Odd Interlude (Complete) Read online

  She plays the light over the architrave before stepping into that room. “You had to go through these two air locks to escape to the coast. They weren’t taking any chances.”

  I follow her. “They who?”

  “I’ve got some ideas,” she replies, but offers no more as she leads me across the chamber to another four steps that ascend to a third pried-open door.

  Another big truck passes overhead, followed by lighter traffic, but the vibrations no longer disturb me. I am troubled now by an even stronger premonition that ahead waits an unequaled abomination, an evil so pure, so perfectly vicious and thoroughly unwholesome that it belongs in a deeper level of Hell than any Dante ever imagined.

  Past that third door, Jolie says, “From here on, there’s power,” and she presses a wall switch.

  Warm light springs from tubes hidden in coves along both sides of a corridor that is as long as a football field, about twelve feet wide, maybe eight feet high. Every surface is pale yellow, shiny, and seems to be seamlessly plasticized.

  The air is warmer here, and it has an astringent chemical smell that isn’t unpleasant.

  “When I first pried open that third set of doors,” she says, “it was a lot warmer in here than this, and the smell was a lot stronger. I first thought the air might be bad for me, like toxic or something, but it doesn’t irritate my throat or eyes, and if the stuff is gonna make me grow a second head, it hasn’t happened yet.”

  Compared to the rooms preceding it, this space looks welcoming, but my presentiment of evil remains acute, and I’m glad that I have the pistol.

  The girl says, “The next doors are powered-up and locked. Can’t be pried open. All these barriers. So maybe there’s a million bars of gold beyond it or the secret recipe for McDonald’s special sauce. This hallway is as far as we can go.”

  About halfway to those distant doors, a figure lies on the hallway floor. At first it might be mistaken for a man, but then not.

  As we approach the sprawled form, the girl says, “Whatever’s beyond those last doors, if they are the last ones, there must not be anyone left over there. If anyone was over there, they wouldn’t just leave the thing here so long. They’d take it away.”

  I can’t tell for certain how tall the creature might have been in life or exactly what weight, because it appears to have mummified in the greater heat that she mentioned and in the chemical-laden air. As a guess, I would say it stood over seven feet and weighed short of three hundred pounds. But it is radically dehydrated, skin shrunken over its lanky body, over its long hands, and over the once-fearsome features of its huge head, skin as wrinkled as a gray linen suit worn hard and until threadbare and never once pressed.

  What I can determine is that it is a primate, legs longer than its arms, more sophisticated than gorillas and other anthropoids, with a spinal curve like that of Homo sapiens, capable of standing fully erect. But there the similarity to a man ends, for this thing has long four-knuckled fingers, five per hand, and two three-knuckled thumbs per hand. Its toes are as long as its fingers, six per foot, with one thumblike toe in each half dozen.

  “I call him Orc,” the girl says.

  “Why?”

  “Well, I had to call him something, and Bob didn’t seem right.”

  I don’t know her yet, but I think I’m going to like her.

  “Orc because he makes me think of the orcs in The Lord of the Rings.”

  Its skull, to which the flesh of the face has been shriveled and shrink-wrapped by the heat, is nearly the size and shape of a watermelon. The eyes have collapsed back into the desiccated brain, but judging by the sockets, they must have been the size of large lemons, set not horizontally like human eyes, but vertically. The remaining nose cartilage and a mass of shriveled tissue draped over it suggest a proboscis like that of an anteater, though three hooked lengths of hornlike structures, each two inches long, bristle from that portion of the face, unlike anything an anteater can boast. The lips have shrunk from the teeth, which are reminiscent of a wolf’s oral weaponry. The mouth cracks uncommonly wide to allow the fullest use of that wickedly sharp and still-gleaming array of cutlery.

  The presentiment of evil that has had its claws in me for most of the journey from the beach has not faded, but the reason for it is not this cadaver. Whatever alarms me is behind the closed doors at the end of this corridor, either living specimens related to this corpse or something worse.

