“Sounds familiar. I guess a demi-god’s kid wouldn’t really have a need to steal my wallet or car or whatever else she was doing in that stream.”
Steel interjected, “Monkey Man kept him off your trail after the devil dance. I was monitoring your interplay with him on the turnpike, and other than a little prodding, trying not to interfere. You not only surprised me but outwitted him. Tearing the bridge down today was his counterattack.”
“So not only are you trying to kill me but this crazy, violent demi-asshole is too.”
“He’s responding to your magical output. Remember, you draw energies. His is a dangerous, destructive force.”
“Why’s he allowed to stay in this house, then?”
“We’re civil. We asked that he surrender you to us alive, and besides, Sheoblask is our uncle.”
“Jesus Christ. Are you nuts? He’s a deranged killer.”
“Uncle Red Eye may kill us all eventually. Right now, he needs you alive as much as we do. We want to learn best how to guide you in getting the time tunnel operational again, while he answers to Pan’s rivals and wants to shut the Earth’s tunnels down. He knows our hopes for you, and to complete his objective, he needs to figure out who you are. Like Mother, he believes you have a hidden ally who is acting through you. He wants to discover who it is. Essentially, we both use similar methods of deduction. Only, if one of my tests kills you, I’ll have failed in my research, and Pan will have to shift his resources to protect the tunnels. But if Sheoblask kills you, it’s because he would no longer need to solve the puzzle of who you are.”
Mother crone screeched, “Deets is a plant, somebody’s spy. There’s no other explanation on how he discovered the alley portal before partaking the mushroom.”
Maybe she was right.
The Shadow Creature. No one knows it helps me. They can’t sense its nothingness.
Amelia glanced past my chair and into the hallway again as she spoke. “Deets is an anomaly, Mother. We all agree we can’t fathom how he gained his magical insight.”
I closed my eyes and let my head flop back against the chair cushion. “What else?”
“At some point, you’ll receive some tunnel-jump guidance. Small hops, as you’re a risk.”
“Hmm, okay. So nobody told me how I’m supposed to do whatever I’m trying to do or why you guys can’t do this all yourself.”
“You simply live your life, pursuing your dreams. With your new knowledge, you might experiment with magic. I can’t say. The universe is taking steps to fix the damaged area through you. We’ll follow your path as we believe you’ll eventually zero in on the tunnel problem. It may be tomorrow, it may be fifty years from now. Once you do, Steel will then attempt an analysis and brief you on how to repair it. From our observations, you’ll instinctively know how to operate within or parallel to the remains of the tunnel.”
“I’m supposed to jump into an invisible, ruined god-mess?” I stood up and stalked to the window. Snow tapped lightly against the panes.
Everybody sat still. I could see their reflections in the glass. They sipped or smoked, watching me watching them.
Amelia broke the silence. “Deets, do you have anything you want to share with us?”
There it was. The Shadow Creature was my ace. “No, but I have more questions. How are you so sure I’ll find the broken portal or whatever it is?”
“Pigeon was launching a routine jump from New York to Pan’s place in the Andes when the explosion occurred. Steel was prepping for a time-hop. You’ve zeroed in on the two portals that Pigeon was transiting, and you have stayed connected to Steel. You have become aware of Sheoblask. These are all keys to the initial blast. Pan is confident your tunnel-see abilities will be pulled towards the gravity of the collapsed area eventually.”
“I’m like some lab rat in a maze attracted by the smell of cheese. Will I have to time travel?”
Steel snickered. “Let’s hope not.”
Amelia frowned before answering. “We don’t know what will be entailed. Time-jumping is not for the faint-hearted. It requires complicated preparations, which Steel was in the middle of when Sheoblask rocketed into the New York alleyway portal. From what we can discern, the blast scrambled future, past, and present time-tunnel routes, then blanked everything out.”
I thought of Nando, realized he was wandering far from the days he was born into and couldn’t return.
Suddenly, Amelia leaned forward as if listening intently, then instructed Steel to go check the house for Sheoblask.
Everyone was quiet, thinking through the evening’s conversation. The fire sizzled. The future loomed. I watched a clump of snow form on the window sill. It was building up quickly. My mind felt agile, assembling pieces of information, sticking bits of insane god-logic together as fast as the flakes clung to each other. This family of immortals had provided insight into how my life worked, and why. I knew they suspected me of knowing something that I wasn’t letting on about. They were right. I wasn’t about to reveal the existence of the dark healer. They had shared much information in the hope I would do the same, but I understood I was still the naive one in this holy foul-up, and maybe my one advantage was to keep them blind to my shadow mentor.
When my mouth opened, I saw it as a hollow blackness in the glass. It took me a moment to realize words were coming from the dark hole, bouncing off the window and back towards my audience.
“Who else is involved? Anyone I should know about?”
“There is a witness of the explosion from the tunnels. You’ll know him as an ally if you meet him. Then there’s a strange energy, seemingly out-of-place, that Pigeon and Steel felt.”
“You’ve gotta be kidding. Like what isn’t a strange energy in this whole mess? What’s Einstein have to do with the tunnels?”
