Regardless of its origins, whether mummified flesh and bones or clay and wire and latex, there might be some magic in Gypsy Mummy. The source of magic in this world is more mysterious than all the explanations that sorcerers and wizards have given for it, and it is more prevalent than can be understood by those who live according to the constricted form of reason so prevalent in our time.
On the night that Stormy and I had come here, when we were but sixteen and expected to grow old together, a man and woman in their early twenties were already consulting Gypsy Mummy. They appeared to be mystified by the predictions that they received, though the meaning seemed clear to us.
Each time they fed a quarter to the machine, the woman asked, aloud, “Gypsy Mummy, tell us, will Johnny and I have a long and happy marriage?”
Johnny read the cards as he received them. The first declared A COLD WIND BLOWS, AND EACH NIGHT SEEMS TO LAST A THOUSAND YEARS. Thereafter the machine produced THE FOOL LEAPS FROM THE CLIFF, BUT THE WINTER LAKE BELOW IS FROZEN, followed by the even more ominous THE ORCHARD OF BLIGHTED TREES PRODUCES POISONOUS FRUIT. They were not pleased with Gypsy Mummy, but by the eighth card, they were more annoyed with each other than with the mummified sage, bickering over their interpretations, which in every case failed to grasp the most obvious meaning.
With our first coin, Stormy and I received YOU ARE DESTINED TO BE TOGETHER FOREVER. We didn’t spend a second quarter. There was nothing else we needed to know.
In the six years since my previous petition to Gypsy Mummy, the machine had been modified to require two quarters per fortune. When offering their divinations, even deceased Gypsies needed to account for inflation.
“How long do I have to wait,” I murmured, “before your promise to me comes true?”
For fifty cents, I received a card that offered no prediction on either side.
I supposed that in any stack of pre-printed fortunes put into the machine, there might be a blank or two.
Another fifty cents got me a second card with not a word on it.
Wondering if I had been expected, if someone might be watching me right that minute, I looked around, but the other patrons were preoccupied with their claptrap prophets. The cashier had her nose in the romance novel.
I studied the stitched eyelids beyond the glass. Stormy used to insist that after we received the card so desired by Johnny and his girlfriend, the mummified dwarf had opened one eye and winked. It made no sense that sewn-shut eyes could wink, especially when the coarse black thread wasn’t broken. Whether the wink might have been a moment of magic or whether it was nothing more than a little fantasy that Stormy wanted to believe, I never questioned her claim because it gave her such pleasure to think it had happened.
Again I asked, “How long do I have to wait before your promise to me comes true?”
I paid two more quarters, listened to them clink into the machine’s cash box—and received a third blank card.
After a fourth of the same, I pretended interest in some of the nearby soothsaying contraptions and waited for someone to feed coins to the Gypsy.
Maybe ten minutes passed before two girls, about fourteen years old, approached the machine. Each spent fifty cents for which she got a printed card that she shared with her friend. They conferred over the meaning of their fortunes, giggled, and then swapped cards, each apparently preferring the other’s future. They wandered away, sharing the popcorn.
Neither girl had spoken aloud to the Gypsy, as instructions above the coin feed directed, and I’d had no opportunity to see the messages on their cards, which they took away with them. Clearly, however, they had not received blanks.
You might say that it was just a machine, that the cards were stacked in the mechanism in no particular order, that getting four blanks for two bucks was nothing more than happenstance. All of that is rational, and certainly in the case of the two girls and others who consulted Gypsy Mummy, your point would be irrefutable. But in my life, uncanny things had happened to me with some regularity, not just related to my ability to see lingering spirits and to find my way by psychic magnetism. Because of my other experiences, I could not be shaken from the belief that the four cards without fortunes would have come to me if I’d consulted Gypsy Mummy hours earlier or hours later.
Besides, for six years, I had believed in the message on the card in my wallet, and for most of the past two years, that promise—and sometimes it alone—had sustained me. I could no more stop believing in Gypsy Mummy than I could stop believing in my own existence.
Leaving the arcade, I was able to imagine two meanings that the blank cards might have been intended to convey. First, that the promise to me would not be kept. Second, that I had so little time to live that I didn’t have any future on which the mummified oracle could comment.
I much preferred interpretation number two.
Just outside of the tent, watching the people who busied along the concourse, I had a sense of time running out. I checked my watch—7:40. The crowd would keep growing for another couple of hours. Because of the jackpot drawing, the carnival wouldn’t close until well after midnight, perhaps not until one in the morning. If there was something important for me to learn here, I still had plenty of time to discover it.
I concentrated on the name Wolfgang and tried to hear his whiskey-soaked voice in my mind’s ear. Had I seen his face when he and his companions had pursued me through the dark mall, psychic magnetism would now be more likely to draw me to him. But because his voice had been so distinctive, perhaps it would serve nearly as well.
