nimbuses of white light revolving slowly around the streetlamps, which soldiered their way up Storrow Drive and smiled a little. Something big has come up, he thought. Agent X-9 has slipped in with good news from our underground base . . . we ‘ve located the batpoison we’ve been looking for!
‘The excitement wears off, believe me,’ Duke said dryly.
Pearson turned his head, startled.
‘Around the time they fish your second friend out of Boston Harbor with half his head gone, you realize Tom Swift isn’t going to show up and help you whitewash the goddam fence.’
‘Tom Sawyer,’ Pearson muttered, and wiped rainwater out of his eyes. He could feel himself flushing.
‘They eat something that our brains make, that’s what Robbie thinks. Maybe an enzyme, he says, maybe some kind of special electrical wave. He says it might be the same thing that lets us
— some of us, anyway — see them, and that to them we’re like tomatoes in a farmer’s garden, theirs to take whenever they decide we’re ripe.
‘Me, I was raised Baptist and I’m willing to cut right to the chase — none of that Farmer John crap. I think they’re soul-suckers.’
‘Really? Are you putting me on, or do you really believe that?’
Duke laughed, shrugged, and looked defiant, all at the same time. ‘Shit, I don’t know, man.
These things came into my life about the same time I decided heaven was a fairytale and hell was other people. Now I’m all fucked up again. But that doesn’t really matter. The important thing, the only thing you have to get straight and keep straight, is that they have plenty of reasons to kill us. First because they’re afraid of us doing just what we’re doing, getting together, organizing, trying to put a hurt on them . . . ‘
He paused, thought it over, shook his head. Now he looked and sounded like a man holding dialogue with himself, trying yet again to answer some question, which has held him sleepless over too many nights.
‘Afraid? I don’t know if that’s exactly true. But they’re not taking many chances, about that there’s no doubt. And something else there’s no doubt about, either — they hate the fact that some of us can see them. They fucking hate it. We caught one once and it was like catching a hurricane in a bottle. We — ‘
‘Caught one!’
‘Yes indeed,’ Duke said, and offered him a hard, mirthless grin. ‘We bagged it at a rest area on I-95, up by Newburyport. There were half a dozen of us — my friend Robbie was in charge We took it to a farmhouse, and when the boatload of dope we’d shot into it wore off — which it did much too fast — we tried to question it, to get better answers to some of the questions you’ve already asked me. We had it in handcuffs and leg-irons; we had so much nylon rope wrapped around it that it looked like a mummy. You know what I remember best?’
Pearson shook his head. His sense of living between the pages of a boy’s adventure story had quite departed.
‘How it woke up,’ Duke said. ‘There was no in-between. One second it was knocked-out-loaded and the next it was wide-awake, staring at us with those horrible eyes they have. Bat’s eyes. They do have eyes, you know — people don’t always realize that. That stuff about them being blind must have been the work of a good press-agent.
‘It wouldn’t talk to us. Not a single word. I think it knew it wasn’t going to ever leave that barn, but there was no fear in it. Only hate. Jesus, the hate in its eyes!’
‘What happened?’
‘It snapped the handcuff-chain like it was tissue-paper. The leg-irons were tougher — and we had it in those special Long John boots you can nail right to the floor — but the nylon boat-rope .
. . it started to bite through it where it crossed its shoulders. With those teeth — you’ve seen them
— it was like watching a rat gnaw through twine. We all stood there like bumps on a log. Even Robbie. We couldn’t believe what we were seeing . . . or maybe it had us hypnotized. I’ve wondered about that a lot, you know, if that might not have been possible. Thank God for Lester Olson. We’d used a Ford Econoline van that Robbie and Moira stole, and Lester’d gotten paranoid that it might be visible from the turnpike. He went out to check, and when he came back in and saw that thing almost free except for its feet, he shot it three times in the head. Just pop-pop-pop.’
Duke shook his head wonderingly.
‘Killed him,’ Pearson said. ‘Just pop-pop-pop.’
His voice seemed to have risen out of his head again, as it had on the plaza in front of the bank that morning, and a horrid yet persuasive idea suddenly came to him: that there were no batpeople. They were a group hallucination, that was all, not much different from the ones peyote users sometimes had during their drug-assisted circle jerks. This one, unique to the Ten O’clock People, was brought on by just the wrong amount of tobacco. The folks Duke was taking him to meet had killed at least one innocent person while under the influence of this mad idea, and might kill more. Certainly would kill more, if given time. And if he didn’t get away from this crazed young banker soon, he might end up being a part of it. He had already seen two of the batpeople . . . no, three, counting the cop, and four counting the Vice President. And that just about tore it, the idea that the Vice President of the United States —
The look on Duke’s face led Pearson to believe that his mind was being read for the third record-breaking time. ‘You’re starting to wonder if maybe we’ve all gone Looney Tunes, you included,’ Duke said. ‘Is that right?’
‘Of course it is,’ Pearson said, a little more sharply than he had intended.
‘They disappear,’ Duke said simply. ‘I saw the one in the barn disappear.’
‘What?’
‘Get transparent, turn to smoke, disappear. I know how crazy it sounds, but nothing I could ever say would make you understand how crazy it was to actually be there and watch it happen.
‘At first you think it’s not real even though it’s going on right in front of you; you must be dreaming it, or maybe you stepped into a movie somehow, one full of killer special effects like in those old Star Wars movies. Then you smell something that’s like dust and piss and hot chili-peppers all mixed together. It stings your eyes, makes you want to puke. Lester did puke, and Janet sneezed for an hour afterward. She said ordinarily only ragweed or cat-dander does that to her. Anyway, I went up to the chair where he’d been. The ropes were still there, and the handcuffs, and the clothes. The guy’s shirt was still buttoned. The guy’s tie was still knotted. I reached out and unzipped his pants — careful, like his pecker was gonna fly outta there and rip my nose off — but all I saw was his underwear inside his pants. Ordinary white Jockey shorts.
That was all, but that was enough, because they were empty, too. Tell you something, my brother
— you ain’t seen weird until you’ve seen a guy’s clothes all put together in layers like that with no guy left inside em.’
‘Turn to smoke and disappear,’ Pearson said. ‘Jesus Christ.’
‘Yeah. At the very end, he looked like that.’ He pointed to one of the streetlights with its bright revolving nimbus of moisture.
‘And what happens to . . . ‘ Pearson stopped, unsure for a moment how to express what he wanted to ask. ‘Are they reported missing? Are they . . . ‘ Then he knew what it was he really wanted to know. ‘Duke, where’s the real Douglas Keefer? And the real Suzanne Holding?’
Duke shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Except that, in a way, it’s the real Keefer you saw this morning, Brandon, and the real Suzanne Holding, too. We think that maybe the heads we see aren’t really there, that our brains are translating what the bats really are — their hearts and their souls — into visual images.’
‘Spiritual telepathy?’
Duke grinned. ‘You got a way with words, bro — that’ll do. You need to talk to Lester. When it comes to the batpeople, he’s damn near a poet.’
The name rang a clear bell, and after a moment’s thought, Pearson thought he knew why.
‘Is he an older guy with lots of white hair? Looks sort of like an aging tycoon on a soap opera?’
Duke burst out laughing. ‘Yeah, that’s Les.’