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 owned 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 him. 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.