Twilight Eyes (68 page)

When next I regained consciousness, I was still hot, fiercely hot, yet I was shivering uncontrollably, hot and cold at the same time. The sweat was near the boiling point when it burst from me, but then it seemed instantly to freeze on my skin.

I tried to turn my mind away from my own misery, tried to focus on Rya and regain the miraculous strength and stamina that I had lost. Examining her, I could no longer find a pulse in her temples, throat, or wrist. Her skin seemed colder than before. When I frantically lifted one of her eyelids, I thought something was different about the eye beneath, a terrible emptiness. “Oh no,” I said, and I felt for the pulse again—”No, no, Rya, please, no”—but still I could not find any heartbeat. “Goddamn it,
no
!” I held her against me, held her tighter, as if I could prevent Death from prying her out of my embrace. I rocked her like a baby, and I crooned to her, and I told her she would be fine, just fine, that we would lie on beaches again, that we would make love again and laugh, that we would be together for a long, long time.

I thought of my mother's subtle but paranormal ability to blend various herbs into healing brews and poultices. The same herbs had no medicinal value when others blended them. The healing power was in my mom, not in the powdered leaves and bark and berries and roots and flowers with which she worked. All of us in the Stanfeuss family had some special gift, strange chromosomes welded here and there in the genetic chain. If my mother could heal, why couldn't I, damn it? Why was I cursed with Twilight Eyes when God could have blessed me as easily with healing hands? Why was I doomed only to see goblins and oncoming disaster, visions of death and disaster? If my mother could heal, why couldn't I? And since I was unquestionably the most gifted of anyone in the Stanfeuss family, why couldn't I heal the sick even better than my mom could?

Holding Rya's body tightly, rocking her as one might rock a baby, I
willed
her to live. I insisted that Death depart. I argued with that dark specter, tried humoring him, cajoling him, then did my best with reason and logic, then begged, but begging soon turned to bitter argument; finally I was threatening him, as if there was anything with which Death could be threatened. Crazy. I was crazy. Out of my mind with fever, yes, but also insane with grief. Through my hands and arms I attempted to convey the life within me into her, strove to pour it out of me and into her as I might pour water from a pitcher to a glass. In my mind I formed an image of her alive and smiling, then gritted my teeth and clenched my jaws and held my breath and
willed
that mental image to become a reality, strained so hard at the bizarre task that I passed out again.

Thereafter, fever and grief and exhaustion conspired to carry me deeper into the kingdom of incoherence where I reigned. Sometimes I found myself trying to heal her, and sometimes I was singing softly to her—mostly old Buddy Holly tunes, the lyrics strangely twisted by delirium. Sometimes I babbled out lines of dialogue from the old Thin Man movies with William Powell and Myrna Loy, which we both liked so much, and sometimes the dialogue was remembered bits and pieces of things we had said to each other in moments of tenderness, in love. I alternately raged at God and blessed Him, bitterly accused Him of cosmic sadism one moment and, seconds later, weepingly reminded Him of His reputation for mercy. I ranted and raved, keened and cooed, prayed and cursed, sweated and shivered, but mostly I wept. I recall thinking that my tears might heal her and bring her back. Madness.

Considering the copious flow of tears and sweat, it seemed only a matter of time until I shriveled up, turned to dust, and blew away. But at that moment such an end was immensely appealing. Just turn to dust and blow away, disperse, as if I had never existed.

