Many large cities supported a weekly New Age newspaper that reported on natural foods, holistic healing, and spiritual matters ranging from reincarnation therapy to spirit channeling.
Los Angeles had three.
Roy bought them all and returned to the car.
By the dim glow of the ceiling light, he flipped through each publication, scanning only the space ads and classifieds. Gurus, swamis, psychics, Tarot-card readers, acupuncturists, herbalists to movie stars, channelers, aura interpreters, palm readers, chaos-theory dice counselors, past-life guides, high-colonic therapists, and other specialists offered their services in heartening numbers.
Roy lived in Washington, D.C., but his work took him all over the country. He had visited all the sacred places where the land, like a giant battery, accumulated vast stores of spiritual energy: Santa Fe, Taos, Woodstock, Key West, Spirit Lake, Meteor Crater, and others. He’d had moving experiences in those hallowed confluences of cosmic energy—yet he had long suspected that Los Angeles was an undiscovered nexus as powerful as any. Now, the sheer plenitude of consciousness-raising guides in the ads strengthened his suspicion.
From the myriad choices, Roy selected The Place Of The Way in Burbank. He was intrigued that they had capitalized every word in the name of their establishment, instead of using lowercase for the preposition and second article. They offered numerous methods for “seeking the self and finding the eye of the universal storm,” not from a shabby storefront but “from the peaceful sphere of our home.” He also liked the proprietors’ names—and that they were thoughtful enough to identify themselves in their ad: Guinevere and Chester.
He checked his watch. Past nine o’clock.
Still parked illegally in front of the post office, he called the number in the ad. A man answered: “This is Chester at The Place Of The Way. How may I assist you?”
Roy apologized for calling at that hour, since The Place Of The Way was located in their home, but he explained that he was slipping into a spiritual void and needed to find firm ground as quickly as possible. He was grateful to be assured that Chester and Guinevere fulfilled their mission at all hours. After he received directions, he estimated that he could be at their door by ten o’clock.
He arrived at nine-fifty.
The attractive two-story Spanish house had a tile roof and deep-set leaded windows. In the artful landscape lighting, lush palms and Australian tree ferns threw mysterious shadows against pale-yellow stucco walls.
When Roy rang the bell, he noticed an alarm-company sticker on the window next to the door. A moment later, Chester spoke to him from an intercom box. “Who’s there, please?”
Roy was only mildly surprised that an enlightened couple like this, in touch with their psychic talents, found it necessary to take security precautions. Such was the sorry state of the world in which they lived. Even mystics were marked for mayhem.
Smiling and friendly, Chester welcomed Roy into The Place Of The Way. He was potbellied, about fifty, mostly bald but with a Friar Tuck fringe of hair, deeply tanned in midwinter, bearish and strong looking in spite of his gut. He wore Rockports, khaki slacks, and a khaki shirt with the sleeves rolled to expose thick, hairy forearms.
Chester led Roy through rooms with yellow pine floors buffed to a high polish, Navajo rugs, and rough-hewn furniture that looked more suitable to a lodge in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains than to a home in Burbank. Beyond the family room, which boasted a giant-screen TV, they entered a vestibule and then a round room that was about twelve feet in diameter, with white walls and no windows other than the round skylight in the domed ceiling.
A round pine table stood in the center of the round room. Chester indicated a chair at the table. Roy sat. Chester offered a beverage—“anything from diet Coke to herbal tea”—but Roy declined because his only thirst was of the soul.
In the center of the table was a basket of plaited palm leaves, which Chester indicated. “I’m only an assistant in these matters. Guinevere is the spiritual adept. Her hands must never touch money. Though she’s transcended earthly concerns, she must eat, of course.”
“Of course,” Roy said.
From his wallet, Roy extracted three hundred dollars and put the cash in the basket. Chester seemed to be pleasantly surprised by the offering, but Roy had always believed that a person could expect only the quality of enlightenment for which he was willing to pay.
