“If they go in an attraction, off the concourse, maybe we can take them quietly. Squeeze them hard for information.”
“Ten-four.”
“That phone call,” the chief said to me, “was a prelim report on Jeremy and Sibyl von Witzleben.”
The ice-cream eaters had stopped to watch people playing a dart game involving a spinning wheel, an array of balloons, and a barker who distracted the players with amusing patter.
“The von Witzlebens were both microbiologists. She was also an epidemiologist, a specialist in epidemic diseases. He had an advanced degree in virology.”
“What were they up to in Venezuela?” I wondered.
Having lost interest in the dart game, the ice-cream eaters meandered east along the concourse.
The chief said, “They were doing something that could be done only where the government, courts, and cops are all hugely corrupt.”
The ice-cream eaters began to melt into the crowd.
“Damn, where are my guys? Gotta keep those two in sight till I can turn them over to plainclothes.”
“I’ll do it, sir.”
“You don’t have one of these,” he said, indicating the walkie-talkie, “and you can’t have mine.”
As he hurried from the tent to trail the ice-cream eaters at a distance, all the thoughts and memories ricocheting through my head at last coalesced:
Standing at the sink in the half-bathroom at Lauren Ainsworth’s house, watching the rushing water pour over the wound in my hand, the water too hot, exacerbating the pain, but I don’t cool it down, because I’m gripped by a sense of a pending revelation related to the water and the blood and the pain, aware that there is something I know but do not know I know, something about blood and terrible pain and water. The plump cashier with the auburn hair saying, “You’re the one tonight, honey, you’re the one tonight.” Gypsy Mummy and the four blank cards, four blank cards suggesting no future, no future at all, four when one would have conveyed the message. Perhaps the one thing I knew about the true and hidden nature of the world was that there were no coincidences. The Cadillac Escalade burning at the bottom of the desert arroyo. On the phone with Chief Porter, while he’s telling me about Wolfgang and Jonathan and Selene, now known to be Woodrow and Jeremy and Sibyl, and he says, “One or all three look to’ve been junkies … hypodermic needles … ampules of drugs.” Being chased through the pitch-black department store, relying on my special guide dog, my psychic magnetism. Eye-to-eye with Muggs. Microbiologists, epidemiology, virology. Four blank cards, four predictions of death. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death. But no bodachs. Why no bodachs if mass murder is about to happen? The dying girl in the closet, saying, “You a dog. Oh, yeah, you a dog.” Blood and terrible pain and water. Blind in the death-black department store, led by my faithful guide dog, good old psychic magnetism, led to the man-made cave of suburban bats. A minimum of thirty percent of any colony of bats is infected with rabies. The auburn-haired woman in ticket booth number four, reading Ozzie Boone’s The Last Good Bite, a novel in which death by bats was the red herring. There are no coincidences. The dying girl saying, “Hey, dog, you got papers?” Papers meaning proof of vaccination. Hypodermic needles, ampules of some drug. No, ampules of a vaccine. Blood and terrible pain and water. Hydrophobia. Another name for rabies. Hydrophobia. More facts courtesy of Ozzie Boone: The victim of rabies suffers intense thirst, but any attempt to drink induces violent, agonizing spasms of the throat, hence the word hydrophobia, fear of water. Eye and facial muscles become paralyzed. Infected dogs foam at the mouth, are wild with rage and quick to bite. Venezuela, a dictatorship, virtually a terrorist state. The first two of the Four Horsemen, Pestilence and War. Pestilence as a weapon in the silent war that is part of the true and hidden nature of the world. Weaponized rabies. The cultists vaccinated, the rest of us not. No bodachs because tonight involves only a quiet infection of thousands, no one aware, and the dying doesn’t start for days, the dying and the violence, people raging like rabid dogs, which is when the bodachs would show up in legions. The sandpiper winging through the air, vanishing to one observer but visible to others. To infect the thousands on the midway, the weaponized rabies would have to be airborne, invisible to those who breathed it in, its presence known only to the vaccinated cultists.
The C-4 was a distraction.
