Odd Interlude (8 page)

Through Ardys, it says, “You’re dead, shitface.”

“Yeah? Well, you’re probably ugly as hell.”

“Not when I’m in this bitch.”

“I’d rather be dead than as ugly as you.”

“You’re ugly enough, shitface.”

I reply, “Sticks and stones.”

She starts around the table.

I circle in the other direction, taking a two-hand grip on the pistol and aiming it point-blank at her chest.

“You won’t shoot her,” the Presence says.

“I killed a woman earlier tonight.”

“Liar.”

“Freak.”

“Killing the bitch won’t kill me.”

“But you’ll have to find another host. By then I’ll be out of the house, and you won’t know where to look for me.”

She throws the cleaver.

My paranormal ability includes occasional prophetic dreams but not, darn it, glimpses of the future while I’m awake, which would be really, really helpful in moments like this.

I don’t expect her to throw it, I haven’t time to dodge, the blade whooshes past my face close enough to shave me if I had a beard, and chops into the cabinetry behind me, splitting the raised panel on an upper door.

The puppeteer is probably limited to the physical capabilities of whatever host it inhabits. I am maybe fifteen years younger than Ardys, stronger, with longer legs. The Presence is right, I won’t kill Ardys, she’s innocent, a victim, and now as she returns to the knife drawer, there’s nothing I can do but split in the figurative sense before her rider uses her to split me literally.

I race along the hallway, reaching the foyer just as the front door opens and a tall, husky guy halts on the threshold, startled to see me. He must be the husband, William Harmony. I say, “Hi, Bill,” hoping he’ll politely step out of the way, but even as I speak, his expression hardens, and he says, “Shitface,”
which either means that the insult is so appropriate that it’s the first thing people think to say when catching sight of me
or
the Presence has flipped out of Ardys and into her spouse.

Although I don’t know Bill as well as I know Ardys, I don’t want to shoot this innocent, either. Call me prissy. If I retreat to the kitchen, the puppeteer will flip out of Bill and into Ardys once more, and she’ll have a carving knife or a butcher knife, or a battery-powered electric knife, or a chain saw if they happen to keep one in the kitchen. Bill is wearing a sailor’s cap, which is appropriate, because his neck is as thick as a wharf post, his hands look as big as anchors, and his chest is as wide as the prow of a ship. There’s no way that I can go through him, which leaves me no choice but to sprint up the nearby staircase to the second floor.

Six

I am perpetually—sometimes darkly—amused by the workings of my mind, which can often seem less rational than I would like to believe they are. The human brain is by far the most complex object known to exist in the entire universe, containing more neurons than there are billions of stars in the Milky Way. The brain and the mind are very different things, and the latter is as mysterious
as the former is complex. The brain is a machine, and the mind is a ghost within it. The origins of self-awareness and how the mind is able to perceive, analyze, and imagine are supposedly explained by numerous schools of psychology, although in fact they study only behavior through the gathering and the analysis of statistics. The
why
of the mind’s existence and the
how
of its profound capacity to reason—especially its penchant for moral reasoning—will by their very nature remain as mysterious as whatever lies outside of time.

As I race up the stairs to the second floor, intent upon not falling into the hands of the possessed Bill Harmony, who looks like he has the strength to break me apart as easily as I might break in half a breadstick, I am afraid of dying—and therefore failing to protect Annamaria as I promised—and at the same time I am mildly embarrassed by the impropriety of dashing pell-mell toward the more private portion of their residence, into which I haven’t been invited.

I hear myself saying, “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” as I ascend the stairs, which seems absurd, considering that my trespass is a far lesser offense than the puppetmaster’s intention to use Mr. Harmony to bash my brains out. On the other hand, I think it speaks well of human beings that we are capable of recognizing when we’ve committed an impropriety even while we’re in a desperate fight for survival. I’ve read that in the worst Nazi and Soviet slave-labor
camps, where never enough food was provided to inmates, the stronger prisoners nearly always shared rations equitably with weaker ones, recognizing that the survival instinct does not entirely excuse us from the need to be charitable. Not all human competition has to be as brutal as that on the Food Network’s
Cupcake Wars
.

