One Door Away From Heaven

Chapter 64

NATURE HAD ALL but reclaimed the land that had been the Teelroy farm. Deer roamed where horses had once plowed. Weeds ruled.

Undoubtedly handsome in its day, the rambling Victorian house had been remodeled into Gothic by time, weather, and neglect.

The resident was a repulsive toad. He had the sweet voice of a young prince, but he looked like a source of warts and worse.

At first sight of the Toad, Preston almost returned to his SUV. He almost drove away without a question.

He found it difficult to believe that this odious bumpkin's fantastic story of alien healing would be convincing. The man was at best a bad joke, and more likely he was the mentally disordered consequence of generations of white-trash incest.

Yet…

During the past five years, among the hundreds of people to whom Preston had patiently listened recount their tales of UFO sightings and alien abductions, occasionally the least likely specimens proved to be the most convincing.

He reminded himself that pigs were used to hunt for truffles. Even a toad in bib overalls might once in a while know a truth worth learning.

Invited inside, Preston accepted. The threshold proved to lie between ordinary Idaho and a kingdom of the surreal.

In the entry hall, he found himself among a tribe of Indians. Some smiled, some struck noble poses, but most looked as inscrutable as any dreamy-faced Buddha or Easter Island stone head. All appeared peaceable.

Decades ago, when the country had been more innocent, these life-size, hand-carved, intricately hand-painted statues had stood at the entrances to cigar stores. Many held faux boxes of cigars as if offering a smoke.

Most were chiefs crowned by elaborate feathered headdresses, which were also carved out of wood and were hand-painted like the rest of their costumes. A few ordinary braves attended the chiefs, wearing headbands featuring one or two wooden feathers.

Of those not holding cigar boxes, some stood with a hand raised perpetually in a sign of peace. One of the smiling chiefs made the okay sign with thumb and forefinger.

Two — a chief, a brave — gripped raised tomahawks. They weren't threatening in demeanor, but they looked sterner than the others: early advocates of aggressive tobacco marketing.

Two chiefs held peace pipes.

The hall was perhaps forty feet long. Cigar-store Indians lined both sides. At least two dozen of them.

A majority stood with their backs to the walls, facing one another across the narrow walk space. Only four figures stood out of alignment, angled to monitor the front door, as if they were guardians of the Teelroy homestead.

More Indians loomed on alternating risers of the ascending stairs, against the wall opposite the railing. All faced the lower floor, as though descending to join the powwow.

"Pa collected Indians." The Toad didn't often trim his mustache. This fringe drooped over his lips and almost entirely concealed them. When he spoke, his lilting voice penetrated this concealing hair, with the mystery of a spirit at a seance speaking through the veiled face of a medium. Because he barely moved his hair-draped lips when he spoke, you could almost believe that he himself wasn't speaking at all, but was an organic radio receiving a broadcast signal from another entity. "They're worth a bunch, these Indians, but I can't sell 'em. They're the most thing I've got left of my daddy."

Preston supposed that the statues might indeed have value as folk art. But they were of no interest to him.

A lot of art, folk art in particular, celebrated life. Preston did not.

"Come on in the livin' room," said his flushed and bristling host. "We'll talk this out."

With all the grace of a tottering hog, the Toad moved toward an archway to the left.

The arch, once generous, had been reduced to a narrow opening by magazines tied with string in bundles of ten and twenty, and then stacked in tight, mutually supportive columns.

The Toad appeared to be too gross to fit through that pinched entry.

Surprisingly, he slipped between the columns of compressed paper without a hitch or hesitation. During years of daily passage, the human greaseball had probably lubricated the encroaching magazines with his natural body oils.

The living room was no longer truly a room. The space had been transformed into a maze of narrow passageways.

"Ma saved magazines," explained the Toad. "So do I."

Seven- and eight-foot stacks of magazines and newspapers formed the partitions of the maze. Some were bundled with twine. Others were stored in cardboard boxes on which, in block letters, had been hand-printed the names of publications.