The dam had never been a target.
Nothing had been what it appeared to be. Or, rather, everything had been more than it appeared to be.
Fifteen thousand infected. And then how many would they infect before their symptoms became apparent?
This wasn’t only about Pico Mundo. The secret war fought all around us by armies little noticed was about to escalate.
“Norman, are you all right?”
I turned to Connie, who had put a hand on my shoulder. My horror must have been evident, because she flinched as if something about my face, my eyes, frightened her.
“No, you’re not all right—are you?”
“The man Wolfgang Schmidt,” I said. “Did you know him?”
“Did I know him? Has something happened to him?”
News of the three brutal murders in the carnie park had not spread to every corner of the midway in the three hours since they occurred, probably because Wyatt Porter had done his best to keep a lid on it.
“Do you know him?” I asked.
“I know who he is. But I don’t know him.”
“He bought two concessions.”
“Some say he never was from a carnie family. Norman, your hand needs medical attention.”
“What concessions did he buy?”
“They belonged to Solly Nickles. Solly got lung cancer and it went fast with him. His kids didn’t want a carnival life, so he took the best offer. Schmidt overpaid.”
“Which concessions, Connie?”
“The duck shoot and the fun house.”
In my mind’s eye, I saw the facade of the fun house: the giant dimensional sculpture of an ogre’s face, twenty feet from chin to crown, almost as wide, detailed and scary but hokey at the same time, its crazed eyes rolling in its sockets. Periodically a growl issued from its open mouth, a growl and a strong blast of compressed air that traveled twenty feet into the promenade, mussing patrons’ hair and startling them.
I stepped out of the tent, not quite into the throng, scanning the crowd for Chief Porter. The pumping calliope, the hundred other musics, the laughter and screams of the marks on the thrill rides, the smells and dazzling lights made me a little dizzy. I could not see the chief. He had followed the ice-cream eaters out of sight.
Behind me, Connie said, “Norman, what’s wrong?”
The fun house was east along this leg of the concourse.
I glanced at my wristwatch. Eleven o’clock.
“Norman, your hand.”
Forty-five minutes. Unless someone got nervous for whatever reason and pulled the trigger sooner.
I pressed forward through the resisting crowd, east toward the fun house.
Fifty
The midway crowd was bigger than a crowd, a throng, bigger than a throng, a multitude, the ceaseless press and crush of human flesh. People of all kinds and ages. Senior citizens with canes and hearing aids and bifocals. Teenagers in groups, dressed and accessorized in rebellion and yet dressed alike, some intent on texting or playing games on their phones even with the riotous carnival clamoring for their attention and their dollars all around them. Children eating cotton candy and ice cream and popcorn, children who should have been home in bed but were here with their parents, children with painted faces, none of them painted like Death, yet each of them a dead child walking if the cult succeeded. Short men with tall women. Fat women with skinny men. The gay, the straight, and the confused. Democrats and Republicans and those who, if asked, would shout Neither! The rich and the poor. All races, all creeds, all targets for those who did not believe that life was precious.
By the time I re
ached the fun house, I still had not seen Chief Porter or the two men he was tailing. In the giant face of the ogre, the eyes were not rolling as before, but were fixed straight ahead. The sculpted beast no longer issued threatening roars accompanied by great blasts of breath. The eerie music had been silenced. The lights that previously pulsed and flashed were dark now. A sign, hanging from a cord strung between two stanchions on the entrance ramp simply declared CLOSED.
I didn’t think it wise to enter the attraction by way of the ramp, in plain view of everyone on the concourse. Some people might recognize me, and a few of them might be cult members.
In truth, I assumed that it wouldn’t be wise to enter the fun house by any means whatsoever. But I was exhausted and bleeding and terrified. It wasn’t possible for me to buy an ice cream and go to the carousel instead and ride around on one of the swan benches provided among the horses for those who were in no condition to climb into a saddle and hold on to a brass pole.
