6: Ricochet Rabbit and A Window to the World(s)
Timmy couldn’t take his eyes off of the giant chandelier hanging from the ceiling. He’d seen things this beautiful in movies and sometimes television, but always thought that they’d just been invented for the make-believe stuff on the screens. After a few more moments of gawking, he blinked and looked around to make sure there weren’t any cameras, or maybe on of those camera-creatures with the wings and beaks and hairy legs. Maybe Bob had just brought him to a make-believe world. He thought that over, and decided it would be okay.
“It’s a leftover from when this place used to be a hotel,” said a voice behind him. Timmy turned to face the Reverend, the nice man who’d driven a van over to Riley’s Bakery to pick up him and Bob. Timmy liked the Reverend right away; he looked kind of like an old hippie (Dad’s word) with his long dark hair and beard, but he didn’t act like Dad said all hippies acted – always too “stoned” (whatever that meant) on drugs and smelly because they never took baths and out on the street begging for money because they were too goddamn lazy to work for a living. The Reverend, he was neat and clean and smelled nice and he helped people. Like all the poor people here in the Open Shelter, people who didn’t have homes or money to buy food with. Timmy thought that was really nice.
The Reverend put a hand on Timmy’s shoulder. “Are you okay?”
Timmy nodded, and then pointed to the pretty tile on the floor.
“Italian marble,” said the Reverend. “Very expensive. The fire back in 1969 took out all of the upper floors, but this areas right here, the lobby, wasn’t touched. So the city put a new roof over what remained – a cheap roof, but functional – and gave it to me so I could use it to … well, you can see for yourself, right?”
Again, Timmy nodded. There were at least thirty people in here right now, of all ages, enjoying the food and the soft, warm furniture, some of them even watching the television over in the corner. They all acted as if they were right at home. Timmy liked everything about the Reverend and the Open Shelter.
“I think I got something I’m supposed to give to you,” he whispered to the Reverend, speaking slowly, as always, so that he didn’t trip that switch that made him say “Terrible, just terrible,” over and over. He didn’t want to look like a “retard” (another one of Dad’s words) in front of this nice man.
He reached into his coat pocket for the Fancy Man’s card, but the Reverend gently grabbed his wrist and whispered, “Not out here in front of everyone, okay?”
“Okay.” Then: “Hey, Reverend, do you know…do you know what that thing was that Bob was drawing?”
“No. Can you describe it to me?”
Timmy nodded his head with great enthusiasm; the Reverend was talking to him like he was a normal person who didn’t have a dumb old brain and saw things that other people didn’t. That made him feel good, gave him confidence he rarely felt, and so he described, in the best detail he could remember (which was actually quite accurate), the creature he’d seen on the roof.
The Reverend listened, and by the time Timmy finished his description, the Reverend’s face looked blank and tight. It reminded Timmy of the way Dad used to look before he had a “bad night.”
The Reverend gave a short, sharp nod of his head. “You don’t say? How utterly fascinating. Thank you, Timmy. Oh, Robert!”
Bob heard the Reverend shout his name. He reluctantly put down the tray of warm food that nice black lady (Ethel, that was her name!) was handing to him, and walked over, taking his own sweet time about it. “You bellowed, O Captain, my Captain?”
The Reverend grabbed Bob’s upper arm and began dragging him toward a set of swinging metal doors that looked like they led into a kitchen. “You’re lucky that’s all I did, Robert.”
Bob looked back at Timmy. “He only calls me ‘Robert’ when I’m in deep sewage … which is most of the time, now that I think of it.”
“Come with us, please, will you, Timmy?” said the Reverend. Timmy followed along, feeling anxious. Did he just get Bob into trouble? He sure hoped not. He liked Bob and wanted Bob to like him. People didn’t like you if you got them into … deep sewage. Timmy felt for a moment like he was going to cry but managed to swallow it all down. He didn’t want to look like a sissy to his new friends … actually, his only friends. He didn’t want them to think he was more trouble than he was worth, not like all the foster families did.
