4
VIVIAN MISSED breakfast. The motel alarm clock was broken, like everything else in the room, and its red LED display could only be read with the correct, precise application of pressure to various parts of the screen. A few minutes of manipulation passed before she realised she was reading it right. The morning was gone. It was one o’clock in the afternoon.
She put on her coat and boots and crammed The Violet Path into her pocket, rolling it into a tight tube so it would fit. She had no intention of reading it again, but she thought it might improve her credentials when she went to visit the other schools of Telos – they would, perhaps, be more willing to talk if they thought of her as one of their own. She found the folded piece of paper with their addresses on it, forced down a cup of sulphurous tap water, and left her room.
Down in the lobby the reception desk was unattended again. Troy was gone and Judy obviously hadn’t returned, and there was an end-of-the-world emptiness about the whole place. The dining area looked as it had done the previous night. Seeing as she was the only guest, they probably hadn’t even bothered opening for breakfast.
Vivian got to the entrance of the lobby and stopped. She rested her fingers on the handle, and then, seeing the parking lot was barren and knowing there was absolutely nobody else in the motel, went back to the reception desk and picked up the box of donations to the mountain. She shook it, then slid open the wooden bottom. There was a ten-dollar bill in there. She took it. She’d get a proper breakfast, wrath of the Telurians be damned.
Outside it was another perfect, bright day. A slight chill from the altitude, despite the sunshine. Even with her body clock so askew, Vivian looked upon the town with a kind of hungover clarity. It seemed a less strange place than when she’d arrived; or rather, it seemed there was another Mount Hookey that she hadn’t paid attention to the day before. She noticed regular shops and businesses – a pizza place, a realtor, a hardware store – in among the healers and the gurus. Regular people, too. Outside the gas station, two men in baseball caps and slack denims peered under the bonnet of a car. A bored-looking girl with bad skin aligned the trolleys outside the supermarket. In light of all this, the events of the previous day took on the haziness of a fever dream.
Shelley’s map took her in all directions, so Vivian decided to eat in the first coffee shop she came to. It was called Steamin’ Pete’s and was decked out like a fisherman’s shack, tackle and fibreglass fish and bits of boat nailed to the walls. Her dad had liked fishing, but had never taken her with him. There was a neat pile of Lotus Guide Northern California magazines on a stand near the door, but apart from that the place seemed free of spiritual trappings. It was busy, too. There was hissing and clanging from the kitchen out back, strong and delicious smells of coffee and Mexican food. Vivian joined the queue and rolled her ill-gotten ten-dollar bill in her trouser pocket.
She ordered a pancake breakfast and another black coffee, forgot about the tax for the hundredth time since arriving in the USA, and ended up spending nearly the whole ten dollars. She grimaced. The peppy waitress glanced meaningfully at the tips jar when she gave Vivian her receipt. Vivian looked at it too. It had a quirkily handwritten sign that read: “All tips go to the mountain!”
Vivian walked away with her order number on a little fishing rod and got a table to herself under a huge, fake salmon. When the waitress brought over her pancakes and coffee she asked to borrow a pen and made a list on the back of a napkin. There were other things to do besides looking for Jesse. She wanted to ring the police in Lewiston and see if they had caught the man with the bell, or at least retrieved her possessions. She’d asked them to call her at Cedar Lodge, but the chances of any message reaching her seemed slim given that the motel’s reception was apparently abandoned for large portions of the day, and the Lewiston police department didn’t seem a particularly motivated bunch.
If she didn’t get her wallet and passport back she’d have to ring the embassy. Her bank, too. She didn’t have a number for either, and without her phone she couldn’t look it up. She hadn’t seen a library or an internet cafe. She could go to the embassy in person, but how was she meant to do that if she couldn’t pay for a bus ticket? Could her bank wire her money to anywhere in the world? Come to think of it, had she even seen a bank or an ATM since she’d got there?
