Deeply Odd(74)

Among the nations of Earth in all its history, ours is one of the precious few that has not brought forth its Hitler, its Stalin, its Pol Pot, its Mao Tse-tung, its Vlad the Impaler, the one who is never satisfied to have every knee bend to him but wants also to be the architect of a new world by destroying the existing one. But something is afoot. Atrocities like this, once rare but ever more frequent, would have at one time shocked the country but now seem to titillate as many people as they shock. My vision on the freeway in Los Angeles, others that have come in dreams, and things like this collection lead me to fear that our turn on the rack and wheel is coming. In this age when innocence is ever more mocked, when truth is aggressively denied if not actively hated, when so many people despise those with whom they disagree, when priests and teachers molest those whom they should protect, when power and fame are celebrated but true law and modesty are disparaged, what fire wall remains between the people and the forces that would devour them?

I am just one fry-cook with a special talent, not David certain to bring down Goliath, one mortal man trying to make his way through a storm in which swarm uncountable leviathans. I am only you, like you, born of man and woman, but with this gift or burden. In that stable in Elsewhere, I felt as you would have felt, overwhelmed and terrified of failing.

At the door, I almost crossed the threshold before I realized that I would be stepping not into the Nevada night where three dogs slept and snored, but into the blind-black wasteland that surrounded buildings in Elsewhere. And waiting in that blighted place was the Other Odd who had wanted to kiss me, who’d said Give me your breath, piglet, your breath, and the sweet fruit at the end of it.





Twenty-six


HESITATING AT THE DOOR, I HAD NO WAY OF KNOWING how long I might have to wait for this dust-free and lifeless stable in Elsewhere to become again the dirty and spider-ruled building in my reality. A minute or two? An hour? Until all the children were dead?

Should the fabled Headless Horseman come here seeking to repair himself, he would have scores of heads to choose from, and if I again encountered the Other Odd, my head also might be available for the horseman’s consideration.

Thinking about the Other might quickly draw him to me, but he remained a figure of such dark fascination that I couldn’t banish him from my mind. I remembered the disgusting tone and texture of his cold, flaccid flesh, like that of a corpse after rigor mortis had come and gone, when the minions of Death were busy within. Yet he had been strong, unstoppable, and ten rounds of 9-mm ammunition had done no damage to him. Now I had two pistols with fifteen-round magazines, plus four spare magazines, nine times the ammo that I’d had before; but considering that ten shots had zero effect, nine times zero wasn’t a calculation worth making.

In that industrial building in Elsewhere, back in that suburb of Los Angeles, there had been a moment when I stared at one of the chain-hung lamps, questioning its existence—whereupon it began to lose substance and to dim. I was certain now that, by an act of will alone, I could cause Elsewhere to wane and my world to emerge once more around me.

Previously this door had been made of vertical planks with a Z of cross braces on the inside, knotholes visible through the white paint, here and there raw wood revealed where a splinter had been gouged out. The evenly white door before me looked and felt smooth, flawless, like a plastic panel, the half-formed idea of a door.

When I pressed the palm of my left hand against that surface and thought hard about its previous appearance, I began to feel the planks, the screw heads, the knotholes partly swollen out of the wood around them.

The lamps hanging from the ceiling went out, and I was left with only the frosty beam of the LED flashlight, which revealed the planks as they should have been, the floor of hard-packed earth, the empty stalls, the spiders poised in their gossamer traps, but nothing of the collection of heads.

I stepped into a night that was not a lightless wasteland, in which the heavens were not as black as the ceiling of a coal mine. Indeed, the storm, which I had assumed would catch up with us once more, must have been so drained by the thirsty desert to the west that it had nothing more to offer. The clouds were tattering and lifting, as though within the hour they might, at least in places, peel away like bandages and reveal a healed and vibrant sky.

I put away the canister of pressurized sedative and drew one of the two Glocks. That seemed the wise thing to do.

Jessie, Jasmine, Jordan …

Remaining close to the tree line, I approached the stone-and-timber building that had a steep and beetling roof. From the moment I first glimpsed it, even from a distance and in the dark, it had seemed to be an ominous structure. Now as I circled it, on closer inspection, that first impression ripened, grew darker, and I felt that herein I would find corruption and depravity that explained the collection of heads.