Alison would help in that, whether she wanted to or not. I was sure of that. Her head was apple pie to me. I could go in whenever I damn well pleased. I knew that now. But I was still very reluctant to do so. And I was resolved to give her every chance to come forward on her own.
I just did not know how long I could wait for that.
We set off for Ojai at a few minutes past ten. I had a date at midnight, remember, with Oom-ray-key-too.
I took the coast highway up, through Malibu and Oxnard. Alison kept far to her side of the car all the way. While easing through Malibu I asked her, "Still playing with your numbers?"
She replied softly, "Bastard."
It was our first verbal exchange since the invasion.
I said, "You're right, of course. I apologize. But I won't alibi it. I did it deliberately. I might do it again, too, if I have to. I am not playing parlor games here, kid. People have lost their lives in this game already. You or I could be next. So you sit there and mix that in with your numbers. When you decide that perhaps it's best to pool the resources here, I'm ready to listen to you."
She asked, grim-voiced, "What did you get from me?"
I showed her a sober smile. "I calculate there were roughly seventy-five to eighty pricks under the tables back there."
She flared: "Jesus, Ashton! That's that's just—"
I said, "Yeah, right, it's despicable."
She turned toward her window, chin on fist, sat silent for perhaps ten seconds, then laughed softly, said, "It's so hard to stay mad at you."
I shrugged, replied, "So you may as well quit trying. I also picked up on your Twelve."
She said disgustedly, "Shit!"
I said, "Yeah. I'm ready to listen to you, kid."
“I'm not ready to talk to you, Ashton.”
"Let me talk to you, then. You can tell me how far off I am. Either you are one of The Twelve or you work for them."
"I said I'm not talking to you, Ashton."
"Close, though?"
She fidgeted. "I won't say how close."
"You folks have had Jim Cochran and Frank Valdiva on your payroll all these many years. I'd say about ten years."
"Jesus Christ, Ashton."
"You're sponsoring Vicky and Manuel, aren't you."
"Wait! Just wait right there! I told you I am not talking to you! So just cut it out!"
"You were dispatched when the thing turned violent. Wasn't supposed to work that way. Terrible glitch. And there lay poor May-un-chee-tee, Vicky's natural mother, with her head bashed in. Your own damned agent did it to her. So what are you? The Wizard of Womanland? You can put it all back together again, like Humpty Dumpty?"
"Shut up! Just shut up!"
"The hell I will! Damn you! Damn you, Alison, and all your wonderful Twelve! Who the hell gave you guys the God franchise around here? Those poor little kids don't know who they are or where they are right now! And their mother—yes, dammit, their mother, the only one they've ever known, is totally abandoned and left to bleed in the trenches. What's worse than being a widow is to be the widow of a disgraced cop—and that's the way this is going to come out, isn't it. Beaudfid, beautiful job you guys did here!"
Alison was crying.
And, shit, I cannot handle female tears.
I reached over and touched her, said, "Hey. If the shoe binds, don't wear it. It isn't yours. I'm sorry. But if you're not going to talk to me, kid, I am just naturally going to assume the worst. So tell me the way it is. So we can both feel better."
She dabbed at her eyes with a tissue, leaned her head against the window, said, very quietly, “The fucking shoe fits very well, Ashton. But it was built for binding. And I cannot get it off. So we'll both just have to go on feeling...”
I sighed, said, "Well, maybe it's a Cinderella slipper."
"How so?"
"Maybe it will slip right off come midnight."
She shivered, touched me lightly on the cheek with her fingers, replied, "It is not a Cinderella slipper, Ashton. It's a ten-league boot. And I would not take it off if I could."
And that, I supposed, was about as much voluntary honesty as I was going to get all night.
I asked her, "How much is twelve and one?"
She brightened, smiled, told me, "It's the thirteen original colonies, isn't it? Judge and jury. Jesus and the apostles. Quite a sum of things, I'd say."
"A holy number, would you say?"