That brought her to the last bullet point on her list: Mum? Her mother could perhaps send over the funds, but it was a call Vivian was anxious to avoid. Mrs Owens was a habitual worrier, and the combined stresses of hearing about her daughter’s predicament, the lack of success on the Jesse-finding front, and the prospect of having to transfer money via twenty-first-century means would probably, literally, be enough to kill her.
Vivian went over the question mark repeatedly, until the biro had scored through to the tabletop. She realised suddenly that someone had sat opposite her. They were breathing loudly through their mouth, and each exhale was accompanied by a gust of sour coffee breath, with notes of something more grotesque underneath.
“How’s it taste?”
She looked up. It was Mr Blucas. He was wearing the same anorak and woolly hat he’d worn the previous day. He had just two shopping bags with him today, different from the ones he’d had in the motel, she noticed. One contained some women’s clothes, the other a bundle of what might have been loft insulation and a fishing lure he’d obviously just stolen from one of the other tables. He nodded at the remains of her pancake.
Vivian looked around for support, but everyone else in the cafe was trying to ignore him too.
“It’s good,” she said quietly, and looked down at her list again as though it demanded all of her attention.
“Food’s garbage here,” said Mr Blucas.
Vivian shrugged. “It’s okay.”
“Everything’s garbage here.”
She glanced up. He sat back in his chair and nodded to himself in agreement. She tried to eat her last rasher of bacon but let her fork fall to the plate when she caught another mouthful of his breath.
“You come up here on the Amtrak?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“You eat onboard?”
“I’m sorry,” said Vivian, “I’m just trying to do some work.”
“I used to go all over on the trains,” he said, ignoring her. “All over.”
Vivian contemplated getting up and leaving. It wasn’t fair. She’d only been here ten minutes. She wanted to finish her coffee.
“On the old Amtrak you could get a hamburger and Coke for one dollar and twenty cents.” His eyes rolled back and went completely white. “Now they charge you ten dollars, twenty dollars. And you know what?”
He waited for an answer.
“What?”
“It’s garbage!”
“Oh.”
She looked around for another table to sit at, but the place was full.
“Who you looking for?” he demanded.
“No one,” Vivian said.
“You won’t find your brother in here,” he said.
Vivian looked at him and he grinned a tobacco-yellow grin.
“What do you know about my brother?” she asked. She leaned forward and nearly knocked her coffee cup over with her elbow.
“They were going to put him in my room,” he said. “Those sons of bitches.”
“You saw him at the motel?”
“I said, ‘You put him in my room and I’ll get this whole garbage place closed down!’ And they listened, yes ma’am. Everyone listens to me round here. I run this whole town. You’ll see.”
He looked around the cafe now, and the rest of the diners studied their plates of eggs and toast and tortillas. Vivian came forward again, found the smell too much, retreated to where the air was clearer.
“When you say he was in your room – do you mean you have the key to that room?”
“I got keys to every room in town. I got keys to doors folks like you can’t even see. You ever seen an Ascended Master before?”
>
Vivian sighed.
“No.”
“You’re looking at one!”
He cackled.
“Do you know where Jesse is now?” Vivian asked. “Honestly?”
“My brother lived here, once,” said Mr Blucas.
“Mr Blucas.”
He shook his head. “Brothers. Who’d have them? Just a pain in the ass.”
“Do you know where he is?”
Mr Blucas swung his head back around and his hat teetered but still refused to fall from where it was balanced on his crown. Wisps of dirty straw-coloured hair poked out from underneath.
“What do you reckon?” he said. “Do you think my brother and your brother are somewhere together? Laughing about us? I bet they are. Sons of bitches.”
Vivian sat back in her chair and knew that she was getting nothing from him. She wondered if there was anyone in the whole town – the whole state – she could get a straight answer from.
“Please,” she said. “If you know anything…”
“Oh, yes ma’am, you can bet he’s gone to the big house.”
“The big house? You mean prison?”
