Стивен Кинг. Клетка (engl)
страница №2
... Four Seasons Hotel, which was now a tangle of broken glass, brokenbodies, crashed vehicles, and spilled blood. "It's like the fucking Night of
the Living Dead." Officer Ulrich Ashland started back toward Boylston Street
with his hand still on the butt of his gun. "Except these people aren't
dead. Unless we help them, that is."
"Rick!" It was a cop on the other side of the street, calling urgently.
"Rick, we gotta go to Logan! All units! Get over here!"
Officer Ashland checked for traffic, but there was none. Except for the
wrecks, Boylston Street was momentarily deserted. From the surrounding area,
however, came the sound of more explosions and automotive crashes. The smell
of smoke was getting stronger. He started across the street, got halfway,
then turned back. "Get inside somewhere," he said. "Get under cover. You've
been lucky once. You may not be lucky again."
"Officer Ashland," Clay said. "Your guys don't use cell phones, do
you?"
Ashland regarded him from the center of Boylston Street-- not, in
Clay's opinion, a safe place to be. He was thinking of the rogue Duck Boat.
"No, sir," he said. "We have radios in our cars. And these." He patted the
radio in his belt, hung opposite his holster. Clay, a comic-book fiend since
he could read, thought briefly of Batman's marvelous utility belt.
"Don't use them," Clay said. "Tell the others. Don't use the cell
phones."
"Why do you say that?"
"Because they were." He pointed to the dead woman and the unconscious
girl. "Just before they went crazy. And I'll bet you anything that the guy
with the knife-- "
"Rick!" the cop on the other side shouted again. "Hurry the fuck up!"
"Get under cover," Officer Ashland repeated, and trotted to the Four
Seasons side of the street. Clay wished he could have repeated the thing
about the cell phones, but on the whole he was just glad to see the cop out
of harm's way. Not that he believed anyone in Boston really was, not this
afternoon.
4
"What are you doing?" Clay asked Tom McCourt. "Don't touch him, he
might be, I don't know, contagious."
"I'm not going to touch him," Tom said, "but I need my shoe."
The shoe, lying near the splayed fingers of the lunatic's left hand,
was at least away from the exit-spray of blood. Tom hooked his fingers
delicately into the back and pulled it to him. Then he sat down on the curb
of Boylston Street-- right where the Mister Softee truck had been parked in
what now seemed to Clay like another lifetime-- and slipped his foot into
it. "The laces are broken," he said. "That damn nutball broke the laces."
And he started crying again.
"Do the best you can," Clay said. He began working the butcher knife
out of the portfolio. It had been slammed through with tremendous force, and
he found he had to wiggle it up and down to free it. It came out
reluctantly, in a series of jerks, and with ugly scraping sounds that made
him want to cringe. He kept wondering who inside had gotten the worst of it.
That was stupid, nothing but shock-think, but he couldn't help it. "Can't
you tie it down close to the bottom?"
"Yeah, I think s-- "
Clay had been hearing a mechanical mosquito whine that now grew to an
approaching drone. Tom craned up from his place on the curb. Clay turned
around. The little caravan of BPD cars pulling away from the Four Seasons
halted in front of Citylights and the crashed Duck Boat with their gumballs
flashing. Cops leaned out the windows as a private plane-- something
midsize, maybe a Cessna or the kind they called a Twin Bonanza, Clay didn't
really know planes-- came cruising slowly over the buildings between Boston
Harbor and the Boston Common, dropping fast. The plane banked drunkenly over
the park, its lower wing almost brushing the top of one autumn-bright tree,
then settled into the canyon of Charles Street, as if the pilot had decided
that was a runway. Then, less than twenty feet above the ground, it tilted
left and the wing on that side struck the faзade of a gray stone building,
maybe a bank, on the corner of Charles and Beacon. Any sense that the plane
was moving slowly, almost gliding, departed in that instant. It spun around
on the caught wing as savagely as a tetherball nearing the end of its rope,
slammed into the redbrick building standing next to the bank, and
disappeared in bright petals of red-orange fire. The shockwave hammered
across the park. Ducks took wing before it.
Clay looked down and saw he was holding the butcher knife in his hand.
He had pulled it free while he and Tom McCourt were watching the plane
crash. He wiped it first one way and then the other on the front of his
shirt, taking pains not to cut himself (now his hands were shaking). Then he
slipped it-- very carefully-- into his belt, all the way down to the handle.
As he did this, one of his early comic-book efforts occurred to him . . . a
bit of juvenilia, actually.
"Joxer the Pirate stands here at your service, my pretty one," he
murmured.
"What?" Tom asked. He was now beside Clay, staring at the boiling
inferno of the airplane on the far side of Boston Common. Only the tail
stuck out of the fire. On it Clay could read the number LN6409B. Above it
was what looked like some sports team's logo.
Then that was gone, too.
He could feel the first waves of heat begin to pump gently against his
face.
"Nothing," he told the little man in the tweed suit. "Leave us boogie."
"Huh?"
"Let's get out of here."
"Oh. Okay."
Clay started to walk along the southern side of the Common, in the
direction he'd been heading at three o'clock, eighteen minutes and an
eternity ago. Tom McCourt hurried to keep up. He really was a very short
man. "Tell me," he said, "do you often talk nonsense?"
"Sure," Clay said. "Just ask my wife."