I was unable to get up and move any farther, though I traveled in the many dreams that came to me when I dozed. In Oregon I sat in the kitchen of the Stanfeuss house and ate a slice of my mother's home-baked apple pie while she smiled down at me and while my sisters told me how good it was to have me back and how happy I would be to see my father again when—very soon now—I joined him in the peace of the hereafter. On a carnival midway, under a blue sky, I went to the high-striker to introduce myself to Miss Rya Raines and ask for a job, but the woman who owned the high-striker was someone else, someone I had never seen before, and she said she had never heard of Rya Raines, that such a person as Rya Raines had never existed, that I must be confused, and in fear and panic I hurried around the carnival from one concession to another, looking for Rya, but no one had ever heard of her, no one, no one. And in Gibtown I sat in a kitchen, drinking beer with Joel and Laura Tuck, and there were other carnies crowded around, including Jelly Jordan, who was no longer dead, and when I leapt up and put my arms around him and hugged him with sheer joy, the fat man told me that I should not be surprised, that dying was not the end, that I should look over there by the sink, and when I looked I saw my father and my cousin Kerry sipping apple cider and grinning at me, and they both said, “Hello, Carl, you're looking good, kid,” and Joel Tuck said—

“Good Christ, boy, how did you even get this far? Look at that shoulder wound.”

“Looks like a bite,” Horton Bluett said, leaning in close with a flashlight.

“Blood on his sides here,” Joel Tuck said worriedly.

And Horton said, “This here leg of his pants is soaked with blood too.”

Somehow the dream had shifted to the mine shaft in which I sat, Rya in my arms. All the other dream people had vanished except for Joel and Horton.

And Luke Bendingo. He appeared between Joel and Horton. “H-Hang on, S-S-Slim. We'll g-g-get you home. Just you hang in th-th-there.”

They tried to take Rya out of my arms, and that was intolerable even if it was just a dream, so I fought them. But I did not have much strength and could not resist them for long. They took her from me. With the sweet burden of her removed, I was without purpose, and I slumped, rag-limp, weeping.

“It's okay, Slim,” Horton said. “We'll take over now. You just lay back and let us do what we need to do.”

“Fuck you,” I said.

Joel Tuck laughed and said, “That's the spirit, boy. That's the
survivor
spirit.”

I don't remember much more. Fragments. I recall being carried through dark tunnels where flashlight beams swept back and forth and were, in my delirium, sometimes transformed into searchlights carving slices out of a night sky. The final vertical shaft. The last two tunnels. Someone lifting my eyelid . . . Joel Tuck looking at me with concern . . . his nightmare face as welcome as anything I had ever seen.

Then I was outside, in the open air, where the hard, gray clouds that seemed always to hang over Yontsdown County were hanging again, clotted and dark. There was a great deal of new snow on the ground, perhaps two feet of it or more. I thought back to the storm that had been pending on Sunday morning, when Horton had taken us into the mines, and that was when I began to realize I was not dreaming. The storm had come and gone, and the mountains were buried under a blanket of fresh snow.

Sleds. They had two long bobsleds, the kind with wide, ski-type runners and a seat with a back on it. And blankets. Lots and lots of blankets. They strapped me into one sled and wrapped me up in a couple of warm wool covers. They put Rya's body on the other sled.

Joel crouched beside me. “I don't think you're altogether with us, Carl Slim, but I hope some of what I say will sink into you. We came here overland, by a roundabout route, 'cause the goblins have been keeping a tight watch on all the mountain roads and trails ever since you blew the hell out of the Lightning Coal Company. We've got a long, hard way to go, and we've got to go it as quiet as we can. Do you read me?”

“I saw a dog's bones down in Hell,” I told him, amazed to hear those words coming out of me, “and I think Lucifer probably wants to grow hydroponic tomatoes because then he can fry up souls and have club sandwiches.”

“Delirious,” Horton Bluett said.

Joel put a hand on my face, as if by that touch he could focus my fragmented attention for a moment. “Listen good and hard, my young friend. If you start wailing like you were wailing down there in the ground, if you start babbling or sobbing, we'll have to put a gag on you, which I sure don't want to do because you're having some trouble getting your breath now and then. But we can't risk drawing attention to ourselves. Do you hear me?”

“We'll play the rat game again,” I said, “like in the powerhouse, all quick and silent, creeping down the drains.”

That must have sounded like more nonsense to him, but it was as close as I seemed able to come to expressing an understanding of what he was telling me.