At the head of the stairs, as I hear Mr. Harmony thundering up the two flights behind me, I discover that the hallway leads right and left. I turn left, trusting my intuition, which unfortunately isn’t 100 percent reliable.

Out of a room to my right, a boy of about fifteen, bare-chested and barefoot, wearing pajama bottoms, erupts as if catapulted, slams into me, drives me into the wall, and reveals himself to be possessed when he says, “Shitface.”

Although the impact knocks the wind out of me, although I drop the pistol, although the boy’s sour breath reeks of garlic from the previous night’s dinner, and although I am beginning to be offended by the unnecessary repetition of that insult to my appearance, I am nevertheless impressed by the puppeteer’s ability to switch from host to host in what seems like the blink of an eye. Cool. Terrifying, yes, but definitely cool.

As I drive one knee hard into the boy’s crotch, I say, “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” which I mean even more sincerely than the regret I expressed for violating the sanctity of their second floor. He collapses into the
fetal position with a wordless groan that would most accurately be pronounced “urrrrlll,” and I assure him that although he feels that he is dying, he will live.

Mr. Harmony is standing at the head of the stairs, looking confused. But then his face hardens into a gargoyle snarl as the Presence invades him.

After scooping up the pistol, I bolt across the hall, into the room out of which the boy attacked me. I slam the door. In the knob is a button that engages the latch, but there’s no deadbolt.

Mr. Harmony tries the door, violently rattling the knob, just as I brace it with a straight-backed chair snared from a nearby desk. Even though the animal that Mr. Harmony most reminds me of is a rhinoceros, this trick should hold him off for a couple of minutes.

At the double-hung eight-pane window, I pull open the draperies, see a porch roof beyond, and disengage the latch. I can’t raise the inner sash, and I can’t lower the outer sash, because the window has been painted shut.

If I were Mr. Daniel Craig, the most recent James Bond, I would quickly kick out the wooden muntins separating the panes in the lower sash, squeeze through the sash without raising it, and be gone. But I am only me, and I’ve no doubt that a backspray of shattering glass would blind me, while the bristling end of a broken muntin would pierce one calf or the other, gouge open the peroneal artery, and bleed me
dry in 2.1 minutes. Another famous film character, Kermit the Frog, sings a song about how “It’s not easy being green,” and as true as that might be, it’s even less easy being a man who isn’t James Bond.

Meanwhile, at the door, Mr. Harmony doesn’t bellow like some beast from the African veldt, but he slams his shoulder against the door or kicks it with rhinocerosian fury.

Perhaps sixteen years have passed since I last tried to hide under a bed; and even then I was easily found.

Two additional doors offer the only possibilities. The first leads to a closet in which Mr. Harmony could beat me half to death with his humongous fists and then garrote me with a wire clothes hanger.

The second opens into a bathroom. This door
does
have a deadbolt on the inside. The bathroom features a large frosted-glass window directly above the toilet.

The Victorian tilework offers a field of pale green with here and there hand-painted white baskets overflowing with roses, all set off with white-and-yellow-checkered trim. It strikes me as too busy, even garish, but in the interest of staying alive, I enter the bath anyway and lock the door behind me.

I put the pistol on the counter beside the sink, disengage the well-lubricated window latch, and find to my surprise that the window is not painted shut. The lower sash slides up easily and stays there without
need of a prop. Beyond lies the same porch roof I had seen from the other room.

As events have unfolded since I first went snooping, this has seemed like a night when I would be well-advised not to buy a lottery ticket or play Russian roulette. Although now my luck seems to have changed, I’m still not in a mood to sing Kermit the Frog’s other hit song, “Rainbow Connection.”

Whether it is the sight of the loo or the excitement of the chase, I am suddenly aware that this evening I have drunk a beer, a can of Mountain Dew, and a bottle of water. Mr. Harmony has not quite yet broken down the bedroom door, so it seems wise to take the time to pee here rather than hurry onward and soon be hampered in my flight by having to run with my thighs pressed together.