5
"Where are we going?" Tom asked. "I was headed for the T." He pointed
to a green-painted kiosk about a block ahead. A small crowd of people were
milling there. "Now I'm not sure being underground is such a hot idea."
"Me, either," Clay said. "I've got a room at a place called the
Atlantic Avenue Inn, about five blocks further up."
Tom brightened. "I think I know it. On Louden, actually, just off
Atlantic."
"Right. Let's go there. We can check the TV And I want to call my
wife."
"On the room phone."
"The room phone, check. I don't even have a cell phone."
"I have one, but I left it home. It's broken. Rafe-- my cat-- knocked
it off the counter. I was meaning to buy a new one this very day, but. . .
listen. Mr. Riddell-- "
"Clay."
"Clay, then. Are you sure the phone in your room will be safe?"
Clay stopped. He hadn't even considered this idea. But if the landlines
weren't okay, what would be? He was about to say this to Tom when a sudden
brawl broke out at the T station up ahead. There were cries of panic,
screams, and more of that wild babbling-- he recognized it for what it was
now, the signature scribble of madness. The little knot of people that had
been milling around the gray stone pillbox and the steps going below-ground
broke up. A few of them ran into the street, two with their arms around each
other, snatching looks back over their shoulders as they went. More-- most--
ran into the park, all in different directions, which sort of broke Clay's
heart. He felt better somehow about the two with their arms around each
other.
Still at the T station and on their feet were two men and two women.
Clay was pretty sure it was they who had emerged from the station and
driven off the rest. As Clay and Tom stood watching from half a block away,
these remaining four fell to fighting with each other. This brawl had the
hysterical, killing viciousness he had already seen, but no discernible
pattern. It wasn't three against one, or two against two, and it certainly
wasn't the boys against the girls; in fact, one of the "girls" was a woman
who looked to be in her middle sixties, with a stocky body and a no-nonsense
haircut that made Clay think of several women teachers he'd known who were
nearing retirement.
They fought with feet and fists and nails and teeth, grunting and
shouting and circling the bodies of maybe half a dozen people who had
already been knocked unconscious, or perhaps killed. One of the men stumbled
over an outstretched leg and went to his knees. The younger of the two women
dropped on top of him. The man on his knees swept something up from the
pavement at the head of the stairs-- Clay saw with no surprise whatever that
it was a cell phone-- and slammed it into the side of the woman's face. The
cell phone shattered, tearing the woman's cheek open and showering a freshet
of blood onto the shoulder of her light jacket, but her scream was of rage
rather than pain. She grabbed the kneeling man's ears like a pair of
jughandles, dropped her own knees into his lap, and shoved him backwards
into the gloom of the T's stairwell. They went out of sight locked together
and thrashing like cats in heat.
"Come on," Tom murmured, twitching Clay's shirt with an odd delicacy.
"Come on. Other side of the street. Come on."
Clay allowed himself to be led across Boylston Street. He assumed that
either Tom McCourt was watching where they were going or he was lucky,
because they got to the other side okay. They stopped again in front of
Colonial Books (Best of the Old, Best of the New), watching as the unlikely
victor of the T station battle went striding into the park in the direction
of the burning plane, with blood dripping onto her collar from the ends of
her zero-tolerance gray hair. Clay wasn't a bit surprised that the last one
standing had turned out to be the lady who looked like a librarian or Latin
teacher a year or two away from a gold watch. He had taught with his share
of such ladies, and the ones who made it to that age were, more often than
not, next door to indestructible.
He opened his mouth to say something like this to Tom-- in his mind it
sounded quite witty-- and what came out was a watery croak. His vision had
come over shimmery, too. Apparently Tom McCourt, the little man in the tweed
suit, wasn't the only one having trouble with his waterworks. Clay swiped an
arm across his eyes, tried again to talk, and managed no more than another
of those watery croaks.
"That's okay," Tom said. "Better let it come."
And so, standing there in front of a shop window filled with old books
surrounding a Royal typewriter hailing from long before the era of cellular
communications, Clay did. He cried for Power Suit Woman, for Pixie Light and
Pixie Dark, and he cried for himself, because Boston was not his home, and
home had never seemed so far.
6
Above the Common Boylston Street narrowed and became so choked with
cars-- both those wrecked and those plain abandoned-- that they no longer
had to worry about kamikaze limos or rogue Duck Boats. Which was a relief.
From all around them the city banged and crashed like New Year's Eve in
hell. There was plenty of noise close by, as well-- car alarms and burglar
alarms, mostly-- but the street itself was for the moment eerily deserted.
Get under cover, Officer Ulrich Ashland had said. You've been lucky once.
You may not be lucky again.
But, two blocks east of Colonial Books and still a block from Clay's
not-quite-fleabag hotel, they were lucky again. Another lunatic, this one a
young man of perhaps twenty-five with muscles that looked tuned by Nautilus
and Cybex, bolted from an alley just in front of them and went dashing
across the street, hurdling the locked bumpers of two cars, foaming out an
unceasing lava-flow of that nonsense-talk as he went. He held a car aerial
in each hand and stabbed them rapidly back and forth in the air like daggers
as he cruised his lethal course. He was naked except for a pair of what
looked like brand-new Nikes with bright red swooshes. His cock swung from
side to side like the pendulum of a grandfather clock on speed. He hit the
far sidewalk and sidewheeled west, back toward the Common, his butt
clenching and unclenching in fantastic rhythm.
