Cynthia whispered in a strengthless little voice. “That’s a hand.”
“What.” he asked, honestly not understanding, although later he would think he must have known what it was, lying there at the bottom of the aquarium, what else could it have been.
“A hand,” she almost moaned. “A fuckin hand.”
And, as one of the tigers swam between the second and third fingers (the third had a slim gold wedding ring on it), he saw that she was right. There were fingernails on it. There was a thin white thread of scar on the thumb. It was a hand.
He stepped forward, ignoring her grab at his shoulder, and bent down for a better look.
His hope that the hand was fake despite the wedding ring and the realistic thread of scar glimmered away. There were shreds of flesh and sinew rising from the wrist. They wavered like plankton in the currents generated by the tank’s regulator. And he could see the bones.
He straightened up and saw Cynthia standing at the desk. The top of this one was much neater. There was a PowerBook on it, closed. Next to it was a telephone. Next to the phone was an answering machine with the red mes-sage-light blinking. Cynthia picked up the telephone. lis-tened, then put it back. He was startled by the whiteness of her face.
With that little blood in her head, she should be lying on the floor dead-fainted away, he thought. Instead of fainting, she reached a finger toward the PLAY MESSAGES button on the answering machine.
“Don’t do that!” he hissed. God knew why, and it was too late, anyway.
There was a beep. A click. Then a strange voice-it seemed to be neither male nor female, and it scared the hell out of Steve-began to speak. “Pneuma,” it said in a contemplative voice. “Soma.
Sarx. Pneuma. Soma. Sarx. Pneuma. Soma. Sarx.” It went on slowly enunciating these words, seeming to grow louder as it spoke. Was that possible. He stared at the machine, fascinated, the words hitting into his brain (soma sarx pneuma)
like tiny sharp carpet-tacks. He might have gone on staring at it for God knew how long if Cynthia hadn’t reached past him and banged the STOP button hard enough to make the machine jump on the desk.
“Sorry, nope, too creepy.” She sounded both apologetic and defiant.
They left the office. Farther down the corridor, in the workroom or lab or whatever it was, The Tractors were still singing about the boogie-woogie girl who had it stacked up to the ceiling and sticking in your face.
How long is that fucking song. Steve wondered. been playing fifteen minutes already, got to ‘ye been.
“Can we go now.” Cynthia asked. “Please.”
He pointed down the hall toward the bright yellow lights.
“Oh Jesus, you’re nuts,” she said, but when he started in that direction, she followed him.
It s “Where are you taking me.” Ellen Carver asked for the third time. She leaned forward, hooking her fingers through the mesh between the cruiser’s front and back seats. “Please, can’t you tell me.”
At first she’d just been thankful not to be raped or killed… and relieved that, when they got to the foot of the lethal stairs, poor sweet little Kirstie’s body was gone There had been a huge bloodstain on the steps outside the doors, however, still not entirely dry and only partially covered by the blowing sand which had stuck to it. She guessed it had belonged to Mary’s husband. She tried to step over it, but the cop, Entragian, had her arm in a pincers grip and simply pulled her through it, so that her sneakers left three ugly red tracks behind as they went around the corner to the parking lot. Bad. All of it. Hor-rible.
But she was still alive.
Yes, relief at first, but that had been replaced by a growing sense of dread. For one thing, whatever was hap-pening to this awful man was now speeding up. She could hear little liquid pops as his skin let go in various places, and trickling noises as blood flowed and dripped. The back of his uniform shirt, formerly khaki, was now a muddy red.
And she didn’t like the direction he had taken-south. There was nothing in that direction but the vast bulwark of the open-pit mine.
The cruiser rolled slowly along Main Street (she asswned it was Main Street, weren’t they always.). passing a final pair of businesses: another bar and Harvey’s Small Engine Repair. The last shop on the street was a somehow sinister little shack with—ODEGA
written above the door and a sign out front which the wind had blown off its stand. Ellen could read it anyway: MEXICAN FOOD S.
The sun was a declining ball of dusty furnace-fire, and the landscape had a kind of clear daylight darkness about it that struck her as apocalyptic. It wasn’t so much a ques-tion of where she was, she realized, as who she was. She couldn’t believe she was the same Ellen Carver who was on the PTA and had been considering a run for school board this fall, the same Ellen Carver who sometimes went out to lunch with friends at China Happiness, where they would all get silly over inai-tais and talk about clothes and kids and marriages-whose was shaky and whose was not. Was she the. Ellen Carver who picked her nicest clothes out of the Boston Proper catalogue and wore Red perfume when she was feeling amorous and had a funny rhinestone tee-shirt that said QUEEN OF THE UNI–VERSE. The Ellen Carver who had raised two lovely chil-dren and had kept her man when those all about her were losing theirs. The one who examined her breasts for lumps once every six weeks or so, the one who liked to curl up in the living room on weekend nights with a cup of hot tea and a few chocolates and paperbacks with titles like Misery in Paradise. Really. Oh really. Well, yes, probably; she was those Ellens and a thousand others: Ellen in silk and Ellen in denim and Ellen sitting on the commode and peeing with a recipe for Brown Betty in one hand; she was, she supposed, both her parts and more than her parts, when summed, could account for… but could that possibly mean she was also the Ellen Carver whose well-loved daughter had been murdered and who now sat huddled in the hack of a police-car that was beginning to stink unspeakably, a woman being driven past a fallen sign reading MEXICAN FOOD’s, a woman who would never see her home or friends or husband again. Was she the El]en Carver being driven into a dirty, windy darkness where no one read the Boston Proper catalogue or drank mai-tais with little paper umbrellas poking out of them and only death awaited”.
“Oh God, please don’t kill me.” she said in a boneless, trembly voice she could not recognize as her own. “Please, sir, don’t kill me, I don’t want to die. I’ll do whatever you say, but don’t kill me. Please don’t.”
He didn’t answer. There was a thump from beneath them as the tar quit. The cop pulled the knob that turned on the headlights, but they didn’t seem to help much; what she saw were two bright cones shining into a world of roiling dust. Every now and then a tLlmhleweed would fly in front of them, headed east. Gravel rumbled beneath the tires and pinged against the undercarriage.
They passed a long, ramshackle building with rusty metal sides-a factory or some kind of mill, she thought-and then the road tilted up. They started to climb the embankment.
“Please,” she whispered. “Please, just tell me what you want.”
“Uck,” he said, grimacing, and reached into his mouth like a man who’s got a hair on his tongue. Instead of a hair he pulled out the tongue itself. He looked at it for a moment, lying limply in his fist like a piece of liver, and then tossed it aside.
They passed two pickup trucks, a dumptruck, and a yellow-ghost backhoe. all parked together inside the first Switchback the road made on its way to the top.
“If you’re going to kill me, make it quick,” she said in her trembly voice. “Please don’t hurt me. Do that much, at least, promise you won’t hurt me.”
But the slumped, bleeding figure behind the wheel of the cruiser promised her nothing. It simply drove through the flying dust, guiding the car to the crest of the bulwark. The cop didn’t hesitate at the top hut crossed the rim and started down, leaving the wind above them as he did. Ellen looked back, wanting to see some last light, but she was too late.