Unassigned Territory (46 page)

Bug House began to cackle, as though some clever remark were on the tip of his tongue. Then he began to cough. His face turned bright red and he stomped both feet on the ground. Delandra began to pound him on the back. “This guy,” Bug House managed, “this girl says he tells it like it is.”

“No.”

Bug House nodded. He was seized by another spasm of coughing, however, and was unable to continue.

Obadiah turned away. He turned toward the eastern end of the street just in time to see Harlan Low walking out of a bar. The man was dressed in the clothes Obadiah had seen on him the morning they left for the desert—the dark slacks and gold sharkskin sport coat. Except that the coat was not really being worn. It was just hung upon one shoulder and covered just one side of his torso, the other side being free to accommodate the large plaster cast. Above all of that he wore a pair of black-rimmed wraparound shades and the silly-looking straw hat which had somehow emerged with him from the hole in the desert and Obadiah was aware of whatever note of dignity he had hoped for dissipating in the cooling air.

Bug House was still coughing when Harlan Low reached them. Delandra kissed him on the cheek and Bug House rose to shake his good hand, though there were still tears running down his cheeks and he was unable to speak.

“Weddings always make him cry,” Delandra said. “Isn’t it sweet?”

“It’s the end of the world,” Bug House spluttered. “A girl told me.”

“Well, the last days, at least,” Harlan said. He winked at Obadiah and seemed, Obadiah thought, for some reason to be in excellent spirits. Perhaps it had something to do with the scent of whiskey on the man’s breath, though he did not appear intoxicated.

“Mr. Wheeler. Miss Hummer?” someone said. Obadiah turned to find that a silver-haired man in a dark suit had come to the doorway of the building. “Would you care to step into our waiting room?”

Delandra entered first. Obadiah was about to enter but Bug House had him by the arm and was tugging on it. There was a mischievous twinkle in his red-rimmed eyes. “I still haven’t told you the good part,” he said. “This chick, man, the one who told me the world was going to end, she had her twat dyed red, white, and blue. I got me a look at that item, bro.” Bug House extended his lower jaw and the scar tissue along the right side of his face glistened in the neon light which had begun to flutter above the doorway which led to the Chapel of Eternal Love. Obadiah smiled weakly at Harlan and moved forward to shake the hand of the man with the silver hair and then on to the red velvet, the white lace, and marbled mirrors of the waiting room. Behind him he could hear Harlan coming through the door. “You must be the father of the bride,” he heard the silver-haired man say. “Yes,” Harlan Low said, “I am.”

I
t might have been hours, possibly days. Perhaps the dome had been built in order to alter time. So that perhaps an entire age had gone the way of sand in an hourglass as Rex Hummer climbed toward the stars. He had long ago shattered the crystal of his watch and so knew nothing of the day or the hour.

For a while the Sarge had spoken to him. As near as Rex could tell, the man had been trying to “talk sense” to him. At one point, somewhere near the first floor, Rex had relived the day his sister put his eye out with a pellet gun. He had remembered the Sarge scooping him up in arms as big and hard as clay pipes, running him to the truck while Delandra ran behind. He remembered her voice and the color of the sky. He remembered the long ride into town, Sarge driving the truck as hard as it would go. He remembered his head in Delandra’s lap and the towel pressed hard against his wound. He remembered her hair blown back in the wind above him and her tears, like a warm rain blown all about the cab on a summer storm and how for that one piece of time—he’d thought then it was the first, and later, he’d thought it was the last—he’d known what it was like to be a part of something, the three of them, bound together in the pain that was rightfully his.

