Enigmatic Pilot (34 page)

He felt that the Quist leader had spoken correctly when he suggested that his fate was somehow linked to theirs. He did not know how that particular machine worked, but the coincidence could not be ignored. That was what had drawn him to the storehouse. He could not turn his back on the mystery now. He owed it to the monstrous twins. He owed it to the Quists—and to himself. While there was fear and skepticism in their faces, he sensed no ill will toward him. These people were not Spirosians or Vardogers, of that he was sure, and both St. Ives and Hattie had advised him to rely on his instincts in a pinch.

“All right,” he agreed. “But a curse on you all if you do not keep your word and try to abscond with what is not your own!”

He threw in this last pronouncement for theatrical flourish, remembering the professor—reasoning that such a ritually inclined people, so fervent in their devotion to things they obviously did not comprehend, might in the absence of any physical force he could offer be checked by superstition. His threat had the desired result. He could see it in the eyes around the circle, a response enhanced by a chance gust of wind that unnerved the candles and yet left the sheen of the Headstones unchanged.

“Go with haste and with care,” McGitney said, pointing to the heavy door. “We will keep our word, while you put your truth to the test. A boy your age alone at night in a place like this—you took risks of your own accord far greater than you face at our hands. But hurry now. For we
know
we are at risk.
There are folk about right now who want us gone—and others that would like to see us dead. It is not my intention to draw you into our tribulations. Go forth and return with speed.”

The two men McGitney had singled out to take charge of Lloyd donned trail-weary dust coats and escorted him outside with the aid of a small lantern. The night was mad with starlight, a buckshot blast of crystal, like some celestial analog of all the scattered souls and dreams below, the moon a distant glass globe full of cold white flame. Lloyd directed them back the way he had come. The going was easier this time, with the extra light and the knowledge of where he was going, but his heart beat faster, flanked as he was by two large unknown men (who had removed their turbans once outside). He wished Hattie were there to give him courage, but that would just have put her more in harm’s way.

There were low hints of mouth-organ music in the distance, and every so often the growling of dogs or the whine of tomcats, but other than that the town appeared to have folded in on itself at last. Lloyd led the men to the Clutters’ darkened place of dark business and whispered to them to wait while he went inside. The two Quists remained silent, and whether they trusted him or not they did not prevent him from entering the building on his own.

Everything was as he had left it. His parents were both sound asleep in their open coffins—his mother breathing deeply, his father snoring and farting, keeping alive the memory of their supper. It was hard to see, and with so many boxes and stuff to run into, it was a miracle he did not create a crashing confusion to wake the whole establishment. But he knew what he was looking for—his bag burrowed down on the other side of the container he had been assigned. By feel alone he probably would have been able to find it, but he was assisted by a telltale glow from within the bag. The sight drew his breath short. The Ambassadors’ box was indeed aglimmer just like the
Headstones! He removed it from the bag and held it aloft, marveling at how it seemed to project its carved message into the room. The aura it cast reminded him of countless visions he had had just upon falling asleep. The sight surprised him, for he had begun to form the view that the Headstones’ illumination may have been some kind of trick that McGitney had devised to wow his followers—although he could not account for it, or explain the surges in brightness that he seemed to stimulate.

Nevertheless, without having been able to examine the tablets himself, Lloyd had remained skeptical of any magical power. Now, with his own familiar box in hand and the same phenomenon manifest, he had to concede that there was indeed some force at work, a kind of energy he had never encountered before—save perhaps that night when he met Mother Tongue. It was the one thing he could liken this demonstration to—and it turned his mind back to his bag, where the other eye, the mate of the gift he had given Hattie, nestled in its protective rags. To his even greater astonishment, he now found that the eye had changed, too. Where before it had always felt cool if not cold to the touch, and was always dark unless he held it up to the light (which he had stopped doing because of the unsettling memories it provoked), it was this time quite definitely warm to the touch and lit from within, as if answering some call from the markings on the box.