Tom McCourt clutched Clay's arm, and hard, until this latest lunatic
was gone, then slowly relaxed his grip. "If he'd seen us-- " he began.
"Yeah, but he didn't," Clay said. He felt suddenly, absurdly happy. He
knew that the feeling would pass, but for the moment he was delighted to
ride it. He felt like a man who has successfully drawn to an inside straight
with the biggest pot of the night lying on the table in front of him.
"I pity who he does see," Tom said.
"I pity who sees him," Clay said. "Come on."
7
The doors of the Atlantic Avenue Inn were locked.
Clay was so surprised that for a moment he could only stand there,
trying to turn the knob and feeling it slip through his fingers, trying to
get the idea through his head: locked. The doors of his hotel, locked
against him.
Tom stepped up beside him, leaned his forehead against the glass to cut
the glare, and peered in. From the north-- from Logan, surely-- came another
of those monster explosions, and this time Clay only twitched. He didn't
think Tom McCourt reacted at all. Tom was too absorbed in what he was
seeing.
"Dead guy on the floor," he announced at last. "Wearing a uniform, but
he really looks too old to be a bellhop."
"I don't want anyone to carry my fucking luggage," Clay said. "I just
want to go up to my room."
Tom made an odd little snorting sound. Clay thought maybe the little
guy was starting to cry again, then realized that sound was smothered
laughter.
The double doors had ATLANTIC AVENUE INN printed on one glass panel and
a blatant lie-- BOSTON'S FINEST ADDRESS-- printed on the other. Tom slapped
the flat of his hand on the glass of the lefthand panel, between BOSTON'S
FINEST ADDRESS and a row of credit card decals.
Now Clay was peering in, too. The lobby wasn't very big. On the left
was the reception desk. On the right was a pair of elevators. On the floor
was a turkey-red rug. The old guy in the uniform lay on this, facedown, with
one foot up on a couch and a framed Currier & Ives sailing-ship print on
his ass.
Clay's good feelings left in a rush, and when Tom began to hammer on
the glass instead of just slap, he put his hand over Tom's fist. "Don't
bother," he said. "They're not going to let us in, even if they're alive and
sane." He thought about that and nodded. "Especially if they're sane."
Tom looked at him wonderingly. "You don't get it, do you?"
"Huh? Get what?"
"Things have changed. They can't keep us out." He pushed Clay's hand
off his own, but instead of hammering, he put his forehead against the glass
again and shouted. Clay thought he had a pretty good shouting voice on him
for a little guy. "Hey! Hey, in there!"
A pause. In the lobby nothing changed. The old bellman went on being
dead with a picture on his ass.
"Hey, if you're in there, you better open the door! The man I'm with is
a paying guest of the hotel and I'm his guest! Open up or I'm going to grab
a curbstone and break the glass! You hear me?"
"A curbstone?." Clay said. He started to laugh. "Did you say curbstone?
Jolly good." He laughed harder. He couldn't help it. Then movement to his
left caught his eye. He looked around and saw a teenage girl standing a
little way farther up the street. She was looking at them out of haggard
blue disaster-victim eyes. She was wearing a white dress, and there was a
vast bib of blood on the front of it. More blood was crusted beneath her
nose, on her lips and chin. Other than the bloody nose she didn't look hurt,
and she didn't look crazy at all, just shocked. Shocked almost to death.
"Are you all right?" Clay asked. He took a step toward her and she took
a corresponding step back. Under the circumstances, he couldn't blame her.
He stopped but held a hand up to her like a traffic cop: Stay put.
Tom glanced around briefly, then began to hammer on the door again,
this time hard enough to rattle the glass in its old wooden frame and make
his reflection shiver. "Last chance, then we're coming in!"
Clay turned and opened his mouth to tell him that masterful shit wasn't
going to cut it, not today, and then a bald head rose slowly from behind the
reception desk. It was like watching a periscope surface. Clay recognized
that head even before it got to the face; it belonged to the clerk who'd
checked him in yesterday and stamped a validation on his parking-lot ticket
for the lot a block over, the same clerk who'd given him directions to the
Copley Square Hotel this morning.
For a moment he still lingered behind the desk, and Clay held up his
room key with the green plastic Atlantic Avenue Inn fob hanging down. Then
he also held up his portfolio, thinking the desk clerk might recognize it.
Maybe he did. More likely he just decided he had no choice. In either
case, he used the pass-through at the end of the desk and crossed quickly to
the door, detouring around the body. Clay Riddell believed he might be
witnessing the first reluctant scurry he had ever seen in his life. When the
desk clerk reached the other side of the door, he looked from Clay to Tom
and then back to Clay again. Although he did not appear particularly
reassured by what he saw, he produced a ring of keys from one pocket,
flicked rapidly through them, found one, and used it on his side of the
door. When Tom reached for the handle, the bald clerk held his hand up much
as Clay had held his up to the bloodstained girl behind them. The clerk
found a second key, used this one in another lock, and opened the door.
"Come in," he said. "Hurry." Then he saw the girl, lingering at a
little distance and watching. "Not her."
"Yes, her," Clay said. "Come on, honey." But she wouldn't, and when
Clay took a step toward her, she whirled and took off running, the skirt of
her dress flying out behind her.
8
"She could die out there," Clay said.
"Not my problem," the desk clerk said. "Are you coming in or not, Mr.
