I shook my head. “Magic.”
“I’ve done a lot of reading on the subject. It’s the only thing that makes sense to me.”
“Magic?”
“Maybe that’s the wrong word.” He leaned forward, the front legs of his chair coming down on the porch. “All I know is that whatever makes us this way cannot be measured or quantified or explained. It’s not physics, it’s metaphysics.”
“Maybe we’re crystals that have been astral-projected into human form.”
He stood, laughed. “Maybe.” He looked at his watch. “Look, it’s getting late; I gotta go. I have to work tomorrow.”
“Me, too. For no pay.”
“It’s a weird world.”
We walked through the house, he said good-bye to Jane, and I accompanied him out the front door to his car. “Are you really leaving?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Probably.”
“Let me know when you decide.”
“Of course.”
I watched him pull away, watched his taillights disappear around the corner. I was not tired, and I didn’t feel like staying inside and watching TV. Neither did Jane, and when she finished washing the dishes, we went for a walk. We ended up in my old neighborhood, standing on a small dock to which was anchored a child’s sailboat.
We looked out over the small man-made lake that wound between the condos. Jane put an arm around me, leaned against my shoulder. “Remember when we used to go out to the pier at Newport?”
“And eat at Ruby’s?”
“Cheeseburger and onion rings,” she said, smiling. “That sounds good right now.”
“Clam chowder at the Crab Cooker sounds better.”
We were silent for a moment.
“I guess we’ll never live in Laguna Beach,” she said quietly.
A mosquito buzzed by my head, and I slapped at it. The condos across the water looked cheap to me all of a sudden, the lake pathetic. I thought of the deep darkness of the ocean night, the clusters of lights that marked the beach towns visible from the pier, and I felt unaccountably sad. I felt almost like crying. More than anything else, I wished things were different, wished we were back in our old life in our old apartment and none of this had ever happened.
I wished we weren’t Ignored.
I turned, pulled her with me back toward the sidewalk. “Come on,” I said. “It’s getting late. Let’s go home.
EIGHT
The murderer came into the office in the middle of the morning, getting off the elevator and walking calmly over to the front desk.
I caught him out of the corner of my eye, a brightly colored blur, and I glanced up to see a short, heavyset man in a clown suit and mime makeup open the small swinging gate that separated the public waiting area from our work area.
My stomach lurched; my mouth suddenly went dry. Even before I saw the knife in the clown’s hands, I knew why he was here. My first thought was that someone had been allowed into Thompson who hadn’t yet killed his boss and that that person was going to kill whoever was his boss here. But I didn’t recognize the clown, and I knew he didn’t work on this floor.
And then I noticed that no one was looking at him.
No one saw him.
All this I thought in the space of a few seconds, the time it took the clown to walk up to Ray Lang’s desk, put a hand over Ray’s mouth, and draw the knife across his throat.
I lurched to my feet, knocking over my chair, trying to scream but unable to get out any sound at all.
He drew the knife slowly, expertly. The blood did not shoot, did not squirt, but oozed and flowed from the thin opening, spreading down over Ray’s white shirt in a continuous wave. Hand still holding Ray’s mouth shut, the man quickly shoved his knife first in one of Ray’s eyes, then the other. The blade emerged with pieces of white and green goo stuck to the otherwise red steel.
The man wiped the blade off on Ray’s hair before taking his hand from the planning inspector’s mouth. The noise that issued from Ray’s bloody throat was more a gurgle than a scream, but by now he was flailing around wildly enough that he had gotten the attention of everyone in the office.
The clown grinned at me, did a little jig. I looked into his eyes, and I knew that he was insane. Even beneath the clown makeup, I could see the craziness. This was not the temporary insanity of Philipe. This was the real thing. And it scared the shit out of me.
“There he is!” I cried, pointing, finally able to move, to act, to speak. People were running over to where Ray was slipping bloodily out of his chair, but no one heard me, no one paid any attention to me.
And no one saw the murderer.
“You’re almost there,” the man said, and his voice was a crazed raspy whisper. He laughed, a sound like fingernails grating on a chalkboard. “Oh, the things you’ll see….”
And then he was gone. Vanished. Where he had been there was nothing, only clear space.
The air felt heavy, filled with the burnt-rubber smell of drilled teeth.
I looked around wildly, ran to the elevator, waited for it to open, all the while scanning the room. But there was nothing. And when the elevator door did not open, when it was obvious that the murderer had not simply turned invisible and made for the exit but had actually disappeared, I hurried back behind the counter to where Ray lay dying.
Paramedics arrived, performed emergency lifesaving procedures, rushed Ray to the hospital, but he was dead even before he left the floor, and they were unable to revive him.
After Ray’s departure, I became the center of attention. The police were there, photographing the chair, taking down statements, and a crowd gathered as I gave my story. The same people who had been ignoring me as I screamed and pointed at the murderer were now all ears as I related what I’d seen, what had happened. I recalled what the clown had said to me: “You’re almost there.”
