Forever Odd Read online

  I couldn’t hear her breathing, of course, because the dead do not breathe.

  She wanted to sit in my lap and wriggle her bottom and share her blood with me.

  The dead don’t talk. But it was easy to believe that Datura might be the sole exception to the rule. Surely even death could not silence that garrulous goddess. She would heave herself upon me, sit on my lap, wriggle her bottom, press her dripping hand to my lips, and say Want to taste me, boyfriend?

  Very little of that mind movie was enough to make me want to switch on the flashlight.

  If Andre had intended to check out the electrical vault, he would have done so by this time. He had gone elsewhere. With both his mistress and Robert dead, the giant would blow this place in the car that they had stashed on the property.

  In a few hours, I could dare to venture back into the hotel and from there to the interstate.

  As I touched my thumb to the flashlight switch, before I pressed it, light bloomed beyond the curve that I had recently transited, and I heard Andre at the mouth of the tunnel.

  FIFTY-FOUR

  ONE GOOD THING ABOUT REVERSE PSYCHIC magnetism is that I can never be lost. Drop me into the middle of a jungle, without a map or a compass, and I’ll draw my searchers to me. You’ll never find my face on a milk carton: Have you seen this boy? If I live long enough to develop Alzheimer’s and wander away from my care facility, pretty soon all the nurses and patients will be wandering after me, compelled in my wake.

  Watching the light play around the first length of the tunnel, past the curve, I warned myself that I was indulging in another ghost story, spooking myself for no good reason. I should not assume that Andre sensed where I had gone.

  If I sat tight, he would decide there were more likely places that I might have taken refuge, and he would go away to search them. He hadn’t entered the drain. He was a big man; he would make a lot of noise, crawling in that cramped tunnel.

  He surprised me by firing a shot.

  In that confined space, the concussion seemed bad enough to make my ears bleed. The report—a loud bang but also like the hard toll of an immense bell—rang with such vibrato, I swore that I could feel sympathetic tremors racing through the haversian canals of my bones. The bang and the toll chased each other through the drain, and the echoes that followed were higher pitched, like the terrifying shrieks of incoming rockets.

  The noise so disoriented me that the tiny chips of concrete, peppering my left cheek and neck, mystified me for a moment. Then I understood: ricochet.

  I rolled flat, facedown, minimizing my exposure, and frantically wriggled deeper into the tunnel, scissoring my legs like a lizard and pulling myself forward with my arms, because if I rose onto my hands and knees, I would for sure take a round in the buttocks or the back of the head.

  I could live with one butt cheek—just sit at a slant for the rest of my life, not worry about how baggy the seat of my blue jeans looked, get used to the nickname Halfass—but I couldn’t live with my brains blown out. Ozzie would say that I often made such poor use of the brain I had that, if worse came to worst, I might in fact be able to get along without it, but I didn’t want to try.

  Andre fired another shot.

  My head was still ringing from the first blast, so this one didn’t seem as loud, though my ears ached as if sound of this volume had substance and, passing through them, strained their dimensions.

  In the instant required for the initial crash of the shot to be followed by the shrieking echo, the slug would have ricocheted past me. As scary as the noise might be, it signified that my luck held. If a bullet found me, the shock of impact would effectively deafen me to the gunfire.

  Skittering like a salamander, away from his light, I knew that darkness offered no protection. He couldn’t see his target, anyway, and relied on luck to wound me. In these circumstances, with curved concrete walls conducive to multiple ricochets of the same slug, his odds of nailing me were better than his chances would have been at any game in the casino.

  He squeezed off a third shot. What pity I’d once had for him—and I think there might have been a little—was so over.

  I couldn’t guess how often a bullet would have to glance off a wall until its wounding power had been sapped. Salamandering proved exhausting, and I had no confidence that I would be able to reach a safe distance before my luck changed.

  A draft suddenly sucked at me from the darkness to my left, and I instinctively scrambled toward it. Another storm drain. This one, a feeder line to the first, also about three feet in diameter, sloped slightly upward.

