Random Walk: A Novel for a New Age

Nineteen

He was surprised how much he enjoyed walking.

Of course it didn’t hurt that it was a glorious day. The sun was high and bright, but it never shined for long without interruption; just as the heat was on the verge of becoming oppressive, a cloud would interpose itself. And the wind, a steady force at his back, kept the heat from building up.

Amazing how much color the prairie had. He’d been driving through similar country for months, but when you slowed to a walk you saw the different patches of wildflowers. At highway speed the colors blurred.

Lunatics. Walking across the country, talking about miracles. This one had thrown away a pair of glasses, that one had discarded a hearing aid. Like the dimwits who made a pilgrimage to Lourdes, hobbled into the cathedral, walked out beaming, pronounced themselves cured, cast aside their crutches, and fell down a flight of stone steps. Still, they were a happy bunch, physically attractive, glowing from within. Pleasant enough to be around.

And wonderfully accepting, perfectly delighted to have him in their midst. If he was harebrained enough to walk away from his car and tag along with them to De Smet, he was obviously their kind of people.

A pretty girl, Kimberley. Young, certainly, but older than the swimmer in Pueblo, the pudgy little darling whose swimsuit wouldn’t stay up.

Kimberley was a different physical type entirely, tall and slender, one of those clear-eyed Scandinavian country girls you found all over these parts.

He reached into his pocket even as he gazed at the back of her neck. A gold chain circled her throat, but it would snap like a twig if he tried to strangle her with it. But the picture wire in his pocket, that would do the job nicely enough. He’d just have to find some way to cut her out of the herd. Then a quick silent kill and the parade could go on without her.

The tricky part would be rejoining the line of march himself, so that he could select his next target.

Within the hour he got her off by herself.

She had been sharing her water with him, and it was almost gone. She spotted a farmhouse and said she wanted to refill her container from their pump. He said he’d go with her. She offered no objection, and no one volunteered to join them.

Up a straight gravel road to the white clapboard farmhouse. She rang the bell and no one responded to it. “Let’s see,” she said. “They won’t miss the water, but where do you suppose the pump is?”

She looked for it and he stayed at her side, his hand in his pocket, fingering the length of picture wire. Or should he use his hands? God, she was nice. He’d get her from behind, press up against her, let her bottom rub against him as she fought…

She had found the pump and was working its handle. Water spurted forth. She caught some in one cupped hand, lapped it up. “It’s good,” she announced. “Not sulphury. Drink, I’ll pump.”

She worked the pump handle. Now, he thought, willing his hands to reach for her.

But first he’d have a drink. He bent over, put his mouth to the faucet, let her pump the cold well water for him. He drank deeply, water splashing all over his face and onto his shirt. Then he stood up, and it was his turn to pump for her. She held her hair out of the way but made no effort to keep the water from soaking her face and chest as she drank. She stood up at last, laughing, her T-shirt clinging to her body, her nipples clearly visible through the wet cotton.

“Gosh, look at me,” she said. Then her eyes caught his. “Uh, I guess you are looking at me, aren’t you?”

“I was just noticing that,” he said, pointing to the crystal suspended from the gold chain.

“It’s pretty, isn’t it?” She held it out, displaying it to him. “Gary gave it to me last night.”

“Is he your boyfriend?”

She laughed. “No, it was just, well, a gift. Somebody gave it to him and he gave it to me and I guess in a couple of days it’ll be time for me to give it to somebody else. He said it gets stronger every time you pass it on.”

“It gets stronger?”

“I’m not sure what that means. I asked him if he was sure he didn’t want to keep it, and he said you had to give it away in order to keep it, and I don’t know what that means, either.”

Kimberley is your sister.

He thought for a moment that the words had been spoken aloud. But only he had heard them. A voice in his head, then. And a meaningless one at that. He had no brothers or sisters. Anyway, Kimberley was young enough to be his daughter.

She said, “Mark? You want to pump some more and I’ll hold the bottle?”

He worked the handle. She held the container, an empty plastic bottle that had originally held a diet soft drink, and capped it when it was full.

The pump handle was a bar of white metal a foot and a half long. It was removable, and it would do if he wanted to knock her out. But he didn’t have to knock her out.

“Kimberley? Hold still a minute.”

She did just that while he moved to stand behind her. His hands settled themselves on either side of her neck.

“Oh, great,” she said. “How did you know I needed a neck rub?”

