Who Made Stevie Crye? (18 page)
Read Who Made Stevie Crye? Online
Authors: Michael Bishop
Tags: #Fiction, #science fiction, #General
“Yes, I know. Dreaming.”
“Not dreaming, only. Fading out. Fading away. My consciousness stolen and put to someone else’s purposes. This past week, though, that feeling’s been underscored by an impossible occurrence. Dr. Elsa, my best friend, didn’t believe it, and maybe I’m believing it only to keep from thinking I’m either crazy or the pawn of some megalomaniac force.”
“Tell me, child.”
Reassured by the Sister’s warm voice and bulk, Stevie told. She began with a rigorous tirade against the pricing policies of Pantronics Data Equipment Corporation, proceeded to an account of her trip to Hamlin Benecke & Sons in Columbus, and finished with a long, ill-organized epilogue about the typewriter’s behavior since. She tried to get everything in, but her story sounded scattershot and harebrained even to her, chock-a-block with flashbacks, flash-forwards, and shameful arpeggios on the Sister’s heartstrings. Teddy and Marella came into the story, and Seaton Benecke and ’Crets and, inevitably, Ted, dead of cancer at thirty-nine. Finally, Stevie opened her file folder and pushed the long page of nightmare transcripts toward the prophetess.
“I dreamed these,” she said. “But the Exceleriter wrote them. They’re all about Ted. In the third one he says he died so I could fulfill myself—as if his dying would somehow free me from the tyranny of his life. He wasn’t a tyrant, though. It doesn’t make sense to me, Sister.
It doesn’t make sense!
” She ended near tears, this time angry ones.
“May I read this?” When Stevie, tight-lipped, nodded her assent, the black woman opened out the half-page of examination-table paper, took a magnifying glass from her typewriter stand, and worked line by line through the transcripts. A slow and assiduous reader, she kept her brow furrowed as she read, but at one point tapped the page with her forefinger and smiled. “‘Licensed haruspex,’“ she quoted. “Entrail-reading. That’s a divining I
don’t
do. People still sometimes call me out to paw through pig or chicken guts, but not since my Delphinia days have I obliged ’em. The slime ’n’ the stink’s fit only for bustards. Birds, I mean.” Her brow furrowed again, and she read some more, quoting in a high-pitched murmur, “ ‘There’s another woman, Stevie.’ Hmmmmm, mmmmh-yeah. Another woman, he says.” She perused the remainder of that nightmare and almost the entirety of the next in thoughtful silence. Then she looked up at Stevie and declared, “And here he says this business about dying so you could develop yourself is a lie. Heartfelt, though. A heartfelt lie. That’s nice, now. Heartfelt lies are sweet, like syrup in an open head wound.”
“He never lied to me when he was alive.”
“You don’t believe this story here?”
“It was a dream, Sister—a dream my lousy, lying Exceleriter stole from my head. Why should I believe it?”
“You don’t believe it ’cause it came through your typewriter?”
“That’s right. I can’t believe anything that machine puts to paper. It turned Marella into a living skeleton. It made me seduce my son.”
“But it’s only typin’ what you’re dreamin’, ain’t that so?”
“I guess. I don’t know. Maybe I’m dreaming what the Exceleriter types. It could just as easily work that way as the other.”
“The question is, Miz Crye—Stevie—where do these dreams come from and is the dreamer outside you tellin’ lies or maybe layin’ down clues? Answer that and you got a solution, I think, a chance to pull through your trial and put things to rights. You got to diagnose these dreams, that’s all.”
“Interpret them?”
“Everything you’re worried about’s in these nightmares. The way your man ran out on you, why he did it, and what’s gonna happen next. Please leave these nightmares here with me. So I can diagnose ’em.”
“For how long? For how much?”
“Don’t worry about the fee.” She swiveled aside and typed out a line next to Stevie’s address. “That’s your telephone number. I’ll call you in a day or so to let you know how my oneiromancy comes out. By this Tuesday, maybe, it’ll all be straight again, your Pretty Damn Exasperatin’ machine as tame as this here rheumatic Remington.”
“Oneiromancy?”
