Bullshit. There was enough spookiness in this world without planting some where there wasn’t fresh manure.
“Ain’t no train passing through here, my friend.” Garrett came up close, so his body’d cast a shadow over the seated one, grant him some shade. “No train passing anywhere, come to mention it.”
The other rose then, like a heap of sticks conspiring themselves upright. Garrett was surprised to see that the old dude was taller than himself.
“Don’t I know it,” the old man sighed, again in that voice like a night wind passing.
“Where you goin’?” Garrett asked.
The old man looked out uncertainly beyond Garrett, at the orphaned land, and the flat horizon, and whatever mysteries lay beyond. For the first time, Garrett got a good look at the man’s eyes, saw they were pale white, too.
Sweet Lord of Contagions, he’s flat-ass blind.
“You got any people?” Garrett ventured, with growing concern.
“A boy…” the other answered vaguely, the sound all dust.
“He know where you are?”
“No…. But I know where he is.”
“Well, lemme just help you there,” Garrett said, stifling a fruity belch. Damn that fourth brew, and the damnation heat, and the friggin’ gnats that accompanied you everywhere, swarming like your own personal wedding veil. He extended a hand. “I’m Garrett Lambert.”
“Call me Marcus…” said the other, and though he was blind his hand reached out and clasped Garrett’s firmly.
It was all cobwebs, and dust and ashes, with not a living thing in it.
And as his life flowed out into this blind, ravenous seeker after one certain, most special boy, Garrett Lambert had time for just one final, piquant reflection….
Man, he’d thought that concert in ’68 with the Lizard King was pure stone weirdness.
But it wasn’t a patch on this.
In the time of early morning, Enid Blindman emerged out onto the porch of the house May Catches the Enemy had secured them outside Pine Ridge-part of the housing tract, she’d explained, that had been built after the twister had come through and cleared out the trailer park that had been on this land, just after the turn of the new century and before the Change. Since then, most of the people had cleared out, too, so there were plenty of places on which you could hang a VACANCY sign.
Enid found Papa Sky sitting patiently there, shaving a reed for his Selmer. He marveled as the old man’s fingers moved deftly from long practice, not needing the distraction of sight.
Enid settled next to him, began tuning his guitar.
“Pretty brisk for you to be out here,” he said.
“Hadda say me some goodbyes,” Papa Sky replied. “Ely went winging off back East.”
“I’da figgered you’da gone with him, the two of you being so long on the road and all.”
Papa Sky was quiet a bit, mulling the days of their time together. “Nah…. He needed some alone time to think on things, get comfortable with who he is ’stead of who he’s been.”
Enid gazed off past the low buildings to the gentle rise of the valley and the snow-dusted plain beyond. “Way I hear Cal tell it,” he said, “Stern was one mean hombre once upon a time. Took some major cojones, you takin’ on reforming him.”
“Well…” Papa Sky shook his head dismissively, then raised the Selmer to his lips and started in, mournful and lovely, on “Someone to Watch Over Me.”
Enid joined in, fingering the maple jumbo with complexity and grace, and Papa would’ve sworn it was Django if he didn’t know better, only even finer, truer still.
Finally, they came to a stopping place and let the last of the sweet sound drift off into the dawning air. A meadowlark trilled far off, answering their song with his own.
You gonna come clean, Old Man? Papa Sky asked himself. Or you just gonna let your axe do all your talkin’?
He felt his heart pounding like a kettledrum fit to burst. But he knew it wouldn’t, knew he had a good many years yet left in him, even if he could remember back to when the only sound movies had in them was what music you could make with your own two hands.
“Don’t you go thinkin’ I was no saint or nothin’, son,” Papa Sky said with a fierce rumble more intense than he intended. “I took on Ely Stern ’cause maybe I figgered, after all the wrong he done, all the folks he hurt, if he could earn a second chance…well, maybe I could, too.”
Then Papa Sky told Enid Blindman just who he was, and who Enid was, too.
SIXTY
Dawn came with tumbled clouds and spitting rain.
Melissa Wade awoke from a troubling dream in which she was changed into a thing of wisps and luminance.
Then, looking at her hands gleaming in the darkness of the room, she knew it was true.
She began to weep softly, and rocked herself as she floated in the air above tumbled covers.
She looked about her and did not recognize where she was. The bedroom was mostly bookcases crammed with paperbacks, a few pieces of IKEA furniture, a computer. The room was dim, the blinds closed against the dawn, but she could see clearly enough in the light that sheened off her own body. Atop the desk beside the computer, she discerned a framed photograph of herself; of the way she had been.
The door opened and Melissa turned away, wiped her eyes quickly.
“I heard you moving around,” Theo said behind her, and his voice had an odd roughness.
“Where am I?” Melissa asked vaguely, still coming out of sleep.
“My place,” Theo said apologetically. “I hope you don’t mind.”
She turned to him then, and was surprised to see how dazed he looked. Not to mention scratched, cut, beaten, disheveled and shell-shocked.
And that didn’t even take into account that he was no longer human.
She saw that he had moved to block her from seeing the photo by the computer; embarrassed, he turned it facedown behind him. Melissa smiled to herself, feeling warmed for the first time. It was still Theo, after all.
“Do you remember what happened?” he asked tentatively.
She searched her memory, found painful shards there.
“Jeff…?” she asked.
He nodded, neither of them wanting to say the word. Tears welled in his luminous big eyes. “I’m sorry, Melissa. I’m so sorry.”
“What about the others?” she said when she could, and her voice was high and thin as birdsong.
“Made it back,” Theo said. His mouth twisted into a melancholy smile. “Guess the good guys won….”
The good guys. Melissa didn’t even know who the good guys were anymore.
But no, she realized, thinking back on the evening before, that wasn’t true.
Theo was a good guy.
Theo, who had followed her and found her, who had held tight to her against the worst ravages of the Storm…
Who had killed Jeff to save her.
Theo loved her, had always loved her.
Had Jeff loved her?
She thought he had when he’d sewn that dead stone into her flesh, when he’d delayed her becoming what she truly was.
But was that to save her…or merely to save what he needed her to do?
She knew the answer. And what she had held within to warm herself for so very long turned dead as that stone.
Theo spoke then of incidental things, of the town’s power being down, the gems lifeless and possessed of no miracles now. Their cozy enclosed universe of electric lights and gasoline engines had collapsed like a spent balloon.
Eventually, he said, they might be able to turn it around. But only time would tell.
She was studying him closely now in the glow of her own being; his sensitive features despite the change, his delicacy.