Collected Stories

Come Again?

The fact that the state of Florida would give the odious Boy Cartwright a driver’s license only shows that the state of Florida isn’t as smart as it thinks it is. The vile Boy, execrable expatriate Englishman, handed this document across the rental-car counter at Gulfport-Biloxi Regional Airport and the gullible clerk there responded by giving him the keys to something called a Taurus, a kind of space capsule sans relief tube, which turned out on examination in the ghastly sunlight to be the same whorehouse red as the rental clerk’s lipstick. Boy tossed his disreputable canvas ditty bag onto this machine’s backseat, the Valium and champagne bottles within chattering comfortably together, and drove north.

This was not the sort of assignment the despicable Boy was used to. As by far the most shameless and tasteless, and therefore by far the best, reporter on the staff of the Weekly Galaxy, a supermarket tabloid that gives new meaning to the term degenerate, the debased Boy Cartwright was used to commanding teams of reporters on assignments at the very peak of the tabloid Alp: celebrity adultery, UFO sightings, sports heroes awash in recreational drugs. The Return of Laurena Layla — or, more accurately, her nonreturn, as it would ultimately prove — was a distinct comedown for Boy. Not an event, but the mere anniversary of an event. And not in Los Angeles or Las Vegas or Miami or any of the other centers of debauchery of the American celebrity world, but in Marmelay, Mississippi, in the muggiest, mildewiest, kudzuest nasal bowel of the Deep South, barely north of Biloxi and the Gulf, a town surrounded mostly by De Soto National Forest, named for a reprobate the Weekly Galaxy would have loved if he’d only been born four hundred and fifty years later.

There were two reasons why Boy had drawn this bottom-feeder assignment, all alone in America, the first being that he was in somewhat bad odor at the Galaxy at the moment, having not only failed to steal the private psychiatric records of sultry sci-fi-pic star Tanya Shonya from the Montana sanitarium where the auburn-tressed beauty was recovering from her latest doomed love affair, but having also, in the process, inadvertently blown the cover of another Galaxy staffer, Don Grove, a member of Boy’s usual team, who had already been ensconced in that same sanitarium as a grief counselor. Don even now remained immured in a Montana quod among a lot of Caucasian cowboys, while the Galaxy’s lawyers negotiated reasonably with the state authorities, and Boy got stuck with Laurena Layla.

But that wasn’t the only reason for this assignment. Twenty-two years earlier, when Boy Cartwright was freshly at the Galaxy, a whelp reporter (the Galaxy did not have cubs) with just enough experience on scabrous British tabloids to make him prime Galaxy material, just as despicable in those days but not yet as decayed, he had covered the trial of Laurena Layla, then a twenty-seven-year-old beauty, mistress of the Golden Church of Sha-Kay, a con that had taken millions from the credulous, which is, after all, what the credulous are for.

The core of the Golden Church of Sha-Kay had been the Gatherings, a sort of cross between a mass seance and a Rolling Stones world tour, which had taken place in stadiums and arenas wherever in rural America the boobs lay thick on the ground. With much use of swirling smoke and whirling robes, these Gatherings had featured music, blessings, visions, apocalyptic announcements, and a well-trained devoted staff, devoted to squeezing every buck possible from the attending faithful.

Also, for those gentlemen of discernment whose wealth far exceeded their brains, there had been private sessions attainable with Laurena Layla herself, from which strong men were known to have emerged goggle-eyed, begging for oysters.

What had drawn the younger but no less awful Boy Cartwright to Laurena Layla the first time was an ambitious Indiana D.A. with big eyes for the governorship (never got it) who, finding Laurena Layla in full frontal operation within his jurisdiction, had caused her to be arrested and put on trial as the con artist (and artiste) she was. The combination of sex, fame, and courtroom was as powerful an aphrodisiac for the Galaxy and its readers then as ever, so Boy, at that time a mere stripling in some other editor’s crew, was among those dispatched to Muncie by Massa (Bruno DeMassi), then owner and publisher of the rag.

Boy’s English accent, raffish charm, and suave indifference to putdowns had made him a natural to be assigned to make contact with the defendant herself, which he had been pleased to do, winning the lady over with bogus ID from the Manchester Guardian. His success had been so instantaneous and so total that he had bedded L.L. twice, the second time because neither of them could quite believe the first.

