Blue Light (8 page)

We came to one house and Reggie walked up on the lawn. He went to a redwood gate at the side and unhooked a metal latch. When he turned around he saw that I was still at the sidewalk.

“Come on.”

“Come on where?”

“Come on!” Reggie shouted in an intense whisper.

We went through the gate and down the side of the house. The pathway there was yellowish cement that almost glowed in the darkness. A cold breeze met us, and I had to duck my head to make it under the low hanging branches.

At the back of the house there was a door in the ground. It was an ornate portal to the basement that had thick opaque glass panes in it. One of the panes had been broken. Reggie lifted up the door and latched it to the house. Then he stood back.

“What?” I asked the boy.

“You go on. I want you to see what’s down there.”

I didn’t need any special powers of perception to hear the fear in Reggie’s voice.

I descended into the darkness of the basement. I couldn’t see a thing.

“There’s a door right in front of you,” Reggie called down at me. “Open it up. The light’s on the right side on the wall.”

I walked straight ahead until my toes kicked wood, about five steps. Then I fumbled around for the knob. The moment the door was open I smelled it. A sickly sweet odor that was cloying, like a baseball field piled high with rotting lilies.

I snapped on the light and then fell to my knees, vomiting.

Her corpse had been decapitated and then split open from pelvis to throat. Her ribs had been broken outward, and the flesh of her arms and legs had been torn open. The hands looked as if they had been lacerated by claws.

Only the bottoms of her feet were left untouched.

The head had been tossed in the corner. I was drawn to it. She was facing upward, but there was not much of a face. The maniac had destroyed her features and then discarded her.

“It’s Phyllis,” Reggie said.

His unexpected voice gave me such a fright that I jumped away and yelped.

“What’s wrong with you, Reggie?”

Ignoring my shock, he said, “I came looking for her. Nobody’d seen her in a while, and I just thought I’d look for her.”

Reggie’s abilities, though still immature, were finding things and hiding. Ordé wanted to call him Scout, but Reggie liked his own name.

“I came looking for her,” he said again.

I couldn’t take my eyes off the remains of Phyllis Yamauchi. Her organs were spread out around the body on the dirty concrete floor. The dried blood had flowed out more or less evenly and made a kind of dark frame for the horrible sculpture.

The body was a grisly enough sight, but it was the intent behind the murder that hit me so hard. The killer not only hated her, Phyllis, but also hated her flesh and bones and blood. He’d stripped away every vestige of humanity, leaving only a tattered lump of meat.

I looked up at the ceiling, trying to blot the sight from my mind. All along the unpainted beams hung a chorus of pale spiders. Silent, spinning, waiting. They were unconcerned with the tableau on the floor. These spiders I used as beacons of sanity. Death was less to them than a spring breeze, certainly nothing compared to a frothy, juicy moth.

“What should we do?” Reggie asked me.

I had forgotten he was there.

“Can you tell what happened by tasting her blood, like Ordé?”

Reggie looked at me with big, frightened eyes.

“Well, can you?”

“Once Wanita cut her finger and I kissed it,” Reggie said.

“Yeah?”

“And I saw a big ship leaving the harbor. She saw that ship the day before with my mother, but I wasn’t there.”

“So you can read blood,” I concluded.

Reggie looked at the body and shook his head no. I understood. He might have been a god, but he was still only a boy.

I searched the basement until I found a washer and dryer in a small room. I took a sheet from a basket in there and tore it into two cloths — one larger and one smaller. Then I went back to Phyllis’s body. Deep inside her chest cavity was still moist. I soaked up some of the blood in the smaller rag and then wrapped it in the larger one.

A couple of blocks away Reggie asked, “Should we call the cops?”

“Uh-uh, no, I don’t think so, kid. The police would just start looking for some maniac. They’d never believe what Phyllis was. They’d probably blame us. What we should do is go to Ordé and ask him what he thinks happened.”

