“And I heard shouting. It was your voice!”
“I didn’t hear that.”
Mrs. Findlay took another good look into his apartment and then stormed back to her place, muttering, “I should call the police on you.”
The gnome was still watching him. Ed ignored it as he went to the kitchen to put the gun back in its hiding place. He took the lid off of the cardboard box and stared at the one remaining packet of heroin in the box. Hands shaking, he put down the gun, opened the packet, and used a little of the powder—just a little; he couldn’t afford to waste it. Then he put everything back in the box and slid the box into its hiding place.
Stumbling to his bedroom, he sprawled out on top of the blanket as the heroin worked its way through his system. Sleep took him before long. But the sleep was not restful; dreams of death and darkness filled his mind. He was in a desert, looking out through a car window at bodies scattered across the dusty pavement. Two men wandered among the bodies, checking them, but all were dead.
Sobbing softly in his sleep, Ed left the desert dream and found himself in absolute darkness. A tremulous, high-pitched noise came from all around him, like a woman in terrible pain. He stumbled forward, arms outstretched, until his foot hit something heavy on the ground. A tiny light was flickering in the distance ahead of him. Another one lit up far to his right, and another to his left. Soon the yellow lights were all around him, like a sea of flickering stars. The lights sloped upward as they got farther away from him, as though he was at the bottom of a wide, shallow bowl with the lights scattered around the inside of it. The high-pitched noise rose to an ear-splitting intensity before ceasing abruptly, and the lights all winked out at once.
As awful as the noise had been, the silence was worse. A sense of mortal danger had begun to fill the void around him. A deep rumbling, like the footsteps of a terrible beast far off in the distance, shook the ground. He shivered and wrapped his arms around himself. A sense of wrong, of deep malevolence, emanated from whatever was stomping around in the far-off blackness.
Just when Ed thought he would die from fright, he had the impression of being pulled away to someplace else. The darkness was still there, but the sense of danger and malevolence was gone. He was suspended in space with no reference to tell him which way was up. A calm and reassuring voice spoke softly into his ear.
“Don’t be afraid.”
Ed shuddered as relief flooded his whole body. He felt safe now, protected from danger. “What was that?” he thought, unable to vocalize the words, but thinking them seemed to be enough. “There was something out there.”
“It will try to hurt you,” the voice said. “It will try, but you can win in the end. It can’t beat you unless you let it.”
“But what does it want?”
“Control,” the voice told him. “It wants to hold the world in its grip. You have to stop it.”
Ed struggled to understand. His brain felt disconnected from his body. “How could I possibly...? It was so... big.”
“The teacher can help you,” the voice said. “He can help with other things, too.” An image of the gnome appeared in Ed’s mind. “He can make it leave you alone. Go to him.” Another image appeared: a house on a hilly, tree-lined street. It was the house where he’d dropped off that girl.
“Who is this teacher?” Ed asked. The voice didn’t answer; it had left him. Looking around desperately, he found that he was lying on his bedroom floor. He must have fallen out of bed in his sleep. Ed rolled over and sat up, fighting a wave of dizziness, and looked around for the gnome. It was gone.
He staggered to the bathroom to splash some water on his face. As he blinked the water away, he was startled for a moment by his reflection in the mirror. His pale, gaunt face gazed back at him with red eyes. He looked like a ghoul. A skinny ghoul with sideburns.
That girl had said something about parties on Saturdays. What was her name? he thought. Denise? No, Doris. I think today’s Saturday. Ed sat down on the toilet and tried to pull his thoughts together.
14
A Meeting with the Guru
The driveway was full. Ed drove past the house, past a long line of cars on both sides of the street, to find a spot. The houses in this area were like mansions compared to what he was used to: colorful and ornate, with perfect lawns. Ed imagined legions of landscapers on hands and knees, cutting the grass with manicure scissors while the homeowners watched from their shaded porches.
He sat in the car for a minute, wondering if he should just turn around and go home. He wouldn’t know anybody except for Doris, and it he didn’t even really know her. But the voice in his dream had told him to come here, and it didn’t seem like the kind of voice he should ignore.
