Fain lay on his back on the narrow motel bed and followed a crack in the ceiling with his eyes. It roughly outlined the shape of a scorpion, its stinging tail poised to strike at the light fixture.
He imagined the tail jabbing forward into the light bulb and through it into the socket. A shower of sparks sprayed out and drifted to the floor.
His fantasy was interrupted by sounds coming from the adjoining room. Through the wall he could hear a woman squeal in feigned ecstasy. A man laughed through phlegmy lungs. The Horizon Motel, he had discovered, was a favorite of the down-scale hookers of Western Avenue.
He closed his eyes and willed his other senses inward as he concentrated on his predicament. It all seemed so unfair. He had not set out to hurt anyone or to profit off the misery of others. All he wanted to do was help people, make them happy. If he could get rich doing that, why not?
Rich. Hah. What did all those contracts and TV shows and personal appearances add up to? One hundred and forty dollars and a bed in a hot-sheet motel. And that hundred and forty would shrink fast. He had better get his brain working.
A sound gradually intruded on his concentration. A staccato percussive sound. Someone was knocking at his door.
Fain rolled off the bed and moved cautiously over to stand next to the door. Another crowd of hostile curiosity seekers? Process server? Police?
Shit, he was getting paranoid.
“Who is it?”
“Let me in.” The voice was female, low and vibrant. Something in the tone compelled him to obey.
He unbolted the door and opened it.
The woman who stood outside was nearly as tall as he. The skin was dark and smooth across wide cheekbones. Her mouth, full and firm, was not smiling. The thick hair that fell loose to her shoulders was midnight black with strands of silver, giving it a lively sheen. The woman looked at him with eyes of pale gray that were a startling contrast to the dark face.
“Hello, McAllister Fain.” She stepped past him and seemed to flow into the room. She wore a long, colorful dress that moved with her body.
Fain stared at her. He knew at once who she was even though he had not seen her in almost thirty years. It took the logical portion of his brain several moments to catch up with the intuitive.
“Darcia?”
“Yes.”
A hundred questions pushed forward in his mind. He asked one of them. “How did you find me?”
“That was not so hard. I have known where you were since I called you at your apartment many weeks ago.”
Fain thought back to Echo Park and when all his troubles began. A telephone voice registered on his memory. He said, “A woman asked if I was the McAllister Fain from Michigan, then hung up.”
“I was that woman. When I read in the paper what you had done, I knew it must be you and that you had discovered your power. But I had to be sure.”
He shook his head as though to clear it. “Darcia, why are you here?”
“I have many things to tell you. May we sit down?”
“Yes. Sure.” He pulled the room’s one comfortable chair over for her, and he sat on the bed.
“What did you mean when you said I had discovered my power?”
“The power to make the dead walk.”
“That was as big a surprise to me as to anybody.”
Darcia shook her head. “You always had it locked deep within you, but you needed the key. You must have found someone to give you the key.”
Fain could not take his eyes off the woman. Her gaze held him like a physical bond. He said, “I went to an old shaman called Le Docteur. He told me what to do. I thought I was just fooling around. Later, I found it was all for real, and I didn’t even need most of the rigmarole he gave me.”
“Ah, yes. All you needed was the key. It would have been so much better if you had never learned what you could do. No matter what happens now, you must never, never use this terrible power again.”
“I already decided that,” Fain said. “I’ve got nothing but trouble now because of it.”
“That is always the way, but it was inevitable that one day you would learn about yourself and would have to try.”
“How do you know all this?” Fain said. “What is this power, and where does it come from? Why me?”
“I will come to that,” said the woman. “Listen to me carefully now as I tell you of the danger you are in and what you must do.”
“What danger?” he said.
“Desperate danger of life and death. Those you brought back understand by now what has been done to them. They have one common goal, and that is to destroy you.”
“Are you kidding?” He looked into the luminous gray eyes. “No, you’re not kidding.”
Darcia continued. “They will come at night, and they will come very soon.”