“Dream divining, Stevie. Haruspicy’s out, but I’m good for chiromancy, horoscopy, astrodiagnosis, oneiromancy, water-witchin’, and several different kinds of sortilege. Automatic writing’s one of my tools, and teletypomancy’s a field I’d be happy to pioneer. You’re so fascinatin’, Stevie, I got to do you gratis. Tea leaves, fishbowls, and fish guts aren’t my style, but for a crack at a bit of oneirotypomancy—” Betty Malbon smiled broadly—“I’d pay
you
a fee.”
She rolled the paper up and performed her two-finger dogtrot for another four or five lines, making notes or private comments on Stevie’s case. “Besides, child, I’m flat-out worried about you.”
“Thanks,” said Stevie. “You can keep the transcripts.”
Sister Celestial rotated back toward Stevie and put both her big hands on the table. “Just don’t do a feature on me, all right? My new sign’s all the publicity I need, even if I haven’t been in the papers since ’79. I get gawkers enough as it is. Horn-blowers ’n’ toilet-paperers. All the uppity riffraff.”
“I won’t. I’ll do something else. Tomorrow’s a workday for me, and I haven’t got a project yet—but I’ll think of something.”
“Sure you will.”
“It’ll drive me buggy—absolutely buggy—until I do, but I’ll put my mind to it. Maybe a travel piece for
Brown’s Guide
.”
Although the Sister was facing her, nodding her approval of these tentative plans, the Remington suddenly began to type by itself. It churned out a brief line, activated its own carriage-return mechanism, and repeated this process three more times before falling silent again. In a stupor of disbelief Stevie and the prophetess watched the keys move up and down and the typebars flick in and out of their basket. When the clatter ceased, the women looked at each other.
“You did that, didn’t you?” Stevie asked.
“Child, I was sitting here no different from you. That machine’s a softie, but I’ve always had to touch it some to make it go. First time for everything, I guess, but I never hoped to play witness to a willful typing machine.”
Trembling imperceptibly, but feeling the tremors quicken, Stevie stood up. “What did it write?”
The Sister removed the sheet of paper from the cylinder and passed it over the table.
“No, I don’t want it. Just read it to me.”
Sister Celestial recited the Remington’s lyric:
“Ladybug, Ladybug,
Fly away home.
Your house is on fire,
And your children will burn.”
“Oh, God,” said Stevie. “That’s the Exceleriter. That’s the Exceleriter talking through your machine. I’ve got to go.” She cinched her car coat about her waist and banged her shoulder into the piano trying to get around it. “If anything’s happened to Teddy and Marella, I’ll kill myself.” Clutching her shoulder, she ricocheted around the upright to the door. “That’s not an idle threat, Sister. I mean it. Dear God, I’ve let them down again. I’ll . . . I’ll kill myself.”
Stolid in her chemise, Sister Celestial appeared beside the piano. “Your friend’s taking care of your children, Stevie. They’re all right. That machine’s having you on.”
“My house is on fire, Sister. My children will burn.” Stevie yanked the inner storm door open and pushed the outer pine-panel door into the cold. Beside Highway 27, the Sister’s winking signboard played its colors across the ebony sheen of the asphalt. “Thank you for listening. I’ve got to go. It’s my kids—my darling kids.”
She stumbled off the porch and over the buried stepping-stones to the makeshift parking lot where her van awaited.
“Drive careful!” the Sister shouted after her. “You drive careful ’cause I’m gonna call you, child! I’m gonna call you!”
XXXIV
Like some hotshot teen-age drugstore daredevil
, Stevie scratched off. She rammed the microbus up the gravel slope to the highway and tore along the gloomy corridor north of Button City. Her heater whined a hollow remonstrance. Her heart winked on and off with the colored bulbs on the Sister’s signboard. In fact, she did not begin to feel that she would survive the five-mile trip to Kudzu Valley, last rinky-dink community on the road to Barclay, until the van swung hard to the left and a curtain of midnight-black foliage obscured the reflection of the signboard in her rearview mirror. Then, there in the inky wilderness, she was alone with her worries.
Ladybug, Ladybug, fly away home. Your house is on fire, and your children will burn.