We walked on a ways. The sun was coming up, and even though I had the blood of a murdered woman in my pocket, I was struck by the dawn’s beauty. The wisps of black clouds made a grid over the orange light. There was an ancient hue to the light, something that had once known greatness. I could feel my heart and mind open up to the scrutiny of light. I felt the connection between the blood in my veins and the furnace above. I looked down after a while, seeing the afterimage of Sol in the sidewalk and passing lawns. I had walked off the sidewalk and into the street. My visions distracted me so much that I almost walked into the path of an oncoming car.

“Why’d you come to me, Reggie?” I asked the boy, partly to get the answer and partly because I wanted to concentrate on the world around me.

“Huh?”

“Why’d you come to me? You could have gone to Eileen or even Ordé.”

“Eileen would have been too scared, and I don’t know where Ordé lives. Anyway, I don’t like Ordé too much. He so weird, always tryin’ to make everything sound so big when it’s all just normal.”

“But you could have found Ordé if you wanted, and you know we’re gonna have to go to him anyway.”

“That’s okay,” Reggie answered. “It’s okay if I go with you.”

We got to Ordé’s place a little bit before six. No one answered the front door, so we went around the back and knocked there. When he didn’t come out I took up the metal lid of a trash can and started banging.

That got his attention.

“I told you to go away, Chance,” he shouted through the closed door. “Take Scout and get as far away as you can. Run.”

“Phyllis Yamauchi was murdered,” I said. “I have some of her blood.”

As I said it, I realized that this was the first death of a Blue other than those that died on the first night that light fell. Reggie’s sister had died and so had Eileen’s husband. Ordé claimed that even they had not truly died. He said that their energy, along with
who they had become
, had separated from the body to carry their life force into the energy fields of Earth. But that was during the coming of the light. All the Blues that had lived were healthy, never sick, and somehow had the appearance of agelessness. Even Eileen Martel looked as though she could walk all day. Reggie and Wanita had grown some, but they were kids.

While I was thinking about gods and death, the door opened. Ordé stood there in an untied terry cloth bathrobe. He was naked underneath, and Reggie stole glances at the man’s penis like any boy would.

Ordé hadn’t shaved, bathed, or even pushed his hair out of his face.

“Come on,” he said.

His once sparse kitchen was now crowded. There were boxes of powdered milk and dried soup on the counter and a large-caliber rifle and a clip-loading pistol on the table. Under the table were boxes of ammunition.

“You going to war, teacher?” I asked, stunned at my own brazen humor.

Ordé sat at the table and held out his hand.

“Give it to me,” he said.

I took the rags from my pocket and began to unwrap the larger from the smaller. Ordé was impatient, though, and took them from me. He shook the tattered sheet around until the blood packet fell to the floor. He got down on his knees and pushed the whole thing in his mouth.

He hiccupped once and then slumped down into unconsciousness.

Reggie and I tried to wake him, but it couldn’t be done. I pulled the rag from his mouth and made sure that he was breathing. Then the boy and I dragged him to the cot in his bedroom.

He was unconscious for nineteen hours. Reggie went home to his mother and Wanita (they had taken up residence with Eileen Martel in San Francisco), but he came back at about six that evening.

At one the next morning Ordé gasped and scrambled to his feet.

“Oh, my God!” he yelled, maybe with some kind of relief, and then ran to the bathroom.

Reggie was sound asleep on the floor when the prophet awoke, but he was right behind me chasing Ordé to the toilet.

We found our teacher studying his face in the mirror, running his fingertips around his cheeks and eyes. He was crying and laughing.

“What is it, teacher?” I asked.

Ordé turned to me, grabbed me by my shoulders, and asked, “Do you see me?”

I nodded. He looked over at Reggie, and the boy nodded too.

“I made it back. I fought him off. I’m still alive.”

Ordé went to the toilet bowl and urinated with no shame. He turned to us halfway through and said, “We have a lot to do. A lot to do.”

Reggie and I went out to Ordé’s living room. His couch was a long and backless wooden bench, and his chair was a piano stool. I turned on the light and then went to sit next to Reggie on the bench. There was a glistening effect to the light because of the aluminum foil Ordé had used to block out the windows.

He came in after a few more minutes, dressed in jeans with his chest still bare, his long hair at least combed, and with a look of determination and fear in his eyes.

