Who Made Stevie Crye? (27 page)
Read Who Made Stevie Crye? Online
Authors: Michael Bishop
Tags: #Fiction, #science fiction, #General
“Here, ’Crets,” crooned this young man, vanishing into the abyss beyond the hatch opening. “Come and take your medicine. . . .”
Meantime, the posse at Stevie’s front door was working up a powerful kinetic potentiality. She could see these rabid battering-ram bearers smashing their way into her house and toppling on sheer momentum into the dining room. She would find them sprawled across the floor like bowling pins, their loblolly trunk penetrating a shattered pane of the French doors dividing the dining room from the foyer. Torn between the needs to oversee Seaton’s search and to prevent her house’s demolition, she turned out Marella’s light and hurried down the stairs to parlay with the zealots demanding entry.
XLV
She found only Sister Celestial outside
. The black woman’s vehicle—a foreign-made economy car, probably a Datsun—was parked beneath the tulip tree by the front walk, but the noise her formidable fist made rapping on the door bore only a generic similarity to the insistent thumping of a battering ram. Distressed by the incongruity between what she had heard upstairs and what was occurring down-, Stevie admitted the prophetess to the foyer.
“I thought you’d come to the kitchen door.”
“Well, I tried back there, child, but when getting no answer, I came around here to do my rapping.”
“Seaton Benecke came, Sister. At first I thought it was you. He’s upstairs trying to chase his monkey out of the attic.”
Sister Celestial was carrying a carpetbag even larger than Seaton’s extermination kit. She had on two or three raveled sweaters, a pair of fur-lined snow boots, and the same shawl and chemise she had worn yesterday. Her cologne diffused through the stairwell like the fragile scent of early gardenias, reassuringly.
“Better let him go about his business, then. You gonna take me someplace warm or we hafta stand in this beef locker all evening?”
“Did you hear me? Benecke’s upstairs and my typewriter’s glowing.”
“I know. So’s my Remington. I banged it good almost all day.”
“
Literally
glowing.”
“I don’t doubt you think so. Most writers get to thinking that way after a long spell at their helpmeets. It’s a delusion, though, child. Lately you’ve been the victim of dreams ’n’ delusions you just can’t tell from outright lies.”
A hand on the Sister’s arm, Stevie ushered her toward the warmth of the kitchen. She was still confused. The terms of the Sister’s last verbal equation did not seem to balance. Even the revivifying dry heat at the rear of the house did not enable Stevie to make them compute. So, to create a semblance of orderliness, she installed her visitor at the kitchen table and set before her a veritable smorgasbord of snacks, including cheese dips and wine.
“I expected you at ten-thirty or so,” Stevie said. “You gave Benecke time to get here ahead of you.”
“Look at your clock, Stevie.”
Stevie obeyed. According to the digital readout on her wall oven, it was 10:34. Had someone reset the clock while she was upstairs? If not, thirty or forty minutes of which she had a memory of extraordinary vividness had not yet occurred. Seaton Benecke had not come calling in the uniform of a Ridpest exterminator, and the irate villagers banging at her door were merely the phantom progeny of a perverse imagination.
“Betty,” Stevie said, compelled by circumstance to use the Sister’s given name. “Please, Betty, it’s impossible to sort this all out.”
“It all depends on which lie you want to give the most credentials.”
“That’s not much help.”
“All right, now listen. While you were writing a story this afternoon, letting your real-life sorrow bog down in wishes and symbolism, Sister C. was feeding paper in and out of her Remington, typing like sixty to keep your evenin’ from being a stack o’ blank pages. Some of what I did was me, and some was most likely that Benecke buck.” She reached down and pulled from her carpetbag a small sheaf of double-spaced pages held together with a paper clip. This she flipped onto the table for Stevie to examine. “That’s Chapter Forty-four, child. It tells you what you think you just been through. If it’s not really what you want to think, just ignore those umpity-uhm-uhm minutes it sets down. Throw ’em back like so many piddlin’ bream, and pretty soon you’ll get to this here big-mouth bass of a talk with your wily Sister. She knows all the angles.”
Stevie read the first paragraph of the chapter she had just dazedly experienced. It opened with engine noises (RRRRR-uhm, RRRRR-uhm) and a knocking at her breakfast-nook door. Astonished, Stevie skimmed the remainder of the chapter, which concluded with an assault on her front door. In between the engine noise and the assault, the chapter posited a patent absurdity. Stevie, still incredulous, reread this impossible document, dropped it back onto the table, and wondered if she were supposed to dismiss its contents as a tissue of contemptible fictions. If so, she could not easily oblige the Sister. She
remembered
snatching away young Benecke’s beard. She
remembered
seeing a monkey’s arm snake out of his portmanteau. And so on. And what you remember, she told herself,
must
have occurred, even if only in a dream.
