Part 28 (1/2)

There were only one or two at first. Because there was no need for them to die until the sneakers were there, and they weren't there until I saw them there.

'Why me?' he asked clearly in the stillness.

The sneakers didn't move and no voice answered.

'I didn't know you, I never met you, I don't take the kind of stuff you sold and never did. So why me?'

One of the sneakers twitched. There was a papery rustle of dead flies. Then the sneaker - it was the mislaced one - settled back.

Tell pushed the stall door open. One hinge shrieked in properly gothic fas.h.i.+on. And there it was. Mystery guest, sign in, please, Tell thought.

The mystery guest sat on the John with one hand lying limply on his thigh. He was much as Tell had seen him in his dreams, with this difference: there was only the single hand. The other arm ended in a dusty maroon stump to which several more flies had adhered. It was only now that Tell realized he had never noticed Sneaker's pants (and didn't you always notice the way lowered pants bunched up over the shoes if you happened to glance under a bathroom stall? something helplessly comic, or just defenseless, or one on account of the other?). He hadn't because they were up, belt buckled, fly zipped. They were bell-bottoms. Tell tried to remember when bells had gone out of fas.h.i.+on and couldn't.

Above the bells Sneakers wore a blue chambray work-s.h.i.+rt with an appliqued peace symbol on each flap pocket. He had parted his hair on the right. Tell could see dead flies in the part. From the hook on the back of the door hung the topcoat of which Georgie had told him. There were dead flies on its slumped shoulders.

There was a grating sound not entirely unlike the one the hinge had made. It was the tendons in the dead man's neck, Tell realized. Sneakers was raising his head. Now he looked at him, and Tell saw with no sense of surprise whatever that, except for the two inches of pencil protruding from the socket of his right eye, it was the same face that looked out of the shaving mirror at him every day. Sneakers was him and he was Sneakers.

'I knew you were ready,' he told himself in the hoa.r.s.e toneless voice of a man who has not used his vocal cords in a long time.

'I'm not,' Tell said. 'Go away.'

To know the truth of it, I mean,' Tell told Tell, and the Tell standing in the stall doorway saw circles of white powder around the nostrils of the Tell sitting on the John. He had been using as well as pus.h.i.+ng, it seemed. He had come in here for a short snort; someone had opened the stall door and stuck a pencil in his eye. But who committed murder by pencil? Maybe only someone who committed the crime on . . .

'Oh, call it impulse,' Sneakers said in his hoa.r.s.e and toneless voice. 'The world-famous impulse crime.'

And Tell - the Tell standing in the stall doorway - understood that was exactly what it had been, no matter what Georgie might think. The killer hadn't looked under the door of the stall and Sneakers had forgotten to flip the little hinged latch. Two converging vectors of coincidence that, under other circ.u.mstances, would have called for no more than a mumbled 'Excuse me' and a hasty retreat. This time, however, something different had happened. This time it had led to a spur-of-the-moment murder.

'I didn't forget the latch,' Sneakers told him in his toneless husk of a voice. 'It was broken.'

Yes, all right, the latch had been broken. It didn't make any difference. And the pencil? Tell was positive the killer had been holding it in his hand when he pushed open the stall door, but not as a murder weapon. He had been holding it only because sometimes you wanted something to hold - a cigarette, a bunch of keys, a pen or pencil to fiddle with. Tell thought maybe the pencil had been in Sneakers's eye before either of them had any idea that the killer was going to put it there. Then, probably because the killer had also been a customer who knew what was in the briefcase, he had closed the door again, leaving his victim seated on the John, had exited the building, got . . . well, got something . . .

'He went to a hardware store five blocks over and bought a hacksaw,' Sneakers said in his toneless voice, and Tell suddenly realized it wasn't his face any more; it was the face of a man who looked about thirty, and vaguely native American. Tell's hair was gingery-blonde, and so had this man's been at first, but now it was a coa.r.s.e, dull black.

He suddenly realized something else - realized it the way you realize things in dreams: when people see ghosts, they always see themselves first. Why? For the same reason deep divers pause on their way to the surface, knowing that if they rise too fast they will get nitrogen bubbles in their blood and suffer, perhaps die, in agony. There were reality bends, as well.

'Perception changes once you get past what's natural, doesn't it?' Tell asked hoa.r.s.ely. 'And that's why life has been so weird for me lately. Something inside me's been gearing up to deal with . . . well, to deal with you.'

The dead man shrugged. Flies tumbled dryly from his shoulders. 'You tell me, Cabbage - you got the head on you.'

'All right,' Tell said. 'I will. He bought a hacksaw and the clerk put it in a bag for him and he came back. He wasn't a bit worried. After all, if someone had already found you, he'd know; there'd be a big crowd around the door. That's the way he'd figure. Maybe cops already, too. If things looked normal, he'd go on in and get the briefcase.'

'He tried the chain first,' the harsh voice said. 'When that didn't work, he used the saw to cut off my hand.'

They looked at each other. Tell suddenly realized he could see the toilet seat and the dirty white tiles of the back wall behind the corpse . . . the corpse that was, finally, becoming a real ghost.

'You know now?' it asked Tell. 'Why it was you?'

'Yes. You had to tell someone.'

'No - history is s.h.i.+t,' the ghost said, and then smiled a smile of such sunken malevolence that Tell was struck by horror. 'But knowing sometimes does some good . . . if you're still alive, that is.' It paused. 'You forgot to ask your friend Georgie something important, Tell. Something he might not have been so honest about.'

'What?' he asked, but was no longer sure he really wanted to know.

