Three victims, two killers, and yet there were no signs of a struggle. I couldn’t help but wonder if the dead, who were clearly compatriots of the two gunmen, had not understood what would be done to them. Supposing instead that they knew their fates as soon as Jim and Bob arrived, then could it be that strict obedience to the cult required them to acquiesce without resistance?
The latter possibility chilled me. If they were so brainwashed as to be unable to defend their lives, if they were so profoundly committed to evil that they would sacrifice themselves upon its altar, stopping their plan for the destruction of Pico Mundo might be even more difficult than I already anticipated it would.
They were, of course, the three who had pursued me in the abandoned mall barely sixteen hours earlier. Wolfgang, Jonathan, and Selene. I had not glimpsed their faces then; and I was grateful that their ruined countenances were pressed into the sofa cushions, sparing me the sight of them now.
None of their spirits had lingered, which was no surprise. I’ve noticed over the years that some good people linger, as do some not so good as they ought to be, but really bad people split the scene when their heart thumps out the last beat. I suspect perhaps they owe a serious debt, and the creditor wants to collect it without delay.
I holstered the Glock and, with some disgust, I fished the wallet out of one of the men’s jeans. From a credit-card pocket in the wallet, I withdrew a California driver’s license. His name—or at least the name under which he obtained the license—was Wolfgang Leopold Schmidt. His photo ID revealed one of those rare Neanderthals who believed that a close shave, an expensive haircut, a crisp white shirt, and a sincere smile could help him pass for human. He was wrong about that.
I dropped the wallet on the floor and took my tinkered-with, highly secure, untraceable smartphone from a jacket pocket. When I switched it on, the bright-gold exclamation point appeared against a black background.
Edie Fischer, the elderly lady who had founded whatever secret organization employed Deke and Maybelle Bullock, wore a brooch in the shape of an exclamation point formed from gold, diamonds, and rubies. In her company, when people asked her what the exclamation point meant, she had said at one time or another that it meant “Seize the day,” or “Live life to the fullest,” or “Sister, what a hoot it is to be me.”
Later, when she had pinned the brooch to the sleeve of the sweater that I wore under a bulletproof vest, just before I went into action against the cult in Nevada, she admitted that it meant none of those things. When I asked what it did mean, she had said, “Never you mind what it means.” Then she had sent me off to rescue seventeen kidnapped children. She promised the brooch would bring me through the night alive, and whether the jewelry had anything to do with it or not, I did survive.
I entered my access code in the phone. After my smiling face replaced the exclamation point, the phone didn’t look as smart as it was supposed to be, but I was then able to make a call.
When Chief Wyatt Porter answered his cell on the third ring, I said, “Sir, I’m sorry if I’m about to ruin a lovely evening with Mrs. Porter.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time, Oddie. It’s just good to have you back in town.”
“Sir, I know your department does some disaster planning. What I’m wondering is if Malo Suerte Dam collapsed, do you know if maybe enough water would pour out of the lake so that Pico Mundo might be completely submerged?”
“Why would the dam collapse?”
“If maybe somebody blew it up.”
“Who wants to blow it up?”
“I’m not sure anyone does.” I found myself staring at the three dead people, and I turned my back to them. “But if someone does want to do it, then they’re members of a satanic cult.”
“This again. I was hoping you were wrong about that when you mentioned it at breakfast.”
“I wish I had been.”
“The bastards shot me the last time.”
“I remember, sir.”
“What do people get from all that devil mumbo-jumbo anyway?”
“A sense of purpose, I guess.”
“They could volunteer at an animal shelter instead.”
“Yes, sir. But then they wouldn’t get to have group sex while wearing goat horns or kill people for fun.”
“Never gave a whole lot of thought to the dam being blown up. I’d have to talk to some knowledgeable people about whether it would put us underwater. What I know for sure is it wouldn’t do us any good.”
“Maybe you could send someone out there to the dam to have a look at it.”
“I’ll be there myself at first light.”
“I mean now, sir.”
“It’s almost eight o’clock. Can’t inspect all that much in the dark, son.”
“Well, you could look around and see if maybe there’s a truck full of explosives parked on the dam.”
“I thought this was a what-if chat.”
“It’s more a what-if-right-now chat.”
“Seems like you must have been back more than just a day, what with all this you’ve already stirred up.”
“I hit the ground running, sir.”
“Well, all right, then, I’ll get on out there to Malo Suerte and see what’s what.”
“You’ll probably have to send deputies, sir. There’s another thing you’ll want to deal with yourself.”
“We only have one dam. What else do these ignorant fools want to blow up?”
“They’ve killed three of their own, blew their brains out.”
He sighed. “I should have retired after I was shot.”
“You’re still a young man, sir.” I gave him the make and model of the motor home and described its approximate position in the carnie campground.
“Why kill their own?” he asked.
“From what I can gather, they thought I had a lead on these three and that through them maybe I’d find the others.”
“Evidently you did have a lead on them. I’ll be there with a crime-scene team, we’ll talk.”
“I won’t be here, sir. I’ve got this other thing I really have to do.”
“What thing?”
“I won’t know until I go after it and find it. You remember how this works when I’m on the hunt.”