And his hands, as if with a will of their own, began to knead her trapezius muscles, his fingers going right to the tight spots and working at them. She made appreciative noises while he massaged her gently but firmly for several minutes. Then, with a sigh, she straightened up. “We’d better get going,” she said, “if we want to catch up with the others.”

It didn’t take them long to overtake the rest of the group. Kimberley fell into conversation with a young woman who was carrying an infant in a sling on her back, and Mark found himself drawn forward in the procession until he was walking with a woman named Sue Anne and a very soft-spoken Indian named George. Sue Anne did most of the talking. She was telling him and George about some woman named Sara, and was clearly in awe of the woman. He found himself picturing Sara in his mind. He visualized a tall fiery-eyed woman with a tawny mane of hair, a sort of combination of Amazon and Valkyrie, and he was taken aback to learn that Sara was actually a short slender gray-haired woman who happened to be blind.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “I thought people get healed right and left on this hike. I keep hearing about the deaf hearing and the lame walking.”

“That’s what usually happens,” Sue Anne said.

“Sara chose to be blind,” George put in. “So she can see better.”

He didn’t stop in De Smet. He’d had no interest in the little house on the prairie, that had just been a way to start a conversation with Kimberley. Bunches of them stopped at various stores and eating places in De Smet to buy food, and then they all moved on, and he moved along with them.

He wasn’t sure why. There were any number of good-looking women in the group, but he was beginning to realize that he was not going to be able to do anything about it. He had had his hands on Kimberley’s throat, for heaven’s sake, and had wound up giving her a massage. And now whenever he began to make one of his companions the object of a fantasy, that voice sounded in his head, insisting that the woman in question was his sister.

Whatever that was supposed to mean.

As De Smet disappeared behind them, he felt as though he had let go of the steering wheel of his life. He’d certainly let go of the Lincoln; it was close to three hours west of him by now, and every step was taking him farther away from it. He could still turn around and walk back to his car, but would it even be there if he did? He seemed to remember having left the key in the ignition, and he knew he’d left the doors unlocked. The crime rate was undeniably low in rural South Dakota, but a Lincoln with the keys in it, parked at the side of the road, might still prove an irresistible temptation to some local teenager. It wouldn’t have lasted fifteen minutes in downtown Kansas City. How long would it last out here?

It struck him that he would probably never know. Because he wouldn’t go back for the car. He couldn’t go back. He could only go forward. Whatever that meant, and wherever that led.

He was walking now with a man named Douglas and a woman named Lissa. He tried to have a fantasy about Lissa — she was quite attractive — but it wouldn’t work. He felt somehow connected to Lissa. She had just been talking of astral bodies, a concept he had never understood but seemed almost able to grasp now, and when he tried to fantasize about her all he could think of was that they were Siamese twins on the astral plane, their spirit bodies joined at the nape of the neck. When his hands reached for her throat they fastened at the same time upon his own. He could not strangle her without cutting off his own air line.

He stopped trying, but then it came to him that Lissa was very like a woman named Marguerite whom he had killed in her own home six years ago in Kansas City. He had strangled her with her own pajama cord, winding it twice around her throat and drawing it tight, watching her pale eyes as the life drained out of them. When had he last thought of Marguerite? Not in months, maybe years, but he remembered her now—

And felt her pain. And felt her terror. Before he had witnessed it but now he felt it, and he and Marguerite shared a throat and the cord was choking both of them at once. Marguerite was your sister, said the damned voice in his head, and suddenly they were all his sisters, they were all linked to him, they were all part of him, and he felt his own being rent by a hundred and one mortal wounds.

“Mark? Are you all right?”

Yes, he told Douglas. He was okay.

“You look like you’re hurting, man.”

He had a headache, a brutal one, a line of fire bisecting his skull. He said as much to Douglas, and asked who was likely to have an aspirin.

“Hold still,” Douglas said. And he thrust his hands down at his sides, huffed and puffed like a weightlifter about to attempt a new personal best, and then placed his hands on either side of Mark’s head. Something buzzed — around Mark’s head at first, then within it. After a moment Douglas dropped his hands. “There,” he said. “That any better?”

“The headache’s gone,” Mark said.

Douglas was wiping his forearms with his hands, as if flinging some invisible unpleasantness from them. “If it comes back,” he said, “just tell somebody. Most everybody who’s been here a few days knows how to do that.”

“You’ll learn,” Lissa assured him. “I’ll show you tonight, if I’m not busy. Or somebody else will. And in a week you’ll be teaching people yourself.”

But they were wrong, he thought. His hands didn’t take pain away. They inflicted it.

