From the Corner of His Eye
Page 79“She's drivin' the pies,” Angel said. “What's your name?"
“Wolfgang Kickmule."
“That's a silly name."
“It's not silly at all."
“My name's Pixie Lee."
Junior reached the window seat and stared down at her. “I don't believe that's true."
“Truer than true,” she insisted.
“Your name's not Pixie Lee, you little liar."
“Well, it's sure not Velveeta Cheese. And don't be rude."
The various flavors of canned soda were always racked in the same order, allowing Barty to select what he wanted without error. He got orange for Angel, root beer for himself, and closed the refrigerator.
Retracing his path across the kitchen, he caught a faint whiff of jasmine from the backyard. Funny, jasmine here inside. Two paces later, he felt a draft.
He halted, made a quick calculation, turned, and moved toward where the back door ought to be. He found it half open.
For reasons of mice and dust, doors at the Lampion house were never left ajar, let alone open this wide.
Holding on to the jamb with one hand, Barty leaned across the threshold, listening to the day. Birds. Softly rustling leaves. Nobody on the porch. Even trying hard to be quiet, people always made some little noise.
“Uncle Jacob?
No answer.
After nudging the door shut with his shoulder, Barty carried the sodas out of the kitchen and forward along the hall. Pausing at the livingroom archway, he said, “Uncle Jacob?"
No answer. No little noises. His uncle wasn't here.
Evidently, Jacob had made a quick trip to his apartment over the garage and, with no thought for mice and dust, had not closed the back door. Junior said, “You've caused me a lot of trouble, you know.” He'd been building a beautiful rage all night, thinking about what he'd been through because of the girl's temptress mother, whom he saw so clearly in this pint-size bitch. “So much trouble."
“What do you think about dogs?"
“What're you drawing there?” he asked.
“Do they talk or don't they?"
“I asked you what you're drawing."
“Something I saw this morning."
She refused to look at him, the way her mother had refused to look at him when he'd been making love to her in the parsonage. She began twisting a red pencil in a handheld sharpener, making sure that the shavings fell into a can kept for that purpose. “I saw it here."
Junior tossed the pad on the floor. “Bullshit."
“We say bulldoody in this house."
Weird, this kid. Making him uneasy. All in white, with her incomprehensible yammering about talking books and talking dogs and her mother driving pies, and working on a damn strange drawing for a little girl.
“Look at me, Angel."
Twisting, twisting, twisting the red pencil.
“I said look at me."
He slapped her hands, knocking the sharpener and the pencil out of her grasp. They clattered against the window, fell onto the window-seat cushions.
When she still didn't meet his stare, he seized her by the chin and tipped her head back.
Terror in her eyes. And recognition.
Surprised, he said, “You know me, don't you?"
She said nothing.
“You know me,” he insisted. “Yeah, you do. Tell me who I am, Pixie Lee."
After a hesitation, she said, “You're the boogeyman, except when I saw you, I was hiding under the bed where you're supposed to be."
“How could you recognize me? No hair, this face."
“I see."
“See what?” he demanded, squeezing her chin hard enough to hurt her.
Because his pinching fingers deformed the shape of her mouth, her voice was compressed: “I see all the ways you are."
Tom Vanadium was too unnerved by the Cain scare to be interested in the newspaper anymore. The strong black coffee, superb before, tasted bitter now.
He carried the mug to the sink, poured the brew down the drain and saw the cooler standing in the corner. He hadn't noticed it before. A medium-size, molded-plastic, Styrofoam-lined ice chest, of the type you filled with beer and took on picnics.
Paul must have forgotten something that he'd meant to take on the pie caravan.
The lid of the cooler wasn't on as tight as it ought to have been. From around one edge slipped a thin and sinuous stream of smoke. Something on fire.
By the time he got to the cooler, he could see this wasn't smoke, after all. It dissipated too quickly. Cool against his hand. The cold steam from dry ice.
No time for horror, disgust. Every second mattered now, and every minute might cost another life.
To the phone, the police. No dial tone. Pointless to rattle the disconnect switch. The line had been cut.
