To Make Death Love Us (8 page)

"It's very thick,"
she said, fearing that they could not.

"What the hell are
you doing?" Will Carney shouted from the cab, startled by the taps on the window. "Are we playing
goddamn games?"

"We need some light
back here," Colonel John shouted back. "We have to see if we're to get out of here at
all."

"Stay right where
you are! You bloody little maniac! Don't move! Don't do anything!"

"But Will," began
Colonel John, "unless we . . ."

"Someone will come
for us! But if you damn well move, you'll send us to our deaths, sure as sin." There was raw,
naked fear in Will's voice.

Colonel John
frowned, trying to shift his small frame
against the weights resting against them. He was able to move only a little. "Perhaps
Will is right. Perhaps moving would be dangerous. We'll wait."

It sounded like a
death sentence from an unrelenting judge.

What they would
wait for was not clear. They were on an old, abandoned road, long out of use, miles from any­one.
No one would come, or if they did, more likely it would be only to find their bodies in the
wrecked truck at the bottom of the ravine.

Serena turned and
stared back at the freaks tumbled amid the wreckage and clutter inside the truck, seeing them
with her sightless eyes, her remarkable fingers. Her mind touched Marco's mind as he sat silently
in the cab, slowly bleeding his life away. She felt the gentle rush and flow of life ebbing in
his veins. Marco's mind seemed remarkably clear, clearer than it had ever been in her memory. He
seemed to have found some peace in himself that she felt was his growing acceptance of
approaching death.

Her mind probed
each of them in turn, Pepino the Rubber Man, Colonel John, and Paulette. She probed Will Carney's
mind, reading the terror, larger in his mind than in all the others, for death was something that
robbed him of all his dignity.

And in this reading
of them, she sought the key to open the door that would set them all free. She probed deep within
them, past their hopes and wants and bodily needs, to their dreams, to the primal streams that
made them all tick.

Each and every one
of them had become infected with a kind of stunned paralysis, an inability to act or move. To
move was to court death, to move wrongly was to wed it.

And so, in dreams
resigned to the idea of death, they
were
content to do nothing until the rain washed enough of the mountain out from under the wheels and
made the decision for them.

There is a
wrongness in this, this stupid and ugly death. None of them wanted to die. It was a thought in
each mind she probed. Serena could not sit back and let them go quietly and unprotestingly to
their deaths. She might not be able to help, they might all still die, but she meant for them all
to fight against it.

Serena wrapped her
hands against her chest, as if draw­ing her body physically within herself. She had to
concen­trate, she had to reach them all in some way.

She dreamed the
strongest dream she had ever dreamed in her life and it went out into the night and into them
all, touching them all.

The fear in Will's
mind, the utter stark terror, repelled her. His mind was past all reason and her dream was closed
out. The other freaks had terror in keeping with their diminished stature in the world and they
opened their minds to her, unknowingly, and she began the dream for them, trying to make them see
as she saw, dream as she dreamed.

It was her secret
and her power.

She understood them
all, what made each of them what they were, their hopes, fears, cowardices, and petty acts. And
knowing them false, she loved them anyway. For the pain. She loved them for the pain. And she
lived for that moment when she would wrench them out of this life­time, and in so doing, make
them strong until the end came that made death love them.

And because she
understood them, she gave them each a dream promise in keeping with each of the kinds of pain
each of them lived.

Pepino the Rubber
Man she reached first, and she made him two promises, both terrible in their own way. Very
terrible. And only that, because they were true.

Pepino was a
philosopher and had always been one. He examined the ways of the world like a scientist counting
drops of blood in the teeming cells of a corpse.

He knew himself to
be mediocre. Even his double-joint-edness, which set him apart from most of the world, had no
drama to it.

From the first day
he bent his thumb back to his fore­arm for the amusement of his schoolmates, his antic talent was
little better than commonplace. After all, there was Harriet down the block, who'd been born with
a sixth toe on each foot, and Martin, who could spit clear across the width of the boys' John.
There were special wonders as fine or finer than his own.

He did have,
however, the advantage of having been born a gypsy, and was trained from the beginning in the
technique of making coin from even such meager gifts as his own.

He lived with the
woman he thought to be his mother in a storefront in Philadelphia. A constantly changing gypsy
family of between twenty and thirty shared the space with him. He found that pleasant for several
rea­sons.

He was never
without companionship or confederates in games or ventures of small thievery. He had partners in
sexual experimentation and lost his virginity to a cousin— he supposed that was what she was—when
he was twelve. There was always more than enough shared warmth in his nighttime bed to keep him
comfortable in the coldest of Philadelphia winters. Even the fact that some of the younger
children of the protean family occasionally re­lieved themselves upon his own body during the
night, only served to teach him humility and forbearance, useful tools for a
philosopher.

The jumble of
children served as cover for his frequent truancy from public school. He stopped going altogether
sometime around the sixth grade. He found his education for himself at the public library and
never stole a book from it, much as he would have liked to.

There was one great
unpleasantness. He rarely had enough to eat. His appetite was abnormal. Thin as a rail, some
furnace within his belly consumed food in great quantity and left almost nothing upon his
bones.

His life, all of
his life, had been one long battle to keep the pangs of hunger stilled.

He joined his first
carnival on the promise that he would be given all the hot dogs, sausages, candy, and popcorn he
could eat. If he spent everything he earned on food, he still did not get enough.

