Odd Interlude (9 page)

The puppetmaster can marshal its army with shocking speed, because it needs no telephone. And perhaps it doesn’t have to possess its subjects one by one to convey the threat that I pose. Maybe it is able to broadcast an instruction to all of them simultaneously, which they are not compelled to obey—as they are compelled when their oppressor enters intimately into one of them—but which they obey nevertheless because the consequences of disobedience are so dire.

Jolie says, “Hold tight to me. We can’t risk a light for a while, and the way is very dark.”

Her hand is small and delicate in mine, but strong.

We push through the overhanging vines. They are cold ropy creepers that conjure in my mind the strange image of dead snakes dangling from the head of a lifeless Medusa.

As before, the drainage tunnel is as dark as any blind man’s world, and it is almost as quiet as a deaf man’s life. The rubber soles of our shoes extract little sound from the concrete pipe. The floor is not puddled with water through which we might splash, and no debris has washed here that might crackle underfoot. If vermin share this darkness with us, they are as silent as the rats that slink through dreams.

The air is cool and smells clean. In a drain, even one of this size, especially in the rainy season, which is now, I expect at least the faint scents of mold and spooring fungi, the fetor of occasional stagnant pools skinned with slimy algae, a whiff of lime efflorescing from the concrete. The odorless condition of this realm is no less disorienting than the blackness all around.

We stay to the center, the low point of the curving passage, which means the girl can’t be feeling her way along the wall. Yet she proceeds with confidence, never hesitating, walking at an ordinary pace, as if she knows that no obstruction lies ahead, as if all she needs to find her way is the cant of the floor under her feet and a draft so faint that only she can feel it.

I have in the past been in lightless places that were less welcoming than this and fraught with dangers, forced to crawl and explore blindly with my hands. Although this great pipe smells clean and seems to harbor no mortal threats, I find it immeasurably more disturbing than any previous dark place I have known.

Step by step, my nerves become more raw, abraded by the silken darkness, pinched by the silence, and what flutters in my stomach also creeps up and down my spine.

Halting, holding fast to the girl’s hand, I ask, “Where are we going?”

She whispers, “
Shhhh. Voices carry in the pipe. If they listen at the outlet, maybe they’ll hear. Besides, I’m counting steps, so don’t confuse me.”

I glance back, but the moonless night is still awaiting dawn. Unable to see the vine-straggled outlet, I can’t judge how far we might have come.

Jolie continues forward, and I follow.

From the moment we entered, the floor has sloped upward. Now the angle of ascent increases. Soon I sense that this tunnel is curving to the left.

Three disturbing things happen in the next few minutes, two of them in that perfect gloom and the third in weak but welcome light.

First my singular intuition, which if it could smell and see would have the nose of a hunting dog and the eyes of a hawk, tells me with steadily increasing insistence that this tunnel is not what it seems to be. I assume that it must have been constructed to channel torrents of rain from the shoulders of the four-lane highway high above or from a network of open gullies, with the intention of preventing erosion of the coastal hills. But this is not a drain, not a piece of common infrastructure with a public purpose.

Being guided by the girl through the blind and odorless quiet, I perceive a pair of truths about this tunnel, the first being that it proceeds to something other than manholes and drainage grates. Ahead will be found peculiar features, and at some far terminus
lies an immense facility of mysterious purpose. These perceptions don’t pour into me as a flood of images but as feelings. I am not able to feel them more vividly by concentrating on them, nor can I translate these feelings into clear details. In all its aspects, my psychic gift has always been more powerful than I can comfortably manage but weaker than I wish it were.

The associated truth is that the place to which this passageway ultimately leads is thought to be abandoned but is not entirely so. I have a vague impression of colossal structures, vast rooms that stand empty and others that house exotic machines long unused and corroded. But somewhere in those monumental installations, cocooned by rings of derelict buildings in which nothing moves except fitful drafts and ghosts that are nothing more than bestirred forms of dust, there is a hub of activity. That hub might seem small by comparison to the forsaken architectures that surround it, but my sense is that this secret core is itself large and bunkered, staffed by men and women as busy as the population of any hive.