Chester left the room with the basket.
From the ceiling, pin spots had washed the walls with arcs of white light. Now they dimmed until the chamber filled with shadows and a moody amber radiance that approximated candlelight.
“Hi, I’m Guinevere! No, please, don’t get up.”
Breezing into the room with girlish insouciance, head held high, shoulders back, she went around the table to a chair opposite the one in which Roy sat.
Guinevere, about forty, was exceedingly beautiful, in spite of wearing her long blond hair in medusan cascades of cornrows, which Roy disliked. Her jade-green eyes flared with inner light, and every angle of her face was reminiscent of every mythological goddess Roy had seen portrayed in classical art. In tight blue jeans and a snug white T-shirt, her lean and supple body moved with fluid grace, and her large breasts swayed alluringly. He could see the points of her nipples straining against her cotton shirt.
“How ya doin’?” she asked perkily.
“Not so good.”
“We’ll fix that. What’s your name?”
“Roy.”
“What are you seeking, Roy?”
“I want a world with justice and peace, a world that’s perfect in every way. But people are flawed. There’s so little perfection anywhere. Yet I want it so badly. Sometimes I get depressed.”
“You need to understand the meaning of the world’s imperfection and your own obsession with it. What road of enlightenment do you prefer to take?”
“Any road, all roads.”
“Excellent!” said the beautiful Nordic Rastafarian, with such enthusiasm that her cornrows bounced and swayed, and the clusters of red beads dangling from the ends clicked together. “Maybe we’ll start with crystals.”
Chester returned, pushing a large wheeled box around the table to Guinevere’s right side.
Roy saw that it was a gray-and-black metal tool cabinet: four feet high, three feet wide, two feet deep, with doors on the bottom third and drawers of various widths and depths above the doors. The Sears Craftsman logo gleamed dully in the amber light.
While Chester sat in the third and last chair, which was two feet to the left and a foot behind the woman, Guinevere opened one of the drawers in the cabinet and removed a crystal sphere slightly larger than a billiard ball. Cupping it in both hands, she held it out to Roy, and he accepted it.
“Your aura’s dark, disturbed. Let’s clean that up first. Hold this crystal in both hands, close your eyes, seek a meditative calm. Think about only one thing, only this clean image: hills covered with snow. Gently rolling hills with fresh snow, whiter than sugar, softer than flour. Gentle hills to all horizons, hills upon hills, mantled with new snow, white on white, under a white sky, snowflakes drifting down, whiteness through whiteness over whiteness on whiteness…”
Guinevere went on like that for a while, but Roy couldn’t see the snow-mantled hills or the falling snow regardless of how hard he tried. Instead, in his mind’s eye, he could see only one thing: her hands. Her lovely hands. Her incredible hands.
She was altogether so spectacular looking that he hadn’t noticed her hands until she was passing the crystal ball to him. He had never seen hands like hers. Exceptional hands. His mouth went dry at the mere thought of kissing her palms, and his heart pounded fiercely at the memory of her slender fingers. They had seemed perfect.
“Okay, that’s better,” Guinevere said cheerily, after a time. “Your aura’s much lighter. You can open your eyes now.”
He was afraid that he had imagined the perfection of her hands and that when he saw them a
gain he would discover that they were no different from the hands of other women—not the hands of an angel after all. Oh, but they were. Delicate, graceful, ethereal. They took the crystal ball from him, returned it to the open drawer of the tool cabinet, and then gestured—like the spreading wings of doves—to seven new crystals that she had placed on a square of black velvet in the center of the table while his eyes had been closed.
“Arrange these in any pattern that seems appropriate to you,” she said, “and then I’ll read them.”
The objects appeared to be half-inch-thick crystal snowflakes that had been sold as Christmas ornaments. None was like another.
As Roy tried to focus on the task before him, his gaze kept sliding surreptitiously to Guinevere’s hands. Each time he glimpsed them, his breath caught in his throat. His own hands were trembling, and he wondered if she noticed.
