Page 35 of Going Home in the Dark

“We need to talk to Pastor Larry.”

“Talk? We need to interrogate the shit out of him.”

“Not tonight. We better tread carefully.”

“Yeah. We don’t want to wake up back where we started, with no memory of having returned to Maple Grove, and Ernie still in a coma or dead.”

“It’s getting late.”

“I’m too exhausted to think straight.”

“We need to go back to the motel and get some sleep, start fresh in the morning.”

“They call it a ‘motor hotel.’”

“So they can charge more.”

“Well, they provide a free continental breakfast.”

“I am deeply moved.”

Soon the three amigos would be in their beds, in their separate rooms, where bad dreams waited for them—and maybe something worse.

19On the Way to the Motel, Rebecca Remembers a Busy Day Long Ago

Geeks had invented so much involving the key technologies that were rapidly changing the world that Rebecca expected her amigos to need maybe an hour to devise a plan to learn what the ten identical naked manlike things had been. By noon the day after the events at Saint Mark’s, she became aware that these boys were instead the kind of geeks who played Mozart on an ocarina, or wrote puppet shows in which Big Bird was strangled by the Cookie Monster, or drew pictures of King Kong in body armor wielding a giant machine gun. However, their sophisticated planning expertise was too small to be measured.

This understanding relaxed and pleased Rebecca and convinced her that she had done the right thing by seeking their friendship, for she was the same kind of geek. She’d taught herself to write cursive backward as fluidly as she could write it forward, and she enjoyed composing letters to famous people with no intention of mailing them, starting with “enarC accebeR” (Rebecca Crane) and concluding with, for example, “raeD moT esiurC” (Dear Tom Cruise).

If the amigos couldn’t figure out a plan—and they couldn’t—they could blue-sky any issue in an entertaining fashion. And ifthey never arrived at a brilliant plan, at least they never arrived at a bad one, either.

Maybe the things under the church were demons summoned from Hell or clones raised in laboratory vats from which they had been released by angry anti-cloning activists, or perhaps they were the product of extraterrestrial seedpods that lacked enough imagination to produce ten different people. Whatever those creatures were, they apparently moved about town via storm drains and other mysterious subterranean passageways that might eventually have to be explored, though the amigos were not eager to do so.

The day after the terror in Saint Mark’s basement was a Saturday. Still shaken, the friends could think of nothing else to do but run surveillance on Pastor Larry Turnbuckle. They didn’t believe the Lutheran Church was manufacturing artificial human beings, in spite of its history of rebellion from theological tradition. However, the good reverend’s involvement in that phenomenon seemed undeniable.

They pooled their funds and purchased four walkie-talkies, each about the size of a pack of Marlboros, which is not to say that the amigos smoked, for they did not. The reference to cigarettes is for the sole purpose of conveying the size of the communication devices.

This purchase was possible because each of these young people enjoyed a source of income. During the school year, Bobby wrote book reports and research papers for other kids, even for students in the grades above him; seniors whose parents had nocked them like arrows in bows of ambition and aimed them at universities were particularly eager to pay well for him to write the essays that were required to accompany their applications to various colleges. Spencer Truedove was at that time already living alone while hismother was looking for the self she had once been and his father was cohabiting with Venus Porifera in the rectory of the Church of the Sacred Erogenous Revelation; because Mr. Truedove was consumed by his ministry and rarely visited the house where he had lived such a straitlaced life that it embarrassed him, Spencer sold various household goods as he needed money. A set of fine china. Silver picture frames. Clothes that his mother hadn’t found suitable in her exciting new life. Occasionally a piece of furniture. Even then a fine guitarist, Ernie went twice a month to the college where his mother was a professor, put his hat on the ground with a framed photo of Britta, and played for donations; the students and faculty members, aware of who he was, assumed his mother would visit them if they were insufficiently generous with their contributions, and as a consequence he received no one-dollar bills but a satisfying sheaf of fives and tens, now and then a twenty. Rebecca was a beneficiary of maternal guilt; whether her mother was living in Miami Beach with Fernando or in Vegas with Enrique or in San Antonio with Alejandro, she sent a generous check every month with a card signed “Amor, Madre.”

