The Weird Part 100

He tried to ask what it was she had felt, what it was in him that had so unhinged her, but she reached in with the flexing hand and touched his forearm.

'You'll have to come with me.'

'Where?'

'To meet the real REM Group.'

And she began to cry. He knew immediately that she was weeping for him, and he murmured that he would come with her. She tried to smile rea.s.surance, but there was still too much pain in her. They stayed that way for a time, and then they left the office building together.

They were impaired, every one of them in the sprawling ranch-style house in Hidden Hills. One was blind, another had only one hand. A third looked as if she had been in a terrible fire and had lost half her face, and another propelled herself through the house on a small wheeled platform with restraining bars to keep her from falling off.

They had taken the San Diego Freeway to the Ventura, and had driven west on 101 to the Calabasas exit. Climbing, then dropping behind the hills, they had turned up a side road that became a dirt road that became a horse path, Lonny driving Anna Picket's '85 Le Sabre.

The house lay within a bowl, completely concealed, even from the dirt road below. The horse trail pa.s.sed behind low hills covered with mesquite and coast live oak, and abruptly became a perfectly surfaced blacktop. Like the roads Hearst had had cut in the hills leading up to San Simeon, concealing access to the Castle from the Coast Highway above Cambria, the blacktop had been poured on spiral rising cuts laid on a reverse bias.

Unless sought from the air, the enormous ranch house and its outbuildings and grounds would be unknown even to the most adventurous picnicker. 'How much of this acreage do you own?' McGrath asked, circling down the inside of the bowl.

'All this,' she said, waving an arm across the empty hills, 'almost to the edge of Ventura County.'

She had recovered completely, but had said very little during the hour and a half trip, even during the heaviest weekend traffic on the 101 Freeway crawling like a million-wheeled worm through the San Fernando Valley out of Los Angeles. 'Not a lot of casual drop-ins I should imagine,' he replied.

She looked at him across the front seat, fully for the first time since leaving Santa Monica. 'I hope you'll have faith in me, trust me just a while longer,' she said.

He paid strict attention to the driving.

He had been cramped within the Buick by a kind of dull fear that strangely reminded him of how he had always felt on Christmas Eve, as a child, lying in bed, afraid of, yet anxious for, the sleep that permitted Santa Claus to come.

In that house below lay something that knew of secret mouths and ancient winds from within. Had he not trusted her, he would have slammed the brake pedal and leaped from the car and not stopped running till he had reached the freeway.

And once inside the house, seeing all of them, so ruined and tragic, he was helpless to do anything but allow her to lead him to a large sitting-room, where a circle of comfortable overstuffed chairs formed a pattern that made the fear more overwhelming.

They came, then, in twos and threes, the legless woman on the rolling cart propelling herself into the center of the ring. He sat there and watched them come, and his heart seemed to press against his chest. McGrath, as a young man, had gone to a Judy Garland film festival at the Thalia in New York. One of the revived movies had been A Child Is Waiting, a nonsinging role for Judy, a film about r.e.t.a.r.ded children. Sally had had to help him out of the theater only halfway through. He could not see through his tears. His capacity for bearing the anguish of the crippled, particularly children, was less than that of most people. He brought himself up short: why had he thought of that afternoon at the Thalia now? These weren't children. They were adults. All of them. Every woman in the house was at least as old as he, surely older. Why had he been thinking of them as children?

Anna Picket took the chair beside him, and looked around the circle. One chair was empty. 'Catherine?' she asked.

The blind woman said, 'She died on Sunday.'

Anna closed her eyes and sank back into the chair. 'G.o.d be with her, and her pain ended.'

They sat quietly for a time, until the woman on the cart looked up at McGrath, smiled a very kind smile, and said, 'What is your name, young man?'

