Swan Song (68 page)

Roland was about to be dismissed. He decided to try another tactic. “Who are you going to pray to? The god on top of Warwick Mountain?”

There was silence. The two make-up artists froze, and both of them looked at Roland. He could hear the Savior’s breathing in the quiet.

“Brother Gary’s joined us,” Roland continued calmly. “He’s told us everything-where you’re going and why.” Under Roland’s persuasion in the black trailer, Gary Cates had repeated his tale of God living atop Warwick Mountain, West Virginia, and something about a black box and a silver key that could decide whether the earth lived or died. Even the grinding wheel hadn’t changed the man’s story. True to his word, Macklin had spared Brother Gary’s life, and Brother Gary had been skinned and hung by his ankles from a flagpole in front of Sutton’s post office.

The silence stretched. Finally, the Savior said softly, “I don’t know any Brother Gary.”

“He knows you. He told us how many soldiers you have. He told us about the two tanks. I’ve seen one of them, and I guess the other is around back somewhere. Brother Gary’s a real fountain of information! He told us about Brother Timothy leading you to Warwick Mountain to find God.” Roland smiled, showing bad teeth between the folds of his bandages. “But God’s closer than West Virginia. Much closer. He’s right out there, and he’s going to blast you to Hell in six hours if we don’t get what we want.”

The Savior was sitting very still. Roland saw him tremble. Saw the left side of his mouth twitch and his left eye begin to bulge, as if shoved forward by a volcanic pressure.

The Savior shoved the two make-up artists aside. His head swiveled toward Roland-and Roland saw both sides of his face.

The left side was perfect, brightened by rouge and smoothed with powder. The right side was a nightmare of scar tissue, the flesh gouged out by a terrible wound and the eye white and dead as a river pebble.

The Savior’s living eye fixed on Roland like Judgment Hour, and as he stood up he grabbed the chair and flung it across the room. He advanced on Roland, the little crucifixes jingling around his neck, and lifted his fist.

Roland stood his ground.

They stared at each other, and there was a great, empty silence like that before the clash of an irresistible force and an immovable object.

“Savior?” a voice spoke. “He’s a fool, and he’s trying to bait you.”

The Savior wavered. His eye blinked, and Roland could see the wheels turning in his head, trying to connect and make sense of things again.

A figure stepped out of the gloom to Roland’s right. It was a tall, frail-looking man in his late twenties with slicked-back black hair and wire-rimmed glasses over deep-socketed brown eyes. A burn scar zigzagged like a lightning bolt from his forehead to the back of his skull, and along its route the hair had turned white. “Don’t touch him, Savior,” the man urged quietly. “They have Brother Kenneth.”

“Brother Kenneth?” The Savior shook his head, uncomprehending.

“You sent Brother Kenneth as a trade for this man. Brother Kenneth is a good mechanic. We don’t want him harmed, do we?”

“Brother Kenneth,” the Savior repeated. “A good mechanic. Yes. He’s a good mechanic.”

“It’s almost time for you to go on,” the man said. “They’re singing for you.”

“Yes. Singing. For me.” The Savior looked up at his fist, hanging in the air; he opened it and let his arm fall back to his side. Then he stood staring at the floor, the left corner of his mouth twitching in an on-again, off-again grin.

“Dear me, dear me!” Brother Norman fretted. “Let’s finish the job now, kiddies! He’s on presently, and we want him to look confident!”

A couple of other people emerged from the shadows, took the Savior’s arms and turned him around like a marionette so the make-up artists could finish.

“You’re a foolish, stupid heathen,” the man with the eyeglasses said to Roland. “You must want to die very much.”

“We’ll see who lives and dies when six hours are up.”

“God is on Warwick Mountain. He lives up near the top, where the coal mines are. I’ve seen him. I’ve touched him. My name is Brother Timothy.”

“Good for you.”

“You can go with us, if you like. You can join us and go to find God and learn how the wicked will die at the final hour. He’ll still be there, waiting for us. I know he will.”

“When’s the final hour going to be?”

Brother Timothy smiled. “That only God knows. But he showed me how the fire will rain from Heaven, and in that rain even Noah’s Ark would drown. In the final hour all the imperfection and wickedness will be washed clean, and the world will be fresh and new again.”

“Right,” Roland said.

“Yes. It is right. I stayed with God for seven days and seven nights, up on Warwick Mountain, and he taught me the prayer that he will speak at the final hour.” Brother Timothy closed his eyes, smiling beatifically, and began to recite: “Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks, the lady of situations. Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel, and here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card, which is blank, is something he carries on his back which I am forbidden to see. I do not find The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.” And when he opened his eyes they glistened with tears.