Riddle?" He had a Boston accent, not the blue-collar-Southie kind Clay was
most familiar with from Maine, where it seemed that every third person you
met was a Massachusetts expat, but the fussy I-wish-I-were-British one.
"It's Riddell." He was coming in all right, no way this guy was going
to keep him out now that the door was open, but he lingered a moment longer
on the sidewalk, looking after the girl.
"Go on," Tom said quietly. "Nothing to be done."
And he was right. Nothing to be done. That was the exact hell of it. He
followed Tom in, and the desk clerk once more double-locked the doors of the
Atlantic Avenue Inn behind them, as if that were all it would take to keep
them from the chaos of the streets.
9
"That was Franklin," said the desk clerk as he led the way around the
uniformed man lying facedown on the floor.
He looks too old to be a bellhop, Tom had said, peering in through the
window, and Clay thought he certainly did. He was a small man, with a lot of
luxuriant white hair. Unfortunately for him, the head on which it was
probably still growing (hair and nails were slow in getting the word, or so
he had read somewhere) was cocked at a terrible crooked angle, like the head
of a hanged man. "He'd been with the Inn for thirty-five years, as I'm sure
he told every guest he ever checked in. Most of them twice."
That tight little accent grated on Clay's frayed nerves. He thought
that if it had been a fart, it would have been the kind that comes out
sounding like a party-horn blown by a kid with asthma.
"A man came out of the elevator," the desk clerk said, once more using
the pass-through to get behind the desk. Back there was apparently where he
felt at home. The overhead light struck his face and Clay saw he was very
pale. "One of the crazy ones. Franklin had the bad luck to be standing right
there in front of the doors-- "
"I don't suppose it crossed your mind to at least take the damn picture
off his ass," Clay said. He bent down, picked up the Currier & Ives
print, and put it on the couch. At the same time, he brushed the dead
bellman's foot off the cushion where it had come to rest. It fell with a
sound Clay knew very well. He had rendered it in a great many comic books as
CLUMP.
"The man from the elevator only hit him with one punch," the desk clerk
said. "It knocked poor Franklin all the way against the wall. I think it
broke his neck. In any case, that was what dislodged the picture, Franklin
striking the wall."
In the desk clerk's mind, this seemed to justify everything.
"What about the man who hit him?" Tom asked. "The crazy guy? Where'd he
go?"
"Out," the desk clerk said. "That was when I felt locking the door to
be by far the wisest course. After he went out." He looked at them with a
combination of fear and prurient, gossipy greed that Clay found singularly
distasteful. "What's happening out there? How bad has it gotten?"
"I think you must have a pretty good idea," Clay said. "Isn't that why
you locked the door?"
"Yes, but-- "
"What are they saying on TV?" Tom asked.
"Nothing. The cable's been out-- " He glanced at his watch. "For almost
half an hour now."
"What about the radio?"
The desk clerk gave Tom a prissy you-must-be-joking look. Clay was
starting to think this guy could write a book-- How to Be Disliked on Short
Notice. "Radio in this place? In any downtown hotel? You must be joking."
From outside came a high-pitched wail of fear. The girl in the
bloodstained white dress appeared at the door again and began pounding on it
with the flat of her hand, looking over her shoulder as she did so. Clay
started for her, fast.
"No, he locked it again, remember?" Tom shouted at him.
Clay hadn't. He turned to the desk clerk. "Unlock it."
"No," the desk clerk said, and crossed both arms firmly over his narrow
chest to show how firmly he meant to oppose this course of action. Outside,
the girl in the white dress looked over her shoulder again and pounded
harder. Her blood-streaked face was tight with terror.
Clay pulled the butcher knife out of his belt. He had almost forgotten
it and was sort of astonished at how quickly, how naturally, it returned to
mind. "Open it, you sonofabitch," he told the desk clerk, "or I'll cut your
throat."
10
"No time!" Tom yelled, and grabbed one of the high-backed, bogus Queen
Anne chairs that flanked the lobby sofa. He ran it at the double doors with
the legs up.
The girl saw him coming and cringed away, raising both of her hands to
protect her face. At the same instant the man who had been chasing her
appeared in front of the door. He was an enormous construction-worker type
with a slab of a gut pushing out the front of his yellow T-shirt and a
greasy salt-and-pepper ponytail bouncing up and down on the back of it.
The chair-legs hit the panes of glass in the double doors, the two legs
on the left shattering through ATLANTIC AVENUE INN and the two on the right
through BOSTON'S FINEST ADDRESS. The ones on the right punched into the
construction-worker type's meaty, yellow-clad left shoulder just as he
grabbed the girl by the neck. The underside of the chair's seat fetched up
against the solid seam where the two doors met and Tom McCourt went
staggering backward, dazed.
The construction-worker guy was roaring out that speaking-in-tongues
gibberish, and blood had begun to course down the freckled meat of his left
biceps. The girl managed to pull free of him, but her feet tangled together
and she went down in a heap, half on the sidewalk and half in the gutter,
crying out in pain and fear.
Clay was standing framed in one of the shattered glass door-panels with
no memory of crossing the room and only the vaguest one of raking the chair
out of his way. "Hey dickweed!" he shouted, and was marginally encouraged
when the big man's flood of crazy-talk ceased for a moment and he froze in
his tracks. "Yeah, you!" Clay shouted. "I'm talking to you!" And then,
because it was the only thing he could think of: "I fucked your mama, and
she was one dry hump!"
