“What you want to do?” Stidge asked. “Grab this one, make her help us find Tom?”
“No,” Charley said. “Nothing like that, Stidge.” To Elszabet he said, “We don’t mean no trouble. We’re going to move along. You see our friend Tom, you give him our regards, okay?” He was gesturing to the others, and they were starting to slip away toward the woods, the scar-faced one first, then Stidge. Charley remained where he was another moment, until the other two were out of sight in the trees. “Hope we didn’t trouble you any, ma’am,” he said. “We’re just passing through, on our way. All right?” He was edging away as he spoke. “You tell Tom that Charley and the boys were looking for him, okay?”
Then he was gone too. Elszabet realized that she was shivering: soaked through and more than a little shaken up. A delayed reaction was sweeping over her. Her teeth chattered. Some flickering fragments of space visions were dancing at the outer reaches of her mind, like pale transparent flames dancing on the embers of a bonfire.
Dante came running toward her, Teddy Lansford just behind.
“Everything all right?” Dante asked.
Elszabet brushed at the rain streaming across her forehead and fought back a shudder. “I’ll be okay. I’m a little wobbly, I guess.”
“Who were they?”
“I think they were the scratchers Tom used to travel with. Looking for him. They want to get out of the neighborhood before the tumbondé people pass through, and they want to take Tom with them wherever they’re going.”
“Grubby bastards,” Dante said. “As if we didn’t have enough problems to deal with today, we have to have scratchers too.”
“Should we call the police?” Lansford asked.
Dante laughed. “Police? What police? Any police this county has, they’re down by Mendo trying to control the tumbondé mob this morning. No, we’ll have to watch out for those three ourselves. In our spare time.” She looked at Elszabet. “You’re still pretty shaky, aren’t you?”
“I was trying to sidetrack a space vision. And then I turned around and there were three scary-looking strangers standing right behind me. Yeah, I’m still shaky.”
“Maybe this’ll help,” said Dante. She stepped closer and put her hands on Elszabet’s back and shoulders, and began to move things around in there, rearranging bones and muscles and ligaments as though she were shuffling papers on a desk. Elszabet gasped in surprise and pain at first, but then she felt the tension and distress beginning to leave her, and she swayed back against Dante, letting it happen. Gradually a sense of some balance returned to her. “There,” Dante said finally. “That a little better now?”
“Oh, my. Absolutely tremendous.”
“Loosen up the back, it loosens up the mind. Hey, did you ever find out where April and Ferguson were?”
Elszabet put her hand to her lips. “God. I forgot all about them. I was on my way over to the dorm when the vision started to hit and then—”
Suddenly the voice of Lew Arcidiacono said out of the speaker just back of her right ear, “Elszabet? I think it’s starting now. We’ve got the word that there’s a whole mess of tumbondé people not very far down the road and they’re probably going to be heading smack in our direction very soon.”
Elszabet switched to A frequency. “Terrific. How are you doing with the energy walls?”
“We’ve got a solid line of defense up all along the probable line of approach. But if the march gets sloppy they may begin to come at us from one of the unshielded sides. I can use all the extra personnel you can send down here now.”
“Right. I’ll have Dante head out your way with everyone she has. Stay in touch, Lew.”
“What’s happening?” Dante asked.
“They’re getting near us,” Elszabet said. “The tumbondé crowd, just a little way down the road.”
“Here we go, huh?”
“We’ll be able to handle it. But Lew’s calling for help on the front line. Take everybody from the gym and go on down there pronto, okay? I’ll look in at the dorm for April and Ferguson and meet you there in five minutes.”
“I’m on my way,” Dante said.
Elszabet summoned up a fragile grin. “Thanks for the backrub,” she said.
The dormitory building lay twenty paces to her right. She trotted over, slipping and sliding on the muddied path and rain-slicked grass. The storm was getting worse all the time. Half-stumbling, Elszabet pulled herself up onto the dorm porch and went clomping into the building, leaving big muddy tracks. “Hello?” she called. “Anybody here?”
All quiet. She wandered down the hallway, peering into this room, and that, the little dens where her unhappy patients passed their unhappy days. No sign of anyone around. At the far end of the hall she paused at number seven, Ed Ferguson’s room. As she touched her hand to the doorplate she heard odd crooning sounds coming from inside, deep, heavy, slow.
April squatted crosslegged in the middle of the floor, rocking steadily back and forth, singing tonelessly to herself, sobbing a little. Behind her, half-obscured by the big woman’s bulk, Ed Ferguson was sitting motionless on the floor, leaning against one of the beds, his head thrown back and his arms dangling alongside his hips. He looked drugged.
Elszabet went first to April and dug her fingers into the soft flesh of the big woman’s shoulder, trying to slow her rocking.
“April? April, it’s me, Elszabet. It’s all right. Don’t be afraid. What’s the matter, April?”
“Nothing. There isn’t anything the matter.” Thick husky voice, heavy with emotion. “I’m fine, Elszabet.” Tears running down her face. She would not look up. Rocking even harder now, she began to sing again. “It’s raining, it’s pouring, the old man is snoring—”
The song gave way to the sort of rhythmic humming a woman who was holding a baby might make, and then to unintelligible crooning. But April seemed calm, at least. She seemed lost in some private world. Elszabet rose and walked over to Ferguson. He didn’t move at all. The look on his face was unfamiliar, a strangely benign expression that completely altered his normal tense and sour appearance; at a quick glance she might not have been able to recognize this man as the grim, bitter, gloomy Ed Ferguson. He was transfigured. His eyes were wide and shining with some ineffable bliss; his face was relaxed, almost slack; his mouth was drawn back in a broad smile of the deepest happiness.
So extraordinary was that beatific expression of Ferguson’s that it was another moment before Elszabet realized that his eyes were remaining open without blinking, that he didn’t seem to be drawing breath.
She knelt beside him, alarmed. “Ed?” she said sharply, shaking him. “Ed? Can you hear me?” She put her hand to his chest and felt for a heartbeat. She listened for the sounds of breathing. She grasped his limp cool wrist and searched as best she knew how for a pulse. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing at all.
She looked across at April, who was rocking harder and harder. She was singing another children’s song, one that seemed almost familiar, but her voice was so blurred and indistinct that Elszabet was unable to make out any of the words. “April, what happened to Ed Ferguson?”
“To Ed Ferguson,” April repeated very carefully, as if examining those sounds to discover some possible meaning in them.
“To Ed, yes. I want to know what happened to Ed.”
“To Ed. To Ed. Oh, Ed ” April giggled. “He made the Crossing. Tom helped him do it. We all held hands, and Tom sent him to the Double Kingdom.”
“He what?”
“It was very easy, very smooth. Ed just let go. He just dropped the body, that’s all he did. And off he went to the Double Kingdom.”
Good God, Elszabet thought.
“Who was here with you then?”