Ash Wednesday (31 page)

Fred
Hibbs
stared down at his soiled plate. "Jeez, I hate it here."

"Why don't ya go?"

"Go where? Got no relatives. All I
got's
my daddy's house."

"Sell it."

Hibbs
grunted. "I can see you ain't been talking to no realtors lately. Nobody's sold a house here since
this's
all started. "

"Been renting some," Jake said.

"Oh, sure, to them scientists and such. But now most of them are
pullin
' out. I talked to
Melva
Dupes about
sellin
' my place, and she told me no way. Said
Merridale's
just another—what'd she call it—Love Channel or something."

"Love
Canal
," said Jake. "Where they dumped those chemicals."

"Yeah. Love
Channel's
a pussy." Eddie raised an eyebrow. "Sorry,
Jakie
."

Jake blushed pleasantly, said, "You're a dirty old man, Eddie," and disappeared into the kitchen with Fred
Hibbs's
empty plate.

The two men sat for a while without speaking, and then Eddie said, "You still seeing your parents?"

Hibbs
shook his head. "I put . . . like sheets of cardboard around 'em. But I know they're there."

"Really bothers you, huh?"

"Wouldn't it you?"

Eddie shrugged. "My folks weren't from around here. Never got married, nor nobody ever lived with me. Folks lived there before moved away." He sighed. "I got
nobody
in
my
house.
Lotsa
old friends though. All around town. I can see
them
a whole lot better now, if only people didn't keep
tryin
' to hide them."

"You're crazy, Eddie, you know that?"

"Crazy, huh? You just remember who seen 'em first, son. You remember
that
." He dropped the final piece of doughnut into the coffee and wolfed it down, licking a crumb from his wrinkled lips before bending them in a smile.

"I may be crazy, but I ain't scared."

~*~

While Eddie Karl was finishing his breakfast, Tom Markley was pushing open the door of his sporting goods store on High Street, noticing as he did that it was empty as usual. Max Douglas, his only remaining salesman, sat behind the counter reading a paperback Executioner novel, which he tried to hide when he saw Markley enter. Markley pretended not to notice. He was past caring. "Anything?"

"Cy Holland was in, bought a headband. He and his family's going skiing for two weeks over Christmas. I think they just want to—" He stopped as Markley held up his hand.

"Take an early lunch, huh?" Markley said. "Be back around noon or so."

"Sure, Tom. Whatever." Max bundled up and left the store.

Alone, Markley looked at the single bill of sale registered that morning. A headband. A four-fucking-ninety-five headband. The Friday before Christmas, and a total of five bucks. It was enough to make a body sick.

Markley ripped off his bifocals and looked around his empty store. Empty? Not quite. In one way it was full—full of merchandise that sat and sat and sat waiting for someone to come in and buy it. He kicked the side of the counter savagely, doing more harm to his foot than to the sturdy wood, but it helped nonetheless.

God
damn
Clyde Thornton, he thought. It was Thornton who was responsible, Thornton up there in Ted
Bashore's
big house, rented for a pittance because rich old Ted couldn't bear to
sell
it, oh, no, not even if he could have found a buyer, but he could afford to
run
, couldn't he? Off to goddamn
Florida
for a few months until this unpleasantness clears up. Sure, that's what
everybody
with money does—runs away. Doesn't matter if their town goes down the toilet, that there's no money left to keep the merchants in business.

Why doesn't Thornton find something? That's what he's here for! Markley was starting to think maybe Thornton really didn't
want
to. Maybe he liked being the big man too much. Markley shook his head and jammed a Camel in his mouth. Not only was his business shit, he was barely even mayor anymore. At the town meetings everyone deferred to
Thornton
; everyone asked
Thornton
questions. And Thornton would smile and be gracious, while never saying a goddamn thing, and would refer to Markley as "Mr. Mayor," while wearing a smirk broad enough to tell the whole town that "Mr. Mayor" meant absolutely nothing in his scheme of things.

That thinly veiled contempt had begun to spread, touching the rest of the town, so that when before people had smiled, had helloed, had stopped to chat with the mayor, now they only nodded and walked on, the ends of their mouths twitching skyward in a vague memory of warmth toward this man who was now an impotent fool, who could only say, "I don't know," when they asked their questions. Thornton would never say that. Instead it was always, "We've thought of that possibility and are looking into it at this time. We'll inform you as soon as we learn anything definite." Or maybe, "Our investigations have so far not disproved those possibilities, but we can't make a positive statement yet." Or, "No, radioactivity cannot be ruled out as a possible source for the phenomenon, although it seems highly doubtful," and, "Chemicals, combined with the precise amount of wind or underground stream activity, are a somewhat remote possible source, but we're not ruling anything out yet."

Tom Markley would sit there fuming, wanting to stand up and yell at Thornton to cut the bullshit and confess that he didn't know any more than anybody else. But he didn't. He was afraid to, afraid that the people of Merridale would interpret his outbreak as jealousy and think even less of him than they already did. God, but it was a lot of crap to put up with for a token $500 a year.

