Apocalypse (24 page)

He saw her shrink, trying to cower into her useless scrap of nightgown—but then, as if knocking her down with one hand and picking her up with the other, he lifted her head again with a sudden smile. He knew how to do that, smile. He could show his teeth as well as anyone.

“Tell you what,” he said. “I've got an idea how we can do this. I finally found something that really turns me on.” His smile broadened, became a boyish grin, but his voice turned knife hard, honed to stab. “You go into the bathroom and run yourself a tub of cold water and soak in it for fifteen, twenty minutes. Then come back out here and just lie real still.”

He watched it hit her, watched it all become clear in her ever-so-intellectual mind. Watched the horror take her face, gape her mouth, she could not speak, she could not yet breathe—and he twisted the knife.

“You got any soft little baby blankets left around here? We'll cover you with one. Lay it on you in pretty folds. I can't do it as well as Barry Beal, but it doesn't have to be perfect. It'll just get messed up again when I lift it.”

She scrambled back from him, spiderlike on the bed, her adrenaline surge giving her back her breath, her voice. Though the voice spasmed in her throat. “Oh. Oh. You. You—you beast!”

“Right,” said Mark, and he started to take off his trousers.

Cally plunged off the bed, banging her emaciated knees on the floor, then found her feet and scuttled from closet to dresser, snatching clothing, clutching it against her half-naked, famished chest. Mark, hanging his trousers, stood in her way and laughed at her as she hesitated to come near him, to push past him.

“You were right, you know,” he told her. “This town is going down the tubes. Bears burning on the water tower, crazy bimbo preaching in the park, dead babies coming back as bugs, and now there's a beast. It all goes to prove you were right. I admit you were right. We've got nothing to argue about any more.”

“Get out of my way,” Cally ordered in the same strangled tone, as if her own fury was a noose around her throat, turning her face red and threatening to kill her. Mark winced and pouted in mock pathos.

“You don't approve of the beast?”

“Go to hell.” Goaded into courage, Cally reached past him to claw her jeans from their hanger. The movement pressed her against him, against the good smell of his tee-shirted neck and shoulders. If he tried to grab her … but his hands did not lift. He stood laughing deep in his chest as she turned and ran into the bathroom to dress where he could not see her. Even above the sound of his own stony mirth he heard the cold-metal sound of the bolt sliding shut.

He followed and stood outside the door, still laughing to make sure she heard him there. She was no longer entirely terrified of him, just wildly angry. He knew what would have thrilled and terrified her: if, after all, he had wanted her. But he preferred her anger. Standing there in his jockey briefs, he preferred to show her what she could plainly see: that even a corpse had roused him more than she.

Bolt slid again, door opened, she stood there clothed, the slim-cut jeans baggy on her, hanging in folds from her protuberant hipbones. Seemed like she was going to turn into an old bag, a craggy-hipped cow, no matter what she did. And too intent on herself to know it.

She said as if she expected him to care, “I'm getting out of here.”

“Where? Going home to Mummy?”

“None of your business.” She scurried circles around his large, half-naked presence in the bedroom, slamming things into a suitcase. A sizable suitcase, but not nearly large enough to hold all the baggage she was going to have to take with her. And she was in a wild hurry, and everything she laid hold of, panties, dreams, shirts and jeans and pain, makeup, break-up, purse and money and memories, they all went in jumbled, confused. Mark knew smugly that she was going to have a mess to sort out and clean up later. When the suitcase was only approximately full, Cally closed it.

“Here,” said Mark with exaggerated solicitude, “let me help you carry that. Wisp like you, arms like spaghetti noodles, you can't possibly handle—”

She glared, silencing him—she almost frightened him. Her set teeth between thin, thin lips gave her the look of a death's head, spectral. But she was too much in a rush and tumult to notice how Mark blinked; she snatched up the suitcase, heaved and blundered it out to the door and into the car, an ant carrying away what was left of the picnic. It was in fact very nearly too heavy for her.

“Toodle-loo!” Mark stood on the front lawn in his underwear and waved as she drove away.

“What I mean,” said Borough Council President Wozny, “we've got to do something.”

