Part 48 (2/2)

'For us, yeah. Biggest I've ever seen.'

'Does it make you nervous? Having so many of your people in the same place?'

'No,' Duke said simply. 'Robbie can smell bats. He . . . shhhh, here we go.'

Robbie Delray, smiling, raised his hands, and the babble quieted almost at once. Pearson saw Duke's look of adoration on many other faces. Nowhere did he see less than respect.

'Thanks for coming,' Delray said quietly. 'I think we've finally got what some of us have been waiting four or five years for.'

This sparked spontaneous applause. Delray let it go on for a few moments, looking around the room, beaming. Finally he held his hands up for quiet. Pearson discovered a disconcerting thing as the applause (in which he had not partic.i.p.ated) tapered off: he didn't like Duke's friend and mentor. He supposed he might be experiencing a touch of jealousy - now that Delray was doing his thing at the front of the room, Duke Rhinemann had clearly forgotten Pearson existed - but he didn't think that was all of it. There was something smug and self-congratulatory in that hands-up, be-quiet gesture; something that expressed a slick politician's almost unconscious contempt for his audience.

Oh, get off it, Pearson told himself. You can't know anything like that.

True, quite true, and Pearson tried to sweep the intuition out of his mind, to give Delray a chance, if only for Duke's sake.

'Before we begin,' Delray went on, 'I'd like to introduce you to a brand-new member of the group: Brandon Pearson, from deepest, darkest Medford. Stand up for a second or two, Brandon, and let your new friends see what you look like.'

Pearson gave Duke a startled look. Duke grinned, shrugged, then pushed Pearson's shoulder with the heel of his hand. 'Go on, they won't bite.'

Pearson was not so sure of that. Nevertheless he got up, face hot, all too aware of the people craning around to check him out. He was most particularly aware of the smile on Lester Olson's face - like his hair, it was somehow too dazzling not to be suspect.

His fellow Ten O'Clock People began to applaud again, only this time it was him they were applauding: Brandon Pearson, middle-echelon banker and stubborn smoker. He found himself wondering again if he hadn't somehow found his way into an AA meeting that was strictly for (not to mention run by) psychos. When he dropped back into his seat, his cheeks were bright red.

'I could have done without that very well, thanks,' he muttered to Duke.

'Relax,' Duke said, still grinning. 'It's the same for everybody. And you gotta love it, man, don't you? I mean, s.h.i.+t, it's so nineties.'

'It's nineties, all right, but I don't gotta love it,' Pearson said. His heart was pounding too hard and the flush in his cheeks wasn't going away. It felt, in fact, as if it was deepening. What is this? he wondered. A hot-flash? Male menopause? What?

Robbie Delray bent over, spoke briefly to the bespectacled brunette woman sitting next to Olson, glanced at his watch, then stepped back to the covered easel and faced the group again. His freckled, open face made him look like a Sunday choirboy apt to get up to all sorts of harmless d.i.c.kens - frogs down the backs of girls' blouses, short-sheeting baby brother's bed, that sort of thing - during the other six days of the week.

'Thanks, folks, and welcome to our place, Brandon,' he said.

Pearson muttered that he was glad to be here, but it wasn't true - what if his fellow Ten O'Clock People turned out to be a bunch of raving New Age a.s.sholes? Suppose he ended up feeling about them as he did about most of the guests he saw on Oprah, or the well-dressed religious nuts who used to pop up on The PTL Club at the drop of a hymn? What then?

Oh, quit it, he told himself. You like Duke, don't you?

Yes, he did like Duke, and he thought he was probably going to like Moira Richardson, too . . . once he got past the s.e.xy outer layer and was able to appreciate the person inside, that was. There would undoubtedly be others he'd end up liking as well; he wasn't that hard to please. And he had forgotten, at least temporarily, the underlying reason they were all here in this bas.e.m.e.nt: the batpeople. Given the threat, he could put up with a few nerds and New Agers, couldn't he?

He supposed he could.

Good! Great! Now just sit back, relax, and watch the parade.

He sat back, but found he couldn't relax, at least not completely. Part of it was being the new boy. Part of it was his strong dislike for this sort of forced social interaction - as a rule, he viewed people who used his first name on short notice and without invitation as hijackers of a sort. And part of it . . .

Oh, stop! Don't you get it yet? You have no choice in the matter!

An unpleasant thought, but one it was hard to dispute. He had crossed a line that morning when he had casually turned his head and seen what was really living inside Douglas Keefer's clothes these days. He supposed he had known at least that much, but it wasn't until tonight that he had realized how final that line was, how small was the chance of his ever being able to cross back to the other side of it again. To the safe side.