In the event, L.L. was found innocent, justice being blind, while Boy was unmasked as the scurrilous Galaxyite he in fact was, and he was sent packing with a flea in his ear and a high-heel print on his bum. However, she didn’t come off at all badly in the Galaxy’s coverage of her trial and general notoriety, and in fact a bit later she sent him the briefest of thank-you notes with no return address.

That was not the last time Boy saw Laurena Layla, however. Two years after Muncie it was, and the memory of the all-night freight train whistles there was at last beginning to fade, when Laurena Layla hit the news again for an entirely different reason: She died. A distraught fan, a depressingly overweight woman with a home permanent, stabbed L.L. three times with a five-and-dime steak knife, all the thrusts fatal but fortunately none of them disfiguring; L.L. made a lovely corpse.

Which was lucky indeed, because it was Boy’s assignment on that occasion to get the body in the box. Whenever a celebrity went down, it was Galaxy tradition to get, by hook or by crook (usually by crook), a photo of the recently departed lying in his or her casket during the final viewing. This photo would then appear, as large as physically possible, on the front page of the following week’s Galaxy, in full if waxen color.

Attention, shoppers: Next to the cash register is an intimation of mortality, yours, cheap. See? Even people smarter, richer, prettier, and better smelling than you die, sooner or later; isn’t that news worth a buck or two?

Getting the body in the box that time had been only moderately difficult. Though the Golden Church of Sha-Kay headquarters in Marmelay — a sort of great gilded banana split of a building with a cross and a spire and a carillon and loudspeakers and floodlights and television broadcasting equipment on top — was well guarded by cult staff members, it had been child’s play to Mickey Finn a staffer of the right size and heft, via a doctored Dr Pepper, borrow the fellow’s golden robe, and slip into the Temple of Revelation during a staff shift change.

Briefly alone in the dusky room with the late L.L., Boy had paused above the well-remembered face and form, now inert as it had never been in life, supine there in the open gilded casket on its waist-high bier, amid golden candles, far too much incense, and a piped-in celestial choir oozing out what sounded suspiciously like “Camptown Races” at half speed. Camera in right hand, he had reached out his left to adjust the shoulder of that golden gown to reveal just a bit more cleavage, just especially for all those necrophiles out there in Galaxyland, then it was pop goes the picture and Boy was, so far as he knew, done with the lovely late lady forever.

But no. It seemed that, among the effects Laurena Layla had left behind, amid the marked decks, shaved dice, plastic fingernails, and John B. Anderson buttons, was a last will and testament, in which the lady had promised her followers a second act: “I shall Die untimely,” she wrote (which everybody believes, of course), “but it shall not be a real Death. I shall Travel in that Other World, seeking Wisdom and the Way, and twenty years after my Departure, to the Day, I shall return to this Plane of Existence to share with You the Knowledge I have gained.”

Twenty years. Tomorrow, the second Thursday in May, would be the twentieth anniversary of Laurena Layla’s dusting, and an astonishing number of mouth-breathers really did expect her to appear among them, robes, smiles, cleavage, Wisdom, and all. Most if not all of those faithful were also faithful Galaxy readers, naturally, so here was Boy, pasty-faced, skeptical, sphacelated, Valium-enhanced, champagne-maintained, and withal utterly pleased with himself, even though this assignment was a bit of a comedown.

Here was the normally moribund crossroads of Marmelay, a town that had never quite recovered from the economic shock when the slave auction left, but today doing its best to make up all at once for a hundred and fifty years of hind teat. The three nearby motels had all quadrupled their rates, the two local diners had printed new menus, and the five taverns in the area were charging as though they’d just heard Prohibition was coming back. Many of the Sha-Kay faithful did their traveling in RVs, but they still had to eat, and the local grocers knew very well what that meant: move the decimal point one position to the right on every item in the store. The locals were staying home for a couple days.

Boy traveled this time as himself, a rare occurrence, though he had come prepared with the usual array of false identification just in case. He was also traveling solo, without even a photographer, since it wasn’t expected he’d require a particularly large crew to record a nonevent: “Not appearing today in her Temple of Revelation in the charmingly sleepy village of Marmelay, Mississippi…”

So it was the truth Boy told the clerk at the Lest Ye Forget Motel, unnatural though that felt: “Boy Cartwright. The Weekly Galaxy made one’s reservation, some days ago.”

“You’re a foreigner,” the lad in the oversize raspberry jacket with the motel chain’s logo on its lapel told him, and pointed at Boy as though Boy didn’t already know where he was. “You’re French!”

“Got it in one, dear,” Boy agreed. “Just winged in from jolly old Paris to observe the festivities.”

