At The Stone; 7:30 P.M.
"It's because we're such an integrated city," Snipe heard the balding, bearded man on the TV say, "and I don't mean racially. I mean, we're such an interdependent city. . . If the subways go out, Wall Street closes down. If the traffic lights fail, or the sewer systems backs up, or a transformer out in God-knows-where blows itself to pieces, then we're in deep trouble. And now, with people left and right arming themselves—often illegally—we are just perpetuating the fear that caused us to arm ourselves in the first place."
Snipe thought he had never enjoyed anything quite so much: The city, his city, was about to fall apart right in front of him.
He wished he could look out one of the windows and see mobs running through the streets, torches in hand, screaming "Death to all!" But he knew it wasn't as bad as that. Not yet, anyway. Of course, if he got lucky . . .
Then he heard, below the noise of the TV, from behind, from near the door, in his voice, "Hey you, dipshit!" He remembered using the words on Carter Barefoot just before beating the crap out of him. He heard again, again in his voice, "Hey you, dipshit!"
And so he did not bother to turn and look. He knew who it was; he knew what it was. And he knew what it wanted.
7:40 P.M.
Georgie had been pounding on lots of doors. Wanamaker's apartment was empty, and Aunt Sandy's apartment, too. Wilson Gruscher had pleaded so poignantly, from behind his locked door, for him to go away that at last he had, and Carter Barefoot, also from behind his locked door, had whimpered something about meeting him "on the street—ten minutes!" which Georgie thought was probably a lie, but he had little time to worry about it.
He was tired. Bone-tired. And Winifred Haritson was a lot heavier than he had supposed she would be.
"I hurt, Georgie," she pleaded. "Oh I hurt." She said the words every half minute or so, as if discovering her pain anew each time. Georgie wished fervently that she'd stay quiet, and so he told her, time and again, "I know it hurts, Mrs. Haritson. I know it hurts."
He was carrying her piggyback style, her skeletal arms crossed in front of his neck. Her head was down, so her cheek rested against his shoulder; she wept constantly, and softly.
Georgie imagined, now and then, that he could feel her pain.
He slowed his gait when he approached The Stone's main entrance doors. The lobby was all but pitch dark—he could see the vague, dark yellow mounds of an old couch and chair and, in one corner, the suggestion of a phone booth, sans phone, which had been ripped out long before. He looked through the double doors at the street. It too was dark. And still.
He heard a scream then, and he stopped walking. He listened. He heard it again, from his left, from down a short hallway. From Lou's apartment, he realized. Where Snipe was. He thought it had not been so much a scream of pain as a scream of frustration—Goddammit, Goddammit, why does it have to end now?
He listened. He heard nothing else. He went to the doors, pushed them open, and carried Winifred Haritson out to the street.
He turned right. He stopped. Someone was standing a couple yards away. "Who's there?" he said.
"It's me," he heard. "Carter Barefoot." His voice sounded very nasal, because his nose had been turned into pulp by Snipe. "Where we goin', anyway?"
8:00 P.M.
Jim Hart was cold. He had pulled the sheet and blanket over himself, but he was still cold. He was convinced that the hospital had turned the heat off. Maybe it was part of the therapy. Keep the patients cold and numb.
At any rate, it would explain the creepers of fog swirling into the room.
He said to John Marsh, in the other bed, "Look at that, look at that!" and nodded at the fog.
Marsh looked; he saw nothing.
"They're crazy!" Jim Hart insisted. "The people who run this place are crazy. They want us to freeze. Jesus, aren't you cold?"
John Marsh said nothing.
Jim Hart watched the fog swirl into the room, watched it curl around the bedposts. It was a strange kind of fog, he thought. It seemed to move under a power all its own. And its colors were wrong. Because it shouldn't have had colors at all, he realized.
At Central Park: Near Bethesda Fountain
He said to himself, aloud, "I am a creature of the earth." And for the very briefest of moments he had no idea what it meant.
