Gunny gets up close, cheek-to-cheek in the mirror, and he says that there is one more thing Jeremy should know. That the new police advancements in computer and forensic science make it possible for them to cut open a victim’s eyeballs and see the face of a killer burned on the retina by the inflamed optic nerves, and maybe it would be wise if Jeremy did something about that.
Jeremy thinks about it, and then he agrees with that too.
Time to get way fucking serious.
FIVE
This Seat is Saved
TWENTY-ONE.
Ariel had lost her way.
She was wandering in a place unfamiliar. It was a hot thicket of leafy green vines that nearly blotted out the sun. What she could see of the sky was a white glare. She knew only that she had to get from where she was to some other place, that she couldn’t stay where she stood, and so she pushed onward through the wall of vegetation ahead as another closed at her back.
There were thorns in here. They were stabbing her and cutting across her skin whenever and wherever she moved. It was treacherous, this going forward. It was painful and almost unbearable, but she had no choice; she must bear it, to reach the other side.
She smelled earth, and heat, and the raw green growth that surrounded her. She was aware also of another smell, a sweet aroma, a rich scent nearly like wine, perfuming the air. She saw small dark berries hanging from the thorned vines by the hundreds, some wholly black and others touched with red, and she realized she stood in a dense thicket of blackberry brambles that went on in all directions.
The question was: which way led out? Or, another question, and more troubling: was there any way out?
She continued onward, in the direction she had chosen though she couldn’t remember making such a decision. It had been made for her, it seemed. She could always stop, turn and go another way, but it seemed to her that sometimes in this world you just have to trust something.
She had not gone very far when the man came through the brambles, and stood before her as if to block her path.
Ariel knew him. She knew his face, from a driver’s license picture. She knew what he’d done to two friends of hers, and she knew now what he wanted to do to her.
As she backed away, he followed. He wore no expression. Fear tightened around her heart and hobbled her legs. He came on unhurriedly, with a supreme and terrifying confidence, and as he closed the distance between them his face began to change.
Ariel saw the flesh ripple and move, like clay being reshaped by a phantom hand. The bones began to shift beneath it. With a series of cracking noises the features distorted and destroyed themselves as one cheek swelled outward and the other caved in, as the nose collapsed into a widening fissure and the forehead lengthened like a slab of veined stone. One eye retreated into the dark while the other burst out like the eye of a fish popped by a hook.
All this, while his lower jaw slid forward. Then with a sound like sticks being broken it began to unhinge itself from the upper jaw, and as Ariel backed away through the slashing thorns she put her hand up before her own face to push aside the image of a reptilian mouth yawning open, stretching itself to impossible size, dwarfing even the misshapen head upon which it had grown. The grotesque body lurched toward her, staggering through the brambles, its arms at its side and hands gripped into fists, its single eye wet and gleaming on the edge of the voracious mouth.
Something dark flew out of that gaping hole. It was followed by another, and another still, and then three at a time and five at a time, ten and then twenty, a vomiting forth of dark sleek projectiles that in an instant grew wings and black feathers and spun around Ariel like a living whirlwind.
The crows flew in black swarms from Jeremy Pett’s straining mouth. Some of them came at Ariel, jabbing and clawing, their small red eyes ticking this way and that, but most of them fell upon the fruit, and this they tore from the vines and swallowed in dripping beaks as they fought each other for the next swallow. They tumbled through the black-stained air in vicious struggling knots, their shrill cries nearly human in their expressions of greed, triumph and frustrated anguish.
Thousands of crows blighted the air. They battered themselves into Ariel’s face, they battered into each other and, still fighting and tearing at each other over the sweet pulp, flapped on broken wings in their death spirals. Through chinks in the black walls that circled her, Ariel saw Jeremy Pett spinning around and around, his arms outstretched wide like the cylinders of a bizarre machine, the engine of a carnival ride that has popped its rivets and burned out its regulators and now must spin and spin until it spins itself to pieces or shatters itself in a blast and roar. As the crows streamed out of him, he had shriveled. His clothes had fallen away, revealing a body that had become an emaciated horror of gray flesh. The hideous head with its gaping mouth had darkened like an old wart and was flagging back and forth, boneless, on the spindly neck. It began to implode, and as the last few black feathered things struggled out blinking their red eyes and already tearing at each other, the head collapsed like an airless balloon.
In all this shrieking noise, in all this flurry of feathers and chaos of claws, Ariel watched the skeletal body fall, still locked in its spinning circle, and she thought, He is a vessel.
The crows came at her. They tangled in her hair and jammed against her nostrils. They squirmed against her eyes and thrashed across her mouth. But as she staggered back, seeking some place to protect herself in this field of life that had become the province of hell, she realized that they were only coming at her because she was between them and the few vines of fruit that remained unseized, and they would not stop until they had it all, every last bit of it.
Look at me, someone said.
Ariel turned her head. Standing beside her was the girl.
She looked exactly as Ariel remembered her. She wore the same clothes and the same raggedy straw hat, and she stared at Ariel through ebony eyes that were both serene and impassioned. Her cheeks were marred by scatters of teenaged acne, the same as before.
Walk with me, the girl said. Her voice had no accent yet it reminded Ariel of a voice she had once heard and trusted, somewhere in the long-ago.
When the girl held out her hand Ariel took it.
The crows continued to swirl around them, but none penetrated the space between.
Whether the girl moved first or she herself did, Ariel didn’t know. But they were walking together side-by-side through the brambles, hand holding hand, as the black curtains of crows flapped in their faces and hissed at their backs. Still, not one entered the space they occupied, and as Ariel and the girl walked forward the crows retreated before them. Speaking in shrill tongues of indignation, the solid walls of feathers and glinting crimson eyes began to break apart like so many crumbling leaves shaken off a dead tree.