Guinevere progressed from crystals to the reading of his aura through prismatic lenses, to Tarot cards, to rune stones, and her fabulous hands became ever more beautiful. Somehow he answered her questions, followed instructions, and appeared to be listening to the wisdom that she imparted. She must have thought him dim-witted or drunk, because his speech was thick and his eyelids drooped as he became increasingly intoxicated by the sight of her hands.
Roy glanced guiltily at Chester, suddenly certain that the man—perhaps Guinevere’s husband—was angrily aware of the lascivious desire that her hands engendered. But Chester wasn’t paying attention to either of them. His bald head was bowed, and he was cleaning the fingernails of his left hand with the fingernails of his right.
Roy was convinced that the Mother of God could not have had hands more gentle than Guinevere’s, nor could the greatest succubus in Hell have had hands more erotic. Guinevere’s hands were, to her, what Melissa Wicklun’s sensuous lips were to her, oh, but a thousand times more so, ten thousand times more so. Perfect, perfect, perfect.
She shook the bag of runes and cast them again.
Roy wondered if he dared ask for a palm reading. She would have to hold his hands in hers.
He shivered at that delicious thought, and a spiral of dizziness spun through him. He could not walk out of that room and leave her to touch other men with those exquisite, unearthly hands.
He reached under his suit jacket, drew the Beretta from his shoulder holster, and said, “Chester.”
The bald man looked up, and Roy shot him in the face. Chester tipped backward in his chair, out of sight, and thudded to the floor.
The silencer needed to be replaced soon. The baffles were worn from use. The muffled shot had been loud enough to carry out of the room, though fortunately not beyond the walls of the house.
Guinevere was gazing at the rune stones on the table when Roy shot Chester. She must have been deeply immersed in her reading, for she seemed confused when she looked up and saw the gun.
Before she could raise her hands in defense and force Roy to damage them, which was unthinkable, he shot her in the forehead. She crashed backward in her chair, joining Chester on the floor.
Roy put the gun away, got up, went around the table. Chester and Guinevere stared, unblinking, at the skylight and the infinite night beyond. They had died instantly, so the scene was almost bloodless. Their deaths had been quick and painless.
The moment, as always, was sad and joyous. Sad, because the world had lost two enlightened people who were kind of heart and deep-seeing. Joyous, because Guinevere and Chester no longer had to live in a society of the unenlightened and uncaring.
Roy envied them.
He withdrew his gloves from an inside coat pocket and dressed his hands for the tender ceremony ahead.
He tipped Guinevere’s chair back onto its feet. Holding her in it, he pushed the chair to the table, wedging the dead woman in a seated position. Her head flopped forward, chin on her breast, and her cornrows rattled softly, falling like a beaded curtain to conceal her face. He lifted her right arm, which hung at her side, and put it on the table, then her left.
Her hands. For a while he stared at her hands, which were as appealing in death as in life. Graceful. Elegant. Radiant.
They gave him hope. If perfection could exist anywhere, in any form, no matter how small, even in a pair of hands, then his dream of an entirely perfect world might one day be realized.
He put his own hands atop hers. Even through his gloves, the contact was electrifying. He shuddered with pleasure.
Dealing with Chester was more difficult because of his greater weight. Nevertheless, Roy managed to move him around the table until he was opposite Guinevere, but slumped in his own chair rather than in the one Roy had been using.
In the kitchen, Roy explored the cabinets and pantry, collecting what he needed to finish the ceremony. He looked in the garage as well, for the final implement he required. Then he carried those items to the round room and placed them atop the wheeled chest in which Guinevere stored her divining aids.
He used a dish towel to wipe off the chair in which he had been sitting, for at the time he had not been wearing gloves and might have left fingerprints. He also buffed that side of the table, the crystal ball, and the snowflake crystals that he had arranged earlier for the psychic reading. He had touched nothing else in the room.