She was the ladybug. What had she said before the Remington relayed the Exceleriter’s upsetting message? “It’ll drive me buggy—absolutely buggy.” Ladybuggy, apparently. Anyway, those were her words, and the Exceleriter—tripewriter, psyche-scriber, demon machine—had echoed them in order to panic her, to add one more cruel fear to the pack already weighing her down. Even fourteen miles away, that modern instrument of torture was still with her, and Stevie could hear it typing
YOURHOUSEISONFIREANDYOURCHILDRENWILLBURN
,
YOURHOUSEISONFIREANDYOURCHILDRENWILLBURN
in the lub-dupping syllables of her blood. She could almost see her dead husband’s old family house aflame against the February night, angel wings of incandescence rippling toward the stars, gables collapsing, balusters charring like kitchen matches. In that blue-vermilion inferno, tiny bodies writhed, the burnt-match-stick bodies of her children. . . .
They’re with Dr. Elsa, Stevie. They’re not at the Crye place, they’re at the Kensingtons’ lakeside bungalow.
Maybe . . .
Kudzu Valley was dead. Stevie hated going through this little hamlet. On April 30, 1976, almost two and a half years before Jonestown, Guyana, several elderly residents of Kudzu Valley had committed suicide on the post-office lawn to protest the construction of the Cusseta Dam a mile or two above their town. Few people in the region fully twigged the details of this bizarre incident, but, through anonymous local intermediaries, the Carter administration had urged the state to cancel this vast engineering project and the dam had never been built. Otherwise Stevie would be riding a motor launch over the subaqueous ruins of Kudzu Valley or skirting them in her VW via two or three dike-top causeways.
As it was, she cruised into the moribund business district at 7:13 P.M. (by the digital display board on the branch office of the Farmers and Merchants Bank) and, about two minutes later (by the lighted face of her own Lady Timex), past the infamous lawn of the red-brick post office, her fear of what she might find in Barclay perplexingly mixed up with her incomplete knowledge of what had once happened here. There were no ghosts on the lawn, thank God, and the people of Kudzu Valley had had the good sense to resist commissioning an abstract bronze statue to commemorate the dramatic self-sacrifice of their saviors. All they had built in the interval was a brand-new city hall, funded to the tune of $162,000 by an Economic Development Administration grant in the palmy days before the election of Reagan.
Stevie drove past this angular modern building, with its darkened churchlike windows, into a corridor of winter-blasted kudzu; a thousand leafless vines lay tangled at roadside, as if by a band of incompetent electricians. Wilderness was taking over again, the wastes of February. At the strange town’s northern city limits Stevie’s headlights picked out a gigantic red torii, or Shinto gateway, spanning the road—but once through this landmark, her van freed itself of Kudzu Valley’s sinister influence and sped up the mountain’s passing lane like Phaethon’s reckless chariot. Home was only a few miles away.
Foot to floorboard, Stevie took the curves, dips, and inclines. She met no other traffic, and when she came swinging into Barclay parallel to the naked mound of the railroad tracks, the Temperature & Time clock on her hometown bank said 38° (Fahrenheit) and a split second later 7:24 (P.M.). For some sign of the fire devouring her house and children Stevie looked to her left—over the tall common cornice of the pharmacy, the five-and-dime, and the Barclay Restaurant.
Nothing; no fire.
After cornering at the traffic light north of these establishments, she could see her house clearly, a pagodalike shadow fronted by elms and dogwoods. Unless the fire smoldered in the set-apart garage or the canning-bottle boxes in the storm cellar, no part of her property was burning. The Exceleriter, through the Sister’s Remington, had lied.
Again.
Oh, but I’m glad it lied, Stevie thought. Not glad, of course, but thankful I didn’t come rushing home to disaster.
She parked in the unpaved drive near the kitchen and slumped in relief over the steering wheel. Her headlights lit the clutter of garden implements, plywood scraps, broken furniture, paint cans, and storage trunks in the open garage. It wanted cleaning out. She could not even get the microbus in there, and neighborhood dogs sometimes lay down amid the disarray for long winter naps. What the hell? Teddy and Marella were still with the Kensingtons and her house had escaped destruction. Stevie lifted her head and depressed the button controlling the headlights. Immediately the interior of the garage was plunged into darkness, and the chill night air began to refrigerate the van. Time to go in and turn on a space heater.
