Seemingly stunned by his companion’s words and deeds, Ollie encircled me with his massive arms, hugged me to him, let me go, and said, “You take care of yourself, Norman.”
Shuffling away, Lou said, “His name isn’t Norman.”
Ollie returned to his companion’s side and put a hand on his shoulder to halt him. Glancing at me, the strongman said, “What is his name?”
“Truth,” Lou said.
“That’s a funny name.”
“Mercy,” Lou said.
“Truth Mercy — that’s his name?”
“There’s no right name for him.”
“What did you see when he touched you?”
The little guy looked at me one last time and shook his head. “Too much. I saw too much.”
Evidently the illustrated man knew his friend well enough to realize that those were his final words on the subject. They walked away from me and did not glance back again.
Shaken, I hurried out of the campground, up the long incline through knee-high grass, and across the service road to the shorter slope. When I reached the top, returning to the midway behind the sideshow tents, I looked down on the trailers and motor homes arrayed far below just in time to see two police cruisers and a morgue van enter the campground with emergency lights flashing but without sirens.
Standing there, rerunning in memory the encounter with Lou and Ollie, I thought that if there were others in the world with wild talents similar to mine, they would surely find it as difficult to live like ordinary people as I did. Perhaps for some of them, merely simplifying their lives, living in one-room apartments, wearing only jeans and T-shirts or another minimalist wardrobe, resolving not to complicate things by planning for the future, working in undemanding jobs such as fry cookery or tire sales was not enough to keep them sane and give them hope. Maybe some of them needed to withdraw from society more than I did. Burdened with one kind of psychic perception or another — or several — some might find stability and a degree of peace in the carnival, where outcasts and nonviolent misfits had long been welcome, where odd ducks were accepted, and where no one sought to know the secrets of others in the show.
Whatever Lou had seen when I touched him, his gift — or curse — obviously must be different from mine. He probably could not see the lingering spirits of the dead, but he might now know that I could. I suspected that he had learned other things about me, too, perhaps including the nature of the suffering that I might have to endure in the hours ahead. Dwarf in a bear suit, comic figure in whatever show he performed, the little guy had no doubt known his share of bullies and tormentors. And yet it was a good bet that he had more foresight and more wisdom than the thirty-three mechanical oracles housed in ALL THINGS FORETOLD.
I passed between two sideshow tents, back to the bright, loud, busy midway, no longer using psychic magnetism to seek out Wolfgang, Jonathan, and Selene, but focusing instead on the executioners, Jim and Bob.
Twenty-three
Through the open bedroom window of the seaside cottage came the pleasantly cool breath of the sea, but I sweated in twisted sheets. Perspiration streamed from me also in my turbulent nightmare, as the Happy Monster, Blossom Rosedale, led me toward what would prove to be the amaranth.
No sounds existed now except those that I made, as if the outer world had ceased to exist, as though I had become the world entire, isolated and adrift in a void. The furious knocking of my heart, the gasping for breath, each inhalation inadequate to my need, and a hard chattering sound, something rattling, that I could not identify.
There were light and shadow but no longer faces or mysterious shapes, only currents of color washing across my eyes, color and at times a rippling darkness, and I was very afraid. Sometimes Blossom seemed to manifest beside me, like a spirit, but at other times I was not aware of her.
Moving, moving forward, moving with great effort, moving, but to what, to where?
As the physicists tell us, time was created in the big bang, a necessary condition for the expansion and maturation of the universe. All that exists outside the universe exists also outside of time, where no experience is measured in minutes. In dreams, time exists, though not as we know it in the waking world, strangely distorted and unreliable, as if on a subconscious level we’re aware that time isn’t enduring, that it is not a required condition of our existence, that there comes a point when we will have no need of it.
With or without Blossom, I seemed to travel for hours, crossing a considerable distance, though it might also have been mere seconds before again I heard a sound not made by me. A voice cried out, and again a face appeared on which I could concentrate.
The face was Wyatt Porter’s, and the voice was his, too, and he shouted my name: “Oddie!”
Blossom was with me again, supporting me. I struggled forward, gripping the urn of ashes with both hands. When the chief called my name again, my vision cleared further, and I stared down the muzzle of his pistol, which swelled in dimension until it was the diameter of a cannon barrel. He fired.
Twenty-four
When seeking Wolfgang, I’d had no face to associate with the name, but I’d had his singular gravelly voice to conjure in memory, which helped me to focus my mind, my gift, and home in on him. In the case of Jim and Bob, I had glimpsed them from the back of the motor home, but I hadn’t seen their faces, and neither of them possessed a memorable voice. Having their first names only, I wasn’t hopeful of being the Tonto that they feared.
I still believed that the key to unlocking the cultist’s plan and the means to thwart it could be found in the carnival, but the longer I stalked the midway, the more discouraged I became about my prospects of finding my quarry. I tried to navigate the surging crowd on the concourse, but the people repeatedly turned like a tide and resisted me, their faces either glassy with excitement or weary with a surfeit of joyless “fun,” but always indifferent to me, as the sea would be indifferent as it drowned me in a treacherous current.
Each time I passed the carousel, the wild-eyed horses pumped up and down more frantically with each rotation, and the calliope seemed to pipe with greater frenzy, growing ever more off-key. The Dodgem Cars crashed into one another with great — and then greater — abandon, their trolley poles striking ever-brighter showers of sparks from the overhead electric-wire grid. The shrieking of the shrouded riders in the Caterpillar and the screaming of those who stood in cages on the rapidly spinning and then up-tilting Roulette Wheel sounded not like expressions of delight, but instead like the death cries of terrified people pierced by the pain of mortal wounds. As they stumbled and tumbled through the giant revolving barrel that expelled them from the fun house, their shrill laughter was, to my ear, like the insane cackling in the deepest cells of an asylum, and all the while, the giant face of the ogre growled and blew out a fierce breath that took strollers by surprise.
If I concentrated too intently on Jim and Bob, if I sought them too insistently, too urgently, through the strobing lights and flung shadows of the spinning rides, I risked becoming the hunted instead of the hunter in a moment of reverse psychic magnetism. Sometimes, when I tried too long or too ardently to be drawn to my quarry, they were instead drawn to me. On those occasions, I saw them only after I had been seen and recognized, which was a dangerous situation when those I sought were ruthless murderers.