Chapter 34
After retrieving his jacket from the trunk of the Mercedes and getting into Sharon’s dry car, Laif drove south on the slick Orange freeway at a safe sixty miles-per-hour.
She cried next to him.
He felt bad for her and tried consoling her. “I’m so sorry.” He didn’t know what else to say. He couldn’t take the pain away. He wasn’t supposed to take it away. It was part of her love that she had for the dog. It was supposed to hurt.
He wanted to hug her again, but driving on the wet freeway made that dangerous. The last thing he wanted was to bring more tragedy into her life. He offered, “Don’t take the delivery man’s actions personally. He wouldn’t have done it without the Brewsters’ influence.”
“Can we talk about this later?” She said between sniffles.
“I’m sorry.” Sad feelings remained with him. His life held frequent battles with evil, exposing himself to danger while using truth as his primary weapon. He couldn’t ensure protection to people around him. He was falling in love with her, and yet doing so exposed her to these dangers.
“It’s not just Cuddles. It’s Marlene, my sister. It’s Cindy, Adriana. They were all too young to die. Too full of life.”
“Cindy and Adriana aren’t dead.”
“We don’t know that.”
“I know Cindy’s not.”
“Even if they’re alive, where are they? All we know is the Brewsters might be on vacation somewhere. How on earth are we going to find them? Two beautiful girls are going to end up on the six o’clock news as victims of necrophilia.”
The Honda plowed through a flooded part of the freeway, squishing water to the sides, freezing Laif’s heart as the tires hydroplaned across, finally gripping the pavement beyond. Sharon didn’t appear to notice.
The remnants of rain were still everywhere, torturously sluggish in diminishing. Dangerous. He moved to the slow lane and reduced the Honda’s speed to fifty-five. He swallowed hard. “We’re going to see Creo.”
“He’s not going to help. We’re wasting time.”
“You still have the Brewsters’ dirty underwear?”
“Yeah. Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
“We’ll use it to locate them.”
Her mouth dropped open. “Are you serious?”
“Our psychic powers might be strong enough if Creo and I work together.”
While steering with his left hand, he punched Creo’s home number into her cell phone. After twenty seconds, he pushed the off button. Creo didn’t like answering machines. He thought they were too unnatural for communication. Laif looked at his watch; it was 9:23 p.m., too early for Creo to be in bed, too late for him to be sitting around at home. Laif knew that Creo religiously hung out at a rave nightclub called Club Gel in Santa Ana.
“Creo,” she said with a sour expression. “I don’t like him, and it’s not just because he forced me to see the truth earlier.” To Laif’s horror, she grabbed a bottled water from a six-pack in the backseat, screwed off the cap, and took a swig. He felt itchy with sweat.
What if she spills it? What if the car hits a pothole in the road and the bottle jumps from her hands into my lap, gurgling out water?
She stuck the bottle—uncapped—between her thighs and took out a newsletter from her jeans. “Maybe there’s a clue in here.”
Ashamed, he hesitantly requested. “Could you cap the water?”
“Oh. Yeah, sorry.” She screwed the cap on. After five minutes of flipping through the pages, she said, “Remember that spanking camp advertisement?”
“Yeah.”
“The dates are from April 13 through April 17.”
“Today is April 13.”
“It’s the only vacation spot advertised in this paper.”
He said, “That does sound like a vacation the Brewsters would enjoy.”
“We could be chasing smoke.”
Several moments of silence slipped between them.
He decided, “We’ll know for sure when we meet with Creo.”
She folded the newsletter back into her pocket.
He exited Lincoln Avenue, made a right on Sunkist, went down a few blocks and turned into the driveway of a three-story building with reflective glass on the outside. They went around to the back of the building to a warehouse with no windows.
A pink neon-light tube encircled a double-door entrance where a line of about twenty people waited, half wearing costumes—some skimpily clad bunnies with soft furry tails, some football players with headgear and pads, some schoolgirls with plaid skirts with white blouses, the bottoms tied high so their belly buttons were exposed.
“We are definitely not dressed for this,” stated Sharon.
“It’s okay. You don’t need a costume.” He didn’t want to put her in any more danger than necessary. He didn’t even want to think of her being hurt. “It’d be safer if I went in alone.”
“I’m going with you.”
“If we both go,” he rationalized, “the dark mist might recognize us. It’s already seen us together.”
She pointed to a van with a canopy extended from the roof out to two poles. “What’s that?”