The large maniac in the yellow shirt cried out something that sounded
eerily like what the Power Suit Woman had cried out just before meeting her
end-- eerily like Rast!-- and whirled back toward the building that had
suddenly grown teeth and a voice and attacked him. Whatever he saw, it
couldn't have been a grim, sweaty-faced man with a knife in his hand leaning
out through a rectangular panel that had lately held glass, because Clay had
to do no attacking at all. The man in the yellow shirt leaped onto the
jutting blade of the butcher knife. The Swedish steel slid smoothly into the
hanging, sunburned wattle beneath his chin and released a red waterfall. It
doused Clay's hand, amazingly hot-- almost hot as a freshly poured cup of
coffee, it seemed-- and he had to fight off an urge to pull away. Instead he
pushed forward, at last feeling the knife encounter resistance. It
hesitated, but there was no buckle in that baby. It ripped through gristle,
then came out through the nape of the big man's neck. He fell forward-- Clay
couldn't hold him back with one arm, no way in hell, the guy had to go
two-sixty, maybe even two-ninety-- and for a moment leaned against the door
like a drunk against a lamppost, brown eyes bulging, nicotine-stained tongue
hanging from one corner of his mouth, neck spewing. Then his knees came
unhinged and he went down. Clay held on to the handle of the knife and was
amazed at how easily it came back out. Much easier than pulling it back
through the leather and reinforced particleboard of the portfolio.
With the lunatic down he could see the girl again, one knee on the
sidewalk and the other in the gutter, screaming through the curtain of hair
hanging across her face.
"Honey," he said. "Honey, don't." But she went on screaming.
11
Her name was Alice Maxwell. She could tell them that much. And she
could tell them that she and her mother had come into Boston on the train--
from Boxford, she said-- to do some shopping, a thing they often did on
Wednesday, which she called her "short day" at the high school she attended.
She said they'd gotten off the train at South Station and grabbed a cab. She
said the cabdriver had been wearing a blue turban. She said the blue turban
was the last thing she could remember until the bald desk clerk had finally
unlocked the shattered double doors of the Atlantic Avenue Inn and let her
in.
Clay thought she remembered more. He based this on the way she began to
tremble when Tom McCourt asked her if either she or her mother had been
carrying a cell phone. She claimed not to remember, but Clay was sure one or
both of them had been. Everyone did these days, it seemed. He was just the
exception that proved the rule. And there was Tom, who might owe his life to
the cat that had knocked his off the counter.
They conversed with Alice (the conversation consisted for the most part
of Clay asking questions while the girl sat mutely, looking down at her
scraped knees and shaking her head from time to time) in the hotel lobby.
Clay and Tom had moved Franklin's body behind the reception desk, dismissing
the bald clerk's loud and bizarre protest that "it will just be under my
feet there." The clerk, who had given his name simply as Mr. Ricardi, had
since retired to his inner office. Clay had followed him just long enough to
ascertain that Mr. Ricardi had been telling the truth about the TV being out
of commish, then left him there. Sharon Riddell would have said Mr. Ricardi
was brooding in his tent.
The man hadn't let Clay go without a parting shot, however. "Now we're
open to the world," he said bitterly. "I hope you think you've accomplished
something."
"Mr. Ricardi," Clay said, as patiently as he could, "I saw a plane
crash-land on the other side of Boston Common not an hour ago. It sounds
like more planes-- big ones-- are doing the same thing at Logan. Maybe
they're even making suicide runs on the terminals. There are explosions all
over downtown. I'd say that this afternoon all of Boston is open to the
world."
As if to underline this point, a very heavy thump had come from above
them. Mr. Ricardi didn't look up. He only flapped a begone hand in Clay's
direction. With no TV to look at, he sat in his desk chair and looked
severely at the wall.
12
Clay and Tom moved the two bogus Queen Anne chairs against the door,
where their high backs did a pretty good job of filling the shattered frames
that had once held glass. While Clay was sure that locking the hotel off
from the street offered flimsy or outright false security, he thought that
blocking the view from the street might be a good idea, and Tom had
concurred. Once the chairs were in place, they lowered the sun-blind over
the lobby's main window. That dimmed the room considerably and sent faint
prison-bar shadows marching across the turkey-red rug.
With these things seen to, and Alice Maxwell's radically abridged tale
told, Clay finally went to the telephone behind the desk. He glanced at his
watch. It was 4:22 p.m., a perfectly logical time for it to be, except any
ordinary sense of time seemed to have been canceled. It felt like hours
since he'd seen the man biting the dog in the park. It also seemed like no
time at all. But there was time, such as humans measured it, anyway, and in
Kent Pond, Sharon would surely be back by now at the house he still thought
of as home. He needed to talk to her. To make sure she was all right and
tell her he was, too, but those weren't the important things. Making sure
Johnny was all right, that was important, but there was something even more
important than that. Vital, really.
