Gojiro (30 page)
Komodo’s head spun. Sheila Brooks . . . inside.
The crowd surged on, desperate to unburden their Doom upon the Dreamer of the Sad Tomorrow. But in the car there was only silence. Silence and heat. Komodo felt it, that terrible, familiar fire—until she started to scream.
Then: Varrooom. She gunned the motor, squealed the tires. The Sheila Brooks Club members flew away. In the distance, Komodo could still hear them yell. “The End . . . I’ve seen it . . .”
They were back on the freeway now. She didn’t need the speed anymore. Whatever potential terror might pass by, it could never get to her. Behind those forbidding goggles her eyes were fixed, straight ahead. Komodo sat beside her, said nothing. There was nothing left to say.
* * *
On they went, past Berdoo, out to Indio, Desert Center. Komodo felt as if his heart was about to break, watching Sheila Brooks’s hands tighten about the steering wheel. How awful, to see that terror on her blanched face, to watch it bully her across the landscape, yet remain aloof, unnamed, out of conscious range, never to be acknowledged or exorcised. Komodo thought he’d seen expressions like that before, many times, always on his birthday.
Every August 6, he’d sit by the Dish, watching the
hibakushas
. One by one, the stolid Bomb survivors rose from their folding chairs, stood behind the podium, bore their witness. The pointylipped woman said, “The sun was before me, but then there was no sun. It was a red ball of wax. I was seized, inexplicably, with the need to see if it was raining. I held out my hand and a drop of the sun fell on my palm, like a bloody tear.” Then came the man with the dark glasses, the one with the tic. “My fingernails were ripped out. They flew across the room like darts.” Another woman told how she saw her own shadow burned into the wall.
By that time, Komodo would be weeping, his head in his hands. “Why should I escape while they suffer?” he asked Gojiro. “Why am I not on that platform, sharing their pain?” The monster would respond, as was his reflex, with rage. “Every year the same stories! Ain’t there a Dean Martin roast on or something?” But then, more tenderly, the reptile would hug his friend. “You wouldn’t like it. They’d make you dress up, wear itchy clothes. You know how you hate itchy clothes. Come on, turn it off.”
But Komodo couldn’t. He had to keep on watching, looking at the faces from his devastated hometown, hoping for a clue as to who he was. One survivor in particular stuck in his mind; she was different, not a regular. She was younger, no more than forty, which would have made her a child when the Heater hit—six, no more. Yet she looked older, wearier than the rest. They put pancake makeup on her haggard face to cover the keloid scars, but that only made her look more ghastly. Speaking in a grinding monotone, she said she’d wanted to be a teacher, to “create a world where a child would feel happy. A pretty world.” But then the Bomb fell, so that was over, of course. “I saw something I knew I wasn’t supposed to see. I saw Hell. I shall never leave it.”
Komodo watched that woman’s face and found it impossible to imagine her saying anything else. The Heater had stolen all her other words. This seemed the greatest horror of the Bomb, Komodo sometimes thought, the way it consumed the minds of the living. It was as if the agony of the dead had been transferred to the minds of the survivors, remaining with those
hibakushas
to see, and resee.
So many times Komodo wished he could find that
hibakusha,
snap his fingers before her eyes, throw open the doors of that Hell in which she dwelled. But there was nothing to be done. The sad woman never returned to the Dish, no matter how many of Komodo’s melancholy birthdays passed by. Now Komodo peered across the interior of that little red Corvette and felt the same appalling impotence. Sheila Brooks was in Hell, and there wasn’t anything he could do about it.
The most hideous thing was that he wouldn’t, even if he could. There was no way Komodo would lift a finger to alter the course of that speeding sports car. The Triple Ring Promise prevented it. “
She has a secret, a secret that she may not even know herself.
” That’s how he’d pled his case, trying to convince Gojiro that Sheila Brooks’s dilemma might overlap their own, that light shed on one might illuminate the other. Now the words resounded with an awful irony, for there was no turning back. What was sworn was sworn in blood and fire. If Sheila Brooks was driving straight toward the Encrucijada, Komodo understood that he had no choice but to go along for the wrenching ride. He could not, would not, stop her. It was his most sacred vow.
The shame of it!
Gojiro was right, Komodo knew then; there were limits to Cosmo, boundaries to self-dramatized Order. He had no business being in that little red Corvette. What was happening now was a private thing. It was between Sheila Brooks and her father and her dead mother. If he had any decency he would jump from that speeding car and dash himself against the black slab highway.
