I toasted and finished the muffins first, while Bertie prepared both a chocolate milkshake and a vanilla Coke. Our star eater was also a two-fisted drinker.
By the time I followed the muffins with the hash and sausages, a second bodach had appeared. This one and the first moved through the diner with an air of agitation, back and forth, here and there, always returning to the smiley gourmand, who remained oblivious of them.
When the bacon cheeseburgers and the well-done fries were ready, I slapped one hand against the bell that rested beside the griddle, to alert Bertie that the order was up. She served it hot, kissing plate to counter without a rattle, as she always does.
Three bodachs had gathered at the front window, persistent shadows that remained impervious to the wilting power of the desert sun, peering in at us as though we were on exhibit.
Months often pass during which I encounter none of their kind. The running pack that I’d seen earlier in the street and now this convocation suggested that Pico Mundo was in for hard times.
Bodachs are associated with death much the way that bees seek the nectar of flowers. They seem to sip of it.
Ordinary death, however, does not draw a single bodach, let alone a swarm of them. I’ve never seen one of these beasts hovering at the bedside of a terminal cancer patient or in the vicinity of someone about to suffer a fatal heart attack.
Violence attracts them. And terror. They seem to know when it’s coming. They gather like tourists waiting for the predictable eruption of a reliable geyser in Yellowstone Park.
I never saw one of them shadowing Harlo Landerson in the days before he murdered Penny Kallisto. I doubt that any bodachs were in attendance when he raped and throttled the girl.
For Penny, death had come with terrible pain and intolerable fear; surely each of us prays—or merely hopes, depending on his certainty of God—that his death will not be as brutal as hers. To bodachs, however, a quiet strangulation apparently isn’t sufficiently exciting to bestir them from whatever lairs they inhabit in whatever strange realm is their true home.
Their appetite is for operatic terror. The violence they crave is of the most extreme variety: multiple untimely deaths spiced with protracted horror, served with cruelty as thick as bad gravy.
When I was nine years old, a drug-whacked teenager named Gary Tolliver sedated his family—little brother, little sister, mother, father—by doctoring a pot of homemade chicken soup. He shackled them while they were unconscious, waited for them to wake, and then spent a weekend torturing them before he killed them with a power drill.
During the week preceding these atrocities, I had twice crossed Tolliver’s path. On the first occasion, he’d been followed closely by three eager bodachs. On the second occasion: not three but fourteen.
I have no doubt that those inky forms roamed the Tolliver house throughout that bloody weekend, invisible to the victims and to the killer alike, slinking from room to room as the scene of the action shifted. Observing. Feeding.
Two years later, a moving van, driven by a drunk, sheered off the gasoline pumps at a busy service station out on Green Moon Road, triggering an explosion and fire that killed seven. That morning, I had seen a dozen bodachs lingering there like misplaced shadows in the early sun.
Nature’s wrath draws them as well. They were seething over the ruins of the Buena Vista Nursing Home after the earthquake eighteen months ago, and did not leave until the last injured survivor had been extracted from the rubble.
If I had passed by Buena Vista prior to the quake, surely I would have seen them gathering. Perhaps I could have saved some lives.
When I was a child, I first thought that these shades might be malevolent spirits who fostered evil in those people around whom they swarmed. I’ve since discovered that many human beings need no supernatural mentoring to commit acts of savagery; some people are devils in their own right, their telltale horns having grown inward to facilitate their disguise.
I’ve come to believe that bodachs don’t foster terror, after all, but take sustenance from it in some fashion. I think of them as psychic vampires, similar to but even scarier than the hosts of daytime-TV talk shows that feature emotionally disturbed and self-destructive guests who are encouraged to bare their damaged souls.
Attended now by four bodachs inside the Pico Mundo Grille and also watched by others at the windows, Fungus Man washed down the final bites of his burgers and fries with the last of his milkshake and vanilla Coke. He left a generous tip for Bertie, paid his check at the cashier’s station, and departed the diner with his slinking entourage of slithery shadows.
Through dazzles of sunlight, through shimmering curtains of heat rising from the baked blacktop, I watched him cross the street. The bodachs at his sides and in his wake were difficult to count as they swarmed over one another, but I would have bet a week’s wages that they numbered no fewer than twenty.
ALTHOUGH HER EYES ARE NEITHER golden nor heavenly blue, Terri Stambaugh has the vision of an angel, for she sees through you and knows your truest heart, but loves you anyway, in spite of all the ways that you are fallen from a state of grace.
She’s forty-one, therefore old enough to be my mother. She is not, however, eccentric enough to be my mother. Not by half.
Terri inherited the Grille from her folks and runs it to the high standard that they established. She’s a fair boss and a hard worker.
Her only offbeat quality is her obsession with Elvis and all things Elvisian.
Because she enjoyed having her encyclopedic knowledge tested, I said, “Nineteen sixty-three.”
“Okay.”
“May.”
“What day?”
I picked one at random: “The twenty-ninth.”
“That was a Wednesday,” Terri said.
The lunch rush had passed. My workday had ended at two o’clock. We were in a booth at the back of the Grille, waiting for a second-shift waitress, Viola Peabody, to bring our lunch.
I had been relieved at the short-order station by Poke Barnet. Thirty-some years older than I am, lean and sinewy, Poke has a Mojave-cured face and gunfighter eyes. He is as silent as a Gila monster sunning on a rock, as self-contained as any cactus.
If Poke had lived a previous life in the Old West, he had more likely been a marshal with a lightning-quick draw, or even one of the Dalton gang, rather than a chuck-wagon cook. With or without past-life experience, however, he was a good man at grill and griddle.
“On Wednesday, May 29, 1963,” Terri said, “Priscilla graduated from Immaculate Conception High School in Memphis.”
“Priscilla Presley?”
“She was Priscilla Beaulieu back then. During the graduation ceremony, Elvis waited in a car outside the school.”
“He wasn’t invited?”
“Sure he was. But his presence in the auditorium would have been a major disruption.”
“When were they married?”
“Too easy. May 1, 1967, shortly before noon, in a suite in the Aladdin Hotel, Las Vegas.”
Terri was fifteen when Elvis died. He wasn’t a heartthrob in those days. By then he had become a bloated caricature of himself in embroidered, rhinestone-spangled jumpsuits more appropriate for Liberace than for the bluesy singer with a hard rhythm edge who had first hit the top of the charts in 1956, with “Heartbreak Hotel.”
Terri hadn’t yet