He didn't have a cell phone, and neither did Sharon, he was almost
positive of that. She might have picked one up since they'd separated in
April, he supposed, but they still lived in the same town, he saw her almost
every day, and he thought if she'd picked one up, he would have known. For
one thing, she would have given him the number, right? Right. But--
But Johnny had one. Little Johnny-Gee, who wasn't so little anymore,
twelve wasn't so little, and that was what he'd wanted for his last
birthday. A red cell phone that played the theme music from his favorite TV
program when it rang. Of course he was forbidden to turn it on or even take
it out of his backpack when he was in school, but school hours were over
now. Also, Clay and Sharon actually encouraged him to take it, partly
because of the separation. There might be emergencies, or minor
inconveniences such as a missed bus. What Clay had to hang on to was how
Sharon had said she'd look into Johnny's room lately and more often than not
see the cell lying forgotten on his desk or the windowsill beside his bed,
off the charger and dead as dogshit.
Still, the thought of John's red cell phone ticked away in his mind
like a bomb.
Clay touched the landline phone on the hotel desk, then withdrew his
hand. Outside, something else exploded, but this one was distant. It was
like hearing an artillery shell explode when you were well behind the lines.
Don't make that assumption, he thought. Don't even assume there are
lines.
He looked across the lobby and saw Tom squatting beside Alice as she
sat on the sofa. He was murmuring to her quietly, touching one of her
loafers and looking up into her face. That was good. He was good. Clay was
increasingly glad he'd run into Tom McCourt . . .or that Tom McCourt had run
into him.
The landlines were probably all right. The question was whether
probably was good enough. He had a wife who was still sort of his
responsibility, and when it came to his son there was no sort-of at all.
Even thinking of Johnny was dangerous. Every time his mind turned to the
boy, Clay felt a panic-rat inside his mind, ready to burst free of the
flimsy cage that held it and start gnawing anything it could get at with its
sharp little teeth. If he could make sure Johnny and Sharon were okay, he
could keep the rat in its cage and plan what to do next. But if he did
something stupid, he wouldn't be able to help anyone. In fact, he would make
things worse for the people here. He thought about this a little and then
called the desk clerk's name.
When there was no answer from the inner office, he called again. When
there was still no answer, he said, "I know you hear me, Mr. Ricardi. If you
make me come in there and get you, it'll annoy me. I might get annoyed
enough to consider putting you out on the street."
"You can't do that," Mr. Ricardi said in a tone of surly instruction.
"You are a guest of the hotel."
Clay thought of repeating what Tom had said to him while they were
still outside-- things have changed. Something made him keep silent instead.
"What," Mr. Ricardi said at last. Sounding more surly than ever. From
overhead came a louder thump, as if someone had dropped a heavy piece of
furniture. A bureau, maybe. This time even the girl looked up. Clay thought
he heard a muffled shout-- or maybe a howl of pain-- but if so, there was no
follow-up. What was on the second floor? Not a restaurant, he remembered
being told (by Mr. Ricardi himself, when Clay checked in) that the hotel
didn't have a restaurant, but the Metropolitan Cafe was right next door.
Meeting rooms, he thought. I'm pretty sure it's meeting rooms with Indian
names.
"What?" Mr. Ricardi asked again. He sounded grouchier than ever.
"Did you try to call anyone when all this started happening?"
"Well of course!" Mr. Ricardi said. He came to the door between the
inner office and the area behind the reception desk, with its pigeonholes,
security monitors, and its bank of computers. There he looked at Clay
indignantly. "The fire alarms went off-- I got them stopped, Doris said it
was a wastebasket fire on the third floor-- and I called the Fire Department
to tell them not to bother. The line was busy! Busy, can you imagine!"
"You must have been very upset," Tom said.
Mr. Ricardi looked mollified for the first time. "I called the police
when things outside started . . . you know . . .to go downhill."
"Yes," Clay said. To go downhill was one way of putting it, all right.
"Did you get an answer?"
"A man told me I'd have to clear the line and then hung up on me," Mr.
Ricardi said. The indignation was creeping back into his voice. "When I
called again-- this was after the crazy man came out of the elevator and
killed Franklin-- a woman answered. She said . . ." Mr. Ricardi's voice had
begun to quiver and Clay saw the first tears running down the narrow defiles
that marked the sides of the man's nose. ". . . said . . ."
"What?" Tom asked, in that same tone of mild sympathy. "What did she
say, Mr. Ricardi?"
"She said if Franklin was dead and the man who killed him had run away,
then I didn't have a problem. It was she who advised me to lock myself in.
She also told me to call the hotel's elevators to lobby level and shut them
off, which I did."
Clay and Tom exchanged a look that carried a wordless thought: Good
idea. Clay got a sudden vivid image of bugs trapped between a closed window
and a screen, buzzing furiously but unable to get out. This picture had
something to do with the thumps they'd heard coming from above them. He
wondered briefly how long before the thumper or thumpers up there would find
the stairs.
"Then she hung up on me. After that, I called my wife in Milton."
"You got through to her," Clay said, wanting to be clear on this.
"She was very frightened. She asked me to come home. I told her I had
been advised to stay inside with the doors locked. Advised by the police. I
told her to do the same thing. Lock up and keep a, you know, low profile.
She begged me to come home. She said there had been gunshots on the street,
and an explosion a street over. She said she had seen a naked man running
through the Benzycks' yard. The Benzycks live next door to us."
"Yes," Tom said mildly. Soothingly, even. Clay said nothing. He was a
bit ashamed at how angry he'd been at Mr. Ricardi, but Tom had been angry,
too.
"She said she believed the naked man might-- might, she only said
might-- have been carrying the body of a . . .mmm . . . nude child. But
possibly it was a doll. She begged me again to leave the hotel and come
home."
