Boo had gone to the corner of the room farthest from the door. I found myself drawn there, too.
In its circulation through the building, the supercooled water absorbs heat. It then travels to a large underground vault near the eastern woods, where a cooling tower converts the unwanted heat to steam and blows it into the air to dissipate; thereafter, the water returns to the chillers in this room to be cooled again.
Four eight-inch-diameter PVC pipes disappeared through the wall, near the ceiling, close to the corner where Boo and I had been drawn.
Boo sniffed at a four-foot-square stainless-steel panel set six inches off the floor, and I dropped to my knees before it.
Beside the panel was a light switch. I clicked it, but nothing happened—unless I’d turned lights on in some space beyond the wall.
The access panel was fixed to the concrete wall with four bolts. On a nearby hook hung a tool with which the bolts could be extracted.
After removing the bolts, I set aside the panel and peered into the hole where Boo had already gone. Past the butt-end and tucked tail of the big white dog, I saw a lighted tunnel.
Unafraid of dog farts, but fearful about what else might lie ahead, I crawled through the opening.
Once I had cleared the two-foot width of the poured-in-place concrete wall, I was able to stand. Before me lay a rectangular passageway seven feet high and five feet wide.
The four pipes were suspended side by side from the ceiling and were grouped on the left half of the tunnel. Small center-set lights revealed the pipes dwindling as if to eternity.
Along the floor, on the left, were runs of separated copper pipes, steel pipes, and flexible conduits. They probably carried water, propane, and electrical wires.
Here and there, white patterns of calcification stained the walls, but the place wasn’t damp. It had a clean smell of concrete and lime.
Except for the faint rushing noise of water flowing through the pipes overhead, the passageway lay silent.
I consulted my wristwatch. In thirty-four minutes, I would need to be in the garage to meet the Hoosier’s Hoosier.
With purpose, Boo trotted forward, and I followed with no clear purpose at all.
I proceeded as silently as possible in ski boots, and when my shiny quilted thermal jacket whistled as I moved my arms, I took it off and left it behind. Boo made no sound whatsoever.
A boy and his dog are the best of all companions, celebrated in songs and books and movies. When the boy is in the grip of a psychic compulsion, however, and when the dog is fearless, the chance that all will turn out well is about as likely as a Scorsese gangster movie ending in sweetness, light, and the happy singing of cherubic children.
CHAPTER 30
I DISLIKE SUBTERRANEAN PASSAGEWAYS. I ONCE died in such a place. At least I’m pretty sure I died, and was dead for a while, and even haunted a few of my friends, though they didn’t know I was with them in a spook state.
If I didn’t die, something stranger than death happened to me. I wrote about the experience in my second manuscript, but writing about it didn’t help me to understand it.
At intervals of forty or fifty feet, air monitors were mounted on the right-hand wall. I found no signs of tampering.
If the passageway led to the cooling-tower vault, as I was sure that it must, then it would be about four hundred feet long.
Twice I thought I heard something behind me. When I looked over my shoulder, nothing loomed.
The third time, I refused to succumb to the urge to glance back. Irrational fear feeds on itself and grows. You must deny it.
The trick is to be able to differentiate irrational fear from justifiable fear. If you squelch justifiable fear and soldier on, dauntless and determined, that’s when Santa Claus will squeeze down the chimney, after all, and add your peepee to his collection.
Boo and I had gone two hundred feet when another passageway opened on the right. This one sloped uphill and curved out of sight.
Four additional PVC pipes were suspended from the ceiling of the intersecting corridor. They turned the corner into our passageway and paralleled the first set of pipes, heading toward the cooling tower.
The second serviceway must have originated in the new abbey.
Instead of bringing the brothers back to the school in the two SUVs, risking attack by whatever might be waiting in the blizzard, we could lead them along this easier route.
I needed to explore the new passageway, though not immediately.
Boo had proceeded toward the cooling tower. Although the dog would not be of help when I was attacked by the creeping thing behind me, I felt better when we kept together, and I hurried after him.
