Billy Ray’s pleading didn’t do no good. The memory come for him anyway. He didn’t have no say. It pulled him down into water circling a drain, emptying into a pipe as cold as a tomb. He put up a fight, but it was too strong, the current was too swift, and he was too drunk. With one final silent scream, Billy Ray Hawkins was dragged into a hole in the black depths of his mind where the memory could feast on him, where it could eat him alive.
Billy Ray and three of the men who worked with him sit on the outcrop of white limestone with their feet dangling in the Three Forks River, popping the tops on one beer after another, telling lies ’bout women and fantasizing what they’re gonna do with their share of the dope money. They’d taken off early that afternoon, it being Billy Ray’s birthday, and bought four cases of beer to drink at Milkstone—after they run off the teenage boys who was swimmin’ in the pool behind the rocks, and chased away the couples makin’ out in the nearby cave entrance.
With half a dozen brews under his belt, Billy Ray gets up to relieve himself, then goes back to his truck to fetch the fifth of Maker’s Mark whisky. He’d bought it as a birthday present for himself and had purposed to drink the whole thing tonight!
But he won’t have the bottle all to himself if he takes it back down to the river. Four men’d make quick work of a fifth. So he turns instead toward the huge cave entrance—a hundred feet tall and probably twice as wide—on the hillside and considers the rockfall that plugs it like a cork. He spies a rock outcrop on the top of that tumble of boulders that’d make a dandy place to watch the sunset and drink his whisky in peace. Already several sheets to the wind, Billy Ray’s climb to the top of the boulder pile is no easy matter. But once there, he’s rewarded with the view he was expecting—a ridge of low clouds, painted pink and golden by the setting sun, outlines the green mountains to the west.
His viewing spot has one drawback, though. It’s hot up here! It was near ninety while they was working and it doesn’t feel like it’s cooled off at all since. Billy Ray’s about to climb back down and stick his feet in the water with the others when he notices there’s a crack in the rock wall of the hillside behind a big boulder at the top of the rockfall. It’s a cave entrance. And one thing you can count on—it might be a hundred fifty in the shade or snowing or raining like a big dog, but down in a cave it’s always fifty-seven degrees. The trick is to go deep enough in the cave to get to the cool air without going so deep you get lost and can’t find your way back out.
But he’ll be fine. He has a small flashlight on the keychain in his pocket to light up the cave floor in front of him so he don’t trip over nothing. And he’ll stay close to the cave entrance so he can make his way back to it.
He follows the small puddle of light at his feet about fifty yards or so down into the cave and finds a flat rock to sit on that feels gloriously cool. He makes himself comfortable, leans back against an equally cool cave wall facing the jagged crack of light in the cave opening and turns off his flashlight. The dark is smooth, cool and comforting. He always has liked the dark—’cept when he’s with his Becca and then he leaves the bedside lamp on so he can see. He opens up the bottle, ripping off the red wax seal, and takes two huge gulps.
Whew! Fine whiskey like that would warm you up if you was sitting on an iceberg. The liquid goes down smooth and it isn’t long before his face is numb and his fingers clumsy. He spills a little whisky on the front of his T-shirt, and when he reaches to wipe it off, he brushes the amulet that hangs from a gold chain around his neck—the amulet he’d stole out of the back of one of the campers where them carneys lived who come to town every summer with their rigged games and rickety old carnival rides. Though he can’t see it in the dark, his fingers trace its familiar shape and he recalls scooping blood off the floor and dripping it into the little stoppered vial inside the amulet, drip, drip, drip until the vial was full.
He suddenly laughs out loud, hears his laughter echo and laughs harder because it seems like a whole crowd of people are laughing with him, rejoicing with him that there is one less nigger to pollute the planet thanks to Billy Ray Hawkins! Payback. Bishop Washington took his self-respect—offering to help Billy Ray’s white family when they come on hard times, pushing Billy Ray’s mama away like the big buck done. So Billy Ray took Bishop Washington’s son. A fair trade. He cut the boy’s body up with a chain saw, drove to a spot south of Cincinnati and threw the pieces into the Ohio River. They’d never find a trace of that boy.
And after that, he always made it a point to seek out Bishop or his fat wife, Theresa, in a crowd, like at the Kentucky Derby festival or the county fair. Or sidle up to one of ’em picking out toothpaste in the grocery store. He’d get as close as he could and laugh so hard inside he could barely keep it in—here they was standing three feet away from all that was left of their only son and they didn’t know it!
By the time his butt gets sore sitting on the rock, Billy Ray has drunk half the bottle of whiskey on top of six beers and has a satisfying buzz in his head. He stands unsteadily and flips on his flashlight to light up the floor so he don’t trip over nothing on his way back to the cave entrance. But there is no light where he thought the cave entrance should be. He turns around in a full circle, looking for the jagged beam of sunlight from the crack in the rock, but can find it nowhere.
Then he gets it.
