Deeply Odd Page 8

  Several pages of a newspaper flocked along the street, faux birds of ill omen, flapping ungainly wings of words.

  “What’s the story of your dream?” I asked. “What happens in it?”

  “A true and lovely thing. That’s all I’ll say for now. But I will never, as you suggest, get on with my life by leaving you here and driving away. If you must go by foot now and alone, so be it. But I’ll get on with my life by waiting right here until you come back.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t.”

  She opened her voluminous purse. “Take the gun.”

  I thought of the premonition: universal war, all against all. If such a conflict was coming, it wouldn’t happen in the next day or the next week, probably not even in the next year. Maybe it wouldn’t ever happen. The future isn’t set. Our free will creates our future.

  Mrs. Fischer plucked the weapon from her purse and pressed it into my hands. “Take, take. I’ve got others.”

  As I tucked the pistol in my waistband and under my sweatshirt, I said, “You seem to be prepared for anything.”

  “We all better be prepared, child.” Her eyes remained solemn even when she smiled. She reached out and gently pinched my cheek. “Be safe, Oddie. Come home.”

  Nine

  WHEN I GOT OUT OF THE LIMOUSINE, THE WIND TOSSED my hair and threw dust in my eyes, as if it were a malicious spirit. The day was chilly for Southern California in early March, especially considering that the storm front had come in from the southwest. The sea, which this gruff wind would have bullied into whitecaps, must have been unusually cold. I could faintly smell the distant shore, mostly the astringent scent of iodine given off by certain seaweeds when they are tossed onto the beach to decompose above the tide line.

  I walked past the thrift shop to the nearby corner and turned left. The two- and three-story buildings were old, mostly of painted brick with cast-stone Art Deco details in their parapeted roofs and pedimented windows. Phoenix palms lined the street, more stately than the neighborhood in which they flourished.

  Instead of consciously choosing a route, I went where psychic magnetism drew me, never sure when I might find myself before a door and know that my quarry waited beyond it, or round a corner and come face-to-face with him, or hear the word dirtbag spoken behind me and turn to discover that my talent for attraction had drawn him to me instead of me to him, his silencer-equipped Sig Sauer in my face—or crotch.

  Ahead of me, from high in a wind-tossed phoenix palm, four rats that were remarkably fat for these lean times descended from their fair-weather nest in the thick dry skirt just below the glorious spray of green fronds. Like a precision drill team, they came one behind the other, nose to tail, legs synchronized. At the bottom of the tree, the quartet spilled over the curb, into the gutter, and disappeared through the bars of a drainage grate, as disciplined as any human family in the vast flat Midwest when the tornado sirens wailed and the house had to be abandoned for the storm cellar in the backyard.

  Although I know the world is an intricately more complex place than it appears to most people, although I understand in my blood and bones that humanity is a turbulent family aboard an endless train, on an infinite journey to shores that can only dimly be imagined by the living, I don’t see signs and portents everywhere I look. Most often, a haloed moon means nothing more than that reflective volcanic ash has made its way into the stratosphere, and a two-headed goat is only a genetic curiosity. The mommy-porn genre currently sweeping the book industry and the Babylonian excess of most television shows probably fall within the historical norm in our culture’s sleaze index and are not omens of the imminent collapse of civilization, though if I were not so busy, I might start building an ark.

  Those four brown rats, however, descending at precisely that moment instead of any other, impressed me as being more than merely rodents on the run from threatening weather. For one thing, at the curb, before slinking into the gutter, each turned its head toward me, its whiteless eyes as glossy as black glass, its scaly tail lashing back and forth twice before it continued out of sight into the drain.

  I found myself drawn to the curb, where I stood staring at the large rectangular grate, shivering with recognition. It was made in an age when public works were elegant and well crafted instead of slipshod. The parallel iron bars met a four-inch iron ring in the center of the design. Within the ring, a stylized iron lightning-bolt angled from right to left. On a fogbound night in Magic Beach, more than a month previously, on a street deserted but for me, I had been drawn to such a grating, below which grotesque shadows capered in pulses of eerie light.