Since the animal-burning incident the night before he had called yet another emergency council meeting. Though nebulous council opinion had long since condensed into a consensus: no longer was it a question of whether there might possibly be a witch. Instead, it was a matter of eradicating the obviously extant witch.

Everyone sitting in the room knew, without Gerald Wozny's needing to stick his neck out and say it, what he meant by “do something.” Ahira had been proselytizing and healing in the town park three or four times a week, and the council members had their informants; the number of her band of misfits had steadily grown, including even the “woodchucks,” the people who lived in holes and were scared of shadows, from the mountains surrounding the town. People like Bud Zankowski, the crazy coal mine hermit, and the otherwise-nameless Bicycle Man, who rode his eponymous vehicle from house to house sharpening knives and scissors, who slept no one knew where, somewhere so far back in the woods even the deer hunters hadn't found it. And who was rumored to be a rapist, kidnapper and child molester. These were the sorts of people Ahira attracted. The Hoadley majority, who liked their religion served with coffee and doughnuts, looked on with a queasy, motion-sick sense of indecency at what Ahira was doing, rather as if they were seeing their town roll over like a shit-eating coon hound and show its verminous underbelly and spraddle its legs. Ahira's band of followers had passed the five hundred mark and was creeping toward the ominous six-six-six. Ahira had to go.

And every day the cicadas wailed.

“Reverent Berkey and Father Leopold don't want no more to do with it,” President Wozny admitted. “It” being the silencing of Ahira. He would have said more, something inspiring about the secular leaders of the community taking upon themselves the threats facing the community, but he didn't like the way the council secretary was looking at him through her aliform glasses. The woman lived to contradict him.

“Something you want to say, Zephyr?” he inquired with a show of resignation.

She laid down her notebook on the table in front of her and crossed her hands atop it; the nails were enameled into blood-red bone-hard spear points much the same shape as her glasses. “I been doing some checking,” she said. “And what I say, that Ahira ain't your witch at all.” Zephyr paused, waiting for prompting from another council member. It would have been immodest for her to continue without urging. Reluctantly Wozny provided it.

“How come not?”

“She ain't from around here. Ain't none of us never seed her before. The 'cyclopedia says a witch is somebody from close at hand.” Zephyr produced a tiny fold of tablet paper from her purse, displaying it as proof of research done, though she did not open it. “It says this here kind of town is perfect for a witch. Any kind of backwater. Places where people just stay, got to put up with each other, one of them gets to be a witch. So what the 'cyclopedia says,”—Zephyr took care to cite opinion greater than her own, authority of Right Here In Black And White potency—“the witch is somebody we knowed from little on up, somebody we'd look right past. Somebody that's got a secret, somebody—” Zephyr affected a delicate hesitation, but her eyes glinted salaciously behind her rhinestoned glasses. “Somebody different, been hiding it. Light in their loafers, what I mean.”

The other female council member pressed for a clarification of terms. “You mean somebody what's a sissy, like?”

Tapping at her evidence, Zephyr came right out with it: “Says in here witchcraft's got to do with all them wrong kinds of—sex.” On the significant word her voice dropped to a nasal leer. Measuring the reaction, she allowed herself satisfaction. Even Gerald Wozny was listening with greatest interest. A well-done presentation, she knew, really very well done.

The council indulged in a murmur of scandalized appreciation for a moment, until its blunt old German member brought it back to business. “Don't make no sense to me,” he complained. “Didn't none of this here locusts and stuff start until after that Ahira come.”

“That's what I say,” Wozny declared. But then he hastily mollified the opposition by adding, “Maybe this Ahira's funny and we don't know about it.” And at once, like any well-fed herd animal, the Council was off on the enticing scent of deviant sexual practices.

“What about that one the cops found the other night?”

“Oh, Norma Koontz! Musser. Wasn't that something? But there ain't no harm in Norma.”

“What about that there fellow rides a bicycle, rings the bell at the children? I always did say—”

“I got a better one than that for you,” said Zephyr. She kept her voice suggestively low, and the council came to immediate attention.

Zephyr had been doing some checking other than in the encyclopedia. She started, as Hoadley storytellers generally did, at the outer rim of the topic, spiraling in toward the center. “Do you remember old man Witherow? Lived up Olp's Dam Hollow.”

