Deeply Odd (8 page)

Mr. Hitchcock stopped patting my shoulder, rose from the tiled bench, and crossed the room. He beckoned with one finger, and as I rose to my feet, he walked through the closed door, into the hallway.

Apparently, travel is much easier when you’re dead. No need to concern yourself with doors, tollbooths, or airport security agents who want to probe your butt.

When I opened the door and stepped into the hall, Zilla was at her workstation, folding freshly laundered towels.

Mr. Hitchcock stood a hundred feet away, at the intersection of this corridor with one serving the TV lounge and the chiropractor’s office. He raised his right arm high and waved, as if we were in a crowded train station and he needed to attract my attention through the bustling throng.

The attendant couldn’t see him, of course. She said to me, “Is something wrong?”

“I decided I didn’t need a shower, after all, ma’am. The
idea
of a shower was refreshing enough.”

“I can only give you a partial refund,” she said apologetically.

Eager to follow Mr. Hitchcock, who seemed to intend to lead me somewhere, I said, “That’s all right. I don’t need a refund.”

As I turned away, she stepped out from behind her station and approached me. “Wait a minute, sir, please. It’s just, you see, whether you used the towel or not, we still have to wash it, and clean the room.”

She was earnest and clearly wanted to treat me fairly.

“I understand,” I assured her. “No problem.”

“But I
can
return half your money.”

“No, ma’am, really, it’s fine. It was only the idea of a shower, but I paid for it with paper money, which is only the
idea
of money, so it was a totally fair exchange.”

My attitude perplexed her into silence as I hurried toward Mr. Hitchcock.

He led me along the intersecting hallway to the very back of the building, where he phased through a fire door labeled
STAIRS
. I opened the door and entered the stairwell in a more traditional manner, in time to see him floating down the first flight, his feet a few inches above the treads.

As I followed, looking down on him, I decided he had manifested not as he had been late in life but as he had been in his early fifties, hair still dark but receding, the beginning of a bald spot at the crown of his head. He was born in 1899, so his fifties were the 1950s, a decade in which he made
Rear Window, Dial M for Murder, Strangers on a Train, North by Northwest, To Catch a Thief, The Wrong Man
, and
Vertigo
, more classic films than most directors produce in a lifetime.
Rebecca
, the first version of
The Man Who Knew Too Much, Notorious, Spellbound, Suspicion, Shadow of a Doubt
, and so many other great works were already in his past.
Psycho, The Birds
, and others were in his future.

We descended four flights, which put us in the basement. With the aplomb that he exhibited routinely in life, the director floated through another closed door, and I discovered that beyond it lay the mechanical heart of the truck stop, a chamber that perhaps seemed more vast than it was, housing huge boilers, chillers, a maze of big PVC pipes serving the heating-cooling system, and
banks of circuit breakers. There was also much equipment that I could not identify, in fact so much that I might very well have been in the engine room of a starship.

Cold harsh light fell from the fluorescent fixtures. Shadows had sharp edges, and the stainless-steel housings of the various machines glistened as if crusted in ice.

Mr. Hitchcock cast no shadow at any time, of course, and my own shrank under my feet as we came to a halt beneath a large array of fluorescents in what seemed to be the center of the room. He put one finger to his lips, suggesting silence, and then tilted his head to the right, cupping a hand around that ear in a theatrical gesture, which reminded me that he had begun his long career in silent films.

I cocked my head, too, and we stood there in a comic posture, as if we were Laurel and Hardy puzzling over the source of a peculiar sound that would prove to be a block-and-tackle failing in the moment before a piano dropped on our heads. The humming and purring of the machinery had no menace, however, and I heard nothing else, certainly nothing that would put the hairs up on the nape of my neck.

But then I
did
hear something, two men arguing, their words muffled and not quite decipherable—yet close. Surprised, I turned, but no one shared the open center of the room with us, and between the banks of machinery, the aisle by which we had arrived here was also deserted. Other passageways serving additional rows of machines waited to be explored, but I didn’t think I’d find the two men in any of them. That angry pair seemed near but not quite real, their voices sonorous and distorted like those of malevolent presences in a dream.

