“It wanted to make love to you,” he says.
“Love?” she says, her voice barely under control. “No. Oh, no. Tak understands nothing about love, cares nothing about love. It wanted to fuck me, that’s all. When it discovered it couldn’t use Herb to do that, it killed him.” Tears are running down her face now. “It doesn’t give up easily when it wants something, you know. What it did to him… well, imagine what would happen to one of little Ralphie Carver’s shoes if you tried to get it on your big grownup’s foot. If you just kept jamming it and shoving it, harder and harder, oblivious of the pain, oblivious of what you were doing to it in your obsession to wear it, walk in it…”
“All right,” he says. He looks down toward the bottom of the hill, almost expecting to see the vans coming back, but there is nothing. He looks up the street and sees more nothing; Cammie is standing out of sight in the shadow of the precariously leaning Cattlemen’s Hotel. “I get the message.”
“Then can we go in? Or do you even intend to go in? Have you lost your nerve?”
“No,” he says, and sighs.
There’s an old-fashioned iron thumb-latch on the bunkhouse door, but when he tries to grasp it, his thumb goes straight through. Below it, appearing like something floating up through dirty water, is a plain old suburban doorknob. When Johnny grasps it, a suburban door forms around it, first overlying the planks and iron bands, then replacing them. The knob turns and the door opens on a dark room that smells as stale as dirty laundry. The moonlight floods in, and what Johnny sees makes him think of stories he’s read in the papers from time to time, the ones about elderly recluse millionaires who spend the last years of their lives in single rooms, stacking up books and magazines, collecting pets, shooting Demerol, eating meals out of cans.
“Quick, hurry,” she says. “He’ll be in the downstairs bathroom. It’s off the kitchen.”
She moves past him, taking his hand as she does, and leads him into the living room. There are no stacked books and magazines, but the sense of reclusion and insanity grows rather than lessens as they advance. The floor is tacky with spilled food and soda; there is an underlying sour smell of clabbered milk; the walls have been scribbled over with crayon drawings that are frightening in their primitive preoccupation with bloodshed and death. They remind him of a novel he read not so long ago, a book called Blood Meridian.
Movement flickers to his left. He turns that way, heart speeding up, adrenaline dumping into his bloodstream, but there are no gun-toting cowboys or sinister aliens, not even an attacking little kid with a knife. It’s only a shimmer of reflected light. From the TV, he assumes, although there’s no sound.
“No,” she whispers, “don’t go in there.”
She leads him toward the doorway straight ahead. Light shines through it, printing a bright oblong on to the food-encrusted carpet. Electricity may not yet have been invented along the rest of what used to be Poplar Street, but there’s still plenty here.
Now Johnny can hear grunting sounds, interspersed with mildly labored breathing. Sounds as human-and as instantly recognizable-as snoring, sneezing, wheezing, whistling. Someone going to the toilet. Doing number two, as they used to say when they were kids. A grade-school couplet comes to mind: Mother gives me lemonade, around the corner fudge is made. Whoa, Johnny thinks, that one’s right up there with little bitty baby Smitty.
As they enter the kitchen and he looks around, it occurs to Johnny that perhaps the good folk of Poplar Street deserve what’s happening to them. She’s been living like this for God knows how long and we never knew, he thinks. We’re her neighbors, we all sent her flowers when her husband ate the end of his gun, most of us went to his funeral (Johnny himself had been in California, talking to a convention of children’s librarians), but we never knew.
The counter jostles with jars, discarded packaging, empty glasses, and soft-drink cans. Many of the latter have become antfarms. He sees the Tupperware pitcher with the remains of the doctored chocolate milk in it, and the crust of Tak’s bologna-and-cheese sandwich beside it. The sink is stacked with dirty dishes. Beside the dish drainer, a plastic bottle of detergent which might have been purchased when Herb Wyler was still alive lies overturned. Around its nozzle is a long-congealed puddle of green dishgoo. On the table are more stacks of dirty dishes, a squeeze-bottle of mustard, sprays of crumbs (there’s a Van Halen cassette lying in one of these), an aerosol can of whipped cream, two bottles of catsup, one mostly empty and one mostly full, open pizza boxes littered with crusts, bread-wrappers, Twinkies wrappers, and a Doritos bag pulled down over an empty Pepsi bottle like a weird condom. There are also piles and piles of comic books. All those that Johnny can see are issues of Marvel’s MotoKops 2200 serie s. Spilled Sugar Pops are scattered across the cover of an issue which shows Cassie Styles and Snake Hunter standing hip-deep in a swamp and firing their stun-pistols at Countess Lili Marsh, who is attacking on what could be a jet-powered motorscooter. BAYOU BLAST! the title screams. In the far corner of the room is a heap of bulging plastic garbage bags, none secured with ties, most oozing ant-infested swill. All the cans seem to bear the smiling face of Chef Boyardee. The stove is covered with pots encrusted with the Chefs orange sauce. On top of the fridge, a bizarre crowning touch, is an old plastic statuette of Roy Rogers mounted on the faithful Trigger. Johnny knows without having to ask that it was a present to Seth from his uncle, something perhaps remembered from the days of Herb Wyler’s own youth and patiently hunted out of a dust-covered attic carton.
Beyond the fridge is a half-open door, casting its own wedge of light out on to the filthy linoleum. The door’s angle isn’t too severe for Johnny to be able to read the sign on it:
EMPLOYEES MUST WASH HANDS AFTER USING THE LAVATORY (AND CUSTOMERS SHOULD)
“Seth!” Audrey stage-whispers, dropping Johnny’s hand and rushing for the bathroom door. Johnny follows her.
From behind them, spots of dancing red light stream out of the den’s arched doorway like meteor debris; they flash across the dark living room toward the kitchen. Even as they do, Cammie Reed steps through the door from outside. She has the gun in both hands now, and as she stands looking around the dim living room, she slips her right index finger inside the trigger-guard and nestles it against the trigger. She is hesitant, not sure where to go next. Her eye is drawn to the flicker of reflected TV-light from the den, her ear by the sound of people moving in the kitchen. The voice in her head, the one demanding revenge for Jimmy, has fallen silent, and she isn’t sure which way to go. Her eye registers a brief strobe of red light, but her mind does nothing with the input; it is totally preoccupied with the question of how she should go on. Marinville and Wyler are in the kitchen, she’s sure of that, but is the killer brat in there with them? She glances doubtfully toward the TV flicker again. No sound, but maybe autistic children watch it with the sound off.
She has to be sure, that’s the thing. There are probably just a couple of rounds left in the.30-.06… and they likely won’t give her a chance to pull the trigger more than once or twice, anyway. She wishes the voice would speak up again, tell her what to do.
And then it does.
Across the street, on the cement path between the Carvers” front door and the sidewalk,
Cynthia has seen Cammie go into the Wyler house. Her eyes widen. Before she can say anything, Steve nudges her sharply. She looks at him and sees he’s got a finger to his lips. In his other hand he’s got a knife from the Carvers” kitchen rack.
“Come on,” he murmurs.
“You’re not going to use that, are you?”
“I hope I don’t have to,” he says. “Are you coming?”