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  “Neither suitable nor unsuitable, sir.”

  His eyes were blue, and when he narrowed them, they seemed to grow brighter, as if his squint compressed the color in them. “How come you rode through all that dangerous habitat of schemin’ men and all that wasteland crawlin’ with snakes and beasts, and you with no dang gun?”

  “I don’t like guns, Mr. Bullock.”

  “You don’t need to like one to know you got to have it. I don’t like gettin’ a colonoscopy every five years, but I grit my teeth and drop my drawers and get it done just the same.”

  “I’ve never had a colonoscopy, either.”

  “Well, you’re not of an age to need one. That there’s a joyful experience you got to earn by livin’ to my age. Anyways, around this here safe house, everyone’s got to have themselves a firearm, not just to keep in a drawer, but to carry at all times. Once we get you settled in, I’ll fix you up with the very thing you need. You had yourself some breakfast yet?”

  “More than some, sir. Just need a bed. I didn’t sleep last night.”

  “Then bring yourself on in the house and meet Maybelle. She’s my missus. You’ll like her. Everybody does. She’s a peach. We haven’t enjoyed a bit of company since that astronaut had to hide out here while we worked up a convincin’ new identity for him. Maybelle’s starved for better company than me.”

  Thirteen

  Maybelle Bullock was a pretty lady of about fifty, trim and blond. She reminded me of that long-ago actress Donna Reed, the way Miss Reed had looked in It’s a Wonderful Life. When we entered from the back porch, Maybelle was standing at the kitchen sink, peeling fresh peaches, wearing a housedress of the kind that few women wore in recent years, with saddle shoes and white socks.

  She didn’t at first favor me with a smile, but her handshake was firm and her manner welcoming. Her direct stare probed, as if the story of my life were written in my eyes in a few succinct lines that she could read.

  To her husband, she said, “He’s not fully smooth and blue, but he sure is close to it.”

  “I figured you’d see him that way,” said Deacon Bullock.

  “Don’t you?”

  “I’d be a fool to argue it.”

  In the seventh volume of these memoirs (this is the eighth), I have written about the mysterious organization into which I had been welcomed by Edie Fischer, who will appear before much longer in this book, as well. Although I’d been told by her and others that I was remarkably smoothed out and blue for someone my age, I had not been able to get from them an explanation of that apparent compliment. I was a novice among them, and evidently the full truth of who they were and what they hoped to achieve would be revealed to me only in stages, as I earned the right to more knowledge of them.

  Maybelle’s smile, when now it came, was as warm as any I had ever received, one of those that makes you feel like long-loved kin. She took my hand in both of hers, not to shake it again, but to squeeze it gently.

  She said, “It’s purest pleasure bein’ a help whatsoever way we can.”

  “Thank you, ma’am. I don’t want to be a bother.”

  “You couldn’t be a bother if you tried.” Picking up the paring knife once more, she said, “I’m makin’ a peach pie to have with lunch, your favorite.”

  I didn’t ask how she could know the variety of pie that I most enjoyed. She would tell me or she wouldn’t. Among these folks, a novice had to live by their rules, even if they chose not to share some of those rules with him.

  “Peach pie. That’s kind of you, Mrs. Bullock.”

  “Please, you call me Maybelle.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Thank you. But I’m afraid I’ll probably sleep right through lunch, not having slept last night. What I need most now is a bed.”

  “Then we’ll have us a late lunch or early dinner.”

  Deacon Bullock said, “He don’t got a gun.”

  His wife looked first astonished and then severely disapproving. “Why would a fine young man such as yourself not carry a gun?”

  “I don’t like them.”

  “Guns don’t feel nothin’ about you, one way or t’other. No fair reason for you to feel bad towards them.”

  “I guess that’s one way to look at it.”

  She picked up a pistol that had, until now, been lying on the counter on the other side of the basket of peaches. “Had this Colt since my weddin’ day.”

  “How long have you been married, ma’am?”

