HELLz BELLz (21 page)

They went through the house, closing and locking the windows. They met in the living room and Joe shut the last one. Suzie stepped up behind him and encircled his waist with her arms. He felt her breasts against the small of his back. Her hand slipped inside the waist of his pants. She cooed.

“It’s the bell,” he whispered. “Doing it again.”

She rested her face between his shoulder blades and said, “Um-hm.”

“We can’t. Not now.”

“Then when?”

“You know what I mean.” He turned around. She held on and buried her face in his chest. His fledgling erection pushed against her abdomen. She said, “He’s got the right idea, even if you don’t.” Then she put her hand there and began to massage it through his pants.

“John’ll be out any minute,” he said in weak protest.

“Maybe he likes to watch.”

Her fingers began to squeeze him. He didn’t want her to stop.

John came up the hallway reciting Poe in his sonorous voice:

Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,

To the throbbing of the bells—

Of the bells, bells, bells;

Keeping time, time, time,

As he knells, knells, knells,

In happy Runic rhyme,

To the rolling of the bells—

Of the bells, bells, bells—

Joe pushed her away and dropped his hands over his burgeoning crotch. Suzie flashed a lascivious smile.

Woolrich came into the room, smiling. “Had to learn that entire poem in high school. Old Poe was onto something, don’t you think?”

Pleased with himself, he recited a few more lines:

They are neither man nor woman—

They are neither brute nor human—

They are Ghouls:

And their king it is who tolls;

And he rolls, rolls, rolls,

A paean from the bells!

“Or something like that,” he said in conclusion.

“Very nice, John,” said Joe. “Can we get going now?”

“If we’re the ghouls, who’s our king?” Suzie wanted to know. Joe saw she was very serious.

“It’s just a poem,” he said. “Don’t take it to heart.”

“It’s a fair question,” said Woolrich in his lecturer’s voice. “In a very real sense, we
are
ghouls. The only living creatures with enough self-awareness to understand we’re going to die. A very ghoulish prospect, don’t you agree?”

“I never thought about it like that,” she said, looking at the retired professor with new respect.

“As to your astute query, I’d say the king, in our case, is either God or Death. Now, I’m not entirely convinced of God’s existence, but we know without doubt that Death waits at the end of each and every life, do we not?”

“That’s right,” she conceded with an awed expression.

Joe said, “You can have this discussion on the road. We have to get moving.”

“You’re always ready to turn tail and run, aren’t you, Joe.” The way she said it, it wasn’t a question.

Joe wondered why she was suddenly turning on him. Was it because he’d just brushed off her amorous advances? Was the bell again bringing her underlying hostilities to the surface? Maybe she was the type who craved chaotic relationships and was trying to fit him into the surly role Gary had played until somebody gave the bum the ultimate flattop haircut.

“Why is that, Joe?” She put her hands on her hips and stuck her chest out. She was baiting him, intent on drawing him into some sort of showdown.

“Get off my back, will ya?” he said.

Having lost his audience, Woolrich drifted into the kitchen and began rummaging through the fridge.

“You think you’re better than Joe Six-pack because you own a bookstore? I think you’re Joe Chickenshit, always ready to run for the hills. No wonder your wife dumped you on the side of the road. I mean, she is a bitch and all, but still…”

“I think you’re fishing for a fight, but I’m not taking the bait.”

“Joe Blow Chickenshit. Lost his wife and his gun, now he wants to run.”

Joe balled his fists. “All right, you tell me then, what should we do? Give in to our violent urges and go on a killing spree like half the town? Is that what you want? End up like your boyfriend? Would that make you happy?”

“No that’s not what I want,” she said, indignant. “Instead of running from the fucking bell, why don’t we blow it up or knock it down? Jesus, it’s only a bell. I thought you were a fighter.”

Woolrich ambled in from the kitchen with a carton of orange juice in his hand. “She has a point, you know,” he said. “If the bell is the source of all the trouble, why not just put it out of commission?”

“With what? You just happen to have some dynamite lying around the house?”