Somewhere, though, along about the third floor, the voice of Sarge had begun to fail along with the greenish light. The sounds of pursuit were gone there, too, though once, peeking through what he discovered were the Electro-Magnetron’s windows—tiny rectangular slits it was necessary to actually press one’s face against to see out of—he thought he saw something outside. It was daylight out there. And what he saw was a man in a uniform, a gun on his hip, being pulled by a dog on a string across a yellow patch of stone. The scene did not appear quite real to him, and, pulling back from it, he took it to be like the sounds which had thus far plagued him. A test was all. Tests were not that uncommon in these situations—he thought for instance of Christ in the wilderness. His glory was that He had met the challenge. A single spray-painted message waited for him at the third level, the words in a luminous Day-Glo green streaked across the metal floor at his feet: “In the world you are having tribulation, but take courage! I have conquered the world.”

D
elandra had chosen a tropical setting because it matched Obadiah’s shirt. She thought now that he looked quite nice in it, flanked by two delicately potted palms and the twin heads of Tiki gods which appeared to have been carved from the trunks of older, larger palms. Dog Potty stood to Obadiah’s left, his damp brow shining in the phony torchlight which issued from the heads of the gods. Harlan Low was somewhere behind them but when the minister asked if someone would give away the bride Harlan said that he would and when Delandra looked back over her shoulder to find him she was startled once again by his resemblance to her own father and she was moved in a way she had not expected.

Obadiah felt her hand tighten on his arm as Harlan Low’s voice issued from the back of the room and it did, he thought, lend a certain dignity to the affair after all. At his side Bug House was standing in such a way that Obadiah could see the blue cover of the paperback sticking out of the side pocket of his jacket. He assumed the book was a collection. The name, H. P. Lovecraft, was printed in bold orange letters across the top. There was a list of titles: “The Dunwich Horror,” “The Whisperer in the Darkness,” “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” The titles disappeared beneath the material of Bug House’s coat. The only one which meant anything to him was “The Call of Cthulhu.” It seemed to him that at some point in his youth—that time in which he had been devouring almost anything resembling sci-fi in the Pomona Public Library—it was one of the things he had read. Cthulhu, he seemed to recall, was some sort of ancient god banished long ago to something like another dimension, where he had remained through the ages but from which he occasionally emerged—usually because some unwitting mortals had fooled with something they should have left alone. In the story in question he seemed to remember something about a group of sailors. And now this girl claimed to be part of a secret cult and she had said the author of the dime store collection had told it like it was. Well, why not? Mastamho for Cthulhu. A girl with her twat dyed to match the Electro-Magnetron. A cult of the hand—just as Harlan had imagined. For a moment he could almost imagine it adding up to something after all. It was a little like believing the Table Mountain People had achieved transference. But there you were. Maybe they had. Or maybe they had just gone crazy and killed themselves. And maybe toward the end there they had worn funny hats and gone dancing on the edge, out where there was no such thing as random noise, but where the dancers danced alone, in ever-widening orbits, until a kind of heat death had set in and, with no one checking it out, the pulse had been lost altogether, the lamp gone like an evening’s mist in the desert’s hard white light. And it did tend to get a little funky in the darkness—what with the pilgrims cutting off one another’s balls and such.

Still, he did try, for a moment anyway, call it for old time’s sake, to imagine it—the transference of the Table Mountain People, the return of Mastamho. You had to wonder, though, just what there was left for the old boy to do anyway—if suicide and insanity were his stock in trade? The dude had after all been a long time gone. What if, upon getting one good look at what had come down in his absence—his own shadow as it were, the son of a bitch should lose his nerve, turn right around and beat it, straight back to the safety of eternal night. A big disappointment, no doubt, for all concerned. At Obadiah’s side, Bug House, having squared his shoulders, had begun to grin. The thing was aimed at the minister—the fixed eyes, the ridged jaw, the small eyes twinkling in that mask of shining flesh. The minister, Obadiah noted, was having no part of it. He was looking at the book.

When the silver-haired gentleman at last looked up it was to ask Obadiah if there was a ring. There was. After a moment of fumbling, Bug House produced it. Obadiah placed it upon Delandra’s finger. Or maybe, he thought, Mastamho had leaked out ahead of time and Sarge Hummer had brained him with a shovel—the Thing, after all, being what the fuss was all about. Another big letdown. But then they did say time had a way of making fools—even of the great ones. One thought of Joe Louis in wrestler’s garb. Maybe even gods had dues to pay. The maybes multiplied. A parlor game for pilgrims with time to kill. Or what it was all about.

