“Haven’t you ever used one? It’s great. You can dice an onion in a flash.”
The sight of the knife didn’t fill Martie with terror, as had her shadow and the bathroom mirror. It did, however, make her uneasy, although she couldn’t explain her queer reaction to it.
“Martie? Are you okay?”
“Yeah, sure, let’s go.”
Susan twisted the knob but hesitated to open the kitchen door.
Martie put her hand over her friend’s, and together they pulled the door inward, admitting cold gray light and a sharp-toothed wind.
Susan’s face drained of color at the prospect of entering the roofless world beyond her threshold.
“We’ve done this a hundred times before,” Martie assured her.
Susan clutched the doorjamb. “I can’t go out there.”
“You will,” Martie insisted.
Susan attempted to return to the kitchen, but Martie blocked her. “Let me in, this is too hard, it’s
agony.
”
“It’s agony for me, too,” Martie said.
“Bullshit.” Desperation clawed some of the beauty out of Susan’s face, and a feral terror darkened the green of her jungle eyes. “You’re getting off on this, you love it, you’re crazy.”
“No, I’m mean.” Martie gripped the doorjamb with both hands, holding her ground. “I’m the mean bitch.
You’re
the crazy bitch.”
Suddenly Susan stopped pushing at Martie and clutched at her instead, seeking support. “Damn, I want that Chinese takeout.”
Martie envied Dusty, whose biggest worry of the morning would be whether the rain would hold off long enough for his crew to get some work done.
Fat drops of rain—at first in fitful bursts but soon more insistently—began to rattle on the roof that covered the landing.
Finally, they stepped across the threshold, outside. Martie pulled the door shut and locked it.
The extraction phase was behind them. Worse lay ahead, however, and Martie was unable to see most of it coming.
6
Skeet ran exuberantly down the steeply pitched roof, toward the brink, angling for a point of departure that would ensure he landed on skull-cracking pavement rather than on mattresses, bounding along the convex orange-brown tiles as though he were a kid racing across a cobbled street to an ice-cream vendor, and Dusty ran grimly after him.
To those watching from below, it must have appeared that the two men were equally deranged, fulfilling a suicide pact.
More than halfway down the slope, Dusty caught up with Skeet, grabbed him, wrenched him off his intended trajectory, and stumbled diagonally across the incline with him. Some clay tiles cracked underfoot, dislodging small chunks of roofer’s mortar, which rattled toward the rain gutter. Remaining upright on this rolling debris was no less difficult than walking on marbles, with the added challenges of the rain and the slimy lichen and Skeet’s energetic and gleeful resistance, which he waged with flailing arms and spiking elbows and disturbing childlike giggles. Skeet’s invisible dance partner, Death, seemed to give him supernatural grace and balance, but then Dusty fell and took Skeet down with him, and entwined they rolled the last ten feet, perhaps toward the mattresses or perhaps not—Dusty had lost his bearings—and across the copper gutter, which twanged like a plucked bass string.
Airborne, plummeting, letting go of Skeet, Dusty thought of Martie: the clean smell of her silky black hair, the mischievous curve of her smile, the honesty of her eyes.
Thirty-two feet wasn’t far, merely three stories, but far enough to split open the most stubborn head, far enough to crack a spine as easily as one might snap a pretzel stick, so when Dusty fell flat on his back on the piled mattresses, he thanked God as he bounced. Then he realized that in free fall, when each lightning-quick thought could have been his last, his mind had been filled with Martie, and that God had occurred to him after the fact.
The Sorensons had purchased first-rate mattresses. The impact didn’t even knock the wind out of Dusty.
Skeet, too, had crashed into the safety zone. Now he lay as he had landed, face planted in the satin-weave ticking, arms over his head, motionless, as though he had been so fragile that even a fall into layers of cotton batting, foam rubber, and airy eiderdown had shattered his eggshell bones.
As the top mattress quickly became sodden with rain, Dusty got onto his hands and knees. He rolled the kid faceup.
Skeet’s left cheek was abraded, and a small cut bisected the shallow cleft in his chin. Both injuries had probably occurred as he had rolled across the roof tiles; neither produced much blood.
