Odd Apocalypse (8 page)

Furthermore, those at the wall were not testing its sturdiness or announcing their arrival. They were fumbling their way along it, no doubt seeking a door, but not as ordinary men would seek it. The descending night did not fully reign. The land was light enough for a man to find his way. Their halting, thumping progress suggested that, if people, they were blind or lame, or both.

I couldn’t believe that a legion of the disabled had crossed the fields of Roseland to explore the stable or to confront me—for what reason?—as I huddled in it.

Whatever creatures threw their twisted shadows on the windows and knocked their limbs against the walls, I preferred not to meet them. And whatever they might want from me, I was not prepared to give it.

The first of them turned the corner and found the north door, by which Kenny had recently fled. It beat upon the bronze, not as if knocking politely for admission but as if determining the nature of the barrier. In addition to the pounding, there were questing sounds in the area of the door handle.

Wondering for the first time how Kenny had gotten those facial scars, I hurried from the middle of the stable toward the south door.

I didn’t want to risk making my way through this goblin night to the stone tower in the eucalyptus grove. I was even less charmed, however, by the prospect of remaining here for whatever hoedown these visitors had planned.

As I approached the south door, that great bronze panel rang with the blows of something seeking entrance. Being a mere fry cook and seer of ghosts, lacking the talent to teleport, I now had no way out.

To my left, the tack room couldn’t be locked. It contained no furniture these days, and therefore the door couldn’t be barricaded.

The ten empty stalls behind me offered no hope of concealment.

Beyond a door to my right lay the feed room, which was about twelve feet on a side. Because it had no windows, it was now as black as any dungeon.

I had seen the feed room on a previous visit. I knew that along the right-hand wall were empty shelves, and opposite them stood two five-foot-long bins, each about four and a half feet deep and four feet back to front.

The bin nearest the door had three lids on top, hinged at the back, and was divided into three compartments. Unless I dismembered and distributed myself, I wouldn’t fit.

The second had two lids but was one big compartment. Strongly constructed of heavy and well-joined wood, it was lined inside with tight-fitted stainless steel. Each lid featured a drop lip that set in a groove on the bin edge, making a rubberless seal, perhaps to keep the mice out of the grain.

Given any other reasonable choice, I wouldn’t have climbed into that empty bin, which as I recalled bore an uncomfortable resemblance to a casket. But if the insistent visitors currently pounding on the doors at both ends of the stable were hostile, the alternatives to the bin were to die in the tack room or die in the aisle, or die in one of the horse stalls, and I didn’t consider any of those options to be reasonable.

Whether or not my unknown adversaries had the benefit of eyes, I was as good as blind when I pulled shut the feed-room door behind me—no lock, of course—and felt my way to the second bin. I lifted one lid and pushed it back until the automatic hinge latch held it open at full extension.

I didn’t need to be quiet getting into the bin, because those who wanted to come into the stable to have a powwow or a chow-down were making those bronze doors ring like bells.

On the underside of the lid was a six-inch-long pull handle with a
knob on the end. If you were standing before the bin, you could lean across it and reach that peg to jiggle the hinge latch loose and then to draw the lid back toward yourself.

As I heard the wheels of the north door rumble in their tracks, I swung up and into this most inadequate of hidey-holes and lowered the lid, closing myself in the feed bin with the hope that its name wouldn’t prove to be as apt now as it had been in the past.

Sitting on the floor of that box, facing forward, I held tight to both pull handles, which were welded to the lids, hoping that if anyone came into the room and tried to open the bin, it would seem to be warped and corroded and wedged shut with age.

The south door, too, rolled aside, especially loud because the pocket that received it lay behind the back wall of the feed room.

After the doors were opened wide enough to suit the visitors, all was silent, as if once they had filed into the aisle between the rows of stalls, they just stood there. Doing what?

They were probably listening for any sounds I might make, just as I was listening intently to them. But as I was one and they were many, they ought to search more confidently, aggressively.

Another minute passed. I began to wonder if they had actually entered the stable after opening the doors or if instead they were still outside, at the threshold.

I might have thought the isolation of the feed bin prevented me from hearing them, but along the front of that long box were two rows of five holes, one a foot above the other. Four inches in diameter, each hole was covered with a fine-mesh screen, perhaps to allow air inside to prevent mold from forming on the grain that had been kept there back in the day. I should have been able to hear anything other than the most stealthy of movements.

The chlorine-like smell of ozone intensified to such an extent that I worried it might tease a sneeze from me.

Without faith to act as a governor, the human mind is a runaway worry generator, a dynamo of negative expectations. And because your life is yours to shape as you wish with free will, if you entertain too much anxiety about too many things, if you place no trust in providence, what you fear will more often come to pass. We make so many of our own troubles, from mere mishaps to disasters, by dwelling on the possibility of them until the possible becomes inevitable.

Therefore I told myself to stop worrying about sneezing, to place myself in the care of providence. Quick now, here, now, always, if we are in a condition of complete simplicity (as the poet said), hope and trust will more reliably keep a man afloat, while fear is more likely to sink him.

Silence upon silence … Just when I began to think the visitors had gone, the feed-room door opened.

Whoever it was didn’t have a flashlight. Evidently night had swallowed the day entirely, because through the screened holes, I could detect not even the faintest glow of sunset seeping in from the windows in the main part of the stable.

At least one of the pack shuffled across the threshold. The searcher seemed big, heavy if not tall, for there was a cumbersome quality to the movements.

