Forever Odd

removed.
        With grim expectations, I walked faster now, not because psychic magnetism pulled me more effectively, which it did not, but because at each intersection, I had the confirmation of their footprints in the silt.
        The endless gray walls, the monotony of the patterns of shadow and light thrown by the overhead lamps, the silence: This might have served as Hell for any hopeless sinner whose two greatest fears were solitude and boredom.
        Following the discovery of the first footprints, I hurried along for more than another thirty minutes, not running but walking briskly-and came to the place at which they had exited the maze.

----

    EIGHTEEN
        
        WHEN I TOUCHED THE STAINLESS-STEEL SERVICE DOOR in the wall of the tunnel, a psychic hook bit deep, and I felt myself being reeled forward, as if my quarry were the fishermen and I the fish.
        Beyond the door, an L-shaped hallway. At the end of the L, a door. Pushing through the door, I found a vestibule, spiral stairs, and at the top another slump-stone shed with tool rack.
        Although the February day was pleasantly warm, not blistering, the air in here was stuffy. The smell of dry rot settled from the rafters under the sun-baked metal roof.
        Apparently Simon had picked the lock as he had done at the first shed off the alleyway near the Blue Moon Cafe. Leaving, they had closed the door, and it had latched securely behind them.
        With my laminated driver’s license, I could spring a simple latch, but although cheap and flimsy, this model would be impervious to a plastic loid. I retrieved the pair of locking tongs from my backpack.
        I was not concerned about the noise alerting Simon and his crew. They would have passed this way hours ago; and I had every reason to believe that they had kept moving.
        As I was about to apply the tongs to the lock cylinder, Terri’s satellite phone rang, startling me.
        I fumbled it from my pocket and answered on the third ring. “Yeah?”
        “Hi.”
        From that single word, I recognized the smoky-voiced woman who had called while I’d been sitting under the branches of the poisonous brugmansia behind the Ying house, the previous night.
        “You again.”
        “Me.”
        She could have obtained this number only by calling my recharged cell phone and talking to Terri.
        “Who are you?” I asked.
        “You still think I have the wrong number?”
        “No. Who are you?”
        She said, “You have to ask?”
        “Didn’t I just?”
        “You shouldn’t have to ask.”
        “I don’t know your voice.”
        “So many men know it well.”
        If she wasn’t speaking in riddles, she was at least being obscure, taunting.
        “Have I ever met you?” I asked.
        “No. But can’t you dream me up?”
        “Dream you up?”
        “I’m disappointed in you.”
        “Again?”
        “Still.”
        I thought of the footprints in the silt. One pair had belonged to either a boy or a woman.
        Not sure of the game, I waited.
        She waited, too.
        In most of the rafter junctions, spiders had spun webs. Those architects hung, glossy and black, among the pale carcasses of flies and moths on which they had feasted.
        Finally I said, “What do you want?”
        “Miracles.”
        “By which you mean-what?”
        “Fabulous impossible things.”
        “Why call me?”
        “Who else?”
        “I’m a fry cook.”
        “Astonish me.”
        “I sling hash.”
        She said, “Icy fingers.”
        “What?”
        “That’s what I want.”
        “You want icy fingers?”
        “Up and down my spine.”
        “Get an Eskimo masseuse.”
        “Masseuse?”
        “For the icy fingers.”
        The humorless always need to ask, and she did: “Is that a joke?”
        “Not a great one,” I admitted.
        “You think everything’s funny? Is that the way you are?”
        “Not everything.”
        “Not very much at all, asshole. You laughing now?”
        “No, not now.”
        “You know what I think would be funny?”
        I didn’t reply.
        “What I think would be funny is I take a hammer to the little creep’s arm.”
        Overhead, an eight-legged harpist moved, and silent arpeggios trembled through taut strings of spider silk.
        She said, “Will his bones shatter like