Odd Apocalypse (8 page)

Whether or not my unknown adversaries had the benefit of eyes, I was as good as blind when I pulled shut the feed-room door behind me—no lock, of course—and felt my way to the second bin. I lifted one lid and pushed it back until the automatic hinge latch held it open at full extension.

I didn’t need to be quiet getting into the bin, because those who wanted to come into the stable to have a powwow or a chow-down were making those bronze doors ring like bells.

On the underside of the lid was a six-inch-long pull handle with a
knob on the end. If you were standing before the bin, you could lean across it and reach that peg to jiggle the hinge latch loose and then to draw the lid back toward yourself.

As I heard the wheels of the north door rumble in their tracks, I swung up and into this most inadequate of hidey-holes and lowered the lid, closing myself in the feed bin with the hope that its name wouldn’t prove to be as apt now as it had been in the past.

Sitting on the floor of that box, facing forward, I held tight to both pull handles, which were welded to the lids, hoping that if anyone came into the room and tried to open the bin, it would seem to be warped and corroded and wedged shut with age.

The south door, too, rolled aside, especially loud because the pocket that received it lay behind the back wall of the feed room.

After the doors were opened wide enough to suit the visitors, all was silent, as if once they had filed into the aisle between the rows of stalls, they just stood there. Doing what?

They were probably listening for any sounds I might make, just as I was listening intently to them. But as I was one and they were many, they ought to search more confidently, aggressively.

Another minute passed. I began to wonder if they had actually entered the stable after opening the doors or if instead they were still outside, at the threshold.

I might have thought the isolation of the feed bin prevented me from hearing them, but along the front of that long box were two rows of five holes, one a foot above the other. Four inches in diameter, each hole was covered with a fine-mesh screen, perhaps to allow air inside to prevent mold from forming on the grain that had been kept there back in the day. I should have been able to hear anything other than the most stealthy of movements.

The chlorine-like smell of ozone intensified to such an extent that I worried it might tease a sneeze from me.

Without faith to act as a governor, the human mind is a runaway worry generator, a dynamo of negative expectations. And because your life is yours to shape as you wish with free will, if you entertain too much anxiety about too many things, if you place no trust in providence, what you fear will more often come to pass. We make so many of our own troubles, from mere mishaps to disasters, by dwelling on the possibility of them until the possible becomes inevitable.

Therefore I told myself to stop worrying about sneezing, to place myself in the care of providence. Quick now, here, now, always, if we are in a condition of complete simplicity (as the poet said), hope and trust will more reliably keep a man afloat, while fear is more likely to sink him.

Silence upon silence … Just when I began to think the visitors had gone, the feed-room door opened.

Whoever it was didn’t have a flashlight. Evidently night had swallowed the day entirely, because through the screened holes, I could detect not even the faintest glow of sunset seeping in from the windows in the main part of the stable.

At least one of the pack shuffled across the threshold. The searcher seemed big, heavy if not tall, for there was a cumbersome quality to the movements.

The first lid on the feed box nearest the door swung up with a soft rattle and a faint creak of hinges. And then banged shut. The second lid. The third.

In a lightless room, the seeker had peered into the three pitch-black compartments of the bin and had judged them empty. Unless this individual was equipped with the latest generation of the highest of high-tech night-vision goggles, he could by his very nature see as well in the dark as any cat.

Firmly gripping each lid of my hideaway by its pull handle, I
strained to keep both of them down in anticipation of an imminent attempt to throw them open.

The searcher shuffled to the second bin, did not at once try to open it, but instead strummed the screens of a couple of the ventilation holes in front of my face.

If the darkness didn’t fully blind the hunter as it blinded me, the fineness of the wire mesh should prevent me from being seen clearly if at all. I was unnerved, however, to think that we might be eye to eye.

Distraction was dangerous. I needed to concentrate on pulling down with all my might on the lids, so that if my adversary abruptly yanked on them, they wouldn’t budge and would seem to be corroded shut.

Another strumming of the screens appeared to be a taunt, as if the hunter knew where I was and wanted to twist my nerves a little, perhaps to salt my flesh with fear sweat and thereby make me tastier.

Now sniffing. Sniffing at the screened holes, like a bloodhound seeking a scent.

I was grateful that the air was so redolent of ozone, for surely that would make me harder to detect.

The sniffing swelled into a vibrant snort, an incredibly noisy fluttering of nares and septum, not the snort of either a man or a dog, but of some predatory creature.

Bleachy ozone tingled in my sinuses, but I trusted providence to prevent a sneeze, refused to worry, declined to dwell on negative possibilities, and I did not sneeze, did not sneeze, still did not sneeze, but then I farted.

In the hollow steel-lined bin, my unfortunate eruption resonated such that it would have humiliated me if my first concern had been social acceptance. My first concern, however, was survival. At the moment, I didn’t have the capacity for embarrassment because terror filled me.

Narcissists are everywhere in this ripe age of self-love, which amazes me because so much in life would seem to foster humility. Each of us is a potential source of foolishness, each of us must endure the consequences of the foolishness of others, and in addition to all of that, Nature frequently works to impress upon us our absurdity and thereby remind us that we are not the masters of the universe that we like to suppose we are.

Even before I revealed myself by that indelicate sound—and just for the record, it was
only
sound—I knew that I wasn’t a master of the universe. I merely hoped that I might be the master of the feed bin, and in fact its
secret
master.