For the very briefest of moments he saw himself as something he had never been—a man. And for the very briefest of moments he was afraid, because he was cold, and he was hungry, and he did not know what he was doing here, in Central Park, in Manhattan, with the voices of a thousand strange people moving about in his head. ("Oh yes, that was Thursday, wasn't it?" and "Watch for the light; wait till it turns green," and "We have this in a size twelve," and "I know it hurts," and "I ain't gonna do nothing to ya; I just want your wallet, just your wallet!"). And then he knew that they were his people, the children of the island, the children of this island, and that he was here to call to them. To give their heritage back to them. So they could take their island back.
"I am a creature of the earth," he said again. "And the energy within me is the earth's energy." He took one long, deep breath.
He focused that energy.
And on the Upper West Side, in a law office on West 110th Street, the newly installed junior partner of the law firm of Johnson, Bigny and Belles, a young woman named Karen Gears, looked up from her work at a window which faced south and one word escaped her, "No!" It was a plea, a word of desperation—keep the dreams away, lock them up in her childhood, where they belong, where, indeed, they had begun, and where she had supposed they had ended.
"It's turned awful damned cold," said Carter Barefoot to Georgie MacPhail. "Awful damned cold!" He was dressed in old, stretch-polyester brown pants, a faded yellow Dacron shirt—Georgie guessed that it was as old as he was—and a threadbare denim jacket that was obviously doing very little to keep him warm.
The three of them—Georgie, Mrs. Haritson, Carter Barefoot—bad seated themselves just inside a storefront. Georgie's plan had been to hail a taxi, which would take them to Bellevue. But the street was unusually quiet, and Georgie guessed, correctly, that people were staying at home in the face of the recent murders in the city.
Georgie could not imagine why Carter Barefoot was complaining so much about being cold. It was cold, sure, but even Mrs. Haritson, before she'd passed out, hadn't been complaining about it. Of course, Georgie considered, she had other things to worry about, didn't she?
"How's Mrs. Haritson?" asked Carter Barefoot.
"I guess she fainted or something," Georgie answered. He looked at her; she was sitting up; her head was over on her right shoulder, her arms hanging loosely at her sides. "She looks like she's asleep."
"Is she dead?" asked Carter Barefoot.
Georgie put his finger to her neck, felt nothing, put his finger an inch lower; he got a pulse. "No," he whispered, "she's not dead."
Carter Barefoot allowed his head to fall back so it rested against the iron grating in front of the doors. "Where we goin' exactly?"
"Bellevue," Georgie answered. "I'm takin' Mrs. Haritson to Bellevue. They'll fix her up."
Carter Barefoot nodded slightly. "Uh-huh. It's sure awful damned cold."
On the fringes of the West Village, in lower Manhattan, a good-looking, dark-haired, gray-eyed boy was lying on his back on his bed. The lights were out, the shades and curtains drawn. He had always liked darkness.
He was remembering that just two days before, he had somehow gotten Christine Basile, of all people, to agree to go out with him. He was remembering also that barely a month before, he'd celebrated a birthday. His sixteenth, he'd been told. The man who called himself his father had given him an extra set of keys to the car.
The boy was weeping now, and he was whispering to himself, "What a crock of shit, what a damned crock of shit!"
In Manhattan, on West Tenth Street, in a small, bachelor apartment which had been decorated very tastefully in earthtones, and included a wicker loveseat, bamboo shades, and a large, well-maintained fresh-water aquarium, a man named Philip Case—who was apparently in his early thirties—was holding his head and tightly gritting his teeth, trying futilely to shut out the images that came to him in waves, like a tide filled with bad memories.
Sam Campbell was getting very angry. He and Joyce had been waiting—he checked his watch—an hour and a half and he was sure now that the receptionist had forgotten all about him. He patted Joyce's hand. "I'm going to go see what the problem is, Joyce." She nodded, and he made his way to Lenny Wingate's desk. She had her head lowered.
"Hello?" he said.
She made no response.
"Hello?" he repeated. "Do you remember me?"
She looked up slowly at him; he saw that her face was red and slightly puffy, as if she'd been crying.
"I'm sorry," he said, ''I just—"
"Yes?" she said.
"I just wanted to know, I was wondering—my name's Campbell . . ."
"Oh, yes, Mr. Campbell." She took a deep breath, as if to give herself energy. "Yes. I called the doctor, everything's okay." She withdrew a pass from her desk, handed it to him; "This is a Ward R pass. You and your wife can both use it.'
