Deeply Odd (12 page)

Nevertheless, the knob felt solid in my grasp, and it turned without resistance. The knuckles of the barrel hinges revolved soundlessly around the pivot pins, and the door opened as smoothly as one liquid flowing into another, so that I could almost believe that I was adventuring in my sleep.

Beyond lay a hallway. The ceiling, walls, and floor were as uniformly gray and smooth as in the garage and stairwell. Overhead hung the usual crude lamps. When I stared hard at the nearest one, it produced less light, not because the bulb dimmed but because the bulb, the shade, and the chain all seemed to diminish in substance when studied intently, as if sufficient scrutiny might in time cause them to disappear altogether. I didn’t test that hypothesis because I didn’t want to be left whimpering in the dark.

On both sides of the corridor were a few doors like the one through which I had just come. America’s primary institution of learning—the movies—has taught us that when we find ourselves in a strange and eerily quiet place with lots of doors, waiting behind one of them will be either a psychopathic killer or a monster of supernatural or extraterrestrial origin. Of course, if it’s an Adam Sandler comedy, behind the door will lurk a goofy dude waiting to deliver a joke involving poop, pee, or genitals. I wasn’t in such a
comedy, but that was all right, because I preferred a psychopath or a monster.

When I opened the nearest door on the right, nothing bit off my head. A single lamp hung in the center of the unfurnished gray room.

I crossed to the windows and was stunned to see the sprawling suburbs of the valley cast in darkness, not one streetlamp or building light to be seen. Far beyond the Hollywood hills, to the southwest, no faintest glow rose from the flatlands of Los Angeles and environs, though on an ordinary night, the incandescence of civilization would shimmer in the air and paint the bellies of the clouds a burnt-butter yellow. Above the black land, the blacker sky had been swept clean of moon and stars.

In the middle distance, three widely separated lakes of low flames glimmered and twinkled red-orange-blue, like the baleful campfires of savage and malevolent settlements. They burned without illuminating their surroundings, as if the night air had unnatural weight sufficient to prevent the light from rising.

Although the uncanny gloom flooded the land before, between, and beyond the pooling fires, the realm on the farther side of the windows was not blind-dark. I was able to discern that the street in front of this building had vanished, replaced by barren ground. And suddenly I knew that the suburbs and the city they encircled had not merely gone dark in a power outage but had ceased to exist either as intact structures or as ruins. In my reality, this building stood in an industrial neighborhood, but in Elsewhere, it seemed to loom alone above a blackened wasteland.

I had wanted a window with a view. Now I wanted a quiet corner in which I could curl up in a ball and suck my thumb until
my fairy godmother came and took me away from this hostile, empty world.

In this blighted kingdom, however, wishes were answered in such a perverse way that they were far better left unwished. Twenty feet below, where the street should have been, something moved, a vertical shadow in the otherwise still and amorphous dark. Squinting, I saw what might have been a man, but he was so little differentiated from the murk around him that I couldn’t make out his face or determine what he wore. One thing about him was certain: He didn’t have fairy wings.

If the weak light in the room around me filtered through the glass, none of it reached as far as the figure below, although it revealed me to him. He halted, I sensed him looking up, but I did not draw back from the window. I had already been seen. He would come to me or he wouldn’t. After a moment, he approached the front of the building, disappearing into the recessed entrance.

Pistol in hand, I returned to the second-floor hall. Moments before, I had climbed the west stairs, which originated at the garage in back. The door at the east end of the hallway suggested another stairwell rising from the front of the building, which was probably the one by which he would come to me.

My keen intuition, which had often been my salvation, was largely a mental faculty, its physical expression limited to an occasional tingle at the nape of the neck, the hairs bristling on the backs of my hands, and—unseemly but true—a certain tightening of the scrotum, although that last reaction was about as erotic as a spinal tap. In this instance, a swift series of chills quivered violently through me, as if I were constructed entirely of taut harpstrings that thrummed with glissandos of foreboding.

