I never knew whether I was drawn to eccentric people or if they were drawn to me. Either way, my life had been full of them — and they had enriched it. I suspected eccentricity was often if not always a response to pain, a defense mechanism against anguish and torment and sorrow. With a father who played no positive role in my life and with a mother whose behavior often made her a candidate for an asylum, I am sure that I would have been the eccentric I became even if I’d never been gifted or cursed with my sixth sense.
No bodachs were in view along Marigold Lane.
As the last light bled out of the day, less than fully aware of how I had gotten there, I found myself parked across the street from St. Bartholomew’s Church, where Stormy’s uncle, Sean Llewellyn, still served as the priest and rector.
Some of the happiest times that she and I shared were on the open deck of St. Bart’s bell tower, to which we would sometimes climb with a picnic dinner, to dine there among the immense but silenced bells, surrounded by the best view in Pico Mundo. We felt that we were above all strife in that high redoubt, our future together no less enduring than the town we overlooked.
With the approach of night, the tower was up-lit, and a red aircraft warn-off light served as finial at the peak of the belfry roof. As I watched it winking, I recalled how spectacular the sunset had been the last time that Stormy and I had climbed up there with a picnic hamper, on what we could not know would be the final night of her life.
No bodachs crept the front stairs of the church or climbed the walls, or danced in glee upon the bell-tower roof.
Four minutes till seven o’clock. I pulled back into traffic.
Stormy had lived in one of four apartments in a house three blocks from the Pico Mundo Grille. In my not-so-random drive through town, I next parked across the street from that place.
Orphaned young, supporting herself as a counter girl and then as the manager of an ice-cream shop, she had been poor by almost any definition. She had furnished her humble rooms with items from thrift shops, and yet her apartment had been stylish and comfortable. Old silk-shaded floor lamps with beaded fringes. Upholstered Victorian footstools paired with crude imitations of Stickley-style chairs. Maxfield Parrish prints. Carnival-glass vases. Cheap bronze castings of various breeds of dogs displayed on end tables and windowsills. The eclectic mix shouldn’t have worked, but it did, because she had magic in her and because she could see the magic in everyday things.
I had moved out of my studio apartment above the garage and into Stormy’s place after she died. I lived there for a year, until I left town on my journey of discovery. Her things had been packed away and stored in a room at Ozzie Boone’s house. I could dispose of nothing. Every item she owned, however inexpensive it might be, was to me a treasure, a store of memory and a memento of love unrivaled and undying.
How long I sat there, across the street from the house in which she had lived, I couldn’t be sure. I drove away only when my tremors stopped, only when the world gradually regained its detail and ceased to be just a blur.
Now that night had fully claimed Pico Mundo, I allowed intuition to guide me and cruised to the town square, at the center of which lay Memorial Park with its handsome bronze statue of three soldiers from World War II. Unlike the other streets of the historic district, those four blocks surrounding the park were lined not with flowering jacarandas but with magnificent old phoenix palms with enormous crowns of fronds.
Couples occupied the park benches, cuddling in the light of the three-globe cast-iron lampposts. The many restaurants were open, of course, but also all of the specialty shops, which catered as much to tourists as to locals. People were window-shopping, some of them carrying cones of ice cream as they ambled from shop to shop, some sipping from Starbucks cups, some walking their dogs, some talking and laughing. Although my perception might have been distorted by melancholy, it seemed to me that most of those people were in pairs, the larger percentage of them holding hands, as if they were extras in a movie of high romance, accessorizing a scene for which the director’s purpose might have been to say that life was a parade lived two-by-two, as it had been since before Noah’s fabled ark and as it would be always.
No bodachs capered among the crowd. None slithered under the benches on which couples shared moments of affection.
Neither circling the town square nor cruising any of the other streets before this had I received the slightest psychic impression that one day the town would be submerged, a community of drowned and drifting cadavers. Indeed, if Pico Mundo were inundated because of the collapse of Malo Suerte Dam, the town would not stand underwater in precisely the same condition as now, which is how it had appeared in the dream; the rushing waters would do great damage, tumbling cars along the streets, uprooting trees, ripping down awnings, smashing windows.… No rational scenario allowed for the lights to remain aglow in the aftermath of such a disaster, as they had been when I had floated through my nightmare.
Brooding about that, I circled Memorial Park a second time and saw an enormous banner that I had somehow overlooked before. It was strung across an intersection: big red and black letters on a white background, announcing the annual spring fair at the Maravilla County Fairgrounds, currently under way. Fun for the whole family. The lowest of three lines on the banner declared FEATURING THE WORLD-FAMOUS SOMBRA BROTHERS MIDWAY SHOWS.
The carnival was back in town.
Sombra Brothers Midway Shows had occupied the fairground six years earlier, when Stormy and I found the fortune-telling machine in an arcade tent.
You might think it was a coincidence that I should return to Pico Mundo in expectation of the fulfillment of the fortune-teller’s prediction just when the Sombra Brothers returned as well. So very much about our strange and deeply layered world remained mysterious to me, but my experiences had taught me, among other things, that there were no coincidences.
Seventeen
At ticket booth number four, the cashier was a plump woman with long ringlets of auburn hair. The carnival had a jackpot drawing to entice people to stay later and spend more. When she took my money and gave me an admission ticket, she said, “Honey, be sure you stay for the big drawin’ at eleven-forty-five. Three nights, the winners didn’t hang around to collect, so now it’s up to twenty-two thousand dollars. Got to be here to win. Hang on to your ticket. You’re the one tonight, honey.” She had such a beatific smile that her sales pitch seemed like a sincere prediction.
My intuition — which is seldom wrong — insisted the carnival held secrets that, if revealed, would help me to discover the meaning of my nightmare and the nature of the threat hanging over Pico Mundo. Carnies are a tightly knit community and generally more law-abiding than the rest of us. But there was no reason to dismiss the notion that a few cultists might have made their home in the Sombra Brothers operation, perhaps without other carnies being aware of their demonic nature and their keen interest in terrorism.
The first thing I did after paying admission and entering the fairground was to head for the southern perimeter of the midway, where in the past there had been a long row of specialty tents, including games (not of the arcade kind) and novelty services. The offerings along that flank of the concourse were pretty much as they had been in past years, among them: Bingo Palace; Quarter Toss; an air-rifle shooting gallery; Wearable Art, where an artist with an airbrush would paint any image you wanted on a T-shirt; Face It, where you could have your face decorated with water-soluble paints in an almost infinite variety of ways.