What with one thing and another she was a whole new story. No better time to tell herself to the world than the present.
Tomorrow might never come.
PART SIX: IN SECRETS, MOST REVEALED
Tommy-Ray had been in the driver's seat of a car since his sixteenth birthday. Wheels had signalled freedom from Momma, the Pastor, the Grove and all they stood for. Now he was heading back to the very place a few years ago he couldn't have escaped from fast enough, his foot on the accelerator every mile of the way. He wanted to walk the Grove again with the news his body carried, wanted to go back to his father, who'd taught him so much. Until the Jaff the best life had offered was an off-shore wind and a west swell at Topanga; him on a crest knowing the girls were all watching him from the beach. But he'd always known those high times couldn't last forever. New heroes came along, summer after summer. He'd been one of them, supplanting surfers no more than a couple of years older, who weren't quite as lithe. Boy-men like himself who'd been the cream of the swell the season before, suddenly old news. He wasn't stupid. He knew it was only a matter of time before he joined their ranks.
But now, he had a purpose in his belly and brain he'd
never had before. He'd discovered ways to think and behave the airheads at Topanga never even guessed existed. Much of that he had to thank the Jaff for. But even his father, for all his wild advice, hadn't prepared him for what had happened at the Mission. He was a myth now. Death at the wheel of a Chevy, racing for home. He knew music that would have people dancing till they dropped. And when they dropped, and went to meat, he knew all about that too. He'd seen the spectacle at work on his own flesh. It gave him a boner remembering.
But the night's fun had only just started. Less than a hundred miles north of the Mission his route took him through a small village on the fringes of which lay a cemetery. The moon was still high. Its brightness gleamed on the tombs, washing the color from the flowers that were laid here and there. He stopped the car, to get a better look. After all, this was his territory from now on. It was home.
If he'd needed any further proof that what had happened at the Mission was not the invention of a crazyman, he got it when he pushed open the gate and wandered in. There was no wind to stir the grass, which grew to knee height in several places, where tombs had been left untended. But there was movement there nevertheless. He advanced a few more paces, and saw human figures rising into view from a dozen places. They were dead. Had their appearance not testified to the fact the luminescence of their bodies—which were as bright as the bone shard he'd found beside the car—would have marked them as part of his clan.
They knew who had come to visit them. Their eyes, or in the case of the ancients among them, their sockets, were set on him as they moved to do him homage. None even glanced at the ground as they came, though it was uneven. They knew this turf too well, familiar with the spots where badly built tombs had toppled, or a casket been pushed back up to the surface by some motion in the earth. Their progress was, however, slow. He was in no hurry. He sat himself down on the grave which contained, the stone recorded, seven children and their mother, and watched the ghosts come his way. The closer they came the more of their condition he saw. It wasn't pretty. A wind blew out of them, twisting them out of true. Their faces were either too wide or too long, their eyes bulging, their mouths blown open, cheeks flopping. Their ugliness put Tommy-Ray in mind of a film he'd seen of pilots enduring G-force, the difference being that these were not volunteers. They suffered against their will.
He was not disturbed in the least by their distortions; nor by the holes in their wretched bodies, or their slashed and severed limbs. It was nothing he hadn't seen in comic books by the age of six; or on a ghost-train ride. The horrors were everywhere, if you wanted to look. On bubble-gum cards, and Saturday morning cartoons, or in the stores on T-shirts and album covers. He smiled to think of that. There were outposts of his empire everywhere. No place was untouched by the Death-Boy's finger.
The speediest of these, his first devotees, was a man who looked to have died young, and recently. He wore a pair of jeans two sizes too big for him, and a muscle shirt adorned with a hand presenting the fuck sign to the world. He also wore a hat, which he took off when he came within a few yards of Tommy-Ray. The head beneath had been practically shaved, exposing several long cuts to view. The fatal wounds, presumably. There was no blood out of them now; just a whine of the wind that blew through the man's gut.
A little distance from Tommy-Ray he stopped.
"Do you speak?" the Death-Boy asked him.
The man opened his mouth, which was already wide, a little wider, and proceeded to make a reply as best he could, by working it up from his throat. Watching him, Tommy-Ray remembered a performer he'd seen on a late show, who'd swallowed and then regurgitated live goldfish. Though it was several years ago the sight had struck a chord in Tommy-Ray's imagination. The spectacle of a man able to reverse his system by practice, vomiting up what he'd held in his throat—not in the stomach surely; no fish, however scaly, could survive in acid—had been worth the queasiness he'd felt while watching. Now the Fuck-You-Man was giving a similar performance, only with words instead of fishes. They came at last, but dry as his innards.
"Yes," he said, "I speak."
"Do you know who I am?" Tommy-Ray asked.
The man made a moan.
"Yes or no?"
"No."
"I'm the Death-Boy, and you're the Fuck-You-Man. How 'bout that? Don't we make a pair?"
"You're here for us," the dead man said.
"What do you mean?"
"We're not buried. Not blessed."
"Don't look at me for help," Tommy-Ray said. "I'm burying nobody. I came to look because this is my kind of place now. I'm going to be King of the Dead."
"Yes?"
"Depend on it."
Another of the lost souls—a wide hipped woman—had approached, and puked up some words of her own.
"You..." she said, "...are shining."
"Yeah?" said Tommy-Ray. "Doesn't surprise me. You're bright too. Real bright."
"We belong together," the woman said.
"All of us," said a third cadaver.
"Now you're getting the picture."
"Save us," said the woman.
"I already told the Fuck-You-Man," Tommy-Ray said, "I'm burying nobody."
"We'll follow you," the woman, said.
"Follow?" Tommy-Ray replied, a shudder of excitement running down his spine at the idea of returning to the Grove with such a congregation in tow. Maybe there were other places he could visit along the way, and swell the numbers as he went.
"I like the idea," he said. "But how?"
"You lead. We'll follow," came the response.
Tommy-Ray stood up. "Why not?" he said, and started back towards the car. Even as he went he found himself thinking: this is going to be the end of me...
And thinking, didn't care.
Once at the wheel he looked back towards the cemetery. A wind had blown up from somewhere, and in it he saw the company that he'd chosen to keep seem to dissolve, their bodies coming undone as though they were made of sand, and being blown apart. Specks of their dust blew in his face..He squinted against it, unwilling to look away from the spectacle. Though their bodies were disappearing he could still hear their howls. They were like the wind, or were the wind, making their presence known. With their dissolution complete he turned from the blast, and put his foot on the accelerator. The car leapt forward, kicking up another spurt of dust to join the pursuing dervishes.