Odd Interlude (7 page)

She continues speaking in a quiet voice from which all drama and most inflection are edited, and it is this self-control, which takes such a great effort of will, that lends credence to her incredible story. Her hands have closed into tightly clenched fists.

“His wife, Denise, who is screaming and near collapse, seems suddenly to collect herself—just as Donny at last begins to scream. She tells us what she will need to stanch the bleeding, sterilize the wound as best she can, and sew it up. You see, she must share in Donny’s punishment by being the instrument that ensures his permanent disfigurement, which a first-rate surgeon might have minimized. There will be nerve damage and numbness. And every time she looks at him for the rest of their lives, she will in part blame herself for not being able to resist … to resist being used in this fashion. We know that if we fail to assist her, any one of us might be the next to slash his own face. We assist. She closes the wound.”

Ardys’s fists unclench, and she lowers her head. She has about her an air of exhaustion, as if analyzing her words before speaking them, with an ear for those that might summon the Presence that she fears, has drained both her physical and mental reserves.

Less than an hour of darkness remains, yet the night seems to be rising, submerging the hills, lifting
the houses out of anchorage to set them adrift. This perception is nothing more than a reflection of my state of mind; a change in my conception of reality, of what’s possible or not, is what has actually for a moment unmoored me.

If I understand Ardys, then the Presence that entered my dream and tried to explore the archives of my memory is more than a reader. It is in their case a
controller
of great power and greater cruelty, a tyrannical puppeteer. Beginning five years earlier, it has made of Harmony Corner not precisely a prison and not in scope an empire, but a pocket universe akin to a primitive island on which a god carved of stone demands absolute obedience, with the difference that
this
false deity is capable of brutally enforcing its commands. It entered rebellious Donny and forced him to mutilate himself, and thereafter it entered Denise and, using her hands, made sure that Donny’s face would always testify to the dire consequence of disobedience.

Earlier, when Sweet Donny became Angry Donny, the Presence must have entered him and taken control. I had suddenly been talking not to the mechanic’s second and less appealing personality, but instead to another individual entirely, the puppetmaster.

The service station had no television, and Donny was wide awake when he was abruptly possessed. My understanding of how the Presence travels and how it takes up tenancy in another’s mind is incomplete.
Watching the boob tube might not be an invitation to this particular damnation, after all—though it’s still not a wise idea to spend a lot of time watching reality-TV shows about celebrity families living in the wild with gorillas.

I realize, too, that by “my own private door” Ardys means the door to her mind. For a moment, she thought that she felt it opening.

They live in unceasing expectation of being invaded, controlled. How they have held fast to their sanity for five years is beyond my comprehension.

Although I assume Ardys has said as much as she dares to say, she raises her head and continues, speaking softly and in a voice that might seem weary if I didn’t know the effort required of her to make it sound so. “My sister-in-law, Laura, is a Harmony, but her married name is Jorgenson. She and Steve, her husband, have three children. The middle one was a boy named Maxwell. We called him Maxy.”

I am sobered by her determination to maintain a voice without dramatic emphasis and, presumably, also to repress internally the emotions that these revelations should inflame. Her effort suggests that on some level the Presence is always aware of the general mood of each of the subjects in its little kingdom. Perhaps it’s alerted to a possibility of disobedience when one of them becomes a bit too agitated emotionally, in much the way that our nation’s security forces employ computers to monitor millions of phone calls, not listening to every exchange but
scanning for certain combinations of words that might identify a conversation between two terrorists.

“Maxy was always exceptional-looking. A pretty baby, then a beautiful toddler. More handsome year by year. He was six when things changed. He was eight when we learned there is a degree of beauty that, if exceeded, inspires envy and requires the removal of the one whose appearance causes offense.”

Her ability to speak of child murder with such bland words and in such a dispassionate tone indicates that in the three years since the killing of Maxy, she has developed and refined techniques of self-possession that I could never match. She is eerily composed, all excited feeling subdued, for this is what she must do to survive—and now to save her daughter.