Wedged between flanking buttresses of magazines and cartons, tall wooden bookshelves stood packed with paperbacks. Issues of National Geographic. Yellowing piles of pulp magazines from the 1920s and '30s.

Cramped niches in these eccentric palisades harbored small pieces of furniture. A needlepoint chair had been squeezed between columns of magazines; more ragged-edged pulps were stacked on its threadbare cushion. Here, a small end table with a lamp. And here, a hat tree with eight hooks upon which hung a collection of at least twice that many moth-eaten fedoras.

More life-size wooden Indians were incorporated into the walls, wedged between the junk. Two were female. Indian princesses. Both fetching. One stared at some far horizon, solemn and mystical. The other looked bewildered.

No daylight penetrated horn the windows to the center of the labyrinth. Veils of shadow hung everywhere, and a deeper gloom was held off only by the central ceiling fixture and occasional niche lamps with stained and tasseled shades.

Overall, the acidic odor of browning newsprint and yellowing paperbacks dominated. In pockets: the pungent stink of mouse urine. Underneath: a whiff of mildew, traces of powdered insecticide — and the subtle perfume of decomposing flesh, possibly a rodent that had died long ago and that was now but a scrap of leather and gray fur wrapped around papery bones.

Preston disliked the filth but found the ambience appealing. Life wasn't lived here: This was a house of death.

The incorporation of cigar-store Indians into the walls of the maze lent a quality of the Catacombs to the house, as though these figures were mummified corpses.

Following the Toad through the twists and turns of this three-dimensional webwork, Preston expected to find Ma Toad and Pa Toad, though dead, sitting in junk-flanked niches of their own. Funeral clothes hanging loose and largely empty on their dry skeletal frames. Eyes and lips sewn shut with mortuary thread. Ears shriveled into gristly knots. Mottled skin shrink-wrapped to their skulls. Nostrils trailing spiders' silk like plumes of cold breath.

When the Toad ultimately led him to a small clearing in the maze, where they could sit and talk, Preston was disappointed not to find any family cadavers lovingly preserved.

This parlor at the hub of the labyrinth barely measured large enough to accommodate him and the Toad at once. An armchair, flanked by a floorlamp and a small table, faced a television. To the side stood an ancient brocade-upholstered sofa with a tassel-fringed skirt.

The Toad sat in the armchair.

Preston squeezed past him and settled on the end of the sofa farthest from his host. Had he sat any closer, they would have been brought together in an intolerably intimate tete-a-tete.

They were surrounded by maze walls constructed of magazines, newspapers, books, old 78-rpm phonograph records stored in plastic milk crates, stacks of used coffee cans that might contain anything from nuts and bolts 10 several human fingers, boxy floor-model radios from the 1930s balanced atop one another, and an array of other items too numerous to catalog, all interlocked, held together by weight and mold and inertia, braced by strategically placed planks and wedges.

The Toad, like his loon-mad ma and pa before him, was a world-class obsessive. Packrat royalty.

Ensconced in his armchair, the Toad said, "So what's your deal?"

"As I explained on the phone earlier, I've come to hear about your close encounter."

"Here's the thing, Mr. Banks. After all these many years, the government went and cut off my disability checks."

"I'm sorry to hear that."

"Said I'd been fakin' twenty years, which I flatly did not."

"I'm sure you didn't."

"Maybe the doctor who certified me made a true racket of it, like they say, and maybe I was the only for real sufferin' soul ever crossed his doorstep, but I have been a genuine half-cripple, damn if I weren't."

"And this relates to your close encounter — how?" Preston asked.

A small glistening pink animal poked its head out of the Toad's great tangled beard.

Preston leaned forward, fascinated until he realized that the pink animal was the man's tongue. It slid back and forth between lips no doubt best left unrevealed, perhaps to lubricate them in order to facilitate the passage of his lies.

