gates are open. There's no authority anymore. It's dog eat dog, and every man a beast.'
When he stooped to the window, the curious spell that he had cast over her was broken by his clear intent to leave.
She moved toward him. 'No. Damn you, stop.'
That grin again: sardonic, full of appetite and devoid of humor. 'You know the story of the flood, the ark, the animals loaded two by two-all that Old Testament bullshit. But do you know why? Why the world had to end, why the judgment, the big flush, and then a whole new start?'
'Get away from the window.'
'It's pertinent, sweetheart. You did the right thing once, but now your head is stuffed with twenty years of learning, which means doubts and equivocations and confusions. Now you can either shoot me in the back-again-or suck on that pistol and blow your own brains out.'
Render ducked his head, hunched under the raised sash, and slid across the sill, as Molly shouted, 'Neil!'
The outer rest-room door slammed open, and Neil rushed into the room as Molly reached the open window. 'What's happening?'
Stooping to the window, one hand on the wet sill, pistol ready in the other, she said, 'We can't just let him go.'
'Who? Where?'
She leaned out of the window, head in the rain, and looked left along the alleyway, then right: the night, the storm, the suspicion of monstrosities growing nearby in secret shadows, and Render already gone.
PART FOUR
'The corpse you planted last year in your garden,
Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?'
– T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
25
AT THE BAR AGAIN, WHEN MOLLY DISCOVERED THAT strong coffee was available, she ordered a mug of it. Hot, black, thick, fragrant, it had the power, if anything did, to wake her from this dream if she were dreaming.
From the table of the tosspots, Derek waved at her. She ignored him.
Neil took coffee with her, suggesting answers to some of the things that puzzled her, though he had none of substance for the questions that were the most profound and therefore most urgent.
'So he recognized us when we passed him on the ridge road,' she said. 'But how did he find us here?'
'The Explorer's parked out front. He recognized it.'
'If he didn't come to kill me, why did he come?'
'From what you've said, it sounded like he was? throwing down a challenge to you.'
'Challenging me to what-kill him? What sense does that make?'
'None,' Neil admitted.
'He called me a barren woman. How could he know?'
'There's ways he could've found out we don't have kids.'
'But how could he know that we've tried so hard for seven years and that? I can't.'
'He couldn't know.'
'But he did.'
'He was just guessing,' Neil said.
'No. He knew, all right. He knew. He stuck the knife in exactly where it would hurt the most. The crude bastard called me 'an empty hole.' '
Her thoughts seemed muddled, maybe because she'd had too little sleep or because this night had been filled with too much event to process. The coffee hadn't clarified her mind yet, and perhaps even a pot of it wouldn't bring her thinking up to speed.
'Funny but? I'm glad now we didn't have children,' Neil said. 'I couldn't handle being unable to protect them from all this.'
His left hand rested on the bar. She covered it with her right. He had such strong hands but had used them all his life in gentle pursuits.
'He quoted T. S. Eliot,' she said, coming now to the thing that most mystified and most disturbed her.
'Are we back at Harry Corrigan's place?'
'No. I mean Render. He said 'between the idea and the reality' and later 'between the desire and the spasm.' They were wrapped up in his other crazy rantings, but they're lines from 'The Hollow Men.' '
'He could know Eliot is one of your favorites.'
'How could he know?'
Neil considered a moment but had no answer.
'Just before he left, he said 'Dark, dark, dark-they all go into the dark,' which is more Eliot. The thing that used to be Harry Corrigan? and now Render.'
She sensed that she was circling an elusive insight that, once seized and opened, would unfold into a stunning revelation.
'That lurching, head-shot Harry Corrigan wasn't really Harry,' she said. 'So I wonder? was my father, in the rest room, really my father?'
'What do you mean?'
'Or maybe he was really Render? but not only Render.'
'I'm still chasing you and losing ground.'
'I don't know what I mean, either. Or maybe I know down on a sub conscious level, where I can't get my hands around it? because right now, the hairs are quivering on the back of my neck.'
Too little sleep, too little coffee, too much terror. Layered veils of weariness and confusion hid the truth from her if in fact she was close to any truth at all.
Deputy Tucker Madison, chief strategist of those who were determined to resist the taking of their town and their world, joined Molly and Neil at the bar.
'A few of us are remaining here in case new recruits show up,' he informed them, 'but most of us are forming task groups and heading out. One squad to inspect the bank and find ways to better fortify it. Another to truck food out of the market before it floods. A third to procure more weapons from Powers' Gun Shop. Are you with us?'
Molly thought of the yellow-spotted black fungus squirming with repulsive inner life, growing rapidly in the janitorial closet, the harbinger of a new world, a changed world, and even if no other choice might be as sensible as to fortify the bank and hunker down, the effort seemed futile.
'We're with you,' Neil assured Tucker. 'But there's this? situation we have to deal with first.'
Molly glanced across the room at Derek Sawtelle and his group of fugi-tives from reality. Just as she feared before submitting to his macabre little show-and-tell, he had been an agent of despair.
'We'll meet you at the bank in a little while,' Molly told Tucker.
Futility is always in the eye of the beholder. Her fate was in her own hands. With hope, all things were possible.
That was what she had always believed. Until tonight, however, she had operated automatically on that philosophy and had not found it necessary to remind herself of it or to argue herself into that conviction.