Turning right, I joined the crowd and headed along a length of the midway that I had not yet explored. I had taken no more than a dozen steps when I turned abruptly, colliding with a woman in a green fishnet top and red culottes. I apologized, though considering her outfit, she should have apologized as well, and I set off back the way I had come. Past the Dodgem Cars, where drivers crashed into one another with glee. Past the high-striker, where a muscular customer swung the sledgehammer and rang the bell. Toward the flatbed truck with the two huge swiveling spotlights. Toward the major sideshows that occupied the east end of the southern concourse. Psychic magnetism had never before worked so quickly, had never drawn me with such power and urgency as this.
Twenty
I was compelled to move, move, move. The compulsion grew so strong that I almost broke into a run, but to avoid drawing attention to myself, I exercised restraint as best I could. On rare occasions, when this curious talent of mine grew especially powerful, I was to a degree at its mercy, crashing forward almost recklessly, afraid that I might plunge into some peril that I would not recognize until too late.
A hundred people had gathered in front of adjacent sideshows where two barkers ballyed their attractions. I slipped through the crowd and between the two large tents, heading off the midway, hoping that no carnies or security guards would notice me. Shadows closed in quicker than I expected. I slowed down a little, fearful of tripping over something and impaling myself on one of the steel tent stakes or garroting myself on a guy rope. Such a death was exactly the kind of end I might decisively—if unconsciously—bring upon myself to prove once and for all that I didn’t deserve the unwanted label HERO, that I was only a fry cook and a clumsy one.
Behind the tents, the elevated midway withered down to a service road. I sprinted across the blacktop and checked my pace again as I found myself on another slope, this one darker and much longer than the first, covered in wild grass as high as my knees.
The hullabaloo and razzle-dazzle of the midway faded significantly. The most immediate sound became the chorus of crickets all around me. The night was warm enough that I worried about rattlesnakes, which in the right conditions liked to hunt in the dark for just such prey as crickets and grass toads.
Below lay a large graveled area that, during fair week, became a campground for the carnies, with water and electrical hookups. At least two hundred travel trailers and motor homes were parked in rows. Some were own
ed by concessionaires who operated independently within the carnival, on-the-road homes for them and their families. Others belonged to Sombra Brothers and were rented to those carnies who didn’t have their own accommodations.
From about the age of twelve until Stormy and I became an item, every fair week I had hung out in the carnival. I had gotten some part-time work at a grab joint, flipping hamburgers and manning the deep fryer, which is where I first discovered my inner fry cook. I’d met a lot of carnies, and I’d liked most of them. In the mainstream culture, they lived as outsiders, and so did I to some extent, though by necessity rather than by choice.
Now, as I was drawn into the graveled lanes between the rows of trailers and motor homes, most of the windows were dark, because every able-bodied member of the community had gone to work. In those places where amber lamplight warmed a pane of glass, most likely an aging grandparent or a young mother with an infant looked forward to the return of the others and to the little private family time between the post-midnight shutdown of the midway and the show call, which was usually noon on Monday through Thursday, 11:00 A.M. on Friday and Saturday.
I came to a large motor home with light in many of its windows. A curtain had been drawn across the windshield for privacy, and blinds covered the panes in both front doors. I felt compelled to open the door on the passenger side, and I took hold of the handle, but then I thought I heard muffled voices. I stifled the urge to go inside, at least by that route.
After circling the big vehicle, I found a back entrance on the port flank, and no light glowed in the small pane centered in the upper portion of it. I tried the door. It wasn’t locked.
Sometimes I thought that my paranormal gift must have come with a measure of madness, though not insanity so fervid that I needed to be locked up for the protection of the community. My derangement put at jeopardy no one but myself.
Ozzie Boone said that any talent—whether to write songs or to write novels or to track people by psychic magnetism—came with the obligation to use it to the fullest of one’s ability, with a fierce commitment barely distinguishable from neurotic obsession. A writer, he believed, had to stretch with every book, to explore kinds of stories that he’d never told before, to employ narrative techniques that tested the limits of his gift.
In fact, he said, commitment to the point of obsession wasn’t merely an obligation but a necessity, the sine qua non without which the novelist might as well bite on a shotgun barrel and exit this life as Hemingway had done.
Ozzie had a tendency toward rhetorical flamboyance that I found charming and amusing. By his own admission, however, he had not lived up to his ideal; and I wondered if a high-fat, six-thousand-calorie diet was for him a slow-motion shotgun.
As for my psychic magnetism, according to Ozzie’s philosophy, considering that it was a talent, I had no choice but take it to the max, no acceptable moral choice other than to jump out of an airplane without a parachute if that’s what it told me to do. Now it demanded that I open the back door of the motor home, which I did, and the door didn’t creak, for which I was grateful, and I stepped up and inside, into a mostly dark room, and the vehicle was so large and so stable that it didn’t rock in the slightest when it took on my weight.
Barely enough pale light fell through an open interior door to reveal that I had entered a bedroom.
I stood listening, and after a moment I heard low voices: two men, forward in the vehicle. I couldn’t understand what they were saying. Hoping to hear them more clearly, I moved to the open door and stood beside it, my left ear past the jamb. The distance was still too great, their voices too muted, for me to hear more than one word in ten, and none of those seemed to belong in the same conversation.
