he heard a multiplicity of voices. Not, just six—oh, no.
They did not move—they did not have to. He heard them calling to him inside his own head. Beat him, they called. Beat him! Release your hatred …
“That’s enough!” Fanny cried, and fired one of the revolvers into the air, as the storm broke and people scattered.
Lloyd dropped the cane, leaving Joshua Breed groveling in the mud, bleeding and soiled, whimpering like the dog the day before.
The six white women with the single face were gone, dissolved in the downpour as if they had never been.
CHAPTER 7
Something in Between
THE SIGHT OF LLOYD MERCILESSLY WHIPPING THE WOUNDED rouster at last spurred Rapture to action. She raised her skirt hem and dashed through the deluge to wrench her son out of his trance. The few items they had purchased she left behind in the streaming rain, dragging the boy along the mud-strewn boardwalk in a huffing flurry of anger and alarm until they reached the relative safety of the Clutters’ once more.
She did not look behind her to see the gun-toting Fanny Ockleman shaking her head at the boy’s performance. She did not see the sharpshooter stow her revolvers, adjust her hat, and stride over to retrieve the cane as if the sun were shining brightly and the most extraordinary event that had transpired had been the boy’s vented fury. Rapture was too busy trying to master the shame and chagrin that had replaced her pride and concern when her son stepped forward.
Lloyd, meanwhile, was beside himself with fascination and embarrassment. The excitation that had arisen inside him was like no other he had ever experienced—a sickening, insatiable lust and release beyond any he had known before. The entire world had been eclipsed in the heat of it. There was only his hunger, his will being fulfilled to the grotesque exclusion of all other senses. And the disquietude of the six watchers.
Were these what the Vardogers looked like? Or had it been a projection of their insidious science?
I wonder if I saw what I did because they wanted me to see it or because of how I felt? he thought.
Strangely enough, the very brutality of his performance drew a very different response from what his mother had anticipated. Racing back to the Clutters’ soaking wet, struggling with what she could carry and still mind Lloyd, Rapture assumed that all the items they had abandoned would either be stolen or spoiled by the rain. Not so. What she had not counted on was that the Breed gang, and slobbish Josh in particular, had long been a source of fear and local hatred. While the Bushrod Rangers comprised members who were respected at least in quarters of the community, no one would have spoken in favor of Portion Breed and his son’s confederates if they could avoid it, and for once it seemed they could. Perhaps things were going to change for the better around Independence.
So what if little Lloyd had whacked the tar out of Josh? The younger Breed had had it coming since he was that size and then some. The target that had apparently been chosen by chance gave the Sitturd whelp a line of credit to draw upon, and, ironically, the same child and his family who had been hounded out of Zanesville for using the native powers of his brain was now applauded and even lionized by the townsfolk of this Missouri outpost for unleashing some inner force of almost meditative violence. Rapture could only shake her head in wonder as, one by one, the items she had cast behind them returned, supplemented with more store-bought things, handmade items, food stocks, and provisions of all kinds. No one asked any questions about where the family was headed; it was just assumed somewhere west. People gave in the way that no tithing box had ever known, and when Hephaestus hobbled home after his first partial but still honest day’s work in as long as he could remember, he was startled to find his young son a hero again, his wife speechless, and the coffin-crowded shop front of the lackluster carpenter and rather keen embalmer Othimiel Clutter and his wife overflowing with things that the Sitturds would desperately need to reach their destination.
It was several minutes before Rapture could find the words to suggest more than explain what had transpired, and even then her limping husband limped far behind in his comprehension. The rain had cleared off again, the sun was near