“Thanks, Chance. You too, Scout. I was so scared after Coyote’s warning that I couldn’t do anything. But now I have survived.” Ordé brought his hands together right between his eyes so that his fingers pointed up toward his forehead.

“Coyote’s message? That’s what you got out of my blood?” I asked.

“We are no longer mechanical pieces of flesh, Chance. Not just a heart to pump blood or a brain to translate primitive signals. Our blood and bone and flesh sing out the whole world that might be.”

I wasn’t in the mood for a sermon right then. I wanted answers but I knew that Ordé wasn’t so easily pinned down.

“If I feel something,” he continued, “or perceive something, if I learn something in any way — that knowledge is everywhere in me. I am more than a part of the whole; I am potentially everything. That’s why I can taste what has happened in blood.”

“So who killed Phyllis?” Reggie asked.

That’s when Ordé told us the story of what he called Gray Man; how Horace LaFontaine died of cancer but was then resurrected in blue light. How he went out in the desert and hibernated in a cave for almost four years.

“He is Death,” Ordé said. “And Death seeks its own.”

“He wants to kill us?” Reggie asked.

Ordé nodded. Then he said, “It was written in Phyllis’s blood because she fought Gray Man, she made him bleed that thick lifeless blood of his. She knew his story before she died.”

Ordé took a small folding knife from his pocket and pricked the tip of his right forefinger. A tiny drop of red appeared from the cut. He held the finger out to me.

“Taste this and see what I’ve seen.”

“Died?” I asked.

“Yes,” Ordé replied. “It was true death. His hands ended her body’s life, and his essence extinguished her light.”

I
WAS UNCONSCIOUS BEFORE
I knew I was falling. After tasting that salty drop of blood, I was in another place. Many of Ordé’s memories became my own, including the story of Gray Man.

On the night that blue light struck, the corpse that had once been Horace LaFontaine staggered, skinny as a rail and barely dressed, up into the hills. He walked through fences and over large stones, pushed down small trees when they stood in his way. His bones crackled from the electricity he’d sucked out of the wall of his once-sister’s home.

The human thoughts in his mind, all the memories of the life of the man who once bore a name, were now like specimens in glass jars in a great laboratory of death.

As he made his way through dense foliage, blood-hungry night insects came at him. But before any of them could alight, cold blue electricity ignited them in the air.

He made his way like that, false fireflies dying around him as he went, perverted blue light inside and out. Walking death seeking its own company. Unbridled potential with no life to temper it.

He went north dimly aware of a coyote that stalked him. Her nose close to the ground. Her quick feet ready to run. He couldn’t catch her, but then again, if she came within rock-throwing distance, she would die. Both were aware of the limits of their power. The coyote had witnessed blue light that night also. Now she smelled the unnatural odors that fumed around Horace LaFontaine. She tracked him as a scientist might follow the path of a celestial body that has, for no known reason, altered its course.

She sniffed the air and then licked the ground he walked on. All her senses cried out. She yipped and howled, but her warnings about Gray Man went unheard.

Three days later, far up a slope that was the beginning of a long meandering decline into the northern desert, Gray Man found his cave. In some cubicle of Horace’s mind he had gleaned the story of another man who died and came back to life. The man was buried in an underground chamber, behind a great boulder.

There was a stone above the cave. Gray Man climbed in, digging into the earth under the stone with hardened nails. From far off, the coyote watched, remembering the placement of the stars and the trees and the smell of the ground.

After many hours, almost in daylight, the boulder fell, sealing the dead man in.

Coyote spent the day circling, coming closer. She was skittish, frightened even by small breezes that rustled in the dead grass. It wasn’t until twilight that she made it to the rockbound cave. She sniffed and studied, whimpered and barked.

When she reached the upper part of the blocking stone, she pawed the dry dirt a little and stared hard, as if maybe she could peer beneath.

The dead hand shot out of the ground faster than she could see. The long-nailed finger destroyed the right eye and curled upward to rip out the bones of her head. But she was too quick to be killed. Half blinded but still alive, crying loudly at the pain and darkness, she ran at full speed back into the hills.