Deeply Odd(28)
I found myself drawn to the curb, where I stood staring at the large rectangular grate, shivering with recognition. It was made in an age when public works were elegant and well crafted instead of slipshod. The parallel iron bars met a four-inch iron ring in the center of the design. Within the ring, a stylized iron lightning-bolt angled from right to left. On a fogbound night in Magic Beach, more than a month previously, on a street deserted but for me, I had been drawn to such a grating, below which grotesque shadows capered in pulses of eerie light.
On that occasion, in the grip of curiosity, I had knelt to peer between the bars, into the culvert, seeking an explanation for this unusual display. I had been by some means induced into a half trance, so that I lowered my face ever closer to the drain, overcome not only by a compulsion to learn what might lie below but also by the intense expectation that, whatever it proved to be, I needed it as surely as I needed air and water and food to sustain life.
The sudden arrival of an unexpected ally on that lonely street in Magic Beach had broken the spell and had brought me to my feet. Later, I felt that I had been close to discovering something that might have been the end of me—not merely death but a more terrible and enduring end.
Now, I did not follow the rats to the grate, but turned away and walked swiftly, not quite running. I went four blocks, the battalions of incoming storm clouds forgotten, oblivious of the wind, the rats banished from my mind. Rather, I succumbed to one of those fugues that sometimes strike us when, below the age of ten, we chance upon a truth meant only for adults, a sharp truth that stabs darkness into the light of innocence, that makes us at once rebel against this assault on wonder, that sends us away to games and bicycles and all manner of distractions, from which we rise in a few hours, like a sleeper from a dream, having spun a cocoon of denial to protect us from that piercing truth, although it is a fragile cocoon that in time will dissolve.
Halting at a street corner, looking back the way I’d come, I had no memory of the buildings I had passed, only of the lightning-bolt grate that lay four blocks to the south. For that distance, I’d even forgotten why I’d come here. Now I remembered the rhinestone cowboy, his spiky white hair, his pitiless stare, his vacation-in-Hell tan.
My heart lagged my brain, beating hard and fast, as if I were still within a step of the ominous drain grating. Giving it time to settle into a rhythm less suggestive of a crisis in an ER, I studied my surroundings.
I had arrived in a district of old industrial buildings, mostly constructed of dark-red or pale-yellow brick with slate or tile or corrugated-metal roofs, others of stucco cracked and stigmatized with stains of such disturbing shapes that they might have depicted Armageddon reflected in a fun-house mirror. Some structures appeared still to be in use. Others were untenanted or abandoned, diminished by missing windowpanes, months of debris compacted by wind and rain in their doorways, and weeds bristling from cracks in the pavement of the adjacent parking yards, around which chain-link fencing sagged.
As the last blue sky shrank northward, thunderheads towered as if they were mountains thrusting violently from the earth’s crust in a fierce seismic and volcanic age millions of years before any living thing yet crawled the planet.
I walked south, into the wind, retracing my route for a block and a half—noticing that other street drains lacked the lightning bolt—until I arrived at the mouth of a wide alleyway similarly lined with industrial buildings and warehouses. In some other pockets of this neighborhood, workers labored, deliveries were being made and shipments loaded. But here, in spite of wind-stirred power-company lines that softly whistled overhead, there lay a stillness more suited to a ghost town than to any place in a living city.
As I entered the alley, the sun abruptly submerged in clouds, and the bleak, black shadows of utility poles melted into the potholed pavement. On both sides were elevated loading docks, man-size doors, big roll-ups, and latticed windows of many small panes so filthy that they were all but opaque.
Past the middle of the block, I was drawn to a building narrower than the others, with a man door and three roll-ups large enough to admit trucks of any size. The windows were as blinded with dust as all the others, but lights inside lent the glass a silvery sheen.
Beyond doubt, the cowboy trucker was nearby. The image of him in my mind’s eye grew brighter and more colorful and so fearsome that, to prevent him from fulfilling his threat, I wished fervently that I had bought a Kevlar jockstrap.
At the man-size door, I stood with my head cocked, listening. When I heard nothing, I drew the pistol from my waistband. I tried the lever handle, and the unlocked door opened a crack. Emboldened by the enduring silence, I eased inside and closed the door quietly behind me.