“Oh yes,” the man in the Yankees cap said, turning his silvery no-eyes on David. “Yes indeed.”
“Whatever you brought me up here for, I don’t want to hear it!” David cried. “I want you to take me back! Back to my dad! I hate this! I hate being in the Land of the-”
He broke off as a horrible thought struck him. The Land of the Dead, that was what the man had said.
He’d called David an exception. But that meant- “Reverend Martin … I saw him on my way to the Woods. Is he… The man looked briefly down at his old-fashioned radio, then looked back up again and nodded. “Two days after you left, David.”
“Was he drunk?”
“Toward the end he was always drunk. Like Billingsley.”
“Was it suicide?”
“No,” the man in the Yankees cap said, and put a kindly hand on the back of David’s neck. It was warm, not the hand of a dead person. “At least, not conscious suicide. He and his wife went to the beach. They took a picnic. He went in the water too soon after lunch, and swam out too far.”
“Take me back,” David whispered. “I’m tired of all this death.”
“The poisoned field is an affront to God,” the man said. “I know it’s a bummer, David, but-”
“Then let God clean it up!” David cried. “It’s not fair for him to come to me after he killed my mother and my sister-”
“He didn’t-”
“I don’t care! I don’t care! Even if he didn’t, he stood aside and let it happen!”
“That’s not true, either.”
David shut his eyes and clapped his hands to his ears. He didn’t want to hear any more.
He refused to hear any more. Yet the man’s voice came through anyway. It was relentless. He would be able to escape it no more than Jonah had been able to escape God. God was as relentless as a bloodhound on a fresh scent. And God was cruel.
“Why are you on earth?” The voice seemed to come from inside his head now.
“I don’t hear you! I don’t hear you!”
“You were put on earth to love God-”
“No!”
“-and serve him.”
“No! Fuck God! Fuck his love! Fuck his service!”
“God can’t make you do anything you don’t want to-”
“Stop it! I won’t listen, I won’t decide! Do you hear? Do you-”
“Shh-listen!”
Not quite against his will, David listened.
PART IV
THECHINA PIT:
GOD IS CRUEL
Johnny was ready to suggest that they just get going-Cynthia could hold the kid’s head in her lap and cushion it from any bumps-when David raised his hands and pressed the heels of his palms to his temples. He took a deeper breath. A moment later his eyes opened and looked up at them: Johnny, Steve, Cynthia, his father. The faces of the two older men were as puffed and discolored as those of journeymen fighters after a bad night in a tank town; all of them looked tired and scared, jumping like spooked horses at the slightest sound. The ragtag remains of The Collie Entragian Survival Society.
“Hi. David,” Johnny said. “Great to have you back. You’re in-”
“-Steve’s truck. Parked near the movie theater. You brought it down from the Conoco station.” David struggled to a sitting position, swallowed, winced. “She must’ve shook me like dice.”
“She did,” Steve said. He was looking at David cautiously. “You remember Audrey doing that?”
“No,” David said, “but I was told.”
Johnny shot a glance at Ralph, who shrugged slightly- Don‘t ask me.
“Is there any water? My throat’s on fire.”
“We got out of the theater in a hurry and didn’t bring anything but the guns,” Cynthia said. “But there’s this.” She pointed to a case of Jolt Cola from which several bottles had already been taken. “Steve keeps it on hand for Mr. Marinville.”
“I’m a freak about it since I quit drinking,” Johnny said. “Gotta be Jolt, God knows why.
It’s warm, but-”
David took one and drank deeply, wincing as the car-bonation bit into his throat but not slowing down on that account. At last, with the bottle three-quarters empty, he put his head back against the side of the truck, closed his eyes, and burped ringingly.
Johnny grinned. “Sixty points!”
David opened his eyes and grinned back.
Johnny held out the bottle of aspirin he had liberated from the Owl’s. “Want a couple?
They’re old, but they seem to work all right.”
David thought it over, then took two and washed them down with the rest of the Jolt.
“We’re getting out,” Johnny said. “We’ll try north first-there are some trailers in the road, but Steve says he thinks we can get around them on the trailer-park side. If we can’t, we’ll have to go south to the pit-mine and then take the equipment road that runs northwest from there back to Highway 50. You and I’ll sit up front with-”
Johnny raised his eyebrows. “Pardon?”
“We have to go up to the mine, okay, but not to leave town.” David’s voice sounded hoarse, as if he’d been crying. “We have to go down inside the pit.”
Johnny glanced at Steve, who only shrugged and then looked back at the boy. “What are you talking about, David?” Steve asked. “Your mother? Because it would probably be better for her, not to mention the rest of us, if we-”
“No, that’s not why. . . Dad?” The boy reached out and took his father’s hand. It was an oddly adult gesture of comfort. “Morn’s dead.”
Ralph bowed his head. “Well, we don’t know that for sure, David, and we mustn’t give up hope, but I guess it’s likely.”
“I do know for sure. I’m not just guessing.” David’s face was haggard in the light of the crisscrossing flash-light beams. His eyes settled on Johnny last. “There’s stuff we have to do. You know it, don’t you?
That’s why you waited for me to wake up.”
“No, David. Not at all. We just didn’t want to risk moving you until we were sure you were okay.” Yet this felt like a lie to his heart. He found himself filling up with a vague, fluttery nervousness. It was the way he felt in the last few days before beginning a new book, when he understood that the inevitable could not be put off much longer, that he would soon be out on the wire again, clutching his balance-pole and riding his stupid little unicycle.
But this was worse. By far. He felt an urge to hop the kid over the head with the butt of the Rossi shotgun knock him out and shut him up before he could say any thing else.
Don’t you fuck us up, kid, he thought. Not when we’re starting to see a tiny bit of light at the end of the tunnel.
David looked back at his father. He was still holding Ralph’s hand. “She’s dead but not at rest. She can’t be as long as Tak inhabits her body.”
“Who’s Tak, David?” Cynthia asked.
“One of the Wintergreen Twins,” Johnny said cheer- fully. “The other one is Tik.”
David gave him a long, level look, and Johnny dropped his eyes. He hated himself for doing it but couldn’t help it.
“Tak is a god,” David said. “Or a demon. Or maybe nothing at all, just a name, a nonsense syllable-but a dangerous nothing, like a voice in the wind. It doesn’t matter.
What does is that my mom should be put to rest Then she can be with my sister in… well, in wherever there is for us after we die.”
“Son, what matters is that we have to get out of here,” Johnny said. He was still managing to keep his voice gentle, but now he could hear an undercurrent of impatience and fear in it. “Once we get to Ely, we’ll contact 7 the State Police-hell, the FBI. There’ll be a hundred cops on the ground and a dozen helicopters in the air bynoon tomorrow, that I promise you. But for now-”
“My mom’s dead, but Mary’s not,” David said. “She s still alive. She’s in the pit.”
Cynthia gasped. “How did you know she was even gone?”
David smiled wanly. “Well, I don’t see her, for one thing. The rest 1 know the same way I know it was Audrey who choked me. I was told.”
“By who, David?” Ralph asked.
“I don’t know,” David said. ‘~1 don’t even know if it matters. What matters is that he told me stuff.
True stuff. I know it was.”
“Story-hour’s over, pal,” Johnny said. There was a raggedness in his voice. He heard it, but he couldn’t help it. And was it surprising? This wasn’t a panel-discussion on magical realism or concrete prose, after all. Story-hour was finished; bug-out time had arrived. He had absolutely no desire to listen to a bunch of shit from this spooky little Jesus Scout.