She tried to turn the doorknob, meaning to chance it anyway-she had gone too far to turn back now. She would hurl herself out into the pelting rain and just run. Where? Anywhere.
But instead of turning the knob, her hand fell back to her side, swinging like a nearly exhausted pendulum. Then she was turning around, resisting with all her will but turning anyway, to face the thing in the archway leading into the den… and she thought, considering what spent most of its time in there, den was exactly the right word for what the room had become.
She was back from her safe place. God help her, she was back from her safe place, and the demon hiding inside her dead brother’s autistic little boy had caught her trying to escape. She felt Tak crawling inside her head, taking control, and although she saw it all and felt it all, she couldn’t even scream.
Johnny lunged past the sprawled, face-down body of Susi Geller’s redheaded friend, his head ringing from a slug which had screamed past his left ear… and it really had seemed to scream. His heart was running like a rabbit in his chest. He had moved far enough in the direction of the Carvers” house to be caught in a kind of no-man’s-land when the two vans opened fire, and knew he was extremely lucky to still be alive. For a moment there he had almost frozen, like an animal caught in a pair of oncoming headlights. Then the slug-something that had felt the size of a cemetery headstone-had gone past his ear and he had streaked for the open door of the Carver house, head down and arms pumping. Life had simplified itself amazingly. He had forgotten about Soderson and his goaty expression of half-drunk complicity, had forgotten his concern that Jackson not realize his freshly expired wife was apparently coming home from the sort of interlude about which country-western songs were written, had forgotten Entragian, Billingsley, all of them. His only thought had been that he was going to die in the no-man’s-land between the two houses, killed by psychotics who wore masks and weird outfits and shone like ghosts.
Now he was in a dark hall, just happy to realize he hadn’t wet his pants, or worse. People were screaming somewhere behind him. Mounted on the wall was a jury of Hummel figures. They had been placed on little platforms… and the Carvers had seemed so normal in other respects, he thought. He started to giggle and shoved the heel of one hand against his lips to stifle the sound. This was definitely not a giggling situation. There was a taste on his skin, just the taste of his own sweat, of course, but for a moment it seemed almost to be the taste of pussy, and he leaned forward, sure he was going to vomit. He realized he would almost certainly pass out if he did and that thought helped him to control the urge. He took his hand away from his mouth, and that helped more. He no longer felt much like laughing, either, and that was probably good.
“My daddy!” Ellen Carver was howling from behind him. Johnny tried to remember if he had ever-in Vietnam, for instance-heard such piercing, keening grief coming out of such a young throat and couldn’t. “My DADDY!”
“Hush, honey.” It was the new widow-Pie, David had always called her. Still sobbing herself but already trying to comfort. Johnny closed his eyes, trying to get away from it like that, and instead his hideous memory showed him what he had just stepped over-lunged over, really. Susi Geller’s friend. A little redheaded girl, just like in the Peanuts comic strip.
He couldn’t leave her out there. She had looked as dead as Mary and poor old Dave, but he had leaped over her like Jack over the candlestick, his ear screaming from the near miss and his balls drawn up and as hard as a couple of cherrystones, not a state in which a man could make a reasonable diagnosis.
He opened his eyes. A Hummel girl wearing a bonnet and holding a shepherd’s crook was giving him a dead china come-on. Hey, sailor, want to comb some wool with me? Johnny was leaning against the wall on his forearms. One of the other Hummel figures had fallen off its little platform and lay in shards at his feet. Johnny supposed he had knocked it off himself while he had been struggling not to puke and trying to get that awful punchline-I don’t know about the other two, but the guy in the middle looks like Willie Nelson-out of his head.
He looked slowly to his left, hearing the tendons in his neck creak, and saw the Carvers” front door still standing open. The screen was ajar; the redhead’s hand, white and still as a starfish cast up on a beach, was caught in it. Outside, the air was gray with rain. It came down with a steady hissing sound, like the world’s biggest steam iron. He could smell the grass, like some sweet wet perfume. It was spiced with a tang of cedar smoke. God bless the lightning, he thought. The burning house would bring the police and the fire engines. But for now…
The girl. A little redheaded girl, like the one Charlie Brown was so crazy for. Johnny had jumped right over her, gripped by the blind impulse to save his own ass. Understandable in the heat of the moment, but you couldn’t leave it that way. Not if you wanted to sleep at night.
He started for the door. Someone grabbed his arm. He turned and saw the intent, fearful face of Dave Reed, the dark-haired twin.
“Don’t,” Dave said in a conspirator’s hoarse whisper. His adam’s apple went up and down in his throat like something in a slot. “Don’t, Mr Marinville, they could still be out there. You could draw fire.”
Johnny looked at the hand on his arm, put his own hand over it, and gently but firmly removed it. Behind Dave he could see Brad Josephson watching him. Brad’s arm was around his wife’s considerable waist. Belinda appeared to be quivering all over, and there was a lot of her to quiver. Tears were streaming down her cheeks, leaving shiny mocha tracks.
“Brad,” Johnny said. “Get everybody who’s here into the kitchen. I’m pretty sure that’s the furthest room from the street. Sit them on the floor, okay?” He gave the Reed boy a gentle push in that direction. Dave went, but slowly, with no rhythm in his walk. To Johnny he looked like a windup toy with rust in the gears.
“Brad?”
“Okay. Don’t you go getting your head blown off, now. There’s been enough of that already.”
“I won’t. I’m attached to it.”
“Just make sure it stays attached to you.”
Johnny watched Brad, Belinda, and Dave Reed go down the hall toward the others-in the gloom they were just clustered shadows-and then turned back to the screen door. There was a fist-sized hole in the upper panel, he saw, with jags of torn screen curling in from the edges. Something bigger than he wanted to think about (something almost the size of a cemetery headstone, perhaps) had come through there, miraculously missing his clustered neighbors… or so he hoped. None of them was screaming with pain, anyhow. But Jesus, what in God’s name had the guys in the vans been shooting? What was that big?
He dropped to his knees and crawled toward the cool, wet air coming through the screen. Toward that good smell of rain and grass. When he was as close as he could get, with his nose almost on the mesh, he looked to the right and then to the left. To the right was good-he could see almost all the way up to the corner, although Bear Street itself was lost in a haze of rain. Nothing there-no vans, no aliens, no loonies dressed like refugees from Stonewall Jackson’s army. He saw his own house next door; remembered playing his guitar and indulging all his old folkie fantasies. Ramblin Jack Marinville, always headed over the next horizon-line in those thirsty Eric Andersen boots of his, lookin for them violets of the dawn. He thought of his guitar now with a longing as sharp as it was pointless.
The view to the left wasn’t as good; was lousy, in fact. The stake fence and Mary’s crashed Lumina blocked any significant sightline down the hill. Some one-a sniper in Confederate gray, say-could be crouched down there almost anywhere, waiting for the next good target. A slightly used writer with a lot of old coffeehouse fantasies still knocking around in his head would do. Probably no one there, of course-they’d know the cops and the FD would be here any minute and would have made themselves scarce-but probably just didn’t seem good enough under these circumstances. Because none of these circumstances made sense.