He momentarily remembered the things some of those families did to him, remembered the pain and the hard moist things and the pressure and the bleeding and the taste of old nasty dishrags in the dark, and felt himself shudder like a scaredy-cat. He didn’t like those memories, or feeling this way. He was so lost in these brief but dreadful flashes of memory that he didn’t even see the other fellow until he bumped into him.
“Whoa,” said the other fellow, almost dropping a tray of dirty dishes he’d been gathering off of the tables. “What’s the rush there, Ricochet Rabbit?”
Timmy shrugged and felt his face flush with embarrassment, then looked up and saw that the other fellow was missing one of his ears.
“Don’t look so humiliated,” said the other fellow. “I didn’t drop anything, so it’s no big deal, okay?”
Timmy only nodded because he knew what would come out of his mouth if he tried speaking right now.
The other fellow held out his hand. “My name’s Sam. You’re Timmy, right? That’s what I thought. Looks like the Reverend and Bob have ditched you. Were you supposed to be going with them?”
Timmy nodded.
“Okay, then,” said Sam. “What you need to do is go through those swinging metal doors, through the kitchen, and follow the yelling. He usually winds up yelling when Bob is here, so it won’t be hard for you to find his office. It was nice meeting you, Timmy.”
Timmy nodded, took a deep breath, and gave Sam’s hand a firm squeeze. He liked Sam. He liked Ethel. They didn’t treat him like he was stupid or worthless. He hoped he could stay here for a little while.
He followed Sam’s directions and, sure enough, he heard the Reverend’s voice yelling from behind an old but highly-polished wooden door. Timmy thought about knocking but he didn’t want to interrupt, so he slowly and quietly opened the door leading into the Reverend’s office and slipped in as unobtrusively as he could.
Bob was seated in front of a small but nice-looking wooden desk that was polished to a shine just like the door. The Reverend was pacing back and forth on the other side, flipping through the pages of Bob’s sketch pad.
“These are really excellent, Robert. Superb. Outstanding. Life-like, even.” He tossed the sketch pad onto the desk. “I especially like the sketch of, what is it – eight or nine of them? – all clustered together on a roof like a bunch of drunken Shriners gawking at some woman pole-dancing in a Los Vegas strip-club!”
“Wow,” said Bob. “That was quite the mouthful, Reverend. Listen, I gotta ask: do those pearly similes just come to you in the moment or do you write everything down ahead of time and memorize it?”
“Don’t try my patience today, Robert.”
Bob looked into the Reverend’s eyes and saw something there that seemed to scare him a little. “I apologize. Seriously, I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry?” asked the Reverend, then pounded the tip of his index finger against Bob’s sketch pad. “Onlookers. Onlookers? You were planning to tell me about this when, please?”
“When I came in for dinner tonight.”
The Reverend studied Bob’s face for a moment, and a lot of the anger seemed to trickle out of him like air from a leaky balloon. “I believe you. And I‘m sorry that I shouted. It’s just … shit. Onlookers. Those smarmy, self-righteous little pricks rub me the wrong way, you know?”
“It was hard to tell, based on your guarded reaction.”
Timmy cleared his throat. “Wh-what are they?”
Both the Reverend and Bob turned to look at him, then back at each other.
“Oh, no, no you don’t” said the Reverend. “This one’s all yours, Señor Substruo .”
Bob stared. “You’re all heart, you know that?”
“Famous for it in many circles.” The Reverend pointed at Timmy. “G’head. Tell him.”
Timmy held up his hand. “What’s … I m-mean … why did you call Bob that name?”
Bob tried suppressing a laugh, didn’t make it, and spread his hands in front of him. “To quote a man we all know and perspire, ‘G’head. Tell him.’”
The Reverend glared at him. “You’re on my list, Robert. And every time you open your mouth, you get nearer to the top.”
“Really? Does that mean I might get a pony for Christmas?”
Ignoring him, the Reverend walked over to Timmy. “Bob is … he’s … um, er, well …”
“A bang-up job so far,” said Bob. “So concise. You should think about a career in public relations.”
The Reverend rolled his eyes toward Heaven and sighed. “Why me? I ask You.” He exhaled and put his hands on Timmy’s shoulders. “You promise not to think I’ve gone ‘round the bend?”
