Peter opened his mouth, closed it again. "I-"
"You could thank him, Peter," his mother said dryly.
"That movie probably shook him up," Mulligan said. "It has that effect on people. I've seen it hundreds of times by now, but it still gets me. That's all it was, Pete. A movie."
"A movie?" Peter said. "No-we were coming up the stairs…" He held out his hand and saw the Bowie knife.
"That's where the reel ended. Your mother said you were interested in seeing how it all looks from up here. Since you're the only people in the theater, there's no harm in that, is there?"
"Peter, what in the world are you doing with that knife?" his mother asked. "Give it to me immediately."
"No, I have to-ah. I have to-" Peter stepped away from his mother and looked confusedly around at the little projection booth. A corduroy coat draped from a hook; a calendar, a mimeographed piece of paper had been tacked to the rear wall. It was as cold as if Mulligan were showing the movie in the street.
"You'd better settle down, Pete," Mulligan said. "Now here you can see our projectors, the last reel is all ready to go in this one, see, I get them all set up beforehand and when a little mark shows up in a couple of the frames I know I have so many seconds to start up the-"
"What happens at the end?" Peter asked. "I can't get straight in my head just what's-"
"Oh, they all die, of course," Mulligan said. "There's no other way for it to end, is there? When you compare them with what they're fighting, they really do seem sort of pathetic, don't they? They're just accidental little people, after all, and what they're fighting is-well, splendid, after all. You can watch the ending up here with me, if you'd like. Is that okay with you, Mrs. Barnes?"
"He'd better," Christina said, sidling toward him.
"He went into some kind of trance down there. Give me that knife, Peter."
Peter put the knife behind his back.
"Oh, he'll see it soon enough, Mrs. Barnes," Mulligan said, and flicked up a switch on the second projector.
"See what?" Peter asked. "I'm freezing to death."
"The heaters are broken. I'm liable to get chilblains up here. See what? Well, the two men are killed first, of course, and then… but watch it for yourself."
Peter bent forward to look through the slot in the wall, and there was the empty interior of the Rialto, there the hollow beam of light widening toward the screen…
Beside him, an unseen Ricky Hawthorne loudly sneezed, and he was aware of everything shifting again, the walls of the projection booth seemed to waver, he saw something recoil in disgust, something with the huge head of an animal recoiling as if Ricky had spat on it, and then Clark Mulligan locked back into place again, saying, "Film has a rough spot there, I guess, it's okay now," but his voice was trembling, and his mother was saying, "Give me the knife, Peter."
"It's all a trick," he said. "It's another slimy trick."
"Peter, don't be rude," his mother said.
Clark Mulligan looked toward him with concern and puzzlement on his face, and Peter, remembering the advice from some old adventure story, brought the Bowie knife up into Mulligan's bulging stomach. His mother screamed, already beginning to melt like everything around him, and Peter locked both hands on the bone handle and levered the knife up. He cried out in sorrow and misery, and Mulligan fell back into the projectors, knocking them off their stands.
19
"Oh, Sears," Ricky said-gasped. His throat blazed. "Oh, my poor friends." For a moment they had all been alive again, and their fragile world had been whole: the double loss of his friends and their comfortable world reverberated through the whole of his being, and tears burned in his eyes.
"Look, Ricky," he heard Don saying, and the voice was compelling enough to make him turn his head. When he saw what was happening on the floor of the apartment, he sat up. "Peter did it," he heard Don say beside him.
The boy was standing six feet away from them, his eyes intent on the body of the woman lying some little way from them. Don was on his knees, rubbing his neck. Ricky met Don's eyes, saw both horror and pain there, and then both of them looked back down at Anna Mostyn.
For a moment she looked as she had when he had first seen her in the reception room at Wheat Row: a young woman with a lovely fox face and dark hair: even now the old man saw the real intelligence and false humanity in her oval face. Her hand clutched the bone handle protruding out just below her breastbone; dark blood already poured from the long wound. The woman thrashed on the floor, contorting her face; her eyes fluttered. Random flakes of snow whirled in through the open window and settled down on each of them.
Anna Mostyn's eyes flew open, and Ricky braced himself, thinking she would say something; but the lovely eyes drifted out of focus, not seeming to recognize any of the men. A wave of blood gushed from her wound; then another boiled out, sheeting across her body and touching the knees of the two men; she half-smiled, and a third wave rushed across her body and pooled on the floor.
For an instant only, as if the corpse of Anna Mostyn were a film, a photographic transparency over another substance, the three of them saw a writhing life through the dead woman's skin-no simple stag or owl, no human or animal body, but a mouth opened beneath Anna Mostyn's mouth and a body constrained within Anna Mostyn's bloody clothing moved with ferocious life: it was as swirling and varied as an oil slick, and it angrily flashed out at them for the moment it was visible; then it blackened and faded, and only the dead woman lay on the floor.
In the next second, the color of her face died to chalky white and her limbs curled inward, forced by a wind the others could not feel. The dead woman drew up like a sheet of paper tossed on a fire, drawing in, her entire body curling inward like her arms and legs. She fluttered and shrank before them, becoming half her size, then a quarter of her size, no longer anything human, merely a piece of tortured flesh curling and shrinking before them, hurtled and buffeted by an unfelt wind.
The tenement room itself seemed to exhale, releasing a surprisingly human sigh through whatever was left of her throat. A green light flashed about them, flaring like a thousand matches: and the remainder of Anna Mostyn's body fluttered once more and disappeared into itself. Ricky, by now leaning forward on his hands and knees, saw how the particles of snow falling where the body had been spun around in a vortex and followed it into oblivion.
Thirteen blocks away, the house across the street from John Jaffrey's on Montgomery Street exploded into itself. Milly Sheehan heard the crack of the explosion, and when she rushed to her front window she was in time to see the facade of Eva Galli's house fold inward like cardboard, and then break up into separate bricks flying inward to the fire already roaring up through the center of the house.
"The lynx," Ricky breathed. Don took his eyes from the spot on the floor where Anna Mostyn had dwindled into vacant air, and saw a sparrow sitting on the sill of the open window. The little bird cocked its head at the three of them, Don and Ricky already beginning to move across the floor toward it, Peter still gazing at the empty floor, and then the sparrow lifted itself off the sill and flew out through the window.
"That's it, isn't it?" Peter asked. "It's all over now. We did it all."
"Yes, Peter," Ricky said. "It's all over."
And for a moment the two men exchanged glances of agreement. Don stood up and walked as if idly to the window and saw only a slackening storm. He turned to the boy and embraced him.
20
"How do you feel?" Don asked.
"He asks how I feel," Ricky said, supported by pillows on his bed in the Binghamton hospital. "Pneumonia is no fun. It affects the system adversely. I advise you to refrain from getting it."