They fail to explore these experiences in part because they believe that acknowledging the supernatural would be irrational. They are also frightened, often unconsciously, by the prospect of opening their minds and hearts to the truth of a universe far more complex and meaningful than the material world that their education tells them is the sum of all things.
I was not surprised, therefore, that Viola’s nightmare, which earlier in the day had seemed likely to be of no consequence, had proved to be a matter of importance, after all. “Do your dreams have voices, sounds?” I asked her. “Some people’s don’t.”
“Mine do. In the dream, I can hear myself breathing. And this crowd.”
“Crowd?”
“A roaring crowd, like the sound in a stadium.”
Baffled, I said, “Where would such a place be in Pico Mundo?”
“I don’t know. Maybe a Little League game.”
“Not such a big crowd at one of those,” Stormy noted.
“Wasn’t necessarily thousands of voices. Could’ve been a couple hundred,” Viola said. “Just a crowd, all roaring.”
I said, “And then, how is it that you see yourself shot?”
“Don’t see it happen. The shadows, the flashes of light, I’m running, and I stumble, fall on my hands and knees…”
Viola’s eyes twitched behind their lids as though she were asleep and experiencing the nightmare for the first time.
“…on my hands and knees,” she repeated, “hands in something slippery. It’s blood. Then shadows whirl away and light whirls in, and I’m looking down at my own dead face.”
She shuddered and opened her eyes.
Tiny beads of sweat stippled her forehead and her upper lip.
In spite of the electric fan, the room was warm. But she hadn’t been sweating before she began to recall the dream.
“Is there anything else, any other details?” I asked. “Even the smallest thing might help me. What were you…I mean your dead body…what was it lying on? A floor of some kind? Grass? Blacktop?”
She thought for a moment, shook her head. “Can’t say. The only other thing was the man, the dead man.”
I sat up straighter on the sofa. “You mean another…corpse?”
“Next to me…next to my body. He was sort of tumbled on his side, one arm twisted behind his back.”
“Were there other victims?” Stormy asked.
“Maybe. I didn’t see any but him.”
“Did you recognize him?”
“Didn’t get a look at his face. It was turned away from me.”
I said, “Viola, if you could try hard to remember—”
“Anyway, I wasn’t interested in him. I was too scared to wonder who he was. I looked in my own dead face, and I tried to scream, but I couldn’t, and I tried harder, and then I was sitting up in bed, the scream squeezing out of me but, you know, only just the wheeze of a scream.”
The memory agitated Viola. She started to get up from the chair. Maybe her legs were weak. She sat down again.
As though she were reading my mind, Stormy asked, “What was he wearing?”
“What—him in the dream? One foot bent back, the shoe half off. A loafer.”
We waited while Viola searched her memory. Dreams that are as rich as cream while they unfold are skim milk when we wake, and in time they wash out of our minds, leaving as little residue as water filtered through cheesecloth.
“His pants were splattered with blood,” Viola said. “Khakis, I think. Tan pants, anyway.”
The slowly swiveling fan stirred the leaves of a potted palm in one corner of the room, raising from its fronds a dry rustling that made me think of cockroaches scurrying, and rats, and nothing good.
Reading the last details of her dream that yet remained in the cheesecloth of memory, Viola said, “A polo shirt…”
I got up from the sofa. I needed to move. I realized that the room was too small for pacing, but I remained on my feet.
“Green,” Viola said. “A green polo shirt.”
I thought of the guy behind the shoe-rental counter at Green Moon Lanes, the blonde drawing beer behind the bar—both in their new work uniforms.
Her voice growing even quieter, Viola said, “Tell me the truth, Odd. Look at my face. Do you see death in me?”
I said, “Yes.”
TWENTY-FIVE
ALTHOUGH I’M UNABLE TO READ FACES TO DISCOVER either a person’s future or the secrets of her heart, I could not look a moment longer at Viola Peabody’s face, for I imagined what I couldn’t truly read, and in my mind’s eye saw her motherless daughters standing at her grave.
