"We"re what?"
So Pearson explained a little about the Ten O"Clock People and their tribal gestures (surly glances when confronted by no smoking signs, surly shrugs of acquiescence when asked by some accredited authority to Please Put Your Cigarette Out, Sir), their tribal sacraments (gum, hard candies, toothpicks, and, of course, little Binaca push-b.u.t.ton spray cans), and their tribal litanies (I"m quitting for good next year being the most common).
Duke listened, fascinated, and when Pearson had finished he said, "Jesus Christ, Brandon! You"ve found the Lost Tribe of Israel! Crazy f.u.c.ks all wandered off following Joe Camel!"
Pearson burst out laughing, earning another annoyed, puzzled look from the smooth-faced fellow over in NoSmo.
"Anyway, it all fits in," Duke told him. "Let me ask you something - do you smoke around your kid?"
"Christ, no!" Pearson exclaimed.
"Your wife?"
"Nope, not anymore."
"When was the last time you had a b.u.t.t in a restaurant?"
Pearson considered it and discovered a peculiar thing: he couldn"t remember. Nowadays he asked to be seated in the no-smoking section even when he was alone, deferring his cigarette until after he"d finished, paid up, and left. And the days when he had actually smoked between courses were long in the past, of course.
"Ten O"Clock People," Duke said in a marveling voice. "Man, I love that - I love it that we have a name. And it really is like being part of a tribe. It - "
He broke off suddenly, looking out one of the windows. A Boston city cop was walking by, talking to a pretty young woman. She was looking up at him with a sweetly mingled expression of admiration and s.e.x-appeal, totally unaware of the black, appraising eyes and glaring triangular teeth just above her.
"Jesus, would you look at that," Pearson said in a low voice.
"Yeah," Duke said. "It"s becoming more common, too. More common every day." He was quiet for a moment, looking into his half-empty beer schooner. Then he seemed to almost physically shake himself out of his revery. "Whatever else we are," he told Pearson, "we"re the only people in the whole G.o.ddam world who see them."
"What, just smokers?" Pearson asked incredulously. Of course he should have seen that Duke was leading him here, but still . . .
"No," Duke said patiently. "Smokers don"t see them. Non-smokers don"t see them, either." He measured Pearson with his eyes. "Only people like us see them, Brandon - people who are neither fish nor fowl.
"Only Ten O"Clock People like us."
When they left Gallagher"s fifteen minutes later (Pearson had first called his wife, told her his manufactured tale of woe, and promised to be home by ten), the rain had slackened to a fine drizzle and Duke proposed they walk awhile. Not all the way to Cambridge, which was where they would end up, but far enough for Duke to fill in the rest of the background. The streets were nearly deserted, and they could finish their conversation without looking back over their shoulders.
"In a bizarre way, it"s sort of like your first o.r.g.a.s.m," Duke was saying as they walked through a gauzy groundmist in the direction of the Charles River. "Once that kicks into gear, becomes a part of your life, it"s just there for you. Same with this. One day the chemicals in your head balance just right and you see one. I"ve wondered, you know, how many people have just dropped dead of fright at that moment. A lot, I bet."
Pearson looked at the b.l.o.o.d.y smear of a traffic-light reflection on the shiny black pavement of Boylston Street and remembered the shock of his first encounter. "They"re so awful. So hideous. The way their flesh seems to move around on their heads . . . there"s really no way to say it, is there?"
Duke was nodding. "They"re ugly motherf.u.c.kers, all right. I was on the Red Line, headed back home to Milton, when I saw my first one. He was standing on the downtown platform at Park Street Station. We went right by him. Good thing for me I was in the train and goin away, because I screamed."
"What happened then?"
Duke"s smile had become, at least temporarily, a grimace of embarra.s.sment. "People looked at me, then looked away real quick. You know how it is in the city; there"s a nut preachin about how Jesus loves Tupperware on every street corner."
Pearson nodded. He knew how it was in the city, all right. Or thought he had, until today.
"This tall redheaded geek with about a trillion freckles on his face sat down in the seat beside me and grabbed my elbow just about the same way I grabbed yours this morning. His name is Robbie Delray. He"s a housepainter. You"ll meet him tonight at Kate"s."
"What"s Kate"s?"