At all costs, I needed to avoid a confrontation with that shadowy
figure. I didn’t know
why
I must keep my distance from the man, if man he was, and I had no one to ask, because intuition is a one-way communication from God, who never seems inclined to satisfy our curiosity, perhaps because, given the chance, every one of us would be like a child on a family road trip, endlessly asking
Are we there yet?
or the equivalent.

I turned away from the east end of the corridor and hurried to the west stairs, by which I had come up from the garage. Going down again seemed foolhardy, in part because leaving the building wasn’t an option. If I ventured outside into unknown conditions, I might find it difficult if not impossible to get back inside. I assumed that I would have to be within the envelope of the building to be able to return to my reality when the shift occurred again, which might be hours or mere minutes from now.

After bolting up two flights to the top of the stairs, I pulled on the door, which swung open as silently as those before it, as if its lever handle, latch, and hinges operated with zero friction. For a long moment, I stood on the landing, listening.

When the stairwell door opened on the second floor, I didn’t hear a sound. No sudden draft alerted me. I knew the visitor from the wasteland had entered the stairs only when his shadow preceded him, flowing onto the midfloor landing below in such a sinuous fashion as to suggest that the man yet unseen would prove to be in part a serpent.

I slipped into the hallway and eased the door shut, although left to gravity, it would most likely have closed without a click.

The third floor seemed identical to the second. I doubted that I had time to race all the way to the east stairs before my pursuer would arrive and see me.

Besides, switching stairwells for hours on end was not a strategy,
hardly even worthy of the word
tactic
. That gambit was certain to result, sooner or later, in the two of us coming face-to-face in a doorway, which might not end well for me even though I had a pistol.

In my experience, sometimes the guy on the other side of the door possessed something more formidable than a handgun, such as a submachine gun or an automatic shotgun, or an enraged ferret that he threw in my face. Or he was clothed head to foot in body armor and held a surface-to-air missile that, if fired horizontally, could reduce you to a pile of flaming entrails. Or he was wearing a nine-sheath spring-loaded antique-Chinese automatic-knife breastplate, which in a split second could skewer you with enough stilettos to kill you and, should you have one, your cat as well.

Trusting to luck, such as it was, I hurried halfway along the corridor and chose a door to my left. Beyond, a dimly lighted flight of stairs led up to another door. I was pretty sure the building featured no more than three stories. Maybe these stairs went to an attic.

I don’t like attics any more than I like cellars.

Most people have never found anything in an attic more off-putting than silverfish, dry rot, and faded high-school photographs that remind them of how much promise they once had and of how little it has been fulfilled.

In my case, however, I tend to find things like a collection of shrunken heads hanging by their hair from the rafters or a fighting falcon trained to swoop down and pluck out an intruder’s eyes, or a tripwire-activated capture net that drops over any unwanted visitor and cinches ever tighter around him until he’s immobilized.

In spite of my experiences of attics, looking back the way I had come, when I saw the door begin to open at the west end of the
hallway, I stepped across the threshold onto the landing. I drew the door shut behind me.

Once I was on the roof, I would be outside of the building’s envelope, with nowhere to run and with more than a forty-foot drop to the ground below. Nevertheless, I hastily climbed this last flight of stairs because, for one thing, when confronted with the Unknown, of which this man from the wasteland was an embodiment, it was never wise to be confrontational, and because rational optimism is required of anyone who hopes to be a survivor, and finally because there was nowhere else to go.

THE DOOR AT THE HEAD OF THE STAIRS OPENED NOT into an attic but instead into a ten-foot-square room as featureless and somehow artificial as all those before it, which soon proved to be a kind of shed on the roof. Directly opposite the entrance door waited an exit, through which I stepped onto the flat and parapeted top of the building, closing that last door behind me.

Without a window between me and this absolute-black sky, the effect of such undetailed heavens was profound, frightening not just because of the uncanny darkness but also for a reason that eluded me. Or perhaps the reason was not elusive. Maybe I dreaded acknowledging and considering it, for fear that contemplation would soon sweep me out of the main currents of sanity, into a tributary of madness.

