In the holding area, all the cells which had been occu-pied were now standing open and empty.
“That boy,” the figure in the doorway whispered. Its hands were white on the stock of the shotgun. “That nasty little drug user.”
It stood there a moment longer, then stepped slowly into the room. Its eyes shifted back and forth in its expres-sionless face. Its hat-a Smokey-style with a flat brim—was slowly rising again as the thing’s hair pushed it up. It had a great deal more hair than the hat’s previous owner. The woman Collie Entragian had taken from the detention area and down the stairs had been five-six, a hundred and thirty pounds. This thing looked like that woman’s very big sister: six-three, broad-shouldered, probably two hun-dred pounds.
It was wearing a coverall it had taken from the supply shed before driving back out of what the mining company called Rattlesnake Number Two and the townspeople had for over a hundred years called the China Pit. The coverall was a bit tight in the breast and the hip, but still better than this body’s old clothes; they were as useless to it now as Ellen Carver’s old concerns and desires. As for Entragian, it had his belt, badge, and hat; it wore his pistol on her hip.
Of course it did. After all, Ellen Carver was the only law west of the Pecos now. It was her job, and God help anyone who tried to keep her from doing a good one.
Her former son, for instance.
From the breast pocket of the coverall it took a small piece of sculpture. A spider carved from gray stone. It canted drunkenly to the left on Ellen’s palm (one of its legs on that side was broken off), but that in no way dissi-pated its ugliness or its malevolence. Pitted stone eyes, purple with iron that had been volcano-cooked millennia ago, bulged from above its mandible, which gaped to show a tongue that was not a tongue but the grinning head of a tiny coyote. On the spider’s back was a shape which vaguely resembled a country fiddle.
“Tak!” the creature standing by the desk said. Its face was slack and doughy, a cruel parody of the face of the woman who, ten hours before, had been reading her daughter a Curious George book and sharing a cup of cocoa with her. Yet the eyes in that face were alive and aware and venomous, hideously like the eyes of the thing resting on her palm.
Now she took it in her other hand and raised it over her head, into the light of the hanging glass globe over the desk. “Tak ah wan! Tak ah lah! Mi him, en tow! En tow!”
Recluse spiders came hurrying toward it from the dark-ness of the stairwell, from cracks in the baseboard, from the dark corners of the empty cells. They gathered around it in a circle. Slowly, it lowered the stone spider to the desk.
“Tak!” it cried softly. “Mi him, en tow.”
Aripple went through the attentive circle of spiders. There were maybe fifty in all, most no bigger than plump raisins. Then the circle broke up, streaming toward the door in two lines. The thing that had been Ellen Carver before Collie Entragian took her down into the China Pit stood watching them go. Then it put the carving back into its pocket.
“Jews must die,” it told the empty room. “Catholics must die. Mormons must die.
Grateful Dead fans must die.” It paused. “Little prayboys must also die.”
It raised Ellen Carver’s hands and began tapping Ellen Carver’s fingers meditatively against Ellen Carver s collarbones.
PART III
THE AMERICAN WEST: LEGENDARY SHADOWS “HoLy shit!” Steve said. “This is amazing.”
“Fucking weird is what it is,” Cynthia replied, then looked around to see if she had offended the old man. Billingsley was nowhere in sight.
“Young lady,” Johnny said. “Weird is the mosh pit, the only invention for which your generation can so far take—credit. This is not weird. This is rather nice, iii fact.”
“Weird,” Cynthia repeated, but she was smiling. Johnny guessed that The American West had been built in the decade following World War II, when movie the-aters were no longer the overblown Xanadus they had been in the twenties and thirties, but long before mailing and multiplexing turned them into.Dolby-equipped shoe-boxes. Billingsley had turned on the pinspots above the—screen and those in what once would have been called the orchestra-pit, and Johnny had no trouble seeing the place. The auditorium was big but bland. There were vaguely art-deco electric wall-sconces, but no other grace-notes. — Most of the seats were still in place, but the red plush was faded and threadbare and smelled powerfully of mildew. The screen was a huge white rectangle upon which Rock Hudson had once clinched with Doris Day, across which—Charlton Heston had once matched chariots with Stephen Boyd. It had to be at least forty feet long and twenty feet high; from where Johnny stood, it looked the size of a drive-in screen.
There was a stage area in front of the screen-a kind of architectural holdover, Johnny assumed, since vaudeville must have been dead by the time this place was built. Had—it ever been used. He supposed so; for political speeches,
or high school graduations, maybe for the final round of the Cowshit County Spelling Bee. Whatever purposes it had served in the past, surely none of the people who had attended those quaint country ceremonies could have pre-dicted this stage’s final function.
He glanced around, a little worried about Billingsley now, and saw the old man coming down the short, narrow corridor which led from the bathrooms to the backstage area, where the rest of them were clustered. Old fella ’s got a bottle stashed, he went back for a quick snort, that’s all, Johnny thought, but he couldn’t smell fresh booze on the old guy when he brushed past, and that was a smell he never missed now that he had quit drinking himself.
They followed Billingsley out onto the stage, the group of people Johnny was coming to think of (and not entirely without affection) as The Collie Entragian Survival Soci-ety, their feet clumping and echoing, their shadows long and pallid in the orchestra sidelights.
Billingsley had turned these on from a box in the electrical closet by the stage-left entrance. Above the tatty red plush seats, the weak light petered out in a hurry and there was only dark-ness ascending to some unseen height. Above that-and on all sides as well—the desert wind howled. It was a sound that cooled Johnny’s blood… but he could not deny the fact that there was also something strangely attractive about it… although what that attraction might be, he didn’t know.
Oh, don’t lie. You know. Billingsley and his friends knew as well, that’s why they came here. God made you to hear that sound, and a room like this is a natural ampli-fier for it.
You can hear it even better when you sit in the front of the screen with your old pals, throwing legendary shadows and drinking to the past. That sound says quit-ting is okay, that quitting is in fact the only choice that makes any sense. That sound is about the lure of empti-ness and the pleasures of zero.
In the middle of the dusty stage and in front of the curtainless screen was a living room—easy chairs, sofas, standing lamps, a coffee-table, even a TV. The furniture stood on a big piece of carpet. It was a little like a display in the Home Living section of a department store, but what Johnny kept coming back to was the idea that if Eugene Ionesco had ever written an episode of The Twi—light Zone, the set would probably have looked a lot like this. Dominating the decor was a fumed-oak bar. Johnny ran a hand over it as Billingsley snapped on the standing lamps, one after—the other. The electrical cords, Johnny saw, ran through small slits in the lower part of the screen. The edges of these rips had then been mended with electrical tape to keep them from widening.