“Dream Floater,” the boy says.
And then, as if the words were some sort of magical incantation, his waxy, unnatural limpness departs. He begins to scream in fear, and to twist in young Jim Reed’s arms. Jim is caught by surprise and drops the boy, who lands on his ass. That must hurt like a bastard, Johnny thinks, heading in that direction without even thinking about it, but the kid shows no sign of pain; only fear. His bulging eyes are still staring up the street as he begins paddling frantically with his feet, sliding back into the house on his bottom.
Johnny, now standing on the edge of the Carver driveway, turns to look, and sees two more vans swinging around the corner from Bear Street. The one in the lead is candy pink and so streamlined it looks to Johnny like a giant Good amp; Plenty with polarized windows. On the roof is a radar dish in the shape of a Valentine heart. Under other circumstances it might look cute, but now it only looks bizarre. Curved aerodynamic shapes protrude on either side of the Good amp; Plenty van. They look like lateral fins or maybe even stubby wings.
Behind this vehicle, which may or may not be called Dream Floater, comes a long black vehicle with a bulging, dark-tinted windshield and a toadstool-shaped housing, also black, on the roof. This ebony nightmare is chased with zigzag bolts of chrome that look like barely disguised Nazi SS insignia.
The vehicles begin to pick up speed, their engines purring with a humming, cyclic bent.
A large porthole irises open in the left side of the pink vehicle. And on top of the black van, which looks like a hearse trying to transform itself into a locomotive, the side of the toadstool slides back, revealing two figures with shotguns. One is a bearded human being. He, like the alien driving the blue van, appears to be wearing the tags and tatters of a Civil War uniform. The thing beside him is wearing another sort of uniform altogether: black, high-collared, dressed with silver buttons. As with the black-and-chrome van, there’s something Nazi-ish about the uniform, but this isn’t what catches Johnny’s eyes and freezes his vocal cords so he is at first unable to cry a warning.
Above the high collar, there seems to be only darkness. He has no face, Johnny thinks in the second before the creatures in the pink van and the dead black one open fire. He has no face, that thing has no face at all.
It occurs to Johnny Marinville, who sees everything, that he may have died; that this may be hell.
Letter from Audrey Wyler (Wentworth, Ohio) to Janice Conroy (Plainview, New York), dated August 18, 1994:
Dear Janice, Thanks so much for your call. The note of condolence, too, of course, but you’ll never know how good it was to have your voice in my ear last night-like a drink of cool water on a hot day. Or maybe I mean like a sane voice when you’re stuck in the booby hatch!
Did any of what I said on the phone make sense to you? I can’t remember for sure. I’m off the tranks-“Fuck that shit,” as we used to say back in college-but that’s only been for the last couple of days, and even with Herb pitching in and helping like mad, a lot of the world has been so much scrambled eggs. Things started being that way when Bill’s friend, Joe Calabrese, called and said my brother and his wife and the two older kids had been killed, shotgunned in a drive-by. The man, who I’ve never met in my life, was crying, hard to understand, and much too shaken to be diplomatic. He kept saying he was so ashamed, and I ended up trying to comfort him, and all the time I’m thinking, There’s got to be a mistake here, Bill can’t be dead, my brother was supposed to be around for as long as I needed him.” I still wake up in the night thinking, “Not Bill, it’s just a goof-up, it can’t be Bill.” The only thing in my whole life I can remember that felt this crazy was when I was a kid and everybody came down with the flu at the same time.
Herb and I flew out to San Jose to collect Seth, then flew back to Toledo on the same plane as the bodies. They store them in the cargo hold, did you know that? Me neither. Nor wanted to.
