Jerry broke the silence. “Man, at least you’ll die on acid.” He peered over the edge of a deeply eroded cliff. “Whoa, it’s dark down there. It’ll be a bitch to climb down into that pit.”
I heard the sweat on Jerry’s palm slip against the knife.
Now.
I reached out calmly to Chuck. “I’ll dig my own grave up here. Hey, man, we had a good time traveling together from Arizona. If I’m going to die, let me lay forever under these stars.”
“Freddie said...”
But I had gently removed the shovel from his hand.
Jerry saw through my ruse. “Don’t give him—”
My first swing was an awkward chop at Jerry’s arm as I sidestepped away from Chuck. But luck was with me, the shovel tip slapped his wrist and the knife flew from his hand. Everybody froze as we watched it sail, the sharp blade glinting as it sliced arrow-like, striking Rabid Dog Woman in the center of her forehead. She screamed, pulled out the knife, stumbled in pain, and forgot about the edge of the cliff. Her left leg went over while the other splayed out on the upper surface. Flailing her arms at the dirt for traction, she made the same sounds she had when she had been ripping at my pants with her teeth. She was slowly sliding over the lip of the ragged escarpment.
Jerry and Chuck didn’t have a chance. I stepped quickly between them. Blue sparks flew from my magical hand as I gripped the shovel shaft. Coils of lightning wrapped around the weapon. It became an extension of a roar that rumbled within me. I couldn’t tell where my hands ended and where the wood pole began.
The air surrounding me screamed. It was the most terrifying sound I had ever heard in my life, yet frighteningly satisfying as I knew it sprung forth from within me, needing my living lungs and my beating heart to give birth to its energy.
Jerry managed a panicked “What the fuck?” before the handle jabbed him in the stomach and a quick thump to his chest sent him tripping over the snarling dog-lady and tumbling down the cliff.
Chuck kind of hiccuped a “Who the hell are—?” before he began yelping and tried to keep from falling after I rammed the shovel blade against his kneecap. “You broke my leg, man.”
“Odd words, Chuck, very odd words. Consider my reason. Bye.”
I scampered back along the only trail I knew. Jerry was cursing, trapped in a bramble of cactus and stiff hardwood bushes about twenty feet down into the impenetrably dark gravesite he had planned for me.
I approached the clan’s driveway quickly and quietly. There were motorcycle keys scattered on the mechanic’s worktable. I identified a Honda key, spotted the bike.
Damn, where’s the ignition? I’ve ridden one of these before.
The key fit.
Chapter 23
The familiar red glow moved calmly upwards from just inside one of the open garage sheds.
The scrape of his voice sounded as if it emanated from the pile of gears, bolts, clamps, and oil cans piled in disarray amidst bumpers and rusty rods, loose wires, and boxes of spark plugs.
“Mother and Sheoblask are right. Not only can you tunnel-see, but you’re very adept with a power you still don’t understand how to use. I’ve learned about all I need to know to guide you in a tunnel repair, but I can’t figure who’s helping you learn your skills. Leaping across rooms and magical warrior abilities on a night of violence are a far cry from that frantic skirmish with Gus and Drake in the Poconos. This is beyond your dream helpers or your power symbol. Who’s guiding you, Deets? You know Sheoblask tuned in as soon as you used magic tonight. He’s going to haunt your every step to find out who your teacher is.”
I looked at the doors and windows of the house, searching the shadows for my enemies. I whispered harshly, “You trying to bring everybody after me? Shut up or help.”
“Them? That gang indulging themselves without a hope of clarity to guide them into the next day? Without their blowhard leader, most of them wouldn’t think of you as a threat. And as for me, all you see is the cigarette, right?”
“I’ve got to get out of here.”
“You walk between two worlds, Deets.” The cigarette waved in the direction of the house. “Practice a new skill.”
“What are you talking...?” Then I understood. Steel wanted me to retrieve my artwork. Another test?
