All The Bells on Earth (22 page)

“Revelations 1, verse 12.”

“Ah,” Walt said. “From Revelations. Somehow I remember that those were
candlesticks
, but what you’ve got is lampstands?”

“The catalogue number you gave me is lampstands. That’s Revised Standard Version. King James is candlesticks. Now, if you want the candlesticks instead of the lampstand, we offer those too, but they’re a little more pricey, although they do come with good candles—aromatic.”

“No,” Walt said. “That sounds nice, but I think I prefer the lampstand. I just can’t …
Surely
it must be one or the other?”

“It’s our policy to please the customer.”

Walt nearly hung up again. This was blatantly fraudulent. Fraud with its mask torn off. A moment ago the whole thing was funny; now he felt like a credulous fool. “Look,” Walt said, “what’s the deal here? Seriously.”

After a moment the man said, “What do you
think
the deal is?”

“To tell you the truth,” Walt said, “I think I’m getting hosed.”

“Well, then that’s the truth. You’re getting hosed.”

“That’s it?”

“Let’s put it this way—sometimes you get what you
think
you pay for. It’s like that here. All I can tell you is that we’ve had a
lot
of satisfied customers. You might be one of them, or you might be one of the other. The choice is yours. The choice is always yours.”

There was something about this speech that took the wind out of Walt’s sails. Whatever else was true about Dilworth Catalogue Sales, this man clearly believed in it on some fundamental level. He was a salesman, not a shyster.

“Shall I enter this?” the man asked.

“Yeah,” Walt said. “I guess so. What’s the total?”

“That’s $35.45 plus tax plus two dollars shipping … that’s $40.10.”

“Great,” Walt said. “Don’t forget the card.”

“It’s already on the order form—no extra charge.”

Walt hung up. He had just paid forty dollars for junk. It was a damned good thing that Ivy was going to work for Argyle. Lord knows how they’d get the bills paid otherwise.

He razored open a box and pulled out the contents, plastic bags full of dollhouse furniture—not the usual plastic trash, but high-toned wooden furniture, mouse-size. There were even little rolled-up rag rugs. He sold the heck out of these to dollhouse fanatics, usually adults crazy for little bitty things.

The motor home door slammed shut, and he looked out in time to see Jinx cutting across toward the front porch. The world was waking up.

“Bluebird,” Walt said, glancing toward the rafters just in case it was necessary, “fetch me my golden lampstand this very day, a quarter hour before the sun reacheth the zenith.” He chuckled a little bit, as if to imply that what he’d said was a sort of joke.

“A
ND WHAT ABOUT THE
testimonials for the Sensible Investor? I don’t want the same crowd we ran through the Startup America meetings last year. They’ll be all right up in San Jose in the spring, but we’d be in bad shape if one of them was recognized as a ringer. We need some new faces. And tone it down, too. This is the nineties. A couple of years ago the public believed any damned thing. Now they don’t want risk.”

Argyle studied himself in the mirror. He hadn’t gotten a good night’s sleep in weeks now. And he had a splitting headache. His late-night forays into the neighborhood inevitably made his head ache as if he’d been hit with a club. And the voices—the satanic gibbering and muttering in his nightmares, like someone had opened a door onto Hell….

“The testimonial crowd is entirely new,” the man on the other end of the line said tiredly. “New faces, new stories. Don Little over at the temp agency worked that out along with the gimmick. You’d have to look hard to spot any kind of pyramid element. I’m surprised nobody got back to you with the prospectus.”

“I am too,” Argyle said flatly. But then he remembered. In fact someone
had
gotten back to him—weeks ago. He’d forgotten it, put the paperwork away in a drawer. His mind just wasn’t with it somehow. Business kept getting shunted aside by this damned …

Abruptly he had the uncanny feeling that someone was looking at him, a feeling so profound that he swiveled around in his chair and looked behind him, although it was impossible: the wall was windowless, only three or four feet away. There was a sound in his ears like the rushing of wind and a creaking like a heavy body swinging slowly on a wooden gallows. Sweat ran into his collar as he sat staring, tensed, his head pounding, waiting for something to happen. Slowly he opened the bottom desk drawer. There were four jars in it, from LeRoy’s collection. He untwisted one of the lids, releasing the sigh of breath, the last exhalation of life trapped within.

