Steve took the flashlight and shone it on Billingsley’ s tile fish, so joyful and funky here in the dark. He wasn’t surprised to find that he no longer liked it much. Now it _ was like laughter in a haunted house, or a clown atmidnight . He snapped the light off.
“What are you thinking, boss?”
“Don’t call me that anymore, Steve. I never liked it that much to begin with.”
“All right. What are you thinking, Johnny?”
Johnny looked around to make sure they were still alone. His face, dominated by his swelled and leaning nose, looked both tired and intent. As he shook out another three aspirin and dry-swallowed them, Steve realized an amazing thing: Marinville looked younger. In spite of everything he’d been through, he looked younger.
He swallowed again, grimacing at the taste of the old pills, and said: “David’s mom.”
“What?”
“It could have been. Take a second. Think about it. You’ll see how pretty it is, in a ghastly kind of way.”
Steve did. And saw how completely it made sense of the situation. He didn’t know where Audrey Wyler’s story had parted company from the truth, but he did know that at some point she had been gotten to . . . changed by the stones she had called the can tahs.
Changed? Afflicted with a kind of horrible, degenerative rabies. What had happened to her could have happened to Ellen Carver, as well.
Steve suddenly found himself hoping Mary Jackson was dead. That was awful, but in a case like this, dead might be better, mightn’t it? Better than being under the spell of the can tahs. Better than what apparently happened when the can tahs were taken away.
“What do we do now?” he asked.
“Get out of this town. By any means possible.”
“All right. If David’s still unconscious, we’ll carry him. Let’s do it.”
They started back to the lobby.
David Carver walked downAnderson Avenue past West Wentworth Middle School.
Written on the side of the school-building in yellow spray-paint were the words IN THESE SILENCES
SOMETHING MAY RISE. Then he turned anOhio corner and began walking downBear Street . That was pretty funny, sinceBear Street and the Bear Street Woods were nine big suburban blocks from the
junior high, but that’s the way things worked in dreams. Soon he would wake up in his own bedroom and the whole thing would fall apart, anyway.
Ahead of him were three bikes in the middle of the street. They had been turned upside down, and their wheels were spinning in the air.
“And Pharaoh said unto Joseph, I have dreamed a dream,” someone said, “and I have heard say of thee, that thou canst understand a dream to interpret it.”
David looked across the street and saw Reverend Martin. He was drunk and he needed a shave. In one hand he held a bottle of Seagram’s Seven whiskey. Between his feet was a yellow puddle of puke. David could barely stand to look at him. His eyes were empty and dead.
“And Joseph answered Pharaoh, saying, It is not in me:
God shall give Pharaoh an answer of peace.” Reverend Martin toasted him with the bottle and then drank. “Go get em,” he said. “Now we’re going to discover if you know where Moses was when the lights went out.”
David walked on. He thought of turning around; then a queer but strangely persuasive idea came to him: if he did turn around, he would see the mummy tottering after him in a cloud of ancient wrappings and spices.
He walked a little faster.
As he passed the bikes in the street, he noted that one of the turning wheels made a piercing and unpleasant sound: Reek-reek-reek. It made him think of the weathervane on top of Bud’s Suds, the leprechaun with the pot of gold under his arm. The one in- Desperation! I’m in Desperation, and this is a dream! I fell asleep while I was trying to pray, I’m upstairs in the. old movie theater!
“There shall arise among you a prophet, and a dreamer of dreams,” someone said.
David looked across the Street and saw a dead cat-a cougar-hanging from a speed-limit sign. The cougar had a human head. Audrey Wyler’s head. Her eyes rolled at him tiredly and he thought she was trying to smile. “But if he should say to you, Let us seek other gods, you shalt not hearken unto him.”
He looked away, grimacing, and here, on his own side ofBear Street , was sweet Pie standing on the porch of his friend Brian’s house (Brian’s house had never been onBear Street before, but now the rules had apparently changed). She was holding Melissa Sweetheart clasped in her arms. “He was Mr. Big Boogeyman after all,” she said. “You know that now, don’t you?”
