7
A summer night on the outskirts of a Midwestern city.
Somewhere people were watching Harrison Ford snap his bullwhip; somewhere the Actor President was no doubt smiling his untrustworthy smile; here, in this campground, Andi Steiner was lying on a discount-store lawn recliner, bathed in the headlights of Rose’s EarthCruiser and someone else’s Winnebago. Rose had explained to her that, while the True Knot owned several campgrounds, this wasn’t one of them. But their advance man was able to four-wall places like this, businesses tottering on the edge of insolvency. America was suffering a recession, but for the True, money was not a problem.
“Who is this advance man?” Andi had asked.
“Oh, he’s a very winning fellow,” Rose had said, smiling. “Able to charm the birdies down from the trees. You’ll meet him soon.”
“Is he your special guy?”
Rose had laughed at that and caressed Andi’s cheek. The touch of her fingers caused a hot little worm of excitement in Andi’s stomach. Crazy, but there it was. “You’ve got a twinkle, don’t you? I think you’ll be fine.”
Maybe, but as she lay here, Andi was no longer excited, only scared. News stories slipped through her mind, ones about bodies found in ditches, bodies found in wooded clearings, bodies found at the bottom of dry wells. Women and girls. Almost always women and girls. It wasn’t Rose who scared her—not exactly—and there were other women here, but there were also men.
Rose knelt beside her. The glare of the headlights should have turned her face into a harsh and ugly landscape of blacks and whites, but the opposite was true: it only made her more beautiful. Once again she caressed Andi’s cheek. “No fear,” she said. “No fear.”
She turned to one of the other women, a pallidly pretty creature Rose called Silent Sarey, and nodded. Sarey nodded back and went into Rose’s monster RV. The others, meanwhile, began to form a circle around the lawn recliner. Andi didn’t like that. There was something sacrificial about it.
“No fear. Soon you’ll be one of us, Andi. One with us.”
Unless, Rose thought, you cycle out. In which case, we’ll just burn your clothes in the incinerator behind the comfort stations and move on tomorrow. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
But she hoped that wouldn’t happen. She liked this one, and a sleeper talent would come in handy.
Sarey returned with a steel canister that looked like a thermos bottle. She handed it to Rose, who removed the red cap. Beneath was a nozzle and a valve. To Andi the canister looked like an unlabeled can of bug spray. She thought about bolting up from the recliner and running for it, then remembered the movie theater. The hands that had reached inside her head, holding her in place.
“Grampa Flick?” Rose asked. “Will you lead us?”
“Happy to.” It was the old man from the theater. Tonight he was wearing baggy pink Bermuda shorts, white socks that climbed all the way up his scrawny shins to his knees, and Jesus sandals. To Andi he looked like Grandpa Walton after two years in a concentration camp. He raised his hands, and the rest raised theirs with him. Linked that way and silhouetted in the crisscrossing headlight beams, they looked like a chain of weird paperdolls.
“We are the True Knot,” he said. The voice coming from that sunken chest no longer trembled; it was the deep and resonant voice of a much younger and stronger man.
“We are the True Knot,” they responded. “What is tied may never be untied.”
“Here is a woman,” Grampa Flick said. “Would she join us? Would she tie her life to our life and be one with us?”
“Say yes,” Rose said.
“Y-Yes,” Andi managed. Her heart was no longer beating; it was thrumming like a wire.
Rose turned the valve on her canister. There was a small, rueful sigh, and a puff of silver mist escaped. Instead of dissipating on the light evening breeze, it hung just above the canister until Rose leaned forward, pursed those fascinating coral lips, and blew gently. The puff of mist—looking a bit like a comic-strip dialogue balloon without any words in it—drifted until it hovered above Andi’s upturned face and wide eyes.
“We are the True Knot, and we endure,” Grampa Flick proclaimed.
“Sabbatha hanti,” the others responded.
The mist began to descend, very slowly.
“We are the chosen ones.”
“Lodsam hanti,” they responded.
“Breathe deep,” Rose said, and kissed Andi softly on the cheek. “I’ll see you on the other side.”
Maybe.
“We are the fortunate ones.”
“Cahanna risone hanti.”
Then, all together: “We are the True Knot, and we . . .”
But Andi lost track of it there. The silvery stuff settled over her face and it was cold, cold. When she inhaled, it came to some sort of tenebrous life and began screaming inside her. A child made of mist—whether boy or girl she didn’t know—was struggling to get away but someone was cutting. Rose was cutting, while the others stood close around her (in a knot), shining down a dozen flashlights, illuminating a slow-motion murder.
Andi tried to bolt up from the recliner, but she had no body to bolt with. Her body was gone. Where it had been was only pain in the shape of a human being. The pain of the child’s dying, and of her own.
Embrace it. The thought was like a cool cloth pressed on the burning wound that was her body. That’s the only way through.