The sounds faded and disappeared. The presence in the room evaporated. There was nothing behind him but framed diplomas and thank-you trophies from Little League and from kids’ soccer teams.

“Are you there?”

“Yeah,” he said into the phone. He looked at his list, trying to concentrate. “What about the orphans?”

“They’re gangbusters. We got IRS approval last week. The photo layouts are perfect—Filipino girl about four years old, crying at the edge of this vast dump, scrounging for garbage. She’s got enormous eyes, like a kid in one of those paintings. Big crocodile tears.”

“Where’d you find her?”

“The girl? Pasadena. The photo shoot was at some kind of landfill out in Whittier. We trucked in a lot of crap to set it up right—rags and bottles and rotten fruit, that kind of thing. Big mountain of it. Looks like a typical third-world dump. Anyway, the girl’s got this little busted-up basket with—get this—an old brown banana and a stuffed doggy in it. We took a rock and beat the hell out of the doggy, yanked its eye out, really made it look loved. It’s purely pitiful. Girl’s mother’s a maid for Benson up there. You remember Jim Benson?”

“Benson?” Argyle groped through his mind, trying to remember the name. The words “yanked its eye out” echoed in his head, going around like a nursery-rhyme refrain. “Didn’t Benson threaten to go to the press over the coupon giveaway? I thought he met with a couple of broken legs.”

“That was
Benton
, with a
T
. He’s up in Camarillo now, state hospital, completely mental. This is the guy who did that great PR package for ‘Get Rich Yesterday.’ ”

“How about the maid and the girl? Are they all right?”

“We put them on a plane back to Manila. No chance the mother will ever see the ads.”

“I didn’t mean all right that way. I mean
happy
. The kid. The little girl.”

“Happy?”

“Yeah. Did you take care of her? I don’t
use
children, not unless they’re imaginary children.”

“Sure, we took care of her. Absolutely. We gave the mother two one-way tickets and a thousand bucks—a choice between that and deportation.”

“Send her another thousand. Five thousand. And the same in trust for the girl. And call George Mifflin in Manila. Tell him to keep an eye on both of them.”

“Whatever you say.”

“That’s what I say. What kind of ads have we got?”

“Twenty-four so far, all in slick magazines. Save the starving orphans—the usual deal. Pathetic enough to make you cry. It’ll draw like rotten meat. Beats the hell out of the legitimate ads, I can tell you that.”

“Good. That’s it?” He could hear the creaking again, as if there were ghost children on the swings outside, and he realized that it was far hotter in the room than it should be. There was rain pattering against the windows now. He loosened his tie and unbuttoned his shirt, looking around uneasily. He could swear something was
here
, in the room, now.

Three more jars in the drawer.

“One more thing quick,” the man said. “Benson’s got a dynamite idea for an estate liquidation ploy. He wants me to run it past you.”

“Shoot.” Argyle looked at the desktop, working hard to listen. There was static on the phone, and the voice seemed to come from a long way away, as if the man were speaking on a string-and-can phone from some other room.

“Basically you donate your dead parents’ estate,” he was saying, “especially properties. The money goes—get this—
to buy wilderness land
. We run up a color brochure showing ‘holdings in trust’—so many million acres of northwest wilderness. Pictures of moose, buffalo, long article about the threat to the national parks system, mining, grazing, sale of public lands….”

Argyle lost track of what the man was saying. He loosened his tie and unbuttoned his shirt at his neck. His mouth was dry and his scalp itched, and he felt a vast pressure rising up within him, as if in another forty seconds he would simply explode. He tried to ignore it.