"Specialty bookstore in Cambridge. Mysteries. We meet there once or twice a week. It"s a good place. Good people, too, mostly. You"ll see. Anyway, Robbie grabbed my elbow and said, "You"re not crazy, I saw it too. It"s real - it"s a batman." That was all, and he could have been spoutin from the top end of some amphetamine high for all I knew . . . except I had seen it, and the relief . . . "
"Yes," Pearson said, thinking back to that morning. They paused at Storrow Drive, waited for a tanker truck to go by, and then hurried across the puddly street. Pearson was momentarily transfixed by a fading spray-painted graffito on the back of a park bench, which faced the river. THE ALIENS HAVE LANDED, it said. WE ATE 2 AT LEGAL SEAFOOD.
"Good thing for me you were there this morning," Pearson said. "I was lucky."
Duke nodded. "Yeah, man, you were. When the bats f.u.c.k with a dude, they f.u.c.k with him - the cops usually pick up the pieces in a basket after one of their little parties. You hear that?""
Pearson nodded.
"And n.o.body knows the victims all had one thing in common - they"d cut down their smoking to between five and ten cigarettes a day. I have an idea that sort of similarity"s a little too obscure even for the FBI."
"But why kill us?" Pearson asked. "I mean, some guy goes running around saying his boss is a Martian, they don"t send out the National Guard; they put the guy in the b.o.o.byhatch!"
"Come on, man, get real," Duke said. "You"ve seen these cuties."
"They . . . like to?"
"Yeah, they like to. But that"s getting the cart before the horse. They"re like wolves, Brandon, invisible wolves that keep working their way back and forth through a herd of sheep. Now tell me - what do wolves want with sheep, aside from getting their jollies off every time they kill one?"
"They . . . what are you saying?" Pearson"s voice dropped to a whisper. "Are you saying that they eat us?"
"They eat some part of us," Duke said. "That"s what Robbie Delray believed on the day I met him, and that"s what most of us still believe."
"Who"s us, Duke?"
"The people I"m taking you to see. We won"t all be there, but this time most of us will be. Something"s come up. Something big."
"What?"
To that Duke would only shake his head and ask, "You ready for a cab yet? Getting too mildewy?"
Pearson was mildewy, but not ready for a cab. The walk had invigorated him . . . but not just the walk. He didn"t think he could tell Duke this - at least not yet - but there was a definite upside to this . . . a romantic upside. It was as if he had fallen into some weird but exciting boy"s adventure story; he could almost imagine the N. C. Wyeth ill.u.s.trations. He looked at the nimbuses of white light revolving slowly around the streetlamps, which soldiered their way up Storrow Drive and smiled a little. Something big has come up, he thought. Agent X-9 has slipped in with good news from our underground base . . . we "ve located the batpoison we"ve been looking for!
"The excitement wears off, believe me," Duke said dryly.
Pearson turned his head, startled.
"Around the time they fish your second friend out of Boston Harbor with half his head gone, you realize Tom Swift isn"t going to show up and help you whitewash the G.o.ddam fence."
"Tom Sawyer," Pearson muttered, and wiped rainwater out of his eyes. He could feel himself flushing.
"They eat something that our brains make, that"s what Robbie thinks. Maybe an enzyme, he says, maybe some kind of special electrical wave. He says it might be the same thing that lets us - some of us, anyway - see them, and that to them we"re like tomatoes in a farmer"s garden, theirs to take whenever they decide we"re ripe.
"Me, I was raised Baptist and I"m willing to cut right to the chase - none of that Farmer John c.r.a.p. I think they"re soul-suckers."
"Really? Are you putting me on, or do you really believe that?"
Duke laughed, shrugged, and looked defiant, all at the same time. "s.h.i.t, I don"t know, man. These things came into my life about the same time I decided heaven was a fairytale and h.e.l.l was other people. Now I"m all f.u.c.ked up again. But that doesn"t really matter. The important thing, the only thing you have to get straight and keep straight, is that they have plenty of reasons to kill us. First because they"re afraid of us doing just what we"re doing, getting together, organizing, trying to put a hurt on them . . . "
He paused, thought it over, shook his head. Now he looked and sounded like a man holding dialogue with himself, trying yet again to answer some question, which has held him sleepless over too many nights.
"Afraid? I don"t know if that"s exactly true. But they"re not taking many chances, about that there"s no doubt. And something else there"s no doubt about, either - they hate the fact that some of us can see them. They f.u.c.king hate it. We caught one once and it was like catching a hurricane in a bottle. We - "
"Caught one!"
