Zod Wallop (24 page)

He was in the underground labyrinth of Grimfast Castle and, as luck would have it, he had stumbled into the lair of the Midnight Machines.

Gabriel read with tears burning her eyes and when she came to the end, that terrible, bleak moment when the Midnight Machines engulf Henry, chopping him into small pieces that are snatched up by waiting lizards and dog-shaped creatures that haunt the lower regions of Grimfast, she read on, turning a page she had refused to turn before, and so she read of—and saw hellishly depicted—Lord Draining’s arrival on the scene. Lord D. sauntered into the room of carnage and casually snatched up a severed ear and held it up to his own ear, tilting his head in a listening attitude. “You can hear the ocean,” he said, and his courtiers laughed heartily and laughed again when he affixed the ear, carnationlike, beneath the ruffled collar of his silken shirt.

Gabriel flung the book across the room, knocking a vase from the dresser. The vase thumped softly against the thick carpet and rolled without breaking. Gabriel screamed, hurled herself from the bed and grabbed the vase.
We’ll see what shatters
, she thought, eyeing the closed window.

She stopped then, pressed the vase to her stomach, leaned forward as though sheltering an infant from hurricane gales.

She remembered Allan as a small child, how willful he had been even then, as though independence were everything, the only goal. She had only wanted to be close to him and it seemed, perversely, that distance was all he craved.

And now he had fled her. She rocked slowly back and forth, head down. She squeezed her eyes tight shut, thought to will her son’s thoughts into her mind.

Where are you Allan? Allan, come back
.

No echo of Allan came to her. But something else did. Something Peake had said. He had said that her son and the others were psychically linked by the drug Ecknazine. That the drug created a sort of daisy chain of consciousness, reaching out from one to the other, causing Gainesborough himself to create perfect caricatures of people he had never even met.

Gabriel rose shakily to her feet. Clutching the neck of the vase in her hand she raced from the bedroom, dashed up the stairs to the third floor, and down the hall to the guest bathroom.

She blinked for a moment at her image in the medicine cabinet mirror. Her hair fell in wild ringlets over her forehead. Her eyes were wet from crying and her nightgown was torn, revealing the curve of her left breast. Her disarray was artful, a heroine in a movie, and she allowed herself one moment of admiration, licking a finger and wiping a smudge of mascara from her cheek.

Then she swung the vase and her image shattered and she swung the vase again and it too exploded, sharp-edged pieces of clay tumbling into the sink.

A drop of blood fell onto the white porcelain, and Gabriel reached up and touched her forehead which was bleeding. She smiled, licked her finger, and reached toward the mirror. The envelope was there, where Marlin Tate had hidden it, and Gabriel yanked it out, tore it open, and emptied its contents into her hand.

She filled a plastic tumbler with tap water and counted the pills. Ten. The last of the Ecknazine. She threw the lot of them into her mouth, washing them down with the water, and then returned to her bedroom where she lay down on the wide, canopied bed.

All right
, she thought, closing her eyes. Where is my son?

Jeanne sat up in the bed and clicked the light on. Mark was leaning over her. He had the handcuffs again, and the playful smirk that accompanied these games. He was naked.

“Hey babe. You are under arrest,” he said. “House arrest.”

He had taken a shower and gargled something minty, but the primary effluvia was beer, and not the summer bouquet of a cold one being popped at a barbecue, but rather the dank, gut-puking reek of a cheap roadhouse.

Jeanne deftly slid out of bed. “Gotta go to the bathroom,” she said.

He caught her ankle; she wasn’t expecting it, and she fell forward instantly, the side of her face banging the bare carpet hard, her left hand coming up reflexively but not fast enough, twisting her wrist.

He helped her to her feet. “Sorry,” he said, wobbling slightly, the handcuffs stupidly waving in his hand, his lips puffed out in an expression of remorse that never seemed genuine, something learned as a child and dragged into adulthood.

She stared at him, rubbed the flame of her wrist, said okay or was about to say okay or it’s all right or any of the hundred things that came in the wake of Mark’s drunken moments. She said nothing, walked quickly by him and into the bathroom.

She sat on the toilet, urinated, considered crying but didn’t, discovered, indeed, that no profound emotion was under the surface of her disgust.

She went to the sink and splashed water in her face. There was a small thread of blood she could taste with her tongue, but she could detect no real damage. She thought that she might even have sex with Mark, sex being, after all, a pleasurable way of passing time. And time had to be passed.

Pass that time
, please.

Her reflection in the mirror showed a pale woman with tightly curled dark hair and large eyes, a woman who looked like she had intended to say something but had decided to let it go, had decided, in fact, that words were worthless, really. This woman turned away now, casting a cold, sad eye on the bathroom as though biding it farewell forever. And before Jeanne could do more than jerk back, startled by her reflection’s desertion, a hotel shimmered into being.

It was a large, pink hotel on the edge of the ocean, and she knew it immediately for the hotel of the enigmatic postcard. Jeanne watched as the doors to the hotel swung open and a tiny figure emerged. The figure paused for a moment and then skipped down the steps and ran across the dunes toward the water.

Amy. She was too far away for any feature to clearly identify her, but Jeanne knew it was Amy. She wore Amy’s green bathing suit. She ran, barefoot and wild, through the tide with Amy’s style, an off balance, clownish run. Her flying hair was Amy’s tangled summer mane.

Amy.

As Jeanne watched, the girl halted abruptly and looked up at the hotel. The stillness of her attitude suggested she was listening. The call must have come again. Amy turned and ran back toward the hotel, water exploding brightly under her feet.

Jeanne gasped. Amy, head down, racing full tilt, was rapidly closing the distance between herself and the hotel. Only the hotel had undergone a transformation.

