Unassigned Territory (25 page)

Jack now turned to the half-open door and made a signal to the woman in the truck, then he closed the lid and covered it with the sheet. The lights came back on in Lyle’s eyes. He cranked his head back down to a more realistic position. “Come on,” Jack said, “let’s get it in the truck and get out of here.”

“What about them?” Lyle asked.

Jack looked at Obadiah and Delandra. “Fuck them,” he said. “We got what we came for.” He moved a step closer to the end of the bed. He looked first at Delandra then at Obadiah. “It’s been fun,” he said. “But I wouldn’t ever want to see either of you around again. Is that clear?”

No one said anything. Obadiah could feel Delandra’s shoulder, hot against his own. Lyle had moved a bit to one side, closer to the case. He reached out suddenly and hit Obadiah across the side of the neck with the shortened barrel of his gun.

Obadiah saw the barrel moving toward him and turned his head away. It hadn’t looked as if the gun was moving that quickly and he was stunned at the explosion of pain. He felt himself start up and then sink back down. His ass slipped off the edge of the bed and hit the floor hard. “Somebody’s talking to you, Dipshit,” he heard Lyle say through a red mist. “You understand or not?”

Obadiah said that he understood. He sat on the floor with his hands at his sides while Jack and Lyle carried the case out the door and loaded it into the truck. For a moment the truck’s headlights filled the room and then they were gone and there was just the night pressing in upon them from the empty lot and the flats beyond and somewhere in the blackness at the edge of town the pack of dogs Obadiah had heard as he walked around the building with Lyle were still yapping mindlessly at the moon.

“Well,” Delandra said. “That’s that.”

T
he girl Rex met in Porkpie Wells was named Dina and the possibility that it might be something good lasted roughly twenty-four hours. It survived a hard rain and one very drunk night and then it soured.

It all started to go bad in the bright sunlight at the foot of a dirt road leading into Table Mountain. The road, normally open year-round, was closed. There was one of the state’s yellow and black barricades set up at the entrance together with a road’s closed sign and a warning about flash floods. Rex and the girl sat at the side of the road, and looked at the sign. “Take a four-wheel drive to even try it, if the road’s washed out,” Rex told her. The only other way in lay far to the west—the road out of Ridgecrest, and that was something like a day’s drive.

Dina did not take the news well. She called Rex a pussy and a dildo. She said that he was an even bigger pussy than the bikers she had left in Porkpie Wells and that she would go on alone, at which point it was necessary for Rex physically to restrain her from starting oil’ down twenty miles of bad road with nothing more on her feet than a ninety-nine-cent pair of Flojos.

It was a grim scene and the beginning of the end. For such a diminutive person the girl proved herself capable of really horrendous amounts of noise. Rex drove with a pounding head as the girl railed at him, from the cutoff road at Table Mountain to the southernmost tip of Death Valley, where his radiator at last failed him in a town called Dry Creek.

•     •     •

In the end, Rex supposed, it could have been worse, his radiator could have failed in the middle of nowhere. As it was, there was a station in Dry Creek and a man willing to sell him another. It took Rex the rest of the afternoon to get it on, and by sunset the girl had become unmanageable. She’d been taking something all afternoon, popping pills she kept in an embroidered leather satchel. At some point near sundown she complicated matters considerably with the purchase of two bottles of mad dog 20/20. She eventually followed that with a short dog of Silver Satin and at something like one or two in the morning tried to commit suicide by banging her head on the surface of an empty concrete slab behind the station.

The commotion woke the station’s owner and his wife, who were able to help Rex in restraining the girl. It was an even uglier scene than the one played out on the Table Mountain road and by sunrise Rex had the distinct impression he was being held in some way responsible for it by the residents of Dry Creek—all of whom had by first light been drawn to the scene, very much, it appeared to Rex, like flies to shit.

The last he saw of little Dina she was seated on the back of a car belonging to some local young stud. The car was a souped-up ’59 Chevy with baby moons on the tires and a small stack of chromed pipes in the rear window. Dina was seated on a rear fender, an ice pack on her head. She was holding it there like a cap with one hand and drinking a beer with the other and when Rex passed she stuck her tongue out at him. It was the way he would remember her—one more postcard from a collection whose meaning he had yet to discern.