“They got him locked up good!” said Mr Blucas, and laughed loudly again. “You go and look in the big house. They’ll be there. My brother and your brother. Two goddamn sons of bitches.”
At this the waitress appeared by his side, radiant and youthful, a whole different species.
“I’m sorry, Mr Blucas,” she said. “You know we can’t have you cursing in here while people are trying to eat.”
“I’m going already,” said the old man, and heaved himself out of his chair. “Need to go and see if my room is ready. It had better be ready.”
He picked up his shopping bags and turned to the rest of the room.
“You’re all getting fed garbage,” he said. “Twenty-four-seven. I’ve told you and told you. But you won’t listen.” He looked down at Vivian. “You got any change from that ten-dollar bill you stole?”
Vivian flushed with guilt and said nothing. How did he know? Had he been spying on her? He showed her half a mouthful of yellow teeth again.
“You’re alright,” he said. “You take as much as you need. They won’t miss it.”
Then he shuffled out of the cafe in his gigantic coat, muttering to himself. Whenever he passed a table, people put down their cutlery and pushed their plates away, as if just his presence had somehow tainted the food.
* * *
Vivian left the cafe half an hour later feeling sick and a little woozy. Her stomach was a truculent thing at the best of times, but two days of fasting followed by pancakes and bacon and heavy syrup had thrown it into great, heaving spasms. She could still smell Mr Blucas, too, regardless of how many times she washed her face and hands in Steamin’ Pete’s bathroom. Coffee and urine and something fungal.
What if Jesse really was in prison? That was another reason to contact the police. Before she left Steamin’ Pete’s, she asked the waitress if there was a police station in town. The waitress still seemed to begrudge Vivian her lack of tip, or perhaps she thought her responsible for luring Mr Blucas into the cafe, but answered her shortly: no. The nearest police station was Lewiston. Mount Hookey was a safe town, and they had no need for law enforcement.
The route Shelley had sketched took Vivian in a slightly misshapen oblong up and down both sides of the highway. The western side, further down the foothills of the mountain, seemed the more dishevelled half of town. Here the forest gave way to a kind of prairie, so dry and brittle it may as well have been desert.
In a yard of brown grass she found the “Telurian Mission”, or what was left of it. It had been a converted church by the looks of things, but its spire was skeletal and the rest of the building was a charred shell. There was a wooden sign outside on which the name of the school had been stencilled, and on top of that someone had graffitied a black, inverted triangle. It seemed some kind of warning.
A man walking his shih-tzu stopped slightly too close to feel comfortable and surveyed the devastation with her. He said nothing. He was beaming.
“What happened here?” Vivian asked.
“The mission?” said the man. “They got what was coming to them!”
He made a triangle with his fingers, inverted, like the graffiti, and pointed it in the direction of the ruined church. His dog sniffed at one of Vivian’s boots. Vivian guessed at what he might have meant. A lot of bad blood, as Shelley had said.
“Thank goodness someone’s purged the negative energy, right? Can you feel that? Phewee!”
He brought his finger-triangle to his lips, blew through it, then laughed and went on his way, dragging the shih-tzu behind him. Vivian spent another few moments looking at the burned timbers of the church. She didn’t agree with the man. Seemed there was a whole lot of negative energy here that hadn’t been purged.
She took out her map. She crossed the Telurian Mission from her list and scanned the rest. Angels of Telos. Temple of Telos. Light of Telos. Telos Now. The Telos Sanctuary. That was just the first page.
It was tiring, demoralising work. Angels of Telos she found in a trailer park on the edge of town, an RV covered in so much neon signage it looked more like a casino than a place of spiritual learning. Vivian was met on the doorstep by the oldest, most artificially tanned woman she had ever seen, who straight-up invited her in and offered her a cup of tea and postage-stamp-sized tab of acid. Vivian declined both. She asked after Jesse. The woman said she’d never met him, but she’d seen him in a dream during one of her visits to Telos. She asked Vivian if she knew where the entrance to the Telurian vortex was. Vivian said no. She asked if Vivian would like to be shown one day. Vivian declined this, too. Vivian asked the woman – whose name sounded like “Eenoo”, though she couldn’t have spelled it – if she had a telephone she could use. Eenoo had thrown out her phone on the same day that John F. Kennedy had been assassinated and hadn’t bought another one since.
