668, page 6
Eventually he launched into the various varying rituals and ceremonies that would, if done properly, guide the Older Deities to Langford Place where they, the dedicated acolytes, would prostrate themselves before them, the Older Deities, and generally make them, the Older Deities, feel welcome before they, the Older Deities, smashed almost everything to a pulp. Except the dedicated acolytes.
The incredible psychic emanations from these rites and Saturday night meetings were evidently responsible for the civic decline of Hamtucket; the occasional foray into sacrificial victim gathering was clearly responsible for the declining population, less those who had moved away because of the rites and meetings which had devastated the town’s economy; and the abrupt increase in natural disasters such as earthquakes and hurricanes could only be explained by the trans-universal vibrations created when the Older Deities responded with enthusiasm to the call of their new high priest.
Star paths had been charted.
Planetary orbits had been corrected and noted.
Calendars had been developed, discarded, redeveloped, burned, further explored in initial development, tested and revamped and tested again.
Finally the work was done.
At the annual summer solstice meeting and fried chicken barbecue behind John Laste’s house, Maclemmon announced the time and date the Older Deities would arrive. And he also figured he knew, within six inches or so, where they would land.
The dedicated acolytes trembled with excitement.
However, Maclemmon in his madness explained that they needed one more victim. One more innocent lamb to the slaughter. One more sign so that the Older Deities would know that he truly was their earthly high priest on Earth, and that it was he who had shown them the way to the True Path of Landing, assuming there were no clouds. No rain date had been set.
Then, horribly, at least to the dedicated bunch of acolytes, Maclemmon was found dead in the middle of the street, his hair turned white, his skin blackened as if burned by a thousand matches or a blowtorch, and his lips parted in what one acolyte whose dedication had become a little shaky lately insisted was an incantation which proved that Maclemmon had been about to betray them all and bring the Older Deities in much earlier than was fashionable for this sort of thing.
A hasty convocation of the faithful decided, however, that they might as well go on with it since they couldn’t stop it anyway, and as long as there was an heir to the estate, the heir might as well be the final sacrifice.
Kent Montana was to be the offering.
His blood was to fill the Sacred Soup Bowl of the Older Deities just in case they were thirsty from their long journey out of space.
His bones would be their meal.
His thighs would be their sofas.
His heart would be their snack.
His lungs would be the bellows to keep their interstellar fire aflame.
And when that was all over and the Older Deities sated, they would kill him.
And once he was dead, things he had not been meant to know would come to pass without his knowledge because he was, in the final analysis, dead.
Thus spaketh Hester Kerwin, who ought to know because it was she, and she alone, who had been Howmaster Maclemmon’s lover, confidante, and Keeper of the Bingomomicron whenever Maclemmon didn’t have it, which was hardly ever.
In point of fact, she had only had it once.
It had been enough.
3
Kent Montana stood up, bowed to the astonished housekeeper, and marched purposefully to the front door without looking back. He was no fool most of the time; he knew full well that if he left the grounds, he would forfeit everything. He also knew full well that if he stayed in this unsavory manse, he would also forfeit everything because he’d be dead and therefore in no condition to complain. About anything. Weighing the death of a lifelong dream against the death of a long life proved, in the short run, to be no contest, mixed metaphorically speaking.
He opened the door.
“Be … ware,” said the Russian peasant, clinging to his ironing board on the front porch.
Kent looked down at him from both height and station. “You’re nuts.”
“The indigenous crow flies backward this night,” the little man continued, undeterred, and unconcerned that his cloth cap was rippling. “If you see him, you will die.”
Hester hastened into the hall and gasped when she saw the Russian lurking so openly on the threshold.
Kent maintained his composure. “Crows are black.”
The Russian blinked stupidly.
“Even if they were flying backward at night, I wouldn’t be able to see them.”
“Him,” the Russian lurker on the threshold corrected with an upraised finger, although, technically speaking, he wasn’t lurking anymore since everyone could see him and he wasn’t trying to hide. Or lurk. Just forewarn. “Him. There’s only one.”
“Well, him is black, I wouldn’t be able to see him, and besides, crows don’t fly at night.”
“Ah.” The Russian cocked his head as if listening to the ironing board. “I… see.”
Kent smiled patiently.
The Russian smiled back with what few teeth he had left, and those were black as crows, tipped his cap, and backed down the steps to the sidewalk.
Kent closed the door.
Hester peered through the triangular leaded glass pane beside the door. “He told me yesterday the flamingos were running back to Capistrano. I told him they were sparrows, and he said he didn’t know sparrows were pink.” She shook her head at the complexities of Man, then glared at him. “Hey, man, you were going to leave.”
“Only in that I am going to live,” he explained.
“Well, listen here, harken, and pay attention, Mr. Know-It-All Baron from a foreign country,” she snapped indignantly. “You can leave, or you can stay, or you can dither here all night, it doesn’t make any difference. The Older Deities are coming, and you can’t run far enough to avoid them.”
“Houston,” he said.
