There were only one or two at first. Because there was no need for them to die until the sneakers were there, and they weren"t there until I saw them there.
"Why me?" he asked clearly in the stillness.
The sneakers didn"t move and no voice answered.
"I didn"t know you, I never met you, I don"t take the kind of stuff you sold and never did. So why me?"
One of the sneakers twitched. There was a papery rustle of dead flies. Then the sneaker - it was the mislaced one - settled back.
Tell pushed the stall door open. One hinge shrieked in properly gothic fashion. And there it was. Mystery guest, sign in, please, Tell thought.
The mystery guest sat on the John with one hand lying limply on his thigh. He was much as Tell had seen him in his dreams, with this difference: there was only the single hand. The other arm ended in a dusty maroon stump to which several more flies had adhered. It was only now that Tell realized he had never noticed Sneaker"s pants (and didn"t you always notice the way lowered pants bunched up over the shoes if you happened to glance under a bathroom stall? something helplessly comic, or just defenseless, or one on account of the other?). He hadn"t because they were up, belt buckled, fly zipped. They were bell-bottoms. Tell tried to remember when bells had gone out of fashion and couldn"t.
Above the bells Sneakers wore a blue chambray work-shirt with an appliqued peace symbol on each flap pocket. He had parted his hair on the right. Tell could see dead flies in the part. From the hook on the back of the door hung the topcoat of which Georgie had told him. There were dead flies on its slumped shoulders.
There was a grating sound not entirely unlike the one the hinge had made. It was the tendons in the dead man"s neck, Tell realized. Sneakers was raising his head. Now he looked at him, and Tell saw with no sense of surprise whatever that, except for the two inches of pencil protruding from the socket of his right eye, it was the same face that looked out of the shaving mirror at him every day. Sneakers was him and he was Sneakers.
"I knew you were ready," he told himself in the hoa.r.s.e toneless voice of a man who has not used his vocal cords in a long time.
"I"m not," Tell said. "Go away."
To know the truth of it, I mean," Tell told Tell, and the Tell standing in the stall doorway saw circles of white powder around the nostrils of the Tell sitting on the John. He had been using as well as pushing, it seemed. He had come in here for a short snort; someone had opened the stall door and stuck a pencil in his eye. But who committed murder by pencil? Maybe only someone who committed the crime on . . .
"Oh, call it impulse," Sneakers said in his hoa.r.s.e and toneless voice. "The world-famous impulse crime."
And Tell - the Tell standing in the stall doorway - understood that was exactly what it had been, no matter what Georgie might think. The killer hadn"t looked under the door of the stall and Sneakers had forgotten to flip the little hinged latch. Two converging vectors of coincidence that, under other circ.u.mstances, would have called for no more than a mumbled "Excuse me" and a hasty retreat. This time, however, something different had happened. This time it had led to a spur-of-the-moment murder.
"I didn"t forget the latch," Sneakers told him in his toneless husk of a voice. "It was broken."
Yes, all right, the latch had been broken. It didn"t make any difference. And the pencil? Tell was positive the killer had been holding it in his hand when he pushed open the stall door, but not as a murder weapon. He had been holding it only because sometimes you wanted something to hold - a cigarette, a bunch of keys, a pen or pencil to fiddle with. Tell thought maybe the pencil had been in Sneakers"s eye before either of them had any idea that the killer was going to put it there. Then, probably because the killer had also been a customer who knew what was in the briefcase, he had closed the door again, leaving his victim seated on the John, had exited the building, got . . . well, got something . . .
"He went to a hardware store five blocks over and bought a hacksaw," Sneakers said in his toneless voice, and Tell suddenly realized it wasn"t his face any more; it was the face of a man who looked about thirty, and vaguely native American. Tell"s hair was gingery-blonde, and so had this man"s been at first, but now it was a coa.r.s.e, dull black.
He suddenly realized something else - realized it the way you realize things in dreams: when people see ghosts, they always see themselves first. Why? For the same reason deep divers pause on their way to the surface, knowing that if they rise too fast they will get nitrogen bubbles in their blood and suffer, perhaps die, in agony. There were reality bends, as well.
"Perception changes once you get past what"s natural, doesn"t it?" Tell asked hoa.r.s.ely. "And that"s why life has been so weird for me lately. Something inside me"s been gearing up to deal with . . . well, to deal with you."
The dead man shrugged. Flies tumbled dryly from his shoulders. "You tell me, Cabbage - you got the head on you."
