Текст книги "The Bazaar of Bad Dreams"
Автор книги: Stephen Edwin King
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Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 33 страниц)
‘I’m a winner either way,’ he said, and entered Monday’s date: November 23, 2009.
The Kindle thought for a long time, then produced a newspaper front page.
The date was Monday’s date.
The headline was huge and black.
Wesley spilled his coffee and yanked the Kindle out of danger even as lukewarm liquid soaked his crotch.
Fifteen minutes later he was pacing the living room of Robbie Henderson’s apartment while Robbie – who’d been up when Wesley came hammering at the door but was still wearing the tee-shirt and basketball shorts he slept in – stared at the screen of the Kindle.
‘We have to call someone,’ Wesley said. He was smacking a fist into an open palm, and hard enough to turn the skin red. ‘We have to call the police. No, wait! The arena! Call the Rupp and leave a message for her to call me, ASAP! No, that’s wrong! Too slow! I’ll call her now. That’s what—’
‘Relax, Mr Smith – Wes, I mean.’
‘How can I relax? Don’t you see that thing? Are you blind?’
‘No, but you still have to relax. Pardon the expression, but you’re losing your shit, and people can’t think productively when they’re doing that.’
‘But—’
‘Take a deep breath. And remind yourself that according to this, we’ve got almost sixty hours.’
‘Easy for you to say. Your girlfriend isn’t going to be on that bus when it starts back to—’ Then he stopped, because that wasn’t so. Josie Quinn was a member of the team, and according to Robbie, he and Josie had a thing going on.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I saw the headline and freaked. I didn’t even pay for my breakfast, just ran up here. I know I look like I wet my pants, and I damn near did. Thank God your roommates are gone.’
‘I’m pretty freaked, too,’ Robbie admitted, and for a moment they studied the screen in silence. According to Wesley’s Kindle, Monday’s edition of The Echo was going to have a black border around the front page as well as a black headline on top of it. That headline read:
COACH, 7 STUDENTS KILLED IN HORRIFIC BUS CRASH; 9 OTHERS CRITICAL
The story itself really wasn’t a story at all, only an item. Even in his distress, Wesley knew why. The accident had happened – no, was going to happen – at just short of 9:00 p.m. on Sunday night. Too late to report any details, although probably if they heated up Robbie’s computer and went to the Internet—
What was he thinking? The Internet did not predict the future; only the pink Kindle did that.
His hands were shaking too badly to enter November 24. He pushed the Kindle to Robbie. ‘You do it.’
Robbie managed, though it took him two tries. The Echo’s Tuesday story was more complete, but the headline was even worse:
DEATH TOLL RISES TO 10
TOWN AND COLLEGE MOURN
‘Is Josie—’ Wesley began.
‘Yeah,’ Robbie said. ‘Survives the crash, dies on Monday. Christ.’
According to Antonia ‘Toni’ Burrell, one of the Meerkats cheerleaders, and one of the lucky ones to survive Sunday night’s horrific bus crash with only cuts and bruises, the celebration was still going on, the Bluegrass Trophy still being passed hand-to-hand. ‘We were singing “We Are the Champions” for the twentieth time or so,’ she said from the hospital in Bowling Green, where most of the survivors were taken. ‘Coach turned around and yelled for us to keep it down, and that’s when it happened.’
According to State Police Captain Moses Arden, the bus was traveling on Route 139, the Princeton Road, and was about two miles west of Cadiz when an SUV driven by Candy Rymer of Montgomery struck it. ‘Ms Rymer was traveling at a high rate of speed west along Highway 80,’ Captain Arden said, ‘and struck the bus at the intersection.’
The bus driver, Herbert Allison, 58, of Moore, apparently saw Ms Rymer’s vehicle at the last moment and tried to swerve. That swerve, coupled with the impact, drove the bus into the ditch, where it overturned and exploded.
There was more, but neither of them wanted to read it.
‘Okay,’ Robbie said. ‘Let’s think about this. First, can we be sure it’s true?’
‘Maybe not,’ Wesley said. ‘But Robbie … can we afford to take the chance?’