She frowned, then scowled. “Is that some kind of upper class British humor thing?”
Guess not, he thought.
And I suppose, he continued as long as he was thinking and there wasn’t much else going on at the moment, that if I do leave, all of this will be damned inconvenient for my conscience. Assuming the world is around long enough to let me have a conscience. The question, among others, is: Can I live with it? Can I face myself cheerfully each sunny morning without screaming, knowing that the utter destruction of half the civilized world, and France, is all my fault because I did nothing to prevent it? Can I film a film for all to enjoy when all to enjoy aren’t? Can I afford to let all those people die when they could be buying tickets instead?
What kind of a man are you, Kent Montana, which isn’t your real name but who the hell cares, if you’re going to die at dawn?
What sort of son did your mother raise, other than an extremely cautious one?
What kind of supposedly sensitive human being are you that you would allow other human beings to die horrible, terrible, gory, and undoubtedly disgusting deaths at the hands, or whatever, of prehistorically deified creatures from outer space who used to rule this world and want another shot at it?
And what, exactly, lurks behind all those pale yellow ruffles?
Hester tapped his chest with a forefinger.
He shook his head quickly. “Huh?”
“If you ask yourself any more questions,” she told him sympathetically, “you’ll faint.”
He laughed. “I have a tendency,” he confessed.
“I noticed.”
As if a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders and dropped on his head, he clapped his hands once, rubbed his palms together briskly, and said, “All right, Miss Kerwin, all right, you win. Lead me to the Bingomomicron without delay. We’ll do our duty and let Howmaster know he didn’t have the last word after all.”
She threw her arms around him.
He embraced her.
She kissed him gratefully.
He kissed her back, gratefully but not the same, and slightly puzzled because her lips, while they were very nice lips indeed, were also somewhat familiar lips beyond the fact that they were, unquestionably, real lips.
However, before he could kiss her again just to check the validity of his perceptions, she pulled away reluctantly, glanced through the hall window again, and said, “But what about John and Marsha and Caroline and Rex and Wally and Quentin and Ivan and Pilandra, and maybe even Sheila?”
“Rex?”
She checked her wristwatch. “Damn, it’s already long after eight. They’ll be here in two hours, more or less.” Panic flitted across her eyes and made her blink. “My god, so much to do, so little time.”
He smiled and took her arms gently to calm her. “It’s all right, Miss Kerwin. Don’t worry about it. We’ll just have a surprise for them, that’s all.” A thoughtful, perilously close to decisive, nod. “But first we must dress for this sham occasion. We cannot, of course, let them know that we know that what they know isn’t true, because we know something they don’t know.” A wink. “I don’t suppose there’s any food?”
“I was going to order out.”
“Ah.” He reached down to pick up his suitcase, and realized with a start that it wasn’t there. Not only wasn’t it there, it wasn’t even in the house because he’d left it back at the Gutted Oyster. “Damn.”
Someone knocked on the door.
They exchanged nervous glances.
The knocking grew louder.
Kent took a deep breath, tucked it into his lungs, and answered the summons.
“Actually,” said the little Russian, handing over Kent’s suitcase with his free hand, “it was more sideways like.”
Kent closed the door.
One of those nights, he figured; it was going to be, aside from die sacrifice and the Older Deities, one of those goddamn nights.
Hester, seeing that he teetered dangerously on the verge of thinking again, snatched the suitcase from his grip, picked up the flashlight on the first step of the staircase, and said without a trace of shame, “Walk this way.”
Kent glanced at the ceiling, pleading fervently for strength, courage, and a little taste for a change. Then he followed her to the second floor which was, essentially, a large, long rectangular hall off of which, in the center of each wall, was a room. She brought him to the back room, put down his suitcase, handed him the flashlight, told him not to be too long, and vanished into the dark.
Kent wasted no time theorizing or ruminating, much less looking for a place to hang his clothes. If he was to get out of here alive, and with Stellar Artists Productions in his pocket, he had to assume the mantle of a man of action. It damn near choked him, but he managed to get it on anyway, then flipped open the suitcase, untied the silken ties that held his suits and trousers and shirts and socks and underwear snugly into place, stripped, shivered, and proceeded, in time-honored baronial fashion, to pull his jeans on one leg at a time. He had tried the other way once and had nearly broken his back. Then he put his shirt on one sleeve at a time, socks one foot at a time, sturdy western boots in the usual manner, which meant a lot of hopping about on one foot and slamming into the walls, and finally, a bulky tartan cardigan which would serve not only to guard against the fact that the house had no heat to speak of, and so he said nothing, but also to provide him with a conveniently deep pocket for the especially manufactured Aberdeen revolver he took from a secret compartment in his suitcase lid.
One never knew, when one was going face to whatever with the Older Deities, when one would need something to shoot them with.
And if they didn’t show up, there was always that damned Russian.
As soon as he was finished, he retied the ties, closed the suitcase, stuck it in a comer so no one would trip over it, and stepped into the hall.
Aside, from the usual creaking and settling of old, tired wood, the house was silent.