“We punch all the rich liberal buttons,” the man said, “tap all the eco-fears, if you follow me. Guarantee your children’s natural birthright into perpetuity and get a hell of a big tax write-off too. We do the whole scam Ponzi-style. Keep enough liquid income to cover ourselves in case we actually need to buy a little property. How fast can these people die, anyway? And we can show the inheritors the same piece of land over and over. It’s foolproof. You got anything to add?”

“Add? I’d work Indians into it. That’s always good. Picture of some old dead chief.

“Of course. We might risk the life insurance angle, too. That works like crazy for nursing homes and mausoleums; there’s no reason it won’t work for us….”

“Right,” Argyle said hurriedly. The room seemed to shake now, as if from heavy footfalls. The phone receiver thrummed in his hand. “That’s fine. Save the details for some other time.”

“All right. Now, on the 900 numbers. The crystal readings never got off the blocks. Standard psychic stuff is still the bread and butter. Soft porn’s holding its own. That kind of thing’s established, you know, but this fad stuff … What I’m saying is if it’s current, then we’ve got to get on top of it quicker, get the product out there….” The man’s voice droned on, running down accounts. “… breakfast cereal,” he said. “… computerized fortune cookie messages, gardening tips, dating service, Zantar the Psychic …”

“What?” Argyle was lost, baffled. His mind spun. He was hot, feverish. Was the man talking gibberish? “Wait.” He croaked the word out, laying the phone down without punching the hold button. He put his hands to his ears, trying to press out the rushing and creaking, which had sprung up again as if someone had put a cassette tape in the stereo. The sensation of being on view increased by the moment, and he looked around wildly, at the windows, at the lamp-lit playground equipment beyond, at the murky, shadowed corners of the office. He felt shrunken, tiny, like a specimen insect in a glass jar. The very air vibrated, and he was seized with panic, with the wild desire to run. Did he hear a bell tolling?

The windows ran with rainwater, and what had sounded like the rush of wind had evened into the unmistakable exhalation of heavy breathing. He felt a stirring against the back of his neck, as if someone stood very close behind him now, whispering softly.

He didn’t dare turn around, but reached into the drawer again, turning the lid from one of the jars. There was a fleeting cry, swallowed immediately in the noise and the shaking. He opened another, and the spirit fled, the presence in the room undiminished, ravenous.

He was hot, burning up inside, his very cells on fire. Slowly he stood up, desperate simply to leave, to get out into the rain and the wind. He took a careful step toward the door. His shoulders hunched forward, retracting from the presence at his back. He knew damned well who it was.
What
it was. There was a stench of something burning, something sulphurous, and tendrils of smoke curled up from the carpet beneath his feet. With a wild shriek he lurched forward and grabbed the doorknob, which throbbed like a live thing. He slammed against the door with his shoulder, whimpering and shaking with terror. The door held. He was trapped!

Something wet slithered against his neck like the tongue of a lizard, and he screamed out loud, taking the knob in both hands and twisting it, falling to his knees on the carpet, his eyes screwed shut….

And the door swung inward, bumping gently against his knee. He opened his eyes. Abruptly the noises ceased, the presence in the room evaporated like steam. He heard the sound of rain against the window again. God almighty! He’d been out of his mind with fear,
pushing
on the door instead of pulling!

He realized then that the hallway outside the office door was full of children and their mothers, and he quickly pushed the door shut again. He took a long, shuddering breath and stood up, and right then he felt the wet fabric of his pants against the skin of his legs. He looked down, horrified. He’d wet himself in his terror.

The phone receiver still lay on the table, where he’d dropped it. His hands shook so badly that he could barely pick it up. “You still there?”

“Yeah,” the man said. “Everything all right over there?”

“Fine,” Argyle said, his voice husky. “There’s nothing wrong here. The storm’s apparently got the phones all screwed up. Listen, you keep up the good work. I’ve got a meeting.”

“Good enough. I’ll have Don send over a copy of the Sensible Investor prospectus. Anything else?”

The window lit up just then, and almost at the same time there was a crack of thunder that shook the walls.