  She cast a loving look at her husband. “Be twenty-eight years come August nine. And only six bad days in all that wedded bliss.”

  Deacon Bullock’s grin went flatline. “Only five bad days by my calculation, sugar.”

  Picking up the paring knife to slice the peach that she had just peeled, his wife said, “Even if it was five by both counts, won’t all of them be the same five for each of us.”

  Mr. Bullock appeared mildly stricken. “How many of your six you think don’t match my five?”

  “I’d guess two.”

  “What two days did I think we was good and you felt we wasn’t? That’s goin’ to trouble my sleep till I figure it out.”

  Mrs. Bullock winked at me but spoke to her husband. “It’ll do you some good to reflect on it.”

  Taking off his Stetson and fanning his face, her husband said, “Guess I got my assignment for the day.”

  To me, his wife said, “From what I heard, whether you like guns or don’t, you got the skill and guts to use ’em.”

  “Unfortunately, it’s been necessary.”

  “So it will be again. What gun was it you most recently used?”

  “A Glock with a fifteen-round magazine.”

  “What caliber?” she asked.

  “Forty-five ACP.”

  “That be model twenty-one, Deke?”

  “I suspect so,” her husband said.

  “We got one for this young man?”

  “More than one,” Mr. Bullock said.

  “One will do,” I assured them.

  “Oddie, Deke’ll take you up to your room. You sleep like a bear if you can, don’t worry yourself none about when is dinner. When it is will be when you’re ready for us to put it on the table.”

  “Thank you, ma’am. You’re very kind.”

  “The mister here has five days when he mightn’t have agreed with you on that. And you call me Maybelle.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Mr. Bullock led me through rooms where mohair-upholstered sofas and armchairs were graced with antimacassars, where mantel clocks—and one grandfather clock—ticked, where well-tended ferns cascaded from decorative plant stands. On the walls hung framed needlepoint scenes that seemed to have been inspired by Currier and Ives, and between panels of brocade draperies hung lacework sheers, so that I felt as though I’d been dropped backward in time one hundred years or more.

  My bedroom offered more of the same, the kind of room where I might have stayed during a visit to my grandmother, if the only grandmother I’d ever known had not been a professional gambler and hard drinker who spent most of her life on the road in search of one illegal high-stakes poker game or another. I loved Pearl Sugars, my mother’s mother, but Granny Sugars would have curled up like a pill bug and died rather than have to live a single day in such Victorian orderliness and calm.

  I, on the other hand, could have stayed contentedly in that room for a month, because it was such a welcome relief from the chaos and violent drama of my life. Not that I would be given that much time. I would probably have to settle for eight hours.

  The bed had been turned down. A drinking glass and an insulated carafe of ice water stood on a tray atop the right-hand nightstand, and beside the carafe waited a crystal decanter containing Scotch whiskey. Mr. Bullock informed me that many other libations were available on request.

  The small en suite bathroom lacked a tub but had a shower.

  “A relaxin’ hot shower might help you sleep the sleep of the innocent,” he suggested.

>   “I believe you’re right, sir.”

  “You just go ahead and call me Deke. Every mother’s son does.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “While you’re showerin’ up and brushin’ your teeth, I’ll be back here with your gun, so don’t go lockin’ me out. I’ll put the little darlin’ in the top drawer of that there nightstand.”

  Later, when I came out of the steamy bathroom in the robe that had been provided, I opened the nightstand drawer and found the Glock plus two loaded, fifteen-round magazines in addition to the one that was already in the pistol.

  The sight of the weapon depressed me. Well, not the sight of it, but the hard fact that I would almost certainly need to use it.

  Both windows provided a view of the colonnade of velvet ash trees and the driveway leading to the state route. Here beyond the city limits of Pico Mundo, there were no sidewalks, no streetlamps, only a few hardscrabble farms, an occasional ranchette where people bred one kind of horse or another, mostly quarter horses for racing, lots of dust, and a sky paled by bleaching sun and dry desert air.