She says, “There’s a short story by Shirley Jackson, ‘The Lottery,’ which concerns a ritual stoning. Everyone in the town must participate so that something outrageous and morally repugnant may seem normal, essential to public order, and a moment of community bonding. Those who participate in that lottery do so voluntarily. When someone too beautiful had to be removed from the Corner, everyone participated, one after the other, including Maxy himself, but none voluntarily.”

The horrific scene she suggests with such restraint chills me as much as anything ever has.

I am inexpressibly grateful that I am invulnerable
to the power of this mysterious Presence. But then I pray that I am indeed not vulnerable, because perhaps on second try the puppetmaster will find a way to open my own private door.

Speaking now in a whisper, Ardys says, “Here, mere stones are considered uninspired. More imagination is employed. And unlike in the Jackson story, the sacrifice is not performed efficiently but with an intention to prolong the event as you might want to see a good ball game go into several extra innings to increase the drama and the ultimate satisfaction.”

My palms are damp. I blot them on my jeans before picking up the pistol from my lap.

“In three years, there has not been another whose appearance has caused such offense,” Ardys informs me. “Until recently. Members of our family have begun expressing envy of my daughter’s growing beauty, both to her and to me. Of course I mean this envy has been expressed by another for whom they are forced to speak.”

I have a hundred questions, but before I can pose one, Ardys gets up from the chair and asks that I come with her.

She opens the front door and leads me inside.

For a moment, I look back warily at the shadowed porch and the deeper gloom beyond. When I close the door, I turn the deadbolt, for it seems that the night itself might rise like a rough beast and slouch across the threshold in our wake.

I follow her along the hallway to the immaculate kitchen.

In my experience, everything in Harmony Corner is spotless. Hard work must be essential to relieve their minds from continuous morbid consideration of their desperate situation. Focusing intently on what they
can
control—like the cleanliness of their homes and enterprises—must be one of the few ways they can keep aglow the embers of hope.

In the kitchen light, I discover that Ardys Harmony is lovely. Perhaps in her late thirties, she has a complexion as clear as light, and her eyes are the color of crème de menthe, darker green than I would have thought any eyes could be. Her otherwise perfect skin is marked by crow’s-feet, but those tiny wrinkles seem to me to be evidence not of aging but instead of the courage and the steel willpower with which she faces each day in the Corner, as even now her eyes are squinted and her mouth tightly set with determination.

She draws me to the sink, above which is a window that frames a view of the larger house on the hill behind this one. As earlier, lamplight brightens some of the second-floor windows in that imposing residence.

“My husband’s parents bought this property in a foreclosure sale in 1955. It was dilapidated. They revitalized the businesses, turned failure into success, and built additional houses as their children got married and the family grew. They lived in the hilltop
house until they died, both of them nine years ago. Bill and I lived up there four years—until everything changed. Five years now, we’ve lived down here.”

Without directly telling me that their controller and tormentor can be found in the highest of the seven houses, without mentioning a name or providing a description, without putting her request into words that might draw unwanted attention, she nevertheless conveys to me by her eyes and her expression what she hopes I might achieve. Maybe I, immune to the powers of the Presence, will be able to enter its lair undetected and kill it. I understand what she wants of me as clearly as if I could read minds.

If the Presence is alone and the Harmonys are many, and if it can control only one person at a time—as the story of Donny’s cut and Denise’s sewing up of his wound seems to indicate—then surely sometime in five years, they might have found a way to overwhelm their enemy. I don’t have enough information, however, to understand their long enslavement or to calculate the odds of my succeeding at the task she hopes that I will undertake.

The need to speak somewhat indirectly of these things and in a subdued manner complicates my information gathering. I ask, “Is it a man I’m looking for or something else?”

She turns from the window. “This line of talk is inadvisable.”

I persist: “A man?”

“Yes and no.”

“What does that mean?”

