Deeply Odd (26 page)

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
.

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.

The sixty-by-forty-foot block stood like a fortress, forbidding and windowless. Even a medieval castle would have featured arrow loops, narrow openings from which archers could defend against the barbarians, or high clerestory windows to admit natural light. But I sensed that nothing natural was wanted within, that this building had been constructed to
celebrate
barbarism, that its builders felt no need for arrow loops or gun ports, for they knew that civilization, in its current and foreseeable state, would have no interest in mounting an assault against them.

Three broad and shallow steps led up to the only door, which was at what seemed to be the back of the building, out of sight from the main house. I dared the flashlight and saw a bronze slab, green with time, featuring a pattern of scores of little arrowheads in many lines radiating out from a central hub, on which was a word in raised bronze letters—
CONTUMAX
.

I had no idea what the word
contumax
might mean. It sounded like an over-the-counter laxative or a drug to treat cold sores, although it was certainly neither. Whatever the word meant, the pattern of arrowheads suggested militant hostility to something.

Perhaps the door was most often locked, although not on this night of celebration. When it eased inward, I discovered a shadowy
vestibule. Opposite this first door, a second stood a quarter open to a more well-lighted chamber.

I did not want to go inside, to risk being trapped in a place that had one exit, but I sensed that what waited to be learned here was something I must know if I were to be of any use to the children. I stepped inside and eased the outer door shut behind me.

After crossing quietly to the inner door, I stood listening, but heard nothing. I held my breath, the better to hear, but the silence remained absolute.

When I inhaled, a peculiar bitter smell, faint but unpleasant, caused me to grimace. It registered as a taste, too, even fainter than the scent. The flavor reminded me of ipecac, the syrup that doctors use to induce vomiting when someone has been poisoned, but in this case disguised—inadequately—by mint.

I pushed open the inner door, crossed the threshold, and was halted by the drama of the space.

Stone-and-timber walls as outside, cobblestone floor, without a piece of furniture, the room must have been forty feet wide and fifty end to end, the raftered ceiling forty feet overhead. Along the wall to the left and along the wall to the right stood seven concrete pedestals, fourteen in all, each perhaps seven feet high. Mounted atop every pedestal, lit from above by pin spots, angled to peer down imperiously, were the bleached-white skulls of what might have been Rocky Mountain bighorn rams, identifiable by their enormous, curved, and deeply grooved horns.

The cobblestones were flat, without rounded edges, with minimal grout lines, set in a circular pattern that swirled around the room, ring after diminishing ring, leading to a large round stone at the center. With growing alarm, I walked to that medallion and
read the word carved into it:
POTESTAS
. Here was another test of my knowledge—and additional proof of my ignorance.

I looked left and right at the totems on the fourteen pedestals. Set on the sides of those narrow heads, twenty-eight eye sockets, though empty, though black and hollow, seemed to watch and menace me. The builders of this house of the profane did not mean for the skulls to be seen simply as what they were, did not intend for them to be thought of as mere rams’ heads, but placed them here as symbols of the great horned serpent who was the prince of this world. Fourteen goatish mouths were fixed open, perhaps to express the insatiable appetite that the prince encouraged and that he promised to feed generously.

I proceeded no farther, but I saw at the front of the room a large slab of what might have been black granite elevated on thick black-granite legs. On the wall directly behind the slab, hanging from two points on a rafter, a long loop of glossy red beads, each as large as a plum, had been threaded through five evenly spaced human skulls that I knew must be as real as those of the bighorn rams.

A miniature version of this macabre construction had hung from the citizens-band radio in the cab of the cowboy’s eighteen-wheeler.

From the first encounter that had led me here and in many other moments of the day, I had been given clear clues to the nature of my adversaries. On some level, I noted all those jigsaw pieces, fitted them together—and then refused to acknowledge the picture that they formed.

Patterns exist in our seemingly patternless lives, and the most common pattern is the circle. Like a dog pursuing its tail, we go around and around all our lives, through the circles of the seasons, repeating our mistakes and pursuing our redemption. From birth to death we explore and seek, and in the end we arrive where we
started, the past having made one great slow turn on a carousel to become our future, and if we have learned anything worth learning, the carousel will bring us to the one place we most need to be.

