Sarah knocked on Montague"s door the evening after her botched baptism. Somehow, despite it all, she felt just stable enough for contact. It opened, and behind it was the boy who"d sat with her last night. He looked unsure, but he stepped back, motioned for her to enter. The room was bare but for two beds. "You feeling any better?" the boy asked.
"A little."
The boy stepped back, as if she were feral.
"I"m Sarah."
2.
They talked about innocuous things for a while, and Montague found that his words were coming out all wrong. It was as if his mouth was only partially connected to his brain. True, he was flummoxed by her, but what did that have to do with his mouth?
And then she had to go and say it, a name that made everything make sense. Daniel, she said, and Montague went cold. He"d never met the man, but there were stories. Daniel was a wanted felon allowed to hide out because he and the preacher were old friends. Daniel was Reverend Durham"s brother and was wanted for stagecoach robbery. Daniel was the preacher"s father, and of course was wanted by the government for one reason or another. A hiding Confederate soldier, a deserter. A witch who was allowed to live on the outskirts of town only because he deposited a large sum of gold on the steps of the church every week. None of these tales carried much weight with Montague, who, like his father, was a slave to logic. Unlike his father, he desperately wanted to believe each of them. "What do you want with him?"
"He"s the reason we were coming here." Sarah winced when she said we.
"What was he going to do for you?" asked Montague, who was reexamining each of the strange tales for veracity.
"I"m not sure."
"He lives two or three miles past the church," said Montague, suddenly understanding why she"d mentioned him. "It"d be dangerous," he told her.
Sarah"s face darkened. She smoothed down her dress and took a step back. "I"m going," she told him. "And I"m going tonight."
3.
Sarah snuck out after Joseph began snoring. She opened the window and crawled down the shingled roof.
The saloon made noise a ways off, but otherwise all was quiet. She was careful to remain in the shadows until she"d reached the edge of town, where the tenement house loomed against a pale night sky. Hollow noises rang out on the upper floors and a dank smell permeated the air around the place, and as she pa.s.sed it she kept her eyes on the blank stare of its windows, on the wet walls that wrapped their acrid stink around the poor. She veered away, then stopped when she saw the moonlit cross. She went cold, shuddered, and wrapped her arms around herself.
She started for the cross.
4.
Nathaniel Durham had locked himself in his study all evening. When the bell tolled midnight, he tossed his spectacles onto the thick pages of The Gospel According to Matthew, stood, and stretched. He shuffled from his office, pa.s.sing the depictions of Christ"s Pa.s.sion, and went to the window overlooking town. He thought he saw something and squinted, not believing it. Was that the girl coming toward the church?
"Well, I"ll be-"
But she turned from the path, trudging up the road beside the cemetery, and Nathaniel suddenly understood where she was headed.
5.
When the woods opened up on the plain, Sarah could find no dwelling.
She turned, but there was only s.p.a.ce. Endless land, the promise of the New World. She smiled sadly, thinking of Papa. It"s not a new world to us, he"d said. We were here when the world was Pangaea. Before men rose out of the muck, we were here. This he"d said during their last walk together, perhaps no more than a week ago. Our last walk, she thought. Standing at the edge of a dark wood, the limitless expanse of earth before her, Sarah closed her eyes and began to cry. "b.a.s.t.a.r.ds," she whispered, or perhaps she only thought it. If only she"d had a little control. If only her body hadn"t gotten away from her.
An owl screeched and Sarah opened her eyes. A man stood before her. He wore no shirt and some type of ill-fitting slacks. He was nearing her with every step.
She backed away.
"I"m Daniel," he said. "And I"m sorry." With that he closed in, looked her deep in the eyes. "I"m so sorry."
At first Sarah couldn"t meet his stare. It was so direct it was nearly confrontational. Then what he"d said hit her: How did he know?
Daniel"s blue eyes, startling in the moonlight, watered. He turned toward the plain. "Would you like to come in?"
"Come in where?" asked Sarah. Around them, nothing.
Now his smile took, and he shoved his hands in his pockets, kicked at the dirt. Stones skipped.
