With Annamaria to protect and with the responsibility to thwart whatever vast destruction was on the yellow-eyed hulk’s agenda, I had enough to keep me busy. I could not afford to be distracted by the melancholy spirits of murdered girls who would want to lead me to their long-hidden graves.
Concerned that even thinking about those sad victims would draw their spirits to me, if indeed they still lingered, I tried to elicit more information from Annamaria as we proceeded cautiously through the nearly impenetrable murk.
“Are you originally from around here?” I asked softly.
“No.”
“Where are you from?”
“Far away.”
“Faraway, Oklahoma?” I asked. “Faraway, Alabama? Maybe Faraway, Maine?”
“Farther away than all of those. You would not believe me if I named the place.”
“I would believe you,” I assured her. “I’ve believed everything you’ve said, though I don’t know why, and though I don’t understand most of it.”
“Why do you believe me so readily?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you do know.”
“I do?”
“Yes. You know.”
“Give me a hint. Why do I believe you so readily?”
“Why does anyone believe anything?” she asked.
“Is this a philosophical question—or just a riddle?”
“Empirical evidence is one reason.”
“You mean like—I believe in gravity because if I throw a stone in the air, it falls back to the ground.”
“Yes. That’s what I mean.”
“You haven’t been exactly generous with empirical evidence,” I reminded her. “I don’t even know where you’re from. Or your name.”
“You know my name.”
“Only your first name. What’s your last?”
“I don’t have one.”
“Everybody has a last name.”
“I’ve never had one.”
The night was cold; our breath smoked from us. She had such a mystical quality, I might have been persuaded that we had exhaled the entire vast ocean of fog that now drowned all things, that she had come down from Olympus with the power to breathe away the world and, out of the resultant mist, remake it to her liking.
I said, “You had to have a last name to go to school.”
“I’ve never gone to school.”
“You’re home-schooled?”
She did not reply.
“Without a last name, how do you get welfare?”
“I’m not on the welfare rolls.”
“But you said you don’t work.”
“That’s right.”
“What—do people just give you money when you need it?”
“Yes.”
“Wow. That would be even less stressful than the tire life or shoe sales.”
“I’ve never asked anyone for anything—until I asked you if you would die for me.”
Out there in the dissolved world, St. Joseph’s Church tower must have remained standing, for in the distance its familiar bell tolled the half-hour, which was strange for two reasons. First, the radiant dial of my watch showed 7:22, and that seemed right. Second, from eight in the morning till eight in the evening, St. Joe’s marked each hour with a single strike of the bell and the half-hour with two. Now it rang three times, a solemn reverberant voice in the fog.
“How old are you, Annamaria?”
“In one sense, eighteen.”
“To go eighteen years without asking anyone for anything—you must have known you were saving up for a really big request.”
“I had an inkling,” she said.
She sounded amused, but this was not the amusement of deception or obfuscation. I sensed again that she was being more direct than she seemed.
Frustrated, I returned to my former line of inquiry: “Without a last name, how do you get health care?”
“I don’t need health care.”
Referring to the baby she carried, I said, “In a couple months, you’ll need it.”
“All things in their time.”
“And, you know, it’s not good to go to term without regularly seeing a doctor.”
She favored me with a smile. “You’re a very sweet young man.”
“It’s a little weird when you call me a young man. I’m older than you are.”
“But nonetheless a young man, and sweet. Where are we going?” she wondered.
“That sure is the million-dollar question.”
“I mean right now. Where are we going now?”
I took some pleasure in answering her with a line that was as inscrutable as anything that she had said to me: “I have to go see a man with hair like wool-of-bat and tongue like fillet of fenny snake.”
“Macbeth,” she said, identifying the reference and robbing me of some of my satisfaction.
“I call him Flashlight Guy. You don’t need to know why. It’s liable to be dicey, so you can’t go with me.”
“I’m safest with you.”
“I’ll need to be able to move fast. Anyway, I know this woman—you’ll like her. No one would think of looking for either of us at her place.”
A growling behind us caused us to turn.
For an instant it seemed to me that the hulk had followed us and, while we had been engaged in our enigmatic conversation, had by some magic separated himself into three smaller forms. In the fog were six yellow eyes, as bright as road-sign reflectors, not at the height of a man’s eyes but lower to the ground.
When they slunk out of the mist and halted just ten feet from us, they were revealed as coyotes. Three of them.
The fog developed six more eyes, and three more rangy specimens arrived among the initial trio.
Evidently they had come out of Hecate’s Canyon, on the hunt. Six coyotes. A pack.
EIGHTEEN
HAVING LIVED WHERE PRAIRIE MET MOJAVE, IN Pico Mundo, I had encountered coyotes before. Usually the circumstances were such that, being skittish about human beings, they wanted to avoid me and had no thought of picking my bones.
On one late-night occasion, however, they had gone shopping for meat, and I had been the juiciest item in the display case. I barely escaped that situation without leaving behind a mouthful of my butt.
