CHAPTER 31
Christopher Bradenton struggled out of delirium like a man struggling out of quicksand. He ached all over. His face felt alien, as if someone had injected it with silicone in a dozen places and it was now the size of a blimp. His throat was raw pain, and more frightening, the opening there seemed to have closed from ordinary throat-size to something no larger than the bore of a boy's air pistol. His breath whistled in and out through this horribly tiny connection he needed to maintain contact with the world. Still it wasn't enough, and worse than the steady, throbbing soreness there was a feeling like drowning. Worst of all, he was hot. He could not remember ever having been this hot, not even two years ago when he had been driving two political prisoners who had jumped bail in Texas west to Los Angeles. Their ancient Pontiac Tempest had died on Route 190 in Death Valley and he had been hot then, but this was worse. This was an inside hot, as if he had swallowed the sun. He moaned and tried to kick the covers off, but he had no strength. Had he put himself to bed? He didn't think so. Someone or something had been in the house with him. Someone or something... he should remember, but he couldn't. All Bradenton could remember was that he had been afraid even before he got sick, because he knew someone (or something) was coming and he would have to... what? He moaned again and rocked his head from side to side on the pillow. Delirium was all he remembered. Hot phantoms with sticky eyes. His mother had come into this plain log bedroom, his mother who had died in 1969, and she had talked to him: "Kit, oh Kit, I tole you, `Don't get mixed up with those people,' I said. `I don't care nothing about politics,' I said, `but those men you hang around with are crazy as mad dogs and those girls are nothing but hoors. ' I tole you, Kit..." And then her face had broken apart, letting through a horde of grave beetles from the splitting yellow parchment fissures and he had screamed until blackness wavered and there was confused shouting, the slap of shoeleather as people ran... lights, flashing lights, the smell of gas, and he was back in Chicago, the year was 1968, somewhere voices were chanting The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching! The whole world... and there was a girl lying in the gutter by the entrance to the park, her body clad in overall jeans, her feet bare, her long hair full of glass-fragments, her face a glittering mask of blood that was black in the heartless white glow of the streetlights, the mask of a crushed insect. He helped her to her feet and she screamed and shrank against him because an outer-space monster was advancing out of the drifting gas, a creature clad in shining black boots and a flak-jacket and a walleyed gas mask, holding a truncheon in one hand, a can of Mace in the other, and grinning. And when the outer-space monster pushed its mask back, revealing its grinning, flaming face, they had both screamed because it was the somebody or something he had been waiting for, the man Kit Bradenton had always been terrified of. It had been the Walkin
128 Dude. Bradenton's screams had shattered the fabric of that dream like high C shatters fine crystal and he was in Boulder, Colorado, an apartment on Canyon Boulevard, summer and hot, so hot that even in your skivvy shorts your body was trickling sweat, and across from you stands the most beautiful boy in the world, tall and tanned and straight, he is wearing lemon-yellow bikini briefs which cling lovingly to every ridge and hollow of his precious buttocks and you know if he turns his face will be like a Raphael angel and he will be hung like the Lone Ranger's horse. Hiyo Silver, away. Where did you pick him up? A meeting to discuss racism on the CU campus, or in the cafeteria? Hitchhiking? Does it matter? Oh, it's so hot, but there's water, a pitcher of water, an urn of water carved with strange figures which stand out in bas relief, and beside it the pill, no-!THE PILL! The one that will send him off to what this angel in the light yellow briefs calls Huxleyland, the place where the moving finger writes and doesn't move on, the place where flowers grow on dead oak trees, and boy, what an erection is tenting out your skivvies! Has Kit Bradenton ever been so horny, so ready for love? "Come to bed, " you say to that smooth brown back, "come to bed and do me and then I'll do you. Just the way you like." "Take your pill first," he says without turning. "Then we'll see." You take. the pill, the water is cool in your throat, and little by little the strangeness comes over your sight, the weirdness that makes every angle in the place a little more or a little less than ninety degrees. For some time you find yourself looking at the fan on the cheap Grand Rapids bureau and then you're looking at your own reflection in the wavy looking glass above it. Your face looks black and swelled but you don't let it worry you because it's just the pill, only!!!THE PILL!! "Trips," you murmur, "oh boy, Captain Trips and I am sooo horny..." He begins to run and at first you have to look at those smooth hips where the elastic of his briefs rides so low, and then your gaze moves up the flat, tanned belly, then to the beautiful hairless chest, and finally from the slimly corded neck to the face... and it is his face, sunken and happy and ferociously grinning, not the face of a Raphael angel but of a Goya devil and from each blank eyesocket there peers the