They have brought Curtis to Nun’s Lake because they would have come here anyway if they’d never met him. It had been the next stop on their UFO pilgrimage, and they’d taken a detour to the Neary Ranch when the government cordoned off part of Utah in search of the crazed drug lords that all clear-thinking people knew must actually be ETs.
Besides, after the violent encounter at the crossroads store, they believed it would be wise to get farther from the Nevada border than Twin Falls, Idaho.
Now, after a much needed day of rest, as the twins confer in the dining nook, studying maps and deciding where best to go next, Curtis watches the lake for nuns at play. And he occupies his mind with such big plans for a world-changing campaign that his ten-year-old brain, though organically augmented more than once at his beloved mother’s insistence, feels as if it might explode.
Even when plans are being busily spun to save a world, dogs must pee. Old Yeller makes her urgent need known by pawing at the door and by rolling her eyes at her brother-become.
When Curtis goes to the door to let the dog out, Polly rises from the dining nook and warns him to stay inside, where he will be less easily detected if agents of the evil empire are in the vicinity with scanners.
He’s told them that there is no empire aligned against him. The true situation is in some ways simpler and in other ways more complex than standard political entities. The twins are staying with the Star Wars template nonetheless, perhaps hoping that Han Solo and a Wookie will show up in an Airstream travel trailer to add to the fun.
“I’ll take her out,” says Polly.
“No one needs to go along,” Curtis explains. “I’ll let her out by herself, but I’ll stay with her in spirit.”
“The boy-dog bond,” Polly says.
“Yeah. I can have a look around the campground through little sister here.”
“This is so Art Bell,” Polly says, referring to a radio talk-show host who deals in UFO reports and stories of alien contact. She shivers with the thrill of it.
Old Yeller jumps from the motor home to the ground, the sisters reconvene over the maps, and Curtis returns to the co-pilot’s seat.
His bond with little sister is at all times established, twenty-four hours a day, whether he is focused on it or not. Now he focuses.
The cockpit of the Fleetwood, the trees beyond the windshield, and the nunless lake beyond the trees all fade from his awareness, and Curtis is both inside the motor home and afoot in the world with Old Yeller.
She pees but not all at once. Padding among the motor homes and the travel trailers, she happily explores this new territory, and when she finds something particularly to her liking, she marks the spot with a quick squat and a brief stream.
The warm afternoon is gradually cooling as the clouds pour out of the west, roll down the rocky peaks, and, trapped between the mountains, condense into ever darker shades of gray.
The day smells of the sheltering pines, of the forest mast, of rain brewing.
Death-still, the air is also heavy with expectancy, as if in an instant, the eerily deep calm might whip itself into a raging tumult.
Everywhere, campers prepare for the storm. Extendable canvas awnings are cranked shut and locked down. Women fold lawn furniture and stow it in a motor home. A man leads two children back from the lakeshore, all in swimsuits and carrying beach toys. People gather up magazines, books, blankets, anything that shouldn’t get wet.
Old Yeller receives unsolicited coos and compliments, and she rewards every expression of delight with a grin and the brisk wagging of her tail, although she cannot be distracted from her explorations, which she finds ceaselessly intriguing. The world is an infinite sea of odors and every scent is a current that either brings fresh life to complex memories or teases with mystery and a promise of wondrous discoveries.
Curiosity and the measured payout of a full bladder lead Old Yeller through a maze of recreational vehicles and trees and picnic benches to a motor home that looms like a juggernaut poised to crush battalions in a great war that is straining toward eruption at any moment. Even compared to the twins’ impressive Fleetwood American Heritage, this behemoth is a daunting machine.
Sister-become is drawn to this caravan fit for Zeus, not because of its tremendous size or because of its formidable appearance, but because the scents associated with it both fascinate and disturb her. She approaches warily, sniffs the tires, peers cautiously into the shadows beneath the vehicle, and at last arrives at the closed door, where she sniffs still more aggressively.
