“The others are in the car,” Raymond said. Raymond turned then, moving away.
Harry followed, turning back into the main aisle.
He watched Raymond march resolutely toward the screen door, banging it open, swallowed by light.
Harry hurried after him.
“Ah sir. Excuse me, sir.” The voice came from behind Harry, and Harry turned.
The cashier was smiling from behind the counter. “That will be ninety-five cents, plus tax, of course.”
Harry faltered, looked to see if there might be some other customer standing nearby, someone to whom the words would make sense.
The young man smiled. “The postcard,” he said, as though reading Harry’s mind. “It’s ninety-five cents.”
“Ah,” Harry said, looking down at the shiny-surfaced rectangle still clutched in his left hand. “I’m sorry, I—” He was about to say that he really didn’t want the card, had not, in fact, examined it.
And the clerk would say—or perhaps just think—
yeah, you don’t want it if you have to pay for it, right buddy
?
Harry was paying for the postcard when he recognized the young man.
All the details of that day were etched in Harry’s mind and he couldn’t be mistaken. For proof there was the blue, badly etched anchor on the kid’s wrist.
“You all right, Mister?”
Harry blinked. “I—” He was mistaken, of course. This was someone else, another blond teenager with—
“I got to her real quick,” the cashier said. “I had my arms around her, and I was ready to turn and haul for shore. There was a nasty rip clawing at my legs, but I knew I could handle it. That’s when old Momma Ocean sucker punched me. Something floating in that wave, maybe a two-by-four (a lot of rotten lumber was landing on the beach after the hurricane), something plowed into my skull and I was out of the game, shark food, shark shit by Sunday.”
“Jim Lansdown. You’re Jim Lansdown, the lifeguard. They said you’d been drinking.”
The young man suddenly jerked forward and, spit flying from his mouth, shouted, “That’s a goddamn lie! I quit all that six months earlier, went through a rehab for it, was going to an AA meeting every night, ask anyone, they said as much at my funeral. You’re the one, aren’t you? You’re the fucker that’s tied me up, set this big stinking investigation in motion. I can smell the guilt in you, all the dead-fish guilt. You son-of-a—”
An explosive crash of thunder pitched the store into thick darkness. The floor buckled under Harry and a high, shrieking wind erupted, filling the blackness above him with flying objects, a pitched battle of poltergeists.
Harry crawled toward the door, toward where, that is, the door had been; no rectangle of light existed to guide him. Something slapped his cheek; he tasted blood on his tongue.
Some sort of epilepsy, perhaps. Maybe this was the disorientation one felt on being shot through the head.
I’ve been killed by a dead lifeguard
, Harry thought.
I’ve fouled up his afterlife, and he’s killed me. Fair enough.
Still, reflexively, he continued to crawl through a welter of airborne debris. Hunkered down, the top of his head came in contact with something pliant. He lifted a cautious hand, pressed against the hot, rusty grid of wire. He pushed the screen door open, hearing the little shop bell that announced the comings and goings of customers.
A glare as devoid of detail as the night he crawled from assailed his eyes.
He heard Raymond bellow through the hot white air: “Lord Gainesborough!”
He felt his shoulders clutched as he scudded forward and down wooden stairs; then he was being carried, unceremoniously, through the upside-down splendor of blinding light. Then he was dumped in the dust, a lifesize Pen Pal.
“I can’t see,” he said. “Everything’s too bright.”
“Here,” someone—Rene—said, “put these on.”
He felt the frames slide over his ears. The light turned grayish green and the long-necked silhouette of the girl made a reassuring shape in the light.
Someone fumbled in his pocket for the keys. “Allan, you’d better drive.”
H
ER
H
USBAND
H
AD
gone outside to smoke a cigar, and Ada sat on the sofa, cradling her second cup of tea on her lap. The elegant, angry woman who had introduced herself to Ada as Gabriel Allan-Tate and who had said, without preamble, “Your son has kidnapped my Allan,” was striding back and forth behind the sofa, her heels clacking on the wooden floor.