Lloyd felt a deep, inner need to take the eye in hand. To fondle it. When he did, he found that it had gained in weight and was growing warmer. He wondered how it would react in the immediate presence of the Headstones. For the first time since he had given the other one to Hattie, he stared at it, as if he had never seen it before. Embedded deep inside the iris now, there appeared to be depth upon depth of shimmering layers, like a small golden-green tornado or some almost living mechanism—a minuscule self-illuminating creature, or a captured
strand of lightning. Lloyd could not be sure what it looked like, only that it seemed to look back at him, filling his head with a sublime radiance. He was suddenly intensely glad that he had given the mate to Hattie. His mate.

He might have stood there staring at the eye for quite a while longer, but Hephaestus gave out a grunt in his sleep and then there came a furtive tap on the glass of the window. The Quists were summoning him.

He slipped the eye into his pocket, feeling its cold-hot heat against his leg. For some reason, he felt he must keep it with him—that he needed it. Hattie’s skull fetish he tucked back into its protective rags with the precious communication from his uncle, which had set them out on their perilous flight in the first place. The box he wrapped in a piece of cloth from his bag and then he slipped out the door, restoring the darkness to his sleeping parents in their coffins.

He found that the men called Drucker and Soames were both wound very tight. They interrogated him by gesture when he emerged, and when he assented that he had what he had gone to get they set out again at a nervous pace. As silent as the two had been before, they were even more so now, listening with their whole bodies, as if something sinister had transpired while he was inside. He would have asked them what had happened to put them so on edge, but he felt certain they would just shush him up and hurry him along. Maybe there really were people out to get them, he thought, as they pigeon-stepped through the mud past the wagon lying on its hitch. It reminded him again that there may have been people out to get him, too. He did not know what to believe on that score, but the possibility niggled at him. The one called Soames appeared to flinch. Then Lloyd felt it, too. A sudden twinge of emergency. Footsteps—and some other sound. Then, from behind one of the buildings they had to walk between, a sharp bolt of lantern light stabbed out at them, creating a sudden infestation of shadows.

“Allo there, fine citizens!” a muffled man’s voice accosted them, and before they knew it as many as eight other men had stepped out from behind the other building. Some of them wore gunnysacks with eye slits cut into them pulled over their heads, which made them look particularly menacing in the moonfall. Others had dirty hats tugged down low with bandannas to hide their faces.

The man with the lantern, who sported two large dueling pistols in his belt, had on the kind of netted hat Lloyd had seen on beekeepers, which seemed especially malignant. He was tall, and his clothes were cleaner and more expensive than the others’. All the other ruffians were armed in some way: hickory ax handles, fence pickets, crowbars. One very large man in the back stood poised with a hay tine. A short, stinking torch was lit from the lantern, the spookish light wavering over the timbers of the wall.

Drucker and Soames stepped forward, putting themselves between Lloyd and the men, but the tall one in the beekeeper’s hat just laughed. What would Hattie have said? What would she do now? Captain of dark crossroads. She might have fled—but, like St. Ives, she was a game one with a bluff, too. Despite the acid burning in his stomach and his heart thumping against his rib cage, he could feel Mother Tongue’s eye in his pocket becoming both hotter and colder all at once. He sneaked his hand into his britches, gripping the orb for comfort.

“Stand aside,” Soames instructed the assembled host.

“Peace, citizens!” the netted hat replied, in a voice that reminded Lloyd of a rat in a gutter full of leaves. “We mean no harm. I swear it! Unless, of course, by some chance you happen to be religious fanatics bent on preaching your degenerate ways … fouling the waters of our fair community and taking liberties with our laws that the one true God will not tolerate. You wouldn’t be such vermin as that, would you?”

“Let us pass,” Drucker demanded, balling up a butcher-size fist in spite of his common sense and the hopeless mismatch.

“Oh, yes, boys!” joked the man in the netted hat to his brethren. “We’ll let them pass, all right! Won’t we?”

Despicable hoots of amusement rose from the shadowed figures beside him. The torch swooshed in the air, leaving an angry tattoo in the dark for a second.

“We’ll let you pass from this point right here into the pit of hell, you swine. We know who you are. Meddling in matters that don’t concern you, infecting communities wherever you go!”