'Who my biggest third-floor customer was in those days. Who was into me for almost eight thousand dollars. Who had been cut off. Who went to a rehab in Rhode Island and got clean two months after I died. Who won't even go near the white powder these days? Georgie wasn't here back then, but I think he knows the answer to all those questions just the same. Because he hears people talk. Have you ever noticed the way people talk around George, as if he isn't there?'

Tell nodded.

'And there's no stutter in his brain. I think he knows, all right. He'd never tell, Tell, but I think he knows.'

The face began to change again, and now the features swimming out of that primordial fog were saturnine and finely chiseled. Paul Jannings's features.

'No,' Tell whispered.

'He got better than thirty grand,' the dead man with Paul's face said. 'It's how he paid for rehab . . . with plenty left over for all the vices he didn't give up.'

And suddenly the figure on the toilet seat was fading out entirely. A moment later it was gone. Tell looked down at the floor and saw the flies were gone, too.

He no longer needed to go to the bathroom. He went back into the control room, told Paul Jannings he was a worthless b.a.s.t.a.r.d, paused just long enough to relish the expression of utter stunned surprise on Paul's face, and then walked out the door. There would be other jobs; he was good enough at what he did to be able to count on that. Knowing it, however, was something of a revelation. Not the day's first, but definitely the day's best.

When he got back to his apartment, he went straight through the living room and to the John. His need to relieve himself had returned - had become rather pressing, in fact - but that was all right; that was just another part of being alive. 'A regular man is a happy man,' he said to the white tile walls. He turned a little, grabbed the current issue of Rolling Stone from where he'd left it on the toilet tank, opened it to the Random Notes column, and began to read.

You Know They Got a h.e.l.l of a Band.

When Mary woke up, they were lost. She knew it, and Clark knew it, too, although he didn't want to admit it at first; he was wearing his I'm p.i.s.sed So Don't f.u.c.k with Me look, where his mouth kept getting smaller and smaller until you thought it might disappear altogether. And 'lost' wasn't how Clark would put it; Clark would say they had 'taken a wrong turn somewhere,' and it would just about kill him to go even that far.

They'd set off from Portland the day before. Clark worked for a computer company - one of the giants - and it had been his idea that they should see something of the Oregon, which lay outside the pleasant, but humdrum upper-middle-cla.s.s suburb of Portland where they lived - an area that was known to its inhabitants as Software City. 'They say it's beautiful out there in the boonies,' he had told her. 'You want to go take a look? I've got a week, and the transfer rumors have already started. If we don't see some of the real Oregon, I think the last sixteen months are going to be nothing but a black hole in my memory.'

She had agreed willingly enough (school had let out ten days before and she had no summer cla.s.ses to teach), enjoying the pleasantly haphazard, catch-as-catch-can feel of the trip, forgetting that spur-of-the-moment vacations often ended up just like this, with the vacationers lost along some back road which blundered its way up the overgrown b.u.t.t-crack of nowhere. It was an adventure, she supposed - at least you could look at it that way if you wanted - but she had turned thirty-two in January, and she thought thirty-two was maybe just a little too old for adventures. These days her idea of a really nice vacation was a motel with a clean pool, bathrobes on the beds, and a hair-dryer that worked in the bathroom.

Yesterday had been fine, though, the countryside so gorgeous that even Clark had several times been awed to an unaccustomed silence. They had spent the night at a nice country inn just west of Eugene, had made love not once but twice (something she was most definitely not too old to enjoy), and this morning had headed south, meaning to spend the night in Klamath Falls. They had begun the day on Oregon State Highway 58, and that was all right, but then, over lunch in the town of Oakridge, Clark had suggested they get off the main highway, which was pretty well clogged with RVs and logging trucks.

'Well, I don't know . . . ' Mary spoke with the dubiousness of a woman who has heard many such proposals from her man, and endured the consequences of a few. 'I'd hate to get lost out there, Clark. It looks pretty empty.' She had tapped one neatly shaped nail on a spot of green marked Boulder Creek Wilderness Area. 'That word is wilderness, as in no gas stations, no rest rooms, and no motels.'

'Aw, come on,' he said, pus.h.i.+ng aside the remains of his chicken-fried steak. On the juke, Steve Earle and the Dukes were singing 'Six Days on the Road,' and outside the dirt-streaked windows, a bunch of bored-looking kids were doing turns and pop-outs on their skateboards. They looked as if they were just marking time out there, waiting to be old enough to blow this town for good, and Mary knew exactly how they felt. 'Nothing to it, babe. We take 58 a few more miles east . . . then turn south on State Road 42 . . . see it?'

'Uh huh.' She also saw that, while Highway 58 was a fat red line, State Road 42 was only a squiggle of black thread. But she'd been full of meatloaf and mashed potatoes, and hadn't wanted to argue with Clark's pioneering instinct while she felt like a boa constrictor that has just swallowed a goat. What she'd wanted, in fact, was to tilt back the pa.s.senger seat of their lovely old Mercedes 'and take a snooze.

'Then,' he pushed on, 'there's this road here. It's not numbered, so it's probably only a county road, but it goes right down to Toketee Falls. And from there it's only a hop and a jump over to U.S. 97. So - what do you think?'

'That you'll probably get us lost,' she'd said - a wisecrackshe rather regretted later. 'But I guess we'll be all right as long as you can find a place wide enough to turn the Princess around in.'

'Sold American!' he said, beaming, and pulled his chicken-fried steak back in front of him. He began to eat again, congealed gravy and all.

'Uck-a-doo,' she said, holding one hand up in front of her face and wincing. 'How can you?'

'It's good,' Clark said in tones so m.u.f.fled only a wife could have understood him. 'Besides, when one is traveling, one should eat the native dishes.'

'It looks like someone sneezed a mouthful of snuff onto a very old hamburger,' she said. 'I repeat: uck-a-doo.'