4: The Portal
One day that summer I decided to stroll downtown to eat a cup of ice cream. It was one of my numerous days off work. I hadn’t gotten around to having lunch yet, and there wasn’t much in my fridge. I like to think that ice cream is a complete food, what with the sugar, the fat, the milk proteins, and the bits of fruit flavoring.
Val and I could have had an enjoyable debate about this—and I was perfectly capable of imagining it, but I’d learned not to get into long mental conversations with her ghost. I was even starting to think about finding another woman.
Not that I had any good prospects. A big problem with Santa Cruz is that so many of the people who live there are stone cold crazy. They aren’t bad off enough to be in the nuthouse, but they’re crazy just the same.
Take my landlady Diane Simly. Diane liked to sit on her porch every afternoon, waiting to see if any of the high-school kids happened to throw a cigarette butt or a gum wrapper onto her front lawn. That was her idea of what to do with her time—and she was always sure that she was right.
On the crucial summer afternoon that I want to tell you about, I’d finished rummaging around my house for my sandals, my keys, my wallet, my cell phone, and Droog’s leash. As I stepped onto my porch, I heard Diane yelling at a kid.
“Excuse me? Excuse me? I think you dropped something?”
I had a sudden mental image of cutting my landlady into tiny pieces with her electric hedge-clippers and feeding the pieces to the sea lions off the pier at three a.m. Okay, maybe I was a little crazy too—my grief had nearly pushed me over the edge. At least I still had a certain sense of irony. I knew to hold my toxic thoughts in quotes.
But never mind about Diane, I needed ice cream now, the good stuff from Mahalo Gelato on Pacific Avenue. I headed off down the alley. Droog trotted out from under my porch and dogged my steps. My faithful hound. I’d leash him later.
It was a perfect summer day, the first of July. The fog had burned off; the air was cool and salty. The faint roar of the surf floated in— along with the barking of the voracious sea lions beneath the pier.
To tell the truth, sea lions creep me out—I don’t like the way their hind legs are flesh-bound within the blubber of their tapering rears. To me, they look they’re in bondage, inching their ungainly way across a dock. It was easy to imagine that a sea lion would eat human flesh. Dogs eat their owners all the time—that is, they eat friendless owners who die alone with their pets in locked-up homes. Maybe that was in the cards for me.
A palm tree shuddered overhead, sending criss-cross shadows dancing across the alley like switchblades. Smiling at my not-quite-serious thoughts about Diane and the sea lions, I imagined a sound track of dissonant axe-murderer music. Sometimes I still thought of that murder I’d read about in the paper—and about the green-handled axe that Skeeves had shown me years ago. I put a sneaky crouch into my gait, bending my fingers like claws.
Droog sniffed one of my hands—just to see if I was holding food—and he glanced up at me with his alert, hazel-brown eyes.
“Never mind, Droogie,” I told him. “I’m only playing.”
And with that, I forgot about Diane and switched over to a different head game, to wit, the Infinite Paths project that I’d invented over the last few months. My discovery was that, with some thought, I could devise ever-new patterns for traversing familiar routes—without ever running out. It was a good way to stop thinking about Val.
My cottage on the alley behind Madrone Street lay some six blocks from Mahalo Gelato on Pacific Avenue—basically, I had to go three blocks south and three blocks west. I had a knack for planning routes in my head, and I’d worked out that there were twenty distinct ways to make this trip, assuming that I took an efficient route without any detours.
But who said that, as a semi-employed guy strolling to town, I had to be completely efficient? I could open up more possibilities by occasionally walking the wrong way. Suppose, for instance, that I allowed a block of retrograde motion to the east, and a compensatory block of extra motion to the west. According to my calculations, this gave me thirty-five times as many routes, yielding a glorious seven hundred possibilities. And if I added a jog to the north cancelled by an extra block to the south, I could find more than thirty-five thousand routes.
And there was nothing to stop me from detouring through three or even four blocks. Moreover, thanks to numerous alleys and footpaths, I had the option of splitting most Santa Cruz blocks in two, effectively doubling the size of my grid. So there were in fact millions of ways to get to the ice-cream parlor from my cottage—without going very far out of the way. With a certain amount of luck and industry, I planned never to use the same route twice.
Why? To some extent, my Infinite Paths project was just a distraction. But there was a deeper motive for what I was doing. I half-believed the world around me to be a kind of maze. I had a persistent fantasy that, if only I traveled along the right sequence of twists and turns, I might find my way out of my dull labyrinth of woe. Deep down, I thought I might still find Val.
Today, feeling energetic, I decided to try for a really odd-ball path. Like a mail-delivery bot with a program flaw, I trundled to and fro, backtracking some blocks and circling others, recrossing streets I’d already passed, and approaching familiar streets from unfamiliar directions.