“You idiot,” he says aloud, his words slurred. “There ain’t no light ’cause the sun’s gone down.”
Looks like he’s going to have to spend the night in the cave and wait for dawn to light up the entrance. He sits back down heavily, clicks off the flashlight, lifts the bottle to his lips and gulps down another swig.
He wakes up in the dark, not certain where he is. He ain’t home in his own bed, that’s for sure, feels like he’s been lyin’ on a rock. He reaches down and discovers he has, indeed, been sleepin’ on a rock. Then he remembers the cave and decides he don’t want to spend the rest of the night here. That cave entrance ain’t but a little way away. He’s gonna get in his truck and go home!
Flipping on the flashlight, he staggers off in the direction of the cave entrance, clutching the near empty bottle of Maker’s. He doesn’t find the cave entrance right away, but it’s around here somewhere. It doesn’t really dawn on him that he’s in trouble until he staggers out into a huge cavern. He feels the open air all around him and shines the light upward, but the light doesn’t reach the ceiling. Or the walls. Even drunk as he is, he’s certain he did not come through this cavern on his way from the crack behind the boulder to the flat rock where he woke up!
He is lost.
The realization sobers him a little. But only a little. He has downed almost the whole bottle of whiskey in—how long? How long has he been in here? Too long. He shivers, turns the bottle up and takes the last swallows in big gulps, then tosses the empty bottle out into the darkness. It hits the floor, rolls, and then clunks up against something solid. Billy Ray shines his light in that direction and he can see…what is it?
All by itself in the center of the cavern is a pile of rocks about four feet tall with a large flat rock stretched across the top to form something like a table. He lurches unsteadily toward it. When he points the flashlight down so he don’t trip, he sees lines drawn on the cave floor in black chalk. The lines appear to form a big circle. He steps inside it to trace the other lines that cross and recross the circle, but he can’t make out the shape those lines form.
But if there’s chalk marks on the floor and stacked-up rocks, that means people come here. He’s not down in one of them caves that goes on for miles and never ends. There’s another entrance nearby—probably in one of the walls of this very cavern—and he just can’t see it. He shines his flashlight out in front of him toward a cavern wall and staggers toward it, looking for an opening.
But he should have kept the light pointed at his feet because he trips, sprawls on his face on the floor of the cave and feels a sharp pain in his chest. He gets to his knees, stumbles to his feet and shines the light on the front of his shirt, where he finds a sliver of glass stabbing through it into his skin. His amulet is broken! As he watches helplessly, Isaac Washington’s blood begins to leak out of it.
No! He tries to catch the blood in his palm, but it is no use. The boy’s blood runs down the side of Billy Ray’s hand and a drop of it makes a big red splotch in the dust on the floor of the cave.
The cavern is suddenly filled with such a blinding red light that Billy Ray lurches away from it, stumbles backward and falls again, landing on his butt just outside the black chalk circle on the floor.
What the—?
It smells like something’s on fire, charred, and the light he sees with his eyes squeezed almost shut flickers like flames. A rumbling roar, the sound of a rockslide, shakes the whole cavern and then the light dims around him. Like he is in a shadow. Like something is blocking the light. Something huge.
He lifts his head and opens his eyes. At first, he sees only a black shape in silhouette against an impossible wall of flames that stretches all the way to the ceiling of the cavern. Then the shape moves aside so the flames light it up.
Billy Ray screams, shrieks, wails in utter terror with such ferocity it rips out his throat, sending a spray of bloody spittle into the air. He scoots backward on his butt away from the creature, sucks in a breath and screams again. This time, only blood, no sound, comes out his lips because his first scream was so fierce it shredded his vocal cords. He’s screaming in his head, though. Oh, my yes, he is screaming in a high-pitched wail that sounds like an animal, a rabbit maybe, run over by a threshing machine.
A creature fifty feet tall has risen out of a lake of fire, a monster too hideous to fit inside a human head. It looks down at Billy Ray, leans toward him, and Billy Ray hears another sound—but not with his ears. It’s a sound like cloth ripping. What is ripping is Billy Ray’s mind. It is tearing apart, the gash running down the middle, leaving frayed edges behind it. And then the image of the creature fills his head, leaving no room for any other thought or feeling or memory.
Suddenly, he feels himself running, carried along by his own legs. He does not recall willing them to lift him off the floor or commanding them to flee from the red horror in the cavern. Still, he finds himself racing down a dark corridor lit from behind with a red glow, the roar of a beast bouncing off the walls, echoing and multiplying. Then all is black.
When he wakes, Billy Ray is lying in cool darkness, but a shaft of bright light streams down from above about thirty yards ahead of him. He opens one eye, then sits bolt upright and starts to scream, but the only sound that comes out is a barking cough. So terrified he is instantly sick, he vomits beer and whisky and bile out in heaving gasps that go on and on until he is too weak to move. As he lies panting on the floor of the cave, he becomes aware of wet pants and the stink of urine. He has soiled himself.
