The Sound of Broken Ribs(73)

Derrick didn’t come to her funeral.

Over the span of ages, Pam Baker knew the grief of her grandnephews and grandnieces and their children’s children. Every life she had ever touched passed down her memory from one mind to another. And another… and another… and another…

For a dozen decades, she knew immortality.

And then she was forgotten. Only then did Pam come to know death. Only then did she know the answer to the riddle of the Eternity.

Nothing ever ends until it does. And then it’s as if it never existed at all.

*

Belinda Walsh watched the creature eat the fat woman like a goddamn candy bar. It wrapped its impossibly large hands around the fat lady, gripping her, fist over fist, like a microphone in the hands of a diva deep in the moment of her most passionate song. Its mouth snapped downward. Off came the fat lady’s head. The black beast chewed and smiled. Smiled and chewed. Once it was done with the big bitch’s head, the mouth snapped down again and bit Big Bertha in half. Then each leg disappeared like a log into a wood chipper.

Belinda turned the deadbolt and backed away from the door.

The Ebony One snatched the entire front off the main cabin. It tossed the wall, door and window and frame still attached, off to the side as if it weighed nothing more than a hardback novel.

Belinda stumbled backward. Sat down hard. She thought to scramble away, but never actually did so. Where could she go? Where could she run from such a thing capable of ripping the front of a building off like the cover of a matchbook?

“Please,” she stammered. “Puh-please d-d-don’t eat me.”

I’m not going to eat you, pretty.

“Yuh-you’re not?”

Oh, no.

“Then… then wha-what are you g-g-gonna do?”

I’m gonna do much worse than eat you, pretty. Much, much worse.

“Oh, God,” Belinda sobbed.

I’m going to give you eternity to think about what you’ve done.

The Ebony One was now as big as a two story house. One of its over-long arms reached out and offered what looked to be a galaxy trapped in a ball. In the creature’s palm, stars and nebula and entire solar systems twirled into infinity.

Time overlaps—

“Like a pretzel,” Belinda murmured.

—and you will exist in the fold.

“It’s so pretty.”

You may never reap the pain you’ve sown. But you will tend your fields all the same. Come, pretty, and know Forever.

*





PART

THREE





Harold Duncan, worried about his wife, chased a trail of credit card charges from Ohio to the west coast.

His plane landed in Ontario, California at a quarter past one the next day. Disembarking, grabbing his luggage, and renting a car took a total of two-and-a-half hours. He was on his way to the Baker’s on Valley Boulevard, where Lei had spent just over five bucks a little over twenty-eight hours ago.

He showed Lei’s picture to the cashier, not knowing what he was hoping for. Of course the teenager behind the counter didn’t know who Lei was, and Harry figured that even if she had waited on Lei yesterday, the chances she’d remember one customer out of the hundreds were beyond slim.

Harry left the Baker’s and stopped at the first hotel he came across—the Imperial Hotel on Valley. The girl behind the desk was called Julie, and Julie had a pleasant enough smile.

After checking him in, she said, “You missed all the action by a day.”

“Sorry?”

“Yesterday this place was jumping with police. Some big ol’ black dude killed some other black lady. Don’t think they knew each other. That’s the scariest part, I think. Black on black crime, right? Fuckin’ scary. Don’t worry, though, I didn’t give you the dead woman’s room. Not the murderer’s either. Both of them are crime scenes, anyway. Got you one all the way on the other end. You shouldn’t be bothered by nobody. Not even black people.” She smiled and offered him his room key.

Harry didn’t know how to respond to the woman’s jumbled-up, racist statements, so he smiled and nodded. Took his keys and left.

There seemed to be a delay in Lei’s credit card purchases showing up on American Express’ website because the charge for the cabin she’d rented the day before didn’t show up until almost seven o’clock that evening.

Something told Harry to wait until sunrise before driving up to Big Bear, but the overprotective husband in him didn’t want to wait. He jumped in the car, set the GPS, and made for the mountains. The drive took a little over an hour. Once he hit snow, there was nobody on the road.

The front wall of the main cabin was blocking the entrance. That was odd enough, but what struck Harry as queerest of all was the woman sitting cross-legged in the middle of the now open-faced lobby of the check in area. A single light pole resting at the corner of the cabin shined in and down upon the woman, covering her in its yellow-orange pall. A fine layer of glistening snow lay on her shoulders.

Harry parked as close to the wall blocking the way as possible, killed the engine, and got out. He crunched through the freshly fallen snow and cut through the trees on the side of the road to get past the debris in his path.

The woman sitting on the floor in the lobby was gibbering. Her words came faster than Harry could decipher, but there were some he caught: pain and eternity being two of them.