“Nothing, but he somewhat theorized their existence and, after talking to you, mused about the possibility of god residue. Jenny steered him to meet with you that time in the sandbox, that’s all. Not all of us use my brother’s violent methods of observation.”
“Clue him in. I’ve got my hands full with Red Eye.”
Steel entered the room and flashed a rapid hand signal to Amelia as she answered me. “We’ll be ready for anything, Deets. Your well-being is to our benefit. We’ve protected you before.”
“Ah, you must be referring to my trusty jungle buddies, Monkey Man and Fish Man.”
“Yes, they are Pan’s spawn from an earlier age—before humans came around for him to impregnate. They are our older brothers from different mothers. As talented magical artisans, they constantly upgrade the main portal boxes over a large section of the universe. The formula written in the alley was devised by them to protect transit areas and to empower the magic symbols of every local tunnel user.”
Mother scowled. “They’re mischievous vermin, busy-bodies, graffiti scribblers.”
I chuckled as I spoke, “Why are there monkeys riding winged fish on the portals?”
Amelia rolled her eyes and shook her head wearily at her mother’s remark before answering me. “They’re symbols of traffic flow and congestion in nearby passages. The other markings reflect symbolic destinations if you jumped at that moment. Usually a representation of strong desires appear.”
The tree we had become—Teresa and I as one—in the Poconos.
“Makes sense.” I craned my head to watch the white flakes spiral out of the black. “I still don’t know how I’m supposed to...”
The glass no longer reflected anyone but myself. I turned to an empty room.
Chapter 17
After searching every room twice, I stepped out the front door. The faint tire tracks from Sheoblask’s monster Cadillac were filling with white powder, fading to nothing at the tree line. But Amelia, Mother, Jenny, and Steel had jumped. Had they chased him? Had hostilities been renewed? So much for being forth
right with me. No explanation or goodbye.
Exhaustion overcame me. I conked out on the couch and awoke to a cold, dead fire at dawn. I searched the house again, this time looking for signs of a portal. The house was large—two stories, thirteen rooms, an attached greenhouse, and a clean basement with eighty-three bottles of wine on a rack. The only connection to a possible portal I found was a dry cow patty in the greenhouse. There was no television, phone, or radio. I was comforted to discover a well-stocked kitchen, running water, working heat, and a room with sewing, woodworking, and artistic supplies in it.
The snow had piled up to about three feet overnight and was still coming down, so my search outdoors was limited to the steps outside the front and back doors. Sometime during that first day in the mansion, I sensed a series of gray behemoths circling beyond the forested property. Mountains.
For the next three nights, I barely slept as I listened to every creak or groan in the building. I steeled myself against the thought of Sheoblask returning by rehashing my attributes Amelia had praised. Thinking of her, I wondered if she would show up to guide me. Or maybe let me further investigate the mysteries beneath her blouse? What was expected of me now? The mansion had yet to reveal if it was a blessing or a trap.
Chapter 18
The Snowbound House, 1968
I kept the house lights blazing in most rooms, dragged a mattress downstairs and close to the fireplace in the den, stoked up a good fire from wood I found stacked by the back door, and set up a space to draw.
Finally, after months of barely working on my craft, I let myself go, pouring the insanity of living in the world of mushroom portals, immortals, and gods onto paper. There was a brightly colored portrayal of Pan standing among the valley cows and another of Nando in his gold suit. I churned out a mountain landscape filled with monkeys and fish and drained my soul into a rendering of shattered glass reflecting a grinning Johnny. I managed to take care of myself, remembering what happened when I forgot to eat or sleep. Yet I was relentless in my production, drawing a helicopter gunning down ragged, bearded men in an otherwise pristine jungle, labored over three renditions of a jaguar peering through leaves, and then stunned myself with a technical masterpiece of a drunken man sobbing over a photograph. I sniffled back memories and tears while coloring in a sketch of naked women wearing devil dancer masks and ran out of the horrible brown cigarettes as I drew a group of humanoids covered in snakeskins, furs, and feathers. Constantly scratching at the top of my head, I spent a contemplative week fiddling with a portrait featuring an unfinished jigsaw puzzle of a black dog.
Snow kept falling, day after day, piling higher throughout the nights, until I had to go up to the second floor if I wanted to see outside. I’d stare at the mounting snow, thinking my enforced seclusion felt somewhat like an initiation rite. Was I being observed by the family? Was I imprisoned, locked into some lost, inescapable dimension?
Settling into my blankets before sleep, I would send mental messages to Teresa, flicking my fingers through the intricacies of my magical feathered-dog symbol. I’d lay still, holding my breath, hoping for a soft voice or a gentle touch from the darkness.
But nothing. I’d close my eyes and be haunted in dreams of Teresa’s red Volkswagen rolling in the current, further and further downriver from the broken jungle gym entanglement of Silver Bridge. I would lift myself from the mattress, soaked from night sweats, and try to battle past another nightmare of demon claws around Audrey’s throat. When the horror faded, I would listen to the night blame me for the indulgent decisions that led to her unknown fate. And always, a voice from outside the house would finally call, offering redemption. In answer, I would fling open the front door, gulping air as I stood in the swirling cold until my teeth chattered. Shivering, I’d stagger back to the den and wrap myself in a blanket, sitting close to the fire until a gray air signaled the sun was behind the thick clouds outside.