For a few minutes he pulled open drawers and doors in the tool chest, examining the magical contents, until he found an item that seemed appropriate to the circumstances. It was a pentalpha, also called a pentagram, in green on a field of black felt, used in more serious matters—such as attempted communication with the spirits of the dead—than the mere reading of runes, crystals, and Tarot cards.
Unfolded, it was an eighteen-inch square. He placed it in the center of the table, as a symbol of the life beyond this one.
He plugged in the small electric reciprocating saw that he had found among the tools in the garage, and he relieved Guinevere of her right hand. Gently, he placed the hand in a rectangular Tupperware container on another soft dish towel that he had arranged as a bed for it. He snapped the lid on the container.
Although he wanted to take her left hand, too, he felt that it would be selfish to insist on possessing both. The right thing was to leave one with the body, so the police and coroner and mortician and everyone else who dealt with Guinevere’s remains would know that she’d possessed the most beautiful hands in the world.
He lifted Chester’s arms onto the table. He placed the dead man’s right hand over Guinevere’s left, on top of the pentalpha, to express his conviction that they were together in the next world.
Roy wished he had the psychic power or purity or whatever was required to be able to channel the spirits of the dead. He would have channeled Guinevere there and then, to ask if she would really mind if he acquired her left hand as well.
He sighed, picked up the Tupperware container, and reluctantly left the round room. In the kitchen, he phoned 911 and spoke to the police operator: “The Place Of The Way is just a place now. It’s very sad. Please come.”
Leaving the telephone off the hook, he snatched another dish towel from a drawer and hurried to the front door. As far as he could recall, when he had first entered the house and followed Chester to the round room, he had touched nothing. Now, he needed only to wipe the doorbell-push and drop the dish towel on the way to his car.
He drove out of Burbank, over the hills, into the Los Angeles basin, through a seedy section of Hollywood. The bright splashes of graffiti on walls and highway structures, the cars full of young thugs cruising in search of trouble, the pornographic bookstores and movie theaters, the empty shops and the littered gutters and the other evidence of economic and moral collapse, the hatred and envy and greed and lust that thickened the air more effectively than the smog—none of that dismayed him for the time being, because he carried with him an object of such perfect beauty that it proved there was a powerful and wise creative force at work in the universe. He had evidence of God’s existence secured in a Tupperware container.
&
nbsp; Out on the vast Mojave, where the night ruled, where the works of humankind were limited to the dark highway and the vehicles upon it, where the radio reception of distant stations was poor, Spencer found his thoughts drawn, against his will, to the deeper darkness and even stranger silence of that night sixteen years in the past. Once captured in that loop of memory, he could not escape until he had purged himself by talking about what he had seen and endured.
The barren plains and hills provided no convenient taverns to serve as confessionals. The only sympathetic ears were those of the dog.
…bare-chested and barefoot, I descend the stairs, shivering, rubbing my arms, wondering why I’m so afraid. Perhaps even at that moment, I dimly realize that I’m going down to a place from which I’ll never be able to ascend.
I’m drawn forward by the cry that I heard while leaning out the window to find the owl. Although it was brief and came just twice, and then only faintly, it was so piercing and pathetic that the memory of it bewitches me, the way a fourteen-year-old boy can sometimes be seduced as easily by the prospect of strangeness and terror as by the mysteries of sex.
Off the stairs. Through rooms where the moonlit windows glow softly, like video screens, and where the museum-quality Stickley furniture is visible only as angular black shadows within the blue-black gloom. Past artworks by Edward Hopper and Thomas Hart Benton and Steven Ackblom, from the latter of which peer vaguely luminous faces with eerie expressions as inscrutable as the ideograms of an alien language evolved on a world millions of light-years from Earth.
In the kitchen, the honed-limestone floor is cold beneath my feet. During the long day and all night it has absorbed the chill from the Freon-cooled air, and now it steals the heat from my soles.