Underneath the canopy were a large steel canister on a table and a man in a black mask inflating balloons of all colors. Five balloons were already knotted and affixed to the ends of sticks that were half-way placed inside a jar on the table. An open box was also on the table, full of black and blue masks with white elastic bands. Five people stood in line.
After a purchase, a man and woman in their mid-20s walked away. They had blue masks over their eyes. The balloon they shared went from one set of lips to the other, draining the gas inside. As they neared the line in the front of the building, they began laughing so hard they hunched over as if hairballs tickled the inside of their lungs.
“Looks like nitrous oxide.” Legal use of this drug, otherwise known as laughing gas, is used for patients in small quantities by dentists. Laif detested abuse of this or any drug.
“Is this club safe?”
“You stay here. I should be fine if I wear your wig, my sunglasses, and a mask.”
“What makes you think I’ll be safe here? I’m going with you.”
She didn’t look as if she could be persuaded to stay. Her eyes held slight fear tempered with courage and determination. He hated and admired that because although they were good qualities, they could get her into trouble.
“At least let me get the masks while you wait here.” He put on the wig and sunglasses, and opened the car door.
Moist night air hit his lungs, halting him. He looked up warily at the clouds in the night sky. It hadn’t rained for three hours, but what if it began? Southern California was an excellent place to stay if you didn’t like rain, but on a day like today, rain could sneak up on you.
“What are you waiting for?” she questioned from behind.
He stepped out onto the wet pavement. It was unpleasant, to say the least. As he ran towards the canopy, his shoes felt heavy with water, sticking to the pavement like rubber suckers. When he reached the cover of the canopy, he felt safer.
The people in line were rather quiet and stiff compared to those walking away inhaling the gas. When he reached the salesman, he thought it odd that the man seriously asked, “How can I help you today, sir?” Besides pushing illegal use of a substance, the man’s voice contrasted with his silly appearance: pink earmuffs, a blue mask over his eyes, a purple polka-dotted green sweater, violet jeans, and brown Birkenstock sandals with striped black and purple socks.
“Two masks.”
After completing the purchase, Laif paused at the edge of the canopy, fear anchoring him.
The vastness of the sky and its potential contents literally took his breath away. If gravity stopped working, he would fall up into the moist clouds. This thought made him dizzy.
An old man with a cane in line reached out to Laif’s shoulder to steady him. He had long grey hair, perhaps a leftover hippie from the sixties. “You alright, buddy?”
Laif gulped in air, as though it were as precious as diamonds. He nodded to the old guy.
“You don’t look so good.”
He sprinted to the car, jumped inside, and slammed the door closed, still gulping in breaths.
“You okay?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he lied. “Put this on.” He handed her the mask.
She put it around her head, and he took off his sunglasses and put his mask on as well. As he handed her back the wig, she said, “You keep it. We’ll be better disguised if you wear it.” She pulled out a hair-band from her purse and tied her hair into a bun behind her head. “I’ll be better disguised with short hair.”
He couldn’t help staring at her. The sight of her was soothing. Her scent had filled the car, somehow calming him and allowing him to breathe easily.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, not knowing how right everything was about her.
She was beautiful before with her hair down, and now she was beautiful in a different way. He could see the back of her neck, tender, smooth, and he wanted to kiss it as he had kissed her lips earlier. He had never felt so strongly about a woman before.
She laughed shyly and looked away. “You’re staring at me, Laif.”
The memory of her lips lingered. He shook his head and tried to focus, but her soft lips wouldn’t relent. He could still feel their gentle fullness.
“Sorry.”
As they walked to the line by the entrance, she whispered, “What if we have a whole room of raving, lunatic dancers angry at us?”
“The dark mist can’t affect so many people, maybe up to five or eight.”
“But we won’t have an escape.”
“We don’t have a choice. We’re strained for time. Besides we won’t spend long in there.”
“I’m getting sick of other people’s old anger. Why don’t they take responsibility to get rid of it?”
“Tell me about it.” Laif had been thinking that for years. Having the ability to feel other people’s anger was stressful. He figured it was at least as bad for his health as smoking one cigarette a month. He worked out daily at the gym with weights and in aerobics classes just to cope with the stress he endured from other people's negative emotions.
The line crept forward as two security men checked drivers’ licenses and stamped hands at the front.
“I haven’t been to a nightclub in years. Isn’t thirty too old for this?”
“Nonsense.” He noticed most people in line were in their early twenties, but the old hippy with the cane was walking up to the back of the line now. “We won’t be out of place. Creo is forty-six.”