"All right," Tell said. "I will. He bought a hacksaw and the clerk put it in a bag for him and he came back. He wasn"t a bit worried. After all, if someone had already found you, he"d know; there"d be a big crowd around the door. That"s the way he"d figure. Maybe cops already, too. If things looked normal, he"d go on in and get the briefcase."
"He tried the chain first," the harsh voice said. "When that didn"t work, he used the saw to cut off my hand."
They looked at each other. Tell suddenly realized he could see the toilet seat and the dirty white tiles of the back wall behind the corpse . . . the corpse that was, finally, becoming a real ghost.
"You know now?" it asked Tell. "Why it was you?"
"Yes. You had to tell someone."
"No - history is s.h.i.t," the ghost said, and then smiled a smile of such sunken malevolence that Tell was struck by horror. "But knowing sometimes does some good . . . if you"re still alive, that is." It paused. "You forgot to ask your friend Georgie something important, Tell. Something he might not have been so honest about."
"What?" he asked, but was no longer sure he really wanted to know.
"Who my biggest third-floor customer was in those days. Who was into me for almost eight thousand dollars. Who had been cut off. Who went to a rehab in Rhode Island and got clean two months after I died. Who won"t even go near the white powder these days? Georgie wasn"t here back then, but I think he knows the answer to all those questions just the same. Because he hears people talk. Have you ever noticed the way people talk around George, as if he isn"t there?"
Tell nodded.
"And there"s no stutter in his brain. I think he knows, all right. He"d never tell, Tell, but I think he knows."
The face began to change again, and now the features swimming out of that primordial fog were saturnine and finely chiseled. Paul Jannings"s features.
"No," Tell whispered.
"He got better than thirty grand," the dead man with Paul"s face said. "It"s how he paid for rehab . . . with plenty left over for all the vices he didn"t give up."
And suddenly the figure on the toilet seat was fading out entirely. A moment later it was gone. Tell looked down at the floor and saw the flies were gone, too.
He no longer needed to go to the bathroom. He went back into the control room, told Paul Jannings he was a worthless b.a.s.t.a.r.d, paused just long enough to relish the expression of utter stunned surprise on Paul"s face, and then walked out the door. There would be other jobs; he was good enough at what he did to be able to count on that. Knowing it, however, was something of a revelation. Not the day"s first, but definitely the day"s best.
When he got back to his apartment, he went straight through the living room and to the John. His need to relieve himself had returned - had become rather pressing, in fact - but that was all right; that was just another part of being alive. "A regular man is a happy man," he said to the white tile walls. He turned a little, grabbed the current issue of Rolling Stone from where he"d left it on the toilet tank, opened it to the Random Notes column, and began to read.
You Know They Got a h.e.l.l of a Band.
When Mary woke up, they were lost. She knew it, and Clark knew it, too, although he didn"t want to admit it at first; he was wearing his I"m p.i.s.sed So Don"t f.u.c.k with Me look, where his mouth kept getting smaller and smaller until you thought it might disappear altogether. And "lost" wasn"t how Clark would put it; Clark would say they had "taken a wrong turn somewhere," and it would just about kill him to go even that far.
They"d set off from Portland the day before. Clark worked for a computer company - one of the giants - and it had been his idea that they should see something of the Oregon, which lay outside the pleasant, but humdrum upper-middle-cla.s.s suburb of Portland where they lived - an area that was known to its inhabitants as Software City. "They say it"s beautiful out there in the boonies," he had told her. "You want to go take a look? I"ve got a week, and the transfer rumors have already started. If we don"t see some of the real Oregon, I think the last sixteen months are going to be nothing but a black hole in my memory."
She had agreed willingly enough (school had let out ten days before and she had no summer cla.s.ses to teach), enjoying the pleasantly haphazard, catch-as-catch-can feel of the trip, forgetting that spur-of-the-moment vacations often ended up just like this, with the vacationers lost along some back road which blundered its way up the overgrown b.u.t.t-crack of nowhere. It was an adventure, she supposed - at least you could look at it that way if you wanted - but she had turned thirty-two in January, and she thought thirty-two was maybe just a little too old for adventures. These days her idea of a really nice vacation was a motel with a clean pool, bathrobes on the beds, and a hair-dryer that worked in the bathroom.