  On that occasion, in the grip of curiosity, I had knelt to peer between the bars, into the culvert, seeking an explanation for this unusual display. I had been by some means induced into a half trance, so that I lowered my face ever closer to the drain, overcome not only by a compulsion to learn what might lie below but also by the intense expectation that, whatever it proved to be, I needed it as surely as I needed air and water and food to sustain life.

  The sudden arrival of an unexpected ally on that lonely street in Magic Beach had broken the spell and had brought me to my feet. Later, I felt that I had been close to discovering something that might have been the end of me—not merely death but a more terrible and enduring end.

  Now, I did not follow the rats to the grate, but turned away and walked swiftly, not quite running. I went four blocks, the battalions of incoming storm clouds forgotten, oblivious of the wind, the rats banished from my mind. Rather, I succumbed to one of those fugues that sometimes strike us when, below the age of ten, we chance upon a truth meant only for adults, a sharp truth that stabs darkness into the light of innocence, that makes us at once rebel against this assault on wonder, that sends us away to games and bicycles and all manner of distractions, from which we rise in a few hours, like a sleeper from a dream, having spun a cocoon of denial to protect us from that piercing truth, although it is a fragile cocoon that in time will dissolve.

  Halting at a street corner, looking back the way I’d come, I had no memory of the buildings I had passed, only of the lightning-bolt grate that lay four blocks to the south. For that distance, I’d even forgotten why I’d come here. Now I remembered the rhinestone cowboy, his spiky white hair, his pitiless stare, his vacation-in-Hell tan.

  My heart lagged my brain, beating hard and fast, as if I were still within a step of the ominous drain grating. Giving it time to settle into a rhythm less suggestive of a crisis in an ER, I studied my surroundings.

  I had arrived in a district of old industrial buildings, mostly constructed of dark-red or pale-yellow brick with slate or tile or corrugated-metal roofs, others of stucco cracked and stigmatized with stains of such disturbing shapes that they might have depicted Armageddon reflected in a fun-house mirror. Some structures appeared still to be in use. Others were untenanted or abandoned, diminished by missing windowpanes, months of debris compacted by wind and rain in their doorways, and weeds bristling from cracks in the pavement of the adjacent parking yards, around which chain-link fencing sagged.

  As the last blue sky shrank northward, thunderheads towered as if they were mountains thrusting violently from the earth’s crust in a fierce seismic and volcanic age millions of years before any living thing yet crawled the planet.

  I walked south, into the wind, retracing my route for a block and a half—noticing that other street drains lacked the lightning bolt—until I arrived at the mouth of a wide alleyway similarly lined with industrial buildings and warehouses. In some other pockets of this neighborhood, workers labored, deliveries were being made and shipments loaded. But here, in spite of wind-stirred power-company lines that softly whistled overhead, there lay a stillness more suited to a ghost town than to any place in a living city.

  As I entered the alley, the sun abruptly submerged in clouds, and the bleak, black shadows of utility poles melted into the potholed pavement. On both sides were elevated loading docks, man-size doors, big roll-ups, and
latticed windows of many small panes so filthy that they were all but opaque.

  Past the middle of the block, I was drawn to a building narrower than the others, with a man door and three roll-ups large enough to admit trucks of any size. The windows were as blinded with dust as all the others, but lights inside lent the glass a silvery sheen.

  Beyond doubt, the cowboy trucker was nearby. The image of him in my mind’s eye grew brighter and more colorful and so fearsome that, to prevent him from fulfilling his threat, I wished fervently that I had bought a Kevlar jockstrap.

  At the man-size door, I stood with my head cocked, listening. When I heard nothing, I drew the pistol from my waistband. I tried the lever handle, and the unlocked door opened a crack. Emboldened by the enduring silence, I eased inside and closed the door quietly behind me.

  I stood in a brick-walled garage brightened by overhead banks of fluorescent tubes. Only the middle of the three bays contained a vehicle, a white Ford van, one of those small delivery vans used by florists and caterers, although this one had no company name or logo emblazoned on it.

