The Sleepwalkers Part 23

"What, you're some kind of a bigamist, or what?"

Here is the crossroads. Ron knows if he pushes on down this road, it might lead to a dead end, or to disaster. Still, there's a chance it might work.

He takes a breath, then lets it out in a slow, measured stream.

Ron Bent was never much good at taking risks, but for some reason he's feeling lucky today, praise G.o.d. So he decides to go for it.

"No," he says, "I'm no bigamist, and no controlling husband either. But if you were my wife, I think we'd be too busy to leave the house, if you know what I mean."

Janet's mouth drops open. She spins all the way around in her chair and her face turns bright red.

Ron holds his breath. Yes, this is the crossroads, and she chooses which way they go from here. She holds his fate just like she's holding her breath right now.

And Janet says: "Is that right? Well . . . maybe you ought to tell my husband that. He don't . . . well, let's just say, he ain't of the same way of thinking that you are. And even if he was, he wouldn't be able to . . . put his money where his mouth is."

Ron is sweating. The air in here feels like poison and his head is pounding. There's no time for subtlety. He has to get out. He can feel it.

"If I were him, I'd have my mouth where your money is all day," Ron says, almost smiling. That's a pretty good line for him. He was never any good at coming up with lines.

Janet stands up. "Is that right?" Her voice is confrontational but tremulous, and her cheeks are still glowing.

"You know what I think?" Ron says. "I think that's what you want too."

"Is that right?"

"Only I don't think you want it from your husband anymore," he says. "I think you want it from me."

"You are a bold man," she says. Her lipstick looks garish, even ghoulish in the strange light, her lips contorted into a prurient smile.

"I bet you tend to get what you want," he says.

"You bet I do," she says, moving forward. Still, she remains at least an arm's length back from the bars.

"So how about you tell me what you want and how you want it,"

Ron says.

"Yeah?" she says, her voice breathy now. She unb.u.t.tons the top b.u.t.ton on her shirt. "You like this? You want this? Then why don't you come on over here and get it?"

He can see her chest rise and fall in trembling breaths. This is good, this is- "But I can't open the door, Ron," she says.

Ron represses a sigh, blinks, regroups.

"That's a shame," he says. "Guess you'll be missing out then," and he takes the biggest risk of all-acting uninterested, he walks away from her, over to the cot on the far side of the cell and sits down.

"Ooh!" she says, stomping a foot in frustration. She looks back at the door. She stands there for a moment, thinking hard.

"Alright," she says. She takes out her gun and sets it on the table, still well out of Ron's reach. "You'd better make it quick, though. I don't want to get caught." She walks toward Ron, swaying her copious hips as she comes. She unbuckles her pants and starts to pull them down, pressing her wide a.s.s up against the bars.

The horrible thing is that Ron actually feels a grain of attraction beneath the revulsion. G.o.d, he thinks, I must be pretty hard up.

But there's no time to contemplate his miserable love life.

He steps up to her, pa.s.ses the arm with "the hook" on the end of it through the bars and wraps it tightly around her waist, feeling her gasp with excitement as he does.

With the other hand, he reaches through and grasps the metal buckle of her belt.

"Come on," she says, "quick, now."

And Ron is quick. He yanks the belt out of her belt loops with his good hand, holding her to the bars with his other arm. Then he pa.s.ses the belt around her neck, as fast as he can, and before Janet Faris knows what's going on, she's strapped by her neck to the bars. When she tries to pull at the leather, Ron reaches through the bars with "the hook" and restrains her.

"Okay, Janet," he says, "where are the keys to the cell?"

All that escapes Janet's mouth is a dusty-sounding wheeze. Ron jerks the belt for a second, a dog's choke collar.

"Where are they? Point."

She points down and makes a pathetic gagging sound.

Ron rummages through her pockets. He finds several Tootsie Roll wrappers, some change, and finally a fairly large, almost cartoonish-looking key.

