3: Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters

For the longest time after the visit to Grandma and Grandpa, Timothy didn’t say very much, with the exception of “Terrible, just terrible.” The pale hand of the dead little girl found its way into his dreams, and the images of the Fancy Man and the creatures he called his friends was never far from his memory. Everywhere he looked, it seemed that a hand was sticking out of a garbage can, or part of a leg from a yard-waste bag, or even something that could have been a head of hair from the Dumpsters along the downtown square or in the Indian Mound Mall’s parking lot.

He stopped taking out the trash because he was afraid that as soon as he took the lid off the can and started to drop in the bag, the hand of some monster or dead little girl would reach out and grab his wrist and pull him down into the place where the Fancy Man and his monster friends lived in their blue-tinted world. Whenever his mother or father became angry and demanded to know why he was so afraid of the trash can, Timothy couldn’t find the words to express his terror, and so settled on “Terrible, just terrible,” and hoped that would explain it.

“Goddamn kid’s getting worse,” said Dad one night after he had many beers. This time, Mom was drinking with him while Timothy played at the top of the stairs with his red rubber-wheeled fire truck (they thought he’d gone to bed half an hour ago).

“I know he is,” said Mom. “But what can we do?”

Dad cleared his throat, and Timothy heard the sound of paper being unfolded. “This fellow I know at work,” said Dad, his voice low and steady, “his sister’s got a kid like Timothy – you know, slightly retarded and all. Anyway, he told me about this specialist over in Columbus who’s got this experimental treatment that works wonders. Says his niece has been like a new girl since the doctor gave her the treatment and put her on the new drugs. Can you read my writing?”

“Yes,” replied Mom. The paper crinkled again. “Are you saying that you maybe want to go see him?”

“I’m saying that we’re definitely going to see him. Friday. I already made the appointment.”

There was a long silence, and then Mom said: “Is it really that bad, Timothy’s behavior?”

Dad hit the top of the table with his fist – a sound Timothy knew well. “Jesus Christ, hon, what do you think? The kid doesn’t do anything except play with the fucking fire truck Dad gave him, he won’t do his chores any longer—”

“—he does all of his chores except for taking out the trash.”

“Are you giving me lip, woman?”

“No, dear. Not at all. I’m sorry if there was a tone or anything.”

Timothy heard the sound of Dad pushing a bunch of stuff off the kitchen table; things shattered, things cracked. It sounded awful, and Timothy held his red rubber-wheeled fire truck closer to him, hoping it would protect him.

“The fuck you didn’t give me lip,” shouted Dad. Then came the sound of him knocking his chair over, and the next thing there was more shouting and more things breaking and Mom screaming for him to stop, please stop, she was sorry, she’d do whatever he wanted, but that made Dad all the madder and the house was filled with the sound of fists and open hands hitting flesh and soon Mom’s shouts and screams became hushed whimpers and quiet, heavy tears. Timothy knew what was happening: Mom was just sitting there (or lying there, or kneeling there, hands covering her face, rocking back and forth) while Dad hit on her, and there was nothing he could do about it except listen and try to keep the pictures of it from his head.

It lasted a long time. Finally, Timothy, in tears, went back to his room and closed the door and sat in the dark. He didn’t want to go to another doctor. There had been nothing but doctors for as long as he could remember, and they all did the same thing, ran the same tests (“Can you put these pieces in their right slots, Timothy?” “What does this picture look like to you, Timothy?” “Would you tie your shoe laces for me, Timothy?”), and sent him home with the same stupid pills he had to take.

It finally got quiet. Timothy listened as Dad stomped up the stairs. He hoped that Dad wasn’t going to come in and hit him now – that’s the way it always happened: first Mom, then him. Sometimes both. Dad stopped outside Timothy’s room, the shadow of his feet blocking out some of the hall light that bled in under the bottom of the door. Timothy held his breath and clutched his fire truck. And then dad mumbled something under his breath and walked away and Timothy was able to breathe again.

And that’s when the blue light began to glow in the back yard. At first it was soft, like the radiance of a distant streetlight, but then it started to get brighter, deeper, and stronger, like those great big spotlights Timothy saw in those police shows Mom and Dad liked to watch.

He was at first terrified by the thought of what the blue light might mean, but then remembered that the light had only appeared when he pressed on his eyes, and he wasn’t doing that right now, so it couldn’t be what he was thinking … could it?

