The Guru clenched his jaw for a moment, and Ed thought that he might have gone too far. But the flash of anger in the old man’s eyes was soon replaced by one of understanding. “Maybe I know more than you think I do. I want to help you, but I can’t do that until you are clean. Tonight I’ve given you something to show you a different way.”
Ed was now feeling decidedly woozy. “What did you give me?”
“Something to show you how it should be. I want you to know what it feels like to turn on your mind, instead of turning it off. Please stay with Doris at all times until I say you can go. This is for your safety. Now enjoy yourself tonight. Starting tomorrow, no drugs. When you have gone a week without them, come back to me and we can continue from there.” The Guru put his hands on the wheels of his chair, preparing to roll himself away.
Ed felt his last shreds of his patience disappearing. The prospect of a week alone with the gnome, defenseless, was terrifying. “That’s it? ‘Come back another time’?”
Doris opened her mouth to deliver what would undoubtedly be a fierce retort, but a commotion from the back of the room erupted before she had a chance to speak. Six people were pushing through the crowd in the hall, their eyes all fixed on the Guru. Four were pretty young women. The other two were men, and although the girls deferred to both, it was evident which one was the leader of this little group. Both of the men had shaven heads, but the one in charge was tall—well over six feet—and solidly built, and he strode forward with a self-assurance that the other one lacked. He wore simple, dark clothes, but carried himself like a king. The Guru’s two bodyguards placed themselves in front of the wheelchair, and it was clear to Ed that his audience was at an end. The Guru fixed his gaze on the leader of the group, but was still speaking to Ed when he said, “If you can’t quit, you’ll die. Now, please excuse me. I have to do something about him.”
Ed felt himself beginning to panic. He was already starting to feel a need for another fix. This Guru knew how to help him, but instead was sending him away empty-handed. Ed stood up, intending to say something more to the Guru. Doris pulled at his arm with such urgency that the words got stuck in his throat. Confused and disoriented, he let her pull him to a corner of the room.
“Who is that?” Ed whispered.
“His name is Arthur,” she whispered. “Don’t go near him.”
As Arthur walked up to the Guru’s chair, the people in the hallway apparently decided they could enter the room again; they filled up the space quickly, crowding around Arthur and the Guru in hopes of witnessing a great confrontation.
Watching Arthur, Ed felt the odd sensation in his head increase. The room became suddenly cooler, and the air appeared to shimmer. An unearthly glow surrounded the tall man, Arthur, as he spoke to the Guru. It began as a faint impression of yellow light, but gradually grew into an aura as bright as the sun.
At the center of the light was Arthur. He looked like an angel. Ed had never seen anything so beautiful. Brilliant yellow sparks flew off of him in a dazzling display of light. How could Doris believe that he was dangerous? The Guru seemed to distrust Arthur as well; he spoke sternly to him and radiated anger. No light surrounded the Guru, though. Ed found himself taking an involuntary step toward Arthur, and for an instant Arthur looked around and noticed him. Their eyes met for only half a second, and then Arthur’s attention was on the Guru once more. Doris held Ed’s arm with both hands and tried to pull him back.
“I told you not to come back to this house, Arthur Papadakis,” the Guru was saying. “You and Nathaniel were both forbidden to return. You were not invited to this party.”
Arthur laughed softly. “But I was invited, Rodney, just not by you. Harold said I could come over any time. He is the host of this party, isn’t he?”
“I am the host in Harold’s absence,” said the Guru, his gaze taking in the entire group of people before him, “and I say you’ve got to leave. All of you.”
“Soon, old man,” Arthur said arrogantly. “There’s someone else we came to see.”
The Guru’s eyes narrowed. “The one you’re looking for isn’t here.”
Arthur’s smile grew. “He’s here. I’ve already seen his face. You can’t hide anything from me.”