“Laurena Layla, you mean,” the lad told him, solemn and excited all at once. Nodding, he said, “She’s coming back, you know.”

“So one has heard.”

“Coming back tomorrow,” the lad said, and sighed. “Eight o’clock tomorrow night.”

“I believe that is the zshedule,” Boy acknowledged, thinking how this youth could not have been born yet when Laurena Layla got herself perforated. How folly endures!

“Wish I could see it,” the lad went on, “but the tickets is long gone. Long gone.”

“Ah, tickets,” Boy agreed. “Such valuable little things, at times. But as to one’s room…”

“Oh, sure,” the lad said, but then looked doubtful. “Was that a single room all by yourself?”

“For preference.”

“For this time only,” the lad informed him, speaking as by rote, “the management could give you a very special rate, if you was to move in with a family. Not a big family.”

“Oh, but, dear,” Boy said, “one has moved out from one’s family. Too late to alter that, I’m afraid.”

“So it’s just a room by yourself,” the lad said, and shrugged and said, “I’m supposed to ask, is all.”

“And you did it very well,” Boy assured him, then flinched as the lad abruptly reached under the counter between them, but then all he came up with was some sort of pamphlet or brochure. Offering this, he said, “You want a battlefield map?”

“Battlefield?” Boy’s yellow spine shriveled. “Are there public disorders about?”

“Oh, not anymore,” the lad promised, and pointed variously outward, saying, “Macunshah, Honey Ridge, Polk’s Ferry, they’re all just around here.”

“Ah,” Boy said, recollecting the local dogma, and now understanding the motel’s name. “Your Civil War, you mean.”

“The War Between the States,” the lad promptly corrected him. He knew that much.

“Well, yes,” Boy agreed. “One has heard it wasn’t actually that civil.”

In the event, Boy did share his room with a small family after all. In a local pub — taa-vin, in regional parlance — he ran across twins who’d been ten years old when their mother, having seen on TV the news of Laurena Layla’s demise, had offed herself with a shotgun in an effort to follow her pastoress to that better world. (It had also seemed a good opportunity for her to get away from their father.) The twins, Ruby Mae and Ruby Jean, were thirty now, bouncing healthy girls, who had come to Marmelay on the off chance Mama would be coming back as well, presumably with her head restored. They were excited as all get-out at meeting an actual reporter from the Weekly Galaxy, their favorite and perhaps only reading, and there he was an Englishman, too! They just loved his accent, and he loved theirs.

“It’s one P.M.,” said the musical if impersonal voice in his ear.

Boy awoke, startled and enraged, to find himself holding a telephone to his head. Acid sunlight burned at the closed blinds covering the window. “Who the hell cares?” he snarled into the mouthpiece, which responded with a rendition of “Dixie” on steel drum.

Appalled, realizing he was in conversation with a machine, Boy slammed down the phone, looked around the room, which had been transmogrified overnight into a laundry’s sorting area, and saw that he was alone. The twins had romped off somewhere, perhaps to buy their mother a welcome-home pair of cuddly slippers.

Just as well; Boy was feeling a bit shopworn this morning. Afternoon. And that had been the wake-up call he must have requested in an optimistic moment late last night. Most optimistic moments occur late at night, in fact; realism requires daylight.

Up close, the banana-split Temple of Revelation appeared to have been served on a Bakelite plate, which was actually the shiny blacktop parking area, an ebony halo broadly encircling the temple and now rapidly filling with RVs, tour buses, pickup trucks, and all the other transportations of choice of life’s also-rans.

And they were arriving, in their droves. Whole families, in their Sunday best. Sweethearts, hand in hand. Retired oldsters, grinning shyly, made a bit slow and ponderous by today’s early-bird special. Solitaries, some nervous and guarded in hoods and jackets too warm for the weather, others gaudily on the prowl, in sequins and vinyl. Folks walked by in clothing covered with words, everything from bowling teams and volunteer fire departments to commercial sports organizations and multinational corporations that had never given these people a penny. Men in denim, women in cotton, children in polyester. Oh, if Currier and Ives were alive in this moment!

Boy and the rental Taurus circled the blacktop, slaloming slowly among the clusters of people walking from their vehicles toward the admission gates. Show or no show, miracle or nix, revelation or fuggedabahdid, every one of them would fork over their ten bucks at the temple gate, eight for seniors, seven for children under six. Inside, there would be more opportunities for donations, gifts, love offerings, and so on, but all of that was optional. The ten-spot at the entrance was mandatory.

