Page 22

22

Rebecca 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, but he 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.”

“What would be in it for us?” Hornfly leaned forward in his chair and pointed at Bobby. “You know what’s wrong with your kind? You always go for the easy answers. Aliens, zombies, gigantic apes, gigantic reptiles, gigantic insects, crooked greedy businessmen. Your movies suck because, in art as in all things, you go for easy answers. Life on Earth is more complex than your kind can imagine.”

“That’s unfair,” said Bobby. “We’re very imaginative.”

“Watch your mouth, boy. We are incapable of unfairness. We lack the faults of your kind.”

“You’re very full of yourselves, aren’t you?”

Hornfly’s eyes narrowed. “It is merely the truth of ourselves.”

“That’s your position, is it?”

“Our position? Soon we will disgust ourselves by looking so human that you’ll not know we’re among you. Then will come the Day of Fun when we will exterminate every last one of your kind.”

“You could kill us all in one day?”

Hornfly looked a bit crestfallen. “It’ll take eight or ten months, maybe as much as a year and a half.”

“Then why do you call it ‘the Day of Fun’?”

“It sounds more inspiring than ‘the Year and a Half of Fun.’ We want it so bad, we need to think it’ll happen in twenty-four hours.”

“What were those things in the church basement?”

“Mistakes in manufacturing.”

“That’s all you’re going to say? How many weird mistakes in manufacturing do you make? What does that even mean? The Day of Fun is actually a year and a half, half-formed people are ‘mistakes in manufacturing.’ You don’t make sense. It’s all stupid talk.”

The wriggling hair stood straight up on Hornfly’s head, and his face presented an expression of great offense. “We are smarter than Alpha. Beta is smart. Alpha is stupid. They do absurd things to people on the third floor. Absurd things!”

Bobby looked at the ceiling. “There is no third floor.”

“Not here, you stupid, stupid boy. Not the third floor here. You are tedious and too stupid to live. If you were comatose on the third floor, they would get nothing worthwhile from your tiny brain. Right now, right here, Wayne Louis Hornfly could squash you like a ripe grape between our thumb and forefinger. Or burst upon you and destroy you from the inside out. But then the disappearance of a child would have to be explained. Nothing so agitates your species as the disappearance of a child.”

Bobby intuited that the time to pivot and run had arrived, but curiosity was such a powerful desire that he stood his ground. We should also consider that the human brain is not fully developed until one’s early twenties and that a fourteen-year-old does not have a full grasp of the fragility of human life.

Bobby said, “What about Pastor Larry? He must know what you are. Why does he allow you here? Why is he involved with you?”

“Surely you are aware there are those of your people who hate all humankind. He’s one of those. He wants to save the planet by curing it of the human plague. Okay now, Bobby, Bob, Roberto—you need to go home to bed and have a nice dream.”

Bobby indicated the book on the table. “What were you reading?”

Favoring his visitor with a broad smile full of green teeth, licking his lips with a purple tongue, Wayne Louis Hornfly said, “We were reading about blood, pain, mayhem, cruelty, murder, and mass death. As useless as your kind is in all other ways, when you write tales of blood, pain, mayhem, cruelty, murder, and mass death, you create thrilling narratives that are deeply moving and inspiring.”

Hornfly rose from the armchair. By going vertical, he made the room seem smaller. He towered, loomed, glowered.

Bobby backed up a step.

“Oh,” Hornfly said, “how we would like to burst upon you and spread our filaments throughout you, into every organ, into your brain, our filaments and felts, until you have fed us all you have.”

“Nice meeting you,” Bobby said, pivoted, and ran.

In room 208, Rebecca thrust up from her bed, electrified by the recovered memory that wasn’t her own, that was Bobby’s memory shared with her psychically, which is a concept that one will not find in a novel by, say, Hemingway or Faulkner. This was an experience that would have scared most people, but after the life she had led thus far, Rebecca could not be easily frightened.

However, the encounter with Wayne Louis Hornfly brought her a moment of enlightenment. Since returning to Maple Grove, she had been enlightened about one thing or another more often than during the seventeen years she’d spent in California. In the entertainment business, enlightenment was achieved only with the assistance of a guru or recreational drugs, or a personal trainer, or attendance at the Burning Man festival—all of which she’d avoided. In this case, she suddenly realized that her obsession with cleanliness had its roots in her adolescence, perhaps in encounters with the mysterious, filthy Hornfly and others like him—or maybe also from a traumatic incident involving a large volume of muck so putrid and disgusting that it would affect her psychology for the rest of her life.

“Breakfast with Bobby and Spencer in five minutes,” her phone reminded her.

Flashback to 7:10 and cut to room 212.

At the desk by the window, Spencer Truedove was working on his hat. Because black felt attracted lint and was sometimes targeted by birds, he traveled with a small cleaning kit in a zippered leather case. The hat needed to be perfect, because it was more than just headgear. The hat was the logo of his brand as surely as the logo of Apple Inc. was an apple with a bite out of it. When America Art magazine published a long, adoring article about Spencer’s work, they hadn’t put one of his paintings on the cover, as was their custom, but instead used a photograph of his porkpie hat.

However, the hat wasn’t merely a logo. The hat meant much more to him than that. He was more attached to his hat than anyone could know. He loved the hat. And why shouldn’t he? His successful career proved he was somebody, but the hat and the rest of his outfit was what made it hard for anyone to say he had a bland personality. Even before his mom and dad abandoned him, they paid little attention to him. When he was nine, he had overheard his father talking with a neighbor who was also a drinking buddy. His father said, “I think maybe that boy is from Mars. His mother has this big personality—everyone says so—and I’m damn sure I’m colorful in my own way, but Spencer is about as colorful as a peeled turnip. He fades into the walls. Three or four days can go by when I forget he lives with us.” Well, if that was true, those days were gone. Everyone had to acknowledge that a man who wore a porkpie hat at all times, both outside and indoors, a man who didn’t take it off to eat or make love, was eccentric. Eccentricity was perhaps the primary measure of personality. Eccentric people were noticed, by God. They didn’t fade into the walls. Bland people don’t have photographs of their hats on the cover of a national magazine. Spencer’s famous hat was no less important to him as was being a multimillionaire.

He had just finished restoring the hat to its full glory but had yet to put it on his head when the recovered memory shared by Bobby and Rebecca became Spencer’s as well. The downside of this development was fear and a sense of violation; his mind had been invaded. The upside was the convenience of this sharing; at their forthcoming breakfast, Bobby would not need to tell his amigos all about Wayne Louis Hornfly, which would have ensured that, as they listened rapt, their food would have gone cold.

When the vision of the past faded away, Spencer got up from the desk and put on his hat and regarded himself in the mirrored doors of the closet and adjusted the hat. He opened the door of room 212 and stepped onto the second-floor promenade of the motel precisely as Bobby stepped out of room 210 and Rebecca stepped out of room 208. It was as if they were engaged in a choreographed sequence and the band would now strike up and they would proceed to the diner while dancing and singing. They just walked.