“Where am I?” Skeet asked.
“Not where you wanted to be.”
The kid’s bronze eyes had a dark patina of anguish that hadn’t been evident during the manic minutes on the roof. “Heaven?”
“I’ll make it seem like Hell, you smacked-out creep,” Motherwell said, looming over them, grabbing Skeet by his sweater and hauling him to his feet. If the sky had been split by lightning and shaken by thunder, Motherwell could have passed for Thor, Scandinavian god of the storm. “You’re off my crew, you’re finished, you hopeless screwup!”
“Easy, easy,” Dusty said, scrambling to his feet and off the mattress.
Still holding Skeet a foot off the ground, Motherwell rounded on Dusty. “I mean it, boss. Either he’s gone, he’s history, or I can’t work with you anymore.”
“Okay, all right. Just put him down, Ned.”
Instead of releasing Skeet, Motherwell shook him and shouted in his face, spraying enough foamy spittle to flock him like a Christmas tree: “By the time we buy new mattresses, three
expensive
mattresses, there goes most of the profit. Do you have any clue, you shithead?”
Dangling from Motherwell’s hands, offering no resistance, Skeet said, “I didn’t ask you to put down the mattresses.”
“I wasn’t trying to save
you,
asshole.”
“You’re always calling me names,” Skeet said. “I never call you names.”
“You’re a walking pus bag.” Straight Edgers, like Motherwell, denied themselves many things, but never anger. Dusty admired their efforts to lead a clean life in the dirty world they had inherited, and he understood their anger even as he sometimes wearied of it.
“Man, I
like
you,” Skeet told Motherwell. “I wish you could like me.”
“You’re a pimple on the ass of humanity,” Motherwell thundered, casting Skeet aside as if tossing a bag of garbage.
Skeet almost slammed into Foster Newton, who was passing by. Fig halted as the kid collapsed in a heap on the driveway, glanced at Dusty, said, “See you in the morning if it doesn’t rain,” stepped over Skeet, and proceeded to his car at the curb, still listening to talk radio through his headphones, as though he’d seen people jumping off roofs every day of his working life.
“What a mess,” Ned Motherwell said, frowning at the drenched mattresses.
“I’ve got to check him into rehab,” Dusty told Motherwell, as he helped Skeet to his feet.
“I’ll take care of this mess,” Motherwell assured him. “Just get that cankerous little weasel-dick out of my sight.”
All along the rainwashed circular driveway to the street, Skeet leaned on Dusty. His previous frenetic energy, whether it had come from drugs or from the prospect of successful self-destruction, was gone, and he was limp with weariness, almost asleep on his feet.
The security guard fell in beside them as they neared Dusty’s white Ford van. “I’ll have to file a report about this.”
“Yeah? With whom?”
“The executive board of the homeowners’ association. With a copy to the property-management company.”
“They won’t kneecap me with a shotgun, will they?” Dusty asked as he propped Skeet against the van.
“Nah, they never take my recommendation,” the guard said, and Dusty was forced to reevaluate him.
Rising out of his stupor, Skeet warned, “They’ll want your soul, Dusty. I know these bastards.”
From behind a veil of water that drizzled off the visor of his uniform cap, the security guard said, “They might put you on a list of undesirable contractors they’d rather not have in the community. But probably all that’ll happen is they’ll want you never to bring this guy inside the gates again. What’s his full name, anyway?”
Opening the passenger door of the van, Dusty said, “Bruce Wayne.”
“I thought it was Skeet something.”
Helping Skeet into the van, Dusty said, “That’s just his nickname.” Which was truthful yet deceptive.
“I’ll need to see his ID.”
“I’ll bring it later,” Dusty said, slamming the door. “Right now I’ve got to get him to a doctor.”
“He hurt?” the guard asked, following Dusty around the van to the driver’s side.
“He’s a wreck,” Dusty said as he got in behind the wheel and pulled the door shut.
The guard rapped on the window.
Starting the engine with one hand, winding down the window with the other, Dusty said, “Yeah?”