Some days, I would walk through the building checking every room for a sign of change—something missing, something moved, or an item that had never been there before. More than once, I theorized I was in a mental hospital. The hallways and rooms must be busy with staff and patients, but I’m hallucinating right through them, as if they were invisible people.
Or am I a guest of the gods again, like the summer I spent at Pan’s cottage?
Finally, one never-imagined day, the sun burst through the windows. The drip of melting snow became a constant for weeks. A crop of purple crocus sprung between two slush-covered logs in the woodpile. A strange, new light announced the eternal blizzard to be over.
I gathered my artwork together, viewing it with fresh eyes. There were thirty complete color drawings, eleven inches by fourteen, protected by individual sheets of tracing paper, tucked neatly into a clean drawing pad. I had signed all of them with my Purpura pencil.
After the sun came back, I spent time sitting in the woods or exploring the rocky valleys and mountains near the house. There was no sign of civilization, and I had to dig deep to overcome the increasingly panicky belief that Steel or Sheoblask had teleported me to another planet where I was the sole human inhabitant. There were deer and birds and a near-disastrous encounter with a skunk but no sign of smoke or lawns or hikers or sounds of machinery.
On a day that I felt the house had no more use for me, I put on my winter jacket, ditched my old boots for a pair of Hush Puppies, and packed my knapsack with colored pencils, cans of tuna, a box of crackers, a can opener, a fork, matches, five sodas, a couple of shirts, and my drawing pad. I breathed out a silent farewell, pulled the front door shut, and followed the driveway where the tracks of Sheoblask’s Cadillac had long ago disappeared.
Chapter 19
What was next? Amelia had said I should just live my life. Teresa had joked about me being supported by the gods while I drew. Well, that bizarrity came true, but something I figured out about Santa Pigeon during my isolation was the real clue to my path. When I first met Pigeon in New York, my interactions with him had led me to discover the mysteries of Monster Alley. In the Cambridge courthouse, his poem had granted permission for my eventual journey to find Monster Valley. Back in the fall, after I escaped from Bellevue, he questioned what I would do with myself, and immediately thereafter, I had found my old traveling boots and knapsack, ready to join me on the next phase of my quest. Gerald Santa Pigeon was a signpost. Every time I saw him, I had been offered ways to find a portal.
As I walked, I calculated I must have been living in the mansion for about four months. There had been sixty-seven bottles of vino still left in the basement, and I estimated I had drunk about a bottle a week out of the original eighty-three.
Around midafternoon, I spotted a flatbed truck on a gravel road. It was my first sign of human activity I had seen in a half-day of hiking. I asked the driver where he was going.
“Memphis, then up to Saint Louis, and on down 66 to Oklahoma City.”
Still on Earth, then.
“Hey, I don’t know where I am.”
“You’re in eastern Tennessee. You want a ride, you climb on the bed. I don’t normally pick up hitchers, but you can strap yourself onto that tarp back there, behind the crates and between the pallets, so no one can see you. Cops stop us, I don’t know you’re there. You jumped on when I was taking a piss at a truck stop.”
“Right on. Hey, what’s today?”
“Thursday.”
“I mean the date.”
“The fourth.”
“Uh, what month?”
“You just land on this planet? It’s April fourth.”
“I’ve been in the mountains all winter. Lost track.”
But the trucker was right. After my winter of solitude and self-reflective art, traveling at high speed on a flatbed, belted beneath two ropes holding me tight to a bundled tarp, it did feel like I had just landed on this planet.
Traffic was light, t
he road dark. Wind whipped around me. Grit and pebbles sprinkled my face and caught in my beard. I gripped the rope as crates creaked, pallets jostled, and the asphalt whizzed beneath me. But the early evening stars above held still.
I think I went nuts this winter. That meeting with Pan’s family and the information they laid on me blew me away into another world. Maybe they figured out their problem by now—tunnel’s patched, and I can find my kid and try to set things right with Teresa again.
“Jesus Christ, I can’t believe you fell asleep back here. Wake up, you gotta get off. There’s going to be cops all over the place.”
“Uh, okay, what’s happening, man?
“Martin Luther King was killed a few hours ago in Memphis. Just heard it on the radio. We’re about five miles out of town. I’d stay away. The place might blow.”
“That’s some terrible news. Man, country’s a mess. You go away for awhile and, bang, it explodes in your face the moment you step back in. Hey, thanks for the ride, man.”
“Take care, kid.”
I continued walking west on a road that was increasingly becoming more populated with warehouses and storefronts. A flashing red light approached from behind me. A police car slowed up next to me and directed a blinding, white light into my face.
“Well, what do we got here?”
“Looks like a real live hippie.”
“Rare, to find one alive.”
The two officers both burst out laughing, pulled the car in front of me, and approached me on foot.
After harassing me about my long hair and beard, one patrolman was frisking me, the other rummaging through my knapsack when a second cop car pulled up alongside us.
Miracles (The Remarkable Adventures of Deets Parker Book 3) Page 11