Everyone here was looking for a sign, in a way, and so was Boy, but the sign he sought would say something like VIP or PRESS or AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. And yes, there it was: MEDIA. How modern.

The media, in fact, were sparse in the roped-off section of parking lot around to the side of the banana split, where a second entrance spared the chosen few from consorting with the rabble. Flashing his Galaxy ID at the golden-robed guardian of the MEDIA section, driving in, Boy counted two TV relay trucks, both local, plus perhaps half a dozen rentals like his own. Leaving the Taurus, Boy humped onto his shoulder the small canvas bag containing his tape recorder, disposable camera, and a folder of the tear sheets of his earlier coverage of Laurena Layla, plus her truncated note of gratitude, and hiked through the horrible humidity and searing sun to the blessed shade of the VIP entrance.

It took two golden-robers to verify his ID at this point, and then he was directed to jess go awn in an keep tuh the left. He did so, and found himself in the same curving charcoal-gray dim-lit corridor he’d traversed just twenty years ago when he’d gotten the body in the box. Ah, memory.

Partway round, he was met by another fellow in a golden robe, next to a broad black closed metal door. “Press?” this fellow asked.

“Absolutely.”

“Yes, sir,” the fellow said, drew the door open, and ushered him in.

With the opening of the door, crowd noises became audible. Boy stepped through and found himself in a large opera box midway down the left side of the great oval hall that was the primary interior space of the temple. Raised above auditorium level, the box gave a fine view of the large echoing interior with its rows of golden plush seats, wide aisles, maroon carpets and walls, battalions of lights filling the high black ceiling, and the deep stage at the far end where L.L. used to give her sermons and where her choir and her dancer-acolytes once swirled their robes. The sect had continued all these years without its foundress, but not, Boy believed, as successfully as before.

The stage looked now as though set for some minimalist production of King Lear bare, half-lit, wooden floor uncovered, gray back wall unlit, nothing visible except one large golden armchair in the exact center of the stage. The chair wasn’t particularly illuminated, but Boy had no doubt it would be, if and when.

Below, the hall was more than half full, with the believers still streaming in. Sharing the box with Boy were the expected two camera crews and the expected scruffy journalists, the only oddity being that more of the journalists were female than male: four scruffy women and, with Boy, three scruffy men. Boy recognized a couple of his competitors and nodded distantly; they returned the favor. None of them was an ace like himself.

Ah, well. If only he’d succeeded in that Montana sanitarium. If only Don Grove were not now in a Montana pokey. If only Boy Cartwright didn’t have to be present for this nothingness.

The con artists who ran Sha-Kay these days would no doubt produce some sort of light show, probably broadcast some old audiotapes of Laurena Layla, edited to sound as though she were addressing the rubes this very minute rather than more than twenty years ago. At the end of the day the suckers would wander off, very well fleeced and reasonably well satisfied, while the fleecers would have the admissions money, fifty or sixty thousand, plus whatever else they’d managed to pluck during the show.

Plus, of course, TV This nonevent would be broadcast live on the Sha-Kay cable station, with a phone number prominent for the receipt of donations, all major credit cards accepted.

No, all of these people would be all right, but what about poor Boy Cartwright? Where was his story? “The nonappearance today in Marm—”

And there she was.

It was done well, Boy had to admit that. No floating down into view from above the stage, no thunderclaps and puffs of smoke while she emerged from a trapdoor behind the golden chair, no fanfare at all. She was simply there, striding in her shimmering golden robe down the wide central aisle from the rear of the hall, flanked by a pair of burly guardians to keep the faithful at bay, moving with the same self-confidence as always. Most of the people in the hall, including Boy, only became aware of her with the amplified sound of her first “Hosannas!”

That had always been her greeting to her flock, and here it was again. “Hosannas! Hosannas!” spoken firmly as she nodded to the attendees on both sides, her words miked to speakers throughout the hall that boomed them back as though her voice came from everywhere in the building at once.

It was the same voice. That was the first thing Boy caught. It was exactly the same voice he’d heard saying any number of things twenty years ago, hosannas! among them as well as oh yes! and more more!

She’s lip-synching, he thought, to an old tape, but then he realized it was also the same body, sinuous within that robe. Yes, it was, long and lithe, the same body he well remembered. The same walk, almost a model’s but earthier. The same pitch to the head, set of the shoulders, small hand gesture that wasn’t quite a wave. And, hard to tell from up here, but it certainly looked like the same face.

