If I ever need a lawyer, Don thought, you're the one I want.
It seemed to have worked for the boy as well. "I don't know if I'd have your style," Peter said, returning the old man's smile.
And so, Don reflected after everyone had left, the voices on the tapes had failed: the tapes had drawn the four of them even closer together. Peter's comment to Sears had been expressed in an adolescent fashion, but it had been a tribute all the same; and Sears had shown his enjoyment of it.
Don went back to the tape recorder: Alma Mobley lay within it, trapped on a few spools of coated amber stuff.
Frowning, he pushed the "play" button. Silky at first, sunny, her voice resumed.
"-and Alan McKechnie and all the other stories I used to hide the truth from you. It's true, I did want you to see: your intuition was better than anyone else's. Even Florence de Peyser became curious about you. But what good would it have done? Like your 'Rachel Varney,' I have lived since the times when your continent was lighted only by small fires in the forest, since Americans dressed in hides and feathers, and even then our kinds have abhorred each other. Your kind is so bland and smug and confident on the surface: and so neurotic and fearful and campfire-hugging within. In truth, we abhor you because we find you boring. We could have poisoned your civilization ages ago, but voluntarily lived on its edges, causing eruptions and feuds and local panics. We chose to live in your dreams and imaginations because only there are you interesting.
"Don, you make a grave mistake if you underestimate us. Could you defeat a cloud, a dream, a poem? You are at the mercy of your human imaginations, and when you look for us, you should always look in the places of your imagination. In the places of your dreams. But despite all this talk about imagination, we are implacably real, as real as bullets and knives-for aren't they too tools of the imagination?-and if we want to frighten you it is to frighten you to death. For you are going to die, Donald. First your uncle, then the doctor, then Lewis. Then Sears, and after Sears, Ricky. And then you and whomever you have enlisted to help you. In fact, Donald, you are dead already. You are finished. And Milburn is finished with you." Now the Louisiana accent had vanished; even femininity had gone from the voice. It was a voice with no human resonance at all. "I am going to shatter Milburn, Donald. My friends and I will tear the soul from this pathetic town and crush its bare bones between our teeth."
A hissing silence followed: Don yanked the tape from the machine and tossed it into a cardboard box. In twenty minutes he had all his uncle's tapes in boxes. He carried the cartons into the living room and methodically fed all of the tapes into the wood fire, where they smoked and curled and stank and finally melted down to black bubbles on the burning logs. If Alma could see him, he knew, she'd be laughing.
You're dead already, Donald.
"Like hell I am," he said out loud. He remembered the haggard face of Eleanor Hardie, into which age had so suddenly burrowed; Alma had been laughing at him and the Chowder Society for decades, belittling their achievements and engineering their tragedies, hiding in the dark behind a false face, waiting for the moment to jump out and say boo.
And Milburn is finished with you.
"Not if we can get to you first," he said into the fire. "Not if this time we shoot the lynx."
III - The Last of the Chowder
Society
"Could you defeat a cloud, a dream, a poem?"
-Alma Mobley
"And what is innocence?" Narcissus enquired of his friend.
"It is to imagine that your life is a secret," his friend replied.
"Most particularly, to imagine it a secret between yourself
and a mirror."
"I see," Narcissus said. "It is the illness for
which mirror-gazing is the cure."
1
Near seven o'clock Ricky Hawthorne rolled over in bed and groaned. Feelings of panic, of emergency, filled him, making the darkness admonitory: he had to get out of bed, get moving, to avert some terrible tragedy. "Ricky?" Stella uttered beside him. "Fine, fine," he answered, and sat up in bed. The window at the far end of the room showed dark gray shot through with lazily falling snow-flakes so big they looked like snowballs. Ricky's heartbeat sounded: doom, doom. Someone was in terrible danger; in the instant before shooting into wakefulness, he'd seen an image and known-rendingly -who it was. Now all he knew was that it was impossible for him to stay in bed. He raised the covers and put one leg over the side.
"Was it your nightmare again, baby?" Stella whispered hoarsely.
"No. No, not that. "I'll be okay, Stella." He patted her shoulder and left the bed. The urgency clung. Ricky slid his feet into his slippers, pulled a robe over his pajamas, and padded to the window.
"Honey, you're upset, come back to bed."
"I can't" He rubbed his face: still that wild feeling, trapped in his chest like a bird, that someone he knew was in mortal danger. Snow transformed Ricky's back yard into a range of shifting and dimpled hills.
It was the snow which reminded him: the snow blowing through a mirror in Eva Galli's house, and a glimpse of Elmer Scales, his face distorted by an obligation to a commanding and cruel beauty, running raggedly through the drifts. Raising a shotgun: turning a small form into a spray of blood. Ricky's stomach savagely bent in on itself, shooting pain down into his bowels. He pressed a hand into the soft flesh below his navel and groaned again. Elmer Scales's farm. Where the last stage of the Chowder Society's agony had begun.
"Ricky, what's wrong?"
"Something I saw in a mirror," he said, straightening up now that the pain had dissolved, aware that his statement would be nonsense to Stella. "I mean, something about Elmer Scales. I have to get out to his farm."
"Ricky, it's seven o'clock on Christmas morning."
"Makes no difference."
"You can't. Call him up first."
"Yes," he said, already on his way out of the bedroom, going past Stella's white, startled face. "I'll try that."
He was on the landing outside the bedroom, still with that wakening emergency sounding along his veins (doom, doom) and was torn for a second between rushing into the wardrobe closet and throwing on some clothes so he'd be ready to leave and running downstairs to the telephone.
A noise from downstairs decided him. Ricky put his hand on the banister and descended.
Sears, fully dressed and with the fur-collared coat over his arm, was just coming out of the kitchen. The look of aggressive blandness which was Sears's lifelong expression was gone: his old friend's face was as taut as he knew his own to be.
"You, too," Sears said. "I'm sorry."
"I just woke up," Ricky said. "I know what you're feeling-I want to go with you."
"Don't interfere," Sears said. "All I'm going to do is get out there, have a look around and make sure everything's all right. I feel like a cat on a griddle."