All The Bells on Earth (21 page)

He’s
drunk
, Bentley thought—and at four in the morning! Argyle’s head swiveled from side to side then, unnaturally again, as if he had a crick in his neck that he was trying to work out, but couldn’t. No, he wasn’t drunk. He was in the grip of some kind of fit. A grand mal seizure? He tried to stand, but sat back down hard, and Bentley could hear the sound of gibbering now. A rush of laughter followed the gibbering, and then a low moaning, almost like a foghorn.

In a frightful rush, Bentley understood the truth. What he had feared had finally come to pass: like Murray LeRoy had been, Argyle was possessed, inhabited, manipulated by demons. “Lord have mercy,” Bentley whispered.

Argyle stood up now, swaying on his feet like a marionette. Shakily, slowly, he reached up and jerked out a fistful of his own hair. Clutching it in his hand, he shuffled across the carpet, making a noise like flies buzzing against a window, one hesitant step at a time, until he slammed his foot into the wooden box on the floor and pitched forward across it like a stuffed dummy, where he lay heaving, his face mashed into the carpet, ghastly noises wheezing out of him. Then abruptly he fell still, apparently dead or comatose.

Bentley crouched there speechless, nearly unable to move. Rain swept in under the house eaves, thudding against his shoulders. He shivered in the chill air, certain that he had just witnessed a man’s damnation, that Argyle had quite simply gone to Hell.

What did this require of Bentley? He was a minister, a man of God. Had he been led to this window merely to witness Argyle’s descent into damnation? He felt tiny, exposed to the wind and rain and cold, and the darkness settled around him pitilessly, like an accusation.

He saw something then, dimly through the nearly closed door at the opposite side of the room—a shadow approaching, as if along a hallway. Someone else was in the house! He ducked out of sight, then peered up over the sill at the very corner of the window, keeping well back out of the way. His hands shook against the wooden sill as the door to the room swung open slowly, as if the intruder were doubtful, wondering what he might find. Whoever it was paused there in the shadows, then stepped forward into the room. Light from the ceiling lamp fell across his face….

Bentley croaked out a hoarse cry and fell over backward, tearing fronds off the trunk of the tree fern and scrabbling in the muddy flowerbed on his hands and knees as the rain pummeled his back and shoulders. He crawled along the side of the house, blinking the water out of his eyes. A hibiscus limb snatched off his hat, and he groped for it blindly, clutching it in his hand now and reeling forward, suddenly free of the shrubbery and staggering through the rain toward his car. He tore the car door open, slid in behind the wheel, and started the engine, glancing backward as he accelerated up the rainswept street, half expecting Argyle’s corpse-pale face to peer out through the lighted window.

For it had been Argyle himself who had come out of the shadowed hallway and into the room, carrying two glasses of orange juice and dressed in red pajamas identical to the pair worn by the dead man on the floor.

T
HE NEWSPAPER LAY IN
the bushes that morning, hidden from view, just like he’d asked. It was early. The paperboy must have set the alarm for three
A.M.
! Not bad for a dead bird in a jar, he thought. He smiled uneasily. Of course it was just coincidence….

But what if it wasn’t? He stood on the sidewalk and thought about it, looking down the empty street toward the church. First the tomatoes, now the newspaper. The bluebird of happiness was apparently granting his wishes. The idea was lunatic, and he chuckled now, thinking about it. A man runs across a magical charm, Aladdin’s lamp, and he gives its genie full rein, casting spells and calling down wishes. Does the man conquer kingdoms, attain vast power, amass a fortune? No, he makes the genie work out on newspapers and tomato vines, uses it to control the ant problem in the kitchen.

So give it back to Argyle, he told himself suddenly, and his smile faded. This idea had slipped into his mind as if out of nowhere: essentially he had
stolen
it, hadn’t he? And normally he didn’t
steal
things. And he didn’t lie, either. And now he was up to his ears in both these crimes.