But not twenty years older. The same age, or very close to the same age, twenty-seven, that Laurena Layla had been when the fan had given her that bad review. The same age, and in every other respect, so far as Boy could tell from this distance, the same woman.

It’s a hologram, he told himself, but a hologram could not reach out to pat the shoulder of a dear old lady on the aisle, as this one now did, causing the dear old lady to faint dead away on the instant.

She’s real, Boy thought. She’s returned, by God.

A chill ran up his back as she ran lightly up the central stairs to the stage, the hairs rose on his neck, and he remembered all too clearly not the body in the box but the body two years before that, as alive as quicksilver.

She stopped, turned to face her people. Her smile was faintly sad, as it had always been. She spread her hands in a gesture that welcomed without quite embracing, as she always had. “Hosannas,” she said, more quietly, and the thousands below thundered, “Hosannas!”

Boy stared. Gray sweat beaded on his gray forehead. His follicles itched, his clothing cramped him, his bones were gnarled and wretched.

“I have been away,” Laurena Layla said, and smiled. “And now I have returned.”

As the crowd screamed in delight, Boy took hold of himself — metaphorically. You are here, my lad, he reminded himself, because you do not believe in this crap. You do not believe in any of the crap. If you start coming all over goose bumps every time somebody rises from the dead, of what use will you be, old thing, to the dear old Weekly Galaxy?

Onstage, she, whoever she was, whatever she was, had gone into an old routine, feel-good mysticism, the basic tenets of Sha-Kay, but now delivered with the assurance of one who’s been there and done that. The faithful gawped, the TV crews focused, the second-string stringers from the other tabs wrote furiously in their notebooks or extended their tape recorders toward the stage as though the voice were coming from there, and Boy decided it was time to get a little closer.

Everyone was mesmerized by the woman on the stage, or whatever that was on the stage. Unnoticed, Boy stepped backward and through the doorway to the hall.

Where the golden guardian remained, unfortunately. “Sir,” he said, frowning, “were you going to leave already?”

“Just a little reconnoiter, dear,” Boy assured him.

“I’m not supposed to let anybody past this point,” the guardian explained, looking serious about it.

This was why Boy never went on duty without arming himself with, in his left trouser pocket, folded hundred-dollar bills. It was automatic now to slide hand in and C-note out, the while murmuring; “Just need a quieter location, dear. Those TV cameras foul my recorder.”

The reason employees are so easy to suborn is that they’re employees. They’re only here in the first place because they’re being paid for their time. Whatever the enterprise may be, they aren’t connected to it by passion or ownership or any other compelling link. Under the circumstances, what is a bribe but another kind of wage?

Still, we all of us have an ass to protect. Hand hovering over the proffered bill, the guardian nevertheless said, “I don’t want to get in any trouble here.”

“Nothing to do with you, old thing,” Boy assured him. “I came round the other way.”

The bill disappeared, and then so did Boy, following the long curved hall toward the stage. More and more of the temple layout he remembered as he moved along. Farther along this hallway he would find that faintly sepulchral room where the body had been on display, placed there because crowd control would have been so much iffier out in the main auditorium.

That last time, Boy had had no reason to proceed past the viewing room, which in more normal circumstances would have been some kind of offstage prep area or greenroom, but he knew it couldn’t be far from there to the stage. Would he be closer then to her?

The likeness was so uncanny, dammit. Or perhaps it was so canny. In any event, this Laurena Layla, when close to people, kept moving, and when she stopped to speak she kept a distance from everyone else. Could she not be observed up close for long? If not, why not?

Though as Boy came around the curving hallway his left hand was already in his pocket, fondling another century, there was no guard on duty at the closed greenroom door; a surprise, but never question good fortune. In case the undoubted sentry was merely briefly away to answer mother’s call, he hastened the last few yards, even though the brisk motion made his brain-walnut chafe uncomfortably against the shell of his skull.

The black door in the charcoal-gray wall opened soundlessly to his touch. He slipped through; he pulled the door shut behind him.

Well. It did look different without a coffin in the middle. Now it was merely a staging area, dim-lit, with the props and materials of cultish magic neatly shelved or stacked or hung, waiting for the next Call. A broad but low-ceilinged room, its irregular shape was probably caused by the architectural requirements of the stage and temple that surrounded it. That shape, with corners and crannies in odd shadowed places, had added to the eeriness when Boy and his Hasselblad had been in here twenty years ago, but now it all seemed quite benign, merely a kind of surrealistic locker room.

