“Remarkable,” I said.
“As is everything around us, if we look.”
The sandpiper flew from the hand, and Tim leaped to his feet to watch the bird soar skyward.
I said, “At dinner tonight with Blossom …”
“Yes?”
“Will you show me the trick with the amaranth? You’ve promised to show me, ma’am, but you never do.”
“It is not a trick, odd one. It’s better than that.”
“So will you show me?”
“Not tonight. But soon.”
Winging away, repeating its flight call—pjeev, pjeev, pjeev—the sandpiper diminished to a dot, then vanished, but of course at the same moment it suddenly came into view of those who were farther north along the shore.
“Ma’am?”
“Yes, Oddie?”
“Do you know the true and hidden nature of the world?”
“What do you think?”
“I think you do. I’ll probably never understand it. Aside from English, I never was much good in school.”
Forty-six
The puncture in my palm was more than an inch wide, but on the back of my hand, where the point of the blade had torn through, it was somewhat narrower. I bled freely, but not as voluminously as I would have bled if the nameless girl had severed an artery or vein when she attacked me. That was a bit of luck, because I had no time to go to a hospital emergency room.
In a washbasin drawer in the ground-floor half-bath at the Ainsworth house, I found first-aid supplies. Band-Aids, gauze pads, adhesive tape, rubbing alcohol, iodine …
A decorative container of liquid soap stood on the counter beside the sink. I turned the spigots, adjusted the water temperature so that it was warm but perhaps not so hot as to exacerbate the pain of the wound. The soap smelled of oranges. Lathering up proved to be about as much fun as sticking my hand in a wasps’ nest.
After I rinsed off the soap, I kept my hands under the spout, though I could have stood there all night rinsing away the oozing blood. Maybe I was in shock, but I seemed to zone out as I watched the water foaming in the sink, the bubbles tinted pink and sparkling. I had set the temperature too hot, and the longer I kept my hand in gushing water, the more sharply the wound stung. Nevertheless, I stood there, watching the fast-flowing stream, grimacing at the torture but enduring it, because I was overcome by a sense that some revelation was impending, a revelation related to the water, the blood, the pain. There was something important that I knew—but didn’t know I knew. Water, blood, pain …
The feeling passed, though not the pain. I was not a guy to whom revelations came easily.
Letting the water run in the sink, I poured rubbing alcohol and then iodine into both the entrance and exit wounds, all the while making shrill sounds of less than manly distress through my clenched teeth.
I used a small towel to wrap my left hand, to avoid dripping blood all over the marble countertop and the floor. With my right hand only, I prepared gauze pads. I found a bottle of thick and odorous fluid stoppered with a brush; it was used to paint shut small weeping wounds, creating a flexible sort of artificial skin, never meant for serious cuts into which bacteria might have been carried by a blade. My tetanus vaccination was current. Even if I might be trapping germs in the wound, I wasn’t going to die of an infection. It took time for an infection to develop, and I doubted that I had enough hours left to accommodate one. The sealant dried swiftly, and I painted layer over layer. For the moment, anyway, the bleeding stopped. I applied the gauze pads and then wound adhesive tape around and around my hand.
Through all of that, I left the water running, listening to it rush into the sink and gurgle down the drain. In those sounds, there seemed to be words, a quick and liquid voice. I felt that everything depended on my understanding what was being said.
I wondered if being stabbed and having to kill the girl had left me in a state of shock that muddied my thinking. My skin was cold and clammy. A slight dizziness came and went and came again. Both were symptoms of a drop in blood pressure, which was one of the causes of physiological shock.
Bandaged, I watched the water for another half minute but then cranked it off when enlightenment did not come.
I was still cold and clammy, but the lightheadedness seemed to have passed.
