Stalking the Nightmare Part 15

"Well, let's just trot it out here."

Satan reached into an inner pocket, and brought out a small piece of paper that looked like litmus paper. He handed it to Teddy Crazy. He was careful not to touch the emcee.

Teddy Crazy held it in his hand for a moment, then threw it down on the desk." All right, nutso, enough of this nonsense. Let's find out exactly what it is you're trying to promote with that get-up and all these insane shenanigans."

"I'm not trying to promote anything, Mr. Crazy. I'm here merely to reward you for your unstinting service."

"Now you're trying to say I work for you?"

Incredulity, from the audience.

"On the contrary," said Satan. "Evil is an essence, Mr. Crazy. It is like faith. One must believe to make it so.

Contrariwise, if one does not believe, whatever it is that is doubted, ceases to be. Bishop Berkeley introduced the theory on Earth many years ago, as I recall."

Teddy Crazy looked bored. "Forget the philosophy, creep, and just sock it to me nitty-gritty."

Satan nodded agreement. "Fine. Fine. I don't have too much time to waste, in any case.

"The point is, Mr. Crazy, that many of the people you have sent to me from this show--most recently a Professor Tessler, a Miss DeStyre, a Mr. Grogan and two others, just tonight, do not really belong in my operation.

They have been discredited, disbelieved-in, through your machinations, and so they are cluttering up really overcrowded conditions in my, uh, suburb. It's playing havoc with property values, ruining the neighborhood with all of these good folk. It seems the only way to get things back on a more-or-less even keel is to reward you for what you've done, and put an end to all of this. Thus: the little delight before you."

Teddy Crazy turned to his audience. "Can you folks dig what this nit is saying?"

They could dig it... and they laughed.

"Well, if I'm a charlatan, Mr. Crazy, then you should have no fears about trying this little potion soaked into the talla paper."

"That's just swell, Satan old buddy. You think I'm gonna drop acid right here in front of a coupla five million people, just to give you your jollies? You think I'm gonna pollute my precious bodily fluids, just to give you a chance to push whatever hideous narcotic this is, in front of school children and helpless folks who want something to lighten their burdens? No chance... no d.a.m.n chance, as you'd say!"

"I'm afraid you have no choice, Mr. Crazy," Satan said, and stared at the emcee with eyes like the maws of leaping volcanos.

"How about it, folks..." Teddy Crazy's voice rose a trifle hysterically, "do you believe this moron is the devil?

Do you believe he's what he says he is?"

The audience began screaming, the sound built up and up, and all across America viewers by the millions added their l.u.s.ty throaty yells of disbelief and ridicule and hysteria.

Even as Teddy Crazy--quite without any volition--lifted the tall a paper and popped it into his mouth, and chewed it. They screamed louder and louder, telling the man in the devil suit that he was a fraud, that they didn't believe in him, that he wasn't real... even as Teddy Crazy turned to stone before their very eyes. Turned to a nice pink marble, and then crumbled into a pile of dust on the desktop and the chair.

But it didn't help his visitor much. Because, as he had said, disbelief brings disillusion. That which is not accepted, is rejected. Teddy Crazy was dust, but his visitor vanished. Just like that. Never to be heard from again.

There were rumors, later that month, out of the Vatican, that there was a terrific power struggle going on downstairs for possession of the Dark Kingdom, but the reports were unreliable, so no one ever really knew.

But this was true; Teddy Crazy, in dying and doing the world two big favors, got the highest rating of his career.

The Cheese Stands Alone

Cort lay with his eyes closed, feigning sleep, for exactly one hour after she had begun to snore. Every few minutes he would permit his eyes to open to slits, marking the pa.s.sage of time on the luminous dial of his watch there on the nightstand. At five AM precisely he slipped out of the Olympic pool-sized motel bed, swept up his clothes from the tangled pile on the floor, and dressed quickly in the bathroom. He did not turn on the light.

Because he could not remember her name, he did not leave a note.

Because he did not wish to demean her, he did not leave a twenty on the nightstand.