Aboard the Fleetwood, physically far removed from Old Yeller, Curtis nonetheless is disquieted and overcome by a sense of danger. His first thought is that this juggernaut, like the Corvette behind the crossroads store, might be more than it appears to be, a machine not of this world.
The dog had penetrated the illusion of the sports car and had perceived the alien conveyance beneath. Here, however, she sees only what anyone can see—which strikes her as plenty strange enough.
At the motor-home door, one sharp smell suggests bitterness, while another is the essence of rot. Not the bitterness of quassia or quinine; the bitterness of a soul in despair. Not the stench of flesh decomposing, but of a spirit hideously corrupted in a body still alive. To the dog, everyone’s body emits pheromones that reveal much about the true condition of the spirit within. And here, too, is a twist of an odor suggesting sourness; not the sourness of lemons or spoiled milk, but of fear so long endured and purely distilled that sister-become whimpers in sympathy with the heart that lives in such constant anxiety.
She has not a dram of sympathy, however, for the vicious beast whose malodor underlies all other scents. Someone who lives in this vehicle is a sulfurous volcano of repressed rage, a steaming cesspool of hatred so dark and thick that even though the monster currently is not present, its singularly caustic spoor burns like toxic fumes in sister-become’s sensitive nose. If Death truly stalks the world in living form, with or without hooded robe and scythe, its pheromones can be no more fearsome than these. The dog sneezes to clear her nostrils of the stinging effluvium, growls low in her throat, and backs away from the door.
Old Yeller sneezes twice again as she rounds the front of the enormous motor home, and when, at Curtis’s instruction, she looks up toward the panoramic windshield, she sees—as thus does he—neither a goblin nor a ghoul, but a pretty young girl of nine or ten. This girl stands beside the unoccupied driver’s seat, leaning on it, bent forward, peering toward the lake and at the steadily hardening sky, probably trying to judge how long until the tension in the clouds will crack and the storm spill out.
Hers might be the bitter despair and the long-distilled sourness of fear that in part drew sister-become to investigate this ominous motor home.
Surely the girl isn’t the source of the rotten fetor that, for the dog, identifies a deeply corrupted soul. She is too young to have allowed worms so completely to infest her spirit.
Neither can she be the monster whose heart is a machine of rage and whose blood is hatred flowing.
She notices sister-become and looks down. The dog—and Curtis unseen in his Fleetwood redoubt—gaze up from the severe angle that is the canine point of view on all the world above two feet.
Yeller’s wagging tail renders a judgment without need of words.
The girl is radiant.
In her home on wheels, where evidently she belongs, she appears nevertheless to be lost. And haunted. More than merely haunted, she half seems to be a ghost herself, and the big windshield lies between her and the dog as though it is a cold membrane between the land of the living and the land of the dead.
The radiant girl turns away and moves deeper into the motor home, evanescing into the dim beyond.
Chapter 64
NATURE HAD ALL but reclaimed the land that had been the Teelroy farm. Deer roamed where horses had once plowed. Weeds ruled.
Undoubtedly handsome in its day, the rambling Victorian house had been remodeled into Goth
ic by time, weather, and neglect.
The resident was a repulsive toad. He had the sweet voice of a young prince, but he looked like a source of warts and worse.
At first sight of the Toad, Preston almost returned to his SUV. He almost drove away without a question.
He found it difficult to believe that this odious bumpkin’s fantastic story of alien healing would be convincing. The man was at best a bad joke, and more likely he was the mentally disordered consequence of generations of white-trash incest.
Yet…
During the past five years, among the hundreds of people to whom Preston had patiently listened recount their tales of UFO sightings and alien abductions, occasionally the least likely specimens proved to be the most convincing.
He reminded himself that pigs were used to hunt for truffles. Even a toad in bib overalls might once in a while know a truth worth learning.
Invited inside, Preston accepted. The threshold proved to lie between ordinary Idaho and a kingdom of the surreal.
