Deeply Odd

Thirty-three

In my almost twenty-two years, I had encountered only one other who could see spirits, the English boy whom I mentioned earlier. I had known him less than a day before he had been crushed to death between a stone wall and a runaway truck.

Risking the gong, certain now that the moment for which Boo lingered in this world would soon come, I closed the door, dropped on one knee before the girl, and matched her whisper.

“What’s your name, sweetheart?”

“Verena. Verena Stanhope.”

“You see people, too, people no one else sees.”

Her eyes searched mine, and it seemed to me that the gray-green shade of them darkened just before she said, “Dead people, you mean.”

“I see them, too, Verena.”

Her eyes were celadon saucers but bottomless, of such great depth that she could take in the knowledge of whole worlds and have room in that gaze for still more.

I said, “You’re not afraid of the dead people.”

“No. They’re just … sad mostly.”

“You’re a strong girl, I know. It’s made you stronger.”

She looked away from me, as though praise embarrassed her, but then she met my eyes again. “Mister, I sure have a lot of stuff to ask you.”

“That will have to wait, Verena.”

She nodded and glanced at Boo, who had joined our huddle. “I’ve never seen an animal ghost before.”

“I suspect he’s been hanging around me these past few months just for this night. What this means, I think, is that something will happen to keep me from leading you out of this place, and the dog will be your guide.”

My words alarmed her. “No, we need you.”

“Maybe not if you have Boo. That’s his name.”

“No, you,” she said, and clutched my arm with her free hand.

“You’ve been given a gift, Verena, and it will never fail you. You can fail the gift, but not the other way around. You understand?”

After a hesitation, she nodded.

I said, “You have to do what you have to do, always and without complaint. I know you can. I know you will.”

Boo licked the hand with which she gripped me.

“We have to go,” I said. “Lead the other kids behind me. And if something happens … follow the dog. Wherever he takes you, don’t be afraid. He won’t fail you.”

The girl let go of my arm and quickly kissed my cheek before I could stand up.

I knew what she must be thinking, the very thing that she had earlier said to the others to calm them: If he has to, he’ll die for us.

“I will, if it comes to that,” I assured her, and saw that she understood the promise.

Into the hall, Boo first, then me, and then the seventeen with Verena in the lead. I turned right, toward the back stairs that I had climbed earlier.

From the crowd gathered on the cantilevered deck outside, cries of excitement rose, a swelling wave of sound that was partly a shriek of cold, savage delight and partly a wail of adulation, of veneration. Never before had I heard human voices devoted to such an expression, and in spite of its source, the roar was so inhuman that I shuddered as if I were as boneless as a sea medusa.

With a backward glance, I saw that several of the children were all but paralyzed by the deranged chorus. But Verena encouraged them, and pulled them, and with the urging of some of the more stalwart, the reluctant ones came along.

Before I was halfway to the stairs, the volume of the demented crowd subsided but swelled again, louder, louder and markedly more belligerent, more infernal, and more eerily ecstatic than it had been the first time.

The pandemonium inspired in me two feelings that I didn’t recall having previously been afflicted by simultaneously, stark terror and sorrow, terror at the prospect of falling into the hands of such people, sorrow at the realization of what they had lost — or thrown away — in their enthusiasm for the thrill of license, for the rewards of absolute corruption, and for the comfort of being in bondage to a master who would, for all their days in this world, provide for them anything they wanted, without admonition or rebuke.

As Boo passed through the stairwell door and as I opened it after him, the cacophony briefly subsided only to increase a third time, crescendoing to a Bedlam pitch. But then, as if an orchestra conductor had slashed his baton down to command a full stop, the roar abruptly became a silence.

Two seconds later, when Verena reached me at the stairwell door, the gong was struck. I could not conceive of its size, because the note was so low and so powerful that it echoed bong-ong-ong-ong-ong through my bones as if it would disjoint me, and the building around me rattled and shimmied as it would have done in an earthquake.

At the farther end of the third-floor hallway, one of the modern ceiling lights morphed into a chain-hung lamp with a conical shade. Over there, too, a smooth gray blandness spread across the plastered ceiling, across the wallpaper, across the wooden floor and carpet runner, creeping toward us.

Boo waited on the landing. I urged Verena to follow the dog, and promised to provide protection at the end of the procession. “Hurry, girl. Hurry!”

As the children hustled past me into the stairwell, I watched what they could not see behind them: another of the nine low-profile ceiling fixtures transforming into a crude hanging lamp, and then a third, the grayness seeping rapidly toward me.