“You may kiss the bride,” the man told him.

Outside a chunk of moon had risen in a purple sky and a cooling breeze stirred in an empty street. Doc Potty wanted to kiss the bride. Harlan Low stood alone at the edge of the curb, looking back toward the lights of town. He had his dark glasses in his pocket and his straw hat pushed back on his head so that he reminded Obadiah of the beleaguered newspaperman in an old movie. With his arm stuck out in front of him it looked as if he were trying to find a ride.

“It was nice of him to do that,” Delandra said.

“Yes, it was.”

“Now that Dog Potty is another story.”

“Yes,” Obadiah replied, “he is.”

“He told me he was in the war.”

Obadiah shook his head. “He tells people that.”

“He wasn’t?”

“He was in the service. He was in a war. No one is sure just which one it was. The closest he got to Vietnam was Hawaii.”

“He went crazy in Hawaii?”

Obadiah nodded slowly. “He set fire to a kitchen and something blew up. The Veterans Administration’s had him off and on ever since. As you can see, they’ve done wonders for him.”

A white pickup truck went by in the street and some guy in a cowboy hat stuck his head out the window and whistled at Delandra. Obadiah shivered in the thin cotton shirt. His ankle had begun to throb from standing too long and he circled Delandra’s shoulders with his arm for support. He watched the luminous rose-colored tint Harlan Low’s cast had acquired beneath the neon lights of the Chapel of Eternal Love. “You know the Doc called me one night from the VA hospital,” he said.

“Doc Potty?”

“The same. We grew up together. I met him in the first grade, the first day of class. He was wearing this Superman T-shirt and some kid from the third grade bet him he couldn’t fly. The Doc seemed to think he could. He jumped from the top of a jungle gym and broke the hell out of his leg, hooked it between a couple of bars on the way down.” He paused for a moment envisioning the scene; it had been with him for a long time. “At any rate,” he said, getting back to what he had started, “the lad called me one night from Long Beach. They had him down there in the veterans hospital and they were doing a lot of fucking around with him. We’d heard he was back but no one had talked to him yet. Anyway, I got this call, collect, and it was Richard. He said he just wanted to tell me something. He wanted to tell me there’s a happy man in every crowd.”

“That was it?”

Obadiah nodded. Delandra put her arm around his waist. They had begun to walk away from the chapel, back along the street. They were following Bug House and Harlan Low.

“So what do you think?” Delandra asked him. “Is there?” Obadiah watched the two men walking ahead of him. They appeared to be having some sort of conversation and he found in the mere suggestion of this cause for an absurd amount of pleasure. Their two hats bobbed in and out of the shadows and Harlan’s cast flashed suddenly pure and white in the lights of a passing car. “You know,” Obadiah said, “I believe there is.”

R
ex Hummer was alone upon the circular floor and he had the sensation of floating. The painted constellations arched above him through the black emptiness of space. From somewhere far below him a pale greenish light rose upward. It passed the electrodes and the sacred stones, dissipating as it reached the black arc of the dome. Even the pain, he found, had left him. So that he really was alone. And yet he felt nothing like loneliness. He was in fact the still point of the turning world and he imagined for a moment it was the way God Himself must have felt just prior to the moment of creation when all was formless and waste and yet everything that would ever be had been born already, in the mind of the Creator, all eternity existing in one pulsating instant, waiting only for him to say it: Let there be light. Rex Hummer shifted his ass upon the tractor seat and gazed down into the machinery before him, his arms raised, the bloodstained buckskins already stiffening about them, his hands poised above the charred keys of a child’s xylophone as he prepared to strike the first notes.

KEM NUNN was born in Pomona, California, and has studied at Columbia University and the University of California at Irvine.