“But why should they want to hurt me?” Fain said.
“Revenge,” said the woman.
“For what? I only wanted to help them and those who loved them.”
“That is not important. The souls of those people no longer inhabit the bodies. The things that now walk the earth — the things you brought back — are soulless, mindless creatures that know only that you are the one responsible for their agony. As their physical bodies continue to decay, they have only one mission — to destroy you.”
The woman was silent for a moment. Fain was not sure how seriously to take all this. She might be completely wacko. But in his heart he knew better. This woman spoke the truth. Finally, he said, “Suppose I just took off? How could they find me?”
“I found you,” she said. “You can run; you can keep running. You may stay ahead of them for a day or a month or a year. But you cannot run forever, and when you stop, they will find you. You are tied to them forever, and as long as they exist and you exist, you will not escape.”
“Sounds pretty grim,” he said.
“There is more,” said Darcia. “The danger is not only to you. Your friends will suffer, too.”
“I have no friends,” he said. “Not anymore.”
“Yes, you have. There are those who care for you, those who have helped you, wittingly or not. The living dead ones will strike at you through them if they must. It is up to you to warn them.”
Fain leaned forward, bringing his face closer to the woman’s. “Who … are … you?” he said.
“You know,” she said. “Look at my eyes.”
He did. The woman’s eyes were the same shade of pale gray, silver-flecked, as his. Deep within those eyes he sensed a reflection of the same fire that smoldered in his own.
“I am your mother,” she said.
For a moment he could not speak. He knew instinctively that what the woman said was true. Finally, he managed, “And my father?”
“He is the man you have always believed him to be.”
“You and he …”
“Yes.”
“And my … my father’s wife — What about her?”
“She was a very kind woman. Because of my illness I was unable to raise a child. She adopted you and brought you up as her own.”
“Did she know about you and my father?”
“She never spoke of it. None of us did. But she was a perceptive woman. I think in her heart she knew.”
“And you stayed with us.”
“I did. Until your father was widowed. Then it was time for me to go. I promised myself I would never interfere in your life. Not unless it was necessary. Now it is. I tried to see you when you were in the big house in the hills, but I was turned away.”
“You told them you were my mother.”
“Yes.”
Fain closed his eyes and massaged them. “God, this is all happening so fast.” He looked at the woman again. “This … power — where does it come from?”
“From my family, my blood. There is a Shawnee word for it, but it would mean nothing to you. We all have a little of it. Some of us can read thoughts; others foresee the future or find lost objects. But the power to make the dead walk is given blessedly to only a few. One male child in every other generation. My father had the power. His grandfather. Now you, my son. I pray that you will be the last.”
“Darcia, what can I do?”
“You must protect your friends. Through no fault of their own, they are menaced by your acts.”
“I’ll do what I can. But isn’t there some way to end this horror?”
“You must send them back. All those you called from beyond the shadows, you must return there.”
“But how? How can I do that?”
“I cannot tell you, my son. The man who gave you the terrible key to your power must show you how to reverse it. There is no other way.”
The tall Indian woman rose from the chair. “I must go now.”
He stood up and faced her. “When will I see you again?”
“You will not. There is no time left for me.”
“But — ”
She reached out and gently placed two fingers on his lips, silencing him.
“Good-bye, my son.”
She turned from him and floated out the door, closing it soundlessly behind her. Fain stared after her but made no move to follow. He knew she would be gone.
As he stood there, trying to assimilate the things Darcia had told him, he became slowly aware that it was growing dark in the room.
They will come at night and they will come soon.
Well, if his walking corpses were coming after him, he was sure as hell not going to make it easy for them. He shrugged into his jacket and left the room, heading for the lobby.
The clerk sat behind his Plexiglas shield, reading the Herald sports page. A heavily made-up woman in a miniskirt and white vinyl boots was on the telephone, arguing with somebody. Fain waited impatiently for her to finish.
Finally, he tapped her on the shoulder. “I have to make a very important call. Would you mind …?”
