41
They reached Mobile at twilight the following day, traveling in the equipment truck. Because Billy was in no shape to drive, the Volkswagen van had been left in Birmingham. Mirakle would hire someone to bring it down.
The boy's sick, Mirakle had repeatedly thought during the long drive. Billy had been racked alternately with chills and fever; he'd slept for most of the trip, but the shudderings and moanings he'd made spoke of nightmares beyond Mirakle's experience. It had been Dr. Mirakle's intention to put Billy on a bus and send him back to Hawthorne, but Billy had said no, that he'd promised to come to Mobile and he'd be all right if he could just rest.
Billy's pallor had faded to a grayish brown, his face covered with sweat as he huddled on the seat under a green army blanket. Emotions sizzled within him, and terror had a grip on his bones.
They were driving along the flat expanse of Mobile Bay, where small waves topped with dirty green foam rolled in to a bare brown shore. Mirakle glanced over and saw that Billy was awake. "Are you feeling better?"
"Yeah. Better."
"You should've eaten when we stopped. You need to keep up your strength."
He shook his head. "I probably couldn't keep food down."
"I don't expect you to help me now. Not after what happened. You're just too sick and weak."
"I'll be okay." Billy shivered and drew the coarse blanket closer around him, though the Gulf air was thick and sultry. He stared out the window at the rolling waves, amazed at the vista of so much water; the sun was setting behind gray clouds, casting a pearly sheen over the bay.
"I should put you on a bus and send you home," Dr. Mirakle said. "You know, I . . . don't understand what happened last night and maybe I don't want to, but . . . it seems to me you're a very special young man. And possibly you have a very special responsibility, too."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean . . . taking this power, or gift, or ability—whatever you choose to call it—and helping those parapsychologists I was telling you about. If you can communicate with the dead—'lay the dead to rest,' I suppose you might call it—then you should be working with scientists, not traveling with a two-bit carnival or spending your life in a town the size of a postage stamp. Billy, you have much to offer; perhaps the answer to a great many mysteries ... or perhaps the beginning of new ones. Does it . . . affect you like this, every time?"
"It's only happened like this once before. That was bad too, but this is . . . agony. It's like having a long scream bottled up inside you, but you can't find your voice to let it out. I feel like I'm burning up, but I'm cold too. There's too much going on in my head, and I ... I can't think straight." He sighed, more of a breathy moan, and let his head fall back against the seat, his eyes closed. He had to open them again, quickly, because strange blurred visions—the last things those people had seen before they died in the gondola: spinning sky and blinking lights, fingers curled in the mesh of the canopy, the world turning at frightening speed in a blaze of colors—whirled in his brain.
Dr. Mirakle drove the truck over a long bridge, and then turned off the road into an area of older clapboard houses; most of them were two-storied structures that spoke of the harsh hand of time and salt-air abrasion. Mirakle stopped the truck before a large house with a front porch and boarded-over windows. The white paint was peeling in long strips, showing the bleached gray wood underneath. They sat in the truck for a moment more, as the gray light darkened. "You don't have to do this," Mirakle said.
"I know. The way I feel, I don't even know if I can."
"Was what you did worth the pain?"
Billy considered the question, then nodded. "Yes. It was."
"And you'd do the same thing again?"
"I don't know. I try to . . . think I'm strong enough, but I'm afraid. And I know that when I'm afraid, I get weaker" He turned his weary gaze onto Mirakle. "I don't want to be like I am. I never asked for it. Oh God, if I just could forget about revenants and the black aura and Death for a little while! ... I want to be like everybody else."
"Everybody else is afraid, too," the man said quietly. "But don't you understand that you of all people shouldn't be afraid, because you can see past Death to another kind of life? You know that going into the ground isn't the end of it; and if you can help other people see that, then . . . your life can make a difference in the whole scheme of things! My God, what an opportunity you have! If I were in my right mind, I'd try to talk you into touring the country with me, and giving some sort of demonstration of the spirit world! We'd wind up as either millionaires or skid-row bums!"
Billy smiled grimly.
"But," Mirakle continued, "your future lies far beyond the carnival circuit, Billy. Think about that parapsychology institute I told you about in Chicago. Will you?"
"Okay," Billy said. "I will."
"Good. Well. Are you ready? We'll leave the equipment in the truck for now."
They got out, Billy following Dr. Mirakle up a weeded-over sidewalk. It was all he could do to climb the porch steps.
"Forgive the place," Mirakle said. He left the door open so air could circulate. "I had to board up the windows after the glass was broken out one summer. It wouldn't be worth putting new glass in. Thank God the electricity still works."
"Do you have a telephone?" Billy wanted to call the hospital in Birmingham again, to check on Santha Tully. Early this afternoon, when he'd called for the second time, a nurse had told him that Santha was still on the critical list and that the antivenom flown up from Florida had been administered soon after Santha had been brought in.
"No, I'm afraid not. I don't have any callers. Please, sit down." He scooped newspapers out of the sofa and dumped them on the floor "I know you're concerned about your friend, but I'm sure they're doing everything they can for her. We'll find a phone booth later, if you like."
Billy nodded, wandering over to the bookshelves. He'd seen a pale gray aura around her, not a black one—did that mean there was a chance she might survive?
Mirakle said, "Why don't you sit down and rest. I'll look in the kitchen, perhaps I can find something to eat. All right?" Billy nodded, and the man went back through a corridor to the rear of the house. "Chicken noodle okay with you?" he called out in another moment. "It's canned, so I presume it's safe to eat."
"That's fine, thanks." Billy stepped into another large room, his shoes stirring up clouds of dust. The room held a cluttered desk and an upright piano with yellow keys. He punched his finger at a few of them, hearing off-key notes ring like a stabbed cat. Then he went through another door into the hallway, and there was the staircase that Dr. Mirakle had told him about. A single bulb studded the ceiling at the top of the stairs, casting a murky gray glow.
Billy touched the banister. He could hear Mirakle wrestling with pots and pans in the kitchen, at the hallway's end. He climbed the steps slowly, his hand clenching the banister, and when he reached the top he sat down. Water was running in the kitchen. Billy said softly, "Kenneth?" He waited for a few minutes, trying to concentrate through a wall of leftover terrors. "Kenneth?" he whispered.
There was a figure at the bottom of the stairs. It stood motionlessly for a moment, then placed a foot on the first step.
Billy sighed and shook his head. "I don't think there's anyone here. There might not have ever been."
"I know," Mirakle replied softly. "I . . . had once hoped that Kenneth was here, but . . . that's a selfish hope, isn't it? If some part of him remained, that would mean he was troubled, wouldn't it?"