If I had been Hutch Hutchison and had found myself on the menu of a coyote pack twice within seventeen months, I would have viewed this not as an interesting coincidence but as irrefutable scientific proof that coyotes as a species had turned against humanity and were intent on exterminating us.
In the fog, on the greenbelt, alongside Hecate’s Canyon, the six prime specimens of Canis latrans had none of the appeal of any of the various species and breeds that pet shops put in their windows.
This was unusual, believe it or not, because coyotes sometimes can have a goofy charm. They are more closely related to wolves than to dogs, lean and sinewy, efficient predators, but with feet too big for their bodies and ears too big for their heads, they can appear a little puppylike, at least as cute as Iran’s homicidal dictator when he puts on a leisure suit and has his photo taken eating ice-cream cones with grade-school children whose parents have volunteered them to be suicide bombers.
With narrow faces, bared fangs, and radiant-eyed intensity, these current six coyotes confronting Annamaria and me did not have what it took to be featured in a Purina Puppy Chow commercial. They looked like fascist jihadists in fur.
In most perilous moments, I can put my hands on a makeshift weapon, but on this empty greensward, the only possibility seemed to be a wooden fence pale if I could break one of them loose. No rocks. No baseball bats, buckets, brooms, antique porcelain vases, frying pans, shovels, pop-up toasters, or angry cross-eyed ferrets, which had proved to make effective impromptu weapons in the past.
I began to think I really needed to get over my gun phobia and start packing heat.
As it turned out, I had a weapon of which I was unaware: one young, pregnant, eni
gmatic woman. As I urged her to back slowly away from the toothy pack, she said, “They are not only what they appear to be.”
“Well, who is?” I said. “But I think these guys are largely what they appear to be.”
Instead of cautiously retreating from the beasts and hoping to discover an unlocked gate in a fenced backyard, Annamaria took a step toward them.
I said what might have been a bad word meaning excrement, but I hope that I used a polite synonym.
Quietly but firmly, she said to the coyotes, “You do not belong here. The rest of the world is yours…but not this place at this moment.”
Personally, I did not think it was good strategy to tell a pack of hungry carnivores that would-be diners without the proper attire would not be served.
Their hackles were raised. Their tails were tucked. Their ears were flat to their heads. Their bodies were tense, muscles tight.
These guys were up for a meal.
When she took another step toward them, I said nothing because I was concerned my voice would sound like that of Mickey Mouse, but I reached after her and put a hand on her arm.
Ignoring me, she said to the coyotes, “I am not yours. He is not yours. You will leave now.”
In some parts of the country, coyotes are called prairie wolves, which sounds much nicer, but even if you called them fur babies, they would not be cuddly bundles of joy.
“You will leave now,” she repeated.
Astonishingly, the predators seemed to lose their confidence. Their hackles smoothed down, and they stopped baring their teeth.
“Now,” she insisted.
No longer willing to meet her eyes, they pricked their ears and looked left, right, as though wondering how they had gotten here and why they had been so reckless as to expose themselves to a dangerous pregnant woman.
Tails in motion, ducking their heads, glancing back sheepishly, they retreated into the fog, as if they had previously been foiled by Little Red Riding Hood and now this, leaving them deeply unsure of their predatory skills.
Annamaria allowed me to take her arm once more, and we continued south along the greenbelt.
After some fruitless reflection on the meaning of what had just transpired, I said, “So, you talk to animals.”
“No. That’s just how it seemed.”
“You said they were not only what they appeared to be.”
“Well, who is?” she asked, quoting me, which will never be as enlightening as quoting Shakespeare.
“What were they…in addition to what they appeared to be?”
“You know.”
“That’s not really an answer.”
She said, “All things in their time.”
“That’s not an answer, either.”
“It is what it is.”
“Yes, I see.”
“Not yet. But you will.”
“I never saw the White Rabbit, but we’ve fallen out of the world into Wonderland.”
She squeezed my arm. “The World itself is a wonderland, young man, as you well know.”
Off to our right, visible only now and then as shadowy forms along the edge of Hecate’s Canyon, the coyotes skulked parallel to us, and I called them to her attention.
“Yes,” she said, “they will be persistent, but do they dare look toward us?”
As we proceeded, I watched them for a while, but not once did I glimpse the faintest flicker of a radiant yellow eye in the murk. They seemed to be focused strictly on the ground before them.
“If you can handle a coyote pack,” I said, “I’m not sure you really need me.”
“I have no influence over people,” she said. “If they wish to torture and murder me, and they are determined to shatter all my defenses, then I will suffer. But coyotes—even beasts like these—don’t concern me, and they shouldn’t worry you.”
“You seem to know what you’re talking about,” I said. “But I’m going to worry a little about the coyotes anyway.”
“‘Virtue is bold, and goodness never fearful.’”
I said, “Shakespeare, huh?”
“Measure for Measure.”
“I don’t know that one.”
“Now you do.”
As much as I admired the Bard of Avon, it seemed to me that goodness needed to be fearful of those slouching shapes in the fog if goodness wanted to avoid being chewed up and swallowed.