Some of those present remembered him.

“Had a daughter Blanche, run away with a fellow from Hoople. Remember? Then she come back, had a baby, finally married a Wertz.” The Wertzes were a solid, unassuming Hoadley family, Catholics turned Lutheran because of a mixed marriage. “Todd Wertz. And he adopted the baby.”

Nods. “It was a boy,” volunteered the other female council member—women were in charge of keeping track of these things. Men participated in gossip, but women were in charge, the guardians and promulgators of Hoadley's values. “Their oldest. Peter Wertz.” Her eyes took on a deep look as she dredged memory. “Seems to me he didn't do too well.”

“I remember that boy,” a man offered. “He was one of them didn't—didn't—he didn't do sports, or—”

“He didn't fit in,” said Zephyr smoothly, “and he went away.”

“To California!” The other woman pounced into the center of this circling dance, the nugget of information like a trophy between her teeth, a mouse in a cat's mouth. “He was one of them hippies, like.”

“Sure,” said Gerald Wozny. “I know his father at work. He says they don't know what become of him. Don't never hear from him no more.” This statement caused shock and smug pity for the parents; it was an unaccountable thing, such an ungrateful child.

“Well, I know a woman knows his mother,” said Zephyr, “and I just today found something out.”

Council gave her its most interested attention. Once again she prolonged the suspense by starting roundabout and spiraling in.

“You know how them pesky bugs are getting on everybody's nerves?” she asked rhetorically. “Well, they work on Mrs. Wertz something awful. Seems like she hears them reproaching her. And she got to crying and went and told her neighbor lady something she hadn't never told nobody.”

Zephyr paused until urged to go on.

“They hear from Peter all right,” she said finally. “They heard he had him one of them sex change operations.”

A gratifying hubbub followed this statement. Zephyr, with a seasoned performer's sense of timing, waited (thinly smiling) to cap the story, to put the icing on the cake. And Wozny, of all people, served as her foil.

“What's all this got to do with anything?” he demanded, irritated that she had created such a sensation, suddenly aware that the council meeting had gotten out of his control. And Zephyr leaned forward, her spear-tipped fingers tapping and crawling on the tabletop, and opened her mouth, and spake.

“Why, what it's got to do is that this here Peter Wertz ain't in California at all.” A pause, sufficient for effect but not allowing for interruption. “He's back here, he's right outside of town, only he's a woman now. And he lives with another woman.”

Uproar, topped by a common-sense blast from the German farmer. “Why, then what the hun did he have the operation for?”

That no-nonsense question went unanswered, because Wozny, along with half a dozen other council members, was clamoring for the culprit's name.

“Well, he changed his name,” said Zephyr with tantalizing slowness.

“We can figure that!” the other female council member snapped.

“Uses his real father's last name,” Zephyr divulged at last. “Danyo. Shirley Danyo, he calls himself now.”

Go home to Mummy? Not hardly. It was in fact the last place in the world Cally wanted to be, with her indifferent, ever-preoccupied mother, even if Owen and Tammy had not been there to ask questions, which they were. She would go—she would go where her heart was: where her horse was. And where her friend was, her big-voiced, generous friend, the only person she could think of who seemed to like her just as she was, for herself, and not want anything of her, and not tangle her in any of the complicated meshes of sex and love and duty and role. And she would keep it from Mark as long as she could, where she was going. When he found out he would make something dirty of it somehow. Hoadley would make something dirty of it somehow. She sensed that.

A good thing it was so late, very little traffic on the roads, because she could not seem to help driving like a crazy woman.… Cally started to sob and drove more recklessly than ever.

Down, down, screeching around the sharp curve and rocketing through the single-lane stone railroad underpass, the dark and dripping tunnel … Around the hairpin bend and up the steep hill beyond. The night, the road were a mine tunnel flooded with stagnant tears. Tarry pavement melted seamlessly into dark forest unseen against a soft-coal sky. Headlights lit only blackness. Behind them, Cally jockeyed over the steering wheel and pressed, forcing her puny way over the hill and down again, down, down into the pregnant depths at an unreasonable rate of speed.