Thorn

Chapter Twenty

Pat O'Grandison was dreaming again, and again the dream was of Annie, and in this dream she was naked. She and Pat were in bed together, and the sheets were satin. There were paintings and statues all about, watching. Pat was enormously aroused, but even more important was the secret that Annie was about to whisper into his ear.

Before he could hear a word of it, he awoke with a small start. It was dusk, and he could not immediately remember whose great house this was or how he came to be in it. He was lying on his back on a sofa in an unknown, luxuriously furnished room. His shoes were off, and his knapsack was under his head where he had put it to make a pillow against the sofa's wooden arm. He was beginning to remember now.

A brown-haired, slightly built girl was sitting at the foot of the sofa, looking at Pat. She wore jeans and a loose pullover shirt.

"Annie?" Pat was fully awake in an instant, and his body jerked up into a straight sitting position. At first glance he was sure this girl was her. The sense of Annie's presence was very strong. But as soon as he got a good look he could see this wasn't Annie's face, though this too was a face he ought to know. He had been asleep, and there was certainly a resemblance, and the lights in the room had not been turned on as yet.

"I'm Helen, Pat," she said, in a voice that was certainly not Annie's either. "Annie's friend. You saw a lot of me in Chicago. Don't you remember?"

"Oh, yeah. Sure. Gosh." Gosh popped out in Pat's speech fairly often, part of a general plan, never deliberately thought out as such, to remain as young or at least as young-seeming as he possibly could. Sometimes this plan worried him and he wondered at its purpose.

The girl took hold of his foot in its dirty sock, squeezing it absently, as if she were petting a small child. Her fingers were strong. "Pat? You know Ellison has just been on the phone, talking to someone about you. He was very guarded in what he said, but I'm sure you were the real subject of what they were talking about."

"Ellison?"

"My stepfather. He owns this house. The big fat man who looks a lot like Del."

"Del?"

The girl sighed faintly. "Del is his older brother. You don't remember anything about that night in Phoenix, do you, when you and I first met? That was at Del's house."

Pat pulled his feet free from her near-caress and swung them to the floor, where he started fumbling them into his shoes.

Helen told him: "I wouldn't be a bit surprised if Ellison is making plans to get rid of you tonight. I don't know why else he would have let you sack out in his house like this. He doesn't like boys the way Del does sometimes. He just wanted to check with Del first, or with Gliddon, about what they want to do with you. Maybe they'll want to find out how much you know."

"Oh my God. I'm gonna split." Somehow Pat doubted that the girl was making any of this up, just for fun or just to get him out of the house. There was something about that huge old dude, her stepfather, that made Pat believe he could be capable of murder; Anyway, even if Helen was making it up, it wasn't a situation Pat wanted to prolong.

But even now he couldn't just leave without trying once more. "Helen? Tell me where Annie is. I know she's right around here somewhere."

Helen shook her head, and appeared to be annoyed. But then she reached over and with cool fingers touched Pat on the cheek. It was almost like the way that Annie had used to reach and touch him sometimes. "Pat, I know you liked her, and she liked you." Helen paused there, looking at him with strange eyes in the dusk. "She was there on that night in Phoenix, too. She met you the same time I did. A lot of things got started on that night."

"I don't really give a shit about that night in Phoenix any more." Pat was jerking on his shoelaces to get them tied. One lace broke, and he just let it go. He stood up. "Where is she now?"

"I was trying to tell you." Helen, sounding irritated, stood up too. Pat could see now that she was barefooted; still she stood a little taller than Annie. "The bad news about her. She was just a runaway from somewhere, and she didn't count for much. Anyway, you see there was another real bad night at the house in Phoenix, a few months after you were there. I mean the night when Del was supposedly kidnapped. Something went wrong with the scheme and Annie was killed. Almost everyone thought that I was the girl who died. Just as they thought that Del was dead—he wants everyone to think that, of course. But really he had another body ready, the body of a fat old man, that would look enough like Del after it had been blown up in the truck. And he even faked dental records and everything, just in case. You can do a lot, when you have as much money as Del has. And—"

"I don't wanna know about all that, I wasn't there. I'm gonna leave."

"Sure. You'd better get out of here now. But what are you going to do, just walk the roads? You'll be picked up, that way."

Something in the way she said it made it a special warning. "Picked up?"

"I don't mean just by the law. Look, Pat, I'll give you a ride somewhere, okay? I know Annie would want me to look out for you if I could. She thought you were something special, you know. She talked about you quite a lot."

"She did?"

Helen didn't answer, but moved away. His backpack dangling from one hand, Pat followed her on tiptoe through several darkening rooms. They came to a heavily grilled back door, where Helen bent to do something to the lock.