Now he's getting somewhere. Gripping the belt with the hook now, (and hoping its squeezing force will be enough to keep Janet pinned in place), he reaches the key toward the lock on his cell door. But it's too far. And from this angle he's not able to keep the pressure on Janet's neck. He looks back and sees her fingers already creeping under the strap of her belt. In another second, she'll be free. He has to make a split-second decision and hope it's the right one. Instantly, he lets go of the belt and steps over to the lock. Fumbling, fumbling, now the key is in.

On the other side of the bars, Deputy Faris is coughing herself into a frenzy-now trying to run for her gun on the table, now stumbling with her pants around her ankles.

And Ron is turning the key, turning it more, finally hearing the click of release resonate through the whole steel frame of the door. He's sliding the bars out of the way and stepping into freedom.

And into the path of Janet's waiting gun barrel.

Her face is now redder than ever, fueled not by libido but by fury.

In one fist she holds the bunched-up front of her pants, which are thankfully now pulled back up where they belong, and in the other trembling fist she holds a .38 revolver.

"Well, you are one sick criminal, mister, trying to take advantage of a woman like that," she spits.

Ron doesn't put his hands up; he just stands there.

"I need to get out of here," he says, trying to calm her, to lead her on the long road back to reason. "That boy they took into the Dream Center, I think he's in trouble. I think there might be a lot of kids endangered by what's going on at that place."

"There's a lot of folks endangered right here in this room, mister," she growls.

Didn't Shakespeare say something like "h.e.l.l hath no fury like a woman scorned"? Looks like the old codger was right.

"Janet," Ron says.

"No," she says. "Get back in there!"

And she waves the gun barrel toward the open cell door.

"I can't, I have to go," Ron says. "You can shoot me if you have to."

Saliva glistens on her chin now, and Ron watches her finger tense on the trigger.

"You can go one of two places," she says. "Back into that cell, or to h.e.l.l."

Just then, there's a sound outside. The door opens. The sheriff 's wide, lax face balloons into view.

"Janet, come on, we have to-" and he stops. "What in the-?"

Janet turns to look at the sheriff, and that's all the opportunity Ron needs. In one step, he's struggling for Janet's gun. It discharges one shot straight up, shattering the last dying fluorescent bulb before he wrestles it away from her.

"Ned, help!" Janet screams.

The sheriff charges into the pitch blackness, gun drawn, and promptly runs right into a heavy wood table and almost falls on his face. By the time he rights himself and skirts the obstruction, Janet has found her Maglite and turned it on. It strobes around the room. Here's the desk, the TV, the table, the blinking sheriff, the open door.

But there is no Ron Bent.

Outside, Ron races up to the sheriff 's office and past it. There are no pains in his joints now; the adrenaline pumping through his veins has calmed their throbbing ache.

As he pa.s.ses the squad car, he glances in the window and sees the keys still in the ignition. By the time the sheriff rounds the corner of his trailer, he can only get off one shot at the car as it speeds away. One taillight shatters, and Ron Bent is free.

And it looks like his luck might finally be changing. Praise G.o.d.

Christine crouches in a stand of cypress trees, listening to the murmur of insects. Sometimes, something disturbs the water nearby and she stops breathing, listening hard. It's at such times when she can hear her sister's voice. At first, she could only hear it in the electric rustle of the radio station, AM five thirty-five. Now she can hear it whispering all the time, especially at times like this when all else is silent. And her sister's voice isn't the only one, not by a long shot. There are thousands of voices, maybe millions, and they never stop. Some whisper sadly, some scream in vengeful madness. Some are so, so lucid. One such voice is speaking now, from the boughs of the cypress.

And the laughter starts, the laughter of thousands.

Christine knows the dead. All they want is company.

"Shut up, you dead hag," she whispers. She fights to disbelieve what the voice told her, but in her mind all she can see is Billy, floating facedown in a slick of his own blood.

She heard the gunshots maybe five minutes ago, a whole volley of them, but she won't let herself believe any of those bullets found her Billy. She doesn't believe it because she can't believe it. Because if Billy is dead, then her hope is dead.

And besides, the voices can be tricky.

Anna's voice is tiny and far away. It's instantly shrieked down by a dissonant chorus.