“Please, Betty, is Seaton upstairs or not? I’ve been going crazy for a week. You’ve got to help me, not make me crazier.”
“Well, child, he is and he ain’t. Chapter Forty-four says he is. If we drop out that chapter, though, and start this one over, with me arrivin’ at your kitchen door, well, then, he ain’t.” Sister C. leaned back, folding her arms beneath her bosom. “What do you want to do? We can renumber this chapter so there’s no hiccup in the story. We can renumber
all
the chapters right to the end, closing things up as tightly sweet as you like.”
“Betty, you can’t tear up a piece of someone’s life and throw it away like a sheet of typing paper.
“Happens all the time.”
“Shock treatment? Are you talking about shock treatment? Maybe people who’ve been jolted by electric current lose their memories—but that’s a drastic approach to psychological problems, Sister. I’m not that far gone.”
“I’m not an electric current, Stevie, but maybe I’m a shock treatment. I’m here to help. So
you
tell
me
if Seaton’s upstairs. It’s your decision, child. You’ll think it’s yours, anyway, and that’s almost the same thing.”
“Of course he’s upstairs.”
“Yeah, a course he is.” The Sister reached across the table and pulled Chapter Forty-four to her with the tips of her fingernails. “This stays in, then. I’m going to file it with Chapters Forty-five, Forty-six, Forty-seven, and so on, right down here in my bag.” She did just that.
“You know what’s going to happen next?” Stevie asked the prophetess. “You know how this nightmare’s going to end?”
“Pretty much. The details slip around some ’cause my Remington and me was typing so fast this afternoon I couldn’t hold
ever’
single part of it—except afterwards, I mean, with paper clips and this here carryall.”
“Let me see the others,” Stevie demanded. “Chapters Forty-five, Forty-six, and the rest. Let me see them.”
“Child, I can’t.”
“This is
my
story, Betty. I’m the focus. Whatever you’ve got in there you’ve got because of me. I have a right to see it.” Stevie could hear the rude peremptoriness of her tone. “I
need
to see it,” she pleaded. “My life’s at stake. My sanity. I’m not a windup toy to . . . to amuse jaded children.”
“We don’t like to think so, do we?”
“Don’t hold out on me, Betty. It’s cruel. It’s unnecessary. It’s—”
“—dramatically astute, Stevie. Crafty. If I hand these chapters over to you, you’re gonna sit here readin’ ’em. You might even flip to the end to see how everything comes out.”
“I won’t,” Stevie said. “I promise I won’t.”
“That’s a easy promise, right up there with ‘Your tax money couldn’t be more wisely spent’ and ‘I’ll send for you in a month or two.’ Besides, child, you don’t
want
to know the outcome. You think you do now, but once you did, why, you’d feel pushed and squeezed and violated and manipulated and all out of control of most of what was happening around you.”
“Just like lots of other women.”
“Not this one, Stevie. It’s all in how you look at things.”
“Let me see those other chapters!”
“You’d like that, I know. You
think
you’d like that. That’s why I came at such short notice—to guide you through the parts already decided. You got to live ’em, child, not read ’em. You’re luckier ’n you suppose, though. You got Sister C. to walk you through the hard parts. No matter how steep or scary the climb, I’m your seeing-eye on the stairway to heaven.”
“But —”
“But nothing. This blither-blather’s gettin’ us nowhere. It’s time to start a new chapter in the amazin’ history of your tribulations. Sooner we get moving, sooner we get through ’em and close out your account.”
“A new chapter? When? About what?”
“Right now, of course, and the what’s pretty easy, too. Just tell me your biggest worry at this very instant.”
Stevie glanced around the table at Sister Celestial’s carpetbag, now snapped shut and belted against her prying eyes.
“Besides that,” the prophetess said.
“Seaton and ’Crets in my attic. Seaton with a valise full of capuchins.”
“Good for you, gal. Let’s go see what we can do about those worrisome things.”
XLVI
Gripping Stevie’s wrist
, Sister Celestial drew her charge away from the table and around the temptingly mysterious cargo of her carpetbag toward the dining-room door. Here the women exchanged looks of mutual support and trust. Beyond this door (no more or less portentous in design, carpentry, and installation than most such doors in Victorian-style houses of a certain age) lay adventure, a cold, well-waxed pathway to danger and revelation. They had to go through the door. Ignorant of what was yet to befall them, Stevie embraced Sister Celestial, separated from her, and, to steady her nerves, sighed deeply.
“All right,” she said. “Let’s go.”