  One more thing strikes me as important. This carcass appears to be as dry as a mass of parchment, but no stains or time-hardened residue of decomposing tissues mars the floor under it. Where did the bodily fluids go, the dissolving and putrefying fats?

  “I’ve been studying old Orc for a few months,” the girl says.

  “Studying him?”

  “I can learn something from him. Something that’ll help us. I’m sure I can.”

  “But … studying him here alone?”

  No more than six feet from the body are a few folded, quilted blue moving blankets that Jolie has apparently provided for her comfort. She sits on one and folds her legs Indian-style.

  “Orc doesn’t scare me. Nothing much can scare me after five years of Dr. Hiskott.”

  “Who?”

  The girl spells it for me. “The creep lives in what used to be our house. We’re his animals to torment. Slaves, toys.”

  “The puppetmaster.”

  “Talking to you on the porch, Mom couldn’t speak his name. He knows when it’s used. But here I’m beyond the bastard’s range. He can’t hear me say how much I hate him, how much I want to kill him really hard.”

  I settle onto another folded moving blanket, facing her.

  Jolie dresses to express the rebellion in which she dares not engage: dirty sneakers, jeans, a worn-denim jacket appliquéd with decorative copper rivets to suggest chain mail, and a black T-shirt on which a white skull grins.

  In spite of that outfit and the settled anger that hardens her face, her tender beauty is greater than her mother has been able to convey. She is one of those girls who, though a tomboy, would always be chosen to play an angel in the church Christmas pageant and would be cast as the secular saint in any school play. Her beauty has no significant quality of nascent sexuality, but rather she is luminous and projects a goodness and an innocence that is a reflection of that profound grace we sometimes glimpse in nature and from which we take assurance that the world is a place of exquisite purpose.

  “Dr. Hiskott. Where did he come from, Jolie?”

  “He says Moonlight Bay. That’s a couple miles up the coast. But we think he really came from Fort Wyvern.”

  “The army base?”

  “Yeah. Just inland from Moonlight Bay—and from here. Humongous.”

  “How humongous?”

  “Like 134,000 acres. A small city. Civilian workers, military guys, their families—forty thousand people used to live there. Not counting.”

  “Not counting what?”

  “Things like Orc.”

  The lighting in the cove flutters, dims, goes out, and comes back on before I can bolt to my feet.

  “Don’t freak,” the girl says sweetly. “It happens now and then.”

  “How many nows and how many thens?”

  “It never stays dark more than a couple seconds. Besides, I’ve got a flashlight, you’ve got a gun.”

  As I am not one to unnecessarily frighten children and as I wish not to further frighten myself, I refrain from suggesting that what comes for us in the dark might find my pistol as unimpressive as her mini flashlight.

  “Anyway,” she says, “they closed Wyvern after the end of the Cold War, before I was born. People say there were secret projects at Wyvern, new weapons, experiments.”

  Looking at the mummified creature, I ask, “What experiments?”

  “No one knows for sure. Weird stuff. Maybe messing around with genes, crap like that. Some say there’s still something going on there, even though it’s officially closed.”

&
nbsp; A bass electronic noise pulses along the hall, a whummm-whummm-whummm that seems to stir the marrow in my bones.

  “That happens sometimes, too,” the girl says. “I don’t know what it is. Don’t worry about it. Nothing ever happens after it.”

  I look toward the sealed doors she has been unable to open. “You think this connects with … someplace in Wyvern?”

  “Well, I don’t think it’s a space-warp shortcut to Disney World. Anyway, Dr. Hiskott is sick when he checks into the motor court. He seems exhausted, confused, his hands shaking. My aunt Lois registers him. When he takes his driver’s license from his wallet, he scatters a bunch of cards on the counter. Aunt Lois helps gather them up. She says one was a photo ID for Fort Wyvern. Before she married my uncle Greg, back when Wyvern was still open, she worked there.”

  “Why would he still carry a card years after the place closed?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  I don’t have to be a mentalist to read, in her direct green gaze, that we both know the answer to my question.

  “Hiskott stays in his cottage three days, won’t let the maid change the linens or clean. And then he wasn’t just Dr. Hiskott anymore. He was … something else, and he took control.”