He decided that his dumb old brain was playing tricks on him again. It always had, and probably always would. He remembered the doctor telling his mom and dad something about “…not enough oxygen” reaching his brain before he was born. Tommy still didn’t quite understand that, because it seemed to him that if Mom had a lot of air inside of her and he was breathing some of it, then somebody should have been farting a lot. The observation made him laugh – quietly, so as not to draw Dad’s attention.

He rose from his bed and walked toward his window. He pulled back the curtain – just a little at first, just enough to allow the blue light to slice into his room like some kind of great ghost knife, then he got mad at himself for being such a little baby and pulled the curtain all the way open, tying it off on the side.

Even though the Fancy Man wasn’t in the backyard, many of his friends were. And Timothy still wasn’t pressing on his eyes.

An ornate, four-wheeled circus cage sat in the center of the yard. Inside the cage, lying on its side, was a huge stone sculpture of a woman’s head. Shimmering gossamer webs blanketed the sculpture, holding it down like a weighted net; it tried rolling to one side, then the next, but the webs remained strong. Finally, defeated, the sculpture opened its eyes and pursed its lips; the darkness trembled with trills and arpeggios and flutings, echoes of a winter’s midnight wind whispering soon on this late-August night. A flock of coelacanths and paddlefish swam around the cage as if their long-ago vanished prehistoric ocean still existed in the spot.

Surrounding the cage and scattered throughout the yard was a crowd of creatures both wondrous and frightening: a man with the head of a black hawk wearing a feathered headdress, a turtle with a small antlers, a raven-headed woman in a golden flowing gown, a lion peering out from behind the a visor in a suit of armor, a wolf in multi-colored bandoleers, a mouse with angel’s wings, a steer-skull being wearing the uniform of a Spanish Conquistador, a glass owl, a crystalline buffalo, a jade spider; dressed in deerskin shirt and breechclouts and leggings, with medicine pouches and beaded necklaces, holding flutes and horn-pipes and ceremonial chimes, their music and soft singing became the unbound wings of time, momentarily holding Timothy’s spirit in the spell of a lullaby that offered comfort, joy, and the promise of safety. For some reason, it reminded Timothy of an Elton John song that his mother always listened to over and over whenever she got sad (she’d probably play it a lot tomorrow after Dad left for work); there was something about the scene in the yard that was really pretty, but it was also kind of gloomy, just like that song.

One of the things in the yard – it looked like one of those great big rock heads Timothy saw in a TV show about Easter Island – blinked its eyes and pointed up toward the sky. Making certain to be as quiet as possible, Timothy unlocked his window and pushed it up just enough that he could lean out and see what was going on.

Up in the night sky the moon had become a shimmering silver rose, its petals formed by the wings of the hundreds—maybe thousands—of angels perched around it, looking down like spectators into an arena. They were watching a Quetzalcoatlus twice the size of an airplane pump its mammoth wings and fly in wide, graceful circles. (Timothy wasn’t sure how he knew that the bird was called a “Quetzalcoatlus” and figured maybe the stone-headed figure had told him somehow).

But the giant bird was not alone.

A WWII German pursuit plane with twin machine guns mounted on its wings was engaged in an intense but playful dogfight with the flying reptile. The plane turned in tight, precise maneuvers as the pterosaur tried attacking it from below. The machine guns strafed without mercy or sound, a silent-film prop spitting out bursts of sparking light, firing off round after round.

The creatures in the yard were smiling at the entertainment. Timothy decided to wave at them, just to see if they’d wave back.

An empty space in the center of the back yard rippled like someone had just thrown a pebble into a pool of water, and a leg came out, followed by an arm, then a shoulder, and then the Fancy Man was standing there. He returned Timothy’s wave, and then held one of his hands straight out in front of him, palm-out, a policeman directing traffic. The other beings in the yard all stopped what they were doing – even the pursuit plane and the giant Quetzalcoatlus froze in the air. The Fancy Man—H. Trismegistus, that was the name on the card he’d given to Timothy almost a year ago—shrugged as if in apology, and then began to slowly close his hand into a fist. As his fingers bent down and inward, the beings in the yard began to shimmer with the same light-blue glow Timothy was coming to know so very well, but as the Fancy man’s fingers curled closer together, that shimmer bean to intensify until Timothy could hardly make out any of the beings at all, except for dim, distant shadows and silhouettes. Then with a flourish, the Fancy Man removed his bowler hat (or was it called a “derby”?) and made a grandiose bow, like a circus ringmaster, and at that moment all of the light-blue glow curled and churned and twisted itself into something like a thick rope, and vanished back into his hand when he closed the fingers into a tight fist. He was now the only person or thing in the backyard.