'Lonny,' McGrath said. He watched as she rolled herself to his feet and put a hand on his knee. He felt warmth flow through him, and his fear melted. But it only lasted for a moment, as she trembled and moaned softly; as Anna Picket had done in the office. Anna quickly rose and drew her away from McGrath. There were tears in the cart-woman's eyes.

A woman with gray hair and involuntary head tremors, indicative of Parkinson's, leaned forward and said, 'Lonny, tell us.'

He started to say tell you what? but she held up a finger and said the same thing again.

So he told them. As best he could. Putting words to feelings that always sounded melodramatic; words that were wholly inadequate for the tidal wave of sorrow that held him down in darkness. 'I miss them, oh G.o.d how I miss them,' he said, twisting his hands. 'I've never been like this. My mother died, and I was lost, I was miserable, yes there was a feeling my heart would break, because I loved her. But I could handle it. I could comfort my father and my sister, I had it in me to do that. But these last two years...one after another...so many who were close to me...pieces of my past, my life...friends I'd shared times with, and now those times are gone, they slip away as I try to think of them. I, I just don't know what to do.'

And he spoke of the mouth. The teeth. The closing of that mouth. The wind that had escaped from inside him.

'Did you ever sleepwalk, as a child?' a woman with a clubfoot asked. He said: yes, but only once. Tell us, they said.

'It was nothing. I was a little boy, maybe ten or eleven. My father found me standing in the hallway outside my bedroom, at the head of the stairs. I was asleep, and I was looking at the wall. I said, "I don't see it here anywhere." My father told me I'd said that; the next morning he told me. He took me back to bed. That was the only time, as best I know.'

The women murmured around the circle to each other. Then the woman with Parkinson's said, 'No, I don't think that's anything.' Then she stood up, and came to him. She laid a hand on his forehead and said, 'Go to sleep, Lonny.'

And he blinked once, and suddenly sat bolt upright. But it wasn't an instant, it had been much longer. He had been asleep. For a long while. He knew it was so instantly, because it was now dark outside the house, and the women looked as if they had been savaged by living jungles. The blind woman was bleeding from her eyes and ears; the woman on the cart had fallen over, lay unconscious at his feet; in the chair where the fire victim had sat, there was now only a charred outline of a human being, still faintly smoking.

McGrath leaped to his feet. He looked about wildly. He didn't know what to do to help them. Beside him, Anna Picket lay slumped across the bolster arm of the chair, her body twisted and blood once again speckling her lips.

Then he realized: the woman who had touched him, the woman with Parkinson's, was gone.

They began to whimper, and several of them moved, their hands idly touching the air. A woman who had no nose tried to rise, slipped and fell. He rushed to her, helped her back into the chair, and he realized she was missing fingers on both hands. Leprosy...no! Hansen's disease, that's what it's called. She was coming to, and she whispered to him, 'There...Teresa...help her...' and he looked where she was pointing, at a woman as pale as crystal, her hair a glowing white, her eyes colorless. 'She...has...lupus...' the woman without a nose whispered.

McGrath went to Teresa. She looked up at him with fear and was barely able to say, 'Can you...please...take me to a dark place...?'

He lifted her in his arms. She weighed nothing. He let her direct him up the stairs to the second floor, to the third bedroom off the main corridor. He opened the door; inside it was musty and unlit. He could barely make out the shape of a bed. He carried her over and placed her gently on the puffy down comforter. She reached up and touched his hand. 'Thank you.' She spoke haltingly, having trouble breathing. 'We, we didn't expect anything...like that...'

McGrath was frantic. He didn't know what had happened, didn't know what he had done to them. He felt awful, felt responsible, but he didn't know what he had done!

'Go back to them,' she whispered. 'Help them.'

'Where is the woman who touched me...?'

He heard her sobbing. 'She's gone. Lurene is gone. It wasn't your fault. We didn't expect anything...like...that.'

He rushed back downstairs.