"Could be. Why not?"
I sighed, said, "Okay. Sign me on. But just for the mission. I do not wear shoes that bind."
She said, "Silly man. You were born in shoes that bind."
That surprised the hell out of me. I said, "I was?"
She nodded, angled the gaze away from me, said, "They were fitted to you on the backseat of a Fairlane Ford."
I had not told her about that! Had she seduced the seducer? God, I hoped so!
Chapter Thirty-Five: Saints and Devils
There is an old saying: "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread." Believe it came from Alexander Pope, eighteenth century. Shakespeare conveyed the same idea with different words in Richard III:
The world is grown so bad, that wrens make prey where eagles dare not perch.
He went on to say, later in the play:
And thus I clothe my naked villainy
With odd old ends stol'n forth of holy writ,
And seem a saint when most I play the devil.
I was heading into a hell of a night—whether to enact the role of Pope's fool or Shakespeare's wren, I could not say— perhaps both or neither—but I did have the strongest feeling that I was pursuing something probably better left alone, because saints and devils are often indistinguishable one from the other. I have even heard it argued that they indeed are the same: They merely take the form in mortal eyes of the effect experienced; good effect to you, saint; bad effect, devil.
I do not claim to know the truth of that. I do feel most strongly that there are agencies at work in this world that utilize a set of moral rules that are different than the common set, you might say a "higher order"—or even a "transcendent morality." There are transcending laws in the natural sense. The law of gravity, for example, keeps you and me attached to the planet. The aerodynamic principle allows us to transcend gravity to a certain degree, and we escape it entirely via motive velocity.
In the moral sense, does a just and loving God smile at the doe in the jaws of the hungry predator, or does he rebuke the lion who is faithful to his own wiring in eating the doe? The doe might cry out, "My god has forsaken me!" while the lion is sending up "Thanks for food." Do not they both address the one god? Is the god of the lion not also the god of the doe? But how account for justice in this scenario unless we admit to a higher sense, a "transcendent morality" that views the same act in an entirely different way than you and I?
If there are rules to this game called life, they should apply to one and all alike, shouldn't they? Sauce for the saints should be sauce for the sinners; right for me is right for you; wrong for me is wrong for God. Right?
Well...maybe not. Two apples and two pears do not make four nectarines. Some of the most successful con men make their bucks by mixing terms on us. If the car salesman gives you a thousand-dollar "overallowance" for your trade- in while overcharging you two thousand for the new one, who's coming out ahead in the deal?
There is this "math puzzle" concerning three traveling salesmen who arrive at the one hotel in town at the same time. There is only one room available. The three decide to share the room. The rate is twenty-five dollars. The clerk is bad at math, so takes ten bucks from each. The bellman overbears the men grumbling about the overcharge, reports it to the clerk. So the clerk gives the bellman five dollars to divide among the three men. The bellman is no better at math than the clerk, so he refunds one dollar to each of the three guests and pockets two for himself as a tip. The puzzle: Each man ended up paying nine dollars as his share. Three men times nine dollars equals twenty-seve
n dollars. Twenty-seven dollars for the room and two dollars for the bellman equal a total of twenty-nine dollars. What happened to the other dollar?
If you have trouble following that, pity the retail clerk unwittingly playing a "change game" with a good con man.
But, see, we are all of us retail clerks handling the currency of life. Saints and devils look alike—and where we usually go astray is in the mistaken belief that saints wear halos and devils horns. It ain't necessarily so. The doe in the jaws of the lion will see God with horns; the lion sees a halo. This is subjective reality. Is there, somewhere, a truly objective reality, from our point of view, wherein the horn and the halo merge into one?
All our mystics say so.
They even seem to be telling us that the lion and the doe are one.
If that is true, then it must be true also that the subjective reality is a fool's game in which saints are sinners and lions are does; we're all going to wake up one day to discover that "life," as Shakespeare assured us, is a stage, and we an itinerant repertory company, endlessly exchanging roles and repeating our little plays until finally we get it all right.