Acting as if I was a person of authority in the Sombra Brothers operation, with my bleeding left hand thrust under my sport coat as if soothing an acidic stomach or doing a Napoleon imitation, I left the concourse. I walked between the fun house and the Wall of Death, which featured performances by a motorcycle daredevil riding at high speed, parallel to the ground, around the wall of a circular arena about fifteen feet deep, doing tricks, while the patrons on tiered bleachers looked down at him, waiting for something to go wrong that would turn him into Jell-O in a costume. They were between shows, but gasoline fumes lingered from the previous one.
Most of the carnival’s attractions were in tents, but the fun house had board walls with a canvas roof. They had probably put it up and torn it down a thousand times without incident, but I doubted that there was a structural engineer in the world who, upon a close inspection of the place, wouldn’t have the vapors. Images of ghosts, vampires, and werewolves covered the side wall, but they were no more scary than Mickey Mouse.
At the back of the structure, a loosely fitted wooden door was labeled KEEP OUT / EMPLOYEES ONLY. Although few marks ever ventured behind the attractions, the former owner, Solly Nickles, evidently believed in consistency of presentation; the words on the door looked as if they had been written by the finger of a skeleton using blood for paint.
I thought the door would be locked but it wasn’t. I couldn’t decide if that was a good or bad thing.
When I stepped inside, I found myself in a small vestibule with a ten-foot ladder nailed to the wall in front of me. Four steps to my left. Four to my right. Each set of steps led to a door.
I tried the door on the left. It opened awkwardly outward, because above it on the inner side hung a lighted EMERGENCY EXIT sign. Beyond lay a narrow corridor in which the walls, floor, and ceiling were painted flat black. This fun house was a walkthrough rather than a ride-through palace of thrills and chills, a black maze in which monsters popped from walls or dropped from ceilings, triggered by motion detectors. Ordinarily, the maze would be all but pitch-black, but at the moment a string of work lights revealed the way. Hanging overhead were rubber spiders the size of poodles, vaguely luminescent.
I could hear the noises of the carnival and the boisterous crowd, but no sound that seemed to come from within the fun house.
I tried the door on the right and found the same situation, although instead of spiders, there were shrunken heads.
Chief Porter had said that he’d assigned Taylor Pipes and Nick Korker to keep watch at the two attractions. I knew them both. Nice guys.
I almost called out, but then decided to keep silent.
In my mind’s eye, I summoned Taylor’s and Nick’s faces. I concentrated on their names, and psychic magnetism drew me to the ladder. I needed both hands, and the pain in my left made an ordeal of ascension. I left a slick of blood on the rungs, which worried me, not because I might be losing a critical amount of it, which I wasn’t, but because I was trying to be quiet and was pretty much succeeding—though the blood left a trail that could be noticed and followed.
Ten feet above the floor of the vestibule, the ladder brought me to an opening about four feet wide and a little over six high. Rungs in the walls provided grips to swing safely off the ladder and onto my feet. The walls were painted light gray there, and a string of small work lights ran end to end. No rubber spiders or shrunken heads or other claptrap cluttered the space. I assumed that the maze lay under me and that this passageway allowed an employee to travel from one end of the fun house to the other without encountering customers.
I stood listening but, as far as I could tell, still heard no sound that originated within those walls. All the noise filtering in from the carnival, however, would surely mask the scrapes and clicks and creaks of anyone who might be moving as cautiously through the structure as I was.
The gray corridor ended in another ladder that led down a four-foot-square shaft. Although my left hand wasn’t growing numb and the pain remained as bad as ever, it became stiffer by the minute and less useful to me. As much as possible, I tried to grip with just my fingers, rather than wrap the skewered palm around the rungs, but the descent became a sweat-inducing heart-knocking gruesome little journey.
At the bottom waited another door. When I opened it, I found Taylor Pipes’s body.
Fifty-one
He had been shot once in the back. There wasn’t much blood because the round had gone through his heart, stopping it in an instant. He hadn’t drawn his weapon. Taylor Pipes had been smart and quick, not a guy who allowed himself to be shot from behind.