reptilian face of an adder; he is coming toward you as you scream, he is whispering: Trips, baby, Captain Trips... Then murkiness, faces and voices that he didn't remember, and at last he had surfaced here, in the small house he had built with his own hands on the outskirts of Mountain City. Because now was now, and the great wave of revolt which had engulfed the country had long since withdrawn, the young Turks were now mostly old lags with gray in their beards and big coke-burned holes where their septa used to be, and this was the wreckage, baby. The boy in the yellow briefs had been long ago, and in Boulder Kit Bradenton had been little more than a boy himself. My God, am I dying? He beat at the thought with agonized horror, the heat rolling and billowing in his head like a sandstorm. And suddenly his short, quick respiration stopped as a sound began to rise from somewhere beyond and below the closed bedroom door. At first Bradenton thought it was a fire-siren, or a policecar siren. It rose and grew louder as it grew closer; beneath it he could hear the jagged pounding of footfalls clocking along his downstairs hall and then through his living room and then battering up the stairs in a Goth's stampede. He pushed himself back against his pillow, his face drawing down in a rictus of terror even as his eyes widened to circles in his puffy, blackish face and the sound neared. Not a siren any more but a scream, high and ululating, a scream that no human throat could make or sustain, surely the scream of a banshee or of some black Charon, come to take him across the river that separates the land of the living from that of the dead. Now the running footsteps clattered straight toward him along the upstairs hall, boards groaning and creaking and protesting under the weight of those merciless rundown bootheels and suddenly Kit Bradenton knew who it was and he shrieked as the door burst inward and the man in the faded jeans jacket ran in, his murderer's grin flashing on his face like a whirring white circle of knives, his face as jolly as that of a lunatic Santa Claus, carrying a galvanized steel bucket high over his right shoulder. "HEEEEEEEOOOOOOWWWWWWWW!" "No!" Bradenton screamed, crossing his arms weakly across his face. "No! Noo—!" The bucket tipped forward and the water flew out, all of it seeming to hang suspended for a moment in the yellow lamplight like the largest uncut diamond in the universe, and he saw the dark man's face through it, reflected and refracted into the face of a supremely grinning troll who had just made its way up from hell's darkest shit-impacted bowels to rampage on the earth; then the water fell on him, so cold that his swelled throat sprang momentarily open again, squeezing blood from its walls in big beads, shocking breath into him and making him kick the covers all the way over the foot of the bed in one convulsive spasm so that his body would be free to jackknife and sunfish as bitter cramps from these involuntary struggles whipped through him like greyhounds biting on the run. He screamed. He screamed again. Then lay trembling, his feverish body soaked from toe to crown, his head thumping, his eyes bulging. His throat closed to a raw slit and he began to struggle for breath miserably again. His body began to shake and shiver.
129 "I knew that'd cool you off!" the man he knew as Richard Fry cried cheerily. He set the bucket down with a clang. "Ah say, Ah say Ah knew dat wuz goan do de trick, Kingfish! Thanks are in order, my good man, thanks from you tendered to me. Do you thank me? Can't talk? No? Yet in your heart I know you do. "Yeee-GAAAHHH!" He sprang into the air like Bruce Lee in a Run Run Shaw kung-fu epic, knees spread, for a moment seeming to hang suspended directly over Kit Bradenton as the water had done, his shadow a blob on the chest of Bradenton's soaked pajamas, and Bradenton screamed weakly. Then one knee came down on either side of his ribcage and Richard Fry's blue-jeaned groin was the crotch of a fork suspended above his chest by inches, and his face burned down at Bradenton's like a cellar torch in a gothic novel. "Had to wake you up, man," Fry said. "I didn't want you to boogie off without a chance for us to talk a bit." "... off... off... off me..." "I'm not on you, man, come on. I'm just hanging suspended above you. Like the great invisible world." Bradenton, in an agony of fear, could only pant and shake and roll his trapped eyeballs away from that jolly, fuming face. "We got to talk about ships and seals and sailing wax, and whether bees have stings. Also about the papers you're supposed to have for me, and the car, and the keys to the car. Now all I see in your gay-radge is a Chevy pickup, and I know that's yours, Kitty-Kitty, so how 'bout it?" "... they... papers... can't... can't talk..." He gasped harshly for air. His teeth chittered together like small birds in a tree. "You better be able to talk," Fry said, and stuck out his thumbs. They were both double jointed (as were all his fingers), and he wiggled them back and forth at angles that seemed to deny biology and physics. "Cause if you aren't, I'm going to have your baby blues for my keychain and you're going to have to trot around hell with a seeing eye dog." He jammed his thumbs at Bradenton's eyes and Bradenton jerked back against the pillow helplessly. "You tell me," Fry said, "and I'll leave you the right pills. In fact, I'll hold you up so you can swallow them. Make you well, man. Pills to take care of