One Door Away From Heaven (15 page)

Leilani listened intently. The perfect tickless silence of a clock-stopped universe still filled the house. Bleeding, of course, is a quiet process.

In spite of a free-spirited tendency to be unrestrained in all things, Sinsemilla had thus far restricted her artistic scalpel work to her left arm. A six-inch-long, two-inch-wide snowflake pattern of carefully connected scars, as intricate as lacework, decorated or disfigured her forearm, depending on your taste in these matters. The smooth, almost shiny, scar tissue glowed whiter than the surrounding skin, an impressive tone-on-tone design, although the contrast became more pronounced when she tanned.

Leave the house. Sleep in the yard. Let Dr. Doom deal with the mess if there is one.

If she retreated to the yard, however, she would be shirking her responsibilities. Which was exactly what old Sinsemilla would do in a similar situation. In any predicament whatsoever, if Leilani wondered which among many courses of action was the right one and the wisest, she ultimately made her decision based on the same guiding principle: Do the opposite of what Sinsemilla would do, and there is a better chance that you’ll come through all right, as well as an immeasurably higher likelihood that you’ll be able to look in the mirror again without cringing.

Leilani opened the door to her room and switched on the light. Her bed was as neatly made as the ratty spread would allow, just as she’d left it. Her few personal items hadn’t been disturbed. The Sinsemilla circus had not played an engagement here.

One door remained.

Her palms were damp. She blotted them on her T-shirt.

She remembered an old short story that she’d read, “The Lady or the Tiger,” in which a man was forced to choose between two doors, with deadly consequences if he opened the wrong one. Behind this door waited neither a lady nor a tiger, but an altogether unique specimen. Leilani would have preferred the tiger.

Not out of morbid interest but with some degree of alarm, she’d researched self-mutilation soon after her mother became interested in it. According to psychologists, most self-mutilators were teenage girls and young women in their twenties. Sinsemilla was too old for this game. Self-mutilators frequently suffered from low self-esteem, even self-loathing. By contrast, Sinsemilla seemed to like herself enormously, most of the time, or at least when medicated, which was in fact most of the time. Of course, you had to suppose that she had originally gotten into heavy drugs not merely because “they taste so good,” as she put it, but because of a self-destructive impulse.

Leilani’s palms were still damp. She blotted them again. In spite of the August heat, her hands were cold. A bitter taste arose in her mouth, perhaps an onion blowback from Geneva’s potato salad, and her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth.

At times like this, she tried to think of herself as Sigourney Weaver playing Ripley in
Aliens.
Your hands were damp, sure, and your hands were cold, all right, and your mouth was dry, but nevertheless you had to stiffen your spine, work up some spit, open the damn door, and go in there where the beast was, and
you had to do what needed to be done.

She blotted her hands on her shorts.

Most self-mutilators were deeply self-involved. A small number could be confidently diagnosed as narcissists, which was where old Sinsemilla and the psychologists definitely could shake hands. Mother in a merry mood often sang an ebullient mantra that she’d composed herself: “I am a sly cat, I am a summer wind, I am birds in flight, I am the sun, I am the sea, I am
me
!” Depending on the mix of illegal substances that she consumed, when she was balancing just so on the tightrope between hyperactivity and drooling unconsciousness, she would sometimes repeat this mantra in a singsong voice, a hundred times, two hundred, until she either fell asleep or broke down sobbing and
then
fell asleep.

In three clinkless steel-assisted steps, Leilani reached the door.

Ear to the jamb. Not a sound from the other side.

Ripley usually had a big gun and a flamethrower.

Here was where Mrs. D’s occasional confusion of reality and cinema would come in handy. Recalling her previous triumph over the egg-laying alien queen, Geneva would smash through the door without hesitation, and kick butt.

One more blot. You didn’t want slippery hands in a slippery situation.

Sinsemilla said she cried because she was a flower in a world of thorns, because no one here could see the full beautiful spectrum of her radiance. Sometimes Leilani thought this might indeed be the reason that her mother dissolved so often in tears, which was scary because it implied a degree of delusion that made this woman more alien than the ETs that Preston eagerly pursued.
Narcissistic
seemed inadequate to describe someone who, even when caked in her own vomit and reeking of urine and babbling incoherently, believed herself to be a more delicate and exquisite flower than any hothouse orchid.

Leilani knocked on the bedroom door. Unlike her mother, she had a respect for other people’s personal spaces.

Sinsemilla didn’t respond to the knock.

Maybe dear Mater was fine, in spite of her performance in the backyard. Maybe she was sleeping peacefully and ought to be left to enjoy her dreams of better worlds.

