Son of the endless night, p.34
Son of the Endless Night, page 34
He approached the toilet by inches. Getting there took most of the rest of his life.
He looked down into the blood-flecked rusty bowl, at the water slowly clearing from a pinkish brew.
A large bubble traveled through the pipe and the water belched at him; he jerked back, the roots of his hair icicles. When he looked down again, there was an eyeball floating in the slowly churning water, roots dangling like the tendrils of a jellyfish. Pete stared at it.
"Oh, Pete," he heard his mother say clearly from the other side of the hallway, "are you going to stay in there all night?"
He turned his head slowly and replied in a boyish voice, "No, Mama. I'm all through with my bath."
"Did you wash your ears?"
"Yes."
"Did you wash your peepee?"
"Yes."
"Be sure you scrub the ring out of the tub. Your father will be home in a little while, and he'll want to take a bath too."
"I did already."
"I thought I heard King at the back door a few minutes ago. Would you go down and let him in? I need to finish this sewing."
"Okay, Mama."
"Put your slippers on first."
"They're on already!"
"Well, you know I have to keep reminding you," his mother said mildly.
Pete took his cap gun with him to let King in. It looked just like a real gun. If a burglar saw it, he would run. Pete was six and he wasn't afraid of burglars. But he liked having the gun with him all the same.
King wasn't on the back porch when he looked out. But he saw fresh paw prints in the snow, going away from the house. To that part of the yard where they dug the vegetable garden every spring, where now the moon was brightest.
There he saw the dog leaping and cavorting, throwing up clouds of snow. But this long-legged animal didn't look much like King, who was a stocky mongrel with cropped ears. He was lanky and shaggy and almost the size of a pony; he had a long pointed nose. And someone was riding on his back, gripping a solid handful of his tawny coat. Fascinated, little Pete pressed his face close to the cold glass pane of the back door, holding his breath now so he wouldn't fog the glass.
The rider on the dog's back was a lady with long dark hair, and as he watched, it occurred to him that she was naked. She was having an exciting time. He could hear faint yips of laughter as the hound carried her dashingly from one corner of the yard to another; he soared with her over the snow-heaped stone barbecue. He was both a prince of dogs and a clown; he made Pete giggle, but there was an element of uneasiness in his mirth, foreboding.
He attempted to deny these feelings by raising the cap gun to the glass. "Bang!" he said. "Bang!" The hairy hound continued, untiringly, to leap from one snowburst to another, which were illuminated like fireworks by the brimstone of his eyes.
The woman became aware of Pete, as his fascination with her nudity, her large breasts like hardboiled eggs with the dark yolk showing through, became both an itch and a guilt. He couldn't bear her scrutiny, her dark intimidating eyes, as she deliberately directed the dog closer to the back door. He slipped down below the level of the glass, and sat with his back to the door.
He would have to tell his mother about the eye in the toilet. Sometime.
He had flushed and flushed, but the eye just wouldn't go down to stay.
She wouldn't believe it wasn't his fault the eye was there in the first place.
With his lower lip stuck out and his cheeks burning, Pete played with the gun in his lap. It seemed large to him, heavier, unfamiliar. He ran a small finger across the ramp front sight, down over the precise shocking hole in the blued muzzle, underneath the six-inch barrel to the trigger guard. He touched the nose of a jacketed hollow-point .38 round in the large cylinder. It was the exact size of the head of his peepee.
Through the wood of the door he felt the heavy blows of the dog's paw. He felt fear.
"You can't come in! Not till I'm ready."
There was room for him, too, on the dog's back, he knew that. But if he climbed up there and went riding with the naked woman, who could tell if they would ever bring him home again.
Pete shivered and shivered. He knew that no one would believe anything he said from now on, just because Norm had to have a piece of ass.
With a forefinger he prodded the trigger of the revolver. It resisted him.
His mother's voice called down the stairs, jolting him. He'd heard that tone before. It meant— it meant—
He was in big trouble!