“Get that Satan out of here!” the Savior croaked. “Get him out!”

“Six hours,” Roland said, but in his mind the prayer for the final hour echoed like the memory of a funeral bell.

“Get thee behind me, Satan; get thee behind me, Satan; get thee behind me, Sa-” the Savior intoned, and then Roland was taken out of the stockroom and delivered to Brother Edward again for the return trip.

Roland impressed everything he saw on his mind to report back to Colonel Macklin. He’d discovered no obviously weak areas, but once he sat down to draw a map of what he’d seen, maybe one would become apparent.

The ritual of the headlights was repeated. Roland was returned to the Jeep, and again he and Brother Kenneth passed without looking at each other. Then he was in the Jeep and breathing easily once more as Judd Lawry drove toward the fires of the AOE’s camp.

“Have fun?” Lawry asked him.

“Yeah. Get me to the Command Center fast.” I do not find the Hanged Man, Roland thought. God’s prayer for the final hour was somehow familiar to him-but it wasn’t a prayer. No. It was… it was…

There was some kind of activity around the colonel’s trailer. The guards were out of formation, and one of them was hammering at the door with the butt of his rifle. Roland leapt out of the Jeep as it slowed down, and he ran toward the trailer. “What’s going on?”

One of the guards hastily saluted. “The colonel’s locked himself in, sir! We can’t get the door open, and… well, you’d better hear it for yourself!”

Roland went up the steps, pushed the other guard aside and listened.

The sound of breaking furniture and shattering glass came through the Airstream’s metal door. Then there was a barely human wailing that sent a shiver creeping up even Roland Croninger’s spine.

“Jesus!” Lawry said, blanching. “There’s some kind of animal in there with him!”

The last time Roland had seen him, the colonel was immobile on his cot and burning up with fever. “Somebody was supposed to be with him at all times!” Roland snapped. “What happened?”

“I just stepped out for about five minutes to have a smoke!” the other guard said, and in his eyes was the fearful knowledge that he would have to pay dearly for that cigarette. “It was just five minutes, sir!”

Roland hammered on the door with his fist. “Colonel! Open up! It’s Roland!”

The noise became a guttural grunting that sounded like a bestial equivalent of sobs. Something else shattered-and then there was silence.

Roland beat on the door again, stepped back and told the guard to get it open if he had to blast it off its hinges.

But someone else walked calmly up the steps, and a hand gripping a thin-bladed knife slid toward the door’s lock.

“Mind if I give it a try, Captain?” Air whistled through the hole where Alvin Mangrim’s nose had been.

Roland detested the sight of him, and also of that damned ugly dwarf who stood jumping up and down a few feet away. But it was worth a shot, and Roland said, “Go ahead.”

Mangrim inserted the blade into the door’s keyhole. He began to twist the knife back and forth, a hair at a time. “If he’s got the bolts thrown, this won’t do much good,” he said. “We’ll see.”

“Just do what you can.”

“Knives know my name, Captain. They speak to me and tell me what to do. This one’s talking to me right now. It says, ‘Easy, Alvin, real easy does the trick.’” He gently swiveled the blade, and there was a click! as the lock popped open. “See?”

The bolts had not been thrown, and the door opened.

Roland entered the darkened trailer, with Lawry and Mangrim right behind him. “We need some light!” Roland shouted, and the guard who’d sneaked a cigarette popped the flame up on his lighter and gave it to him.

The front room was a shambles, the map table overthrown and the chair broken to pieces, the rifles pulled off the wall rack and used to shatter lanterns and more furniture. Roland went into the bedroom, which was equally wrecked. Colonel Macklin was not there, but the lighter’s flame showed what looked at first like fragments of gray pottery lying all over the sweat-damp pillow. He picked one up and examined it, couldn’t quite figure out what it was; but some kind of white jellylike stuff got on his fingers, and Roland flung the thing aside.

“He’s not back here!” Lawry yelled from the other end of the trailer.

“He’s got to be somewhere!” Roland shouted back, and when his voice faded away he heard something.

The sound of whimpering.

Coming from the bedroom closet.

“Colonel?” The whimpering stopped, but Roland could still hear rapid, frightened breathing.

Roland walked to the closet, put his hand on the knob and started to turn it.

“Go away, damn you!” a voice thundered from behind the door.

Roland froze. That voice was a nightmarish mockery of Colonel Macklin’s. It sounded as if he’d been gargling with razor blades. “I… have to open the door, Colonel.”