Sarah stepped to the side. Her mouth hung open. There, right up where there had only been darkness, a dimly lit window hung. But only a window. She could only stare. Then her eyes were drawn above it, to where smoke lazily exited a chimney. She blinked, and there was a roof. In seconds an entire house appeared, and a coop behind it, insane with the screams of chickens.
She must have looked terrified because Daniel got down on his haunches, put his elbow on his knee, and reached out to her, saying, "Come along, Sarah. It"s okay." And although she didn"t know how he knew her name, she edged forward, took his hand, and allowed him to lead her through the open door. He closed it behind them, and suddenly the world silenced. Sarah felt like they"d closed a door on the rest of creation.
Chapter Twenty: A Vase Shatters in Gibsonton.
1.
For Veronica, it was a time of endless roads, long nights, and filched ident.i.ty.
She"d been staying at the Motel 6, sans Chris, and going to work from there, and Robert hadn"t called, hadn"t dropped a note, nothing. Nothing, that is, until he"d had her served at work. She"d signed, bid the messenger good day, then tossed the papers into the garbage beside her desk. After that, she"d stood up, taken a deep and cleansing breath, performed a check on the teller line, dropped several clips of hundred dollar bills into her purse-a dozen, maybe; maybe a few more than that-and had, not two minutes later, strode from the bank calmly, as if exiting the confessional.
The romance of a new life had long appealed to her. Driving to the office or on errands, she"d often imagined what it would be like to skip the designated exit. Where, and when, would she stop? What would it mean?
After taking the money she drove to the edge of town, paused at a stoplight. East, and she would hit Daytona; west, and Tampa wasn"t far. The light turned green, and she tensed a moment, then got in the westbound lane. She tapped the brakes once at cruising speed, five miles under the limit, and remained in the far right-hand lane, her hands clutching ten and two, her mind, for perhaps the first time ever, completely free.
That night, she decided on a town called Gibsonton, though she was somewhat sorry to be stopping, to be yielding to another exit, another town. Towns, she now thought, existed to keep you, to trap you. She felt hopeless: she"d been born too late. The ideals and dreams of earlier times were dead; price tags and million dollar yachts, tax exemptions and gated communities-these made up the new Eden. She"d long felt an overwhelming wanderl.u.s.t, but had squelched it in order to live a socially acceptable life, but it had been unbearable, and it wasn"t Robert"s fault, or little Jenn"s, but her own. To vanish, she thought with a smile. Now that"s romantic. A new life, a new name, and new dreams.
For miles there were only trailer parks and fields in which cows grazed under the setting sun. Dusk now, the moon a white thumbprint following her. She saw boarded-up filling stations and abandoned cars, but no people, and she began to wonder if Gibsonton was a ghost town. Another mile brought a series of spa.r.s.ely populated trailer parks, and a truck stop cafe sporting only one car out front, an old Pontiac Firebird, the phoenix dull on its hood.
Then she saw something. It was huge and round and partially concealed by a tree. Below it an old double wide trailer seemed to rear back, as if in fear. She slowed down, leaned over the steering wheel, shook her head, staring blankly. She"d been stopped nearly a minute before she realized what she was looking at. The construct was a mess, some of its seats had rusted through, and it leaned precariously over the street. "A Ferris wheel," she said. "A f.u.c.king Ferris wheel."
She heard the low sound, a low grating sound to her left, and turned her head, screamed, raised her hands defensively, kicked up her knees and stomped her feet against the window.
There was a head at the window, a huge head with yellow-green eyes. She was in the pa.s.senger"s seat now, her hand out defensively. Then she realized, I"m in a car, there"s a window between me and that, that thing. Is it a tiger? It watched her, one eye showing through the pane, and then it turned, trod off lazily toward another beast, this one lazing in the sand surrounding a dilapidated trailer. The first collapsed beside the other, licked its paw, and ran it over its head.
Veronica sat up, back flat against the door, then leaned forward, peered out the window. Tigers, she thought. There are two tigers roaming the street not five miles off the highway.
