And the big man sighed as he glanced toward the ceiling.
"Never mind. I'll handle this," the wasted man said.
"No. I want you with me."
"Nothing's going to threaten you while you're here. I just need to talk with him. You like some coffee, Lucas? Have you got a little time to talk with me?" "I want to see my father."
"And you'll see him. But I have a couple of questions." "About what?" 'The commune." And the horror of it all returned to him.
FIVE
The thing came struggling down the street. It crawled on its hands and knees and tried to shield its eyes from the sunlight, but the pain was too intense, and all it did was crawl on blindly. It was snarling, foaming at the mouth, although it didn't do that willingly. The broken white line stretched before it, and it wavered to one side and then the other as in agony it tried to move directly down the center. Objects angled past it, beeping. It heard voices, sensed the people crowding near it, and it snarled at them and bared its foamy teeth and kept on crawling. How it reached here, it could not remember. Trees and grassland it remembered. But this hot black surface and this white line, it could not recall or understand. It just kept struggling down the white line. Someone screamed. More objects inched past, beeping. And the pain. The awful pain. It fell, face cracking on the hot black surface. It squirmed forward on its stomach, the white line stretching forward from its nose. It pawed at its skull. It jerked its head from side to side. As the murmurs gathered closer, it snarled to defend itself.
SIX
Rettig stopped the cruiser, puzzled by the crowd that filled the main street. He saw cars and trucks stopped, drivers getting out, people on the sidewalk pointing, others coming from the side streets, from Sunday brunch in restaurants. He was stepping from the cruiser, putting on his hat, and with his hand near his revolver, he moved forward. What the hell was this about? He'd seen so many bad things in the last few days that he had no idea what worse could happen. And this morning. Word had gotten around so fast that even for a small town it was startling. People in a panic, leaving town or gathered in small groups and talking wildly. He had seen three traffic jams this morning, forced to waste time clearing them. He'd shot a frenzied dog, had helped its bleeding owner to a doctor. He had found a mangled woman by a laundromat. But now a mob that filled the street. He didn't like where this was heading.
Weak from lack of sleep and scared because the town would shortly be in chaos, worried for his family, he had phoned his sister down in Denver to make arrangements for his wife and daughter to go there. They were packing right now, and he knew that many others had made plans to leave the town as well.
But all the same, he thought he knew what to expect- more of this but surely nothing worse. Yet even as he walked up to the crowd to part it, he was sensing something that was far beyond his knowledge, something that when he reached out to shift the crowd would show him some dark final truth that ever after would change everything.
He heard the words but didn't understand them, couldn't make them out, a snarled fog-throated muttering. He pushed on through the crowd and stopped and stared, and it must once have been a person, but its trunk was cloaked with furs. Its arms and legs were bloody. It was snarling, drooling, jerking, its hair down to its waist and falling all around it, a beard down to its stomach, its face dark from dirt and scabs, and bugs were crawling on it as it leered up, blinking. "Own oom," it was choking. Rettig didn't understand the sounds. He stumbled back against the crowd, his heart beating faster. Then he understood the choking, rasping, barking. "Throne room," it repeated. "Throne room, throne room, throne room."
SEVEN
They were standing in the hallway, staring through the window at the figure on the bed in there. The figure wore a gown now, the collar of it showing just above the sheet that covered him. His beard was trimmed, his hair was cut, an intravenous bottle hung beside him, leading to the needle in his arm. Although he was unconscious, straps restrained him.
"Do you recognize him?" Slaughter asked.
Lucas Wheeler concentrated. "I'm not certain. It's been lots of years. I mean, I doubt many people could identify me after so long. How can I be certain about him?"
"But is there anything at all familiar?"
"Oh, a little. That thin nose and mouth. The thing is, I knew several people like that, but the commune had a couple hundred members, and I wasn't up there long enough to meet them all. Plus, no one was as gaunt as he is. Let's say he was twenty back then. Now he'd be forty-three. A man can change a lot in that time.
Slaughter glanced at Dunlap. Then he scratched his wrinkled brow and turned to Lucas once again. "Well, would it help if you were closer to him?"
"I don't think I want that."
"He's unconscious. Those straps are secure. He isn't any threat to you."
"I know that. But you have to understand how much that commune scared me."
Slaughter narrowed his gaze. "What do you mean?"
"Look, I never said this back in nineteen-seventy, but when my father came to get me, I'd been praying all along for something like that. I was scared I'd never get away from there. When that policeman found me in the ditch for the latrine, I wasn't hiding from him. It was Quiller I was hiding from."
"You know about this?" Slaughter said to Dunlap.
"Yes, he told me when we went to get some coffee at your office. They were evidently-"
"Let me tell it," Lucas said. "I should have told it long ago. You've got to understand how young I was. Eighteen, and I thought I'd figured everything. The way my father acted toward my mother and me. Hell, he was actually convinced that she was cheating on him. He was certain that I wasn't even his. I mean I couldn't stand it anymore. I felt there had to be a better life, and when those hippies came through town, I knew they'd found it. So I hung around with them. Can you imagine? No guilt. Freedom to do anything that you're inclined toward without fear of what somebody else will say. I'd never had that, and I loved it. But the trouble started then, and soon the town turned on the hippies, and the ranchers forced them from the valley. I was worse off than before because I thought I knew then what I wanted, so I struggled through the summer, but my father and I kept arguing, and I snuck out late one night to join the commune. But I didn't know that they were crazy, see. I figured they'd be like the hippies in the town. But these were different. Quiller had selected them. That's why he wanted several thousand at the start. To pick and choose the special types he wanted. Every freak who'd tripped out once too many times. Every nut who was almost psychotic. Every radical whose idea of protest was to plant a bomb or set fire to a building. Hell, they didn't need the drugs. A lot of them were scrambled to begin with. And they took one look at me and said that I would be their first new member. Well, I should have known. The hippies in the town had warned me. 'Very bad,' they told me, but they never explained what they meant. I suspect they only sensed what was the matter. All the same, I should have known. Because the summer had been time enough for Quiller to control the commune, to make it even more extreme. You want to talk about hypnotic people? Quiller had a way of looking in your eyes and making you agree to anything, and he had crazies working with him who would make you go along with him. I'd grown a half-assed beard. I'd let my hair grow long, but if I stood out from the people in the town, I stood out equally from Quiller and the commune. They had let their hair and beards keep growing longer. They had started dressing even weirder than the hippies who had been in town. Quiller used to sit in his Corvette-"
"The red Corvette? He kept it?" Dunlap asked abruptly.