As Stevie reached for the door handle, a weird thumping sounded behind her. She twisted about in her seat. The passenger section was empty, and the rear window revealed only the street behind her and the formless shrubs standing sentinel in front of Mrs. Hinman’s screened-in porch. What had she heard? Maybe the sudden contraction of the van’s gasoline tank or a lump of caked-on dirt falling from the chassis to the ground. Nothing more. Stevie turned about and reached again for the door handle.
This time the thump was louder.
When she whirled in annoyance to find its cause, a miniature white skull was peering at her through the rear window, its bottomless eyes drinking in her sanity like powerful vacuums. Tiny hands scrabbled at the glass beside the eerie face, while the horizontal slash of its mouth bowed into a threatening rictus. Stunned, Stevie gripped the lapels of her coat and screamed. Inside the bucketlike interior of the microbus, her scream rang and reverberated.
Instead of dropping to the driveway, however, the ghoul clinging to the rear of the van found handholds and foot purchase and clambered up the window glass to the roof. It was ’Crets, Seaton Benecke’s evil little capuchin.
Stevie stopped screaming, opened the driver’s door only to slam it shut again, and, after emphatically locking it, leaned away from the window breathing rapidly and holding her eyes tightly closed.
What do I do now? Sit here until help arrives? Break for the kitchen door? Get out and negotiate? What?
The capuchin was skittering back and forth above her, dashing from one end of the van to the other. His claws—toenails? fingernails?—sounded like the noise the kids’ guinea pigs had made running across the wire mesh in their cage. That was hardly an intimidating sound. Why was she cowering inside a locked vehicle while a creature less than two-feet-tall did a jig to keep from freezing its furry fanny off? Well, partly because of the way ’Crets looked, partly because she still did not understand how he had managed to travel all the way from Columbus to Barclay
outside
her Volkswagen, and partly because he belonged to Seaton Benecke. It might be possible to leap into the yard and brain the imp with a rock, and so escape this ludicrous captivity—but the monkey had arrived here by some supernatural agency, underwritten in a menacing way by the misbehavior of the Exceleriter, and Stevie felt safer in the van. That afternoon she had imagined ’Crets growing to King-Kong proportions in order to dismantle her vehicle, and tonight she could easily imagine the monkey sprouting wings and swooping violently upon her as soon as she opened the door and bolted for the house. ’Crets did not have to obey the petty statutes of empirical reality, for the typewriter in her study had given him a terrifying
carte blanche
.
“Come on, Elsa,” Stevie said. “Bring my kids home and get me out of this. My delusions don’t affect you. ’Crets’ll vanish as soon as you get here.”
Then she remembered what Teddy had said that morning about feeling better about himself. Maybe her delusions had a wider range of application than she wanted to believe. Maybe they grew progressively stronger and more influential. After all, Sister Celestial had seen her Remington operate by itself, apparently at the bidding of Stevie’s Exceleriter; and her acknowledgment of the typewriter’s uncanny behavior represented a breakthrough of sorts—human corroboration that Stevie was not merely hallucinating these episodes. Of course, she
had
dreamed a couple of episodes that her machine had tried to pass off as genuine.
“Shit,” she said. (Silly biddies screamed; resolute heroines cursed. She disapproved of her own acquiescence in this convention, but that was the rule nowadays, and Stevie observed it because she was made that way.)
’Crets, meanwhile, continued to hold her hostage in the van, skittering, leaping, pausing. The roof pinged and popped but only occasionally bubbled inward at the conclusion of a supercapuchin leap. It was like enduring a manic-depressive hailstorm. Stevie kept wondering about the pads on ’Crets’s feet, if they weren’t totally frozen by now and bruised to boot. If you put your mind to it, you could almost feel
sorry
for the nefarious hellion.
