One Door Away from Heaven

Page 46

“You poor kid,” Cass whispers. “All alone, on the run.”
“I’ve got my dog.”
Getting up from the booth, Polly says, “Now you’ve got us, too. Come on, Cass, let’s pull stakes and hit the road.”
“We haven’t heard his whole story yet,” Cass protests. “There’s aliens and all sorts of spooky stuff.” Still leaning toward Curtis, she drops her voice to a whisper: “All sons of spooky stuff”, right?”
“Spooky stuff,” he confirms, thrilled to see the delight that he has given her with this confirmation.
Polly is adamant. “They’re hunting for him right across the state line. They’re sure to come nosing around here soon. We’ve got to get moving.”
“She’s the alpha twin,” Cass whispers solemnly. “We’ve got to listen to her, or there’ll be hell to pay.”
“I’m not the alpha twin,” Polly disagrees. “I’m just practical. Curtis, while we get the rig ready to roll, you take a shower. You’re just a little too fragrant. We’ll throw your clothes in the washer.”
He’s reluctant to endanger these sisters, but he accepts their hospitality for three reasons. First, motion is commotion, which makes it harder for his enemies to detect him. Second, but for the big windshield, the motor home is more enclosed than most vehicles; the other windows are small, and the metal shell largely screens his special biological-energy signature from the electronic devices that can detect it. Third, he has been Curtis Hammond for approximately two days, and the longer that he settles into this new life, the harder he is to find, so he probably poses little danger to them.
“My dog could use a bath, too.”
“We’ll give her a good scrubbing later,” Polly promises.
Past the galley, a door stands open to a water closet on the right, which is separate from the rest of the bathroom. On the left, a vertically stacked washer-dryer combination.
Directly ahead is the bathroom door, and beyond it lies the last eighteen feet or so of the motor home. The sole bedroom is accessed through the bath.
Old Yeller stays behind with Polly, and Cass shows Curtis how to work the shower controls. She unwraps a fresh cake of soap and lays out spare towels. “After you’ve undressed, just toss your clothes out the bathroom door, and I’ll wash them.”
“This is very nice of you, ma’am. I mean Cass.”
“Sweetie, don’t be silly. You’ve brought us just what we’ve been needing. We’re girls who like adventure, and you’ve seen aliens.”
How her eyes sparkle on the word adventure, only to sparkle even more bewitchingly on the word aliens. Her face glows with excitement. She all but quivers with expectation, and her body strains against her clothes just as the powerful body of Wonder Woman forever strains against every stitch of her superhero costume.
Alone, Curtis removes his small treasury from his pockets and puts the cash aside on the vanity. He slides open the bathroom door just far enough to toss his clothes out in front of the washer, then slides it firmly shut again.
He is Curtis Hammond enough to blush at being na*ed here in the sisters’ bathroom. At first this seems to indicate that he’s well settled in his new identity, already more Curtis than he is himself, and becoming more Curtis all the time.
Peering in the mirror, however, he watches his face darken to a shade of scarlet that he’s never noticed in other people, suddenly causing him to question whether he’s fully in control of himself. A blush this fierce is surely beyond the range of human physiological response. He seems to be as red as a lobster cooking in a pot, and he’s convinced that anyone, seeing him like this, would suspect that he’s not who he pretends to be. Furthermore, he looks so sheepish that his expression alone would fill any policeman with suspicion and predispose any jury to convict.
Heart beating fast and hard, counseling himself to remain calm, he steps into the shower before turning on the water, which Cass advised him not to do. It’s immediately so hot that he cries out in pain, stifles the cry, mistakenly cranks the water hotter still, but then over-compensates, and stands in a freezing spray. He’s lobster-bright from top to bottom, and his teeth chatter so hard he could crack walnuts, if he had walnuts, and it’s just as well he doesn’t have walnuts, because the shells would make a mess, and then he’d have that to clean up. Listening to himself babble to himself about walnuts, he’s amazed that he has survived this long. Once more he tells himself to be calm—not that it did much good the last time.
He remembers that Cass advised a quick shower because the motor home isn’t connected to utilities; the system is operating off the vehicle’s storage tanks and the gasoline-powered generator. Because he failed to obtain a precise definition of quick, he’s certain that he’s already used more water than is prudent, so he soaps up as fast as possible, rinses down, remembers his hair, pours shampoo straight from the bottle onto his head, realizes at once that he has seriously overused the product, and stands in rising masses of suds that threaten to fill the shower stall.