  A fourth shot slammed through the tunnel I had departed. All but certainly beyond the reach of ricochet, I returned to my hands and knees and crawled forward.

  Soon the angle of incline increased, then increased again, and ascent became more difficult minute by minute. I grew frustrated that my pace should slow so much with the rising grade, but finally I accepted the cruel fact of my diminished capacity and counseled myself not to push my body to collapse. I wasn’t twenty anymore.

  Numerous shots rang out, but I did not keep count of them after my buttocks were no longer at risk. In time I realized that he had ceased firing.

  At the top of its slope, the branch I traveled opened into a twelve-foot-square chamber that I explored with my flashlight. It appeared to be a catch basin.

  Water poured in from three smaller pipes at the top of the room. Any driftwood or trash carried by these streams sank to the bottom of the space, to be cleaned out by maintenance crews from time to time.

  Three exit drains, including the one by which I had arrived, were set at different levels in different walls, none near the floor where the flotsam would be allowed to accumulate. Water already was flowing out of the catch basin through the lowest of these.

  With the storm raging, the level within the chamber would rise inexorably toward my observation post, which was in the middle of the three outflow lines. I needed to transfer to the highest of the exit drains and continue my journey by that route.

  A series of ledges encircling the chamber would make it possible for me to stay out of the debris in the catch basin and get across to the farther side. I would just need to take my time and be careful.

  The tunnels I had thus far traveled had been claustrophobic for a man my size. Given his bulk, Andre would find them intolerable. He would rely on a ricochet having wounded or killed me. He would not follow.

  I squirmed out of the drain, into the catch basin, onto a ledge. When I looked down the slope I had just mastered, I saw a light in the distance. He grunted as he doggedly ascended.

  FIFTY-FIVE

  I LIKED THE IDEA OF WITHDRAWING DATURA’S pistol from under my belt and firing down on Andre as he crawled toward me in the tunnel. Payback.

  The only thing better would have been a shotgun, or maybe a flamethrower, like the one with which Sigourney Weaver torched the bugs in Aliens. A vat of boiling oil, bigger than the one Charles Laughton, as the hunchback, poured down on the Parisian rabble from the heights of Notre Dame would have been cool, too.

  Datura and her acolytes had left me less willing than usual to turn the other cheek. They had lowered my threshold of anger and raised my tolerance for violence.

  Here was a perfect illustration of why you must always choose carefully the people with whom you hang out.

  Poised on a six-inch ledge, my back to the murky pool, holding with one hand to the lip of the drain, I could not have a taste of revenge without putting myself at too much risk. If I tried to fire Datura’s pistol at Andre, the recoil would surely upset my precarious balance, and I would fall backward into the catch basin.

  I did not know how deep the water might be, but more to the point, I didn’t know what junk lay just below the surface. The way my luck had been waxing and waning lately, mostly waning, I would fall onto the broken hardwood handle of a shovel, splintered and sharp enough to put an end to Dracula, or the rusted tines of a pitchfork, or a couple of spear-point ir
on fence staves, or maybe a collection of Japanese samurai swords.

  Unharmed by the single shot that I had gotten off, Andre would reach the top of the drain and see me impaled in the catch basin. I would discover that, brutish as he appeared to be, he possessed a jolly laugh. As I died, he would speak his first word, in Datura’s voice: Loser.

  So I left the gun at the small of my back and made my way around the ledge to the farther side of the room, where the highest of the exit drains lay an inch or two above my head, four feet higher than the one from which I had just extracted myself.

  The dirty water cascading out of the high inflow pipes kicked up spray when it met the pool, splashing my jeans to mid thigh. But I couldn’t get any filthier or hardly any more miserable.

  As soon as that thought crossed my mind, I tried to reel it back because it seemed like a challenge to the universe. No doubt inside of ten minutes, I would be astonishingly filthier and immensely more miserable than I was at that moment.