"I'm grateful," said the Toad, "that some three-eyed starmen come along and healed me. They were a weird crew, no two ways about it, and plenty scary enough to please the big audience you need, but in spite of their bein' so scary, I acknowledge they committed a good deed on me. The problem is, now I'm not the pitiful half-cripple that I always used to be, so there's no way to get back on disability."

"A dilemma," Preston said.

"I made a promise to the starmen — and a solemn promise, it was — not to reveal them to the world for what they done here. I feel most bad about breakin' that promise, but the hard fact is I've got to eat and pay bills."

Preston nodded at the bibbed and bearded moron. "I'm sure the starmen will understand."

"Don't mean to say I'm not for-sure grateful about havin' the cripple takin' right out of me with that blue-light thing of theirs. But all-powerful like they were, it seems queer they wouldn't also thought to give me some skill or talent I could put to use makin' a livin'. Like mind readin' or seein' the future."

"Or the ability to turn lead into gold," Preston suggested.

"There would be a good one!" the Toad declared, slapping his armchair with one hand. "And I wouldn't abuse the privilege, neither. I'd make me just as little gold as I needed to get by."

"You strike me as responsible in that respect," said Preston.

"Thank you, Mr. Banks. I do appreciate the sentiment. But this is all just jabber, 'cause the spacemen didn't think to bless me in that regard. So… though it shames me to break my solemn promise, I can't see any damn way out of this dilemma, as you called it, except to sell my story of bein' de-crippled by aliens."

Although the Toad gave even deeper meaning to the word fraud than had any politician of recent memory, and though Preston had no intention of reaching for his wallet and fishing out a twenty-dollar bill, curiosity compelled him to ask, "How much do you want?"

What might have been a shrewd expression furrowed the Toad's blotchy red brow, pinched the corners of his eyes, and further puckered his boiled-dumpling nose. Or it might have been a mini seizure.

"Now, sir, we're both smart businessmen here, and I have a world of respect for you, just as I'm sure you have for me. When it conies to business matters between such as us, I don't believe it's my place to set a final price. More like it's your place to start the dealin' with a fair offer to which, with due consideration, I'll reply. But seein' as how you have been a gentleman to me, I will give you the special courtesy of sayin' that I know what's fair and that what's fair is somewhere north of a million dollars."

The man was a complete lunatic.

Preston said, "I'm sure it's fair, but I don't think I've got that much in my wallet."

The choirboy voice produced a silvery, almost girlish laugh, and the Toad slapped his armchair with both hands. He seemed never to have heard a funnier quip.

Leaning forward in his chair, clearly confident of his ability to be amusing in return, the Toad winked and said, "When the time comes, I'll accept your check, and no driver's license necessary."

Preston smiled and nodded.

In his quest for extraterrestrial contact, he had tolerated uncounted fools and frauds over the years. This was the price he had to pay for the hope of one day finding truth and transcendence.

ETs were real. He badly wanted them to be real, though not for the same reasons that the Toad or average UFO buffs wanted them to be real. Preston needed them to be real in order to make sense of his life.

The Toad grew serious. "Mr. Banks, you haven't told me your outfit yet."

"Outfit?"

"In a true spirit of fair dealin', I'm obliged to tell you that just earlier this very day, Miss Janet Hitchcock herself of Paramount Pictures paid me a visit. She'll be makin' an offer tomorrow. I told her straight out about your interest, though I couldn't tell her your outfit, bein' as I didn't know it."

If Paramount Pictures ever sent an executive to Nun's Lake to buy the Toad's tale of being de-crippled by aliens, their purchase of screen rights could be reliably taken as an omen that the universe would at any moment suddenly implode, instantly compacting itself into a dense ball of matter the size of a pea.

"I'm afraid there's been a misunderstanding," said Preston.

The Toad didn't want to hear about misunderstandings, only about seven-figure bank drafts. "I'm not pitchforkin' moo crap at you, sir. Our mutual respect is too large for moo crap. I can prove every word I'm sayin' just by showin' you one thing, one thing, and you'll know it's all real, every bit of it." He rolled up and out of the armchair as though he were a hog rising from its slough, and he waddled out of the hub of the maze by a route different from the one that they had followed here from the front hall. "Come on, you'll see, Mr. Banks!"