The second of the three disturbing things that happen in this black passageway, subsequent to the pair of clairvoyantly received truths, is an ominous perception that something pernicious beyond comprehension lies ahead, something unwholesome exceeding all my previous experience of wickedness. A
flood tide of apprehension wells and swiftly builds into an almost incapacitating fright, a shrinking, anxious fear that some pure evil looms with all the power of a mile-high tsunami.

I believe—I
know
—that the unknown thing I sense and fear is not here now, but instead waits far ahead, in that fortified hub of which I can
feel
the existence though I cannot see it. This perfect blackness oppresses me, however, and because the girl seems quite at home in it, I am increasingly troubled by the thought that she is so comfortable in the dark because she is
of
the dark, never was the innocent child that I have assumed, but is one with the distant threat toward which she seems to lead me.

She whispers,
“We’re coming to a threshold, don’t trip,”
and squeezes my hand as if to reassure me.

Her apparent solicitude should steady my nerves a little, but it does not. The perception of some unknown but monumental evil waiting ahead does not relent, in fact intensifies. After hearing the story of young Maxwell’s murder by his possessed kin, after seeing lovely Ardys Harmony transformed into a homicidal puppet with a cleaver, I have no reason to dread this unknown menace more than I fear the Presence, the puppetmaster, but my intuition continues to insist.

The promised threshold is perhaps two inches high. My left shoulder brushes what might be a heavy sliding door, and my pistol, clutched in that
hand, rings loudly off steel. Through the sole of one of my shoes, I feel a metal channel inset in the midpoint of the foot-wide threshold.

“The beach is so far away, we can risk it now,” Jolie says, letting go of my hand and switching on a small flashlight the size of a Magic Marker.

The flash is welcome although inadequate, the darkness flowing in again behind the beam as it moves, flowing like the cloak of something cowled and hostile, figures of dim light squirming in the stainless-steel walls, as though they are the tortured denizens of some parallel reality separated from ours by a thin, distorting membrane.

The narrow ray reveals that we have left the pipe behind and have entered a rectangular chamber approximately ten feet wide and twenty long. The floor seems to be white ceramic tiles separated not by grout lines but by thin spines of polished steel. All other surfaces are stainless steel.

With the beam, the girl indicates a crowbar and several wood wedges of different sizes, which lie together in a corner. “I had to pry open the doors, and it wasn’t easy, I about thought I’d blow out a carotid artery. They were pneumatic once, I think, but there’s no power to them now.”

The breached darkness is more disturbing than the blinding gloom that preceded it. Even in cramped quarters, absolute blackness allows the mind to imagine a generous space, but here the ceiling is
hardly more than seven feet above the floor, and the sheen of the cold steel is sinister.

“What is this place?” I ask.

“Maybe the pipe behind us was just a storm drain a long time ago, before Grandpa even bought the Corner. But someone connected this system to it. Someone weird and up to no good, if you ask me.” She plays the light across the walls to the left and right, where the smooth steel is interrupted by double rows of inch-diameter holes. “I’ve thought about it a lot, and what I figure is this was first of all some kind of escape route. If people used it, they were decontaminated in these rooms—you know, maybe because of bacteria and viruses. Maybe. I don’t know. Feels right. But if you weren’t people, if you were anything else and you got this far, they trapped you here and instead of pumping in germ-killing mist or whatever, they instead pumped poison gas into the room.”

“ ‘If you were anything else’? What anything?”

Before the girl can respond, a rumbling arises, not unlike the subterranean roar of certain earthquakes. It seems to come from overhead, however, and as it grows louder, I look uneasily at the ceiling.

“Probably an eighteen-wheeler,” Jolie says. “We’re under the Coast Highway here, beyond the Corner.”

She leads the way to the end of the room, where four steps ascend to a second threshold. Here she has pried open another set of steel doors. Beyond lies a chamber identical to the first.

She plays the light over the architrave before stepping into that room. “You had to go through these two air locks to escape to the coast. They weren’t taking any chances.”

