The night was cool, the mountain bathed in silver light. The moon no longer seemed like a ship on a dark sea. It made me think of a cataracted eye that might suddenly open to stare out from the rotted burial wrappings that swaddled a mummy’s face.
“Sir,” I asked worriedly, “when does it stop—the destruction, the revenge?”
“Never fear, Mr. Thomas. The entity’s rage will be restricted to this property.”
“Entity.” I let the word have its rhythm, pronouncing the three syllables distinctly, perhaps hoping that it would make more sense to me. I knew its definition. It just didn’t make sense. “Entity.”
“It doesn’t belong in this world, you see. Now that it has been released from its bonds, it will settle scores, so to speak, and then depart.”
“You’re sure?”
“Very.”
“Entity,” I said.
“This is all new to you, Mr. Thomas. Now that you’ve learned a bit more about the true nature of the world, you’re worried that from here on, it’ll be one damn thing after another.”
“Yes, sir. My very thought.”
“Take heart. It’s unlikely that anything this spectacular will ever happen to you again.”
“How unlikely?”
“Highly.”
“Entity,” I said again.
“Give it time, son. To settle in.”
“I’ll give it a little time to settle in.”
“There you go.”
From two hundred feet uphill, where she was parked on the shoulder of the state route, Mrs. Fischer switched on the headlights of the limousine, flashed them at me a couple of times, and then switched them off.
“She has the children safely gathered, Mr. Thomas. Not a one was lost or even injured.”
“Good old Boo.”
“Dogs,” he said with evident fondness. “I have always had dogs. As will you, Mr. Thomas.”
“You can call me Odd. I’d like that. Or Oddie.”
“Yes, Mr. Thomas. And you may call me Hitch.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
Mr. Hitchcock chose neither to dematerialize like an ordinary spirit nor to float swiftly ahead of me, feet off the ground. He walked at my side, one hand on my shoulder.
“When I was alive in the material sense,” he said, “I had many faults, as everyone does. At times I could be something of a glutton as regards both food and drink.”
I had no idea where this was leading.
“I remember once at the Chelsea Arts Ball at the Albert Hall, in London, I had much too much to drink and everything suddenly
seemed to be receding from me—people, walls, everything. I’m afraid I embarrassed dear Alma.”
“Sir, it’s hard to imagine you reeling around, out of control.” As a director he was known as a perfectionist and a control freak.
“Oh, I didn’t embarrass my patient wife in that way. I simply clammed up and found it impossible to engage in conversation, which made me appear to be bored and rude.”
We walked a few steps in silence.
He said, “I was raised by Jesuits, you know. They were fierce disciplinarians. I lived in horror of the prior and his punishments, so much so that, as a boy, I developed a morbid revulsion from any behavior that might be considered bad. I came to fear my own capacity for evil and error, which developed into a dread of authority that was almost phobic.”
Perhaps it was best that I not ask what capacity for evil the director of
Psycho
had worried about in himself. But then it turned out to be less than I might have imagined.
“As an adult, I loved to drive, to be behind the wheel with open road ahead. But I so dreaded being stopped by a traffic cop—dreaded it like death, Mr. Thomas—that I hardly ever drove. I left all the driving to Alma or hired drivers even before I could afford to hire them. Always questioning your motivations is a healthy thing, but
fearing
your capacity for doing the wrong thing, so that you retreat from many aspects of life, is a terrible error in itself.”
If I’d had a father capable of wisdom and interested in passing it along to a son, this might have been what it would have felt like.
I said, “My girl, Stormy Llewellyn, she was the best person I’ve ever known. She was amazing, sir. She believed that this life is not the first of two but the first of three.”
“Quite the philosopher for a young lady who worked in an ice-cream shop,” he said sincerely, not with a wry edge.
After the scene that I had just witnessed, nothing more could surprise me that night.
I said, “Stormy called this life boot camp. She said we have to persevere through all this world’s obstacles and all the wounds that it inflicts if we want to earn a second life. We’re in training, see. After boot camp, there’s what she called service. Our life of service will be full of tremendous adventure, as if you had rolled all the adventure novels ever written into one.”