Sister C., as if she had visited the old Crye house many times and knew its every squeaky floorboard by heart, escorted Stevie through both the chilly dining room and the quarter-open French doors (which, of course, no battering ram had knocked askew or deprived of window glass). Just over the foyer’s threshold, however, Stevie stubbed her toe on a low obstacle and began to pitch forward. Falling, she saw that she had tripped on a small female corpse. Indeed, the severed lower arm of this corpse spun across the waxed hardwood ahead of her like a pink propeller or boomerang. It struck the riser of the bottom step just as Sister Celestial caught Stevie by the waist and kept her from crashing to the floor.
A frightened bark escaped Stevie’s lips. She clutched the Sister’s sleeve and jumped away from the body that had almost upended her. “Is it Marella?” she cried. She feared that Benecke had performed an unspeakable kind of surgery on her daughter and dumped the evidence here as a grisly taunt.
“Hush now,” the Sister said familiarly. “Don’t fret. Sister’s here. It’s only a doll, only a doll baby.”
True enough, Stevie discovered. The torso, head, and lower limbs of Marella’s life-sized plastic doll, Toodles, lay at her feet, its naked body parts collapsed upon themselves as if the stale air inside them had been sucked out by a vacuum pump or a sodomite of psychopathic cravings. The sight appalled Stevie. She could not imagine how anyone or anything could have inflicted such injury, such unorthodox—for Barclay, at any rate—mutilation. Toodles had never hurt a living soul. Although she had never bawled, wet, pooped, or walked in circles either (as some newer dolls did), her existence to date had been a delight and a comfort to Marella. The force that had perpetrated this infamy upon Toodles deserved only remorseless exorcism.
“How could this have happened?” Stevie asked. “How?”
“Evil’s minions, child. Seaton’s familiars. Seaton’s probably an Irish name for Satan, now I think on it.”
It got worse. On the bottom landing, like a fleecy bathmat that a puppy has tossed about the dooryard, lay the tattered body of Marella’s teddy bear, Kodak. All the make-believe creature’s make-believe innards had been removed, leaving him stuffing-free and pancake-flat. Empty head down and ebony eyes agleam, Kodak dripped over the landing step like a Salvador Dali watch. Stevie stopped to touch his flattened paw, but Sister C. murmured a dissuading “Uh-uh” and pointed her up the remaining steps.
A small candlelike bulb in a sconce at the next landing threw a reddish-orange glow over the felt and synthetic-fur carnage still ahead of them. Stevie was appalled to see her daughter’s saffron Big Bird doll looking like a gutless unplucked chicken, her homemade Raggedy Ann lodged between two banister railings like a lost sock, and her portly opossum, Purvis, reduced to a pilose shadow of himself, his snout an impotent appendage almost indistinguishable from his consumptive breast. This last creature—one of Marella’s favorites—appeared to have been applied to the baseboard of the next landing like a fuzzy decal. Stevie recognized the opossum only by his coloring and the jaunty cut of his vest. Angry tears popped into her eyes, and she did not need the Sister to prod her toward the hall at the top of the stairs.
“The bastard,” she said. “There was no need for him to turn his monkeys loose on Marella’s animals.”
“Trashy window-dressing. He’s setting up his Big Finish in the attic.”
Stevie paused on the landing, a hand on the newel-post. “What big finish? A fight?”
“Sort of. Psychologically. He’s setting you up.”
“I’m ready. I’ve been ready for a week.”
“Maybe you have, and maybe you haven’t.”
“Let’s go. I’ll show you what I have and haven’t been.”
There were other disemboweled toy creatures in the corridor as well as just over the threshold of Marella’s room: Peepers, a seal. Racky, a raccoon. Velvet Belly, a cat. Sweetcakes, a turtle. And some lumpy piles of anonymous fuzz to which Stevie was unable to put baptismal names or generic labels. Strands of artificial hair floated in the chilly chamber, almost like spiderwebs, while vestiges of sterner fluff clung to the carpet the way gorse polka-dots a moor. These evidences of slaughter infuriated Stevie. But, satisfied that both Teddy and Marella were asleep and therefore ignorant of the massacre that Benecke and his capuchins had wrought, she yanked back the door to the step-down closet and flailed her way through a regiment of summer clothes and an obstacle course of suitcases and two-speed fans to the hatch opening into the attic.
A monkey on the closet bar sprang to her back, pushing her to her knees, then leapt for the safety of another phalanx of garments in hanging plastic bags. Panting, Sister C. squeezed into the closet behind Stevie and hunkered with her at the square of plywood separating them from her nemesis.
“Another door,” the prophetess said. “You
sure
you’re ready?”
“What do I say to that question in the Chapter Forty-six you won’t let me read?”
“Just what you’ve done growled at me, Stevie. Then we prise this hatch open and go duck-walking into both the attic and Chapter Forty-seven. That’s fittin’—they’re both hewn from rough timbers.”
Stevie nodded. Then she and the Sister curled their fingers around the hatch frame to prise the splintery plywood panel from its jamb.