I dropped the lid of the toilet. Sat. Fumbled my phone from a pocket. Held it in my injured hand. My good hand was shaking so that I had to concentrate to press the correct digits. Chief Porter had two cell phones. I figured he was fielding a lot of calls on the first one. I dialed the number that only Mrs. Porter and I knew. He answered, asked me to hold, and finished a call on the other phone.
When he came back to me, he sounded harried, which I’d never known him to be before. He knew about the explosions, of course, not just those that I had heard and seen, but another one at a warehouse at the opposite end of town from the Blue Sky Ranch.
“All hell’s breaking loose tonight.” He was furious. “These madmen, these goddamn losers.”
“Sir, nothing that’s happened so far is the main event. These are all distractions, to get your men spread thin.”
“Distractions from the dam?”
“I don’t think it’s going to be the dam.”
“I’ve got four men at Malo Suerte ever since I talked to you. If it’s not the dam, I need them elsewhere.”
I hesitated. “I don’t know if it’s the dam or not. I just don’t know. Sir, there are three dead men and one dead woman here at Lauren Ainsworth’s place.”
“Not Lauren.”
“No, sir. She and the girls are safe.”
“Thank God.”
“These are cultists. Two more are dead just inside the orchard fence that runs beside the Ainsworth driveway.”
“Six altogether?”
“Six.”
“Did you …”
“Yes, sir. I did. I did them all. They’ve forced me to be a killing machine, and I can’t … I can’t take much more of it.” My voice broke, and for a moment, I couldn’t piece it together again.
“Son, are you all right?”
My voice returned, but to my ear it didn’t sound much like me. “She stabbed me in the hand, but that’s okay. I can take more of that, but I can’t take more killing.”
“I’ll be there right away, Oddie.”
“No. No, sir. No. I’m leaving here as soon as I hang up. Did the CSI team finish in that motor home?”
“Yes. The coroner removed the bodies.”
“You search the place, find anything?”
“Concealed gun closet. Weapons, ammo. Hundred thousand in cash. Passports and driver’s licenses, their pictures but different names.”
“Wolfgang, Jonathan, and Selene.”
“Actually Woodrow, Jeremy, and Sibyl.”
“What do you know about them?”
“We’re working it. One or all three look to’ve been junkies. Forty hypodermic needles in the fridge, lots of ampules of drugs.”
“What drug?”
“The lab is analyzing.”
“You at the fairground?”
“Just left there to—”
“Go back. I’ll meet you there. Maybe it’s the dam, maybe something else. But the operation’s being run from the carnival.”
“Nothing can happen there that would put the town underwater.”
“Remember, sometimes my dreams are symbolic, not literal.”
Even in his silence, I could hear his alarm. Then he said, “There’s ten, twelve thousand people in the fairgrounds tonight.”
I looked at my watch. Ten minutes past ten o’clock.
“If anything’s going to happen there,” I said, “it might not be until the crowd is at its peak for the big drawing. Eleven forty-five might be the target time.”
“Might doesn’t cut it, Oddie. If they’ve moved that C-4 in here, I’ve got to evacuate this place now.”
My hand throbbed like an abscessed tooth. “The cult will ha
ve people on the midway, Chief. The moment they see an evacuation starting, they’ll move up the strike time.”
“Maybe the timer’s already set, and they can’t change it.”
“Or maybe they’re using a cell phone as a detonator, all they have to do is make a call to it.”
“Sonofabitch.”
I stood up from the toilet, though it was an appropriate seat, considering that the cult seemed on the verge of flushing away Pico Mundo. And more than this one town. Maybe much more. “I’m walking right along the edge of it, Chief.”
“The edge of what?”
“The truth. Understanding. I can almost see it. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
“Not from where you are.”
“Quarter to eleven at the latest.”
“Leaves us just an hour.”
“Meet me at a concession on the southwest side of the midway. Place called Face It.”
“Wait a second. When you were on the midway earlier, did you see any bodachs?”
“No, sir.”
“Not even one? Then nothing’s going to happen at the carnival. If it was going to be blown sky-high, the place would be crawling with those bodachs of yours.”
