my head, then turned around and charged across the ring, gathering speed and whooping horribly.
These last ten seconds had affected different people in different ways, and many who had been pressed close about the ring had already drawn back or run from the bolts of lightning or sheets of flame that inevitably would be crackling about me, but there was still an appalling number of people straight ahead of me. I had no time to crawl under ropes, so I just sprinted harder and slammed through them, posts going down and ropes flapping, but I went through. And I threw Arthur Trammel as hard as I could at a flock of about fifty ready-to-faint people.
Some of them fainted. Others got the hell out of the way, either afraid of Trammel or afraid of me. And, too, a lot of them already knew I was a maniac, and that helped. There weren't many who cared to tangle with such as I.
All of a sudden, I noticed that, though I hadn't consciously chosen a destination, I had already come uphill about halfway to the funny-shaped bush I'd chosen yesterday. There were still plenty of people between it and me, though most of them weren't looking at me, but behind me at Trammel and the crowd now baying at my heels. I aimed at the bush.
Oh, man, I had done some other running in days gone by, but this was by far the best running I'd done. This time I had incentive. I noticed with a kind of detached interest a guy rolling about and a woman throwing dirt in her face, and I guess there were fits all over. That made the going easier for me, but it wasn't all gravy.
Two guys who loomed before me, either petrified or being brave, turned out to be foolhardy and received a fist in their chops. I gave one other guy a shoulder and, terrible as it may sound, straight-armed a woman. But she was a great big broad-shouldered man of a woman—and she was, after all, in my way.
Only at the very last did I actually start thinking I might make it. Of course, making it wasn't such a hell of a great thing, anyway. You can't be exactly lighthearted about jumping off a sixty-foot cliff.
So I veered away from the cliff's edge in order to get a better crack at that bush. Some people scattered and I dodged whooping around others, and then, when I was almost opposite the bush, I spun right and sprinted toward it.
As I ran toward the edge of the cliff I wondered if I were truly acting in a rational fashion, if this were really what I had so carefully planned. After all that had happened, there was at least a small chance that I was out of my mind. The thought bothered me, but I kept running.
Then I reached the edge of the cliff, leaped from it, flapped my arms, and took off for the sun.
Chapter Twenty-Four
I flew no better than Lovable, for whom the sun had been his undoing, and I went in the same direction he had gone: down. Ah, but I had planned it this way, I told myself. Because, though I was afraid to look just yet, I knew that somewhere down there, right below that bush, was an open reservoir, with several feet of water in it, which reservoir Lyn and I had carefully cased yesterday afternoon. So all I had to do was keep falling, which was no trick at all, and I would, if my calculations were correct . . . Right then a sickening thought struck me:
My God, was that the right bush?
Suddenly I didn't want to go through with it. That was tough. All these thoughts were going through my mind with lightning speed, of course, because all this time I was still falling. Finally, I looked down, just in time to see water, and also just in time to realize that I must have been yelling, because as I plummeted into the water much of it filled my open mouth. When I hit the reservoir bottom, the impact knocked the air out of my lungs, but I was conscious, and shoving upward with my legs and paddling.
When my head broke the surface, I could hear the roar of the convertible's engine and knew that Lyn must have seen me coming. I hauled myself over the wall and dropped to the ground, ran around to the reservoir's far side, and leaped into the convertible without opening the door. Lyn was gunning the motor in low before I landed.
She didn't say anything, just slammed the accelerator down and started on the route we'd planned. Her face was white and scared, her lips pressed tightly together. At the dirt road two hundred yards out from the cliff she swung right toward the state highway. We'd driven the other way yesterday, and that way the road ended at Hollis.
Lyn glanced quickly at me and spoke. "What happened? I heard the most awful sounds."
"You heard some awful sounds. What do you think I—"
The shrill wail of a siren cut through my answer. On our right, coming like a bat out of hell down the state highway toward us, was a police radio car.
"Go," I said. "Go, baby, go."
A second police car was a hundred yards behind the first one; a third followed it. "Oh, murder," I said. "There'll be a thousand cop cars after us in a minute. There'll—"
I stopped because we were almost at the intersection. We were going to make it ahead of that first police car. But we had to turn, and the way Lyn was driving, I figured we'd turn over instead of left.
"Hit the brakes!" I yelled, but she was already hitting them. We slid, skidded sideways, and swerved on the dirt road as she let up on the brake pedal and jammed it down again, yanking the steering wheel left. When we hit asphalt, the car shuddered and tires shrieked. I could smell hot rubber and brake lining, then I felt the car tip.
I thought we were going over for sure, and as I started to reach for the wheel she snapped it right, whipped it left again as the wheels banged down on the asphalt. We slid clear over the edge of the road, hit the dirt, then veered back onto the highway. A shot cracked out and I glanced over my shoulder to see the radio car behind, so close I could see the bore of a gun held in an officer's hand. His right arm was stuck out the window by him and it looked as if the gun were aimed squarely at my left eye.
I snapped around, shoved my hands down between my legs to the sack of tetrahedrons ready for me on the floor boards, metal gadgets like a kid's jacks, only multi
pointed and sharp. In the war, they were scattered on roads to stop enemy vehicles. This was war, and right now that guy shooting at me was an enemy.
Another shot cracked out and the slug crashed through the windshield as I swung my arms up, clutching a double handful of tetrahedrons, and threw them over my head and behind the car. I reached down for more, tossed them out onto the road, then jerked my head around for a look.
The officer was just about to fire again and kill me when the car's front tires hit a whole mess of tetrahedrons; and then the back ones hit more. There was one bang from the gun, then four almost simultaneous bangs as all four tires blew out. The car jerked, skidded off the road. For a moment I thought it was going over, but the car stayed upright.
Far down the road behind us there was a mass of cars, part of the rabid fifty thousand joining the chase. I got busy, tossed out tetrahedrons until the sack was empty. By the time I finished, the other two police cars were out of commission, one clear off the road and the other partly on it, turned sideways, and the mass of a hundred or so other buggies was almost upon the beginning of the tetrahedron highway. I couldn't bear to look.
I turned around, stared ahead, trying to think.
Suddenly Lyn cut into my thoughts. "What's the matter? You're white as a sheet. And why do you keep saying that?"
"Saying what? I didn't know I was saying anything."
"You keep saying, 'Trammel is risen, Trammel is risen.'"
I wiped sweat off my forehead. "Baby," I said, "believe it or not, he is."
"Oh, my goodness," she said. "Shell, pull yourself together."
"Ha. That's what he did. He's back there. I wouldn't be surprised if he's back there in that reservoir dancing around on the water."
Always Leave ’Em Dying Page 16
