A barely-legible metal sign leaning against a broken wall said it was.
“And who’s Ethel?” she asked, but True didn’t tell her.
Across the road were a half-dozen remnants of houses, not much left but the roofs and frames, and around them stood the boulders and shale that had over the years—decades?—drifted down from the rugged hill behind. Between two of the ruins was a rusted swingset, a slide and a seesaw. Once upon a time, a children’s playground.
The Scumbucket negotiated another sharp turn, another descent into a washed-out gully, and there the asphalt ended. Ahead the road turned to dirt.
“Your boy wanted to get away from it all, didn’t he?” True asked, easing on the brake. “You sure about this?”
“He said he lives a half-mile past the pumps,” Terry said. “We’re almost there.”
“I think if I’d wanted to be a hermit I would’ve chosen an island in the Caribbean,” True replied, but he pressed the pedal and the wheels of the van went round and round, raising whorls of dust behind them. “Maybe I’m crazy, but that’s just me.”
They continued on. True had been glancing every so often in the sideview mirror. It disturbed him that he couldn’t see anything through the dust. They rounded one more snakespine of a curve and Terry said, “That’s it.”
On the right was a small, regular-looking adobe-style house, nothing special about it at all. It might have been plucked from any Southwestern city suburb, with a minimalist and rock-loving landscaper in charge. But then again, most adobe-style houses in city suburbs were connected to power lines and didn’t have a pair of big metal boxes that could only be heavy-duty generators cabled up alongside. As they got nearer, they could hear a rumble like an old aircraft engine turning its propellor. An honest-to-God outhouse stood out back, along with a raised wooden platform that held a showerhead and some kind of waterbucket device operated by a pullchain. A sagging pickup truck the dun color of mole’s skin was parked on the shale in front of the house. Berke thought that it had probably used its share of twenty-five-cents-a-gallon gas.
True was getting the picture of where they were. He could see two trailers standing maybe a hundred yards further on, where the dirt road ended at a rock wall that angled toward the sky. He figured the Zen masters of hermitry lived in those trailers. Either that, or they were cooking meth and hiding from the IRS.
“You guys ever watch Western movies?” he asked. They gave him blank expressions. “Know what a box canyon is?” When there was no reply, he wondered what young people were learning in schools these days. “Well,” said True, “we’re in one.”
He stopped the Scumbucket in front of the house. A reddish-brown dog came rocketing off the shady porch, planted its paws in the stones and gave them a reception that could be heard even over the rumble of aircraft props.
Terry saw a man emerge from the house. The man stood on the porch, watching them climb out of the van. He looked as if he were trying to decide if he knew them or not. True clutched his leather bag close to his side.
Over the dog’s barking and the generator noise, Terry called out, “Mr. Gherosimini? I’m Terry Spitzenham! You remember? From The Five? You wrote me a letter saying I could come—”
“My brother!” the man shouted, and lifted his hands in the air. He had a gray beard that hung over the chest of his overalls and was decorated with what appeared to be small metallic beads. His deeply-seamed face grinned. “Finally come home!” He came striding off the porch with the gait of an energetic younger man. The barking dog put itself between him and the visitors in a posture of defense.
Eric Gherosimini was making music as he walked, though they couldn’t hear it. Tied in his beard with white and gold-colored cords were little bells. He was barefoot. Nomad thought the soles of those horny-toed feet must have been an inch thick to survive all the wicked edges. Gherosimini was thin and stoop-shouldered and bald on the top of his scalp except for a few remaining wild sprigs of gray, while the hair on the sides and back flowed down over his shoulders like opaque curtains. He wore wire-rimmed glasses that were not very different from Terry’s.
My brother. Finally come home.
Oh my God, Nomad thought. This dude’s going to ask Terry to change places with him so he can go out and paint the world red, and Terry will have to be the guardian of the secret fucking keyboards until the next sucker comes along.
But Eric Gherosimini raised his index finger to the dog and said sternly, “Stereo!” The mongrel stopped barking. Then the frail genius of the 13th Floors looked Terry full in the face, blinked his electric-blue eyes and touched Terry’s shirt, which today was black-and-purple paisleys on a background of dove gray.
“Boss shirt,” he said with admiration. “Vintage, ’66? H.I.S.?”
“You got it.” Terry remembered who he was talking to. “Sir.”
Gherosimini put an arm around Terry’s shoulder. “Come on inside. All of you. Come see the madman’s dreams.”
They followed him, with Stereo sniffing at their shadows.
TWENTY-EIGHT.
“I didn’t know if you’d be here or not,” Terry said, when he didn’t know what else to say.
“Usually here, man. Don’t get out much, but…how do you guys say it?…it’s all good.”
“Can I ask something?” True waited for Eric Gherosimini’s eyes to focus on him. It looked to True as if the man had some difficulty in that department. “Why do you live so far from town? There’s just nothing around here.”
Gherosimini’s gaze floated down along the creases of True’s slacks to take aim at the black wingtips. An impish smile worked at the corners of his mouth. “Man, I know I’ve been out of action a lonnngggg time, but they sure don’t make road managers like they used to.”
They were sitting in what passed as the man’s living room. It contained inflatable chairs in Day-Glo colors and a plaid sofa that must have come all the way from Scotland’s Salvation Army. On the woodplank floor was a blue rug with the image of the moon and sun woven into it. Some type of scrawny leafless tree in a rusted metal pot stood in a corner, its limbs bearing a strange fruit of several different kinds of multi-colored glass windchimes. A fan powered by the generator continually stirred the chimes into musical tinklings. A blue cone of incense burned in a metal cup on a table made out of what True thought might be compressed telephone books. The faintly sweet smell of the incense reminded Ariel of the way the air smelled at Singing Beach, in Manchester, after a summer rain. Several unlit candle lanterns in an ornate Moroccan style stood about, indicating that the generators were not always running. Stereo sprawled on the floor at his master’s bare feet, chewing on a green dental hygiene bone.
And it was not every living room that had walls covered, every inch except the front window, with white sound-dampening acoustic tiles. Bamboo blinds hung over the window. Tacked up in several places on the wall tiles were posters of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, the rugged majesty of the Big Sur coast and the skyline of Seattle showing the Space Needle.
Gherosimini had brought them small ceramic cups of reddish-hued water that he’d said was sent to him by a fellow shapeshifter from the Lion’s Head Fountain at a place called Chalice Well, in England. He offered a part-toast, part-prayer that the world should be healed by the power of mystic waters, and that it should begin right here in this room.
Nomad thought the water tasted like it had been soaking rusty nails. He took a couple of sips and decided, mystic waters or not, he wasn’t going to run the risk of getting lockjaw.