To dissolve the suds as quickly as possible, he cranks the water to cold again, and by the time that he finally shuts the spray off, his teeth are rattling like an electric-powered nutcracker once more. He’s sure that he has so drained the motor home’s water system that the vehicle will topple sideways out of balance or suffer some catastrophic failure resulting in great financial loss and possibly even the destruction of human life.
Out of the shower, on the bath mat, vigorously drying himself, he realizes that personal grooming is related to socializing, and he has proven time and again that he’s a lousy socializer. Yet he can’t go through life without a bath, because walking around filthy and stinky is not good socializing, either.
In addition to those worries and woes, he’s still embarrassed about being na*ed in the sisters’ bathroom, and now he realizes that he will have to wear nothing but a large towel until his clothes are laundered. He turns to the mirror, anxious to see if his face remains an unnatural shade of lobster, and he discovers something far worse than expected in his reflection.
He isn’t being Curtis Hammond.
“Holy howlin’ saints alive.”
In shock, he drops the towel.
More accurately: He is being Curtis Hammond but not entirely, not well, certainly not convincingly enough to pass for human.
Oh, Lord.
The face in the mirror isn’t hideous, but it is stranger than any face in any carnival freak show that ever welcomed gawking rubes into its sawdust-carpeted chambers.
In Colorado, in the farmhouse, beyond the bedroom door with the plaque announcing STARSHIP COMMAND CENTER, this motherless boy had found the used Band-Aid discarded on the nightstand, and the dried blood on the gauze pad had provided him with a perfect opportunity to fashion a disguise. Touching the blood, absorbing it, he’d added Curtis Hammond’s DNA to his repertoire. While the original Curtis continued sleeping, his namesake had fled out of the bedroom window, onto the porch roof, and then here to Castoria and Polluxia’s bathroom, though not directly.
Being Curtis Hammond—in fact, being anyone or anything other than himself—requires a constant biological tension, which produces a unique energy signature that identifies him to those equipped with the proper scanning technology. Day by day, however, as he adjusts to a new identity, sustaining the adopted physical form becomes easier, until after a few weeks or months, his energy signature is virtually indistinguishable from those of other members of the population that he has joined. In this case, that population is humanity.
Stepping closer to the mirror, he wills himself to be Curtis Hammond, not in the half-assed fashion revealed by the mirror, but with conviction and attention to detail.
In the reflection of his face, he watches several peculiar changes occur, but the flesh resists his command.
One slip-up like this can be disastrous. If Cass and Polly were to see him in this condition, they would know that he isn’t Curtis Hammond, that he isn’t of this earth. Then he could probably kiss their generous assistance and their root-beer floats goodbye.
As good as his motives are, he might nevertheless wind up like the stitched-together brute who escaped Dr. Frankenstein’s lab only to be pursued by torch-bearing villagers with zero tolerance for dead bodies revived in creative new formats. He couldn’t imagine Cass and Polly hunting him with torches high, howling for his blood, but there would be no shortage of others eager to take up the chase.
Worse, even a brief lapse in the maintenance of his new identity reestablishes the original biologic tension and makes his unique energy signature as visible to his enemies as it would have been in the minutes immediately following his original transformation into Curtis Hammond, back in Colorado. In essence, with this lapse, he has reset the clock; therefore, he remains highly vulnerable to detection if his savage pursuers cross his path again in the next couple days.
He worriedly studies the mirror as the pleasant features of Curtis Hammond reassert possession of his face, but they return gradually and with stubborn errors of proportion.
As his mother always told him, confidence is the key to the successful maintenance of a new identity. Self-consciousness and self-doubt fade the disguise.
The mystery of Gabby’s panicky exit from the Mercury Mountaineer is solved. Racing across the salt flats, rattled by his inability to calm the ever more offended and loudly blustering caretaker, the boy had suffered a crisis of confidence and for a moment had been less Curtis Hammond than he’d needed to be.
Physical danger doesn’t shake his equanimity. Adventuring, he is comfortable in his new skin. He’s able to be Curtis Hammond with aplomb even in great jeopardy.
Although remaining poised in peril, he is seriously unnerved by socializing. The simple act of showering, with all the complications that arose, reduced him to this imperfect Curtis.
With deep chagrin, he decides that he is the Lucille Ball of shapechangers: physically agile, admirably determined, and recklessly courageous in the pursuit of his goals—but socially inept enough to entertain demanding audiences and to exasperate any Cuban-American bandleader crazy enough to marry him.