At least that’s what Komodo was thinking when he noticed that car behind them again. A gray Mercedes. Komodo thought he’d seen it earlier, before they turned off at the Oversoul Mall, the large, sleek Germanic automobile effortlessly keeping pace with the frantic accelerations of the Corvette. Now it was trailing them again, not particularly close, but there nevertheless.
“ . . . Every time we turned around there’d be that car, the gray one, following us . . .”
It was just then, with the moon rising higher in the giant sky, that she slammed on the brakes. Sand flew as the Corvette hairpinned across the median, hurtling between yuccas until it cracked into the wooly trunk of a Joshua tree.
“Ms. Brooks! Are you all right? A good thing we were wearing our seat belts. Their effectiveness in the reduction of highway fatalities cannot be overestimated. Did you swerve to avoid an injured animal?” Sheila Brooks did not answer. She’d already left the car.
When Komodo got out all he saw was the towering screen of the Desert View Motor Cinema.
Gojiro vs. the Enigma-Inking Squid at the Rock of Knowledge!
A long shot now: the leviathan bellowing, beating his withery foreclaws on his Triple-Ringed chest. Komodo paused to watch. It was involuntary. From the earliest of times, even the slightest glimpse of his friend would cause Komodo to stop, be stirred.
It was in the reflected light of the reptile’s image that Komodo saw Sheila Brooks. Again, Komodo stopped, stared. In her red gravity boots and tangerine sundress, he thought he’d never seen her look more lovely. But then, as a tractor-trailer truck blared by, his quavering heart turned cold.
She was holding a gun to her head!
Komodo leaped. His jump was long, loaded with apogee, laced with hang time. He beseeched Newtonian dispensation so he might come down in time. He impacted feet first, harder than projected.
“Oof.” The gun flew one way, Sheila Brooks the other.
She was lying on her back when he got to her, looking up. Her goggles were up around her hairline. He stared into huge green eyes. “I try,” she sobbed. “I try . . . to get there. But
he
stops me.” She pointed toward the drive-in screen where that giant squid clamped on Gojiro’s head like a helmet of slime. “I can’t get by him . . . it’s driving me crazy!”
That’s when it started up, with the two of them on the freeway, looking up at Gojiro. She felt it first. “That time at Albie’s party,” she said slowly, “before the car blew up. I don’t know . . . I looked at you, and there was like a click. It’s like, weird, but it’s happening again.”
“Yes,” Komodo concurred.
The pheromone!
It was infusing, right on that beer-bottle-strewn median, just as it had under that smoky big top. Only now there wasn’t a hundred yards to cross, or even a hundred feet. It was inches—inches between their lips.
“Ms. Brooks . . .”
“Mr. Komodo . . .”
The wind ceased to blow and the sound of speeding trucks was sucked out. Then, just as it was beneath Bullins’s birthday tent, all time and space fell away. Again, they could have been anywhere. Atop the great ice floes, upon the endless pampas, racing down the long, mirthless hallways of a Paris office building. They were in a zone of their own, moving forward, according to the pheromone’s irrepressible pull.
“Ahhh,” Komodo said.
“Ahhh,” Sheila Brooks said.
Closer, closer, across that fearsome gap.
But then Komodo sensed it, things blowing apart, her lips receding, swirling away like blown leaves into the vast desert night. Something was coming between them, driving them apart.
At first it was far off, then nearer. “Come in, Gojiro! Please heed this humble servant’s plea! Please come in, Gojiro, Bridger of Gaps, Linker of Lines, Nexus of Beam and Bunch, Defender of the Evolloo! Please come in!”
That strange supplication—someone was chanting it! Komodo whirled to the sound, saw a boy. A wild boy, dressed in rags. He was coming closer, singing all the while. But then that lone voice in the night was joined by another. It was Sheila Brooks, picking up the boy’s refrain.
“Ms. Brooks!” He reached for her, but she staggered away.
That was when Komodo felt the cold steel against his ear. “Federal agent. Don’t move. A derringer is a lady’s gun, but at this range, it’ll still make a hole.” Cologne sheared through the diesel fumes. Farther down the median, another man was knocking that wild, chanting boy to the ground. “Please come in Gojiro! Ow!”