"Where did that eye in the toilet come from, Peter Raff? I wouldn't want to be you when your father gets home."
Wham! Wham! The hound with the long nose wanted him to come out. But Pete didn't have to see him up close to know that he had long teeth and claws.
"What I'd like to know," Captain Moorman was saying sternly, "is how you could just stand there, Raff, and let poor old Norm flush himself down the toilet. Are you listening to me? You'd better come up with an answer."
"Oh, shit," Pete mumbled, realizing he was a goner. Nobody loved him anymore. He would just crawl under his bed and stay there. In the morning maybe everything would be all right again.
He'd never liked the dark. He hated the dark. He wanted light and more light. Terrible things never seemed to happen when the sun was shining.
His finger prodded the trigger of the gun again. Wishfully, belligerently.
The dawn came up full in Pete Raff's face, it was hail and farewell and flags waving in a redhot breeze, the whistling microdot of a meteor arriving from outer space, circling one pinched, astonished eye while the brain, seething with the stricken power of a collapsed wasps' nest, gave off its final flashes of memory and regret, a strident note of music from a martial horn.
58
Hillary began to feel unwell during her third-period social studies class. Cramps had her white-knuckled and hunched over her desk when Mr. Rauscher noticed and dropped by to ask her quietly if she wanted to be excused to go to the infirmary. Hillary could only nod.
He gave the rest of the class a pop quiz, which earned Hillary some dirty looks as she went out the door with the teacher's arm around her. On the fourth floor the school nurse, Mrs. Groveman, took over and had Hillary lie down on the couch. She drew the shades over the windows. Hillary couldn't straighten her legs.
"Do you think you might throw up?" Mrs. Groveman asked her. She positioned a wastebasket with a garbage can liner near the couch.
"Don't know," Hillary said.
"You're not menstruating yet, are you, Hillary?"
"No'm."
"This could be it," the nurse said cheerfully. "Do you want to go home?"
"Yes'm."
"Let me get a cold cloth for your head, and I'll just call your mother."
Groveman wrung out a cloth at the washbasin and covered Hillary's eyes and forehead with it: Hillary's hands were clenched over her belly, and she hissed at a particularly prolonged pain, a couple of tears squeezing from beneath her pressed-down lids. Groveman produced a thermometer and cautioned her not to bite down. "I'll just be gone a few minutes," she said.
"Okay."
The last cramp had been the worst, but there weren't any more. Hillary straightened carefully on the couch and breathed easier. She felt wan and sleepy, barely aware of the slender tube between her lips, the silvery bulb nestled under her tongue. Mrs. Groveman had returned, silently; at least Hillary thought she heard the school nurse moving around in the room. The cloth, no longer cool, was plucked from her face. Hillary sighed, took the thermometer out of her mouth, and opened her eyes.
"Hello, Hillary," Polly Windross said, leaning over her with a smile.
Hillary almost leaped off the couch. Her eyes were goggled. A smattering of freckles darkened against the drained pallor of her skin.
Polly's blond hair fanned down across one cheek, and curled up like a pretend-mustache under her pert nose. She was wearing her familiar red tam, the light green cape with the dark green border. She held the washcloth in her left hand. Her right hand was out of sight beneath the cape.
"What's the matter? You're so jumpy. It's only me." Polly dropped the washcloth in the wastebasket and held out her hand, a sweeping imperious gesture. "Come on. We have to get going."
"Mrs. Grovemannnnn ..." Hillary croaked; she had almost no voice. She edged backward on the leatherette couch, away from Polly's languidly beckoning fingers, the plaid skirt of her jumper riding up around her hips. She looked yearningly at the door to the infirmary, which was closed. The room was dark in contrast to the brilliant yellow rectangles of the shades over the windows.
"Oh, you can be such a baby," Polly said, a little wise twist to her child's shapely mouth. "I told you. It's time to go."
"Where?"
"Outside. All our friends are waiting."
"Who's . . . waiting?"
"Our friends, Hillary. Come see."