"Where are your folks now?" Pat whispered near her ear.

"Sometimes they don't seem much like my folks," she whispered back. "They're around. Be quiet. Here now, I've got to hold this—you go on out."

The door swung open to a small patio. Pat had been in mansions before, enough to know something about alarm systems. He went out quietly. Helen delayed behind him, doing something to a mechanism attached to the heavy door, then closing it carefully behind her when she was out too.

After that she led Pat along the side of the house, over a brick walk, to an outside entrance to the garage. Again there was a brief delay, while she used keys and stealth for a tricky opening. They were inside the garage then, where it was very dark. Helen led Pat past two cars to a third smaller one and unlocked the right door for him. When the dome light came on he could see he was getting into a Subaru, one of the small station wagon models that he thought usually came with four-wheel drive.

Helen walked around and got in on the driver's side. It was cold in the garage. The engine purred, headlights came on, a garage door rolled itself up ahead of them, and now somewhere an alarm bell was ringing stridently.

"Now they're going to wonder what's going on," Helen said, a certain satisfaction in her voice. The Subaru leaped into the night.

* * *

She drove Pat in a direction that must have taken them away from the center of town, for the roads remained up-and-down-hill gravel. You might have thought you were already way out in the remote countryside, except there were so many mailboxes along the road, and gravel driveways curving away from the road uphill and down. There must be a fair number of houses tucked just out of sight. In the dark it was hard to tell.

Gradually the driveways and mailboxes thinned out, then finally ceased to appear at all. They were really getting out into the boondocks now.

"Where we going?" Pat asked, beginning to get curious.

Helen didn't answer right away. "There's something I think I want to show you," she said at last.

A lot of road was going by in the lonely headlights. Traffic, that had never been heavy, had thinned out now to nothing. Pat wondered, and couldn't tell for sure, whether or not they might be driving in some great circle, and it was all a hoax, a joke on him.

"Sometimes," he said, to be making talk, "I feel like I been on the road a hundred years."

"Don't talk like that. I feel that way too much myself."

"You?" He sighed. "Actually you've just tried it once, right? With Annie to Chicago? And now you're home again."

Helen turned on the car radio. Rock music came in. But then almost at once the music began to fade, as if they were far and getting farther from the station. At last she said: "Yeah. Just that once."

"And that's where I met you. Right?"

"No." Now her voice was remote, and there was something in it that frightened Pat. "I told you where we met. It's no good just trying to forget what has happened, Pat. You can't change things that way. You met Annie and me both that first night in Phoenix. Uncle Del was giving a party—that's what he liked to call it, anyway. You were invited. I mean Gliddon brought you in, along with a few other road-kids that he collected somewhere. He's good at collecting. And he likes that kind of party too."

"Helen? Maybe you could just take me back somewhere near the center of town, and let me off. I'll do okay getting a ride from there."

"But you got stoned so early you probably really don't remember anything. Dear Uncle Del and his parties. And that one was especially bad because someone got killed. And did you know, we were all in a movie that night? You're such a movie freak, I bet you remember that much anyway if you tried hard."

Pat had an inward feeling, terrible and indescribable, that he got usually when a bout of mental illness was about to strike. But he knew what was going on. No way he was going to be lucky enough to get out of that.

"Or most of us were in a movie, anyway," Helen amended, turning off suddenly onto an almost invisible side road. "On some of us it wouldn't take," she added obscurely. The car jounced violently. The road, or track, was badly rutted here and obviously little used. A branch dragged across the windshield. Then the bottom of the car scraped hard on a rock or graveled hump projecting up between the ruts. Helen drove on as if she hadn't noticed the noise. Apparently no serious damage had been inflicted.

"Was Annie in the movie?"

Helen didn't answer.

"Come on, Helen, tell me. Annie isn't really dead, I know that much. I got this feeling about her, you know?"

"She's dead!" Helen snapped at him, in a new and abrupt voice. She turned her eyes from the road to look at Pat, long enough so he wished she'd turn back and watch where they were going. Again low branches of some kind clawed at the windshield, and the car rocked in and out of ruts. So far the four-wheel-drive was pulling it through. Helen had to turn back to watch her steering. Angrily she said: "How can I help you when you keep on saying crazy things like that?"

"Sorry, I . . ."

A sign came unexpectedly into the headlights. It had been crudely improvised long ago, long enough that the wood and the white paint were weather-worn, the message barely legible. It said, simply enough: BRIDGE OUT.

"Helen, you sure you know where we're going?"