Yeah, but maybe she was in trouble. Maybe this was one of those times when knowing CPR proved useful or when you wanted paramedics. If you were on the road in unknown territory, you could pull down directions to the nearest hospital from a satellite; this high-tech age was the safest time in history for perpetually wrecked freaks with a yen to travel.

She knocked again.

She wasn’t sure whether she should be relieved or anxious when her mother called out to her in a fruity theatrical voice: “Pray ye, say who knocketh upon my chamber door.”

On a few occasions, when Sinsemilla had been in one of these playacting moods, Leilani had played along with her, speaking with the fake old-English dialect, using stage gestures and exaggerated expressions, hoping that a minimum of mother-daughter bonding might occur. This always proved to be a bad idea. Old Sinsemilla didn’t want you to become a member of the cast; you were expected only to admire and be charmed by her performance, for this was a one-woman show. If you persisted in sharing the spotlight, the larky dialogue took a nasty turn, whereupon you found yourself the target of mean criticism and vicious obscenities delivered in the stupid phony voice of whatever Shakespearean character or figure from Arthurian legend that Sinsemilla imagined herself to be.

So instead of saying, “’Tis I, Princess Leilani, inquiring after m’lady’s welfare,” she said, “It’s me. You okay?”

“Enter, enter, Maiden Leilani, and come thou quickly to thy queen’s side.”

Yuck. This was going to be worse than blood and mutilation.

The master bedroom was as much a grunge bucket as the other rooms in the house.

Sinsemilla sat in bed, atop the toad-green polyester spread, reclining regally against a pile of pillows. She wore the full-length embroidered slip with flounce-trimmed skirt that she had bought last month at a flea market near Albuquerque, New Mexico, on their way to explore the alien enigmas of Roswell.

If whorehouse decor favored red light, as reputed, then this atmosphere was better suited to a prostitute than to a queen. Though both nightstand lamps were aglow, a scarlet silk blouse draped one lampshade, and a scarlet cotton blouse covered the other.

This quality of light flattered Sinsemilla. Bindles, kilos, bales, ounces, pints, and gallons of illegal substances had stolen less of her beauty than seemed either probable or fair, and as good as she looked in daylight, she was even prettier here. Although her bare feet were grass-stained and filthy, though her fine slip was rumpled and streaked with dirt, though her hair had been tossed and tangled by the moon dance, she might pass for a queen.

“What saith thee, young maiden, in the presence of Cleopatra?”

Stopping two steps inside the door, Leilani didn’t suggest that an Egyptian queen who had reigned more than two thousand years ago probably had not spoken in a phony accent out of a bad production of
Camelot.
“I was going to bed, and I just thought I’d see if you were all right.”

Waving Leilani toward her, Sinsemilla said, “Come hither, dour peasant girl, and let thy queen acquaint thee with a work of art fair suitable for the galleries of Eden.”

Leilani had no clue to the meaning of her mother’s words. From experience she knew that purposefully remaining clueless might be the wisest policy.

She advanced one more step, not out of a sense of obligation or curiosity, but because by turning away too quickly, she might invite accusations of rudeness. Her mother imposed no rules or standards on her children, gave them the freedom of her indifference; yet she was sensitive to any indication that her indifference might be repaid in kind, and she wouldn’t tolerate a thankless child.

Regardless of the inconsequential nature or the questionable validity of the triggering offense, an upbraiding from old Sinsemilla could escalate into a long bout of vicious hectoring. Although Mother might not be capable of physical violence, she could do serious damage with words. Because she’d follow you anywhere, push through any door, and insist on your attention, you could find no sanctuary and had to endure her verbal battering—sometimes for hours—until she wound down or went away to get high. During the worst of these harangues, Leilani often wished that her mother would dispense with all the hateful words and throw a few punches instead.

Leaning forward from the pillows, old Sinsemilla Cleopatra spoke with a smiling insistence that Leilani knew to be a cold command: “Come, glowering girl, come, come! Looketh upon this little beauty and wish that thou were as well made as she.”

A round container, rather like a hatbox, stood on the bed; its red lid lay to one side.

Sinsemilla had been shopping earlier, in the afternoon. With her, Preston was generous, providing money for drugs and baubles. Maybe she had in fact bought a hat, for in her more seductive moods, she liked the glamour of berets and billycocks, panamas and turbans, cloches and calashes.

“Don’t tarry, child!” the queen commanded. “Come hither at once and lay thine eyes upon this treasure out of Eden.”

Obviously, this audience with her highness wouldn’t end until the new hat—or whatever—had been properly admired.

With a mental sigh that she dared not voice, Leilani approached the bed.

As she drew closer, she noticed that the hatbox was perforated by two parallel, encircling lines of small holes. For a moment this seemed like mere decoration, and Leilani didn’t deduce the function of the holes until she saw what had come in the container.

