Desperation Read online

  David was on his knees, head down, eyes closed, hands pressed together in front of his chin. The dusty linoleum beneath him was lighter than that which surrounded him. Straight ahead was a second lighter rectangle. It was here that the old projectors--clattery, baking-hot dinosaurs that raised the temperature in this room as high as a hundred and twenty on some summer nights--had stood. To his left were the cutouts through which they had shone their swords of light and projected their larger-than-life shadows: Gregory Peck and Kirk Douglas, Sophia Loren and Jayne Mansfield, a young Paul Newman hustling pool, an old but still vital Bette Davis torturing her wheelchair-bound sister.

  Dusty coils of film lay here and there on the floor like dead snakes. There were old stills and posters on the walls. One of the latter showed Marilyn Monroe standing on a subway grating and trying to hold down her flaring skirt. Beneath a hand-drawn arrow pointing at her panties, some wit had printed Carefully insert Shaft A in Slot B, making sure tool is seated firmly & cannot slip out. There was an odd, decayed smell in here, not quite mildew, not quite dry-rot, either. It smelled curdled, like something that had gone spectacularly bad before finally drying up.

  David didn't notice the smell any more than he heard Audrey softly calling his name from the hall which ran past the balcony. He had come here when the others had run to Billingsley--even Audrey had gone as far as stage-left at first, perhaps to make sure they were all going down the hall--because he had been nearly overwhelmed by a need to pray. He had an idea that this time it would just be a matter of getting to someplace quiet and opening the door--this time God wanted to talk to him, not the other way around. And this was a good place to do it. Pray in your closet and not in the street, the Bible said, and David thought that was excellent advice. Now that he had a closed door between him and the rest of them, he could open the one inside him.

  He wasn't afraid of being observed by spiders or snakes or rats; if God wanted this to be a private meeting, it would be a private meeting. The woman Steve and Cynthia had found was the real problem--she for some reason made him nervous, and he had a feeling she felt the same about him. He had wanted to get away from her, so he had slipped over the edge of the stage and run up the center aisle. He was under the sagging balcony and into the lobby before Audrey turned back from the stage-left side of the movie screen, looking for him. From the lobby he had come up to the second floor, and then had simply let some interior compass--or maybe it was Reverend Martin's "still, small voice"--lead him up here.

  He had walked across the room, barely seeing the old curls of film and the remaining posters, barely smelling the odor which might or might not have been celluloid fantasies stewed by the desert sun until they fell apart. He had stopped on this patch of linoleum, considering for a moment the large holes at the corners of the lighter rectangle shape, holes where the kingbolts which held the projector firmly in place had once gone. They reminded him (I see holes like eyes)

  of something, something which fluttered briefly in his mind and then was gone. False memory, real memory, intuition? All of the above? None of the above? He hadn't known, hadn't really cared. His priority then had been to get in touch with God, if he could. He had never needed to more than now.

  Yes, Reverend Martin said calmly inside his head. And this is where your work is supposed to pay off. You keep in touch with God when the cupboard's full so you can reach out to him when it's empty. How many times did I tell you that last winter and this spring?

  A lot. He just hoped that Martin, who drank more than he should and maybe couldn't be entirely trusted, had been telling the truth instead of just mouthing what David's dad called "the company line." He hoped that with all his mind and heart.

  Because there were other gods in Desperation.

  He was sure of it.

  He began his prayer as he always did, not aloud but in his mind, sending words out in clear, even pulses of thought: See in me, God. Be in me. And speak in me, if you mean to, if it's your will.

  As always at these times when he felt really in need of God, the front of his mind was serene, but the deeper part, where faith did constant battle with doubt, was terrified that there would be no answer. The problem was simple enough. Even now, after all his reading and praying and instruction, even after what had happened to his friend, he doubted God's existence. Had God used him, David Carver, to save Brian Ross's life? Why would God do a wild and crazy thing like that? Wasn't it more likely that what Dr. Waslewski had called a clinical miracle and what David himself had thought of as an answered prayer had actually been nothing more than a clinical coincidence? People could make shadows that looked like animals, but they were still only shadows, minor tricks of light and projection. Wasn't it likely that God was the same kind of thing? Just another legendary shadow?

