Michael Bishop - Ancient of Days

The TV monitor came to my rescue. “Look.” I pointed. “Somebody’s coming.”

In fact, two cars were pulling up in front of the house: a late-model Plymouth glinting indigo in the actinic glare of the MARTA lamps and, right behind it, a blue VW beetle of older vintage. Caroline Hanna climbed gingerly out of the Volkswagen; then, as if they had taken a moment to settle a minor disagreement, Le May and Niedrach hatched from opposite doors of the Plymouth. All three people started up the walk to the house together, and another monitor picked them up.

“Whyn’t you go greet your sweetie ’fore I yank this here chair out from under your tail?”

“That’s a good idea.”

Only by coincidence had Caroline and the agents arrived at the same time. She was surprised to see me, even more surprised to see Adam. She had come to provide RuthClaire with female companionship for the rest of the evening. But face to face with me again, Caroline was shy. She hoped to let her entire greeting consist of a friendly pat on my arm, but I pulled her to me and brushed her forehead with my lips. Niedrach interrupted to say that he and Le May had to talk to me in private, and Adam led Caroline into the studio.

“What is it?” I asked the investigators.

“We want you to come with us,” Le May said.

“Where? What for?”

Adam returned as if to eavesdrop on the rest of our talk. Le May hesitated, afraid to proceed in front of the habiline, and my stomach clenched.

“You must tell me, too,” Adam said. “I am deserving to hear.”

Niedrach nodded. “We want to see if Mr. Loyd can make an identification for us.”

“What kind of identification?” I asked.

“Take a ride with us,” Niedrach said. “We’ll show you.”

“I am going, too,” Adam declared.

Le May started to protest, but Niedrach shook his head. So, after telling the others we’d be back shortly, the four of us went out into the muggy summer evening under smog-blurred stars and got into the FBI agent’s Plymouth. A mosquito was trapped in the back seat with Adam and me, and we listened to its faint but annoying whine until the habiline jerked his head and snapped his mouth shut on the insect. He settled back into his seat. Helplessly, I stared at him.

“Forgive me, Mister Paul. I am edgy this night.”

Le May spoke into a hand-held mike from under the dash. “We’re on our way.”

Static answered.

At the bottom of Hurt Street, Le May turned right on Waverly, part of a historic enclave dense with trees and Victorian houses in various stages of decay or renovation. From Waverly, we wound onto the southwest-to-northeast diagonal of Euclid Avenue, eventually creeping uphill past a row of shops to the brightness of Little Five Points. We crossed Moreland and dipped away from the bustle of the Points into a neighborhood of shabby clapboard bungalows and red-brick apartment buildings from the 1940s. I had no idea where we were going, but Adam seemed to.

“The Little Five Points Unaffiliated Meditation Center?” he asked.

“That’s right,” Niedrach replied. “How did you know?”

“Here, for many Sundays and a few troubled weekdays, Miss RuthClaire and I took our church before my surgery. I liked it. It had no rigid doctrines and welcomed anyone who had a spiritual hungriness.”

Presently, then, Le May let the Plymouth coast to rest behind a Fulton County police car and an ambulance parked beside the Little Five Points Unaffiliated Meditation Center. A host of people stood on the narrow front lawn. The blue-and-white flasher on the squad car picked these people out of the darkness, again and again. The door to the Meditation Center—once, I could tell, a single-story brick house like many other houses here—stood open. The stained-glass fanlight above the door was illuminated from behind by a cruel electric glare. Obviously, the police had been here a while.

Niedrach told Adam and me that when we entered the building, we would see just what the Meditation Center director, Ryan Bynum, had found upon entering its sanctuary at 8:47 P.M. for a routine check of the premises. The policemen working this crime had restored the scene to the physical conditions that had greeted Bynum.

Le May had already threaded his way through some of the teen-age gawkers on the lawn. He beckoned us after. Adam and I reluctantly obeyed. One of the young people, recognizing Adam, came forward with a copy of Newsweek and asked him to autograph its cover. Strutting uncertainly, the kid looked scarcely more than fourteen.

“You’re impeding a murder investigation,” Niedrach told him.

“Four letters,” the kid snarled. “Just his goddamn first name.”

Distractedly, Adam signed the magazine, printing ADAM beneath the image of his naked feet. The kid grumbled thanks and moved back into the crowd loitering nearby.

“He’s going to sell it to a speculator for two hundred or so bucks,” Niedrach said.

Adam shrugged.

In the church’s foyer, a man with a gold teardrop in his left ear lobe hugged Adam possessively. Tall but graceful, he had to stoop to do so. I knew without being introduced that this was Ryan Bynum, the Center’s director.

“Good to see you again, Adam,” Bynum said. “You’ve been away too long.”

Adam said, “I am not here to rejoin, but—”

“You can talk! My God, it’s a miracle , Adam!”

“—to accompany Mister Paul. These agents think he may be able to identify the victim.”

Bynum was beside himself over Adam’s ability to speak, but, upon receiving a condensed version of the events that had brought it about, began to discuss tonight’s untoward happenings: “Some churches get firebombed. Some get defaced with graffiti. But ours draws a more creative, more neurotic, kind of vandal.” Bynum was sidling along the foyer wall so that we could squeeze past him into the living-room-sized sanctuary. “Whoever did it, well, he ought to be a member. He needs us. If not us, then serious, serious therapy.”

The sanctuary, or main meditation room, was brightly lit—a departure from the way Bynum had found it only an hour ago, a departure from the aqueous gloom into which members had to tiptoe when they wanted to meditate or commune. Because of the lights, we could look across the sanctuary to the dais under a huge bronze mandala and see exactly what Niedrach and Le May wanted us to see, namely, the murder victim, who reposed in a leather lounger that someone had wrestled onto the dais so that it sat there like a laid-back throne.

Adam and I exchanged puzzled looks because a shaggy, orangish-red orangutan sprawled in the lounger. The creature wore a set of headphones, but its posture betrayed its lifelessness. Upside-down in its lap was a naked plastic doll: a black baby doll for a black child. It had fallen across the orangutan’s lap so that its head was wedged between one shaggy thigh and the lounger’s leather armrest.

“It’s a costume,” Niedrach said. “Mr. Bynum found the victim this way. The head comes off.” He wove his way through rows of loungers and divans to the dais. There, gripping the orangutan head at the neck, he turned it—as if trying to unscrew a diving helmet from a diving suit. A moment later, he lifted the head clear and gestured at the startling human visage protruding from the costume’s neck hole.

It was Nancy Teavers. Her head shone like a large mottled egg. Either she or Craig had shaved off every lock of her hair. The spiky white coiffure she had worn to Sinusoid Disturbances had been a wig. Whatever the case then, tonight she was bald. Her eyes bulged. Bruises discolored her cheeks. Her lips were bloated. I still recognized her as the unhappy waitress who had decided to go west to make her fortune. Instead, she had gone to Craig Puddicombe, and Craig had turned her into a punkette, a babysitter for the kidnapped T. P., and an orangutan. What did this grotesque progression mean? Perhaps a bizarre homicidal performance-art parody of Darwinism and evolutionary theory.