The Vanishing (16 page)

Although it was not visible from here, the next estate over was empty and dark. He could tell because the glow he used to see over the stand of trees to the west had disappeared over two weeks ago. Word was that the estate was for sale, that the actor who’d bought it couldn’t meet the mortgage payments and was trying to get out from under it before news of his financial situation spread.

Fame was so ephemeral. He remembered talking with his young secretary several years ago after hearing on the radio that the magician Doug Henning had died. He mentioned that he’d seen Henning perform in the late 1970s.

‘‘Who is he?’’ she’d asked. ‘‘I’ve never heard of him.’’

He was shocked, and after that, he’d developed a small obsession, running by his secretary the names of minor celebrities from previous decades whenever they died or he came across them in print, checking to see if she recognized any of them. Louis Nye? No. Anthony Newly? No. Steve Allen? No. Godfrey Cambridge? No. Larry Hovis? No. Slappy White, Nipsey Russell, William Conrad, Charles Nelson Riley? No, no, no and no.

He realized that most of the people he’d grown up watching on TV had completely faded from the cultural landscape. It was a depressing discovery, although it taught him a lesson. In the celebrity-obsessed society of California, it was easy to ascribe a greater importance to fame than it actually deserved.

But fame was fleeting.

Money lasted.

Money and monuments.

Like this house.

He looked admiringly at the structure. It was a strange confluence of events that had created this wonderful building. If he had not wanted a house in the Bay Area, if he hadn’t known Frank Gehry, hell, if they’d discussed the house on a different day, this edifice might not exist. At least not in the form it did now.

His gaze moved on to the surrounding grounds. The damn place was overgrown with vegetation. This was the fourth landscaping service he’d hired just this year, and it looked like he’d have to find yet another one. He’d explained to Gary Martinez, the owner of the business, how he wanted the property maintained, and the man had seemed to understand, but either he hadn’t properly communicated with his employees or the landscapers who worked for him were incompetent. Whatever the reason, the area around the house looked like hell, and Haskell decided that tomorrow he would call Martinez on the carpet and tell him to shape up or ship out.

Or maybe he’d just fire his ass.

It depended on how he felt in the morning.

Haskell walked slowly across the cobblestone driveway and up the burnished marble steps to the front door. He considered ringing the bell and announcing his presence, but it was late.

He punched in the security code and opened the door.

As always, his mail was stacked neatly on a steel table designed to flow with the curved wall. An assistant had printed out a list of phone messages that had arrived for him during the day and had placed this sheet next to the pile of mail, weighing it down with a geometric hunk of translucent plastic. He picked up the sheet the same way he did each evening, scanning the phone numbers, struck by the realization that he had more daily contact with strangers than he did his own family.

The entry hall seemed empty and cold, the recessed lights sterile rather than homey, and Haskell thought that maybe he
should
have brought someone back with him for the night. None of the Gucci-clad do-gooders who’d thrown themselves at him held any appeal, but he remembered a young San Francisco social worker from early in the evening who’d thanked him for his donation to the cause and who’d struck him as someone he wouldn’t mind giving the high hard one. He didn’t remember her name, but it would be easy enough to find out if he wanted.

Which he probably wouldn’t by morning.

Still, the night was long and the thought of spending it alone left him feeling dispirited.

Of course, there was always Suzonne . . .

The smile on his face was not quite bitter, not quite amused, but some unclassifiable combination of the two.

He was too tired to even stop by his office to drop off the mail, so he left everything on the table and walked through the entry hall, past the unused guest wing, into the main corridor, loosening his tux as he proceeded through the house.

The building was not quiet. Howls were coming from the Quiet Room, and although they were faint, they could still be heard even through the soundproofing. The acoustics in this place really were amazing. He hummed to himself, trying not to hear the sounds, but the cries grew louder and wilder as he approached, and with the absence of any competing noise, they became impossible to ignore.

