I was dressed now in my customary attire: sneakers, blue jeans, and a white T-shirt. No bandage wrapped my left hand, and I bore no wounds.
The town lay in an unnatural quiet, the silence of cemeteries. No vehicles plied the streets. No pedestrians. No sign of a living soul. I felt that I must be alone, having returned to my hometown after all of humanity had been killed off, and a deep uneasiness overcame me.
I started walking, not certain where I should go. Within half a block, I heard hurried footsteps, heels clicking against a sidewalk in the preternatural silence. I couldn’t quite discern from which direction they approached.
Uncertain who or what might be rushing toward me, I halted.
A moment later, Lou Donatella turned the corner; he waved at me. He wasn’t dressed either as a bear cub or as he had been dressed when he burst into the fun house to save me. Like me, Lou wore sneakers, blue jeans, and a white T-shirt, though on his shirt were the words LITTLE IS BIG.
Still disoriented, I thought that I had returned to my role as a counselor for the lingering spirits who would not move on to the Other Side.
Then Lou said, “Hey, dude!”
If I could hear the dead, not just see them, I had to be dead, as well. But like the amaranth … dead and not dead.
Lou grabbed my hand and pumped it with both of his and said, “Big orientation meeting at the movie theater on the square this evening. Can’t wait for it. See you there, pal.” He hurried past me, engaged in some task I could not imagine. As I looked after him, he turned once and shook two fists in the air, and laughed, and said, “Isn’t this great?” before he continued on his way.
I watched him until he turned another corner, and gradually an understanding came to me. Or I wanted to believe that it was an understanding, a perception of truth, and not just a wild hope.
At a run, fast as I could go, I headed toward the house in which Stormy had rented an apartment. In this Pico Mundo, I could run much faster than in the old, and without tiring.
When eventually I turned a corner into the street where she had lived, I found the sidewalk opposite her apartment house lined with people whom I’d known. All of them were people who had died and lingered, who had finally crossed over with my help. An old school teacher of mine. A high-school friend who had died young. A young prostitute who had been shot to death at a place once called the Church of the Whispering Comet Topless Bar, Adult Bookstore, and Burger Heaven. There were dozens of them, scores, including Mr. Elvis Presley and Mr. Frank Sinatra. They were all dressed in sneakers and blue jeans and white T-shirts, both the men and women, but each of their outfits had a detail or two different from the others. This one wore his cuffs rolled. That one wore his sleeves rolled. This one sported an embroidered flower on her shirt.
They started waving when they saw me, and I was so excited to see them that I almost dashed across the street to shake their hands and hug them. But of all the people I have loved, there was one for whom my love had been most pure, and I could not stop until I knew for sure that Gypsy Mummy’s promise had been kept.
I raced up the steps to the front door of the house, the one that featured a large oval of leaded glass here as it did in the other Pico Mundo. She didn’t wait for me to go inside and knock at her apartment, but flung open the door and came into my arms on the stoop. I lifted her off her feet and turned in a circle with her, astonished, amazed, in a state of bliss that I thought I would never know again.
Stormy Llewellyn in sneakers and blue jeans and a white T-shirt, with pink military-style epaulets sewn on the shoulders. Beautiful Stormy whole and radiant and laughing down at me as I looked up into her face.
She said, “What took you so long, griddle boy?”
Before I could answer, she said, “Put me down, put me down, come on, I have to show you.”
When I put her down, she took me by the hand and led me through the front door, into the house, along the hallway, through the door to her apartment. The place was as it had been in the other Pico Mundo: the old floor lamps with silk shades and beaded fringes, the Stickley-style chairs with the contrasting Victorian footstools, the Maxfield Parrish prints and the carnival-glass vases.
She talked excitedly all the way along the hall and into the apartment: “What did I tell you, odd one? Boot camp! And what did I say followed boot camp? A life in service! And what did I say that life of service would be?”
“You said it would be a great adventure, greater than all the adventure-story writers in the history of the world could imagine. You said it would out-Tolkien Tolkien, and that after it comes the third and eternal life.”
“You did listen, after all,” she said. “Sometimes I wondered, griddle boy.”
She tore open a coat-closet door and took from it something like a crossbow, though it was a work of art, apparently made of silver and elegantly engraved from the stock to the stirrup.
She said excitedly, “No guns here, Oddie. No guns. I know you’ll like no guns. They wouldn’t be useful, anyway.”
She handed me as well a quiver of short arrows that were tipped in silver.
“No one here kills other people. That’s all over and done with, all those terrible things. No more of that. No one eats the animals, and the animals don’t eat us. Wait’ll you talk to one. To an animal, I mean. It’s the freakiest thing, but good freaky.”
From the closet she took a second quiver of short arrows, these tipped in gold, and handed it to me.
Bewildered, I said, “What is all this for?”
“It’s sort of like Purgatory here, but not stuffy and sorrowful, the way we always thought it would be. Atonement, oh, yeah, we’ve got atonement to do, buddy, you better believe it, but the way we do it is nothing like you’d expect. The true and hidden nature of the world is as true here as it was back where we came from, but here it’s not hidden.”
I put the crossbow on a nearby armchair, the quivers with it, and said, “But what are we at war with?”
“Oh, my adorable fry cook, wait till you see them. They’re the most hideous terrifying creatures, and
wickedly cunning, and there’s ever so much that can go wrong. But what you always know now, what we all know here, is exactly what we’re fighting for and how right it is to fight for it. Now kiss me.”
I did.
That is as much as I can say to those who are not yet here, but I suspect that my friend and mentor and surrogate father, Mr. Ozzie Boone, who loved me as if I were his own son, will in his inimitable way add a chapter fifty-three.
Fifty-three
Earlier in the night, the sky had pulsed with distant heat lightning along the southern horizon. We had no expectation of rain, however, and the weather report had said that the storm would never cross the county line.
In the last hour of the day, I was ensconced in my custom-built armchair, which had been constructed to serve me without any fear whatsoever of collapse until I attained the magnificent weight of five hundred pounds, if I ever did.
My cat, Terrible Chester, curled on the sofa, alternately snoozing and glaring at me with what might have been mistaken for contempt, though I knew it to be a kind of amused and gentle scorn.
Oblivious of the cult’s heinous bombings in distant parts of Pico Mundo, I sipped Caymus Cabernet Sauvignon, nibbled champagne cheese, and for the third time read Bleak House, which I found to be anything but bleak. I was on page 102 when, precisely at 11:19, the meteorologists were proved wrong. Such a flash of lightning scorched the night and flared so brightly at every window that, had gravity not been a special challenge to me, I would have shot to my feet in alarm. Even as an immediate and equally bright second flash followed the first, an unprecedented crash of thunder shook the house from chimney top to foundation, vibrating in the windowpanes. The second peal outdid the first, and on the top of the side table next to my chair, my wineglass wobbled and almost tipped over.