Deeply Odd

Ten

The Prostar+ stood in the transformed garage as though it had eaten the Ford van. I wondered if I should reconsider my disdain for possessed-vehicle movies like The Car, Maximum Overdrive, and The Love Bug.

After a life of supernatural engagement, I was not paralyzed by this seeming impossibility. I scurried around the eighteen-wheeler to the side farther from the door that I left open behind me, sheltering there until I could get a glimpse, at an angle through the driver’s window and the windshield, of who followed me out of the stairwell. If one of them was the rhinestone cowboy, I might still get the drop on him. If that proved to be impossible — if, say, he appeared with the flamethrower that he intended to use on the children — I could retreat through the outer door by which I’d entered the building and hide elsewhere along the alley, at a position from which I could monitor events.

No one came out of the stairwell, but I heard two men talking. They seemed to be nearby, yet their voices were veiled. The words were distorted beyond understanding, as when the cowboy and the man with the battered-boxer face — semitransparent and unaware of me — had been in urgent angry conversation in the basement machine room at the truck stop.

This time, they did not appear even in phantom form. I had only their voices, by which I could not precisely place them. And then they fell silent.

I was concerned that they had become aware of me, as I had been aware of them in the machine room. Perhaps our circumstances had been reversed and I was semitransparent to them while they were invisible to me.

The next twenty or thirty seconds were as sharp as saw teeth, working on my taut-wire nerves, as I waited to feel the singular chill of one of these men passing through the space that I occupied.

Instead, I heard an engine turn over, not that of the ProStar+, but that of a much smaller truck, though it was muffled and hollow, filtered through some barrier just as the voices had been filtered. I could only assume that it was the white Ford van, which had become invisible to me.

A moment later, a rattling and low rumbling perplexed me for a moment. But then I realized that this was the distorted sound of a big segmented door rolling on its tracks.

I turned toward the alleyway, but none of the three roll-ups was in motion, all snugged down tight.

I listened to the unseen van reverse away from me, out of the garage. Following its departure came the rumble of the huge segmented door descending, although the door behind the ProStar+ and the two flanking it were already down and locked.

In high school, the spirit world frequently distracted me from science studies, and my interest in higher mathematics was no greater than my interest in self-immolation, but I scored well in English. I possessed the ability and the skills to write about the coexistent garages. But I sadly lacked the knowledge to intelligently express a theory explaining how such a thing could be — or, for that matter, why fire makes water boil.

If two garages existed in the same place, in different worlds or dimensions or whatever, I seemed to be, for the moment, in the world/dimension/whatever that was different from mine. And the two men whose voices I heard had evidently driven the Ford van away into the world from which I had come.

In Shower 5 at Star Truck, in the basement machine room of that same facility, and now in the garage of this industrial building, two realities crossed. Shower 5 Elsewhere had not been a shower room at all but a barren place, just as Basement Machine Room Elsewhere had been devoid of machinery, and this garage in Elsewhere was likewise a stark concrete box. I had been shot to death in the Elsewhere shower but remained alive in the real Shower 5. Now the rhinestone cowboy parked his truck in Elsewhere and, with some associate, drove away into my reality, perhaps fearing that authorities were looking for the ProStar+ because he had run me off the road with it — or for a reason I couldn’t fathom. This guy was able to do things that people failed to see, like shoot an innocent cantaloupe to bits, and he could step out of reality into Elsewhere when it suited him.

My skull hurt. My brain felt abused. I needed a plate of my own überfluffy pancakes to restore my full cognitive function.

The cowboy might have as many paranormal talents as I possessed, or even more. Maybe. Except … Well, it seemed to me that anyone with such astonishing abilities would not dress so ridiculously. Not that I’m saying that every superhumanly gifted person ought to wear jeans and sweatshirts or T-shirts, as I do, or all Ralph Lauren. But boots of carved leather with fancy snakeskin inlays? A black sports coat with red lapels and collar crusted with sequins, as if he was a Grand Ole Opry wannabe? The Joker, Bane, Lex Luthor, the Green Goblin: They all had better taste in clothing than this guy.

Besides, in the real world, as opposed to the worlds of comic books, a guy with paranormal powers would not want to draw attention to himself. Trust me.

Alone with the eighteen-wheeler, I decided to check it out. He had left a set of keys in the ignition, evidently certain that there were no thieves in Elsewhere. The driver’s compartment contained nothing of interest other than the string of red beads and little carved-bone skulls, which hung from the overhead CB radio.

On closer inspection than I had been able to do previously, I found that the long vertical latch bolts on the back of the trailer were secured by custom shackles. One of the keys released them.

When I opened the tall doors, a row of LED bulbs brightened along the center of the trailer ceiling, front to back. Immediately inside the doors, a two-panel stainless-steel gate blocked entrance. Into a series of vertical one-inch bars, a talented metalworker had incorporated three pentagrams, a Celtic cross, a Maltese cross, a Latin cross, an ankh, two swastikas, and perhaps a dozen symbols that I couldn’t name. Work by an artisan this masterful — not a weld showing, the steel regrained after construction, the dazzling design harmonious in spite of its disparate elements — would have cost many thousands of dollars.

Beyond the gate, the three walls, the floor, and the ceiling of the trailer were painted with the same symbols, sun-yellow forms on a black background. The lighting revealed no cargo.

In fact, it looked like a trailer that never carried freight, and if that should be the case, I wondered what purpose it served for the cowboy. Evidently, he wasn’t a true trucker after all, just a man who drove a truck. He must earn his living in some other way, though I doubted that, even in this transgressive age, anyone could sustain a paying career as a burner of defenseless children.

