Their unnatural behavior was ominous without implying aggression.
This aerial ballet, humdrum in its pattern yet inexpressibly graceful, conveyed a mood as clear and unmistakable as any ballet ever performed by dancers on a stage, as affecting as any piece of music ever meant to touch the heart and the mood here was sorrow. Sorrow so poignant that it pinched my breath and made me feel as though something more bitter than blood were pumping through my veins.
To poets but also to those whose stomachs curdle at the mention of poetry, birds in flight usually evoke thoughts of freedom, hope, faith, joy. The thrum of these pinions, however, was as bleak as the keening of an arctic wind coming across a thousand miles of barren ice, it was a forlorn sound, and in my heart it coalesced into an icy weight.
With the exquisite timing and choreography that suggests psychic connections among the members of a flock, the double ring of birds fluidly combined into a single ascending spiral. They rose like a coil of dark smoke, around and up and up through the flue of the night, across the pocked moon, becoming steadily less visible against the stars, until at last they dissipated like mere fumes and soot across the rooftop of the world.
All was silent. Windless. Dead.
This behavior of the nighthawks had been unnatural, certainly, but not a meaningless aberration, not a mere curiosity. There was calculation therefore meaningin their air show.
The puzzle resisted an easy solution.
Actually, I wasn't sure I wanted to fit all the pieces together.
The resultant picture was not likely to be comforting. The birds themselves posed no threat, but their bizarre performance couldn't be construed as a good thing.
A sign. An omen.
Not the kind of omen that makes you want to buy a lottery ticket or take a quick trip to Vegas. Certainly not an omen that would make you decide to commit more of your net worth to the stock market. No, this was an omen that might inspire you to move to rural New Mexico, up into the fastness of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, as far from civilization as you could get, with a hoard of food, twenty thousand rounds of ammunition and a prayer book.
I returned the pistol to the holster under my jacket.
Suddenly I was tired, drained.
I took a few deep breaths, but each inhalation was as stale as the air I exhaled.
When I wiped a hand across my face, hoping to slough off my weariness, I expected my skin to be greasy. Instead, it was dry and hot.
I found a penny-size tender spot just below my left cheekbone.
Gently massaging it with a fingertip, I tried to remember whether I had knocked against anything during the night's adventures.
Any pain without apparent cause is a possible early signal of a forming lesion, of the cancer that I have thus far remarkably escaped. If the suspect blemish or tenderness occurs on my face or hands, which are exposed to light even though sheathe in sunscreen, the chances of malignancy are greater.
Lowering my hand from my face, I reminded myself to live in the moment.
Because of XP, I was born with no future, and in spite of my limitations, I live a full life perhaps a better oneby concerning myself as little as possible with what tomorrow may bring. The present is more vivid, more precious, more fulfilling, if you understand that it is all you have.
Carpe them, said the poet Horace, more than two thousand years ago.
Seize the day. And trust not in tomorrow.
Carpe noctem works as well for me. I seize the night, wringing from it all that it has to offer, and I refuse to dwell on the fact that eventually the darkness of all darknesses will wring the same from me.
The solemn birds had cast down a dreary mood, like feathers molting from their wings. I walked determinedly out of that fallen plumage, heading toward the movie theater where Bobby Halloway was waiting.
The sore spot on my cheek might never develop into a lesion or a blister. Its value, as a source of worry, had been solely to distract me from the more terrible fear that I was reluctant to face, The longer Jimmy Wing and Orson were missing, the greater the likelihood they were dead.
Bordering the northern edge of Dead Town's residential district is a park with handball courts at one end and tennis courts at the other.
In the middle are acres of picnic grounds shaded by California live oaks that have fared well since the base closure, a playground with swings and jungle gyms, an open-air pavilion, and an enormous swimming pool.
The large oval pavilion, where bands once played on summer nights, is the only ornate structure in Wyvern, Victorian, with an encircling balustrade, fluted columns, a deep cornice enhanced by elaborate millwork, and a fanciful roof that drops from finial to eaves in shingled scallops reminiscent of the swags of a circus tent. Here, under strings of colored Christmas lights, young men had danced with their wive sand then gone off to bloody deaths in World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam, and lesser skirmishes. The lights still dangle from rafter to rafter, unplugged and sheathe in dust, and often it seems that if you squint your eyes just slightly on moonlit nights like this, you can see the ghosts of martyrs to democracy dancing with the spirits of their widows.
As I strode through the tall grass, past the community swimming pool, where the chain-link fence sagged around the entire perimeter and was completely broken down in a few spots, I increased my pace, not solely because I was anxious to get to the movie house. Nothing has happened here to make me fearful of the place, but instinct tells me not to linger near this concrete-walled swamp. The pool is nearly two hundred feet long and eighty feet wide, with a lifeguard platform in the center.
