Apocalypse (32 page)

I can't argue with him none. It's our only chance. I look at Joanie, and she looks at me and nods, and we get up.

We should've went outside, maybe, but we didn't. We just done it right where we was, in between the horses. That nude dude drawed a circle on the floor around Joanie and me with his finger—it showed on them planks, red, like blood—and then I seen it was blood. His finger was dripping when he stood up. He looks at Joanie.

“I have a name now,” he says, hard. And then he looks at me.

“I want you to know my name,” he says, soft. “It is Eros.”

“All right,” I says. “Thanks.” For what he was doing, I meant.

He takes a stand on the rim of the circle with his back to us, and Joanie started the spell. She stood by one of them wooden horses and said words didn't make no sense to me, and she made her voice sound fierce but the rest of her was shaking. But Eros didn't shake none. He was cool. He was like some movie star facing the firing squad without a mask or a cigarette. Rock solid beautiful.

Me, I just stood there like a dummy.

First thing I noticed was the smell, like Trout Creek, all sulphur. But I didn't hardly have time to smell it before the devil come busting out in front of us like a blast furnace, so hot and fierce I just about couldn't stand it. I put my hands over my eyes and looked right through them, red, and I could still see him. He didn't look like no Sunday-School devil with red tights or a pitchfork or nothing. I wouldn't of been so scared of him if he did. He was big, maybe twice as tall as me, he was a big swaying snake of fire with the face of a person, except the next minute he wasn't no more. Next he was a person all the way, grinding his hips like a peep show dancer, except his face was a politician or a mine owner or a television preacher, I ain't sure which, and his hands was burning bones. And he had a big hard-on and big breasts both. But then he was one of them nosy old ladies from Hoadley. All at once, sort of. Trying to see him was like watching shapes in fire flames, and trying to touch him would have been like grabbing a bonfire, and I knowed why he was like that. He was the devil. You couldn't get hold of him.

And before he even said nothing, that hot dog Eros, the one who was supposed to be protecting us, just melted away. Not like when he disappeared before. This time he made a puddle on the floor. Little bits of fingernail and hair and dandruff and cookie crumbs, melted icing and stuff floating in something like hot motor oil. And a big old chunk of wood. It flared up and burned like a firecracker. He was gone.

And the devil says to us, “How dare you.” His voice was like the whooshing sound a welding torch makes, but I understood him okay, right down to my bones, and I was shaking worse than Joanie. Old Satan, he was plenty mad. Or she was. Sounded like a she, just then.

Joanie may have been shook but she had guts. She didn't give him time to say no more. She says, “Call it off.” She tries to say it like she's got a right to order the devil around, but I guess she don't fool nobody. Her voice ain't behaving, and it keeps getting worse. “Make it stop,” she says. “Call it a day. I've had it. I don't want any more of this Ahira business. I don't want the world to end. I don't even want Hoadley to end. I just want.…” Her voice shook so bad she couldn't finish. Or maybe she didn't know what she wanted.

Anyways, when the devil heard what she was saying he let out a blast-furnace roar scared me so bad I about peed my pants, until I figured out he was laughing. Laughing!

Yukking it up so hard he could barely talk. “You ridiculous humans!” he hollered. “You poor, wide-eyed, wishful, muddleheaded, muck-footed, absurd fools! You call on me!”

“Yes,” says Alita. “You gave me the power. You gave me this face. Take them away.”

Old Satan is still laughing, jiggling and shooting off sparks; I can't look at him. “You simpleminded twit,” he says to Joanie, “don't you know what that is lying in a puddle in front of you? Like dog pee?”

“It's just the doppelganger.”

“Ninny. Pudding-faced, hyperventilating coitophobe. It's your dream lover.”

I still had my hands over my eyes, trying to look at the devil, but now I wanted to look at Joanie. I squeezed a peek at her between my fingers. I couldn't see her real good—it was like she was a black person standing there. But I could tell she had stopped shaking. She was standing real still with her hands stretched out a little like she was dizzy or floating.

The devil says, “He was your dream of the way your lover should look, and you are your dream of the way you should look, and now look at your dreams!” And he laughed some more.

Joanie says, “So my dreams are melting. So what else is new? Listen to me! I want you to stop what is happening in Hoadley.”