In the entry hall, he found himself among a tribe of Indians. Some smiled, some struck noble poses, but most looked as inscrutable as any dreamy-faced Buddha or Easter Island stone head. All appeared peaceable.
Decades ago, when the country had been more innocent, these life-size, hand-carved, intricately hand-painted statues had stood at the entrances to cigar stores. Many held faux boxes of cigars as if offering a smoke.
Most were chiefs crowned by elaborate feathered headdresses, which were also carved out of wood and were hand-painted like the rest of their costumes. A few ordinary braves attended the chiefs, wearing headbands featuring one or two wooden feathers.
Of those not holding cigar boxes, some stood with a hand raised perpetually in a sign of peace. One of the smiling chiefs made the okay sign with thumb and forefinger.
Two—a chief, a brave—gripped raised tomahawks. They weren’t threatening in demeanor, but they looked sterner than the others: early advocates of aggressive tobacco marketing.
Two chiefs held peace pipes.
The hall was perhaps forty feet long. Cigar-store Indians lined both sides. At least two dozen of them.
A majority stood with their backs to the walls, facing one another across the narrow walk space. Only four figures stood out of alignment, angled to monitor the front door, as if they were guardians of the Teelroy homestead.
More Indians loomed on alternating risers of the ascending stairs, against the wall opposite the railing. All faced the lower floor, as though descending to join the powwow.
“Pa collected Indians.” The Toad didn’t often trim his mustache. This fringe drooped over his lips and almost entirely concealed them. When he spoke, his lilting voice penetrated this concealing hair, with the mystery of a spirit at a seance speaking through the veiled face of a medium. Because he barely moved his hair-draped lips when he spoke, you could almost believe that he himself wasn’t speaking at all, but was an organic radio receiving a broadcast signal from another entity. “They’re worth a bunch, these Indians, but I can’t sell ’em. They’re the most thing I’ve got left of my daddy.”
Preston supposed that the statues might indeed have value as folk art. But they were of no interest to him.
A lot of art, folk art in particular, celebrated life. Preston did not.
“Come on in the livin’ room,” said his flushed and bristling host. “We’ll talk this out.”
With all the grace of a tottering hog, the Toad moved toward an archway to the left.
The arch, once generous, had been reduced to a narrow opening by magazines tied with string in bundles of ten and twenty, and then stacked in tight, mutually supportive columns.
The Toad appeared to be too gross to fit through that pinched entry.
Surprisingly, he slipped between the columns of compressed paper without a hitch or hesitation. During years of daily passage, the human greaseball had probably lubricated the encroaching magazines with his natural body oils.
The living room was no longer truly a room. The space had been transformed into a maze of narrow passageways.
“Ma saved magazines,” explained the Toad. “So do I.”
Seven-and eight-foot stacks of magazines and newspapers formed the partitions of the maze. Some were bundled with twine. Others were stored in cardboard boxes on which, in block letters, had been hand-printed the names of publications.
Wedged between flanking buttresses of magazines and cartons, tall wooden bookshelves stood packed with paperbacks. Issues of National Geographic. Yellowing piles of pulp magazines from the 1920s and ’30s.
Cramped niches in these eccentric palisades harbored small pieces of furniture. A needlepoint chair had been squeezed between columns of magazines; more ragged-edged pulps were stacked on its threadbare cushion. Here, a small end table with a lamp. And here, a hat tree with eight hooks upon which hung a collection of at least twice that many moth-eaten fedoras.
More life-size wooden Indians were incorporated into the walls, wedged between the junk. Two were female. Indian princesses. Both fetching. One stared at some far horizon, solemn and mystical. The other looked bewildered.
No daylight penetrated from the windows to the center of the labyrinth. Veils of shadow hung everywhere, and a deeper gloom was held off only by the central ceiling fixture and occasional niche lamps with stained and tasseled shades.
Overall, the acidic odor of browning newsprint and yellowing paperbacks dominated. In pockets: the pungent stink of mouse urine. Underneath: a whiff of mildew, traces of powdered insecticide—and the subtle perfume of decomposing flesh, possibly a rodent that had died long ago and that was now but a scrap of leather and gray fur wrapped around papery bones.