The older woman, Helen Kurtis, had fallen asleep in an overstuffed chair and was snoring. She reminded Ada of her own aunt Clarice, who could doze in a straight-backed chair, maintaining a starched dignity, as though mummified and on display.
Before falling asleep, Helen Kurtis had given a matter-of-fact account of the night’s harrowing events, assuring Ada that her son and daughter-in-law were fine—that everyone was fine—and that, no doubt, they would show up momentarily.
Ada jumped when Gabriel leaned over the sofa and spoke directly into her ear.
“It’s time to call the police, I think. For all I know, your son, urged on by imaginary voices, could be murdering the others.”
“Raymond,” Ada responded, turning to regard the woman and somewhat shocked to find herself addressing an upside-down head and expanse of white throat, “is a gentle person and has never harmed anyone.”
Gabriel somersaulted into the sofa, righted herself with languid grace, and smiled wickedly as she brushed her dress down over white thighs. “I believe you have just described the average mass murderer. It is the gentle types that are always coming unhinged. Surely the local police have a right to know that a psychotic who has abducted a poor, helpless wheelchair-bound girl, an unfortunate woman who, I understand, is quite hopelessly brain-dead…surely the police should be informed that such an individual is at large in the community. I do not know how Allan fell under his spell, but my son must be released before his life is ruined by the association. I’ve seen how these things work. If you are along for the ride on one of these killing sprees, your reputation is ruined for life. Guilt by association, you know. Blame it on the media, but that’s the way it is.”
Ada glared at this rude woman whose arrogance and sense of privilege were as overbearing as the dark scent she wore, one of those aggressive, expensive perfumes with a name like Ravish.
“Raymond is not, I assure you, embarked on a killing spree. And your son is certainly free to—”
The sound stirred them all. Gabriel looked up at the ceiling. Helen Kurtis woke, snorting. And John Story entered the cabin, opening the door and letting the whup whup whup noise in. “Looks like we have company,” he said.
Ada, her husband, Gabriel, and Helen all stood on the porch and watched the big helicopter settle in the clearing by the lake. The sun’s reflection in the water shivered.
Three men, all of them wearing suits, disembarked from the silver chopper and moved gingerly—displaying great distaste for the muddy ground that sucked at shiny shoes and tailored pants legs—toward the cabin.
“Jesus,” Gabriel said, her voice off to Ada’s right, “it’s Peake.”
Ada disliked the man instantly. His lips were too red, and his habit of leaning forward and speaking in a low just-between-you-and-me voice reminded her of a smarmy talk show host trying to woo gullible viewers with a whisper. He also had the annoying habit of running his long fingers through his hair while tilting his head back, as though he were luxuriating under a hot shower, and if someone had told him that this mannerism would endear him to people… well, all Ada could say was: someone had done him a great disservice.
He sprawled in the sofa with his head back and said his mission was one of great urgency, life and death, as it were. He told them his name was Dr. Roald Peake and that he was the head of a corporation involved in pharmaceutical research and that Mrs. Allan-Tate could corroborate that.
Everyone looked at Gabriel Allan-Tate as though she would do just this, perhaps with some precise, formal gesture, but she seemed disoriented, staring out the window with an expression that might have indicated poor digestion or the end of a love affair.
“Gabriel,” Peake said, coming off the sofa with a serpentine glide and swooping an arm around the woman’s shoulder. He leaned toward her ear, bowing to do so. “If you are worried about that housekeeping unpleasantness, that nasty smell in the foyer, let me assure you that it is taken care of. I urge you to put it from your mind and never approach it again.”
He steered Gabriel to a chair—as though he were the host and this his house—and resumed his position on the sofa.