The other schools were a series of greater or lesser disappointments. The Temple of Telos was housed in a grey, modular building that could have been the reception for a taxi rank. Its doors were closed, and there was no furniture inside. Light of Telos was a kiosk that sold organic e-cigarettes. Telos Now was another residential property, like Shelley’s, but even more run-down. Its sign was a piece of A4 paper stuck to the inside of a Plymouth Voyager that was parked outside the house, all of its tyres flat. There were vague murmurings of recognition from the man in the kiosk, but he couldn’t say anything definite about Jesse’s whereabouts, and the woman who Vivian took to be the owner of Telos Now was asleep in the back of the Voyager and didn’t look like she wanted waking.
Vivian was close to giving up when she saw the Telos Sanctuary. It seemed far more promising than any of the other schools. It was on the mountain side of the town rather than the desert side, where everything was inexplicably more affluent. It looked a little like an alpine chalet. Up some steps was a tasteful little rock garden that Vivian would have called Japanese, were it not for the totem pole centrepiece and that same childlike rendering of John of Telos that was perched on top of it. Over the front door were the words: “One Light, one Spirit.”
Vivian rang the bell and heard something like wind chimes overhead. The door opened almost instantly. The man on the other side was short and bald and had a precisely trimmed white beard. He was in white robes but also wore a pair of rimless spectacles that gave him an air of approachable normality.
He smiled.
“Hello Vivian,” he said. “Missing something?”
She blinked at him.
“I’m afraid Jesse is long gone. But he’s not the only thing you’re missing, is he?”
“I…” She started. “Sorry, what?”
“Come in, dear heart,” the man said. “Come in, come in. Let’s see what we can do for you.”
5
THE MAN was Glenn, whom Shelley had mentioned in passing, and the Telos Sanctuary was, accor
ding to him, one of the newest and best equipped schools in Mount Hookey. He led her through the lobby, which was scattered with gigantic pebbles that Vivian presumed were for sitting on. Another reception desk here, attended by a teutonically beautiful young woman who smiled like Glenn had done, and next to it what looked like a small library and gift shop. Opposite was a great mural of John of Telos. She thought of her dad again, for some reason – something about the beard. There was a trickling fountain that was just short of relaxing since the motor that powered it was louder than the water itself. The place smelled of pine resin and incense, and there was the sound of dolphins and whales coming from somewhere.
At the rear was a circular “moon door” that led to some stairs. Vivian followed Glenn up to the floor above. The staircase was lined with more pictures of John of Telos, and some photographs of Glenn with initiates and fellow Telurians. In one of them he was embracing a famous boxer from the 1990s whose name Vivian couldn’t remember.
“Is that…” she said.
Glenn just looked over his shoulder, smiled and nodded.
“I thought you’d only just opened?”
“Oh no,” said Glenn, “we’ve been going for nearly thirty years. We had to change our name and premises, because…” He paused. “Let’s just say the IRS isn’t favourably disposed to us.”
He had an aristocratic East Coast accent. Vivian found that reassuring, and slightly at odds with everything around him.
The floor above was one huge, long room with a vaulted roof, like a barn. In the middle of the east-facing wall was a huge triangular window, which perfectly framed the summit of the mountain. Vivian was reminded of the front cover of The Violet Path. There were two women in front of the window standing on coloured mats. Their hands were together in prayer. They were hardly moving at all. At the other end of the room was a fireplace and a kitchen, where a young man was stirring a pot of something. Cushions and furs on the varnished wooden floor. Crystals absolutely everywhere, but at least it was quiet, and no one was offering her acid.
The Follower Page 4