The Fancy Man shook his hand like he’d just touched something too hot, then looked up at Timothy in the window and mouthed the words Happy early birthday before pulling a long, long, long scarf from inside one of his sleeves, unfolding it, holding it up like a curtain, and giving it a little shake.

For my next trick , he mouthed, pulling away the curtain to reveal a pale-skinned, blonde-haired little girl who looked confused and horrified. She no longer had human legs; instead, she stood on the thin but muscular legs of a fawn. She looked up at Timothy and said something that might have been Thank you for trying to help me, but before Timothy could figure out whether that was what she said or not the Fancy Man took hold of her hand and the two of them stepped to the side, vanishing into the ripple.

Timothy was surprised to feel the tears running down his cheeks and quickly wiped them away because crying was for sissies. He looked up into the sky and saw that the plane and giant Quetzalcoatlus were gone, as well.

A rustle from the bushes that now grew where Mom had once tried starting a rose garden, and then something stepped directly into the semi-foggy but nonetheless bright moonlight. It took Timothy a few moments to realize what it was.

Its head was box-shaped and shone with a deep, hand-rubbed rosewood finish. A long, sharp beak protruded from the middle of front of the box; on each side of the box was a hand-sized half-sphere of brass that looked like the bulging eyes of a toad; a thin iron rod like a neck connected the box-head to a wider, longer box that looked like a small child’s coffin standing on end, held upright by a pair of thick, powerful, furry legs, each ending in a wide wolf’s paw, claws extended to give it purchase and balance.

Timothy thought again of the frightened blonde-haired girl with her fawn legs and wondered if she was turning into—or being turned into—one of these…whatever they were.

A set of membranous wings unfurled from the back of the creature’s lower half, and with a series of metallic clicks and scrapes the creature began to move back and forth across the yard, bending its legs at the knees and hopping forward while its wings fluttered with a furious speed. This creature too seemed to take a bow in Timothy’s direction, and something about it struck Timothy as almost funny, so he laughed. Then a bright burst of white light erupted into his room, followed by a large shadow, and Timothy didn’t need to turn around to know what was about to happen.

“What the fuck are you doing out of bed,” slurred Dad, “and what’s so goddamned funny?”

Timothy heard the sound of Dad unbuckling his belt and pulling it from around his pants. Timothy knew Dad was going to bend the belt and give it a good, loud snap! Dad bent the belt and gave it a good loud snap!

Timothy sent a silent wish to the box-bird-wolf-winged thing in the yard below: Make it stop, please?

The creature gave another slight bow, and then sidestepped into instantaneous nothingness. Timothy heard his dad’s approaching footsteps, felt his strong, rough hand grip his shoulder, and then, for a while, it was all pain and screaming and crying while, from downstairs in the kitchen, Mom shouted and wept and wailed.

Toward the end of the beating—and this was a bad one because Timothy could feel the cheeks of his butt started to bleed a little—he looked over at his Spider-Man clock. It was five minutes after midnight. It was now his birthday. And as he began to lose consciousness, Timothy summoned the memory of a certain Elton John song that his mom liked to listen to whenever she was sad, and thought he’d sit with her tomorrow when she played it over and over and tried not to feel bad about the way her life had turned out.

4: “… It Was Then That I Carried You.”

That Friday, as promised, Timothy climbed into the backseat of the car while Mom and Dad got in the front, and Dad started the car, and Mom looked back and smiled through all of the makeup she’d had to use to hide the bruises (some of her face was still swollen, and Timothy wondered what kind of a lie they were going to have to come up with to explain that), and they began their drive to Columbus to see the specialist with his experimental treatment.

Timothy didn’t like the way that sounded, “experimental treatment.” It sounded like something a mad doctor would say in a Frankenstein movie or something. He cradled his red rubber-wheeled fire truck against his chest and tried not to wince whenever the car hit a bump and sent a knife-edge of pain through his still-raw and seeping butt. (Mom had worried that Timothy might need stitches, but she was able to clean everything up and used a bunch of bandages and medical tape to make a kind-of cushion so it wouldn’t hurt Timothy too much.)

As they were taking the on-ramp to I-70, Dad cleared his throat and said, “You two know how much I love you, right?”

“Of course we do, honey,” replied Mom, almost sounding as if she believed it.

