Baptism in Blood(120)
Tears were streaming down Lisa Harrow’s face, a great waterfall of them. “You can’t believe a word he says,” she told them woodenly. “You can’t. He must be crazy.”
“I’m not crazy,” her husband said. “I’m possessed. Don’t you know that by now? I invited the Devil into my soul, and he set up house. I think he’s set up house for good.”
“He’s been talking like that all night,” Lisa said. “He’s been telling me I’d be better off dead.”
“We’d all be better off dead,” Stephen said, and that was when Gregor saw it, coming out of the pocket of Stephen’s academic tweed jacket, a little Colt gun with a silver handle. It was a lady’s gun, the kind made to look stylish in a purse, next to a silver lipstick and compact set. It couldn’t belong to Stephen Harrow unless he’d bought it blind on the street somewhere, caring nothing at all but that he had something to shoot with.
Clayton Hall saw the gun, too, and started to rise. “Jesus Christ. Stephen. What do you think you’re doing?”
Stephen pointed the gun at Clayton and smiled. “Sit down for a while, Clayton. I’m just making sure I get my full say in before you all decide to jump me. I’ve still got a lot to say.”
“Nobody’s going to jump you until you’ve said everything you want to say,” Gregor told him. “There’s nothing you have to say that we don’t want to hear.”
“There’s nothing I have to say that you do want to hear,” Stephen corrected happily—and he was happy, Gregor thought, deliriously happy. He was the happiest man Gregor had ever seen in his life. “I know all about it now, from beginning to end. I know more about it than I ever thought I was going to know. I’m a genius in the spiritual life. But it’s time, you know.”
“Time for what?” Minna Dorfman asked.
“Time to do what they’re always telling you to do, all those people who think they know better,” Stephen told them. “Time to let go and let God.”
“What?”
Stephen held the gun high over his head, so that light hit the silver metal and bounced off, making rainbows. “It belonged to her, you know,” he said. “It belonged to Zhondra. I never had much use for guns. I thought they were barbaric.”
“Maybe you ought to let me have that now,” Clayton said, getting up again. “You’re going to hurt somebody with it if you go on waving it around.”
“Oh, well, Clayton. You know how it is. You never hurt anybody as much as you hurt yourself.”
“Crap,” Clayton said, making a desperate dive in Stephen Harrow’s direction.
It happened too fast. Clayton’s body was still in the air, mid-jump, when Stephen pressed the barrel of the gun to his own throat and blew a hole in his windpipe.
Five
1
THE NEWS ABOUT STEPHEN Harrow came over the radio while Maggie Kelleher was closing up shop. The shop had actually been closed to business for hours, but Joshua had been doing inventory and Maggie had been drinking wine at David Sandler’s house and now all the mundane things were left to be done that should have been done before, like cashing out the register and putting the money in the bank. Now, drifting through the rooms of the little bookstore, Maggie wished she had stayed at the beach and made love to David until dawn. As it was, they had only managed one single hurried coupling on the sand. It was so hard to figure out what was going on sometimes, when you were trying to sort out messes like sex and love. Maggie tried to imagine herself in David’s apartment in the city, and saw herself only as she had been on her own and alone in New York. Maggie the invincible, she thought now. She had a half-full glass of wine in her hand. The bottle of Vin Santo, the new one, was sitting on the desk in the front room. She thought of herself walking down Sixth Avenue in the dark, dressed in a long skirt and high-heeled boots and a short heavy coat, carrying an enormous tote bag. Maggie the invincible. Maggie the almost bag lady. Maggie who had never really been good enough to do what she wanted to do with her life, and who was now old enough to know it. That was why all this business about going to New York with David was so hard for her. The “with David” part was easy. That had been coming. It was something of a relief that it was finally here. Maggie thought she could live with David forever, nestled among the books. It was New York she wasn’t sure she wanted. Maybe, for David, she would be like that girl in Lost Horizon—beautiful and desirable as long as she stayed in Shangri-La, nothing but a skeleton and hanks of hair the moment she stepped outside it. Maggie the invincible, she thought again, and laughed out loud. In Bellerton she was something special, exotic, set apart. In New York, she was nothing better than another girl who had almost had a career but then hadn’t, in the end, because it hadn’t worked out, because she hadn’t wanted it enough, because in that race there were so many other runners.