minutes—and then to my surprise, the phantom slumped into a crouch once more and loped away with the others. With the suppleness of black silk ribbon, it slipped between window sash and sill, into sunlight.
I blew out my sour breath and sucked sweet air, watching as a final score of bodachs spilled through the hallway arch.
When these last foul spirits had departed for the Mojave heat, I returned to the living room. Cautiously.
At least a hundred of them had passed through this room. More likely, there had been half again that many.
In spite of all that traffic, not one page of any magazine or romance novel had been ruffled. Their passage had left no slightest impression in the nap of the carpet.
At one of the front windows, I peered out at the blighted lawn and the sun-scorched street. As far as I could determine, none of the recently departed pack lingered in the neighborhood.
The unnatural chill in this small house had gone the way of the bodachs. The desert day penetrated the thin walls until every surface in the living room seemed to be as radiant as the coils of an electric heater.
During their passage, that tumult of purposeful shadows had left no stain on the hallway walls. No trace of the burning-electrical-cord smell remained, either.
For the third time, I stepped up to that doorway.
The black room was gone.
BEYOND THE THRESHOLD LAY AN ORDINARY chamber, not infinite in its dimensions, as it had seemed earlier, measuring no more than twelve by fourteen feet.
A single window looked out through the branches of a lacy melaleuca that screened much of the sunlight. Nevertheless, I could see well enough to determine that no source existed for a sullen red light either in the center of this humble space or in any corner.
The mysterious power that had transformed and controlled this room—casting me minutes back, and then forward, in time—was no longer in evidence.
Apparently, this served as Fungus Man’s study. A bank of four-drawer filing cabinets, an office chair, and a gray metal desk with a laminated imitation-wood-grain top were the only furnishings.
Side by side on the wall opposite the desk hung three black- and-white, poster-size photographs that appeared to have been printed on a draftsman’s digital plotter. They were head shots, portraits of men—one with feverish eyes and a gleeful smile, the other two glowering in the gloom.
All three were familiar, but I could at first put a name to only the one with the smile: Charles Manson, the vicious manipulator whose fantasies of revolution and race war had exposed a cancer at the core of the flower-power generation and had led to the demise of the Age of Aquarius. He had carved a swastika on his forehead.
Whoever the other two might be, they didn’t have the look of either Vegas comics or famous philosophers.
Perhaps my imagination, as much as the melaleuca-filtered sunlight, imparted a faint silvery luminescence to each man’s intense gaze. This glow reminded me of the milky radiance that informs the hungry glare of animate corpses in movies about the living dead.
In part to alter the quality of those eyes, I switched on the overhead light.
The dust and disorder that characterized the rest of the house were not in evidence here. When he crossed this threshold, Fungus Man left his slovenliness behind and became a paragon of neatness.
The file cabinets proved to contain meticulously kept folders filled with articles clipped from publications and downloaded from the Internet. Drawer after drawer contained dossiers on serial killers and mass murderers.
The subjects ranged from Victorian England’s Jack the Ripper to Osama bin Laden, for whom Hell had prepared a special suite of fiery rooms. Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer. Charles Whitman, the sniper who killed sixteen in Austin, Texas, in 1966. John Wayne Gacy: He liked to dress up as a clown at children’s parties, had his picture taken at a political event with First Lady Rosalyn Carter, and buried numerous dismembered bodies in his backyard and under his house.
A particularly thick file had been assembled for Ed Gein, who had been the inspiration for both Norman Bates in Pyscho and Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. Gein had enjoyed eating soup from a human skull and had fashioned a fancy belt from the nipples of his victims.
The unknown dangers of the black room had not daunted me, but here was a known evil, entirely comprehensible. Cabinet by cabinet, my chest tightened with dread and my hands trembled, until I slammed shut a file drawer and resolved to open no more of them.
Memory freshened by what I’d seen in those folders, I could now put names to the poster-size photographs that flanked Charles Manson.
A portrait of Timothy McVeigh hung to the right of Manson. McVeigh had been convicted and executed for the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, where 168 people were killed in 1995.
To the left hung Mohammed Atta, who had flown an airliner into one of the World Trade Center towers, killing thousands. I had seen no evidence that Fungus Man sympathized with the cause of radical Islamic fascists. As with Manson and McVeigh, he apparently admired Atta for the terrorist’s cruel vision, brutal actions, and accomplishments in the service of evil.
This room was less of a study than it was a shrine.
Having seen enough, too much, I wanted to get out of the house. I yearned to return to Tire World, breathe the scent of rubber ready for the road, and think about what to do next.
Instead, I sat in the office chair. I am not squeamish, but I cringed slightly when I put my hands on the arms of the chair where his hands might have rested.
On the desk were a computer, a printer, a brass lamp, and a day-date calendar. Not a speck of dust or lint could be seen on any surface.
From this perch, I surveyed the study, trying to understand how it could have become the black room and then could have reverted to this ordinary space again.
No residual St. Elmo’s fire of supernatural energy glimmered along the metal edges of the file cabinets. No otherworldly presences revealed themselves.
For a while, this room had been transformed into ... a portal, a doorway between Pico Mundo and somewhere far stranger, by which I do not mean Los Angeles or even Bakersfield. Perhaps for a while this house had been a train station between our world and Hell, if Hell exists.
Or if I had reached the bloody red light at the center of that otherwise perfect darkness, perhaps I would have found myself on a planet in a remote arm of the galaxy, where bodachs ruled. Lacking a boarding pass, I had instead been flung into the living room and the past, then into the carport and the future.
Of course I examined the possibility that what I had seen could have been mere delusion. I might be as crazy as a laboratory rat that has been fed a diet of psychosis-inducing toxins and forced to watch TV “reality” shows that explore in detail the daily lives of washed-up supermodels and aging rock stars.
From time to time, I do consider that I might be mad. Like any self-respecting lunatic, however, I am always quick to dismiss any doubts about my sanity.
I saw no reason to search the study for a hidden switch that might convert it again into the black room. Logic suggested that the formidable power needed to open that mysterious doorway had been projected not from here but from the other side, wherever that might be.
Most likely Fungus Man was unaware that his sanctum served not merely as a catalogued repository for his homicidal fantasies but also as a terminal admitting bodachs to a holiday of blood. Without my sixth sense, perhaps he could sit here, happily working on one of his grisly files, and not be conscious of the ominous transformation of the room or of the arriving hordes of demonic entities.
From nearby came a tick-tick-tick,