Currently, it was two-thirds full of collected rain. The black water would be black in daylight, too, because it was thickened with rotting oak leaves and other debris. In this fetid sludge, even the moon lost its silver purity, leaving a distorted, bile-yellow reflection like the face of a goblin in a dream.
Although I remained at a distance, I could smell the reeking slough.
The stench wasn't as bad as that in the bungalow kitchen, but it was pretty close.
Worse than the odor was the aura of the pool, which could not be perceived by the usual five senses but which was readily apparent to an indescribable sixth. No, my overactive imagination wasn't overacting.
This is, at all times, an undeniably real quality of the pool, a subtle but cold squirming energy from which your mind shrinks, an evil mojo that slithers across the surface of your soul with all the tactility of a ball of worms writhing in your hand.
I thought I heard a splash, something breaking the surface of the sludge, followed by an oily churning, as if a swimmer were doing laps.
I assumed these noises were the products of my imagination, but nevertheless, as the swimmer stroked closer to my end of the pool, I broke into a run.
Beyond the park lies Commissary Way, along the north side of which stand the enterprises and institutions that, in addition to those in Moonlight Bay, once served Wyvern's thirty-six thousand active-duty personnel and thirteen thousand of their dependents. The commissary and the movie theater anchor opposite ends of the long street. Between them are a barbershop, a dry cleaner, a florist, a bakery, a bank, the enlisted men's club, the officers' club, a library, a game arcade, a kindergarten, an elementary school, a fitness center, and additional shops all empty, their painted signs faded and weathered.
These one- and two-story buildings are plain but, precisely because of their simplicity, pleasing to the eye, white clapboard, painted concrete blocks, stucco. The utilitarian nature of military construction combined with Depression-era frugality which guided every project in 1939, when the base was commissioned could have resulted in an ugly industrial look.
But the army architects and construction crews had made an effort to create buildings with some grace, relying on only such fundamentals as harmonious lines and angles, rhythmic window placement, and varying but complementary roof lines.
The movie theater is as humble as the other buildings, and its marq
uee rests flat against the front wall, above the entrance. I don't know what film last played here or the names of the actors who appeared in it.
Only three black plastic letters remain in the tracks where titles and cast were announced, forming a single word, WHO.
In spite of the absence of concluding punctuation, I read this enigmatic message as a desperate question referring to the genetic terror spawned in hidden laboratories somewhere on these grounds. Who am I? Who are you? Who are we becoming? Who did this to us? Who can save us?
Who? Who?
Bobby's black Jeep was parked in front of the theater. The vinyl roof and walls were not attached to the frame and roll bars, so the vehicle was open to the night.
As I approached the Jeep, the moon sank behind the clouds in the west, so close to the horizon now that it was unlikely to reappear, but even from a block away, I could clearly see Bobby sitting behind the steering wheel.
We are the same height and weight. Although my hair is blond and his is dark brown, although my eyes are pale blue and his are so raven black they have blue highlights, we can pass for brothers. We have been each other's closest friends since we were eleven, and so perhaps we have grown alike in many ways. We stand, sit, and move with the same posture and at the same pace, I think this is because we have spent so much time surfing, in sync with the sea. Sasha insists we have "catlike grace, " which I think flatters us too much, but however catlike we may or may not be, neither of us drinks milk from a saucer or prefers a litter box to a bathroom.
I went to the passenger side, grabbed the roll bar, and swung into the Jeep without opening the low door. I had to work my feet around a small Styrofoam cooler on the floor in front of the seat.
Bobby was wearing khakis, a long-sleeve white cotton pullover, and a Hawaiian shirt he owns no other styleover the thin sweater.
He was drinking a Heineken.
Although I had never seen Bobby drunk, I said, "Hope you're not too mellow." Without looking away from the street, he said, "Mellow isn't like dumb or ugly, " meaning the word too should never be used to modify it.
The night was pleasantly cool but not crisp, so I said, "Flow me a Heinie? "
"Go for it." I fished a bottle out of the ice in the cooler and twisted off the cap.
I hadn't realized how thirsty I was. The beer washed the lingering bitterness out of my mouth.
Bobby glanced at the rearview mirror for a moment, then returned his attention to the street in front of us.
Braced between the seats, aimed toward the rear of the Jeep, was a pistol-grip, pump-action shotgun.
"Beer and guns, " I said, shaking my head.
"We're obviously not Amish."
"You come in by the river like I said?"
"Yeah."
"How'd you drive through the fence? "
"Cut the hole bigger."
"I expected you to walk in."
"Too hard to carry the cooler."
