Garden of Evil (6 page)

‘I'm very, very pleased with you, Mr Rook,' he said, under his breath, although he may not have been talking entirely to himself. ‘You're coming along famously.'

N
ext morning he was woken up at 7.11 by Tibbles jumping up on to his chest.

‘
Aaahhh
!' he shouted, and sat bolt upright. Tibbles weighed over six pounds, and had badly winded him, but more than that, he had abruptly jolted him out of his dream.

He had been wandering around the college parking lot in a dense yellow smog, trying to find his car. It was no longer in his usual parking space – or rather Royston Denman's space – but he couldn't imagine who would have wanted to move it, apart from Royston Denman. On the other hand, Royston Denman had given up complaining about it years ago, especially since these days he had become a climate-change fanatic and usually came to college by bicycle, wearing a streamlined helmet.

Jim couldn't imagine who would have wanted to
steal
it, either. A 1971 Mercury Marquis, in metallic green? Hardly a collector's car. You could pick one up online for less than twenty-five hundred dollars.

He was almost about to give up looking for it when he heard the low whistling noise of its 7.1-liter engine. Someone had moved it, but they were parked somewhere close by, as if they were patiently waiting for him to find them.

He followed the sound of the engine until the car gradually took shape through the smog. It was parked at an angle close to the entrance to the parking lot, with exhaust smoke billowing out its tailpipe. Its passenger door was wide open. It reminded Jim of the folk story told by the Irish poet W.B. Yeats about the death coach that arrives outside your house when you are about to die, the
cóiste bodhar
, and waits outside with its door open to take you away, because it cannot return to the underworld empty.

Jim approached his car warily. As he came nearer, he bent down so that he could see who was sitting in the driving seat. When he did, he immediately felt a crawling sensation all over his scalp, as if he had lice.

It was the shadowy figure that he had almost run over, and which had appeared on his balcony. He was shocked to see it sitting there, but for some reason he felt less afraid of it now than he had been when he had seen it yesterday. It seemed more solid now, more definite, although its cloak still seemed to flow and ripple as if it were being blown by an unfelt wind, and its face was concealed by a deep, floppy hood. Its left hand was resting loosely on top of the steering wheel, covered by a gray suede glove. On top of the glove, on its wedding finger, it was wearing an elaborate silver ring, like a mass of intertwined snakes.

‘
Where would you like me to take you, Mr Rook
?' the figure asked him, in that reverberating voice. ‘
A man with your gift – he could go anyplace he chose
,
believe me
.'

‘Who are you?' Jim demanded. ‘What do you want? This is my car, Charlie, not yours. If I want to go anyplace, I'll drive there myself, thanks.'

‘
Aha – but you can never go to the places to which
I
can take you
,' the shadowy figure replied. It turned its head slightly, and as it did so, Jim saw two glittering eyes inside the darkness of its hood.

At that moment, Tibbles sprang on to his bedcover and he sat up in shock.

He called Dr Ehrlichman's secretary, Rosa, and asked her if college was going to be open today.

‘Absolutely,' she said. ‘You won't be going back to your usual room, though, until the crime-scene people have finished with it, and it's all been cleaned up and redecorated. We've relocated you to Art Studio Four, on the second floor.'

‘Art Studio Four?
Art Studio Four
? That's nothing but an expletive deleted storeroom.'

‘I'm sorry. Dr Ehrlichman said to tell you that the college is oversubscribed this year and we don't have any other classrooms free. By the way, you won't miss his assembly this morning, will you?'

‘Of course not.'

‘You
will
miss it, Jim. I know you.'

‘I'll try my best, Rosa. But I've always been allergic to Dr Ehrlichman's inspirational speeches. And his academic forecasts, too. They bring on my asthma, and I don't even suffer from asthma. I can't even predict what I'm going to have for lunch, let alone what grades my students are going to get a year from now.'

‘Please try, Jim. It will make him so much happier.'

‘Rosa – you can only be happier if you're happy to begin with.'

‘Well, all right. It will make him marginally less grouchy.'

Jim made himself a Swiss-cheese-and-tomato sandwich for breakfast. He would rather have had pastrami, but he had used it all up yesterday and there was nothing else left in the fridge. He would almost have preferred to share Tibbles' turkey dinner, which actually smelled quite tasty. Tibbles didn't even look up at him, even when he tucked his briefcase under his arm and went to the front door and said, ‘Later, you obscenely fat cat.' Tibbles had his head in his dish, gobbling.

As Jim drove to college, his thoughts kept going around and around like some nauseating carousel ride that wouldn't come to an end, no matter how much he wanted to get off. Again and again he saw that dark shadowy figure, twisting off his balcony like smoke; and the same shadowy figure in last night's dream about his car. Those glittering eyes, inside that hood. Again and again he pictured the nightmare that Summer had described to him, about lines of people shuffling toward the final fiery furnace. Then he saw the pale self-satisfied face that kept appearing in Ricky's portrait of The Storyteller, in spite of all his efforts to paint him differently, and the same man in white, sitting at the bar yesterday evening, mocking him.

He didn't want to think about what had happened at the restaurant because it was too embarrassing. You had to be seriously off your head to get yourself barred from Barney's Beanery.

