"These aren't my clothes," he said. The two men were blurred shapes in his fogged vision. "I went up to play the piano."
"Let's go."
The night was chilly. During a ride in a little car, Billy felt the cold wind in his face. Its chill helped to clear his senses a bit. He could see lights on towers that stood high off the ground. "Where is this place?" he asked the two men, but neither of them answered.
They approached what looked to Billy like a huge square of concrete. He almost fell twice on the flagstone walkway, and the man in the gray suit had to help him walk. Billy felt a coldness coming off the man, like a bitter frost.
And then he remembered the shape changer saying his mother was dead.
The memories came back in a rush: the hospital, the chapel, the man behind him pressing a strong-smelling cloth to his face. A distant memory of engines whining. The sun beating down on a runway, and on the horizon nothing but white desert. He tried to pull free from the gray-suited man, but he was held in a viselike grip. Inside the concrete structure, Billy was made to put on a pair of cotton slippers. The air smelled like the hospital room. The two men led him along a hallway to a closed door, and one of them knocked on it. A voice said, "Come in."
They took him in and left him, and the door closed behind him. Billy weaved on his feet, his vision blurring in and out. The largest man he'd ever seen was waiting in a chair before him, next to a table that held a lamp and a cassette recorder. The man wore a long white caftan trimmed in gold, was bald, and had small black eyes.
"Hello, Billy," Krepsin said, and put aside the file folder of newspaper clippings he'd been going through. "Please sit down." He motioned toward one of the two chairs that faced him.
"Think." Billy told himself. He knew he'd been drugged, knew he was a long way from home. And knew also that he was in danger "Where am I?"
"In a safe place. Don't you want to sit down?"
"No."
"My name is Augustus Krepsin. I'm a friend of Wayne Falconer's."
"Wayne Falconer? What's he got to do with this?"
"Oh, everything! Wayne asked that you be brought here. He wants very much to see you. Look here at what Wayne's been doing." He showed Billy the folder, full of clippings about the Alcott Hotel video tape. "He's been cutting these out. You're a famous young man, did you know that?"
"Then . . . Wayne's here?"
"Of course. He even loaned you his clothes. Come on, sit down! I'm not going to bite you!"
"What do you want with me? I was playing the piano. Somebody came up behind me and—"
"Just to talk," Krepsin said. "Just a few minutes of your time, and then we'll take you wherever you'd like to go." He offered a plateful of Oreos, Lorna Doones and vanilla wafers. "Have one."
Billy shook his head. Everything was mixed up in his mind, nothing was clear. Wayne wanted to see him? Why? "The woman with the needles," he said, pressing a hand to his forehead. "Why'd she keep sticking me?"
"What woman, Billy? Oh, I imagine you've been under a lot of strain. With what you did at that hotel, I mean. You're in newspapers all across the country. Wayne's very interested in you, Billy. He wants to be your friend."
"No. I don't believe you." Exhausted, he sank down into one of the chairs. "I want to call Dr. Hillburn, tell her where I am."
"Of course you do. And you will. Tomorrow morning. It's late, and the telephone system here isn't very reliable. Wayne wanted you brought here—to Mexico—as his guest. I'm sorry if you've been under a strain, but—"
"Why didn't Wayne just ask me to come?"
"He did. Well, he asked Dr. Hillburn. Several times. But evidently that woman was resistant to your leaving Chicago. Perhaps some of the staff misinterpreted Wayne's request. Wayne's told me so much about you, I feel I know you already. You and Wayne . . . you're alike in many ways. You're both well on your way in making a mark for yourselves—and you're both special, aren't you? He's a healer, and you're . .. . blessed with a sight few other men ever know. To see beyond this world, and into the next. The pictures in those clippings aren't faked, are they?"
Billy didn't want to answer, but he was so sluggish and lazy it didn't seem to matter "No, they're real."
"I knew they weren't faked. How could you fake something like that, in front of so many witnesses? No, no; you can see the dead, can't you? And you can speak to them?"
"Yes."
Krepsin ate another cookie; his black eyes gleamed with the desire to pick the secrets from Billy Creekmore's mind. "You've seen life after death, haven't you? And you can control the dead? You can speak to them and make them do as you please?"
"I don't try to control them. I try to help them. Why are you taping all this? Why's it so important to you?"
"It's just . . . this subject excites me. And it excites Wayne, too."
"What do you mean?"
Krepsin smiled. "You really don't see it, do you? You don't understand your own potential! What you've done up to now is important, but you can go much, much further. Oh, the secrets you could know about Death! The power you could hold! You could reach anyone on the other side, you could relay messages back and forth. People would pay a lot for that. You could find out where lost treasures were, you could bring back messages that would shock the world! You'd be a famous and powerful young man! Don't you see that?"
"No."
"Wayne does," Krepsin said quietly. "He wants you to join the Crusade, Billy. He wants you to tour with him."
"What?"
"Yes. Tour with him. Wayne would be the healer, and you would be the ... the spiritual adviser! With all this publicity, it would be a simple thing! People would pay to see you summon the dead. Oh, they'd sit in awe of you, Billy! You'd have your own television show, and you'd speak to the dead right on the air before millions of people!"
Staring at the man, Billy shuddered inwardly. It would be like digging up graves so people could gawk at the bones, like a Ghost Show using real revenants, a hideous entertainment.
"Think of it!" Krepsin said. "You've only scratched the surface! You and Wayne, touring together! There are no secrets that would be hidden from you. Billy, you'd even hold power over the dead!"
Billy felt dizzy and sick. But he looked into the man's black eyes and saw the truth. The man wanted power over the dead himself. The man wanted to use him like some puppet in a sideshow, pulling in the paying customers with hints of dark mysteries. He couldn't believe that Wayne had any part in this! "No," he said. "I can't do that. I won't do it."
"And why not? Why not? Of course you may be afraid and reluctant now, but after you think about it—and after Wayne's talked to you—you'll see the light. Ever since I saw those newspaper articles—no, ever since Wayne told me all about you and your mother, I knew there was something special about you. I knew you had the power to—"
And then he stopped, a strangled whine bubbling in his throat.
Billy stared at him. On Krepsin's hand a fly had landed.
The man leaped up with a scream, knocking over the chair and table as he tried to get away from the thing. He batted wildly at the air as the fly buzzed around his head. In his mind he was back on the refugee ship that had brought him and his family from Greece, and he was seven years old and watching the flies crawl over his parents' stiffened corpses as fever killed half the people aboard.
Krepsin's eyes bulged from their sockets. The fly had touched him. Disease had broken through his barriers. Rats chittered in the ship's hold, his parents' bodies moldering and full of maggots. He screamed with pure terror as the fly danced across his cheek, and he fell to his knees.