Preston had no fear of the Toad, and he was pretty sure the man lived alone. Nevertheless, although additional members of this inbred clan might be lurking around and might prove ferociously psychotic, he wasn't put off by the prospect of meeting them, if they existed.

The atmosphere of" decline and dissolution in this house was from Preston's perspective a romantic ambience. To a man so in love with death, this was the equivalent of a starlit beach in Hawaii. He wished to explore more of it.

Besides, although the Toad had thus far seemed to be a flagrant fraud, his sweet clear voice had resonated with what had sounded like sincerity when he'd claimed that he could show Preston one thing to prove that his story was "all real, every bit of it."

Into tunnels of paper and Indians and stacked furniture, Preston followed his host. Into a warren of glossy fashion, pulp fiction, and yellowing news compacted into building blocks.

Out of angular and intersecting passageways as oddly scented as the deepest galleries of ancient Egyptian tombs, around a shadowy cochlear spiral where the Toad's open-mouthed breathing whispered off every surface with a sound like scarabs scuttling in the walls, they progressed through two more large rooms, identifiable as separate spaces only by the intervening doorways. The doors had been removed, evidently to facilitate movement through the labyrinth. The remaining jambs and headers were embedded like mine-shaft supports in the tightly packed materials that formed these funhouse corridors.

All windows had been blocked off. Maze partitions often rose until the overhead plaster allowed no higher stacks; therefore, the ceiling transitions from chamber to chamber were difficult to detect. The oak floors remained consistent: worn to bare wood by shuffling traffic, darkened here and there by curious stains that resembled Rorschach patterns.

"You'll see, Mr. Banks," the Toad wheezed while through his snaky warrens he hurried like a Hobbit gone to seed. "Oh, you'll see the proof, all right!"

Just when Preston began half seriously to speculate that this bizarre house was a tesseract bridging dimensions, existing in many parallel worlds, and that it might go on forever, the Toad led him out of the labyrinth into a kitchen.

Not an ordinary kitchen.

The usual appliances were here. An old white-enameled range— yellowed and chipped — with side-by-side ovens under a cooktop. One humming and shuddering refrigerator that appeared to date from the days when people still called them iceboxes. Toaster, microwave. But with these appliances, the ordinary ended.

Every countertop, from the Formica surface to the underside of the upper cabinets, was packed to capacity with empty beer and soda bottles stacked horizontally like the stock of a wine cellar. A few cabinet doors stood open; within were more empty bottles. A pyramid of bottles occupied the kitchen table. The window above the sink provided a view of an enclosed back porch that appeared to contain thousands of additional bottles.

The Toad apparently prepared all his meals on the butcher-block top of the large center island. The condition of that work surface was unspeakable.

A door opened on a set of back stairs too narrow for the storage of Indians. Here, with glue, empty beer bottles — most of them green, some clear — had been fixed to the flanking walls and to the ceiling, hundreds upon hundreds of them, like three-dimensional wallpaper.

Although the malty residue in all the containers had years ago evaporated, the stairwell still smelled of stale beer.

"Come along, Mr. Banks! Not much farther. You'll see why north of a million is a fair price."

Preston followed the Toad to the top of the glass-lined stairs. The upper hall had been narrowed by an accumulation of junk similar to the collection on the lower floor.

They passed rooms from which the doors had been removed. Annexes of the primary first-floor maze appeared to have been established in these spaces.

The Toad's bedroom still featured a door. The chamber past this threshold had not been transformed into an anthill of tunnels as had so much of the house. Two nightstands with lamps flanked the large unmade bed. A dresser, a chiffonier, and a chifforobe provided the Toad with ample storage space for his bib overalls.