I went to one of the open windows. Beyond lay a side yard overhung by pepper trees. Out of the warm darkness came the sweet fragrance of jasmine that had been planted and tended by Viola’s caring hands.
Ordinarily, I have no fear of the night. I feared this one, however, because the change from August 14 to August 15 was coming express-train fast, as if the rotation of the earth had drastically gained speed by the flicking of a godly finger.
I turned to Viola, who still sat on the edge of her armchair. Her eyes, always large, were owlish now, and her brown face seemed to have a gray undertone. I said, “Isn’t tomorrow your day off?”
She nodded.
Because she had a sister who could baby-sit her daughters, Viola worked at the Grille six days a week.
Stormy said, “Do you have plans? What are you doing tomorrow?”
“I figured I’d work around the house in the morning. Always things to do here. In the afternoon…that’s for the girls.”
“You mean Nicolina and Levanna?” I asked, naming her daughters.
“Saturday—that’s Levanna’s birthday. She’ll be seven. But the Grille is busy Saturdays, good tips. I can’t miss work. So we were going to celebrate early.”
“Celebrate how?”
“That new movie, it’s a big hit with all the kids, the one with the dog. We were going to the four-o’clock show.”
Before Stormy spoke, I knew the essence of what she would say. “Might be more of a crowd in a cool theater on a summer afternoon than at a Little League game.”
I asked Viola, “What did you plan after the movie?”
“Terri said bring them to the Grille, dinner on her.”
The Grille could be noisy when all the tables were filled, but I didn’t think that the enthusiastic conversation of the patrons in our little restaurant could be mistaken for the roar of a crowd. In dreams, of course, everything can be distorted, including sounds.
With the open window at my back, I suddenly felt vulnerable to an extent that made the skin pucker on the nape of my neck.
I looked out into the side yard again. All appeared to be as it had been a minute ago.
The graceful branches of the peppers hung in the breathless, jasmine-scented night air. Shadows and shrubs plaited their different darknesses, but as far as I could tell, they didn’t give cover to Bob Robertson or anyone else.
Nevertheless, I stepped away from the window, to the side of it, when I turned once more to Viola. “I think you ought to change your plans for tomorrow.”
By saving Viola from this destiny, I might be sentencing someone else to die horribly in her place, just as might have been the case if I had warned off the blond bartender at the bowling alley. The only difference was that I didn’t know the blonde…and Viola was a friend.
Sometimes complex and difficult moral choices are decided less by reason and by right than by sentiment. Perhaps such decisions are the paving stones on the road to Hell; if so, my route is well paved, and the welcoming committee already knows my name.
In my defense, I can only say that I sensed, even then, that saving Viola meant saving her daughters, too. Three lives, not one.
“Is there any hope…” Viola touched her face with the trembling fingers of one hand, tracing the bones of jaw and cheek and brow, as if discovering not her skull but instead Death’s countenance in the process o
f replacing her own. “…any hope this can pass from me?”
“Fate isn’t one straight road,” I said, becoming the oracle that earlier in the day I had declined to be for her. “There are forks in it, many different routes to different ends. We have the free will to choose the path.”
“Do whatever Oddie says,” Stormy advised, “and you’ll be all right.”
“It’s not that easy,” I said quickly. “You can change the road you take, but sometimes it can bend back to lead you straight to that same stubborn fate.”
Viola regarded me with too much respect, perhaps even awe. “I was just sure you knew about such things, Odd, about all that’s Otherly and Beyond.”
Uneasy with her admiration, I went to the other open window. Terri’s Mustang stood under a streetlamp in front of the house. All quiet. Nothing to be alarmed about. Nothing and everything.
We had taken steps to be sure we weren’t being followed from the bowling center. I remained concerned, anyway, because Robertson’s appearance at Little Ozzie’s house and again in the churchyard had surprised me, and I could not afford to be surprised a third time.