Because he could not get away fast enough, he pushed the car out of the parking slot in front of the room and let it gather momentum down through the silent lot till it b.u.mped out onto the street. Through the open window he turned the wheel, caught the door before the car began rolling backward, slid inside and only then started the engine.

Route 1 between Big Sur and Monterey was empty. The fog was up. Somewhere to his left, below the cliffs, the Pacific murmured threats like an ancient adversary. The fog billowed across the highway, conjuring ectoplasmic shapes in the foreshortened beams of his headlights. Moisture hung from the great, thick trees like silver memories of time before the coming of Man. The twisting coast road climbed through terrain that reminded him of Brazilian rain forest: mist-drenched and chill, impenetrable and aggressively ominous. Cort drove faster, daring disaster to catch up with him. There had to be more than the threat of the forest.

As there had to be more in this life than endodontics and income properties and guilt-laden late night frottage with sloe-eyed dental a.s.sistants. More than pewter frames holding diplomas from prestigious universities. More than a wife from' a socially prominent family and 2.6 children who might fit a soap manufacturer's perfect advertising vision of all-American youth. More than getting up each morning to a world that held no surprises, There had to be disaster somewhere. In the forest, in the fog, in the night.

But not on Route 1 at half-past-five. Not for him, not right now.

By six-thirty he reached Monterey and realized he had not eaten since noon of the previous day when he had finished the root ca.n.a.l therapy on Mrs. Udall, had racked the drill, had taken off his smock and donned his jacket, had walked out of the office without a word to Jan or Alicia, had driven out of the underground garage and started up the Coast, fleeing without a thought to destination.

There had been no time for dinner when he'd picked up the c.o.c.ktail waitress, and no late night pizza parlor open for a snack before she fell asleep. Acid had begun to burn a hole in his stomach lining from too much coffee and too little peace of mind.

He drove into the tourist center of Monterey and had no trouble finding a long stretch of open parking s.p.a.ces. There was no movement along the shop-fronted sidewalks. The sun seemed determined never to come up. The fog was heavy and wet; streaming quicksand flowed around him, For a moment the windows of a shop jammed with driftwood-base lamps destined for Iowa bas.e.m.e.nt rec rooms solidified in the eye of the swirling fog; then they were gone. But in that moment he saw his face in the gla.s.s. This night might stretch through the day.

He walked carefully through the streets, looking for an early morning dinette where he might have a Belgian waffle with frozen strawberries slathered in sugary syrup. An egg sunnyside up. Something sunny side up in this unending darkness.

Nothing was open. He thought about that. Didn't anyone go to work early in Monterey? Were there no services girding themselves for the locust descent of teenagers with rucksacks, corpulent business machine salesmen in crimson Budweiser caps and Semitic widows with blue hair? Had there been an eclipse? Was this the shy, pocked, turned-away face of the moon? Where the h.e.l.l was daylight?

Fog blew past him, parted in streamers for an instant. Down a side street he saw a light. Yellow faded as parchment, wan and timorous. But a light.

He turned down the side street and searched through the quicksilver for the source. It seemed to have vanished. Past closed bakeries and jewelry shops and scuba gear emporia. A wraith in the fog. He realized he moved through not only the empty town and through the swaddling fog, but through a condition of fear. Gnotobiosis: an environmental condition in which germfree animals have been inoculated with strains of known microorganisms. Fear.

The light swam up through the silent, silvered shadow sea; and he was right in front of it. Had he moved to it... had it moved to him?

It was a bookstore. Without a sign. And within, many men and women; browsing.

He stood in the darkness, untouched by the sallow light from the nameless bookshop, staring at the nexus.

For such a small shop, so early in the morning, it was thronged. Men and women stood almost elbow to elbow, each absorbed in the book close at hand. Gnotobiosis: Cort felt the fear sliding through his veins and arteries like poison.

They were not turning the pages.

Had they not moved their bodies, a scratching at the lip, the blinking of eyes, random shifting of feet, a slouch, a straightening of back, a glance around... he would have thought them mannequins. A strange but interesting tableau to induce pa.s.sersby to come in and also browse. They were alive, but they did not turn the pages of the books that absorbed them. Nor did they return a book to its shelf and take another. Each man, each woman: held fascinated by words where the books had been opened.