everything." Bradenton, now trembling with fear as much as with cold, forced the words out through his clacking teeth. "Papers... in the name of Randall Flagg. Welsh dresser downstairs. Under the... contact paper." Bradenton tried desperately to think. Had he gotten this man a car? It was so far away, all the flames of delirium were in between, and the delirium seemed to have done something to his thought processes, burned out whole banks of memory. Whole sections of his past were scorched cabinets filled with smoldering wires and blackened relays. Instead of the car this awful man wanted to know about, an image of the first car he'd ever owned drifted up, a 1953 Studebaker with a bullet nose that he had painted pink. Gently, Fry put one hand over Bradenton's mouth and pinched his nostrils shut with the other. Bradenton began to buck beneath him. Furry moans escaped around Fry's hand. Fry took both hands away and said, "Does that help you remember?" Strangely, it did. "Car..." he said, and then panted like a dog. The world swirled, steadied, and he was able to go on. "Car's parked ".. behind the Conoco station... just outside of town. Route 51." "North or south of town?" "Suh... suh .." "Yes suh! I got it. Go on." "Covered with a tarp. Byoo... Byoo... Buick. Registration's on the steering post. Made out... Randall Flagg." He collapsed into panting again, unable to say more or do anything except look at Fry with dumb hope. "Keys?" "Floormat. Under..." Fry's backside cut off any further words by settling on Bradenton's chest. He settled there the way he might have settled on a comfortable hassock in a friend's apartment and suddenly Bradenton couldn't even get a small breath.. He expelled the last of his tidal breath on a single word: ".. please ." "And thank you," Richard Fry/Randall Flagg said with a prim grin. "Say goodnight, Kit." Unable to speak, Kit Bradenton could only roll his eyes whitely in their puffed sockets. "Don't think unkindly of me," the dark man said softly, looking down at him. "It's just that we have to hurry now. The carnival is opening early. They're opening all the rides, and the Pitch-til-U-
130 Win, and the Wheel of Fortune. And it's my lucky night, Kit. I feel that. I feel that very strongly. So we have to hurry."
It was a mile and a half to the Conoco station, and by the time he got there it was quarter past three in the morning. The wind had picked up, whining along the street, and on his way here he had seen the corpses of three dead dogs and one dead man. The man had been wearing some sort of uniform. Above, the stars shone hard and bright, sparks struck off the dark skin of the universe. The tarp which covered the Buick had been pegged tautly to the ground, and the wind made the canvas flap. When Flagg pulled the pegs the tarpaulin went cartwheeling off into the night like a large brown ghost, moving east. The question was, in . which direction was he heading? He stood beside the Buick, which was a well-preserved 1975 model (cars did well out here: there was little moisture and rust had a hard time starting), scenting the summer night sir like a coyote. There was desert perfume on it, the kind you can only smell clearly at night. The Buick stood whole in an automobile mortuary of dismembered parts, Easter Island monoliths in the windy silence. An engine block. An axle looking like some muscle-boy's dumbbell. A pile of tires for the wind to make hooting sound effects in. A cracked windshield. More. He thought best in scenes like these. In scenes like these, any man could be Iago. He walked past the Buick and ran his hand across the dented hood of what might once have been a Mustang. "Hey, little Cobra, don't ya know ya gonna shut em down..." he sang softly. He kicked over a stove-in radiator with one dusty boot and disclosed a nest of jewels, winking back at him with dim fire. Rubies, emeralds, pearls the size of goose eggs, diamonds to rival the stars. Snapped his finger at them. They were gone. Where was he to go? The wind moaned through the shattered wing window of an old Plymouth and tiny living things rustled inside. Something else rustled behind him. He turned and it was Kit Bradenton, clad only in absurd yellow underpants, his poet's pot hanging over the waistband like an avalanche held in suspended animation. Bradenton walked toward him over the heaped remains of Detroit rolling iron. A leafspring pierced through his foot like crucifixion, but the wound was bloodless. Bradenton's navel was a black eye. The dark man snapped his fingers and Bradenton was gone. He grinned and walked back to the Buick. Laid his forehead against the slope of roof on the passenger's side. Time passed. At some length he straightened, still grinning. He knew. He slipped behind the wheel of the Buick, and pumped the gas a couple of times to prime up the carburetor. The motor purred into life and the needle on the gas gauge swung over to F. He pulled out and drove around the side of the gas station, his headlight beams for a moment catching another pair of emeralds, cat's eyes glistening warily from the tall grass by the Conoco station's ladies' room door. In the cat's mouth was the small limp body of a mouse. At the sight of his grinning, moonlike face peering down at it from the driver's side window, the cat dropped its morsel and ran. Flagg laughed aloud, heartily, the laugh of a man with nothing on his mind but lots of good things. Where the Conoco's tarmac became highway, he turned right and began to run south.