Odd Interlude #2 Read online

  Now I fully understand why she has no fear of Orc. Or perhaps of anything.

  At the end of the hallway, head cocked and curious, Boo stands before the sealed pair of stainless-steel doors.

  Jolie says, “This time, with you here, if Hiskott tries to possess me while I’m beyond his reach, and he can’t find me … well, then he’ll kill me as soon as I reappear.”

  “So you’ll stay here until I can take him down.”

  “I can’t stay here forever and ever,” she says.

  “And I don’t have forever. Today. It’s got to be done today—and sooner than later.”

  She has restrained her curiosity until now. “Why can’t he get into your mind and possess you?”

  “I don’t know, Jolie. But I always have been hard-headed.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “Maybe I just don’t have much of a mind for him to get his tentacles around.”

  “Or that. He says he can’t access the woman with you, either.”

  “That’s good to know.”

  “Who is she?”

  Getting to my feet, I say, “Now that is the million-dollar question.”

  “You don’t know who she is?”

  “I just met her yesterday. I know her first name. That’s a start. In a year or two, I’ll know her last name, if she has a last name, which she says she doesn’t.”

  Rising to her feet, Jolie says, “Are you always a little silly?”

  “I’m usually a lot silly.”

  “It’ll get you killed in the Corner.”

  “Maybe not. So far, being at least a little silly has kept me alive.”

  “He’ll have them all searching for you, anyone who doesn’t have to be up at the diner or the service station. You can’t go anywhere in the Corner without being seen.”

  “Well, I’m just an ordinary, everyday, nothing-special fry cook. People tend to look right through guys like me.”

  She stares at me solemnly for a beat, but then she proves to be still capable of a small smile.

  I would give just about anything to hear Jolie laugh one day. I don’t think she’s laughed in a long time.

  At the end of the hallway, my ghost dog walks through the steel doors.

  NINE

  Before I leave the fearless girl with Orc the inhuman mummy in the subterranean passageway between the possessed land of Harmony and the unknown government-sponsored atrocities of Wyvern (which makes this already as unusual a sentence as any I’ve ever written in these memoirs), she tells me one more important thing that I should know before I try to beard the lion in his den.

  And speaking of peculiar language, why do we say beard the lion instead of confront the lion? The image it brings to mind is of me crawling recklessly into a cave to use spirit gum to attach a fake beard to a sleeping feline of daunting size. Because no lion is ever going to be induced to play Abraham Lincoln in a stage play, there would seem to be no reason to glue a beard on a lion other than to poke fun at it and laugh at its humiliation as the other lions mock it mercilessly. I’m sure that Ozzie Boone knows the origin of that expression, and no doubt our finest universities are crawling with intellectuals who have spent their entire academic careers writing papers about bearding lions—not to mention thick, learned volumes about the derivation of such sayings as belling the cat and spanking the monkey—but from time to time I am saddened to think that I will almost certainly not live long enough or have sufficient leisure to research such peculiarities of language myself, which I might enjoy doing.

  Anyway, the one additional thing of importance that Jolie has to tell me before I leave her is this: Although Hiskott is secretive and self-contained, he doesn’t live alone in the big house on the hill. Over the years, he has read the memories—and sometimes taken temporary control—of guests who stay in the motor-court cottages, and on three occasions, he has asserted permanent dominion over them and has taken them into his house, whereafter they are never seen again. In every case, these seem to be individuals who are pretty much loners, without families who might miss them. After stripping the plates off those people’s cars, Donny parks them in the deep shade of a grove of oaks, halfway down the hills between the motor court and the family’s houses, where they are cannibalized for parts as the service station needs them and are allowed otherwise to fall into ruin. Food and anything else Hiskott demands is brought to him by the family, but no one has cleaned for him in over three years; therefore none of the Harmonys has seen the inside of the house since the first of those three luckless souls walked zombie-like through the front door.