  David closed his eyes tighter, concentrating on the mantra and trying to clear his mind.

  See in me. Be in me. Speak in me if it's your will.

  And a kind of darkness came down. It was like nothing he had ever known or experienced before. He sagged side-ways against the wall between two of the projection-cutouts, eyes rolling up to whites, hands falling into his lap. A low, guttural sound came from his throat. It was followed by sleeptalk which perhaps only David's mother could have understood.

  "Shit," he muttered. "The mummy's after us."

  Then he fell silent, leaning against the wall, a silver runner of drool almost as fine as a spider's thread slipping from one comer of what was, essentially, still a child's mouth. Outside the door which he had shut in order to be alone with his God (there had once been a bolt on it, but that was long gone), approaching footsteps could now be heard. They stopped outside the door. There was a long, listening pause, and then the knob turned. The door opened. Audrey Wyler stood there. Her eyes widened when they happened on the unconscious boy.

  She came into the fuggy little room, closed the door behind her, and looked for something, anything, to tilt and prop under the knob. A board, a chair. It wouldn't hold them off for long if they came up here, but even a thin margin might mean the difference between success and failure at this stage. But there was nothing.

  "Fuck," she whispered. She looked at the boy, realizing without much surprise that she was afraid of him. Afraid even to go near him.

  Tak ah wan! The voice in her head.

  "Tak ah wan!" This time out of her mouth. Assent. Both helpless and heartfelt.

  She went down the two steps into the projection-booth proper and crossed, wincing at each gritting step, to where David leaned on his knees against the wall with the cutouts in it. She kept expecting his eyes to fly open--eyes that would be filled with an electric-blue power. The right hand in her pocket squeezed the can tahs together once more, drawing strength, then--reluctantly--left them.

  She dropped to her own knees in front of David, her cold and shaking fingers clasped before her. How ugly he was! And the smell coming from him was even more offensive to her. Of course she had stayed away from him; he looked like a gorgon and stank like a stew of spoiled meat and sour milk.

  "Prayboy," she said. "Ugly little prayboy." Her voice had changed into something that was neither male nor female. Black shapes had begun to move vaguely beneath the skin of her cheeks and forehead, like the beating, membranous wings of small insects. "Here's what I should have done the first time I saw your toad's face."

  Audrey's hands--strong and tanned, chipped here and there with scabs from her work--settled around David Carver's throat. His eyelids fluttered when those hands shut off his windpipe and stopped his breath, but just once.

  Just once.

  4

  "Why'd you stop?" Steve asked.

  He stood in the center of the improbable onstage living room, beside the elegant old wetbar from the Circle Ranch. His strongest wish at that moment was for a fresh shirt. All day he had been baking (to call the Ryder van's air conditioning substandard was actually to be charitable), but now he was freezing. The water Cynthia was dabbing onto the punctur
es in his shoulders ran down his back in chill streams. At least he'd been able to talk her out of using Billingsley's whiskey to clean his wounds, like a dancehall girl fixing up a cowpoke in an old movie.

  "I thought I saw something." Cynthia spoke in a low voice.

  "Waddit a puddy-tat?"

  "Very funny." She raised her voice to a shout. "David? Dayyyy-vid!"

  They were alone onstage. Steve had wanted to help Marinville and Carver look for the kid, but Cynthia had insisted on washing out what she called "the holes in your hide" first. The two men had disappeared into the lobby. Marinville had a new spring in his step, and the way he carried his gun made Steve think of another kind of old movie--the kind where the grizzled but heroic white hunter slogs through a thousand jungle perils and finally succeeds in plucking an emerald as big as a doorknob from the forehead of an idol watching over a lost city.

  "What? What did you see?"

  "I don't really know. It was weird. Up on the balcony. For a minute I thought it was--you'll laugh--a floating body."