Suddenly the monkey’s scampering was interrupted by a deep-throated baying. Cyrano, the Cochrans’ basset hound, stood bandy-legged and crimson-eyed in her drive, his muzzle contorted into a sousaphone bell for the bugling of his bafflement and outrage. He was barking steadily, as he did on winter’s nights when disturbed by a passing stranger or a bout of boredom. The Cochrans seldom seemed to hear him, but to Stevie Cyrano’s mournful baritone always sounded like twelve drunks yodeling in a barrel and she frequently awoke marveling at his stamina. Now he had sighted ’Crets, and if someone—anyone—took note of Cyrano’s baying, her ordeal might soon end.
On his big splayed feet, the basset trotted to the VW’s rear bumper and then, barking continuously, circled to his left. Cyrano was moving as ’Crets moved, tracking the monkey’s zigzaggy progress across the roof. Stevie could hear the capuchin screeching simian obscenities at the dog. She stared as if hypnotized into the basset hound’s eyes, which were red-rimmed, always bloodshot. The lambent overspill of the arc lamp on the corner made the bottom crescents of Cyrano’s eyes gleam like broken coals. The dog looked insane, possessed. Saliva whipped from his mouth as he blew his built-in sousaphone, and his squat forelegs came off the ground every time he toodled. He was an engine of indefatigable retribution, his bark Great Gabriel’s trump.
Even ’Crets seemed to think so. The capuchin rappelled on either air or willpower down Stevie’s passenger window, his death’s-head face leering in at her as he shinnied by. A moment later, a streak of silver-white luminosity, the monkey jackrabbited away from the house through a patch of exhausted ground that Ted had once liked to garden. ’Crets’s escape was concealed from Cyrano by the body of the van. Stevie tried to see where the capuchin was going, but he leapt into the shrubbery on the far edge of the lawn.
What kind of eyesight did Cyrano have? None too good, Stevie feared. He had registered the monkey’s descent from the roof and mistakenly deduced that ’Crets was now
inside
the vehicle with Stevie. Ferociously snapping his jaws, Cyrano continued to bay at the microbus, and his eyes had the ruthless demented look of a serial killer or a rush-hour commuter. He wanted the monkey, and he had taken the fatuous doggy notion that Stevie was harboring the white-faced specter in the VW. Stevie had never seen the basset hound in such a temper. He was possessed for sure.
“Enough’s enough.” Stevie tried to open her door.
Instantly Cyrano hurled his tubular body forward. (He was so long that he reminded Stevie of those hook-and-ladder fire trucks that require a second steering wheel midway along their span.) He was too short to hit the door very high up, but he thudded against its base, drove it back on Stevie’s shoe, and caught the silken flap of his right ear in the jamb. Howling in pain, he pulled his ear free and tumbled away from the Volkswagen even angrier. It was then that Stevie got her shoe loose and pushed the door wide open so that she could extend her hurt foot into the night air. It did not hurt badly, but she was as angry with the basset as he was with the door that had clipped his ear.
“Damn it, Cyrano. The monkey’s gone. You’re wasting your time. How about letting me limp into the house, okay?”
But Cyrano was not appeased. Either he held Stevie responsible for his injury or he believed that ’Crets was huddled in the passenger’s seat, for he picked himself up and came yodeling toward the microbus on a dead run. His leap carried him scarcely higher than the door’s metal sill, but Stevie positioned her unhurt foot so that the dog’s nose struck it in the instep. Cyrano gasped, did half a barrel roll, and landed on his side next to the van. He lay stunned for a moment, breathing heavily, and then struggled to his feet again. Once up, he waddled away from Stevie toward his own house, occasionally throwing reproachful looks over his shoulder.
Stevie climbed out. “Yeah, I know. You save me from that furry vampire, and I kick you in the nose. Come back tomorrow, Cyrano, and I’ll give you some table scraps.”
Cyrano’s waddle turned into a trot, and he disappeared into the drainage ditch on the other side of the street. A moment later he was a grotesque shadow hitching its way up the Cochrans’ lawn. Well, that was why people let their dogs run loose in small towns—to scare off suspicious organ-grinder monkeys and eat their neighbors’ kids’ pet guinea pigs. The prevention of other folks’ crimes absolved the dogs of their own.
A cynical thought, maybe, but Stevie felt sorry for that put-upon canine Pavarotti, Meistersinger of her Gelid Midnights. She had bruised his ego as well as his eponymous proboscis.
