Koko (83 page)

Poole scarcely knew what he felt, or why—there was too much sadness in all this. Koko,
who was M.O. Dengler, or was the person who had once been M.O. Dengler, seemed like
a child himself. Poole did not know that he was going to speak, but he said, “Manny.”

M.O. Dengler swiveled his head and looked at him.

Poole stepped forward into the cold green room. Until this moment, some part of him
had resisted believing that Dengler really was Koko. Despite everything he had said
to Maggie and Lieutenant Murphy, Poole felt as if the wind had been knocked out of
him. He did not have even the beginning of an idea of what he was
going to do now. It was still hard to accept the idea that Dengler could wish to do
him harm. Harry Beevers uttered a keening sound through his bloody gag. Poole heard
Conor and Tim pad in behind him and spread out on either side.

Dengler seemed not to have aged at all. He made Poole feel old and out of shape and
almost corrupt with experience. He felt almost shamed before Dengler.

Over Dengler’s alert nineteen-year-old face, Poole saw that what he had taken for
a pattern of waves was a row of children’s heads. Their bodies had only partially
been painted in. Some held their hands upraised, others reached out with sticklike
arms. Red paint wound through them like a skein. Dengler’s young face tilted up toward
Poole, his lips slightly parted as if he were going to say—
I was right about God.
Or—
Whatever it was, it was a long time ago.

On the side wall had been painted, in large black letters, the same slogan Poole had
seen in the police Polaroids:
A DROWSY STIFLED UNIMPASSIONED GRIEF.
And beneath that, in the same large letters:
PAIN IS AN ILL-U-SHUN.

Poole took in all this in less time than it took to blink. He understood. He was in
no-place, all right. He was back there. This was where Koko lived all the time, in
that underground chamber he and Underhill had visited twice.

I’m here to help you, Poole wanted to say.

Dengler smiled up at him from the center of his uncannily preserved youth.

You been bad?
Dengler seemed to ask him.
If you haven’t…

Harry Beevers squealed again, and his eyes rolled up into his head.

“I’m here to help—” Poole started to say, and the words seemed almost dragged out
of him, as if he were in one of those dreams where every step requires immense effort.

“Come out with us, Dengler,” Conor said, very simply. “It’s what you want to do.”

The smiling child with outstretched empty hands seemed to step out toward Poole as
if from the back of a shadowy hootch, and for a second he thought he heard wingbeats
in the cold air above his head.

“Stand up and come toward us,” Conor said, taking a step forward with his own hand
held out.

Beevers squealed in pain or outrage.

Then Poole heard the sound of men thudding down the iron
staircase. He looked at Dengler’s calm empty face in horror. “Stop!” he yelled. “We’re
all alive! Don’t come any further!”

Almost before he stopped shouting at the policemen, Poole saw Dengler move up off
the floor in a fluid, uncoiling motion. In his hand was a long knife.

“Dengler, put the knife down,” Underhill said.

As Dengler stood and moved closer to the light bulb, the startling innocence and youthfulness
of his face disappeared like a mirage. He smashed the bulb with the handle of his
knife, and the room went dark as a mineshaft. Poole instinctively crouched.

“Are you okay in there?” called a voice from the stairs.

“Dengler, where are you?” Underhill whispered. “Let’s all get out of this alive, all
right?”

“I have work to do,” came a voice that Michael did not immediately recognize. The
voice seemed to come from everywhere in the room.

“Who’s inside that room?” shouted Lieutenant Murphy. “I want to know who’s in there,
and I want to hear everybody’s voice.”

“Poole,” called Poole.

“Underhill.”

“Linklater. And Beevers is in here, but he’s injured and gagged.”

“Anybody else?” the lieutenant yelled.

“Oh, yes,” came a quiet voice.

“Lieutenant,” Poole called out, “if you come in here shooting, we’ll all die. Go back
up the steps and let us come out. We’ll need an ambulance for Beevers.”

“I want each man to come out alone. He will be met by an officer and escorted up the
steps. I can offer the services of a hostage negotiator, if the man holding you will
deal with one.”

Poole steadied himself by putting his hand on the floor. That too was cold and wet,
even sticky, and Michael realized that he was touching Harry Beevers’ blood.