“No, of course not.” Woolrich stroked his chin whiskers. “But I think I know where to find a wrecking-ball rig. Remember the Murdoch Building? They started the demolition a couple of days ago. Why couldn’t we commandeer a bit of their heavy equipment and knock that devil bell down?”

“Hell yeah,” Suzie said with a sudden grin. “Knock the sonofabitch down and smash it to smithereens. I like the way you think, Professor. Not like some men I know.” She cut her eyes at Joe.

Joe scoffed, “When was the last time you operated a wrecking-ball rig, John?”

“How hard can it be? Surely, with our combined intelligence we could figure it out.”

“You think they just leave the keys in those things?”

“I can hot-wire it,” said Suzie. “Probably.”

Joe pulled out the pack of cigarettes and lit one. He shook one out for Suzie: a peace offering. She accepted it and let him light it for her. Woolrich took a big pull from the carton of juice, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

Blowing smoke toward the ceiling, Joe said, “I guess it’s not such a crazy idea. I would like to knock the son of a bitch down.”

Suzie graced him with a victor’s smile.

“But we’ll be taking a big risk,” he added. “Getting that close to the bell could play hell with our heads.”

“What’s life without taking a few risks?” Suzie sucked on her smoke and winked an eye.

“What, indeed,” said Woolrich, grinning at her breasts.

“All right,” Joe relented, “I’m game.”

Woolrich added, “If it’s God’s will, we just might succeed. If not, we’ll just be spinning our wheels. If there even
is
a God. Either way, it should be most interesting.”

She held the gun in her lap and stared through the windshield at the rippling street. Something
was
under there. The streets and the houses and the trees were not real. They were nothing but a three-dimensional illusion to be ripped away like a painted curtain whenever the creator of the illusion wanted to reveal what was really there at the heart of reality. Sara knew now she had lived her whole life in this illusion but now she was ready to see behind the curtain. Those things had slipped into her eyes to eat away her false vision so she could see what the world really was. They hadn’t come to eat her soul. They were here to show her the true workings of the universe.

She giggled. At such moments, there was nothing to do but laugh at your own ignorance and at your own sad foibles. There would be no phony Oz behind the curtain. She wouldn’t wake up like Dorothy in her own bed to discover she’d only been dreaming. No. This was no dream. Life was the dream. This was something else, something beyond life and death. When the moment of truth came, she would find herself in the shadowy realm of the soul, at the very heart of existence. Then all her worries would be gone. And she would come face to face with God.

Something moved down at the end of the street. A shadow. A man? A curtain-lurker? Another lost soul, most likely. One who was not ready for what was about to be revealed. One who found only confusion in the divine music of the bell. Another heathen, given to violent impulses like those poor souls she’d seen on the baseball diamond. If he interfered with her impending enlightenment, she would dispatch him with the gun. Her new vision would cut through the darkness like a gleaming diamond of truth. She was one of the chosen ones now.

She raised Joseph’s pistol from her lap and propped her wrist on the steering wheel so the gun was pointing at the approaching shadow. The windshield glass rippled like water. A pity Joseph wasn’t here to share the miracle with her. He wasn’t really a bad man. He was just another lost soul too caught up in life’s illusion to have a clue as to what was coming. No, it was best he wasn’t here. He would just get in her way with all the emotional baggage accumulated over the years of their illusory life together. Leaving him at gunpoint had been the right thing to do. No regrets.

Sara watched the approaching shadow grow larger beyond the end of the gun barrel.

The tolling of the iron bell resonated deep within her soul.

She understood that this was but a prelude to the full symphony, and that she soon would be hearing the true music of the spheres.

* * *

The black van crashed into the front of the BP station in an explosion of glass and didn’t stop rolling until it plowed into an island of canned foods and sundries. Josh ran after it like a hunter hot on the trail of wounded prey.

Jesus was sprawled on his back, his bare legs sticking out of the pink toga like spindly sticks sprouting curly hair. James squatted beside him, his rifle laid across his bent knee. “Hey, are you all right?” asked James.

Jesus opened his eyes. Angry fire burned within the blue orbs. James didn’t get the impression that the Savior was thinking of turning the other cheek. He appeared ready to call down lightning bolts on the van of tattooed freaks. But Josh beat him to the punch.