“Yeah, but Creo is crazy. Why does he come here? Doesn’t he have better things to do than hang out at a rave club?”
He smirked. “Good question.”
The line moved forward.
Sharon seemed antsy. She kept rolling onto the balls of her feet in her sandals, flexing her calves – her wonderful, tight calves. “How will I know when a lie controls me again? I could be infected right now, and this club isn’t even real.”
“A good clue is illogic, like my face contorting in odd ways and huge spiders in the suburbs of Pomona attacking you. You did well at the Brewsters’ house. Remember that.”
The line moved forward, and three-hundred pounds of muscle bulged through the first bouncer’s tight, black t-shirt and gray trousers as he held his palm out, stopping people, speaking behind his shoulder to another security man. He moved an orange cone in front of the line to hold people back for a while. Evidently the place was packed.
“So if something isn’t logical?”
“That’s a good clue. Also use intuition. We use it as children, but as we grow older we tend to disregard it for what appears to be fact. But unspoiled intuition is more powerful than cognition. It uses everything inside you—your mind, heart, and whatever psychic sense you may possess.”
Ahead in the line, a woman turned around and offered blue pills to the couple behind her. “Take these, man. They’re top quality X.” Laif understood them to be speaking of the popular rave drug called ecstasy. The couple threw the blue pills into their mouths and gulped down the bottled water they held. “It’ll start coming on in about twenty minutes.”
Sharon whispered, “What about their intuition? Where is it now? Why isn’t it stopping them?”
“Some people bend it away. When a child is being abused, his intuition says, ‘This is wrong.’ He cries, screams, yells, makes whatever fuss he can, but as his actions have no effect, he learns helplessness and bends the intuition. It’s too painful to live in that dysfunctional household with good intuition telling him things nobody wants to hear.”
Sharon’s eyebrows creased as though she were struggling to take this in.
“These children use defenses to bend intuition. This way they live with their family in relative peace. The hurt becomes buried, but its influence doesn’t. It creates more hurt in their lives until it’s heard, until it’s accepted.” He felt angry coals burn brighter in his heart, making his stomach hot and his head heavy. “That’s all the hurt wants—to be heard!”
People in front of him looked back in irritated, worried, sour expressions, like they just bit into rotten fruit.
Laif turned to Sharon. “Sorry. It’s just I don’t have all the answers. It’s frustrating.”
“You don’t have to explain.” She got closer. Her heat and smell intertwined around him, calming him. Did she know her effect on him? She touched his ear with her lips as she spoke quietly, sending waves of pleasant tingles throughout his body. “So these people’s bent intuition steers them to more hurt?”
He had difficulty answering. She had made him too calm or excited – he couldn’t tell which. “Yes … and you couldn’t tell them this. If you tried … they would laugh and continue hurting themselves, not connecting with it, just as they did with their original hurt."
“That’s sad.” She moved slightly away. He felt it. It shouldn’t have made such a marked difference, but it did.
“Once you turn away, you are turned away." He could feel anger growing inside him again, speeding his heartbeat and speech. “It's not just about them. They hurt others by hurting themselves. They have a role to play that others depend on; they were given life for a reason. Some could have saved another, but instead were getting high in their apartments. Some could have invented a cure for cancer. Some could have been there for their kids. They don’t know how important they are, how important it is to be aware!”
People around him cocked their heads in his direction.
Sharon hugged him, her body melting into his. After a moment that seemed as an hour, she spoke softly, “It’s okay.”
“It’s not, Sharon. I want to hit them. I want to beat it into their brains. I know this is wrong, but they’re infuriating.”
“It makes me mad too. I had an alcoholic mother and addict father. Sometimes I wish the state would have taken me and my sister away. Maybe Marlene would have been alive today then.”
He hugged her back.
“When my parents were still together, they brought scum into the house, men who leered at me and Marlene. I was afraid for her, the way they looked at her. I would be flirtatious just to get their attention off her.”
Laif felt a thorn stick deep within his heart.
“They tried to do stuff to me. I couldn’t sleep on those nights. I had to be vigilant because my parents weren’t. Their minds were too far gone.”
“I’m sorry.” His response seemed pathetic, weak. He wanted to do more. He wanted to be inside her to dig out the sorrow, if that were possible.
She stroked her soft hand on his neck.
“I wish I could …”
“You’re there for me now, and for others. That’s what makes it all worth it. There are good people in this world. There are people who stay true to their hearts and help others.”