My journey had so far taken almost twenty-two years, but it had become a far more profound voyage nineteen months ago than it had been previously. I have often said that in a quest for the purpose of my life, I learn by going where I have to go. And I
do
learn. But I realized here, only now, that learning had not been my primary motivation, that since the mall shootings in Pico Mundo, I had been on a pilgrimage to seek the sacrament of penance, in search of forgiveness for a failure that I refused to believe could ever be mitigated by ordinary confession and contrition. And I had come now full circle to the same adversary that I had not entirely defeated back then, the same implacable adversary from which I had perhaps saved many people, but not all, not nineteen who died, including she whose heart was one with mine.

The killers at the Green Moon Mall had been members of a satanic cult. And so were the cowboy trucker and the people gathered in this place, this night. Different people, different cult, same enemy. I’d known the truth hours earlier but had striven to repress it.

Denial couldn’t be maintained. The skulls of fourteen bighorn rams were positioned, mockingly, where in a Catholic church the fourteen stations of the cross would be. The red beads and the five human skulls insulted the rosary and its five joyful, five sorrowful, and five glorious mysteries.

The enemy was the same, but I was in a darker and far more desperate place now than I had been on that day in Pico Mundo.

The men in that cult nineteen months earlier had made a
game
of evil, committing murder primarily for the excitement of it, playing
at satanic faith the way that boys might play at being vampires, with wax fangs and with capes made from blankets. The cultists in Pico Mundo never committed entirely to their faith, not intellectually or emotionally. When the confrontation came between me and them, they had their boldness and their viciousness, but they did not have any genuine power beyond that of other sociopaths. In the end, though deadly, they had been nothing more than thrill killers.

But the pilot of the ProStar+ and the congregation to which he belonged were true believers, so diligent and so passionate in the practice of their faith that they were rewarded with the ability to open doors to Elsewhere. They enjoyed the capacity to blind others to their actions, as the cowboy blinded the people in the supermarket to the fact that he had fired a pistol and threatened to kill innocent shoppers if I didn’t come with him quietly.

In this new and pending confrontation, these darksiders greatly outnumbered me. And although my paranormal gifts usually gave me an advantage, their gifts made them at least my equals.

My eyes had adjusted to the lighting, and now I saw that on the black-granite table at the front of the room lay what might have been a thick black book. I was loath to approach that altar, but I knew that I must do so.

Bound in black leather, the volume contained a thousand numbered pages, which must have been blank when it was bound. On the top of the first page someone had printed these words:
This coven of the demon Meridian, founded to glorify his name, on the 7th day of October, in the year 1580, in Oxford, Oxfordshire, England
.

Each of the next 433 pages was dedicated to one year in the coven’s existence. The heading of the page featured the year, a name followed by the words
high priest
, and the location. Each page also
contained a handwritten meditation on the beauty and the necessity of evil, apparently composed by the priest. As I paged through, I saw that some priests served decades, others a few years. I didn’t have time to examine the book carefully enough to determine when they had moved their little cult to America. On page 433 was the current year and the name of the high priest, Lyle Hetland; otherwise that page was blank, for he had not yet written his meditation.

Over four hundred years and numerous generations of madness and murder. They were not the first of their kind and would not be the last. Accounts of such groups dated back to the earliest fragments of written history. If the world survived long enough, accounts of the activities of their latest iterations would be reported on the Internet or by whatever medium might one day replace it. The human heart may choose truth or lies, light or darkness, and even if the world were to become a universally prosperous, totally materialist sphere where everyone claimed to be scientific rationalists, some would secretly worship evil—and commit it—even if none were left who believed in the existence of absolute good. Good people are from time to time exhausted by the relentless nature of the enemy and need some period of peace, but those who worship darkness thrive on the battle, on violence and hatred, and have no taste for peace.

I’d gone where I had to go, and I’d learned what I resisted learning. And now there was only one place left for me: the house, where the children were being held, where the killing would soon begin.

The rams’ skulls were only that to me, no matter what they might be to others here, and I turned my back on them.