That modest ambition was now unfulfilled as the searcher in the dark scrabbled at the lid, tried to tear open one and then the other, and then both at the same time.

With desperate tenacity, I held fast to the pull handles, which were easier to grip than the edge of the lid with which my adversary was struggling.

As it strove to get at me, it not only snorted but also snarled and grunted and growled and even squealed, leading me to conclude that my suspicions were correct, that it wasn’t human, for it didn’t once say “sonofabitch.”

Others of its kind crowded into the dark room. An evil chorus of bestial sounds, their voices were nothing like those of monkeys, but the cacophony was equal to that of a monkey house in a lightning storm.

The first through the door continued to pry furiously at the lids as others began to pound on them and on the sides of the bin. They rocked my haven back and forth, as well, although it was too cumbersome and there was too little room for maneuvering to allow them to tumble it on its side.

I felt like a mouse sealed in a can and subjected to the sport of cruel little boys.

Because my years have been filled with fighting and chasing and being chased, more on foot than in cars, and because I have eaten far less fried food than I have prepared for others, I’m in pretty good physical shape. But already my arms had begun to ache from the strain of holding down the lids.

Remaining a positive thinker was going to get more difficult minute by minute.

One or more of this hungry crowd—if it was in fact a hope of dinner that drove them and not something even more unthinkable—scratched fiercely at the screens in the ventilation holes and then did more than scratch. The fine wire mesh slit with a sound like a pull-tab slider parting the teeth of a tiny zipper, which suggested that they either had knives or exceedingly sharp claws.

They could not seize me by reaching through holes as small as four inches in diameter, but they could poke at me with blades or sticks, which I expected them to do at any moment. If they could see to any extent in darkness, which seemed to be the case, and if the ventilation screens no longer inhibited their view of me, they would know exactly where to jab for maximum effect.

I searched the blackness in front of me for any hint of animal eye shine, but I could detect none. If not for their expressions of anger and need, I might have thought they were robot assassins whose stares were dead black because their eyes were cameras that took in the entire spectrum of light but gave back nothing.

Hands slick with sweat, my grip on one of the pull handles slipped slightly. My primary adversary reacted instantly to that minor fumble, wrenching at the lid with greater fervor.

My heart knocked so hard that its frantic rhythm was a tom-tom pulse in my ears, and even in the chaos of the assault upon the feed bin, I could hear my ragged breathing.

Since I lost Stormy, I have no need of my life. If I should be taken young by some divine act of mercy, perhaps sudden death by accident or a cerebral embolism, I would not care. But like most people who have glimpsed a scene from the latest remake of
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
while channel surfing, or have dipped into a Stieg Larsson novel on an unfortunate page, I fear dying in a prolonged and messy fashion that involves either torture or being devoured alive.

Now that I didn’t have to worry about revealing myself with a sneeze, the astringent scent of ozone of course faded a bit, so that suddenly I could smell the horde of zombies or rabid black bears or whatever they were. To call their stench body odor would be like describing the reek of a rotting cabbage as less fragrant than a rose.

I began to gag, and their stink was so intense that I could also
taste
it. If I started to retch, I might be convulsed with nausea and wouldn’t be able to pull hard enough on the lids to keep the beasts out. The very thought of retching caused me to retch. A bitter mass rose in my throat, I choked it down, but I knew that I wouldn’t be able to swallow it again.

Suddenly the pack in the feed room fell silent and halted their assault. Their smell swiftly ebbed, receded entirely, as did the tang of ozone.

Beyond the torn screens in the ventilation holes, the light of the stable sconces—if not also daylight—seemed to plume into the dark room through the open doorway, as if it were not real light at all but instead a phosphorescent exhalation of cold breath, which then lay as a pale and uneven gray condensation on the rough board walls.

I was accustomed to being the target of violence. But I wasn’t familiar with bad guys who, at the height of their assault and having victory within their grasp, abruptly turned peaceable and went away to meditate.

Whatever they were, the motivation for their retreat was not likely to be an attack of conscience and a tender desire to dispense a little mercy.

Some people misunderstand evil and believe it will relent, and because their misplaced hope inspires dark hearts to dream darker dreams, they are the fathers and mothers of all wars. Evil does not relent; it must be defeated. And even when defeated, uprooted, and purified by fire, evil leaves behind a seed that will one day germinate and, in blooming, again be misunderstood.

I had defeated nothing. I knew better than to believe that my mysterious attackers would not return. The question was—
when
?

Holding fast to the pulls on the underside of the feed-bin lids, I
listened but heard nothing except my less frantic breathing and an occasional twang as my weight shifting ever so slightly upon the stainless-steel liner caused it to flex.

After a minute or so, the pale light, the absence of ozone, and the silence drew me to the conclusion that the grunting pack had not left of their own will but had been somehow swept away when the too-early nightfall was magically undone and the day restored to morning.

I didn’t know how night could have come so quickly after dawn or how it could have been rolled back, as if time were not a river with a fixed course but instead a changeable wind gusting now toward but now away.

My curious life has been filled with supernatural events, but never before one like this.

An argument could be made that the many strange things I see and experience are in fact as natural as the sun and moon, and that the five senses of other human beings have not yet adapted to the full reality of the world.

That theory would seem to suggest that I am special, better than others, but I know that isn’t true. In spite of my talent, I am not any better than any other soul seeking redemption, no more than a good musician is a better person than those with no musical talent, and I am worse than some.