Ed didn’t hear the Guru’s reply. A flicker of movement behind Arthur’s aura had caught his attention. Something dark was lurking behind the blinding yellow light. If he squinted, Ed could make out a huge, hideous shape behind the light. It looked demonic, like a creature straight out of Hell, and it watched the Guru over Arthur’s shoulder and moved its lips as Arthur spoke. Then Ed saw the lines, microscopic filaments connecting this thing to Arthur’s hands and legs and face. When the creature moved, Arthur moved in exactly the same way. A puppeteer with its marionette. Ed wondered if the demon was projecting the golden aura somehow, using it as a shield so no one would see it controlling Arthur from behind.
The air in the room had become so cold that Ed found himself shivering. Suddenly feeling sick, he put a hand on her shoulder and looked for a way out of the room.
“Ed, what’s wrong? Are you okay?” Doris pulled him by the hand through the crowd and out of the living room. The gray-haired man Ed had seen earlier stood in the hallway.
“Arthur’s going to miss you,” he whispered to Ed.
“What?” Ed asked. “Am I going somewhere?”
“He’s going to miss you by one,” said Rat. “Idiot.”
“Shut up, Rat,” said Doris. “Ed, just ignore him.” She drew Ed farther down the hallway and into another room. There were fewer people in here; two sat on top of a desk in the corner, while a chubby, middle-aged man sat in one of two leather easy chairs against the opposite wall. Ed followed Doris, grateful that it was warmer out here. Doris convinced the chubby man to vacate his seat by giving him a hard shove, then helped Ed sit down. “Are you all right?” she said again.
“Yeah. I don’t know.” The ceiling was starting to melt, dripping paint onto the floor. He could see the wooden beams above the ceiling turning to liquid as well. He huddled into the chair and tried not to get dripped on. “What’s wrong with the ceiling? Why is it doing that?”
Doris looked up. “Nothing’s happening to the ceiling.”
“Oh.” He closed his eyes, but the whirling shapes that filled his vision made him more dizzy. “I don’t like it.”
“You just have to get used to it. After a while, you start to tell the difference between hallucinations and reality.”
“Reality,” Ed repeated. “Right.” It all looked real enough to him. He held his head in his hands, watching the carpet dissolve in a raging torrent of paint and liquefied wood, and hoped this feeling wouldn’t last too long. Doris sat on the arm of the chair and rubbed his shoulders.
“He didn’t give you much,” she reassured him. “I think he just wanted you to have a taste of it, so you could see what it’s like to expand your horizons a little bit. You’ll be fine in a while. It’s amazing, though, isn’t it?”
Ed didn’t answer immediately. Amazing it certainly was, but not in a way he would have liked. He tried to calm himself by talking. “How do you live here? Who owns this house?”
Doris leaned an elbow on the back of the chair. “It belongs to a friend of the Guru’s. I don’t know if he owns it, actually, but he lets us live here. We don’t have to pay anything. He just lets us stay here. He must be rich.”
The whirling images diminished somewhat as Ed allowed himself to relax, though he continued to see impossible swirls of color. Doris’ face appeared briefly to be made of millions of tiny geometric shapes. “So this Guru just goes around drugging people against their will?”
“The Guru has a reason for everything he does, and you need to be a little more respectful.”
“Respectful!” Ed saw flames rising up in the corner of the room, but the flames quickly changed to snakes and slithered away. “He’s not really your uncle, is he?”
“Of course not. Would you have come here if I�
��d started talking about Gurus?”
“Is that blood?” Ed asked. He was looking out the window at the house next door, which had suddenly become illuminated by a strange light. A black cloud spun slowly over the house, and a dark fluid had begun to trickle out of the cloud.
“No, I’m sure it’s not,” Doris said without a trace of concern. “Chocolate syrup, probably.”
Ed continued to watch the cloud. The fluid poured onto the roof of the house next door—only a little at first, but swiftly increasing until it was a red waterfall. It ran down the roof and spread out from the house to form a red lake. “It is,” he said. “It’s blood.”
“Just ignore it,” Doris told him.
He sat in the chair for what seemed like eons; at some point Doris moved to sit in the other chair, but she never left his side. After a while, the shaven-headed young man who had been accompanying Arthur entered the room. He spotted Ed and came straight over.