‘No,’ Robbie said. ‘No, I guess we can’t. Of course we can’t. But Wes, if we call the police, they won’t believe us. You know that.’
‘We’ll show them the Kindle! We’ll show them the story!’ But even to himself, Wesley sounded deflated. ‘Okay, how about this. I’ll tell Ellen. Even if she won’t believe me, she might agree to hold the bus for fifteen minutes or so, or change the route this guy Allison’s planning to take.’
Robbie considered. ‘Yeah. Worth a try.’
Wesley took his phone out of his briefcase. Robbie had gone back to the story, using the Next Page button to access the rest.
The phone rang twice … three times … four.
Wesley was preparing to deliver his message to voicemail when Ellen answered. ‘Wesley, I can’t talk to you now. I thought you understood that—’
‘Ellen, listen—’
‘—but if you got my message, you know we’re going to talk.’ In the background he could hear raucous, excited girls – Josie would be among them – and lots of loud music.
‘Yes, I did get the message, but we have to talk n—’
‘No!’ Ellen said. ‘We don’t. I’m not going to take your calls this weekend, and I’m not going to listen to your messages.’ Her voice softened. ‘And hon – every one you leave is going to make it harder. For us, I mean.’
‘Ellen, you don’t understa—’
‘Goodbye, Wes. I’ll talk to you next week. Do you wish us luck?’
‘Ellen, please!’
‘I’ll take that as a yes,’ she said. ‘And you know what? I guess I still care about you, even though you are a lug.’
With that she was gone.
He poised his finger over Redial, then made himself not push it. It wouldn’t help. Ellen was wearing her my-way-or-the-highway hat. It was insane, but there it was.
‘She won’t talk to me except on her schedule. What she doesn’t realize is that after Sunday night she may not have a schedule. You’ll have to call Ms Quinn.’ In his current state, the girl’s first name escaped him.
‘Josie’d think I was prankin’ on her,’ Robbie said. ‘A story like that, any girl’d think I was prankin’ on her.’ He was still studying the Kindle’s screen. ‘Want to know something? The woman who caused the accident – who will cause it – hardly gets hurt at all. I’ll bet you next semester’s tuition she was just as drunk as a goddam skunk.’
Wesley hardly heard this. ‘Tell Josie that Ellen has to take my call. Have her say it’s not about us. Tell her to say it’s an emer—’
‘Dude,’ Robbie said. ‘Slow down and listen. Are you listening?’
Wesley nodded, but what he heard most clearly was his own pounding heart.
‘Point one, Josie would still think I was prankin’ on her. Point two, she might think we both were. Point three, I don’t think she’d go to Coach Silverman anyway, given the mood Coach has been in lately … and she gets even worse on game trips, Josie says.’ Robbie sighed. ‘You have to understand about Josie. She’s sweet, she’s smart, she’s sexy as hell, but she’s also a timid little mousie. It’s sort of what I like about her.’
‘That probably says heaps of good things about your character, Robbie, but you’ll pardon me if right now I don’t give a rat’s ass. You’ve told me what won’t work; do you have any idea what might?’
‘That’s point four. With a little luck, we won’t have to tell anybody about this. Which is good, since they wouldn’t believe it.’
‘Elucidate.’
‘Huh?’
‘Tell me what you’ve got in mind.’
‘First, we need to use another one of your Echo downloads.’
Robbie punched in November 25, 2009. Another girl, a cheerleader who had been horribly burned in the explosion, had died, raising the death toll to eleven. Although The Echo didn’t come right out and say so, more were likely to die before the week was out.
Robbie only gave this story a quick scan. What he was looking for was a boxed story on the lower half of page 1:
CANDACE RYMER CHARGED WITH MULTIPLE COUNTS OF VEHICULAR HOMICIDE
There was a gray square in the middle of the story – her picture, Wesley assumed, only the pink Kindle didn’t seem able to reprint news photographs. But it didn’t matter, because now he got it. It wasn’t the bus they had to stop; it was the woman who was going to hit the bus.
