Apocalypse (20 page)

“All of you whom I touch must wear my mark,” she said, her eyes not on the intruding townspeople but on her own people, the misfits. Her glance on them, soft as twilight. “You are my people, and my mark is the seal of our bond. Who wants to come to me and be healed?”

Already they crowded around.

The bent woman straightened, and smiled, and wore a dusky mark on the side of her thin face. The blind man threw down his white cane, tore the paper bag off his head, and he was handsome with seeing eyes and a dark, romantic scar. The woman who was so fat she could scarcely move laughed and cried; her dress dragged to the ground from her new, thinner shoulders, and even her shoes no longer fit her. She pushed her hair back from the burning mark and wore it proudly. The man with stumps stood on legs again, and yelled aloud like a football player running in the winning touchdown, and leaped about the park with fists in air, shouting. His plain face bore Ahira's mark.

Priest and pastor and most of their followers turned and left, silent, too horrified to converse, doing their best to censor from their minds what they had seen. Magic, they told themselves, an illusion, like on TV. Had to be. There was nothing like any of this going on elsewhere; the world was circling in its same old rutted round. Therefore what had happened could not have happened, or how could Hoadley go on with its routine, its stagnation, its life? They would not make anything they had seen real by conversing of it.

They left, but Cally Wilmore stayed, keeping to the outskirts of the crowd, picking crumbs and sweet specks of icing from the edge of some huge forbidden ceremonial cake. She saw Ahira touch people who seemed to have nothing wrong with them, putting on them her mark—was it blood, or fire, or wine? In the nightfall streetlamp-and-firefly light Cally could not decide. But she saw the smiles, shouts, sometimes glad tears of those who received the mark, and knew that Ahira had healed something in them.

The green girl (made that way by jaundice plus a prescription drug overdose) came, and her skin returned to the Dresden shepherdess beauty she had been born with, and she wept. Garrett came to Ahira, received the mark and a subtle change in his head, his face, the mind behind the face, and he pulled out of his pockets hundreds of dominoes and tossed them black-flashing into the air, and left them where they landed. Barry Beal came to Ahira with him. But Ahira looked at Barry—watching, Cally could not understand the look. Something of the lover in it, but also something of scorn. Ahira would not touch him.

She told him, “You are mine the way you are. You wear my mark large, and you wore it before any of the others.” Ahira's voice rang out into the dark and hubbub as she gave the accolade, and Cally saw Barry Beal straighten, his particolored face parted again with his wide smile, quartered, as if he wore a harlequin mask. Tall and cocky he stood, proud to be Ahira's possession, proud of his birthmarked face for perhaps the first time in his life.

Cally looked at broad-chested Barry Beal, and thought of Eros in the forest and her own sullen Mark home in his house of death, and felt the ever-present ache in her gut grow harder. As if she belonged there she went and took her place in line.

Close to the strange woman Ahira, very close, Cally could see only beauty. But though she could not find a flaw in that poreless glowing veneer of flesh, she knew if for what it was: somehow, a living mask. She knew it because she stood close enough to smell Ahira amid the stale-beer and bird-cage odors of the misfits. And though Ahira did not smell strongly, what odor Cally discerned belonged to Hoadley.

When Ahira's chamois-soft hand reached toward her, Cally stopped it with a frail, defiant gesture.

“No, thank you,” said Cally. “I just wanted to look at you. I wanted to see what sort of woman would kill an animal and hang it up and set it afire.”

Ahira reacted with a faint smile. “But I did not do that,” she said. “One of you did it.”

Cally felt unease crawl like a mouse through her puny shoulders. The woman was telling the truth; she felt it. “But the rest of it,” she challenged, “Mrs. Zepka and the naked man and the—” At last she knew what to call them. “—the hungerbabies, you did.”

Ahira's smile quirked a shadow wider in qualified assent. “Hoadley helped me,” she acknowledged. And only after she spoke did Cally feel the profound depth of the understanding between her and this—this unnatural woman, this ungodly beauty, this frightening fetch. Ahira had known of what she spoke. What else did Ahira know about her? What was Ahira? It did not matter. To the marrow of her nearly-fleshless bones Cally knew the most important thing about Ahira.

