One Door Away from Heaven
Page 48

Curtis is most interested, however, in their wealth of UFO lore, their rococo speculations about life on other worlds, and their dark suspicions regarding the motives of extraterrestrials on Earth. In his experience, humankind is the only species ever to concoct visions of what might lie in the unknown universe that are even stranger than what’s really out there.
A glow appears in the distance, not the headlamps of approaching traffic, but a more settled light alongside the highway.
They arrive at a rural crossroads where a combination service station and convenience store stands on the northwest corner. This isn’t a shiny, plasticized, standard unit allied with a nationwide chain, but a mom-and-pop operation in a slightly sagging clapboard building with weathered white paint and dust-frosted windows.
In movies, places like this are frequently occupied by crazies of one kind or another. In such lonely environs, monstrous crimes are easily concealed.
Since motion is commotion, Curtis wants to keep moving until they reach a well-populated town. The twins, however, prefer not to let the on-board fuel supply drop below fifty gallons, and they are currently running with less than sixty.
Polly drives off the blacktop onto the unpaved service apron in front of the building. Gravel raps the Fleetwood undercarriage.
The three pumps—two dispensing gasoline, one diesel fuel—are not sheltered under sun-and-rain pavilion, as in modern operations, but stand exposed to the elements. Strung between two poles, red and amber Christmas lights, out of season, hang over the service island. These are taller than contemporary service-station pumps, perhaps seven feet, and each is crowned by what appears to be a large crystal ball.
“Fantastic. Those probably date back to the thirties,” Polly says. “You rarely see them anymore. When you pump the fuel, you can watch it swirl through the globe.”
“Why?” Curtis asks.
She shrugs. “It’s the way they work.”
A faint exhalation of wind lazily stirs the string of Christmas lights, and reflections of the red and amber bulbs glimmer and circle and twinkle within the gas-pump glass, as though fairy spirits dance inside each sphere.
Entranced by this magical machinery, Curtis wonders: “Does it also tell your fortune or something?”
“No. It’s just cool to look at.”
“They went to all the trouble of incorporating that big glass globe in the design just because it’s cool to look at?” He shakes his head with admiration for this species that makes art even of daily commerce. With affection, he says, “This is a wonderful planet.”
The twins disembark first—Cass with a large purse slung from one shoulder—intent on conducting a service-stop routine that is military in its thoroughness and precision: All ten tires must be inspected with a flashlight, the oil and the transmission fluid must be checked, the window-washing reservoir must be filled. …
Old Yeller’s mission is more prosaic: She needs to toilet. And Curtis goes along to keep her company.
He and the dog stand at the foot of the steps and listen to a mere whisper of a breeze that travels to them out of the moonlit plains in the northwest, from beyond the service station that is now blocked from sight by the Fleetwood. Apparently the night air carries a disturbing scent that inspires Old Yeller to raise her talented nose, to flare her nostrils, and to ponder the source of the smell.
The antique pumps are on the farther side of the motor home. As the twins disappear around the bow in search of service, the sniffing dog trots toward the back, not with typical wayward doggy curiosity, but with focus, purpose. Curtis follows his sister-become.
When they round the stern of the Fleet wood to the port side, they come into sight of the weather-beaten store about forty feet away, past the pumps. The door stands half open on hinges stiff enough to resist the breeze.
The dog halts. Backs up a step. Perhaps because the fantastical pumps disconcert her.
On closer consideration, Curtis finds them to be no less magical but less Tinkerbellish than they appeared from inside the vehicle. As he stares up at the globes, which are currently filled with darkness instead of with churning fuel, reflections of the red and amber Christmas lights shimmer on the surface of the glass but appear to swarm within it, and suddenly this display has an air of malevolence. Something needful and malign seems to be pent up in the spheres.
Near the bow of the motor home, a tall bald man is talking to the twins. His back is toward Curtis, and he’s forty feet away, but something seems wrong with him.
The dog’s hackles rise, and the boy suspects that the uneasiness he feels is actually her distrust transmitted to him through their special bond.
Although Old Yeller growls low in her throat and clearly has no use for the station attendant, her primary interest lies elsewhere. She scampers away from the motor home, almost running, toward the west side of the building, and Curtis hurries after her.
He’s pretty sure this isn’t about toileting anymore.