  I drew shut the draperies, locked the door, took off the robe, and slipped under the covers, grateful that the house was well air-conditioned. I left the nightstand drawer open to be sure that I could have the pistol in hand quickly if I woke and needed it.

  Fourteen

  Some dreams matter. Most don’t. Often it can be hard to know which might be which. The dream that afflicted me in the bedroom of the Bullock house was more intensely real than a 3-D movie; and if it had needed a movie title, I would have called it The Swimmer. Both during the unfolding of the dream and after I woke from it, I had no doubt that it mattered.

  I swam underwater without effort, hardly kicking my feet, never stroking with my arms, as if drawn along by a current, and either I had no need to breathe or I breathed in water and took oxygen from it as efficiently as a fish. I drifted through the flooded central historic district of Pico Mundo, which was genuinely quaint in some places and artificially quaint in others, the latter buildings having been added after downtown had become a tourist destination because it was so picturesque. Numerous specialty shops and restaurants and bakeries and art galleries lined these streets. Light from their windows and from the antique cast-iron streetlamps, each crowned with three frosted globes, radiated through the water. The jacaranda trees that lined these avenues were laden with purple flowers that stirred in the water as they might in a mild breeze. Initially the mood was magical, full of wonder, so that I glided along in a kind of ecstasy, as I had during dreams of flying when I was a boy.

  Soon, however, the mood changed. I came to feel that this was not a pleasant fantasy of life underwater, that Pico Mundo would not reveal to me a population of mermaids and mermen, that instead it was drowned. Drowned and dead and lost forever. The quality of the light changed subtly at first, the warm and welcoming glow of shop windows turning cold and off-putting. Beyond those display windows, dark shapes now floated, no doubt ruined merchandise adrift in flooded rooms.

  I did not yet feel suffocated, continued to breathe water for air, but felt the urgent need to know how deeply submerged the town might be, whether under lake or ocean. I worked my arms, fluttered my feet, seeking the surface, but I could not ascend, only continue to drift forward through the streets. The longer I struggled to rise but failed to gain a fraction of a fathom, the more fearful I became, until upon me settled the conviction that this submerged world was a graveyard, the home of Death himself, and that life existed only at the surface, which I must reach in order to survive.

  The light grew not merely cold and uninviting but also eerie, as if the shops were not shops after all, as if they were the dwellings of sorcerers and necromancers and voodooists, as though beyond their windows much witchery and diabolism were under way. In my peripheral vision, I became aware of something floating beside me, and when I looked more directly, I met the fixed stare of a corpse. A young woman, perhaps twenty, floated past, arms limp and moved only by the feeble currents, head turned toward me. She might have been lovely in life, with raven hair and celadon eyes, but she was not lovely now. Her bloodshot eyes bulged in their sockets, and her face was clenched in an expression of stark terror, as though, in the last instant of her life, such a frenzied state of fear had overcome her that even death could not relax her features.

  When she sailed past me, the currents somehow conveying her at greater speed than they moved me, I sensed a looming horror more blood-freezing than a corpse. I eeled about and discovered behind me a flotilla of dead bodies, men and women and children, hundreds and perhaps thousands of them drifting through the weirdly lit flood, none of them bloated with gas and rising toward the surface as a corpse would in the waking world.

  As they came past me, to both sides and above and below, I saw that in every case the eyes were protuberant, the face frozen open-mouthed in an expression of extreme fright. A little girl of about seven, her long blond hair billowing around her like the seeking tentacles of a sea anemone, bumped against me, and I shuddered in revulsion. Her protruding eyes rolled with sudden life, and from her open mouth issued a froth of gas bubbles that broke against my lips and carried with them one word: “Contumax.”

  I thrust up from the bed, flailing at the sheets as if I were a drowning man trying desperately to throw off the arms of the sea that would drag him down. I needed a moment to understand that I’d been dreaming, that I had come awake, and another moment to remember where I had gone to bed.