In my mind’s eye, the creature at my back had three necks but only two heads. The body was human, but the heads were those of coyotes. It wanted to plant my head on its center neck.
You might wonder where such a baroque irrational fear could have come from. After all, as you know, I’m droll, but I’m not grotesque.
A casual friend of mine in Pico Mundo, a fiftyish Panamint Indian who calls himself Tommy Cloudwalker, told me of an encounter he had with such a three-headed creature.
Tommy had gone hiking and camping in the Mojave, when winter’s tarnished-silver sun, the Ancient Squaw, had relented to spring’s golden sun, the Young Bride, but before summer’s fierce platinum sun, the Ugly Wife, could with her sharp tongue sear the desert so cruelly that a sweat of scorpions and beetles would be wrung from the sand in a desperate search for better shade and a drop of water.
Maybe Tommy’s names for the seasonal suns arise from the legends of his tribe. Maybe he just makes them up. I’m not sure if Tommy is partly genuine or entirely a master of hokum.
In the center of his forehead is a stylized image of a hawk two inches wide and one inch high. Tommy says the hawk is a birth-mark.
Truck Boheen, a one-legged former biker and tattooist who lives in a rusting trailer on the edge of Pico Mundo, says he applied the hawk to Tommy’s forehead twenty-five years ago, for fifty bucks.
Reason tips the scale toward Truck’s version. The problem is, Truck also claims that the most recent five presidents of the United States have come secretly to his trailer in the dead of night to receive his tattoos. I might believe one or two, but not five.
Anyway, Tommy was sitting in the Mojave on a spring night, the sky winking with the Wise Eyes of Ancestors—or stars, if scientists are correct—when the creature with three heads appeared on the farther side of the campfire.
The human head never said a word, but the flanking coyote heads spoke English. They debated each other about whether Tommy’s head was more desirable than the head already occupying the neck between them.
Coyote One liked Tommy’s head, especially the proud nose. Coyote Two was insulting; he said Tommy was “more Italian than Indian.”
Being something of a shaman, Tommy recognized that this creature was an unusual manifestation of the Trickster, a spirit common to the folklore of many Indian nations. As an offering, he produced three cigarettes of whatever he was smoking, and these were accepted.
With solemn satisfaction, the three heads smoked in silence. After tossing the butts in the campfire, the creature departed, allowing Tommy to keep his head.
Two words might explain Tommy’s story: peyote buttons.
The following day, however, after resuming his hike, Tommy came across the headless corpse of another hiker. The driver’s license in the guy’s wallet identified him as Curtis Hobart.
Nearby was a severed head, but it was the one that had been on the center neck between the coyotes. It looked nothing like Curtis Hobart in the driver’s-license photo.
Using his satellite phone, Tommy Cloudwalker called the sheriff. Shimmering like mirages in the spring heat, the authorities arrived both overland and by helicopter.
Later, the coroner declared that the head and the body did not belong together. They never located Curtis Hobart’s head, and no body was ever found t
o go with the discarded head that had been dropped on the sand near Hobart’s corpse.
As I hurried after Boo, along the passageway toward the cooling tower, I did not know why Tommy’s unlikely story should rise out of my memory swamp at this time. It didn’t seem germane to my current situation.
Later, all would clarify. Even on those occasions when I am as dumb as a duck run down by a truck, my busy sub conscious is laboring overtime to save my butt.
Boo went to the cooling tower, and after unlocking the fire door with my universal key, I followed him inside, where the fluorescent lights were on.
We were at the bottom of the structure. It looked like a movie set through which James Bond would pursue a villain who had steel teeth and wore a double-barreled 12-gauge hat.
A pair of thirty-foot-high sheet-metal towers rose above us. They were linked by horizontal ducts, accessed at different levels by a series of red catwalks.
Inside the towers and perhaps in some of the smaller ducts, things were turning with loud thrumming and whisking noises, perhaps huge fan blades. Driven air hissed like peevish cats and whistled like catcalls.