NINETEEN
A FEW BLOCKS BEFORE WE ARRIVED AT THE Cottage of the Happy Monster, our skulking escorts faded away into the fallen clouds and did not return, although I suspected that we had not seen the last of them.
The house stood alone at the end of a narrow lane of cracked and runneled blacktop. Huge deodar cedars flanked the road, their drooping branches seeming to carry the fog as if it had the weight of snow.
With a thatched and dormered roof, cedar-shingle walls, trumpet vines espaliered along the roof line, and a bougainvillea-covered porte-cochere, the large cottage could have been copied from one of the romantic paintings of Thomas Kinkade.
Like curious spooks, pale shapes of curdled mist pressed to the casement windows, gazing in, as though deciding whether the rooms inside were conducive to haunting.
A dark amber glow of considerable appeal shone through those phantom spirits. As we drew closer, I saw that this cheerful light glimmered and twinkled along the beveled edges of the diamond-shaped panes of glass, as though a person of magical power resided within.
As we had approached along the lane, I had prepared Annamaria for Blossom Rosedale, with whom she would be staying for an hour or two. Forty-five years ago, when Blossom had been six years old, her drunk and angry father dropped her headfirst into a barrel in which he had been burning trash primed with a little kerosene.
Fortunately, she had been wearing tightly fitted glasses, which spared her from blindness and saved her eyelids. Even at six, she’d had the presence of mind to hold her breath, which saved her lungs. She managed to topple the barrel and quickly crawl out, though by then aflame.
Surgeons saved one ear, rebuilt her nose—although not to the extent that it resembled a normal nose—and reconstructed her lips. Blossom never had hair thereafter. Her face remained forever seamed and puckered with keloid scars too terrible to be addressed by any surgical technique.
Out walking a week previously, I had encountered her as, with a flat tire, she pulled to the side of the road. Although she insisted that she could change the tire herself, I did the job because Blossom stood under five feet, had only a thumb and forefinger on her burned left hand, and had not been dressed for the rain that threatened.
With the spare tire in place, she had insisted that I come with her for coffee and a slice of her incomparable cinnamon-pecan cake. She called her home the Cottage of the Happy Monster, and though the place was a cottage and she was a deeply happy person, she was no more a monster than was Spielberg’s E.T., whom she somewhat resembled.
I had visited her once again in the week since we had met, for an evening of five-hundred rummy and conversation. Although she had won three games out of three, with stakes of a penny for every ten points of spread, she and I were on the way to becoming good friends. However, she did not know about the supernatural side of my life.
Now, when she opened the door in answer to my knock, Blossom said, “Ah! Come in, come in. God has sent me a sucker to fleece at cards. Another prayer answered. I’ll have my Mercedes yet.”
“You won fifty cents the last time. You’ll need to beat me every day for a thousand years.”
“And won’t that be fun!” Blossom closed the door and smiled at Annamaria. “You remind me of my cousin Melvina—the married Melvina, not the Cousin Melvina who’s an old maid. Of course, Cousin Melvina is crazy, and presumably you are not.”
I made introductions while Blossom helped Annamaria out of her coat and hung it on a wall peg.
“Cousin Melvina,” Blossom said, “has a problem with a time traveler. Dear, do you believe time travel is possible?”
Annamaria said, “Twenty-four hours ago, I was in yesterday.”
“And now here you are in today. I’ll have to tell my cousin about you.”
Taking Annamaria by the arm, Blossom walked her toward the back of the cottage.
“Cousin Melvina says a time traveler from 10,000 A.D. secretly visits her kitchen when she’s sleeping.”
As I followed them, Annamaria asked, “Why her kitchen?”
“She suspects they don’t have cake in the far future.”
The cottage was magically lit by Tiffany-inspired stained-glass lamps and sconces, the shades of which Blossom had crafted herself.
“Does Melvina have a lot of cake in her kitchen?”
“She’s a positive fanatic for cake.”
On a living-room wall hung a colorful and intricately detailed quilt of great beauty. Blossom’s quilts sold in art galleries; a few museums had acquired them.
“Perhaps her husband is having midnight snacks,” Annamaria said.
“No. Melvina lives in Florida, and her husband, Norman, he lives in a former Cold War missile silo in Nebraska.”
From a kitchen cabinet, Blossom took a container of coffee and a package of filters, and gave them to Annamaria.
As Annamaria began to prepare the brewer, she said, “Why would anyone want to live in an old missile silo?”
Opening a tin of cookies, Blossom said, “To avoid living with Melvina. She’d go anywhere with him, but not into a missile silo.”
“Why wouldn’t there be cake in the far future?” Annamaria asked.
With pastry tongs, Blossom transferred cookies from the tin to a plate. “Melvina says maybe they lost all the best recipes in a world war.”
“They had a war over cake?”
“Probably the war was for the usual reasons. Cake would have been collateral damage.”
“She does sound kind of crazy.”
“Oh, yes,” said Blossom, “but not in a bad way.”
Standing in the open door, I said, “Annamaria is in a little trouble—”
“Pregnancy isn’t trouble,” Blossom said, “it’s a blessing.”