Except, unfortunately, for the wind. It was pretty loud, screaming and howling in the eaves the way it was, rattling the windows and doors, and puffing down the chimney.
Other than that, however, it was silent.
Caution, and a carefree sense of in for a penny, what the hell, led him reluctantly to explore the other rooms, which were empty, dusty, and dark.
Then, suddenly and without warning, he noticed a fifth door.
He squinted at it, looked up, and realized it must lead to the attic.
Did he, he wondered, want to go up there?
Was such a thorough investigation of the house’s inner reaches absolutely, positively, unquestionably necessary in order to assure his and Hester’s safety during the coming trials and tribulations?
“Hey!” Hester called from the bottom of the stairs. “In case you didn’t know, there’s a—”
“Don’t bother,” he told her sourly, and opened the door.
Meanwhile…
John Laste opened the bedroom closet, pressed a small button just to the right of the frame, and pushed through the two hundred tailored suits arranged in pinstripe order into a secret room at the back. There he examined the assembled arsenal on the wall. His private collection. It had cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years, but the comfort the weapons gave him just in the knowing they were here was well worth it, except for the tax when he purchased them legitimately and wrote them off as a business expense.
He would need something tonight.
Not as protection against the others, because they were weak and venal and disgusting little creatures who would be taken care of in due course.
No.
He needed something to use against Kent Montana.
It took him fifteen minutes before he settled on the perfect instrument.
After examining it closely to be sure its components were in working order, he tucked it neatly into his inside evening jacket pocket, especially made to conceal such a weapon. Then he turned off the light, pushed back through the suits, pressed the button, and stepped into the bedroom.
“Darling,” Marsha said, stepping out of her clothes closet and fussing with her lace and silk bodice because the emerald one had been too cold, “were you in the weapons room again?”
Sweat trickled down his spine.
“Honestly.” She bent over her vanity, patted her hair, smudged out a wrinkle, and started for the hall. “You men are just like little boys, aren’t you? Always playing with things that can hurt you.”
He stared after her.
There was a cautionary signal in that seemingly innocuous statement. He knew it. And he knew that it must have something to do with his clandestine affair with Caroline Putney. Unless, he thought as he hurried after her, it had something to do with his secret financial dealings with kindly Kenilworth Smith. Of course, it may have nothing at all to do with any of it. It may just be a simple, potent warning that she knew all about his brief furtive dalliance with that dumbass actor kid’s mother, and she was ready to forgive him.
Or, he thought as he stumbled down the stairs where Marsha was already waiting with their pre-dinner and sacrifice cocktail, it was a threat.
Damn, he thought as he marveled aloud at his wife’s beauty and taste, women can be so sneaky sometimes.
Meanwhile…
Wally Putney adjusted his clip-on club tie so that it cleverly concealed the Velcro strip that held his nylon tight-mesh shirt together. Then he slipped into his Oxford loafers, fluffed the tassels, checked himself in the mirror, and decided that he was about as ready as he’d ever be.
He was nervous.
So much was at stake tonight, so many disparate yet common futures riding on the back of one man, that he hoped they wouldn’t serve anything really greasy, or he’d probably embarrass himself.
No. Never mind. Nothing embarrassed him anymore. Nothing had since those nightmarish years in grade school, where he had first gotten used to the unthinking cruelty of others as they teased him about his weight, his myopia, his intelligence, his mother, his father, his four brothers and three sisters, his fortune, his dog, his parakeet, his stubbed nose, his knocked knees, his shoes, his airplane, his limpid hair, and his stutter. He had outgrown most of it now, except for the stubbed nose and the limpid hair, but he was still crushed by the weight of a complex so complex that complexity was a mere word in the words that described his complex psychological affliction.
He went downstairs.
He stepped into the living room just as Caroline switched off the television and swirled around to greet him.
He sighed with both delight and melancholy. She was so beautiful, so ethereal, so seductive and yet so innocent in her pink chiffon gown and black velvet choker with the diamond in the middle. At that moment there wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do for her. Too bad she was a slut.
“Wally!” she said delightedly.
He preened at her blatant adoration. “Caroline, darling, we’re going to be late if we don’t hurry. We still have our evening perambulation to do. Stimulating the appetite, remember? Good for the juices.”
She pouted. “Wally.”
He smiled benevolently and checked the kitchen to be sure Puffball had enough to eat, checked the locks on all the doors and windows, and checked to be sure he had the weapon safely tucked into his trouser pocket. Caroline hadn’t mentioned it all evening, but he knew she was aware that he had it. It was he, after all, who had volunteered to do the necessary deed since he couldn’t bear the thought of trying to get all that blood out of all that chiffon. She had, fortunately, seen the wisdom of it, especially when he had demonstrated how proficient he was with the instrument.
“Wally!” she had gasped.
God, it felt good!
“Wally?” she chided now, pointing to the emerald watch on her wrist.
“All right, dear,” he said. He fetched their coats, helped her into his, and opened the front door.
The fog had thickened.
The wind blew like a son of a bitch.
