Saint Odd (33 page)

I assumed the four doors through which I had not entered all led to different sections of the maze and that patrons returned more than once to this space behind the ogre’s head as they tried to find their way out. The cultist who had taken Taylor by surprise might have left the fun house for some reason or he might still be lurking elsewhere within it. In either case, there were five doors by which he could return at any moment.

Turning from the last mirror, I saw what had been so important to me in the dream of the amaranth: what I had thought of as the urn, a stainless-steel cylinder about half again as tall and half again as wide as a carton of milk.

The object stood beside a heavy-duty electric air compressor and associated equipment that, even to a mechanical ignoramus like me, couldn’t be mistaken for anything other than the source of the ogre’s blasts of breath that accompanied his roars of rage. A four-inch-diameter tube led from the compressor to the monster’s mouth.

The urn could be nothing else than a container of the weaponized rabies virus suspended in some medium that would efficiently convey it into the ogre’s exhalations, whereupon it would be spewed with force across the crowded concourse, through the happy bustling crowd, toward the many rides and the other attractions in the center of the midway. The medium would be odorless and tasteless but might appear as a faint mist.

Because Ozzie Boone had written a novel about a killer virus
and because he was incapable of withholding from his friends the numerous fascinating details of the research he did for a novel, I knew a few things about viruses, just as I knew more than I ever wanted to know about bats, liver flukes, the incidence of psychopathic tendencies in clowns, and the capacity of hogs to be trained to kill.

Bacteria were exceedingly small creatures, but viruses were smaller still. Big viruses were one-fifth the size of the average bacterium, but the vast majority of them were orders of magnitude smaller. The flu virus measured eighty thousandths of a millionth of a meter in diameter. Viruses were so tiny, they couldn’t be seen with ordinary microscopes. Their structure wasn’t known until the invention of the electron microscope in 1933. Billions of viruses could fit into one drop of water.

Viruses have none of our five senses. But they have one sense, the only one they need: an unexplained ability to detect the chemical composition of the cell surface of whichever species make the best hosts for them. Detecting it, they are drawn to it. You might say that viruses have one sense, and that it is pretty much the same one that I call psychic magnetism.

For those who don’t believe the world is a mysterious and deeply layered place, brood on
that
awhile.

The urn could hold megatrillions of the weaponized rabies virus, enough perhaps to infect the entire population of the planet. Pico Mundo might be the locus from which a plague spread across several counties in California and Nevada before being contained, or across the nation, or across the world.

From the top of that shiny cylinder of death sprouted a nozzle encircled by what appeared to be a rotating petcock currently in the closed position. A rubber tube connected the nozzle to a hole
that had been drilled in the four-inch-diameter out-feed pipe through which the compressor released jets of the ogre’s breath into the world beyond.

I knelt beside the cylinder and was about to pluck that tube from the nozzle when the door at the west end of the room flew open and a little man appeared there. Lou Donatella wasn’t dressed as a bear cub this time, but pretty much like me, except that he had the good taste not to wear a powder-blue sport coat. Holding the pistol in a two-hand grip, he squeezed off three shots, killing the man behind me, who I had not heard come out of one of the other doors.

More often than I could count in my eventful life, I had been taken by surprise, but never more so than by Lou’s in-the-nick-of-time arrival. After our brief encounter in the carnie campground, he had decided to ally himself with me.

Our eyes met in shared amazement and astonishment, which were not the same thing, which I knew to be true because Ozzie Boone had explained the difference to me.

When he spoke, Lou revealed that he possessed psychic abilities, as I had thought that he might: “I foresaw this much, but not what comes next.”

I tore the rubber tube from the urn just as one of the mirrors, which proved to be a hidden door, flew open like the lid of a jack-in-the-box, and a cultist shot me. Lou shot the cultist, and in turn the cultist shot Lou dead. Although I’d taken a bullet in the right side of my chest and could not get my breath, I had the strength and balance to shoot the cultist, finishing the job that my short comrade had started.