Dad looked in the rear-view mirror and Timothy nodded his head.

“Well, I was thinking, after the doctor, we might go to one of the malls and do some shopping. Get yourselves something nice.”

“That would be wonderful, honey,” said Mom.

Timothy nodded his head. It was always this way after a “bad night” (as Dad called them). He pulled his red rubber-wheeled fire truck closer to his chest, but he must have forgotten to turn off the barking dog and the siren because the car was suddenly filled with loud wailing and even louder yapping, and both Mom and Dad jumped a little at the noise and Timothy was trying to find the switches to turn everything off, but then Dad turned around and screamed at him to turn the fucking thing off right now or he’d throw it out the window, and Timothy was trying but he was shaking because he was scared, and then he looked up as Mom shouted something at Dad, and that’s when Timothy realized that when Dad had turned around to yell at him, the car had swerved over into the opposite lane and there was a truck coming right at them, its horn blaring, and by the time Dad turned back around and saw what was happening it was too late.

Later, wreckers towed away the car while an ambulance hauled Timothy to the hospital and a coroner’s wagon loaded up what was left of Mom and Dad. Timothy—his neck in a brace, his head bandaged and held in place by something big and metal that looked like it was built with an Erector set—closed his eyes and in the grip of a painkiller haze tried to think of a prayer, but all he could remember were the words printed on a picture that Mom kept in a frame on the table by her side of the bed. It was some kind of poem, even though it didn’t rhyme, and it was all about this guy talking to Jesus on a beach and asking Him why, at the really bad times in the guy’s life, Jesus had abandoned him – and the guy knew this was true because he could turn and point to where two set of footprints became one.

He prayed that Jesus was now carrying Mom and Dad up to Heaven. Timothy never understood what made his Dad so sad and angry, but as he began to drift off under the influence of the painkillers, Timothy figured it must have been something terrible, just terrible that happened to his dad when he was a kid.

And then Timothy drifted away, to a place where no light-blue glow could find him…he hoped.

#

He was in the hospital for a long time. Both of his legs had been broken, as well as both arms and a section of his collar bone, there was something the doctors said about “…internal bleeding” and “…possible damage to the spine and brain, but we’ll monitor him closely,” and a bunch of other things that he didn’t really understand. He cried a lot because Mom and dad were dead, and even Grandma and Grandpa (who drove from new York the morning after the accident) couldn’t help him to feel any better about still being alive.

When he was able to start moving a little on his own again, Timothy wrote a note to one of the nurses asking if he could have his pants back, there was something in the pockets he needed. He didn’t ask or say anything out loud, because every time he tried to speak, all he could say was, “Terrible, just terrible.”

The nurse gave him his torn and bloodstained ants. Timothy reached into the side pocket and found the business card that the Fancy Man had given to him. He wanted to make sure he never lost it.

Looking at the card again after all this time, Timothy, for a moment, thought his dumb old brain must have gotten damaged because it didn’t say the same thing. It didn’t even look like words. When he looked at the card, what he saw was this:

And that wasn’t right at all. He blinked a few times, looked at it again, still couldn’t make any sense out of what had happened to it (he’d thought for a moment that maybe his blood had caused the ink to smear, but there was no blood on the card), and then he had an idea. He moved his hands toward his face—which not only hurt a lot but was hard to do because both arms were still in casts that went way up pat his elbows—and once he could touch his face, he closed his eyes and pressed on them for several seconds. Pulling away his fingers, he opened his eyes and wasn’t surprised to see that everything inside the room and outside the windows was now cast in a shade of light blue. He knew this wouldn’t last long, so he looked once more at the card and saw:

H. Trismegistus, Agathosdaimon

Psychopompos

Keepers

And that was right; that was what the card had said on the day the Fancy Man had given it to him. So maybe his dumb old brain wasn’t too damaged, after all.

#

Grandma and Grandpa couldn’t take in Timothy: they were both too old, they said; they were both too set in their ways to care for a damaged child, they said; they both had too many health problems of their own, they said; and they were sorrier than they could say, they said. But Timothy knew they loved him, right? And they would come to visit him often, they promised, but they had to be getting back because there were things to do and the money they’d used for this trip, for the gas and the hotel and the food—not to mention the deposit they had to put down at the funeral home for the coffins—was almost gone. But Timothy understood, didn’t he? Of course you do, they said, you’re such a brave, strong boy, your mom and dad must be so proud of you, smiling down from their place in Heaven.