All the same, he couldn't help thinking that all of these nightmares and all of these incidents were somehow entangled with each other, like the tangled-up snakes on the shadowy figure's ring. It was impossible to distinguish where dreams ended and reality began. Or maybe they weren't dreams. Maybe they were
all
real – the shadowy figure and the man in white and Summer's nightmare about Armageddon. Or maybe
none
of them was real. Or maybe they were just coincidences and Summer was right and he was going nuts.

It required some complicated maneuvering, but he managed to park his car in the space marked J. ROOK. Somehow he didn't feel like tempting fate by parking in Royston Denman's space. It wasn't smoggy this morning, unlike his dream, but you never knew. He made sure he locked his car, too, because he never usually bothered. He didn't want to come back at the end of the day and find some shadowy character in a hood sitting in the driver's seat, offering to drive him to God alone knows where.

He was too late for Dr Ehrlichman's assembly, of course, which was partly due to the crawling traffic along Sunset, and partly due to the fact that he had deliberately left his apartment about ten minutes too late to make it in time.

He climbed the two flights of stairs to the second floor and walked along to the end of the corridor to Art Studio Four. Assembly hadn't finished yet, so the building was empty, and his footsteps echoed.

Before he opened the battered, blue-painted door, he peered through the porthole. Instead of the separate desks of Special Class Two, there were four long benches, all of them spattered with inks and paints of every conceivable color. The walls were hung with scores of paintings and portraits – landscapes and abstracts and odd-looking animals by students who seemed to believe that horses had legs as thin as golf clubs and bodies the shape of overstuffed couches.

There were shelves on either side of the studio, too, crowded with sculptures and pottery in various stages of completion. Most of the human figures were lumpy and misshapen, more like trolls than people, and the jugs and bowls looked as if they been molded during a disastrous out-take of the pottery scene in
Ghost
.

Jim did one thing more before he opened the door. He craned his head and looked up toward the ceiling. If there was anybody nailed up there, with or without cats, he wasn't going to go inside. All he could see, however, was a grubby plastered ceiling with cracks in it, and a small lizard, and two fluorescent tubes hanging down.

He went in. Art Studio Four smelled strongly of oil paint and dried clay and damp dishrags, so he went across and opened the windows. From the second floor, he could see the windows of his own classroom, Special Class Two, and three figures in white protective suits moving around inside it. Outside Special Class Two, there was a grassy slope, which rose gradually up to a small grove of five or six eucalyptus trees, surrounded by a scattering of dry fallen leaves.

To his surprise, Simon Silence was standing underneath these trees, his arms spread wide. He was wearing a white shirt and white linen pants and sandals, just like yesterday, and his white canvas sack was lying by his feet. It was difficult for Jim to see clearly at this distance, but he looked as if he had his eyes shut, and he was chanting, or singing.

Whatever he was doing, Simon Silence too had missed Dr Ehrlichman's assembly, but then Jim reckoned that
he
wasn't in any position to complain about that. And Simon Silence was the son of a pastor, after all. Maybe this was the way he always started his day, by praying or singing hymns. Just because Jim thought that praying to God was futile, that didn't mean that he disapproved of anybody else doing it. Jim thought that buying lottery tickets was equally futile, but that didn't mean that some people didn't occasionally get lucky.

He laid his briefcase down on his desk, opened it up, and took out fifteen freshly printed copies of his grammar questionnaires. He thumbed through them, ready to hand them out, but then he had second thoughts and tucked them back into his briefcase again. After seeing at least some of his new class sitting outside the college grounds yesterday, listening to Simon Silence, he thought that he might start the morning differently, and read them a poem by Rachel X. Speed instead. He didn't quite understand why, but he had a feeling that he might learn more about them by listening to their reactions to
A New Language of Love
than he would by watching them struggle to work out the difference between ‘pour' and ‘pore' – as in, ‘
DuWayne poured over his books all evening
.'

He sat down at his own desk. It was antique, and made of pine – small and square and covered with almost as much ink and paint as the students' four benches. Some bored art teacher had used felt-tip pens to draw a highly detailed doodle of a naked woman on it, with a large green snake entwined around her. The woman was blindfolded, so that she couldn't see how the snake was triumphantly leering at her.

Underneath, the doodler had written the letters
but even though Jim knew a smattering of words in Greek, like
(which meant kebab), he had no idea what this meant. Beware of blind bends?

He tried to open the desk drawer. It was jammed at first, but he managed to wrench it from side to side and at last it came out. Inside was a roll of Scotch tape, a half-finished pack of fruit Life Savers, and a dog-eared copy of
Hustler
magazine for June, 2009.

He was just leafing through the center-spread pictorial of a bosomy young woman named Alexis Ford when the studio door burst open and a diminutive girl with frizzy black hair and upswept eyeglasses came staggering in, carrying in her arms an oversized, grubby white teddy bear with the Star of David on its T-shirt. She was wearing a pond-green cardigan over a drab gray dress, and brown shoes that looked almost like hiking boots.

She stopped and stared at Jim and his copy of
Hustler
and said, in a very nasal voice, ‘Oh,
zay moykhl
! I'm sorry. I guess I shoulda knocked.'