“The past few months were quite a generous gift to you, Deets. Pan likes you as a houseguest. He was delighted you were able to spend the winter creating those masterpieces you so easily churn out.” He tossed his cigarette to the ground and stubbed out the glow. “Pan believes your creative abilities are crucial when you find the tunnel wreck we’re searching for, but they won’t be the only skills needed.”
I didn’t miss his insinuation. To enter a house full of people who wanted to kill me, I’d have to move very carefully. Invisibly. And Steel wasn’t offering hints on how to. I believed he was rooting for me, even believed I could do it, but I also knew he was a calculating observer.
The drawings were testimony to who I was, to my relationship with Pan and his belief in me. I could sense the pencil work, every detail, every line, every layer of color shaking in fear from being trapped inside the walls of the evil-infused building. I hadn’t produced thirty illustrations in the snowbound house of the gods to abandon them to the hands of the maniac that had condemned me. Or to his mindless robots.
I opened the door to the candle-lit house.
Three naked women and a man lay entangled on a pile of pillows and couch cushions in the drum room. They were lazily fondling and sucking each other, looking worn out from whatever they had been doing while I was being executed.
One of the women, her tits being massaged by the man, who rested his head on her lap, raised a hand to point at me. Her mouth formed a wordless question, and her eyes looked intensely bewildered. The man, dazzled by the tits above his head, didn’t pay any attention to me.
Another of the women, one hand lingering on the guy’s crotch, looked up, focusing on me.
“It’s the chaos master.”
I raised a hand in salutation, signaling my intent to be calm and not to bother them.
I’m an hallucination. I’m nothing. I come from nowhere and will return to nowhere.
“Hi, don’t let me hassle you. I just, uh, died... hum, wanted to thank your lord... ah, let him know how grateful I am. Everything’s cool.”
Man, it feels weird to lie on acid, even to save my life.
The two tripped-out women stared wordlessly. The one removed her hand from fiddling with the guy’s limp dick to point me in the direction of the hall.
I could hear movement, voices, and moans of sexual pleasure from the rooms further down the corridor.
My knapsack or my art weren’t in the last places I had seen them.
Entering deeper into the house, I became the light of a candle, then the spaces of shadow. I slipped between the glow and ink as an energy that moved, no longer seen as human.
A door opened across from me, and a naked man walked out, pausing and staring in my direction momentarily. “Wow, it’s like...the air is really air…wow.”
I was tunnel-jumping. I knew he had only seen the shifting hallucination I had become.
Looking into the room he just left, I spotted my knapsack next to a group of candles. My colored pencils lay scattered nearby, some of the ends blackened or melted. I sensed only two bodies in the room, so I took a chance and stepped in. The mother of the baby sat on a mattress staring at her sleeping child. Her eyes buzzed with an intense absorption of the flickering flames around her.
I could tell she had been able to visually assemble patterns in the room and distinguish my presence as a human shape.
I gathered up my pencils, slung the knapsack onto my back. I’ll need these colors. They’re my most faithful companions.
“Were you sent here to kill my baby?”
; “No, I’m here to find mine.”
Her head turned to focus on where I stood as she spoke of her child. “He’s beautiful.”
“Yeah, looks a bit like a cantaloupe.”
“A beautiful cantaloupe.”
“Where’re my drawings?”
“Across space and movement, in some other world.”
Peering out the door, listening to the sounds of the house, I tuned in to a whistling squeak rising in pitch at the far end of the hall. Tweety climaxing. The master’s bedroom, where the treasures are kept.
I moved decisively to the door where Brenda’s tweets emanated from, put my hand on the knob, and heard a voice that sounded like color on paper. I recognized it as my soul calling to me. “We’re in a box. Nando, Pan, Cecilia, Johnny, all of us.”
The door opened quietly. Rolly Dixon and Wild Bird’s softest melody, “Always Love”, drifted through the room. The layers of guitar washed through me like a beautiful message of hope, becoming a primer on how to survive in a dangerous place.
“Anything you try can be done.”