What did that mean?
But I knew what that meant.
I was becoming Ignored here in Thompson.
Like he was.
The Ignored of the Ignored.
I remembered as a child going on a ride at Disneyland called Adventures Through Inner Space. On the ride, you were supposed to feel as though you had been shrunk by the Mighty Microscope and were entering the invisible world of the atom. I wondered now if I was in just such an invisible world, a world that most people couldn’t see, that existed concurrently with the visible universe.
Maybe the murderer was a ghost.
I wondered about that, too. People throughout the years, throughout the centuries, who claimed to have seen ghosts? Maybe they’d just seen an Ignored Ignored. A man like that would be two steps removed from normal human life. Perhaps there were no ghosts. Perhaps there was no afterlife. Maybe we just ceased to exist when we died. Maybe the whole concept of life after death had originated with a misinterpretation of Ignored sightings.
I wished there was a history of our people, a history of the Ignored.
Ralph got off the elevator and hurried immediately over to where I was talking to the police. “I was at the bank when I heard. What happened?” he demanded.
The cop questioning me gave him a brief overview of what had occurred.
Ralph looked at me. “You’re the only one who saw anything?”
“I guess so.”
“We need you,” the mayor said. “For whatever reason, you can see this guy. You can help us track him.”
For whatever reason.
I knew the reason, and I was frightened. It was getting worse. Like some progressive disease. At one time, I had had normal friends, participated in normal society. But I had faded into the ranks of the Ignored. Now I seemed to be fading even more. At the moment, I appeared able to bridge the gap between the regular Ignored and this guy—whoever, whatever he was. But would I eventually become like him, invisible to everybody? Would James and Jane and everyone else I knew stop thinking about me, stop noticing me, and one day look around and find that I was not there, that they could
no longer see me?
No, I told myself. It didn’t work that way. I wouldn’t become invisible. I wouldn’t let myself become invisible.
“He’s crazy,” I said. “He’s insane.”
“Don’t worry. You won’t be in any danger. Someone will always be with you. You don’t have to hunt him down, just track him. Like a bloodhound.”
“That’s not what I’m worried about.”
“We’ll take him out,” the cop said. “He won’t kill again.”
“That’s not what I’m worried about,” I said.
“Then what are you worried about?”
I looked away from them, unable or unwilling to share with them my true fears. “I don’t know,” I lied.
NINE
He struck again, an hour later, killing Teddy Howard in the church and leaving the reverend’s slit-open body to flop around on the altar like a gutted fish until unmerciful death arrived.
TEN
The mood of the city changed overnight. Instantly, everyone became tense, nervous, on edge. It was like the Night Stalker days back in Southern California. Thompson had never had serial killings before. There was a crime rate, of course—with rape and domestic violence statistically on a par with the national average. But there had never been anything like this, and when the police composite based on my description was printed in the paper and shown on the Thompson channel, the fear factor jumped up considerably. The clown costume struck a chord in everyone, and the fact that there was an Ignored out there who was ignored even by us, who was trapped in that boss-killing initiation mode, scared everyone. Gun sales shot through the roof. Even Jane started sleeping with a baseball bat next to the bed.
And yet…
And yet I could not get as worked up about the killer as everyone else. I had seen him, I knew how dangerously deranged he was, but it was not the fact that he was a murderer that disturbed me.
It was the fact that no one but me had seen him.
You’re almost there.
I had been Ignored at Automated Interface, at UC Brea, perhaps for my entire life. I could deal with that. I had accepted the fact that I was different from normal people. But I could not accept the idea that I was different from the other Ignored.
That I was getting worse.
I went to work the next day, and I noticed for the first time that the nods and smiles I had once gotten from my coworkers at city hall were no longer forthcoming. How long had this been going on? Had I been fading away for a while now and just not noticed it?
I tried to think about what I discussed with my coworkers and friends. Was it any more boring than the conversational topics of others? Was I that forgettable even here? Again, my thoughts on being Ignored were swinging back again. Maybe I wasn’t average because I was Ignored. Maybe I was Ignored because I was average. Maybe I had brought this on myself. Maybe there was something I could do, some way I could change my behavior or personality, that would reverse the process.
I was temporarily transferred from the planning department to the police department. Here I was not ignored. I was an important detecting device in the eyes of the mayor and the chief, and I was treated as though I were Hercule Poirot.
The only problem was that there was really nothing to go on, nothing that could be done to facilitate the capture of this lunatic. I could only walk around town, followed by two detectives, and see if I could spot him anywhere. For an entire week, I spent my days walking through offices and stores and shopping centers, my eyes peeled for the clown or for someone who looked like he could be the clown. I rode with patrolmen up and down neighborhoods. I looked through books of mug shots.
Nothing.