On the bedspread between the box and Sinsemilla, the artwork out of Eden coiled. Emerald-green, burnt umber, with a filigree of chrome-yellow. Sinuous body, flat head, glittering black eyes, and a flickering tongue designed for deception.

The snake turned its head to inspect its new admirer, and with no warning, it struck at Leilani as quick as an electrical current would leap across an arc between two charged poles.

Chapter 20

ON THE HIGHWAY, bound southwest toward Nevada, Curtis and Old Yeller sit on the bed, in the dark, sharing the frankfurters. Their bonding has progressed sufficiently that even in the gloom, the dog doesn’t once mistake boy fingers for a permissible part of dinner.

This mutt isn’t, as Curtis first thought, his brother-becoming. She is instead his sister-becoming, and that’s okay, too.

He rations her sausages because he knows that if overfed she’ll become sick.

All but incapable of being overfed, he consumes the remaining hot dogs once he senses that Old Yeller is just one furter from an unpleasant flowback. The sausages are cold but delicious. He would eat more if he had them. Being Curtis Hammond requires a remarkable amount of energy.

He can only imagine the daunting quantity of energy required to be Donella, the waitress whose magnificent dimensions are matched by the size of her good heart.

Reminded of Donella, he worries about her welfare. What might have happened to her among all the flying bullets? On the other hand, although she provides a convenient target, her fantastic bulk no doubt makes her more difficult to kill than are ordinary mortals.

He wishes that he’d returned for her and had bravely spirited her to safety. This is a ridiculously romantic and perhaps irrational notion. He’s just a boy of comparatively little experience, and she’s a grand person of great age and immeasurable wisdom. Nevertheless, he wishes he had been brave for her.

Helicopter rotors rattle the night again. Curtis tenses, half expecting gunfire to riddle the motor home, to hear the booted feet of winch-lowered SWAT officers thumping on the roof and demands for his surrender blasted on a loudspeaker. The
chudda-chudda-chudda
of air-slicing steel grows thunderous…but then diminishes and fades entirely away.

Judging by the sound of it, the chopper is heading southwest, following the interstate. This is not good.

Finished with the hot dogs, Curtis drinks orange juice from the container—and realizes that Old Yeller is thirsty, too.

Drawing upon the messy experience of giving the dog a drink from a bottle of water in the Explorer, he decides to search for a bowl or for something that can serve as one.

The motor home is rolling along at the speed limit or faster, and he assumes that the owners—the man and woman whose voices he heard earlier—are still in the cockpit, hashing over the excitement at the truck stop. If they’re sitting at the far end of the vehicle, facing away from the bedroom, they aren’t in a position to see any light that might leak under or around the door.

Curtis eases off the bed. He feels the wall beside the jamb, finds the switch.

His dark-adapted eyes sting briefly from the glare.

Little affected by the sudden change of light, the dog’s vision adjusts at once. Previously lying on the bed, she now stands upon it, following Curtis’s movements with curiosity, her tail wagging in expectation of either adventure or a share of the juice.

The bedroom is too small and too utilitarian for decorative bowls or for knickknacks that might be of use.

Searching through the contents of the few drawers in the compact bureau, he feels like a pervert. He’s not exactly sure what perverts do, or why they do whatever it is they do, but he knows that secretly poking through other people’s underwear is definitely a sign that you are a pervert, and there seems to be as much underwear in this bureau as anything else.

Flushed with embarrassment, unable to look at Old Yeller, the boy turns from the bureau and tries the top drawer on the nearest nightstand. Inside, among articles of no use to him, are a pair of white plastic jars, each four inches in diameter and three inches tall. Though small, either of these will be suitable as a dish for the dog; he will simply refill it with juice as often as the pooch requires.

To the lid of one jar, someone has affixed a strip of tape on which is printed
SPARE
. Curtis interprets this to mean that of the two jars, this is the one of less importance to the owners of the motor home, and so he decides to appropriate this spare in order to cause them as little inconvenience as possible.

The jar features a screw-top. When he twists off the lid, he is horrified to discover a full set of teeth inside. They grin at him, complete with pink gums, but purged of blood.

Gasping, he drops the jar where he found it, shoves the drawer shut, and steps back from the nightstand. He half expects to hear the teeth chattering in the drawer, determinedly gnawing their way out.

He has seen movies about serial killers. These human monsters collect souvenirs of their kills. Some keep severed heads in the refrigerator or preserve their victims’ eyes in jars of formaldehyde. Others make garments from the skin of those they murder, or they create mobiles with weird arrangements of dangling bones.

None of those movies or books has introduced him to a homicidal psychopath who collects teeth still firmly fixed in carved-out chunks of jawbone, gums attached. Nevertheless, though just a boy, he is sufficiently well informed about the darker side of human nature to understand what he saw in that jar.