  “So it seems they do the cleaning,” Jolie says. “But we’re pretty sure they aren’t just used like we are. He’s got some other purpose for them, which is why he never lets us see them.”

  “Maybe he uses them as his Praetorian Guard, his ultimate protectors, in case one of your family should ever slip the leash and try to kill him.”

  “Like bodyguards.” Clearly she long ago came to this conclusion and has given it considerable thought without finding it a fully satisfactory explanation. “But why wouldn’t he be just as worried that one of them might slip the leash?”

  So many things in my continuing education are learned by going where I have to go and doing what I have to do. Therefore, my only answer is: “I guess I’ll find out.”

  Jolie surprises me by throwing her arms around me and pressing one ear against my chest, as though listening to my heart to judge the strength, steadiness, and truth of it. She is more than a foot shorter than I am, so slight for such a strong girl.

  I return the hug, suddenly certain that I will fail her, though since childhood I have expected myself to fail much more often than I actually do.

  “I’ve waited five years for you,” she says. “I knew you’d come one day. I always knew.”

  Perhaps to her I’m a knight in shining armor who cannot fail to win the day. I know that I am less capable and less noble than the knights of folklore and fairy tales. My only armor is my belief that life has meaning and that, when my last sun has set and my last moon has risen, when the dawn comes that marks the moment when I am born with the dead, there will be mercy. If thinking me a knight nourishes her hope, however, I might count myself a success for having done this if nothing more.

  When we step back from each other, she has no tears to wipe away, because she is beyond easy sentimentality and too tough to cry for herself. Her eyes are lotus-leaf green, but she is no lotus-eater; she has survived not by forgetting but by remembering. I see in her a diligent accountant who records the puppetmaster’s every offense in a mental ledger. When the day comes to settle accounts, she will know what his payment must be. Although she is young and small, she will do whatever she can to help her family wring from him the full and terrible balance that he owed.

  “I’ll do my best to get him,” I promise. “But my best might not be good enough.”

  “Whatever,” she says. “You won’t just run and save yourself. I know you won’t. You run toward things, not away from them. I don’t know who you are, except you’re not Harry Potter. There’s something about you, I don’t know what it is, but it’s something, and it’s good.”

  Only a worse fool than I would reply to that, for any response would diminish either her or me, or both of us. Such genuine trust, so sweetly expressed, bears witness to an innocence in the human heart that endures even in this broken world and that longs to ring the bell backward and undo the days of history until all such trust would be justified in a world started anew and as it always should have been.

  “Jolie, I’ll need a flashlight to find my way out. But I don’t want to leave you here without one, in case these lights go off again and stay off.”

  “I’ve got two.” She fishes the second mini flashlight from a pocket of her denim jacket and presents it to me.

  “The big pipe that we followed up through the hills and out of the Corner—do other tributary drains feed it?”

  “Yeah.
Five. When you’re going back—three to your left, two on your right. You can’t walk upright in any of them. You have to stoop. Sometimes you have to crawl.”

  “Tell me where they go.”

  “Nowhere. At the end of each, it’s been sealed off. I don’t know why or when. But storm water hasn’t been flowing through those drains in a long time, maybe ever since the people at Fort Wyvern connected their escape hatch to the system—if it is an escape hatch.”

  “So I can’t go anywhere except back to the beach.”

  “No. But I don’t think they’ll be waiting there for you. See … well, there’s something else. But if I tell you, I don’t want it to be another weight on your mind. You’ve got enough to worry about.”

  “Tell me anyway. I love to worry. I’m aces at it.”

  She hesitates. From a hip pocket of her jeans, she extracts a slim wallet, flips it open, and shows me a photograph of a handsome boy of about eight.

  “Is that Maxy?”

  “Yeah. Hiskott said Maxy had to die ’cause he was too beautiful. He really was a cute little boy. So we’re supposed to think it was envy because Hiskott has changed into something super-ugly. But I don’t think that’s why he killed Maxy.”

