the shadow moved up to the window and his head came around sharply.
“Vern…?”
“You’d better go back in. I don’t want to cause you any more trouble.”
“He’s upstairs doing some sales reports. He got a very nice job as a salesman for Shoop Motors when he got out of the Air Force. We live nice, Vern. He’s really very good to me….Oh, Vern… why? Why’d you
“You’d better go back in.”
“I waited, God you
“Come on, Terry. I’m tired, leave me alone.”
“The whole town, Vern. They were so ashamed. There were reporters and TV people, they came in and talked to
“Where are they, Terry?”
“They moved away, Vern. Kansas City, I think.”
“Oh, Jesus.”
“Neola’s living closer.”
“Where?”
“She doesn’t want you to know, Vern. I think she got married. I know she changed her name….Lestig isn’t such a good name around here any more.”
“I’ve got to talk to her, Terry. Please. You’ve got to tell me where she is.”
“I can’t, Vern. I promised.”
“Then call her. Do you have her number? Can you get in touch with her?”
“Yes, I think so. Oh, Vern…”
“Call her. Tell her I’ll stay here in town till I can talk to her. Tonight. Please, Terry!”
She stood silently. Then said, “All right, Vern. Do you want her to meet you at your house?”
He thought of the hard-lined shapes in the glare of headlamps, and of the thing that had run screaming as he lay beside the mulberry bush. “No. Tell her I’ll meet her in the church.”
“St. Matthew’s?”
“No. The Harvest Baptist.”
“But it’s closed, it has been for years.”
“I know. It closed down before I left. I know a way in. She’ll remember. Tell her I’ll be waiting.”
Light erupted through the front door, and Teresa Howard’s face came up as she stared across the roof of the stolen car. She didn’t even say goodbye, but her hand touched his face, cool and quick; and she ran back.
Knowing it was time once again to travel, the dragon-breath deathbeast eased sinuously to its feet and began treading down carefully through the fogs of limitless forevers. A soft, expectant purring came from its throat, and its terrible eyes burned with joy.
He was lying full out in one of the pews when the loose boards in the vestry wall creaked, and Lestig knew she had come. He sat up, wiping sleep from his fogged eyes, and replaced the smoked glasses. Somehow, they helped.
She came through the darkness in the aisle in front of the altar, and stopped. “Vernon?”
“I’m here, Sis.”
She came toward the pew, but stopped three rows away. “Why did you come back?”
His mouth was dry. He would have liked a beer. “Where else should I have gone?”
“Haven’t you made enough trouble for Mom and Dad and me?” He wanted to say things about his right foot and his eyesight, left somewhere in Southeast Asia. But even the light smear of skin he could see in the darkness told him her face was older, wearier, changed, and he could not do that to her.
“It was terrible, Vernon. Terrible. They came and talked to us and they wouldn’t let us alone. And they set up television cameras and made movies of the house and we couldn’t even go out. And when they went away the people from town came, and they were even worse, oh God, Vern, you can’t believe what they did. One night they came to break things, and they cut down the tree and Dad tried to stop them and they beat him up so bad, Vern. You should have seen him. It would have made you cry, Vern.”
And he thought of his foot.
“We went away, Vern. We had to. We hoped—” She stopped.
“You hoped I’d be convicted and shot or sent away.”
She said nothing.
He thought of the hooch and the smell.
“Okay, Sis. I understand.”
“I’m sorry, Vernon. I’m really sorry, dear. But why did you do this to us? Why?”
He didn’t answer for a long time, and finally she came to him, and put her arms around him and kissed his neck, and then she slipped away in the darkness and the wall boards creaked, and he was alone.
He sat there in the pew, thinking nothing. He stared at the shadows till his eyes played him tricks and he thought he saw little speckles of light dancing. Then the light glimmers changed and coalesced and turned red and he seemed to be staring first into a mirror, and then into the eyes of some monstrous creature, and his head hurt and his eyes burned….
And the church changed, melted, swam before his eyes and he fought for breath, and pulled at his throat, and the church re-formed and he was in the hooch again; they were questioning him.
He was crawling.
Crawling across a dirt floor, pulling himself forward with his fingers leaving flesh-furrows in the earth, trying to crawl away from them.
“Crawl! Crawl and perhaps we will let you live!”
He crawled and their legs were at his eye level, and he tried to reach up to touch one of them, and they hit him. Again and again. But the pain was not the worst of it. The monkey cage where they kept him boxed for endless days and nights. Too small to stand, too narrow to lie down, open to the rain, open to the insects that came and nested in the raw stump of his leg, and laid their eggs, and the itching that sent lilliputian arrows up into his side, and the light that hung from jerry-rigged wires through the trees, the light that never went out, day or night, and no sleep, and the questions, the endless questions…and he crawled…God how he crawled…if he could have crawled around the world on both bloody hands and one foot, scouring away the knees of his pants, he would have crawled, just to sleep, just to stop the arrows of pain…he would have crawled to the center of the earth and drunk the menstrual blood of the planet…for only a time of quiet, a straightening of his legs, a little sleep….
Because I’m a human being and I’m weak and no one should be expected to be able to take it. Because I’m a man and not a book of rules that says I have to take it. Because I was in a place without sleep and I didn’t want to be there and there was no one to save me. Because I wanted to live.
He heard boards creaking.
He blinked his eyes and sat silently and listened, and there was movement in the church. He reached for his smoked glasses, but they were out of reach, and he reached farther and the crutch slid away from the pew seat and dropped with a crash. Then they were on him.
Whether it was the same bunch he never knew.
They came for him and vaulted the pews and smashed into him before he could use whatever it was he’d used on the kid at the house, the kid who lay on a table in the City Hall, covered with a sheet through which green stains and odd rotting smells oozed.
They jumped him and beat him, and he flailed up through the mass of bodies and was staring directly into a wild-eyed mandrill face, and he
The man screamed, clawed at his face, and his face came away in handfuls, the rotting flesh dripping off his fingers. He fell back, carrying two others with him, and Lestig suddenly remembered what had happened in the