Yesterday had been fine, though, the countryside so gorgeous that even Clark had several times been awed to an unaccustomed silence. They had spent the night at a nice country inn just west of Eugene, had made love not once but twice (something she was most definitely not too old to enjoy), and this morning had headed south, meaning to spend the night in Klamath Falls. They had begun the day on Oregon State Highway 58, and that was all right, but then, over lunch in the town of Oakridge, Clark had suggested they get off the main highway, which was pretty well clogged with RVs and logging trucks.
"Well, I don"t know . . . " Mary spoke with the dubiousness of a woman who has heard many such proposals from her man, and endured the consequences of a few. "I"d hate to get lost out there, Clark. It looks pretty empty." She had tapped one neatly shaped nail on a spot of green marked Boulder Creek Wilderness Area. "That word is wilderness, as in no gas stations, no rest rooms, and no motels."
"Aw, come on," he said, pushing aside the remains of his chicken-fried steak. On the juke, Steve Earle and the Dukes were singing "Six Days on the Road," and outside the dirt-streaked windows, a bunch of bored-looking kids were doing turns and pop-outs on their skateboards. They looked as if they were just marking time out there, waiting to be old enough to blow this town for good, and Mary knew exactly how they felt. "Nothing to it, babe. We take 58 a few more miles east . . . then turn south on State Road 42 . . . see it?"
"Uh huh." She also saw that, while Highway 58 was a fat red line, State Road 42 was only a squiggle of black thread. But she"d been full of meatloaf and mashed potatoes, and hadn"t wanted to argue with Clark"s pioneering instinct while she felt like a boa constrictor that has just swallowed a goat. What she"d wanted, in fact, was to tilt back the pa.s.senger seat of their lovely old Mercedes "and take a snooze.
"Then," he pushed on, "there"s this road here. It"s not numbered, so it"s probably only a county road, but it goes right down to Toketee Falls. And from there it"s only a hop and a jump over to U.S. 97. So - what do you think?"
"That you"ll probably get us lost," she"d said - a wisecrackshe rather regretted later. "But I guess we"ll be all right as long as you can find a place wide enough to turn the Princess around in."
"Sold American!" he said, beaming, and pulled his chicken-fried steak back in front of him. He began to eat again, congealed gravy and all.
"Uck-a-doo," she said, holding one hand up in front of her face and wincing. "How can you?"
"It"s good," Clark said in tones so m.u.f.fled only a wife could have understood him. "Besides, when one is traveling, one should eat the native dishes."
"It looks like someone sneezed a mouthful of snuff onto a very old hamburger," she said. "I repeat: uck-a-doo."
They left Oakridge in good spirits, and at first all had gone swimmingly. Trouble hadn"t set in until they turned off SR 42 and onto the unmarked road, the one Clark had been so sure was going to breeze them right into Toketee Falls. It hadn"t seemed like trouble at first; county road or not, the new way had been a lot better than Highway 42, which had been potholed and frost-heaved, even in summer. They had gone along famously, in fact, taking turns plugging tapes into the dashboard player. Clark was into people like Wilson Pickett, Al Green, and Pop Staples. Mary"s taste lay in entirely different directions.
"What do you see in all these white boys?" he asked as she plugged in her current favorite - Lou Reed"s New York.
"Married one, didn"t I?" she asked, and that made him laugh.
The first sign of trouble came fifteen minutes later, when they came to a fork in the road. Both forks looked equally promising.
"Holy c.r.a.p," Clark said, pulling up and popping the glove compartment open so he could get at the map. He looked at it for a long time. "That isn"t on the map."
"Oh boy, here we go," Mary said. She had been on the edge of a doze when Clark pulled up at the unexpected fork, and she was feeling a little irritated with him. "Want my advice?"
"No," he said, sounding a little irritated himself, "but I suppose I"ll get it. And I hate it when you roll your eyes at me that way, in case you didn"t know."
"What way is that, Clark?"
"Like I was an old dog that just farted under the dinner table. Go on, tell me what you think. Lay it on me. It"s your nickel."
"Go back while there"s still time. That"s my advice."
"Uh-huh. Now if you only had a sign that said REPENT."
"Is that supposed to be funny?"
"I don"t know, Mare," he said in a glum tone of voice, and then just sat there, alternating looks through the bug-splattered windshield with a close examination of the map. They had been married for almost fifteen years, and Mary knew him well enough to believe he would almost certainly insist on pushing on . . . not in spite of the unexpected fork in the road, but because of it.