Candace Rymer was point four.
VI – Candy Rymer
At five o’clock on a gray Sunday afternoon – as the Lady Meerkats were cutting down basketball nets in a not-too-distant part of the state – Wesley Smith and Robbie Henderson were sitting in Wesley’s modest Chevy Malibu, watching the door of a roadhouse in Eddyville, twenty miles north of Cadiz. The parking lot was oiled dirt and mostly empty. There was almost certainly a TV inside The Broken Windmill, but Wesley guessed discriminating tipplers would rather do their drinking and NFL-watching at home. You didn’t have to go inside the joint to know it was a hole. Candy Rymer’s first stop had been bad, but this second one was worse.
Parked slightly crooked (and blocking what appeared to be the fire exit) was a filthy, dinged-up Ford Explorer with two bumper stickers on the back. MY CHILD IS AN HONOR STUDENT AT THE STATE CORRECTIONAL FACILITY, one read. The other was even more telling: I BRAKE FOR JACK DANIELS.
‘Maybe we oughta do it right here,’ Robbie said. ‘While she’s inside slopping it up and watching the Titans.’
It was a tempting idea, but Wesley shook his head. ‘We’ll wait. She’s got one more stop to make. Hopson, remember?’
‘That’s miles from here.’
‘Right,’ Wesley said. ‘But we’ve got time to kill, and we’re going to kill it.’
‘Why?’
‘Because what we’re up to is changing the future. Or trying to, at least. We have no idea how tough that is. Waiting as long as possible improves our chances.’
‘Wesley, that is one drunk chick. She was drunk when she got out of that first juke joint in Central City, and she’s going to be a lot drunker when she comes out of yonder shack. I can’t see her getting her car repaired in time to rendezvous with the girls’ bus forty miles from here. And what if we break down while we’re trying to follow her to her last stop?’
Wesley hadn’t considered this. Now he did. ‘My instincts say wait, but if you have a strong feeling that we should do it now, we will.’
Robbie sat up. ‘Too late. Here comes Miss America.’
Candy Rymer emerged from The Broken Windmill in a kind of slalom. She dropped her purse, bent down to get it, almost fell over, cursed, picked it up, laughed, and then continued to where her Explorer was parked, digging her keys out as she went. Her face was puffy, not quite hiding the remains of what must once have been very good looks. Her hair, blond on top and black at the roots, hung around her cheeks in lank curls. Her belly pooched out the front of elastic-waist jeans just below the hem of what had to be a Kmart smock top.
She got in her beat-to-shit SUV, kicked the engine into life (it sounded in desperate need of a tune-up) and drove forward into the roadhouse’s fire door. There was a crunch. Then her backup lights came on and she reversed so fast that for one sickening moment Wesley thought she was going to hit his Malibu, crippling it and leaving them on foot as she drove off to her appointment in Samarra. But she stopped in time and peeled onto the highway without pausing to look for traffic. A moment later Wesley was following as she headed east toward Hopson. And the intersection where the Lady Meerkats’ bus would arrive in four hours.
In spite of the terrible thing she was going to do, Wesley couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for her, and he had an idea Robbie felt the same. The follow-up story they’d read about her in The Echo told a tale as familiar as it was sordid.
Candace ‘Candy’ Rymer, age forty-one, divorced. Three children, now in the custody of their father. During the last dozen years of her life she’d been in and out of four spin-dry facilities, roughly one every three years. According to an acquaintance (she seemed to have no friends), she had tried AA and decided it wasn’t for her. Too much holy-rolling. She had been arrested for DUI half a dozen times. She had lost her license after each of the last two, but in both cases it had been restored, the second time by special petition. She needed her license to get to her job at the fertilizer factory in Bainbridge, she told Judge Wallenby. What she didn’t tell him was that she had lost the job six months previous … and nobody checked. Candy Rymer was a booze-bomb waiting to go off, and the explosion was now very close.