“And the third life, Mr. Thomas?”
“She thought that after we finish service, then we receive our eternal life.”
I stopped, withdrew my wallet from a hip pocket, and opened it to the plastic window in which I kept the card. I could read it in the moonlight. In fact, I could have read it in the dark:
YOU ARE DESTINED TO BE TOGETHER FOREVER
.
“We got it from a fortune-telling machine in an arcade at a carnival when we were just sixteen.”
“Gypsy Mummy,” he said, naming the machine. “Quite a colorful device. I might have used it in a movie if I’d made a few more.”
I looked up from the card and met his stare. The kindness in his eyes reminded me of my closest friends in Pico Mundo.
An owl hooted nearby, and a more distant owl responded. Two ordinary owls in an ordinary night.
“I believe this card, sir. I trust it totally. I’m sure it’s the truest thing I’ve ever known.”
He smiled and nodded.
“What do you think, sir? I’d really like to know. What do you think about the card?”
“You’re not ready to leave this world yet, Mr. Thomas.”
“I don’t think it’ll be much longer. It’s all coming around to how it started in Pico Mundo nineteen months ago.”
“What must be
will
be.”
I smiled. “You sound like Annamaria now.”
“And why wouldn’t I?” he asked, which gave me something to think about.
Putting away my wallet, I said, “Boot camp. Sometimes, sir, the training seems unnecessarily hard.”
“In retrospect, it won’t,” he assured me.
Mr. Hitchcock walked with me all the way to the car. He pointed not to the front door on the starboard side but to the door behind it, which served the long passenger compartment, and the power window purred down.
I leaned into the window and saw the children crammed into the back of the limousine, a couple of them sitting on the floor. None of them appeared to be uncomfortable. They looked tired but awake, wide awake.
They were silent, but they were not afraid. Neither I nor they needed to say anything just then.
Boo was lying on the floor at Verena Stanhope’s feet. The girl gave me two thumbs up.
I withdrew my head, and the window purred shut.
“I’m not sure how we handle it from here,” I said.
“Mrs. Fischer will know exactly.”
“Yeah,” I said, as I began to take off my shoulder holsters. “I guess I’d be surprised if she didn’t.”
He pointed to the moon. Although the night sky appeared to be clear around that sphere, there must have been thin mist or dust at some altitude to diffract its light, for the moon had developed a
corona, concentric circles changing color outward from pale blue to purple-red.
“Quite a visual,” he said. “Nicely moody. You could do it as a trick shot, of course, but the real thing is prettier.”
“I still can’t get used to you talking.” I turned my back to him, and he unbuckled the bulletproof vest. “I sure wish we had time to discuss your movies. I have at least a thousand questions.”
“I’m not about movies anymore, Mr. Thomas.”
Turning to him, I said, “Will I be seeing you again, sir?”
“One cannot say.”
“Cannot or will not?”
He put a forefinger to his lips, as if to say that we must not discuss such things.
As he began to rise off the ground, he said, by way of good-bye, “Oddie.”
“Hitch.”
He didn’t merely ascend straight up, but also moved away from me laterally as he rose into the darkness, fast and then faster, until he vanished behind a remaining patch of clouds.
What a wonderful ham he was.
An owl hooted and another owl returned the call. Two ordinary owls in an extraordinary night, in a world unfathomed and perhaps unfathomable by the living.
ALTHOUGH THIS SHOULD HAVE BEEN A TAXING DAY FOR a woman of Mrs. Fischer’s age, she appeared to be fresh and alert as she piloted the Mercedes limousine down from the forested heights toward the flats where cactus and mesquite flourished.
Glancing at me, she said, “How are you, child?”
After a long moment of silence while I considered my condition, I said, “It’s getting easier, and that scares me.”
“You mean the killing.”
The guns, the Kevlar vest, and the utility belt were piled on the floor in front of my seat. My feet straddled all that gear.
“Yes, ma’am. The killing.”
“How many.”
“Five.”
I thought of Jinx. How blue the eye beneath the yellow contact lens. I wondered how much different she would have looked without the Goth makeup and the attitude.