Tweety was rolling off Freddie. Another woman, the brunette who I’d never known to be anything other than half-naked, was laying fully naked next to them.
“Feel that? Something just rustled wrong.” Freddie sounded alarmed.
“I’m sorry, Freddie.”
“No, it wasn’t you.”
Tweety looked straight at me. “The door was just opened by an invisible something.”
“Hold onto nothing more than love.”
I dropped to the floor, spotted a wooden chest with candles sputtering on it, and knew the drawings were inside.
“Anything you understand is not unknown.
Anything you look for can be seen.
Anywhere you are is where you should be.
Beautifully, easily.”
Light was bouncing chaotically around the room, totally out of sync with the music. Shadows sought hidden crevices or dove beneath floorboards, trying to escape the growing horror that came with Freddie’s restlessness. He told the women that when they finished with love, they would go check on the death of that evening’s faithless interloper. He positioned Tweety to his liking and issued harsh instructions to the brunette, “Listen to me. All you need right now is love. Hear it surrounding you. Let it live in you. I’m showing you how to let it become alive in you.” Then a violent slap collided against skin and reverberated through the room.
“Oh.” The brunette stifled a cry.
“Not like that. C’mon—hurt, kill, love, spit, come. Let it all get tangled inside your blood and cunt and that headache you call your life, like a ball that I can rip from you.”
Protecting myself, I took a breath of the harmony Rolly and Wild Bird were trying to infuse the room with, held it deep inside, and moved on my stomach across the room.
“Anything you created is there for you.
Anyone you save is loving you.
Anything you learn is being you.
Beautifully, easily.”
The LSD gripped me full-force suddenly, roaring like a solar storm through my head.
Multi-colored flowers drifted upwards from where I crawled, bursting into tentacles of poisonous gas as they reached the level of Freddie’s bed. The brunette’s shrapnel of screams wounded me. I paused to watch myself bleed out in liquid rainbows.
People needed help. My mind latched onto a vision of everything that had ever died—all of eternity bared its shredded skeleton. I held still, conflicted.
The snakeskin and swastika writhed and twisted above the commotion on the bed.
Doubt came with a tweet and a slap, Nazi-saluting and striking like a fer-de-lance.
Why am I risking myself for some paper with my pencil marks on it? Doesn’t my life have more purpose than wanting my stuff back? The people in all these rooms have a symbol of doom etched into their souls. Some are monsters, some are prisoners. Can’t I help? If not, can’t I just run?
No. I heard my soul calling me from that box. I can’t let the ruin that governs this house overcome me. I’ve got to keep believing in the reason I’m here. I have to survive and find the path the gods have picked for me. That truth can’t be held captive. It has to be freed.
My right hand shot forward.
“Hold onto nothing more than love.”
My fingers gripped Rolly’s music itself as it floated through the room. Holding tightly, I hauled the rest of me out into the open, past the end of the bed. I squirmed my way towards the chest. My torso became the wooden floor. One of my legs seemed a ghost. My arm reached forward, a void between spinning stars. My head didn’t exist. My foot nudged me forward, pushing from a space outside my consciousness, far away from the room, far away from everything that had ever been.
Freddie’s anger caused the walls to trickle blood. “There’s something freaky happening with that artist creep. Feel it?”
“Don’t stop, Freddie.”
“Don’t ever tell me when to stop, when to go. Red lights, green lights. Take the one that gets you through to where my head is, and maybe you can fuck me in a hole up on the hill. But there’s a misfire in the circuitry. No, man, it’s like we’re on stage for some strange shit. Get up, we’re going to go visit the graveyard. Fucking phantoms are crawling around.”
The music held me together as they climbed off the bed.
“Hold onto nothing more than love.”
And the three of them walked right over me. I could feel their feet squish through my skin, slide into my organs, and land on the floor. They hadn’t tripped over me or seen me. I wasn’t in their existence.
They left the room. I heard the front door open and close.
