Forever Odd

  I explained: “That’s a short story by Ernest Hemingway.”

  “The guy with the line of furniture? What’s Hemingway got to do with this?”

  I shrugged. “I have a friend who’s always thrilled when I make a literary allusion. He thinks I could be a writer.”

  “Are the two of you gay or something?” she asked.

  “No. He’s hugely fat, and I’m supernaturally gifted, that’s all.”

  “Boyfriend, sometimes you don’t make a lot of sense. Did you kill Robert?”

  Except for our two swords of light, shining past each other, the second floor receded into unrelieved darkness. While I had been in the crawlspaces and the vertical chase, the last light had washed out of the winter day.

  I didn’t mind dying, but this cavernous fire-blackened pit was an ugly place to do it.

  “Did you kill Robert?” she repeated.

  “He fell off a balcony.”

  “Yeah, after you shot him.” She didn’t sound upset. In fact she regarded me with the calculation of a black widow spider deciding whether to take a mate. “You play clueless pretty well, but you’re for sure a mundunugu.”

  “Something was wrong with Robert.”

  She frowned. “I don’t know what it is. My needy boys don’t always stay with me as long as I’d like.”

  “They don’t?”

  “Except Andre. He’s a real bull, Andre is.”

  “I thought he was a horse. Cheval Andre.”

  “A total stallion,” she said. “Where’s Danny the Geek? I want him back. He’s a funny little monkey.”

  “I cut his throat and pitched him down a shaft.”

  My claim electrified her. Her nostrils flared, and a hard pulse appeared in her slender throat.

  “If he didn’t die in the fall,” I told her, “he’s bled to death by now. Or drowned. The shaft’s got twenty or thirty feet of water at the bottom.”

  “Why would you have done that?”

  “He betrayed me. He told you my secrets.”

  Datura licked her lips as though she had just finished eating a tasty dessert. “You’ve got as many layers as an onion, boyfriend.”

  I had decided to play the we’re-two-of-a-kind-why-don’t-we-join-forces game, but another opportunity arose.

  She said, “The Nigerian prince was full of shit, but I might believe you can become a panther after midnight.”

  “It’s not a panther,” I said.

  “Yeah? So what is it you become?”

  “It’s not a saber-toothed tiger, either.”

  “Do you become a leopard, like on Kilimanjaro?” she asked.

  “It’s a mountain lion.”

  The California mountain lion, one of the world’s most formidable predators, prefers to live in rugged mountains and forests, but it adapts well to rolling hills and low scrub.

  Mountain lions thrive in the dense, almost lush scrub in the hills and canyons around Pico Mundo, and often they venture into adjoining territory that would be classified as true desert. A male mountain lion will claim as much as a hundred square miles as his hunting range, and he likes to roam.

  In the mountains, he’ll feed on mule deer and bighorn sheep. In territory as barren as the Mojave, he will chase down coyotes, foxes, raccoons, rabbits, and rodents, and he will enjoy the variety.

  “Males of the species average between one hundred thirty and one hundred fifty pounds,” I told her. “They prefer the cover of night for hunting.”

  That look of wide-eyed girlish wonder—which I had first seen on our way to the casino with Doom and Gloom, and which was the only appealing and guileless expression that she possessed—overcame her again. “Are you gonna show me?”

  I said, “Even in the daytime, if a mountain lion is on the move instead of resting, people rarely see it because it’s so quiet. It passes without detection.”

  As excited as ever she had been at a human sacrifice, she said, “These paw prints—they’re yours, aren’t they?”

  “Mountain lions are solitary and secretive.”

  “Solitary and secretive, but you’re going to show me.” She had demanded miracles, fabulous impossible things, icy fingers up and down her spine. Now she thought that I would at last deliver. “You didn’t conjure these tracks to lead me here. You transformed…and made these tracks yourself.”

  If Datura’s and my positions had been reversed, I would have been standing with my back to the mountain lion, oblivious as it stalked me.

