Deeply Odd(29)
I stood in a brick-walled garage brightened by overhead banks of fluorescent tubes. Only the middle of the three bays contained a vehicle, a white Ford van, one of those small delivery vans used by florists and caterers, although this one had no company name or logo emblazoned on it.
When I opened the van, the cargo area contained nothing, though perhaps soon it would imprison three bound, gagged, and terrified children meant for burning. For the sake of silence, I left the vehicle open.
In the back wall of the garage, opposite the roll-ups, two doors flanked a freight elevator. There is a classic short story in which a man must open one of two doors, aware that a beautiful lady waits behind one and a hungry tiger behind the other, but he doesn’t know which door is which. Given my luck, I expected to find tigers to the left and right. The freight route didn’t appeal, either.
Compelled to the door on the right, I found ascending stairs. They were concrete with glued-on rubber treads for safety, which also served to mute my footsteps. I eased the door shut behind me.
I had climbed halfway to the first landing when I heard two male voices above me in the stairwell. The words bounced between the brick wall on my right and the easy-clean glossy-yellow fiberboard on my left, and were distorted so that I couldn’t be certain that either speaker was the cowboy trucker.
With the pistol, I could intimidate them. But if my quarry was not one of the two, I would have no way of knowing whether or not I might be threatening innocent men.
I hurriedly descended the stairs, entered the garage—and found it changed. Instead of overhead fluorescents, three single-bulb lamps with cone-shaped shades hung on chains. The poor light shone just bright enough for me to see that the brick walls were gone and that bare concrete replaced them.
More startling than any of that was the red-and-black ProStar+ with sparkly silver striping and its long black trailer, which stood in the center bay where the white van had been only seconds earlier. In this enclosed space, the eighteen-wheeler looked even bigger than it had appeared to be on the open road, and although an inanimate object of any size, lacking consciousness and intention, cannot be malevolent, this truck seemed as malign as the Death Star with which Darth Vader atomized entire planets.
Ten
THE PROSTAR+ STOOD IN THE TRANSFORMED GARAGE as though it had eaten the Ford van. I wondered if I should reconsider my disdain for possessed-vehicle movies like The Car, Maximum Overdrive, and The Love Bug.
After a life of supernatural engagement, I was not paralyzed by this seeming impossibility. I scurried around the eighteen-wheeler to the side farther from the door that I left open behind me, sheltering there until I could get a glimpse, at an angle through the driver’s window and the windshield, of who followed me out of the stairwell. If one of them was the rhinestone cowboy, I might still get the drop on him. If that proved to be impossible—if, say, he appeared with the flamethrower that he intended to use on the children—I could retreat through the outer door by which I’d entered the building and hide elsewhere along the alley, at a position from which I could monitor events.
No one came out of the stairwell, but I heard two men talking. They seemed to be nearby, yet their voices were veiled. The words were distorted beyond understanding, as when the cowboy and the man with the battered-boxer face—semitransparent and unaware of me—had been in urgent angry conversation in the basement machine room at the truck stop.
This time, they did not appear even in phantom form. I had only their voices, by which I could not precisely place them. And then they fell silent.
I was concerned that they had become aware of me, as I had been aware of them in the machine room. Perhaps our circumstances had been reversed and I was semitransparent to them while they were invisible to me.
The next twenty or thirty seconds were as sharp as saw teeth, working on my taut-wire nerves, as I waited to feel the singular chill of one of these men passing through the space that I occupied.
Instead, I heard an engine turn over, not that of the ProStar+, but that of a much smaller truck, though it was muffled and hollow, filtered through some barrier just as the voices had been filtered. I could only assume that it was the white Ford van, which had become invisible to me.
A moment later, a rattling and low rumbling perplexed me for a moment. But then I realized that this was the distorted sound of a big segmented door rolling on its tracks.
I turned toward the alleyway, but none of the three roll-ups was in motion, all snugged down tight.
I listened to the unseen van reverse away from me, out of the garage. Following its departure came the rumble of the huge segmented door descending, although the door behind the ProStar+ and the two flanking it were already down and locked.