The story hadn’t mentioned her home address in Montgomery, but it didn’t need to. In what Wesley considered a rather brilliant piece of investigative journalism (especially for The Echo), the reporter had retraced Candy’s final binge, from The Pot O’ Gold in Central City to The Broken Windmill in Eddyville to Banty’s Bar in Hopson. There the bartender was going to try to take her keys. Unsuccessfully. Candy was going to give him the finger and leave, shouting ‘I’m done giving my business to this dive!’ back over her shoulder. That was at seven o’clock. The reporter theorized that Candy must have pulled over somewhere for a short nap, possibly on Route 124, before cutting across to Route 80. A little further down 80, she would make her final stop. A fiery one.
Once Robbie put the thought in his head, Wesley kept expecting his always-trustworthy Chevrolet to die and coast to a stop at the side of the two-lane blacktop, a victim of either a bad battery or the Paradox Laws. Candy Rymer’s taillights would disappear from view and they would spend the following hours making frantic but useless calls (always assuming their phones would even work out here in the mid-South williwags) and cursing themselves for not disabling her vehicle back in Eddyville, while they still had a chance.
But the Malibu cruised as effortlessly as always, without a single gurgle or glitch. He stayed about a quarter mile behind Candy’s Explorer.
‘Man, she’s all over the road,’ Robbie said. ‘Maybe she’ll ditch the damn thing before she gets to the next bar. Save us the trouble of slashing her tires.’
‘According to The Echo, that doesn’t happen.’
‘Yeah, but we know the future’s not cast in stone, don’t we? Maybe this is another Ur, or something.’
Wesley was sure it didn’t work that way with Ur Local, but he kept his mouth shut. Either way, it was too late now.
Candy Rymer made it to Banty’s without going in the ditch or hitting any oncoming traffic, although she could have done either; God knew she had enough close calls. When one of the cars swerved out of her way and then passed Wesley’s Malibu, Robbie said: ‘That’s a family. Mom, Pop, three little kids goofin’ around in the back.’
That was when Wesley stopped feeling sorry for Rymer and started feeling angry at her. It was a clean, hot emotion that made his pique at Ellen feel paltry by comparison.
‘That bitch,’ he said. His knuckles were white on the steering wheel. ‘That drunken who-gives-a-shit bitch. I’ll kill her if that’s the only way I can stop her.’
‘I’ll help,’ Robbie said, then clamped his mouth so tightly shut his lips nearly disappeared.
They didn’t have to kill her, and the Paradox Laws stopped them no more than the laws against drinking and driving had stopped Candy Rymer on her tour of southern Kentucky’s more desperate watering holes.
The parking lot of Banty’s was paved, but the buckling concrete looked like something left over from an Israeli bombing raid in Gaza. Overhead, a fizzing neon rooster flashed on and off. Hooked in one set of its talons was a moonshine jug with XXX printed on the side.
The Rymer woman’s Explorer was parked almost directly beneath this fabulous bird, and by its stuttering orange-red glow, Wesley slashed open the elderly SUV’s front tires with the butcher knife they had brought for that express purpose. As the whoosh of escaping air hit him, he was struck by a wave of relief so great that at first he couldn’t get up but only hunker on his knees like a man praying. He only wished they’d done it back at The Broken Windmill.
‘My turn,’ Robbie said, and a moment later the Explorer settled further as the kid punctured the rear tires. Then came another hiss. He had put a hole in the spare for good measure. By then Wesley had gotten to his feet.
‘Let’s park around to the side,’ Robbie said. ‘I think we better keep an eye on her.’
‘I’m going to do a lot more than that,’ Wesley said.
‘Easy, big fella. What are you planning on?’
‘I’m not planning. I’m beyond that.’ But the rage shaking through his body suggested something different.
According to The Echo, she had called Banty’s a dive in her parting shot, but apparently that had been cleaned up for family consumption. What she actually threw back over her shoulder was, ‘I’m done doing business with this shitpit!’ Only by this point she was so drunk the vulgarity came out in a slippery slur: shi’pih.
Robbie was so fascinated at seeing the news story played out before his eyes that he made no effort to grab Wesley as he strode toward her. He did call ‘Wait!’ but Wesley didn’t. He seized the woman and commenced shaking her.