“Wait—”
“I said don’t move!” The gun jammed harder into Komodo’s skull. “Ms. Brooks, please. There are orders to return you to your home. Your husband is worried about you.” Komodo could see the man now. He was huge and wide-shouldered, with a blond crew cut, wearing bubble shades.
“Bobby? Worried about me?”
“Worried out of his mind.”
“But what are you going to do with Mr. Komodo?”
“No problem. He’s an alien. His papers are not in order. He needs a medical briefing.” Right then an ambulance pulled up. Out got three heavyset men in white coats. They walked closer, carrying a straitjacket.
“But—”
“If you’d just step into the car, Ms. Brooks.” The rear door of that gray Mercedes, which vas now parked beside the little red Corvette, swung open. The man who’d been kicking the wild boy came over to help Sheila Brooks into the back seat, slammed the door behind her. It was hard to see through the tinted windows, but Komodo was certain someone was raising his arm, greeting Sheila Brooks. On the screen above, Gojiro was vanquishing that squid, flinging it around by its tentacles.
“Ms. Brooks—” Komodo pitched forward, but the blond man was too strong. No doubt the recipient of much special-forces training, he nonchalantly brought a knee up into the small of Komodo’s back, sent him to the ground coughing. “You’re supposed to be dead, so if I kill you it won’t matter much, will it? Be a good Coma Boy and go with these guys. You’re way overdue for a checkup.”
“What’s a fucking Coma Boy anyhow?” asked the man with the straitjacket, grabbing hold of Komodo.
“He was big once,” said the blond.
“For what?”
“For sleeping.”
“Sleeping?”
“Nine years.”
“Jap Van Winkle.” The man gave Komodo a kick. “Hey, asshole, how come you were so tired?”
“You’d be tired too if you got hit on the head with a A-bomb.”
“No shit? That’s rough.”
“Yeah. Strap that thing on him, tuck this Coma Boy in nice and tight. We haven’t got all night.”
They were grinding Komodo’s face into the cold sand when half a dozen vehicles pulled up in a rush. Blocky men with video cameras swarmed out, followed by several elaborately coiffed women teetering on unsteady high heels and brandishing microphones.
“Mr. Komodo! Channel Seven,” a cool brunette yelled. “Is it true that you are the Coma Boy?”
“Mr. Komodo! Channel Two. Is it true that you escaped from Okinawa in an open boat and the government has been covering it up all these years?”
“Mr. Komodo! Channel Eight. Are the Gojiro films based on your experiences?”
“Why are you wearing that straitjacket?”
“I-I-I,” Komodo stammered. The blond and his henchmen were no longer in sight. They were in that ambulance, tearing down the freeway, followed by the gray Mercedes containing Sheila Brooks. “Ms. Brooks!”
The newscasters jumped. “Sheila Brooks? Was Sheila Brooks in that car? Is it true that you’ve signed a deal with Brooks-Zeber to make a picture about Joseph Prometheus Brooks? Can we confirm that, Mr. Komodo?”
Then, through a megaphone, came Shig’s voice. “Mr. Komodo cannot answer your questions now. A full statement will be forthcoming on this spectacular revelation. Whatever you have imagined about this fabulous Coma Boy case, the actual truth will be far more astounding. I repeat, no questions now.”
The newspeople were in an uproar. “You said we’d get coverage for the overnights. You can’t shut us out now!”
“Mr. Komodo is still subject to recurring bouts of comatosis, due to the cruel, inhuman, illegal, and morally unauthorized experiments done on him while he was held prisoner by the U.S. Army on Okinawa,” Shig announced through his bullhorn. “Please respect that condition. A detailed account of the lawsuits now being filed will be forthcoming at the news conference soon to be held.”
“You fuckin’ geek! You promised exclusives! You promised on-cameras. One-on-ones. Up-close-and-personals. We need morning-show coverage. Drive-time supplements.”
“No further comment!” Shig barked. Then he grabbed Komodo, led him to the limo.
The reporters pushed forward, their flashblubs popping like microwave corn, but it was no use. The limo was already barreling away.
Visitors
I
T WAS THE SUN THAT WOKE HIM,
the brutal desert rays hard on his loose-slung leathers.