Neighbors might not be home. And by the time he knocked, asked to use the phone, dialed ... Too great a waste of time.
Think, think. A three-minute drive to the Lampion place. Maybe two minutes, running stop signs, cutting comers.
Tom snatched the revolver off the table, the car keys from the pegboard.
Slamming through the door, letting it bang shut behind him hard enough to crack the glass, crossing the porch, Tom took the beauty of the day like a fist in the gut. It was too blue and too bright and too gorgeous to harbor death, and yet it did, birth and death, alpha and omega, woven in a design that flaunted meaning but defied understanding. It was a blow, this day, a hard blow, brutal in its beauty, in its simultaneous promises of transcendence and loss.
The car stood in the driveway. As dead as the phone.
Lord, help me here. Give me this one, just this one, and I'll follow thereafter where I'm led. I'll always thereafter be your instrument, but please, please, GIVE ME THIS CRAZY EVIL SON OF A BITCH!
Three minutes by car, maybe two without stop signs. He could just about run it as fast as drive it. He had a bit of a gut on him. He wasn't the man he used to be. Ironically, however, after the coma and the rehab, he wasn't as heavy as he had been before Cain sunk him in Quarry Lake.
I see all the ways you are.
The girl was creepy, no doubt about it, and Junior felt now precisely as he had felt on the night of Celestina's exhibition at the Greenbaum Gallery, when he had come out of the alleyway after disposing of Neddy Gnathic in the Dumpster and had checked his watch only to discover his bare wrist. He was missing something here, too, but it wasn't merely a Rolex, wasn't a thing at all, but an insight, a profound truth.
He let go of the girl's chin, and at once she scrunched into the corner of the window seat, as far away from him as she could get. The knowing look in her eye wasn't that of an ordinary child, not that of a child at all. Not his imagination, either. Terror, yes, but also defiance, and this knowing expression, as though she could see right through him, knew things about him that she had no way of knowing.
He fished the sound-suppressor from a jacket pocket, drew the pistol from his shoulder holster, and began to screw the former to the latter. He misthreaded it at first because his hands had begun to shake.
Sklent came to mind, perhaps because of the strange drawing on the girl's sketch pad. Sklent at that Christmas Eve party, only a few months ago but a lifetime away. The theory of spiritual afterlife without a need for God. Prickly-bur spirits. Some hang around, haunting out of sheer mean stubbornness. Some fade away. Others reincarnate.
His precious wife had fallen from the tower and died only hours before this girl was born. This girl ... this vessel.
He remembered standing in the cemetery, downhill from Seraphim's grave-although at the time he'd known only that it was a Negro being buried, not that it was his former lover-and thinking that the rains would over time carry the juices of the decomposing Negro corpse into the lower grave that contained Naomi's remains. Had that been a half-psychic moment on his part, a dim awareness that another and far more dangerous connection between dead Naomi and dead Seraphim had already been formed?
When the sound-suppressor was properly attached to the pistol, Junior Cain leaned closer to the girl, peered into her eyes, and whispered, “Naomi, are you in there?” Near the top of the stairs, Barty thought he heard voices in his bedroom. Soft and indistinct. When he stopped to listen, the voices fell silent, or maybe he only imagined them.
Of course, Angel might have been playing around with the talking book. Or, even though she'd left the dolls downstairs, she might have been filling the time until Barty's return by having a nice chat with Miss Pixie and Miss Velveeta. She had other voices, too, for other dolls, and one for a sock puppet named Smelly.
Granted that he was only three going on four, nevertheless Barty had never met anyone with as much cheerful imagination as Angel. He intended to marry her in, oh, maybe twenty years.
Even prodigies didn't marry at three.
Meanwhile, before they needed to plan the wedding, there was time for an orange soda and a root beer, and more of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
He reached the top of the stairs and proceeded toward his room.
After two years of rehabilitation, Tom had been pronounced as fit as ever, a miracle of modem medicine and willpower. But right now he seemed to have been put back together with spit and string and Scotch tape. Arms pumping, legs stretching, he felt every one of those eight months of coma in his withered-and-rebuilt muscles, in his calcium depleted-and-rebuilt bones.