There. The closed door opposite, across the empty black floor. That was the route Boy had not taken last time, when the viewers of the remains had been herded through the main temple and over the stage, past many opportunities to show their sorrow and their continued devotion in a shall we say tangible way, before they were piloted past the dear departed, out the door Boy had just come in, and down the long hall to what at this moment had been converted into the VIP entrance.

After a quick glance left and right, reassuring himself he was alone and all the stray dim corners were empty, he crossed to that far door, cracked it just a jot, and peered one eyed out at what looked like any backstage. Half a dozen technicians moved about. A hugely complex lightboard stretched away on the right, and beyond it yawned the stage, with Laurena Layla — or whoever — in profile out there, continuing her spiel.

She looked shorter from here, no doubt the effect of the high-ceilinged stage and all those lights. The golden chair still stood invitingly behind her, but she remained on her feet, pacing in front of the chair as she delivered her pitch.

How would it all end? Would she sit in the chair at last, then disappear in a puff of smoke? A trapdoor, then, which would make her devilish hard to intercept.

But Boy didn’t think so. He thought they’d be likelier to repeat the understated eloquence of that arrival, that L.L. would simply walk off the stage as she’d simply walked onto it, disappear from public view, and come… here.

She would not be alone, he was sure of that. Determinedly alone onstage, once free of the suckers’ gaze, she would surely be surrounded by her… acolytes? handlers?

Boy had his story now. Well, no, he didn’t have it, but he knew what it was: the interview with the returned L.L. The Galaxy had treated any number of seers and mystics and time travelers and alien abductees with po-faced solemnity over the years, so surely this Layla would understand she was in safe hands when she was in the hands — as he certainly hoped she soon would be — of Boy Cartwright. The question was how to make her see his journal’s usefulness to her before her people gave him the boot.

The old clippings; the thank-you note. Waggle those in front of her face, they’d at least slow down the proceedings long enough to give him an opportunity to swathe her in his moth-eaten charm. It had worked before.

His move at this point was to hide himself, somewhere in this room. This was where he was sure she would travel next, so he should conceal himself in here, watch how the scam proceeded, await his opportunity. Snick, he shut the stageward door, and, clutching his canvas bag between flaccid arm and trembling ribs, with its valuable cargo of clippings and thank-yous, he turned to suss the place out.

Any number of hiding places beckoned to him, shady nooks at the fringes of the room. Off to the right, in a cranny that was out of the way but not out of sight of either door, stood two long coatracks on wheels, the kind hosts set up for parties, these both bowed beneath the weight of many golden robes. Don one? At the very least, insert himself among them.

As he hurried toward that darkly gold-gleaming niche, a great crowdroar arose behind him, triumphant yet respectful, gleeful yet awed. Just in time, he thought, and plunged among the robes.

Dark in here, and musty. Boy wriggled backward, looking for a position where he could see yet not be seen, and his heel hit the body.

He knew it, in that first instant. What his heel had backed into was not a sports bag full of laundry, not a sleeping cat, not a rolled-up futon. A body.

Boy squinched backward, wriggling his bum through the golden robes, while the crowd noise outside reached its crescendo and fell away. He found it agony to make this overworked body kneel, but Boy managed, clutching to many robes as he did so, listening to his knees do their firecracker imitations. Down at mezzanine level, he sagged onto his haunches while he pushed robe hems out of the way, enough to see…

Well. This one won’t be coming back. In this dimness, the large stain across the back of the golden robe on the figure huddled on the floor looked black, but Boy knew that, in the light, it would be a gaudier hue. He felt no need to touch it, he knew what it was.

And who. The missing sentry.

I am not alone in here, Boy thought, and as he thought so he was not; the stageward door opened and voices entered, male and female.

Boy cringed. Not the best location, this, on one’s knees at the side of a recently plucked corpse. Hands joining knees on the floor, he crawled away from the body through the robes until he could see the room.

Half a dozen people, all berobed, had crowded in, Laurena unmistakable among them, beautiful, imperious, and a bit sullen. The others, male and female, excited, chattered at her, but she paid them no attention, moving in a boneless undulation toward a small makeup table directly across the room from where Boy slunk. They followed, still relieving their tension with chatter, and she waved a slender forearm of dismissal without looking back.

“Leave her alone now.”

This was said clearly through the babble by an older woman, silver-haired and bronze-faced in her golden robe, who stood behind the still-moving Laurena, faced the others, and said, “She needs to rest.”

