Forever Odd

pride in it.
        Sitting in that tunnel, spooking myself, I banished Kali not only from the role that she had given herself in that movie serial, but banished her entirely from my mind. I concentrated on the iguanas tricked up to pass for dinosaurs and on the dwarfs in leather chaps or whatever they had been wearing.
        Instead of Kali, within seconds Datura crept into my thoughts, torn by the lion but nonetheless amorous. She was crawling toward me along the tunnel right now .
        I couldn’t hear her breathing, of course, because the dead do not breathe.
        She wanted to sit in my lap and wriggle her bottom and share her blood with me.
        The dead don’t talk. But it was easy to believe that Datura might be the sole exception to the rule. Surely even death could not silence that garrulous goddess. She would heave herself upon me, sit on my lap, wriggle her bottom, press her dripping hand to my lips, and say Want to taste me, boyfriend !‘
        Very little of that mind movie was enough to make me want to switch on the flashlight.
        If Andre had intended to check out the electrical vault, he would have done so by this time. He had gone elsewhere. With both his mistress and Robert dead, the giant would blow this place in the car that they had stashed on the property.
        In a few hours, I could dare to venture back into the hotel and from there to the interstate.
        As I touched my thumb to the flashlight switch, before I pressed it, light bloomed beyond the curve that I had recently transited, and I heard Andre at the mouth of the tunnel.

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    FIFTY-FOUR
        
        ONE GOOD THING ABOUT REVERSE PSYCHIC MAGNETISM is that I can never be lost. Drop me into the middle of a jungle, without a map or a compass, and I’ll draw my searchers to me. You’ll never find my face on a milk carton: Have you seen this boy? If I live long enough to develop Alzheimer’s and wander away from my care facility, pretty soon all the nurses and patients will be wandering after me, compelled in my wake.
        Watching the light play around the first length of the tunnel, past the curve, I warned myself that I was indulging in another ghost story, spooking myself for no good reason. I should not assume that Andre sensed where I had gone.
        If I sat tight, he would decide there were more likely places that I might have taken refuge, and he would go away to search them. He hadn’t entered the drain. He was a big man; he would make a lot of noise, crawling in that cramped tunnel.
        He surprised me by firing a shot.
        In that confined space, the concussion seemed bad enough to make my ears bleed. The report-a loud bang but also like the hard toll of an immense bell-rang with such vibrato, I swore that I could feel sympathetic tremors racing through the haversian canals of my bones. The bang and the toll chased each other through the drain, and the echoes that followed were higher pitched, like the terrifying shrieks of incoming rockets.
        The noise so disoriented me that the tiny chips of concrete, peppering my left cheek and neck, mystified me for a moment. Then I understood: ricochet .
        I rolled flat, facedown, minimizing my exposure, and frantically wriggled deeper into the tunnel, scissoring my legs like a lizard and pulling myself forward with my arms, because if I rose onto my hands and knees, I would for sure take a round in the buttocks or the back of the head.
        I could live with one butt cheek-just sit at a slant for the rest of my life, not worry about how baggy the seat of my blue jeans looked, get used to the nickname Halfass -but I couldn’t live with my brains blown out. Ozzie would say that I often made such poor use of the brain I had that, if worse came to worst, I might in fact be able to get along without it, but I didn’t want to try.
        Andre fired another shot.
        My head was still ringing from the first blast, so this one didn’t seem as loud, though my ears ached as if sound of this volume had substance and, passing through them, strained their dimensions.
        In the instant required for the initial crash of the shot to be followed by the shrieking echo, the slug would have ricocheted past me. As scary as the noise might be, it signified that my luck held. If a bullet found me, the shock of impact would effectively deafen me to the gunfire.
        Skittering like a salamander, away from his light, I