I can’t, I’ve been running from this pain my whole life.
Perhaps so, but you’re all out of running room. Embrace it. Swallow it. Take steam or die.
8
The True stood with hands upraised, chanting the old words: sabbatha hanti, lodsam hanti, cahanna risone hanti. They watched as Andi Steiner’s blouse flattened where her breasts had been, as her skirt puffed shut like a closing mouth. They watched as her face turned to milk-glass. Her eyes remained, though, floating like tiny balloons on gauzy strings of nerve.
But they’re going to go, too, Walnut thought. She’s not strong enough. I thought maybe she was, but I was wrong. She may come back a time or two, but then she’ll cycle out. Nothing left but her clothes. He tried to recall his own Turning, and could only remember that the moon had been full and there had been a bonfire instead of headlights. A bonfire, the whicker of horses . . . and the pain. Could you actually remember pain? He didn’t think so. You knew there was such a thing, and that you had suffered it, but that wasn’t the same.
Andi’s face swam back into existence like the face of a ghost above a medium’s table. The front of her blouse plumped up in curves; her skirt swelled as her hips and thighs returned to the world. She shrieked in agony.
“We are the True Knot and we endure,” they chanted in the crisscrossing beams of the RVs. “Sabbatha hanti. We are the chosen ones, lodsam hanti. We are the fortunate ones, cahanna risone hanti.” They would go on until it was over. One way or the other, it wouldn’t take long.
Andi began to disappear again. Her flesh became cloudy glass through which the True could see her skeleton and the bone grin of her skull. A few silver fillings gleamed in that grin. Her disembodied eyes rolled wildly in sockets that were no longer there. She was still screaming, but now the sound was thin and echoing, as if it came from far down a distant hall.
9
Rose thought she’d give up, that was what they did when the pain became too much, but this was one tough babe. She came swirling back into existence, screaming all the way. Her newly arrived hands seized Rose’s with mad strength and bore down. Rose leaned forward, hardly noticing the pain.
“I know what you want, honeydoll. Come back and you can have it.” She lowered her mouth to Andi’s, caressing Andi’s upper lip with her tongue until the lip turned to mist. But the eyes stayed, fixed on Rose’s.
“Sabbatha hanti,” they chanted. “Lodsam hanti. Cahanna risone hanti.”
Andi came back, growing a face around her staring, pain-filled eyes. Her body followed. For a moment Rose could see the bones of her arms, the bones in the fingers clutching hers, then they were once more dressed in flesh.
Rose kissed her again. Even in her pain Andi responded, and Rose breathed her own essence down the younger woman’s throat.
I want this one. And what I want, I get.
Andi began to fade again, but Rose could feel her fighting it. Getting on top of it. Feeding herself with the screaming life-force she had breathed down her throat and into her lungs instead of trying to push it away.
Taking steam for the first time.
10
The newest member of the True Knot spent that night in Rose O’Hara’s bed, and for the first time in her life found something in sex besides horror and pain. Her throat was raw from the screaming she’d done on the lawn recliner, but she screamed again as this new sensation—pleasure to match the pain of her Turning—took her body and once more seemed to render it transparent.
“Scream all you want,” Rose said, looking up from between her thighs. “They’ve heard plenty of them. The good as well as the bad.”
“Is sex like this for everybody?” If so, what she had missed! What her bastard father had stolen from her! And people thought she was a thief???
“It’s like this for us, when we’ve taken steam,” Rose said. “That’s all you need to know.”
She lowered her head and it began again.
11
Not long before midnight, Token Charlie and Baba the Russian were sitting on the lower step of Token Charlie’s Bounder, sharing a joint and looking up at the moon. From Rose’s EarthCruiser came more screams.
Charlie and Baba turned to each other and grinned.
“Someone is likin it,” Baba remarked.
“What’s not to like?” Charlie said.
12
Andi woke in the day’s first early light with her head pillowed on Rose’s breasts. She felt entirely different; she felt no different at all. She lifted her head and saw Rose looking at her with those remarkable gray eyes.
“You saved me,” Andi said. “You brought me back.”
“I couldn’t have done it alone. You wanted to come.” In more ways than one, honeydoll.
“What we did after . . . we can’t do it again, can we?”
Rose shook her head, smiling. “No. And that’s okay. Some experiences absolutely cannot be topped. Besides, my man will be back today.”
“What’s his name?”
“He answers to Henry Rothman, but that’s just for the rubes. His True name is Crow Daddy.”
“Do you love him? You do, don’t you?”
Rose smiled, drew Andi closer, kissed her. But she did not answer.
“Rose?”
“Yes?”
“Am I . . . am I still human?”
To this Rose gave the same answer Dick Hallorann had once given young Danny Torrance, and in the same cold tone of voice: “Do you care?”
Andi decided she didn’t. She decided she was home.