I follow her. “They who?”

“I’ve got some ideas,” she replies, but offers no more as she leads me across the chamber to another four steps that ascend to a third pried-open door.

Another big truck passes overhead, followed by lighter traffic, but the vibrations no longer disturb me. I am troubled now by an even stronger premonition that ahead waits an unequaled abomination, an evil so pure, so perfectly vicious and thoroughly unwholesome that it belongs in a deeper level of Hell than any Dante ever imagined.

Past that third door, Jolie says, “From here on, there’s power,” and she presses a wall switch.

Warm light springs from tubes hidden in coves along both sides of a corridor that is as long as a football field, about twelve feet wide, maybe eight feet high. Every surface is pale yellow, shiny, and seems to be seamlessly plasticized.

The air is warmer here, and it has an astringent chemical smell that isn’t unpleasant.

“When I first pried open that third set of doors,” she says, “it was a lot warmer in here than this, and the smell was a lot stronger. I first thought the air might be bad for me, like toxic or something, but it doesn’t irritate my throat or eyes, and if the stuff is
gonna make me grow a second head, it hasn’t happened yet.”

Compared to the rooms preceding it, this space looks welcoming, but my presentiment of evil remains acute, and I’m glad that I have the pistol.

The girl says, “The next doors are powered-up and locked. Can’t be pried open. All these barriers. So maybe there’s a million bars of gold beyond it or the secret recipe for McDonald’s special sauce. This hallway is as far as we can go.”

About halfway to those distant doors, a figure lies on the hallway floor. At first it might be mistaken for a man, but then not.

As we approach the sprawled form, the girl says, “Whatever’s beyond those last doors, if they
are
the last ones, there must not be anyone left over there. If anyone was over there, they wouldn’t just leave the thing here so long. They’d take it away.”

I can’t tell for certain how tall the creature might have been in life or exactly what weight, because it appears to have mummified in the greater heat that she mentioned and in the chemical-laden air. As a guess, I would say it stood over seven feet and weighed short of three hundred pounds. But it is radically dehydrated, skin shrunken over its lanky body, over its long hands, and over the once-fearsome features of its huge head, skin as wrinkled as a gray linen suit worn hard and until threadbare and never once pressed.

What I
can
determine is that it is a primate, legs
longer than its arms, more sophisticated than gorillas and other anthropoids, with a spinal curve like that of Homo sapiens, capable of standing fully erect. But there the similarity to a man ends, for this thing has long four-knuckled fingers, five per hand, and two three-knuckled thumbs per hand. Its toes are as long as its fingers, six per foot, with one thumblike toe in each half dozen.

“I call him Orc,” the girl says.

“Why?”

“Well, I had to call him something, and
Bob
didn’t seem right.”

I don’t know her yet, but I think I’m going to like her.

“Orc because he makes me think of the orcs in
The Lord of the Rings
.”

Its skull, to which the flesh of the face has been shriveled and shrink-wrapped by the heat, is nearly the size and shape of a watermelon. The eyes have collapsed back into the desiccated brain, but judging by the sockets, they must have been the size of large lemons, set not horizontally like human eyes, but vertically. The remaining nose cartilage and a mass of shriveled tissue draped over it suggest a proboscis like that of an anteater, though three hooked lengths of hornlike structures, each two inches long, bristle from that portion of the face, unlike anything an anteater can boast. The lips have shrunk from the teeth, which are reminiscent of a wolf’s oral weaponry. The mouth cracks uncommonly wide to
allow the fullest use of that wickedly sharp and still-gleaming array of cutlery.

The presentiment of evil that has had its claws in me for most of the journey from the beach has not faded, but the reason for it is not this cadaver. Whatever alarms me is behind the closed doors at the end of this corridor, either living specimens related to this corpse or something worse.

One more thing strikes me as important. This carcass appears to be as dry as a mass of parchment, but no stains or time-hardened residue of decomposing tissues mars the floor under it. Where did the bodily fluids go, the dissolving and putrefying fats?