Except it had been no dream, no hallucination.
She brought the telephone to her ear (this one was black, and of a size that fit her face) and listened. Nothing, of course. There was electricity in this house if nowhere else on the block-Tak had to have its TV-but at some point it had killed the phone.
Audrey got up, looked at the arch leading into the den, and knew what she would see if she peeked in: Seth in a trance, Tak entirely gone. But not into the movie this time, or not precisely. She heard confused cries and what was almost certainly a gunshot from across the street, and a line from Genesis occurred to her, something about the spirit of God moving on the face of the waters. The spirit of Tak, she had an idea, was also in motion, busy with its own affairs, and if she tried to get away now she probably would make it. But if she got to the others and told them what she knew, and if they believed, what might they do in order to escape the glamor in which they had been ensnared? What might they do to Seth in order to escape Tak?
He told me to go, she thought. I better trust him. But first-
First there was the thing he had told her to do before she left. Such a simple thing… but it might solve a lot. Everything, if they were very lucky. Audrey hurried into the kitchen, ignoring the cries and babble of voices from across the street. Now that her mind was made up, she was all but overwhelmed by a need to hurry, to get this last chore done before Tak turned its attention back to her.
Or before it sent Colonel Henry and his friends again.
When things went wrong, they went wrong with spectacular suddenness. Johnny asked himself later how much of the blame was his-again and again he asked it-and never got any clear answer. Certainly his attention had lapsed, although that had been before the shit actually hit the fan.
He had followed along behind the Reed twins as they headed through the woods toward the path, and had allowed his mind to drift off because the boys were moving with agonized slowness, trying not to rustle a single bush or snap a single twig. None of them had the slightest idea that they were not alone in the greenbelt; by the time Johnny and the twins entered it, Collie and Steve were on the path and well ahead of them, moving quietly south.
Johnny’s mind had gone back to Bill Harris’s horrified survey of Poplar Street on the day of his visit back in 1990, Bill at first saying Johnny couldn’t be serious, then, seeing he was, asking him what the deal was. And Johnny Marinville, who now chronicled the adventures of a cat who toted a fingerprint kit, had replied: The deal is I don’t want to die yet, and that means doing some personal editorial work. A second-draft Johnny Marinville, if you like. And I can do it. Because I have the desire, which is important, and because I have the tools, which is vital. You could say it’s just another version of what I do. I’m rewriting my life. Re-sculpting my life.
It was Terry, his first wife, who had provided him with what might really have been his last chance, although he hadn’t said so to Bill. Bill didn’t even know that, after almost fifteen years when their only communication had been through lawyers, Johnny and the former Theresa Marinville had commenced a cautious dialogue, sometimes by letter, mostly on the phone. That contact had increased since 1988, when Johnny had finally put the booze and drugs behind him-for good, he hoped. Yet there was still something wrong, and at some point in the spring of 1989 he had found himself telling his first ex-wife, whom he had once tried to stab with a butter-knife, that his sober life felt pointless and goalless. He could not, he said, imagine ever writing another novel. That fire seemed to be out, and he didn’t miss waking up in the morning with it burning his brains… along with the inevitable hangover. That part seemed to be done. And he could accept that. The part he didn’t think he could accept was how the old life of which his novels had been a part was still everywhere around him, whispering from the corners and murmuring from his old IBM every time he turned it on. I am what you were, the typewriter’s hum said to him, and what you’ll always be. It was never about self-image, or even ego, but only about what was printed in your genes from the very start. Run to the end of the earth and take a room in the last hotel and go to the end of the final corridor and when you open the door that’s there, I’ll be sitting on a table inside, humming my same old hum, the one you heard on so many shaky hungover mornings, and there’ll be a can of Coors beside your book-notes and a gram of coke in the top drawer left, because in the end that’s what you are and all you are. As some wise man or other once said, there is no gravity; the earth just sucks.
“You ought to dig out the kids” book,” she had said, startling him out of this reverie.
“What kids” book? I never-”
“Don’t you remember Pat the Detective Kitty-Cat?”
It took him a minute, but then he did. “Terry, that was just a little story I made up for your sister’s rugmonkey one night when he wouldn’t shut up and I thought she was going to have a nervous-”
“You liked it well enough to write it down, didn’t you?”
“I don’t remember,” he had said, remembering.
“You know you did, and you’ve got it somewhere because you never throw anything away.
Anal bastard! I always suspected you of saving your goddam boogers. In a Sucrets box, maybe, like fishing lures.”
“They’d probably make good fishing lures,” he had said, not thinking about what he was saying but wondering instead where that little story-eight or nine handwritten pages-might be. The Marinville Collection at Fordham? Possible. The house in Connecticut he and Terry had once shared, the one she was living in, talking to him from, at that very moment? Quite possible. At the time of the conversation, that house had been less than ten miles away.
“You ought to find that story,” she said. “It was good. You wrote it at a time when you were good in ways you didn’t even know about.” There was a pause. “You there?”
“Yeah.”
“I always know when I’m telling you stuff you don’t like,” she said brightly, “because it’s the only time you ever shut up. You get all broody.”
“I do not get broody.”
“Do so, do so.” And then she had said what might have been the most important thing of all. Over twenty million dollars in royalties had been generated by her casual memory of the story he had once made up to get his rotten nephew to go to sleep, and gazillions of books chronicling Pat’s silly adventures had been sold around the world, but the next thing out of her mouth had seemed more important than all the bucks and all the books. Had then, still did. He supposed she’d spoken in her perfectly ordinary tone of voice, but the words had struck into his heart like those of a prophetess standing in a delphic grove.
“You need to double back,” the woman who was now Terry Alvey had said.
“Huh?” he had asked when he’d caught his breath. He hadn’t wanted her to understand how her words had rocked him. Didn’t want her to know she still had that sort of power over him, even after all these years. What does that mean?”
“To the time when you felt good. Were good. I remember that guy. He was all right. Not perfect, but all right.”
“You can’t go home again, Terr. You must have been sick the week they took up Thomas Wolfe in American Lit.”
“Oh, spare me. We’ve known each other too long for Debate Society games. You were born in Connecticut, raised in Connecticut, a success in Connecticut, and a drunken, narcotized bum in Connecticut. You don’t need to go home, you need to leave home.”
“That’s not doubling back, that’s what us AA guys call a geographic cure. And it doesn’t work.”
“You need to double back in your head,” she replied-patient, as if speaking to a child. “And your body needs some new ground to walk on, I think. Besides, you” re not drinking anymore. Or drugging, either.” A slight pause. “Are you?”
“No,” he said. “Well, the heroin.”
“Ha-ha.”
“Where would you suggest I go?”