But hell, there wasn’t anything
normal
about this. Here he was confronted by liars and cheats, with Argyle’s baloney and the giant grinning postal inspector with eyes like a sand hog. Whose rules was he supposed to play by? What if a man found a grocery sack full of money in the bushes, and he
knew
, say, that it was dirty money, drug money—a lot of wrinkled fifties and hundreds, utterly untraceable. What would he do with it? Advertise? “Attn, scum, found yr money in a shrub….” How
could
that be the right thing to do, in any way you could explain in under an hour? And anyway, this wasn’t a bag full of money, it was just a dead bird pickled by some Third-World trinket company with an arcane sense of humor.

Unless of course it wasn’t.

The door to the motor home swung open and Henry looked out, fumbling with his eyeglasses and dressed in a pair of pajamas and floppy-looking slippers. He spotted Walt out on the sidewalk and gave him the high sign.

“Paper?” Walt asked him. He stepped toward him across the wet lawn, pulling off the plastic wrapper and handing it over.
There
, he thought, abruptly relieved of his burden. It’s out of my hands now. Like giving the sack of dirty money to the church, it expiates the living daylights out of the sin.

Henry looked at the paper, then tried to hand it back. He was too much of a gentleman to take it. “Go ahead,” he whispered, clearly not wanting to wake up Jinx. “You first. I can work a crossword or something.”

“No, heck,” Walt said. “I’ve got work to do anyway.”

“Well, here. Take the sports or something. What do you read first? Financial page?”

“Not a thing,” Walt lied. “I’m just going to stuff boxes with it. You might as well take a look at it first.”

“If you’re sure …”

“Sure I’m sure.”

“Thanks,” Henry said. He nodded and then shut the door, and Walt found himself standing in a fresh drizzle, his newspaper gone. Well, this took care of it. He could quit agonizing over the damned bluebird. Apparently the creature didn’t work after all; he hadn’t gotten his wish, had he?

He headed for the garage and cranked up the space heater, then climbed up the ladder and had a look in the rafters. Spotting the tin box, he reached in among the fishing tackle and pulled it out, opening the lid and sniffing the ginlike aroma that wafted out of it. The bird itself wasn’t nearly as deteriorated as he remembered it. Its feathers were almost glossy now, a bright, clear blue, and its eyes were open and alert. Well, not alert, for heaven’s sake. There was no use getting nutty about it.

He thought suddenly of the demons hightailing it out of Pandora’s box, and he replaced the jar and shut the lid again, shoving it back in among the salmon eggs and the fishing lures, then stuffed the tackle box back into the rafters. Maybe later he would find an even safer place for it.

He climbed down and poured a cup of coffee, then sorted through the half dozen mail-order catalogues that had arrived in yesterday’s junk mail—the competition. Walt was on every address list in the country by now. It fascinated him to think of it: his name and address reproducing itself like a slow virus along with thousands and millions of other addresses—long lists of them sold back and forth as if they were eggs in a basket instead of words and numbers. Somewhere, right now, enterprising people were pulling down a staggering fortune buying and selling names. The concept was almost mystical, sublunar capitalism in the information age.

Two months ago he himself had paid good money for three lists of a thousand addresses each—seven cents per address—which was about all the catalogue production and mailing he could afford to do right now. There was forty pages of offset printing along with darkroom work, collating, stapling, addressing, and bulk-rate postage, which added up to more than two thousand dollars per catalogue, and the cold truth was that within three weeks of the catalogue’s coming out, orders dwindled nearly to nothing, and it was time to put out another one that was in some clear way different from the last, and him wondering all the time whether he ought to hustle another thousand addresses in order to expand things generally. But he had no real idea how much was too much—how many catalogues, how much inventory. It wasn’t like planting corn; in the business of catalogue sales, the relationship between sowing and reaping was in no way clear. Probably Dr. Hefernin could sell him a pamphlet on the subject.

He found the current Archie McPhee catalogue, one of his favorites, and the American Science and Surplus catalogue, which was offering overstock Water Weenies right there on the first page along with dental burs, radiation gloves, and something called a “Toilet Seat Alarm,” the purpose of which wasn’t made clear. There were sixty-five pages crammed with this kind of stuff, half of it electronic. Walt envied the hell out of that kind of inventory. His little collection of rubber skeletons and palm-tree hats was pitiful in comparison. Now that the tin shed was up, though, he could expand a little bit, make fewer trips out to the wholesale warehouses in Bellflower.