Mrs. Fischer said, “You know what they were—those people. You know what they had done and would have done.”
“Yes, ma’am. And I only did what I had to do. But it was still too easy.”
“Maybe that was because they were such worse people than you’ve had to deal with before.”
“Maybe.”
We reached the flats, passed Jeb’s Trading Post, the clusters of modest houses, and then the sprawling complex of large buildings that might have been warehouses. At the interstate, Mrs. Fischer headed east toward Las Vegas.
Four of the children had been snatched from Vegas, but not the others. “Where are we going, ma’am?”
“Exactly where we need to go. You’ll see.”
After a while, we left the interstate for Las Vegas Boulevard South, where the night was splashed with neon pulsing-rippling-spiraling in different rhythms that somehow all seemed to suggest the thrust and throb of sex, where fountains gushed and waterfalls foamed, where the architecture promised elegance or wild delight, or both, where every nuance of design said that money was bliss and that godlike power could be bought or at least rented, where marquees announced the royalty of entertainment, where multitudes surged along the sidewalks, going to or from a show, moving from one casino to another.
I suppose those tourists might have been portraits of gaiety, rejoicing, sweet contentment, and happiness in all its shades. But where I saw those expressions, they seemed to be masks, and often I saw faces shaped by disquiet, misgiving, trepidation, confusion, and doubt, with body language that translated as anxiety and impatience. Perhaps it was my mood, the head collection and other atrocities still so fresh in my mind, but these people seemed like
refugees from places that had gone drab and lusterless for reasons that they could not fully understand. They had come here to find the fun that had been lost elsewhere, fun and brightness and freedom and hope, but they were beginning to suspect, still on some unconscious level, that this hundred-billion-dollar biggest carnival in the history of the world was not an oasis, after all, but just another version of the desert from which they’d fled.
At that moment, there wasn’t a party anywhere in the world that I couldn’t have brought down in five minutes flat.
Mrs. Fischer drove off the famous Strip, zigzagged from one long, flat street to another, found some hills, and at last pulled into the driveway of a substantial but welcoming house with warm light aglow in all its windows. A friendly couple in their fifties at once came out of the residence to welcome us and to assist with the children, all of whom were escorted inside. No names were offered, and I was not asked for mine, but they greeted me as if we had long known one another—as was true of everyone I would later encounter here.
I sensed by the way that Boo remained faithfully at Verena’s side, he might not be my ghost dog anymore, but might have attached himself to a new companion.
This expansive residence, on two levels, was a place where books were honored, as almost every room contained shelves of them. These people had built a shrine to family and to friendship, with clusters of framed photographs of loved ones on tables and mantels and in wall arrangements. Every space seemed to be designed for celebration, with numerous carefully considered groupings of furniture, cozy nooks, and window seats to accommodate easy conversation. Although the place was clean and neat and
tastefully appointed, you felt that you could put your feet up on anything, as you might in your own home.
I can describe what happened in that house over the next few hours, but I cannot explain it. No experience of my life has been so radiant, other than my time with Stormy in our years together, and yet so mysterious.
We were brought into the living room, where three dogs awaited us: a golden retriever, a Bernese mountain dog, and a Bouvier des Flandres, all of which at once began to circulate, like huge stuffed toys come to life, among the children.
On the kitchen island, on the dining-room table, on a side table in the living room were trays of cookies and little cakes, and the children were offered drinks, though most of them at first declined. They were still stressed, if not in some degree of shock. At least four of these knew that their parents had been killed. And the limousine ride here, to an unknown destination, had provided no decompression.
After perhaps ten minutes, nine children joined our group, not all of them the sons and daughters of our hosts, because the nine seemed to range in age from seven to ten. I will not say that they were all beautiful by the standards of our culture, which is obsessed with models and airbrushed celebrities, but they
were
beautiful to me, fresh-faced and glowing with good health.
The nine were the most socially adept group of kids that I had ever seen. They were neither hesitant nor forward, and certainly not territorial as most kids are, but spread out at once among our seventeen rescuees, welcoming them, asking about them, touching them affectionately in that unself-conscious way that childhood friends of some duration can be with one another.