Aside from dying, there was nothing left for me to do but take the stainless-steel cylinder, the urn in the amaranth dream, where
the cultists couldn’t get their murderous hands on it, to Chief Wyatt Porter, who would know what to do, who always knew what to do, who was one of the two surrogate fathers who had always been there for me when my real father could not be bothered.

Leaving the fun house by the door through which Lou Donatella had entered to save me, I turned right because to turn left would be to go into the maze. A short passageway brought me to the ramp that served as the public entrance. Having dropped my pistol to be able to hold the cylinder of weaponized rabies with both arms, I staggered down the ramp, sidled past the stanchions that supported the
CLOSED
sign, and turned left into surging multitudes.

I shouted at people to get out of my way, declared that I was wounded and dying, and they took me seriously when they noticed all the blood. They took me even more seriously when I shouted that I was
diseased
and dying, which was a bald-faced lie, but in crisis you say what you have to say and worry later about whether you screwed up or not. The people who were attracted by the novelty of seeing a man die from a gunshot were repelled by the prospect of contracting the disease with which I might be infected.

At that moment, I saw something that I first thought must be a
hallucination, a consequence of blood loss and shock. Among the people in the crowd, there were some into whom I could look, as if I had X-ray vision, though it was only their hearts that were visible to me. Hearts not red, but black. Hearts not of muscle, but of metal, cardiac machines ticking and thumping and glistening with oil. I am sure that, if autopsied, their hearts would have looked unremarkable. What I saw was the hidden truth of them. From each of those dark and seemingly robotic hearts, a black filament, an umbilical invisible to ordinary eyes, snaked away into the carnival. Snaked away through the whirling amusements and the blinking lights, as if to some puppeteer in concealment. Somehow I knew that not all of them were cultists, that many of them did evil to their fellow men without the need of an organization to support them. When I looked up into their faces, I saw in every case what they did not see in their mirrors: eyes that were like pools of oil, without color. And if they didn’t know me for who and what I was, an entity of terrible power looked through their eyes from its remote lair and knew me, and caused them, one after another, to smile in pleasure at the sight of my suffering. I turned my eyes from them and did not look again.

In this world, Evil works through countless surrogates. Its name is Legion. But Good works through surrogates, as well, and they are legion, too.

The rest of my time on the midway ticked away pretty much as in the dream of the amaranth that I have already recounted. Somehow I found the strength to lumber forward while the carnival around me blurred and became a place without detail, where those luminous smears of red and blue and gold and white and green whirled and pulsed, swooped toward me and soared as if
they were shapeless birds of light. Screams and panicked shouting. Tortured and shrill music. I see no need to describe the pandemonium again.

Pain? Oh, yes. Devastating pain. Like nothing I had ever known before. And a frightening sense of walking a high wire, of falling for a moment, but then finding myself on the wire again, falling into a black void but then rebounding from it once more.

Blossom Rosedale appeared, as she had in the dream, and helped me to stay on my feet. I had never seen the Happy Monster cry before, and I told her not to weep now, told her that I knew to what I was coming, that I had been coming to it for almost two years, and that whatever the place might prove to be, I was not afraid. If I didn’t say all that, I thought I did, but she continued to cry as she helped me along.

I didn’t see the cultist behind us, the last assassin, who would have shot me and no doubt Blossom, too. Chief Wyatt Porter, who had always been there when I needed him, was there again. He loomed as in the dream, the muzzle of his service pistol swelling until it looked like the mouth of a cannon. He shot the lunatic before the lunatic could shoot us.

Just like the transition in the dream, I found myself lying on a hard surface, but unlike in the dream, I knew that I rested on the table where Connie, sister to Ethan, kept her array of paints and brushes and sponges, in the Face It tent. She had swept all of her things to the floor with one arm, and they had placed me upon the table to await the paramedics who were already racing to the scene.

All the noise of the carnival had faded, and there were only soft voices, murmuring and weeping when no weeping was necessary. The three lovely black girls stood by me, looking down with
solemn brown eyes, their faces painted with white-and-gold feathers, their hands upon my arms, my brow, as if to hold me to the world of the living. Terri Stambaugh was there, too, for she had been at the carnival that night. Terri and Blossom Rosedale, as in the dream.