The store sets eater-corner on the lot, facing the crossroads rather than fronting one highway, and all the lights are at its most public face. Night finds a firmer purchase along the flank of the building. And behind the place, where the clapboard wall offers one door but no windows, the darkness is deeper still, relieved only by a parsimonious moon carefully spending its silver coins.
A Ford Explorer stands in this gloom, its contours barely traced by the lunar light. Curtis supposes that the SUV belongs to the man who’s out front talking to the twins.
The silver Corvette, which passed them on the highway earlier in the night, waits here, as well. Intently studying this vehicle, Old Yeller whimpers.
The moon favors the sports car over the SUV, plating its chrome and paint to a sterling standard.
Even as Curtis takes a step toward the Corvette, however, the dog dashes to the back of the Explorer. She stands on her hind legs, forepaws on the rear bumper, gazing up at the tailgate window, which is too high to provide her with a view inside.
She looks at Curtis, dark eyes moon-brightened.
When the boy doesn’t go to her at once, she paws insistently at the tailgate.
In this murk, he can’t see the dog shuddering, but through the psychic umbilical linking them, he senses the depth of her anxiety.
Fear like a slinking cat has found a way into Curtis’s heart, and from his heart into the whole of him, and now it whets its claws upon his bones.
Joining Old Yeller behind the Explorer, he squints through the rear window. He isn’t able to discern whether the SUV carries a cargo or is loaded only with shadows.
The dog continues to paw at the vehicle.
Curtis tries the door handle, lifts the tailgate.
Disengagement of the latch activates a soft light in the SUV, revealing two corpses in the cargo space. They have been tumbled together in such a way as to suggest that they were heaved in here as if they were bags of garbage.
His heart, a sudden stutterer, spasms on the l in lub, and on the d in dub.
He would run if he were not his mother’s son, but he’d rather die than, by his actions, cast shame upon her memory.
Pity and revulsion would turn him away had he not been taught to react to every horror like this as though it were a survival text, to read it quickly but closely for clues that might save his life and the lives of others.
Others, in this case, means Cass and Polly.
Tall, bald, and male, the first of these cadavers appears to be a physical match for the station attendant who’d been talking to the twins a moment ago, Curtis didn’t sec that guy’s face; nevertheless, he’s convinced that it will prove to he identical to this one, though not wrenched by terror.
Billowy, glossy, chestnut hair surrounds and softens the dead woman’s features. Her wide-open hazel eyes stare with startlement at the first glimpse of eternity that she received in the instant when her soul fled this world.
Neither victim bears a visible wound, but each appears to have a broken neck. Heads loll at such unnatural angles that the cervical vertebrae must have been shattered. For these hunters, who thrill to the administration of terror and who revel in murder, such kills are unusually clean and merciful.
Necessity rather than mercy explains the simple wounds. Each corpse has been stripped of its shoes and outer layer of clothing. To masquerade as their victims, the killers needed costumes without rips or stains.
If the combination service station and convenience store is a mom-and-pop operation, then here lie mom and pop. Their business and their identities have been subjected to a hostile takeover.
The dog’s attention is directed once more at the Corvette. Her interest, though intense, isn’t strong enough to draw her toward the sports car, which she regards with obvious dread. She appears to be as puzzled as she is apprehensive, cocking her head left, and then right, blinking, turning half away from the vehicle but then snapping her head toward it as if she’d seen it start to move.
Perhaps in the Corvette waits something worse than what he found in the Explorer, in which case he’ll keep his distance, too. Instead, seeking to learn what he can by sharing the dog’s perceptions, Curtis opens himself more completely to their bond, and looks at the ‘Vette through her eyes.
At first his sister-become seems to see nothing more than Curtis sees—but then for just a second, no longer, the moonlit car shimmers like a mirage. Dream car in more ways than one, internal-combustion illusion, it is merely the suggestion of a 1970 Corvette, masking a fearsome reality. The dog blinks, blinks, but the sports car remains apparently solid, so she turns her head away from it, and out of the corner of her eye, for two seconds or three, she glimpses what Curtis can’t perceive from the corner of his: a transport not of this earth, sleeker even than the sharklike Corvette, like a beast born to stalk sharks with a vengeance. So mighty-looking is this vehicle that you can’t think of it in the language of designers or engineers, but must resort to the vocabulary of military architecture, because in spite of its sleekness, it seems to be a fortress on wheels: all compact buttresses, ramparts, terrepleins, scarps, counterscarps, bastions made aerodynamic, condensed and adapted to rolling stock.