  The electronic sound comes again, a longer series of notes than before: Whummm-whummm-whummm-whummm-whummm.…

  Although shriveled, shrunken, mummified, and long dead, the bony fingers of Orc’s left hand tap the floor, making a rattle like dancing dice, and from its gaping mouth comes an eager keening.

  The lights flutter and go out.

  PART TWO

  TWO-PART HARMONY

  Secret, and self-contained,

  and solitary as an oyster.

  —Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

  EIGHT

  Darkness has its charms, and even in our own hometowns, the world at night can be as enchanting as any foreign port with its exotic architectures. Between dusk and dawn, the commonplace is full of visual delights that only the moon, the stars, and richly textured shadows can provide.

  But pitch-black gloom offers nothing except the fevered images of our imagination. And when we share absolute lightlessness with a grotesque mummy that makes a squalling-cat sound through its mouthful of buzz-saw teeth, the desire for light becomes so intense that we might set ourselves afire to provide it, if we had a match.

  Fortunately, I have no match and am spared self-immolation, but Jolie Harmony has her mini flashlight, to which she resorts (if you want my considered opinion) much too slowly under the circumstances. When at last she does switch on that little torch, she aims it at me, or, more accurately, at my knees, as I am sitting on the floor of the corridor when the lights go out and the desiccated corpse begins to shriek, but then I erupt to my feet as abruptly as a spring-loaded novelty toothpick dispenser offering an afterdinner wooden probe. The beam is so narrow that it illumines only one of my knees, and instead of shifting it to her left, where the monstrous remains were last seen, the girl angles it upward, to my face, as if she’s forgotten who she brought here and needs to confirm my identity.

  Jolie is twelve and I’m almost twenty-two, so it is incumbent upon me to act like the adult in the room—or the corridor. I must not scream like a little girl, because the little girl herself isn’t screaming. Before this adventure reaches an end, being human, I will no doubt have made a fool of myself in any number of ways; therefore, the longer I can delay behaving idiotically, the less humiliating it will be when I have to face her for our good-byes just before I ride off into the sunset with my faithful companion, Tonto. So with more aplomb than I expect, I blink into the light and in measured tones I say, “Show me the mummy.”

  The beam travels along my stiff arms to the pistol that I have in a two-hand grip, lowers from the pistol to the floor, and sweeps a few feet to the left, revealing that my blind aim is off-target. The creature, for which I have no biological classification, is still lying on its back, in the withered posture of a juiceless death. The only part of it that moves is its left hand, the bony fingers rattling against the floor as if in life it was a pianist and still longs to pound out some hot jazz on a keyboard.

  My understanding thus far has been that this fallen beast is a dry husk surrounding a brittle skeleton that encloses the dust to which all creatures—those of us who are monsters and those of us who aren’t—ultimately return. I like that understanding and can cope with it. This seeking hand is too much.

  I stand over the thing, holding the pistol, pleased to see that my hands are shaking less than might be expected, certainly less than those of an octogenarian with familial tremors.

  The cove lights along both sides of the corridor come on, and in that same moment, the mummy’s caterwauling ceases. Its tapping hand falls still.

  As Jolie switches off her mini flashlight and puts it on the floor beside her, I wonder aloud, “What the hell just happened?”

  She’s still sitting cross-legged on her folded moving blanket. She shrugs. “It never amounts to more than that.”

  “You said nothing ever happens after the whummm-whummm-whummm thing.”

  “I forgot about this.”

  “How could you forget such a thing?”

  “It doesn’t happen a whole lot. It’s rare. The hand business is like a postmortem reflex or something.”

  “Totally dehydrated mummies don’t have postmortem reflexes.”

  “Well, it’s something,” she says. “I’ve thought about cutting Orc open, you know, dissecting him, see what’s in there.”

  “That’s a bad idea.”

  “Orc is harmless. And I might learn something important.”

  “Yeah, you’ll learn Orc isn’t harmless. And what about the way it was screaming?”