“I have just recently learned that Mr. Harold Gainesborough and the people who are presently in his company are all participants in an unfortunate drug experiment, administered by Gabriel’s late husband, Marlin Tate, a man of genius but poor judgment. These experiments were conducted while the people involved were patients at Harwood Psychiatric. That such a thing could happen is lamentable…but that milk is, as they say, spilled, and I am here to prevent some greater tragedy from occurring. There is every reason to believe that this drug, this Ecknazine, has powerful hallucinogenic properties which may be linked to certain aging processes…which is to say that one or more of Dr. Tate’s subjects may experience something equivalent to an LSD flashback. Only…well, more dramatic. Dr. Tate destroyed all of his notes, unfortunately, but”—here Peake smiled in a manner that was intended, no doubt, to be ingratiating, but which made Ada shiver—”as a competitor I was aware of some properties of the drug.”
“Spies,” Gabriel said.
Peake shrugged, continued. “The drug established a sort of communal bond, a psychic link. Mind you, the subjects might never have met, might not be aware of the influence they exerted on each other. Dr. Tate spoke of a resonant effect. Ah.” Peake regarded his listeners with what Ada took to be his first genuine expression: one of frustration and anger. “I don’t know what he meant by this ‘resonant’ effect. Perhaps he didn’t know himself. But, here they are, all these Ecknazine folks, all come together. It could be very volatile, could cause psychological damage to one or all of them. Not a flashback, exactly. More…ah… explosive. Or…” He ran his fingers through his hair again, closing his eyes. “Perhaps nothing. In any event, better safe than sorry, and so I am here.”
And what, Ada wanted to know, did that exactly mean, his being here?
Observation
. That was the word he used. He wanted the Ecknazine subjects under observation for a period of time. He wanted to run some psychological and physiological checks on them to determine that they were in no danger.
Ada shot a quick look at her husband, who was standing next to the overstuffed chair that housed the ample Helen Kurtis. His arms were folded, and he was glowering with bulldog truculence, and he saw his wife look at him and spoke back with his red-rimmed, seen-it-and-suffered eyes:
we are not going that route again
, his eyes said.
Ada nodded slowly. Her boy didn’t like to be studied and had not taken kindly to the six weeks he’d been at the Simpec Center for the Study of Human Potential. It had been a great setback for Raymond. It had been something of a setback for Simpec, too, actually. The director of Simpec, a heavyset, excitable man, had accused poor Raymond—who had only been thirteen years old, for heaven’s sake—of outlandish acts of sabotage and—really!—mind control.
H
ARRY
W
AS
W
ORKING
on it, working on putting his world to rights, restoring order. One mental baby step at a time. He sat next to the window in the backseat of the car. Emily was propped woodenly on his left. Occasionally she would lean against him as the car sped around a curve.
The window was down and the wind ran green, honeysuckle fingers through his hair. His sight was fully restored, and he studied the Carolina countryside through the tinted glasses, speaking the sights silently, like a foreigner practicing his new tongue: farm, tractor, oak, dog, pond.
Cautiously, he reached up and took the sunglasses off. The world was less demure, brighter. Cows were revealed, loafing in the shadows cast by green willows.
He gathered strength from the scene. Nothing like cows to center and calm a man. Visual sedatives, cows.
The Sneeze That Destroyed New Jersey
had begun with a family outing whose sole purpose was to “see cows in their natural habitat.” Hay fever had subverted that purpose and taught everyone a lesson in acceptance and given birth to world peace (after the unfortunate but necessary destruction of New Jersey) and…
A small explosion—that registered on Harry’s ear as an
oof!
—was immediately followed by a bouncing deceleration and a number of exclamations from his traveling companions, and an explanatory shout from Raymond that said it all:
flat
!
They all climbed out of the car, and Raymond set about the business of replacing the tire. Fortunately, the trunk did contain a spare, fully inflated, and, after much searching, a jack was also discovered.
“Please, my Lord,” Raymond said, holding up a hand, “Lord Allan and I have the situation well in hand. If you will attend to the ladies, perhaps entertain them with humorous anecdotes, Allan and I will set things to rights in no time.”