A high-pitched terrified squeal came to him from everywhere, bouncing from wall to
wall.

“We’re not hostages,” Poole said. “We’re just standing around in the dark.”

“Poole, I’m sick of talking to
you
,” Murphy yelled. “I want to hear from this Koko. After we get you out of there,
Doctor
Poole, that’s when I’m going to be interested in talking to you. Then I’ll have a
lot to say to
you.
” His voice grew louder as he bawled out the next words. “Mister Dengler! You are
in no danger
as long as you do exactly what I say. I want you to release the other men in the room
one at a time. Then I want you to surrender yourself. Are you clear about that?”

Dengler repeated what he had said when he had put them in darkness. “I have work to
do.”

“That’s fine,” Murphy said. Then Poole heard Murphy say to some other policeman, “I
have work to do. What the hell does that mean?”

A voice whispered into Poole’s ear, so close and unexpected it made him jump. “Tell
him to go all the way up the stairs.”

“He says he wants you to go all the way up the stairs,” Poole shouted.

“Who’s that?”

“Poole.”

“I should have known,” Murphy said in a quieter voice. “If we go back up the stairs,
will he release all of you?”

“Yes,” the voice whispered in Poole’s other ear.

“Yes!” Poole shouted. He had not heard the faintest sound as Dengler moved around
him. Now he could hear the sound of wingbeats again, which was really the sound of
ceaseless movement, as of a large group of people moving all about him, whispering
to one another. He could smell blood.

“Any other requests?” Murphy shouted, sounding sarcastic.

“All the police in the courtyard,” the voice whispered directly into Michael’s face.

“He wants all the police in the courtyard.”

“While the hostages are being released,” Murphy said. “He’s got that.”

“Conor, are you okay?” Poole asked.

There was no answer. The others were dead, and he was alone in the no-place with Koko.
He was in a pool of his friends’ blood and Koko was fluttering around him like a hundred
birds, or bats.

“Conor!”

“Yo,” came Conor’s voice, quieting his dread.

“Tim?”

Again, no answer.

“Tim!”

“He’s fine,” came the whisper. “He’s just not speaking at the moment.”

“Tim, can you hear me?”

Something painful and red hot happened to Michael’s right
side. He clapped his hand over the pain. He felt no blood, but there was a long clean
cut in the fabric of his coat.

“I went to Muffin Street,” he said. “I talked to your mother. Helga Dengler.”

“We call her Marbles,” came a whisper from somewhere off to his right.

“I know about your father—I know what he did.”

“We call him Blood,” came the whisper from where he had last seen Conor.

Poole still held his hand to his side. Now he could feel the blood soaking through
his coat. “Sing me the song of the elephants.”

From different parts of the room Poole heard snatches of unmelodic wordless song,
the music of nothing on earth, the music of no-place. Sometimes it sounded as if children
were speaking or crying out a great distance away. These were the dead children painted
on the walls. Again Poole knew that no matter what he might hear in this room, he
was alone with Koko, and the rest of the world was on the opposite side of a river
no man could cross alive.

As Koko’s song flew through the dark, Poole could also hear the sound of the policemen
retreating up the iron steps. His side flamed and burned, and he could feel blood
soaking into his clothes. The room had widened out to the size of the world, and he
was alone in it with Koko and the dead children.

Finally Murphy’s voice came crackling through a bullhorn. “We are in the courtyard.
We will remain here until the three men with you have come out through the door. What
do you want to do next?”

“We waste no part of the animal,” came the hissing voice.

The dying children wailed and sobbed. No, the children were dead, Poole remembered:
that was Harry Beevers.

“Do you want me to tell him you waste no part of the animal?” Poole asked. “He can’t
hear me anyhow.”

“He can hear you fine,” came the icy whisper.

Then Poole understood. “It was the motto of the butcher shop, wasn’t it? Dengler’s
Lamb of God Butcher Shop. I bet it was painted right under the name,
WE WASTE NO PART OF THE ANIMAL.”