The walls were lined with at least forty large gray metal boxes, similar to junction boxes, except that each featured a large ON/OFF lever and two signal lights, one red and one green. Only green lights glowed at the moment.
All green. A-OK. Good to go. Hunky-dory.
The machinery offered numerous places where someone could hide; and the noise would make even the most lumbering assailant difficult to hear until he was on top of me; but I chose to take the green lights as a good omen.
Had I been aboard the Titanic, I would have been standing on the listing deck, leaning against a railing, gazing at a falling star and wishing for a puppy for Christmas even as the band played “Nearer My God to Thee.”
Although much that was precious has been taken from me in this life, I have reason to remain an optimist. After the numerous tight scrapes I’ve been through, by now I should have lost one leg, three fingers, one buttock, most of my teeth, an ear, my spleen, and my sense of fun. But here I am.
Both Boo and psychic magnetism had drawn me here, and when I proceeded warily into the big room, I discovered the attractant.
Between two more banks of gray metal boxes, on a clear section of wall, hung Brother Timothy.
CHAPTER 31
BROTHER TIM’S SHOD FEET DANGLED EIGHTEEN inches off the floor. Six feet above him at its apex, a 180-degree arc of thirteen peculiar white pegs had been driven into the concrete wall. From these pegs stretched white fibrous bands, like inch-wide lengths of cloth, by which he was suspended.
One of the thirteen lines ended in his mussed hair. Two others terminated in the rolled-down hood bunched at the back of his neck, and the remaining ten disappeared into small rents in the shoulders, sleeves, and flanks of his tunic.
The manner in which those lines had been fixed to him remained at every point concealed.
With his head hung forward, with his arms spread out and angled up from his body, the intention to mock the crucifixion could not have been clearer.
Although lacking visible wounds, he appeared to be dead. Famous for his blush, he was now whiter than pale, gray under the eyes. His slack facial muscles responded to no emotion, only to gravity.
Nevertheless, all of the indicator lights on the surrounding breaker boxes—or whatever they were—remained green, so in a spirit of optimism bordering on lunacy, I said, “Brother Timothy,” dismayed to hear my voice so whispery and thin.
The whoosh-whirr-thrum-throb of machinery covered the breathing of the three-headed cigarette fiend behind me, but I refused to turn and confront it. Irrational fear. Nothing loomed at my back. Not a coyote-human Indian demigod, not my mother with her gun.
Raising my voice, I repeated, “Brother Tim?”
Although smooth, his skin appeared to be as juiceless as dust, grainy like paper, as if life had not merely been taken from him but had been sucked out to the last drop.
An open spiral staircase led to the catwalks above and to the high door in the portion of the cooling tower that rose above ground. The police would have entered by that door to search the vault below.
Either they had overlooked this place or the dead monk had not been here when they had swept through.
He had been a good man, and kind to me. He should not be left to hang there, his cadaver employed to mock the God to whom he had devoted his life.
Maybe I could cut him down.
I lightly pinched one of the fibrous white bands, slid my thumb and forefinger up and down that taut ribbon. Not ribbon, though, nor cotton cloth, nor anything that I had felt before.
Glass-smooth, as dry as talcum, yet flexible. And remarkably cold for such a thin filament, so icy that my fingers began to grow numb from even a brief inspection.
The thirteen white pins were wedges, somehow driven into the concrete as a rock climber drives pitons into cracks with a hammer. Yet the concrete presented not one crack.
The nearest of the thirteen bristled from the wall perhaps eighteen inches above my head. It resembled bleached bone.
I couldn’t see how the point of the piton had been embedded in the wall. It seemed to grow from—or to be fused with—the concrete.
Likewise, I wasn’t able to discern how the fibrous band had been fixed to the piton. Each suspending line and its anchor appeared to be part of a single unit.
Because he was a thief of heads, the Trickster behind me would have a formidable knife of some kind, perhaps a machete, with which I could cut down Brother Timothy. He wouldn’t harm me if I explained that Tommy Cloudwalker and I were friends. I didn’t have cigarettes to offer him, but I did have gum, a few sticks of Black Jack.