The houses were set well back from the road, giving the residents some privacy from traffic and the eyes of passers-by. Stone walls and shrubberies surrounded the immaculate lawns. Lights were on in many of the houses, but the house next door to Doris’ was dark. Ed didn’t like the looks of that place. He locked his car and walked to the house.
The house was big, but the party had apparently outgrown it. Revelers in various states of intoxication walked or stumbled on the front lawn. One couple was having noisy sex on the hood of a car in the driveway, oblivious to the small crowd of people who stood watching. That has to be bad for the suspension, Ed thought. Walking up the sloping driveway to the house, he once again contemplated leaving before anyone noticed him. But at the very moment that he lost his nerve and decided to turn around, Doris called to him from the front porch.
“Ed! You came!” She ran down the steps and collided with him, nearly knocking him into the drooling crowd of voyeurs. She leaned on Ed briefly, catching her balance, and continued shouting to him as though he wasn’t standing a foot in front of her. “I didn’t think you’d come. The G—my uncle said you would, but I didn’t believe it. Come on!” She dragged him by the hand up the steps and inside.
As Doris led Ed into the house, a young man with black, greasy hair and a grim expression glared at him from the opposite end of the porch. Ed met his eyes for a moment, but Doris was pulling him on ahead.
The spectacle out front did nothing to prepare him for what was going on inside. Ed had been to a few raucous parties in college, but this was the most unnerving scene of debauchery he had ever seen. The competing smells of sweat, alcohol, and vomit made him dizzy. Doris led him through the smoky, crowded foyer and down a long hallway. The rooms were smaller than he expected, or perhaps it just seemed that way because they were packed full of people. Ed hated being shorter than average whenever he found himself in a crowd.
Doris stopped just before the arched doorway to the living room, so abruptly that Ed bumped into her. She suddenly looked anxious, or excited; Ed couldn’t tell which. “He’s in here,” she said. “He wants to meet you.”
“Okay.” Ed didn’t see why she should be nervous over this.
“No... you need to understand. Don’t be fooled by the way he looks. He’s a very important man.”
“Important? How―”
She shushed him loudly. A man who had been seated on the floor in the living room had gotten up and was walking toward them. He was thin as a skeleton, with long gray hair and a deeply pockmarked face. He looked Ed up and down, smirking slightly as though amused by what he saw. “What’s this?” he said to Doris. Ed thought he was one of the men who had been sitting outside the house last time.
Doris was at least a foot shorter, but she looked up at the thin man with an imperious air. “Rat, get out of the way. We’re here to see him.”
Rat smiled, revealing crooked, discolored teeth. He looked at Ed in a slightly unfocused way with his disconcerting blue eyes, as if he could see right past Ed’s face and into his cerebral cortex. “You watch yourself, little girl,” he whispered. At first Ed thought he was addressing Doris, but the man was speaking too softly for her to hear. “A baby playing around giants.” With that, Rat brushed past and stalked down the hall
toward the foyer. Ed watched him go, wondering why Doris would hang around with someone like that. He shivered in spite of the cloying warmth.
A tug on his arm pulled his attention away from Rat. Doris spoke quietly, so no one else would overhear, forcing Ed to lean closer. “Promise me you’ll listen to what he says.”
“That guy with the teeth?”
“No, idiot. My uncle. A lot of people think he’s crazy, and they don’t listen to him. But he’s not crazy. He sees things differently, that’s all. He understands things.”
Ed was becoming increasingly curious about this uncle of hers. “I’ll keep an open mind.”
“That’s all he wants, to open your mind.” Doris spun away from him and walked into the living room, Ed trailing behind.
