Never a truer word said or thought.
Anything was possible.
They weren't alone here, Jo-Beth knew. It was not much comfort, but it was some. Every now and then she'd hear somebody calling out, their voices distressed on occasion, but just as often ecstatic, like a congregation half in terror, half in awe, spread across the surface of Quiddity. She didn't answer any of the calls. For one thing, she'd seen forms floating past, always at some distance, that suggested people didn't stay human here. They grew freakish. She had enough problems dealing with Tommy-Ray (who was the second reason she didn't reply to the calls) without inviting more bad news. He demanded her constant attention; speaking to her as they floated, his voice drained of all emotion. He had a good deal to say, between the apologies and the sobs. Some of it she already knew. About how good he'd felt when their father had returned, and how betrayed when she'd rejected them both. But there was a lot more, and some of it broke her heart. He told her first about the trip to the Mission, his story mostly fragments but suddenly becoming stream-of-consciousness descriptions of the horrors he'd witnessed and performed. She might have been tempted to disbelieve the worst of it—the murders, the visions of his own decay—but for his lucidity. She'd never in her life heard him so articulate as when he told her how it felt to be the Death-Boy.
"Remember Andy?" he said at one point. "He had a tattoo...it was a skull...on his chest, above his heart?"
"I remember," she said.
"He used to say one day he'd go out on the crests at Topanga—one last ride—and never come back. Used to say he loved Death. But he didn't Jo-Beth..."
"No."
"He was a coward. He made a lot of noise but he was a coward. I'm not, am I? I'm no momma's boy..."
He started to sob again, more violently than ever. She tried to hush him but this time none of her soothing worked.
"Momma..." she heard him saying, "Momma..."
"What about Momma?" she said.
"It wasn't my fault."
"What wasn't?"
"I only went looking for you. It wasn't my fault."
"I said what wasn't?" Jo-Beth demanded, pushing him off her a little way. "Tommy-Ray, answer me. Did you hurt her?"
He looked like a chided child, she thought. Any pretense to machismo had been stripped from him. He was a raw, snotty child. Pathetic and dangerous: the inevitable combination.
"You hurt her," she said.
"I don't want to be the Death-Boy," he protested. "I don't want to kill anybody—"
"Kill?" she said.
He looked straight at her, as though his direct look might convince her of his innocence. "It wasn't me. It was the dead people. I went looking for you, and they followed me. I couldn't shake them off. I tried, Jo-Beth, I really tried."
"My God!" she said, thrusting him out of her arms.
Her action wasn't that violent, but it churned Quiddity's element out of all proportion to the size of her motion. She was vaguely aware that her repugnance was the cause of this; that Quiddity was matching her mental agitation with its own.
"It wouldn't have happened if you'd stayed with me," he protested. "You should have stayed, Jo-Beth."
She kicked away from him, her feelings making Quiddity boil.
"Bastard!" she yelled at him. "You killed her! You killed her!"
"You're my sister," he said. "You're the only one who can save me!"
He reached for her, his face a mess of sorrow, but all she could see in his features was Momma's murderer. He could protest his innocence to the end of the world (if they weren't beyond that already), she'd never forgive him. If he saw her revulsion he chose to ignore it. He began grappling with her, his hands clutching her face, then her breasts.
"Don't leave me!" he started to shout. "I won't let you leave me!"
How many times had she made excuses for him, because they'd been twin eggs in the same tube? Seen his corruption, and still extended a forgiving hand? She'd even coaxed Howie into putting his disgust at Tommy-Ray aside, for her sake. Enough was enough. This man might be her brother, her twin, but he was guilty of matricide. Momma had survived the Jaff, Pastor John and Palomo Grove, only to be killed in her own house, by her own son. His crime was beyond forgiveness.
He reached for her again, but this time she was ready. She hit him across the face, once, then once again, as hard as she could muster. Shock at the blows made him give up his hold on her for a moment and she started away from him, kicking the churning sea up in his face. He threw his arms in front of him to shield himself and she was gone out of his reach, vaguely aware that her body was not so sleek as it had been, but not taking time to discover why. All that was important now was to be as far from him as she could be; to keep him from touching her ever again; ever. She struck out strongly, ignoring his sobs. This time she didn't look behind her, at least until his din had faded. Then she slowed her pace, and glanced back. He wasn't in sight. Grief filled her up—agonized her—but a more immediate horror was upon her before the full consequences of Momma's death could touch her. Her limbs felt heavy as she pulled them from the ether. Tears half blinding her she raised her hands in front of her face. Through the blur she saw that her fingers were encrusted, as though she'd dipped her hands in oil and oatmeal; her arms were misshapen with some similar filth.
She started to sob, knowing all too clearly what this horror signified. Quiddity was at work on her. Somehow it was making her fury solid. The sea had made her flesh a fertile mud. Forms were springing from it as ugly as the rage which inspired them.
Her sobs became a yell. She'd almost forgotten what it was like to unleash a shout like this, tamed as she'd been by so many years being Momma's domesticated daughter, smiling for the Grove on Monday mornings. Now Momma was dead, and the Grove was probably in ruins. And Monday? What was Monday? Just a name arbitrarily attached to a day and a night in the long history of days and nights which were the life of the world. They meant nothing now: days, nights, names, towns or dead mothers. All that made sense to her was Howie. He was all she had left.
She tried to picture him, desperate to hold on to something in this insanity. His image slipped from her at first— all she could see was Tommy-Ray's wretched face—but she persevered, conjuring him by particulars. His spectacles, his pale skin, his odd gait. His eyes, full of love. His face, flushed with blood the way it was when he spoke with passion, which was often. His blood and love, in one hot thought.
"Save me," she sobbed, hoping against hope that Quiddity's strange waters carried her despair to him. "Save me, or it's over."
"Abernethy?"
It was an hour before dawn in Palomo Grove, and Grillo had quite a report to file.
"I'm surprised you're still in the land of the living," Abernethy growled.
"Disappointed?"
"You're an asshole, Grillo. I don't hear from you for days then you call up at six o'clock in the fucking morning."
"I've got a story, Abernethy."
"I'm listening."
"I'm going to tell it the way it happened. But I don't think you're going to print it."
"Let me be the judge of that. Spit it out."
"Piece begins. Last night in the quiet residential town of Palomo Grove, Ventura County, a community set in the secure hills of the Simi Valley, our reality, known to those who juggle such concepts as the Cosm, was torn open by a power that proved to this reporter that all life is a movie—"