Candy Rymer’s mouth dropped open; the keys she’d been holding dropped to the cracked concrete tarmac.
‘Leggo me, you bassard!’
Wesley didn’t. He slapped her face hard enough to split her lower lip, then went back on her the other way. ‘Sober up!’ he screamed into her frightened face. ‘Sober up, you useless bitch! Get a life and stop fucking up other people’s! You’re going to kill people! Do you understand that? You are going to fucking KILL people!’
He slapped her a third time, the sound as loud as a pistol shot. She staggered back against the side of the building, weeping and holding her hands up to protect her face. Blood trickled down her chin. Their shadows, turned into elongated gantries by the neon rooster, winked off and on.
He raised his hand to slap a fourth time – better to slap than to choke, which was what he really wanted to do – but Robbie grabbed him from behind and wrestled him away. ‘Stop it! Fucking stop it, man! That’s enough!’
The bartender and a couple of goofy-looking patrons were now standing in the doorway, gawking. Candy Rymer had slid down to a sitting position. She was weeping hysterically, her hands pressed to her swelling face. ‘Why does everyone hate me?’ she sobbed. ‘Why is everyone so goddam mean?’
Wesley looked at her dully, the anger out of him. What replaced it was a kind of hopelessness. You would say that a drunk driver who caused the deaths of at least eleven people had to be evil, but there was no evil here. Only a sobbing alkie sitting on the cracked, weedy concrete of a country roadhouse parking lot. A woman who, if the off-and-on light of the stuttering neon did not lie, had wet her pants.
‘You can get to the person, but you can’t get to the evil,’ Wesley said. His voice seemed to be coming from somewhere else. ‘The evil always survives. It flies off like a bigass bird and lands on someone else. That’s the hell of it, wouldn’t you say? The total hell of it?’
‘Yeah, I’m sure, very philosophical, but come on. Before they get a really good look at you or the license plate of your car.’
Robbie was leading him back to the Malibu. Wesley went as docilely as a child. He was trembling. ‘The evil always survives, Robbie. In all the Urs. Remember that.’
‘You bet, absolutely. Give me the keys. I’ll drive.’
‘Hey!’ someone shouted from behind them. ‘Why in the hell did you beat up that woman? She wasn’t doing nothing to you! Come back here!’
Robbie pushed Wesley into the car, ran around the hood, threw himself behind the wheel, and drove away fast. He kept the pedal down until the stuttering rooster disappeared, then eased up. ‘What now?’
Wesley ran a hand over his eyes. ‘I’m sorry I did that,’ he said. ‘And yet I’m not. Do you understand?’
‘Yeah,’ Robbie said. ‘You bet. It was for Coach Silverman. And Josie too.’ He smiled. ‘My little mousie.’
Wesley smiled.
‘So where do we go? Home?’
‘Not yet,’ Wesley said.
They parked on the edge of a cornfield near the intersection of Route 139 and Highway 80, two miles west of Cadiz. They were early, and Wesley used the time to fire up the pink Kindle. When he tried to access Ur Local, he was greeted by a somehow unsurprising message: THIS SERVICE IS NO LONGER AVAILABLE.
‘Probably for the best,’ he said.
Robbie turned toward him. ‘Say what?’
‘Nothing. It doesn’t matter.’ He put the Kindle back in his briefcase.
‘Wes?’
‘What, Robbie?’
‘Did we break the Paradox Laws?’
‘Undoubtedly,’ Wes said.
At five to nine, they heard honking and saw lights. They got out of the Malibu and stood in front of it, waiting. Wesley observed that Robbie’s hands were clenched, and was glad he himself wasn’t the only one still afraid that Candy Rymer might still somehow appear.
Headlights breasted the nearest hill. It was the bus, followed by a dozen cars filled with Lady Meerkats supporters, all honking deliriously and flashing their high beams off and on. As the bus passed, Wesley heard sweet female voices singing ‘We Are the Champions’ and felt a chill race up his back and lift the hair on his neck.
He raised his hand and waved.