“Fuck!” Through sleepbound eyes, he saw the metallic creature, its gleaming jaws closing for the kill. Where was he now? In some hideous mecho-world ruled by knife-toothed insect robots? What to do? Instinct offered no advice, substantive or otherwise. He girded himself for ravaging. But then, just as the fiend had approached, it receded, its steely head rising up into the arid blue sky. That’s when the shrunken reptile caught the true nature of this most recent would-be assailant. It was a pumper. One of those ever-nodding petrol plumbers, set out on a desolate stretch of salt flat.
He couldn’t move. He was stuck, caught in a circle of thorns. Immediately, the pathetic scenario came clear. Obviously, while in the throes of whatever Quadcameral invasion had catapulted him back into the person of that youthful Echo Man, he’d been snared by a clump of tumbleweed and cartwheeled across the Valley floor, eventually blowing to rest against the side of this lone pumper. “Damn!” Rolled random inside a wind pollinating thicket—was there no end to humiliation?
Extricating himself from the dry thistle, the reptile sat up and panted. No wonder a hundred lost wagon-train leaders dubbed spots like this Devil’s Furnaces. If he was an oven stuffer roaster, his pop-up button would have blown long ago. The monster looked around. It was hot, all right. Hot and empty. What was an oil rig doing in the middle of nowhere? And why was it covered up with sand-colored canvas? Evidently, someone was trying to hide it; there wasn’t supposed to be any drilling on the Big Panghorn Missile and Bombing Range. Ole Prospector Pete, that paranoiac rockhound, would give his left ball to get the goods on whoever was working this little claim, for sure. Not that the monster cared. Whatever sleazebag graybeasts stole from one another was no nevermind to him, Gojiro thought lying there, watching the pumper pump.
Up. Down. At first he figured it was the heat, the way he got caught up in the cadence of the metal head’s rise and fall. Up. Down. Hypnotic, like the swing of a carny’s silver-plated watch. Up. Down. Diamond shafts thrusting, piercing sand and shale. Up. Down. Biting, screwing through. Up. Down. Not rock now, but skin. Up. Down. Slashing, sharp on sinew. Up. Down. Muscles severed, bones shattered. Up. Down. Pounding, a stake into the heart.
“Owww!” The pain shot through.
Something’s down there!
Eyes bulging, Gojiro staggered toward the well, looked down into the hole. He saw the black dot coming, but not in time to move away. It splashed up into his face, seeped into the parietal. A smallest glob of crude, belched from down below, it blinded him for a moment, knocked him back.
Rearing up on his shrunken hindclaws, the monster reeled away. It was almost his last step. Because right then that engine started up and the lizard came within a hairsbreadth of being gut-crunched by the sandspewing quartet of Michelins. The car must have been parked on the other side of the well; Gojiro never noticed it. “Motherfucker!” Over and over he rolled, dust cramming every orifice. He tried to get a plate number, but the big car was going too fast. All he saw was the fuzzy gray shape disappearing into the heatstreaked desert air.
* * *
His stride diminished along with the rest of him, it took nearly two hours to find his way back to the center of the Encrucijada. Thirsty and beat, the monster planned to check Pro Brooks, jot down a few cursory fieldwork notes, then scuttle back to the White Light Chamber to wait for Komodo’s return. But that changed when he saw the gray car again, parked in front of the worldshatterer’s crib.
The reptile squinted, took a breath. Victor Stiller was there, standing beside Brooks. Stiller and Brooks! Stiller—in his summer suit, gold cufflinks reflecting in the sunlight. Brooks—severe, parched, unadorned in his parson’s outfit. Brothers in fusion, together again in the Valley of Doom.
Arms spread, fists clenched, Stiller wasn’t his usual impeccable self. He looked all pent-up. He was yelling in Brooks’s ear. Brooks did not appear to acknowledge his longtime colleague. He kept his gaze firmly ahead, maintaining the searching position. Immediately recognizing the potential behavioral bonanza inherent in Stiller’s attempts to alter Brooks’s display, Gojiro moved in.
Stiller placed his ringed fingers on Brooks’s angular shoulder. “Joseph, this is a serious matter. Your continued presence here is in jeopardy.” He reached into the inside pocket of his suit and drew out what looked to be a snapshot. “Do you know this man?”
Brooks did not answer.
“Look at the picture. He was here. He spoke to you. What did he say?”
Again no reply.