Okay. Good. He is being Curtis Hammond once more.
He finishes drying himself, all the while inspecting his body for weirdnesses, but finding none.
A beach towel has been provided as a sarong. He wraps himself in it but feels nonetheless immodest.
Until his clothes are washed and dried, he must stay with Cass and Polly; but as soon as he’s outfitted once more, he’ll slip away with Old Yeller. Now that he can be easily detected by his family’s killers—and perhaps by the FBI, as well, if they have developed the necessary tracking technology—he can’t any longer justify putting the sisters at risk.
No more people should die just because fate brings them into his life at the wrong time.
The hunters are surely coming. Heavily armed. Grimly determined. Thoroughly pissed.
Chapter 44
THE SUN WORKED PAST quitting time, and the long summer afternoon blazed far beyond the hour when bats would have taken wing in cooler seasons. At six o’clock, the sky still burned gas-flame blue, gas-flame bright, and southern California broiled.
Risking economic ruin, Aunt Gen set the thermostat at seventy-six degrees, which didn’t qualify as chilly anywhere other than in Hell. Compared to the furnace beyond the closed windows and doors, however, the kitchen was luxuriously comfortable.
While Micky brewed a large pitcher of peach-flavored iced tea and set the table for dinner, she told Geneva about Preston Maddoc, about bioethics, about killing as healing, killing as compassion, killing to increase “the total amount of happiness,” killing in the name of sound environmental management.
“Good thing I was shot in the head eighteen years ago. These days, I’d be environmentally managed into a hole in the ground.”
“Or they’d harvest your organs, make lampshades out of your skin, and feed your remains to wild animals to avoid despoiling the earth with another grave. Iced tea?”
When Leilani hadn’t arrived by 6:15, Micky was certain that something was wrong, but Geneva counseled patience. By 6:30, Geneva was concerned, too, and Micky heaped chocolate-almond cookies—sans almonds, plus pecans—on a gift plate, providing an excuse to pay a visit to the Maddocs.
The blue ceramic curve of sky, firing in a fierce kiln, offered a receptive bowl if the earth, as seemed likely, melted quick away. A long day’s interment of heat shimmered out of the ground as though spirits were fleeing up through the open gates of perdition, and the air had a scorched smell.
Perched on fence pickets at the back of Geneva’s property, near the bloomless rosebush, crows shrieked at Micky. Perhaps they were familiars of the dark witch Sinsemilla, posted to warn her of the approach of anyone who might be armed with the knowledge of her name.
At the fallen fence between properties, Geneva’s green lawn gave way to the withered brown mat that had served as Sinsemilla’s dance floor. Micky’s nerves wound tight at the prospect of coming face-to-face with either the moon dancer or the philosophical murderer.
She didn’t actually expect to meet Preston Maddoc. Leilani had told Aunt Gen that Dr. Doom would be out all evening.
The drapes were shut, the windows bright with the dragon glare of the westering sun.
Standing on the concrete steps, she knocked, waited, and raised her hand to knock again, but took the cookie plate in both hands when suddenly the knob rattled and the door opened.
Preston Maddoc stood before her, smiling, barely recognizable. His longish hair had been shorn; he wore it now in a short punkish bristle, which didn’t lend him an edgy quality, as it might have given most men, but made him look like a tousled boy. He’d shaved off his mustache, too.
“Can I help you?” he asked pleasantly.
“Uh, hi, we’re your neighbors. Me and Aunt Gen. Geneva. Geneva Davis. And I’m Micky Bellsong. Just wanted to say hello, bring you some homemade cookies, welcome you to the neighborhood.”
“That’s so kind of you.” He accepted the plate. “These look delicious. My mother, God rest her soul, made more varieties of pecan cookies than you could shake a stick at. Her maiden name was Hickory, so she took an interest in the tree that shared her family name. The pecan tree, you know, is a variety of the hickory.”
Micky hadn’t been prepared for his exceptional voice, which was full of the quiet confidence that money can buy, but which also had an appealing masculine timbre and a warmth as inviting as maple syrup spilling over golden waffles. That voice, plus his pleasant looks, made him a disarming advocate for death. She could understand how he might paint a gloss of idealism over the meanest cruelties, charm the gullible, convert well-meaning people into apologists who applauded the executioner and smiled at the musical ring of the blade meeting the chopping block in a busy guillotine.