Seemingly out of the blue, I hit upon the idea of visualizing my route in terms of synthesizing a molecule. Today’s insight was that I could view the molecule’s atoms as independent axes of variation. So a molecule was like a point in a higher-dimensional space, and synthesizing a molecule was like finding a path through this space. And—here came the punch line—projecting such a path onto the map of Santa Cruz could generate a fresh and never-thought-of route. I stopped walking and just stood there for a minute, letting the new idea sink in.
Perhaps I should have been suspicious of how easily the new insight had popped into my head. Perhaps I should have realized that, as of now, my thoughts were being warped by the will of a ruthless exploiter from a hidden world. But why would I start having sick, weird worries like that? For the first time in ages, I was having fun.
I found myself crafting a wonderfully unexpected route through Santa Cruz. The accumulating turns were wrapping the world in a welcome glow of strangeness. And then—triumph! Only a few blocks from my rental home of several years, I arrived at a street I could hardly recognize. My subconscious quest had reached fruition!
Logically, this had to be Yucca Street, but—there’d always been a vacant lot halfway down the block, and today that lot was filled with a dilapidated Victorian home that looked to have been there for eighty years, soft and dank as a decaying tooth. The Vic was dark green, with patches touched up in streaks of mauve and yellow. Gutters hung loose; some windows had missing panes. Junky overgrown eucalyptus trees crowded the free spaces of the yard. A primer-spotted van rested in driveway, perhaps abandoned. It looked as if someone had used the primer to cover up some earlier decorations on the vehicle.
Very strange. Even stranger, I seemed to be in some kind of spatial backwater. As I approached the dilapidated Victorian house, the other houses in the neighborhood became less clearly visible. I could only see bits and pieces of them, as if I were peering out from the center of a mirrored funhouse maze.
While I was still thinking this over, Droog took off down a narrow walkway beside the squalid Vic. As was his custom, he didn’t look back at me for approval, lest I try to call him back. Nose to the ground, tail wagging, he made his move. And, god help me, I followed him, the litter from the eucalyptus trees crunching underfoot—leaves, twigs, fragrant sheets of bark, and tough seed-pods resembling oversized buttons.
Close up, the mysterious house seemed almost organic—like a fungus that puffs up overnight, or like a meaty jungle flower. The building was silent and, I hoped, deserted. Droog trotted forward uncowed. Intoxicated by my growing sense of wonder, I continued in his wake. I was telling myself that this passageway was a probably a public right of way—but now, as we passed the rear of the house, our path became a mere sandy track along one edge of the funky Victorian’s back yard. A dozen paces ahead lay the haven of a crossways alley that warped off into vagueness where it led away from this ghostly house.
I paused and looked around, wanting to explore. The hind part of the house supported a deck of warped splintery material with a weathered gas-powered generator on one corner. All the windows were dark and dead. The euc trees rustled, and low branches knocked against the house.
I peered beneath the porch, wondering if there might be something interesting in the cellar. Instead of a regular basement door, the foundation wall had a recessed round opening, like the entrance to a tunnel. The hole was closed off by an odd circular door with a spiral pattern.
The sandy soil sloped invitingly towards this entrance. I took a few steps closer and touched the door. It was slick and iridescent, like something on a high-tech vehicle. A dark violet band spiraled in from the edge. Looking closer, I saw that the band was patterned in a frieze of raised glyphs. Perhaps my over-excited mind was fooling me, but I seemed to see a sloppy baboon, a flying turnip, a dancing mushroom, a plant with windows in its stems, and a naked woman amid rays of light.
Several yards behind me, Droog whined. I heard a thump from within the house. Someone was home! But I couldn’t leave yet. For in the very center of the door, I’d just now spotted a depression in the precise shape of a human hand. I was filled by a sense that this door was meant for me. Quickly I set my right hand into the smooth cradle at its center—and, yes, my hand was a perfect fit. The door had been waiting for me.
The big disk shuddered, twisted from side to side—and abruptly flopped towards me, flattening me onto my back.
Fortunately the ground was soft, and the door didn’t weigh all that much. Even so, I found it hard to push the disk off me. It was as if something behind the door were pressing it against me—as if I were a rat trapped by a janitor with a garbage can lid.
I heard a slithering sound, shortly followed by a clatter from within the basement. Droog began sounding the alarm—his barks low, hoarse and frightened. I heard a woman’s clear, low voice, calmly soothing the dog. And then her footsteps hurried across the sandy back yard.
Finally the door’s pressure upon me lightened, and I scooted back into the sun. The woman who’d run off was nowhere to be seen. Peering into the basement, I saw a gleaming golden sarcophagus against the side wall, unmistakably an Egyptian relic, its surface filigreed with hieroglyphs.