Clay had what he needed. The landlines were safe. Mr. Ricardi was in
shock but not crazy. Clay put his hand on the telephone. Mr. Ricardi laid
his hand over Clay's before Clay could pick up the receiver. Mr. Ricardi's
fingers were long and pale and very cold. Mr. Ricardi wasn't done. Mr.
Ricardi was on a roll.
"She called me a son of a bitch and hung up. I know she was angry with
me, and of course I understand why. But the police told me to lock up and
stay put. The police told me to keep off the streets. The police. The
authorities."
Clay nodded. "The authorities, sure."
"Did you come by the T?" Mr. Ricardi asked. "I always use the T. It's
just two blocks down the street. It's very convenient."
"It wouldn't be convenient this afternoon," Tom said. "After what we
just saw, you couldn't get me down there on a bet."
Mr. Ricardi looked at Clay with mournful eagerness. "You see?"
Clay nodded again. "You're better off in here," he said. Knowing that
he meant to get home and see to his boy. Sharon too, of course, but mostly
his boy. Knowing he would let nothing stop him unless something absolutely
did. It was like a weight in his mind that cast an actual shadow on his
vision. "Much better off." Then he picked up the phone and punched 9 for an
outside line. He wasn't sure he'd get one, but he did. He dialed 1, then
207, the area code for all of Maine, and then 692, which was the prefix for
Kent Pond and the surrounding towns. He got three of the last four numbers--
almost to the house he still thought of as home-- before the distinctive
three-tone interrupt. A recorded female voice followed. "We're sorry. All
circuits are busy. Please try your call again later."
On the heels of this came a dial tone as some automated circuit
disconnected him from Maine . . .if that was where the robot voice had been
coming from. Clay let the handset drop to the level of his shoulder, as if
it had grown very heavy. Then he put it back in the cradle.
13
Tom told him he was crazy to want to leave.
For one thing, he pointed out, they were relatively safe here in the
Atlantic Avenue Inn, especially with the elevators locked down and lobby
access from the stairwell blocked off. This they had done by piling boxes
and suitcases from the luggage room in front of the door at the end of the
short corridor beyond the elevator banks. Even if someone of extraordinary
strength were to push against that door from the other side, he'd only be
able to shift the pile against the facing wall, creating a gap of maybe six
inches. Not enough to get through.
For another, the tumult in the city beyond their little safe haven
actually seemed to be increasing. There was a constant racket of conflicting
alarms, shouts and screams and racing engines, and sometimes the panic-tang
of smoke, although the day's brisk breeze seemed to be carrying the worst of
that away from them. So far, Clay thought, but did not say aloud, at least
not yet-- he didn't want to frighten the girl any more than she already was.
There were explosions that never seemed to come singly but rather in spasms.
One of those was so close that they all ducked, sure the front window would
blow in. It didn't, but after that they moved to Mr. Ricardi's inner
sanctum.
The third reason Tom gave for thinking Clay was crazy to even think
about leaving the marginal safety of the Inn was that it was now quarter
past five. The day would be ending soon. He argued that trying to leave
Boston in the dark would be madness.
"Just take a gander out there," he said, gesturing to Mr. Ricardi's
little window, which looked out on Essex Street. Essex was crowded with
abandoned cars. There was also at least one body, that of a young woman in
jeans and a Red Sox sweatshirt. She lay facedown on the sidewalk, both arms
outstretched, as if she had died trying to swim, varitek, her sweatshirt
proclaimed. "Do you think you're going to drive your car? If you do, you
better think again."
"He's right," Mr. Ricardi said. He was sitting behind his desk with his
arms once more folded across his narrow chest, a study in gloom. "You're in
the Tamworth Street Parking Garage. I doubt if you'd even succeed in
securing your keys."
Clay, who had already given his car up as a lost cause, opened his
mouth to say he wasn't planning to drive (at least to start with), when
another thump came from overhead, this one heavy enough to make the ceiling
shiver. It was accompanied by the faint but distinctive shiver-jingle of
breaking glass. Alice Maxwell, who was sitting in the chair across the desk
from Mr. Ricardi, looked up nervously and then seemed to shrink further into
herself.
"What's up there?" Tom asked.
"It's the Iroquois Room directly overhead," Mr. Ricardi replied. "The
largest of our three meeting rooms, and where we keep all of our supplies--
chairs, tables, audiovisual equipment." He paused. "And, although we have no
restaurant, we arrange for buffets or cocktail parties, if clients request
such service. That last thump . . ."
He didn't finish. As far as Clay was concerned, he didn't need to. That
last thump had been a trolley stacked high with glassware being upended on
the floor of the Iroquois Room, where numerous other trolleys and tables had
already been tipped over by some madman who was rampaging back and forth up
there. Buzzing around on the second floor like a bug trapped between the
window and the screen, something without the wit to find a way out,
something that could only run and break, run and break.
Alice spoke up for the first time in nearly half an hour, and without
prompting for the first time since they'd met her. "You said something about
someone named Doris."
"Doris Gutierrez." Mr. Ricardi was nodding. "The head housekeeper.
Excellent employee. Probably my best. She was on three, the last time I
heard from her."
"Did she have-- ?" Alice wouldn't say it. Instead she made a gesture
that had become almost as familiar to Clay as the index finger across the
lips indicating Shh. Alice put her right hand to the side of her face with
the thumb close to her ear and the pinkie in front of her mouth.