His headache was gone. He wanted not to believe that so much pain could be lifted with so little effort, but he did believe it almost in spite of himself. Maybe they weren’t completely crazy. Maybe they truly were capable of miracles.

No matter. They could heal headaches, but he had an ache in his heart now where nobody’s hands could possibly reach. Something was happening to him.

And there didn’t seem to be anything he could do to halt the process. He wanted to leave, to turn his back on these people, but he knew that was impossible. He had the strongest feeling that he would die if he separated himself from the others. It was ridiculous, it didn’t make any sense, and yet he was certain of its essential truth.

He thought of leaving even if it meant death, of seeking death, of welcoming it. He saw now that he had been killing pieces of himself for eight years. Every time he killed a woman he had killed something within himself. They were all his sisters, they were all parts of what he was a part of, some interconnectedness of all things, something he had heard of and read about and never ever felt.

He felt it now.

The pain stayed with him, a deep soreness at the base of his throat, a dull ache in his heart, dancing pinpoints of pain in his shoulder blades and the middle of his back. It never went away, and it always seemed to be just a bit more than he could bear, but it never truly got so bad that he could not in fact endure it. And the desire to leave stayed with him, but it too never reached the point where he was able to act on it. Something carried him along. He could not stand it, but he stood it. He could not bear it, but he bore it. He could not go on, but he went on.

There was a wooded area east of De Smet and they made camp there, along the shores of Lake Preston. By the time they were settled in Mark was in a sort of a daze. Years ago as a child at summer camp he’d been hit in the forehead by a thrown baseball, and he’d suffered what was later diagnosed as a concussion. But at the time no one had made him go to the infirmary, and he’d wandered around for hours seeing through a fog and hearing through a filter, his senses muffled, the world at a distance.

He was like that now. He could walk around without bumping into people, he could carry on a conversation when spoken to, but everything was dimly perceived and imperfectly defined. Someone shared food with him and he ate. Someone made a place for him and he sat down. Several people asked him if he was all right. He said that he was.

When a young teenage boy asked him, he found himself at a loss for an answer. “I’m mixed up,” he said finally.

“Yeah, I thought so,” the boy said. “When we’re really confused, what we generally do is we go talk to Sara.”

“I’ve heard about her,” he said. “Everybody mentions her. Do you know her?”

“Well, kind of,” the boy said. “She’s my mom. Come on, I’ll introduce you.”

She was just as she’d been described, and he wondered why he hadn’t encountered her earlier. At one time or other he’d been at the front and middle and rear of the procession, but his eyes had never taken note of this gray-haired gray-eyed woman. It was hard to believe he could have missed her. She was quite striking in appearance, and, more than that, she had a remarkable presence. You could not be near her and remain unaware of her, or unconscious of her power.

The boy introduced them and she extended her hand. He wouldn’t have known she was blind, and even now he found it hard to credit. She looked straight at him, and her eyes seemed to be focused on his. He took her hand, and the current that ran through their bodies almost brought him to his knees.

“Oh,” she said.

And he felt her mind touch his, maneuvering to get a grip, extending fingers of thought that probed his mind and soul. He resisted for an instant, then relaxed some mental sphincter and let her in.

He felt all his emotions at once, fear and relief and shame and anger and dread, so many conflicting emotions with the gain turned so high on all of them that he quite literally did not know what he was feeling. It was like listening to a radio that got every station at the same time, and played all of them at ear-splitting volume. Hearing everything, you could make out nothing.

She was holding his right hand in hers. Without letting go she turned him so that they were facing in the same direction, and she slipped her left arm around his waist. She led him through the trees and across a clearing, told him to sit down, and sat down facing him, her legs folded. She extended both hands so that they rested palms-up on her knees, and, in obedience to an unvoiced command, he put his hands in hers. Again a current ran through him, and again he felt her mind grapple with his. She was in there with him, she was accessing his memory, she was looking at his life.

She said, “You’ve never told anyone.”

“No.”

“How could you stand it?”

“You don’t understand. I enjoyed it. I loved it.”

“And you never made contact with the part of you that didn’t love it. Not until today.” Her eyes regarded him, and he had to remind himself they were sightless. “Everything you’ve felt today has been in you since the first woman you killed. You just didn’t know it until now.”

“I want to die,” he said.

“No you don’t.”

“I do!”

“If you really did you’d be dead. Oh, a part of you wishes you were dead, but a bigger part wants to live. Everybody has a death wish and everybody has a life urge. As long as the life urge is stronger, you stay alive. When the death wish is stronger, you die. Why do you think you came here? Not to die. People don’t walk with us because they want to die. They walk into life, not into death. They come here to save themselves, to heal themselves.”