Although no lock was apparent, the halves of this gate were firmly secured to each other. I could neither pull nor push them apart.

Only as I began to close the doors did I suspect the trailer might not be as vacant as it appeared. Through the steel filigree issued a disturbing scent as sweet as incense and yet suggestive of decomposition, like nothing I’d ever smelled before. Perhaps it was an odor lingering from a previous cargo, but I had not detected it initially. With the malodor came a sudden chill, not internal to me, less than a draft, a mere breath, an icy effluence that, like spicules of sleet, prickled my face.

Convinced that whatever the cowboy hauled, he didn’t merely deal in loads of consumer electronics or goods for the Pottery Barn, I closed the trailer doors. Shot the long bolts. Engaged the shackles.

Although I can’t explain why, following exposure to the stink and the chill, I wanted to spend a couple of hours in a bathtub filled with Purell sanitizing gel, maybe take a few turns being irradiated on the carousel of a human-size microwave oven, spend an hour inhaling steam made with water from the shrine at Lourdes, and have my blood drained from my left arm, processed through a state-of-the-art filtration machine, and returned into my right arm free of all contaminants. Afterward, a lollipop would be nice.

I found myself backing away from the trailer and realized that my skittish heart was cantering again, as it had when I’d seen the drainage grate with the lightning bolt.

Suddenly the black-and-red eighteen-wheeler, with its sparkly silver striping, seemed as if it might be some kind of carnival truck, which had unpleasant associations for me. I know that most carnival folks are nothing like their public image. The majority are good people who just don’t fit in anywhere else, and they have a complex, charming social structure of their own. I read this book, Twilight Eyes, all about them. But I once had a bad experience with two carnies.

This guy named Pecker — I don’t think it was his baptismal name — operated a ring-toss concession. His woolly hair was teased precisely as high as the long beard that depended from his chin, so he almost looked like Siamese twins joined at the tops of their heads. He and his joyfully wicked friend Bucket, the owner-operator of cotton-candy and snow-cone machines, had hoped to establish an after-hours carnival concession, at 3:00 one summer morning, in which I would be gagged and lashed to a tree to serve as the target. The two of them intended to take turns throwing hatchets at me. I had done something that annoyed them. Fortunately, I am quick on my feet, tougher than I look (which I would have to be), and I was in the company of a friendly poltergeist that left them bewildered by beating them senseless with a hundred baseballs from the milk-bottle-pyramid concession.

Anyway, having at last gotten the peek into the trailer that I long had wanted, reasonably sure that my quarry had driven away in the white Ford van, I decided to leave this garage in Elsewhere. I intended to depart through the door by which I had entered, expecting that I would step back into my world as magically as I had previously stepped out of it.

Approaching that exit, however, I noticed for the first time that the only light came from the three overhead bulbs dangling in cone-shaped shades, none whatsoever from the three-foot-high bank of latticed windows above the man door and the three roll-ups. Only perfect blackness lay beyond those panes. I had arrived in the early afternoon, and no more than five minutes had passed since then. The coming storm couldn’t have seethed in so quickly; even if threatening clouds lowered over the city from horizon to horizon, no storm could have banished every last trace of sunlight. At the door, I paused, pistol in my right hand, left hand on the lever handle.

I sensed that opening this door would be as stupid as seeking the source of gas fumes in a dark basement by striking a match.

Intuition is the highest form of knowledge. What we learn from others can be mistaught by those not a fraction as knowledgeable as they pretend or by those who are propagandists with agendas. We are born with intuition, however, which includes the natural law, a sense of right and wrong. A lot of people rebel so continually against natural law that not only does that part of their intuition atrophy but also every other aspect of it. They strike the match, open the door, give their money to an investment adviser named Slick, and trust that if they are really nice to the thug with the switchblade, he’ll be nice to them.

Whatever waited outside this garage in Elsewhere would not be as easy to deal with as a psychopath with a knife.

I backed away from the door, glanced again at the high windows, wishing that the darkness would give way to the murky light of an overcast sky. This was as effective as wishing for world peace.

To look through those windows into the alleyway, I would have to climb to the top of the trailer, an easy enough feat. But the odor and the chill that had passed through the ornamental gate were fresh in memory, and I was possessed by the — perhaps irrational — fear that a trap in the trailer roof would open under my feet and drop me into a kind of trouble that I had never known before.

In need of a room with a view, I returned to the open stairwell door to listen. The quiet was profound, a stillness as in a vacuum. If anyone waited on the upper floor, he must be dead or Death.

Previously, the wall on the left had been paneled in easy-to-clean yellow fiberboard, and the wall on the right had been brick. Now they were both concrete. On the steps, the glued-on rubber treads were missing. The first time I entered this stairwell, before hastily retreating at the sound of voices, it had been in my world. Now it was in some parallel reality.

Some days I wonder about my sanity. A good cheeseburger usually restores my confidence. If that doesn’t work, I watch an episode of some reality-TV show like The Real Housewives of Wherever, and by comparison with the stars of the program, I feel as solid as a blacksmith’s anvil.

The stairwell seemed unnaturally clean. In the becalmed air and the cold light, no dust motes drifted in suspension. Not one tattered strand of spider silk waited for a draft to flutter. No desiccated flies or shriveled moths or single scrap of lint littered the stairs.

No cracks or water stains marred the surrounding concrete. Stepping across the threshold, onto the bottom landing, I felt that I must be somewhere outside of time, the only living creature in a place to which even the spirits of the lingering dead never ventured.

Warily, I climbed the stairs.