The voices all stopped, the nonsense song and the cries of the dead children. For
an instant Poole felt violence gather in the cold dead air about him, and his heart
nearly froze. He heard the rustle
of heavy clothing—Underhill must have moved toward the door. Koko was going to stab
him again, he knew, and this time Koko would kill him and tear his face from his skull,
as he had done with Victor Spitalny.

“Do you think he killed your real mother?” Poole whispered. “Do you think he arranged
to meet Rosita Orosco on the river-bank, and murdered her there? I do. I think that’s
what he did.”

A low voice whispered a wordless exhalation from far off to Poole’s left.

“Conor?”

“Yo.”

“You knew it too, didn’t you?” Poole said. He felt like crying now, but not from fear.
“Nobody told you, but you always knew it.” Poole felt his heart unfreeze. Before Koko
killed all of them, or before the police ran in and shot them all, he had to say these
things.

“Ten days after you were born, Karl Dengler met Rosita Orosco on the riverbank. It
was the middle of winter. He stabbed her, and then he undressed her body and left
her there. Did he rape her body, after he killed her? Or just before he killed her?
Then he came into your bedroom, when you were a little boy, and did to you what he
had done to her. Night after night.”

“What’s going on?” came Murphy’s distorted, amplified voice.

“Night after night,” Poole repeated. “Tim knew it all in some way—without really knowing
anything about what had actually happened, he felt it, he felt everything. Your whole
life was about the stuff that Underhill knew just by looking at you.”

“Underhill goes out first,” Koko whispered from behind Poole. A knife slid under Poole’s
ear, and the children wailed and begged for life. “First Underhill. Then you. Then
Linklater. I’ll come out last.”

“I’m right, aren’t I?” Poole said. His voice was shaking, and he knew that Koko would
not answer him—because he did not have to answer. “Underhill is coming out first!”
he yelled.

And a second later he heard Murphy’s voice come crackling to him from the other side
of the great rushing river. Murphy did not know about the river that surrounded the
no-place and cut it off from every human place.

“Send him out,” Murphy called.

Harry Beevers made a noise like a trapped animal, and creaked against his straps.

If Underhill were alive, Poole thought, Dengler was sending
him out because he wanted Poole to go on with his excellent story. Maggie Lah was
on the other side of the river, and he would never see her again, for on this side
of the river was the bleak little island of the dead.

“Go, Underhill,” Poole said. “Get up those stairs.” His voice sounded stranger than
ever.

The door opened a crack and an amazed Poole saw Tim Underhill’s back slipping out
onto the landing. The door slowly closed behind him. Slow footsteps went up the stairs.

“Hallelujah,” Poole said. “Now who?”

He heard only the creaking and moaning that sounded like the cries of faraway dead
children.

“It was whatever happened in the cave, wasn’t it?” he said. “God help Harry Beevers.”

“Send the next man,” crackled Murphy’s voice.

“Who’s next?” Poole asked.

“It’s different in here now,” Conor whispered.

As soon as Conor spoke, Poole felt the truth of what he had said. The sense of prowling
movement no longer surrounded him: the cold air seemed very empty. Poole stood in
a lightless basement room—there were no faraway children and there was no river. “Let’s
go out together,” he said.

“You first,” Conor said. “Right, Dengler?”

Beevers protested with squeals and grunts.

“I’ll be right behind you,” Conor said. “Dengler, we’re going.”

Poole began moving toward the dim outline of the door. It was as if he had to unlock
his arms and legs. Every step made the wound in his side screech. He could feel the
blood sliding out of his body, and the floor seemed to be covered with blood.

Then Poole knew what had happened—Dengler had slit his own throat. That was why the
voices had stopped. Dengler had killed himself, and his corpse was lying on the floor
of his little cell in the dark.

“Someone will be down very soon to help you, Harry,” he said. “I’m sorry I ever listened
to anything you ever said.”

Creaks and moans.

Poole attained the door. He pulled it toward him and a lesser degree of darkness enveloped
him. He stepped out onto the landing. This had seemed like darkness when they had
come down the stairs. He looked up toward the hazy nimbus at the top of the stairs
and saw two uniformed policemen staring down at him. He thought of poor crazy Dengler,
lying dead or dying back inside the
room, and of Harry Beevers. He never wanted to see Harry Beevers again.