“You can’t go back to
strike force,
but
crew
isn’t the right word, either. Better call them your
circus
or maybe
hullabaloo.
”
“You’re all right,” Dusty said. “I like you.”
The guard smiled and tipped his sopping hat.
Dusty rolled up the window, switched on the wipers, and drove away from the Sorensons’ house.
7
Descending the exterior stairs from her third-floor apartment, Susan Jagger stayed close to the house, sliding her right hand along the shingle siding, as though constantly needing to reassure herself that shelter was close by, fiercely clutching Martie’s arm with her left hand. She kept her head down, focusing intently on her feet, taking each ten-inch-high step as cautiously as a rock climber might have negotiated a towering face of sheer granite.
Because of Susan’s raincoat hood and because she was shorter than Martie, her face was concealed, but from rainless days, Martie knew how Susan must look. Shock-white skin. Jaw set, mouth grim. Her green eyes would be haunted, as though she’d glimpsed a ghost; however, the only ghost in this matter was her once vital spirit, which had been killed by agoraphobia.
“What’s wrong with the air?” Susan asked shakily.
“Nothing.”
“Hard to breathe,” Susan complained. “Thick. Smells funny.”
“Just humidity. The smell is me. New perfume.”
“You? Perfume?”
“I’ve got my girlish moments.”
“We’re so exposed,” Susan said fearfully.
“It’s not a long way to the car.”
“Anything could happen out here.”
“Nothing will happen.”
“There’s nowhere to hide.”
“There’s nothing to hide from.”
Fifteen-hundred-year-old religious litanies were no less rigidly structured than these twice-a-week conversations on the way to and from therapy sessions.
As they reached the bottom of the steps, the rain fell harder than before, rattling through the leaves of the potted plants on the patio, clicking against the bricks.
Susan was reluctant to let go of the corner of the house.
Martie put an arm around her. “Lean on me if you want.”
Susan leaned. “Everything’s so strange out here, not like it used to be.”
“Nothing’s changed. It’s just the storm.”
“It’s a new world,” Susan disagreed. “And not a good one.”
Huddling together, with Martie bending to match Susan’s stoop, they progressed through this new world, now in a rush as Susan was drawn forward by the prospect of the comparatively enclosed space of the car, but now haltingly as Susan was weighed down and nearly crushed by the infinite emptiness overhead. Whipped by wind and lashed by rain, shielded by their hoods and their billowing coats, they might have been two frightened holy sisters, in full habit, desperately seeking sanctuary in the early moments of Armageddon.
Evidently Martie was affected either by the turbulence of the incoming storm or by her troubled friend, because as they proceeded fitfully along the promenade toward the side street where she had parked her car, she became increasingly aware of a strangeness in the day that was easy to perceive but difficult to define. On the concrete promenade, puddles like black mirrors swarmed with images so shattered by falling rain that their true appearance could not be discerned, yet they disquieted Martie. Thrashing palm trees clawed the air with fronds that had darkened from green to green-black, producing a thrum-hiss-rattle that resonated with a primitive and reckless passion deep inside her. On their right, the sand was smooth and pale, like the skin of some vast sleeping beast, and on their left, each house appeared to be filled with a storm of its own, as colorless images of roiling clouds and wind-tossed trees churned across the large ocean-view windows.
Martie was unsettled by all these odd impressions of unnatural menace in the surrounding landscape, but she was more disturbed by a new strangeness within herself, which the storm seemed to conjure. Her heart quickened with an irrational desire to surrender to the sorcerous energy of this wild weather. Suddenly she was afraid of some dark potential she couldn’t define: afraid of losing control of herself, blacking out, and later coming to her senses, thereupon discovering she had done something terrible…something unspeakable.
Until this morning, such bizarre thoughts had never occurred to her. Now they came in abundance.
She remembered the unusually sour grapefruit juice that she’d drunk at breakfast, and she wondered if it had been tainted. She didn’t have a sick stomach; but maybe she was suffering from a strain of food poisoning that caused mental rather than physical symptoms.
