Deeply Odd(49)

In the limousine once more, I considered using the disposable cell phone to call the police and report the bodies in the factory basement. I hoped to foil the rats before they feasted.

But during the past few years, the government had spent many billions to develop systems that could capture from the ether every one of the hundreds of millions of daily phone calls and e-mails sent in this country, store them, and conduct high-speed analysis of that data with enormous arrays of supercomputers. In addition, every smartphone was now a GPS by which they could track you if they wanted to, even when the phone was switched off.

My phone was far from smart, but I suspected that if I called the police, they would at once have my position. And maybe they could electronically tag even this dumb phone, so that they would know everywhere I went from this point forward.

I didn’t dare reveal myself to the police if I were to be free to find the children and rescue them. Although I had not always saved everyone whom I tried to help, I nevertheless felt certain that, even as flawed as I was, I would be more likely to pull those three kids from the pending fire alone than with even well-meaning policemen kibitzing my every move. Besides, they were certain to regard my claims of paranormal talents as delusional. I might be committed to a psychiatric ward on a temporary hold, and the children would be torched days before I was released.

Mrs. Fischer drove, Hoke to my Miss Daisy. Although I needed to concentrate harder than ever to sense out the cowboy’s fading trail through Barstow, distractions plucked at me, each of them arousing in me the thought that I was missing something, failing to see something that I must see if I were to survive: thoughts of the swarming rats in the factory and of the rats descending the palm tree, a pack of rangy yellow-eyed coyotes that had behaved strangely when they had stalked me and Annamaria through a fogbound night in Magic Beach more than a month previously, rats and coyotes that were different creatures and yet somehow one and the same, the head of the Kewpie doll wallowing in the storm run-off and trading its face for mine as it was yanked through the bars of the iron grating, the premonition of a demonic mob slaughtering stalled motorists on the traffic-choked freeway, all of that connected in some way that I could feel but could not define, pointing to some inevitable confrontation, and then three lines from T. S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton” remembered for no apparent reason—Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future / And time future contained in time past—and now the carnival-bright ProStar+ with the yellow symbols painted throughout the black interior of the trailer, the gate of symbols made of steel, the wasteland with the lakes of fire and the Other Odd who had come out of that ultimate darkness, Mr. Hitchcock giving me two thumbs up when I woke in Shower 5 after being shot in the throat by the cowboy, a gesture that now seemed peculiar to me or perhaps more meaningful than I’d taken it to be at the time, Mr. Hitchcock raising one eyebrow as if amused when I suggested that he must be suffering some guilt and remorse that kept him from crossing over to the Other Side, the lightning-bolt grate and the eerie light in the storm drain, Mr. Hitchcock leading me into the basement of Star Truck and cupping a hand around one ear to suggest that I listen for what soon proved to be the voice of the rhinestone cowboy in a different version of the basement, a version in Elsewhere… .

I managed occasionally to give Mrs. Fischer a direction, though I was barely aware of Barstow beyond the windshield, preoccupied with the swift flow of thoughts and memories, the river of puzzling associations that seemed to have two currents, one enticing me into the past, the other sweeping me toward some terrible cataract in the near future.

When I shuddered violently and said, “Here, this place, right now,” Mrs. Fischer pulled off the street, into a parking lot, and braked to a stop.

I came out of my half trance, expecting some place more terrible than the house where a family waited heartsick for any news of their abducted son and daughters, more ominous than the abandoned factory. Instead, we were adjacent to an exit from Interstate 15, in front of a large rectangular diner with a ziggurat-style roof stepping back and up in a pyramidal form, each level outlined in parallel tubes of ruby-red and sapphire-blue neon that were not only cheerful but also seemed to be defiant in the dreary half-light of the waning day and the oncoming storm. The playful architecture was fun to look at, even though I felt certain that the cowboy trucker had been here, and not alone, before he’d gone to the ruins of Black & Buckle Manufacturing to carve and kill two men and to collect the children that he intended to set afire. The place was called Ernestine’s.