The Dead Town

Chapter 47

A mild wind came up, and Mr. Lyss called it a devil wind, not because devils were blowing around in it, but because it started to smooth away the snowmobile tracks. Just as it seemed the trail would be erased before their eyes, they saw house lights through the snow and found their way back to the Bozeman place.

The sad music was still being played. After Mr. Lyss retrieved his long gun from the workbench in the garage, he went into the house, to the living room.

Nummy followed the old man, though he didn’t want to follow because he was afraid of the monster playing the piano. There was something about Mr. Lyss that made you have to follow him, though Nummy didn’t understand what it was. It wasn’t just that he sometimes threatened to cut your feet off and feed them to wolves if you didn’t follow him or if you resisted doing other things he wanted you to do. In fact, Nummy felt compelled to follow Mr. Lyss in spite of the threats. Maybe at the beginning the threats were part of what made Nummy stay with him, but now it was something else. If Grandmama was still alive, she would know what it was and would be able to explain it.

In the living room, Mr. Lyss said to the piano player, “Was Bozeman the most depressive sonofabitch who ever lived, or are you just not playing the livelier music he knew?”

“Kill me,” the piano man said, “and the music will stop.”

“I’d like nothing better than to kill you dead as anyone’s ever been,” Mr. Lyss said. “I’ve killed every damn monster I’ve ever met, and there have been more than a few. But I won’t be told to do it by the monster himself. I’m not a man who can be bossed around. Tell him that’s true, boy.”

Nummy said, “That’s true. Mr. Lyss can’t be bossed around. He gets his back up easy. If he was on fire and somebody told him jump in the water, he might not do it ’cause it wasn’t his idea first.”

“Hell’s bells,” the old man said, “where did that come from, boy?”

“It come from me, sir.”

“Well, I know it came from you, I heard you say it. But it came from somewhere deeper in you than most of your jabber and prattle comes from. Not that I’m encouraging more of the same. I didn’t ask you to psychoanalyze me. I asked you to confirm my simple statement for this gloomy sonofabitch.”

As before, Xerox Bozeman’s hands seemed to float back and forth across the keys, almost as if they weren’t taking the music from the piano, as if instead the music was in the hands and the piano was drawing it out of them, like the land draws lightning to it in a storm.

Nummy felt a little hypnotized by the floating hands, as before. Maybe Mr. Lyss was hypnotized, too, because he listened for a while without saying anything.

But then the old man said, “If you want to be dead because of what you saw when Bozeman died, why don’t you kill yourself?”

“I can’t. My program forbids self-destruction.”

“Your program.”

“The one installed in me in the Hive, in the laboratory where I was made.”

“By Frankenstein,” Mr. Lyss said with some scorn. “In the Hive.”

“That’s right.”

“You’re still sticking to that story.”

“It’s true.”

“And it’s not true that you’re a Martian or some murderous scum from some other planet?”

“It’s not true,” said the piano player.

“We burned some big cocoons earlier tonight. You make those cocoons?”

“No. I’m a Communitarian. The cocoons are made by Builders. We both come from the Hive.”

Mr. Lyss thought about that for a while before he said, “Earlier I wanted to kill you, but I knew for some reason it was a bad idea. I think it’s still a bad idea, damn if I know why, since I’d get plenty of satisfaction from it. So I’ll tell you what — I’ll kill you as dead as dead can be, as soon as I feel it’s right.”

The music was very sad. Nummy thought a person might curl up like a pill bug and never uncurl, listening to that music too much.

“In return,” Mr. Lyss said, “you come along with us, answer some questions.”

“What questions?” the piano player asked.

“Any damn question that pops in my head to ask. I’m not giving you a list of questions ahead of time so you can study them and just scheme up a bunch of lying answers. O’Bannon here is a dummy, but I’m not, and you better keep that in mind. If you lie to me, I’ll know it’s a lie, I can smell a lie better than a bloodhound can smell the nearest sausage. Then I’ll put you in a cage and feed you well and never kill you. You have to earn it. Is that understood?”

“Yes,” the Xerox Bozeman said, and he stood up from the piano.