  I reached overhead, got a two-hand grip on the lip of the new drain, toed the wall, muscled myself up and in.

  Ensconced in this new warren, I considered waiting until Andre appeared at the mouth of the tunnel that I had left, and shooting him from my elevated position. For a guy who had been so reluctant even to handle firearms earlier this same day, I had developed an unseemly eagerness to pump my enemies full of lead.

  The flaw in my plan immediately became clear to me. Andre had a gun of his own. He would be cautious about leaving that lower tunnel, and when I fired at him, he would fire back.

  All of these concrete walls, more ricochets, more earsplitting noise…

  I didn’t have sufficient ammunition to keep him pinned down until the water rose into his drain and forced him to retreat. The best thing I could do was keep moving.

  The tunnel into which I had climbed would be the last of the three outflow drains to take water. In an ordinary storm, it would probably remain dry, but not in this deluge. The level of the pool below rose visibly, minute by minute.

  Happily, this new tunnel was of greater diameter than the previous one, perhaps four feet. I would not have to crawl. I could proceed at a stoop and make good time.

  I didn’t know where that progress would take me, but I was game for a change of scenery.

  As I gathered myself off the floor and into the aforementioned stoop, a shrill twittering arose in the chamber behind me. Andre didn’t strike me as a guy who would twitter, and at once I knew the source of the cries: bats.

  FIFTY-SIX

  HAIL IN THE DESERT IS A RARITY, BUT ONCE in a while, a Mojave storm can deliver an icy pelting to the land.

  If hail had fallen outside, then as soon as I felt boils forming on my neck and face, I could be certain that God had chosen to amuse Himself by restaging the ten plagues of Egypt upon my beleaguered person.

  I don’t think that bats were one of the Biblical plagues, though they should have been. If memory serves me, instead of bats, frogs terrorized Egypt.

  Large numbers of angry frogs won’t get your blood pumping half as fast as will a horde of incensed flying rodents. This truth calls into question the deity’s skill as a dramatist.

  When the frogs died, they bred lice, which was the third plague. This from the same Creator who painted the sky blood-red over Sodom and Gomorrah, rained fire and brimstone on the cities, overthrew every habitation in which their people tried to hide, and broke every building stone as though it were an egg.

  Circling the catch basin on the ledge and levering myself into the highest tunnel, I had not pointed the light directly overhead. Evidently a multitude of leathery-winged sleepers had depended from the ceiling, quietly dreaming.

  I don’t know what I did to disturb them, if anything. Night had fallen not long ago. Perhaps this was the usual time at which they woke, stretched their wings, and flew off to snare themselves in little girls’ hair.

  As one, they raised their shrill voices. In that instant, even as I finished rising into a stoop, I dropped flat, and folded my arms over my head.

  They departed their man-made cave by the highest of the out-flow drains. This route would never entirely fill with water and would always offer at least a partially unobstructed exit.

  If I’d been asked to estimate the size of their community as they passed over me, I would have said “thousands.” To the same question an hour later, I would have replied “hundreds.” In truth, they numbered fewer than one hundred, perhaps only fifty or sixty.

  Reflected off the curved concrete walls, the rustle of their wings sounded like crackling cellophane, the way movie sound-effects specialists used to rumple the stuff to imitate all-devouring fire. They didn’t stir up much of a breeze, hardly an eddy, but brought an ammonial odor, which they carried away with them.

  A few fluttered against my arms, with which I protected my head and face, brushed like feathers across the backs of my hands, which should have made it easy to imagine that they were only birds, but which instead brought to mind swarming insects—cockroaches, centipedes, locusts—so I had bats for real and bugs in the mind. Locusts had been the eighth of Egypt’s ten plagues.

  Rabies.

  Having read somewhere that a quarter of any colony of bats is infected with the virus, I waited to be bitten viciously, repeatedly. I didn’t sustain a single nip.

  Although none of them bit me, a couple crapped on me in passing, sort of like a casual insult. The universe had heard and accepted my challenge: I was now filthier and more miserable than I had been ten minutes previously.