One of the catalogues was new to him—something called
The Captain Grose Collection
. It was expensively done, full color, offering “antiquities and religious relics and reproductions of all natures, direct from the East.”

Walt sipped his coffee, fingering through the catalogue with idle interest at first, then with growing disbelief. It offered hundreds of sacred and sanctified relics: fragments of the true cross, vials of tears from a dozen different sources including the Savior himself, links of the chain that bound St. Peter, droplets of blood from an inventory of martyrs two pages long, wine from the marriage at Cana, toenail parings from the apostles, Tubalcain’s fire fender, the brass-shod broomstick of the Witch of Endor, one of the seven golden lampstands, a tooth from Balaam’s ass, the preserved ears and snout of one of the Gadarene swine, a chip of the stone that the builder refused….

He burst into laughter and shut the catalogue. This
had
to be a joke, an impossibly elaborate, lowball prank. But who on earth … ? He looked at the cover again, trying to estimate how much it had cost to print—the slick, full-color cover, the high-quality paper. It was put out by something called “Millennialist Products, Ltd.” He checked the address—Santa Ana! It was a local company. Immediately he thought of Dr. Hefernin, but this wasn’t in his line. In fact, this had a family resemblance to the stuff in Argyle’s misdelivered box. Maybe it wasn’t a prank after all.

Suddenly suspicious, he opened the catalogue again. A number of the items had no price—apparently you had to call an 800 number to inquire. The priced items were classified as “reproductions” that were “strict copies” of originals in the Captain Grose Collection, with which these replicas were “kept in close association.”

About halfway through the catalog the listings changed, and instead of sacred relics and reproductions there was a list, much shorter, of “profane” relics, “offered strictly in the spirit of scientific inquiry.”

This clearly
was
the stuff in Argyle’s box: the “dead mans grease,” the twigs from the “tree of living flesh,” figures of saints carved out of their own finger bones and preserved in oil, vials of blood….

Walt dialed the number on the back of the catalogue. It was impossibly early, not even seven. Obviously no one would be there, although possibly they’d have a voice-mail ordering system….

A man answered. “Dilworth Catalogue Sales. Twenty-four-hour service.”

Walt was bowled over.
Dilworth!
Argyle after all! Nothing in the catalogue had … “Hello,” he said, scrambling to find something more to say, to keep the man on the line.

“What can I do for you?”

“I’m calling about the catalogue,” Walt said. “The relics catalogue.”

“Mastercard, Visa, or American Express? There’s a fourteen-dollar minimum. Any order over thirty dollars receives the ‘Get Out of Hell Free’ card at absolutely no cost whatsoever.” The man’s voice was perfunctory, as if he had reeled this nonsense off a hundred times that morning already. “Are you interested in the card? I’ll mark the appropriate box on the order form.”

Walt laughed out loud. “I’ll take ten,” he said.

“No can do,” the man said to him. “One per customer. Nobody needs more than one anyway, do they?”

“Of course not,” Walt said. The man was serious! “Just a little joke. Not very funny.”

“Mastercard, Visa, or American Fxpress?”

“Visa,” Walt said hurriedly. Apparently the man wasn’t in a joking mood. He thought about hanging up but he held on instead, thumbing through the catalogue, looking through the reproductions for something cheap. Hell, he could write it off. It was business. And it was only thirty bucks, after all, give or take. No way he was going to miss out on the free card. He reeled off his Visa number and expiration date.

“Delivery address?”

He gave the man his address.

“I need the description, catalogue number, quantity, and price, in that order,” the man said.

“All right. Let’s see. Send me the ‘Ever-burning Brimstone,’ number S-883, quantity one, $8.95, and the ‘Reproduction Golden Lampstand,’ Q-452, quantity one, $26.50. Now what is that exactly?—the lampstand?”