Their conversation faded, then returned, louder and closer than before, though still indecipherable, as if they were just a few feet away but on the farther side of a wall that I couldn’t see. I turned again, and an infuriated man in jeans and a black-leather jacket stalked past close enough to touch, oblivious of me.

His face was hard and seemed subtly broken, the countenance of a stubborn but inept boxer who had taken too many devastating punches. Fierce under heavy lids, his eyes shifted here, there, here with the desperation of a beast born to be free but caged from an early age.

And he was semitransparent.

The lingering dead look as real to me as they would have appeared in life. If they don’t manifest with mortal wounds—as did the decapitated woman crossing the street—and if they don’t pass through walls or float inches above the ground, I am not often able to recognize them as spirits.

This stocky, thick-necked man with the fractured-stone face was not a spirit. His voice, though seeming to be filtered through a foot or two of cotton batting and distorted like a recording played at too slow a speed, was nonetheless far different from the silence imposed upon the deceased.

He changed course abruptly, passed
through
me, and I shuddered as a chill marked the moment when we occupied the same space. As I turned, he stopped one step away, swung back to me, and we were face-to-face. He had abruptly ceased talking. He looked left, right, up, down, and I suspected that he’d felt a chill, as well, but he didn’t otherwise react to me. From my perspective, he was a see-through ghost, as in a movie, but I was invisible to him.

For a moment I perceived—without quite seeing—that the room
he occupied had the same dimensions as the chamber in which I stood, but that it was an empty and desolate space. Cold concrete and ashen light.

The second man in that other basement now spoke again, stepping into view: the rhinestone cowboy. He was as semitransparent as the guy with whom he argued.

Turning from me, the first man joined the would-be murderer of children, and they walked away, swiftly fading from sight as their voices slid into silence.

I no longer sensed that alternate basement. But then came a sound like two metal fire doors falling shut, one a fraction of a second after the other, the former softer than the latter.

When I turned to Mr. Hitchcock, I found that he was watching me. As though soliciting my reaction to what had just happened, he raised his eyebrows.

Although I am not an important person by any definition, at that moment I almost felt like one. In spite of my paranormal ability, I am just a hapless out-of-work short-order cook who struggles to fry well when he has a job and, if possible, at all times to do the right thing. But now I suddenly thought of all those male leads in Mr. Hitchcock’s films, and I felt obligated to fulfill his directorial expectations, to answer his raised eyebrows with a remark witty enough to be delivered by Cary Grant.

Instead, I said, “Uh … wow … see … you know … the thing is … I don’t understand. Where were those two men? Where are they now? Was their argument something that happened here earlier? Or something that’ll happen in the future?”

He shook his head and then tapped the face of his wristwatch with one finger, perhaps to indicate that the time in both basements was the same, that what I’d seen had happened just now. Or maybe
he had done a Rolex commercial during his life and felt a duty to sell the brand even after death.

“Sir, I’m confused.”

With fingers widely spread, hands framing his face, with an expression of amazement, Mr. Hitchcock mocked me, as if to say,
You? Confused? Who knew? Astonishing! Impossible! It beggars belief!

If he’d been Quentin Tarantino or Oliver Stone, I might have been a bit offended—or even alarmed by the possibility of mindless violence—but in his day he’d been known for his unexpected clowning and practical jokes. His friend, the actor Gerald du Maurier, had been appearing in a play at St. James Theater, in London, when during a performance Mr. Hitchcock somehow had gotten a full-grown horse into the star’s dressing room without anyone seeing it happen. When du Maurier returned at the end of the play, he found the huge animal contentedly eating grain from a feed bag.

Now the director turned from me and glided across the basement as if he wore ice skates and the floor were a frozen pond, and I had to hurry to keep up with him. He passed through a heavy fire door, which I yanked open in his wake, wondering if this might be the door that I had heard crash shut twice in quick succession when the see-through cowboy had departed the other basement or this basement, or both.