He strode up to the white door of the Quiet Room and flung open the viewing window.

‘‘Shut up!’’ he yelled.

His . . .
son
—if that’s what the creature leaping about the empty room could be called—stared at him with dull fury. As usual, he had ripped off his clothes. His grotesque member had been rubbed raw or shoved against something abrasive and was red and bleeding, but it was still erect, and Haskell was disgusted by the sight. Around him, the room was a mess, broken furniture thrown together in a pile at the center of the floor, primitive drawings scrawled on the walls with blood and excrement. Haskell thought of the one time, long ago, when his son had been allowed to play with another boy, the child of a housekeeper. There’d been a lot more blood then, and it had taken money and pull with friends of friends in the INS to keep that incident quiet.

The . . .
thing
in the room shrieked at him, leaping at the viewing window.

‘‘Shut up!’’ Haskell screamed again, and slammed the window covering, locking it tight.

He stood there for a moment, unmoving, staring at the white door. Part of him
almost
understood the boy’s behavior—and, in some way, envied it. It was a disconcerting realization, but many was the time he’d felt constricted by traditional modes of conduct, by the mores of society. Sometimes he longed to let loose, to give free rein to his wilder emotions, consequences be damned.

But of course he could not.

He moved down the corridor where the door to Suzonne’s room was not only closed but locked. He knocked on the pale wood, politely at first then with more vigor, but she refused to respond. He kicked at the door, called her name but was met only with silence.

He
should
have brought someone home.

‘‘You’ll take it up the ass tomorrow!’’ he cried. ‘‘And you’ll like it!’’

He stormed over to his own room, slamming the door and yanking off his clothes before getting into bed naked. He lay there, staring upward into the darkness, feeling angry, wondering how it was that some people had the nerve to act on their impulses and others didn’t, wondering what it would feel like to kill his wife and put his son out of his misery.

Thinking to himself that it would probably feel pretty good.

Eleven

The wagon train split up near the Great Salt Lake. None too soon, as far as Marshall was concerned. They’d been through a lot on this trip, seen a lot, and for a fair portion of the journey, the travelers had been split into two camps: those who feared the land and saw biblical import in every minor bump in the road, and those like himself who understood that large portions of the West were undiscovered country and contained things that neither they nor, perhaps, any man had seen before. He imagined that it was similar to the first Englishmen to visit Africa and see lions, giraffes, elephants and those other great primitive beasts.

Although what they’d encountered along the trail made a trip to Africa seem like a walk to Grandmother’s house.

After rejoining the wagon train following his experience with the hut—
the bag of bones

—he and the rest of the travelers had spent a blissful two days enjoying the water, shade and plentiful game of the woods beyond the plain. He’d told everyone what had happened—some of it. He’d left out the compression of time, that strange shift from night to morning. And he hadn’t said a single word about his odd conviction that there was wealth to be had in California. That knowledge he kept to himself. But he’d told them everything else about the doorless, windowless room and the human bones in the bag and in the walls. A few had not believed him, but of those who did, a goodly number came up with reasons for what he’d seen and experienced, telling him that what seemed so bizarre and unreal probably had a perfectly natural explanation.

Then they came across the burial ground.

It was a graveyard unlike any they had ever seen, not least for the fact that the graves had been big enough to accommodate giants. How could they know this, since there were no headstones and the burial plots had been exposed to the elements for so long that they had lost all shape or definition? Because one of the graves had been opened. The huge hole gaped before them like a foundation that had been dug for an unbuilt house, and footprints led away from the pit through the muddy soil, monstrous footprints that were not only four times the size of an ordinary man’s but resembled those of neither animal nor human.

They had hurried away from that place, but questions remained in all of their heads, questions some of them posed at night when the campfires were low and the women and children had gone to sleep: Where had the giants come from, since there appeared to be no city or sign of encampment anywhere near the graveyard? And where had they gone? And how had the one giant come back to life and emerged from the grave?