  I rose into a stoop again and followed the descending drain away from the catch basin. Somewhere ahead, and not too far, I would find a manhole or another kind of exit from the system. Two hundred yards, I assured myself, three hundred at most.

  Between here and there, of course, would be the Minotaur. The Minotaur fed on human flesh. “Yeah,” I muttered aloud, “but only the flesh of virgins.” Then I remembered that I was a virgin.

  The flashlight revealed a Y in the tunnel, immediately ahead. The branch to the left continued to descend. The passage to the right fed the one I’d been following from the catch basin, and because it rose, I figured it would lead me closer to the surface and to a way out.

  I had gone only twenty or thirty yards when, of course, I heard the bats returning. They had soared out into the night, discovered a tempest raging, and had fled at once back to their cozy subterranean haven.

  Because I doubted that I would escape a second confrontation unbitten, I reversed directions with an agility born of panic and ran, hunched like a troll. Returning to the down-bound tunnel, I went to the right, away from the catch basin, and hoped the bats would remember their address.

  When their frenzied flapping crescendoed and then diminished behind me, I came to a halt and, gasping, leaned against the wall.

  Maybe Andre would be on the ledge, crossing from the lowest drain to the highest, when the bats returned. Maybe they would frighten him, and he would fall into the catch basin, skewering himself on those samurai swords.

  That fantasy brought a brief glow to my heart, but only brief because I couldn’t believe that Andre would be afraid of bats. Or afraid of anything.

  An ominous sound arose that I had not heard before, a rough rumbling, as if an enormous slab of granite was being dragged across another slab. It seemed to be coming from between me and the catch basin.

  Usually this meant that a secret door in a solid-stone wall would roll open, allowing the evil emperor to make a grand entrance in knee-high boots and a cape.

  Hesitantly, I moved back toward the Y, cocking my head one way, then the other, trying to determine the source of the sound.

  The rumble grew louder. Now I perceived it as less like stone sliding over stone than like friction between iron and rock.

  When I pressed a hand to the wall of the tunnel, I could feel vibrations passing through the concrete.

  I ruled out an earthquake, which would have produced jolts a
nd lurches instead of this prolonged grinding sound and consistent level of shaking.

  The rumbling stopped.

  Under my hand, vibrations were no longer coursing through the concrete.

  A rushing sound. A sudden draft as something pushed air out of the nearby ascending branch, stirring my hair.

  Somewhere a sluice gate had opened.

  The air had been displaced by a surge of water. A torrent exploded out of the ascending branch, knocked me off my feet, and swept me down into the dark bowels of the flood-control system.

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  TOSSED, TURNED, TUMBLED, SPUN, I SPIRALED along the tunnel like a bullet along a rifle barrel.

  At first the flashlight, strapped to my left arm, revealed the undulant gray tide, lent glitter to the spray, brightened the dirty foam. But the spelunker’s cuff failed, peeled away from my arm, and took the light with it.

  Down through the blackness, bulleting, I wrapped my arms around myself, tried to keep my legs together. With limbs flailing, I’d be more likely to break a wrist, an ankle, an elbow, by knocking against the wall.

  I tried to stay on my back, face up, rocketing along with the fatalism of an Olympic bobsledder whistling down a luge chute, but the torrent repeatedly, insistently rolled me, pushing my face under the flow. I fought for breath, jackknifing my body to reorient it, gasping when I got my head above the flux.

  I swallowed water, broke through the surface, gagged and coughed and desperately inhaled the wet air. Considering my helplessness in its embrace, this modest flow might as well have been Niagara sweeping me toward its killing cataracts.

  How long the aquatic torture continued, I can’t say, but having been physically taxed before entering this flume ride, I grew tired. Very tired. My limbs became heavy, and my neck stiffened from the strain of the constant struggle to keep my head above water. My back ached, I seemed to have wrenched my left shoulder, and with each effort to find air, my reserves of strength diminished until I was perilously close to complete exhaustion.