With the personal-hygiene vigilance of a responsible short-order cook, I’m washing my hands as the bedroom door at last crashes open. I blot them on my sweatshirt, snatch up the pistol, stand on the closed lid of the toilet, and hastily exit the window onto the roof of the porch.

This is the front-porch roof, under which I sat with Ardys. That was only minutes earlier, but it seems like an hour has passed since she first began to talk to me.

The blush of dawn has not yet touched the eastern horizon. In the west, the moon discreetly retreats beyond the curve of the Earth, and it almost seems
that the stars, as well, are receding. Second by second, the dark night grows yet darker.

As the demon-ridden Mr. Harmony begins trying to kick down the bathroom door, I cross the sloped roof toward its lowest edge. I leap off, land on the lawn nine feet below without fracturing my ankles, drop, roll, and spring to my feet.

For an instant, I feel like a prince of derring-do, swashbuckler sans sword. Honest pride can slide quickly into vanity, however, and then into vainglory, and when in the manner of a musketeer you take a bow with a flourish of your feathered hat, you’re likely to raise your head into the downswing of a villain’s hatchet.

I need to get away from the house, but following the blacktop lane up through the hills and vales will surely lead to encounters with possessed members of the Harmony family. I have learned much less about the Presence than I need to know, but I have learned too much to be allowed to live. Through one surrogate or another, it will pursue me relentlessly.

It doesn’t have to possess these people to force them to do what it wants. However many Harmonys there might be—six big houses full of them, surely no fewer than thirty, most likely forty or more—the puppeteer can alert them that they are required to guard against my escape. They will obey out of fear that it will flip from one to another of them, disfiguring or killing at random to punish the slightest thought of rebellion. If they love one another,
none will flee and allow an unknown number of others to be killed as revenge for he who escapes. Freedom at that price isn’t freedom at all, but instead an endless highway of guilt from which perhaps there is no exit but suicide.

They will hunt me down, and I will have to escape with Annamaria or kill them all. I can’t bear to kill so many, or even one of them. The ten-round magazine of my pistol contains only seven cartridges. But the shortage of ammunition isn’t what prevents me from shooting my way out of the Corner. My past and my future constrain me. By
past
I mean my losses, and by
future
I mean the hope of regaining what has been lost.

With dawn mere minutes away, I can imagine no certain hiding place once morning light floods down through the hills. I need to hide because I need time to think. Before I know what I’m doing, I find myself running across the dark lawn and to the rutted track littered with broken shells.

In the absence of the moon, the ocean is as black as oil and the foam in the breaking surf is now the fungal gray of soap suds in which dirty hands have been washed and washed again. The beach lies starlit, and although the galactic whorls overhead contain as many suns as any shore has grains of sand, this strand is as dim as badly tarnished silver, for our Earth is remote, rotating far from the stars and farther every night.

As I reach the end of the unpaved track, underfoot
the shell fragments slide with a sound like the scattered coins of a pirate treasure, and suddenly she rushes past me, having followed me from the house. Without the moon to honor it, her flag of hair is less bright than before, but she is certainly the blond child whom I glimpsed previously, Jolie, daughter of Ardys. If earlier she followed me to the house and then listened to my conversation with her mother on the porch, that explains why, as she passes, she speaks to me as if I am her confirmed conspirator:
“Follow me! Hurry!”

Seven

Jolie is a shadow but as quick as light, and although she gets well ahead of me, she stops to wait at the mouth of the big culvert.

As I arrive there, I hear a man shout not from the beach behind me but perhaps from the houses that stand ten feet above the sea, and another man answers him. Their words are distorted by distance and by being filtered through the sounds of my drumming heart and my rapid breathing, but the meaning of them is nonetheless clear. Those men are in the hunt.

I hear also the engine of some vehicle, perhaps an SUV or a large pickup. From somewhere above and inland, light flares, fades, swells again, and sweeps
across the top of the embankment, over our heads, moving north to south. A searchlight. Mounted on a vehicle.