Pepino learned in
time to manipulate his body so that he "grew" four inches by simply stretching his elastic frame.
He amused the crowds by scratching his back with his own foot. He made his stomach "disappear" by
draw­ing it in till his belly button very nearly touched his back­bone. He learned never to smile
while he performed such outrageous and ludicrous acts and that served to make the crowds laugh
boldly at his otherwise rather unattractive antics.

His skills were
altogether unstartling and, somehow, more sad than ultimately amusing. They were largely
un­salable, as well. Double-jointed rubber men were plenti­ful if not exactly a drug on the
market.

He earned his keep
by being a jack-of-all-trades, but since everyone in carnivals and circuses was adept at many
skills, he was not the only jack-of-all-trades traveling in his circle and therefore, once more,
was a common­place.

He had long,
slender, and clever fingers, and shared out with his employers the bounty of the pockets he
some­times picked. It was not a happy skill for a philosopher and he did it only when his
enormous appetite gave him little choice.

He was an excellent
shill. When the hicks were lured to the games of chance by his imaginary but loudly pro­claimed
winnings, he would smile widely and the sudden, extraordinary gladness that illuminated his face
seemed a benediction and a guarantee that his good fortune should be their own.

Even so, smiling
was no great pleasure to him. He con­sidered it to be a refutation of all that he knew to be true
about life. His summation of life, of its meaning and being, was a simple and direct but profound
one: no one would ever have his or her appetite satisfied completely.

Life meant one was
born to suffer hunger eternally until released by death.

Pepino marked the
quality of his friends by the size of their appetites and the degree to which they were able to
still them.

The Colonel, when
first they'd met, had impressed him with his overwhelming, all-encompassing, appetite to be tall,
threatening, powerful, and, sadly, even potent with large women. It underlaid the midget's every
action—his
great dreams, day and night,
of large things welcoming his potency.

Marco the Strong
Man hungered after a place on the crowded earth to call his home. He was, therefore, a lonely
wanderer on the face of it, pretending that he had such a dwelling place for the heart back in a
fairy-tale land called Newark, New Jersey.

Fat Paulette wanted
love served in many flavors in a crystal boat. Food was love and so her mouth was a small, pursed
cherry and her breasts were mounds of whipped cream. She was a child without hope for love, for
true love, Pepino knew. Her love was as silly as a dripping ice­cream cone.

Pepino knew real
love was a serious matter, an im­mense thing, jealous and twisted and devious, hard to find and
even harder to keep.

Pepino, like all
the others, was drawn to Serena.

In the moon child,
he saw a hunger so vast that it might devour the entire universe were it ever given the means and
leave to do so.

Hers was a
frightening appetite, hidden behind blind eyes and a soft, smiling, innocent mouth.

Pepino loved her
and was glad that she was not beauti­ful in all parts of herself. Otherwise, he would have served
himself up to her as a sacrifice.

But Pepino was
enchanted most of all by Will Carney, for in him he saw the rudest, most blatant appetite of all.
The man was glossy and modern, cheap and inept, brassy and hopeful, boastful, vain, frightened,
bloody-minded, and cowardly. Yet, he wanted to live. His appetite was not alone for the
particulars of life but for life itself.

It was this hunger
that Pepino admired and envied. He had no such desire for life himself but his philosopher's soul
chided and abused him for not desiring it. His mouth
told him that death was a dry bone, yet he had a taste for it.

With all such dark,
Romany contemplation, he was, nevertheless, considered a fairly jolly companion. He never told
anyone that, when he smiled into his or her face, he saw death's head there.

He had been with
Will Carney longer than most of the others. He had, from time to time, considered that he would
probably be with Will still when all the others were dead and gone away.

Now, it would seem,
as he lay trapped in the darkness in the back of the truck, they would all leave one another and
the world in one moment. In a feast of death.

Would his hunger
then be stilled?

Serena seized upon
his hunger then, in a dream, and fed him.

Cooked, carved, and
put upon a platter before him, she offered up her own flesh.

She was a thousand
flavors and tastes on his tongue. She was every morsel of food he had ever eaten or wanted in his
lifetime. Her arms, the delicate meat around her neck and chest, was a delicacy that almost
ripped his soul out of his body.

The dream
tantalized.

He
hungered.

In the dark,
trapped in her dream, he wept, aching for the forbidden taste, for that thing that seemed to
promise an end to hunger, an end to a lifetime of wanting.

Serena shuddered,
feeling his teeth upon her skin in the dream, feeling the marrow sucked so deliciously out of her
thin, birdlike bones, the little legs she offered him, as sweet to eat as roasted larks, a
delight beyond the known pleasures of this world. She was a feast for him that no king, no rich
man had ever seen on this earth, nor would ever see.

She awoke the great
and terrible hunger of his life.

Then, in one
offering of herself, she promised to still it for all time, to sate him of his terrible
need.

All this, the dream
promised him, awaits you if you escape, the feast is yours if you act, move, awake.

That was the first
terrible promise.

The second was the
reality that awaited them all. Pepino felt the truck shake, shudder, the lurch sicken-ingly
outward and down. A great thunderous roaring tore at his ears and his chest. The truck plummeted
down­ward.

Bones broke through
his skin, shattering against each other inside his body. The truck spun end over end.

There his hand was
crushed, there his legs broken, and finally at the bottom, a great bursting and sundering which
eviscerated him. He lay in a pool of his own blood, his chest torn open, his insides threatening
to fall out.