Another blast from the shotgun knocked two of the naked freaks back into the van as soon as they opened the side door. Josh hooted his New Englander’s version of a rebel yell and leveled another blast into the van.
Like shooting fish in a barrel
flashed through James’s mind. “
Jesus,”
he said. Then he said to the supine Savior, “Sorry, I didn’t mean you. It’s just a thing we say sometimes.”

Jesus pushed himself up and tried to stand, but his legs collapsed and he flopped back to the paved turf, grabbing at his pelvis. Tears streamed down his cheeks and he began to blubber like a bewildered baby. James surmised that the impact with the van had broken his hip. James thought: If this guy is Jesus Christ, how come he’s lying here with a broken hip, crying his ass off?
Because he isn’t Jesus.
Then his face began to change. The flesh above the scraggly beard began to move as if
things
were crawling beneath the skin, fleshy humps rolling like waves at the edge of the ocean.

James glanced over at his dead grandmother in the back seat of his mother’s car, then he grabbed the toga man’s beard and gave it a good yank. “You’re not Jesus,” he said. “You’re a fucking psycho who killed my grandmother.” Then he stood up and put the muzzle of his .22 rifle in the psycho’s grimacing face. He tightened his finger against the trigger. Felt it yield to his touch the way his fantasy women did.

“Hey, you gonna shoot Jesus?” shouted Josh as he hurried over.

“He’s not Jesus. He’s a fake.”

“That’s what I tried to tell ya. And you let the fucker kill your granny.”

James kept his eyes locked on the pseudo-savior, his finger glued to the trigger. Sighting down the long barrel the way he’d done just before sending a slug into Skull Man’s back, he revisited the feeling he’d had when he pulled the trigger and erased the freak from the world of the living. In taking the guy off the board, James had outdone Slim Shady, who killed people only in song. It had felt right, as if preordained. He wanted that feeling back. The power was literally at his fingertip. All he had to do was exert a few more pressure-pounds and—BOOM— the bawling bastard would take a trip to hell.

“Do him,” urged Josh, cradling the shotgun like an obedient pet.

The bogus savior’s eyes went wide as he began to comprehend how dire his straits had become. The muzzle an inch from his forehead, he looked cross-eyed up the barrel at James. He turned off his blubber box and started begging for his life, speaking to James for the first time. “Don’t shoot me, man, I’m not—”

Pow!

A small hole appeared in his forehead and he fell back on the pavement. A little puff of smoke snaked from the .22’s muzzle and from the hole in his head. A trickle of bright red blood leaked from the hole and rolled down his nose.

Josh snickered. “See ya in hell, Jesus dude.”

James realized he was still holding his breath and he let it go like an old steam engine venting steam. “Shouldn’t na killed my grandmother,” he said to the corpse that wouldn’t be rising from the dead.

“Come see what I did to those pricks in the van,” Josh said. “Man, that was so wack!”

“Fuck that. I’ve got a better idea.”

“What?” Josh scrunched up his face, trying to figure out what could be cooler than showing off his 12-gauge handiwork.

“If we’re gonna be killing more of these muthafuckas, we ought to have more firepower.”

Josh grinned. “Yeah?”

“Let’s break into Doyle’s Sport Shop and get some real shooters.”

“All right!” Josh fired a celebratory blast into the night sky. Distant gunfire echoed an answer.

* * *

Joe slid behind the wheel of John Woolrich’s Chevy Malibu. John sank his bulk onto the passenger seat and Suzie bounced into the back.

“Give me a smoke,” she said.

Joe passed the cigarette pack and lighter over his shoulder to her. She lit one, then passed them back. Joe fired one up for himself. He knew John didn’t smoke, so he didn’t offer him one.

“Ordinarily,” said Woolrich with a chuckle, “I’d offer a cautionary tale on the dangers of long-term tobacco use, but just now the concept of long-term seems rather superfluous.”

“What?” asked Suzie, blowing a cloud of smoke into the front of the car.

“Nothing, dear. I sometimes ramble on when I’m feeling anxious. Ignore me.”

Joe cranked the engine and backed out of the driveway.