Fragments. I recall being hauled on the bobsled by Joel. Luke Bendingo pulled Rya's body. Now and then, for short spells, the indomitable Horton Bluett relieved Luke and Joel, bull-strong in spite of his age. Deer paths in the forest. Overhanging evergreens forming a canopy—green needles, some sheathed in ice. A frozen stream used for a highway. An open field. Staying close to the gloom of the forest's edge. A rest stop. Hot broth poured into me from a thermos bottle. A darkening sky. Wind. Night.

By nightfall I knew I would live. I was going home. But home would not be home without Rya. And what was the point of living if I had to live without her?

Dreams.

Dreams of death and loneliness.

Dreams of loss and sorrow.

I slept more than not. And when my sleep was interrupted, the culprit was usually Doc Pennington, the reformed alcoholic who served as the much-loved carnival physician for the Sombra Brothers and who had nursed me back to health once before, when I had been hiding out in Gloria Neames's trailer after killing Lisle Kelsko and his deputy. Doc diligently applied ice packs to my head, gave me injections, kept a close watch on my pulse, and encouraged me to drink as much water and—later—as much juice as I was able.

I was in a strange place: a small room with rough board walls that, on two sides, did not reach all the way to the wooden ceiling. Dirt floor. The top half of the wooden door was missing, as if it was a Dutch door that the carpenters had not finished installing. An old iron bed. A single lamp standing on an apple crate. A chair in which Doc Pennington sat or in which the others rested when they came to visit me. A portable electric space heater stood in one corner, its coils glowing red.

“Terribly dry heat,” Doc Pennington said. “Not good. Not good at all. But it's the best we can do right now. We don't want you in Horton's house. None of us can hang around there. Neighbors would notice a lot of guests, talk about it. Back here, we stay low. The windows are even blacked out, so light won't show through. After what happened up at Lightning Coal, the goblins are busting their butts looking for newcomers, outsiders. Wouldn't do to call attention to ourselves. 'Fraid you'll just have to endure the dry heat even though it isn't much help to your condition.”

Gradually the delirium passed.

Even when I grew clearheaded enough to talk rationally, I was too weak to form the words, and when the weakness passed, I was, for a while, too depressed to speak. In time, however, curiosity overcame me, and in a hoarse whisper I said, “Where am I?”

Doc Pennington said, “Out behind Horton's house, at the end of his property. Stables. His late wife . . . she loved horses. They had horses once, way back before she died. This is a three-stall stable and big tack room, and you're in one of the stalls.”

“I saw you,” I said, “and I wondered if I was back in Florida. You came all the way up here?”

“Joel figured there might be need of a doctor who could keep his mouth shut, which meant a carny, which meant me.”

“How many of you came?”

“Just Joel and Luke and me.”

I started to tell him that I was grateful for all the effort they had expended and for all the risks they had taken, and I started to say that I would, however, just like to be left alone to die, to join Rya where she had gone. But my mind fogged up again, and I drifted off to sleep.

Perchance to dream.

Bet on it.

When I woke, wind was howling beyond the stable walls.

In the chair by my bed, Joel Tuck sat watching me. Big as he was, with that face and that third eye and that steam-shovel jaw, it seemed as if he was an apparition, a specter of elemental power, the very thing about which the wind was howling.

“How you feeling?” he asked.

“Poorly,” I whispered hoarsely.

“Your mind clear?”

“Too clear.”

“I'll tell you some of what happened, then. The Lightning Coal Company had a big disaster at their mine. As many as five hundred were killed. Maybe more. Maybe the worst mining disaster in history. Mine inspectors and safety officials from both the state and federal government have flown in, and rescue teams are still at work, but it doesn't look good.” He grinned. “Of course, the inspectors and the safety officials and all the rescue workers are goblins; they've been careful about that. They'll keep their secret about what they were really doing up there. I suppose, when you've gotten your voice and strength back, you'll tell me just what it
was
they were doing.”