‘‘ ‘There were giants in those days,’ ’’ Morgan James said, quoting the Bible as if that explained everything.

Of course, it explained nothing, and they pushed their animals to the limit, trying to get as far from the graveyard as quickly as possible.

Then there’d been the Garden of Skulls.

It was what Marshall called it, though he’d never said so aloud. They’d discovered it shortly after passing through the burnt remnants of an Indian village.
Choctaw,
Uriah Caldwell had announced sagely, but none of them knew if that was true or not. What they did know was that the village had been decimated, the structures torched, even the surrounding fields set afire.

Beyond, past a stand of oak trees, they’d found the skulls.

It was a cold, gloomy day, but even if it had been hot and sunny with a bright cloudless sky, Marshall would have found the sight before them chilling. Skulls, hundreds of them, more than could have possibly belonged to residents of the Indian village, were arranged in various permutations within a walled area the size of a farmer’s vegetable garden. Not all of them, he saw immediately, were human. Some were animal, some were . . . something else. Acting as a base for six baby skulls that had been fused together into a circle was a flat skeletal head as big as an elephant’s with slitted eye sockets and sharp fangs longer than Marshall’s fingers. Farther down was one with no discernible mouth and a single oversized eye.

All of the skulls were joined with other skulls to make shapes that reminded him of flowers or plants. It was what made him think of a garden, but the fact remained that they had not grown here. They had been taken from skeletons and brought to this place and manipulated into these unnatural configurations.

But by whom?

Or what?

Once more, they had fled, and there was no talk now about logical reasons or natural explanations. He and several other men, Uriah included, were willing to concede that there were things beyond their ken, that here in this new land they were encountering phenomena no civilized man had ever seen. But the religious among them took this to mean that God Himself was intervening on their journey, performing miracles, scourging the land of evil, and for the rest of the trip they had prayed and proselytized to the point where Alf Thomas raised his hands to the sky and yelled, ‘‘God, if you’re up there, strike these assholes mute so I don’t have to listen to their fucking voices anymore! Do . . . it . . . right . . .
now!
’’ When nothing happened, he turned to Emily Smith and her group of fanatics and said, ‘‘See? Either God is dead or He doesn’t exist. Now shut the hell up!’’

But of course they didn’t.

Marshall had remained apart from all this, as he’d remained apart since the beginning of the journey. He, too, experienced hunger, fatigue, frustration and fear, but what saw him through was the confidence that there were riches in California, gold for the taking, that strange certainty that had come to him after his abbreviated night in the hut. In his mind, he remembered the flowers he had seen that morning, the rainbow of blossoms that had covered everything as far as the eye could see, and he knew that no matter what hardships they might encounter on the trail, he would make it through to California.

There’d been one other incident, an encounter so strange and inexplicable that even now he didn’t know what to think of it. The wagon train had been traveling for well over a week, seeing nothing untoward, and for the first time in quite a spell, they were relaxed and at ease, the tension that had been pulling them apart nearly dissipated. They had crossed the Great Divide, and this milestone had buoyed their spirits, made them all more congenial, more willing to overlook their differences.

Then they’d passed through the Dark Woods.

They had seen this section of ground a day before from a ridge atop a low mountain pass. It had appeared burned and scarred, brown earth showing through while all around it the land remained green and fertile. Yet, coming upon the location, they discovered a savage overgrown forest, a spot of ground far more fecund than any they had yet encountered and with foliage the likes of which none of them had ever seen. There’d been bushes with tiny multicolored leaves that had grown naturally into the shapes of animals and people, grasses with gold stalks that did not bend in the breeze that blew through constantly and with edges that looked as sharp as razors. The trees, most of them, were taller than seemed possible, and their leaves and branches cut off the sky, shielding out the sun and creating a world of darkness below. A few others grew spindly and short, stunted and deformed, no doubt by the lack of light.