It also necessarily follows, then, that we have immortality now. Not later. Now. The doe does not die in the jaws of the lion. He is transformed into another role. Perhaps the lion eats so many does that he is transformed into one himself, someday, somewhere.
Maybe so. But then, also, maybe not.
I just want you to be thinking about it.
And I lay it on you not in an idle way but because you will need it later, as you advance with me into a hell of a night.
Chapter Thirty-Six: Into the Night
We hit Ojai at about twenty minutes before the midnight hour. My appointment with Oom-ray-key-too was for twelve sharp. She set the time herself. I purposely arrived a bit early to afford a bit of scout time. But an event was under way when we arrived. The drive was full of parked cars. I found a place just up the street for the Maserati; Alison and I walked in. I was wearing the Luger in a shoulder holster beneath the left arm, Campbell's shotgun very much in mind.
I counted twenty-two cars parked on the property, so it was a large group. Of course, it was a Friday night. The moon was high and bright in a cloudless sky, the panoply of stars seemingly close enough to inhale. We could hear the sounds of revelry traveling from the "sacred grove" in the backyard by the time we reached the house. We were headed around and toward the rear when Campbell, in loincloth and toting his shotgun, stepped from behind a large oak. He sneered, "Well, I'll be, if it isn't the jailbird. I guess it's no crime to shoot an escapee, is it."
I shoved Alison aside and kept right toward him. He was raising the shotgun to his shoulder when I took it away from him and slapped his face with the stock. Muscles and all, he went down like a steer in the slaughter pen, unconscious before he hit the ground.
Alison squealed, "Oh, my God!" and stood over him while I unloaded the magazine of the semiauto shotgun. I threw the shells as far as I could and dropped the gun beside the still figure. Alison had a finger at the pulse point in his throat. She told me, "He's alive, but I don't know why. You really hit him a lick there, Professor."
I growled, "So maybe he'll sleep awhile. Come on, let's check out this party."
She asked me, "Sure you want to do that?"
I replied, "No, but I think we'd better."
She said, "Just don't lose your head this time."
I said, "My head! You're the one was screwing the moon, not me."
"Gosh, you get nasty, don't you."
"You started it, kid."
"Just don't take it out on me, Ashton."
I told her, "Hate violence, that's all. Pisses me when someone forces me into it. Sorry if I..."
She said, "It's okay. Was that a lovers' quarrel?"
I gave her a surprised look. "I don't know. Maybe so."
She squeezed my hand, said, "Put it on hold. We'll get back to it."
"Will we?'
We were about halfway between the house and the grove. Alison whispered, "Maybe we should take care of first things first."
I growled, "Alison, you have a very evasive way about you. Would you please work on that? Otherwise you are a very lovely person."
She shushed me and pulled me to a halt, moved very close. We were at the edge of the grove. The sacred mound was no more than twenty feet away. The torches were extinguished and the folks were cavorting. Quite a pile of bodies, probably fifty or more, granting and wriggling all over that mound—now and then a little shriek or an hysterical giggle, ohs and ahs in sharp exclamation.
I could not recognize Oom, or anyone else for that matter, could not even pick out a whole body, they were all so interlaced.
Alison's eyes were sparkling. She gave me a quick squeeze and whispered, "Is that what we were like?"
I told her, "No need to whisper. You couldn't disturb that group with gunfire." I was reminded of something, then. I told her, "I want to check one of those torches."
"For heaven's sake, why?"
"They do tricks. I'd like to know how."
"What kind of tricks?"
"On and off, sparkling fountains, like a fireworks display. The other night I thought I saw burns on your body the same as Jane's—as May-un's."
"You did."
"What?"
"They're fading, but I came out of that with marks."
"Bums?"
"Not exactly. Not painful, anyway. But little red marks. Same pattern. Satanic symbols, I'd say."
"Who put them there?"