The hotel was now bloodred and black, a mountain of sharp needle-spires and crenelated parapets and blind, ancient towers. The seagulls that had wheeled above the hotel had suffered a corresponding change, and now swooped through the air in batlike arcs, their long necks stretching and turning as they maintained their baleful scrutiny of the ground.

Jeanne recognized the world. She had never liked the book, perhaps because Harry had written it after Amy’s death and she knew it lacked real joy, but she had read it through. She recognized the castle and these airborne, fire-spitting serpents. The castle was more horrible, shimmering in the mirror, than it had ever been in the gaily drawn children’s book. It was palpably evil, nothing whimsical here, the kind of nightmare that would strengthen a suicide’s resolve.

Amy took the steps two at a time and ran toward the black, yawning doors.

“No!” Jeanne gasped. Too late. Amy leapt into the darkness and the vast doors swung shut.

Jeanne touched the mirror. And it was empty, a silvery surface that reflected nothing, not even her hand, nothing, a mirror that had gone blind somehow.

Jeanne turned away and stumbled out into the bedroom. She marched to the dresser, opened a drawer, and found a blouse.

“Hey,” Mark said. He grabbed her from behind. “It’s the dead of night. What are you getting dressed for?”

Jeanne struggled out of his grip, turned, holding the blouse. “I’ve got to get to the airport. I’ve— I can’t explain it, but I’ve got to go. I’ll call.”

“Fuck that.” His voice was suddenly cold, strange, something he’d been hiding. He hit her, a quick blow that caught the side of her face, sent her back against the dresser then tumbling forward. He caught her by the hair, dragged her to the bed.

He held her arms, pined under his knees.

She fought to get out from under him, considered sinking her teeth into his bare thigh. He spoke again. “I’m sorry, okay. I got a little out of control there, because”—she hated the way his voice shifted into a whine—”because there’s just no making you happy. It was an accident, okay. I didn’t mean to trip you, okay. But you never give, not even a little, you don’t try to understand me.”

The stale beer smell seemed the perfect olfactory accompaniment to self-pity.

“Okay,” Jeanne said. “Let’s just lie here for a little while, let’s just rest.” She realized he thought she had wanted to leave because she was mad at him for tripping her.

No, actually (she could say) I was inured to escalating violence. It was something else, a vision.

“Let’s just lie here quietly for a moment, okay. A little time out, okay?”

“Okay. Sure.”

He got off her arms and lay beside her. “I don’t ever mean to hurt you, babe. You know that.”

She lay quietly on her side, waiting, watching the bedside clock, listening to his breathing. Five after four. It took hours for the clock to read four-twenty.

The weight of the beer had pulled Mark down into sleep. She rolled away from his weight and softly left the bed.

She was tying her tennis shoes when she heard his voice. “Going somewhere, sweetheart? Thought you could cruise while I snooze?”

She looked up. “I’ve got to go, Mark. The phone’s right there. If you get lonesome, you can call a friend.”

“You’re not going anywhere,” he said and he started to come out of the bed in a rush and his left arm straightened and he screamed. He blinked stupidly at the silver bracelet around his wrist, its mate locked between rungs of the brass bed.

“I’ve got to run,” she said, and she left the bedroom, walked quickly across the living room to the door, and let herself out.

She locked the door and then she did, indeed, run, feeling a heady exhilaration that stayed with her on the cab trip to the airport and caused her to shout “Wonderful!” when the airline reservationist informed her that there was an available flight to St. Petersburg at six-fifteen that morning.

T
HE
S
T.
P
ETERSBURG
A
RMS
was large, pink, and in a state of genteel decay—as were its long-time inhabitants, elderly men and women who dressed rather formally and who sat, during the day, in folding chairs on the beach. Protected from the sun by large yellow umbrellas and layers of clothing, they regarded the ocean with weak but vigilant eyes, like the last of some religious sect, their faith failing with their memories, awaiting the fulfillment of some ancient prophecy.

Half a dozen of them were already turning away from the dying sun and following their long shadows back to the hotel, a journey of approximately fifty yards. One man passed them on his way to the ocean: a thin, brisk man wearing a white suit jacket, baggy pants (both articles of apparel so wrinkled as to suggest some personal antipathy toward ironing), and a Panama hat. He strode purposefully toward the waves. His feet were bare, and his right arm was held straight against his side (shoulder raised a bit, something military in his bearing) and in his right hand he held a small, dark revolver pointed at the sand.

The ocean was rough, the Gulf taunted by gusts of wind, and the man raised his arms, perhaps for balance, as he broached the first waves. He was up to his waist when a white-crested wave rocked him viciously so that he faltered and lost ground. He moved forward with new resolve, however, and stopped with the waters slapping his chest and raised the revolver, pointing it at his temple.

“Land,” a woman onshore said, leaning over to shout in her companion’s ear. “What on earth is he up to now?”

Years of watching television daytime soaps had created in the inhabitants of the St. Petersburg Arms a sense of themselves as passive observers, and not one of them thought of shouting out or acting upon what was happening. There was a sense of something unpleasant occurring, and were the scene in fact a television show it would have been summarily flipped, via the remote, to something nicer.

The man raised the gun and then the big brother to the wave that had rocked him came rushing up and swallowed him. The next wave spit the Panama hat into the air and that was the last of it. The ocean pretended that nothing had happened.

But someone had seen. Now someone shouted, and two young men, a lifeguard and a teenager who had been walking the beach with his dog, raced into the waves.

They were both fearless athletic swimmers, plunging headlong into waves and plowing the troughs with long, powerful strokes.

On the shore, the drama could be observed from a godlike vantage point that excluded the uglier elements of chaos and panic.

“Look there,” a man in a lawn chair said, pointing a liver-spotted finger. “He’s surfaced.”