Indeed, the roof was a lunatic place, disorienting under a moonless and starless vault that seemed at first to be an eternal void, but the next moment might have been the low ceiling of a cavern deep in Earth’s crust, and then again a void. In spite of the distant lakes of fire, if they were truly fire, the land around this isolated structure lay nearly as dark as the sky above, providing so little ambient light
that I could not see as far as any edge of the roof, which in my reality had been guarded by an Art Deco parapet. Even in the remote reaches of the Mojave, even on a night when two thousand feet of dense ecliptical clouds separated the desert from the glowing wonders of the universe, the land gave off at least a dim light, the product of natural radiation, of minerals in the soil, and of certain vaguely luminous plants. Not here. This outer darkness, so complete, seemed to be capable of a kind of osmosis, gradually penetrating me to blacken my thoughts and eventually extinguish my hope.

I could barely see the pale forms of my hands—one fisted, the other clenching the pistol. As I took a two-hand grip on the weapon, it remained all but invisible, and I almost squeezed off a shot just to see the muzzle flash and know that I wasn’t going blind.

Although I wanted to put more distance between me and the door of the shed, wanted to find something behind which I could hide—chimney stacks, air-conditioner housings, anything—my feet seemed to be embedded ankle-deep in long-settled roof tar. But my inability to move was entirely psychological, the blackness above pressing down like deep strata of soil and rock, squeezing upon me from all sides, until it seemed that Fate, in league with Nature, intended that I should become nothing more than a brittle fossil in a thick vein of anthracite.

With effort, I shuffled backward a step, another and another, but then halted as a dizziness overcame me and as I began to think that I must be turning as I retreated, gradually arcing away from the roof shed, where the man from the wasteland might at any moment appear. I needed to keep the pistol trained upon that door, because if the stranger came through it with the obvious intent to attack, he would be backlighted only briefly. I would have but a
second to discern his intent and another second to squeeze off a shot before the door fell shut.

When he was no longer silhouetted by the lighted shed, I might discover that he could see in the lightlessness of this wretched reality as well as I was able to see in the full sun of the day. He could then stalk me at his leisure, while in a growing panic I shot at phantoms until I expended all ten rounds in the pistol’s magazine.

Although I am an optimist, my imagination can conjure countless deadly hands from any shuffled deck before the cards are dealt. I am, therefore, perplexed by so many people who, whether they’re optimists or pessimists, trust any dealer as long as he claims to share their vision of how all things ought to be, who trust their own vision to the extent that they never question it, and who believe that four of a kind and royal flushes always fall by chance in a world without meaning. To such folks, Hitler was a distant and half-comic figure—until he wasn’t; and mad mullahs promising to use nuclear weapons as soon as they obtain them are likewise harmless—until they aren’t. I, on the other hand, believe life has profound meaning and that the meaning of Creation itself is benign, but I also know that there are such things as card mechanics who can manipulate any deck to their great advantage. In life, little happens by chance, and most bad hands we’re dealt are the consequence of our actions, which are shaped by our wisdom and our ignorance. In my experience, survival depends on hoping for the best while recognizing that disaster is more likely and that it can’t be averted if it can’t be imagined.

The roof-shed door opened. The man out of the wasteland appeared with the jaundice-yellow light behind him, a silhouette of which I could see no details whatsoever.

Standing five-ten or five-eleven, he seemed to have an athletic
physique, though he wasn’t the hulking terminator or the sinuous shape-shifter that I might have feared. As far as I could tell, he held no weapon.

No light from the stairs managed to leak out onto the roof, as if some magical barrier contained it, and I couldn’t know whether or not he saw me. But he didn’t slip quickly out of the shed and dodge to one side; he paused in the doorway instead, blocking the door with his body, giving me plenty of time to kill him. His confidence seemed to suggest that he didn’t bear me any ill will and therefore assumed I would not harm him, that he was merely curious about me and anticipated nothing more than curiosity in return.