“I don’t know, sir. I don’t know anymore. Maybe they’ve learned that I can see them. Maybe they’re manipulating me by staying out of sight. See you soon.”
I terminated the call, stepped out of the half-bath into the ground-floor hallway, and discovered the gut-shot dead woman waiting for me.
Forty-seven
The spirits of really bad people seldom lingered this side of the Other Side. When their bodies died, most of them seemed to leave this world as if sucked out of it by the largest vacuum cleaner in the universe. The spirits that lingered were those of people who were basically good, regardless of what faults they might have had in life. On the day of the shootings at the Green Moon Mall, not long before Stormy’s death, I had been confronted by the festering spirit of a man who’d been dead for a day and who felt that he had a score to settle with me. I had not since found myself the target of an assault by a ghost. Then the nameless girl in black, who had put a stiletto through my hand, suddenly appeared in the hallway and, no more subtle in death than in life, conveyed her anger by thrusting two fingers at me, the middle one on each hand.
The dead don’t talk, but they have ways of getting their point across. In addition to rude gestures and more benign pantomime, they can go poltergeist, especially the bad ones. I had lost a perfectly good stereo system to a poltergeist when I was seventeen.
I had learned not to show fear in these cases. My fear empowers them. She glared at me, but I stared calmly back at her and said, “Go away. Aren’t you eager to see what reward you’ll get when you cross over?”
Earlier, in the study, after she had thrown her malfunctioning combat rifle at me, her face had been twisted by hatred and anger. Because she had reminded me of the faces of the drowned people in my dream, I had thought I also read fear in her features.
At the moment, there was no fear in her, only hatred and anger so griddle-hot that it might have fried an egg. Yet still I thought of the floating dead in that submerged Pico Mundo.
She put two fingers to my lips, apparently to indicate that she would tolerate no further talk from me. The fingers felt real to me, as did the touch of any spirit.
Cat-quick, she clawed at my right eye, as if to tear it from its socket. But no spirit could harm a living person by touch, not even those that were more radically evil than this one. This world belonged to the living, not to the dead. Their clawing fingers and their fists passed through us. Their bites could not draw blood.
When she realized that she couldn’t blind or bleed me, her anger grew hotter, boiled into rage. Her beauty distorted like a reflection in a fun-house mirror. The deceptive look of childlike innocence that she had possessed earlier gave way to the truth of her: malice of an especially sinister and bitter degree, a venomous detestation of anyone who did not share her enthusiasm for cruelty, for murder, and who did not worship raw power as she did.
One option existed for some spirits to harm the living. If the malevolence in them was ripe enough, if they loathed every virtue and celebrated every abomination, they were sometimes able to convert their demonic rage into a fearsome energy that they could channel into anything made by the hand of man. We called them poltergeists.
The woman thrust her arms full length, hands palm-out, as if she were some enraptured faith healer proclaiming her power to a tent full of the desperate and gullible, but she didn’t have healing in mind. Pulses of energy issued from her hands, visible but without effect on me, concentric rings of power that caused doors along the hallway to slam shut and crash open.
One of the two carpet runners peeled off the floor, undulated in the air, like some giant parasitic flatworm. It lashed the walls, knocked paintings off their hangers. When it flew at me, I ducked and felt it slap against my back as it ceased to be airborne and tumbled toward the kitchen.
The spirit herself exploded into frenzied motion, careening along the hallway, ricocheting from wall to wall, causing the lights to flicker and a groaning to arise within the walls, as if the wood studs were torquing behind the sheetrock. A table in the foyer rattled along the hardwood floor in a stiff-legged dance, and flung itself through the archway into the living room.
Poltergeists could express power but couldn’t control it. They were blind fury, thrashing torment. They could harm a living person only by chance.
