The lady who had let him in sat next to the other. If they weren’t twins, they had to be sisters. “No, we’re not.”
“We’re not doing anything illegal,” said the other. She looked at her sister. “At least nothing immoral.”
“I didn’t say you were,” Trellis said. “But what are you doing?”
A man wearing a hooded sweatshirt, the hood up over his head, pushed aside the curtain. In one hand he held a fat white candle, in the other, a long black-bladed knife. “What’s the holdup? We’re on a schedule.”
“Mall security,” said the woman next to the curtain.
The man in the sweatshirt glowered at Trellis. “Send the next one in.” He closed the curtain with an impatient tug.
The woman closest to Trellis rose. “Excuse me.” She squeezed past him and opened the door. “Next.”
The tie-dyed housewife shuddered. “Okay.” Trellis caught a glimpse of the man behind her before she climbed the stair. He put his hand on her shoulder. “God bless you,” he said.
“He will.” She stood just inside as if afraid of fully entering.
“How did you find us?” asked the ponytailed women next to the curtain.
The tie-dyed woman rubbed her eyes. “I Googled ‘ban the bomb’ and followed the links. It was a lot of links.”
“We get many that way. It’s not too late to go back. You can still change your mind.”
The woman closed her eyes tight before taking a ragged breath. “No, this is the right time. It’s a good time in my life.”
Trellis looked at the three of them, a strange tableau of women talking without making sense. Also, the hooded figure with a knife unnerved him. Trellis put his hand on his walkie talkie, but wasn’t sure that a better strategy would be to bolt for the door. None of them were paying attention to him. He’d never listened to a conversation that felt so charged with subtext.
“You know it works?” said the tie-dyed woman “It absolutely works?”
“Yes,” said both of the other women.
“I’m in.” She took a deep breath, let it out, and then breathed again before walking to the curtain and through. The ponytailed woman closest to the curtain followed her.
“What in the hell is going on here?” said Trellis, perched on the edge of his seat. His voice raised an octave by the end of the question, and his pulse drummed.
The woman eyed him impassively. Finally, she said, “This isn’t a good way to start. We haven’t been introduced yet. My name is Jennifer.” She put out her hand.
Trellis took her fingers in his own. She had a firm and pleasant handshake. “My sister’s name is Chastity.”
“Trellis,” he said, then flinched, recalling his dream. “Chastity?”
“My parents named the younger children after the virtues. My other sisters are Hope and Patience.” She paused as if thinking over the practice of naming children. “How old are you?”
“Fifty-four,” he said without thinking. How much space was in the trailer beyond the curtain? By his figuring, there could hardly be room for three people on the other side. Whatever they were doing in there, they weren’t making any sounds.
“Do you remember nuclear fire drills?” She rested an elbow on the table and the side of her face in her hand.
“What does this have to do with you and whatever you and those people outside are doing?” His chest constricted, as if his skin had shrunk a couple of sizes, compressing his lungs.
“I do,” she said. “I remember ‘duck and cover.’ I remember radiation shelters in the basements of public buildings. You’re old enough. Do you remember too?”
She sounded so reasonable and matter of fact. Trellis concentrated on slowing his breathing. For a second he thought he’d just felt coronary twinges, his fate from eating most of his meals in Café Court for the last fifteen years, rotating from one fast food outlet to the next. He was on his feet all day, but he’d noticed the bulge of belly that hung over his belt more and more lately, and his mantra, “I’m big boned,” carried less conviction each time he said it. Yes, maybe it was a coronary.
Not that a heart attack was any more comforting than being in a trailer talking to two strange women and a man with a knife.
Trellis felt as if the mall were a thousand miles away, that the trailer existed in an alien landscape. He returned to a familiar script, but it sounded ridiculous to say it. “Ma’am, you can’t sit a trailer in a public parking lot overnight. There’s zoning to consider.”
“Do you want to know why we’re here?”
“Sure.” His head swam a little. The incense was strong, even stronger than he’d first thought. He could taste it, an exotic flower coating the back of his throat. “Can I have a glass of water?”
Jennifer filled a cup she took from the strainer. He sipped it gratefully.
“It’s about the bombs,” she said. “It’s about duck and cover, and confronting the sword of Damocles.”
“I’m sorry?”
She leaned toward him, her hands clasped now, elbows on her knees. “Don’t you remember? Didn’t you have nuclear nightmares?”
For a second he relived being ten (or was it last week?), where he looked out his windows at the orange glow climbing in the sky, and the sick, lost feeling of recognizing it, too late. Rushing toward him, like in those Civil Defense films, a death wall filled with long glass teeth ready to shred him in an incinerator of instant motion. And he couldn’t move, not in the dream. It was always too late. He remembered hiding beneath his desk in third grade like all the other kids, rumps poking out of one side and hands-covered heads poking out the other. Even at the time he thought that his desk would be poor shelter if the roof came down. He sucked his breath in sharply. He had had that dream last week! The illusive dream he never recalled.
“I never knew where my family was, in the dreams. I couldn’t help them,” Jennifer said sadly.
Trellis leaned against the sun-warmed wall. His head swam with incense and the weirdness of the conversation, but what troubled him more were all the nuclear war images he’d ever stored up trying to leak out, every mushroom-clouded nightmare he’d ever dreamed. Nobody talked about nuclear bombs anymore. Atomic bombs were a part of the ’60s. They were yesterday’s fears. Weren’t the bombs locked up safely or destroyed now? “Really, ma’am, this is… interesting… but I think you’re going to have to move the trailer.” He stood, being careful not to thump his head on the ceiling. “Um… what was that you said about the sword of Damocles?”
She considered him for a moment, still leaning forward. “You came all the way out here to see us. Most people can’t come this far. You should see the rest. Come downstairs. Would you tell the folks outside that we’ll be a few minutes?”
Trellis opened the door. Sunlight glinted off windshields, and he could hear automobile traffic again. “The lady asks you to be patient.” The Marine Corps guy shrugged. The line looked like it had gained a few more people since he’d come in.
The closing door shut out all noise.
Jennifer opened the curtain. “Watch the step,” she said as she started down. “There’s no bannister.”
A long flight of stairs lit by a light at the bottom fell before him.
“How can you have stairs in a trailer?” After a few steps, he knew he was below the surface of the parking lot. “You’ll get in trouble for excavating on mall property.” But the roughly-carved rock walls didn’t look new, nor did the rock stairs worn to a groove in the middle appear freshly quarried. His fingers trailed down the stone as he descended, and patterns cut into the cool rock passed beneath them, like hieroglyphs or maybe something even older: cave carvings perhaps. When he came back, he decided, he’d look at them more closely with his flashlight.