“I’m sure your knowledge will come in very handy, but I think we ought to pass that part by, for the time being,” Marinville said. He spoke in a professionally soothing voice, one Steve recognized right away. It was how the boss talked to the women (it was invariably women, usually in their fifties or early sixties) who set up his literary lectures-what he called his cultural bombing runs. “We had better talk things over a little, first. Come on into the theater. There’s quite a setup there. I think you’ll be amazed.”
“What are you, stupid?” she asked. “We don’t need to talk things over, we need to get out of here.”
She looked around at them. “You don’t seem to grasp what has happened here. This man, Collie Entragian-”
Marinville raised his flashlight and shone it full into his face for a moment, letting her get a good look.
“I’ve met the man, as you can see, and I grasp plenty. Come on out front, Ms. Wyler, and we’ll talk. I see you’re impatient with that idea, but it’s for the best. The carpenters have a saying-measure twice, cut once.
It’s a good saying. All right?”
She gave him a reluctant look, but when he started toward the door, she followed. So did Steve and Cynthia. Outside, the wind screamed around the theater, making it groan in its deepest joints.
The dark shape of a car, one with light bars on the roof, rolled slowly north through the wind screaming dark, away from the rampart that marked China Pit at the south end of Desperation. It rolled with its lights off; the thing behind the wheel saw quite well in the dark, even when that darkness was stuffed with flying grit.
The car passed the bodega at the town’s south end. The fallen sign reading MEXICAN FOOD’S was now mostly covered by blowing sand; all that still showed in the weak glow of the porch bulb was CAN
FOO. The cruiser drove slowly on up the street to theMunicipalBuilding , turned into the lot, and parked where it had before. Behind the wheel, the large, slumped figure wearing the Sam Browne belt with the badge on the cross-strap was singing an old song in a tuneless, droning voice: “And we’ll go dance in, baby, then you’ll see … How the magic’s in the music and the music’s in me..
The creature in the driver’s seat killed the Caprice’s engine and then just sat there, head down, fingers tapping at the wheel. A buzzard flapped out of the flying dirt, made a last minute course adjustment as the wind gusted, then landed on the hood of the cruiser. A second followed, and a third. This latest arrival squalled at his mates, then squirted a thick stream of guano onto the car’s hood.
They lined up, looking in through the dirty windshield. “Jews,” the driver said, “must die.
And Catholics. Mor-mons, too. Tak.”
The door opened. One foot swung out, then another.
The figure in the Sam Browne belt stood up, slammed the door shut. It held its new hat under its arm for the time being. In its other hand it held the shotgun the woman, Mary, had grabbed off the desk. It walked around to the front door. Here, flanking the steps, were two coyotes. They whined uneasily and shrank down on their haunches, grinning sycophantic doggy grins at the approaching figure, which passed them with no acknowledgement at all.
It reached for the door, and then its hand froze. The door was ajar. A vagary of the wind had sucked it most of the way shut.. . but not completely.
“What the fuck?” it muttered, and opened the door. It went upstairs fast, first putting the hat on (jamming it down hard; it didn’t fit so well now) and then shifting the shotgun to both hands.
A coyote lay dead at the top of the stairs. The door which led into the holding area was also standing open. The thing with the shotgun in its hands stepped in, knowing already what it would see, but the knowing did not stop the angry roar which came out of its chest. Out-side, at the foot of the steps, the coyotes whined and cringed and squirted urine. On the police-cruiser, the buzzards also heard the cry of the thing upstairs and fluttered their wings uneasily, almost lifting off and then settling back, darting their heads restlessly at each other, as if to peck.
In the holding area, all the cells which had been occupied were now standing open and empty.
“That boy,” the figure in the doorway whispered. Its hands were white on the stock of the shotgun.
“That nasty little drug user.”
It stood there a moment longer, then stepped slowly into the room. Its eyes shifted back and forth in its expressionless face. Its hat-a Smokey-style with a flat brim- was slowly rising again as the thing’s hair pushed it up. It had a great deal more hair than the hat’s previous owner. The woman Collie Entragian had taken from the detention area and down the stairs had been five-six, a hundred and thirty pounds.
This thing looked like that woman’s very big sister: six-three, broad-shouldered, probably two hundred pounds.
It was wearing a coverall it had taken from
the supply shed before driving back out of what the mining company called Rattlesnake Number Two and the townspeople had for over a hundred years called the China Pit. The coverall was a bit tight in the breast and the hip, but still better than this body’s old clothes; they were as useless to it now as Ellen Carver’s old concerns and desires. As for Entragian, it had his belt, badge, and hat; it wore his pistol on her hip.
Of course it did. After all, Ellen Carver was the only law west of thePecos now. It was her job, and God help anyone who tried to keep her from doing a good one.
Her former son, for instance.
From the breast pocket of the coverall it took a small piece of sculpture. A spider carved from gray stone. It canted drunkenly to the left on Ellen’s palm (one of its legs on that side was broken off), but that in no way dissipated its ugliness or its malevolence. Pitted stone eyes, purple with iron that had been volcano-cooked millennia ago, bulged from above its mandible, which gaped to show a tongue that was not a tongue but the grinning head of a tiny coyote. On the spider’s back was a shape which vaguely resembled a country fiddle.
“Tak!” the creature standing by the desk said. Its face was slack and doughy, a cruel parody of the face of the woman who, ten hours before, had been reading her daughter a Curious George book and sharing a cup of cocoa with her. Yet the eyes in that face were alive and aware and venomous, hideously like the eyes of the thing resting on her palm.
Now she took it in her other hand and raised it over her head, into the light of the hanging glass globe over the desk. “Tak ah wan! Tak ah lah! Mi him, en tow! En tow!”
Recluse spiders came hurrying toward it from the dark-ness of the stairwell, from cracks in the baseboard, from the dark corners of the empty cells. They gathered around it in a circle. Slowly, it lowered the stone spider to the desk.
“Tak!” it cried softly. “Mi him, en tow.”
Aripple went through the attentive circle of spiders. There were maybe fifty in all, most no bigger than plump raisins. Then the circle broke up, streaming toward the door in two lines. The thing that had been Ellen Carver before Collie Entragian took her down into the China Pit stood watching them go. Then it put the carving back into its pocket.
“Jews must die,” it told the empty room. “Catholics must die. Mormons must die.
Grateful Dead fans must die.” It paused. “Little prayboys must also die.”
It raised Ellen Carver’s hands and began tapping Ellen Carver’s fingers meditatively against Ellen Carver
s collarbones.
PART III
THE AMERICAN WEST: LEGENDARY SHADOWS
“Holy shit!” Steve said. “This is amazing.”
“Fucking weird is what it is,” Cynthia replied, then looked around to see if she had offended the old man. Billingsley was nowhere in sight.
“Young lady,” Johnny said. “Weird is the mosh pit, the only invention for which your generation can so far take – credit. This is not weird. This is rather nice, iii fact.”
“Weird,” Cynthia repeated, but she was smiling. Johnny guessed that The American West had been built in the decade following World War II, when movie the-aters were no longer the overblown Xanadus they had been in the twenties and thirties, but long before mailing and multiplexing turned them into
.Dolby-equipped shoe-boxes. Billingsley had turned on the pinspots above the – screen and those in what once would have been called the orchestra-pit, and Johnny had no trouble seeing the place. The auditorium was big but bland. There were vaguely art-deco electric wall-sconces, but no other grace-notes. –