That was
another
bizarre thought. Tainted juice was no more likely an explanation than the possibility that the CIA was beaming messages into her brain via a microwave transmitter. If she continued down this twisty road of illogic, she’d soon be fashioning elaborate aluminum-foil hats to guard against long-distance brainwashing.
By the time they descended the short flight of concrete steps from the beach promenade to the narrow street where the car was parked, Martie was drawing as much emotional support from Susan as she was giving, although she hoped Susan didn’t sense as much.
Martie opened the curbside door, helped Susan into the red Saturn, and then went around and got in the driver’s seat.
Rain drummed on the roof, a cold and hollow sound that brought hoofbeats to mind, as though the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death—were approaching at full gallop along the nearby beach.
Martie pulled back her hood. She fished in one coat pocket and then in the other until she found her keys.
In the passenger seat, Susan remained hooded, head bowed, hands fisted against her cheeks, eyes squeezed shut, and face pinched, as if the Saturn were in one of those hydraulic car crushers, about to be squashed into a three-foot cube.
Martie’s attention fixed on the car key, which was the same one she had always used, yet suddenly the point seemed wickedly sharp, as never before. The serrations resembled those on a bread knife, which then reminded her of the mezzaluna in Susan’s kitchen.
This simple key was a potential weapon. Crazily, Martie’s mind clotted with images of the bloody damage a car key could inflict.
“What’s wrong?” Susan asked, though she had not opened her eyes.
Thrusting the key into the ignition, struggling to conceal her inner turmoil, Martie said, “Couldn’t find my key. It’s okay. I’ve got it now.”
The engine caught, roared. When Martie locked herself into her safety harness, her hands were shaking so badly that the hard plastic clasp and the metal tongue on the belt chattered together like a pair of windup, novelty-store teeth before she finally engaged the latch.
“What if something happens to me out here and I can’t get home again?” Susan worried.
“I’ll take care of you,” Martie promised, although in light of her own peculiar state of mind, the promise might prove empty.
“But what if something happens to
you?”
“Nothing is going to happen to me,” Martie vowed as she switched on the windshield wipers.
“Something can happen to anybody. Look at what happened to me.”
Martie pulled away from the curb, drove to the end of the short street, and turned left onto Balboa Boulevard. “Hold tight. You’ll be in the doctor’s office soon.”
“Not if we’re in an accident,” Susan fretted.
“I’m a good driver.”
“The car might break down.”
“The car’s fine.”
“It’s raining hard. If the streets flood—”
“Or maybe we’ll be abducted by big slimy Martians,” Martie said. “Be taken up to the mother ship, forced to breed with hideous squidlike creatures.”
“The streets
do
flood here on the peninsula,” Susan said defensively.
“This time of year, Big Foot hides out around the pier, bites the heads off the unwary. We better hope we don’t have a breakdown in that area.”
“You’re vicious,” Susan complained.
“I’m mean as hell,” Martie confirmed.
“Cruel. You are. I mean it.”
“I’m loathsome.”
“Take me home.”
“No.”
“I hate you.”
“I love you anyway,” Martie said.
“Oh, shit,” Susan said miserably. “I love you, too.”
“Hang in there.”
“This is so hard.”
“I know, honey.”
“What if we run out of fuel?”
“The tank’s full.”
“I can’t breathe out here. I can’t
breathe.”
“Sooz, you’re breathing.”
“But the air’s like a…sludge. And I’m having chest pains. My heart.”
“What
I’ve
got is a pain in the ass,” Martie said. “Guess its name.”
“You’re a mean bitch.”
“That’s old news.”
“I hate you.”
“I love you,” Martie said patiently.
Susan began to cry. She buried her face in her hands. “I can’t go on like this.”
“It’s not much farther.”
“I hate myself.”
Martie frowned. “Don’t say that. Don’t ever.”
“I hate what I’ve become. This frightened, quivering
thing
I’ve become.”
Martie’s eyes clouded with tears of pity. She blinked furiously to clear her vision.
From off the cold Pacific, waves of black clouds washed across the sky, as though the tide of night were turning and would drown this bleak new day. Virtually all the oncoming traffic, northbound on Pacific Coast Highway, approached behind headlights that silvered the wet blacktop.
