Odd Interlude

“Yes,” I assure her. “A monster knows it’s a monster.”

“Always and everywhere?”

“Yes. A monster not only knows that it’s a monster, but it also enjoys being a monster.”

She meets my eyes. “How do you know?”

Indicating Orc, I say, “This isn’t my first monster. I’ve had experience with all kinds of them. Mostly the human kind. And the human kind especially revel in their evil.”

Returning her attention to the teeth, the girl seems to consider what I have said. To my relief, she stops risking a bite and touches instead the creature’s large, bulbous brow, where the crinkled skin sheds a few flakes under her forefinger.

“Anyway,” she says, wiping her finger on her jeans, “there’s another thing I did, besides keeping from him the place I go when he can’t find me. I imagined this secret cave, hidden by brush, high in the hills, as far from the culvert on the beach as you can get and still be in the Corner. And yesterday, when he took me for a while, I let him see the cave in my memory, as if it were real, but not where it’s supposed to be. So now that he’s ready to kill me, maybe he’ll waste time using some of the family to search for the cave.”

“How can you be sure he’s ready … for that?”

“Too much is slipping out of his control. You know about him, so he’s got to kill you. Then he’ll kill the lady with you because he can’t control her. He was going to kill me in a day or two, before you showed up, so he’ll just go ahead and do it as soon as he’s finished with you two.”

Annamaria seems to have uncanny knowledge superior to mine. She says she’s safe in the Corner. Maybe. Maybe not. I wish I could be in two places at once.

“I’ll get him first.”

“I think you might. But if you don’t … the three of us will be buried in the meadow beside Maxy, with no coffins and no headstones.”

She gets to her feet once more and stands with her hands on her hips. In her skull T-shirt and rivet- decorated jacket, she looks both defiant and vulnerable.

“If Hiskott gets you first,” she says, “what I need is a little extra time while he’s looking for the cave that doesn’t exist, just a little extra time to get ready to be killed. I don’t want to beg or scream. I don’t want to cry if I can help it. When he uses my family to kill me, I want to be able to keep telling them how much I love them, that I don’t blame them, that I’ll pray for them.”

TEN

This is not one of the easiest things I have ever done: leaving Jolie alone with the mummified remains in the yellow yet nonetheless dreary corridor, which could as likely be the path to Hell or, worse, one of those airport passageways that leads inevitably to a coven of transportation-agency employees eager to strip-search Grandma, anal-probe a nun, and invite one and all to submit to a body scan that will trigger either bone cancer or the growth of a third eye in an inconvenient place. My ghost dog isn’t even here to watch over her.

On the other hand, she has been alone in this hallway on many previous occasions. She is most likely safer here than anywhere in the Corner. Besides, although she is a girl and a child, she has as much hair on her chest, figuratively speaking, as I do.

With the mini flashlight in one hand and the pistol in the other, I retrace the route along which she led me: through pried-open doors, across two spacious air locks or decontamination chambers. In the stainless-steel walls, holes like the muzzles of rifles take aim at me.

When I arrive at the concrete culvert that previously we passed through in absolute darkness, I pause to sweep the narrow beam over the walls. I am reminded of a maze of such drains about which I wrote in the second volume of these memoirs; in that place I was almost killed more than once. Of course, I can’t allow myself to be wary of one place merely because it reminds me of another place where I almost died, because just about every place reminds me of another place where I almost died, whether it’s a police station or a church, or a monastery, or a casino, or an ice-cream shop. I’ve never almost died in a laundromat or a McDonald’s, or a sushi bar, but then I’m not yet quite twenty-two, and with luck, I’ll have a lot more years in which to almost die in all kinds of venues.

I start along the inclined drain, recalling the original version of Invaders from Mars, 1953, in which evil scheming Martians secretly establish a subterranean fortress under a quiet American town, and actors wearing costumes with visible zippers up the back pretend to be otherworldly monsters, lumbering through tunnels on one nefarious mission or another. In spite of the zippers, it’s an eerie flick, a minor science-fiction classic, but there’s nothing in it as scary as half the people on any Sunday-morning episode of Meet the Press.

Before I’ve gone far, I come to the first tributary drain on the right, which is as Jolie described it: about five feet in diameter, navigable only in a stoop. Because the girl previously explored this branch of the drains and knows that the end is sealed, I have no intention of taking a side trip.

As I’m passing the opening, however, a noise halts me. Issuing from a distance, echoing along that smaller tunnel, arises a low rumbling-grinding sound as though some heavy metal object is moving across concrete. The flashlight beam doesn’t reach far, and just as I wonder if I’m hearing an immense iron ball rolling toward me, set loose by a malevolent alien with a zipper up its back, the sound stops.

At once a draft springs up, smelling faintly of aged concrete. This is not the stale air of sluggish circulation through lightless realms. It’s fresh and clean, whispering against my face, ever so slightly stirring my hair, as pleasantly cool as morning air should be on a January day along the central California coast.

If the upper end of this drain was previously sealed, it is evidently not sealed now. Who opened it and why are of immediate importance, because the timing is unlikely to be coincidental.

No further noise ensues, no slightest sound of anyone descending.

Although no one is likely to have seen Jolie and me fleeing to the beach in the moonless dark, though the girl has misdirected Hiskott — and therefore everyone else — to the nonexistent cave, I am not enthusiastic about returning to the shore. Any other exit from this system might offer advantages over the vine-draped terminus of the main culvert.

With the frequently but not always reliable intuition of a clairvoyant fry cook, I sense that this alternate route might be safe and that whoever unsealed this side drain might possibly be my friend or at least might prefer that Norris Hiskott die rather than that I die, or might rather see both of us dead instead of just me.

I decide to act without delay on this unnervingly qualified perception. After all, the worst that can happen is that I will be killed.

Proceeding in a stoop, darkness ahead and behind, gripping the pistol and the flashlight, almost dragging my knuckles on the floor, I feel like a troll except that of course I don’t eat children, more like Gollum than a troll, Gollum leading Frodo the Hobbit into the lair of the giant, spiderlike Shelob, except that I’m more like Frodo than Gollum, being led rather than leading, which means I’m the one that will get stung, restrained by spun silken threads as tough as wire, and put aside so that later, at my captor’s leisure, I can be eaten alive.

Somewhat to my surprise, there is no Shelob, and after it seems that I’ve gone nearly all the way to Mordor, my calves aching from the strain of walking in this gorilla posture, I arrive at the end of the tunnel. An iron ladder leads up to an open manhole through which falls the first pink light of morning.

When I lever myself out of the drain, I’m standing in a four-foot-wide concrete swale. Behind me, to the east, a long slope leads up to guardrails and the coast highway. In front of me is the county road that leads to Harmony Corner, which lies perhaps two hundred yards to my left. As night spills away to the western horizon and the flamingo dawn flocks more of the sky, I can see the quaint service station, the diner where several vehicles are parked as the breakfast rush begins, but not the cottages in their haven of trees.

If one of the Harmonys happens to see me, I’m at such a distance that he won’t know who I am.

The hum of a motor draws my attention to the open manhole, where a series of stainless-steel wedges suddenly iris inward from its rim and lock together to form what must be a watertight seal. I’d like to believe that