The last of the children entered the stairs as the sixth hanging lamp appeared, and I would have followed them if a door hadn’t opened at the farther end of the hallway, perhaps the door to another set of stairs. The figure who stepped through that door was at too great a distance for me to see his face in fine detail, but by his height and weight and body type, by the way that he moved, I at once recognized myself, the Other Odd. When he drew nearer, I would surely see that he was my twin but for one detail: If Mr. Hitchcock could be believed, the lesser demon known as a senoculus would have three eyes clustered on each side of its head.

Although the cultists wanted the seventeen captives for the cruel sacrifices they had gathered here to celebrate, the senoculus wanted only me. If I followed the children, I would draw this thing to them; and I couldn’t guess what would happen then. I couldn’t risk that instead of providing them with protection, I would bring upon them their destruction with mine.

I stood my ground in the open stairwell door, watching the hallway in my world morph into a hallway in Elsewhere, the senoculus approaching just behind the transformation.

By the power of its will, the demon was causing that in-between realm to emerge and my reality to recede. In the stable in Elsewhere with its collection of heads, when I wanted to leave, I had brought my world to the fore and caused this one to submerge by a similar act of will.

In spite of my gift and the weird life that I live, I am not an expert in the occult. I have always thought it wise not to study that subject, for the same reason that it isn’t wise to make a party game of a Ouija board. Don’t knock on a door if you don’t know what might open it.

Nevertheless, I thought I understood enough about the way of such things to safely assume that the senoculus was native to the lightless wasteland and could also prowl the in-between world that I named Elsewhere. But it could not come at will into the world of the living, my world, unless conjured either by true believers and kept restrained in a pentagram by proper rituals, or unless it was drawn to take residence in one of the living by whatever action or weakness might be an invitation to possession.

Likewise, I was native to this world of ours and could, when I encountered a way station, move about in Elsewhere. But I could not go from Elsewhere into the wasteland. I was not Orpheus, the figure of Greek legend, who was able to enter Hell to try to rescue his beloved wife, Eurydice. Anyway, Stormy Llewellyn was not in Hell; I had no need to rescue her.

And so this entire residence was a way station. With acts of will, both I and the senoculus could make it emerge from beneath — or submerge below — the world of the living, to which I currently belonged, though perhaps not for much longer. In a contest between me and this creature, I suspected that its ability to summon Elsewhere around us was much more powerful than my ability to make that realm recede. We fry-cooks can be a stubborn bunch, but demons have a reputation for obstinacy that way exceeds ours.

The seventh ceiling light remade itself into a chain-hung lamp, and my pursuer drew close enough in the sullen light for me to see his wealth of eyes, my face grotesquely ornamented, and I recalled both the cold, soft feel of this thing and its inhuman strength.

The only advice that Mr. Hitchcock had had for me regarding the senoculus was Run, Mr. Thomas. Run. Even if he was not my guardian angel, which he had denied being, he was playing for the right team, and his advice should no doubt be heeded.

I intended to delay as long as necessary before stepping out of the hall and slamming the door. I hoped that good Boo would have led Verena and the other captives all the way down to the mudroom before I followed them. Although the senoculus apparently wanted me above all others, there was every reason to suppose that if it saw the children or smelled them — all that delicious innocence — it would be compelled to fall upon them.

In our previous encounter, this thing had not passed through walls as a spirit could, and it had not floated along swiftly above the floor as Mr. Hitchcock had done. I assumed that in Elsewhere, if not in its native wasteland, its means of getting from Point A to Point B were no more sophisticated than mine, an assumption that, if wrong, might lead to a hideous, cold kiss and to something worse than possession.

The eighth of nine ceiling lights metamorphosed into a lamp on a chain, the gray of faux concrete crawled closer, and the senoculus spoke in my voice as he strode forward. “Give me your breath, piglet. I want it now.”

I crossed the threshold, slammed the door, and descended only ten steps, two at a time, before I heard the door crash into the upper-landing wall behind me.

Even if the kids were out of the stairwell, they surely had not already left the mudroom. If I managed to plunge to the bottom of the stairs without being snared by the senoculus, I would bring it with me, and it would be upon those innocents before all of them could escape the house, where — according to my theory — it could not pursue them.

I hit the landing and flew pell-mell off it as the walls turned gray around me. The stairs were treacherous at high speed, my balance never that of a circus aerialist, and I caromed off the walls as I dove into that waterless well.

From behind me, with an intimacy that made the skin crawl on the nape of my neck, the thing said, “Let me suck your tongue, piglet.”