She whispered, “You mean to end us. End us all.”

Ahira's smile faded into the tender-eyed frown of concern. “Cally,” she said, though no one had told her Cally's name, “let me touch you, let me stop your hurting, let me put my mark on you. You are one of my people. You must be, or you would not understand.”

Her exquisite hand lifted again, and Cally watched it for a moment, fascinated, almost assenting, before she stepped back in horror.

“You!” she accused. “You mean to destroy Hoadley.”

Ahira smiled again, the same dusky-soft smile. “I will not need to,” she said. “You will do it.”

Tingling with fear and anger and eerie insight, Cally used her strongest weapon. Ahira was not the only one with unaccountable knowledge and the poetry to couch it in.

“O rose,” Cally breathed, “thou art sick. The invisible worm—”

White fire flared up. Ahira had turned to embodied lighting, and fury spun off her with sirocco force. “Get away from me!” Her voice crackled, a thunderbolt out of the darkness.

Cally departed like a dried leaf blown away before the force of that storm. If she had been in boots—but she was not. She scurried homeward, hating the skirt, the insubstantial shoes that would not let her stride out, strike out. In something other than her Hoadley-approved clothing—the uniform that crippled heart and soul and mind as much as body—on her own terms she could have been a worthy antagonist to Ahira, she felt sure of it.

What had Ahira meant by that last odd pronouncement? “You will do it.” She, Cally, would drive Hoadley down into the pit?

Pit? What pit? And of course Ahira had not meant that. She meant people in general. It was a joke, the sick joke of a starved mind, Cally's own. Cally's lips twitched back from those skull protrusions called teeth, and she smiled.

CHAPTER NINE

Tammy had just that warm early summer hit upon an ability to produce a liquid flute-note sound between her lips. The new knack pleased her no end. All day every day she went about her arcane preadolescent business whistling melodiously but randomly, like a yellowthroat warbler, and she softly whistled herself to sleep at night. The fluid, atonal sounds of the child's rapt self-possession touched off in Cally a rush of yearning affection. Tammy had been her first baby, and Tammy was growing up.… Tammy seemed like the one right thing in her life at the time. Everything else seemed to forebode. And nothing was ever again going to be right with Mark, she felt. Some devil in her would not let it be. She could have swallowed her anger and smiled through her teeth and made up to him with food offerings and conciliatory words and tears, as Hoadley wisdom advised, as Cally's hungry heart urged her to do, as she had often done before. But some new and obdurate self-will would not let her do it this time. She had stayed home from church on Sunday—because the hard pews hurt her increasingly bony body, but she would not say as much—she had put a face of defiance on the act, and had sat out on the apartment porch reading the newspaper while the churchgoers passed, for no reason except to shock Hoadley and annoy Mark.

Locating Tammy by the constant stream of her whistling, and Owen by the gunfire bursts of the morning cartoons he watched on TV, Cally called both children and got them moving out the apartment door and down the sidewalk toward Ma Wilmore's house. She was going to leave them there while she went riding. Every day since her most recent quarrel with Mark she had gone riding for hours, dawn, dusk, high noon or after dark in the moonlight, sometimes two or three times a day, and sheerly by constant riding she had reached an accord of sorts with her rebellious black horse, though that was not the reason she went.… Passing Sojourner Hieronymus's stark gray house, she greeted the old woman on the porch with no more than a wave of one attenuated hand, flouting the convention that she must stop and talk. She did not care any longer what anyone thought of her. Least of all that stubborn Mark. She would go riding amid the delectable hills, she would enjoy her life, what was left of it, and to hell with him and all of them.

Owen aimed his forefinger at Sojourner and made pistol-shooting noises at her; Cally did not attempt to stop him. Tammy skipped past the gray porch, her soft hair bobbing, and whistled notes as liquid as her gazing eyes.

With percussive force, as if someone had struck a bell of clay, Sojourner's voice rang out: “Whistling girls and crowing hens always come to bad ends!”

Tammy smiled the brave smile of a good, forgiving child, and skipped on, whistling. Cally called ironically, “Right.”

Then, three strides down the pavement, she turned her eyes to her daughter and felt her heart shiver.