  Even as tough as she has become, Jolie is silenced by grief. A tremor of the mouth tests her composure, but she presses her lips together. She folds the lost boy away and returns him to her pocket.

  “Lately,” she continues, “he’s been taunting all of us, using my family to tell me I’m beautiful, more beautiful than Maxy. He’s trying to terrify me and torment all the others with the thought that he’ll use them to beat me and rip me apart the way he used them to kill Maxy. But it’s a lie.”

  “What’s a lie?”

  “I’m not beautiful.”

  “But Jolie … you really are.”

  She shakes her head. “I don’t see it. I don’t believe it. I know it’s a lie. I can’t be beautiful. Not after what I did.”

  “What do you mean?”

  With one foot, she pushes a folded moving blanket close to Orc. She kneels on it, staring down into the creature’s shriveled face.

  When she speaks, her voice is controlled, allowing no sharp emotions that might be suitable to her words, colored only by a quiet melancholy. “It starts, and it’s horrible. I’m screaming at them to stop, pleading. One after another of them going at Maxy—my family, his family. And they were trying to restrain each other. They were trying. But Hiskott moves so fast, from this one to that one, you never know where he’s going next. Such violent kicking, punching, gouging. Maxy’s blood … on everyone. I can’t stop them, Maxy’s almost dead, and I’ve got to run away, I can’t bear to see the end of it.”

  With no evident distaste, with a deliberate tenderness, Jolie lifts the hand with which the briefly animated, mummified cadaver had tapped the floor.

  Examining the wickedly long fingers, she says, “I start to run but then I’m standing over Maxy, and I don’t know where I got the knife that’s in my hand. Big knife. He’s not quite dead. Bewildered, half conscious. He’s just eight. I’m nine. He recognizes me. His eyes clear for a moment. I stab him once and then again. And again. And that’s the end of him.”

  Her silence has such substance that for a moment I’m not able to force words into it. But then: “It wasn’t you, Jolie.”

  “In a way, it was.”

  “No, it wasn’t.”

  “In a way,” she insists.

  “He was controlling you.”

  In that awful voice of tightly tethered sorrow, in words too mature for her age, she says, “But I saw it. Lived it. I felt flesh and bone resist the knife. I saw him seeing me when the life went out of his eyes.”

  My sense is that if I drop to my knees beside her and try to comfort her, she will not allow herself to be hugged as before. She will thrash away from me, and the bond between us will be damaged. This is her grief, to which she clings in honor of her murdered cousin, and this is her guilt that, although unearned, is perhaps proof to her that in spite of what she was made to do, she is still human. I know a great deal about grief and guilt, but while this is like unto my grief and guilt, it is not mine, and I have no right to tell her what she should feel.

  Lowering the monster’s hand to the floor, she returns again to the study of its face, in particular the large sockets at the bottoms of which lie the mottled and furred tissue that is what remains of its eyes, like the once flourishing but now fossilized mold at the bottom of a long-dry well. Again the cove lighting flutters, does not go out this time, but summons throbs of shadow from those bony orbits, so that it seems a pair of eyes repeatedly roll left to right and back again, entirely black eyes like those of Death might be when he shows up on a doorstep with an eviction notice.

  “I’m not beautiful. That’s not the reason he’s getting ready to kill me. During the past few months, there are times when he seeks me and can’t find me because I’m here. And later, when he takes me and reads me, in my memories it seems I was always somewhere ordinary where he should have found me. For a while he thought the fault was in him, but he now suspects I’ve learned how to hide a thing or two that I don’t want him to know.”

  The power to shut out the puppeteer from even a small part of her memory should be a hopeful development, but she seems to take no hope from it.

  “And is he right? Have you learned to hide a thing or two?”

