Although I can’t explain why, following exposure to the stink and the chill, I wanted to spend a couple of hours in a bathtub filled with Purell sanitizing gel, maybe take a few turns being irradiated on the carousel of a human-size microwave oven, spend an hour inhaling steam made with water from the shrine at Lourdes, and have my blood drained from my left arm, processed through a state-of-the-art filtration machine, and returned into my right arm free of all contaminants. Afterward, a lollipop would be nice.
I found myself backing away from the trailer and realized that my skittish heart was cantering again, as it had when I’d seen the drainage grate with the lightning bolt.
Suddenly the black-and-red eighteen-wheeler, with its sparkly silver striping, seemed as if it might be some kind of carnival truck, which had unpleasant associations for me. I know that most carnival folks are nothing like their public image. The majority are good people who just don’t fit in anywhere else, and they have a complex, charming social structure of their own. I read this book, Twilight Eyes, all about them. But I once had a bad experience with two carnies.
This guy named Pecker—I don’t think it was his baptismal name—operated a ring-toss concession. His woolly hair was teased precisely as high as the long beard that depended from his chin, so he almost looked like Siamese twins joined at the tops of their heads. He and his joyfully wicked friend Bucket, the owner-operator of cotton-candy and snow-cone machines, had hoped to establish an after-hours carnival concession, at 3:00 one summer morning, in which I would be gagged and lashed to a tree to serve as the target. The two of them intended to take turns throwing hatchets at me. I had done something that annoyed them. Fortunately, I am quick on my feet, tougher than I look (which I would have to be), and I was in the company of a friendly poltergeist that left them bewildered by beating them senseless with a hundred baseballs from the milk-bottle-pyramid concession.
Anyway, having at last gotten the peek into the trailer that I long had wanted, reasonably sure that my quarry had driven away in the white Ford van, I decided to leave this garage in Elsewhere. I intended to depart through the door by which I had entered, expecting that I would step back into my world as magically as I had previously stepped out of it.
Approaching that exit, however, I noticed for the first time that the only light came from the three overhead bulbs dangling in cone-shaped shades, none whatsoever from the three-foot-high bank of latticed windows above the man door and the three roll-ups. Only perfect blackness lay beyond those panes. I had arrived in the early afternoon, and no more than five minutes had passed since then. The coming storm couldn’t have seethed in so quickly; even if threatening clouds lowered over the city from horizon to horizon, no storm could have banished every last trace of sunlight. At the door, I paused, pistol in my right hand, left hand on the lever handle.
I sensed that opening this door would be as stupid as seeking the source of gas fumes in a dark basement by striking a match.
Intuition is the highest form of knowledge. What we learn from others can be mistaught by those not a fraction as knowledgeable as they pretend or by those who are propagandists with agendas. We are born with intuition, however, which includes the natural law, a sense of right and wrong. A lot of people rebel so continually against natural law that not only does that part of their intuition atrophy but also every other aspect of it. They strike the match, open the door, give their money to an investment adviser named Slick, and trust that if they are really nice to the thug with the switchblade, he’ll be nice to them.
Whatever waited outside this garage in Elsewhere would not be as easy to deal with as a psychopath with a knife.
I backed away from the door, glanced again at the high windows, wishing that the darkness would give way to the murky light of an overcast sky. This was as effective as wishing for world peace.
To look through those windows into the alleyway, I would have to climb to the top of the trailer, an easy enough feat. But the odor and the chill that had passed through the ornamental gate were fresh in memory, and I was possessed by the—perhaps irrational—fear that a trap in the trailer roof would open under my feet and drop me into a kind of trouble that I had never known before.
In need of a room with a view, I returned to the open stairwell door to listen. The quiet was profound, a stillness as in a vacuum. If anyone waited on the upper floor, he must be dead or Death.
Previously, the wall on the left had been paneled in easy-to-clean yellow fiberboard, and the wall on the right had been brick. Now they were both concrete. On the steps, the glued-on rubber treads were missing. The first time I entered this stairwell, before hastily retreating at the sound of voices, it had been in my world. Now it was in some parallel reality.