She crept back in the driver"s seat, peering cautiously around, as if the beasts across the street were attuned to movement, like a T-Rex in that Spielberg flick. She pressed on the gas, but the car didn"t budge. In her excitement, she"d knocked the transmission into neutral. She pulled down the lever, and drove off.
She pressed on, slower than she would have liked, until a motel appeared. At first glance, it was desolate. It curled around a gravel lot like a serpent, and behind it palms and pines lilted over the Spanish tiled roof. She turned in, stopped in front of the office, got out, and strolled under a portico columned with whitewashed wood. The sidewalk dropped into a swale lined with bedrock.
The lobby was spare. The foyer consisted of a coffee pot, in which a half inch of black smoldered, and a rack filled with brochures. On the counter were a computer, a ledger, and a bell. There were tow doors behind the counter: one was closed, the other cracked. Darkness lined the crack. She slapped the bell. "Be right there!" called a deep voice.
The black behind the door widened, and a figure stepped out. She gasped, flinched back, tripped on her heel, and fell unceremoniously onto her rump.
The man leaned over the counter, opened his mouth, and chuckled.
"You-" she began, staring. "You look like a wookie." The man laughed softly, and she joined him, still staring. He was covered in hair. It spilled from his head, covered his face, pooled around his white T-shirt, grew on the backs of his hands. "You look like Lon Chaney," she continued, and he laughed harder. They shared this until she flew into a coughing fit.
"You okay?" he asked.
She nodded, fist to her mouth, still coughing.
He turned, opened the office door, loomed over her, reaching out an immense hand. She took it and he pulled her up. His filthy T-shirt, the kind businessmen wear under suits, was at eye level. She looked up. "How tall are you?"
"Six eleven and one-half," he said. "But when you get that close to seven feet, does it really matter? Would you like a room, ma"am?"
"Sure," she answered, her mouth still an O of shock.
The man brought his hands up to his eyes, turned them over. "I was the Wolf-Man for Magica Carnival for twenty years, ma"am. Twenty good years," he told her, a look in his eye that might have been anger or nostalgia. He turned slowly, ducked under the door. At his computer he used one finger, struck each key softly. "Name?"
"Veronica Lieber." As soon as it was out she wished she"d thought to say Mona Lipschitz or Candy Browning or even Jane Doe.
"Address?"
"Do I have to tell?"
The man glanced away from the screen. "Wouldn"t dream of making you," he told her, typing in three letters. "How long you staying? Or is that a mystery too?"
"I . . . don"t know."
He studied her. "Thirty dollars a night, or a hundred a week."
"This is a weird place. I might need a week," she said, opening her purse. She withdrew her billfold, removed a crisp bill.
"Did I saw a hundred?"
"You did," she said, sliding the bill over.
"You want a travel guide?"
"You offering?"
He shrugged his ma.s.sive shoulders. "Slow season."
Veronica nodded.
"A hundred twenty."
"I"ve only got hundreds."
"I"ve got change. You want to go out tonight?"
"I think maybe I"ll rest tonight."
The Wolf-Man nodded as if he understood. He eyed her as she made her way out.
Veronica stopped. "What"s your name?"
The man smiled. "My name"s Sal, Ronnie."
The instant he said she decided that after tonight, she"d introduce herself to people as Ronnie. She opened her mouth to speak.
"Just Sal, Ronnie. Don"t know my folks," he said, raising his enormous hands. "And they don"t know me."
Veronica didn"t leave her room that night-the remainder of the day she vegetated on the huge bed and flipped through cable. At some point she drifted off, and didn"t wake until noon the next day.
Disoriented, she stared along the ceiling before attempting the walls, and didn"t recall anything until she saw her open purse on the chair. She cursed, sat up, pressing back into the headboard. Her head was throbbing, her back aching. Her decision seemed more real today.
The room, which she"d thought so cozy last night, now looked dingy. The lamp light was yellow, the shadows along the walls long and hazy, the top sheet stained. She went to the bathroom and was displeased to find the bathtub"s molding tearing like an open sore. Mildew lined the grout, and the shower curtain was rusty and blotched.
"Disgusting," she said, deciding to dress without a shower. "That freak had better give me my money back." After dressing, she tore off for the office.