“Yes. I know, Pie.”
“Walk a little faster, David. Mr. Big Boogeyman’s after you.”
The desert-smell of wrappings and old spices was stronger in his nose now, and David walked faster still. Up ahead was the break in the bushes which marked the entrance to the Ho Chi Minh Trail. There had never been anything there before but the occasional hopscotch grid or KATHI LOVES RUSSELL
chalked on the sidewalk, but today the entrance to the path was guarded by an ancient stone statue, one much too big to be a can tah, little god; this was a can tak, big god. It was a jackal with a cocked head, an open, snarling mouth, and buggy cartoon eyes that were full of fury. One of its ears had been either chipped away or eroded away. The tongue in its mouth was not a tongue at all but a human head-Collie Entragian’s head, Smokey Bear hat and all.
“Fear me and turn aside from this path,” the cop in the mouth of the jackal said as David approached.
“Mi tow, can de lach: fear the unformed. There are other gods than yourscan tah, can tak. You know I speak the truth.”
“Yes, but my God is strong,” David said in a conversa-tional voice. He reached into the jackal’s open mouth and seized its psychotic tongue. He heard Entragian scream-and felt it, a scream that vibrated against his palm like a joy-buzzer. A moment later, the jackal’s entire head exploded in a soundless shardless flash of light. What remained was a stone hulk that stopped short at the shoulders.
He walked down the path, aware that he was glimpsing plants he had never seen anywhere inOhio before-spiny cactuses and drum cactuses, winter fat, squaw tea, Rus-sian thistle.., also known as tumbleweed. From the bushes at the side of the path stepped his mother. Her face was black and wrinkled, an ancient bag of dough. Her eyes drooped. The sight of her in this state filled him with sorrow and horror.
“Yes, yes, your God is strong,” she said, “no argument there. But look what he’s done to me. Is this strength worth admiring? Is this a God worth having?” She held her hands out to him, displaying her rotting palms.
“God didn’t do that,” David said, and began to cry. “The policeman did it!”
“But God let it happen,” she countered, and one of her eyeballs dropped out of her head.
“The same God who let Entragian push Kirsten downstairs and then hang her body on a hook for you to find. What God is this? Turn aside from him and embrace mine. Mine is at least honest about his cruelty.”
But this whole conversation-not just the petitioning but the haughty, threatening tone of it-was so foreign to David’s memory of his mother that he began to walk forward again.
Had to walk forward again. The mummy was behind him, and the mummy was slow, yes, but he reckoned that this was one of the ways in which the mummy caught up with his victims: by using his ancient Egyptian magic to put obstacles in their path.
“Stay away from me!” the rotting mother-thing screamed. “Stay away or I’ll turn you to stone in the mouth of a god! You’ll be can tah in can tak!”
“You can’t do that,” David said patiently, “and you’re not my mother. My mother’s with my sister, in heaven, with God.”
“What a joke!” the rotting thing cried indignantly. Its voice was gargly now, like the cop’s voice. It was spitting blood and teeth as it talked. “Heaven’s a joke, the kind of thing your Reverend Martin would spiel happily on about for hours, if you kept buying him shots and beers-it’s no more real than Tom Billingsley’s fishes and horses! You won’t tell me you swallowed it, will you? A smart boy like you? Did you? Oh Davey! I don’t know whether to laugh or cry!” What she did was smile furiously. “There s no heaven, no afterlife at all … not for such as us. Only the gods-can taks, can tahs, can-”
He suddenly realized what this confused sermon was about: holding him here. Holding him so the mummy could catch up and choke him to death. He stepped for-ward, seized the raving head, and squeezed it between his hands. He surprised himself by laughing as he did it, because it was so much like the stuff the crazy cable-TV preachers did; they grabbed their victims upside the head and bellowed stuff like “Sickness come owwr!