When I plucked one of the lines from which the dead monk hung, to determine its toughness, it proved more taut than I expected, as tight with tension as a violin string.
The fibrous material produced an ugly note. I had plucked only one, but after a beat, the other twelve lines vibrated, too, and from them arose eerie music reminiscent of a theremin.
My scalp crawled, I felt a hot breath on the nape of my neck, I detected a foul smell, I knew this was irrational fear, a reaction to the creepy condition of Brother Timothy and to the disturbing strains of theremin-like sound, but I turned anyway, I turned, chagrined that I was so easily suckered by my imagination, I turned boldly to the looming Trickster.
He wasn’t behind me. Nothing waited behind me except Boo, who regarded me with a baffled expression that hardened my embarrassment into a diamond-bright luster.
As the cold sound from the thirteen tethers faded, I returned my attention to Brother Timothy, and looked up into his face just as his eyes opened.
CHAPTER 32
MORE ACCURATELY: BROTHER TIMOTHY’S EYE-LIDS lifted, but he could not open his eyes because he didn’t possess eyes any longer. In his sockets were matching kaleidoscopic patterns of tiny bonelike forms. The pattern in the left socket irised into new shapes; the pattern in the right did likewise; then both changed in perfect synchronization.
I felt well advised to take a step back from him.
Tongueless and toothless, his mouth sagged open. In the wideness of his silent scream, a layered construct of bony forms, jointed in ways that defied analysis and description, flexed and rotated and thrust forward only to fold inward, as if he were trying to swallow a colony of hard-shelled arachnids that were alive and reluctant to be consumed.
The skin split from the corners of his mouth to his ears. With not one bead of blood, his upper lip peeled toward his scalp, the way the lid of a sardine can rolls back with the twist of a key, and the lower part of his face peeled down over his chin.
While the intention had been to mock the crucifixion of Christ, Brother Timothy’s body had also been a chrysalis from which something less charming than a butterfly strove to emerge.
Beneath the veneer of a face lay the fullness of what I had only glimpsed in the eye sockets,
in the yawning mouth: a phantasmagoria of bony forms linked by hinge joints, by pivot joints, by ellipsoidal joints, by ball-and-socket joints, and by joints for which no names existed, and which were not natural to this world.
The apparition appeared to be a solid mass of bones combined so intimately that they must be fused, compacted so completely that they could have no room to rotate or flex. Yet they did rotate and flex and pivot and more, seemed to move not merely in three dimensions but in four, in an unceasing exhibition of dexterity that astonished and amazed.
Imagine that all the universe and all of time are together kept in right motion and in perfect balance by an infinite gearbox, and in your mind look down into that intricate mechanism, and you will have a sense of my incomprehension, awe, and terror as I stood before the uberskeleton that churned and ticked and flexed and clicked, peeling the gossamer remnants of Brother Tim away from itself.
Something moved vigorously under the dead monk’s tunic.
If popcorn, Pepsi, and a comfortable chair had been available, I might have stayed. But the cooling tower was an inhospitable place, dusty and drafty, offering no refreshments.
Besides, I had an appointment with the Hoosier librarian cake-baker in the school garage. I am loath to be late for an engagement. Tardiness is rude.
A piton popped out of the wall. The fibrous tether reeled that wedge into the kaleidoscopic boneworks, incorporating it in a wink. Another piton came loose, raveled back to Papa.
This rough beast, its hour come ’round at last, didn’t need to slouch to Bethlehem to be born. Sharp white blades slashed through the tunic from within, shredding it. No need for Rosemary; no need to waste years as a baby.
The time had come either to light the black candles and start chanting in admiration—or blow this dump.
Boo had already scrammed. I vamoosed.
I pulled the door shut between the cooling tower and the service passage and fumbled with my key for a moment before I realized that the lock only kept people out; I couldn’t lock anyone inside.