As she watched, a spider ran out of Collie Entragian’s mouth.
The beam of the light shook as she ran it along the line of corpses again. Three men.
Three big men, not a one of the three under six-feet-five.
Iknow why I’m here instead of in jail, she thought. And I know why I wasn’t killed. I’m next. When it’s through with Ellen, I’m next. Mary began to scream.
The an tak chamber glowed with a faint red light that seemed to come from the air itself. Something which still looked a bit like Ellen Carver walked across it, accompanied by a retinue of scorpions and
fiddlebacks. Above it, around it, the stone faces of the can taks peered down. Across from it was the pirin moh, a jutting facade that looked a bit like the front of a Mexican hacienda. In front of it was the pit-the mi, well of the worlds. The light could have been coming from here, but it was impossible to tell for sure. Sitting in a circle around the mouth of the mi were coyotes and buzzards. Every now and then one of the birds would rustle its feathers or one of the coyotes would flick an ear; if not for these moves, they might have been stones themselves.
Ellen’s body walked slowly; Ellen’s head sagged. Pain pulsed deep in her belly. Blood ran down her legs in thin, steady streams. It had stuffed a torn cotton tee-shirt into Ellen’s panties and that had helped for awhile, but now the shirt was soaked through. Bad luck it had had, and not just once. The first one had had prostate cancer- undiagnosed-and the rot had started there, spreading through his body with such unexpected speed that it had been lucky to get to Josephson in time. Josephson had lasted a little longer, Entragian-a nearly perfect specimen-longer still. And Ellen? Ellen had been suffering from a yeast infection. Just a yeast infection, nothing at all in the ordinary scheme of things, but it had been enough to start the dominoes falling, and now…
Well, there was Mary. It didn’t quite dare take her yet, not until it knew what the others were going to do. If the writer won out and took them back to the highway, it would jump to Mary and take one of the ATVs (loaded down with as many can tahs as it could transport) up into the hills. It already knew where to go: Alphaville, a vegan commune in the Desatoyas.
They wouldn’t be vegans for long after Tak arrived.
If the wretched little prayboy prevailed and they came south, Mary might serve as bait.
Or as a hostage. She would serve as neither, however, if the prayboy sensed she was no longer human.
It sat down on the edge of the mi and stared into it. The mi was shaped like a funnel, its rough walls sliding in toward each other until, twenty-five or thirty feet down, nothing was left of the mouth’s twelve-foot diameter but a hole less than an inch across. Baleful scarlet light, almost too bright to look at, stormed out of this hole in pulses. It was a hole like an eye.
One of the buzzards tried to lay its head in Ellen’s bloodstinking lap; it pushed the bird away. Tak had hoped looking into the mi would be calming, would help it decide what to do next (for the mi was where it really lived; Ellen Carver was just an outpost), but it only seemed to increase its disquiet.
– Things were on the verge of going badly wrong. Looking back, it. saw clearly that some other force had perhaps been working against it from the start.
It was afraid of the boy, especially in its current weak-ness. Most of all it was terrified of being completely shut up beyond the narrow throat of the mi again, like a genie in a bottle. But that didn’t have to be. Even if the boy brought them, it didn’t have to be. The others would be weakened by their doubts, the boy would be weakened by his human concerns-especially his concern for his mother-and if the boy died, it could close the door to the outside again, close it with a bang, and then take the others. The writer and the boy’s father would have to die, but the two younger ones it would try to sedate and save.
Later, it might very well want to use their bodies.
It rocked forward, oblivious to the blood squelching between Ellen’s thighs, as it had been oblivious of the teeth falling out of Ellen’s head or the three knuckles that had exploded like pine-knots in a fireplace when it had clipped Mary on the chin. It looked into the funnel of the well, and the constricted red eye at the bottom.
The eye of Tak.
The boy could die.
He was, after all, on~y a boy … not a demon, a god, or a savior.
Tak leaned farther over the funnel with its jagged crystal sides and murky reddish light.
Now it could hear a sound, very faint-a kind of low, atonal humming. It was an idiot sound. . . but it was also wonderful, compelling. It closed its stolen eyes and breathed deeply, sucking at the force it felt, trying to get as much inside as it could, wanting to slow-at least temporarily-this body’s de-generation. It would need Ellen awhile longer.
And besides, now it felt the mi’s peace. At last.
“Tak,” it whispered into the darkness. “Tak en tow mi, tak ah lah, tak ah wan.”
Then it was silent. From below, deep in the humming red silence of the mi, came the wet tongue sound of something slithering.
David said, “The man who showed me these things- the man who guided me-told me to tell you that none of this is destiny.” His-arms were clasped around his knees and his head was bent; he seemed to be speaking to his sneakers. “In a way, that’s the scariest part. Pie’s dead, and Mr. Billingsley, and everyone else in Desperation, because one man hated the Mining Safety and Health Administration and another was too curious and hated being tied to his desk. That’s all.”
“And God told you all this?” Johnny asked.
The boy nodded, still without looking up.
“So we’re really talking miniseries here,” Johnny said. “Night One is the Lushan Brothers, Night Two is Josephson, the Footloose Receptionist. They’ll love it at ABC.”
“Why don’t you shut up?” Cynthia said softly.
“Another county heard from!” Johnny exclaimed. “This young woman, this road babe with attitude, this flashing female flame of commitment, will now explain, complete with pictures and taped accompaniment by the noted rock ensemble Pearl Jam-”
“Just shut the fuck up,” Steve said.
Johnny looked at him, shocked to silence.
Steve shrugged embarrassed but not backing down. “The time for whistling past the graveyard’s over.
You need to cut the crap.” He looked back at David.
“I know more about this part,” David said. “More than I want to, actually. I got inside this one. I got inside his head.” He paused. “Ripton. That was his name. He was the first.”
And still looking down between his cocked knees at his sneakers, David began to talk.
The man who hates MSHA is Cary Ripton, pit- foreman of the new Rattlesnake operation. He is forty-eight, balding, sunken-eyed, cynical, in pain more often than not these days, a man who desperately wanted to be a mining engineer but wasn’t up to the math and wound up here instead, running an open-pit. Stuffing blast-holes full of ANFO and trying not to choke the prancing little faggot from MSHA when he comes out on Tuesday afternoons.
When Kirk Turner runs into the field office this after-noon, face blazing with excitement, to tell him that the last blast-pattern has uncovered an old drift-mine and that there are bones inside, they can see them, Ripton ‘s first impulse is to tell him to organize a party of volunteers, they’re going in. All sorts of possibilities dance in his head. He is too old a hand for childish fantasies about lost goldmines and troves of Indian artifacts, much too old, but as he and Turner rush out, part of him is thinking about those things just the same, oh yes.
The cluster of men standing at the foot of the newly turned blast-field, eyeing the hole their latest explosions have uncovered, is a small one: seven guys in all, counting Turner, the crew boss. There are right now fewer than ninety men working for the Desperation Mining Corporation. Next year, if they’re lucky-if the copper-yield and the prices both stay up-there may be four times that number.
Ripton and Turner walk up to the edge of the hole. There is a dank, strange smell coming out of it, one Cary Ripton associates with coalgas in the mines ofKentucky andWest Virginia . And yes, there are bones. He can see them scattering back into the canted, downsloping dark-ness of an old-fashioned square-drift mine, and while it’s impossible to tell for sure about all of them, he sees a ribcage which is almost certainly human. Farther back, tantalizingly close but still just a little too far for even a powerful flashlight to show clearly, is something that could be a skull.