No one ever told him how the funeral went, whether there were a lot of people or only a few, if anyone cried, or if the music was nice.

Having no other relatives because neither Mom nor Dad had any siblings (and Mom’s parents had been dead a long time), Timothy was now, at the age of eight, completely alone in the world. And that scared him more than he could ever hope to say.

5: Lost Souls and Soup Kitchens

Timothy had never been what people call a “bright child.” Yes, he was a bit slow with most things, but what no one noticed was how thorough he was in everything he did; be it doing the dishes, folding his clothes, or reading a book for his age level, Timothy was never rushed or sloppy in the tasks he performed. But the damage from the accident had done something to him that it would take almost a decade for him to understand.

It forced him to see things. He saw not only the Fancy Man and his friends who kept sidestepping in and out of his life, but he saw different levels of things, as well. Sometimes, when looking at a building, he’d blink and see the ghost of a different building superimposed at the same spot, and behind that ghost building, there would be another building, older, sometimes made of concrete, sometimes of stone, sometimes of wood. And with every ghost building, there would be ghost people—or ghost creatures (who seemed to always come out of the stone structures, many of which had writing over their doorways that resembled the nonsensical scribbling that had briefly been on the Fancy Man’s business card).

These periods of seeing ghost levels were, at first, brief but still unnerving—especially the creatures he saw scrabbling about in the haze. They lived in a world he did not recognize, one of stone structures and fire and mountains made from steel and flesh and bones. He found that if he pressed hard enough on his eyes, these ghost visions disappeared after the light-blue glow went away.

And then there was the Autumn afternoon when he’d been walking around the square and saw a car that looked like his parents’ – it even had the same dent in the side door from where a shopping cart had slammed into it one Christmas. That’s also when he noticed that the downtown Cedar Hill he was seeing was different from the one he knew. The old Arcade Toyland—that had closed five years ago—was back and very busy.

He realized that something wasn’t right—this wasn’t his Cedar Hill, it was a Cedar Hill—and that was his mom and dad in the old car. He even glimpsed himself as a child sitting in the backseat with a little girl who could only have been the sister he never had, the girl that Dad had always wanted.

And each and every time, the creature with the coffin body and brass eyes and wolf’s legs was always there right before or right after. This is how Timothy began to live his life in fear, always remembering the Fancy Man’s words: The gaps are getting too wide, and I can only be in so many places at the same time .

Maybe that’s what he saw; the places that existed behind those gaps (and there must be an awful lot of them now). Or maybe his dumb old brain had been damaged so much that it made him see things that were only imaginary. Either way, it made him very lonely, especially when he entered the foster care system after he was released from the hospital.

These were not good years for him. Some families were really quite kind and tried to understand his behavior and his reluctance to speak, while other families grew angry with him in a hurry. None of them understood why he always began to shake and cry whenever he was asked to take out the trash. Some families treated him like a freak. Some treated him like a burden. Some families did things to him, late at night in his room; sometimes it was the women, sometimes the men, sometimes both. He eventually lost count of how many times he’d had a dishrag jammed into his mouth to muffle his screams. He finally stopped screaming altogether and just le them do whatever they wanted.

By the time he was sixteen, Timothy Oberfield looked twice his age and then some. Many people, at a glance, thought him to be at least thirty-four. And every year, he saw more and more ghost levels hiding behind the people, places, and things of this world, and despite how hard he’d press on his eyes, the visions of these ghost levels stayed longer and longer. It was as if he was sitting in a movie theater, only instead of just one movie being projected onto the screen, there were dozens, hundreds, thousands of them, all being sown at the same time, and all with the same clarity.

One foster family had caught him trying to blind himself with an ice pick. He was back in the Childrens’ Home the next morning.

He tried wearing dark sunglasses, hoping that by blocking out the light he could also block out the visions, but it didn’t work. Then, one Hallowe’en, one of the woman who worked at the Childrens’ Home gave him a pirate costume, and as soon as he put on the eye patch, the levels disappeared. So he kept the eye patch on him at all times for when the ghost worlds came back.

#

Three days before his seventeenth birthday, Timothy gathered together his few personal possessions and stuffed them into a laundry bag he’d stolen from the Laundry room at the Home, and he walked out the front door in the middle of the night and never went back. For the next three years, his life was composed of lost souls and soup kitchens, of ragged people with ragged clothes who, like him, had nowhere to go or no one who cared about them. He slept in alleys, in boxes, sometimes in abandoned or fire-gutted buildings like the ones on the East End that had been destroyed by the massive Fire of 1969. He wore the eye patch and managed to keep himself sane.

