Chapter twelve

I took her home. She sat in the beanbag chair. I stood by the window, staring out at the street. I studied the faces of the people passing. I couldn’t help it.

A truck rumbled past.

“It’s noisy, this city,” Susannah said.

“You get used to it.”

“I don’t think so.”

I didn’t answer. After a while I said: “I have to go out.”

She pushed at her hair distractedly. Her lips trembled. “Am I unbearable?”

“No, no.”

“This isn’t what I’m like at all.”

I nodded.

“Do you think …? Maybe I need a doctor.”

“I don’t know. If you do, so do I.”

“I’m just so …”

“I know.”

“… scared.”

“Yes.”

“I mean, all the time, Michael.”

“It’s going to be all right.”

She nodded. “It’s written in the Big Book.”

“That’s it.”

“Okay,” she said.

“You’ll be fine. I’ll leave the number and the address.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“The machine’ll answer the phone if it rings.”

“Yes.”

“If it’s me, you’ll hear me talking. Just pick up the phone and the machine’ll shut off.”

She nodded.

I kissed her. I headed for the door.

“It’s getting chilly,” she said. “Don’t forget your coat.”

I got my coat, and left without looking at her.

It was full dark now. It was chilly, like she’d said. I walked across town and caught a subway. Express to Times Square, the Broadway up to Lincoln Center. When I climbed up into the air, the center was all around me, vaunting white stone and arching windows, appointments of red and gold inside, and outside, the fountain, lit up, with the bright water rising and falling as on a breath. The theatergoers coming out of the buildings, arm in arm. I could hear cab doors clunking shut. I could hear women laughing, and the sound was like bells. I dug my hands into my pockets, hunched my shoulders and headed uptown.

Lincoln Center fell behind me. That and Tower Records and McGIade’s café were the last signs of civilization. Another block up and I came to the network. It was five or six buildings in a row, glass and red brick, faceless, staring.

Charlie was in radio news, and radio news was in the seven-story tower on the southwest corner. I had the security guard call up the news desk, and the assignment editor recognized my name. I was allowed to pass into the elevator.

The newsroom had an old-fashioned feel to it. It hadn’t been computerized yet. Newsmen were hammering at typewriters in little cubicles that wound across the great expanse of the place. Desk assistants were running around with long sheets of copy over their arms, dumping a batch off in each cubicle. The editors were at the central desk, smoking, watching TV. And beneath everything was the clatter of the wire machines, muffled because they kept them under glass in a long row against the far wall. Other than that, it was quiet just now. The day’s business was over, the night’s shooting hadn’t yet begun.

I waved to the assignment editor, a long blonde named Barb, and she gave me a big grin and waved back. She pointed at one of the huge glass windows on the wall to my right. I walked off toward it.

I peeked through the window into the studio inside. No sign of Charlie. Just a guy on the phone at a table and then an empty chair before a huge console of knobs and dials and switches. There was a bank of tape recorders against the left wall, most of them rolling. I went in through a heavy, soundproofed door.

A voice was coming over a speaker.

“We will continue this vigil all night.” It was a woman’s voice. “And we will hold such vigils wherever the state sanctions murder. We are here in the name of humanity, and in the name of God—and for the good of the state of Florida.”

The man on the phone said, “Have you had any word at all from the governor?”

And the woman started talking again while one of the tape machines recorded her for broadcast. I, by this time, was concentrating on the pair of white socks sticking out from under the console.

“Hey, Charlie?” I said.

The man on the phone pointed at the socks.

“Charlie,” I said.

I heard a snort—an interrupted snore. A voice rose from under the switches and the knobs. “Is she finished?”

“No, it’s me. North.”

“North?”

“Come out of there, Charlie. Life’s intense.”

He grunted again. The white socks stirred. He pushed out from under the console, blinking—I think—behind mirrored shades.

The woman on the speaker said: “If I could find any justification for this, any at all, I would take some comfort from it. But the number of executions has skyrocketed over the last few years, and the streets aren’t any safer, people aren’t any more secure in their businesses or homes. Less so, if anything. We have made a covenant with death.”

The man on the phone waggled his eyebrows at me. I laughed. He said: “Sister O’Connell, thank you very much for speaking with me.”

“Thank you,” she said.

He hung up with a sigh. He said, “Kill it, Charlie.”

Charlie, sitting on the floor beneath the console, felt around for a red button up there. He found it, hit it. One of the tape machines shut down. Charlie scratched his ear. “You want to cut it now?”

“No, we got time. I’m gonna get the D.A. first and have him tell me why the sucker ought to burn.”

Charlie nodded. The man before the phone picked it up again and dialed. Charlie looked up at me from the floor.

“Intense, huh?”

“Molto intenso.”

He wrestled himself up into the chair in front of the console and dropped into it. He took off the mirrored shades, jacked his red eyes wide at me.

“Have you got a cigarette?”

“Augh!” I said.

“Just joking. Here.” He offered me his pack. We lit up. Charlie leaned back against the console, taking a long drag. “So how is she?” he said. I glanced at the guy on the phone. “It’s okay. That’s Fred Lamarr. He’s mechanical.”

“Did she tell you, Charlie?” I asked him. “When I went up to see her?”

“What?”

“The scarred man was there.”

My friend sat bolt upright. “Not … the scarred man.”

“Yeah.”

“Who the fuck’s the scarred man?”

“The guy from my story. The story I told on Christmas night, remember? That scared her.”

“Oh yeah.”

“The reason she was so scared was because she’d been having dreams about the guy. And when I drove into the driveway of her school, he was there. My story, her dream. He was standing right there in the driveway.”

“He’s probably the parking attendant. Or the avatar of Satan. I’m sure he had a perfectly good reason for being there.”