Hillary couldn't move. She was rigid from panic, backed up against a wall. Polly just stared at her, a touch of sharpness in the blue eyes. Tiny lights there, too, that played all around the pupils; Hillary felt something that might have been her own faint shadow enlarging on the wall behind her, becoming black and muscular, strong enough to give her a little push and stand her, unwillingly, alongside Polly, who strode off toward the windows in red boots, not a backward glance as Hillary was propelled, tentative and stumbling, a couple of steps behind her. Whenever she tried to resist, the flourishing blackness rubbed against her persuasively like a very thin, eager dog, pushing her forward. She had to keep moving despite the stoned awkward weight of her feet, the sensation of being pleasantly paralyzed at the base of her spine, the nape of her neck.
Polly reached down to release one of the window shades. It rolled up quick as a blink. The sky outside was gray with faint blooms of cloud. Hillary heard through the window a clamor, an uproar. Polly stepped aside.
"There they are."
Hillary took the last two steps to the window. She looked down at the asphalt play yard of Blessed Sacrament School, which also served as a parking lot for the church. A black iron picket fence surrounded the school and the rectory. No one was in the yard, but the street beyond was filled with young people. Dozens of them, shuffling through a kind of pathetic dance. Some played crude, homemade musical instruments that whined and whanged and twittered. Either they wore motley costumes and makeup (the touches of fresh blood were ingenious) or else, astonishingly, they were naked. Hillary saw shaved scarred heads, missing ears; others were more dismayingly deformed. They had the snouts of crocodiles, or squib arms like thalidomide cherubs.
Hillary felt a shudder which was quieted by the spreading numbness down her back. She looked slowly around at Polly.
"Is it Halloween already?"
"You poor dummy."
"Don't make me go," she sobbed. "I don't want anything to do with them."
"Too bad. Your father can't learn to leave well enough alone. He's a troublemaker. So you're going with us to teach him a lesson. And that's all there is to it."
Behind Hillary the window was unlocked and began to slide up. She heard it but was afraid to look back, to take her hot blurred eyes off Polly.
"No. No."
"There you go again. Listen, baby, you'll like it— once you get there. Hear them? They're having fun."
But Hillary heard only cries of torment, of degradation and woe. She was flooded with a fierce Irish rage.
"I won't go!"
"Oh yes you will!"
Polly's other hand shot out from beneath her cape. There was no flesh on it. Sharp, fire-cured bone struck Hillary in the forehead, a ringing slap as Polly's cape billowed in a gust of wind from the open window, obscuring her face. Hillary felt the low sill strike the backs of her thighs, felt herself curving outward into the air. Her upflung hands reached for something, anything, to hold onto. A scream of pure demented pleasure arose from the throats of the lostlings who paraded obscenely in the street. Above their cries she heard a man's voice call out urgently to her. Hilllary, poised in space, willed herself not to fall. But her feet slipped and she was diving backwards, head down; she had a streaky blurred impression of the sooty stones of the school building and the thick gray sky. Then a violent light exploded behind her eyes and she knew nothing more.
59
By two o'clock in the afternoon of the twelfth of March heavy fog rolling in from Boston Harbor had forced the closing of Logan International Airport to all traffic for the second time that day. The captains of inbound aircraft, including Alitalia's flight 60 from Rome, which was then 125 miles northeast of Boston over the Atlantic and descending for the final leg of its approach, were notified of a potentially long delay and given their options. The Alitalia jet, a Boeing 747, could be diverted to the nearest field large enough to handle the jumbos, which was Bradley International in Windsor Locks, Connecticut. But there was a fifty-fifty chance the wind would change and sweep away most of the fog in a matter of minutes. The captain estimated his fuel reserves at a comfortable two hours of flying time and reported his desire to hold for a favorable break in the weather. He was assigned a pattern some forty miles north of Logan at twelve thousand feet.