They were helping one another. Anna Picket had brought water, and bottles of medicine, and wet cloths. They were helping one another. The healthier ones limping and crawling to the ones still unconscious or groaning in pain. And he smelled the fried metal scent of ozone in the air. There was a charred patch on the ceiling above the chair where the burned woman had been sitting.

He tried to help Anna Picket, but when she realized it was McGrath, she slapped his hand away. Then she gasped, and her hand flew to her mouth, and she began to cry again, and reached out to apologize. 'Oh, my G.o.d, I'm so sorry! It wasn't your fault. You couldn't know...not even Lurene knew.' She swabbed at her eyes, and laid a hand on his chest. 'Go outside. Please. I'll be there in a moment.'

A wide streak of dove-gray now bolted through her tangled hair. It had not been there before the instant of his sleep.

He went outside and stood under the stars. It was night, but it had not been night before Lurene had touched him. He stared up at the cold points of light, and the sense of irreparable loss overwhelmed him. He wanted to sink to his knees, letting his life ebb into the ground, freeing him from this misery that would not let him breathe. He thought of Victor, and the casket being cranked down into the earth, as Sally clung to him, murmuring words he could not understand, and hitting him again and again on the chest; not hard, but without measure, without meaning, with nothing but simple human misery. He thought of Alan, dying in a Hollywood apartment from AIDS, tended by his mother and sister who were, themselves, hysterical and constantly praying, asking Jesus to help them; dying in that apartment with the two roommates who had been sharing the rent, keeping to themselves, eating off paper plates for fear of contracting the plague, trying to figure out if they could get a lawyer to force Alan's removal; dying in that miserable apartment because the Kaiser Hospital had found a way around his coverage, and had forced him into 'home care.' He thought of Emily, lying dead beside her bed, having just dressed for dinner with her daughter, being struck by the grand mal seizure and her heart exploding, lying there for a day, dressed for a dinner she would never eat, with a daughter she would never again see. He thought of Mike, trying to smile from the hospital bed, and forgetting from moment to moment who Lonny was, as the tumor consumed his brain. He thought of Ted seeking shamans and homeopathists, running full tilt till he was cut down. He thought of Roy, all alone now that DeeDee was gone: half a unit, a severed dream, an incomplete conversation. He stood there with his head in his hands, rocking back and forth, trying to ease the pain.

When Anna Picket touched him, he started violently, a small cry of desolation razoring into the darkness.

'What happened in there?' he demanded. 'Who are you people? What did I do to you? Please, oh please I'm asking you, tell me what's going on!'

'We absorb.'

'I don't know what '

'We take illness. We've always been with you. As far back as we can know. We have always had that capacity, to a.s.sume the illness. There aren't many of us, but we're everywhere. We absorb. We try to help. As Jesus wrapped himself in the leper's garments, as he touched the lame and the blind, and they were healed. I don't know where it comes from, some sort of intense empathy. But...we do it...we absorb.'

'And with me...what was that in there...?'

'We didn't know. We thought it was just the heartache. We've encountered it before. That was why Tricia suggested you come to the Group.'

'My wife...is Tricia one of you? Can she...take on the...does she absorb? I lived with her, I never '

Anna was shaking her head. 'No, Tricia has no idea what we are. She's never been here. Very few people have been so needing that I've brought them here. But she's a fine therapist, and we've helped a few of her patients. She thought you...' She paused. 'She still cares for you. She felt your pain, and thought the Group might be able to help. She doesn't even know of the real REM Group.'

He grabbed her by the shoulders, intense now.

'What happened in there?'

She bit her lip and closed her eyes tightly against the memory. 'It was as you said. The mouth. We'd never seen that before. It, it opened. And then...and then...'

He shook her. 'What!?!'

She wailed against the memory. The sound slammed against him and against the hills and against the cold points of the stars. 'Mouths. In each of us! Opened. And the wind, it, it just, it just hissed out of us, each of us. And the pain we held, no, that they held I'm just their contact for the world, they can't go anywhere, so I go and shop and bring and do the pain they absorbed, it, it took some of them. Lurene and Margid...Teresa won't live...I know...'