  Although I occasionally indulged in a beer or a glass of red wine, I wasn’t much of a drinker. I had no taste for hard liquor. Nevertheless, I fished a few cubes of ice from the insulated carafe, dropped them into the glass, and poured more Scotch than I needed.

  At one of the windows, I drew open the draperies with the pull cord and pushed aside the lace sheers. Drinking the Scotch, I stood looking out at the colonnades of velvet ash, the dry land, the distant purple mountains. With its fire, the whiskey gradually warmed away the chill with which the dream had left me.

  A couple of months earlier, in Nevada, I had rescued children who had been kidnapped to be used as human sacrifices. The satanists who abducted them, who now planned some torment for Pico Mundo, were fond of elaborate ceremonies, rituals, secret passwords. They had a formalized greeting, the equivalent of Heil Hitler, which consisted of the first cultist declaring contumax, Latin for “defiant” or “disobedient,” to which the second cultist replied potestas, Latin for “power.” They were declaring that their power came from defying all that was good.

  What did it mean—the whole town under deep water?

  Malo Suerte Lake, a mecca for boating enthusiasts from all over the Southwest, covered a few thousand acres. Not far offshore, it quickly grew deep. The lake lay upland from Pico Mundo; and the town had been built in a shallow bowl in the parched terrain.

  I didn’t know the average depth of Malo Suerte or its exact acreage, or how to calculate the volume of water held back by the breast of the dam. But I couldn’t believe a sudden failure of that structure would result in all of Pico Mundo submerged like some modern-day Atlantis.

  Nearly forty thousand people lived in our town, which was a place of many neighborhoods, from rich to poor, where humanity in its infinite variety dwelt in expectation of no greater catastrophe than perhaps a major earthquake. We anticipated a temblor that one day would cast off the cornices and crack the walls of some of the oldest structures that hadn’t been reinforced to meet new building codes.

  Flash floods happened, sure. But they were nuisances quickly flushed away through both the municipal storm drains and the network of natural arroyos that cut through town and that were bridged by our streets.

  I didn’t realize that I had finished all of the Scotch in my glass until I tasted only ice melt.

  When, as an aspect of my sixth sense, I had a dream that struck me as predictive, its meaning was sometimes clear, sometimes more difficult to interpret. For that reason, a
mong others, my paranormal abilities seemed to be both a gift and a curse.

  A flood caused by the purposeful destruction of the dam would cause serious destruction, and dozens—perhaps scores—might die. But I couldn’t conceive of any circumstances in which the drowning deaths could mount into the hundreds and thousands.

  Consequently, perhaps the nightmare had been in part symbolic, its full meaning accessible only after some analysis. A flood, yes, but something else, too, a second and simultaneous catastrophic event that multiplied the effect of a dam failure.

  Such as?

  Such as …

  More Scotch would not inspire an answer. I needed more time to think. And a better brain with which to do the thinking.

  Fifteen

  When I ventured downstairs a few minutes before five o’clock the knotty pine table in the kitchen had been set for dinner. Mrs. Bullock was pouring iced tea into three tall glasses as I arrived, as though she must be psychic herself and therefore anticipated the precise moment of my appearance.

  “You look all the way rested, fresh, and ready for anythin’ short of Judgment Day,” she declared. “But where’s the gun my Deke give you?”

  “I didn’t think I needed to bring it to dinner, ma’am.”

  “Young man, you need to bring it everywhere your feet take you. Mrs. Fischer says you’re a fella’s got more common sense than any hundred folks picked random from the phone book.”

  Edie Fischer, who had taken me as her protégé and had assisted me in the rescue of the kidnapped children in Nevada, seemed to be the primary benefactor if not also the leader of the clandestine organization that maintained this safe house and, apparently, a vast network of committed followers and secret facilities. She was eighty-six years old, with the physique of a bird, sometimes enigmatic to the point of being incomprehensible, but she was wealthy enough and wise enough and courageous enough to have earned my respect.