  When I opened the van, the cargo area contained nothing, though perhaps soon it would imprison three bound, gagged, and terrified children meant for burning. For the sake of silence, I left the vehicle open.

  In the back wall of the garage, opposite the roll-ups, two doors flanked a freight elevator. There is a classic short story in which a man must open one of two doors, aware that a beautiful lady waits behind one and a hungry tiger behind the other, but he doesn’t know which door is which. Given my luck, I expected to find tigers to the left and right. The freight route didn’t appeal, either.

  Compelled to the door on the right, I found ascending stairs. They were concrete with glued-on rubber treads for safety, which also served to mute my footsteps. I eased the door shut behind me.

  I had climbed halfway to the first landing when I heard two male voices above me in the stairwell. The words bounced between the brick wall on my right and the easy-clean glossy-yellow fiberboard on my left, and were distorted so that I couldn’t be certain that either speaker was the cowboy trucker.

  With the pistol, I could intimidate them. But if my quarry was not one of the two, I would have no way of knowing whether or not I might be threatening innocent men.

  I hurriedly descended the stairs, entered the garage—and found it changed. Instead of overhead fluorescents, three single-bulb lamps with cone-shaped shades hung on chains. The poor light shone just bright enough for me to see that the brick walls were gone and that bare concrete replaced them.

  More startling than any of that was the red-and-black ProStar+ with sparkly silver striping and its long black trailer, which stood in the center bay where the white van had been only seconds earlier. In this enclosed space, the eighteen-wheeler looked even bigger than it had appeared to be on the open road, and although an inanimate object of any size, lacking consciousness and intention, cannot be malevolent, this truck seemed as malign as the Death Star with which Darth Vader atomized entire planets.

  Ten

  THE PROSTAR+ STOOD IN THE TRANSFORMED GARAGE as though it had eaten the Ford van. I wondered if I should reconsider my disdain for possessed-vehicle movies like The Car, Maximum Overdrive, and The Love Bug.

  After a life of supernatural engagement, I was not paralyzed by this seeming impossibility. I scurried around the eighteen-wheeler to the side farther from the door that I left open behind me, sheltering there until I could get a glimpse, at an angle through the driver’s window and the windshield, of who followed me out of the stairwell. If one of them was the rhinestone cowboy, I might still get the drop on him. If that proved to be impossible—if, say, he appeared with the flamethrower that he intended to use on the children—I could retreat through the outer door by which I’d entered the building and hide elsewhere along the alley, at a position from which I could monitor events.

  No one came out of the stairwell, but I heard two men talking. They seemed to be nearby, yet their voices were veiled. The words were distorted beyond understanding, as when the cowboy and the man with the battered-boxer face—semitransparent and unaware of me—had been in urgent angry conversation in the basement machine room at the truck stop.

  This time, they did not appear even in phantom form. I had only their voices, by which I could not precisely place them. And then they fell silent.

  I was concerned that they had become aware of me, as I had been aware of them in the machine room. Perhaps our circumstances had been reversed and I was semitransparent to them while they were invisible to me.

  The next twenty or thirty seconds were as sharp as saw teeth, working on my taut-wire nerves, as I waited to feel the singular chill of one of these men passing through the space that I occupied.

  Instead, I heard an engine turn over, not that of the ProStar+, but that of a much smaller truck, though it was muffled and hollow, filtered through some barrier just as the voices had been filtered. I could only assume that it was the white Ford van, which had become invisible to me.

  A moment later, a rattling and low rumbling perplexed me for a moment. But then I realized that this was the distorted sound of a big segmented door rolling on its tracks.

  I turned toward the alleyway, but none of the three roll-ups was in motion, all snugged down tight.

  I listened to the unseen van reverse away from me, out of the garage. Following its departure came the rumble of the huge segmented door descending, although the door behind the ProStar+ and the two flanking it were already down and locked.