Preston disliked the filth but found the ambience appealing. Life wasn’t lived here: This was a house of death.
The incorporation of cigar-store Indians into the walls of the maze lent a quality of the Catacombs to the house, as though these figures were mummified corpses.
Following the Toad through the twists and turns of this three-dimensional webwork, Preston expected to find Ma Toad and Pa Toad, though dead, sitting in junk-flanked niches of their own. Funeral clothes hanging loose and largely empty on their dry skeletal frames. Eyes and lips sewn shut with mortuary thread. Ears shriveled into gristly knots. Mottled skin shrink-wrapped to their skulls. Nostrils trailing spiders’ silk like plumes of cold breath.
When the Toad ultimately led him to a small clearing in the maze, where they could sit and talk, Preston was disappointed not to find any family cadavers lovingly preserved.
This parlor at the hub of the labyrinth barely measured large enough to accommodate him and the Toad at once. An armchair, flanked by a floorlamp and a small table, faced a television. To the side stood an ancient brocade-upholstered sofa with a tassel-fringed skirt.
The Toad sat in the armchair.
Preston squeezed past him and settled on the end of the sofa farthest from his host. Had he sat any closer, they would have been brought together in an intolerably intimate tête-à-tête.
They were surrounded by maze walls constructed of magazines, newspapers, books, old 78-rpm phonograph records stored in plastic milk crates, stacks of used coffee cans that might contain anything from nuts and bolts to severed human fingers, boxy floor-model radios from the 1930s balanced atop one another, and an array of other items too numerous to catalog, all interlocked, held together by weight and mold and inertia, braced by strategically placed planks and wedges.
The Toad, like his loon-mad ma and pa before him, was a world-class obsessive. Packrat royalty.
Ensconced in his armchair, the Toad said, “So what’s your deal?”
“As I explained on the phone earlier, I’ve come to hear about your close encounter.”
“Here’s the thing, Mr. Banks. After all these many years, the government went and cut off my disability checks.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Said I’d been fakin’ twenty ye
ars, which I flatly did not.”
“I’m sure you didn’t.”
“Maybe the doctor who certified me made a true racket of it, like they say, and maybe I was the only for-real sufferin’ soul ever crossed his doorstep, but I have been a genuine half-cripple, damn if I weren’t.”
“And this relates to your close encounter—how?” Preston asked.
A small glistening pink animal poked its head out of the Toad’s great tangled beard.
Preston leaned forward, fascinated until he realized that the pink animal was the man’s tongue. It slid back and forth between lips no doubt best left unrevealed, perhaps to lubricate them in order to facilitate the passage of his lies.
“I’m grateful,” said the Toad, “that some three-eyed starmen come along and healed me. They were a weird crew, no two ways about it, and plenty scary enough to please the big audience you need, but in spite of their bein’ so scary, I acknowledge they committed a good deed on me. The problem is, now I’m not the pitiful half-cripple that I always used to be, so there’s no way to get back on disability.”
“A dilemma,” Preston said.
“I made a promise to the starmen—and a solemn promise, it was—not to reveal them to the world for what they done here. I feel most bad about breakin’ that promise, but the hard fact is I’ve got to eat and pay bills.”
Preston nodded at the bibbed and bearded moron. “I’m sure the starmen will understand.”
“Don’t mean to say I’m not for-sure grateful about havin’ the cripple taken right out of me with that blue-light thing of theirs. But all-powerful like they were, it seems queer they wouldn’t also thought to give me some skill or talent I could put to use makin’ a livin’. Like mind readin’ or seein’ the future.”
“Or the ability to turn lead into gold,” Preston suggested.
“There would be a good one!” the Toad declared, slapping his armchair with one hand. “And I wouldn’t abuse the privilege, neither. I’d make me just as little gold as I needed to get by.”