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22Rebecca Shares the Moment
At 7:10, as Bobby was slammed by a recovered memory in room 210, Rebecca was dressed and ready to meet him and Spencer in the Spreading Oaks Diner for breakfast at 7:30. She had not donned a wig and glasses with clear lenses or any other disguise. Even if she had wanted to go incognito, as on the previous day, she hadn’t brought a fake nose or a paste-on scar or even a set of buckteeth.
She didn’t consider phoning the security firm in Beverly Hills that usually provided her with armed bodyguards, though two reliable and deadly serious former Marines could have been at her side before the day was out. In Maple Grove, the least of her worries was being assaulted by a psychotic fan. Anyway, she could not expect licensed bodyguards to participate in such activities as breaking into church basements and stashing apparently dead bodies in window seats.
Besides, although neither Bobby nor Spencer was the kind of specimen to be nicknamed “the Rock,” they would put their lives on the line for her, just as she would do for them. She didn’t have the slightest doubt about that. Together with Ernie, they were the first real family any of them had known, and in fact they remained the only family any of them had in this culture that often seemed determined to devalue children and make families obsolete.
To pass time before she would join her amigos for breakfast, she opened a package of wet wipes. With those and a hand towel, she started to clean the mirrored sliding doors of the closet, which were spotted with a substance that disquieted her. You never knew what previous residents might have gotten up to in a motel room.
The very moment that Bobby was overcome by a recovered memory in room 210, Rebecca was likewise stricken. The wet wipes and towel fell out of her hands, and she staggered backward to sit on the edge of the bed, which she had made earlier. Although she had not gone into the rectory on that eventful night when they were fourteen, she received the memory of Bobby’s encounter with Wayne Louis Hornfly as if she had witnessed it herself.
This seemed to suggest that she and Bobby were psychically linked, which they were, although the explanation is more complex and will be revealed later. In spite of her intelligence and her shrewd awareness regarding how the world works, and even though she was a heavy reader of fiction, Rebecca could not have known that this linkage also had the convenient effect of breaking one chapter into two, each of a length more tolerable to modern readers than otherwise would have been the case.
So there was Bobby Shamrock standing just one step inside the second-floor library of the rectory, paralyzed by fear but, it might be assumed, also by curiosity, which is a very powerful desire, as many generations of grieving cats can attest.
“Hornfly. Wayne Louis Hornfly,” said the filthy giant in the armchair. “That is our name for this manifestation of us.”
“How did you know my name?” Bobby asked.
“We know the names of everyone in Maple Grove. We have known the names of every citizen who has lived here since the town was settled, since before you barbarians decorated the oak trees with corpses at Christmas.”
Bobby was sure he could now break the paralysis that fear had imposed on him, buthe just had to know, had to know the truth of Maple Grove, the nature of this creature before him, and what it all meant. He said, “We?”
Hornfly said, “What?”
“We?” Bobby repeated.
Hornfly looked hate-filled but puzzled. “We?”
“You said ‘we’ instead of ‘I.’ Who is ‘we’?”
A sly look evolved out of the hate and puzzlement. “That’s for us to know and you to find out. And by the time you find out, it will be too late for your kind.”
“My kind?”
“Didn’t we just say?”
“What do you mean by that?”
“What could we mean other than humanity, human beings, your disgusting species.”
“And you’re not human?”
Hornfly cocked his head. “Are you stupid? Do we look human?”
“Yeah. Kind of. More or less. More than not.”
The giant smiled broadly. His smile in no way diminished the intensity of the hatred that radiated from him, because it was a self-satisfied and arrogant smile. “We could choose to look more human than we do, but the thought of looking too human repulses us.”
“If you aren’t human, what are you?”
Hornfly took his feet off the footstool and sat up straighter, seeming proud of being whatever he was. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”
“Yes. That’s why I asked. Are you from another planet?”
“That is such a cliché. No, we are not from another planet.”
“You could be lying.”