And I became more and more uneasy. Even while walking, I noticed that I was not noticed, and the feeling was eerily reminiscent of those early days when I’d first discovered that I was Ignored. I thought of Paul and the way we’d found him at Yosemite, naked and crazy and yelling obscenities into crowds of people at the top of his lungs. Was that what had happened to the clown? Had he just snapped under the pressure of such unremitting isolation?
Was that what would happen to me?
You’re almost there.
I said nothing of my fears to Jane. I knew that was wrong. I knew I was falling into the same pattern as last time. I should be sharing everything with her. We should be facing all problems together. But for some reason I could not bring myself to confide in her. She would probably be even more frantic than I was. And I didn’t want her to go through the hell I was going through.
But at the same time, I did want to talk to her. Desperately.
I didn’t know what was the matter with me.
I told her I had witnessed the murder and had been the only one to see the murderer. But I did not tell her why. I did not tell her what had really happened.
The creepiest thing that week was my meeting with Steve. He was a full-fledged lieutenant now, and the chief had put him in charge of coordinating security at city hall. On the off chance that the murderer might strike again at the scene of his original crime, the chief was asking for a maximum ten-second response time to a disturbance anywhere in the building. This way he figured the murderer could be caught in the act.
Steve was asked to implement this policy, and he met with me in order to more accurately determine how quickly the murderer had moved from the elevator to Ray’s desk, how distracted he had been by the other people in the office, how quickly he had disappeared after being spotted. He gave me a no-nonsense official phone call on Thursday asking me to meet him in the planning department before lunch, and after spending the morning on neighborhood patrol, I arrived on the second floor at eleven-thirty. Steve was already there.
And he didn’t recognize me.
I knew it instantly, although it took a few moments of by-the-book Q&A for the fact to really sink in.
He did not know who I was.
We had spent all that time together as terrorists, as colleagues, friends, brothers, and now he did not even remember me. He thought he was meeting me for the first time, that I was simply a faceless bureaucrat from city hall, and it was unnerving to speak to him, to know him so intimately when he obviously didn’t know me at all. I was tempted to tell him, to remind him, to prod his memory, but I did not, and he left without realizing who I was.
There were no more murders, no assaults, no sightings, and gradually the police began to lose interest in me. I was transferred back to city hall, told to keep my eyes open and report anything suspicious, and was promptly forgotten about. In the planning department, my return was not noticed or remarked upon.
I had completed my first week of work since returning when I saw the mayor coming toward me across the first-floor lobby on my way out. I waved to him. “How’s the search going?” I asked. “Any leads?”
He said nothing, looked at me, past me, through me, and continued walking.
ELEVEN
When I awoke the next morning, there was a new tree outside our bedroom window.
I stood in front of the window, staring, a clenched, tight feeling in my chest. The tree was not a small sapling or a potted palm that someone had placed in our front yard. It was a full-sized sycamore, taller than our house, growing, deep-rooted, in the center of the lawn.
It had purple leaves.
I didn’t know what it was or what it meant, I only knew that it frightened me to the bone. I stood there, unable to take my eyes off the sight, and as I stared I saw the front door of the house open and Jane walk across the lawn to get the newspaper from the front sidewalk.
She walked through the tree, as if it weren’t there.
The clenched feeling grew, spreading within me, and I realized that I was holding my breath. I forced myself to breathe. Jane picked up the paper, walked back through the tree and into the house.
Was it an optical illusion? No, the tree was too clear and definite, too there, for it to be a mere image.
Was I crazy? Maybe. But I didn’t think so.
>
Oh, the things you’ll see….
I quickly pulled on a pair of jeans and hurried outside. The tree was still there, big as life and twice as colorful, and I walked up to it, reached out to touch it.
And my hand passed through the bark.
I felt nothing, no warmness, no coldness, no displacement of air. It was as if the tree weren’t there at all. I gathered my courage, walked through it. It looked solid, not transparent or translucent, and while walking through I saw only blackness. Like I really was inside a tree. But I felt nothing.
What the hell was it?
I stood there, staring up at the purple leaves.
“What are you doing?” Jane called from the kitchen.
I looked back at her. She was watching me through the open window with a puzzled expression, as though I was behaving incredibly stupidly, which I suppose to her I was. I walked around the tree, then across the grass to the front door. I went into the kitchen, where she was mixing batter for blueberry muffins.
“What were you doing out there?”
“Looking at something.”
“What?”
I shook my head. “Nothing.”
She stopped stirring, glanced at me. “You’ve been behaving strangely ever since that murder. Are you sure you’re all right?”
I nodded. “I’m fine.”
“You know, a lot of people who witness violent acts, even policemen, go to counseling to work through what they’re feeling.”
“I’m fine,” I said.
“Don’t get so worked up. I’m just worried about you.”
“I’m fine.”
“I—”
“I’m fine.”
She looked at me, looked away, went back to mixing the batter.
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