“Those two are still going at it,” he said with a hint of a southern drawl. “I’m sorry you all had to see that.” He leered at Doris and gave her thigh a squeeze, earning himself a hard slap on the hand. Doris glowered at him. “I need to talk to your friend here, sweetheart,” the bald man said to her. “Don’t worry; I’ll bring him back.”
“He doesn’t have anything to talk to you about,” Doris said, getting up from her seat. “We were just leaving.”
Ed thought of the image of what he’d seen behind Arthur’s aura. Did this man have any idea what Arthur really was? “I don’t have anything to talk to you about,” he said, wondering why those words sounded familiar.
The man smiled a charismatic smile. “I don’t blame you for being skittish. It’s just that you look like a man with some problems, and Arthur is good at solving problems. Better than this Guru clown, anyway.”
Doris advanced on the man with murder in her eyes.
“It’s all right,” Ed told her, seizing her by the arm to hold her back. “It won’t hurt just to talk to him. I won’t let him give me any candy.” Doris tried to protest, but Ed turned away from her before she could say a word. He followed the man to the kitchen, struggling to keep his balance on the smooth wood floor of the hall as it writhed and twisted under his feet. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Doris following at a distance. She seemed to be taking the Guru’s orders quite seriously.
Arthur’s acolyte opened the refrigerator and looked inside. “Looks like a mold farm in there,” he said, making a face as he closed the door. “I’m Larson. I help Arthur.” He held out a hand, but Ed didn’t shake it. “You know,” he continued, “I saw you looking at the girls when we came in. You dig any one in particular?”
“Yeah,” he said. “No.”
“Don’t worry about it, man, it’s okay to look. You could be doing a lot more than looking, though, you know?”
Ed didn’t really know. He stared at Larson dumbly while the kitchen walls slowly shifted colors.
“We got a good thing going, Arthur and me and the girls,” Larson continued. “Arthur takes care of ’em, and they take care of us. Stop me when you get what I’m saying.”
“So,” Ed said, “you and Arthur bring home the bacon, and the girls do the cooking, is that right?”
Larson stared at him for a moment, then doubled over with exaggerated laughter. “The cookin’, right. I like that. Cookin’. Those girls do an awful lot of cookin’. They cook until they walk funny. There’s a few other guys around too, but we always got enough girls to go around. These ones came with us today, they’re not even the cutest of ’em. Hey, you should come hang out with us sometime, smoke a joint, have a chick or three. Arthur’s got a place over in Bel Air, just moved in. You oughtta come stay there some night.”
“Wouldn’t Arthur have a problem with that?”
“‘Course he won’t mind. It’s his idea.”
Ed tried to think of a graceful way to ease out of this conversation. A large swarm of insects was developing in the corner of the kitchen and he wanted to be elsewhere. “I’ll think about it,” he said.
“Yeah,” Larson said, slipping a small piece of paper into Ed’s hand. “Here’s the address. You think about it. I’m telling you, it’s far out. What the hell’s going on in there?”
A sudden outburst of shouting in the living room nearly drowned out Larson’s question. He and Ed hurried across the hall to see what was happening. More people had gathered there, but the Guru was nowhere to be seen. At the center of the room two men were having a heated argument. Everyone else was edging toward the walls, leaving a wide space for them to duke it out. One was short, with a thick beard and clothes that appeared to be made of animal skins. The other was taller and dressed in more conventional clothes. The bearded one glared up at him ferociously, and if it came to a fight, Ed would have bet his money on the little guy if he’d had any money to spare.
“Terry Melcher,” Larson explained to Ed in a whisper, nodding in the direction of the taller man. “Record producer. He’s big-time.”
“Who’s the other one?” Ed whispered.
“That’s Charlie. Writes some songs and thinks he’s a hot shot.”
Melcher’s face was red with anger. “I told you no such thing,” he was shouting, “and you know it. I told Dennis I’d listen to you play, and I listened. And you’re lousy!”
“He’s not that bad,” Larson whispered to Ed. “He’s better than any of the garbage they play on the radio, anyway. He’s got a message, something to say. But he’s nuts.”