She shakes her head. She dares not say, for fear the words she would need to describe my quarry might alert him to the fact that we are conspiring against him. This suggests that once he has taken control of someone, even after he departs that person, the two of them remain linked at all times, at least tenuously.

“He’s only one, I assume.”

“Yes.”

She looks at the pistol in my hand.

I ask, “Will this be enough to do the job?”

Her expression is bleak. “I don’t know.”

As I consider how best to word certain other questions without setting off a psychic alarm in the mind of the Presence, I ask if I may have a drink of water.

She plucks a bottle of Niagara from the refrigerator, and as I put down the pistol on the dinette table, I assure her that I don’t need a glass.

For a man closing in on twenty-four hours without sleep, after a long day of exhausting action, too much caffeine is as problematic as too little. Drowsiness and the lack of focus that it promotes could be the death of me, although so could the edginess and the tendency to overreact that come with an overdose of stimulants. But Mountain Dew, candy bars, and a pair of NoDoz have not yet quite cleared the
sandman’s dust from my eyes. I swallow one more caffeine tablet.

As I put down the water, Ardys comes to me and takes one of my hands in both of hers. Her eyes seem to express desperation, and her look is beseeching.

Something about her stare, perhaps the intensity of it, makes me uneasy. Because my life is marbled with the supernatural, I’m creeped out frequently enough to be familiar with the feeling that something is crawling on the nape of my neck. This time, however, before I can smooth down those fine hairs with my free hand, I realize that the crawling isn’t on my neck but
inside
my skull.

As I slam my own private door, rejecting what has sought to enter, Ardys says, “Have you figured out how to express it better, Harry?”

“Express what?”

“The analogy with the porpoise and the prairie dog.”

Alarmed, I twist my hand free of hers.

The form of Jolie’s mother still stands before me, and surely the substance of her—mind and soul—still inhabits the body even if she is no longer in control of it. The Presence and I are face-to-face, as last we were when it challenged me through Donny, and this time its true countenance is concealed by the Ardys mask. Her skin remains clear and radiant, but her expression of utter contempt is one that I doubt is familiar to that lovely visage. Those dark-green eyes are as striking as they were before, like
the eyes of a woman in some magic-saturated Celtic myth, but they are no longer haunted or sad, or beseeching; they seem to radiate a palpable, inhuman fury.

I snatch the gun from the table.

She says, “Who are you really, Harry Potter?”

“Lex Luthor,” I admit. “That’s why I had to change my name. The thousandth time someone asked me why I hated Superman, I started wishing my name was just about anything else, even Fidel Castro.”

“You are the first of your kind I’ve ever encountered.”

“What kind is that?” I wonder.

“Inaccessible. I possess everyone who sleeps in the motor court, roam their memories, and embed recurrent nightmares that will destroy their sleep for weeks after I’ve departed them.”

“I’d prefer a free continental breakfast.”

Not stiffly, like a zombie, but with her usual grace, she walks—almost seems to glide—to the counter beside the cooktop and opens a drawer. “Sometimes I seize control of motor-court guests while they’re awake—use a husband to brutalize a wife or use a wife to tell her husband lies about infidelities that I imagine for her in delicious detail.”

Ardys stares into the drawer.

“When they leave,” the Presence says through her, “they’re beyond my control, but what I’ve done will have a lasting effect.”

“Why? What’s the point?”

Ardys looks up from the drawer. “Because I can. Because I want to. Because I will.”

“That’s a tidy little moral vacuum.”

Obeying the beast that rides her, Ardys withdraws a meat cleaver from the drawer. In her voice, the hidden demon says, “Not a vacuum. A black hole. Nothing escapes me.”

I suggest, “Delusions of grandeur.”

Raising the cleaver, Ardys approaches the dinette table, which stands between us. “You’re a fool.”

“Yeah? Well, you’re a narcissist.”

I find it dismaying that we never quite outgrow the schoolyard and the puerile behavior thereof. Even this puppetmaster, with almost godlike power over those it controls, feels the need to belittle me with childish insults, and I feel obliged to respond in kind.