Drucker and Soames now both pulled cudgels from beneath their dust coats. Lloyd grew truly frightened. It made no difference that he was not a Quist—he was in their company, this was his fight, too. And they were faced with overwhelming odds, from the lanky sneering coward in the beekeeper’s hat to the giant in the rear with the long hayfork. For a moment, Lloyd considered making a run for it. Just leave the Quist men to their fate and flee back to the Clutters’. With any luck, he would not be pursued. Hopefully, no one would see through which door he vanished. He would make it hard for any of these villains to recognize him again. By morning the horror would be over—one way or another. But his blood boiled at the thought of what that might mean. Somehow they had to get word to the others. They had to warn the Quists of the impending assault. He could not be party to any more loss of life if he could help it.

“I’ll tell you what,” the beekeeper mused. “I see you have a boy with you. No doubt you don’t want him hurt. What say you give us McGitney—take us to the others and we’ll let you go. I swear on the real Bible. You will go free.”

Drucker spat in the mud. “You’ll need a lot more than this ragtag posse a yourn.”

“Oh, we have more coming,” the vigilante leader replied. “Rest assured. Give up the others and you can save yourselves—and the boy.”

“No!” Lloyd cried, and pushed forward holding the Ambassadors’
box before him like a charm, his other hand still plunged inside his pocket, grasping the artificial eye. These men confronting them now were not Vardogers or Spirosians. They were just brutal, and perhaps as stupid as they looked.

The sight of the box with the luminous engravings startled them, but not as much as Lloyd had hoped, even when the etched symbols seemed to project out across their bodies and covered faces. Deftly, he spun the box around, making the figures whirl about like subtle, intelligent fire. The torch that one of the hooded men held seemed so primitive and clumsy by comparison.

“Eh, what’s this now? Some trick?” one of the sack-hooded men growled.

“Keep back!” Drucker yelled, hoisting his cudgel.

“We’ll take that bauble,” the beekeeper drawled. “Then you’ll take us to the others. They’re not far from here, we know. You can’t save them, but you can save yourselves. There’s tar and feathers and a nice oak tree on the edge of town otherwise. Or maybe we’ll burn ’em out!”

The gang cheered at this, and Lloyd thought the noise might draw some assistance. Then he realized that it was quite possible that these men were not mere outlaws and oafs but prominent local residents, ashamed or afraid in some way, yes, otherwise they would not be hiding their faces, but nevertheless doing the dirty work of the community by some after-midnight agreement.

Shades of Zanesville. Mob scenes from across America. The stories St. Ives and Hattie had told him of lynchings and castrations. The oppression he himself had felt too many times before. Scenes of every intimidation and assault he had ever endured flashed through his mind, swelling the impotent rage within him as he gripped the false eye of Mother Tongue ever tighter. He felt it burning now, so hot had his hand become—surely that was it. But why did it seem to throb, pulsing in time with the juice that slopped in the pit of his stomach and the
white-hot hatred that scorched his forehead? He glanced down at his pocket and saw to his disbelief that the eye was shining through his hand, through the cloth, radiating up his arm as if the light and heat could not be contained.

“You’ll get naught out of us, you cur!” Soames snarled, plunging forward to strike the first blow.

The diabolical beekeeper drew one of his pistols and pointed it at Soames’s chest.

“Stop!” Lloyd shouted, and held above his head what was no longer an eye but the Eye. The Eye of his Storm.

The vigilantes gasped, for the brightness was so intense. Hotter and harsher than Greek fire or the silver rush of Chinese rockets. The Ambassadors’ box burned with a pale-green surrounding haze—but Mother Tongue’s Eye could not be looked at, it was so fiercely alight. Some of the men in the gang tried to cover their faces, as the baffled beekeeper man cocked and fired his pistol at Soames, but wide. Drucker ducked, shielding himself from the light the boy had produced from his pocket and trying to skirt the shot from the gun barrel. Soames dived forward, seeking to cudgel the hand that held the firearm, and lost his footing in the mud. Lloyd stood firm, one hand clutching the Ambassadors’ box, the other the Eye, whose rippling green electric flame he could feel racing through his nerves and then out into the dark like a jetted breath of deadly starlight.