“God is cruel.”
David nodded, and Johnny saw the boy was on the verge of tears. “He sure is. Better than Tak, maybe, but pretty mean, just the same.”
“But God’s cruelty is refining… that’s the rumor, anyway. Yeah.”
“Well… maybe.”
“In any case, he’s alive, your friend.”
“Yes-”
“And maybe it wasn’t all about you, anyway. Maybe someday your pal is going to cure AIDS or cancer. Maybe he’ll hit in sixty straight games.”
“Maybe.”
“David, this thing that’s out there-Tak-what is it. Do you have any idea. An Indian spirit. Something like a manitou, or a wendigo.”
“I don’t think so. I think it’s more like a disease than a spirit, or even a demon. The Indians may not have even known it was here, and it was here before they were. Long before. Tak is the ancient one, the unformed heart. And the place where it really is, on the other side of the throat at the bottom of the well… I’m not sure that place is on earth at all, or even in normal space. Tak is a complete outsider, so different from us that we can’t even get our minds around him.”
The boy was shivering a little, and his face looked even paler. Maybe that was just the starlight, but Johnny didn’t like it. “We don’t need to talk about it anymore, if you don’t want to. All right.”
David nodded, then pointed up ahead. “Look, there’s the Ryder van. It’s stopped. They must have found Mary. Isn’t that great.”
“It sure is,” Johnny said. The truck’s headlights were half a mile or so farther on, shining out in a fan toward the base of the embankment. They drove on toward it mostly in silence, each lost in his own thoughts. For Johnny, those questions were mostly concerned with identity; he wasn’t entirely sure who he was any longer. He turned to David, meaning to ask if David knew where there might be a few more sardines hiding—hungry as he was, he wouldn’t even turn his nose up at a plate of cold lima beans-when his head suddenly turned into a soundless, brilliant airburst. He jerked backward in the driver’s seat shoulders twisting. A strangled cry escaped him. His mouth was drawn down so radically at the corners that it looked like a clown’s mask. The ATV swerved toward the left side of the road.
David leaned over, grabbed the wheel, and corrected their course just before the vehicle could nose over the edge and tumble into the desert. By then Johnny’s eyes were open again. He braked instinctively, throwing the boy forward. Then they were stopped, the ATV idling in the middle of the road not two hundred feet from the Ryder van’s taillights. They could see people standing back there, red-stained silhouettes, watching them.
“Holy shit,” David breathed. “For a second or two there-”
Johnny looked at him, dazed and amazed, as if seeing him for the first time in his life.
Then his eyes cleared and he laughed shakily.
“Holy shit is right,” he said. His voice was low, almost strengthless-the voice of a man who has just received a walloping shock. “Thanks, David.”
“Was it a God-bomb.”
“What.”
“A big one. Like Saul in Damascus, when the cataracts or whatever they were fell out of his eyes and he could see again. Reverend Martin calls those God-bombs. You just had one, didn’t you.”
All at once he didn’t want to look at David, was afraid of what David might see in his eyes. He looked at the Ryder’s taillights instead.
Steve hadn’t used the extraordinary width of the road to turn around, Johnny noticed; the rental truck was still pointed south, toward the embankment. Of course. Steve Ames was a clever old Texas boy, and he must have sus pected this wasn’t finished yet. He was right. David was right, too-they had to go up to the China Pit-but the kid had some other ideas that were maybe not so right.
Fix your eyes, Johnny, Terry said. Fix your eyes so you can look at him without a single blink. You know how to.2 do that, don’t you.
Yes, he certainly did. He remembered something an old literature prof of his had said, back when dinosaurs still walked the earth and Ralph Houk still managed the New York Yankees. Lying is fiction, this crusty old reptile had proclaimed with a dry and cynical grin, fiction is art, and therefore all art is a lie.
And now, ladies and gentlemen, stand back as I prepare to practice art on this unsuspecting young prophet.
He turned to David and met David’s concerned gaze with a rueful little smile. “No God—bombs, David. Sorry to disappoint you.”
“Then what just happened.”
“I had a seizure. Everything just came down on me at once and I had a seizure. As a young man, I used to have one every three or four months. Petit mal. Took medica-tion and they went away. When I started drinking heavily around the age of forty-well, thirty—five, and there was a little more involved than just booze, I guess-they came back. Not so petit by then, either. The seizures are the main reason I keep trying to go on the wagon.
What you just saw was the first one in almost”-he paused, pre-tending to count back-”eleven months. No booze or cocaine involved this time, either. Just plain old stress.”
He got rolling again. He didn’t want to look around now; if he did he would be looking to see how much of it David was buying, and the kid might pick up on that. It sounded crazy, paranoid, but Johnny knew it wasn’t. The kid was amazing and spooky… like an Old Testament prophet who has just come striding out of an Old Testa-ment desert, skinburned by the sun and brainburned by God’s inside information.
Better to tuck his gaze away, keep it to himself, at least for the time being.
From the corner of his right eye he could see David studying him uncertainly. “Is that really the truth, Johnny.” he asked finally. “No bullshit.”
“Really the truth,” Johnny said, still not looking directly at him. “Zero bullshit.”
David asked no more questions… but he kept glancing over at him. Johnny discovered he could actually feel that glance, like soft, skilled fingers patting their way along the top of a window, feeling for the catch that would unlock it.
Tak sat on the north side of the rim, talons digging into the rotted hide of an old fallen tree. Now literally eagle-eyed, it had no trouble picking out the vehicles below. It could even see the two people in the ATV: the writer behind the wheel, and, next to him, the boy.
The shitting prayboy.
Here after all.
Both of them here after all.
Tak had met the boy briefly in the boy’s vision and had tried to divert him, frighten him, send him away before he could find the one that had summoned him. It hadn’t been able to do it. My God is strong, the boy had said, and that was clearly true.
It remained to be seen, however, if the boy’s God was strong enough.
The ATV stopped short of the yellow truck. The writer and the boy appeared to be talking. The boy’s dama started walking toward them, a rifle in one hand, then stopped as the open vehicle began moving forward again. Then they were together once more, all those who remained, joined again in spite of its efforts.
Yet all was not lost. The eagle’s body wouldn’t last long-an hour, two at the most-but right now it was strong and hot and eager, a honed weapon which Tak grasped in the most intimate way. It ruffled the bird’s wings and rose into the air as the dama embraced his damane. (It was losing its human language rapidly now, the eagle’s small can toi brain incapable of holding it. and reverting back to the simple but powerful tongue of the unformed.) It turned, glided out over the well of darkness which was the China Pit, turned again, and spiraled down toward the black square of the drift. It landed, uttering a single loud quowwwk! as its talons sorted the scree for a good grip. Thirty yards down the drift, pallid reddish-pink light glowed. Tak looked at this for a moment, letting the light of the an tak fill and soothe the bird’s primitive marble of a brain, then hopped a short distance into the tunnel. Here was a little niche on the left side. The eagle worked its way into it and then stood quiet, wings tightly folded, waiting.