Equipped with walkie-talkies, intrigued by the mystery of the ten golems, motivated by curiosity and fear, the four amigos took up positions on the grounds of the courthouse, in Liberty Park, on the steps of the Leghorn Library, which was named after the state’s long-serving and much beloved senator, and in the cemetery. All eyes were on the rectory.

The early autumn day was pleasantly warm, and the sky was clear, and the state was as flat as ever. People went about their business as usual, and they smiled at the teenagers basking in the sun while reading books. Not one of the townspeople would have imagined that monsters lurked under the streets, but they lurked.

Pastor Turnbuckle was known to be an ardent advocate of the theory that walking twelve thousand steps—preferably more—every day promoted good health and guaranteed such a long life that God would eventually start to feel cheated out of your soul, for which He’d been waiting patiently. For the most part, the reverend walked everywhere while attending to church business and the needs of his flock, as well as when taking care of personal matters. His habit was to pull behind him an over-and-under basket rack on wheels, to be used when he bought groceries or picked up the mail at the post office, or when he stopped at the packaged-liquor store to purchase a fine cabernet sauvignon and a good merlot, which were ostensibly to be used as the sacramental wine on Sunday.

That morning Pastor Larry appeared at 10:22 a.m. He stepped out of the rectory with his two-basket cart in tow. His baby-fine blond hair and round face and watery blue eyes and dreamy smile were all just where they ought to be. From Rebecca’s post in the graveyard, as the reverend came in her direction, she thought of a balloon in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, drifting along as if he contained nothing but a buoying gas.

First, he visited someone, probably an elderly parishioner, at Stubblebuck’s Care Home, an assisted living facility on Cunningham Avenue. Then he called at a house on Mayberry Boulevard, where a young mother in an apron and a little boy about three invited him inside. He window-shopped along Capra Street and stopped for lunch at Cleaver’s Cafe on Mayfield Lane.

Never walking together, the four amigos stalked the clergyman from opposite sides of the street, two following him, two preceding him and trying as best as they could to anticipate his intended route. When he stopped at one venue or another, hisshadowers leaned against buildings or found places to sit, returning to their books.

Their task wasn’t easy. Pastor Larry was hell-bent on reaching his goal of twelve thousand steps. He never proceeded directly from one destination to another. He wove through town on a drunkard’s walk, and though he had the museful expression of a sleepy koala bear clinging to the trunk of a eucalyptus tree, he moved briskly, towing his wheeled basket as if he were collecting souls on the brink of Armageddon, with little time remaining before fire fell from the sky and consumed the world.

By 4:20 that afternoon, his over-and-under baskets were loaded with mail, nonperishable groceries, and dry cleaning. He returned to the rectory, as though he had not been running pell-mell through the cemetery like a man pursued the previous night, as if he had never gone into the church basement and hadn’t found monsters.

Tired, frustrated, and bewildered that Turnbuckle had gone about his day as if monsters in the church basement were no more worrying than an infestation of mice, Rebecca consulted a glass-enclosed message board that stood in front of the church. Announcements of service times and other events were presented with white plastic letters slotted in the grooves of a black background. This evening at 7:00, a semimonthly meeting of “Saint Mark’s Ladies of Compassion” would include planning for their “future charitable works,” which was surely better than a gathering of pitiless ladies of vengeance. At the same time, there would be a meeting of “Saint Mark’s Gentlemen for Jesus,” which wasn’t likely to be a group that summoned satanic creatures or created golems out of mud or raised money to fund the creation of clones. No doubt, Pastor Larry would cycle between the two events.When Rebecca used her walkie-talkie to convey these facts to her amigos, the consensus was that they would be wasting their time if they tried to sneak into the rectory in the hope of uncovering sinister schemes.

Throughout the day, they had used their communication devices discreetly, with the volume low, but surveillance had gotten them nothing. They were disappointed, because they couldn’t know that a time would soon come when those walkie-talkies would save one of them from assault and possibly death. Denied this foresight and unaware of the foreshadowing that just occurred in the previous sentence, they adjourned to dinner at Adorno’s Pizzeria.

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