Cal rose. He felt like one big bruise. Only then did he notice the tune Goldie was softly playing, nodding to himself in the golden dawn light.
“Let’s Face the Music and Dance.”
Goldie lifted his eyes to Cal, and they were glistening.
He feared she might have left the apartment, but he found her in the kitchen.
“Christ, I hate instant coffee,” Colleen murmured, tossing the flat, cold remnant of it down the drain.
Cal said, “I’m sorry.”
She knew he wasn’t talking about the coffee. They both looked down, avoiding each other’s eyes. He moved closer. She took a step back.
“No water in the pipes, I’m startin’ to reek like a pair of old socks.”
“Try getting the smell of blood out of your hair. .”
“Hey, the day’s young.”
Silence settled over them, oppressive. At last, Cal broke it.
“Colleen, Doc and I had a conversation. .”
She lifted her eyes, their brightness returning. “Yeah? Russkie set you straight?”
Cal nodded.
The tension in her shoulders relaxed. “So you’re not gonna march into the mouth of hell.”
“Well. . yeah, I am. But Doc and Goldie are coming, too.”
“Shit.” She averted her face, and Cal had the impression that tears had sprung to her eyes. She swiped a wetness from her cheek and turned back. “You know, when the Wizard told them to get the Witch of the West’s broomstick, it wasn’t any fucking worthiness test-it was so they’d bite the big one and be fucking out of his hair.”
“Look. . I know it’s crazy. It’s. . I just don’t know what else to do.”
“You’ll die.”
“Can’t promise that for sure till I get there.”
Colleen glowered.
Cal said, “Sorry I’m letting you down.”
“You?” Surprise lowered her defenses. “You’ve been a brick.”
“Sure you don’t mean ‘p’ instead of ‘b’?”
“Nah. I know the difference. You’re talkin’to a connoisseur.”
She gazed out the window then, the light full on her marble-fair skin, her eyes glinting jade. He watched her, saying nothing, wondering if she was reflecting on the long night and what remained for her in this broken city.
“Maybe hell’s a real fun place,” she said at last. “No way to know till we get there.”
And though he felt weary and weighted and grim, Cal felt himself smiling as she looked back at him.
WEST VIRGINIA
A man named Jerome Bixby wrote a story called, “It’s a Good Life,” in which the inhabitants of a town were trapped in the tiny, completely arbitrary confines of their village by a child born all-powerful, unhuman and mad.
Wilma had always hated that story; hated the nightmare of helplessness it implied, the subjection to unknowable power and rules.
She thought of it many times, in the days and weeks that followed the grunter attack on the Wishart house.
Seven or eight people tried to leave Boone’s Gap in the twenty-four hours that followed Wilma’s attempt. Two made it back to town, scraped and scared and hornet-stung and exhausted, with tales of things heard and seen in the mist that started just beyond the confines of the town. Al Bartolo, who was gone three days, reported finding the bodies-or what he thought were the bodies-of Phil and Nancy duPone, who’d disappeared into the mist shortly before Al’s attempt. He wouldn’t say what had killed them, but he said over and over again that they were definitely dead.
No one and nothing came into the town. No news, no hikers, no supplies. On the third day Gordy Flue dug a garden in the ground that had been cleared for the housing development, planting beans, potatoes, peas: anything that would grow into late fall. Within days a dozen, then a hundred, followed suit. Hazel got the town council to push through emergency measures pooling and rationing foodstuffs and regulating water. Lookouts were posted daily with binoculars, scanning the blue summer sky above the white wall of the mists.
By Dr. Blair’s count, thirty-five children were taken with the same malady that gripped Tessa Grant, that terrible symptomless silence. The night Deanna Bartolo slid into a fathomless coma despite all her mother’s attempts to keep her from the void, Chrissie Flue cried out, in her sleep, screaming, “Don’t! Don’t!” before lapsing into absorbed contemplation of nothingness from which she could not be roused.
That night, Wilma walked the streets of the town in the darkness, until dawn stained the sky. Watching, listening, searching, though for what she did not know.
Shannon had brought her the news about Chrissie. Shannon, haggard, gray-faced with exhaustion, almost as gaunt as her daughter, who like every other one of the affected children had whimpered and struggled at the same time Chrissie was deadened. It’s spreading, thought Wilma, after the young woman left her again, sitting on her porch in the darkness. And it’s getting worse.
She put on her jeans and sweatshirt and set out on a patrol that had become almost routine to her, checking what she mentally termed the Hotspots of Boone’s Gap. She met no one. Everyone locked their doors and shuttered their windows with the setting of the sun. This was partly for fear of the grunters, though at her suggestion, the town council laid out rations for them near the mineshaft and for the most part this had ended their raids on individual houses.
On her nightly prowls Wilma always had the hope-or the fear-that she’d see Hank, but so far she had not. Worry for him, and the aching sense of what could have been, settled in the back of her mind like a constant, like the arthritis in her wrists that had somehow vanished that first night of the Change.
But other things, too, now walked the nights.
Where Shenandoah Drive crossed Main Street, even the unimaginative saw blue lights flicker and bob. Some, like Ryan, said they saw what seemed to be human figures, or skeletons, dancing or writhing, and heard their cries. Only Wilma, evidently, could see the Indian women and their dead children clearly, could smell their blood thick in the night air. But she always wondered about the dead grunter Gordy Flue found there one morning on his way to weed his crops, the one they had all recognized, despite how dreadfully he had changed, as Joe Rance, who’d worked at the garage on Front Street and had disappeared that first day.
And on the unkempt streets leading to the old Green Mountain shaft Wilma saw nightly the ghostly shapes of the rioters of ’37, heard the shouting of long-dead policemen, the crack of rifles and the slap of mahogany on flesh. Sometimes she had to take cover from the swirling cyclones of maddened hornets that whirled through the darkness, but not tonight. Sometimes there were other things, dark small things like clots of hair and bone and mist, impossible to see clearly. Sometimes only green crawling streams of energy that flowed up from under the soil, or out of the dark maw of the mine.
Tonight as she watched the trickling streaks of light from an alley behind a gutted store building, she felt the tension in the air explode and saw strange ghostly fire erupt in one of the abandoned cars that still littered the streets. Sparks ignited a blowing newspaper, carried the blaze into an empty saloon. Wilma turned and ran, pounded on the door of the city watch headquarters in the old high school. The fires spread, but never grew: instead they burned with the queer slow smoldering that everyone had become aware of in these changed terrible days. While the Fire Patrol was putting them out, others burst spontaneously into being nearby.
And beyond the fires, energy flowed and swirled.
She could see it, almost. Smell it, ozone sharp in her nostrils. Hear the crackle of it in the dark air, shouts and wailing and gunshots that blended into a deep soft rumble, like a monster breath. She didn’t need to follow it. She knew where it went.
Only near dawn did she circle back, after visiting every one of those places in the town-and there were nearly a dozen of them-where she sensed energy of some kind was being drawn out of the ground, out of the mine, out of the past. Silently flitting from shadow to shadow, night-sighted eyes probing the darkness, she returned home, to catnap and rest for a day, to lie in the sun and wash, which she did with dampened facecloths six or seven times a day, not because she needed to but because it made her feel better. And in the darkness, as she turned the corner of Applby Avenue, she paused as she always did, shivering though the night was warm.