Deeply Odd

Thirty-two

Initially, I thought that the children should be untied or the ribbons cut, but I quickly realized the advantage of leaving them tethered to those on both sides of them, wrist to wrist. If suddenly they were spooked by something, they could not scatter in a panic. I was more likely to be able to protect them if they remained together, less likely to lose one who, in unthinking terror, might run and hide.

I went once more to the window, to assess quickly the state of things.

Directly overhead, the architecture of the now-parched storm continued to come apart. Through holes in the roof of clouds, more stars appeared moment by moment, as if those distant suns were just now being born by the thousands.

Over the lake or where the lake had been, that other sky, awful and without one flicker, concealed beneath it what had come from some malignant shore to this one. Dark forms, moving and threatening within a deeper darkness, defied the eye and would not be defined.

As I have explained in previous volumes of this memoir, there are other spirits that I sometimes see in addition to those of the lingering dead, though they might never have been human at any stage of their existence. I call them bodachs because, when visiting Pico Mundo many years earlier, an English boy who apparently had talents akin to mine and who could also see these spirits called them bodachs just before he was crushed to death by a runaway truck. They are as insubstantial as fumes but not transparent, instead soot-black and without features, sinuous. Although they can’t pass through walls as ghosts can, they are able to slip through any crevice or crack, or keyhole. Their silhouettes suggest wolf and human both. They slink and slouch, glide and slither, and they have an interest in certain people, especially in those who will soon die by violence and also in those who will murder them.

I’ve long believed that bodachs feed on human misery, which is why they appear at sites of forthcoming mass murders, where deadly fires will burn, where earthquakes will shake down buildings on our heads. I imagine that they swarm in frenzied multitudes across hard-contested battlefields. They do not appear for single deaths or even for two or three that occur in, say, a car wreck. They are attracted to great slaughters and catastrophes, incapable of harming anyone, as far as I know, just psychic vampires hungry not for our blood but for our pain.

The prospect of seventeen tortured and murdered children should have drawn bodachs to this place, but I hadn’t yet seen one. If a horde of them gathered in the churning blackness just offshore, some other entity abided there as well, some greater power than they, to which they were subservient, some power that could inflict enormous suffering rather than merely feed off it.

Unlike that industrial building in Elsewhere, this place wasn’t surrounded by the lightless wasteland, but only adjoined it for the coming homicidal performances. Leaving by the back of the building, staying away from the lake, we ought to be able to find our way to Mrs. Fischer.

At the stainless-steel stage on the terrace, the cowboy shook an aspergillum, one of those bulbed and pierced hollow wands with which a Catholic priest sprinkled holy water. Whatever he might have been dispensing, it wasn’t holy.

On the second-floor terrace immediately below the window, more members of the cult than ever gathered, seventy or eighty. The senator spoke animatedly with a famous female singer that I had not seen here earlier.

Thus far, I had used one Glock exclusively. Six of fifteen rounds remained. I swapped that magazine for one of the fresh ones on my utility belt.

The children were standing, ready to leave, each of them linked to two others, except a boy at one end and the ponytailed girl at the other end, who each had a hand free. None of them appeared to be as frightened as I felt.

“I’ll lead the way,” I told them. “Stay close, two-by-two to keep the line shorter, unless you have to go single file on the stairs to avoid stumbling over one another.”

Some of them nodded solemnly, while others stared at me with eyes full of lamplight and determination, all of them past tears.

Our culture sentimentalizes children, and we forget one of the things that we should most remember from that time of our lives: Children know that this world can be hard on them, harder than it is on adults. They are physically weaker than adults, financially dependent, and in times of danger, nothing clarifies our thinking more than an awareness of our extreme vulnerability. The power of imagination is at its peak in childhood, and in a crisis like this, it allows no illusions, conjures in the mind a thousand ways that death might come, and thereby makes even the most vulnerable perhaps equal to the moment.

“You might see frightening things and scary people,” I warned them. And the next words I spoke were so spontaneous that it seemed they had not been spoken by me, but instead through me. “If you do see anything scary, then just say very quietly, ‘I am not yours, you may not touch me.’ Can you remember that?”

They nodded, some of them softly repeated what I’d told them, and then all of them recited it in a whisper. Some ineffable quality of that quiet chorus so moved me that my heart, having grown as heavy as iron, grew lighter again, and I allowed myself more hope than I’d been willing to entertain since discovering the collection of heads.

As I turned to lead them from the room, a snow-white German-shepherd mix passed through the closed door. My ghost dog, Boo, had once been the companion of the monks at St. Bartholomew’s Abbey, and he had been with me since I left that place less than three months earlier.

He came to me, and I lowered my left arm to let him nuzzle and lick that hand. He feels as real to me as do human spirits, as did Mr. Hitchcock, whatever the director might be in his current incarnation.

Boo was one of only two animal spirits that I have ever seen lingering in this world. The reasons that inhibit some dead people from crossing to the Other Side do not apply to animals, which are blameless. Since Boo left St. Bartholomew’s with me, I have suspected that he had stayed in this world after death so that I would find him, that he hung out with me not for companionship but because eventually I would need him in a crisis.

Perhaps eventually was now.

The sudden appearance of the dog, the sight of which usually comforted me, alarmed me this time. I thought at once that someone might be in the third-floor hallway, approaching this room, perhaps an entire contingent of cultists, though the Kens had implied that they would be conveying the seventeen sacrifices to the terrace at the appropriate time.

Pistol in hand, I went to the door, which was the only exit from the room, because going out the window would put us in the hands of those apostles of evil on the second-floor deck. I listened, heard nothing over the excited babble of the crowd below, opened the door, stuck my head out, and found the hall deserted.

When I turned, the girl with the ponytail beckoned me. Her brow was furrowed, and she shifted weight back and forth from one foot to the other, as if something excited her.

Leaving the door ajar, I said, “Come on, come on, let’s go.”

Because she was at an end of the line, she led the other kids across the room. But just short of me, she stopped and reached back as far as she could with her left arm, to keep the maximum distance between her and the second child in the procession.

She whispered, “I have to tell you something.”

Ken #1 had said a gong would sound, summoning them to escort the sacrifices to the terrace. I expected to hear it at any moment.

“Tell me later,” I said.

“No,” the girl said adamantly, although still whispering. “It’s really important. I can see him, too.”

“See who?”

She craned her head forward, and I lowered mine, and in an even fainter whisper that those behind her could not hear, she said, “The others don’t see him, but I do. The dog. I see the dog and how you let him lick your hand.”