The Great and Secret Show

‘Was she a friend of yours?’ Jo-Beth asked.

‘Not of mine.’

‘Of Momma’s?’

‘Yes,’ Lois said, still mopping, though the counter was dry.

‘Yes. She was one of your momma’s friends.’

Suddenly, it came clear.

‘One of the four,’ Jo-Beth said. ‘She was one of the four.’

‘I believe she was.’

‘And she had children?’

‘You know, I don’t remember.’

This was the closest a woman of Lois’s scrupulousness came to lying. Jo-Beth called her on it.

‘You remember,’ she said. ‘Please tell me.’

‘Yes. I guess I do remember. She had a boy.’

‘Howard.’

Lois nodded.

‘You’re sure?’ Jo-Beth said.

‘Yes. I’m sure.’

Now it was Jo-Beth who kept her silence, while in her head she’d tried to re-evaluate the events of recent days in the light of this discovery. What did her dreams, and Howie’s appearance, and Tommy-Ray’s sickness have to do with each other, and with the story she’d heard in ten different versions of the bathing party that had ended in death, insanity and children?

Perhaps Momma knew.

iii

Buddy Vance’s driver Jose Luis waited at their agreed rendezvous for fifty minutes before deciding that his boss must have made his way up the Hill under his own power. He called Coney on the car phone. Ellen was at the house but the boss wasn’t. They debated what was best to do, and agreed he’d wait with the car the full hour then drive back via the route the boss would be likeliest to take.

He was nowhere along that route. Nor had he got home ahead of his ride. Again they debated the options, Jose Luis tactfully avoiding mention of the likeliest: that somewhere along the way he’d encountered female company. After sixteen years in Mr Vance’s employ he knew his boss’s skill with the ladies verged on the supernatural. He would come home when he’d performed his magic.

For Buddy, there was no pain. He was thankful for the fact, but not so self-deceiving as to ignore its significance. His body was surely so messed up his brain had simply overloaded on agony, and pulled the plugs.

The darkness that enclosed him was without qualification; expert only in blinding him. Or perhaps his eyes were out; dashed from his head on the way down. Whatever the reason, detached from sight and feeling, he floated, and while he floated he calculated. First, the time it would take for Jose Luis to realize his boss wasn’t coming home: two hours at the outside. His route through the woods would not be difficult to follow; and once they reached the fissure his peril would be self-evident. They’d be down after him by noon. On the surface and having his bones mended by the middle of the afternoon.

Perhaps it was almost midday already.

The only means he had of calculating time’s passing was his heartbeat, which he could hear in his head. He began to count. If he could get some sense of how long a minute lasted he’d be able to hold on to that span of time, and after sixty, know he’d lived an hour. But no sooner had he started counting than his head started a different calculation altogether.

How long have I lived, he thought. Not breathed, not existed, but actually lived? Fifty-four years since birth: how many weeks was that? How many hours? Better think of it year by year; it was easier. One year was three hundred and sixty days, give or take a few. Say he slept a third of that. One hundred and twenty days in slumber-land. Oh Lord, already the moments dwindled. Half an hour a day on the john, or emptying his bladder. That was another seven and a half days a year, just doing the dirt. And shaving and showering, another ten days; and eating another thirty or forty; and all of this multiplied by fifty-four years …

He began to sob. Get me out of here, he murmured, please God get me out of here, and I’ll live like I never lived, I’ll make every hour, every minute (even sleeping, even shitting) a minute spent trying to understand, so that when the next darkness comes along I won’t be so lost.

At eleven Jose Luis got in the car and drove back down the Hill to see if he could spot the boss somewhere on the street. Drawing a blank there he called in at the Food Stop in the Mall, where they’d named a sandwich in honour of Mr Vance’s patronage (flatteringly, it was mostly meat), then at the record store, where the boss would frequently purchase a thousand dollars’ worth of stock. While quizzing Ryder, who owned the place, a customer came and announced to any who were interested that there was some serious shit going down in the East Grove, and did somebody get shot?

The road down to the woods was closed by the time Jose Luis arrived, a solitary cop directing traffic to turn round.

‘No way through,’ he told Jose Luis. ‘The road’s closed.’

‘What happened? Who got shot?’

‘Nobody got shot. It’s just a crack in the road.’

Jose Luis was out of the car now, staring past the cop to the woods.

‘My boss,’ he said, knowing he needn’t name the owner of the limo, ‘he was running down here this morning.’

‘So?’

‘He hasn’t come back yet.’

‘Oh shit. You’d better follow me.’

They made their way through the trees in a silence broken only by barely coherent messages coming through on the cop’s radio, all of which he ignored, until the thicket opened into a clearing. Several uniformed police were setting up barriers at its fringes to prevent anyone straying where Jose Luis was now led. The ground beneath his feet was cracked, and the cracks widened as the cop led him to where his Chief was standing, staring at the earth. Long before he came near the spot Jose Luis knew what lay ahead. The crack in the street and those he’d stepped over to reach this place were the consequence of a larger disturbance: a crevice fully ten feet across, letting on to a devouring darkness.

‘What’s he want?’ the Chief demanded, jabbing his finger in Jose Luis’s direction. ‘We’re keeping this under wraps.’

‘Buddy Vance,’ the cop said.

‘What about him?’

‘He’s missing,’ Jose Luis said.

‘He went running –’ the cop explained.

‘Let him tell it,’ the Chief said.

‘This is where he goes running every morning. Only today he hasn’t come back.’

‘Buddy Vance?’ the Chief said. ‘The comedian?’

‘Yeah.’

The Chief’s gaze left Jose Luis and returned to the hole.

‘Oh my Lord,’ he said.