Gojiro swallowed hard, remembering how Komodo had reached out, seeking to explain the Triple Ring Promise to Brooks, and then—a flash. A
hidden camera
! Gojiro was certain this was the origin of the photo Stiller was pushing into Brooks’s face, blocking the blackclad scientist’s searching stare. “View impeded, Brooks blinks,” the monster duly noted. It was a first. Until then, as far as Gojiro could tell, the worldshatterer’s ever-forbidding eyes had remained wide open in a steady, uninterrupted gaze. But with that photo thrust before him, Brooks blinked. Then, in one quick motion, he snatched the photo from Stiller’s grasp, crumpled it, threw it to the ground.
Stiller picked up the picture with glum resignation. “Why are you testing me, Joseph? Haven’t I always cleared the way for you, secured for you everything you’ve ever wanted? How much trouble would it be to answer a simple question?”
That’s when those army jeeps roared up and that booming voice echoed across the yard. “Damnit, I knew you’d be here trying to tip him off!”
“Colonel Gaylord Grives, military head of the Project . . .” That’s how he was always referred to in those newsreels. Grives, regulator, crew cut amongst the longhairs, a hardhead to reign over the spaceheads, charged to keep the Bomb commonsensical, American. Black-and-white images cascaded in the reptile’s head. Grives in the Valley, after the Heater’s debut, white booties on his feet, inspecting the shattered tower site. Grives in front of Congress giving testimony, a general now, his medals shining in the TV lights. Grives at Komodo’s bedside, looking faintly embarrassed, his large rough hands placing a teddy bear on the pillow of the Coma Boy. Then Grives at Brooks’s funeral, refusing to speak.
And, always, in his Black Spot Dream: Grives slogging toward the Lavarock shore, screaming at Brooks, pushing the worldshatterer into the surf, swearing what happened before would never happen again.
He had to be near mandatory retirement, Gojiro guessed, watching the bulky general hoist himself from his jeep. But even with his considerable girth and the sweatspots radiating from under his hammy arms, Grives retained a reigning presence. He looked strong, alert, ready.
“Gaylord! A pleasant surprise,” Stiller said jauntily.
“What are you doing here?” Grives spat back.
“Visiting an old friend. Joseph is alone out here now. He is entitled to some companionship.”
“Cut the crap, Victor. It’s over.”
“Over? What’s over?”
Grives held out a thick booklet. “The evidence.”
Stiller raised his bushy eyebrows.
“Proof, Victor! Proof of what’s been going on out here. And before I’m done, everyone is going to know about it. Everyone in this poor, beloved, deluded country.”
“Illuminate me.” Stiller was calm, superior.
“You’ll find out—if you don’t know already.”
Gojiro drew closer. It was crazy how the two harped on, talking right past Brooks’s face as if he were not there at all. Brooks didn’t seem insulted. Returned to his searching position, he just kept on staring.
“I never realized you had this flair for melodrama, Gaylord.”
“You won’t be able to bluff your way out of this. I’ve got the goods.”
Then something strange happened. Suddenly, Grives and Stiller weren’t yelling at each other anymore. They were standing stock-still, one on either side of Joseph Brooks, locked into a bizarre tableau, looking out . . .
Searching! The three of them had assumed the position, their sightlines honed to that exact spot. The reptile scrambled to obtain a frontal view. This was a breakthrough, corroboration. Something was out there!
Grives was the one who broke it off. “No!” he screamed. “I won’t stand here, not in this spot—never again!”
Then he turned and went into the house, followed by Stiller and, much to the monster’s surprise, Brooks, as meek as any lamb.
* * *
It was no snap, hanging upside down, suckfooted to the varnished rafters of that ranch house. He wasn’t a fussy little tree frog, there was nary an arboreal indication to be found in even his most strangled helix. Besides, he didn’t have any practice. Try finding a branch from which to drape when you tip in at fifty tons. Now that he was up there, however, Gojiro appreciated the benefits of ceiling-sticking. Shrunk down to a couple of inches, the monster could imagine himself inverted upon on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, bridging the breach between the outstretched hands of Man and God. Also, you couldn’t beat the vantage; who was to notice an anonymous little house lizard, a bug on the wall?