  As wrong as nature is—with its poisonous plants, predatory animals, earthquakes, and floods—sometimes it gets things right.

  FIFTY-TWO

  IMMENSE, THE PAWS, WITH WELL-DEFINED toes…Lowered so slowly, planted so gently that the carpet of ashes, as powdery as talcum, did not plume under them…

  Beautiful coloration. Tawny, deepening to dark brown at the tip of the long tail. Also dark brown on the backs of the ears and on the sides of the nose.

  If our positions had been reversed, Datura would have watched the approach of the mountain lion with cold-eyed amusement, darkly delighted by my cluelessness.

  Although I tried to remain focused on the woman, my attention kept drifting to the cat, and I was not amused, but grimly fascinated and overcome by a growing sense of horror.

  My life was hers to take or spare, and the only future I could count on was but a fraction of a second long, whatever time a bullet would take to travel from the muzzle of the pistol to me. Yet at the same time, her life lay in my hands, and it seemed that my silence in the matter of the stalking lion could not be entirely justified by the fact that I was literally under the gun.

  If we rely upon the tao with which we’re born, we always know what is the right thing to do in any situation, the good thing not for our bank accounts or for ourselves, but for our souls. We are tempted from the tao by self-interest, by base emotions and passions.

  I believe that I can honestly say I did not hate Datura, though I had reason to, but certainly I detested her. I found her repugnant in part because she emblematized the willful ignorance and narcissism that characterize our troubled times.

  She deserved to be imprisoned. In my opinion, she had earned execution; and in extreme jeopardy, to save myself or Danny, I had the right—the obligation—to kill her.

  Perhaps no one, however, deserves as hideous a death as being mauled and eaten alive by a wild beast.

  Regardless of the circumstances, perhaps it is indefensible to allow such a fate to unfold to the point of inevitability when the potential victim, armed with a gun, could save herself if warned.

  Every day we make our way through a moral forest, along pathways ever branching. Often we get lost.

  When the array of paths before us is so perplexing that we can’t make a choice, or won’t, we can hope that we will be given a sign to guide us. A reliance on signs, however, can lead to the evasion of all moral obligations, and thus earn a terrible judgment.

  If a leopard in the highest snows of Kilimanjaro, where nature would never have taken it, is understood by everyone as a sign, then the timely appearance of a hungry mountain lion in a burned-out casino-hotel should be as easy to understand as would be a holy voice from a burning bush.

  This world is mysterious. Sometimes we perceive the mystery, and retreat in doubt, in fear. Sometimes we go with it.

  I went with it.

  Waiting for me to transform from my human state, an instant before discovering she was not after all invincible, Datura realized that something at her back enthralled me. She looked to see what it might be.

  By turning, she invited the pounce, the jaws that bite, the claws that catch.

  She screamed, and the ferocious impact of the lion knocked the pistol from her hand before she was able to aim or to squeeze the trigger.

  In the spirit of mystery that defined the moment, the gun arced high toward me, and reaching up, I received it from the air with a casual grace.

  Perhaps she was mortally torn already, beyond
rescue, but the unavoidable truth is that I held the gun, equivalent to a vorpal blade, yet did not slay the Jabberwock, and cannot claim to be a beamish boy. Ashes plumed around my feet as I sprinted toward the north end of the building, and the stairs.

  Although I never saw her blood drawn nor the lion at its feast, I’ll never be able to purge her screams from my memory.

  Perhaps the seamstress, under the knife of the Gray Pigs, had sounded like this, or the walled-up children in the basement of that house in Savannah.

  Another voice roared—not that of the lion—half in anguish and half in rage.

  Glancing back, I saw Datura’s flashlight, knocked this way and that by thrashing cat and prey.

  Farther away, from the south end of the building, beyond black columns that might have marked the peri-style of Hell, another light approached, in the possession of a hulking shadowy shape. Andre.

  Datura’s screaming stopped.

  Andre’s flashlight swept across her and found the timely lion. If he had a gun, he didn’t use it.