  “They say you should study languages when you’re just a kid, because you get them a lot faster than when you’re grown up. I think it’s that way with figuring how to fake out Hiskott. I can’t hide much, but a little more month by month, including this place, where I go to escape him. I don’t believe any of the adults have been able to do that, but I think Maxy might have been about where I am now when he was killed. Maybe Hiskott suspected Maxy. Maybe he was afraid Maxy might learn to resist being taken, so he murdered him.”

  “You think you could learn to keep him out, deny him control?”

  “No. Not for years if ever. And he won’t let me live that long. But there’s another thing I did.”

  She lightly taps a forefinger against the points of Orc’s lower teeth, moving left to right along the cadaver’s sharkish grin.

  If Orc’s hand can abruptly drum fingers against the floor, its jaws, which seem to be locked open by withered tendons and shrunken muscles, might snap shut on her tender fingertips.

  I consider warning her. But she surely has thought of the same danger, and she will ignore me. Something about this moment suggests that it is neither Orc’s existence nor its origins that intrigues Jolie, nor any particular feature of its demonic face. Instead, brow furrowed, testing the cutting edges of her teeth with her tongue as she assesses Orc’s array of daggers with her finger, she seems to be contemplating a question that worries her.

  And then she puts her concern into words: “Does a monster know it’s a monster?”

  Her question appears simple, and some might find it ridiculous because, as modern thinkers know, psychology and theories of social injustice can explain the motives of all who ever commit an evil act, revealing them to be in fact victims themselves; therefore such things as monsters do not exist—no Minotaurs, no werewolves, no orcs, and likewise no Hitlers, no Mao Tse-tungs. But I can guess why she is asking the question, and in this context it is a complex inquiry of profound importance to her.

  Jolie deserves a thoughtful and nuanced answer, although in our current circumstances, a textured reply will only encourage in her further self-doubt. We don’t have time for such uncertainty because it reliably breeds indecision, and indecision is one of the mothers of failure.

  “Yes,” I assure her. “A monster knows it’s a monster.”

  “Always and everywhere?”

  “Yes. A monster not only knows that it’s a monster, but it also enjoys being a monster.”

  She meets my eyes. “How do you know?”

  Indicating Orc, I say, “This isn’t my first monste
r. I’ve had experience with all kinds of them. Mostly the human kind. And the human kind especially revel in their evil.”

  Returning her attention to the teeth, the girl seems to consider what I have said. To my relief, she stops risking a bite and touches instead the creature’s large, bulbous brow, where the crinkled skin sheds a few flakes under her forefinger.

  “Anyway,” she says, wiping her finger on her jeans, “there’s another thing I did, besides keeping from him the place I go when he can’t find me. I imagined this secret cave, hidden by brush, high in the hills, as far from the culvert on the beach as you can get and still be in the Corner. And yesterday, when he took me for a while, I let him see the cave in my memory, as if it were real, but not where it’s supposed to be. So now that he’s ready to kill me, maybe he’ll waste time using some of the family to search for the cave.”

  “How can you be sure he’s ready … for that?”

  “Too much is slipping out of his control. You know about him, so he’s got to kill you. Then he’ll kill the lady with you because he can’t control her. He was going to kill me in a day or two, before you showed up, so he’ll just go ahead and do it as soon as he’s finished with you two.”

  Annamaria seems to have uncanny knowledge superior to mine. She says she’s safe in the Corner. Maybe. Maybe not. I wish I could be in two places at once.

  “I’ll get him first.”

  “I think you might. But if you don’t … the three of us will be buried in the meadow beside Maxy, with no coffins and no headstones.”

  She gets to her feet once more and stands with her hands on her hips. In her skull T-shirt and rivet-decorated jacket, she looks both defiant and vulnerable.

  “If Hiskott gets you first,” she says, “what I need is a little extra time while he’s looking for the cave that doesn’t exist, just a little extra time to get ready to be killed. I don’t want to beg or scream. I don’t want to cry if I can help it. When he uses my family to kill me, I want to be able to keep telling them how much I love them, that I don’t blame them, that I’ll pray for them.”