He slowly comes to understand that he is in an underground cave that has a hole in the roof. From above, it’s a sinkhole in some farmer’s field. The dirt and rocks that collapsed into the cave where he is lying form a slope he can scramble out of as soon as he can stand.
And as for what he saw…he didn’t see nothing. Not a thing. Lying panting beside a pile of his own vomit, Billy Ray Hawkins manages to stitch back together the rip in his mind. The stitches are halting and knotted. They will not hold well or for long. Eventually, they will completely unravel. But until they do, he will remain sane.
Billy Ray woke up on the floor of the boxcar with his mouth tasting like a pig wallow and a sledgehammer banging away inside his skull. He staggered to his feet, swayed and grabbed hold of the shelf rack that held his gold bars, the gold he was gonna have to give The Man. That was when he noticed it. His pants was wet. He had…no, couldn’t be. He hadn’t never got so drunk he couldn’t hold his water. Well, actually he had once. On his twenty-ninth birthday, he’d woke up with—
He felt the percussion in his throbbing temples. A banging clank in his mind shook his whole body when he banged the door shut in the face of those memories and leaned back against it, trembling.
As Ricky stepped through the south entrance of the Mall of America, a voice rang out from the speakers: “The Universe of Light Show, a nine-minute interactive light experience, will start at seven thirty in front of the Nickelodeon Universe. The show is visible from all four levels of the mall.”
The mall was crowded. As people moved back away from the area where the light show would be held, Ricky made his way forward. He bumped into a little girl in a pink dress having her picture taken beside a gigantic Dora Doll. He bent to help her up, but the little girl’s mother grabbed her arm and glared at Ricky like he’d done something bad. That happened to him a lot, and to the other residents of CALADS. They talked about it over dinner sometimes, about how some people turned away from them and didn’t want to be near them or touch them.
“People are afraid of something ‘different,’” Mrs. Shewmaker always said. “Don’t be mad at them for it. Just smile at them.” So Ricky smiled at the little girl’s mother, but she scooped the child up into her arms and didn’t smile back.
Ricky had never been in the Mall of America without Mr. Nemo beside him. But he knew what to do and where to go, and Ricky was never scared so long as he knew what to do.
A mist-like fog began to appear on both sides of the space on the floor where the show would take place. Then the music started. Ricky loved music, especially music like this with a strong rhythm. The lights blinked on and off with the melody, like the music was making the light happen by being so loud and forceful.
The music changed. It was creepy, then happy, fast and then slow. Beams of blue, green and pink light stabbed down from the ceiling in rhythm with the music. Ricky was so awestruck by the sight of it that for a few minutes he completely forgot what he’d come here to do.
Children raced around through the fog, trying to catch the moving lights. They’d jump into one of the light circles that looked like a flower’s petals on the floor, and then the circle would move and they’d have to find another one. There were big kids almost as tall as Ricky, and little ones who couldn’t even walk, just toddling around holding onto the hand of an older sister or brother. The floor quickly became so jammed with children it was hard to move. Ricky had been standing up front and was carried out onto the floor with the wave of children as soon as the music began. And for a little while he chased lights with them, laughing, hurrying from one colored circle on the floor to another.
Then he remembered what he’d come to do, so he stopped running.
He stood very still in the middle of the crowd of laughing children. Wait until they saw the little yellow birds! Mr. Nemo had shown Ricky a couple of them, and the backpack on Ricky’s back was full of them. When he pulled the string dangling over his shoulder from the pack, it would open up and all those birds would fly out into the lights. It would be the most amazing thing any of them had ever seen, little yellow birds and bright blue and red and purple lights.
Ricky’s face was wreathed in a happy smile of anticipation as he yanked with all his strength on the cord.
The explosion that followed turned Ricky Harrison’s whole upper body into a fine red mist. What was left of him was flung in every direction, dismembered body parts joining the hail of other pieces of children now pelting the crowd and the walls and windows of the surrounding stores.
Sitting in a dark blue van near the south entrance to the Mall of America, strategically parked to be out of view of the pole-mounted security cameras beside the doors, was Sebastian Nemo. Or Alexander Stone or James Carlisle or any of a dozen other names depending on the passport he happened to be using.
He looked at his watch. Fifteen minutes. That was plenty of time. Had the idiot tried to take off the backpack, maybe, and figured out the strap around his chest was locked in the back? Had he panicked, gone running to a mall guard and—?
A sudden roar ate up the world. The percussion blew out both sets of glass doors under the red-white-and-blue Mall of America sign with a mighty fist of sound that rocked Sebastian’s van.
He smiled. He could hear screaming from inside the building as he lifted the burner cell phone from his pocket, flipped open the lid and made a call. Someone picked up after the first ring, but said nothing.
“It’s done,” Sebastian said. He was tempted to add, “I just broke a bottle of champagne across the bow of Operation Maelstrom.” But he didn’t.