The funeral was one of the most horrible experiences of my life-probably the most horrible. Those four coffins-my brother, my sister-in-law, my niece and my nephew-lined up in a row, first in the church and then at the cemetery, where they sat over the holes on those awful chrome rails. Wanna hear something totally nuts? During the whole graveside service I kept thinking of my honeymoon in Jamaica. They have speed-bumps in the road that they call sleeping policemen. And for some reason that’s how I started thinking of the coffins, as sleeping policemen. Well, I told you I’ve been crazy, didn’t I? Ohio’s Valium Queen of 1994, that’s me.
The service at the church was packed-Bill and June had a lot of friends-and everyone was bawling. Except for poor little Seth, of course, who can’t. Or doesn’t. Or who knows? He just sat there between me and Herb with two of his toys on his lap-a pink van he calls “Dweem Fwoatah” and the action figure that goes with it, a sexy little redhead named Cassandra Styles. The toys are from a show called MotoKops 2200, and the names of the damned MotoKops vans (excuse me, the MotoKops Power Wagons, lah-di-dah) are among the few things Seth says which are actually understandable (“Doughnuts buy “em for me” is another one; also “Seth go potty”, which means you’re supposed to go in there with him-he’s trained but very weird about his bathroom habits).
I hope he didn’t understand the service meant the rest of his family is dead, gone from him forever. Herb is sure he doesn’t know (“The kid doesn’t even know where he is,” Herb says), but I wonder. That’s the hell of autism, isn’t it? You always wonder, you never really know, they’re broadcasting but God hooked them up with a scrambler-phone and nothing’s coming through at the receiving end but gibberish.
Tell you one thing-I’ve gained a new respect for Herb Wyler in the last couple of weeks. He arranged EVERYTHING, from the planes to the obituaries in both the Columbus Dispatch and Toledo Blade. And to take Seth in as he has, without a word of complaint-not just an orphan but an autistic orphan-well, I mean, is it amazing or is it just me? I vote for amazing. And he seems to really care for the poor kid. Sometimes, when he looks at the boy, a preoccupied expression comes into his face that could even be love. The beginnings of it, anyway.
This is even more remarkable, it seems to me, when you realize how little a child like Seth can give back. Mostly he just sits plonked down out there in the sandbox Herb put in as soon as we got back from Toledo, like a big boy-shaped raisin, wearing only his MotoKops 2200
Underoos (he has the lunchbox, too), mouthing his nonsense words, playing with his vans and the action figures that go with them, especially the sexy redhead in the blue shorts. These toys trouble me a bit, because-if you’re not entirely sure I’ve lost it, this should convince you-I’m not sure where they came from, Jan! Seth sure didn’t have any such expensive rig the last time I visited Bill and June in Toledo (I checked in Toys R Us, and the MotoKops stuff is VERY pricey), I can tell you that. They aren’t the sort of toys Bill and Junie would have approved of, anyhow-their toy-buying ideas ran more to Barney than Star Wars, much to their kids” disgust. Poor little Seth can’t tell me, that’s for sure, and it probably doesn’t matter, anyway. I only know the names of the vans and the figures that go with them because I watch the cartoon-show with him on Saturday mornings. The chief bad guy, No Face, is tres creepy.
He’s 50 strange, Jan (Seth, I mean, not No Face, har-har). I don’t know if Herb feels that as much as I do, but I know he feels some of it. Sometimes when I look up and catch Seth looking at me (he has eyes of such dark brown that sometimes they actually look black), I get the weirdest chill-like someone’s using my spine for a xylophone. And some odd things have happened since Seth came to live with us. Don’t laugh, but there’ve even been a couple of incidents like the poltergeist phenomena they sometimes dramatize on what Herb calls “the psycho-reality shows”. Glasses flying off shelves, a couple of windows that broke seemingly for no reason, and weird wiggly shapes that sometimes appear in Seth’s sandbox at night. They’re like strange, surreal sand-paintings. I’ll send you some Polaroids next time I write, if I think of it. I wouldn’t tell anybody this stuff besides you, Jan, believe me. Thank God I know and trust your wonder… your curiosity… and your DISCRETION!