“It’s all coming back to me. You aren’t getting in over your head, are you, Oddie?”
“If I am, I won’t know it till I’m there.”
“Karla’s making you her famous apple dumplings.”
“I love those dumplings.”
“After she’s gone to all that work, son, you better stay alive so you can eat them.”
“Count on it,” I said, but I didn’t tell him about the four blank cards from Gypsy Mummy.
I terminated the call and switched off the phone and, without looking back at the three dead bodies, I left the motor home by the front passenger door.
The night remained warm enough for rattlesnakes, but I was less concerned about literal serpents than I was about the figurative ones like Jim and Bob. It wouldn’t make much sense for them to hang around the immediate area, waiting to be linked to the murders that they had committed. On the other hand, you couldn’t expect normal behavior from guys who hoped that if they committed enough mayhem in this world, they would earn for themselves a lucrative franchise selling dung sandwiches in Hell.
Moving along a darkish lane between rows of travel trailers and motor homes, acutely aware of the weight of the Glock in my shoulder holster, I kept my right hand flat against my chest, as if I were suffering a bout of acid reflux, the better to execute a quick draw if necessary.
Twenty-two
I was nearly out of the encampment, intending to return to the midway, when from between a pair of large RVs stepped two men. In the gloom, I almost drew down on them before I realized they were not Jim and Bob.
As they approached and we met in the fall of light from one of the few lampposts in the campground, one of the men proved to be a tall, muscular specimen wea
ring nothing but tennis shoes without socks, a pair of shorts, and a tapestry of tattoos that covered his bald head, face, and entire body. The other, a dwarf, wore a furry costume and carried the realistic-looking head of a baby bear under his right arm.
The little person said, “Hey, dude.”
I said, “Hey.”
They stopped in front of me, and for some reason I stopped, too, although I should have kept moving.
The moment felt surreal, but at the same time, there was about it a quality of hyper-reality. Even as I regarded those two men, I became aware of the flying beams of the spotlights, to the north-east, painting ephemeral infinity symbols across the pregnant clouds that increasingly commanded the sky, of the distant roller-coaster chain clacking through the ratchet angles of the guideway as cars full of riders climbed an incline toward the next long drop, of the dusty smell of the campground, and of the scent of rain pending. The many musics from the carnival volplaned to us, distorted by distance, tantalizing the part of us that seeks sensation as an antidote for dread, while at the same time triggering a vague alarm. I thought this would have been akin to the music that had played throughout Prince Prospero’s castle in Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death,” during the final horrific hours when the thousand revelers, certain that the plague could be denied entrance by the abbey’s battlements, discovered the angel of death in costume among them, when blood then issued from their every pore. I was aware of the faint thrum of wings, as unseen night birds or bats traveled the darkness overhead, of snowflake moths that swooped in seeming ecstasy around the light atop the lamppost, of exaggerated moth shadows sliding-quivering down the walls of a nearby motor home and rippling across the graveled ground. The rush of detail conveyed by my inexplicably heightened senses served to emphasize the surreal pair before me, so that they seemed to have stepped through a tear in reality from someplace beyond.
This is A Moment, stay with it, I told myself, though at the time I could not have explained what A Moment meant.
The illustrated man said, “Cool face.”
I had all but forgotten my harlequin disguise. “Connie did it.”
“You know Connie?”
“Only because she painted my face.”
“Yeah,” the little person said, “but that’s her real name.”
Suspicion scrunched up the big guy’s colorful ink-festooned countenance. “What’re you?”
“Excuse me?”
“Are you a carnie? I don’t get a carnie vibe from you.”
“No, sir. I’m just a guy.”
“Connie wouldn’t give her real name to a mark,” he said, by which he meant a patron of the carnival, someone not part of their tightly knit clan.
“I reminded Connie of her brother, Ethan.”
That revelation astonished both men, and the little person said to his companion, “What do you think, Ollie?”
Ollie didn’t know. “What do you think, Lou?”
“She talked family with him, like he was one of us.” They returned their attention to me.
After a silence, I said, “I need to get going.”
Ollie scowled again. “Wait, wait, wait.”
His small friend said, “I want to shake your hand, dude, but not in this bear suit, and it takes a while for me to skin out of this damn thing.”
“I’ll shake your paw,” I said, holding out my hand.
“No, that won’t work,” Lou said.
“That won’t do any good at all,” Ollie agreed.
“Put your hand on my head,” Lou said.
“Why?”
“I won’t bite it, I swear. Ever since the little person in that reality-TV show, people think we’ve all got an edge. I don’t have an edge.”
“He doesn’t,” the tattooed strongman agreed. “He’s every bit as gentle as he looks.”
“What’s your name, dude?”
“Norman,” I lied.
“Listen, Norman, I wouldn’t hurt a rattlesnake if it was wrapped around my leg.”
Ollie said, “He wouldn’t even hurt his own mother, and that mean bitch sure as hell deserved it.”
Lou shrugged his furry shoulders as if to say that your mom was your mom regardless of what atrocities she committed, a philosophical position with which I had some sympathy.
“Norman, listen, please just put your hand on my head so I can see something. It won’t take but a few seconds.”