Laif was amazed at her attitude. With some people, evil stained and weakened them, but with her, she had become stronger.
The line started moving again. The muscular bouncer checked identification cards and stamped hands, inching them closer to the door. The other bouncer padded people down. Within minutes, they were paying the twenty-dollar entrance fee.
Inside, people undressed further at the jacket check-in, leaving some women in bare underwear. Men walked away shirtless. Women wore shoes with six inch heels and three inch soles, lifting them into supermodel status, exposing lean legs, flat stomachs, and shapely cleavage. Most people had on blue masks or some sort of headgear—cowboy hats, Indian feather headdresses, bunny ears, construction hard hats, hockey masks, Christmas caps—matching their costumes.
The theme tonight was “The Best of Club Gel,” which meant you could wear anything you wanted from past themes or just regular street clothes.
The hallway they walked led to a giant auditorium, which sloped down onto a stage where three go-go dancers in loin cloths, leopard skin bras, and black platform shoes with six-inch soles gyrated to music in a jungle scene. The music was Trance, and it had a hypnotic beat, repetitive yet elevating.
The crowd clotted around the stage, dancing with arms extending upwards, shaking and swaying to the music as a field of grains sways in the wind.
There must have been over five-hundred people in the auditorium.
Laif checked to make sure Sharon’s upper face was properly covered. He ran his hands over his own mask.
She had been right. Being spotted here would be deadly. There were simply too many people. Any exit would be blocked with bodies. The eight people that the dark mist infected would be the closest, surrounding Laif and Sharon and beating them into two purple pulps. Bouncers would get to them too late, and it wouldn’t matter anyway because the mist would just infect the bouncers.
He held her hand as they walked down a ramp leading toward the stage. They would have difficulty hearing each other talk now. Hopefully, Creo was somewhere in this mass of bodies. They squeezed through clusters of people who had already staked out territories.
As he reached the stage, the go-go dancers swung their heads, their long hair spearing the air, elbows and knees jabbing, stomachs flexing, rears and shoulders jutting. Since they wore loin cloths and were up high on blocks on stage, the audience closest could easily see their g-string underwear. This would’ve been a single man’s dream, but Laif found more satisfaction holding Sharon’s warm hand.
He turned back to the path they had taken.
The floor rose incrementally like a movie theater. He could see everybody’s faces in flashes, for powerful strobe lights above the stage shot out at them. Creo’s red hair would make him stand out. But Laif couldn’t spot him.
As they shuffled closer to the stage, his chest tickled from the intense bass. They were getting closer to a speaker system which literally shook his heart inside the chest cavity. His ears hurt.
He pulled at Sharon’s hand to walk further along.
The music seeped into them, making them bounce and jiggle through the throng. It was packed, and other dancers were only inches away, occasionally bumping them. A woman pushed him into Sharon and he held her for a moment. She turned around and smiled, abashed. With all her clothes on, she looked sexier than any girl here.
A dancer next to him suddenly threw her arm out and smacked his mask askew.
Five hundred people were watching. If just one recognized him….
His heart raced and he could hardly breathe.
He lowered his head and quickly squatted to the ground so no one would see as he adjusted his mask. Down there watching heavy boots, pointed high-heeled shoes, and other dangerous footwear, he prayed none would fly into his head fueled by rage borne long ago.
He felt Sharon’s hand on his shoulder. He stood up, and with their hands guarding their masks, they began wedging through the dancers again.
They made it to the other side of the stage and started walking up a stairway toward a bar, when out of the corner of his eye, he saw Creo sitting just below a stage dancer. His red hair was moussed into spikes. He had one leg propped up on the speaker box on which he sat and held a pad in his lap, writing furiously.
After reaching the spot, Laif was relieved to find it quieter here, being behind most of the speakers.
Green laser beams shooting from the ceiling caressed the top of Creo’s spiked red hair. He wore a bright pink sweatshirt with black dashed lines running down.
Next to him on another box, Laif sat and received a musical massage, vibrating with the bass beat from the speaker underneath. A cup of beer jumped along on the box as though alive.
He was relieved it was beer and not water.
Liquids like beer, milk, juice, root beer, coffee, and cola were not anxiety provoking. Clear liquids were. Laif usually added blue food coloring to water before drinking.
Sharon decided to stand next to them.
Creo raised one of his hands and dabbled his fingers in the green laser beams above his head. “Light is energy.”