He turned to walk away as quickly as he could.

The car. Get on the road. There had to be a truck stop, a diner, a greasy spoon, fast food, anything. I've been here before, and this isn't Monterey!

The tapping on the window stopped him. He turned back. The desperate expression on the tortoiselike face of the tiny old woman stiffened his back.

He found his right hand lifting, as if to put itself between him and the sight of her. He shook his head no, definitely not, but he had no idea what he was rejecting.

She made staying motions with her wrinkled little hands and mouthed words through the gla.s.s of the shop window. She spoke very precisely and the words were these: I have it here for you.

Then she motioned him to come around to the door, to enter, to step inside: I have it here for you.

The luminous dial of his watch said 7:00. It was still night. Fog continued to pour down from the Monterey peninsula's forest.

Cort tried to walk away. San Francisco was up the line. The sun had to be blazing over Russian Hill, Candlestick Park, and Coit Tower. The world still held surprises. You're loose now, you've broken the cycle he heard his future whisper. Don't respond. Go to the sun.

He saw his hand reach for the doork.n.o.b. He entered the bookshop.

They all looked up for a moment, registered nothing, the door closed behind him, they dropped their gazes to the pages. Now he was inside among them.

"I'm certain I have it in hardcover, a very clean copy," the little old turtle woman said. Her smile was toothless. How could there be fog in here?

"I'm just browsing," Cort said.

"Yes, of course," she said. "Everyone is just browsing."

She laid her hand on his arm and he shuddered. "Just till a restaurant opens."

"Yes, of course."

He was having trouble breathing. The heartburn. "Is it always... does it always stay dark so late into the morning here?"

"Unseasonal," she said. "Look around. I have it here for you. Exactly."

He looked around. "I'm not looking for anything special."

She walked with him, her hand on his arm. "Neither were they." She nodded at the crowd of men and women.

"But they found answers here. I have a very fine stock."

No pages were turned.

He looked over the shoulder of a middle-aged woman staring intently at a book with steel engravings on both open pages. The turtle said, "Her curiosity was aroused by the question 'How was the first vampire created?'

Fascinating concept, isn't it? If vampires can only be created by a normal human being receiving the bite of a vampire, then how was the first one created? She has found the answer here in my wonderful stock." Cort stared at the book.

One of the steel engravings was of Noah's ark.

But wouldn't that mean there had to be two on board?

The turtle drew him down the line of stacks. He paused behind a young man in a very tight T-shirt. He looked as if he had been working out. His head was bent so close to the open book in his hands that his straight blond hair fell over his eyes.

"For years he has felt sympathetic pains with an unknown person," the turtle confided." He would sense danger, elation, l.u.s.t, despair... none of his own making, and none having anything to do with his circ.u.mstance at that moment. Finally he began to realize he was linked with another. Like the Corsican Brothers. But his parents a.s.sured him he was an only child, there was no twin. He found the answer in this volume." She made shoo'ing motions with her blue-veined hands.

Cort peered around the young man's head and hair. It was a book on African history. There were tears in the young man's eyes; there was a spot of moisture on the verso. Cort looked away quickly; he didn't want to intrude.

Next in line was a very tall, ascetic looking man carefully holding a folio of pages that had obviously been written with a quill. By the flourishes and swirls of the writing, Cort knew the book had to be quite old and very likely valuable. The tortoise woman leaned in close, her head barely reaching Cort's chest, and she said, "Sixteenth century.

First Shakespeare folio. This gentleman wandered through most of his adult life, and decades of academic pursuits, tormented by the question of who actually wrote The Booke of Sir Thomas More: the Bard or his rival, Anthony Munday. There lies his answer, before his eyes. I have such a superior stock."

"Why doesn't he... why don't any of these people turn the page?"

"Why bother? They've found the answer they sought. "

"And there's nothing more they want to know?"

"Apparently not. Interesting, isn't it?"