With my confusion growing more profound, I rushed along a drab corridor to a pair of elevators—the smaller for people, the larger for freight—where Mr. Hitchcock stood. As I arrived, a bell sounded, the first set of doors slid open, he stepped into the waiting car, and I followed him.

Even if I’d been able by then to come up with a line worthy of Cary Grant, before I could have delivered it, the director soared
through the roof of the elevator and disappeared. I had never known a ghost to be this exuberant, this frolicsome, and his apparent delight in his supernatural abilities flummoxed me.

Stepping out of the elevator into the hallway lined with shops on the main floor of Star Truck, I spotted Mr. Hitchcock to my right, standing by the service-map kiosk in the lobby. He raised his right arm high and waved at me, as though I might not recognize him among the dozen or so truck drivers currently entering and leaving the building.

As I approached, he winked out of existence—and then reappeared on the far side of the glass doors of the main entrance.

Exiting the building, joining Mr. Hitchcock, I sensed the cowboy nearby, although he was nowhere in sight. Then I saw the ProStar+ receding along the exit lanes from Star Truck, speeding toward the Coast Highway.

The roar of a nearer engine followed by the shrill squealing of brakes startled me backward. The superstretch Mercedes limo ran down Mr. Hitchcock and slid to a smoking-rubber stop in front of me.

He couldn’t have been roadkill, of course, because he lacked material substance. He was just
gone
.

Through the open window in the driver’s door, Mrs. Edie Fischer said, “Hurry, child, or we might lose him.”

In the distance, the red-and-black rig disappeared into the underpass beneath the highway.

I darted around the car, climbed in the front passenger seat, pulled my door shut, and glanced through the open privacy panel into the passenger compartment. “Where is he?”

Of course Mrs. Fischer didn’t know that I was looking for Mr.
Hitchcock, who I thought must have entered the limousine through the undercarriage.

Perched on her booster pillow, barely able to see over the steering wheel, piloting the immense car around the service islands, she said, “You called him a flamboyant rhinestone cowboy, but I saw him, and there’s no honest honky-tonk in that man. He’s flam with none of the buoyant. All deceit, lies, trickery. Planning murder, is he? Child, you need to take him down.”

“I knocked him flat with apples—Red Delicious, Granny Smiths—but even as much as I hate guns, I probably need one.”

Indicating the purse on the seat between us, she said, “Take the pistol I showed you earlier.”

“I don’t want to get you in trouble.”

“Sweetie, that gun’s even harder to trace than apples.”

I didn’t feel that it was proper to open her purse, even though she invited me to do so. Besides, I didn’t have an immediate use for the weapon. For the time being, we were only following my enemy. I wasn’t going to shoot out his tires or leap from the speeding limo to the driver’s door of the truck. I’m not Tom Cruise. I’m not even Angelina Jolie.

Entering one of the exit lanes, Mrs. Fischer accelerated toward the underpass. “Belt up,” she advised.

By this point, I knew her well enough to take such advice without hesitation.

Coming out of the underpass, ascending the curved on-ramp to the Coast Highway, she rapidly accelerated, as if the laws of physics did not apply to her. If we’d been in an SUV or an ordinary car, we might have demonstrated the power of centrifugal force, might have rolled off the roadway at the apex of the arc. The limo was
heavy, however, with a low center of gravity, and we rocketed to the top of the ramp at launch speed.

Contemptuous of the yield sign, Mrs. Fischer pressed great blasts of sound from the car horn as a warning to any motorists who might be approaching from behind her in the right-hand lane. The limo shot onto the highway, whistling south toward the targeted ProStar+.

“Take it easy,” I warned. “We don’t want to catch him.”

“But you said he’s going to murder three people. He has to be stopped.”

“We’ll stop him, but not yet. We need to see where he’s going, what he’s up to. He’s not in this alone. That reminds me, did you see another guy come out of the truck stop with him?”

“No. He was alone. So this is a
conspiracy
?” She lingered on the last word, as though the sound of it enchanted her.

“I don’t know what it is. This other guy—he’s wearing jeans and a black-leather jacket. Lizard-lid eyes, stocky, looks like he was into one of those martial arts where he broke cement blocks with his face but sometimes the block won.”