It seemed silly to be worried about race then. I had come just a few steps from something beyond race or species or life, even. Not only would I have met the maker in the coming of blue light, I would have seen myself in his radiance.
But now I was back in the mundane world. My teacher, who had been like a god to me, had become just a frightened man.
I wondered again how long it would be before I killed myself. I plugged in my radio and picked up a blues station on FM. Robert Johnson wailed that the blue light was his blues while the red one was his mind. As I fell asleep, his blues mingled with mine.
I felt a clicking around my ears and imagined that small insects were making last-minute plans before they prepared to climb into my brain. I woke up suddenly, slapping all around my head. The knock came right after that.
“Who is it?”
“It’s Reggie.”
“What do you want, Reggie? It’s late.” The windup alarm clock on the floor next to my mattress said 3:16.
“Open up, Chance, we got a problem.”
I was still a member of the Close Congregation. Reggie was still one of the Blues. Even if he was only thirteen, I had to at least talk to him.
I got to my feet and opened the door. Reggie was short for his age. Five two. He had a flattop haircut and wore jeans and a buttoned-up white dress shirt with the tails out.
We just stood there because I had no chairs.
“You got to come with me, Chance.”
“What’s goin’ on?”
“Just come on, man.”
Even in Berkeley the streets were more or less empty at that time of morning. There were a few hippies around. A few drug deals going down. But on the whole, there was no one. We went down Shattuck to Cedar and over to La Loma; from there we got to Buena Vista, Phyllis’s street. The block was lined with two- and three-story brick houses that had deep lawns and big, dark trees.
We came to one house and Reggie walked up on the lawn. He went to a redwood gate at the side and unhooked a metal latch. When he turned around he saw that I was still at the sidewalk.
“Come on.”
“Come on where?”
“Come on!” Reggie shouted in an intense whisper.
We went through the gate and down the side of the house. The pathway there was yellowish cement that almost glowed in the darkness. A cold breeze met us, and I had to duck my head to make it under the low hanging branches.
At the back of the house there was a door in the ground. It was an ornate portal to the basement that had thick opaque glass panes in it. One of the panes had been broken. Reggie lifted up the door and latched it to the house. Then he stood back.
“What?” I asked the boy.
“You go on. I want you to see what’s down there.”
I didn’t need any special powers of perception to hear the fear in Reggie’s voice.
I descended into the darkness of the basement. I couldn’t see a thing.
“There’s a door right in front of you,” Reggie called down at me. “Open it up. The light’s on the right side on the wall.”
I walked straight ahead until my toes kicked wood, about five steps. Then I fumbled around for the knob. The moment the door was open I smelled it. A sickly sweet odor that was cloying, like a baseball field piled high with rotting lilies.
I snapped on the light and then fell to my knees, vomiting.
Her corpse had been decapitated and then split open from pelvis to throat. Her ribs had been broken outward, and the flesh of her arms and legs had been torn open. The hands looked as if they had been lacerated by claws.
Only the bottoms of her feet were left untouched.
The head had been tossed in the corner. I was drawn to it. She was facing upward, but there was not much of a face. The maniac had destroyed her features and then discarded her.
“It’s Phyllis,” Reggie said.
His unexpected voice gave me such a fright that I jumped away and yelped.
“What’s wrong with you, Reggie?”
Ignoring my shock, he said, “I came looking for her. Nobody’d seen her in a while, and I just thought I’d look for her.”
Reggie’s abilities, though still immature, were finding things and hiding. Ordé wanted to call him Scout, but Reggie liked his own name.
“I came looking for her,” he said again.
I couldn’t take my eyes off the remains of Phyllis Yamauchi. Her organs were spread out around the body on the dirty concrete floor. The dried blood had flowed out more or less evenly and made a kind of dark frame for the horrible sculpture.
The body was a grisly enough sight, but it was the intent behind the murder that hit me so hard. The killer not only hated her, Phyllis, but also hated her flesh and bones and blood. He’d stripped away every vestige of humanity, leaving only a tattered lump of meat.
I looked up at the ceiling, trying to blot the sight from my mind. All along the unpainted beams hung a chorus of pale spiders. Silent, spinning, waiting. They were unconcerned with the tableau on the floor. These spiders I used as beacons of sanity. Death was less to them than a spring breeze, certainly nothing compared to a frothy, juicy moth.
“What should we do?” Reggie asked me.
I had forgotten he was there.
“Can you tell what happened by tasting her blood, like Ordé?”
Reggie looked at me with big, frightened eyes.
“Well, can you?”
“Once Wanita cut her finger and I kissed it,” Reggie said.
“Yeah?”
“And I saw a big ship leaving the harbor. She saw that ship the day before with my mother, but I wasn’t there.”
“So you can read blood,” I concluded.
Reggie looked at the body and shook his head no. I understood. He might have been a god, but he was still only a boy.
I searched the basement until I found a washer and dryer in a small room. I took a sheet from a basket in there and tore it into two cloths — one larger and one smaller. Then I went back to Phyllis’s body. Deep inside her chest cavity was still moist. I soaked up some of the blood in the smaller rag and then wrapped it in the larger one.
A couple of blocks away Reggie asked, “Should we call the cops?”
“Uh-uh, no, I don’t think so, kid. The police would just start looking for some maniac. They’d never believe what Phyllis was. They’d probably blame us. What we should do is go to Ordé and ask him what he thinks happened.”
We walked on a ways. The sun was coming up, and even though I had the blood of a murdered woman in my pocket, I was struck by the dawn’s beauty. The wisps of black clouds made a grid over the orange light. There was an ancient hue to the light, something that had once known greatness. I could feel my heart and mind open up to the scrutiny of light. I felt the connection between the blood in my veins and the furnace above. I looked down after a while, seeing the afterimage of Sol in the sidewalk and passing lawns. I had walked off the sidewalk and into the street. My visions distracted me so much that I almost walked into the path of an oncoming car.
“Why’d you come to me, Reggie?” I asked the boy, partly to get the answer and partly because I wanted to concentrate on the world around me.
“Huh?”
“Why’d you come to me? You could have gone to Eileen or even Ordé.”
“Eileen would have been too scared, and I don’t know where Ordé lives. Anyway, I don’t like Ordé too much. He so weird, always tryin’ to make everything sound so big when it’s all just normal.”
“But you could have found Ordé if you wanted, and you know we’re gonna have to go to him anyway.”
“That’s okay,” Reggie answered. “It’s okay if I go with you.”
We got to Ordé’s place a little bit before six. No one answered the front door, so we went around the back and knocked there. When he didn’t come out I took up the metal lid of a trash can and started banging.