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“What is it? What are you going to do? What is this place? Why are we here?”
Homer’s friendly grin became lupine. “You ain’t figured it out yet?”
“Figured what out?”
“What I am.”
“I … know what you are. I mean I understand what Dr. Volker did to you. I know about Lucifer 113.”
“I ain’t talking about no zombie bullshit, boy. Try again.”
Goat licked his lips. “I understand about the Black Eye and the Red Mouth. Is that what you mean?”
The killer sat there for a long moment, his eyes flicking back and forth between Goat’s as if looking for something first in the left, then the right, and over again. It was like the flickering of a candle. “You listened to everything I said and you sat as a witness to everything I done tonight, and you still don’t understand. That’s a damn shame, boy, ’cause I thought you were going to be my apostle. I thought you were like Luke and John and all those holy men who wrote the Bible. I thought I could use you to tell the truth. The real and gospel truth.”
The shift in Homer’s voice and phrasing was immediately chilling. Instead of the faux homespun shit-kicker lingo, these few sentences were spoken in a slow, more precise manner. Goat had noted it only once before, when Homer discussed the way the Red Mouth spoke through him to tell the truth. He wanted to replay that clip, to listen once more to what the man said then because now he felt—no, he was absolutely certain—that it was far more important that the pseudoreligious rant of a psychopathic killer. He saw the dangerous look of cold disappointment in Homer’s eyes and knew that he needed to do something right now.
He said, “I’m trying to understand,” he said, making his words come out with equally slow and sober gravitas. “I want to understand. But the apostles—how many of them understood right away? They had to think about it, to witness it, to let it speak through them, right?”
Goat was Jewish but he’d seen enough movies to know the basic New Testament story. He’d even watched parts of that old Jesus of Nazareth miniseries during a filmmaking class. He grabbed for every detail he could snatch out of memory.
“Peter … the one who was Jesus’s right-hand man. He didn’t get it at first, but look what happened. He’s the role model for the pope, right? He was a fisherman and don’t they say that the pope wears the shoes of the fisherman?”
He wasn’t sure if this was exactly true or if it was something else from another movie. It sounded more or less right.
“And all the others,” Goat continued, keeping the rhythm of it going, “they became true believers. And Paul, what about Paul, remember him? He was kind of a prick and a bad guy and then something happened to him on the road to Damascus and suddenly he’s writing most of the New Testament.” He paused, giving the moment a dramatic beat, choreographing it, directing his own performance. “You want me to tell your story, and I agreed to do that. If you need me to understand the secrets and mysteries of it, then you have to give me time to process it. To think it through. To let it speak inside my head and heart.”
Those were lines from an old movie, an art film about socialism in Paris, but he was pretty sure it was one Homer would never have seen. Goat twisted them to fit, pitching his tone to have a smoldering passion waiting to bloom. Or at least that’s how he imagined it if he was directing someone for this scene. He hoped he was actor enough to pull it off.
Homer Gibbon said nothing as the slow seconds ticked by. Then he reached out and touched Goat over the heart with the tip of his index finger.
“If you open your heart to the Red Mouth, you will see with the Black Eye.”
Goat swallowed. “I-I want to. Just give me time.”
The killer gave him a single, slow nod and let his finger trail down Goat’s body, over his stomach and groin, along his thigh and up cover the edge of the laptop. “You better use this thing to tell my truth, or I will—”
“Homer,” said Goat quickly, taking a terrible risk, “don’t. Look at me. Use the Black Eye to look into my eyes. See me. You don’t need to threaten me anymore. We’ve crossed a line, Homer. We’re somewhere else now.”
The moment stretched and stretched, and then Homer withdrew his hand. He reached for the door handle, but paused to pat Goat’s bound left wrist. “The rope stays on. Trust, like faith, is earned.”
Then he got out of the car and began walking, bare-chested and erect, through the rain to the building with the FREE WI-FI sign.
Goat sagged back and had to fight to keep from hyperventilating. It was an even harder struggle to keep from pissing in his pants.
Then he was in motion. Even one-handed he was fast on a laptop. He accessed the system preferences and found the Wi-Fi, connected to it, and began uploading the files. But as he did so a small window popped up telling him that his email was sent.
Email?
It was only then that he remembered the message he’d composed
way back at Starbucks.
In Bordentown. Homer Gibbon.
Quarantine failed.
It’s here …
