"Die, goddamn it!"
With enormous effort, I reached out. My arms had become wood, but they caught and held fast to Tommy's neck-fingers like roots. He screamed and clawed at my wrists. I could feel my fingers penetrate his flesh, burrowing inward. Suddenly the gun went off and I felt a sickening thud of pain. Again the gun roared. I dropped, but my hands held fast. Tommy screamed. There was a flash of light.
Transition.
Tommy screamed. He leapt up from the bed below me. The priest was right there, forcing him back with a gentle hand to each shoulder.
"It's here!" Tommy shrieked. His eyes scanned the room. "It's here!"
"You're all right. Please, Mr. Wildclown. You're fine there's no one here. Settle!" The Priest strove to hold him still. "You'll injure yourself the more."
"Can't you feel it? Waiting. Watching!" Tommy continued his frantic scan of the room. "It's gray, it's gray and dark. Oh God!"
"Please, lie still. Here." He quickly poured a large shot of brandy from a bottle he must have procured while I dreamt. "Here."
Tommy snatched the glass from him and poured it down his throat. He handed it back to the priest. "Ghosts, all around us." The clown muttered, as the priest refilled his glass. "The dead."
"True, my son," the priest said quietly. He watched Tommy empty the second glass. "These are trying times. But you must remember that the Lord does these things for a reason. It is up to us to gain the wisdom to understand that purpose."
"The ghosts. The angel, Uriel." Tommy lay back on his pillow. "He would know. He could help me escape."
The priest's brow wrinkled. "Uriel? He who protects the Garden?"
"I want to go there," Tommy muttered. "That's the only escape. Forgiveness for all."
"Sleep, my son." The priest tucked Tommy's covers around his ears. "Try to rest. You are overwrought now. Sleep."
"Get Uriel," Tommy muttered. "He'll know what to do."
"Yes," the priest said quietly. "But rest for now."
"I'm tired," Tommy worked his lips then fell asleep.
I watched the priest shake his head and cross himself. He picked up a book from the bedside table, sat down and leafed through it. I could tell he wasn't interested in what he read by the glances he'd throw at Tommy with the turn of each page. "Dear Lord," he mumbled, then after a few seconds of staring; he turned to the book to take his reading more seriously.
I floated overhead trying to recall my own strange dream, but the images flitted away from me like sparrows from a belled cat. Ghosts, I thought. Spooks. I was taken up by a hallucination of utter blackness. It was beautiful.
Chapter 42
I woke up before Tommy, and for a few seconds watched him snore on the pillows below. The Priest sat slumped in his chair. I wondered what had put the driven look on his face. Whatever had happened-the Change-it hadn't been easy on the faithful. Greasetown sure looked like damnation to me and I only used the Bible to flatten cockroaches. What would the Change be like for a believer?
I tried to content myself by floating close to the rough stucco ceiling. I wasn't sure, but I got the feeling it had been shaped and textured into an apostle or something. For a religion that warned against idolatry, they sure had a lot of idols. I couldn't blame them. The human race needed idols-made idols of everything. I had read in an old magazine that at one point in history, however briefly, people had idolized and bought the musical recordings of talking and singing raisins. Was I going to fault the Christians for the odd saint? I looked down again and pondered. Tommy was exerting more and more influence during my possessions, a development that gave me pause to wonder. Was I losing my ability to overpower him? Not a pleasant prospect for someone who was little more than a puff of wind. I was in no position to be giving anything away.
To the best of my knowledge I was the only one of my kind. The only reason I believed this was that if there were others, one of them would have gone public by now. My old rule again, of believing in the inevitability of everything. If I was dissipating, what awaited me? Blacktime forever? That notion was less than inviting. The living worry about losing their bodies-hell, even the dead worry about the condition of their own. I had nothing left to lose but myself.
The universe would do the big Alzheimer's on me. Poof, you're nothing. A part of me had to ask the question. What's wrong with that? I couldn't answer it. I only knew that this was close to life, if it wasn't life, and I was determined to hang onto it, since I had no guarantee there was anything more. The prospect of nothingness loses its attraction the closer you get to it. No wonder so many suicides died screaming. I had to keep focused. I knew I had to finish this case. Even though Tommy's body was not mine I had a certain possessive nature towards it. The Handyman had been torturing me as much as my host. Someone had hired the Handyman. I wanted that someone on the loud end of my gun. Also, I wasn't sure why, but I wanted to see some sort of justice done. Someone had to pay. It was still wrong to murder.
Review the case. Yes, simple enough. So far I had done nothing but bungle my way from mistake to mistake. I had paid dearly for allowing myself to be led by the players in the play. It was a gamble that I had almost lost. And it seemed that Tommy was working on something now, something that ran on a parallel course to my own case. Parallel, yes, but not the same case. Some strange twist of life had intertwined two ugly stories. I had stumbled upon something, just as Adrian and Van Reydner had stumbled upon something at the Morocco. But what?
A real baby would be big business, and it was obvious from Skullface's discussion on Regenerics that Dr. Cotton would need a baby for his theories to work. The problem was, he wasn't the only one who would jump at the chance to claim one. Every crackpot in the world would herald it as a messiah, or the great evil one. A baby in a world that no longer had them would be priceless. But there were no such things as babies.
Even with my ego, I found it difficult to inflate my career with Tommy to date. A few missing persons. A burglary, a host of cheating spouses. Nothing but stiffs, cheap diamonds and stiffs. Why would Billings come to me? I remembered writing the name down, the same that both Harker and Mrs. Cotton had mentioned. Inspector Borden of Authority. Funny, Borden told Billings to talk to me. He told Mrs. Cotton to be a good girl and don't dig too deep into her husband's death. As Harker told me, he was also the Authority contact for the phantom baby reports. There was a theme beginning to take shape and it smelled of dirty diapers. A baby cried late one night at the Morocco Hotel, and everyone who heard it died or disappeared. Now this Owen Grey character. Who was he? Some washed-out detective looking for a missing person. What the hell interested him in the baby? Whatever his involvement, he was gone too.
I looked down at Tommy and noticed that the covers were forming a fair-sized circus tent below his midriff. With little effort, I stepped into his head. My first impulse was to cry out. Pain and pleasure momentarily vied for dominance. I was always amazed at how alike the two sensations were. Pain won out. I gritted my teeth and hissed into a sitting position. The priest's eyelids fluttered like doves. He looked at me with concern, and half-levered himself out of his chair.
"You shouldn't…"
"Let's not debate the right and wrong of it, Father." My shoulder throbbed, my head throbbed, my neck-I hurt all over.
"But…" The priest stepped over to the bed.
"But I'm not going to get any better moving around. Don't worry. I'll stay put. I just want to sit up." Fire lanced along my back as I pushed myself against the headboard.
"It's strange…" His eyes squinted at me.
"What's that?" I could barely hear over the jackhammer in my head.