Cort found it more chilling than interesting. Then the chill fastened itself permanently to his heart, like a limpet, with the unasked question, How long have these browsers been here like this?

"Here's a woman who always wanted to know if pure evil exists anywhere on the face of the earth." The woman wore a mantilla over her shoulders, and she stared mesmerized at a book on natural history. "This man hungered for a complete list of the contents of the great Library of Alexandria, the subject matters contained on those half million handwritten papyrus scrolls at the final moment before the Library was torched in the Fifth Century." The man was gray and wizened and his face had been incised with an expression of ancient weariness that reminded Cort of Stonehenge. He pored over two pages set so closely with infinitesimal typefaces that Cort could not make out a single word in the flyspecks. "A woman who lost her memory,,, said the turtle, indicating with a nod of her tortoise head a beautiful creature festooned with silk scarves of a dozen different colors. "Woke up in a white slave brothel inMarrakech, ran for her life, has spent years wandering around trying to discover who she was." She laughed a low, warm laugh. "She found out here. The whole story's right there in that book."

Cort turned to her, firmly removing her withered claw from his arm.

"And you 'have it here for me,' don't you?"

"Yes; I have it here. In my fine stock."

"What precisely do you have that I want? Here. In your fine stock."

He didn't even need her to speak. He knew exactly what she would say. She would say, "Why, I have the answers you seek." And then he would saunter around the bookshop, feeling superior to these poor devils who had been standing here G.o.d only knew how long, and finally he'd turn to her and smile and say, "I don't even know the questions," and they would both smile at that one--he like an idiot because it was the most ba.n.a.l of cliches, she because she'd known he would say something dithering like that--and he would refrain from apologizing for the pa.s.sing stupidity; and then he would ask her the question and she would point out a shelf and say,, 'The book you want is right there," and then she'd suggest he try pages such-and-such for exactly what he wanted to know: that which had driven him up the Coast.

And if, ten thousand years later, the karmic essence of all that's left of Sulayman the Magnificent, blessed be his name, Sulayman of the potent seal, Sultan and Master of all the djinn, of each and every cla.s.s of jinni, ghul. ifrit.

si'la, div and iblis; if that transubstantiated essence comes 'round again, like Halley's comet comes 'round again; that transmogrified spirit circling back on its limitless hegira through crimson eternity... if it comes 'round again it would find him, Cort--Dr. Alexander Cort, D. D. S. , a Dental Corporation--still standing here elbow-to-elbow with the other browsers. Coelacanths outlined in shale, mastodons flash-frozen in ice, wasps embedded in amber. Gnotobiosis: forever.

"Why do I have the feeling all this isn't random?" Cort said to the old turtle woman. He began edging toward the door behind him. "Why do I have the feeling all this has been here waiting for me, just the way it was waiting for all the rest of those poor f.u.c.king losers? Why do I get the smell of rotting gardenias off you, old lady?" He was almost at the door.

She stood in a cleared s.p.a.ce in the center of the bookshop, staring at him.

"You're no different, Dr. Cort. You need the answers, the same as the rest."

"Maybe a little love potion... a powerstone... immortality... all that good jive. I've seen places like this in television shows. But I don't bite, old lady. I have no need you can fill." And his hand was on the doork.n.o.b; and he was turning it; and he yanked; and the door opened to the ominous fog and the unending night and the waiting forest.

And the old lady said, "Wouldn't you like to know when you'll have the best moment of your entire life?"

And he closed the door and stood with his back against it.

His smile was unhealthy. "Well, you got me," he whispered.

"When you'll be happiest," she said softly, barely moving her thin lips. "When you'll be strongest, most satisfied, at the peak of your form, most in control, bravest, best-looking, most highly regarded by the rest of the world; your top moment, your biggest surge, your most golden achievement, that which forms the pattern for the rest of your life; the instant than which you will have no finer, if you live to be a thousand. Here in my fine stock I have a tome that will tell you the day, hour, minute, second of your n.o.blest future. Just ask and it's yours. I have it here for you."

"And what does it cost me?"

She opened her wet mouth and smiled. Her wrinkled little hands fell open palms up in the air before her.