The captain then informed his passengers, among them Father James Merlo, of the delay. Merlo had been napping in a bulkhead seat of the no-smoking section in coach, where he had a little more room for his long legs. He half heard the news that the long flight was still far from over, grunted, rearranged the nest of little pillows that kept slipping away from beneath his head, and went back to sleep.
In the international terminal building Conor Devon saw a blinking green message on a TV screen that said ***ALL FLIGHTS DELAYED BY FOG*** CONSULT AIRLINES FOR FURTHER INFORMATION*** Conor spoke to a slender Neapolitan girl with a short haircut, who told him that flight 60 was holding and they hoped it would be able to land soon.
He bought a bag of peanuts, checked the time, and made a credit card call to One Pearl Place boutique. Kay Finlay answered the phone.
"Oh, Conor, she isn't here. The school called about eleven thirty, quarter to twelve, something to do with Hillary. Gina went down there right away."
"What about Hillary? Is she sick?"
"There was an accident of some kind. But they said she's going to be all right."
"Thanks, Kay."
The word accident filled his mind big as a blimp. Conor hung up, leafed through his telephone book for the number of the principal's office and placed the call.
"Irene Wimbledon."
"Mrs. Wimbledon, it's Conor Devon. I just heard Hillary was in an accident."
"Oh— oh, but she's perfectly all right, Mr. Devon. Nothing to worry about. She twisted her knee going down the stairs between classes. The nurse put an icebag on it, and by the time your wife arrived the swelling was almost gone."
"Is Gina there?"
"No, they left about half an hour ago. Mrs. Devon was taking Hillary to lunch, and then I believe they were going to do some shopping."
"Well, she must be okay if Gina was taking her shopping."
"Oh, yes. She may have a slight limp for a couple of days."
"That's a relief. How are the boys?"
"The boys are fine, Mr. Devon. A credit to the school. I do have another call waiting, so if you'll excuse me— "
"Sure." Conor hung up and checked the time on one of the monitors. Two eighteen. No change in the weather that he could see. If Father Merlo had to deplane in Connecticut, then he would meet the priest there and drive him to Vermont. No sense waiting for him to be bussed all the way back to Boston. But as long as there was a chance Logan would reopen, he had to wait.
He settled down in a seat that was too small for him, opened his bag of peanuts, and munched as he leafed through a tattered copy of a wrestling fan magazine someone had abandoned on an adjacent seat. He looked at mediocre black and white "action" photos of men whom he knew almost as intimately as his own wife. He failed to find his own scowling face anywhere and cast the magazine aside. Thoughts of Hillary came to mind and he smiled, loving her. He had no inkling that he had not reached the Blessed Sacrament School at all, and that the voice on the telephone, so plausible and reassuring, had not been that of the principal.
60
Gina had arrived at the school a few minutes past noon, and found a parking place on the street beside the rectory. It was lunchtime, and the asphalt schoolyard was crowded with children running around shrilly and aimlessly, many of them in shirtsleeves despite the thirty-degree temperature.
As Gina crossed the yard, passing the grotto of the Virgin beside the rectory, she searched quickly through the mob of playing children but didn't see Dean or Charles. But all of the grades had hobby options during the free period following lunch; the boys were probably inside with computers or small animals.
Up a flight of steps and through double doors past the kindergarten, closed for the day. The lay principal, Irene Wimbledon, was waiting for her in the school offices opposite the first-floor auditorium. She was a small, plump, pigeonlike woman who nodded and becked and smiled; unlikely as it seemed at first glance she was a tough administrator who had survived five years under a hard-driving, bad-tempered parish priest who disliked all women but the Virgin Mary, to whom he was favorably disposed on the basis of her references.
"Where is she?" Gina cried, out of breath. "Is she hurt badly? What happened?"
Wimbledon laid a firm, soothing hand on Gina's arm. "Hillary had a very narrow escape from what surely would have been a fatal fall; she has some bumps and bruises, but she's not seriously hurt. She is badly frightened by the experience. Father Toomey is with her now in the sanctuary. I know you're anxious to see her, but please come into my office for a few moments."
