Yet will I sing, “Any food, any feeding,
Feeding, drink or clothing?
Come, dame or maid
Be not afraid,
Poor Tom will injure nothing.”
1
Jaspin hunched forward, gripping the stick as tightly as he could, using body English to keep the car from flipping over or skidding into a tree. There was no road any more. They were driving across slick slippery sodden grass, some sort of lawn churned into a quagmire by the wheels of the vehicles ahead of him. The rain was coming down so hard it flowed across the windshield in thick streams.
Jill said, “I’m sure this is where my sister is. Find a place to park and I’m going to get out and look for her.”
“Park? With umpteen thousand cars coming right behind me?”
“I don’t care. You pull up by one of those buildings. I’m going to go in there and get her. She isn’t right in the head. If I don’t protect her, somebody’s going to find her and rape her or maybe kill her. This isn’t a procession any more, Barry. It’s a crazy mob now.”
“So I notice.”
“Well, you stop and let me go find April.”
“Sure,” he said, nudging the brake panel. “You can get out right here and go find her.”
The car squiggled over the oozing mud and slid to a stop practically up against some big leafy bush. He kept the engine running.
“Park by one of the buildings,” Jill said. “Not here.”
“I’m not parking anywhere,” Jaspin told her. “I’m going to try to circle around and find some road out of here up that way. But you go on. You go look for your sister.”
“You’re not going to stop?”
“Look,” he said, “this is a dead end, you see? Christ only knows why the Senhor turned in this way, but what we have is some buildings right in front of us and a goddamned redwood forest behind the buildings, and in back of us we’ve got the whole tumbondé pilgrimage rumbling forward like a herd of maddened dinosaurs. I stay in here, I’m going to get squeezed flat up against those buildings or those trees. So you go look for your sister. I’m going to make a left turn up that dirt road and keep on going as far as I can, and if the road gives out I’m going to get out of my car and go on foot. Because what’s going to happen in here this morning is the Black Hole of Calcutta. People are going to get trampled by the thousands. Now you get out and you go look for your sister, if that’s what you want. Come on. Out.”
She gave him a venomous look. “How will I find you again?”
“That’s your problem.” Jaspin pointed off to the left. “You head that way, and maybe when things calm down a little I’ll come back and look for you. Maybe. Go on, now.”
“You bastard,” she said. She glared at him again. Then she shook her head and got out of the car. He watched her for a moment, running off toward the old weatherbeaten gray wooden buildings just ahead. Instantly she was soaked through. She looked like a giant half-drowned chicken sprinting through the rain.
He wondered about Lacy.
She had her own car, somewhere back in the main body of the procession. Not too far back, he hoped. He had told her last night, when the forecast of rain came in, that she should try to move forward, drive as close to the front as she could. He knew the rain was going to scramble everything up, though he hadn’t expected this, the sudden swerve off Highway One onto the county road, the blundering crashing intrusion on this peaceful rural neighborhood. It was impossible to figure what, if anything, the Senhor had had in mind, turning in this direction. He had just turned. There had been energy walls blocking their way, and then for some reason the walls went down and everybody went rolling right on. And now here they were. What a lousy mess, Jaspin thought.
Jill disappeared between two of the buildings. Two to one I’ll never see her again, he told himself. Well, what the hell. He got the car moving again. He felt the wheels digging ruts in the lawn and heard sucking sounds as they pulled free of the muck. Easy, easy—there, he was on a gravel road now, heading up along the front of a shallow-crested hill—just keep your head down and go right on slithering until you’re out of here, kid—
But there was no place for him to go. The gravel road ended at a kind of garbage dump, and there was just what looked like a vegetable garden on the far side and then the forest. Dead end no matter where you went. Jaspin looked back and saw hundreds of cars and vans piling up insanely in the triangular area between the two groups of buildings, with more and more and more coming on from the west. The ones to the rear didn’t seem to realize that there was no road in front, and kept on going, grinding blithely on into what was sure to be the biggest vehicular cataclysm in human history.
It didn’t make sense to drive back down the gravel road and join the frolic. Jaspin abandoned his car at the edge of the vegetable garden and made his way through the downpour as far as an enormous wide-branching tree. Standing under it, he was able to keep more or less dry, and he had a good view of the carnage.
They were just ramming helplessly into each other down there, the big vans going right up over some of the small cars. Like dinosaurs, yes, Jaspin thought, exactly like a herd of dinosaurs running amok. He saw the Senhor’s bus and the bus of the Inner Host right in the middle of it all. Banners were waving in the rain on top of the Senhor’s bus, and someone had mounted the statues of Narbail and Rei Ceupassear on the hood. The giant papier-mâché images were beginning to melt.
Jaspin wished he’d been driving with Lacy instead of Jill. At least that way he would know where she was, now. Jill probably wouldn’t have cared. But the Senhor did. The Senhor had found out that he was getting it on with someone other than his divinely chosen wife Jill, and the Senhor hadn’t liked it. Bacalhau himself had conveyed that information to Jaspin: You touch the red-haired woman, you make the Senhor very angry. So Jaspin and Lacy had been going easy the last couple of days. It was never wise to make the Senhor angry. And now Lacy was down there lost in all that madness and—
No. There she was. Clearly visible, red hair blazing in the midst of a crowd of maybe a thousand people who had left their cars and were lurching around chaotically on the lawn.
“Lacy! Lacy! ”
Somehow she heard him. He saw her looking about. He jumped up and down, wigwagging frantically until she saw him.
“Barry?”
“Get out of there,” he called. She started up the gravel road toward him, and he ran to meet her. She was drenched, her tight neat ringlets uncurling, her hair plastered to her skull. Jaspin held her for a moment, trying to steady her. She was quivering, whether from fright or chill he wasn’t sure.
Her eyes looked wild. “What happened? Why did we come in here?”
“God only knows. But this better be the Seventh Place, because we aren’t going to go any farther, for damned sure.” Sadly he said, “Holy Jesus, what a catastrophe this is turning into.”
“Do you know what this place is?”
“Some kind of boarding school, you think?”
“It’s the Nepenthe Center,” she said. “The mindpick place. I saw the sign when we went through the gate. This is the place where my old partner Ed Ferguson was undergoing treatment.”
“Well, it’s out of business as of right now,” said Jaspin. “It’s going to be a complete ruin in a little while. Look how they’re just swarming right through it.”
“I’ve got to find Ed,” Lacy said.
“Are you kidding?”
“I mean it. He’s probably wandering around dazed in that mob. I want to get him out and up here before he gets hurt. He lives in some kind of dormitory. We ought to be able to find it.”