What was happening with
Mim
didn't make it any easier. Of all the things he did not understand, Tom Markley understood that least of all. Miriam, his wife of thirty—what was it?—thirty-six years, and rock-steady all through them. When he was in Korea and she had to have Katy on her own, when he quit his job at
Shaub's
in Lansford to go into business for himself, when he had his operation and she had to handle the store and the books for a month and a half because he didn't trust his clerks to, she'd been as strong and supportive as he'd ever hoped a woman would be. But lately, in just the past few weeks, she'd been strangely aloof, only half listening to what he was saying. Last weekend, too, they hadn't made love.

It was that which hurt him the most. Rejection did not come easy to him, nor did failure. And he knew somehow that he
had
failed with Merridale, and with
Mim
. Their relationship, like the town itself, was deteriorating, small pieces of it being eaten away. He wished that none of this had ever happened, that the ghosts and the TV crews and Clyde Thornton had never set foot in Merridale.

~*~

Clyde Thornton, on the other hand, was delighted with his lot. From his first fearful doubts about what he would do and find in the town, he had fallen comfortably into his role of media hero, guru, and surrogate mayor. People finally realized who he was, knew what he did, even if, up to this point, he had done nothing but stonewall. But hell, people were used to that, used to getting no answers, only verbal disguises that reassured while they confused.

There were side benefits too. The recognition was damn nice—the sense of being someone important, someone looked up to. It was
him
the people listened to at the town meetings, not the mayor or the police chief. It was
him
the TV cameras were on, him the reporters wanted to talk to. Maybe there weren't as many now as when it started, but there were enough. Besides, fewer reporters meant fewer eyes to see things that shouldn't necessarily be seen.

Ted
Bashore's
house had been a godsend for purposes of secrecy.
Bashore
had practically forced it on Thornton. It was a huge, three-story colonial with two large wings, one of which Thornton occupied, and the other of which was shared by Jackson and Pruett, who had turned the large recreation room in the basement into a laboratory, where they continued to poke and probe, checking water, air, and soil samples until Thornton wondered if they were really humans or just cleverly disguised androids. The agency was happy to pay Ted
Bashore's
account $300 a month rather than the $700 they'd been paying the Lansford Holiday Inn, and Thornton was happy to finally have a residence private enough to entertain some of the women who'd been yapping at his heels.

The first one he'd taken back had been a thin, wiry blonde in her late thirties whom he'd met in a cocktail lounge. Her first words to him were, "Hey, you're a lot better looking in person than you are on TV." He'd bought her a drink, unable to keep his eyes off the spots on her leotard top where her nipples pushed out the fabric like rounded buttons. He could have sworn that they were growing larger as he watched, and she proved later that their propensity for rapid change was no illusion.

She'd balled him silly, worn him out fast, and if she hadn't come, he hadn't been aware of it. To his delight and slight embarrassment, she seemed to be in a constant orgasmic state from the time they got in his rented Fairmont to when he drove her home just before sunrise. It was as though just being with him excited her, and he realized later that it wasn't he who thrilled her, not his kisses, or his fingers, or his cock, but rather his
image
, the one on the TV screens and magazine covers, that she'd been fucking. And he thought, quite rightly, that there must be other women like this.

He found them readily enough. They'd been there all along, smiling and teasing, but before the blonde he'd made no reprisals owing to the simple fact that even if they were serious, he was too recognizable to be seen leading a woman to a motel room that opened directly on a crowded and well-lit parking lot. But Ted
Bashore's
house changed things. There was no one to see him drive the women off the main road and down the tree-lined private lane, no one to watch as they got out of the car and went inside, and no one to watch what followed. Oh, one or two of the girls had run into Jackson or Pruett the next morning in the kitchen, but the scientists were circumspect.

The big benefit of this whole trip however, the
crème de la crème
of benefits, far above media exposure or free and eager sex, was the financial arrangements he'd made. Not that
he
had gone to any great effort to make them; rather they had fallen into his lap like ripe plums, dark and juicy with promise. The man had not given Thornton his name when he called. It had been late at night and Thornton had been alone in the house.

"Dr. Clyde Thornton?"

"Yes?"

"Dr. Thornton, I believe I have a proposition that might interest you."

"Yes?"

“I represent a coalition of people who call themselves Friends of
TriCounty
Power."

"Never heard of it."

"It's a very exclusive group. Private."

"So what can I do for you?"

"A great deal. A man with your influence could be very helpful to us."

"Look, I don't know what you're driving at, but—”

“There's no tap."

"What?"

"I just wanted to let you know that there is no tap on the phone, so we can speak freely."

"Hey. If you're talking about what I think you're—"

"I'll tell you what I'm talking about, Dr. Thornton. I'm talking about your trading your help for our money. That's it in a nutshell. We wouldn't ask you to withhold any information that posed a real threat to the public . . . not a
real
threat. But we
would
hope to be informed first. We would simply like a bit of heat taken off of us and perhaps put elsewhere. "