One Door From Heaven

was afraid to ask.
        The detectives would have preferred that Noah leave directly, but he stopped here and said, "It's all right, son. She didn't have any pain." Rickster's hands moved restlessly, pulling at each other, at the buttons on his pajama top, at his low-set ears, at his wispy brown hair, and at the air as though he might pluck understanding from it. "Mr. Noah, wha… wha…?" His mouth went soft, twisted with anguish.
        Assuming that the question had been Why?, Noah could provide no answer other than a platitude worthy of Nurse Quail: "It was just Laura's time to go."
        Rickster shook his head. He wiped at his flooded eyes, swabbed wet hands across damp cheeks, and gathered his troubled face into an expression so affectingly earnest, so miserable, so desperate that Noah could hardly bear to look at it. Rickster's mouth firmed, and his malformed tongue found the shape of the words that had a moment ago eluded it, and he asked not Why?, but a question more to the point and yet even more difficult to answer: "What's wrong with people?"
        Noah shook his head.
        "What's wrong with people?" Rickster implored.
        His eyes fixed so beseechingly on Noah that it was impossible to turn away from him without responding, and yet impossible to lie even though, to this hard question, lies were the only answers that would soothe.
        Noah knew that he should just put an arm around the boy and walked him back to his bed, where the framed photographs of his dead parents stood on the nightstand. He should have tucked him in and talked to him about anything that came to mind, or about nothing at all, as he had talked for so many years to his sister. More than a need to know what was wrong with people, loneliness plagued this boy, and although Noah had no insight into the source of human cruelty, he could medicate loneliness with a gift of his time and company.
        He felt burnt out, however, and doubted that he had anything within him worth giving. Not anymore. Not after Laura.
        He had no idea what was wrong with people, but he knew that whatever might have broken in the soul of humanity was manifestly broken in him.
        "I don't know," he told this cast-away boy with the castaway face. "I don't know."
        By the time that he retrieved his pistol and reached his car in the parking lot, the previously faraway roar in his head grew louder and acquired a more distinctive character. No longer like thunder, it might have been the angry chanting of the whole mad crowd of humankind-or still the rumble of water tumbling from a high cliff into an abyss.
        On the way to Cielo Vista, he'd broken every law of the highway; but he exceeded no speed limits on the way home, ran no stop signs. He drove with the exaggerated care of a cautious drunk because, mile by mile, the surging sound within him was accompanied by a deepening flood of darkness, and those black torrents seemed to spill from him into the California night. Block by block, streetlamps appeared to grow dimmer, and previously well-lighted avenues seemed to be drowned in murk. By the time he parked at his apartment, the river that might have been hope finished draining entirely into the abyss, and Noah was borne to a bottle of brandy and to his bed on the currents of a bleaker emotion.

Chapter 32
        
        BOY, DOG, AND GRIZZLED GRUMP arrive at the barn-what-ain't-a-barn, but to Curtis it appears to be a barn and nothing more. In fact, it looks like merely the ruins of a barn.
        The structure stands by itself, two hundred yards northwest of the town, past clumps of stunted sage and bristles of wild sorrel and foot-snaring tendrils of creeping sandbur. At a surprisingly sharp line of demarcation, all forms of desert scrub and weeds and cactus surrender to the saline soil, and the inhospitable desert gives way to the utterly barren salt flats-which seems to be a curious place to have built a barn.
        Even in the dark-drenched night, where shadows drip off shadows, the building's decrepit condition is obvious. Instead of describing a straight line, the steeply pitched roof swags from peak to eave. The walls are a little catawampus to the foundation, time-tweaked and weather-warped at the corners.
        Unless the ramshackle barn is actually a secret armory stocked with futuristic weapons-plasma swords, laser-pulse rifles, neutron grenades-Curtis can't imagine what hope it offers them.