  In high school, the spirit world frequently distracted me from science studies, and my interest in higher mathematics was no greater than my interest in self-immolation, but I scored well in English. I possessed the ability and the skills to write about the coexistent garages. But I sadly lacked the knowledge to intelligently express a theory explaining how such a thing could be—or, for that matter, why fire makes water boil.

  If two garages existed in the same place, in different worlds or dimensions or whatever, I seemed to be, for the moment, in the world/dimension/whatever that was different from mine. And the two men whose voices I heard had evidently driven the Ford van away into the world from which I had come.

  In Shower 5 at Star Truck, in the basement machine room of that same facility, and now in the garage of this industrial building, two realities crossed. Shower 5 Elsewhere had not been a shower room at all but a barren place, just as Basement Machine Room Elsewhere had been devoid of machinery, and this garage in Elsewhere was likewise a stark concrete box. I had been shot to death in the Elsewhere shower but remained alive in the real Shower 5. Now the rhinestone cowboy parked his truck in Elsewhere and, with some associate, drove away into my reality, perhaps fearing that authorities were looking for the ProStar+ because he had run me off the road with it—or for a reason I couldn’t fathom. This guy was able to do things that people failed to see, like shoot an innocent cantaloupe to bits, and he could step out of reality into Elsewhere when it suited him.

  My skull hurt. My brain felt abused. I needed a plate of my own überfluffy pancakes to restore my full cognitive function.

  The cowboy might have as many paranormal talents as I possessed, or even more. Maybe. Except … Well, it seemed to me that anyone with such astonishing abilities would not dress so ridiculously. Not that I’m saying that every superhumanly gifted person ought to wear jeans and sweatshirts or T-shirts, as I do, or all Ralph Lauren. But boots of carved leather with fancy snakeskin inlays? A black sports coat with red lapels and collar crusted with sequins, as if he was a Grand Ole Opry wannabe? The Joker, Bane, Lex Luthor, the Green Goblin: They all had better taste in clothing than this guy.

  Besides, in the real world, as opposed to the worlds of comic books, a guy with paranormal powers would not want to draw attention to himself. Trust me.

  Alone with the eighteen-wheeler, I decided to check it out. He had left a set of keys in the ignition, evidently certain that there were no t
hieves in Elsewhere. The driver’s compartment contained nothing of interest other than the string of red beads and little carved-bone skulls, which hung from the overhead CB radio.

  On closer inspection than I had been able to do previously, I found that the long vertical latch bolts on the back of the trailer were secured by custom shackles. One of the keys released them.

  When I opened the tall doors, a row of LED bulbs brightened along the center of the trailer ceiling, front to back. Immediately inside the doors, a two-panel stainless-steel gate blocked entrance. Into a series of vertical one-inch bars, a talented metalworker had incorporated three pentagrams, a Celtic cross, a Maltese cross, a Latin cross, an ankh, two swastikas, and perhaps a dozen symbols that I couldn’t name. Work by an artisan this masterful—not a weld showing, the steel regrained after construction, the dazzling design harmonious in spite of its disparate elements—would have cost many thousands of dollars.

  Beyond the gate, the three walls, the floor, and the ceiling of the trailer were painted with the same symbols, sun-yellow forms on a black background. The lighting revealed no cargo.

  In fact, it looked like a trailer that never carried freight, and if that should be the case, I wondered what purpose it served for the cowboy. Evidently, he wasn’t a true trucker after all, just a man who drove a truck. He must earn his living in some other way, though I doubted that, even in this transgressive age, anyone could sustain a paying career as a burner of defenseless children.

  Although no lock was apparent, the halves of this gate were firmly secured to each other. I could neither pull nor push them apart.

  Only as I began to close the doors did I suspect the trailer might not be as vacant as it appeared. Through the steel filigree issued a disturbing scent as sweet as incense and yet suggestive of decomposition, like nothing I’d ever smelled before. Perhaps it was an odor lingering from a previous cargo, but I had not detected it initially. With the malodor came a sudden chill, not internal to me, less than a draft, a mere breath, an icy effluence that, like spicules of sleet, prickled my face.