About that he had been right.
“God, protect me long enough to get this done,” he said, and allowed himself to be drawn toward the mi. Could he stop even if he tried? Best not to know, maybe.
There were dead animals lying in a rotting ring around the hole in the floor-David Carver’s well of the worlds. Coyotes and buzzards, mostly, but he also saw spiders and a few scorpions. He had an idea that these last protectors had died when the eagle had died. Some withdrawing force had hammered the life out of them just as the life had been hammered from Audrey Wyler almost as soon as Steve had slapped the can tahs out of her hand.
Now smoke began to rise out of the mi … except it wasn’t smoke at all, not really. It was some sort of greasy brown-black muck, and as it began to curl toward him, Johnny saw it was. alive. It looked like clutching three- fingered hands on the ends of scrawny arms.
They were not ectoplasmic, those arms, but neither were they strictly physical. Like the carved shapes looming above and all around him, looking at them made Johnny’s head hurt, the way a kid’s head hurt when he staggered off some viciously swerving amusement park ride. It was the stuff that had crazed the miners, of course. The stuff that had changed Ripton. The glassless windows of the pirin moh leered at him, telling him .. . what, exactly? He could almost hear- (cay de mun) Open your mouth.
And yes, his mouth was open, wide open, like when you go to the dentist. Please open wide, Mr.
Marinville, open wide, you lousy contemptible excuse for a writer, you make me furious, you make me sick with rage, but go on, open wide, cay de mun, you fucking grayhaired pre-tentious motherfucker, we’ll fix you up, make you good as new, better than new, open wide open wide cay de mun OPEN WIDE- The smoke. Muck. Whatever it was. Those were no longer hands on the ends of the arms but tubes. No… not tubes…
Holes.
Yes, that was it. Holes like eyes. Three of them. Maybe more, but three he could see clearly. A triangle
of holes, two on top and one underneath, holes like whispering eyes, like blast-holes- That’s right, David said. That’s right, Johnny. To blast Talc right into you, the way it blasted itself into Cary Ripton, the only way it has to get out of the hole it’s in down there, the hole that’s too small for anything but this stuff this jizz, two for your nose and one for your mouth.
The brownish-black muck twisted toward him, both horrible and enticing, holes that were mouths, mouths that were eyes. Eyes that whispered. Promised. He realized he had an erection. Not exactly a great time for one, but when had that ever stopped him?
Now.., sucking … he could feel them sucking the air out of his mouth.. . his throat… He snapped his mouth shut and yanked the motorcycle helmet down over his head. He was just in time. A moment later the brownish ribbons encountered the plexi-face-shield and spread over it with an unpleasant wet smooching sound. For a moment he could see spreading suckers like kissing lips, and then they were gone, lost in filthy smears of brown particulate matter.
Johnny reached out, seized the brown stuff floating before him, and twisted it in opposite directions, as if he were wringing out a facecloth. There was a needling sensation in his palms and fingers, and the flesh went numb but the brown stuff tore away, some of it drawing back toward the mi, some dripping to he chamber’s floor.
He reached the edge of the hole, standing between a heap of feathers that had been a buzzard and a coyote lying dead on its side. He looked down, reaching up to touch the hanging bags of ANFO as he did, caressing them with tingling, half-numb hands.
Do you know how to set this shit off without dyno or blasting caps? Steve had asked. You do, don’t you? Or you think you do.
“I hope I do,” Johnny said. His voice was flat and strange inside the helmet. “I hope I-”
“THEN COME ON!” a mad voice cried out from below him. Johnny recoiled in terror and surprise. It was the voice of the cop. Of Collie Entragian. “COME ON! TAK AH SM!, PIRIN MOH! COME
ON, YOU ROTTEN COCKSUCKER! LET’s SEE HOW BRAVE YOU ARE! TAK!”
He tried to take a step backward, maybe think this over, but tendrils of muck curled around his ankles like hands and jerked his feet out from under him. He went into the well in a graceless feet-first dive,
hammering the back of his head against the edge as he fell. If not for the helmet, his skull would likely have been crushed in. He curled the bags of ANFO protectively against his chest, making breasts of them.
Then the pain came, first biting, then searing, then seeming to eat him alive. The Mi was funnel-shaped, but the descending, narrowing circle was lined with crystal outcrops of quartz and cracked hornfels.
Johnny slid down this like a kid down a slide that has grown crooked glass thorns. His legs were protected to some degree by the leather chaps and his head was protected by the motorcycle helmet, but his back and buttocks were shredded in moments. He put down his forearms in an effort to brake his slide. Needles of stone tore through them. He saw his shirt-sleeves turn red; an instant later they were in ribbons.
“YOU UKE THAT?” the voice from the bottom of the mi gibed, and now it was Ellen Carver’s voice. “TAK AH LAH, YOU INTERFERING BASTARD! EN TOW! TEN AH
LAK!” Raving.
Cursing him in two languages.
Insane in any dimension, Johnny thought, and laughed in his agony. He lurched forward, meaning to somersault or die trying. Time to tenderize the other side, he thought, and laughed harder than ever. He could feel blood pouring into his boots like warm water.
The brown-black vapor was all around him, whispering and smearing gaping sucker mouths across the helmet’s faceplate. They appeared, disappeared, then appeared again, rubbing and making those low, suggestive smooching sounds. He couldn’t get off his back the way he wanted to, couldn’t somersault.
The angle of descent was too steep. He turned over on his side instead, clutching at the crystal outcrops that were tearing him open, slashing his hands and not caring, needing to stop himself before he was literally cut to ribbons.
Then, suddenly, it was over.
He lay folded at the bottom of the funnel, bleeding everywhere, it felt like, his slit nerves trying to drown out all rational thought with their mindless screaming. He looked up and saw a wide swath of blood marking his path down the inclined, curving wall. Strips of cloth and leather-his shirt, his Levi’s, his chaps-hung from some of the jutting crystals.
Smoke curling up between his legs, coming from the
hole at the bottom of the funnel and trying to seize his crotch.
“Let go,” he said. “My God commands it.”
The brownish-black smoke fell back, curling around his thighs in filthy banners.
“I can let you live,” a voice said. It was no wonder, Johnny thought, that Tak was caught on the other side of the funnel. The hole to which it narrowed was stringent, no more than an inch across. Red light pulsed in it like a wink. “I can heal you, make you well, let you live.”
“Yeah, but can you win me a goddamn Nobel Prize for Literature?”
Johnny slipped the bags of ANFO off his neck, then yanked the hammer from his belt.
He’d have to work fast. He was cut in what felt like a billion places, and already he could feel the grayness of blood-loss crowding in on his mind. It made him think of Connecticut again, and the way the fogs came in after dark during the last weeks of March and the first weeks of April. The oldtimers called it strawberry spring, God knew why.
“Yes! Yes, I can do that!” The voice from the narrow red throat sounded eager. It also sounded frightened. “Anything! Success … money … women… and I can heal you, don’t forget that! I can heal you!”
“Can you bring David’s father back?”
Silence from the mi. Now the brownish-black mist coming out of the hole found the long confusion of slashes along his back and legs, and suddenly he felt as if he had been attacked by moray eels … or piranhas. He screamed.
“I can make the pain stop!” Talc said from its tiny hole. “All you have to do is ask-and stop yourself, of course.”
With sweat stinging his eyes, Johnny used the claw end of the hammer to tear open one of the ANFO