No, he couldn't relax. At least not yet.

'Before we get down to business, I want to thank you all for coming on such short notice,' Robbie Delray said. 'I know it's not always easy to break away without raising eyebrows, and sometimes it's downright dangerous. I don't think it'd be exaggerating to say that we've been through a lot of h.e.l.l together . . . a lot of high water, too . . . '

A polite, murmured chuckle from the audience. Most of them seemed to be hanging on Delray's every word.

' . . . and no one knows any better than I do how difficult it is to be one of the few people who actually know the truth. Since I saw my first bat, five years ago . . . '

Pearson was already fidgeting, experiencing the one sensation he would not have expected tonight: boredom. For the day's strange pa.s.sage to have ended as it was ending, with a bunch of people sitting in a bookstore bas.e.m.e.nt and listening to a freckled housepainter give what sounded like a bad Rotary Club speech . . .

Yet the others seemed utterly enrapt; Pearson glanced around again to confirm this to himself. Duke's eyes shone with that look of total fascination - a look similar to the look Pearson's childhood dog, Buddy, had worn when Pearson got its food-dish out of the cupboard under the sink. Cameron Stevens and Moira Richardson sat with their arms around each other and gazed at Robbie Delray with starry absorption. Ditto Janet Brightwood. Ditto the rest of the little group around the Bunn-O-Matic.

Ditto everyone, he thought, except Brand Pearson. Come on, sweetheart; try to get with the program.

Except he couldn't, and in a weird way it was almost as if Robbie Delray couldn't, either. Pearson looked back from his scan of the audience just in time to see Delray s.n.a.t.c.h another quick glance at his watch. It was a gesture Pearson had grown very familiar with since he'd joined the Ten O'Clock People. He guessed that the man was counting down the time to his next cigarette.

As Delray rambled on, some of his other listeners also began to fall out a little - Pearson heard m.u.f.fled coughs and a few shuffling feet. Delray sailed on regardless, seemingly unaware that, loved resistance leader or no, he was now in danger of overstaying his welcome.

' . . . so we've managed the best we can,' he was saying, 'and we've taken our losses as best we can, too, hiding our tears the way I guess those who fight in the secret wars have always had to, all the time holding onto our belief that a day will come when the secret is out, and we'll - '

- Boink, another quick peek at the old Casio - ' - be able to share our knowledge with all the men and women out there who look but do not see.'

Savior of His Race? Pearson thought. Jesus please us. This guy sounds more like Jesse Helms during a filibuster.

He glanced at Duke and was encouraged to see that, while Duke was still listening, he was s.h.i.+fting in his seat and showing signs of coming out of his trance.

Pearson touched his face again and found it was still hot. He lowered the tips of his fingers to his carotid artery and felt his pulse - still racing. It wasn't the embarra.s.sment at having to stand up and be looked over like a Miss America finalist now; the others had forgotten his existence, at least temporarily. No, it was something else. Not a good something else, either. ' . . . we've stuck with it and stuck to it, we've done the footwork even when the music wasn't to our taste . . . ' Delray was droning.

It's what you felt before, Brand Pearson told himself. It's the fear that you've stumbled into a group of people sharing the same lethal hallucination.

'No, it's not,' he muttered. Duke turned toward him, eyebrows raised, and Pearson shook his head. Duke turned his attention back to the front of the room.

He was scared, all right, but not of having fallen in with some weird thrill-kill cult. Maybe the people in this room - some of them, at least - had killed, maybe that interlude in the Newburyport barn had happened, but the energy necessary for such desperate endeavors was not evident here tonight, in this roomful of yuppies being watched over by Das.h.i.+ell Hammett. All he felt here was sleepy half-headedness, the sort of partial attention that enabled people to get through dull speeches like this without falling asleep or walking out.

'Robbie, get to the point!' some kindred spirit shouted from the back of the room, and there was nervous laughter.

Robbie Delray shot an irritated glance in the direction the voice had come from, then smiled and checked his watch again. 'Yeah, okay,' he said. 'I got rambling, I admit it. Lester, will you help me a sec?'

Lester got up. The two men went behind a stack of book cartons and came back carrying a large leather trunk by the straps. They set it down to the right of the easel.

'Thanks, Les,' Robbie said.

Lester nodded and sat back down.

'What's in the case?' Pearson murmured into Duke's ear.

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