The change was so subtle, perhaps only a mother's glance could have caught it, the scrutiny of a mother as intent and besotted as she. Cally saw. What had a moment before in Tammy's wide-eyed gaze been that peculiar blend of sweep and focus, of essential wildness and fierce dependence, of fawn and fox cub, that we call innocence—it had all turned to something … other. Tammy whistled and looked back at her mother thoughtfully, like Eve calling up the serpent for his sup of milk.

“No,” Cally whispered.

“No, what?” Tammy wanted to know. Her voice, piping and bratty, sounded much the same as ever.

“Nothing.” Cally hurried both kids to her in-laws' place and left them there, taking no time to exchange courteous pleasantries with Ma Wilmore. Heading home, she took the back alleyway so that she would not have to deal with Sojourner, and she ran, her riding boots thudding on the asphalt. A bizarre, feverish, unnatural energy filled her, though she had not eaten more than a few mouthfuls of food in days.

Instead of getting in her car and roaring off at unsafe rates of speed toward the stable, as she had planned, she invaded the hush of the deep-carpeted funeral home with her booted feet, looking for Mark.

She found him atop a step ladder, removing the crystals of the Peach Room chandelier so that he could clean them. He loved to do that; when nothing more urgent pressed he would sit for hours, waiting for a death call and soaking and scrubbing and polishing the small swords of glass.

“Mark,” Cally told him without preamble, “I am going to send the kids away from here.”

He looked down from his perch without replying, wary, exasperated by too many surprises from her, unsure how to react. Cally, intent on her own agenda, saw his face only as unresponsive, an angry mask.

She said, “They'll be better off somewhere else.”

“Why?” Mark found his voice. “Because you've made up your mind to drive me as crazy as you are? You can fix that.”

She swung her head, eyes narrowed to slits, wanting to charge him, trample him under hard feet; the jackass, he would not understand! “No, I can't,” she stated, words hard out of hot lungs. “The world is going crazy. I'm just riding it. I want the kids out of here. Hoadley's going first.”

“I see.” Sarcastically, though he did in fact see, dimly, as if out of the corner of his brain. Too frightened to see more, he blinkered his stare on his wife. “And where do you propose to park the kids? With your mother?”

She had in her hasty planning thought of sending the youngsters to stay with an old friend, a college roommate. But the way he said “your mother” sent adrenaline of primal defense surging through her. Family. Hoadley was spelled f-a-m-i-l-y. It was the sacred word. And by damn she had family of her own, not Hoadley, not Mark's family, but her own; at the mention of her mother Cally grew determined to have this. Thinking of her parents as she had seldom thought of them in all her Hoadley years, Cally could not call their faces clearly to mind. It was as if a haze of Hoadley yellow cheap-coal smoke had gotten in the way. Nevertheless, she was suddenly the child of her parents again, filled with a child's blind anger.

“That sounds like a very good idea,” she said. Every word was an edged weapon.

“Cal, you're not thinking straight.” Mark saw his mistake, and tried reasoning. “Your mother kills plants. She can't even remember to feed a cat.”

“She's my mother! Don't you bad-mouth her. You've never liked her.”

“I'm just telling it the way it is! Cal—”

She took a step forward, thrusting her pointed jaw toward him; still on his stepladder, he looked down on her, the king of the dead in his wholesale-furnished palace, elevated, enthroned, wearing the chandelier like a megalomaniac's crown. She wanted to knock the props out from under him, bring him down where she could level her glare at him. Instead, she had to glower up into his nostrils as she said, “I can send my kids to visit with my own mother if I want to.”

“Cal, they're my kids too.” On his own Mark came down from his pedestal in order to make better eye contact. His embalming school dealing-with-the-distraught classes had taught him all about eye contact. He stood in front of her and kept sincere eye contact with her as he said, “You've told me a hundred times how she never gave a damn about you as a kid. Why do you want to send her Tammy and Owen?”

Cally could have sent the children elsewhere, at that point, with little or no argument from Mark. But she refused to see and press her advantage. She loathed Mark's pop-psychology games—how stupid did he think she was?—and she had discarded the original direction of the argument. She felt herself hell-bent on vindicating her family honor, as if her own worth somehow depended on where she came from. On having definitively come from somewhere.