Helen rounded one more curve, and then slowed down some more. Not for a sign, though. The headlights had now fallen upon what at first appeared to be a wreck—an old car slewed diagonally across what was left of the road, as if it had stalled in some attempt to back out or turn around. Standing near it and squinting back into the Subaru's headlights were a pair of young people, a dark-bearded man and a brown-haired girl. Pat knew another moment of spurious recognition; but this girl was obviously too big and sturdy to be Annie. The man with her was bigger still; both were dressed casually but well.

"Shall we stop?" Helen asked abstractedly, as if she were conversing with herself. Actually there hardly seemed to be a choice, given the blocked and narrow road. A moment later they had come to a halt, a few feet from the stalled car. The man on foot, trying to shade his eyes with one hand, approached the Subaru warily on the driver's side. But before he reached it the girl, her eyes now freed of the headlights' glare, was looking in through the window that Pat had just rolled down. She looked at Pat, and at the young girl driving, and relaxed.

Helen was saying nothing, so Pat spoke. "Can we give you guys a lift somewhere?"

"Sure," said the girl. "I'm Judy Southerland, this is Bill Bird. We got stuck."

The young man, also somewhat relaxed now, was looking in at Helen, who had finally rolled her window down. "We'd really appreciate it," he said with feeling. "I guess it was kind of crazy, our trying to get through here, especially at night. Where are you guys headed?"

"Just riding." Helen sounded cool and remote. "I'm Helen, this is Pat. Actually there was something I wanted to show him, out this way. You want to come along?"

The young man called Bill was silent, as if he didn't quite understand. Pat could hear a nightbird somewhere. The thin moon was down by now. He could see about a million stars, but not a man-made light in sight other than the one pair of headlights.

"Sure we will," said the girl called Judy. "Or I will, anyway." She looked over the top of the car at Bill, and something passed between them.

He shrugged. "Okay." And he moved to open the Subaru's back door.

"No," said Helen, surprising them all. "From here we walk."

"Walk?" All three of them said it.

"It isn't far. Come on." And she turned off the car's lights and engine and got out. She seemed to Pat to be perfectly calm and serious. She moved to the uphill side of the road and paused, evidently waiting for the others to follow.

Pat and the others exchanged puzzled looks, as well as they could by starlight, then he moved to Helen and the other two followed. In single file they began to climb.

The ground was rough and pathless, but Helen moved as if she knew her way. Pat looked down at her feet and realized with a chill that they were still bare. She had to be crazy . . . he didn't know whether he should appeal to the newcomers for support, demand they call a halt, or what. He himself was crazy, that much he knew already. As if there were no other choice, he kept quiet and let himself be led.

The hill at least wasn't high. Soon they were going down its other side, now completely out of sight of cars and road. Then partway up another hill, and along its twisting flank.

Judy wondered aloud: "Does anyone think we'll be able to find our way back? Where are we going, anyway?"

"You don't know?" asked Bill.

Helen paused calmly and turned back. "There's a sort of settlement where we're going. They have a phone there. I know you can't see it from here. But it's just over this next hill." Her voice sounded completely reasonable.

"Oh," said Judy. They went on. Pat had lost track of how far or in which direction they had come. He kept on, following Helen's soundless feet. He hadn't thought, on first seeing her this evening, that she was high on anything—Pat could almost invariably tell—or that her head was screwed on wrong. But now he was dead sure that something wasn't anywhere near right.

Once he paused, turned back, almost determined to call a halt.

The girl, Judy, walking close behind him, shook her head minimally and pushed him gently on. Her eyes were focused past Pat, on the darkness ahead where a low mass of shadow now seemed to indicate trees. She knew, on some level, what she was doing.

He turned again, and walked, one foot loose in its shoe with the broken lace.

"Here," said Helen quietly, turning long enough to utter the one word, then pushing on. And the way began to slope down, the ground underfoot smooth enough to indicate a path. The sound of running water drifted upward, very faint at first. There was at least a respectable trickle.

They came in among the first trees, and darkness deepened. Judy asked: "What is this place, anyway?" Pat could now see buildings of some kind, faintly visible in tree-shaded starlight.

"There used to be a mission here," said Helen. She came slowly to a halt, looking ahead into blackness.

"But you said there was a phone. Didn't you?"

"There is. It's a radiophone of some kind. I guess some special, secret kind."

"What?"

"We'll ask Gliddon if we can use it." Helen's voice was still dream-calm.

"What? Who?"

A new voice, harshly male, said: "Don't move. All four of you freeze, right where you are." And light sprang at them, a blinding beam of it from each side. Pat, as soon as he could begin to see again, made out the ski-masks and the shotguns; and he devoutly wished that he could immediately go mad.