Someone said that everyone should stay back, so as not to stress me, but I said no. I said I wanted to see them all, to see people. I wanted to see not just the people I loved and the people I knew, but also the people I didn’t know. I wanted to see people, because people had been my life, the good and bad, but always so many more good people than bad. They had been my life, and I did not want to die without the faces of people as the last thing I saw of that beautiful and mysterious world.

In the dream, Wyatt Porter had not been by the table on which I was lying, but he appeared there in the fulfillment of the dream, as did Edie Fischer and Connie and Connie’s mother. And I loved them all, those I knew and those I didn’t.

I think the last thing I said was, “Where is Annamaria?”

As in the dream, I closed my eyes and opened them and found myself alone. I seemed to be paralyzed. Couldn’t move a finger. Panic took me for a moment. But then Annamaria spoke, and her voice at once calmed me, though I couldn’t see her.

“Well, young man, you have had quite a day.”

With dreamlike fluidity, I somehow transitioned to a chair in the Face It tent, alone with Annamaria, the table between us.

I was no longer in pain.

On the table stood a wide shallow bowl containing an inch of water, and in the water floated a beautiful white flower bigger than a cantaloupe, its petals radiant and as thick as wax.

“The flower,” said Annamaria, “is the amaranth.”

She proceeded one by one to pluck the petals from the bloom, until she had completely deconstructed it. A couple of hundred pieces of the amaranth lay scattered on the table around the bowl.

“You always said that you wanted to see the flower trick,” she reminded me. “But it is not a trick. I have no trick to show you. This is only what is.”

“ ‘This is only what is,’ ” I said. “Still enigmatic.”

She smiled and shook her head. “No more enigma.”

The debris of petals on the table stirred, although no hand touched them. Before my eyes, the bloom reassembled and became again the exquisite flower that she had taken apart.

As the last petal reattached itself, the tiny bell around my neck began tinkling sweetly, the silver clapper beating against the silver strike and silver lip.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“You know what an avatar is, young man.”

“Yes, I know. It’s the form in which a deity visits Earth.”

“I am no deity. I am no avatar in that sense, but I have been for you—and others before you—something like an avatar. I am only human. Once long ago, I gave birth to a daughter, and later she gave birth to a little boy, and I am now for eternity a universal mother, a mother to love those who, like you, were unloved by their mothers on Earth. You are, young man, as fine a son as any mother could wish to have, and you need not be afraid of what will happen now.”

The silver bell rang one more time, and suddenly I felt as if I were the flower, being dismantled as it had been, pieces of myself falling away, showering away into a terrible darkness, until nothing remained of me. Nothing remained, and yet I was aware in the utterly lightless void.

Before me appeared a form in the void, and it was, of all things, a golden question mark. It might have been an inch high or a thousand miles from dot to upper curve. Because I had no body, I had no sense of perspective.

The question mark remained before me—or above me, or below me—long enough that I began to wonder if I was supposed to respond to it somehow. As I considered what to say, the question mark morphed into a golden exclamation point, like the one on the cell phone that I’d been given by Edie Fischer.

After a moment, the exclamation point exploded soundlessly into a rushing abundance of light. The black void vanished around me, and I found myself flying through a smooth blue realm of radiance with no detectable source, gliding as if on wings, though still I had no body. The blue gave way to the crystalline light of the Mojave, and suddenly I was standing in downtown Pico Mundo on a sun-drenched day. The jacaranda trees were in bloom, and birds were singing, and the air smelled clean and sweet.

I was dressed now in my customary attire: sneakers, blue jeans, and a white T-shirt. No bandage wrapped my left hand, and I bore no wounds.

The town lay in an unnatural quiet, the silence of cemeteries. No vehicles plied the streets. No pedestrians. No sign of a living soul. I felt that I must be alone, having returned to my hometown after all of humanity had been killed off, and a deep uneasiness overcame me.