  “Wasn’t screaming,” the girl says. “Mouth didn’t move. Chest didn’t rise and fall. And if you think about it, that sound was electronic like the whummm but different, freakier. What seems to make sense is that something broadcast the sound, and Orc’s dead vocal cords or its bones or something inside it is maybe like a receiver that just happened to pick up the transmission.”

  She sits there on her blanket, like little Miss Muffet on a tuffet, except that if a spider sits down beside her, she won’t be scared away. She’ll just crush it in her hand.

  I lower my pistol, giving Orc the benefit of the doubt. “Good grief, kid, the first time the lights went out and you heard it, you were here alone?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you came back?”

  “Like I told you, after years of Hiskott, I’m not afraid of much. I’ve seen lots that’s terrible. I saw my cousin Maxy … murdered by Hiskott using my family to do the killing.”

  She has suffered so much, and that sorrows me. But she has been strong in the face of unthinkable adversity, and that inspires me.

  “Please sit down, Mr. Potter.”

  “How do you know my name?”

  “It’s what you told Hiskott when he was controlling Uncle Donny. And he told us to stay away from you.”

  I almost reveal my true identity to her. Then I realize that if she leaves this subterranean refuge and returns to the Corner, within the puppetmaster’s range, he might seize control of the girl, read her memory, and know my real name.

  They say that voodoo priests, witches, and warlocks can’t lay a spell upon you if they don’t know your true name. That’s probably superstitious hogwash. Anyway, this Hiskott guy isn’t a voodoo priest or a witch or a warlock.

  Nevertheless, I decide to keep my true name to myself for the time being.

  Until the recent scare gave me my first white hairs, I had been sitting on the floor, facing the girl, with the mummified monstrosity a few feet to my right. Now I reposition the blanket and sit with a clear view of both Jolie and Orc.

  “You said those three days in his cottage, Hiskott was sick and then he changed, he wasn’t just Hiskott anymore. What do you mean—that you don’t think he had this power when he checked in, that it
came to him somehow while he was staying there?”

  Now Jolie, who was seven when life in the Corner changed, relies on family legend, which has been crafted and polished around dinner tables and firesides, in days of despondency and days of fragile but enduring hope, when they dared not discuss rebellion and, instead, told and retold one another the stories of their years of oppression, thereby transforming their suffering into a tale of endurance from which they could draw courage.

  As that legend has it, Dr. Norris Hiskott arrives in a Mercedes S600, a far more high-end vehicle than what the average guest at their motor court drives. On first appearance, he seems to have been born for this day. Since dawn, a cold breeze has come off the sea, tinctured with an iodine scent from masses of decomposing seaweed that storm waves flung across near-shore rock formations two days earlier. The disturbing odor, the penetrating chill, and the curdled gray sky, lowering by the hour with a pending storm of predicted ferocity, have combined to raise in the Harmonys a mild, persistent disquiet. When registering Norris Hiskott in Cottage 9, Aunt Lois thinks it’s curious that he’s wearing Gucci loafers, expensive tailored slacks, a gold Rolex—and a hooded jersey tattered at the cuffs and stained as if he fished it out of a Dumpster. Although some people might feel the day is cold enough to justify gloves, the pair he’s wearing are as peculiar as the jersey. These are gardening gloves, and he does not take them off. Likewise, he keeps the hood up throughout the registration process. Aunt Lois thinks perhaps some kid would wear a hoodie indoors, but not usually a man of about fifty and not one of this man’s social position and sophistication. He seems furtive, as well, never making eye contact.

  From what Jolie previously said, I hadn’t inferred that the change in Hiskott that brought him this cruel power also altered him physically in some disastrous way. But this makes sense of his envy and of his too-beautiful-to-live decrees.

  Holed up in Cottage 9, he refuses maid service, on the pretense that he is gravely ill with the flu, yet he seems to have a healthy appetite, for he orders a lot of take-out from the diner. Leaving his door unlocked, he asks that the food be left on the small table beside the armchair in the sitting area, and he leaves money for the charges plus tip. Hiskott remains in the bathroom while the delivery is made.