“It’s nearly made her nuts.”

“Nearly? She’s got her feet in Manhattan and her head in Taipan.”

Fred Lamarr, who had been speaking softly into the phone, now looked up and said: “Gimme a roll here, Charlie.”

I glanced at him. “God, he really does look real.”

“I know, it’s amazing.” Charlie spun to his console and fiddled with some knobs and buttons. A man’s voice came over one of the speakers. Beside me, the tape that had just stopped rolling started to roll again.

Fred Lamarr said: “We’re taping this for broadcast, okay?”

And a voice coming out of the speaker answered: “Okay. Shoot.”

“I feel like I’m just—” I began.

“Hold it,” said Charlie.

The voice on the speaker continued: “It seems to me the opponents of the death penalty conveniently forget the reasons the penalty is in force.” Charlie, meanwhile, hit the dials: lowered the volume, fiddled with the treble and base. When he had it right, he turned to me again.

“So?” he said.

“So what’s it mean, Charlie?”

“It means you are one very powerful storyteller, my friend.”

“I feel like I’ve almost got it, but I’m blocking it, you know? If I can just talk it out.”

“Okay,” Charlie said. “Let me get this straight here. You tell a story about a guy she’s dreaming about and then he shows up for real.”

“Right.”

He grabbed the front of his face and screamed.

“Helpful, Charlie, thanks.”

Serious suddenly, he leaned toward me, gesturing with the cigarette. “Okay, Mr. Sherlock,” he said. “Let’s get down and do it. When you eliminate the ridiculous, whatever is left, no matter how obnoxious, must be indefinite. What are our options? Right off the top of your head, who do you think this guy is?”

“Um … the incarnation of a horror thousands of years old?”

“Good. Okay. I’m talking to a fucking lunatic. Any other ideas?”

“I don’t know. He … He’d have to be … We’d both have to know him, Susannah and me.”

“We’re cooking. We’re hot. How could you both know him?”

“We met him, we saw him.”

“So why don’t you remember?”

“We just glimpsed him. I got it. He’s following her, and she’s sort of seen him subconsciously, see, without noticing. Then I spotted him over Christmas and got the idea for the story without knowing it.”

Charlie clapped his hands. “That’ll be a hundred and fifty dollars.”

The voice on the speaker droned on in the background: “Let me just review this crime for you …”

I shook my head. “She’s been dreaming about him for three years, though.”

“Oh come on, man,” said Charlie. “That screws up the whole thing.”

“Can I have my money back?”

“In the mail, big buddy.”

“I mean, the guy’s gotta really be planted in her mind, like in her subconscious.”

“Uh-oh. Subconscious. Woh. Get down.”

“I mean it. It’s like: she must’ve seen him as a kid or something.”

“There you go.”

“But then, how do I know him? I mean, I would’ve had to have seen him as a kid too. I mean, she and I—we’d’ve known each other.”

I stopped. The cigarette was halfway to my mouth.

“Okay. Forget that,” said Charlie.

“No, wait. That’s right.”

“How can it be right? It’s stupid.”

“I’m telling you, I’m telling you.” I stood perfectly straight, perfectly still, vaguely aware of the turning reel and the droning voice and Charlie’s eyes on me and the cigarette burning in my hand. “I can feel it. Like I knew it all along. We knew each other as kids, we knew the scarred man, something terrible about him, something we had to forget. That’s what it is.”

Charlie whistled the theme to The Twilight Zone.

“And I saw her,” I said, staring blindly at the smoke spiraling in front of me. “That must be it. When I saw her, it must have brought him back to me. Or … no. I don’t know. I don’t know. I mean, if we knew each other, then McGill … he must have …” I heard a rough sound come up out of my throat. I put the heels of my palms against my eyes. “I can’t think about this, man. There’s too much. McGill, man. I just can’t think about it.”

Charlie took a long drag off his cigarette. Then he took a long look at me. My hands slid down.

Charlie spoke quietly. “I thought you always said you didn’t care about your past.”

“Oh, sure, yeah,” I said. “But that was bullshit.”

“Oh.”

“… and those who commit the worst crimes against society must suffer the full penalty that society has to offer,” said the voice on the speaker.

“Well, counselor,” said Fred Lamarr, “thank you very much for speaking to me.” He hung up. “Okay, Charlie,” he said, “let’s cut these assholes.”

Charlie nodded, put his cigarette out in an ashtray on the console. “I gotta work,” he said. “I got O.T. I’ll be home late.”

“Okay.” I stubbed my cigarette too. I stood for another moment, dazed. “I guess I gotta talk to her.”

Charlie nodded. I held my hand up.

“Ten-four, camarado.”

“Yo.”

I walked out the soundproofed door. Behind me, Fred Lamarr was saying, “Okay, I’m gonna take about twenty seconds from Sister Jellybean, and maybe two tens from Fry, Sucker, Fry.”

I walked slowly across the room to the news desk. I leaned over a television set to the assignment editor.

“I gave ’em up,” Barb said.

“Good for you. Can I borrow your phone instead?”

“Just dial nine.”

I picked up the phone and called home. After three rings my machine picked up. I waited for the message to end. Then I said:

“Susannah, it’s me.”

I waited. There was nothing.

“Sue,” I said. “Just pick up the phone.”

Still, she didn’t come on.

“Sue, wake up,” I said loudly. “I’ve gotta talk to you.”

Nothing.

I reached into my pocket, rummaged around for the doohickey, the thing that makes the machine play messages back. I found it, held it up to the handset and pressed the button. I heard the tape rewind.

Then it began to play. I heard a rasping voice. A man’s voice that hissed like a snake’s.

“Hello, Michael,” it said. “My name is Johnson. I’m the man with the scar.”