“Pretext,” Steve’s erstwhile boss said.
“Yes, right, a pretext. It’s like how, in the old horror movies, a vampire can’t just come in on his own.
You have to invite him in.”
“Why?” Cynthia asked.
“Maybe because Entragian-the real Entragian-was still inside his head. Like a shadow. Or a person that’s locked out of his house but can still look in the windows and pound on the doors. Now Tak’s in my mother- what’s left of her-and it would kill us if it could . . . but it could probably still make the best Key lime pie in the world, too. If it wanted to.”
David looked down for a moment, his lips trembling, then looked back up at them.
“Him needing a pretext to take us doesn’t really matter. Many times what he does or says doesn’t matter-it’s nonsense, or impulse. Although there are clues. Always clues. He gives himself away, shows his real self, like someone who says what he sees in inkblots.”
Steve asked, “If that doesn’t matter, what does?”
“That he took us and let other people go. He thinks he took us at random, like a little kid in a supermarket, just pulling any can that catches his eye off the shelf and drop.. ping it into his mom’s cart,
but that’s not what happened.”
“It’s like the Angel of Death inEgypt , isn’t it?” Cynthia said in a curiously flat voice.
“Only in reverse. We had a mark on us that told our Angel of Death-this guy Entragian-to stop and grab instead of just going on by.”
David nodded. “Yeah. He didn’t know it then, but he does now-mi him en tow, he’d say your God is strong, our God is with us.”
“If this is an example of God being with us, I hope r I never attract his attention when he’s in a snit,”
Johnny said. –
“Now Tak wants us to go,” David said, “and he knows that we can go. Because of the free-will covenant. That s what Reverend Martin always called it. He.. . he..
“David?” Ralph asked. “What is it? What’s wrong?” David shrugged. “Nothing. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that God never makes us do what he wants us to do. He tells us, that’s all, then steps back to see how it turns out. Reverend Martin’s wife came in and listened for awhile while he was talking about the free-will covenant. She said her mother had a motto: ‘God says take what you want, and pay for it.’
Tak’s opened the door back to Highway 50 … but that isn’t where we’re supposed to go. If we do go, if we leave Desperation without doing what God sent us here to do, we’ll pay the price.
He glanced at the circle of faces around him once again, and once again he finished by looking directly at Johnny Marmnville.
“I’ll stay no matter what, but to work, it really has to be all of us. We have to give our will over to God’s will, and we have to be ready to die. Because that’s what it might come to.”
“You’re insane, my boy,” Johnny said. “Ordinarily I like that in a person, but this is going a little too far, even for me. I haven’t survived this long in order to be shot or pecked to death by buzzards in the desert.
As for God, as far as I’m concerned, he died in the DMZ back in 1969.
Jimi Hendrix was playing ‘Purple Haze’ on Armed Ser-vices Radio at the time.”
“Listen to the rest, okay? Will you do that much?”
“Why should I?”
“Because there’s a story.” David drank more Jolt, grimacing as he swallowed. “A good one. Will you listen?”
“Story-hour’s over. I told you that.”
David didn’t reply.
There was silence in the back of the truck. Steve was watching Johnny closely. If he showed any sign of moving toward the Ryder’s back door and trying to run it up, Steve meant to grab him. He didn’t want to-he had spent a lot of years in the savagely hierarchical world of backstage rock, and knew that doing such a thing would make him feel like Fletcher Christian to Johnny’s Captain Bligh-but he would if he had to.
So it was a relief when Johnny shrugged, smiled, hunkered down next to the kid, and selected his own bottle of Jolt. “Okay, so story-hour’s extended. Just for tonight.” He ruffled David’s hair. The very self-consciousness of the gesture made it oddly charming.
“Stories have been my Achilles’ heel practically since I ditched the stroller. I have to tell you, though, this is one I’d like to hear end with ‘And they lived happily ever after.’”
“Wouldn’t we all,” Cynthia said.
“I think the guy I met told me everything,” David said, “but there are still some parts I don’t know. Parts
that are blurry, or just plain black. Maybe because I couldn’t understand, or because I didn’t want to.”
“Do the best you can,” Ralph said. “That’ll be good enough.”
David looked up into the shadows, thinking- summoning, Cynthia thought-and then began.
“Billingsley told the legend, and like most leg-ends, I guess, most of it was wrong. It wasn’t a cave-in that closed the China Shaft, that’s the first thing. The mine was brought down on purpose. And it didn’t happen in 1858, although that was when the first Chinese miners were brought in, but in September of 1859. Not forty Chinese down there when it happened but fifty-seven, not two white men but four.
Sixty-one people in all. And the drift wasn’t a hundred and fifty feet deep, like Billingsley said, but nearly two hundred. Can you imagine? Two hun dred feet deep in hornfels that could have fallen in on them at any moment.”
The boy closed his eyes. He looked incredibly fragile like a child who has just begun to recover from some terrible illness and may relapse at any moment. Some of that look might have been caused by the thin green sheen of soap still on his skin, but Cynthia didn’t think that was all of it. Nor did she doubt David’s power, or have a problem with the idea that he might have been touched by God She had been raised in a parsonage, and she had seen this look before. . . although never so strongly.
“At ten minutes past one on the afternoon of September twenty-first, the guys at the face broke through into what they at first thought was a cave. Inside the opening was a pile of those stone things. Thousands of them. Statues of certain animals, low animals, the timoh sen cah. Wolves, coyotes, snakes, spiders, rats, bats. The miners were amazed by these, and did the most natural thing in the world: bent over and picked them up.”
“Bad idea,” Cynthia murmured.
David nodded. “Some went crazy at once, turning on their friends-heck, turning on their relatives-and trying to rip their throats out. Others, not just the ones farther back in the shaft who didn’t actually handle the can tahs, but some who were close and actually did handle them, seemed all right, at least for awhile.
Two of these were brothers from Tsingtao-Ch’an Lushan and Shih Lushan Both saw through the break in the face and into the cave which was really a kind of underground chamber. It was round, like the bottom of a well. The walls were made of faces, these stone animal faces. The faces of can taks, I think,
although I’m not sure about that. There was a small kind of building to one side, the pirin moh-I don’t know what that means, I’m sorry-and in the middle, a round hole twelve feet across. Like a giant eye, or another well.
A well in a well. Like the carvings, which are mostly ani-mals with other animals in their mouths for tongues. Can tak in can tah, can tah in can tak.”
“Or camera in camera,” Marinville said. He spoke with an eyebrow raised, his sign that he was making fun, but David took him seriously. He nodded and began to shiver.
“That’s Tak’s place,” he said. “The mine, well of the worlds.”
“I don’t understand you,” Steve said gently.
David ignored him; it was still Marinville he seemed to be mostly talking to. “The force of evil from the mi filled the can tahs the same way the minerals fill the ground itself blown into every particle of it, like smoke. And it filled the chamber I’m talking about the same way. It’s not smoke, but smoke is the best way to think about it, maybe. It affected the miners at different rates, like a disease germ. The ones who went nuts right away turned on the others. Some, their bodies started to change the way Audrey’s did at the end. Those were the ones who had touched the can tahs, sometimes picked up whole handfuls at once and then put them down so they could. . . you know. . . go at the others.