The Toby Ramirez I had known would not have been capable of even such a simple word-association game as this one.
To Manuel, I said, “They’ve begun to pay for your cooperation, haven’t they?”
His fierce pride in Toby’s exhibition of this new verbal skill was so touching and so deeply sad that I could not look at him.
“In spite of all that he didn’t have, he was always happy,” I said of Toby. “He found a purpose, fulfillment. Now what if they can take him far enough that he’s dissatisfied with what he is…but then they can’t take him all the way to normal?”
“They will,” Manuel said with a measure of conviction for which there could be no justification. “They will.”
“The same people who’ve created this nightmare?”
“It’s not got only a dark side.”
I thought of the pitiful wails of the visitor in the rectory attic, the melancholy quality of its changeling voice, the terrible yearning in its desperate attempts to convey meaning in a caterwaul. I thought of Orson on that summer night, despairing under the stars.
“God help you, Toby,” I said, because he was my friend, too. “God bless you.”
“God had His chance,” Manuel said. “From now on, we’ll make our own luck.”
I had to get away from there, and not solely because dawn was soon to arrive. I started walking the bike across the backyard again—and didn’t realize that I’d broken into a run until I was past the house and in the street.
When I glanced back at the Nantucket-style residence, it looked different from the way that it had always been before. Smaller than I remembered. Huddled. Forbidding.
In the east, a silver-gray paleness was forming high above the world, either sunrise seeping in or Judgment coming.
In twelve hours I had lost my father, the friendship of Manuel and Toby, many illusions, and much innocence. I was overcome by the terrifying feeling that more and perhaps worse losses lay ahead.
Orson and I fled to Sasha’s house.
31
Sasha’s house is owned by KBAY and is a perk of her position as general manager of the station. It’s a small two-story Victorian with elaborate millwork enhancing the faces of the dormers, all the gableboards, the eaves, the window and door surrounds, and the porch railings.
The house would be a jewel box if it weren’t painted the station colors. The walls are canary yellow. The shutters and porch railings are coral pink. All the other millwork is the precise shade of Key-lime pie. The result is as though a flock of Jimmy Buffett fans, high on Margaritas and piña coladas, painted the place during a long party weekend.
Sasha doesn’t mind the flamboyant exterior. As she notes, she lives within the house, not outside where she can see it.
The deep back porch is enclosed with glass; and with the help of an electric space heater in cooler months, Sasha has transformed it into an herb greenhouse. On tables and benches and sturdy metal racks stand hundreds of terra-cotta pots and plastic trays in which she cultivates tarragon and thyme, angelica and arrowroot, chervil and cardamom and coriander and chicory, spearmint and sweet cicely, ginseng, hyssop, balm and basil, marjoram and mint and mullein, dill, fennel, rosemary, chamomile, tansy. She uses these in her cooking, to make wonderful, subtly scented potpourris, and to brew health teas that challenge the gag reflex far less than you would expect.
I don’t bother to carry a key of my own. A spare is tucked into a terra-cotta pot shaped like a toad, under the yellowish leaves of a rue plant. As the deadly dawn brightened to a paler gray in the east and the world prepared to murder dreams, I let myself into the shelter of Sasha’s home.
In the kitchen, I immediately switched on the radio. Sasha was winding through the last half hour of her show, giving a weather report. We were still in the wet season, and a storm was coming in from the northwest. We would have rain shortly after nightfall.
If she had predicted that we were due for a hundred-foot tidal wave and volcanic eruptions with major rivers of lava, I would have listened with pleasure. When I heard her smooth, slightly throaty radio voice, a big stupid smile came over my face, and even on this morning near the end of the world, I couldn’t help but be simultaneously soothed and aroused.
As the day brightened beyond the windows, Orson padded directly to the pair of hard-plastic bowls that stood on a rubber mat in one corner. His name is painted on each: Wherever he goes, whether to Bobby’s cottage or to Sasha’s, he is family.
As a puppy, my dog was given a series of names, but he didn’t care to respond to any of them on a regular basis. After noticing how intently the mutt focused on old Orson Welles movies when we ran them on video—and especially on the appearance of Welles himself in any scene—we jokingly renamed him after the actor-director. He has ever since answered to this moniker.
