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He rose up from the cot. Was the radio even on? No. Must be the TV in the barroom. Now he could definitely hear something, but the sound was different, loud laughter and whistles, excited people acting up, sounded like. Was it the TV or real people? He stepped into the next room, found they were open already, three regulars hanging around—Roy, Clayton and old Vincent Peterman, who was always already three sheets to the wind—when he came in the door. “Uh oh, there he is,” said one.

Fred looked at the screen, which showed a gauzy scene of a nearly naked female couple in bed, squirming together. “What the— Who put on this filth?”

“We changed it to that,” said Roy mischievously. “We figured you was asleep. Go ahead and change it back. We knowed ya would.”

Fred did so, switching to the Landfrey channel, which showed an image of a giant bloodied fetus holding a giant dime, which turned out to be a picture on the side of a van. “Aw, shit,” muttered Roy, and the old drunk Vincent added, “Boys, that was just gettin’ hot.”

Fred noticed Heather wasn’t there. “Heather! Where in the doggone is that girl?”

“She ran down to the big party up the street,” said Clayton. “It’s gettin’ all outta control, she got all excited seeing it on TV. Be there or be square.”

CHAPTER 37

CLARE THROWS THE HEAD

As Clare approached the theater on foot, intrigued with the assembled crowd and both thrilled and frightened at the prospect of seeing the image of Christ, on which so much depended, she didn’t even want to talk to Todd anymore, but he kept rattling on to get her goat, acting all blasé but really wanting to start something, like in the old days.

“So you’re way into the big J now, huh? It used to be just UFOs.”

“In the first place,” she said, keeping her voice even to deny him the pleasure of thinking he’d upset her, “‘Big J’ is blasphemy, but you can be very sure Christ doesn’t care a bit what you say about Him. Furthermore, ‘UFO’ isn’t an accurate term when a flying vessel has been identified by experts as a ship that could not be from the Earth.”

“I stand corrected,” said Todd. So typical of him to be sarcastic when he couldn’t counter points she’d made.

“I’m bringing you here because something is happening I think you should see. You’ve screwed everything up like you always did, let some big-butt redheaded Qwiff trick you into losing your head, but His grace is so great, you may still be redeemed.”

“Redeemed from what? I’m dead. You got a way out of that?”

“If you’re so dead, why do you keep talking to me?”

“I don’t, except in your mind.”

“Oh, that’s right, I’m crazy! You go right back to that old line because you think it bothers me. I couldn’t care less that you say that.”

“Severed heads don’t talk. If you hear me talking, that must be because you’re crazy.”

“Then stop talking so I won’t be crazy. Sounds like you want me to be crazy. You always wanted that.”

“Why the hell would I? You think I wanted everything to end up like this?”

“You wanted that Qwiff to show up, didn’t you? You’d been developing her in your mind for years. Finally she was finished and they let her out, to take you.”

“Who did what?”

“The Gnoomes, as you know very well.”

“The Gnoomes and the Qwiff? This comes from that Delbert lunatic, right? The UFO abductee guy?” She wasn’t going to respond.

After a few moments, Todd started in again. “You used to call them ‘the Space Brothers.’ Is this the same bunch, the Gnoomes? I thought they were good guys. Our guardian angels who watch over us and all that.”

“You never paid attention to what I tried to explain to you. The space brothers were the Niff, not the Gnoomes. The Gnoomes are criminals who were exiled to Earth by the Niff millions of years ago. They live in the center of the Earth, and they do more than watch us, and no, they don’t mean us well. They’re here to hold us down, to destroy any prospect of good things, of things being as they should. The Niff, under Christ’s command, seek to defend us against them.”

“Huh. This is new. You didn’t think that before, did you?”

“I’ve done a lot of study and learned some things since I left. A lot of what I used to think was wrong. It came from the Kindred group, whose revisionist leader had intentionally misrepresented the truth.”

“I see. The truth at last, eh? From Delbert, the escaped mental patient.”

“That’s right, be sarcastic! Everything is shit to you. And that’s just… that’s what they want people to think about him.” The theater was now only a block away. Clare stepped faster.

“Okay, whatever you say. What are we going to see here?”

“I told you. Your mural.”

“What mural?”

On the wall of the Mirror, the movie theater.”

“I didn’t get it finished. It just had a little flying saucer up in the corner.”

She heard chanting in the distance but couldn’t make out what was said, except for the word “Jesus.”

“It’s been finished for you. Or rather, you finished it without knowing.”

“Wasn’t there a fairy tale like this once, something about a shoemaker and elves?”

“You’ll find out soon enough. Look, there it is, right there!” Turning the corner, she saw the wall for the first time, surrounded by a noisy, chattering crowd of people, some of them holding placard signs, and among them a few mobile vans with TV station logos on their sides and what looked like satellite dishes on their roofs. Bright lights from poles shone unto the wall, which bore a rough image of a face with a nose and one eye behind what could be seen as heavy dark brown hair and a beard and, above it, two appendages of unequal width and length that might be uplifted arms in approximately the right place to be attached to a body beneath the head, represented by a white field that could conceivably be part of a robe. Above the figure and to one side was a far more focused and clearer picture of a silver flying saucer.

“It’s real! I knew it was!” Clare fell to her knees and elbows, clunking the head against the ground.

“Hey, watch it!” said Todd.

She raised Todd’s head up, holding it so he could see the mural. “There! See? I told you!”

“No, actually, I can’t see anything. I’m dead, you know? Eyes don’t work anymore when you’re dead.”

She was exasperated. “That’s funny, your mouth sure works.”

“So you say.” Now he was trying to sound like he was bored.

“Let’s get closer,” she said. “I want to see!” She started to run in the direction of the wall, tripped and fell, lost her grip on Todd’s head. It rolled forward and bounced against a standing girl’s ankle. The girl, in cutoffs and a halter top, apparently a marathon-goer rather than a Christian, looked down, said, “What the fuck? Yuck!” and gave the head a kick. It rolled farther, and Clare dashed forward to catch and lift it.

“That was close,” said Todd. “She might have seen what I am. Not from a novelty shop.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Clare.

“It’ll matter when they come after you. You know they’ll put you in a mental ward and not just for observation like before.”

“I don’t care. It doesn’t matter. Don’t you see, everything is different now. It’s because of your mural. You were chosen to make it, and now—”

“I wasn’t going to make a mural with a weird distorted picture of Jesus on it. It was supposed to be a bunch of characters from science fiction and horror movies.”