Scanning down, Gojiro wondered about Brooks. Did he function biogenetically, take a dump, make any kind of mess? In contrast to the ramshackle exterior, the inside of the house was as neat as a 4-H pin. Nothing seemed to have changed. The Pueblo rugs on the wall, heavy plank floors, leather easy chairs, the cow skulls above the giant stone fireplace—the reptile had seen it all before in those pre-Bomb shots of convivial fissionist smokers, the flannel-clothed spaceheads puffing on greenpack Lucky Strikes and drinking highballs, as if they were nothing but congenial collegiates in a rathskeller. The only new item was the army-issue cot pushed against the wall, its wool blanket stretched tight with crisp hospital corners. Brooks slept there, the reptile surmised. The grayframed bed couldn’t have been more than six feet long, not nearly long enough.
Grives was all the action, strutting about, his belly straining against his khakis, waving his report. “I got some very strange geologic findings in this area. Very strange,” he thundered in the brusque baritone of his Kentucky coal-town origins.
Stiller leaned back in his chair, filing his nails. “Get to the point, General,” he said with exaggerated impatience.
“I didn’t come to talk to you,” Grives barked back. “I came to talk to him.” The general walked toward Brooks, tried to catch his eye. But Brooks did not look back. He stood motionless in the middle of the room, his shoulders slumping, like a man waiting for a bus that had long since stopped running.
“Come on, Mr. Brooks, let’s put a few things on the table here. F’r instance, I’d like to know why there’s been a mess of seismic irregularities in the area of the abandoned test sites. Also, I’m wondering about the two-thousand-percent increase in radioactive levels in that same twenty-mile radius.”
Stiller stood up, surprise on his face. Obviously he’d been expecting another kind of data. “Gaylord, where do you get these numbers from? Why wasn’t I informed of this study?”
“And have you squash it like every other one? This old soldier isn’t that stupid, not yet, anyway.”
“Let me see that report.”
“Not so fast.”
“But it sounds like testing.” Stiller wiped his forehead with a silk handkerchief. “There’s not supposed to be any testing out here.”
“Now, isn’t that a fact?” Grives glowered.
Stiller regarded Brooks with widening eyes. “Joseph, if there is something—”
“I’ll do the interrogating!” Grives was right next to Brooks now, his eyes slitted, saliva flying. “You’re cooking something up out here, aren’t you, Mr. Brooks? I want to know what it is, and I want to know now! Talk, you—” Grives’s hands rose in front of him. For a moment it seemed as if he was about to take hold of Brooks, throttle him.
“Gaylord! You know his condition.”
“Don’t give me that. You can hear every word I say, can’t you, Brooks? Confess, or I’ll have my men rip this place apart.”
Gojiro looked down from his suctioned perch, acknowledged the irony of the situation. Here was Grives blaming Brooks for those shaking seismatics and big fallout numbers when it was obvious enough who was freaking the Geigers. “Little old me.” It was no surprise. Hadn’t Komodo warned the reptile to stop pacing around the White Light Chamber and belching those gratuitous blasts of Radi-Breath?
Yeah, it was a real scaleslapper okay, Brooks taking all that heat. Probably, once upon a time, nothing would have tickled the monster more. Except now he wasn’t laughing. Gojiro knew the hate on Grives’s face; it was the same hate he himself had once felt toward Brooks. It was an ugly thing, wiping away all mirth.
“All these years of spending money to protect this madman, when all along we should be protecting
against
him!” Grives signaled to his men. “Go to it boys. Whatever he has out here, we’ve got to find it.”
“That is not your decision, General!” Stiller was on his feet now. “You have no authority when it comes to Mr. Brooks.”
“I’m taking the authority, Doctor.”
“On what grounds?”
“On the grounds of national security. On the grounds that it is the right of every human being on this planet to be guaranteed a chance to live their lives free of whatever this man has inside his head. On the grounds that it is incumbent on every right-thinking individual to oppose Evil.”
Stiller rolled his eyes. “Not
that
again!”
Grives leveled his gaze. “Victor, tell me one thing. Have you ever lost a night’s sleep over what he did? Has it ever ruined a single meal for you? Have you ever been sitting with your wife, relaxing, watching the Early Show maybe, and suddenly you have to drop her hand and run to the bathroom because you get sick just thinking of it? I bet not. I bet it doesn’t bother you at all. Well, it bothers me. I remember . . . what he did!”
That’s when the monster went off, riding the sound of those voices he’d heard so many times before, at night, in his sleep. He rode those voices all the way back to Lavarock, bellydowned amongst his type, watching that silver plane land on the water. And again, the three of them were walking through the surf: Grives and Stiller, then Brooks. His old dream, the back pages of a life he always assumed to be of his own writing. Never real.