The Boys from Santa Cruz (34 page)

The shortcut, obviously, had been a success. Asmador had regained the marked trail a quarter mile below the sign pointing to the Omphalos, long before the humans could possibly have reached it. To make sure, he’d knelt to examine the tracks again, and had been pleased to discover that those few footprints that could still be distinguished in the trampled dirt all pointed uphill.

By then, the sun was working Technicolor wonders in the west. The sky in that direction, what little Asmador had been able to see of it through the leafy canopy, had turned pink, shot through with bloody streaks of crimson. Nearer the ground the air seemed to have taken on an eerie goblin green glow. He’d marched on, lightly tapping the ground with the springy, curved tip of the bow every few steps, while chanting the names of the Infernal Council:

Furcalor, Hornblas, Satan, Rosier,

Lucifer, Xaphan, Succor, Dozier.

Astaroth, Azazel, Abadon, Moloch,

Paimon, Rimmon, Kobadon, Misroch.

Exael—

Hearing the sound of human voices a little farther up the trail, Asmador had ducked off the side of the path to count them off as they hiked by. There’d been twelve altogether, ten in orange bracketed by two in blue. But no Oliver and no Epstein. Turning his back on the trail, Asmador had plunged deeper into the woods, circling downhill in his stealthy half crouch until he’d cut ahead of the humans again. Then he’d showed himself, stepping into the middle of a straight, tunnel-like stretch of trail and assuming the classic archer’s position.

The blue shirt in the lead had braked and spread his arms wide
to shield the ones behind him with his body. “Let’s turn around, troopers,” he’d called calmly over his shoulder. “Candy, take them—”

Asmador still wasn’t sure whether he had released the arrow or it had released itself. Either way, it had felt
so
right and
so
preordained, the twang of the bowstring, the
zzzzip
of the arrow, the dull thump of the arrowhead striking home, the faint, shivering vibration of the feathers at the end of the shaft. Then the target had collapsed backward, and all was chaos at the other end of the tunnel, and all was calm at Asmador’s end. Coolly, he had reached behind his back for another arrow, but by then the humans had fled screaming up the trail, the last two dragging Blue Shirt’s body between them.

And now it is nearly dark under the trees; the undersides of the leaves are black against the violet gray of the sky. Asmador shucks off his backpack, returns the unused arrow to the quiver, and rummages around for the night-vision goggles. It takes him a few minutes to figure out how to work them. There are two switches, one to activate the goggles and the other to turn on the narrow infrared beam mounted above the eyepieces, which focus like binoculars. He soon gets the hang of it, though, and sets off up the trail again, following the bobbing neon green shaft of light up the glowing neon green tunnel, and taking up the singsong chant where he’d left off earlier:

Exael, Mastema, Beliar, Carnivean,

Minos, Asmodeus, Belial, Leviathan.

Beleth, Beelzebub, Behemoth, Baal,

Adramelech, Gressil, Hauras, Rofocale…

At first there is no
I.
No self, no other. No here, no there. Just:
is.
But what
is
?
It
is. And what
is
this
it
that
is
? It is:
green.

And with that first concept, the concept of
green,
the words, the ideas, follow one upon the other. Green is a color. A field of color. A field of clover.
I
am in a field of clover. But what is
I
?
I
is…
seeing. I
is…
thinking. I
is…
I
am…

I am! Here! Now!

And so what if I can’t remember my name,
he thought, lying on his side in the damp, sweet-smelling clover, resting his head on his outstretched arm and gradually drifting back like a cosmic jellyfish into the warm, black, amniotic sea of no self, no other, and no problems, pal, no problems whatsoever.

“Over here, everybody!” called Skip, hunkering down next to Oliver. Behind them Beryl, a retired nurse, was crouched over Steve, crooning at him to hang on, telling him everything was going to be okay, which Skip, hearing the breath bubbling in Steve’s lungs, rather doubted.