“No… no… please go away!” Then there was that guttural grunting again, and Roland realized he was crying.

Roland’s spine stiffened. He hated it when the King sounded weak. It wasn’t the proper way for a king to behave. A king should never show weakness, never! He twisted the doorknob and pulled the closet door open, holding the lighter up to see what was inside.

Roland saw and screamed.

He backpedaled, still screaming, as the beast within the closet-the beast wearing Colonel Macklin’s uniform and even the nail-studded hand-crawled out and, grinning crazily, began to stand up.

The crust of growths was gone from the colonel’s face and head, and as Roland retreated across the room he realized the cracked pieces of it were lying over on the pillow.

Macklin’s face had turned inside out. The flesh was bone-white, the nose had collapsed inward; the veins, muscles and knots of cartilage ran on the surface of his face, twitching and quivering as he opened those awful jaws to laugh with a shriek like fingernails on a chalkboard. His teeth had curved into jagged fangs, and his gums were mottled and yellow. The veins on his face were as thick as worms, lacing and intertwining across his bony cheeks, beneath the sockets of his stunned and staring ice-blue eyes, across his forehead and back into his thick, newly grown mat of graying hair. It looked as if the entire outer layer of facial flesh had either been peeled back or rotted away, and exposed was something as close to a living skull as Roland had ever seen.

He was laughing, and the hideously exposed jaw muscles jerked and quivered. The veins writhed as the pressure of blood filled them up. But as he laughed his eyes swam with tears, and he began to slam his nail-studded hand against the wall again and again, dragging the nails down through the cheap paneling.

Lawry and Mangrim had entered the room. Lawry stopped short when he saw the monster in Colonel Macklin’s clothes, and he reached for his.38, but Roland grabbed his wrist.

Mangrim just smiled. “Far out, man!”

Seventy-Two - [True Faces]

Sister was dreaming of the sun. It burned hot in a dazzling blue sky, and she could actually see her shadow again. The sun’s royal heat played on her face, settled into the lines and cracks and seeped down through her skin into her bones. Oh, Lord! she thought. It feels so good not to be cold anymore, and to see the blue sky, and your own shadow looking up at you! The summer day promised to be a scorcher, and Sister’s face was already sweating, but that was all right, too. To see the sky no longer somber and overcast was one of the happiest moments of her life, and if she had to die she asked God to let it be in sunshine.

She stretched her arms up toward the sun and cried aloud with joy because the long, terrible winter was finally over.

Sitting in a chair next to the bed, Paul Thorson thought he heard Sister say something-just a drowsy whisper. He leaned forward, listening, but Sister was silent. The air around her seemed to ripple with heat, though the wind was shrilling outside the shack’s walls and the temperature had fallen to well below zero just after dark. That morning, Sister had told Paul that she’d felt weak, but she’d kept going all day until the fever finally struck her down; she’d collapsed on the porch and had been sleeping, fading in and out of delirium, for about six hours.

In her sleep, though, Sister kept the leather satchel with the glass ring inside locked between her hands, and even Josh couldn’t loosen her grip. Paul knew she’d come too far with the glass ring, had watched over it and protected it from harm for too long; she wasn’t yet ready to give it up.

Paul had presumed that finding Swan meant the end of the dreamwalk path. But in the morning he’d watched Sister peer into the depths of the glass, just as she had done before they’d reached Mary’s Rest. He’d seen the lights glitter in her eyes, and he knew her stare: The ring had taken her away again, and she was dreamwalking somewhere beyond Paul’s realm of senses and imagination. Afterward, when Sister had come back-and it was over in about fifteen or twenty seconds-she shook her head and wouldn’t talk about it. She had returned the glass circle to the satchel and hadn’t looked into it again. But Paul had seen that Sister was troubled, and he knew that this time the dreamwalk path had taken a dark turn.

“How is she?”

Swan was standing a few feet behind him, and how long she’d been there he didn’t know. “About the same,” he said. “As hot as a four-alarm fire.”

Swan approached the bed. She was familiar by now with the symptoms. In the two days since Sylvester Moody had brought his gift of apples, she and Josh had seen eight other people with Job’s Mask who’d drifted into feverish, comalike sleep. When the growths had cracked open from the faces of seven of them, their skin was unmarked, their faces back to-or better than-what they’d been before. But the eighth one had been different.

It was a man named DeLauren, who lived alone in a small shed on the eastern edge of Mary’s Rest. Josh and Swan had been summoned by a neighbor, who’d found DeLauren lying on the shed’s dirty floor, unconscious and feverish. Josh had picked the man up and carried him across the shed to his mattress-and Josh’s weight had popped open a floorboard. As Josh knelt to press the board back, he’d smelled the odor of decaying flesh and seen something wet and gleaming down in the gloom. He’d reached into the hole and brought up a severed human hand with most of the fingers gnawed away.

