But he was afraid of seers and holy men, worried that their powers might be based on something real, that they’d find him out if he got too close. So he climbed back into the one-eyed green T-bird and drove the ten miles back home.
The faculty complex was protected by twelve-foot-high matte adobe walls. The wrought iron gate across the driveway was locked at night, attended by a uniformed guard. But the late-night sentry was not at his post.
John stopped at the barred entrance, sat back in the driver’s seat and fell immediately asleep.
He was sitting in a dark room. Fanciful pulsing light came through large industrial-like windows; the neon pulse was from a blinking sign somewhere outside. This light was blue and red; these colors refused to combine. Each time the sign flashed John saw something different.
The first burst revealed a bookcase filled with tomes, some of which were hundreds of years old while others were modern-day publications with gaudy book jackets promising things unworthy of the written word.
The second flare of blue and red illuminated a high wall where some mad painter had fashioned a huge ogre made mostly of thick black and brown brushstrokes, with hints of scum green here and there.
The third blaze slammed down on Chapman Lorraine’s corpse, a deep and bloody cleft in his temple. The dead man was seated awkwardly on a tarnished brass throne festooned with huge cool-colored man-made jewels that were both opaque and brilliantly striated with platinum radiance.
The light faded but John could see the afterimage of Lorraine quite clearly. There seemed to be some kind of intention in his unfocused eyes, in the crooked grasping of his powerful fingers.
He’s trying to hold on to life through me, Dreamer John thought.
The neon pulsed again. John was afraid that the new brilliance would bring Lorraine fully alive; that those dead hands might drag him back to pay for his crime.
But instead the light seemed to trap the dead man in its cloying glow. Chapman was stuck to his blackened throne. Dreamer John took in a deep breath that came out as a relieved sigh.
After two or three of these exhalations he noticed a sound, a gentle tapping.
The light went down and the tapping stopped. When blue and red filled the room once more, it started up again. John found himself walking down a long, dusty hall guarded by dogs sleeping beneath hanging candelabras. The candlelight flickered, forming and re-forming the walls into hallucinatory images; these possible/impossible subjects ranged from hummingbirds frozen in mid-flight to huge Soviet farm tractors that appeared to be breathing.
His father was there wearing a scuffed-up suit of armor, seated upon a brass-plated horse. John wore a shapeless straw hat and carried a rude rucksack fashioned out of simple calico cloth.
A column of tiny spiders marched in the opposite direction along the edge of the wall. Looking closer John saw that the spiders were actually little severed hands, their fingertips frantically stamping on the wood floor.
The tapping came again. John looked up. He was standing at a plain wood door.
“Who is it?”
“Me of course,” a woman said. She sounded older if not elderly.
It was a familiar voice but he couldn’t place it; like the first notes of a song on the radio — you know the tune but cannot name it.
He hesitated. After a few seconds he felt something wet and warm against his hand. He flinched then saw it was one of the guard dogs now awake and come to greet him. John smiled at the friendly gesture and pulled the door open.
The woman standing there was short, in her early fifties, thin but not skinny, with dark brown skin like chocolate fudge. Her full-length dress was made from natural canvas-like material printed with five or six rude images of blue and red roses. She wore a cotton hat that was round with a ridge along the brim. Half a dozen daisies grew out of the top as if from soil.
Her glasses had delicate pewter frames, surrounding large brown eyes that watched him closely.
There was a half smile on the woman’s lips. This smile tweaked his memory...
“You’re... a... a fairy godmother,” he stuttered.
Her smile deepened.
“You’re my fairy godmother,” he said, shocked.
“How are you, Cornelius?”
“Not too good,” he said. “I mean... nothing’s all that bad but it’s cold in here and my homework is so boring and I can’t get the man I killed out of my head. He’s back there in the living room. I don’t remember his name but...”
“Yes, yes, yes,” the children’s goddess said. She patted his shoulder and walked past him down the candlelit hall of dust, drowsing dogs and impossible images. “All that’s over now.”
When he turned to follow John felt burgeoning elation in his chest. After one step he was grinning, another and he began to laugh. Instead of a third stride he hopped, landed, then swung from the waist like doing the hokey-pokey dance when he was in kindergarten.
He stopped there watching the brown goddess traipse toward the flashing neon at the end of the passageway. He wanted to go after her but was suddenly afraid of the passion rising in him...
“What’s your name?” he shouted.
“Posterity,” she said not turning.
“Professor. Professor.”
Someone was shaking his shoulder; there was an intense light shining. John’s head hurt so badly that he wanted to tear out his brain.
“Professor!”
“Stop shakin’ me, Jasper,” John complained. “My head feels like it’s gonna bust.”
The big Hopi had a set expression that revealed nothing; not joy or glee, anger or love. He called himself Jasper because he liked the stone. Jasper Hutman was the name the university put on his paycheck but John knew his given name was Hototo.
Hototo believed that his tribesmen were put on earth to bring peace and harmony everywhere they went.
“Does that mean the Hopi people are here to save the world?” John asked Hototo early one Tuesday morning when he’d just returned from Senta’s motel room.
“No,” the big, brick red man replied. “There are too few of us and too many of everyone else. All we do is to carry a little peace here and there casting it on the waters and hoping for the best.”
Jasper shook John’s shoulder again and the history professor sat up straight.
“You shouldn’t sleep out here in your car, Professor, there’s all kinds of bad characters up and down this road. And you know they won’t think twice about people like you and me.”
The memory of a fairy godmother came into John’s mind.
“I was waiting for you and fell asleep,” he said.
“You were smiling,” Hototo remarked.
“I think I had a revelation.”
Jasper “Hototo” Hutman went through an iron doorway to open the larger driveway gate. John drove through but found the uniformed Hopi standing in the middle of the lane holding up a fancy beaded belt. The guard approached, handing the bright strap to John. The yellow, red, and blue beads might have been the scales of a fanciful viper. The silver buckle was quite large.
“For you,” Hototo said firmly.
“It’s very handsome,” John said.
The eight-inch buckle had a turquoise bird set at one side. The bird had a red eye and one greenstone feather.
“If you press the bird’s eye it releases a silver knife and handle,” Hototo informed him. “My father gave it to me but I’ll never use it.”
“What makes you think I would?” John asked.
“You’re a wild man, John Woman. I see it in your eyes late at night when you come from Spark City. A man like you needs a weapon.”