“Viola,” I said, turning to her once more, “changing all your plans for tomorrow isn’t enough. You’ll also need to remain vigilant, alert to anything that seems…wrong.”
“I’m already as jumpy as a cricket.”
“That’s no good. Jumpy isn’t the same as vigilant.”
She nodded. “You’re right.”
“You need to be as calm as possible.”
“I’ll try. I’ll do my best.”
“Calm and observant, prepared to react fast to any threat but calm enough to see it coming.”
Poised on the edge of the chair, she still appeared to be as ready to leap as any cricket.
“In the morning,” Stormy said, “we’ll bring you a photo of a man you ought to be on the lookout for.” She glanced at me. “Can you get her a good picture of him, Oddie?”
I nodded. The chief would provide me with a computer-printed blow-up of the photo of Robertson that the DMV had released to him.
“What man?” Viola asked.
As vividly as possible, I described Fungus Man, who had been at the Grille during the first shift, before Viola had arrived for work. “If you see him, get away from him. You’ll know the worst is coming. But I don’t think anything will happen tonight. Not here. From all indications, he’s intending to make headlines in a public place, lots of people….”
“Tomorrow, don’t go to the movies,” Stormy said.
“I won’t,” Viola assured her.
“And not out to dinner, either.”
Although I didn’t understand what could be gained from having a look at Nicolina and Levanna, I suddenly knew that I should not leave the house without checking on them. “Viola, may I see the girls?”
“Now? They’re sleeping.”
“I won’t wake them. But it’s…important.”
She rose from the chair and led us to the room that the sisters shared: two lamps, two nightstands, two beds, and two angelic little girls sleeping in their skivvies, under sheets but without blankets.
One lamp had been set at the lowest intensity on its three-way switch. The apricot-colored shade cast a soft, inviting light.
Two windows were open to the hot night. As insubstantial as a spirit, a translucent white moth beat its wings insistently against one of the screens, with the desperation of a lost soul fluttering against the gates of Heaven.
Mounted on the inside of the windows, with an emergency-release handle that couldn’t be reached from outside, were steel bars that would prevent a man like Harlo Landerson from getting at the girls.
Screens and bars could foil moths and maniacs, but neither could keep out bodachs. Five of them were in the room.
TWENTY-SIX
TWO SINISTER SHAPES STOOD AT EACH BED, VISITORS from one hell or another, travelers out of the black room.
They hunched over the girls and appeared to be studying them with keen interest. Their hands, if they had hands, floated a few inches above the sheets, and seemed slowly to trace the shrouded contours of the children’s bodies.
I couldn’t know for sure what they were doing, but I imagined that they were drawn to the very life energy of Nicolina and Levanna—and were somehow basking in it.
These creatures seemed to be unaware that we had entered the room. They were enthralled if not half hypnotized by some radiance that the girls emitted, a radiance invisible to me but evidently dazzling to them.
The fifth beast crawled the bedroom floor, its movements as fluid and serpentine as those of any reptile. Under Levanna’s bed it slithered, seemed to coil there, but a moment later emerged with a salamandrian wriggle, only to glide under Nicolina’s bed and whip itself silently back and forth, like a thrashing snake in slow-mo.
Unable to repress a shudder, I sensed that this fifth intruder must be savoring some exquisite spoor, some ethereal residue left by the passage of the little girls’ feet. And I imagined—or hope I did—that I saw this squirming bodach repeatedly lick the carpet with a cold thin tongue.
When I would not venture far past the doorway, Viola whispered, “It’s all right. They’re deep sleepers, both of them.”
“They’re beautiful,” Stormy said.
Viola brightened with pride. “They’re such good girls.” Seeing in my face a faint reflection of the abhorrence that gripped my mind, she said, “What’s wrong?”
Glancing at me as I summoned an unconvincing smile, Stormy at once suspected the truth. She squinted into the shadowy corners of the room—left, right, and toward the ceiling—hoping to catch at least a fleeting glimpse of whatever supernatural presence revealed itself to me.