It was less crowded in here. A few people sat in chairs or on the jarringly green shag carpet, chatting or smoking quietly, but the far end of the room was occupied by only three people. Two of them sat on the floor; they stood up as Ed and Doris approached. One was a tall black man with a voluminous afro, the other a somewhat stocky white fellow with short, dark hair and squinty eyes. The third one sat between them in a wheelchair, regarding Ed thoughtfully as he shuffled a deck of cards. He had dark skin and long, ropy hair. Dreadlocks. Both of his legs ended just above where his knees should have been. He wore a faded olive-green military shirt and a pair of jeans with the pant legs folded back under his stumps.
Doris knelt before him, bowing her head. “He came, Guru, just like you said. I shouldn’t have questioned you.”
“You question everybody,” Doris’ uncle said with a smile, handing the cards to the white man to his left. “And I like you that way.” Ed detected a trace of an accent in the way he spoke, but not enough to identify his place of origin. Some Caribbean island, maybe. Doris beamed up at this Guru worshipfully.
Guru... The voice in Ed’s dream had mentioned a teacher. Was this the same person? Was he supposed to kneel, as the girl did? Ed stepped forward uneasily. The Guru whispered something to his attendants—or guards, it seemed—and the two men relaxed a bit. Unsure of what to do, Ed extended his hand. Doris looked at him aghast, as if he’d broken some basic rule of etiquette, but the Guru smiled broadly and shook Ed’s hand with vigor.
“Welcome, Ed. Have a seat. The girl chooses to kneel before me, but it isn’t necessary. Everyone has his own way of showing respect. Gumdrop?” He held out a paper bag.
Ed shook his head politely. This didn’t seem like a good setting to accept candy from strange men. Doris snorted and said, “Oh, just take one. If he wanted to poison you or something, he’d have had me do it.”
“Just one,” the Guru cautioned. Frowning, Ed took a green gumdrop from the bag and put it in his mouth. The candy tasted like spearmint and stuck to his teeth as he chewed. He sat down on the floor next to Doris.
“Rayfield,” the Guru said, “Please clear the room. We need to speak privately.” It took several minutes for the two bodyguards to usher the rest of the people out of the room. A few had to be lifted and carried outside. When they were done, the two guards returned to stand on either side of the wheelchair.
“ What do I call you?” Ed said, holding a hand in front of his mouth to deflect any stray bits of gumdrop, “Do you have a name?”
“Of course I have a name. You can call me Guru. I will call you Ed.”
Ed choked back a laugh. It seemed like bad manners to laugh at this man in front of his bodyguards. Especially considering the size of the bodyguards. “Fair enough.”
Setting the paper bag aside, the Guru said, “You and I have a lot of things to talk about. I’ve been looking for you for quite some time now. Thankfully, my Doris was clever enough to locate you.”
“Looking for me?” Ed frowned. “But I just happened to―” Ed looked at Doris, who was studying the floor. “Doris didn’t tell me she was looking for me.”
The Guru smiled. “I didn’t want to scare you. If she told you any lies to draw you here, it was at my request. Don’t blame her.”
“But why?”
“We have a friend in common. He’s the one who discovered you. Just tell me one thing: do you ever hear a voice?”
Ed blinked. “Do I ever what?”
“I’m thinking of one voice in particular. A man’s voice. He may appear to you as something that has significance to you—a dead loved one, a pet, a stuffed animal from your childhood. An object that has some strong meaning to you.”
Ed stared at the Guru for a moment. For some reason, he felt a strong urge to tell him whatever he wanted to know. Maybe it was the thick, heady air in this house, making him feel all lightheaded. But all he said was, “No. Not really.”
“I see. When he talks to you, what does he look like?” The Guru’s stare was so intense that Ed had trouble looking him in the eye.
“He’s... he’s a gnome. Like the little ceramic things people put in their gardens.”
The Guru didn’t relax his stare. “This form has some significance to you.”
“Eleanor, my... my wife, bought a gnome like that not long before she died.” Doris was watching him as closely as the Guru now. He felt self-conscious under her scrutiny. “After she was killed, it started... it sounds crazy, but the gnome came into the house and watched me. After a while it started to talk, but all it said was my name, over and over. That’s all it ever said for a long time. Then―” He trailed off.
“Don’t worry about telling us, Ed,” the Guru said. “No one else can hear.”