And then one day, while wandering the square downtown, he was just sneaking into the alley behind Riley’s bakery to see if they’d thrown out any day-old bread or doughnuts, he saw a shabby man standing across the street with a sketchbook in his hands, furiously drawing something. By the way he kept looking up, Timothy figured the man must be sketching something on top of one of the buildings.

He struck pay-dirt; two loaves of bread and a box of a dozen doughnuts. He shoved everything into the laundry bag and then walked across the street to see what the guy was sketching.

Up on top of the building on the other side of the Riley’s alley, one of the creatures with the coffin body and brass eyes and wolf’s legs was hopping around. The guy with the sketchpad—he looked maybe forty-five or fifty—was doing a really good job with the picture.

Timothy felt something about this guy, like the two of them were supposed to be here at the same watching the creature on the top of the building; so he took out the Fancy Man’s card and held it in the palm of his hand.

When he spoke, it was very slowly, so that his dumb old brain wouldn’t trip the switch that made him say only “Terrible, just terrible.” That was maybe not the kind of thing an artist liked to hear when you were looking at their work.

“Are you going to draw the wings, too?” asked Timothy.

“Yeah,” replied the guy, “but first I want to…” He stopped drawing and snapped his head around to look at Timothy. “Are you--?” He looked back up at the creature on the roof, then back at Timothy. “You can see it?”

Timothy nodded.

The man with the sketchpad stared at him, chewing on his lower lip, thinking about something. “You ever see one of these things before?”

Again, Timothy nodded.

The guy with the sketchpad blanched and even shook a little. Closing his sketchpad and jamming up under his arm, he held out his hand. “My name’s Bob. What’s yours?”

“Timmy.” He’d always wanted to be called “Timmy,” because it sounded less stuck-up than “Timothy.”

“You got any family or friends?” asked Bob.

Timothy shook his head. “But I think…I mean, I’m supposed to…here.” He handed the business card to Bob. “Are you the man I’m supposed to give this to?”

Bob stared at the symbols on the card, then slowly shook his head. “Do you know what this says?”

Timmy nodded. “It says, ‘ H. Trismegistus, Agathosdaimon, Psychopompos, Keepers.’”

Bob took a step closer to him. “Do you know what any of that means?”

“No, sir.”

Looking at the card once more, Bob handed it back to Timmy. “I’m not the guy you’re supposed to give that to, but I think I know who is. Follow me.”

“Would you like doughnut?”

“You have to be kidding me, how can you think I’d want a doughnut after what you just told—hey, wait a second. Any of them got chocolate frosting? I’m a fool for chocolate frosting.”

A few of them did, and Timmy was happy to share them with his new friend.

They walked to the corner. There was a phone booth there. Bob finished his doughnut, wiped his hand on his coat, and then opened the folding door and stepped inside. Digging a dime out of his pocket, he fed it into the phone and began dialing a number. “That eye patch you wear,” he said to Timmy. “Is that because you don’t have a second eye or do you do it to keep yourself from…well, seeing things?”

Timothy was stunned that Bob would know that. He nodded his head several times.

“I kinda figured,” said Bob, then someone answered the number he’d called. “Hello? Is this Ethel? Hi, you sultry temptress, this is Bob. Listen, I need to speak to the Reverend right away. Thanks, yes, I’ll wait.” He covered the mouthpiece of the phone with his hand and looked back at Timmy. “How long have you been seeing these other things?”

“My whole life.”

“Good Lord. I didn’t think people like you existed any longer.” He removed his hand from the mouthpiece and said, “Reverend, it’s Bob. You need to come to Riley’s Bakery or send someone right away. Of course I sound anxious, that’s because I am anxious. Nothing gets passed you, does it? What, sorry, could you say that again?” He tried not looking at Timmy as this Reverend repeated his question, and almost managed to do it.

“I have someone here you’re going to want to meet. He can read Angelic Script. Yes, I’m sure. You seriously need to get here. What do I think?

“I think I’ve found a goddamn Palimpsest Seer, that’s what. Now get your ass over here. Bring a thermos of Ethel’s coffee, as well, for there are doughnuts in your near future—and from what I gather by what Timmy has shown me, a world of hurt coming down on our heads like curse from Heaven.”

(Chapter 6)