"No," Mr. Ricardi said, almost primly. "Employees have to leave them in
their lockers while they're on the job. One violation gets them a reprimand.
Two and they can be fired. I tell them this when they're taken on." He
lifted one thin shoulder in a half-shrug. "It's management's policy, not
mine."
"Would she have gone down to the second floor to investigate those
sounds?" Alice asked.
"Possibly," Mr. Ricardi said. "I have no way of knowing. I only know
that I haven't heard from her since she reported the wastebasket fire out,
and she hasn't answered her pages. I paged her twice."
Clay didn't want to say You see, it isn't safe here, either right out
loud, so he looked past Alice at Tom, trying to give him the basic idea with
his eyes.
Tom said, "How many people would you say are still upstairs?"
"I have no way of knowing."
"If you had to guess."
"Not many. As far as the housekeeping staff goes, probably just Doris.
The day crew leaves at three, and the night crew doesn't come on until six."
Mr. Ricardi pressed his lips tightly together. "It's an economy gesture. One
cannot say measure because it doesn't work. As for guests . . ."
He considered.
"Afternoon is a slack time for us, very slack. Last night's guests have
all checked out, of course-- checkout time at the Atlantic Inn is noon-- and
tonight's guests wouldn't begin checking in until four o'clock or so, on an
ordinary afternoon. Which this most definitely is not. Guests staying
several days are usually here on business. As I assume you were, Mr.
Riddle."
Clay nodded without bothering to correct Ricardi on his name.
"At midafternoon, businesspeople are usually out doing whatever it was
that brought them to Boston. So you see, we have the place almost to
ourselves."
As if to contradict this, there came another thump from above them,
more shattering glass, and a faint feral growl. They all looked up.
"Clay, listen," Tom said. "If the guy up there finds the stairs . . . I
don't know if these people are capable of thought, but-- "
"Judging by what we saw on the street," Clay said, "even calling them
people might be wrong. I've got an idea that guy up there is more like a bug
trapped between a window and a screen. A bug trapped like that might get
out-- if it found a hole-- and the guy up there might find the stairs, but
if he does, I think it'll be by accident."
"And when he gets down and finds the door to the lobby blocked, he'll
use the fire-door to the alley," Mr. Ricardi said with what was, for him,
eagerness. "We'll hear the alarm-- it's rigged to ring when anyone pushes
the bar-- and we'll know he's gone. One less nut to worry about."
Somewhere south of them something big blew up, and they all cringed.
Clay supposed he now knew what living in Beirut during the 1980s had been
like.
"I'm trying to make a point here," he said patiently.
"I don't think so," Tom said. "You're going anyway, because you're
worried about your wife and son. You're trying to persuade us because you
want company."
Clay blew out a frustrated breath. "Sure I want company, but that's not
why I'm trying to talk you into coming. The smell of smoke's stronger, but
when's the last time you heard a siren?"
None of them replied.
"Me either," Clay said. "I don't think things are going to get better
in Boston, not for a while. They're going to get worse. If it was the cell
phones-- "
"She tried to leave a message for Dad," Alice said. She spoke rapidly,
as if wanting to make sure she got all the words out before the memory flew
away. "She just wanted to make sure he'd pick up the dry cleaning because
she needed her yellow wool dress for her committee meeting and I needed my
extra uni for the away game on Saturday. This was in the cab. And then we
crashed! She choked the man and she bit the man and his turban fell off and
there was blood on the side of his face and we crashed!"
Alice looked around at their three staring faces, then put her own face
in her hands and began to sob. Tom moved to comfort her, but Mr. Ricardi
surprised Clay by coming around his desk and putting one pipestemmy arm
around the girl before Tom could get to her. "There-there," he said. "I'm
sure it was all a misunderstanding, young lady."
She looked up at him, her eyes wide and wild. "Misunderstanding?" She
indicated the dried bib of blood on the front of her dress. "Does this look
like a misunderstanding? I used the karate from the self-defense classes I
took in junior high. I used karate on my own mother! I broke her nose, I
think . . . I'm sure . . ." Alice shook her head rapidly, her hair flying.
"And still, if I hadn't been able to reach behind me and get the door open .
. ."
"She would have killed you," Clay said flatly.
"She would have killed me," Alice agreed in a whisper. "She didn't know
who I was. My own mother." She looked from Clay to Tom. "It was the cell
phones," she said in that same whisper. "It was the cell phones, all right."
14
"So how many of the damn things are there in Boston?" Clay asked.
"What's the market penetration?"
"Given the large numbers of college students, I'd say it's got to be
huge," Mr. Ricardi replied. He had resumed his seat behind his desk, and now
he looked a little more animated. Comforting the girl might have done it, or
perhaps it was being asked a business-oriented question. "Although it goes
much further than affluent young people, of course. I read an article in
Inc. only a month or two ago that claimed there's now as many cell phones in
mainland China as there are people in America. Can you imagine?"
Clay didn't want to imagine.
"All right." Tom was nodding reluctantly. "I see where you're going
with this. Someone-- some terrorist outfit-- rigs the cell phone signals
somehow. If you make a call or take one, you get some kind of a . . . what?
. . . some kind of a subliminal message, I guess . . . that makes you crazy.
Sounds like science fiction, but I suppose fifteen or twenty years ...