They all agreed, verbally and at length, while the older woman made shooing motions and Laurena sank into a sinuous recline on the stool at the makeup table. Boy, alert for any eruption at all from anywhere, trying to watch the action in front of him while still keeping an eye on every other nook and cranny in the entire room — a hopeless task — watched and waited and wondered when he could make his presence, and his news, known.

The older woman was at last succeeding in her efforts to clear the area. The others backed off, calling final praises and exhortations over their shoulders, oozing out of the room like a film in reverse that shows the smoke go back in the bottle. Boy gathered his limbs beneath him for the Herculean task of becoming once more upright, and the older woman said, “You were magnificent.”

Laurena reached a languid arm forward to switch on the makeup lights, in which she gazed upon her astonishingly beautiful and pallid face, gleaming in the dim gray mirror. “What are they to me?” she asked, either to herself or the older woman.

“Your life,” the older woman told her. “From now on.”

Outside, the faithful had erupted into song, loud and clamorous. It probably wasn’t, but it certainly sounded like, a speeded-up version of “We Shall Overcome.”

Laurena closed her striking eyes and shook her head, “Leave me,” she said.

Boy was astonished. An actual human being had said, “Leave me,” just like a character in a vampire film. Perhaps this Laurena was from the beyond.

In any event, the line didn’t work. Rather than leave her, the older woman said, “This next part is vital.”

“I know, I know.”

“You’ll be just as wonderful, I know you will.”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” Laurena asked her. “I’ve trained for it long enough.”

“Rest,” the older woman urged. “I’ll come back for you in fifteen minutes.” And with that, at last, she was gone, leaving Laurena semi-alone, the raucous chorus surging when the door was open.

Boy lunged upward, grabbing for handholds among the robes, knees exploding like bags full of water. His first sentences were already clear in his mind, but as he staggered from concealment, hand up as though hailing a cab, movement flashed from off to his left.

Boy looked, and lunging from another hiding place, between himself and the stageward door, heaved a woman, middle-aged, depressingly over-weight, in a home permanent, brandishing a stained steak knife from the five-and-ten like a homicidal whale.

Good God! Have they both come back? Is there hope for Ruby Mae and Ruby Jean’s mom after all?

Laurena’s makeup mirror was positioned so that it was the whale she saw in it first, not Boy. Turning, not afraid, still imperious, she leveled her remote gaze on the madwoman and said, “What are you?”

“You know who I am!” snarled the madwoman, answering the wrong question. “I’m here to finish what my mother started!”

And in that instant Boy knew everything. He knew that the roused chorus in the temple auditorium meant that cries for help would go for naught. He knew that escape past the madwoman out that door toward the stage was impossible. He knew that he himself could make a dash for the opposite door, the one by which he’d entered, but that Laurena, by the makeup table, would never make it.

But he knew even more. He knew the scam.

However, what he didn’t know was what to do about it. Where, in all this, was poor Boy’s story? Should he zip out the door, report the murders, have that scoop? Should he remain here, rescue the maiden without risk to himself and in hope of the usual reward, have that scoop (and reward)? (The “without risk to himself” part tended to make that plan Plan B.)

How old was she, that was the question, the most important question of all. Answer that one first.

“Dears, dears, dears,” he announced in his plummiest voice, swanning forward like the emcee in Cabaret, “play nice, now, don’t fight.”

They both gaped at him. Like a tyro at the game arcade, the madwoman didn’t know what to do when faced with two simultaneous targets. She hung there, flat-footed, one Supphose’d shin before the other, knife arm raised, looking now mostly like a reconstructed dinosaur at the museum, while Laurena gave him a stare of cool disbelief and said, “And who are you?”

“Oh, but, dear, you must remember me,” Boy told her, talking very fast indeed to keep everybody off balance. “Dear old Boy, from the Galaxy, I still have your thank-you note, I’ve treasured it always, I brought it with me in my little bag here.” Deciding it would be dangerous to reach into the bag — it might trigger some unfortunate response from the dinosaur — he hurtled on, saying, “Of course, dear Laurena, one had to see you again, after all this time, report our meeting, tell the world we—”

The penny dropped at last, and now she was shocked. “You’re a reporter?”

“Oh, you do remember!” Boy exulted. “One knew you would!”

“You can’t stop me!” the madwoman honked, as though she hadn’t been stopped already.