Beside him, Robbie did the same. Then he turned to Wesley, smiling. ‘What do you say, Prof? Want to join the parade?’
Wesley clapped him on the shoulder. ‘That sounds like a damn fine idea.’
When the last of the cars had passed, Robbie got in line. Like the others, he honked and flashed the Malibu’s lights all the way back to Moore.
Wesley didn’t mind.
VII – The Paradox Police
When Robbie got out in front of Susan and Nan’s (where LADY MEERKATS RULE had been soaped on the window), Wesley said, ‘Wait a sec.’
He came around the front of the car and embraced the kid. ‘You did good.’
Robbie grinned. ‘Does this mean I get a gift A for the semester?’
‘Nope, just some advice. Get out of football. You’ll never make it a career, and your head deserves better.’
‘Duly noted,’ Robbie said … which was not agreement, as they both knew. ‘See you in class?’
‘On Tuesday,’ Wesley said. But fifteen minutes later he had reason to wonder if anyone would see him. Ever again.
There was a car in the spot where he usually left the Malibu when he didn’t leave it in Parking Lot A at the college. Wesley could have parked behind it, but chose the other side of the street instead. Something about the car made him uneasy. It was a Cadillac, and in the glow of the arc sodium beneath which it was parked, it seemed too bright. The red paint almost seemed to yell Here I am! Do you like me?
Wesley didn’t. Nor did he like the tinted windows or the oversize gangsta hubcabs with their gold Cadillac emblems. It looked like a drug dealer’s car. If, that was, the dealer in question also happened to be a homicidal maniac.
Now why would I think that?
‘Stress of the day, that’s all,’ he said as he crossed the deserted street with his briefcase banging against his leg. He bent down. Nobody was inside the car. At least he didn’t think so. With the darkened windows, it was hard to be entirely sure.
It’s the Paradox Police. They’ve come for me.
This idea should have seemed ridiculous at best, a paranoid fantasy at worst, but felt like neither. And when you considered all that had happened, maybe it wasn’t paranoid at all.
Wesley stretched out a hand, touched the door of the car, then snatched it back. The door felt like metal, but it was warm. And it seemed to be pulsing. As if, metal or not, the car were alive.
Run.
The thought was so powerful he felt his lips mouth it, but he knew running wasn’t an option. If he tried, the man or men who belonged to the loathsome red car would find him. This was a fact so simple that it defied logic. It bypassed logic. So, instead of running, he used his key to open the street door and went upstairs to his apartment. He did it slowly, because his heart was racing and his legs kept threatening to give way.
The door of 2B stood open, light spilling onto the upstairs landing in a long rectangle.
‘Ah, here you are,’ a not-quite-human voice said. ‘Come in, Wesley of Kentucky.’
There were two of them. One was young and one was old. The old one sat on his sofa, where Wesley and Ellen Silverman had once seduced each other to their mutual enjoyment (nay, ecstasy). The young one sat in Wesley’s favorite chair, the one he always ended up in when the night was late, the leftover cheesecake tasty, the book interesting, and the light from the standing lamp just right. They both wore long mustard-colored coats, the kind that are called dusters, and Wesley understood, without knowing how he understood, that the coats were alive. He also understood that the men wearing them were not men at all. Their faces kept changing, and what lay just beneath the skin was reptilian. Or birdlike. Or both.
On their lapels, where lawmen in a Western movie would have worn badges, both wore buttons bearing a red eye. Wesley thought these too were alive. The eyes were watching him.
‘How did you know it was me?’
‘Smelled you,’ the older of the two replied, and the terrible thing was this: it didn’t sound like a joke.
‘What do you want?’
‘You know why we’re here,’ the young one said. The older of the two never spoke again at all until the end of the visit. Listening to one of them was bad enough. It was like listening to a man whose voicebox was stuffed with crickets.
‘I suppose I do,’ Wesley said. His voice was steady, at least so far. ‘I broke the Paradox Laws.’ He prayed they didn’t know about Robbie, and thought they might not; the Kindle had been registered to Wesley Smith, after all.
