Part 34 (1/2)

He should have worn his jacket. It was that kind of late winter cold that was damp, not solid anymore. Back in Fredonia, you'd be able to feel the thaw in things. But this was a long way from thaw. This was going to be cold like soiled sheets or something. Like sleeping in your own wet laundry.

Suddenly, crouching in the dark at the side of the OTT house, he felt sadder than he'd ever felt in his life. On his knees. In the dirt. He found himself remembering, stupidly, his mother of all people: Her ankles.

Traveling toward those ankles at high speed on his hands and knees because he couldn't walk. Because every time he tried to walk he fell on his f.u.c.king a.s.s. Because he was a baby. Why wouldn't she pick him up? He was her baby.

He shook his head. How idiotic was that? Thinking about his mother? Right now?

(”I've f.u.c.ked Nicole,” Perry had said. ”Half of f.u.c.king G.o.dwin Hall has f.u.c.ked your virgin girlfriend, you stupid, stupid, deaf, blind, f.u.c.king idiot.”) He was behind familiar shrubbery, he realized-right where he'd been that other night, when he'd gotten tossed out of OTT. He put his face to the little window and looked down (blinking, blinking) at the whole tableau of the bas.e.m.e.nt again.

This time, he hadn't really expected to see anyone.

There was no music. No strobe light. He'd convinced himself that he was right, that the whole house was either an illusion, or empty. There was no way a whole house full of girls all dressed up for their Spring Event could be so still, and silent.

It took a while for his eyes to adjust to the darkness well enough to make out the scene: They were standing so motionless they'd blended into the atoms around them, it seemed. They were as gray as the air.

Sorority girls made of air, made of shadows. They were all in black, with their heads bowed, and the only bright thing Craig could see at all was the glinting silver handles on the coffin they were standing around. In the darkness.

But then he pressed his face closer to the window, and he could see that, in the coffin, there was girl. She must have been wearing white, because she was brighter than anything around her, but the darkness was so complete that she seemed to absorb it. She must have been the one they were raising from the dead. (Ridiculous. Pathetic.) He was about to stand up, just leave, when he heard what sounded like vague, dull, stupidly girlish chanting under him.

Girlish monks.

He snorted, hearing that.

Stupid game. Stupid hazing. Stupid him for being here, for caring so much, for crouching down behind a bush trying to catch a glimpse of his girlfriend, who was standing around a coffin in a bas.e.m.e.nt pretending to raise some sorority sister from the dead.

And then, there that guy was: The omnipresent EMT.

He was standing in a corner, in the shadows, the way he always was.

Craig remembered Nicole saying, ”What's EMT stand for?” Denying she'd ever even seen the guy before. He heard Perry say it again: ”You f.u.c.king idiot. You blind a.s.shole.”

He wanted to walk away, but it was mesmerizing, too-the sound of their voices. It was like music bubbling out of the ground. It was the coldness seeping through his jeans. It sounded ancient, and completely new. He could see it very clearly now, the whole thing in the bas.e.m.e.nt. This was no game. The girl in that coffin was dead. The silky inner lining of the casket they'd placed her in was the same color as her blue-gray, blue-white skin. Yes, she was wearing white, but the white had turned to a deathly nothingness, a bluish absence. Craig stared, and stared, and held his breath. s.h.i.+t. Had they killed her? Did they know she was dead? Was he the only one who could see clearly from where he looked down at her through the bas.e.m.e.nt window that the girl was actually dead?

Did they have their eyes closed? Why was the f.u.c.king EMT just sitting there in the corner? Were they so caught up in their chanting that they couldn't see the girl was dead?

Before he even knew what he was doing, Craig was slamming his fists against the flimsy gla.s.s until he'd broken it, and was falling into it, and the girls were all screaming and running and shrieking, just like the time before when he'd run down the bas.e.m.e.nt steps, except this time the screaming had nothing to do with him.

Part Five.

83.

”Something happened to him,” Perry said, ”after the accident. I know Craig. He can be an a.s.shole, but he's one of the smartest people I've ever met. He remembers everything. He can tell you all the presidents in order, their terms of office. He won't admit it, but he can. He's not going to forget what happened on that night.”