"Yes indeed," Duke said, and offered him a hard, mirthless grin. "We bagged it at a rest area on I-95, up by Newburyport. There were half a dozen of us - my friend Robbie was in charge We took it to a farmhouse, and when the boatload of dope we"d shot into it wore off - which it did much too fast - we tried to question it, to get better answers to some of the questions you"ve already asked me. We had it in handcuffs and leg-irons; we had so much nylon rope wrapped around it that it looked like a mummy. You know what I remember best?"
Pearson shook his head. His sense of living between the pages of a boy"s adventure story had quite departed.
"How it woke up," Duke said. "There was no in-between. One second it was knocked-out-loaded and the next it was wide-awake, staring at us with those horrible eyes they have. Bat"s eyes. They do have eyes, you know - people don"t always realize that. That stuff about them being blind must have been the work of a good press-agent.
"It wouldn"t talk to us. Not a single word. I think it knew it wasn"t going to ever leave that barn, but there was no fear in it. Only hate. Jesus, the hate in its eyes!"
"What happened?"
"It snapped the handcuff-chain like it was tissue-paper. The leg-irons were tougher - and we had it in those special Long John boots you can nail right to the floor - but the nylon boat-rope . . . it started to bite through it where it crossed its shoulders. With those teeth - you"ve seen them - it was like watching a rat gnaw through twine. We all stood there like b.u.mps on a log. Even Robbie. We couldn"t believe what we were seeing . . . or maybe it had us hypnotized. I"ve wondered about that a lot, you know, if that might not have been possible. Thank G.o.d for Lester Olson. We"d used a Ford Econoline van that Robbie and Moira stole, and Lester"d gotten paranoid that it might be visible from the turnpike. He went out to check, and when he came back in and saw that thing almost free except for its feet, he shot it three times in the head. Just pop-pop-pop."
Duke shook his head wonderingly.
"Killed him," Pearson said. "Just pop-pop-pop."
His voice seemed to have risen out of his head again, as it had on the plaza in front of the bank that morning, and a horrid yet persuasive idea suddenly came to him: that there were no bat-people. They were a group hallucination, that was all, not much different from the ones peyote users sometimes had during their drug-a.s.sisted circle jerks. This one, unique to the Ten O"clock People, was brought on by just the wrong amount of tobacco. The folks Duke was taking him to meet had killed at least one innocent person while under the influence of this mad idea, and might kill more. Certainly would kill more, if given time. And if he didn"t get away from this crazed young banker soon, he might end up being a part of it. He had already seen two of the batpeople . . . no, three, counting the cop, and four counting the Vice President. And that just about tore it, the idea that the Vice President of the United States - The look on Duke"s face led Pearson to believe that his mind was being read for the third record-breaking time. "You"re starting to wonder if maybe we"ve all gone Looney Tunes, you included," Duke said. "Is that right?"
"Of course it is," Pearson said, a little more sharply than he had intended.
"They disappear," Duke said simply. "I saw the one in the barn disappear."
"What?"
"Get transparent, turn to smoke, disappear. I know how crazy it sounds, but nothing I could ever say would make you understand how crazy it was to actually be there and watch it happen.
"At first you think it"s not real even though it"s going on right in front of you; you must be dreaming it, or maybe you stepped into a movie somehow, one full of killer special effects like in those old Star Wars movies. Then you smell something that"s like dust and p.i.s.s and hot chili-peppers all mixed together. It stings your eyes, makes you want to puke. Lester did puke, and Janet sneezed for an hour afterward. She said ordinarily only ragweed or cat-dander does that to her. Anyway, I went up to the chair where he"d been. The ropes were still there, and the handcuffs, and the clothes. The guy"s shirt was still b.u.t.toned. The guy"s tie was still knotted. I reached out and unzipped his pants - careful, like his p.e.c.k.e.r was gonna fly outta there and rip my nose off - but all I saw was his underwear inside his pants. Ordinary white Jockey shorts. That was all, but that was enough, because they were empty, too. Tell you something, my brother - you ain"t seen weird until you"ve seen a guy"s clothes all put together in layers like that with no guy left inside em."
"Turn to smoke and disappear," Pearson said. "Jesus Christ."