“Fuck you,” she said, withering him with a look.
He seethed impotently while she talked for another two minutes. Just as he was ready to bolt out and find another phone, she hung up and sashayed past him with a sneer.
Fain dug out a fistful of silver and dropped coins into the machine. He dialed Jillian’s number, the black receiver slippery in his sweating palm.
“Hi. This is Jillian Pappas. I’m sorry I can’t take your call personally right now …”
“Shit!” The clerk did not bother to look up from his sports page at Fain’s expletive.
Friends. Was there another friend besides Jillian? No one he had met during the past couple of months, for sure. And before that? It was scary to realize how few real friends he had ever had.
He dug through his wallet, looking for another number, and found it scribbled on the back of some forgotten realtor’s business card. He fed more coins into the pay phone and dialed again.
The receiver buzzed ten times in his ear. Fain ground his teeth and tried to will an answer on the other end.
“So hello.” Ivy Hurlbut’s voice was tight with irritation, but Fain sagged with relief at hearing her.
“Ivy, it’s Mac.”
“Wow, the modern Messiah calling poor plain little me. I’m thrilled beyond words.”
He ignored the sarcasm. “Listen, this is important. I’ve got to see you right away.”
“Are you drunk?”
“Stone sober.”
“Then what the hell is the idea? You dropped me like a hot potato when you went big time with your Hollywood agency and six-figure-a-year writers. Now you call out of the blue and want to see me. Right away, no less. Well, I’m working, hotshot. I’ve got a deadline day after tomorrow, and I’ve got five thousand words to go on a ten-thousand-word story. I should have left the phone off the hook.”
“Wait a minute, Ivy,” he shouted into the mouthpiece. “Don’t hang up. You can call me all the names you want to later. I deserve it. But I have to see you tonight.”
“You don’t sound so good,” she said.
“I’m not. Tell me the quickest way to get to your place and I’ll be right there.”
“Where are you?”
“Sunset and Western.”
“You’re calling me from a massage parlor?”
“I’ll explain later. Just give me your address.”
“Come all the way out the Santa Monica Freeway, hang a left on Main. Drive a couple of miles, past the Auditorium, then hang another left on Violet. It’s a little-bitty street right where Santa Monica turns into Venice. I’m half a block up on the right. You can’t miss it, I’m the only house on the street.”
“Stay put,” Fain said. “I’ll be there as fast as I can.”
“Mac?” All the anger was gone from her voice.
“Yeah?”
“What’s going on?”
“I’ll explain as best I can when I get there,” he said. “It would sound too crazy over the phone.”
He hung up the receiver gently.
• • •
Ivy Hurlbut sat for a minute with the phone in her hand after Mac had broken the connection. She had been prepared to really chew him out, dumping her the way he did, then calling when she was trying like hell to squeeze words out of an idea that wasn’t working. But the tone of his voice had drained her indignation. Chilled her.
She replaced the instrument and shivered. She was not close enough to the ocean to hear the surf, but the nightly mist curled in around her little house shortly after dusk. She crossed the living room to close the front window and went back to the desk she had set up in a corner of the bedroom.
The frame cottage where Ivy lived was the last survivor on a street where similar little houses had lined both sides. A shopping center was going in there — as if the city needed another one — and her cottage was the last survivor. It was scheduled for bulldozing next month.
She tried to concentrate on the sheet in her typewriter, but the words would not make sense. It was an article on the changing beach scene that she had sold to Los Angeles magazine on the basis of a two-page outline. Now the whole thing seemed trite and overdone to her. She reread the sheaf of finished pages, trying to pick up the flow of ideas.
She raised her head at a soft sound at the front door.
Ivy cocked her head and listened. Sometimes the wind created odd noises here. The doorbell had never worked during her residence, and visitors had to knock.
It came again. Not exactly a knock, but more of a spongy thump. It was too soon for Mac to have made it all the way from Hollywood, but somebody was out there. She got up and went to look.
There were no close neighbors to hear Ivy Hurlbut scream.