“After you talk to us. Let me start you out a little bit, with a question. Why did you intend to commit murder on Thursday afternoon? That was your intention, correct? To shoot as many people on that stage as you could?”
“That’s three questions,” said Apollyon.
“Answer the first one, how ’bout it?” Cowboy directed.
“I’d like a Snickers. Really, anything chocolate.”
“Okay, let’s stop this foolishness.” Radio stood up. “Come on, we’re through here.”
Apollyon didn’t move. After a few seconds, he said, “The seventh mansion the Furies possess.”
“What?” Cowboy asked, straining to understand.
“I was told to go to Stone Church,” said the young man. He folded his arms around himself, around that thin body bearing the savage multitude of scars and burns. “I saw the ads on TV. I saw who was going to be there. That band the sniper’s after. Playing on Thursday afternoon, at three o’clock. One show. I looked them up on their website. I looked up the website for Stone Church.” Then he stopped speaking.
“Go ahead,” said Radio. He sat down once more, but he perched on the edge of his chair ready to jump up and rattle the sword again if he needed to.
Apollyon remained silent.
Cowboy tried his hand: “Who was it told you to go to Stone Church?”
Apollyon began to very slightly rock himself back and forth. He had a fixed smile on his face. Looking at it, even from this distance of time and space, made Ariel’s flesh crawl.
“Who was it told you to go to Stone Church, Apollyon?” Cowboy repeated.
The young man said something. It was so soft they couldn’t make it out.
“What was that?” Radio asked. “Who?”
Apollyon spoke a little louder. A name, spoken quickly. Spoken like something that even a destroyer should be afraid of.
A girl’s name.
True froze the video.
“Bethy was—” he began, but Ariel interrupted him because she already knew.
“His sister,” she said. “His raped and murdered sister.”
True stared at her as if seeing something in her face he’d never seen before, or hearing in her voice a firm certainty that he didn’t quite understand, and Ariel was aware of the others staring at her too, and she didn’t fully understand her own feeling either, but watching this video—seeing this young man’s sick smile and hearing his eerily soft voice speaking the name of a dead little girl—made her aware of places in this very room where the light did not completely settle, and where a shadow seemed to shift and shudder at the edge of the corner of the eye.
“This kid’s a lunatic,” Nomad said. “A fucking nutbag.” Even as he made that statement, he was wondering about the lunatics and fucking nutbags who’d decorated Apollyon’s body with fire and blood.
“There’s more,” True told him.
“Show it,” Ariel said.
True clicked on the small circle with the Play arrow in it.
“Who’s Bethy?” Cowboy asked, proving he hadn’t fully done his homework, but as Apollyon sat silent and motionless Radio wrote something on the pad. He slid it in front of his partner, and Cowboy read it and gave a brief nod.
“Bethy told you to go to Stone Church and kill people. Is that correct?” Radio asked.
Apollyon didn’t reply and it looked like he wasn’t going to, as the time counter displayed the passage of twelve seconds. Then he answered, “She told me to find a gun, to steal one if I needed to from Cal Holland’s house, and go kill the girl.”
“What girl?”
“The girl in the band.” Apollyon’s bruised mouth showed the faintest curl of annoyance. “The girl singer. Bethy told me to kill her, because if she dies they won’t finish it.”
“Finish what, Apollyon?” Cowboy asked.
“What they’re doing.” He continued to rock himself back and forth. “Bethy says they don’t even know.”
“Hm,” Radio said. “So…did Bethy tell you what it is?”
“Oh, no.” Apollyon shook his head. He gave a sad smile, the smile of an intelligent but nerdy high school kid who has been snubbed by the cool dudes at the cool table, and who finally and forever knows his role. “I’m not allowed.”
“Stop it!” Nomad commanded. True’s finger was slow. “Stop it now!”
The video froze.
True looked at Nomad, his dark eyebrows upraised.
“How do you figure this is helpful to us?” Nomad’s face was fearsome with its angry mouth and swollen sick-green eye. “You think this is helping us go out to the sound check, meet-and-greet the news people, do interviews and keep ourselves together? This is supposed to pick us up for what we have to do?”
“John?” Ariel said softly. “We need to watch this.”
“No, we don’t.” He pointed at the video frame. “This is a crazy, pain-addicted Satan freak. Nothing else. Okay?”
“What else would he be, John?” asked Terry, and in that question Ariel realized Terry was sitting next to her again, in that seat she’d saved for him on the bench under the eucalyptus tree, but now he was listening to her. He was listening to every single word.
Nomad was unable to answer. He looked from Ariel to Terry and back again, and then to Berke for her caustic acid that dripped upon every unmanagable thought or uncomfortable idea and melted them down to Silly Putty.
This time, it didn’t drip. This time, Berke chewed on her lower lip, and she gave a small nervous laugh and shook her head as if to say she had nothing to say.
“Finish what?” True asked, directing the question to all of them. “Just for interest’s sake. Do you think that’s a reference to your tour, or—”
“The dead don’t speak!” Nomad had nearly shouted it. “Ghosts don’t come back and tell people to do things! The dead are dead! They’re nothing!”
But as he said it, he heard his own ghost tell him that Johnny, there was no roadmap.
No, that was different, he thought. That was a memory. His father was not a ghost telling him to steal a gun and kill a girl because if she was dead, a song would not be finished.
Oh, yeah. Here we go, he thought. Here we go. The communal song. And that girl at the well. That girl in her raggedy straw hat with her ladle of water, trying to stuff him into her sack of buttholes. The angel of life, George had said. God’s voice speaking to Terry in church, and Heaven and Hell and all that garbage for people who were afraid to think for themselves. Oh, yeah; here we go.
“Set it up,” he told them, “so I can knock it down.”
Ariel’s eyes were dark gray with hints of sapphire blue, like gleams of something mysterious in motion just beneath the surface of a sea. “You know what this is about, John. You know best of all, because it was your idea.”
“It’s a song,” he said, almost pleadingly. “Not even finished yet. No music to it. It’s just some words strung out in lines. There are no hidden meanings. No big flash of light. It was just…a way to keep…”
“Us together,” Ariel said, helping him. “I know that’s how it began, but now I think it’s more.”
“A new song?” True asked. “You’re writing a new song? Is there mention of it on your website?”
“No,” Terry said. “We just started thinking about it when we left Austin.”
“How would Connor Addison know about it, then? And according to him…according to his sister…you don’t know what you’re doing. So how can that be?”
“That freak’s sister is dead! Stop talking about his sister!” Nomad feared he was about to blow his circuits; they were going to have to load him into an ambulance and take him to the Hollywood ICU, and maybe the girl would come to him in his room and say I believe in you and he could shout back, Fuck you, I don’t believe in you!