  Respectfully cutting a wide berth around the cat and its kill, Andre kept coming. I suspected he would never stop coming. Runaway locomotives have gravity on their side.

  My trembling light drew the giant more certainly than psychic magnetism could have done, but if I switched it off, I would be all but blinded.

  Although he was still at some distance and though I was not the master marksman of my age, I squeezed off a shot, then another and a third.

  He had a gun. He returned my fire.

  As would have been anyone’s, his aim was better than mine. One slug ricocheted off a column to my left, and another round whistled past my head so close that I could hear it cutting the air separate from the boom and echo of the shot itself.

  Trading fire, I would get my candle snuffed, so I ran, crouching and weaving.

  The stairwell door was missing. I plunged through, raced down.

  Past the landing, on the second flight, I realized that he would expect me to exit at the ground floor and that in those hallways and spaces, all familiar to him, he would catch me, for he was strong and fast and not as stupid as he looked.

  Hearing him enter the stairwell, realizing that he had closed the gap between us even faster than I had feared he might, I kicked open the door at the ground floor but didn’t go through it. Instead, I swept the light across the next set of down-bound stairs to be sure they weren’t obstructed, then switched it off and descended in the dark.

  Having been kicked open, the ground-floor door rebounded shut with a crash. As I reached the lower landing, sliding my hand along the railing for guidance, and continued blindly into territory that I had not scouted, I heard Andre slam out of the stairwell, into the ground floor.

  I kept moving. I’d bought some time, but he wouldn’t be fooled for long.

  FIFTY-THREE

  RISKING LIGHT WHEN I REACHED THE BASEMENT level, I found more stairs but hesitated to follow them. A sub-basement would be likely to present me with a dead end.

  Shuddering, I remembered her story of the lingering spirit of the Gestapo torturer haunting that sous-sol in Paris. Datura’s silken voice: I felt Gessel’s hands all over me—eager, bold, demanding. He entered me.

  Choosing the basement, I expected to find a parking garage or loading docks at which deliveries had been made. In either case, there would be exits.

  I’d had enough of the Panamint. I preferred to take my chances in the open, in the storm.

  Doors lined both sides of a long concrete-walled corridor with a vinyl-tile floor. Neither fire nor smoke had touched this area.

  Because the doors were white but not paneled, I checked out a few of the rooms as I passed them. They were empty. Either offices or storerooms, they had been cleaned out after the disaster because what they contained evidently had not been damaged either by fire or water.

  The acrid stink of the fire’s aftermath had not penetrated here. I had been breathing that miasma for so many hours that clean air felt astringent in my nostrils, in my lungs, almost abrasive in its comparative purity.

  An intersection of corridors presented me with three choices. After the briefest hesitation, I hurried to the right, hoping that the door at the farther end would lead to the elusive parking garage.

  Just as I reached the termination of this passage, I heard Andre crash through the steel door from the north stairs, back in the first hallway.

  At once, I doused my flashlight. I opened the door in front of me, stepped across the threshold, and closed myself into this unknown space.

  My light revealed a set of metal service stairs with rubberized treads. They led only down.

  The door had no lock.

  Andre might conduct a thorough search of this area. Instead he might follow his instinct elsewhere.

  I could wait to see what he did, hope to shoot him before he shot me if he yanked open this door. Or I could follow the stairs.

  Glad that I had snared the pistol from midair, but not daring to take it as a sign that my destiny was survival, I hurried down into the sub-basement, which such a short time ago I had tried to avoid.

  Two landings and three quick flights brought me 360 degrees around to a vestibule and a formidable-looking door. Emblazoned on that barrier were several warnings; the most prominent promised HIGH VOLTAGE in big red letters. A stern admonition restricted access to authorized personnel.

  I authorized myself to enter, opened the door, and from the threshold explored with my flashlight. Eight concrete steps led down five feet, into a sunken electrical vault, a thick-walled concrete bunker approximately fifteen by twenty feet.

