"I still don't understand why you called me," Brad said, mildly irked, again, for having allowed Parkington to record him.
"Those newspaper articles are about people who have disappeared. They are the people Parkington interviewed. Since they all disappeared between one and four months after he interviewed them, and since he took the trouble to track those clippings down and stick them on his wall, it is likely those vanished folks are connected, in some way, to Parkington. I wanted to call and give you a heads up, in case he comes knocking on your door. You might not want to open it."
"You think he killed those people?" Brad had difficulty envisioning a homicidal Parkington.
"I don't know what to think. Do you?"
Brad didn't, and he promised to call if Parkington showed up in Austin.
After he replaced the phone in its cradle, he went to the refrigerator and got a beer. He drank half of it and decided to call Meta at work.
"She left early today," someone told him. "A couple of hours ago, I guess."
Brad sat in a kitchen chair and drank the rest of his beer. He had no idea where she was.
But he did. He realized he did know. Not in the way he had always known, not with that magical (gone and now precious) lost sense but with the new cold logic that had replaced it. She was on her way to Silo, the town where it had all unraveled and where, now, some accursed force awaited her.
He set off at once, driving toward Silo, stopping every hundred miles or so to empty his bladder and take on gas and supplies (which consisted primarily of beer and snacks). He wasn't up for such a trip, not fully recovered from the accident and emotionally exhausted by Meta's betrayal, her retreat from his love and protection into the arms of some monstrous Casanova from Atlantis — and, yes, he admitted that he now swallowed Parkington's nutcase scenarios, and they went down easy; there was something out there in the mountains — under the mountains — that had reached out and wrecked his marriage and was now dragging Meta toward its lair.
But he was exhausted and would be no good at all unless he rested. So, on the far side of midnight, miles away from morn ing, he pulled into a rest stop and turned the engine off and slept.
The sun was up when he woke, and it was late afternoon when he drove down Silo's Main Street. It was a lean town, not given to airs, saturated with the sun's weight, sidewalks cracked by time, two old men on a bench in front of Roy's Restaurant, the Silo Library next door, then a barbershop called Curly's Quick Hair. Brad parked in front of a bar, B&G (which he knew, having eaten lunch there with Meta on a therapeutic outing from the hospital, stood for Bar & Grill, minimalist humor or the lack of it).
Brad wasn't a drinker, and his overindulgence of the day before was now taking its toll. So he went into B&G and sat at the bar counter. He ordered a beer and a fried egg sandwich from the barmaid, a middle-aged woman of undecided hair color with a tattoo on her shoulder that said «Dwayne» over a heart. Under the heart, clearly the work of a less skilled artist, it read: "Stinks." It made Brad sad, that tattoo. He thought of the entropy inherent in all relationships, and he ordered another beer. He considered a plan of action.
He didn't have one, he realized. The certainty that had brought him here had drained out over the miles, and he was left with a panicky sense of abandonment. Who did he know in town? No one. Well, Sheriff Winslow, but what could he say to him? Nothing relevant. He'd sound like a madman.
Am I? he wondered. But it was the truth itself that was mad, and how could it help but irradiate him, taint his own sanity?
His musings were interrupted by the barmaid, shouting "Musky! Hey Musky! Wake up! Come on. I got a couple of beers for you if you take out the trash."
She was leaning over a man and shaking his shoulder. He stirred, raised his head like an ancient bloodhound scenting a rabbit, and said, "Trash." He was a bearded man with a pocked face and heavy-lidded eyes stained yellow, the same color as the bar's smoke-saturated walls, and he had been sleeping in a corner booth, the only other patrons an elderly couple who were dancing to tinny sounds from the jukebox, the sort of music you could make with a comb and a piece of wax paper.
Brad watched the man lumber past the bar counter and through a door that must have led to the alley in back. Brad called to the barmaid, and when she came over, he asked her who she'd just been talking to.
"You mean old Musky?" She looked a little incredulous, a little suspicious. "Musky?"
"That's his name?"
"It's what he answers to, yeah. Why you want to know?"
Brad hesitated. "I thought he might be somebody I heard of recently. But I believe that person's name was Charlie."
"Ain't nobody calls him that anymore. But that's what he was born. Born Charlie Musgrove, the light of his momma's eye, and as full of promise. you won't credit this, 'cause he looks about a hundred years old now, but we were in high school together."
"What happened?" Brad said.
"Shit," the woman said. "Ain't that what the bumper sticker says? Shit happens. He drank up all his opportunities 'cept the opportunity to drink more." She backed up and narrowed her eyes. "Why you want to know about Musky? What makes him any of your business?"
Brad explained, starting with the wasps that had attacked him and his wife in the desert. He did not mention Atlantis under the mountains or the alien theft of his wife's soul, however. He did tell her how Charlie Musgrove figured in the narrative.
"Rattlesnakes!" she said. "You want old Musky to tell you about them rattlesnakes that tried to get him!"
"Yes," Brad said, not wishing to explain, in detail, what he really wanted.
"Hell, he's been hard to shut up on that subject. You won't have any trouble there. If you say the magic words, you'll get an earful. I guarantee it."
"What are the magic words?" "Can I buy you a beer?" she said.
"Turn here," Musky said. They followed a winding road into the mountains. The car leaned upward, as though the stars above were their destination. Musky took a swig from the beer bottle and lurched into song again: "Away in a manager no crib for his bed, the little Lord Jesus was wishin' he's dead. No.»
It hadn't been hard to elicit the rattlesnake story from Musky — who hadn't responded to Brad's initial Charles Musgrove? query — and Musky had a few things to say about Michael Parkington. "That fellow told me I didn't see no rattlesnakes, said I lucinated them. I didn't tell him I'd read that fool book he wrote. Yep, found a copy in a dumpster, autographed to Cindy Lou with his cell phone number, but I guess that didn't work out. That book was a lot of crap, all that Atlantis stuff."
"You don't believe there is some alien force in these mountains?"
Musky finished the beer and threw the empty bottle out the window, which made the Austin-environmentalist in Brad cringe when he heard the shattering glass. "Oh, there's something awful and ancient in these mountains. My grandfather knew all about it, said he'd seen it eat a goat by turning the goat inside out and sort of licking it until it was gone. He said it was a god from another world, older than this one. He called it Toth. A lot of people in these parts know about it, but it ain't a popular subject."
He opened another beer and drank it. "Anyway, I think those rattlesnakes were real."
They bumped along the road, flanked by ragged outcroppings, shapes that defied gravity, everything black and jagged or half erased by the brightness of the car's rollicking headlights.
"Okay! Stop 'er!" Musky said. Brad stopped the car. Musky was out of the car immediately, tumbling to the ground but quickly staggering upright with the beer bottle clutched in his hand. Brad turned the ignition off, put the key in his pocket, and got out.