“But I have nothing to do with that!” He's still laughing, and Joanie gets mad and yells at him.

“You make it stop!”

There's a sort of angry rustling, like fire in a dry woods, and Joanie shuts up. We was all quiet for a little.

Then the devil says, “Ill-mannered twerp, I will tolerate no more insolence from you. I have done nothing but what is expected of me. You called me here to put flesh on your dreams, and I have done what you wanted. You invited me into Hoadley, and once there I listened. All I have done is what Hoadley people said. What they wanted of me. I have fulfilled their expectations.” He snapped his fingers, the sound popped and hissed and crackled like a green log in a fire. “What makes you think I can leave just like that? People are making use of me.”

Joanie whispers, “You are hideous.”

“Me! Don't you see? It's all up to them, not to me.”

Down in Hoadley, the water tower teetered like a huge, stilt-legged, swollen-bellied spider at the edge of the cave-in. From somewhere down in the blackness a broken water main was spraying up a fountain as artistic as that which had once graced the immaculate lawn of the Perfect Rest Funeral Home. But that lawn and fountain were gone, along with half of that Victorian edifice. Rose Room and Peach Parlor, broken open, sent down pale, chaste statuary, lurid amid shards of chandelier. Blue Room and basement storage dropped darkly shining, blimp-shaped caskets like bombs, like overlarge Easter eggs to crack open and spill their contents against some still-unseen bottom. And from the remains of the Homer and Gladys Wildasin yard and all-too-fertile gardens, the long-dead fetuses continued to sift down. Watching them, watching the coffins fall, knowing what Easter-morning treasure might be in them, the crowd swerved from panic to a deeper desperation. Only Gigi was happy.

“I am Death!”

Staring at her, dumbfounded, Cally thought she had never seen the heartless old ever-dying woman so alive, so vital.

“I am Death, and I've got you all in my pocket. You all come to me in the end.” Sitting on her pale horse and looking across a small space at Pestilence, Gigi grinned the tough little grin Cally had once loved. “Right, Shirley?”

Paler than Death's horse, her skin appaloosa-spotted with raisin-colored sarcomas, Shirley did not answer. She seemed not to have heard, not to be aware of much around her; blue-eyed and blank, she stared at the dead things falling, falling, falling into the pit. But Elspeth sucked in a sharp breath, nudged Warrior forward and fingered the hilt of her sword.

“Let Shirley go,” she told Gigi.

Grinning, the old woman said, “Why, I haven't done anything to her. She did it to herself.”

“Let her go!”

“Why, what do you care?” Gigi curled her upper lip; grin turned to a sneer. “She was a man, remember? She lied to you.”

“You old hag.” Elspeth's hand tightened on her sword hilt. “I don't care what she is, I don't care what she's done. You know I love her.”

Shirley's staring blue eyes widened; she turned to look at Elspeth. But Elspeth's fierce, dark scowl was bent on Gigi.

“Let her live.” A small, tea-tan hand, the delicate hand of an artist, gripped the sword hilt. “Or shall we see if Death can die?”

Gigi threw back her iron-gray head and crowed with laughter. “You sneaking jig! Poor excuse of a War. I've never known you to draw that sword against anything except blackberries!”

“Wrong, Gladys.” Shirley spoke, and not to quell the altercation; her voice was weary but her eyes were shining. “When I'm in danger …”

Elspeth reached out briefly to touch her lover, then drew the sword with a long swish of metal against metal. Gigi's grin widened; her old eyes lit as if with fire, for one is never so alive as when one is dying.…

And under Cally's gawking person, black, tempestuous Devil rocketed suddenly out of control.

Cally felt the horse leap, felt the reins snatched from her famished hands by that leap, grabbed for mane, and only then realized that there was a crowd of people all around her and the others; the horse had noticed them before she did. Uplifted hands pulled at her clothing, her legs, trying to unseat her. The mob wanted the horses. The good citizens of Hoadley attacked each other as well as the horsewomen for the mounts that could carry them away from destruction. Something, perhaps a rock or a brick, struck Cally painfully on her thin, stooped shoulder; she ducked her head and kicked hard, not at Devil but at the people clinging to her boots. Devil was fighting like a hell-horse already. He reared—Cally gripped with hands and knees, flat against his neck. She saw bodies go down in front of his striking forehooves, saw blood, shockingly red, saw a vaguely familiar face shout something then turn pale and topple into the abyss—Wozny? The borough council president? It didn't matter; it was war, there was blood brighter than Zephyr Zook's fingernails. Cally saw the flash of Elspeth's sword; Elspeth stayed close by Shirley and slashed at the people menacing them both as if she cut down briar bushes. What became of Gigi, Cally did not see or care. She and Devil had kicked themselves free, and the black horse thundered away, choosing his own path, out of Hoadley.

