reluctant to touch them even with one of my shoes. Standing in the next length of sloping tunnel, I turned to examine this peculiar find.
When I cranked up the flame on the lighter, I discovered that before me lay not mushrooms but a collection of skulls. The fragile skulls of birds. The elongated skulls of lizards. The larger skulls of what might have been cats, dogs, raccoons, porcupines, rabbits, squirrels….
Not a scrap of flesh adhered to any of these death’s-heads, as if they had been boiled clean: white and yellow-white in the butane light, scores of them, perhaps a hundred. No leg bones, no rib cages, just skulls. They were arranged neatly side by side in three rows—two on the bottom step and one on the second from the bottom—facing out, as though, even with their empty eye sockets, they were here to bear witness to something.
I had no idea what to make of this. I saw no satanic markings on the culvert walls, no indications of macabre ceremonies of any kind, yet the display had an undeniably symbolic purpose. The extent of the collection indicated obsession, and the cruelty implicit in so much killing and decapitation was chilling.
Recalling the fascination with death that had gripped me and Bobby Halloway when we were thirteen, I wondered if some kid, far weirder than we ever were, had done this grisly work. Criminologists claim that by the age of three or four, most serial killers begin torturing and killing insects, progressing to small animals during childhood and adolescence, and finally graduating to people. Maybe in these catacombs, a particularly vicious young murderer was practicing for his life’s work.
In the middle of the third and highest row of these bony visages rested a gleaming skull that was markedly different from all the others. It appeared to be human. Small but human. Like the skull of an infant.
“Dear God.”
My voice whispered back to me along the concrete walls.
More than ever, I felt as though I were in a dreamscape, where even such things as concrete and bone were no more solid than smoke. Nevertheless, I did not reach out to touch the small human skull—or any of the others, for that matter. However unreal they might seem, I knew that they would be cold, slick, and too solid to the touch.
Anxious to avoid encountering whoever had acquired this grim collection, I continued downward through the drain.
I expected the cat with the enigmatic eyes to reappear, pale paws meeting concrete with feather-on-feather silence, but either it remained out of sight ahead of me or it had detoured into one of the tributary lines.
Sections of sloped concrete pipe alternated with more spillways, and just as I was beginning to worry that the lighter didn’t contain enough fuel to see me to safety, a circle of dim gray light appeared and gradually brightened ahead. I hurried toward it and found that no grate barred the lower end of the tunnel, which led into an open drainage channel of mortar-set river rock.
I was in familiar territory at last, the northern flats of town. A couple of blocks from the sea. Half a block from the high school.
After the dank culvert, the night air smelled not merely fresh but sweet. The high points of the polished sky glittered diamond-white.
9
According to the digital light board on the Wells Fargo Bank building, the time was 7:56 P.M., which meant that my father had been dead less than three hours, though days seemed to have passed since I’d lost him. The same sign set the temperature at sixty degrees, but the night seemed colder to me.
Around the corner from the bank and down the block, the Tidy Time Laundromat was flooded with fluorescent light. Currently no customers were doing their laundry.
With the dollar bill ready in my hand, with my eyes squinted to slits, I went inside, into the flowery fragrance of soap powders and the chemical keenness of bleach, my head lowered to maximize the protection provided by the bill of my cap. I ran straight to the change machine, fed it, snatched up the four quarters that it spat into the tray, and fled.
Two blocks away, outside the post office, stood a pay phone with winglike sound shields. Above the phone, mounted on the wall of the building, was a security light behind a wire cage.
When I hung my hat on the cage, shadows fell.
I figured that Manuel Ramirez would still be at home. When I phoned him, his mother,