  Suddenly something in him changed. It wasn't like a light going on; it was more as if one had been turned out. He forgot about the stinging of the wounds in his shoulders, but all at once his back was colder than ever. Almost cold enough to start him shivering. For the second time that day he remembered being a teenager in Lubbock, and how the whole world seemed to go still and deadly before the benders arrived from the plains, dragging their sometimes deadly skirts of hail and wind. "I'm not laughing," he said. "Let's go on up there."

  "It was probably just a shadow."

  "I don't think so."

  "Steve? You okay?"

  "No. I feel like I did when we came into town."

  She looked at him, alarmed. "Okay. But we don't have a gun--"

  "Fuck that." He grabbed her arm. His eyes were wide, his mouth pinched. "Now. Christ, something is really wrong. Can't you feel it?"

  "I ... might feel something. Should I get Mary? She's back with Billingsley--"

  "No time. Come or stay here. Suit yourself."

  He shrugged up the sides of the coverall, jumped off the stage, stumbled, grabbed a seat in the front row to steady himself, then ran up the center aisle. When he got to its head, Cynthia was right behind him, once again not even out of breath. The chick could motor, you had to give her that.

  The boss was just coming out of the box office, Ralph Carver behind him. "We've been looking out at the street," Johnny said. "The storm is definitely ... Steve? What's wrong?"

  Without answering, Steve looked around, spotted the stairs, and pelted up them. Part of him was still amazed at the speed with which this feeling of urgency had grabbed hold. Most of him was just scared.

  "David! David, answer if you hear me!"

  Nothing. A grim, trash-lined hallway leading past what were probably the old balcony and a snackbar alcove. Narrow stairs going farther up at the far end. No one here. Yet he had a clear sense that there had been, and only a short time ago.

  "David!" he shouted.

  "Steve? Mr. Ames?" It was Carver. He sounded almost as scared as Steve felt. "What's wrong? Has something happened to my son?"

  "I don't know."

  Cynthia ducked under Steve's arm and hurried down the hallway to the balcony entrance. Steve went after her. A frayed length of rope was hanging down from the top of the arch, still swaying a little.

  "Look!" Cynthia pointed. At first Steve thought the thing lying out there was a corpse, then registered the hair for what it was--some kind of synthetic. A doll. One with a noose around its neck.

  "Is that what you saw?" he asked her.

  "Yes. Someone could have ripped it down and then maybe drop-kicked it." The face she turned up to his was drawn and tense. In a voice almost too low to hear, she whispered, "God, Steve, I don't like this."

  Steve took a step back, glanced left (the boss and David's father looked at him anxiously, clutching their weapons against their chests), then looked right. There, his heart whispered ... or perhaps it was his nose, picking up some lingering residue of Opium, that whispered. Up there. Must be the projection-booth.

  He ran for it, Cynthia once more on his heels. He went up the narrow flight of stairs and was groping for the knob in the dimness when she grabbed the back of his pants to hold him where he was.

  "The kid had a pistol. If she's in there with him, she could have it now. Be careful, Steve."

  "David!" Carver bawled. "David, are you okay?"

  Steve thought of telling Cynthia there was no time to be careful, that that time had passed when they lost track of David in the first place ... but there was no time to talk, either.

  He turned the knob and shoved the door hard with his shoulder, expecting to encounter either a lock or some other resistance, but there was none. The door flew open; he flew into the room after it.

  Across from him, against the wall with the projection-slots cut into it, were David and Audrey. David's eyes were half-open, but only their bulging whites showed. His face was a horrid corpse-color, still greenish from the soap but mostly gray. There were growing lavender patches beneath his eyes and high up on his cheekbones. His hands drummed spastically on the thighs of his jeans. He was making a soft choking sound. Audrey's right hand was clamped around his throat, her thumb buried deep in the soft flesh beneath his jaw on the right, the fingers digging in on the left. Her formerly pretty face was contorted in an expression of hate and rage beyond anything Steve had ever seen in his life--it seemed to have actually darkened her skin, somehow. In her left hand she held the .45 revolver David had used to shoot the coyote. She fired it three times, and then it clicked empty.

