True said, as calmly as he could, “There are just a few more minutes of the video. I’d like to show you the rest of it.”
“Berke!” Nomad said. “Come on, let’s go find us a fucking bar!”
“No,” she told him, and she glanced quickly at him and then away. “I think I’ll stick here. Anyway…it wouldn’t be safe, just walking around.”
True clicked the Play arrow. Nomad did not leave.
Cowboy tap-tap-tapped his pen on the edge of the table. Radio rubbed his mouth, readying it for another rumble.
“Who gave you those marks, Apollyon?” Radio asked. “They’re Satanist symbols, aren’t they?”
“Two questions, one answer: the seventh mansion the Furies possess.”
“Yeah, we heard that already. Is there a meaning to it, or is it gibberish?”
“It has a meaning to me,” said Apollyon.
“Enlighten us.”
“Would I ever like to,” came the reply, “but you wouldn’t understand the game.”
Cowboy jumped in with both boots. “Game? What game would that be?”
Silence from the destroyer.
Tap-tap-tap went Cowboy’s pen. Radio cleared his throat like a burst of static. “Your father told me yesterday that you used to be a model student—”
“I’m still a model student, but I’ve changed schools.”
“We’ll get to that. He said you were active in the chess club. Is that the game you’re talking about?”
“You wish,” said Apollyon, with a crimped smile. “Am I ever going to get my candy? I would talk so much better with something sweet in my mouth.”
“Uh-huh.” For a few seconds Radio searched the young man’s bandaged face, and then he said with the resigned air of a weary soul who really, really wants to go home. “Billy, would you go get him something? What do you want? A Snickers bar?”
“Anything chocolate,” Apollyon said.
Billy the Cowboy got up, dug for change in his pocket and left the room.
“Bad idea,” Nomad heard True say under his breath.
No one spoke on the video until Cowboy returned. “This suit you?” He put a small bag of M&Ms down in front of Apollyon.
“Fine, thanks.” Apollyon delicately tore open the bag and dumped its contents into a pile. He began to separate the candies into areas of blue, green, yellow, red, brown and orange. He took a yellow and a green and chewed them.
“Would you tell us,” said Radio, “how Bethy told you to go to Stone Church?”
Apollyon kept arranging the colors, eating a candy or two or three.
“Did you hear that question?” Cowboy asked, his patience growing thinner than a snake on a dust diet.
When Radio spoke again, his bass voice was dangerous. He was done playing. “Your sister is not among the living. So how can you sit there and tell us—and try to make us believe—that she told you to steal a gun and kill someone? That just kind of defies logic, don’t you think?”
Apollyon ate a few more candies, and then he met the cop’s gaze. “Logic,” he said. “is a creation of men. It’s a narrow door to a very large house. In that house are lots of rooms. Some you’d want to live in, others…not so much. Logic is a shirt that’s been dried too hot, so when it comes out of the machine it’s too tight around your neck, it chokes you and it binds your shoulders, and your mom tells you you’re going to wear it no matter what, because you were wearing it that night and she’s never going to let you throw it away. Then when you do outgrow it, and there’s no way you can fit it on you, she makes a pillowcase out of it for your bed. Is that logical? To make a pillowcase from a shirt?”
Neither cop said anything for a few seconds. Cowboy shifted his weight in his chair. Radio rubbed his fingers together, his elbows supported by the table. He said, “We’re talking about your sister. How did she come tell you to do this? Did she…like…materialize? Out of the air?”
“She just comes. She’s there and then she’s not.” Apollyon continued to eat the M&Ms, as if he had all the time in the world.
“And you do whatever she’s tellin’ you to do, right?” Cowboy asked. “This is her fault, is that it?”
Apollyon stopped chewing.
He did not move nor speak, as the seconds ticked past.
The two cops looked at each other, as if they suspected a trigger had been pulled, or a rope twisted, or a shirt tightened enough to make a person scream.
“Her fault,” said Apollyon, staring at nothing. And again: “Her fault.”
They waited, and in the Days Inn Motel room the viewers could see that the young man’s face had become shiny with sweat, and his smile flickered on and off with erratic speed, and he had placed his index fingers on two M&M candies like they were the opposite poles of the battery that was keeping him alive.
“I was about to hang myself,” he said hollowly, “when she came the first time. I was about to step off the chair. And then Bethy was sitting on my bed looking up at me, and she said, ‘Connor, don’t do that.’ She said, ‘Someone likes you a whole lot, Connor, and they want you to know how much. But you have to show them how strong you are, Connor. They don’t like weak.’ So she told me to go to a place in front of a carwash and wait and somebody would pick me up, and it was a man who gave me a drink from a water bottle and then he drove, and I got sleepy. When I woke up… I was in a room in a house, and the people there asked me if they could do things to me. They were very polite. They were smart people, I could tell that. At first I had to drink a lot from the bottle, but…after a few times, it was all right. When my mom and dad saw, they were going to go to the police but I told them what Bethy said to me, that if they didn’t test my strength here, they were going to test hers there. And she told me all of it. She told me how much that man had hurt her, and what he’d done, and she was afraid they would find out she wasn’t strong enough and they would cast her out where the weak things walked, and she begged, ‘Connor, would you please please pretty please take it for me?’”
“I said I would,” the young man told them. “And she said, for that, she would try to forgive me.” His eyes moved from Radio to Cowboy and back. His smile flickered: on, off, on, off. “They gave me a new name, and they birthed me. They told me why I was born. They made sense out of everything. And when you finally, finally see the sense of things…you know a power that is beyond…” He paused, searching. “Logic,” he said.
Apollyon continued eating his M&Ms, crunching them a few at the time.
When Radio spoke again, some of his bass presence had been muted. “Why’d you say Bethy told you to go kill that girl?”
“She was upset. Bethy was. Early Wednesday morning, when she came. She said it was something I had to do to show I was strong. She said Connor had died, and Apollyon had been born. Born in pain. I was the destroyer now, and that was my job. To destroy.” He frowned, with a red M&M held to his lips. “I think I fucked up, though.” He slowly eased the candy into his mouth. “I was going to shoot the lead singer first. I hated his voice. Then… I thought I’d better do what Bethy wanted, or they might get mad at her. They might hurt her, and I couldn’t… I couldn’t take that. Because…you know…she’s such a little girl. So I think I fucked up.”
“I think I fucked up,” he repeated.
“I think I fucked up,” he said again.
“I think I—”
With sudden terrible speed he grasped a handful of M&Ms, threw them into his mouth, crunched down and inhaled with a hideous rasping howl. He took hold of his own throat and squeezed with both hands. He went sideways off his chair and the two cops scrambled around and over the table to get at him before his airway was blocked. Cowboy started trying to get the hands loosened as the body kicked and writhed beneath him, and Radio ran out the door shouting a garbled unintelligible shout that sounded like he was hollering through a boom box.