"Gosh, I don't know, Ashton. You said you saw them. When did you first see them?"
I said, "When you were standing in the sparklers. Maybe they are not satanic symbols. I mean, maybe the so-called satanists stole the idea. I get the feeling all this stuff began before anyone ever heard of Satan."
She said, "Yes, I think you're right. I researched these designs a while back."
"And...?"
"And I think you're right."
God, she could be a pain in the ass!
I left her standing in the grove and went forward to examine a torch. I even removed one from its standard and smelled it, picked at the wrappings, denuded it. The shaft was steel. Just a solid bar of steel, nothing more. I replaced the shaft in the standard and returned to the grove. If anyone on the mound had noticed my presence, they were ignoring it. I reported to Alison, "Kerosene pack on steel. How the hell do they get the effects?'
She did not reply to that, said instead, "It's nearly midnight. Did you see Oom-ray-key-too?"
"All I saw was daisy chains."
"Let's go to the house. I don't believe she attends these parties."
I said, "She sure as hell attended ours."
"Only to start it, I think. She left before we did. And we were among the first to leave. Ah-ree-pat-muh... damn!"
"What?"
"You know...we were...first to leave."
"Bullshit! You said 'Ah-ree-pat-muh.' Who is that?"
"Let's go to the house."
She was walking away from me. I grabbed her hand and jerked her back. "God damn it, Alison, you owe me!"
"Earth mother," she gritted.
I said, "Oh, ho."
She said, "Can we go now?"
I told her, "Fuck it! You go to the house! I'm going back to Malibu!"
She was furious. "Ashton, don't be a jerk! This is no time for twenty questions! I'll tell you all about it when the time is right!"
"No dice, kiddo. You tell me all about it right here and now!"
God, how it hurt her to be straight. "Ah-ree-pat-muh is the channel," she groaned between clenched teeth.
"The channel for what?"
"From the other side."
"The other side of what?"
"Ashton..."
"Fuck it, Alison! Just fuck it!"
"She anchors them over here, damn you!"
"For what?"
"For their babies. Satisfied? For their babies, damn you."
"They have to come here to get babies?"
"Oh, Ashton. Please..."
"Don't give me an Amazonian bullshit legend!"
"It's not Amazonian. It's So-hay-bi-hee-jee."
Yeah, sure. The soul-walkers, from umpty-million B.C.
Well, I warned you a way back that we were into the Kingdom of Nonsense. You don't have to believe any of this, if you'd rather not. I'd rather not, myself, but I was stuck with it. I'd traveled into the fucking satanic night with it. Now I had to see it through, if only to rescue my sanity.
I patiently asked Alison, "Are you telling me that Vicky and Manuel are soul-walkers?"
She replied, grim-lipped, "No."
"But their mothers are?"
She said, "Damn you, Ashton. You are really compromising me, you know."
"So what's new?" I growled. "You've been compromising me, all week—all the way into a cell, at one point."
"I had nothing to do with that!" she protested. "I got you out, dammit!"
"How'd you do that?"
"I called Frank and told him to by God get you out."
"Oh, you called 'Frank,' eh?"
"Yes, I did. I don't know why now. But I did."
"Were you worried about me?"
"Worried half to death," she admitted, swaying toward me.
It was a lovers' quarrel, yeah. But a bit more important than that too. We both, you know, were committed to the night. And scared to death we would not see the dawn.
Chapter Thirty-Seven: Crossover
Oom was in the garden room. We'd let ourselves in, using the back door. She looked up as we entered, smiled uncertainly at Alison, said to me, "Did you destroy Gordon?"
I replied, "No. He'll probably wake up with a headache, though. How did you know?"
"I saw. Gordon is not evil. Please do not blame him. I sent him to May-un-chee-tee. Gordon does my bidding."
I told her, "Maybe so, but the shotgun does his bidding. I could take no chances with that. Thank you for seeing us. We really must put this problem to rest."
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