Sometimes, in his mind, Tom wasn't running along the residential streets of Bright Beach, but along the corridor of the dormitory wing over which he had served as prefect. He was cast back in time, to that dreadful night. A sound wakes him. A fragile cry. Thinking it a voice from his dream, he nevertheless gets out of bed, takes up a flashlight, and checks on his charges, his boys. Low-wattage emergency lamps barely relieve the gloom in the corridor. The rooms are dark, doors ajar according to the rules, to guard against the danger of stubborn locks in the event of fire. He listens. Nothing. Then into the first room-and into a Hell on earth. Two small boys per room, easily and silently overcome by a grown man with the strength of madness. In the sweep of the flashlight beam: the dead eyes, the wrenched faces, the blood. Another room, the flashlight jittering, jumping, and the carnage worse. Then in the hall again, movement in the shadows. Josef Krepp captured by the flashlight. Josef Krepp, the quiet custodian, meek by all appearances, employed at St. Anselmo's for the past six months with nary a problem, with only good employee reviews attached to his record. Josef Krepp, here in the corridor of the past, grinning and capering in the flashlight, wearing a dripping necklace of souvenirs.
In the present, long after the execution of Josef Krepp, half a block ahead, lay the Lipscomb house. Beyond it, the Lampion place.
A calico cat appeared at Tom's side, running, pacing him. Cats were witches' familiars. Good luck or bad, this cat?
Here, now, the Pie Lady's house, the battleground.
“Naomi, are you in there?” Junior whispered again, peering into the windows of the girl's soul.
She wouldn't answer him, but he was as convinced by her silence as he would have been by a blurted confession—or by a denial, for that matter. Her wild eyes convinced him, too, and her trembling mouth. Naomi had come back to be with him, and it could be argued that Seraphim had returned in a sense, too, for this girl was the flesh of Seraphim's flesh, born out of her death.
Junior was flattered, he really was. Women couldn't get enough of him. The story of his life. They never let go gracefully. He was wanted, needed, adored, worshiped. Women kept calling after they should have taken the hint and gone away, insisted on sending him notes and gifts even after he told them it was over. Junior wasn't surprised that women would return from the dead for him, nor was he surprised that women he'd killed would try to find a route back to him from Beyond, without malice, without vengeance in their hearts, merely yearning to be with him again, to hold him and to fulfill his needs. As gratified as he was by this tribute to his desirability, he simply didn't have any romantic feelings left for Naomi and Seraphim. They were the past, and he loathed the past, and if they wouldn't let him alone, he would never be able to live in the future.
He pressed the muzzle of the weapon against the girl's forehead and said, “Naomi, Seraphim, you were exquisite lovers, but you've got to be realistic. There's no way we can have a life together."
“Hey, who's there?” said the blind boy, whom Junior had nearly forgotten.
He turned from the cowering girl and studied the boy, who stood a few steps inside the room, holding a can of soda in each hand. The artificial eyes were convincing, but they didn't possess the knowing look that so troubled him in the strange girl.
Junior pointed the pistol at the boy. “Simon says your name's Bartholomew."
“Simon who?"
“You don't look very threatening to me, blind boy."
The child didn't reply.
“Is your name Bartholomew?"
“Yes."
Junior took two steps toward him, sighting the gun on his face. “Why should I be afraid of a stumbling blind boy no bigger than a midget?"
“I don't stumble. Not much, anyway.” To the girl, Bartholomew said, “Angel, are you okay?"
“I'm gonna have the trots,” she said.
“Why should I be afraid of a stumbling blind boy?” asked Junior again. But this time the words issued from him in a different tone of voice, because suddenly he sensed something knowing in this boy's attitude, if not in his manufactured eyes, a quality similar to what the girl exhibited.
“Because I'm a prodigy,” Bartholomew said, and he threw the can of root beer.
The can struck Junior hard in the face, breaking his nose, before he could duck.
Furious, he squeezed off two shots. Passing the living-room archway, Tom saw Jacob in the armchair, under the reading lamp, slumped as if asleep over the book. His crimson bib confirmed that he wasn't just sleeping.