  The two-step drop into the projection-booth almost certainly saved Steve at least one more hole in his already perforated hide and might have saved his life. He fell forward like a man who has misjudged the number of stairs in a flight, and all three bullets went over his head. One thudded into the doorjamb to Cynthia's right and showered splinters into her exotic hair.

  Audrey voiced a ululating scream of frustration. She threw the empty gun at Steve, who simultaneously ducked and raised one hand to bat it away. Then she turned back to the slumping boy and began to throttle him with both hands again, shaking him viciously back and forth like a doll. David's hands abruptly quit thrumming and simply lay on the legs of his jeans, as limp as dead starfish.

  5

  "Scared," Billingsley croaked. It was, so far as Mary could tell, the last word he ever managed to say. His eyes looked up at her, both frantic and somehow confused. He tried to say something else and produced only a weak gargling noise.

  "Don't be scared, Tom. I'm right here."

  "Ah. Ah." His eyes shifted from side to side, then came back to her face and seemed to freeze there. He took a deep breath, let it out, took a shallower one, let it out ... and didn't take another.

  "Tom?"

  Nothing but a gust of wind and a hard rattle of sand from outside.

  "Tom!"

  She shook him. His head rolled limply from side to side, but his eyes remained fixed on hers in a way that gave her a chill; it was the way the eyes in some painted portraits seemed to stay on you no matter where you were in the room. Somewhere--in this building but sounding very far away, just the same--she could hear Marinville's roadie yelling for David. The hippie-girl was yelling, too. Mary supposed she should join them, help them search for David and Audrey if they were really lost, but she was reluctant to leave Tom until she was positive he was dead. She was pretty sure he was, yes, but it surely wasn't like it was on TV, when you knew--

  "Help?"

  The voice, questioning and almost too weak to be heard over the slackening wind, still made Mary jump and cup a hand over her mouth to stifle a cry.

  "Help? Is anyone there? Please help me ... I'm hurt."

  A woman's voice. Ellen Carver's voice? Christ, was it? Although she had been in the company of David's mother for only a short time, Mary was sure she was right almost as soon as the id
ea occurred to her. She got to her feet, sparing another quick glance at poor Tom Billingsley's contorted face and staring eyes. Her legs had stiffened up on her and she staggered for balance.

  "Please," the voice outside moaned. It was in the alley which ran behind the theater.

  "Ellen?" she asked, suddenly wishing she could throw her voice like a ventriloquist. It seemed she could trust nothing now, not even a hurt, scared woman. "Ellen, is that you?"

  "Mary!" Closer now. "Yes, it's me, Ellen. Is that Mary?"

  Mary opened her mouth, then closed it again. That was Ellen Carver out there, she knew it, but...

  "Is David all right?" the woman out there in the dark asked, then swallowed back a sob. "Please say that he is."

  "So far as I know, yes." Mary walked over to the broken window, skirting the pool of the cougar's blood, and looked out. It was Ellen Carver out there, and she didn't look good. She was slumped over her left arm, which she was holding against her breasts with her right. What Mary could see of her face was chalky white. Blood was trickling from her lower lip and from one nostril. She looked up at Mary with eyes so dark and desperate they seemed hardly human.

  "How did you get away from Entragian?" Mary asked.

  "I didn't. He just ... died. Bled everywhere and died. He was driving me in his car--taking me up to the mine, I think--when it happened. The car went off the road and turned over. One of the back doors popped open. Lucky for me or I'd still be inside, caught like a bug in a can. I ... I walked back to town."

  "What happened to your arm?"

  "It's broken," Ellen said, hunching over it further. There was something unattractive about the pose; Ellen Carver looked like a troll in a fairy story, hunched protectively over a bag of ill-gotten gold. "Can you help me in? I want to see my husband, and I want to see David."