“It couldn’t be done,” I said through a dry mouth. But their hands were tied behind them, all right. I couldn’t seem to take my eyes away from that.
“It could. If they wanted to bad enough, David, they could.”
“But why?”
“I think you know why. Not any of the tourists, the summer people-like that guy Miller-but there are people from around here who could make a pretty decent guess.
“The Arrowhead Project?” Ollie said, “I stand by one of those registers all day long and I hear a lot. All this spring I’ve been hearing things about that damned Arrowhead thing, none of it good. The black ice on the lakes—”
I thought of Bill Giosti leaning in my window, blowing warm alcohol in my face.
Not just atoms, but different atoms. Now these bodies hanging from that overhead pipe.
The cocked heads. The dangling shoes. The tongues protruding like summer sausages.
I realized with fresh horror that new doors of perception were opening up inside.
New? Not so. Old doors of perception. The perception of a child who has not yet learned to protect itself by developing the tunnel vision that keeps out ninety percent of the universe. Children see everything their eyes happen upon, hear everything in their ears’ range. But if life is the rise of consciousness (as a crewel-work sampler my wife made in high school proclaims), then it is also the reduction of input.
Terror is the widening of perspective and perception. The horror was in knowing I was swimming down to a place most of us leave when we get out of diapers and into training pants. I could see it on Ollie’s face, too. When rationality begins to break down, the circuits of the human brain can overload. Axons grow bright and feverish.
Hallucinations turn real: the quicksilver puddle at the point where perspective makes parallel lines seem to intersect is really there; the dead walk and talk; a rose begins to sing.
“I’ve heard stuff from maybe two dozen people,” Ollie said. “Justine Robards.
Nick Tochai. Ben Michaelson. You can’t keep secrets in small towns. Things get out.
Sometimes it’s like a spring—it just bubbles up out of the earth and no one has an idea where it came from. You overhear something at the library and pass it on, or at the marina in Harrison. Christ knows where else, or why. But all spring and summer I’ve been hearing Arrowhead Project, Arrowhead Project.”
“But these two,” I said. “Christ, Ollie, they’re just kids.”
“There were kids in Nam who used to take ears. I was there. I saw it.”
“But-what would drive them to do this?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they knew something. Maybe they only suspected. They must have known people in here would start asking them questions eventually. If there is an eventually.”
“If you’re right,” I said, “it must be something really bad.”
“That storm,” Ollie said in his soft, level voice. “Maybe it knocked something loose up there. Maybe there was an accident. They could have been fooling around with anything. Some people claim they were messing with high-intensity lasers and masers.
Sometimes I hear fusion power. And suppose… suppose they ripped a hole straight through into another dimension?”
“That’s hogwash,” I said.
“Are they?” Ollie asked, and pointed at the bodies.
“No. The question now is: What do we do?”
“I think we ought to cut them down and hide them,” he said promptly. “Put them under a pile of stuff people won’t want-dog food, dish detergent, stuff like that. If this gets out, it will only make things worse. That’s why I came to you, David. I felt you are the only one I could really trust.’ I muttered, “It’s like the Nazi war criminals killing themselves in their cells after the war was lost.”
“Yeah. I had the same thought.” We fell silent, and suddenly those soft shuffling noises began outside the steel loading door again-the sound of the tentacles feeling softly across it. We drew together.
My flesh was crawling.
“Okay,” I said.
“We’ll make it as quick as we can,” Ollie said. His sapphire ring glowed mutely as he moved his flashlight. “I want to get out of here fast.” I looked up at the ropes. They had used the same sort of clothesline the man in the golf cap had allowed me to tic around his waist. The nooses had sunk into the puffed flesh of their necks, and I wondered again what it could have been to make both of them go through with it. I knew what Ollie meant by saying that if the news of the double suicide got out, it would make things worse. For me it already had-and I wouldn’t have believed that possible.
There was a snicking sound. Ollie had opened his knife, a good heavy job made for slitting open cartons. And, of course, cutting rope.
“You or me?” he asked.
I swallowed. “One each.” We did it.
When I got back, Amanda was gone and Turman was with Billy. They were both sleeping. I walked down one of the aisles and a voice said: ” Drayton. David.” It was Amanda, standing by the stairs to the manager’s office, her eyes like emeralds. “What was it?”
“Nothing,” I said.
She came over to me. I could smell faint perfume. And oh how I wanted her.
“You liar,” she said.
“It was nothing. A false alarm.”
“If that’s bow you want it.” She took my hand. “I’ve just been up to the office. It’s empty and there’s a lock on the door.” Her face was perfectly calm, but her eyes were lambent, almost feral, and a pulse beat steadily in her throat.
“I don’t—”
“I saw the way you looked at me,” she said. “If we need to talk about it, it’s no good. The Turman woman is with your son.
“Yes.” It came to me that this was a way—maybe not the best one, but a way, nevertheless-to take the curse off what Ollie and I had just done. Not the best way, just the only way.
We went up the narrow flight of stairs and into the office. it was empty, as she had said. And there was a lock on the door. I turned it. In the darkness she was nothing but a shape. I put my arms out, touched her, and pulled her to me. She was trembling. We went down on the floor, first kneeling, kissing, and I cupped one firm breast and could feel the quick thudding of her heart through her sweatshirt. I thought of Steffy telling Billy not to touch the live wires. I thought of the bruise that had been on her hip when she took off the brown dress on our wedding night. I thought of the first time I had seen her, biking across the mall of the University of Maine at Orono, me bound for one of Vincent Hartgen’s classes with my portfolio under my arm. And my erection was enormous.
We lay down then, and she said, “Love me, David. Make me warm.” When she came, she dug into my back with her nails and called. me by a name that wasn’t mine. I didn’t mind. It made us about even.
When we came down, some sort of creeping dawn had begun. The blackness outside the loopholes went reluctantly to dull gray, then to chrome, then to the bright, featureless, and unsparkling white of a drive-in movie screen. Mike Hatlen was asleep in a folding chair he had scrounged somewhere. Dan Miller sat on the floor a little distance away, eating a Hostess donut. The kind that’s powdered with white sugar.
“Sit down, Drayton,” he invited.
I looked around for Amanda, but she was already halfway up the aisle. She didn’t look back. Our act of love in the dark already seemed something out of a fantasy, impossible to believe even in this weird daylight. I sat down.
“Have a donut.” He held the box out.
I shook my head. “All that white sugar is death. Worse than cigarettes.” That made him laugh a little bit. “in that case, have two. ” I was surprised to find a little laughter left inside me-he had surprised it out, and I liked him for it. I did take two of his donuts. They tasted pretty good. I chased them with a cigarette, although it is not normally my habit to smoke in the mornings.
“I ought to get back to my kid,” I said. “He’ll be waking up.”
Miller nodded. “Those pink bugs,” he said. “They’re all gone. So are the birds.
Hank Vannerman said the last one hit the windows around four. Apparently the… the wildlife… is a lot more active when it’s dark.”
“You don’t want to tell Brent Norton that,” I said. “Or Norm.” He nodded again and didn’t say anything for a long time. Then he lit a cigarette of his own and looked at me. “We can’t stay here, Drayton,” he said.