  On a raised pad in the center, as on an island, stood a tower of equipment. Perhaps some of these things were transformers, perhaps a time machine for all I knew.

  At the far end of the chamber, a three-foot-diameter tunnel, at floor level, bored away into darkness. Evidently, the vault needed to be a subterranean bunker in the event that equipment exploded, as transformers sometimes did. But in case of a plumbing break or other sudden flood, the drain would be able to carry away a high volume of water.

  Having avoided the main stairs into the sub-basement, I had taken these, which served only the vault. Now I had come to the dead end that I had feared.

  From the instant the lion attacked, I’d weighed options at each turn in my flight, calculating probabilities. In my panic, I had not listened to the still, small voice that is my sixth sense.

  Nothing is more dangerous for me than to forget that I am a man both of reason and supernatural perception. When I function in only one mode or the other, I am denying half myself, half my potential.

  To a lesser extent with other people than with me, this is true of everyone.

  Dead end.

  Nevertheless, I went through the vault door and eased it shut. I checked for a lock, doubting there would be one, and had my doubt confirmed.

  I hurried down the concrete stairs, all the way into the pit, and around the tower of equipment.

  Probing with the flashlight, I saw that the tunnel sloped and gradually curved away to the left, out of sight. The walls were dry and clean enough. I wouldn’t leave a trail.

  If Andre entered this chamber, he would surely peer into the drain. But if I managed to get out of sight, beyond the curve, he would not press the search that far. He would think that I had given him the slip farther back.

  Three feet of diameter did not allow me to proceed in a stoop. I had to crawl into the drain.

  I tucked Datura’s pistol under my belt, in the small of my back, and got moving.

  The shielding curve lay about twenty feet from the entrance. With no need for the flashlight, I switched it off, inserted it in the spelunker’s cuff, and crawled on my hands and knees into the darkness.

  Half a minute later, near the bend in the tunnel, I stretched out full length and turned on my side. I directed the flashlight back the way that I had come, studying the floor.

  A few smudges o
f soot on the concrete marked my progress, but from such spoor alone no one would be able to deduce that I had passed this way. Those traces could have been there for years. Water stains patterned the concrete, too, and they helped to camouflage the soot.

  In the dark again, returning to my hands and knees, I finished rounding the gradual turn. When I should have been out of sight of the vault, I continued another ten feet, fifteen, just to be sure before stopping.

  I sat crosswise to the tunnel, my back against the curve, and waited.

  After a minute, I remembered that old movie serial about the secret civilization under the surface of the earth. Maybe somewhere along this route lay a subterranean city with women in horned hats, an evil emperor, and mutants. Fine. None of that could be as bad as what I’d left behind in the Panamint.

  Suddenly creeping through my memory of the movie came Kali, who didn’t belong in that scenario; Kali, lips painted with blood, tongue lolling. She wasn’t carrying the noose, the skull-topped staff, the sword, or the severed head. Her hands were empty, the better to touch me, to fondle me, to pull my face forcefully toward her for a kiss.

  Alone, without either a campfire or marshmallows, I was telling ghost stories to myself. You might think that my life inoculates me against being scared by mere ghost stories, but you would be wrong.

  Living every day with proof that the afterlife is real, I can’t take refuge in unleavened reason, can’t say But ghosts don’t really exist. Not knowing the full nature of what comes after this world, but knowing for certain that something does, my imagination spins into vortexes darker than any yours has ever visited.

  Don’t get me wrong. I’m sure you’ve got a fabulously dark, twisted, and perhaps even deeply sick imagination. I’m not trying to devalue the dementedness of your imagination and do not mean to diminish your pride in it.

  Sitting in that tunnel, spooking myself, I banished Kali not only from the role that she had given herself in that movie serial, but banished her entirely from my mind. I concentrated on the iguanas tricked up to pass for dinosaurs and on the dwarfs in leather chaps or whatever they had been wearing.

  Instead of Kali, within seconds Datura crept into my thoughts, torn by the lion but nonetheless amorous. She was crawling toward me along the tunnel right now.