The threat of normalcy was held at bay, however, by a collection of straw hats that hung on nails from every wall, ceiling to floor, Straw hats for men, women, and children. Straw hats in every known style, for every need from that of the working farmhand to that of a lady wanting a suitable chapeau to attend church on a hot summer Sunday. Straw hats in natural hues and in pastel tints, in various stages of deterioration, hung in overlapping layers, until Preston almost began to forget they were hats, to see the repetitive shapes of the crowns as a sort of wraparound upholstery like the acoustic-friendly walls of a recording studio or radio station.

A second collection cluttered the room: scores upon scores of both plain and fancy walking sticks. Simple walnut canes with rubber tips and sleek curved handles. Hickory canes with straight shafts but with braided-wood handles. Oak, mahogany, maple, cherry, and stainless-steel models, some with plain handles, others graced by figured grips of cast brass or carved wood. Lacquered black canes with silvery tips, the perfect thing for a tuxedoed Fred Astaire, hung next to those white canes that were reserved for the blind.

The canes were stored in groups in several umbrella stands, but they also hung from the sides of the dresser, the chiffonier, and the chifforobe. Instead of cloth panels, curtains of canes dangled from the drapery rods.

At one window, the Toad had previously unhooked a dozen canes from the rod, revealing a portion of the pane. He'd also rubbed the glass half clean with his hand.

He led Preston to this view and pointed northeast across a weedy field, toward the two-lane road. A little winded from the journey, he said, "Mr. Banks, you see the woods yonder, past the county blacktop? Now look seventy yards easterly of the entrance here to my farm, and you'll damn well see a car pulled in among the trees over there."

Preston was confused and disappointed, having hoped that the Toad's proof of a healing close encounter might be an alien artifact obviously not manufactured on this world or snapshots of strange three-eyed beings — or, if the evidence was obviously fake, then something worth a good laugh.

"That's the sneaky junk car she used to disguise herself when first she come here, pretendin' not to be big-time movie people."

Preston frowned. "She?"

"Miss Janet Hitchcock, like I told you, all the way here from Paramount Pictures down in California, your stompin' grounds. She's watchin' my place so she can see who her competition is!"

A pair of high-power binoculars rested on the windowsill. The Toad handed them to Preston.

The binoculars felt greasy. He winced and almost cast them aside in disgust.

"Proof, sir," said the Toad. "Proof I'm not inventin' all this whoop-de-do about Paramount Pictures, proof I'm bein' foursquare fair with you, businessman to businessman, with full respect. It's just a speck of brightness in among the pines, but you'll see."

Curious, Preston raised the field glasses and focused on the car in the woods. Even though the vehicle was white, it was tucked among the high-skirted trees, shrouded by shadows, and not easy to see in any useful detail.

The Toad said, "She was leanin' against the front of it earlier, watchin' to where my driveway meets the county road, hopin' she'd see who you might be."

The woman no longer leaned against the car. Maybe she had gotten into the vehicle. The interior was dark. He couldn't tell whether someone sat behind the wheel.

"Whatever outfit you're with down there in California, I'm sure you're well connected to the movie world entire, you go to all the same parties as the stars, so you'll recognize a true big wheel like Miss Janet Hitchcock of Paramount Pictures."

When he located the woman, Preston recognized her, all right. She stood apart from the car, not as deep in the shadows as it was, leaning now against a tree, identifiable even in the drowned light of the pending storm. Michelina Teresa Bellsong — ex-con, apprentice alcoholic, job-seeker without hope, niece to senile old Aunt Gen, cheap slut trying to reform, guilt-racked wretch looking for meaning in her stupid sorry little life, self-appointed savior of Leilani, would-be exhumer of Lukipela, self-deluded dragonslayer, useless nosy meddlesome bitch.

Still watching Micky Bellsong, Preston said, "Yes, it's Janet Hitchcock, sure enough. Looks like I'm not going to be able to avoid a bidding war, Mr." — and he almost said Mr. Toad—"Mr. Teelroy."

"Wasn't ever the case I was schemin' toward that, Mr. Banks. I just wanted you to know fair enough that you had competition. I'm not lookin' for more than my story's rightly worth."