Instantly I thought of Skeeves, and the stories of his having stolen a casket from a rich wastrel’s house in San Francisco. Was he hiding in this hard-to-find house?
The near end of the sarcophagus bore an idealized likeness of some pharaoh’s face, with the figure’s head-dress sweeping down the sides of the casket in tooled golden ridges. The basement also held a huge conical wad of gray-green material that fanned out from a pointed tip near the far wall. Perhaps it was a kind of plastic. A sheaf of the stuff was attached to the back of the door, highlighted all over with glints from the sun. The funky stuff tensed like a muscle, dragging the door back towards the wall—and closing it in my face. Very weird.
I heard a footstep on the porch above, and I looked up to see a well-built guy with sun-darkened skin and greenish blond hair. A surfer I’d seen around town a few times before. A jerk. His name was Header. His eyes were fixed on me, and his nose was bleeding bright red. Maybe Header was a coker. He raised a handkerchief to his face and made a noise.
In that very instant, a four-inch-long blue slug dropped down from the porch. The slug began worming around on the ground, eating dirt, growing with great speed. I had an odd, fleeting sensation then, as if an alien personality within the slug were rummaging through my mind. Was this how it felt to go mad?
The swollen blue slug kneaded its flesh against itself, growing lumps and taking on the shape of—a bull sea lion with large, golden eyes. Droog redoubled his barking, giving it everything he had.
Ignoring us, the odd sea lion wallowed out into the middle of the back yard and snuffled the air, perhaps tracking the woman who’d emerged before him.
Droog gave a despairing yelp, and was gone, off around the corner of the alley at the back of the yard.
“Hey!” yelled the guy on the deck above. “Old man!”
Two other grungy surf kids appeared from the house, a boy and a girl, these two a bit shadowy and hard to see. The boy was none other than the missing Ira—the surfer who’d stolen that scrap of metallic hydrogen from the physics lab. The girl was new to me.
“Who told you how to get here?” asked the girl, leaning over the railing of the porch to stare down at me. She had a halo of short-cropped dark hair, and her voice was a low purr. She was silhouetted against the sky.
“Do you know about Val?” I blurted, sensing some connection between this weird scene and my wife’s death. “Is this magic? Can you bring her back?”
“Val’s gone for good,” said Ira. “I’m sorry that happened. We’ve all had some hard times around this weird scene.”
The blue sea-lion-thing was back down on his belly, flopping towards me, his blubber shaking in waves. There was something odd and hypnotic about his golden eyes. Once again I had the feeling of something alien reaching into my mind.
“Tell your pet that I’m good people,” I called to Ira.
“That thing’s not our pet, asshole,” said Header, the big guy with the muscles. “Did you just open our basement door?”
“Maybe,” I jabbered. “I don’t know what’s going on. Did you bring that sea lion home from the ocean? And dye him blue?”
“Was Skeeves in the basement?” pressed Header. “Did he let you in?”
“I didn’t see anything at all,” I said, backing away from the blue sea lion. I didn’t want the unearthly creature to touch me. “Come here, Droog!” I added, my voice breaking. “Protect me!”
The girl on the porch laughed musically, and then she imitated my cry, even putting a break into her voice—as if she was sampling my sound.
With an abrupt series of wriggles, the sculptured blue sea lion circled past me and disappeared along the littered pathway that I’d used to get back here in the first place. Perhaps he was making a break for the sea.
Thoroughly freaked, I took off across the back yard and down the alley like Droog had done. With every step I took, more of the alley became visible. I found Droog resting in a spot of sun on the sidewalk of Cedar Street. He gave me an innocent, unconcerned look. I stood there for a couple of minutes, catching my breath.
What had just happened? I’d opened some kind of giant plastic door beneath the house. A woman had run away, I’d seen a gold sarcophagus in the basement, and Header had had sneezed a blue sea lion out of his nose. None of it made sense.
Not to mention the fact that, as of yesterday, the whipped-to-shit green Victorian house hadn’t been on Yucca Street at all. Nor had I ever seen this place during all the months that I’d been a mailman walking from door to door.
I paused on Cedar Street, thinking things over. Maybe, just maybe, that tunnel under the house could lead to Val. Ira hadn’t exactly said no. Maybe I’d found a new level of reality beneath the workaday world. But maybe I was losing my mind. My heart was beating like a triphammer. I couldn’t take any more just now.
Santa Cruz looked normal from where I was standing, and I knew where I was. That was good. I wanted things to stay still for a few minutes. I could find the ghost house again later. And keep on looking for Val.
But right now I wanted some slack.