"I guess we might need the speed, " I conceded, considering the size of the area to be searched.
He said, "You smell maximum real, bro."
"Worked at it." From the rearview mirror dangled a bright-yellow air freshener shaped like a banana. Bobby slipped it off the mirror and hung it from my left ear.
Sometimes he is too funny for his own good. I wouldn't reward him with a laugh.
"It's a banana, " I said, "but it smells like a pine tree."
"That old American ingenuity."
"Nothing like it."
"We put men on the moon."
"We invented chocolate-flavored breakfast cereal."
"Don't forget plastic vomit."
"Funniest gag ever, " I said.
Bobby and I solemnly clinked bottles in a patriotic toast and took long swallows of beer.
Although I was, on one level, frantic to find Orson and Jimmy, on the surface I fell into the languid tempo by which Bobby lives. He is so laid back that if he visited someone in a hospital, the nurses might mistake him for a patient in a coma, shuck him out of his Hawaiian shirt, and slide him into a backless bed gown before he could correct their misapprehension. Except when he's rocking through epic surf, getting totally barreled in an insanely hollow wave, Bobby values tranquility. He responds better to easy and indirect conversation than to any expression of urgency. During our seventeen-year friendship, I've learned to value this |i relaxed approach, even if it doesn't come naturally to me. Calm is essential to prudent action. Because Bobby acts only after contemplation, I've never known him to be blind sided by anyone or anything. He may look relaxed, even sleepy at times, but like a Zen master, he is able to make the flow of time slow down while he considers how best to deal with the latest crisis.
"Bitchin' shirt, " I said.
He was wearing one of his favorite antique shirts, a brown Asian landscape design. He has a couple hundred in his collection, and he knows every detail of their histories.
Before he could reply, I said, "Made by Kahala about 1950. Silk with coconut-shell buttons. Same shirt John Wayne wore in Big Jim Mclain.
" He was silent long enough for me to have repeated all the shirt data, but I knew he'd heard me.
He took another pull at his bottle of beer. Finally, "Have you really developed an interest in aloha threads, or are you just mocking me? "
"Just mocking you."
"Enjoy yourself." As he studied the rearview mirror again, I said, "What's that in your lap? "
"I'm just way happy to see you, " he said.
Then he held up a serious handgun.
"Smith & Wesson Model 29."
"This is definitely not a barn raising."
"Exactly what is it? "
"Somebody took Lilly Wing's boy."
"Who? "
"Some abb, " I said, meaning an abnormal type, a sleazeball.
"Woofy, " he said, which is Australian surfer lingo for waves contaminated by a sewage spill, but which has evolved other, related meanings, none positive.
I said, "Boosted Jimmy right out of his bedroom, through a window."
"So Lilly called you? "
"I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, biking by right after the abb did the deed."
"How'd you get from there to here? "
"Orson's nose." I told him about the abb, the kidnapper, whom I'd encountered under the warehouse.
He frowned. "You said yellow eyes? "
"Yellow-brown, I guess."
"Shine-in-the-dark yellow? "
"No. Brownish yellow, burnt amber, but the natural color."
Recently, we'd encountered a couple of men in whom radical genetic changes had occurred, guys in the process of becoming something more or less than human, who appeared for the most part normal but whose otherness was betrayed by brief but detectable flashes of animal eye shine. These people are driven by strange, hateful needs, and they are capable of extreme violence. If Jimmy was in the hands of one of these, then the list of outrages to which he might be subjected was even longer than the savageries that a standard-issue sociopath might have in mind.
"You recognize this abb? " I asked Bobby.
"You say about thirty, black hair, yellow eyes, built like a fireplug?"
"Neat little baby teeth."
"Not my type."
"I never saw him before, either, " I said.
"Twelve thousand people in town."
"And this isn't a dude who's a beachhead, " I said, meaning we wouldn't have seen him hanging out with surfers. "So he could still be local and we wouldn't know." For the first time all night, a breeze sprang up, a gentle onshore flow that brought to us a faint but bracing scent of the sea. In the park across the street, the oaks became conspiratorial, plotting together in whispers.
Bobby said, "Why did this abb bring Jimmy here of all places? "
"Maybe privacy. To do his thing."
"I'd like to do my thing, Cuisinart the creep."
"Plus the weirdness of this place probably feeds his dementia."
"Unle
ss it's more directly connected to Wyvern."
"Unless. And Lilly's worried about the guy on the news."
"What guy?"
"Kidnaps kids, locks them away. When he gets three or five or whatever from one community, then he burns them all at once."
"Stuff like this is why I don't listen to news these days."
"You've never listened to news."
Dean Koontz - Seize The Night Page 12