"Yeah. At the very end, he looked like that." He pointed to one of the streetlights with its bright revolving nimbus of moisture.
"And what happens to . . . " Pearson stopped, unsure for a moment how to express what he wanted to ask. "Are they reported missing? Are they . . . " Then he knew what it was he really wanted to know. "Duke, where"s the real Douglas Keefer? And the real Suzanne Holding?"
Duke shook his head. "I don"t know. Except that, in a way, it"s the real Keefer you saw this morning, Brandon, and the real Suzanne Holding, too. We think that maybe the heads we see aren"t really there, that our brains are translating what the bats really are - their hearts and their souls - into visual images."
"Spiritual telepathy?"
Duke grinned. "You got a way with words, bro - that"ll do. You need to talk to Lester. When it comes to the batpeople, he"s d.a.m.n near a poet."
The name rang a clear bell, and after a moment"s thought, Pearson thought he knew why.
"Is he an older guy with lots of white hair? Looks sort of like an aging tyc.o.o.n on a soap opera?"
Duke burst out laughing. "Yeah, that"s Les."
They walked on in silence for awhile. The river rippled mystically past on their right, and now they could see the lights of Cambridge on the other side. Pearson thought he had never seen Boston looking so beautiful.
"The batpeople come in, maybe no more than a germ you inhale . . . " Pearson began again, feeling his way.
"Yeah, well, some folks go for the germ idea, but I"m not one of em. Because, dig: you never see a batman janitor or a bat-woman waitress. They like power, and they"re moving into the power neighborhoods. Did you ever hear of a germ that just picked on rich people, Brandon?"
"No."
"Me either."
"These people we"re going to meet . . . are they . . . " Pearson was a little amused to find he had to work to bring the next thing out. It wasn"t exactly a return to the land of boys" books, but it was close. "Are they resistance fighters?"
Duke considered this, then both nodded and shrugged - a fascinating gesture, as if his body were saying yes and no at the same time. "Not yet," he said, "but maybe, after tonight, we will be."
Before Pearson could ask him what he meant by that, Duke had spotted another cab cruising empty, this one on the far side of Storrow Drive, and had stepped into the gutter to flag it. It made an illegal U-turn and swung over to the curb to pick them up.
In the cab they talked Hub sports - the maddening Red Sox, the depressing Patriots, the sagging Celtics - and left the batpeople alone, but when they got out in front of an isolated frame house on the Cambridge side of the river (KATE"S MYSTERY BOOKSHOP was written on a sign that showed a hissing black cat with an arched back), Pearson took Duke Rhinemann"s arm and said, "I have a few more questions."
Duke glanced at his watch. "No time, Brandon - we walked a little too long, I guess."
"Just two, then."
"Jesus, you"re like that guy on TV, the one in the old dirty raincoat. I doubt if I can answer them, anyway - I know a h.e.l.l of a lot less about all this than you seem to think."
"When did it start?"
"See? That"s what I mean. I don"t know, and the thing we caught sure wasn"t going to tell us - that little sweetheart wouldn"t even give us its name, rank, and serial number. Robbie Delray, the guy I told you about, says he saw his first one over five years ago, walking a Lhasa Apso on Boston Common. He says there have been more every year since. There still aren"t many of them compared to us, but the number has been increasing . . . exponentially? . . . is that the word I want?"
"I hope not," Pearson said. "It"s a scary word."
"What"s your other question, Brandon? Hurry up."
"What about other cities? Are there more bats? And other people who see them? What do you hear?"
"We don"t know. They could be all over the world, but we"re pretty sure that America"s the only country in the world where more than a handful of people can see them."
"Why?"
"Because this is the only country that"s gone bonkers about cigarettes . . . probably because it"s the only one where people believe - and down deep they really do - that if they just eat the right foods, take the right combination of vitamins, think enough of the right thoughts, and wipe their a.s.ses with the right kind of toilet-paper, they"ll live forever and be s.e.xually active the whole time. When it comes to smoking, the battle-lines are drawn, and the result has been this weird hybrid. Us, in other words."
"Ten O"Clock People," Pearson said, smiling.
"Yep - Ten O"Clock People." He looked past Pearson"s shoulder. "Moira! Hi!"
Pearson was not exactly surprised to smell Giorgio. He looked around and saw Little Miss Red Skirt.