When he found both bowls empty, Orson picked up one of them in his mouth and brought it to me. I filled it with water and returned it to the rubber mat, which prevented it from sliding on the white ceramic-tile floor.
He snatched up the second bowl and looked beseechingly at me. As is true of virtually any dog, Orson’s eyes and face are better designed for a beseeching look than are the expressive features of the most talented actor who ever trod the boards.
At the dining table with Roosevelt and Orson and Mungojerrie aboard the Nostromo, I had recalled those well-executed but jokey paintings of dogs playing poker and it had occurred to me that my subconscious had been trying to tell me something important by so vividly resurrecting this image from my memory. Now I understood. Each of the dogs in those paintings represents a familiar human type, and each is obviously as smart as any human being. On the Nostromo, because of the game that Orson and the cat had played with each other, “mocking their stereotypes,” I had realized that some of these animals out of Wyvern might be far smarter than I had previously thought—so smart that I wasn’t yet ready to face the awesome truth. If they could hold cards and talk, they might win their share of poker hands; they might even take me to the cleaners.
“It’s a little early,” I said, taking the food dish from Orson. “But you did have a very active night.”
After shaking a serving of his favorite dry dog food from the box into his bowl, I circled the kitchen, closing the Levolor blinds against the growing threat of the day. As I was shutting the last of them, I thought I heard a door close softly elsewhere in the house.
I froze, listening.
“Something?” I whispered.
Orson looked up from his bowl, sniffed the air, cocked his head, then chuffed and once more turned his attention to his food.
The three-hundred-ring circus of my mind.
At the sink I washed my hands and splashed some cold water on my face.
Sasha keeps an immaculate kitchen, gleaming and sweet-smelling, but it’s cluttered. She’s a superb cook, and clusters of exotic appliances take up at least half the counter space. So many pots, pans, ladles, and utensils dangle from overhead racks that you feel as if you’re spelunking through a cavern where every inch of the ceiling is hung with stalactites.
I moved through her house, closing blinds, feeling the vibrant spirit of her in every corner. She is so alive that she leaves an aura behind her that lingers long after she has gone.
Her home has no interior-design theme, no harmony in the flow of furniture and artwork. Rather, each room is a testament to one of her consuming passions. She is a woman of many passions.
All meals are taken at a large kitchen table, because the dining room is dedicated to her music. Along one wall is an electronic keyboard, a full-scale synthesizer with which she could compose for an orchestra if she wished, and adjacent to this is her composition table with music stand and a stack of pages with blank musical staffs awaiting her pencil. In the center of the room is a drum set. In a corner stands a high-quality cello with a low, cellist’s stool. In another corner, beside a music stand, a saxophone hangs on a brass sax rack. There are two guitars as well, one acoustic and one electric.
The living room isn’t about appearances but about books—another of her passions. The walls are lined with bookshelves, which overflow with hardcovers and paperbacks. The furniture is not trendy, neither stylish nor styleless: neutral-tone chairs and sofas selected for the comfort they provide, for the fact that they’re perfect for sitting and talking or for spending long hours with a book.
On the second floor, the first room from the head of the stairs features an exercise bicycle, a rowing machine, a set of hand weights from two to twenty pounds, calibrated in two-pound increments, and exercise mats. This is her homeopathic-medicine room, as well, where she keeps scores of bottles of vitamins and minerals, and where she practices yoga. When she uses the Exercycle, she won’t get off until she’s streaming sweat and has churned up at least thirty miles on the odometer. She stays on the rowing machine until she’s crossed Lake Tahoe in her mind, keeping a steady rhythm by singing tunes by Sarah McLachlan or Juliana Hatfield or Meredith Brooks or Sasha Goodall, and when she does stomach crunches and leg lifts, the padded mats under her seem as if they will start smoking before she’s half done. When she’s finished exercising, she’s always more energetic than when she began, flushed and buoyant. And when she concludes a session of meditation in various yoga positions, the intensity of her relaxation seems powerful enough to blow out the walls of the room.
God, I love her.
As I stepped from the exercise room into the upstairs hall, I was stricken once more by that premonition of impending loss. I began to shake so badly that I had to lean against the wall until the episode passed.