When Clark Willingham "s b.a.l.l.s are on the line, he doesn"t back down, she thought, and then put a hand over her mouth to hide the grin that had surfaced there.
She was not quite quick enough. Clark glanced at her, one eyebrow raised, and she had a sudden discomfiting thought: if she could read him as easily as a child"s storybook after all this time, then maybe he could do the same with her. "Something?" he asked, and his voice was just a little too thin. It was at that moment - even before she had fallen asleep, she now realized - that his mouth had started to get smaller. "Want to share, sweetheart?""
She shook her head. "Just clearing my throat."
He nodded, pushed his gla.s.ses up on his ever-expanding forehead, and brought the map up until it was almost touching the tip of his nose. "Well," he said, "it"s got to be the left-hand fork, because that"s the one that goes south, toward Toketee Falls. The other one heads east. It"s probably a ranch road, or something."
"A ranch road with a yellow line running down the middle of it?"
Clark"s mouth grew a little smaller. "You"d be surprised how well-off some of these ranchers are," he said.
She thought of pointing out to him that the days of the scouts and pioneers were long gone, that his t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es were not actually on the line, and then decided she wanted a little doze-off in the afternoon sun a lot more than she wanted to squabble with her husband, especially after the lovely double feature last night. And, after all, they were bound to come out somewhere, weren"t they?
With that comforting thought in her mind and Lou Reed in her ears, singing about the last great American whale, Mary Willingham dozed off. By the time the road Clark had picked began to deteriorate, she was sleeping shallowly and dreaming that they were back in the Oakridge cafe where they had eaten lunch. She was trying to put a quarter in the jukebox, but the coin-slot was plugged with something that looked like flesh. One of the kids who had been outside in the parking lot walked past her with his skateboard under his arm and his Trailblazers hat turned around on his head.
What"s the matter with this thing? Mary asked him.
The kid came over, took a quick look, and shrugged. Aw, that ain"t nothing, he said. That"s just some guy"s body, broken for you and for many. This is no rinky-d.i.n.k operation we got here; we"re talking ma.s.s culture, sugar-m.u.f.fin.
Then he reached up, gave the tip of her right breast a tweak - not a very friendly one, either - and walked away. When she looked back at the jukebox, she saw it had filled up with blood and shadowy floating things that looked suspiciously like human organs.
Maybe you better give that Lou Reed alb.u.m a rest, she thought, and within the pool of blood behind the gla.s.s, a record floated down onto the turntable - as if at her thought - and Lou began to sing "Busload of Faith."
While Mary was having this steadily more unpleasant dream, the road continued to worsen, the patches spreading until it was really all patch. The Lou Reed alb.u.m - a long one - came to an end, and began to recycle. Clark didn"t notice. The pleasant look he had started the day with was entirely gone. His mouth had shrunk to the size of a rosebud. If Mary had been awake, she would have coaxed him into turning around miles back. He knew this, just as he knew how she would look at him if she woke up now and saw this narrow swatch of crumbling hot-top - a road only if one thought in the most charitable of terms - with piney woods pressing in close enough on both sides to keep the patched tar in constant shadow. They had not pa.s.sed a car headed in the other direction since leaving SR 42.
He knew he should turn around - Mary hated it when he got into s.h.i.t like this, always forgetting the many times he had found his way unerringly along strange roads to their planned destinations (Clark Willingham was one of those millions of American men who are firmly convinced they have a compa.s.s in their heads) - but he continued to push on, at first stubbornly convinced that they must come out in Toketee Falls, then just hoping. Besides, there really was no place to turn around. If he tried to do it, he would mire the Princess to her hubcaps in one of the marshy ditches which bordered this miserable excuse for a road . . . and G.o.d knew how long it would take to get a tow-truck in here, or how far he"d have to walk just to call one.
Then, at last, he did come to a place where he could have turned around - another fork in the road - and elected not to do so. The reason was simple: although the right fork was rutted gravel with gra.s.s growing up the middle, the leftward-tending branch was once again wide, well-paved, and divided by a bright stroke of yellow. According to the compa.s.s in Clark"s head, this fork headed due south. He could all but smell Toketee Falls. Ten miles, maybe fifteen, twenty at the outside.
He did at least consider turning back, however. When he told Mary so later, he saw doubt in her eyes, but it was true. He decided to go on because Mary was beginning to stir, and he was quite sure that the b.u.mpy, potholed stretch of road he"d just driven would wake her up if he turned back . . . and then she would look at him with those wide, beautiful blue eyes of hers. Just look. That would be enough.