At the beds, the four hunched bodachs might have been priests of a diabolic religion, Aztecs at the altar of human sacrifice, as their hands moved sinuously and ceaselessly in ritualistic pantomime over the sleeping girls.
When I failed to answer Viola’s question at once, she thought that I’d seen something wrong with her daughters, and she took a step toward the bed.
Gently I gripped her arm and held her back. “I’m sorry, Viola. Nothing’s wrong. I just wanted to be sure the girls were safe. And with those bars on the windows, they are.”
“They know how to work the emergency release,” she said.
One of the entities at Nicolina’s bedside appeared to rise out of its swoon and recognize our presence. Its hands slowed but did not entirely stop their eerie movements, and it raised its wolfish head to peer in our direction with disturbing, eyeless intensity.
I was loath to leave the girls alone with those five phantoms, but I could do nothing to banish them.
Besides, from everything that I have seen of bodachs, they can experience this world with some if not all of the usual five senses, but they don’t seem to have any effect on things here. I have never heard them make a sound, have never seen them move an object or, by their passage, disturb so much as the dust motes floating in the air.
They are of less substance than an ectoplasmic wraith drifting above the table at a seance. They are dream creatures on the wrong side of sleep.
The girls would not be harmed. Not here. Not yet.
Or so I hoped.
I suspected that these spirit travelers, having come to Pico Mundo for ringside seats at a festival of blood, were entertaining themselves on the eve of the main event. Perhaps they took pleasure in studying the victims before the shots were fired; they might be amused and excited to watch innocent people progress all unknowing toward imminent death.
Pretending to be unaware of the nightmarish intruders, putting one finger to my lips as if suggesting to Viola and Stormy that we be careful not to wake the girls, I drew both women with me, out of the room. I pushed the door two-thirds shut, just as it had been when we’d arrived, leaving the bodachs to slither on the floor, to sniff and thrash, to weave their patterns of sinuous gesticulations with mysterious purpose.
I worried that one or more of them would follow us to the living room, but we reached the front door without a supernatural escort.
Speaking almost as quietly as in the girls’ bedroom, I said to Viola, “One thing I better clarify. When I tell you not to go to the movies tomorrow, I mean the girls shouldn’t go, either. Don’t send them out with a relative. Not to the movies, not anywhere.”
Viola’s smooth satin brow became brown corduroy. “But my sweet babies…they weren’t shot in the dream.”
“No prophetic dream reveals everything that’s coming. Just fragments.”
Instead of merely sharpening her anxiety, the implications of my statement hardened her features with anger. Good. She needed fear and anger to stay sharp, to make wise decisions in the day ahead.
To stiffen her resolve, I said, “Even if you had seen your girls shot…God forbid, dead…you might’ve blocked it from your memory when you woke.”
Stormy rested her hand on Viola’s shoulder. “You wouldn’t have wanted those images in your mind.”
Tense with determination, Viola said, “We’ll stay home, have a little party, just ourselves.”
“I’m not sure that’s wise, either,” I said.
“Why not? I don’t know what place that was in my dream, but I’m sure it wasn’t this house.”
“Remember…different roads can take you to the same stubborn fate.”
I didn’t want to tell her about the bodachs in her daughters’ room, for then I would have to reveal all my secrets. Only Terri, the chief, Mrs. Porter, and Little Ozzie know most of the truth about me, and only Stormy knows all of it.
If too many people are brought into my innermost circle, my secret will leak out. I’ll become a media sensation, a freak to many people, a guru to some. Simplicity and quiet hours will be forever beyond my reach. My life will be too complicated to be worth living.
I said to Viola, “In your dream, this house wasn’t where you were gunned down. But if you were destined to be shot at the movies, and now you aren’t going to the theater…then maybe Fate comes here to find you. Not likely. But not impossible.”