Nothing could happen to her in daylight, not on the ten-minute drive from the broadcast studios on Signal Hill through the heart of town. The night is when the troop seems to roam. By day they go to ground somewhere, perhaps in the storm drains under the town or even in the hills where I’d found the collection of skulls. And the people who can no longer be trusted, the changelings like Lewis Stevenson, seem more in control of themselves under the sun than under the moon. As with the animal men in The Island of Dr. Moreau, the wildness in them will not be as easily suppressed at night. With the dusk, they lose a measure of self-control; a sense of adventure springs up in them, and they dare things that they never dream about by day. Surely nothing could happen to Sasha now that dawn was upon us; for perhaps the first time in my life, I felt relief at the rising of the sun.
Finally I came to her bedroom. Here you will find no musical instruments, not a single book, no pots or trays of herbs, no bottles of vitamins, no exercise equipment. The bed is simple, with a plain headboard, no footboard, and it is covered with a thin white chenille spread. There’s nothing whatsoever remarkable about the dresser, the nightstands, or the lamps. The walls are pale yellow, the very shade of morning sunlight in a cloud; no artwork interrupts their smooth planes. The room might seem stark to some, but when Sasha’s present, this space is as elaborately decorated as any baroque drawing room in a French castle, as nurturingly serene as any meditation point in a Zen garden. She never sleeps fitfully but always as deep and still as a stone at the bottom of the sea, so you find yourself reaching out to touch her, to feel the warmth of her skin or the throb of her pulse, to quiet the sudden fear for her that grips you from time to time. As with so many things, she has a passion for sleep. She has a passion for passion, too, and when she makes love to you, the room ceases to exist, and you’re in a timeless time and a placeless place, where there’s only Sasha, only the light and the heat of her, the glorious light of her that blazes but doesn’t burn.
As I passed the foot of the bed, heading toward the first of three windows to close the blinds, I saw an object on the chenille spread. It was small, irregular, and highly polished: a fragment of hand-painted, glazed china. Half a smiling mouth, a curve of cheek, one blue eye. A shard from the face of the Christopher Snow doll that had shattered against the wall in Angela Ferryman’s house just before the lights had gone out and the smoke had poured into the stairwell from above and below.
At least one of the troop had been here during the night.
Shaking again but with fury rather than fear this time, I ripped the pistol out of my jacket and set out to search the house, from the attic down, every room, every closet, every cupboard, every smallest space in which one of these hateful creatures might be able to conceal itself. I wasn’t stealthy or cautious. Cursing, making threats that I had every intention of fulfilling, I tore open doors, slammed drawers shut, poked under furniture with a broom handle. In general I created such a racket that Orson sprinted to my side with the expectation of finding me in a battle for my life—then followed me at a cautious distance, as if he feared that, in my current state of agitation, I might shoot myself in the foot and him in the paw if he stayed too close.
None of the troop was in the house.
When I concluded the search, I had the urge to fill a pail with strong ammonia water and sponge off every surface that the intruder—or intruders—might have touched: walls, floor, stair treads and railings, furniture. Not because I believed that they’d left behind any microorganisms that could infect us. Rather, because I found them to be unclean in a profoundly spiritual sense, as though they had come not out of laboratories at Wyvern but out of a vent in the earth from which also rose sulfur fumes, a terrible light, and the distant cries of the damned.
Instead of going for the ammonia, I used the kitchen phone to call the direct booth line at KBAY. Before I entered the last number, I realized that Sasha was off the air and already on her way home. I hung up and keyed in her mobile number.
“Hey, Snowman,” she said.
“Where are you?”
“Five minutes away.”
“Are your doors locked?”
“What?”
“For Christ’s sake, are your doors locked?”
She hesitated. Then: “They are now.”
“Don’t stop for anyone. Not anyone. Not for a friend, not even for a cop. Especially not for a cop.”
“What if I accidentally run down a little old lady?”
“She won’t be a little old lady. She’ll only look like one.”
“You’ve suddenly gotten spooky, Snowman.”
“Not me. The rest of the world. Listen, I want you to stay on the phone until you’re in the driveway.”
“Explorer to control tower: The fog’s pulling back already. You don’t need to talk me in.”
“I’m not talking you in. You’re talking me down. I’m in a state here.”
“I sorta noticed.”