He had dealt much too harshly with the kid. He’d been reacting not to what the kid had done but to everything that had happened in the restaurant and the attic. Delayed-stress syndrome.
But more than that: he had needed to strike out at something, someone, God or man, in frustration over the stupidity of it all, the injustice, the pure blind cruelty of fate. Like some grim bird of despair, his mind kept circling back to the two dead people in the restaurant, the wounded, the cop clinging to a thread of life at Hoag Hospital, their tortured husbands and wives and parents, bereaved children, mourning friends, the many links in the terrible chain of grief that was forged by each death.
The kid had just been a convenient target.
Harry knew he ought to go back and apologize, but couldn’t. It was not the kid he dreaded facing as much as that ghoulish crowd.
“The little creep needed a lesson anyway,” he said, justifying his actions to himself.
He had treated the kid more like Connie might have done. Now he even sounded like Connie.
… you gotta be in sync with the rhythms of destruction…civilization is coming down around our ears… gotta know when to break a rule to save the system… surf on every random wave of madness that comes along….
Harry loathed that attitude.
Violence, madness, envy, and hatred would not consume them all. Compassion, reason, and understanding would inevitably prevail. Bad times? Sure, the world had known plenty of bad times, hundreds of millions dead in wars and pogroms, the official murderous lunacies of fascism and communism, but there had been a few precious eras of peace, too, and societies that worked at least for a while, so there was always hope.
He stopped leaning on the tree. He stretched, trying to loosen his cramped muscles.
The day had started out so well, but it sure had gone to hell in a hurry.
He was determined to get it back on track. Paperwork would help. Nothing like official reports and forms in triplicate to make the world seem ordered and rational.
Out in the street, the whirlwind had gathered more dust and detritus. Earlier the ghost dancer had appeared to be waltzing along the blacktop. Now it was doing a frantic jitterbug. As Harry took a step away from the tree, the column of debris changed course, zigged toward him, and burst upon him with startling power, forcing him to shut his eyes against the abrasive grit.
For one crazy moment he thought he was going to be swept up as Dorothy had been, and spun off to Oz. Tree limbs rattled and shook overhead, shedding more leaves on him. The huffing and keening of the wind briefly swelled into a shriek, a howl — but in the next instant fell into graveyard stillness.
Someone spoke directly in front of Harry, voice low and raspy and strange: “Ticktock, ticktock.”
Harry opened his eyes and wished he hadn’t.
A hulking denizen of the streets, fully six-feet-five, odious and clad in rags, stood before him, no more than two feet away. His face was grossly disfigured by scars and weeping sores. His eyes were narrowed, little more than slits, and gummy white curds clogged the corners. The breath that came between the hobo’s rotten teeth and across his suppurating lips was so foul that Harry gagged on the stench.
“Ticktock, ticktock,” the vagrant repeated. He spoke quietly, but the effect was like a shout because his voice seemed to be the only sound in the world. A preternatural silence draped the day.
Feeling threatened by the size and by the extravagant filthiness of the stranger, Harry took a step backward. The man’s greasy hair was matted with dirt, bits of grass, and leaf fragments; dried food and worse was crusted in his tangled beard. His hands were dark with grime, and the underside of every ragged, overgrown fingernail was tar-black. He was no doubt a walking petri dish in which thrived every deadly disease known to man, and an incubator of new viral and bacterial horrors.
“Ticktock, ticktock.” The hobo grinned. “You’ll be dead in sixteen hours.”
“Back off,” Harry warned.
“Dead by dawn.”
The hobo opened his squinched eyes. They were crimson from lid to lid and corner to corner, without irises or pupils, as if there were only panes of glass where eyes should have been and only a store of blood within the skull.
“Dead by dawn,” the hobo repeated.
Then he exploded. It wasn’t anything like a grenade blast, no killing shockwaves or gush of heat, no deafening boom, just a sudden end to the unnatural stillness and a violent influx of wind, whoosh! The hobo appeared to disintegrate, not into particles of flesh and gouts of blood but into pebbles and dust and leaves, into twigs and flower petals and dry clods of earth, into pieces of old rags and scraps of yellowed newspapers, bottle caps, glittering specks of glass, torn theater tickets, bird feathers, string, candy wrappers, chewing-gum foil, bent and rusted nails, crumpled paper cups, lost buttons….
The churning column of debris burst over Harry. He was forced to close his eyes again as the mundane remains of the fantastic hobo pummeled him.
When he could open his eyes without risk of injury, he spun around, looking in every direction, but the airborne trash was gone, dispersed to all corners of the day. No whirlwind. No ghost dancer. No hobo: he had vanished.
Harry turned around again in disbelief, gaping.
His heart knocked fiercely.
From another street, a car horn blared. A pickup truck turned the corner, approaching him, engine growling. On the other side of the street, a young couple walked hand in hand, and the woman’s laughter was like the ringing of small silver bells.
Suddenly Harry realized just how unnaturally quiet the day had become between the appearance and departure of the rag-clothed giant. Other than the gravelly and malevolent voice and what few sounds of movement the hobo made, the street had been as silent as any place a thousand leagues beneath the sea or in the vacuum of space between galaxies.
Lightning flashed. The shadows of tree limbs twitched on the sidewalk around him.
Thunder drummed the fragile membrane of the sky, drummed harder, the heavens grew blacker as if lightning-burnt, the air temperature seemed to drop ten degrees in an instant, and the laden clouds split. A scattering of fat raindrops snapped against the leaves, ponged off the hoods of parked cars, painted dark blotches on Harry’s clothes, splattered his face, and drove a chill deep into his bones.
TWO
1
The world appeared to be dissolving beyond the windshield of the parked car, as if the clouds had released torrents of a universal solvent. Silver rain sluiced down the glass, and the trees outside seemed to melt as readily as green crayons. Hurrying pedestrians fused with their colorful umbrellas and deliquesced into the gray downpour.
Harry Lyon felt as if he would be liquefied as well, rendered into an insensate solution and swiftly washed away. His comfortable world of granite reason and steely logic was eroding around him, and he was powerless to halt the disintegration.
He could not decide whether he had actually seen the burly vagrant or merely hallucinated him.
God knew, an underclass of the dispossessed wandered the American landscape these days. The more money the government spent to reduce their numbers, the more of them there were, until it began to seem as if they were not the result of any public policy or lack of it but a divine scourge. Like so many people, Harry had learned to look away from them or through them because there seemed to be nothing he could do to help them in any significant way… and because their very existence raised disturbing questions about the stability of his own future. Most were pathetic and harmless. But some were undeniably strange, their faces enlivened by the ticks and twitches of neurotic compulsions, driven by obsessive needs, the gleam of madness in their eyes, the capacity for violence evident in the unremitting coiled tension of their bodies. Even in a town like Laguna Beach — portrayed in travel brochures as a pearl of the Pacific, one more California paradise — Harry could no doubt find at least a few homeless men whose demeanor and appearance were as hostile as that of the man who had seemed to come out of the whirlwind.