Odd Interlude

Compared to her deep strength, I am weak. I am a fumbling fry cook trying to do the best he can with his strange sixth sense, but she is Joan of Arc, fighting against impossible odds, not for her country but for her soul — while Hiskott, in the reach of his power and considering his cruelty, is a more formidable enemy than even the army of England. Jolie, who began this war with the inadequate arms and defenses of a seven-year-old child, has triumphed merely by enduring, has raised the siege of Orleans every day for five long years, and it seems to me that I am in the presence of one who might be a saint in the making.

Now I fully understand why she has no fear of Orc. Or perhaps of anything.

At the end of the hallway, head cocked and curious, Boo stands before the sealed pair of stainless-steel doors.

Jolie says, “This time, with you here, if Hiskott tries to possess me while I’m beyond his reach, and he can’t find me … well, then he’ll kill me as soon as I reappear.”

“So you’ll stay here until I can take him down.”

“I can’t stay here forever and ever,” she says.

“And I don’t have forever. Today. It’s got to be done today — and sooner than later.”

She has restrained her curiosity until now. “Why can’t he get into your mind and possess you?”

“I don’t know, Jolie. But I always have been hard-headed.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“Maybe I just don’t have much of a mind for him to get his tentacles around.”

“Or that. He says he can’t access the woman with you, either.”

“That’s good to know.”

“Who is she?”

Getting to my feet, I say, “Now that is the million-dollar question.”

“You don’t know who she is?”

“I just met her yesterday. I know her first name. That’s a start. In a year or two, I’ll know her last name, if she has a last name, which she says she doesn’t.”

Rising to her feet, Jolie says, “Are you always a little silly?”

“I’m usually a lot silly.”

“It’ll get you killed in the Corner.”

“Maybe not. So far, being at least a little silly has kept me alive.”

“He’ll have them all searching for you, anyone who doesn’t have to be up at the diner or the service station. You can’t go anywhere in the Corner without being seen.”

“Well, I’m just an ordinary, everyday, nothing-special fry cook. People tend to look right through guys like me.”

She stares at me solemnly for a beat, but then she proves to be still capable of a small smile.

I would give just about anything to hear Jolie laugh one day. I don’t think she’s laughed in a long time.

At the end of the hallway, my ghost dog walks through the steel doors.

NINE

Before I leave the fearless girl with Orc the inhuman mummy in the subterranean passageway between the possessed land of Harmony and the unknown government-sponsored atrocities of Wyvern (which makes this already as unusual a sentence as any I’ve ever written in these memoirs), she tells me one more important thing that I should know before I try to beard the lion in his den.

And speaking of peculiar language, why do we say beard the lion instead of confront the lion? The image it brings to mind is of me crawling recklessly into a cave to use spirit gum to attach a fake beard to a sleeping feline of daunting size. Because no lion is ever going to be induced to play Abraham Lincoln in a stage play, there would seem to be no reason to glue a beard on a lion other than to poke fun at it and laugh at its humiliation as the other lions mock it mercilessly. I’m sure that Ozzie Boone knows the origin of that expression, and no doubt our finest universities are crawling with intellectuals who have spent their entire academic careers writing papers about bearding lions — not to mention thick, learned volumes about the derivation of such sayings as belling the cat and spanking the monkey—but from time to time I am saddened to think that I will almost certainly not live long enough or have sufficient leisure to research such peculiarities of language myself, which I might enjoy doing.

Anyway, the one additional thing of importance that Jolie has to tell me before I leave her is this: Although Hiskott is secretive and self-contained, he doesn’t live alone in the big house on the hill. Over the years, he has read the memories — and sometimes taken temporary control — of guests who stay in the motor-court cottages, and on three occasions, he has asserted permanent dominion over them and has taken them into his house, whereafter they are never seen again. In every case, these seem to be individuals who are pretty much loners, without families who might miss them. After stripping the plates off those people’s cars, Donny parks them in the deep shade of a grove of oaks, halfway down the hills between the motor court and the family’s houses, where they are cannibalized for parts as the service station needs them and are allowed otherwise to fall into ruin. Food and anything else Hiskott demands is brought to him by the family, but no one has cleaned for him in over three years; therefore none of the Harmonys has seen the inside of the house since the first of those three luckless souls walked zombie-like through the front door.

“So it seems they do the cleaning,” Jolie says. “But we’re pretty sure they aren’t just used like we are. He’s got some other purpose for them, which is why he never lets us see them.”

“Maybe he uses them as his Praetorian Guard, his ultimate protectors, in case one of your family should ever slip the leash and try to kill him.”

“Like bodyguards.” Clearly she long ago came to this conclusion and has given it considerable thought without finding it a fully satisfactory explanation. “But why wouldn’t he be just as worried that one of them might slip the leash?”

So many things in my continuing education are learned by going where I have to go and doing what I have to do. Therefore, my only answer is: “I guess I’ll find out.”

Jolie surprises me by throwing her arms around me and pressing one ear against my chest, as though listening to my heart to judge the strength, steadiness, and truth of it. She is more than a foot shorter than I am, so slight for such a strong girl.

I return the hug, suddenly certain that I will fail her, though since childhood I have expected myself to fail much more often than I actually do.

“I’ve waited five years for you,” she says. “I knew you’d come one day. I always knew.”

Perhaps to her I’m a knight in shining armor who cannot fail to win the day. I know that I am less capable and less noble than the knights of folklore and fairy tales. My only armor is my belief that life has meaning and that, when my last sun has set and my last moon has risen, when the dawn comes that marks the moment when I am born with the dead, there will be mercy. If thinking me a knight nourishes her hope, however, I might count myself a success for having done this if nothing more.

When we step back from each other, she has no tears to wipe away, because she is beyond easy sentimentality and too tough to cry for herself. Her eyes are lotus-leaf green, but she is no lotus-eater; she has survived not by forgetting but by remembering. I see in her a diligent accountant who records the puppetmaster’s every offense in a mental ledger. When the day comes to settle accounts, she will know what his payment must be. Although she is young and small, she will do whatever she can to help her family wring from him the full and terrible balance that he owed.

“I’ll do my best to get him,” I promise. “But my best might not be good enough.”

“Whatever,” she says. “You won’t just run and save yourself. I know you won’t. You run toward things, not away from them. I don’t know who you are, except you’re not Harry Potter. There’s something about you, I don’t know what it is, but it’s something, and it’s good.”

Only a worse fool than I would reply to that, for any response would diminish either her or me, or both of us. Such genuine trust, so sweetly expressed, bears witness to an innocence in the human heart that endures even in this broken world and that longs to ring the bell backward and undo the days of history until all such trust would be