"She's not—" Sam began, stopped, said, "Thank you. I didn't mean to bother you," then went and got Joyce.
Georgie MacPhail announced, "We gotta keep moving." lie thought it was the right thing to say at the right time, but Carter Barefoot could not have agreed less. "I'm cold," he moaned. "I'm so cold!" And he hugged himself fiercely for warmth.
Inside the pawnshop, a little aged wisp of a man named Samuelson awoke. He had taken to sleeping in his store only in the past few days, when, as he'd put it, "all hell was about to break loose."
He sat up. He looked around his store. He felt certain he would see that someone had broken in. But the store was quiet.
And then he saw the dark forms at the front door. He moved very slowly, partly from caution, partly from fear, and partly from age. He got out of the cot. He edged sideways toward the back of the counter, where he kept two guns—a Smith and Wesson .38, which hadn't worked right in years, and an Italian-made over-and-under shotgun, almost brand new. It was that gun which he took hold of,broke open, and loaded.
There were a hundred or more Philip Cases in Manhattan that night. A hundred or more Karen Gears. A hundred or more boys lying in their darkened rooms and trying desperately to recall the events of just one or two days before. Because such events were their reality, and reality was slipping from them rapidly.
Because Seth had reached them, at last.
Because he had reached into them.
Into their comfortable and private worlds—the worlds they had created for themselves over the decades and the centuries since the Earth had released them.
And Seth did not like what he saw there. He did not like the fear. And the need. And the desperation.
They had become what they had lived amongst.
They had grown apart from the Earth, because they rarely touched it, and because here there was warmth from the cruel winter, and food in abundance, and sex at every street corner.
They had become what they had lived amongst. They had grown apart from the Earth, because they had rarely touched it.
They had grown secure in what they had become, and so had tossed aside what they had been. In stark desperation they had discarded it, and forgotten it. Because it is impossible to be both what they were, and what they had changed themselves into.
Seth had reached into them. Into their comfortable, private worlds. And he had torn those worlds apart.
Sam Campbell and Joyce Dewitte were led to Marsha's room by a psychiatric technician. "You can have fifteen minutes with her," he told them. "Doctor's orders."
"Yes," said Sam, "I understand that."
The technician unlocked the door and pushed it open. Sam and Joyce stepped into the room.
Marsha was sitting up, cross-legged on her bed. She stared mutely at them as they entered.
Sam took hold of Joyce's hand. "Marsha, darling," he said soothingly, "this is Joyce. Do you remember—"
Marsha screamed. It was a chilling shrill noise, as if there were some other person inside her screaming, and she was merely opening her mouth to let it out. No emotion showed around her eyes or in her face. The scream continued, unbroken, for many seconds.
Sam and Joyce stared, transfixed. At last, Sam whispered, "That's not my daughter, that's just not my daughter."
But it was. And deep inside himself, he knew that it was.
And when her screams ended, Marsha broke into fitful weeping punctuated every now and then by, "Oh Daddy, oh Daddy, I'm sorry."
And Sam Campbell, hearing something in her words and in her weeping that he hadn't heard since his wife's death—something very alive and hopeful—ran to her and gathered her into his arms and murmured, "She's come back to me. Oh, Joyce, my daughter has come back to me."
On West Tenth Street, a scream erupted from Philip Case. It was much the same kind of scream that had come from Marsha Campbell and it was a scream done for much the same reasons.
To erase the memories, and the images, and the feelings.
To call back his hard-won humanness.
To blot out the nightmare of what he had been.
On the Upper West Side, the scream did not work for Karen Gears. She threw herself from her south-facing window. Her scream ended abruptly.
On the fringes of the West Village, a boy lay quietly, dreaming again of Christine Basile, his past shut out completely. And forever.
Seth could feel these deaths happening.
And he knew, at last, that he was an imperfect creature who had done an imperfect thing.
He stood. He felt something emerging within himself—something strident, and desperate, and mean.
And for the first time in his life he was frightened.
Because it was late September.
And he was hungry, and cold, and had no idea at all what he was doing here, in Central Park, in Manhattan.