McGrath was raving now. His head was about to burst. He shook her as she cried and moaned, demanding, 'What's happening to us, how could I do such an awfulness to you, why is this being done to me, to us, why now, what's going wrong, please, you've got to tell me, you've got to help me, we've got to do something'

And they hugged each other, clinging tightly to the only thing that promised support: each other. The sky wheeled above them, and the ground seemed to fall away. But they kept their balance, and finally she pushed him to arm's length and looked closely at his face and said, 'I don't know. I do not know. This isn't like anything we've experienced before. Not even Alvarez or Aries know about this. A wind, a terrible wind, something alive, leaving the body.'

'Help me!'

'I can't help you! No one can help you, I don't think anyone can help you. Not even Le Braz...'

He clutched at the name. 'Le Braz! Who's Le Braz?'

'No, you don't want to see Le Braz. Please, listen to me, try to go off where it's quiet, and lonely, and try to handle it yourself, that's the only way!'

'Tell me who Le Braz is!'

She slapped him. 'You're not hearing me. If we can't do for you, then no one can. Le Braz is beyond anything we know, he can't be trusted, he does things that are outside, that are awful, I think. I don't really know. I went to him once, years ago, it's not something you want to '

I don't care, he said. I don't care about any of it now. I have to rid myself of this. It's too terrible to live with. I see their faces. They're calling and I can't answer them. They plead with me to say something to them. I don't know what to say. I can't sleep. And when I sleep I dream of them. I can't live like this, because this isn't living. So tell me how to find Le Braz. I don't care, to h.e.l.l with the whole thing, I just don't give a d.a.m.n, so tell me!

She slapped him again. Much harder. And again. And he took it. And finally she told him.

He had been an abortionist. In the days before it was legal, he had been the last hope for hundreds of women. Once, long before, he had been a surgeon. But they had taken that away from him. So he did what he could do. In the days when women went to small rooms with long tables, or to coat hangers, he had helped. He had charged two hundred dollars, just to keep up with supplies. In those days of secret thousands in brown paper bags stored in clothes closets, two hundred dollars was as if he had done the work for free. And they had put him in prison. But when he came out, he went back at it.

Anna Picket told McGrath that there had been other...

...work. Other experiments. She had said the word experiments, with a tone in her voice that made McGrath shudder. And she had said again, 'For McGrath hath murdered sleep,' and he asked her if he could take her car, and she said yes, and he had driven back to the 101 Freeway and headed north toward Santa Barbara, where Anna Picket said Le Braz now lived, and had lived for years, in total seclusion.

It was difficult locating his estate. The only gas station open in Santa Barbara at that hour did not carry maps. It had been years since free maps had been a courtesy of gas stations. Like so many other small courtesies in McGrath's world that had been spirited away before he could lodge a complaint. But there was no complaint department, in any case.

So he went to the Hotel Miramar, and the night clerk was a woman in her sixties who knew every street in Santa Barbara and knew very well the location of the Le Braz 'place.' She looked at McGrath as if he had asked her the location of the local abattoir. But she gave him explicit directions, and he thanked her, and she didn't say you're welcome, and he left. It was just lightening in the east as dawn approached.

By the time he found the private drive that climbed through heavy woods to the high-fenced estate, it was fully light. Sun poured across the channel and made the foliage seem Rain Forest lush. He looked back over his shoulder as he stepped out of the Le Sabre, and the Santa Monica Channel was silver and rippled and utterly oblivious to shadows left behind from the night.

He walked to the gate, and pressed the b.u.t.ton on the intercom system. He waited, and pressed it again. Then a voice he could not tell if it was male or female, young or old cracked, 'Who is it?'

'I've come from Anna Picket and the REM Group.' He paused a moment, and when the silence persisted, he added, 'The real REM Group. Women in a house in Hidden Hills.'