‘You have no idea what you did,’ the man in the yellow coat said in a meditative voice. ‘The Tower trembles; the worlds shudder in their courses. The rose feels a chill, as of winter.’
Very poetic, but not very illuminating. ‘What Tower? What rose?’ Wesley could feel sweat breaking on his forehead even though he liked to keep the apartment cool. It’s because of them, he thought. These boys run hot.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ his younger visitor said. ‘Explain yourself, Wesley of Kentucky. And do it well, if you would ever see sunshine again.’
For a moment Wesley couldn’t. His mind was filled with a single thought: I’m on trial here. Then he swept it aside. The return of his anger – a pale imitation of what he had felt toward Candy Rymer, but real enough – helped in this regard.
‘People were going to die. Almost a dozen. Maybe more. That might not mean much to fellows like you, but it does to me, especially since one of them happens to be a woman I’m in love with. All because of one self-indulgent drunk who won’t address her problems. And …’ He almost said And we, but made the necessary course correction just in time. ‘And I didn’t even hurt her. Slapped her a little, but I couldn’t help myself.’
‘You boys can never help yourselves,’ the buzzing voice of the thing in his favorite chair – which would never be his favorite chair again – replied. ‘Poor impulse control is ninety percent of your problem. Did it ever cross your mind, Wesley of Kentucky, that the Paradox Laws exist for a reason?’
‘I didn’t—’
The thing raised its voice. ‘Of course you didn’t. We know you didn’t. We’re here because you didn’t. It didn’t cross your mind that one of the people on that bus could become a serial killer, someone who might kill dozens, including a child who would otherwise grow up to cure cancer or Alzheimer’s Disease. It didn’t occur to you that one of those young women might give birth to the next Hitler or Stalin, a human monster who could go on to kill millions of your fellow humans on this level of the Tower. It didn’t occur to you that you were meddling in events far beyond your ability to understand!’
No, he had not considered those things at all. Ellen was what he had considered. As Josie Quinn was what Robbie had considered. And together they had considered the others. Kids screaming, their skin turning to tallow and dripping off their bones, maybe dying the worst deaths God visits on His suffering people.
‘Does that happen?’ he whispered.
‘We don’t know what happens,’ the thing in the yellow coat said. ‘That’s precisely the point. The experimental program you foolishly accessed can see clearly six months into the future … within a single narrow geographical area, that is. Beyond six months, predictive sight grows dim. Beyond a year, all is darkness. So you see, we don’t know what you and your young friend may have done. And since we don’t, there’s no chance to repair the damage, if there was damage.’
Your young friend. They knew about Robbie Henderson after all. Wesley’s heart sank.
‘Is there some sort of power controlling all this? There is, isn’t there? When I accessed Ur Books for the first time, I saw a tower.’
‘All things serve the Tower,’ the man-thing in the yellow duster said, and touched the hideous button on its coat with a kind of reverence.
‘Then how do you know I’m not serving it too?’
They said nothing. Only stared at him with their black, predatory bird-eyes.
‘I never ordered it, you know. I mean … I ordered a Kindle, that much is true, but I never ordered the one I got. It just came.’
There was a long silence, and Wesley understood that his life was teetering inside it. Life as he knew it, at least. He might continue some sort of existence if these two creatures took him away in their loathsome red car, but it would be a dark existence, probably an imprisoned existence, and he guessed he would not retain his sanity for long.
‘We think it was a mistake in shipping,’ the young one said finally.
‘But you don’t know for sure, do you? Because you don’t know where it came from. Or who sent it.’
More silence. Then the older of the two repeated, ‘All things serve the Tower.’ He stood, and held out his hand. It shimmered and became a claw. Shimmered again and became a hand. ‘Give it to me, Wesley of Kentucky.’
Wesley of Kentucky didn’t have to be asked twice, although his hands were trembling so badly that he fumbled with the buckles of his briefcase for what felt like hours. At last the top sprang open, and he held the pink Kindle out to the older of the two. The creature stared at it with a crazed hunger that made Wesley feel like screaming.