The room in which he’d met his end measured perhaps ten feet from the door by which I’d entered to the front wall of the fun house, maybe twenty-five feet from side to side. I was behind the head of the ogre, looking at a reverse mold of the beastly face. From the midway, you couldn’t discern that it had been cast in two pieces, but from this perspective, the joining bolts and the center seam were evident. The backs of the eyeballs, which rolled ominously when the face came to life, were maybe six feet above me, and the mouth just above floor level.
In addition to the door beyond which lay the ladder to the high gray corridor, four other doors offered choices, a pair that flanked the first, and one at each end of the space. Between the doors were trick mirrors. In this one, I swelled fat. In the next, I shrank thin as a pencil. Here, I stood with a huge head and diminutive body. There, I had an immense body and a head no bigger than a baseball. In another, my body and head were sinuous, twisting, as if I were a vaporous genie writhing out of a well-rubbed lamp. In every mirror, I bled from my left hand, and in every mirror, I held the Glock in my right.
I assumed the four doors through which I had not entered all led to different sections of the maze and that patrons returned more than once to this space behind the ogre’s head as they tried to find their way out. The cultist who had taken Taylor by surprise might have left the fun house for some reason or he might still be lurking elsewhere within it. In either case, there were five doors by which he could return at any moment.
Turning from the last mirror, I saw what had been so important to me in the dream of the amaranth: what I had thought of as the urn, a stainless-steel cylinder about half again as tall and half again as wide as a carton of milk.
The object stood beside a heavy-duty electric air compressor and associated equipment that, even to a mechanical ignoramus like me, couldn’t be mistaken for anything other than the source of the ogre’s blasts of breath that accompanied his roars of rage. A four-inch-diameter tube led from the compressor to the monster’s mouth.
The urn could be nothing else than a container of the weaponized rabies virus suspended in some medium that would efficiently convey it into the ogre’s exhalations, whereupon it would be spewed with force across the crowded concourse, through the happy bustling crowd, toward the many rides and the other attractions in the center of the midway. The medium would be odorless and tasteless but might appear as a faint mist.
Because Ozzie
Boone had written a novel about a killer virus and because he was incapable of withholding from his friends the numerous fascinating details of the research he did for a novel, I knew a few things about viruses, just as I knew more than I ever wanted to know about bats, liver flukes, the incidence of psychopathic tendencies in clowns, and the capacity of hogs to be trained to kill.
Bacteria were exceedingly small creatures, but viruses were smaller still. Big viruses were one-fifth the size of the average bacterium, but the vast majority of them were orders of magnitude smaller. The flu virus measured eighty thousandths of a millionth of a meter in diameter. Viruses were so tiny, they couldn’t be seen with ordinary microscopes. Their structure wasn’t known until the invention of the electron microscope in 1933. Billions of viruses could fit into one drop of water.
Viruses have none of our five senses. But they have one sense, the only one they need: an unexplained ability to detect the chemical composition of the cell surface of whichever species make the best hosts for them. Detecting it, they are drawn to it. You might say that viruses have one sense, and that it is pretty much the same one that I call psychic magnetism.
For those who don’t believe the world is a mysterious and deeply layered place, brood on that awhile.
The urn could hold megatrillions of the weaponized rabies virus, enough perhaps to infect the entire population of the planet. Pico Mundo might be the locus from which a plague spread across several counties in California and Nevada before being contained, or across the nation, or across the world.
From the top of that shiny cylinder of death sprouted a nozzle encircled by what appeared to be a rotating petcock currently in the closed position. A rubber tube connected the nozzle to a hole that had been drilled in the four-inch-diameter out-feed pipe through which the compressor released jets of the ogre’s breath into the world beyond.
I knelt beside the cylinder and was about to pluck that tube from the nozzle when the door at the west end of the room flew open and a little man appeared there. Lou Donatella wasn’t dressed as a bear cub this time, but pretty much like me, except that he had the good taste not to wear a powder-blue sport coat. Holding the pistol in a two-hand grip, he squeezed off three shots, killing the man behind me, who I had not heard come out of one of the other doors.