What had just happened? It wasn’t the acid that had turned me invisible. I had slipped into a world that didn’t exist, a world where hallucinations dwelled. Was it how shadows moved through the world?
“Anything you understand is not unknown.”
With the room emptied of Freddie’s vibrations, the candle flames smoothed out their hectic, disturbed dance. After removing the fat wax cylinders, I flipped up the lid of the chest, gathered my artwork, and stuffed the pad into my knapsack. Whispers of thanks from Nando and Cecilia and the rest of my drawings flowed around me as I moved swiftly past rooms where the bodies of lovers lay lost, enslaved within a madman’s demented aura.
“Anyone you save is loving you.”
But I left them, running with my rescued drawings to reclaim myself and find the ruins of the god’s eternal time tunnel.
Chapter 24
The Honda was a small bike. After trying unsuccessfully to figure out how to get the machine into neutral, I finally held in a clutch on the handlebar and, sitting astride the seat, walked my feet fast, moving the motorcycle past the outbuildings and a low stone wall. When the wheels picked up their own momentum on a slight downgrade, I began to glide silently beneath dark, overhanging trees.
Unfamiliar with the road, barely able to make out what lay in front of me, I trusted blind instinct to steer as I rolled over dirt and pebbles and leaves. But I was near panic on what my feet were supposed to do once I brought them up onto the foot rests. I turned the key, flipped my toe upwards against a metal pedal which I believed was the gear-changer, and let go of the clutch, hoping it would jump-start the machine.
Not a pop or stutter.
The pedal on the other side sank without resistance into empty air.
I returned my foot to the gear lever and flicked it through a frenzied series of ups and downs. An incorrect setting clicked, then scraped, then tore at the bike’s gears. Finally, I managed to get gliding smoothly in neutral and remembered there should be a kickstarter, so I flipped my feet around trying to feel for the mechanism but only managed to twist the tip of my shoe momentarily in the spinning spokes of the back whee
l.
I heard somebody yelling from far up on the hill behind the house, then a body of some flailing human-type creature crashed through a dark tumble of bushes and grabbed at me as the bike rolled onto the beginnings of the asphalt part of the road. The attacker’s fingers caught in my beard and yanked my head back, but momentum was in my favor. Though the bike swerved, I kicked out at the grasping monster, catching him low in the groin and causing him to stagger into an off-balance run. His attempt to drag me from the Honda faltered. He let go of my hair and flailed at my right arm, but I lashed out with my elbow and caught him in the jaw. Whoever the assailant was—Jerry, Freddie, or Chuck—sprawled onto the road, grunting and cursing. I took a sudden curve, wobbling too close to the edge of the pavement, one foot swinging out over a sheer drop into a deep chasm as I desperately straightened out my steering. A spray of leaves slapped my chest. Then suddenly, the road tilted sharply and the wheels hummed ominously. A blast of wind in my face snapped me into full alert.
My mind screamed out information, trying to help me the best it could in what it was describing as an impossibly threatening situation. Steep hill, many curves, no lights on bike, no foot brake, the hand brake is screeching.
I overshot a sharp curve, sailed up an embankment, spun the bike away from the fast approaching scrub trees, ducked my head under a looming cactus branch, and flew back unto the asphalt, still going full force. I bounced over a rough patch, and the bike swerved onto the opposite side of the road just as I realized I had to negotiate another impossible curve. Despite my strength, my will, and my hope to squeeze the hand brake past the scraping metal pads into a stop, the wheels never slowed. Gravity forced me to push my head forward and lean hard in the direction of the turn. Though I couldn’t see it, I could feel my right kneecap warning me the asphalt just brushed the outside of my pant leg.
At the next hairpin curve, I’m jumping.
The road ahead of me disappeared. As the bike sped toward this new predicament, I retried flipping through the gears, hoping it would slow me. But they just shrieked as if in terror themselves. Only the handlebars and the wheels worked. The machine tore on with suicidal determination towards the unrecognizable empty space.
Miracles (The Remarkable Adventures of Deets Parker Book 3) Page 14