Ed must have missed Charlie’s retort while Larson was speaking, because Melcher was already answering in a voice even louder than before. “Are you kidding? Jim McGuinn’s farts sound better than that crap you call ‘music.’ Get off your high horse.” He spun around and forced his way through the crowd, bumping right into Ed, who tottered and would have fallen over if Larson hadn’t been there to catch him. Melcher, red-faced and looking quite embarrassed, mumbled an apology and stormed out of the room. Charlie watched him go with a baleful expression. Larson watched both of them thoughtfully. The front door banged open noisily as Melcher left the house.
“Terry’s a nice guy,” Larson whispered to Ed. “The nicest there is. Charlie just knows how to push his buttons.”
Ed slipped away into the crowd while Larson was still craning his neck to get a glimpse of Charlie. Crumpling up the paper Larson had given him, he tossed it into an ashtray and went off to find Doris. He found her in the front foyer. Rat stood nearby, smoking a cigarette and watching them. “What was that all about?” Doris said as Ed approached.
“I need to get out of here,” Ed replied. He began to walk past her, but she caught his arm.
“No you don’t. Not until he says you can leave.” He was starting to pull away when a voice spoke from the hallway behind him.
“He can go if he feels up to it,” said the Guru. He rolled himself into the foyer, still flanked by his two bodyguards, and looked up at Ed sternly. “Remember what I told you, Ed. You have to take the first step. I can only help you if you’re willing to help yourself. All my people have to prove themselves before they can come to me as followers.”
“I can only do what I can do,” Ed said lamely. He chose not to say what he thought of becoming one of the Guru’s “followers.”
The Guru smiled and reached out to pat his arm. “We’ll see what you can do.”
Larson was standing next to Ed once more, laughing softly, although Ed hadn’t noticed his arrival.
Doris jabbed a finger into the center of Larson’s chest. “You want me to give you something to laugh about?” The Guru’s big black bodyguard, Rayfield, hurried over to separate them.
“Sure,” said Larson, looking Doris up and down, his eyes lingering where they shouldn’t. “Let’s see what you got, sugar!”
The Guru rounded on Arthur’s acolyte. “Stop taunting her, fool. Why are you still here? I told you to leave.”
The bald young man looked around and, apparently real
izing that Arthur was no longer there to protect him, hurried from the room as fast as he could without making it obvious that he was hurrying.
“Tell Arthur to stay away from my house,” the Guru called after him. Then, spinning his chair around again, he scanned the crowd of people that had gathered in the entryway. “Where is Benjamin?”
No one moved for several seconds. Then, hesitantly, a young man squeezed through to the front of the crowd. Ed recognized him as the sullen, dark-haired boy he’d seen when he first arrived.
The Guru regarded Benjamin with a cold stare. “Somebody told me you left earlier. Where did you go?”
Benjamin blinked rapidly and tried to talk, but all that came out was a high-pitched squeak.
“I’ve told you all what kind of person Arthur is. And yet somebody in this house slipped out to tell him to come over today. Is it Arthur you want to follow?”
The young man looked at his shoes and remained silent.
“Go on, then. Arthur’s way is not my way. If you want to shave your head and follow him, then go. Get out!”
The Guru said the last words with such force that many in the crowd jumped. Benjamin, still unable to meet the Guru’s eyes, ran out through the open door. When he’d gone, the Guru turned himself back around and frowned at the crowd of revelers. “Is there anyone else who wants to go with him?” No one made a sound. “Good. I hope that’s the last of that.” He turned once again to Ed. “I’m sorry you had to see that. Doris will show you out, if you think you’re ready.”
Outside, the air was chilly and fresh. The cool air was a relief after the dizzying warmth of the house. Doris stepped outside with him, shivering slightly. “So you’re going to just leave me here with all the kooks?” she said.
“You’re used to being around kooks. You’ll be fine.” He started down the steps to the driveway.
“Are you going to do what the Guru told you? Will you be coming back?”
Ed stopped. “I don’t know. I guess it depends on whether I pass his test.”
Forest of the Mind (The Book of Terwilliger 1) Page 13