Besides, why should he spend an hour and a half going back when Toketee Falls was just a spin and a promise away? Look at that road, he thought. You think a road like that is going to just peter out?
He put the Princess back in gear, started down the left fork, and sure enough, the road petered out. Over the first hill, the yellow line disappeared again. Over the second, the paving gave out and they were on a rutted dirt track with the dark woods pressing even closer on either side and the sun - Clark was aware of this for the first time - now sliding down the wrong side of the sky.
The pavement ended too suddenly for Clark to brake and baby the Princess onto the new surface, and there was a hard, spring-jarring thud that woke Mary. She sat up with a jerk and looked around with wide eyes. "Where - " she began, and then, to make the afternoon utterly perfect and complete, the smoky voice of Lou Reed sped up until he was gabbling out the lyrics to "Good Evening, Mr. Waldheim" at the speed of Alvin and the Chipmunks.
"Oh!" she said, and punched the eject b.u.t.ton. The tape belched out, followed by an ugly brown afterbirth - coils of shiny tape.
The Princess. .h.i.t a nearly bottomless pothole, lurched hard to the left, and then threw herself up and out like a clipper ship corks.c.r.e.w.i.n.g through a stormwave.
"Clark?"
"Don"t say anything," he said through clenched teeth. "We"re not lost. This will turn back to tar in just a minute or two - probably over the next hill. We are not lost."
Still upset by her dream (even though she could not quite remember what it had been), Mary held the ruined tape in her lap, mourning it. She supposed she could buy another one . . . but not out here. She looked at the brooding trees, which seemed to belly right up to the road like starving guests at a banquet and guessed it was a long way to the nearest Tower Records.
She looked at Clark, noted his flushed cheeks and nearly nonexistent mouth, and decided it would be politic to keep her own mouth shut, at least for the time being. If she was quiet and non-accusatory, he would be more likely to come to his senses before this miserable excuse for a road petered out in a gravel pit or quicksand bog.
"Besides, I can"t very well turn around," he said, as if she had suggested that very thing.
"I can see that," she replied neutrally.
He glanced at her, perhaps wanting to fight, perhaps just feeling embarra.s.sed and hoping to see she wasn"t too p.i.s.sed at him - at least not yet - and then looked back through the windshield. Now there were weeds and gra.s.s growing up the center of this road, too, and the way was so narrow that if they did happen to meet another car, one of them would have to back up. Nor was that the end of the fun. The ground beyond the wheel-ruts looked increasingly untrustworthy; the scrubby trees seemed to be jostling each other for position in the wet ground.
There were no power-poles on either side of the road. She almost pointed this out to Clark, and then decided it might be smarter to hold her tongue about that, too. He drove on in silence until they came around a down-slanting curve. He was hoping against hope that they would see a change for the better on the far side, but the overgrown track only went on as it had before. It was, if anything, a little fainter and a little narrower, and had begun to remind Clark of roads in the fantasy epics he liked to read - stories by people like Terry Brooks, Stephen Donaldson, and, of course, J. R. R. Tolkien, the spiritual father of them all. In these tales, the characters (who usually had hairy feet and pointed ears) took these neglected roads in spite of their own gloomy intuitions, and usually ended up battling trolls or boggarts or mace-wielding skeletons.
"Clark - "
"I know," he said, and hammered the wheel suddenly with his left hand - a short, frustrated stroke that succeeded only in honking the horn. "I know." He stopped the Mercedes, which now straddled the entire road (road? h.e.l.l, lane was now too grand a word for it), slammed the transmission into park, and got out. Mary got out on the other side, more slowly.
The balsam smell of the trees was heavenly, and she thought there was something beautiful about the silence, unbroken as it was by the sound of any motor (even the far-off drone of an airplane) or human voice . . . but there was something spooky about it, as well. Even the sounds she could hear - the tu-whit! of a bird in the shadowy firs, the sough of the wind, the rough rumble of the Princess"s diesel engine - served to emphasize the wall of quiet encircling them.
She looked across the Princess"s gray roof at Clark, and it was not reproach or anger in her gaze but appeal: Get us out of this, all right? Please?
"Sorry, hon," he said, and the worry she saw in his face did nothing to soothe her. "Really."
She tried to speak, but at first no sound came out of her dry throat. She cleared it and tried again. "What do you think about backing up, Clark?"