“Serial killers,” he whispers to Old Yeller.
Serial killers.

This concept is too complex for the dog to grasp. She lacks the cultural references to make sense of it. Her tail stops wagging, but only because she feels her brother-becoming’s distress.

Curtis still must find a bowl for the orange juice, but he’s not going to look in any more nightstand drawers. No way.

Otherwise, only the closet remains unexplored.

Movies and books warn that closets are problematical. The worst thing that you could dream up in a nightmare, no matter how hideous and fantastic and unlikely, might be waiting for you in a closet.

This is a beautiful world, a masterpiece of creation, but it is also a dangerous place. Villains human and inhuman and supernatural lurk in basements and in cobweb-festooned attics. In graveyards at night. In abandoned houses, in castles inhabited by people with surnames of Germanic or Slavic origin, in funeral homes, in ancient pyramids, in lonely woods, under the surface of virtually any large body of water, even also on occasion under the soap-obscured surface of a full bathtub, and of course in spaceships whether they are here on Earth or cruising distant avenues of the universe.

Right now, he’d rather explore a graveyard or a scarab-infested pyramid with mummies on the march, or the chambers of any spaceship, instead of the closet in these serial killers’ motor home. He’s not in an Egyptian desert, however, and he’s not aboard a faster-than-light vessel beyond the Horsehead Nebula in the constellation of Orion. He’s here, like it or not, and if ever he has needed to draw strength from his mother’s courageous example, this is the moment.

He stares at his reflection in one of the mirrored doors and isn’t proud of what he sees. Pale face. Eyes wide and shining with fear. The posture of a fright-buckled child: tensed body, hunched shoulders, head tucked down as if he expects someone to strike him.

Old Yeller turns her attention from Curtis to the closet. She issues a low growl.

Maybe something hideous
does
lurk in there. Perhaps awaiting Curtis is a discovery far more disgusting and terrifying than the teeth.

Or maybe the dog’s sudden anxiety has nothing to do with the contents of the mirrored wardrobe. She might simply have absorbed Curtis’s mood.

The closet door rattles. Probably just road vibration.

Resolved to live up to his mother’s expectations, reminding himself of his remorse over failing to rescue Donella, determined to locate a suitable juice bowl for his thirsty dog, he grips the handle on one of the sliding doors. He draws a deep breath, clenches his teeth, and opens the closet.

As his reflection slides away from him and as the interior of the wardrobe is revealed, Curtis sighs with relief when he fails to find jars of pickled eyeballs arrayed on the one long shelf. None of the garments hanging from the rod appears to be made of human skin.

Still wary but with growing confidence, he drops to his knees to search the closet floor for anything that might be used as a bowl. He finds only men’s and women’s shoes, and he’s grateful that they don’t contain a collection of severed feet.

A pair of men’s walking shoes appear new. He takes one of these from the closet, puts it on the floor near the bed, and fills it with orange juice from the plastic jug.

Ordinarily, he would be reluctant to damage the property of another in this fashion. But serial killers don’t deserve the same respect as law-abiding citizens.

Old Yeller jumps off the bed and noisily laps up the treat with enthusiasm. She doesn’t hesitate or pause to consider the taste—as though she has drunk orange juice before.

Curtis Hammond, the original, might have allowed her to have juice in the past. The current Curtis Hammond suspects, however, that he and the mutt are continuing to bond and that she recognizes the taste from his recent experience of it.

A boy and his dog can form astonishing, profound connections. He knows this to be true not entirely from movies and books, but from experience with animals in the past.

Curtis is “not quite right,” as Burt Hooper put it, and Old Yeller is neither yellow nor male, nor particularly old, but they are going to be a great team.

After refilling the shoe, he puts down the juice container and sits on the edge of the bed to watch the dog drink.

I’ll take good care of you,
he promises.

He is pleased by his ability to function in spite of his fear. He’s also pleased by his resourcefulness.

Although they’re riding the Hannibal Lecter band bus and running from a pack of terminators who have more attitude than Schwarzenegger with a bee up his ass, although they’re wanted by the FBI and surely by other government agencies that have more-ominous initials and less-honorable intentions, Curtis remains optimistic about his chances of escape. The sight of his canine companion, happily drinking, draws a smile from him. He takes a moment to thank God for keeping him alive, and he thanks his mother for the survival training that so far has been an invaluable assist to God in this matter.

A siren arises in the distance. This could be a fire truck, an ambulance, a police vehicle, or a clown car. Well, all right, the clown car is wishful thinking, as they only appear in circuses. In fact, it’s certain to be the police.

Old Yeller looks up from the shoe, juice dripping off her chin.

The siren quickly grows louder until it’s close behind the motor home.