Daring to lean past the jamb to scout the territory, I saw on the right an open sliding door and beyond it a bathroom. Past the bath lay a kitchen area that was open to a dining nook forward of it. On the left, opposite the bath, was the entrance to what might have been a second bedroom. From my angle, I couldn’t see what lay forward of there, on the left, but I imagined a fairly spacious lounge.
Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have been so bold as to go farther than the back room of the motor home, but this was no ordinary night. Hour by hour, my sense of impending catastrophe became more urgent, and images from the dream flood kept rising unbidden in my mind. Other nightmares usually faded from recollection more rapidly with every minute that passed after I woke. But this one had tenure in my memory, growing more detailed each time that a moment from it rose in my mind’s eye, as if the vividness of the nightmare increased as we drew nearer to the event that it predicted.
I drew the Glock from the shoulder holster under the powder-blue sport jacket and stepped out of the darkness, into the short hallway between the second bedroom and the bath. Just as I crossed the threshold, two men appeared toward the front of the motor home, coming from the area that I supposed must be a lounge. I froze, but when neither of them looked toward me, I sidestepped through the open door of the bathroom.
Now that their positions in relation to mine had changed, I could better hear them as they moved toward the passenger door and then stopped to settle an ongoing discussion.
“I still don’t get why.”
“Why? You don’t get why? Because he must’ve seen all three of them. That’s why.”
“Yeah, so?”
“Bern Eckles thinks the guy knows things.”
“What things?”
Bern Eckles, a former Pico Mundo cop, had also been a member of a satanic cult and, with others, he had planned the shootings at the Green Moon Mall—plus a bombing that never happened. He was serving a life sentence in prison.
“Eckles doesn’t know what things.”
“Cripes, Jim. Kind of extreme, don’t you think?”
“What is?” Jim asked.
“This … this what we did here, just because this idiot Eckles doesn’t know what.”
“No, see, Eckles has tried to figure what happened back then when their attack on the mall went wrong.”
“But you said he doesn’t know what happened.”
“He’s got a theory. It only makes sense to him if the guy who took them down has some real mojo.”
“What mojo?”
Jim said, “Eckles thinks all kinds of mojo.”
“Maybe Eckles has shit for brains.”
“No, Bob, he’s a smart guy.”
“So smart he’s behind bars for life.”
“Because the freak has mojo.”
“What freak?” Bob asked.
“Eckles calls him a freak.”
Although I look as ordinary as the next guy, I suspected that the freak under discussion was me.
Bob said, “We’re the ones with mojo.”
“Contumax.”
“Potestas.”
“Heil Hitler,” I murmured from my listening post just inside the bathroom.
“We’ve got the dark mojo,” Jim said. “Maybe the freak has the other kind.”
“Well, I don’t like hearing that.”
“I don’t like saying it. But he sure had something in Nevada, didn’t he? And who’s dead out there in the desert—our guys or the freak? Eckles is right. Some kind of mojo.”
“Eckles have anything specific or just more blather?”
Jim said, “For one thing, maybe once this freak has met you or touched you or even just seen you, he has a way of tracking you no matter where you are.”
“Tracking? Like he’s a damn Tonto or something?”
“Tracking by mojo.”
“Yeah, so?”
Jim said, “If he tracked Wolfgang’s crew, they might lead him to us.”
“Why not send them away, let him track them out to Florida or wherever the hell?”
“He’d probably know they were misleading him.”
“Probably? All this because probably?”
“He’d stay here in Pico Mundo,” Jim insisted. “Once he saw them, they should have killed hi
m. They tried, but they couldn’t. Anyway, there’s no time to play games with him. It’s happening.”
With a note of wonder in his voice, Bob said, “It really is, isn’t it?”
“It sure is. It’s happening.”
They were silent for a moment, and then Bob said, “What kind of world is it going to be after it happens?”
Jim didn’t need to mull over his answer. He said at once, “Ours. It’s going to be our world, brother.”
“Contumax.”
“Potestas.”
“Lunatics,” I murmured.
Footsteps. A door opened. It closed. Silence.
When I felt certain that I was alone, I stepped out of the bathroom, pistol in hand, and moved forward through the motor home.
In the lounge were two dead men and one dead woman.
Twenty-one
When I was no longer of the world, I would miss its extravagant beauty. I would miss the complex and charming layers of subterfuge by which the truth of the world’s mysteries were withheld from us even as we were tantalized and enchanted by them. I would miss the kindness of good people who were compassionate when so many were pitiless, who made their way through so much corruption without being corrupted themselves, who eschewed envy in a world of envy, who eschewed greed in a world of greed, who valued truth and could not be drowned in a sea of lies, for they shone and, by the light they cast, they had warmed me all my life.
I would not miss the indifference in the face of suffering, the hatred, the violence, the cruelty, the lust for power that so many people brought to the pageant of humanity.
In the lounge—or living room—of the motor home, the two men and the woman had been made to kneel side by side in front of a sofa. Each had been shot, execution style, in the back of the head and slumped facedown into the hideous discharge from their exit wounds.
The murders must have occurred before I entered the vehicle, perhaps only moments before, and the guns must have been fitted with sound suppressors.