With this evidence before him, no doubt can linger any longer. The worse scalawags have arrived.
His nerves feel as taut as high-tuned violin strings, and his dark imagination plucks them with dire possibilities.
Death is here now, as always it is here, but it is not always as engaged and attentive as it is at this moment, waiting for a third course in its supper of bones.
The hunters must suspect that Curtis is in the motor home. Kind fate and his clever sister-become brought him out of the Fleetwood and around the building to this moonlit killing ground without being detected. He won’t remain undiscovered for long: perhaps two minutes, maybe three if his luck holds.
The instant that he shows himself, he will be known.
In his place, therefore, he sends the dog to Polly.
Fearful but obedient, she trots away, retracing the route along which she led him.
Curtis has no illusions that he’ll survive this encounter. The enemy is too near, too powerful, too remorseless to be defeated by one as small and defenseless as this motherless boy.
He harbors some hope, however, that he might be able to warn off Cass and Polly, that they might escape with the dog rather than be slaughtered with him.
Old Yeller disappears around the corner of the building. Beloved familiar, companion spirit, she walks always with an awareness of her Maker—and she will need Him now as never before.
Chapter 46
THE PENITENTIARY WALLS crumbled away from her, but she restacked the stones around herself, and when the bars fell out of the windows, she repaired them with a welder’s torch and fresh mortar.
From this dream of a self-made prison—not a nightmare, scary only because she labored so cheerfully to rebuild her cell—Micky woke, instantly aware that something was wrong.
Life had taught her to recognize danger at a distance. Now even in sleep, she’d sensed a threat in the waking world that called her back from that faraway, comfortable incarceration.
On the living-room sofa, lying on her side, eyes closed, head raised slightly upon a throw pillow, chin tucked down and resting against her clasped hands, she remained perfectly still, breathing softly like a sleeper, listening. Listening.
The house lay enfolded by a shroud of quiet as deep as that in a mortuary after viewing hours, the mourners gone.
Deaf to the threat, she was nonetheless able to sense it, feel it, as she could feel the change in atmospheric pressure when the air thickened just before a thunderstorm flashed and cracked and broke.
Micky had settled on the sofa to read a magazine while waiting for Leilani. The evening waned, and Geneva eventually retreated to her bedroom, leaving instructions to be awakened at once if the girl paid a visit. With Aunt Gen gone, with the contents of the magazine exhausted, Micky stretched out merely to rest her eyes, not to nap.
The cumulative weight of the difficult day, the heat, the humidity, and a growing despair had pressed her down into that dream prison.
Instinctively, she hadn’t opened her eyes when she woke. Now she kept them closed, operating on the theory—so dear to every child and sometimes resurgent in adulthood—that the boogeyman could not hurt her until she looked him in the eye and acknowledged his existence.
Frequently, in prison, she had learned that a pretense of sleep, of stupidity, of naivete, of cataleptic indifference, a pretense of deafness to an obscene invitation and of blindness to an insult, were all wiser responses than confrontation. Childhood can be remarkably similar to prison; the theory of the boogeyman’s eye offers guidance to child and inmate alike.
Someone moved nearby. The soft scuff of shoes on carpet and the creak of floorboards argued against the possibility that the intruder was either a figment of her imagination or a trailer-park ghost.
The footsteps approached. Stopped.
She sensed a looming presence. Someone stood over her, watching as she pretended to sleep.
Not Geneva. Even in one of her movie moments, she wouldn’t be furtive or unnervingly strange like this. Gen remembered being Carole Lombard in My Man Godfrey, Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, Goldie Hawn in Foul Play, but she shared no darker experiences than those of Mildred Pierce. Her secondhand lives were romantic, even if sometimes tragic, and you didn’t have to worry that she would ever be in the grip of a Bette Davis psychosis per Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? or Glenn Close per Fatal Attraction.
Micky’s sense of smell seemed heightened by her meditative stillness and her defensive blindness. She detected the faint astringent scent of strange soap. A crisp aftershave.
He stirred, betrayed once more by the protesting floorboards. Even over the thump of her bass-drum heart, Micky could tell that he was moving away from her.