He had driven for a good two hours, in the direction of the junction, before he realized Dina had forgotten her leather satchel. If she thought he was going to drive the two hours back to give it to her she was crazy. He was going to dump it. He had picked it up and was nearly in the act of tossing the foul thing out an open window when something fell to the seat at his side. It appeared to be a letter addressed to someone named Dina Vagina in San Francisco. The return address was Table Mountain. Rex put the satchel back down and drove for another fifteen minutes, thinking about the letter, before his curiosity got the better of him and he pulled off the road to read it. He stopped on a dusty turnout and parked in the shade of a large Joshua.

The letter was, as Rex had guessed it to be, the letter Dina had spoken of in the bar at Porkpie Wells. The gist of the letter was that Ceton Verity had indeed returned. He had appeared twice now to several of the sisters. He was dressed in white and had about him a special radiance. He said that he was only able to maintain his human form for short periods of time and no one was allowed to touch him. He said that the mystery of the Electro-Magnetron’s missing part had been solved. There was no missing part. It had been revealed to the sisters that the Electro-Magnetron was a psionic device. That at the right time, the correct person would arrive. In the meantime the sisters were to become accomplished in the chanting of certain ancient songs, as the music, though not the key, would play a part in the operation of the Electro-Magnetron. On one page of the letter there was no writing but rather a crude drawing done in blue crayon of a fantastic-looking creature. It was also suggested that Dina find a story entitled “The Call of Cthulhu,” by H. P. Lovecraft.

Rex read the letter twice. Then he looked at the drawing for a long time and once, when he was looking at it, it seemed to him that a peculiar sound had begun, very faintly somewhere above him, as if a wind had begun to whistle in the spines of the Joshua. When he looked up, however, the spines were still in a windless sky. On the bottom of the page there was an unusual word:
Mastamho.

Rex folded the letter very carefully and placed it in the front pocket of his shirt and snapped the button after it. He examined the rest of what was in the satchel: pills, a switchblade knife, a delicate golden chain, some dirty Kleenex, a small change purse with about thirty-five cents in it. Rex threw the pills and the Kleenex into a trash can chained to one end of the turnout. He put the other things back in the satchel. He put the satchel under the seat and drove away.

The road beyond the turnout was filled with shallow dips and in the hollow of each a heat mirage lay in wait for him. For each one that he passed through, causing it to disappear, another would take its place, somewhere ahead of him. For a while he counted them, marking miles with them, until the road at last straightened out and there was only one mirage, thin, shimmering, touched with a crystalline bluish light. This last mirage lay at the base of a distant purple range, for Rex, the hills of home, and it was toward them that he pressed, driving faster now than he had in several days. Because for the first time since the theft of the Mystery of the Mojave, he was a man with a plan. It wasn’t a complete plan yet. But it was forming—a palpable sensation and he felt at the edge of something—some vast coalescing of elements, the movement of momentous tides, as if soon he was to be right there, a witness to creation. Or something like it.

Rex drove hard. Memories of Dina trailed him like the residue of a bad dream and the sunlight, entering the cab now from the rear window, tore at the back of his head with the persistence of termites at rotting wood. A lone bat swung suddenly from an outcropping of rust-colored stone as he made the slow turn that would carry him home. Above him, bare and white before the dull brown hillside, the Terry rested on its blocks. Halfway up the grade he could see there was something stuck to his door. When he got there he found that it was a note—a large scrap of brown paper folded in thirds and stuck to his door with a piece of duct tape The note turned out to be from Tom Shoats, a resident of the junction.
Come see me,
the note said.
It’s about Floyd.
Rex stood in the heat in front of the trailer and held the note in his hands. In spots the paper had gotten wet and the ink had run from the letters to form pale ripples and gaseous-like patterns of great intricacy. Rain, Rex thought, or the tears of angels.