And at that moment DeLauren’s face had cracked open, revealing something black and reptilian underneath. The man had sat up, screaming, and as he’d realized his hoard of food had been discovered he’d crawled across the floor, snapping at Josh with sharp little fangs. Swan had looked away before the rest of the man’s Job’s Mask had cracked apart, but Josh had grabbed him by the back of his neck and flung him head first through the door. Their last sight of DeLauren was as he fled toward the woods, clutching his hands to his face.

There was no way to tell how many bodies had been torn apart and hidden under the shed’s floorboards, or who the people had been. DeLauren’s shocked neighbor said he’d always been a quiet, soft-spoken man who wouldn’t have hurt a fly. At Swan’s suggestion, Josh had set fire to the shed and burned it to the ground. On returning to Glory’s shack, Josh had spent the better part of an hour scrubbing his hands until he got the slime of DeLauren off his skin.

Swan touched the Job’s Mask that covered the lower half of Sister’s face and clung to her skull. It, too, was hot with fever. “What do you think she looks like, deep inside?” Swan asked Paul.

“Huh?”

“Her real face is about to show through,” Swan said, and her dark blue eyes with their glints of many colors met his own. “That’s what’s underneath the Job’s Mask. The face of a person’s soul.”

Paul scratched his beard. He didn’t know what she was talking about, but when she spoke he listened to her, just like everybody else did. Her voice was gentle, but it conveyed a power of thought and command that was far older than her years. Yesterday he’d worked out in the field with some of the others, helping to dig holes and watching Swan plant the apple cores she’d gathered after the big apple-eating festival. She’d explained carefully exactly how deep the holes should be, and how far apart; then, as Josh had followed along behind her with a wheelbarrow full of apple cores, Swan had picked up handfuls of dirt, spat into them, and rubbed the dirt all over each core before placing them in the ground and covering them. And the crazy thing about it was that Swan’s presence had made Paul want to work, though digging holes in the cold ground was not his idea of how to spend the day. She’d made him want to dig each hole as precisely as possible, and a single word of praise from her put energy in him like a charge into a weakening battery. He’d watched the others, too, and seen that she had the same effect on them. He believed that she could grow apple trees from each seed-filled core that went into the ground, and he was proud to dig holes for her until Gideon’s trumpet blared New Orleans jazz. He believed in her, and if she said that Sister’s real face was about to show through, he believed that, too.

“What do you think she looks like, deep inside?” Swan asked him again.

“I don’t know,” he finally replied. “I never met anyone with as much courage. She’s one hell of a woman. A lady,” he said.

“Yes, she is.” Swan looked at the knotty surface of the Job’s Mask. Soon, she thought. Very soon. “She’ll be all right,” she said. “Do you need to get some rest?”

“No, I’m going to stay here with her. If I get sleepy, I can stretch out on the floor. Everybody else asleep?”

“Yes. It’s late.”

“I guess so. You’d better get some sleep yourself.”

“I will. But when it happens, I’d like to see her.”

“I’ll call you,” Paul promised, and then he thought he heard Sister say something again, and he leaned forward to hear. Her head slowly moved back and forth, but she made no other sounds, and she lay still again. When Paul looked up, Swan had gone.

Swan was too keyed-up to sleep. She felt like a child again on the night before Christmas. She went through the front room, where the others slept on the floor around the stove, and then opened the door. Cold wind swept in, fanning the stove’s coals. Swan quickly stepped out, hugging her coat around her shoulders, and closed the door behind her.

“Mighty late for you to be up,” Anna McClay said. She was sitting on the porch steps next to an ex-Pittsburgh steelworker named Polowsky, and both of them were wearing heavy coats, caps and gloves and armed with rifles. At dawn, another pair of guards would take over for a few hours, and the rotating shifts continued all day and night. “How’s Sister doin’?”

“No change yet.” Swan looked at the bonfire that burned in the middle of the road. The wind whipped through it, and a shower of red sparks wheeled into the sky. About twenty people were sleeping around the bonfire, and several more were sitting up, staring into the flames or talking to one another to pass the night. Until she knew where the man with the scarlet eye was, Sister had demanded that the shack be guarded at all times, a demand to which Josh and the others had readily agreed. The volunteers also stayed around the bonfires in the field all night, watching the cornstalks and the new area where the apple cores had been planted.