Ed felt the candy beginning to warm his stomach. He hoped whatever they’d given him wouldn’t mess him up too badly; he still had to drive home. He took a deep breath and continued. “Then it started saying other things, or trying to. And I started hearing it even when I couldn’t see it.”
“Is it talking to you now?”
Now that Ed thought about it, the gnome had been silent since he’d arrived here. “No.”
“What did you do next, after it started talking?”
Ed stared numbly at the carpet in front of him. “At first I drowned it out with music, so I couldn’t hear its voice. Then that stopped working—I could hear it even when I turned the music up, and my neighbor started getting mad—so I tried booze. If I drank enough, the thing would go away and let me sleep. But that didn’t work for very long either. I got desperate; it was around all the time, talking to me. So I... I...”
“You turned to more powerful medicine,” the Guru said. There was no judgment or scorn in the teacher’s voice, but Ed felt his face heating with shame.
He forced himself to meet the Guru’s eyes. “Yeah.”
“It’s all right. I won’t think less of you for it. I’m sure you’ve noted there are some chemicals at work here tonight. But there are better ways to make him leave you alone.”
“It’s an ‘it,’ not a ‘him.’”
“I don’t think what you’re seeing is really a gnome. It’s a person.”
Ed stared at the Guru for a moment, trying to make sense of this. “Do you know who it is?”
The Guru nodded. “The gnome is a person in disguise, that’s all. A dangerous person, if you don’t know what you’re dealing with, but still just a man. The real question is, why you? What is it about you that warrants his attention?” The Guru looked at Ed as though expecting an explanation from him.
It was Doris who finally broke the silence. “But who is it? How can he get inside Ed’s brain?”
“As for who he is, my guess is that he’s someone I used to associate with. This was before your time, dear,” he said to Doris, who raised her eyebrows and whispered “oh” as though she now understood everything. “His name is Nathaniel Gannim,” the Guru went on. “We had a falling out. As for how, it’s just something he does. He used to dabble in things like that when he lived here.”
“He lived here?”
“He was one of mine. When he started using his ability to torment the others, I made him leave.”
Made him
leave? Ed felt a surge of hope. If the Guru still had some kind of authority over him... “Can you make him go away?”
The Guru grimaced. “He’s stronger than I am, and probably too deep inside your mind for anyone to force him out without killing you.”
“But could you—I don’t know, talk to him?”
“He’d never listen to me,” the Guru said. “He has no reason to. This man is very special. Stubborn, too. He’s able to enter your thoughts as this gnome because the gnome is emotionally symbolic to you—it has great significance in your mind. That is how he works: he finds what is most important to you and uses it to get inside. I don’t think he could do this with just anyone, though; you seem to be uniquely special to him.”
“Eleanor bought that gnome for our garden. She loved that thing.”
“Significance,” the Guru said, nodding.
“But if you can’t make him stop―”
“I can’t, but maybe you can. But not the way you’ve been trying so far. You’ve been able to shut him out by turning off your brain with alcohol and drugs. This may have worked for a short time, but it will harm you as well.”
Ed sighed. “Okay, fine. Drugs no good. I can dig it.”
“No, no. You misunderstand. There are different kinds of drugs. Some of them open minds, others close them. You have discovered that drugs of the latter kind can numb you, make this gnome disappear. But in numbing yourself, you’re also killing yourself. The need for the drug will get stronger, until there is nothing left but the need. The first thing you have to do, if you want me to help you at all, is cleanse yourself of this numbing drug.”
Ed shook his head, partly to protest and partly because the room seemed to be rotating slowly around him. “But that’ll let it into my head. I’ll be leaving myself wide open.”
“This is only the first thing you have to do. The rest I can teach you, but first you have to do this on your own. Think of it a test. If you can cleanse yourself in this way, then you will have proven yourself ready to accept my help.”
“Why can’t we just move on to the next part now? You don’t know what it’s like to have this thing in my head.”
Forest of the Mind (The Book of Terwilliger 1) Page 12