The voice said, 'Who are you? What's your name?'

'It doesn't matter. You don't know me. McGrath, my name is McGrath. I came a long way to see Le Braz.'

'About what?'

'Open the gate and you'll know.'

'We don't have visitors.'

'I saw...there was a...I woke up suddenly, there was a, a kind of mouth in my body...a wind pa.s.sed...'

There was a whirring sound, and the iron gate began to withdraw into the brick wall. McGrath rushed back to the car and started the engine. As the gate opened completely, he decked the accelerator and leaped through, even as the gate began without hesitation to close.

He drove up the winding drive through the Rain Forest, and when he came out at the top, the large, fieldstone mansion sat there, hidden from all sides by tall stands of trees and thick foliage. He pulled up on the crushed rock drive, and sat for a moment staring at the leaded windows that looked down emptily. It was cool here, and dusky, even though it was burgeoning day. He got out and went to the carved oak door. He was reaching for the knocker when the door was opened. By a ruined thing.

McGrath couldn't help himself. He gasped and fell back, his hands coming up in front of him as if to ward off any approach by the barely human being that stood in the entranceway.

It was horribly pink where it was not burned. At first McGrath thought it was a woman, that was his quick impression; but then he could not discern its s.e.x, it might have been male. It had certainly been tortured in flames. The head was without hair, almost without skin that was not charred black. There seemed to be too many bends and joints in the arms. The sense that it was female came from the floor-length wide skirt it wore. He was spared the sight of the lower body, but he could tell there was considerable bulk there, a bulk that seemed to move gelatinously, as if neither human torso nor human legs lay within the circle of fabric.

And the creature stared at him from one milky eye, and one eye so pure and blue that his heart ached with the beauty of it. As features between the eyes and the chin that became part of the chest, without discernible neck, there were only charred k.n.o.bs and b.u.mps, and a lipless mouth blacker than the surrounding flesh. 'Come inside,' the doorkeeper said.

McGrath hesitated.

'Or go away,' it said.

Lonny McGrath drew a deep breath and pa.s.sed through. The doorkeeper moved aside only a trifle. They touched: blackened hip, back of a normal hand.

Closed and double-bolted, the pa.s.sage out was now denied McGrath. He followed the as.e.xual creature through a long, high-ceilinged foyer to a closed, heavily paneled door to the right of a spiral staircase that led to the floor above. The thing, either man or woman, indicated he should enter. Then it shambled away, toward the rear of the mansion.

McGrath stood a moment, then turned the ornate L-shaped door handle, and entered. The heavy drapes were drawn against the morning light, but in the outlaw beams that latticed the room here and there, he saw an old man sitting in a high-backed chair, a lap robe concealing his legs. He stepped inside the library, for library it had to be: floor to ceiling bookcases, spilling their contents in teetering stacks all around the floor. Music swirled through the room. Cla.s.sical music; McGrath didn't recognize it.

'Dr. Le Braz?' he said. The old man did not move. His head lay sunk on his chest. His eyes were closed. McGrath moved closer. The music swelled toward a crescendo, something symphonic. Now he was only three steps from the old man, and he called the name Le Braz again.

The eyes opened, and the leonine head rose. He stared at McGrath unblinkingly. The music came to an end. Silence filled the library.

The old man smiled sadly. And all ominousness left the s.p.a.ce between them. It was a sweet smile. He inclined his head toward a stool beside the wingback. McGrath tried to give back a small smile, and took the seat offered.

'It is my hope that you are not here to solicit my endors.e.m.e.nt for some new pharmacological product,' the old man said.

'Are you Dr. Le Braz?'

'It is I who was, once, known by that name, yes.'

'You have to help me.'

Le Braz looked at him. There had been such a depth of ocean in the words McGrath had spoken, such a descent into stony caverns that all casualness was instantly denied. 'Help you?'