On the way back down the hill Rex stopped at the ragged cluster of mailboxes which served the community. The boxes were perched atop a series of uneven wooden posts and steel poles and reminded Rex of something he had once seen in a movie. They reminded him of the heads of dead men. He discovered two pieces of junk mail in his box. One was an advertisement for pornographic material, the second was a brown envelope upon which a message had been stamped in red ink. The message read:

The customer named below

has been singled out for a rare

opportunity...

quite possibly, unlike anything

ever seen or heard about before.

H
arlan had seen the six-fingered hand three times: once in an African slum, once from a freeway in East Los Angeles, and once in Sarge Hummer’s Desert Museum. He still found the idea that the three objects were in some way connected fascinating.

So far there was not much more to go on but this: Sarge Hummer had once advertised the possibility that the Mystery of the Mojave was in fact the body of an alien being. The Sons of Elijah appeared to be an outfit interested in such things. A medallion bearing what might be their symbol had been found in Sarge Hummer’s workroom.

It was what Harlan thought about as he sat on the shoulder of the interstate and looked down on the junction below him. He had a clear view of the Desert Museum and the Chevron station. The rest of it trailed away from him like so much litter cast among the rocks. The place was filled with sour memories but it was the only starting point he knew.

It had taken longer than expected to make it back, but the delay had proven financially agreeable. It had turned out that one of the brothers in the Vegas area was the owner of a car-rental business. It was one of those outfits where you can save money by renting a wreck. In Harlan’s case the wreck had come free of charge, courtesy of the brother for as long as he needed it. The car was a 1950 Studebaker, a lemon-yellow Starlight coupe. The thing had recently been painted, dents and all, and there was still yellow paint on the tires and along the edges of the glass. The son of the man who had loaned Harlan the car said it reminded him of a flying saucer. It was an observation Harlan found both accurate and appropriate—in ways the boy would never guess. He felt slightly ridiculous behind the wheel of the thing but the price was right and it had gotten him back to the Desert Museum. The only problem with that was, now that he was back he had to do something about it. He’d already been on the shoulder of the road for the better part of an hour, watching the Chevron and the museum for signs of life, and he was beginning to feel like the detective in a dime-store novel.

At last he started the car. He made a U-turn on the highway, drove back toward the road which would take him to the museum, and started down it. His shirt stuck to his back. Gravel pinged in the wheel wells and he was aware of the dull beat of his pulse against the plastic steering wheel beneath his hands. It was not altogether clear to him whom he expected to find or what he expected to say. He supposed his best bet would be to locate the owner. But then the owner of the museum was related to the owner of the Chevron. A variety of unpleasant scenarios presented themselves for inspection. Harlan drove on. To learn more of what the Wheeler boy had stolen was to learn more of a next move. And there was either a next move or there was the drive back to Los Angeles.

The rains had fixed it so that Harlan’s car raised no dust. He parked before a supine telephone pole and a wooden sign which said: WELCOME TO SARGE HUMMER’S DESERT MUSEUM, HOME OF THE THING, THE MYSTERY OF THE MOJAVE. Harlan stopped the car and got out. It was just past midday. There was a slight amount of humidity in the air. To the east the sky was clear, but to the west there were clouds. Back of them the sky was the color of brushed aluminum. The clouds themselves were broken into huge, turbulent clusters which had been tugged at by the wind until they too had the look of something metallic and appeared to hang there before the aluminum sky like some vast invading armada whose threat was immeasurable. Harlan got out of the car and walked across the dirt to the steps of the museum. Nothing moved.

He found the building open, as he had left it the morning he had gone to look after Neil’s car. He knocked anyway, on the wall. When there was no answer he went inside. He went directly to the workroom. The medallion still hung from the rafter in front of the plastic moldings. He looked at the medallion. He studied the moldings in some detail. He opened and closed a number of drawers filled with tools. Beneath a workbench he found a pair of wooden Coca-Cola crates partially covered by a piece of canvas. The crates appeared to contain paperwork of some kind. When he had pulled one out and lifted the canvas he saw the paperwork was, in fact, a collection of old magazines.