Martie’s perception of unnatural menace had passed. The rainy day no longer seemed in the least strange. In fact, the world was so achingly beautiful, so
right
in every detail, that although she was no longer afraid of anything in it, she was terribly afraid of losing it.
Despairing, Susan said, “Martie, can you remember me…the way I used to be?”
“Yes. Vividly.”
“I can’t. Some days I can’t remember me any other way but how I am now. I’m scared, Martie. Not just of going outside, out of the house. I’m scared of…all the years ahead.”
“We’ll get through this together,” Martie assured her, “and there’ll be a lot of good years.”
Massive phoenix palms lined the entrance road to Fashion Island, Newport Beach’s premier shopping and business center. In the wind, the trees, like agitated lions preparing to roar, shook their great green manes.
Dr. Mark Ahriman’s suite of offices was on the fourteenth floor of one of the tall buildings that surrounded the sprawling, low-rise shopping plaza. Getting Susan from the parking lot to the lobby and then across what seemed like acres of polished granite into an elevator was not as arduous a trek as Frodo’s journey from the peaceful Shire to the land called Mordor, there to destroy the Great Ring of Power—but Martie was nonetheless relieved when the doors slid shut and the cab purred upward.
“Almost safe,” Susan murmured, gaze fixed on the indicator board inset in the transom above the doors, watching the light move from number to number, toward 14, where sanctuary waited.
Though entirely enclosed and alone with Martie, Susan never felt secure in the elevator. Consequently, Martie kept one arm around her, aware that from Susan’s troubled point of view, the fourteenth-floor elevator alcove and the corridors beyond it—even the psychiatrist’s waiting room—were also hostile territories harboring uncountable threats. Every public space, regardless of how small and sheltered, was an
open
space in the sense that anyone could enter at any time. She felt safe only in two places: in her home on the peninsula—and in Dr. Ahriman’s private office, where even the dramatic panoramic view of the coastline did not alarm her.
“Almost safe,” Susan repeated as the elevator doors slid open at the fourteenth floor.
Curiously, Martie thought of Frodo again, from
The Lord of the Rings.
Frodo in the tunnel that was a secret entrance to the evil land of Mordor. Frodo confronting the guardian of the tunnel, the spiderlike monster Shelob. Frodo stung by the beast, apparently dead, but actually paralyzed and set aside to be devoured later.
“Let’s go, let’s go,” Susan whispered urgently. For the first time since leaving her apartment, she was eager to proceed.
Inexplicably, Martie wanted to pull her friend back into the elevator, descend to the lobby, and return to the car.
Once more she sensed a disquieting strangeness in the mundane scene around her, as if this were not the ordinary elevator alcove that it appeared to be, but was in fact the tunnel where Frodo and his companion Sam Gamgee had confronted the great pulsing, many-eyed spider.
Responding to a sound behind her, she turned with dread, half expecting to see Shelob looming. The elevator door was rolling shut. Nothing more than that.
In her imagination, a membrane between dimensions had ruptured, and the world of Tolkien was seeping inexorably into Newport Beach. Maybe she had been working too long and too hard on the video-game adaptation. In her obsession with doing honor to
The Lord of the Rings,
and in her mental exhaustion, was she confusing reality and fantasy?
No. Not that. The truth was something less fantastic but equally strange.
Then Martie caught a glimpse of herself in the glass panel that covered a wall niche containing an emergency fire hose. Immediately, she turned away, rattled by the razor-sharp anxiety in her face. Her features appeared jagged, with deep slashes for laugh lines, a mouth like a scar; her eyes were wounds. This unflattering expression was not what made her look away. Something else. Worse. Something to which she couldn’t quite put a name.
What’s happening to me?
“Let’s go,” Susan said more insistently than before. “Martie, what’s wrong?
Let’s go.
”
Reluctantly, Martie accompanied Susan out of the alcove. They turned left into the corridor.
Susan took heart from her mantra—“almost safe, almost safe”—but Martie found no comfort in it.