“And that’s what I did?”

“Of course.”

He shook his head, then remembered she couldn’t see the gesture. He said, “No, that’s not true. I came here—”

“To kill someone.”

“Yes.”

“To kill all the women you could. All the pretty ones.”

“Yes!”

“Well, who’s missing? Where should we look for the corpses?”

“I—”

“You’re an accomplished killer and we have plenty of pretty women with us. And you’ve been walking for how many hours? Eight or nine? How many did you kill?”

“None.”

“And you still think that’s what you came for?”

He remembered what the boy had said. When you were confused, you talked to Sara. He wondered why. The more he talked with her, the greater his confusion became.

He said, “I almost killed Kimberley.”

“I don’t know her. She must be fairly new. Tell me about it.” He did, and she said, “Yes, I’m sure she’s new. If she’d been here awhile you wouldn’t even have come that close to harming her. And you didn’t really come very close, you know. In your mind, your conscious mind, you were about to strangle her. In reality you were going to give her a massage. Kimberley picked up on the reality, not your perception of it, and she welcomed the massage, and that’s what you gave her.”

“But in another minute I would have—”

“Would have what? Would have killed her? No, Mark. You did what you would have done, in a minute or in all eternity. And you couldn’t have harmed Kimberley. Not many things can harm us on this walk, you see. The cold doesn’t freeze us and the sun doesn’t burn us, and with a few rare and not unpleasant exceptions, the rain doesn’t fall on us. Something protects us. And even if it didn’t, you can’t kill someone who isn’t ready to be killed. And we’re none of us ready to die because that’s not why we came here.”

“Something you just said.”

“That you can’t kill someone who isn’t ready to be killed.”

“Yes.”

“Did you think you were the Angel of Death? A terrible swift sword, a divine scythe harvesting women in their prime? How did you choose your victims? Did they run to type? Were they all classically beautiful?”

“No.” He thought. “They were women who attracted me.”

“And?”

“There was something about them,” he said. And then he remembered Missy Flanders in Wichita Falls, something in her that had cried out to him, that wouldn’t leave him alone until he had stabbed her in her bed. He reeled a little at the memory, and when he looked up Sara was nodding at him.

He said, “Are you telling me it was their fault?”

“It was their choice,” she said. “Is it your fault they’re dead? No. Every death is a kind of suicide; the one who dies chooses it. You were the rope they used to hang themselves.”

“But—”

“So does that mean you’re blameless? Of course not! It was your choice, time and time again, to play that role in their lives, in their deaths.”

After a long moment he said, “What’s going to happen to me?”

“What do you think should happen?”

“I suppose you’ll have to turn me over to the police.”

“And then you’ll confess, and there will be headlines in the newspapers, and a trial, and you’ll go to prison or to a hospital. Perhaps you’ll even be executed. Is that what you want?”

“Isn’t it what I deserve?”

“I don’t know what anyone deserves. The only way to find out what you deserve is to wait and see what you get. Is that why you came here, Mark?”

“Here?”

“Here. On this walk. You didn’t come here to kill anyone, whether you thought so at the time or not. You came here because you were done with killing.”

“But I couldn’t stop. Even after I let that woman go in Sioux Falls, even after I knew I was sick of it, I killed another woman. I couldn’t stop myself.”

“Maybe you came here to stop.”

“Maybe I came here to be punished.”

She laughed. “Punished? You’re already being punished. The crime was the punishment. Your punishment started eight years ago when you committed your first murder. It’s been going on all along, distancing you, isolating you from the people you love, cutting you off from all the best portions of yourself. You’ve been punishing yourself all that time and today’s the first day you’ve been able to feel it.”

“I don’t like the way it feels.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t imagine you do.”

“What do I do now?”

“Let me think.” She closed her eyes. After a moment she opened them and said, “I think you’re going to have to tell us what you’ve done.”

“You already know.”

“You’re going to have to tell everyone. You’ll tell us about all the women you’ve killed, from the one eight years ago to the one last night.”

“Do I have to?”

“Yes. You have to.”

“And then what? You’ll decide how to punish me?”

“No, Mark. I told you you didn’t come here to be punished.”

“Then what? Why did I come here?”

“For the same reason everybody else did,” she said. “Did you think you were so special?” She got to her feet. “Give me your hand,” she said, “and we’ll rejoin the others. You’ve got a long story to tell.”