Raffle remembered the boy having said something like Kill you and eat me, and for this one twanging, stretched-out second Raffle was able to believe that this old man had eaten Kootie, and was now ready to kill him, ready to blow him up the way he’d apparently blown up the dog.
And an instant later Raffle had leaped the railing and was running away, splashing through the shallow pool, back toward the steps and the car and the smoggy familiar anonymity of the scratch-and-scuffle life south of the 10 Freeway.
THE FIGURE of the old man walked unsteadily to the stairs on the west side of the elevated plaza. A few of the people in line for Phantom tickets nudged their companions and stared curiously at the shapeless black hat, and at the black coat, which was coming apart at the shoulders as the arms swung at the figure’s sides.
The well-dressed people in line had seen the boy run that way, pursued by the bum, and they’d seen the bum come running back, across the pool and right on past to the stairs, in a fright; but this old man was walking calmly enough, and there hadn’t been any screams or cries for help. And the old man was disappearing down the parking garage stairs now, at a slow, labored pace. Clearly whatever had happened was over now.
THE OLD man had thrown Kootie right out of his own body, into a pitch dark room that Kootie somehow knew was “Room 5 in the laboratory at West Orange.”
The boy was panting quickly and shallowly, with a whimper at the top of each expiration. He wasn’t thinking anything at all, and he could feel a tugging in his eyes as his pupils dilated frantically in the blackness.
As he slowly moved across the wooden floor, sliding his bare feet gently, he passed through static memories that were strung through the stale air like spiderwebs.
There was another boy in this room—no, just the faded ghost of a boy, a five-year-old, who dimly saw this dark room as the bottom of a dark creek in Milan, Ohio. He had drowned a very long time ago, in 1852, while he and his friend Al had been swimming. In the terror of being under the water and unable to get back up to the surface, in the terror of actually sucking water into his lungs, he had jumped—right out of his body!—and clung to his friend on the bank above. And he had gone on clinging to his friend for years, while Al had done things and moved around and eventually grown up into an adult.
Kootie shuffled forward, out of the standing wave that was the boy’s ghost, and he was aware of Al himself now, who as a boy had simply walked home after his friend had disappeared under the water and not come back up; Al had had dinner with his mother and father and eventually gone to bed, without remarking on the incident at the creek—and he had been bewildered when his parents had shaken him awake hours later, demanding to know where he had last seen his friend. Everyone in town, apparently, was out with torches, searching for the boy. Al had patiently explained what had happened at the creek…and had been further bewildered by the horror in the faces of his mother and father; by their shocked incredulity that he would just walk away from his drowning friend.
As far as Al had been concerned, he had carried his friend home.
And in this room, thirty-seven years later, the friend had finally left Al.
Al was forty-two by then, though he had never forgotten the drowning. In this dark, locked room he had been working with Dickson on a secret new project, the Kineto-phonograph, and late on a spring night in 1889 the two of them had tried the thing out. It was supposed to be a masking measure—and actually, as such, it had worked pretty well.
Dickson had set up a white screen on one wall, while Al had started up the big wood-and-brass machine on the other side of the room; as the machine whirred and buzzed, the screen glowed for a moment with blank white light, and then Al’s image appeared—already portly, with the resolute chin set now on a thick neck, the graying hair slicked back from the high, pale forehead—and then the image began to speak.
And the ghost of the drowned boy, confronted with an apparently split host, sprang away from Al and ignited in confusion.
ABRUPTLY KOOTIE was back in his own body and remembered who he was, but he couldn’t see—there was some hot, wet framework all over him. Shuddering violently, he reached up and clawed it off; it tore saggily as he dragged it over his head, but when he had flung it onto the railing of the cement steps he could see that it had been a sort of full-torso mask: the now-collapsed head of an old man with a coarse black-fur coat attached to the neck, and limp white fleshy hands lying askew at the ends of the sleeves, it smelled like a wet dog.
Kootie was shaking violently. The morning breeze in the stairwell was chilly on his face and in his wet hair, and he realized numbly that the slickness on his hands and face was blood, a whole lot of somebody’s blood. Profoundly needing to get away from whatever had happened here, he stumbled farther down the steps into the dim artificial light, unzipping his heavy flannel shirt. His throat was open, but he hadn’t started breathing again yet.
Standing on the concrete floor at the foot of the steps, he pulled off the heavy shirt, which was slick with more of the blood; the nylon lining was clean, though, and he wiped his face thoroughly and rubbed his hair with it. Then he pushed the sticky curls back off his forehead, wiped his hands on the last clean patch of quilted nylon, and flung the sodden bundle away behind him. His backpack had fallen to the concrete floor, but at this moment it was just one more blood-soaked encumbrance to be shed.
The shirt he had on underneath was a thin, short-sleeved polo shirt, but at least it had been shielded from the blood. He scuffed black furry slippers off of his Reeboks, wincing at the sight of the red smears on the white sneakers. Good enough! his mind was screaming. Get out of here!
He ran back up the steps, hopping over the collapsed organic framework, and when he was back up on the pavement he hopped over a low retaining wall, down to the Hope Street sidewalk.
He was walking away fast, with a hop in every stride.
The brief vision of normal life that the Music Center had kindled in him was forgotten—his brain was still recoiling from having been violated by another personality, but his nervous system had turned his steps firmly south, toward hiding places. The shaking of his heartbeat had started his lungs working again, and he was breathing in fast gasps with a nearly inaudible whistling in his lungs.
The old man’s memories were still intolerably ringing in his head, and at every other step he exhaled sharply and shook his head, for along with the immediate clinging smells of dog and blood he could feel in the back of his nose the acrid reek of burned hair.
The little boy’s ghost had exploded in an instantaneous white flash halfway between Al and the movie screen, charring the screen and putting a calamitous halt to the world’s first motion picture, which, ahead of its time, had been a talkie.
A combusty.
Later, Al had explained the bandages over his burns as just the result of a crucible happening to blow up while he’d been near it, but of course the press had played it up.
The New York Times headline for April 21, 1889, had read, EDISON BURNED BUT BUSY.