Cally was aware of the things they passed in flashes, unbearably acute, dazzling as the light shattering from Elspeth's sword. A flash: the park gazebo, still with multicolored Christmas bulbs decorating its posts and eaves, still standing like an island in the midst of pit and devastation (although the pigeon-chested bronze general on horseback who had once reared near it had gone down without striking a blow); on it and around it the six-hundred-sixty-six, all those misfits of Hoadley who wore Ahira's mark, stood stolidly waiting for her, quite safe in their expectation that she would save them. Then a span of pounding hooves, and in a flash again the place Cally remembered from another wild, runaway ride: the abandoned cemetery (never say “graveyard”) where white violets languished in the rank grass. Devil had carried her to the hill above Hoadley. From behind her and below her, rising on the updrafts of inferno, came faintly the odors and clamors of extremity. She could have looked back and seen the town, or what remained of it, and seen down into the pit, perhaps. But she did not, for her hypersensitive stare was caught on the cemetery, horrified: the graves were opening. Under the weathered white marble shafts, under the crude fieldstone blocks carved with tulips and hex circles, under the more recent gray granite markers inset with sepia-tone oval portraits of the deceased, under them all the unshorn grass was parting, the violets fainting, six feet of moist violated earth opening, dark as the fundament of Hoadley.

Cally hid her assaulted eyes; Devil carried her on.

But just beyond the cemetery the black horse stopped short, nearly sending his featherweight rider over his shoulder; a different roar in the clamor rising from Hoadley, a different fetor in the updraft's stench, turned him in his tracks. He stood with spraddled forelegs, with pricked, trembling ears, looking. Cally looked as well, over his black crest.

So painfully vivid was everything to her starved eyes that she had to nearly close them in order to see.… She saw. On the water tower. It had toppled but still clung with its metal feet; it hung over the edge of the chasm on its long spidery legs, bulbous body dangling in the darkness. And climbing up that attenuated metal carcass, that arachnid, feeling its way up and out over the lip of the abyss, out into Hoadley, came something as big as its bloated belly and black as the pit. And it seemed to Cally, watching, that the whole day turned storm-lurid-dark; something more than smoke had blotted out the sun.

From the locust trees brushing Cally's neck with long-fingered leaves, black-faced hungerbabies cried, “The beast! The beast! The beast!”

Devil vented a snort of terror, whirled and sprang into a flat-out gallop again, up the graveled trolley line. Though she had caught hold of the reins again, Cally let herself be swept along, caught up in the black tempestuous horse's assault of the hill, in his fateful momentum, in the headlong curving sweep of his leap as he challenged the fallen treetrunk. She rode with her frail body hovering airily above the horse's withers, her shoulder blades jutting from her fleshless back like inchoate wings.

At the hilltop trolley park, as before, Devil slowed and stopped of his own will, though he did not graze. On what must once have been the barker's strip he stood puffing, nostrils flaring; the smell of sulphur hung in the air. Then his ears swooped forward and he spooked. Two people were coming out of the carousel building, arms around each other. Lovers? Perhaps—but peering between her horse's black, pricked ears, Cally saw that their mood seemed more desperate than loving. Their embrace was to keep one another from falling. They were stumbling. Barry Beal and—and that Ahira woman.…

With a horse-snort sound a lick of flame sprang from the peak of the carousel house and wavered there like an ethereal pennant. Devil spooked again, springing backward, but Cally did not go with him. Half dismounting, half falling, she left the horse and staggered toward Ahira on stiffened legs. She stared; the stranger woman's long hair, once a honey-sleek flow, now hung lank, ropy, around a face ugly with cuts and bruises. With drooping head Ahira sank to a seat on the ground, and Barry Beal sat beside her, his arm still around her, protective, loving.…