Swan had told Josh and Sister about facing the man with the scarlet eye in the crowd that day, and she thought that maybe-just a little bit-she understood why he struck out to cause such suffering in human beings. She knew also that he’d almost taken the apple, but at the last second his unthinking rage and pride had won. And she’d seen that he hated her and hated himself for wanting to take a step beyond what he was; but he’d been afraid of her, too, and as she’d watched him stagger away Swan had realized that forgiveness crippled evil, drew the poison from it like lancing a boil. What might have happened if he’d taken the apple she didn’t know, but the moment was gone. Still, she didn’t fear the man with the scarlet eye as she had before, and since that day she hadn’t been looking over her shoulder to see who was coming up from behind.

She walked to the corner of the porch, where Mule was hitched to the support post. The horse was kept warm by several blankets, and there was a pail of spring water for him to drink from. Finding food for him was a problem, but Swan had saved him a dozen apple cores and was feeding him those, as well as roots and some straw that had been stuffed inside Mr. Polowsky’s mattress. He liked horses and had offered to help feed and water Mule. The horse didn’t generally take to strangers, but he seemed to accept Mr. Polowsky’s attention with a minimum of crankiness.

Mule’s head had been drooping, but his nose twitched as he caught Swan’s aroma, and instantly his head came up, his eyes open and alert. She scratched between his eyes and then down at the soft, velvety skin of his muzzle, and Mule nibbled at her fingers with unabashed delight.

Swan suddenly looked over toward the fire and saw him standing there, silhouetted by flames and sparks. She couldn’t see his face, but she could feel him staring at her. Her skin broke out in goose bumps under her patchwork coat, and she quickly looked away, concentrating only on rubbing Mule’s muzzle. But her eyes slid back toward Robin, who had come a few feet closer to the porch’s edge. Her heart boomed like a kettle drum, and again she looked away. From the corner of her eye, she watched him approach, then stop and pretend to be examining something on the ground with the toe of his boot.

It’s time to go back in now, she told herself. Time to check on Sister again.

But her legs didn’t want to move. Robin was coming nearer, and then he stopped again and peered out beyond the fire as if something else had taken his attention. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his coat, seemed to be trying to decide whether to return to the bonfire’s warmth or not. Swan didn’t know if she wanted him to come closer or go away, and she felt as jumpy as a grasshopper on a hot rock.

Then he took another step forward. His mind was made up.

But Swan’s nerve broke, and she started to turn away and go back inside.

Mule decided the issue by choosing that instant to playfully clamp his teeth on Swan’s fingers, holding her prisoner for the few seconds it took Robin to reach her.

“I think your horse must be hungry,” he said.

Swan pulled her fingers free. She started to turn away again, her heart pounding so strongly that she was certain he must hear it, like distant thunder over the horizon.

“Don’t go.” Robin’s voice softened. “Please.”

Swan stopped. She thought he didn’t resemble at all the movie stars in the magazines her mother used to read, because there was nothing clean-cut and Hollywood-handsome about him; he looked nothing like the well-scrubbed teen-age boys in the soap operas Darleen Prescott had watched. His face, for all its hard lines and angles, was young, but his eyes were old. They were the color of ashes but looked capable of fire. She met his gaze, saw that he’d loosened his mask of toughness. His eyes were soft-maybe even tender-as he stared up at her.

“Hey!” Anna McClay said. “You go on about your business. Swan doesn’t have time for you.”

His tough mask tightened again. “Who made you her keeper?”

“Not keeper, smartass. Protector. Now, why don’t you just be a good little boy and go on-”

“No,” Swan interrupted. “I don’t need a keeper, or a protector. Thank you for being concerned about me, Anna, but I can take care of myself.”

“Oh. Sorry. I just thought he was botherin’ you again.”

“He’s not bothering me. It’s all right. Really.”

“You sure? I used to see his type strollin’ the midway, lookin’ for pockets to pick.”

“I’m sure,” Swan replied. Anna gave Robin another warning glare, then returned to her conversation with Mr. Polowsky.

“That’s telling her,” Robin said, smiling gratefully. “It’s about time she got her butt kicked.”

“No, it’s not. You might not like Anna, and she sure doesn’t like you, but she’s doing what she thinks is best for me, and I appreciate that. If you were bothering me, I would let her run you off.”

Robin’s smile faded. “So you think you’re better than everybody else?”

“No, I didn’t mean it like that.” Swan felt flustered and nervous, and her tongue was getting tangled between her thoughts and her words. “I just meant… Anna is right to be careful.”

“Uh-huh. So am I bothering you by being friendly?”