Nevertheless, I could still be knocked unconscious by a flying chair or struck dead by a bronze statue that had become a missile. To die triumphant, after defeating the cultists, would be all right, even perhaps desirable. But after I had come this far at such cost, to be decapitated by a round glass tabletop, flung like a discus, would be so infuriating that in death I might linger long enough to work off my anger with a little poltergeisting of my own, though I had nothing against the Ainsworths or their furniture.
The spirit did her whirling-dervish act, out of the hallway, into the living room. I heard bric-a-brac and light furniture and lamps being gathered up as if by a tornado, and I ran for the front door. A coffee-table book, a thick volume, flew past me, its glossy pages flapping like wings. Something cracked against the side of my head—a candy dish, which fell to the floor and shattered. I didn’t see stars, like characters did in those old Chuck Jones cartoons, but I did see scores of little dark spots swarming in my vision, trying to coalesce and drop me blind to the floor. I kept going, however, and my vision cleared by the time I went through the front door, crossed the porch, and stumbled down the steps.
I didn’t expect the spirit to follow me. Poltergeists usually thrash around like drunken politicians on a junket to some education conference at an offshore resort that is actually an anything-goes whorehouse. They exhaust themselves and wander off, having forgotten what they were doing or why they were there.
As I hurried to the stables that lay to the east, I thought the tumult in the residence was already subsiding. I shouted for Lauren, and after a minute she appeared in the darkness, wary and at first reluctant to switch on the flashlight.
“Where are the girls?” I asked.
The whites of Lauren’s eyes appeared radiant in the night, owlish, and her voice trembled as she said, “All the shooting.”
“It’s finished.”
Fortunately, either the spirit in the house had already worn itself out or its power had been spent to the extent that nothing more than pillows and afghans were being thrown around, the rage having faded to a hissy fit.
“What’s happening,” Lauren asked, “what the hell was that all about, the explosions, my God, the gunshots, like machine guns?”
“Where are the girls?” I asked again.
“I told them to wait, wait and be ready to run, till I was sure it was safe.”
“You can’t go back into the house. There are dead people in the house.”
“Wh
at dead people?”
“Very bad dead people. Four of them. Two on the patio. You don’t want the kids to see them. You don’t want to see them. Is there a friend, family, you can stay with?”
She looked bewildered but nonetheless poised, and I could see from where the girls got their equanimity. “My sister, Arlene. She lives over in the heights. But what’s this all about?”
“No time for that. Where in the house do you keep your car keys? I’ll go in and get them for you.”
“We keep them in the cars. There’s no crime around here to worry about.” She realized what she’d said, looked toward the house, then toward the huge gasoline fire in the distance. “Is it over, whatever it is?”
“No. We need to get out of here. You’ll have to drive.”
“All right.”
“You’ll have to drive fast.”
I was holding up my left hand, and she saw the bandage. “What happened to you?”
“Stabbed. Maybe I could drive your second car if I had plenty of time. But driving the way I need to, I’d pull open the wound before I made it to the county road. Get the girls, come on, let’s blow this place before something else happens.”
When Lauren called them, Veronica and Victoria appeared with Muggs, the Labrador retriever.
In memory I heard the dying woman in the closet. You a dog. Oh, yeah, you a dog.
The girls didn’t appear to be crying. Scared but stalwart. The dog wagged his tail.
The garage was a freestanding structure, separate from the house. We entered through the man-size door between two roll-ups. There were four vehicles. A Ford pickup with an extended bed. A Ford Expedition. A BMW. A 1947 Ford Sportsman Woody that Dave, her late husband, had fully restored and customized.
I thought Lauren would choose the BMW, for its power, but she wanted the Expedition. She told the girls to get in the backseat, buckle up, and keep the dog lying on the seat between them, so that he wouldn’t get hurt.
“When I say fast,” I told her, “I mean to hell with speed limits. You’ve got to drop me off at the fairground before you take the girls to your sister’s, and I need to be there already. Chief Wyatt Porter is waiting for me.”