Jeff Blackhawk's car rattled around them disconcertingly, but Mira felt oddly comforted by the rattling, and the smell of it: the Krispy Kreme doughnuts and old French fries. When they'd left her apartment Jeff was watching Sesame Street with the twins, a show Clark insisted was the opiate of the ma.s.ses. (”This s.h.i.+t's supposed to turn parents into as.e.xual zombies,” he'd said when Mira suggested that a minimal amount of PBS might help the boys with some language acquisition.) ”Look!” Jeff was shouting at the television, pointing. ”It's Elmo!”

”Elmo!” the twins shouted back, as if it were a name they'd known all their lives and had only been waiting until this moment to call out.

Jeff wouldn't even let Mira thank him-not for lending her his car, not for watching her children. ”Just get some great material for your book,” he'd said, ”and thank me in the acknowledgments. It'll be my claim to fame.”

Now Perry Edwards was sitting beside her, directing her to the lanes she needed to be in to get to the exits they needed to take to get to Bad Axe to find the mortician who'd accepted the mangled remains of Nicole Werner, and who had slid them into the white coffin Perry had helped to carry down the aisle of the Bad Axe Trinity Lutheran Church on the day of her funeral.

Mira said, ”Of course, there are head injuries that will cause selective amnesia-”

”But there were no head injuries,” Perry said. ”They did a CT scan. They did ten CT scans.”

Mira stared out Jeff's cracked winds.h.i.+eld. It was a small crack on the left side, making its way across the gla.s.s slowly but perceptibly enough that she could gauge the progress it had made since the last time she'd been in the car. Two inches. In four weeks, at this rate, it would traverse the winds.h.i.+eld.

She tried to think.

Mira had seen skulls.

Plenty of them. Skulls in Romania. Skulls in morgues. Skulls in long, chaotic piles and heaps in the Paris catacombs: Walking through that underground full of bones, Mira had been amazed. So many dead. She'd let her hand drift over the hundreds and thousands of skulls, breathing in the smell she knew was theirs (must, dust) while the dank ceiling dripped ancient water onto her head, and she'd let it sink in how truly flimsy that helmet that protected everything was. That fragile container of dreams and memories and longings and desire. Of everything. One well-placed blow with a tree branch could shatter it all.

The impression had never left her. When she was seven months pregnant with the twins, she'd told Clark (who'd rolled his eyes), ”I want them to wear helmets when they're old enough to ride bikes. And they won't ever be playing soccer.”

But, if there'd been no head injury?

There was nothing, Mira knew, that a CT scan couldn't show. If there was no head injury, no brain damage, how was it that Craig Clements-Rabbitt remembered nothing of the accident that had killed Nicole?

”Well,” Mira finally said, ”there are substances. Drugs. Injectables. There's something called the 'zombie drug.' Scopolamine. At high doses it kills you, but at lower doses it induces amnesia. Prost.i.tutes have been known to use it to drug and rob their customers. In some countries they claim it's used to drug mothers and take their babies, traffic them to adoption agencies. They say it makes people so docile they'll help you burglarize their own houses-and long after the drug is out of their systems, they still have no recollection of the events at all.”

Perry was running his hand over his head. Mira had noticed the buzz cut was growing out. It was as dark as she'd thought it would be.

”They used to give Scopolamine to women during childbirth,” she went on. ”Probably your grandmother was given it-just woke up, and they told her she'd had a baby. It completely blocks the formation of memory. You can't even hypnotize the person to help them remember what happened, the way you can with date rape drugs, because the memory is simply never recorded.

”They think it's been used for voodoo for centuries in Haiti. It's given to victims who are then buried alive and then dug up and told they've died and been exhumed as zombies-and they believe it. They're willing to live the rest of their lives as slaves or prost.i.tutes or servants because they're convinced they died and were brought back to life.”

Perry had stopped rubbing his head. Now he was drumming his fingertips on his knee. The jeans he was wearing were creased so nicely Mira thought maybe he'd never worn them before. It was hard to imagine a boy his age ironing his own jeans, but if any boy would, Perry Edwards would be the boy. He said, ”Before he left that night, in Lucas's car, we had an argument. No,” he interrupted himself, ”we had an actual fight. A fight that ended up with him with a b.l.o.o.d.y nose and us on the floor. He never said a word about it again, either like it never happened or, like after everything else that happened, it didn't matter. I've never known if he just doesn't remember. How do you know about this drug?”