"I understand, of course. I'd like to make you an offer before I leave today, but it's my preference, in these cases, to present the deal in the presence of the whole family, since this much money will affect all of you profoundly. Is there a wife, sir, and children? And what of your parents?"

"Ma and Pa, they're both long gone, Mr. Banks."

"I'm sorry to hear that."

"And I never did marry, not that I was wholly without some good opportunities."

Still focused on the distant woman, Preston said, "So it's just you here alone in this rambling house."

"Just me," said the Toad. "And much as I surely am a committed bachelor, I must admit… it gets awful lonely sometimes." He sighed. "Just me."

"Good," said Preston, turning away from the window and, with savage force, smashing the heavy binoculars into the Toad's face.

The blow produced a wet crunch, a strangled sob, and the man's immediate collapse.

Preston threw the binoculars on the disheveled bed, where he would be able to find them later.

Hooked on the windowsill were several canes. He seized one that featured a bronze wolf's head for a handle.

On his back, flat on the floor, the Toad gazed up, his hideous nose now shattered and more repulsive than before, his unkempt beard bejeweled with blood, his blotchy face suddenly every bit as pale as it had previously been flushed.

Holding the cane by the wrong end, Preston raised it overhead.

The Toad lay stunned, perhaps disoriented, but then his eyes cleared, and when he saw what was coming, he spoke with tremulous emotion and with obvious relief: "Thank you."

"You're welcome," Preston assured him, and hammered the wolf's head into the center of the man's brow. More than once. Maybe half a dozen times. The cane cracked but didn't come apart.

When he was certain that he had killed the Toad, he threw the damaged walking stick on the bed beside the binoculars. Later, he would wipe both objects clean of fingerprints.

He intended ultimately to burn down this great pile of tinder. No evidence would be likely to survive the flames. But he was a careful man.

Quickly, Preston selected another cane. A polished-brass serpent formed the handle, inset with faceted red-glass eyes.

He suppressed the madcap urge to select a jaunty straw hat in which to court the lady of the hour. In addition to being a service to humanity and to Mother Earth, killing was fun, but one must never lose sight of the fact that it was also serious business, fraught with risk and frowned upon by many.

Out of the dead toad's boudoir, along the trash-packed upstairs hall, to the bottle-decorated back stairs and down. Through the foul kitchen, onto the enclosed porch where a thousand and yet a thousand bottles glimmered darkly as if the coming storm were pent up in them and soon to be uncorked.

Outside, he hurried across a backyard that was more dirt than scattered bunch-grass, careful to keep the house between him and the position in the woods from which the entirely useless Ms. Bell-song maintained surveillance.

Most likely she expected to follow him into Nun's Lake, staying at a distance to avoid being spotted. Once she'd found where he had parked the motor home, she evidently intended to watch and wait— and seize the first opportunity to spirit Leilani away, out of Idaho, to Clarissa the Goiter and her sixty parrots in Hemet.

The stupid slut. Fools, the lot of them. They thought that he knew nothing, but he knew all.

Beyond the barren yard lay a thriving field of shoulder-high weeds. He had to stoop only slightly to disappear among them.

Heading east, he plunged through wild grass, milkweed. Cover was provided, too, by scattered cornstalks that had been cultivated long in the past and that had gone wild generations ago, but that still raggedly, stubbornly ruled the field.

He hurried parallel to the distant road, intending eventually to turn north, cross the road beyond her view, and then turn west. He would circle behind the useless Micky Bellsong and club her to the ground with the serpent cane.

The glowering sky pressed lower by the minute, black clouds like knotted fists, full of cruel power. No thunder yet, but thunder soon. And eventually lightning would score the sky and cast hot reflections on the brass serpent, perhaps even as it struck — and struck. But in spite of the dazzling flash and rumble soon to descend, Preston Maddoc knew that the halls of Heaven were deserted, and that no one occupied those heights to look down on what he did, or to care.