When I hesitated, Ollie said, “Pretend you’re checking him to see if he has a fever.”
I wanted to be out of there before Chief Porter and his CSI team showed up; however, I was intrigued by Lou’s request, and intuition kept assuring me that this was A Moment. Besides, in spite of Ollie’s size, these two weren’t the least threatening. They might have been a vaudeville act that had been transported through time from Broadway circa 1920 to this lamplit, graveled stage, where they only wanted to amuse.
I pretended to be checking Lou for a fever, maybe related to the ursine flu. When the palm of my hand met his forehead, I felt a weird tingle, not unpleasant, but it passed at once. The little guy closed his eyes and swayed as if his knees might fold him to the ground in his bear suit.
After perhaps ten seconds, he looked at me again, and tears spilled down his cheeks.
Startled, I took my hand off his forehead.
He said, “I wish I could help you, mister. I really do. I truly wish it. But you’re far beyond me. Way far beyond me. You’re the true deal. The truest. Whatever it is you’ve got to do, only you can do it.”
Then he did the strangest thing but made it seem as natural as the words—Hey, dude—with which he had first greeted me. He took my hand in his two bear-suit paws and kissed it.
When he let go and raised his head, the tears on his cheeks glistened, and those yet unshed sparkled like galaxies in his large dark eyes.
I didn’t know what to say, and he had evidently said all that he would. With the bear head still held under his right arm, he turned away from me.
Seemingly stunned by his companion’s words and deeds, Ollie encircled me with his massive arms, hugged me to him, let me go, and said, “You take care of yourself, Norman.”
Shuffling away, Lou said, “His name isn’t Norman.”
Ollie returned to his companion’s side and put a hand on his shoulder to halt him. Glancing at me, the strongman said, “What is his name?”
“Truth,” Lou said.
“That’s a funny name.”
“Mercy,” Lou said.
“Truth Mercy—that’s his name?”
“There’s no right name for him.”
“What did you see when he touched you?”
The little guy looked at me one last time and shook his head. “Too much. I saw too much.”
Evidently the illustrated man knew his friend well enough to realize that those were his final words on the subject. They walked away from me and did not glance back again.
Shaken, I hurried out of the campground, up the long incline through knee-high grass, and across the service road to the shorter slope. When I reached the top, returning to the midway behind the sideshow tents, I looked down on the trailers and motor homes arrayed far below just in time to see two police cruisers and a morgue van enter the campground with emergency lights flashing but without sirens.
Standing there, rerunning in memory the encounter with Lou and Ollie, I thought that if there were others in the world with wild talents similar to mine, they would surely find it as difficult to live like ordinary people as I did. Perhaps for some of them, merely simplifying their lives, living in one-room apartments, wearing only jeans and T-shirts or another minimalist wardrobe, resolving not to complicate things by planning for the future, working in undemanding jobs such as fry cookery or tire sales was not enough to keep them sane and give them hope. Maybe some of them needed to withdraw from society more than I did. Burdened with one kind of psychic perception or another—or several—some might find stability and a degree of peace in
the carnival, where outcasts and nonviolent misfits had long been welcome, where odd ducks were accepted, and where no one sought to know the secrets of others in the show.
Whatever Lou had seen when I touched him, his gift—or curse—obviously must be different from mine. He probably could not see the lingering spirits of the dead, but he might now know that I could. I suspected that he had learned other things about me, too, perhaps including the nature of the suffering that I might have to endure in the hours ahead. Dwarf in a bear suit, comic figure in whatever show he performed, the little guy had no doubt known his share of bullies and tormentors. And yet it was a good bet that he had more foresight and more wisdom than the thirty-three mechanical oracles housed in ALL THINGS FORETOLD.
I passed between two sideshow tents, back to the bright, loud, busy midway, no longer using psychic magnetism to seek out Wolfgang, Jonathan, and Selene, but focusing instead on the executioners, Jim and Bob.
Twenty-three
Through the open bedroom window of the seaside cottage came the pleasantly cool breath of the sea, but I sweated in twisted sheets. Perspiration streamed from me also in my turbulent nightmare, as the Happy Monster, Blossom Rosedale, led me toward what would prove to be the amaranth.
No sounds existed now except those that I made, as if the outer world had ceased to exist, as though I had become the world entire, isolated and adrift in a void. The furious knocking of my heart, the gasping for breath, each inhalation inadequate to my need, and a hard chattering sound, something rattling, that I could not identify.
There were light and shadow but no longer faces or mysterious shapes, only currents of color washing across my eyes, color and at times a rippling darkness, and I was very afraid. Sometimes Blossom seemed to manifest beside me, like a spirit, but at other times I was not aware of her.
Moving, moving forward, moving with great effort, moving, but to what, to where?
As the physicists tell us, time was created in the big bang, a necessary condition for the expansion and maturation of the universe. All that exists outside the universe exists also outside of time, where no experience is measured in minutes. In dreams, time exists, though not as we know it in the waking world, strangely distorted and unreliable, as if on a subconscious level we’re aware that time isn’t enduring, that it is not a required condition of our existence, that there comes a point when we will have no need of it.