But of course she could reactivate herself, couldn’t she? Boy told her, “One did not have the pleasure of meeting your mother, dear, I’m sorry to say, but one did see her in custody and at the trial, and she certainly was forceful.”

Whoops; wrong word. “And so am I!” cried the madwoman, and lumbered again toward Laurena.

“No no, wait wait wait!” cried Boy. “I wanted to ask you about your mother.” As the madwoman had now halved the distance between herself and the shrinking Laurena, Boy felt an increasing urgency as he said, “I wrote about her, you know, in the Weekly Galaxy, you must have seen it.”

That stopped her. Blinking at Boy, actually taking him in for the first time, a reluctant awe coming into her face and voice, she said, “The Weekly Galaxy?”

“Boy Cartwright, at your service,” he announced with a smile and a bow he’d borrowed from Errol Flynn, who would not have recognized it. “And as a reporter,” he assured her, “I assure you I am not here to alter the situation, but simply to observe. Madam, I will not stand in your way.”

Laurena gawked at him. “You won’t?”

“Good,” the madwoman said, hefted her knife, and thudded another step forward.

“But first,” Boy went hurriedly on, “I do so want to interview Laurena. Very briefly, I promise you.”

They both blinked at him. The madwoman said, “Interview?”

“Two or three questions, no more, and I’m out of your way forever.”

“But—” Laurena said.

Taking the madwoman’s baffled silence for consent, Boy turned to Laurena. “The silver-haired party was your grandmother,” he said.

Managing to find reserves of haughtiness somewhere within, Laurena froze him with a glare: “I am not giving interviews.”

“Oh, but, dear,” Boy said, with a meaningful head nod toward the madwoman, “this exclusive interview you will grant, I just know you will, and I must begin, I’m sorry to say, with a personal question. Personal to me. I need to know how old you are. You are over twenty-one, aren’t you?”

“What? Of course I—”

“Honest Injun?” Boy pressed. “One is not a bartender, dear, one has other reasons to need to know. I would guess you to be twenty-five? Twenty-six?” The change in her eyes told him he’d guessed right. “Ah, good,” he said with honest relief.

“That’s right,” the madwoman said.

They both turned to her, having very nearly forgotten her for a few seconds, and she said, “People don’t get older in heaven, do they?”

“No, they do not,” Boy agreed.

Laurena said, “What difference does it make?”

“Well, if you were twenty-one, you see,” he explained, “you’d be my daughter, which would very much complicate the situation.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Laurena said, which meant, of course, that she had every idea what he was talking about.

Now he did dare a quick dip into his bag, and before the madwoman could react he’d brought out and shown her his audiocassette recorder. “Tools of the trade, dear,” he explained. “No interview without the tape to back it up.”

Laurena finally began to show signs of stress, saying, “What are you doing? She’s got a knife, she’s going to kill me!”

“Again, darling, yes,” Boy said, switching on the machine, aiming it at her. “Just so soon as I leave, at the end of the interview.” Because now at last he knew what his story was, he smiled upon her with as much fondness as if she had been his daughter — interesting quandary that would have been, in several ways — and said, “Of course, in your answers, you might remove our friend’s reason for wanting to kill you all over again.”

Growling, the madwoman bawled, “Nobody’s going to stop me! I’m here to finish what my mother started!”

“Yes, of course, you are, dear,” Boy agreed. “But what if your mother did finish the job?”

The madwoman frowned. “What do you mean? There’s Laurena Layla right there!”

“Well, let’s ask her about that,” Boy suggested, and turned attention, face, and recorder to the young woman. “I must leave very soon,” he pointed out. “I only hope, before I go, you will have said those words that will reassure this lovely lady that her mother did not fail, her mother is a success, she can be proud of her mother forever. Can’t she, dear?”

Laurena stared helplessly from one to the other. It was clear she couldn’t figure out which was the frying pan, which the fire.

To help her, Boy turned back to the madwoman. “You do trust the Galaxy, don’t you?”

“Of course!”

“Whatever this dear child says to us,” Boy promised, “you will read in the Galaxy. Trust me on this.”

“I do,” the madwoman said with great solemnity.

Turning to the other, Boy said, “Dear, five million readers are waiting to hear. How was it done? Who are you? Time’s getting short, dear.”

Laurena struggled to wrap her self-assurance around herself. “You won’t leave,” she said. “You couldn’t.”

“Too bad,” Boy said with a shrug. “However, the story works just as well the other way” Turning, he took a step toward the hall door as the madwoman took a step forward.

“Wait!” cried the former Laurena Layla.