The first lid on the feed box nearest the door swung up with a soft rattle and a faint creak of hinges. And then banged shut. The second lid. The third.

In a lightless room, the seeker had peered into the three pitch-black compartments of the bin and had judged them empty. Unless this individual was equipped with the latest generation of the highest of high-tech night-vision goggles, he could by his very nature see as well in the dark as any cat.

Firmly gripping each lid of my hideaway by its pull handle, I
strained to keep both of them down in anticipation of an imminent attempt to throw them open.

The searcher shuffled to the second bin, did not at once try to open it, but instead strummed the screens of a couple of the ventilation holes in front of my face.

If the darkness didn’t fully blind the hunter as it blinded me, the fineness of the wire mesh should prevent me from being seen clearly if at all. I was unnerved, however, to think that we might be eye to eye.

Distraction was dangerous. I needed to concentrate on pulling down with all my might on the lids, so that if my adversary abruptly yanked on them, they wouldn’t budge and would seem to be corroded shut.

Another strumming of the screens appeared to be a taunt, as if the hunter knew where I was and wanted to twist my nerves a little, perhaps to salt my flesh with fear sweat and thereby make me tastier.

Now sniffing. Sniffing at the screened holes, like a bloodhound seeking a scent.

I was grateful that the air was so redolent of ozone, for surely that would make me harder to detect.

The sniffing swelled into a vibrant snort, an incredibly noisy fluttering of nares and septum, not the snort of either a man or a dog, but of some predatory creature.

Bleachy ozone tingled in my sinuses, but I trusted providence to prevent a sneeze, refused to worry, declined to dwell on negative possibilities, and I did not sneeze, did not sneeze, still did not sneeze, but then I farted.

IN THE HOLLOW STEEL-LINED BIN, MY UNFORTUNATE eruption resonated such that it would have humiliated me if my first concern had been social acceptance. My first concern, however, was survival. At the moment, I didn’t have the capacity for embarrassment because terror filled me.

Narcissists are everywhere in this ripe age of self-love, which amazes me because so much in life would seem to foster humility. Each of us is a potential source of foolishness, each of us must endure the consequences of the foolishness of others, and in addition to all of that, Nature frequently works to impress upon us our absurdity and thereby remind us that we are not the masters of the universe that we like to suppose we are.

Even before I revealed myself by that indelicate sound—and just for the record, it was
only
sound—I knew that I wasn’t a master of the universe. I merely hoped that I might be the master of the feed bin, and in fact its
secret
master.

That modest ambition was now unfulfilled as the searcher in the dark scrabbled at the lid, tried to tear open one and then the other, and then both at the same time.

With desperate tenacity, I held fast to the pull handles, which were easier to grip than the edge of the lid with which my adversary was struggling.

As it strove to get at me, it not only snorted but also snarled and grunted and growled and even squealed, leading me to conclude that my suspicions were correct, that it wasn’t human, for it didn’t once say “sonofabitch.”

Others of its kind crowded into the dark room. An evil chorus of bestial sounds, their voices were nothing like those of monkeys, but the cacophony was equal to that of a monkey house in a lightning storm.

The first through the door continued to pry furiously at the lids as others began to pound on them and on the sides of the bin. They rocked my haven back and forth, as well, although it was too cumbersome and there was too little room for maneuvering to allow them to tumble it on its side.

I felt like a mouse sealed in a can and subjected to the sport of cruel little boys.

Because my years have been filled with fighting and chasing and being chased, more on foot than in cars, and because I have eaten far less fried food than I have prepared for others, I’m in pretty good physical shape. But already my arms had begun to ache from the strain of holding down the lids.

Remaining a positive thinker was going to get more difficult minute by minute.

One or more of this hungry crowd—if it was in fact a hope of dinner that drove them and not something even more unthinkable—scratched fiercely at the screens in the ventilation holes and then did more than scratch. The fine wire mesh slit with a sound like a pull-tab slider parting the teeth of a tiny zipper, which suggested that they either had knives or exceedingly sharp claws.

They could not seize me by reaching through holes as small as four inches in diameter, but they could poke at me with blades or sticks, which I expected them to do at any moment. If they could see to any extent in darkness, which seemed to be the case, and if the ventilation screens no longer inhibited their view of me, they would know exactly where to jab for maximum effect.

I searched the blackness in front of me for any hint of animal eye shine, but I could detect none. If not for their expressions of anger and need, I might have thought they were robot assassins whose stares were dead black because their eyes were cameras that took in the entire spectrum of light but gave back nothing.

Hands slick with sweat, my grip on one of the pull handles slipped slightly. My primary adversary reacted instantly to that minor fumble, wrenching at the lid with greater fervor.

My heart knocked so hard that its frantic rhythm was a tom-tom pulse in my ears, and even in the chaos of the assault upon the feed bin, I could hear my ragged breathing.

Since I lost Stormy, I have no need of my life. If I should be taken young by some divine act of mercy, perhaps sudden death by accident or a cerebral embolism, I would not care. But like most people who have glimpsed a scene from the latest remake of
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
while channel surfing, or have dipped into a Stieg Larsson novel on an unfortunate page, I fear dying in a prolonged and messy fashion that involves either torture or being devoured alive.

Now that I didn’t have to worry about revealing myself with a sneeze, the astringent scent of ozone of course faded a bit, so that suddenly I could smell the horde of zombies or rabid black bears or whatever they were. To call their stench body odor would be like describing the reek of a rotting cabbage as less fragrant than a rose.