“What-two?-how-Christ!”
“Mr Entragian… Collie…” He tries to sound reasonable, tries not to grimace. “You’re breaking my shoulder.”
“Oh. Sorry, man. But-” His eyes go back and forth from the shotgunned woman to the shotgunned man, David Carver with tendrils of blood washing down his white, blubbery sides in tendrils. Entragian can’t seem to pick one to settle on, and consequently looks like a guy watching a tennis match.
Your shirt,” Johnny says, thinking what a stupendous non-starter of a conversational gambit this is. “You forgot to put it on.”
“I was shaving,” Collie replies, and runs his hands through his short, dripping hair. The gesture expresses-as probably nothing else could-a mind that has progressed beyond confusion to a state of almost total distraction. Johnny finds it strangely endearing. “Mr Marinville, do you have the slightest clue what’s happening here?”
Johnny shakes his head. He only hopes that, whatever it was, it’s now over.
Then Peter arrives, sees his wife lying in front of Billingsley’s ceramic German Shepherd, and howls. The sound brings out fresh goosebumps on Johnny’s wet arms. Peter falls on his knees beside his wife just as Pie Carver fell on her knees beside her husband, and oh gosh, does John Edward Marinville have a case of Dem Ole Kozmic Vietnam Blues again or what? All we need, he thinks, is Hendrix on the soundtrack, playing “Purple Haze”.
Peter grabs her and Johnny sees Gary watching with a kind of frozen fascination, waiting for Peter to roll her body into his arms. Johnny can read Soderson’s thoughts as if they were printed on tickertape and running across his brow: What’s he going to make of it? When he rolls her over and her legs flop apart and he sees what he sees, what’s he going to make of it?
Or maybe it’s no big deal, maybe she always goes around that way.
“MARY!” Peter cries. He doesn’t turn her (thank God for small favors) but lifts her upper body, getting her into a sitting position. He screams again-no word this time, no vocal shape at all, just a streamer of amazed grief-as he sees the state of her head, half the face gone, half the hair burned off.
“Peter-” Old Doc begins, and the n the sky is split by a long lance of electricity flowing down the rain. Johnny spins around, dazzled but still (oh yes of course you bet) seeing perfectly well. Thunder rips the street before the lightning can even begin to fade, so loud that it feels like hands clapped to the sides of his head. Johnny sees the lightning strike the abandoned Hobart place which stands between the cop’s house and the Jacksons” place. It demolishes the decorative chimney William Hobart added last year before his problems started and he decided to put the house up for sale. The lightning also ignites the shake roof. Before the thunder has finished pummelling them, before Johnny even has a chance to identify the flash-fried smell in his nostrils as ozone, the deserted house is wearing a crown of flames. It burns furiously in the driving rain, like an optical illusion.
“Ho-lee shit,” Jim Reed says. He’s standing in the Carver doorway with Ralphie still in his arms. Ralphie, Johnny sees, has reverted to thumb-sucking. And Ralphie is the only one (besides Johnny himself, that is) who isn’t still looking at the burning house. He is looking up the hill, and now Johnny sees his eyes widen. He takes his thumb out of his mouth, and before he begins to shriek in terror Johnny hears two clear words… and again, they seem hauntingly, maddeningly familiar. Like words heard in a dream.
“Dream Floater,” the boy says.
And then, as if the words were some sort of magical incantation, his waxy, unnatural limpness departs. He begins to scream in fear, and to twist in young Jim Reed’s arms. Jim is caught by surprise and drops the boy, who lands on his ass. That must hurt like a bastard, Johnny thinks, heading in that direction without even thinking about it, but the kid shows no sign of pain; only fear. His bulging eyes are still staring up the street as he begins paddling frantically with his feet, sliding back into the house on his bottom.
Johnny, now standing on the edge of the Carver driveway, turns to look, and sees two more vans swinging around the corner from Bear Street. The one in the lead is candy pink and so streamlined it looks to Johnny like a giant Good amp; Plenty with polarized windows. On the roof is a radar dish in the shape of a Valentine heart. Under other circumstances it might look cute, but now it only looks bizarre. Curved aerodynamic shapes protrude on either side of the Good amp; Plenty van. They look like lateral fins or maybe even stubby wings.
Behind this vehicle, which may or may not be called Dream Floater, comes a long black vehicle with a bulging, dark-tinted windshield and a toadstool-shaped housing, also black, on the roof. This ebony nightmare is chased with zigzag bolts of chrome that look like barely disguised Nazi SS insignia.
The vehicles begin to pick up speed, their engines purring with a humming, cyclic bent.
A large porthole irises open in the left side of the pink vehicle. And on top of the black van, which looks like a hearse trying to transform itself into a locomotive, the side of the toadstool slides back, revealing two figures with shotguns. One is a bearded human being. He, like the alien driving the blue van, appears to be wearing the tags and tatters of a Civil War uniform. The thing beside him is wearing another sort of uniform altogether: black, high-collared, dressed with silver buttons. As with the black-and-chrome van, there’s something Nazi-ish about the uniform, but this isn’t what catches Johnny’s eyes and freezes his vocal cords so he is at first unable to cry a warning.
Above the high collar, there seems to be only darkness. He has no face, Johnny thinks in the second before the creatures in the pink van and the dead black one open fire. He has no face, that thing has no face at all.
It occurs to Johnny Marinville, who sees everything, that he may have died; that this may be hell.
Letter from Audrey Wyler (Wentworth, Ohio) to Janice Conroy (Plainview, New York), dated August 18, 1994:
Dear Janice, Thanks so much for your call. The note of condolence, too, of course, but you’ll never know how good it was to have your voice in my ear last night-like a drink of cool water on a hot day. Or maybe I mean like a sane voice when you’re stuck in the booby hatch!
Did any of what I said on the phone make sense to you? I can’t remember for sure. I’m off the tranks-“Fuck that shit,” as we used to say back in college-but that’s only been for the last couple of days, and even with Herb pitching in and helping like mad, a lot of the world has been so much scrambled eggs. Things started being that way when Bill’s friend, Joe Calabrese, called and said my brother and his wife and the two older kids had been killed, shotgunned in a drive-by. The man, who I’ve never met in my life, was crying, hard to understand, and much too shaken to be diplomatic. He kept saying he was so ashamed, and I ended up trying to comfort him, and all the time I’m thinking, There’s got to be a mistake here, Bill can’t be dead, my brother was supposed to be around for as long as I needed him.” I still wake up in the night thinking, “Not Bill, it’s just a goof-up, it can’t be Bill.” The only thing in my whole life I can remember that felt this crazy was when I was a kid and everybody came down with the flu at the same time.