“Gather round, kids, we haven’t much time,” Oliver began, when the trainees who were more or less functional had finished rounding up the ones who weren’t. Of the once glorious sunset, there remained only a few streaks of pale yellow melting regretfully into the gray sky. “There is a sick man out there, an armed man with a troubled mind, who wants to do us harm.”

He paused, glancing around at the others like a quarterback
in a huddle. They were all rapt—stoned and rapt. “So here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to play a game we all played when we were children. It’s called hide-and-seek, and we’re going to play it like our lives depended on it. We’re going to split up, and we’re going to hide in the woods, separately if possible. Don’t bunch up, and most of all, stay off the trail—
off
the trail, because that’s where the danger is. Everybody got that?”

There were a few murmured assents; the rest of the cosmic rangers were too stunned or too high to respond.

“Good, good. So let’s go now, let’s split up. Find the best hidey-hole you can, and
stay
in it, stay in it until you hear someone calling—” And here he lowered his voice to a whisper, “until you hear someone calling ‘Ollee ollee in free.’ Even if it takes all night. No matter what you hear, no matter what you see, you stay in hiding until somebody calls ‘Ollee ollee in free.’ We can do this, people—I know we can do this. Now off you go.”

Nobody moved.

“Please—go! Now!” Oliver rose from his squat and made shooing motions, until at last the group began to disperse. By then the sky had faded from gray to starry black, the night wind had begun to rise, and the leaves were whispering and murmuring like the hungry ghosts of Buddhist mythology.

It was a little frightening, being unable to remember one’s name. But it was also somehow liberating, like having been relieved of a heavy, lifelong burden. He foresaw that when his name did come back to him, he would regret the loss of this unaccustomed buoyancy, this lightness of being.

Unless of course he was dead. That seemed like a distinct possibility,
since there seemed to be an arrow sticking out of his side. But there was no blood, and little pain beyond a mild soreness in his ribs and a slight aching in his head, probably from striking the ground when he fell. So he ripped open the sport jacket pinned to his side and discovered that the arrowhead penetrating the leather safety flap of his shoulder holster had lodged in the trigger guard of the pistol inside it with such force that the metal rim had deformed outward.

And that was all it took—seeing the shoulder holster immediately transported him back down to the plane of everyday existence, the plane where he had a name, Ed Pender, and carried a gun, a Smith & Wesson Model 10. Where he and a man named Skip were trying to catch a killer. Where somebody had slipped him a heavy dose of…of the dread El Ess Dee.

Lucy in the sky with diamonds,
he thought—
that’s a song.
Then he looked up at the sky and actually saw the aforementioned diamonds sparkling there, and suddenly another lyric fragment went fluttering through his mind:
something something the diamond sky…
Followed by another:
stars shining up abuuuuve you
…And yet another:
bewitched, bothered, and bewildered
…And now there was no stopping them:
abandoned and forsaken…no direction home…can’t tell the forest for the trees…of greeeen, red roses, too—

Enough! Enough! He squeezed his head between his palms, trying to slow the flow of lyrics so he could think…
think…think what you’re tryin’ to—

No! Make it stop!…
in the naaame of love, before you—

Please, God, somebody, help me make it…
through the night…

“Fuuuuck!” shouted Pender. The cry bounced off the surrounding trees and echoed across the clearing. Then the night went dead quiet, probably because there weren’t any oldies that started with
fuuuuck.

He was still tripping, though. Soaring. Suddenly the night noise came flooding back, like somebody’d turned up a big volume
knob in the sky. The clatter of the aspen leaves like a zillion castanets, the lugubrious
who-who-who
of a great horned owl.

“Special Agent E. L. Pender, that’s who, who, who,” he said aloud, and discovered that, for some reason, talking out loud seemed to help. “Special Agent E. L. Goddamn Pender, getting his shit together for your FBI in peace and war, from here to eternity, till death do us—Shut up, Pender! Yes sir, this is me shutting up, sir!”

Now what? Got to find those fine folks in the pajamas before
he
does. Make them safe. Because like you told McDougal a couple centuries ago, that’s what you
do.
Even more significantly, that’s who you
are.
So focus, pal, focus.