Christine hears a cracking sound above, and barely steps out of the way in time as a huge, ancient limb crashes down and pounds the black earth where she was just standing. If it had hit her, she would probably have been knocked out, fallen face-first into the water, and drowned.

All they want is company.

And they don't like being called hags, or especially being reminded that they're dead.

The darkness seems to deepen. Bats flick past above, though Christine can't actually see them.

"Anna," she whispers, "where is Billy? Should I look for him? Is he okay?"

A moment pa.s.ses, then the silence answers back: Christine does.

She looks up, through the life-woven canopy of leaves above and spies the North Star. Did runaway slaves see the same sight, running up this river two centuries ago?

says the silence

And the voices become murky again, a cacophony of laughs and screams and whispered mumblings, and Christine can't stand to hear it anymore, but it's getting harder and harder to unhear it. So instead, she decides to drown it out, and sings an old hymn she learned as a child: Mine eyes have seen the glory Of the coming of the Lord, He was stamping out the vintage Where the grapes of wrath are stored Something, something, something . . .

With his high and mighty sword, His truth is marching on . . . Billy?

The sound of something moving in the water is more distinct than before, and it's more than just the "blip" of a frog or a fish. The sound comes closer, and Christine stiffens with fear.

"Don't stop singing." He comes around the trunk of a cypress. His chest rises and falls, fast. Even in the dark, she can see his face is streaked with sweat, dirt, and tears.

"Please, don't stop," Caleb says again, almost pleading.

"I thought you were dead," she says.

"I thought you were crazy."

She smiles sadly. "I might be. I honestly don't know."

"It wasn't me they shot," says Caleb. "It was my friend."

"The dead will be glad to have him," she says. "They like humor."

"What do you mean?"

"There's no time. Let's go."

Already, she can hear the distant scratch of the sheriff 's radio, and the chorus of whispers saying: Hand in hand, Billy and Christine run along the riverbank. When the rocks hurt her bare feet, he carries her piggyback, and when the sun finally cracks open the darkness and the whispering shadows give way to the birdsong of morning, they are still among the living and are grateful.

As the heat of the day rises, painting the forest with rich greens and browns, the witch (for so even she thinks of herself) hums a song. She doesn't know the words, or can't remember them. She doesn't remember much, nowadays.

Except Anna, dear Anna.

Made a piece of clay in kindergarten, Anna did, put her tiny fingers in the mud and by the magic of science the teachers made the mud hard, made it immortal, and now they sit on the counter, Anna's hands. Or the empty places where her little hands once were. Hateful, empty places.

That makes her think "The Thought" again, and The Thought makes her bite her lip hard and close her eyes and think of Christine, hateful Christine, the bad, bad girl who put the seed of The Thought into her head.

Even though she's a powerful witch, no spell will banish the thoughts. She knows; she's tried.

Now she's holding a hoe, standing in a patch of sandy dirt and wearing only her socks, a long skirt, and a baseball cap; no shirt. She doesn't wear a shirt much these days. There are no eyes to see her except those belonging to The Forest, and he likes her skin just as it is. She lifts the hoe and hacks at the unyielding earth. She must make an herb garden. She bought the seeds a year-no, no, two years ago-but so far has been unable to plant them, because every time she tries, the shakes start up so bad she can't grip the hoe. Because of Christine, hateful b.i.t.c.h-child.

The sun feels good on her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and the handle of the hoe feels good in her hand, hard and sure. But as she strikes the earth again, tearing up a big clod of dirt this time, The Thought streaks across her mind again, big as a billboard, horrible and certain.

She cries out and throws the hoe to the ground. It lands with an unsatisfying "pit" sound. (Shouldn't she be able to make it explode? Shouldn't she be able to make the earth tremble with her rage? She is a grand witch, after all.) She walks away from the hoe with her hands over her ears, shaking her head back and forth.

The song is in her head still, she realizes suddenly. It's an old song, she knows that much, and the melody is sure and strong in her head, but the words elude her, all but: "glory of the coming . . . "

The phrase thrills her, spreads goose b.u.mps all over her body.