“Okay, this is me focusing. First thing I need to do is…” He snapped off the arrow just above the ferrule and tossed the shaft aside, leaving the arrowhead embedded in the bent trigger guard. “Okay, now all I have to do is find the trail.”

Which turned out to be easier said than done. Because from the center of the perfectly round clearing, everything looked the same. There
were
no directions, and the twinkling stars, though bright enough to sugar-frost the round expanse of clover, were not twinkling brightly enough to light his way.

But if the clearing was perfectly round, Pender told himself, then he couldn’t get lost in it, could he? All he had to do was walk around the whatchamacallit, the circumference of the circle. Pick a direction, clockwise or counter-, and stick to it, and sooner or later he was bound to strike the trailhead.

And that was how it worked out. Pender aimed himself toward the edge of the circle, kept going until he couldn’t go any farther without leaving the clearing, then turned to his right and continued walking, with the clearing on his right and the trees on his left. Then all he had to do was not forget which was right and which was left—a challenge, in his condition, but not an insurmountable one.

To keep the deluge of song lyrics at bay, Pender counted his steps as he marched, and had reached sixty-two when the trees to his left parted, revealing what looked like the mouth of a narrow, twisting tunnel. A rush of triumph, then a sudden wrench of panic—what if this wasn’t
the
path? What if it was some other path? Or no path at all? How goddamn lost would he be then?

His momentum halted, Pender was on the brink of the condition known as paralysis by analysis when a voice that sounded suspiciously like his own growled, “Nothin’ to it but to do it,” and the next thing he knew, he was twelve, thirteen, fourteen paces up the tunnel, and counting.

The rocky, uneven path from the main trail to the Omphalos hadn’t been easy to descend in daylight, without psychedelics; the ascent in the dark, alone, on acid, must have been nearly heroic. Or so Pender had to assume when he reached the top, because he had no memory of the climb whatsoever: his runaway mind had switched his body over to automatic pilot.

Coming upon the golf cart parked by the side of the marked trail, Pender felt as though he’d stumbled on a relic of a lost civilization. Just beyond it, the trail forked downhill into the darkness to the left, uphill into the darkness to the right. The left fork, Pender somehow recognized, would take him back the way they’d come this afternoon, back to the Center and the hot springs and a telephone he could use to call for the cavalry to come bail his ass out of this one, because he had definitely screwed the pooch trying to handle it with only a gimpy P.I. for a partner.

“Left fork it is, then,” he said aloud.

On the other hand,
said that little voice inside Pender’s head, not the one that knew all the song lyrics, but the one that listened to them.

“On the other hand, what?”

On the other hand, if they all went that way, they’re probably already
back and they’ve already called in the cavalry, so what do they need you for?

“And if they went the other way?”

If they went the other way, and they’re in the shit, then you
are
the cavalry.

“Okay, right fork it is.”

Good thinking.

Acid trips ebb and flow. The roller-coaster car is slowing down, clanking back to the start-finish line; convinced the ride is coming to an end, you’ve just unsnapped your seat belt and are waiting for the safety bar to release, when
whooosh
—off you go again.

Skip lost his hold on reality not long after everybody split up. The going got progressively weirder. At one point in time (insofar as there was such a thing), he saw himself in a great open-air ballroom, listening to a distant orchestra playing schmaltzy waltz music. And not long after that, he found himself limping with the aid of his staff down what seemed to be a long, dark tunnel with writhing walls and a lacy ceiling made of flickering stars and whispering leaves.

With only a vague idea where he was or how he’d come to be there, Skip realized he might have been dreaming—either that or he had just awakened from a dream. He also had a strong sense that he was either lost himself or searching for somebody else who was lost. In his free hand, he held a slender flashlight pointing down at the ground. Fascinated by the way the bobbing oblong splash of light on the ground managed to stay the same distance in front of him, a few feet ahead of his feet no matter how fast or slow he went, Skip forgot to look up even after the
oblong of light began to climb a tree trunk, and
splat!
he walked right into the tree.