Timmy didn’t know what that meant, but it sounded likes something bad, like the Reverend was afraid Timmy would think he was a retard, so Timmy nodded his head. That seemed like the right answer, because the Reverend smiled.
“Do you believe in angels, Timmy?”
“I guess so. Sure.”
“Good.” The Reverend pointed at Bob. “Well, Salvador Dali over there isn’t one of them – not even close.”
Bob grunted. “Oh, go sit on a biscuit.”
“As much as I hate to admit it,” continued the Reverend, “Bob is something … he’s something more than an angel. There are angels who wish they could be like him.”
Bob smiled. “That’s better.”
“Will you put a sock in it for thirty seconds, please?”
“I would if I wore socks, maybe.”
The Reverend continued. “It’s a little complicated, Timmy, so I don’t want you to think that I think you’re stupid or anything if I give you a sort-of … really simple explanation, okay? Good, thank you.
“Bob belongs to a special kind of … of club, I guess you’d call it. The members of this club are called The Substruo, and it’s their job to make sure that the, um … that the unseen things that hold this world together stay in place and don’t get broken or damaged or lost or ruined. Does that make sense to you?”
Timmy thought about for a moment. “Kind of … but I’m not really sure. I’m sorry.”
“Not your fault,” said the Reverend. “It’s just, I’m not sure how –”
“You ever play that game Jenga that came out a few years ago?” asked Bob
Timmy nodded.
“It’s like that.” Bob rose from his chair, grabbed up his sketch pad, gave the Reverend a look Timmy couldn’t read, and then began drawing on one of the pad’s blank pages. “You build up that stack of wooden blocks, right? Okay – now imagine that that wooden stack is this world we live in.”
“Okay, yeah.” Timmy thought he was starting to get it.
“My club is in charge of making sure that the stack never falls down, no matter how many wooden blocks are pulled out.”
The Reverend gave Bob the thumbs-up sign. “You’d be surprised how many different kinds of ‘wooden blocks’ Bob and his club have to keep track of. Understand now?”
“Uh-huh. It sounds neat.”
“Some days,” said Bob, “not so much. But it’s a job we love and take seriously.”
Timmy smiled. “I understand. Really, I do.”
Bob grinned. “Excellent.” He finished his drawing, and then turned it toward Timmy and the Reverend. It was a great big fuzzy bunny standing on his back legs, wearing a hat and a vest with a gold sheriff’s badge pinned to it. “See this? Good. Now watch.” Bob took a large eraser from his pocket and make quick business of rubbing out the bunny. He turned the now-blank page around so they could see. “Not there any longer, is it?”
Timmy shook his head and uttered a sad, “No.” It had been a really cute fuzzy bunny.
Bob cocked his head to one side. “Are you sure it’s gone?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Really? Then watch this – nothing up my sleeve ….” Bob pulled a gray crayon from one of his coat’s many pockets and, in flamboyant strokes, began coloring all over the page but not pressing down very hard. As he did this, the outline of the fuzzy bunny began to re-appear. It wasn’t as cute or as detailed as the original sketch, but at least Timmy could see it again, and that made him happy.
Bob held up the page. “Seems to me that Mr. Ricochet Rabbit never went anywhere. He just made himself invisible for a minute or two.”
Timmy laughed and clapped his hands together.
“Do you know what that’s called?” asked the Reverend. “Not the rabbit, but what Bob did to make it come back again? That process is called ‘palimpsest.’ It’s when you build or draw or make something in the place where something else used to be, but when you’re done and the new thing is there, you can still see the thing that used to be there.”
“I see that all the time,” said Timmy. “That’s w-w-why I wear this.” He pointed to his eye patch.
The Reverend and Bob exchanged a serious look. “Can you tell us about some of these things?” the Reverend asked.
“Oh, you bet’cha!” And Timmy proceeded to tell them about all the ghost-worlds and ghost-people and ghost-things he’d seen, all of the ghost-scents he’d smelled, all the ghost-sounds and music he’d heard; he told them how he sometimes felt like he was watching a thousand different movies all being projected onto the same screen at the same time; he told them about his dumb old brain and how it sometimes played tricks on him; all of it poured out of him like water gurgling from the top of an intricately-carved stone fountain, splashing, cascading, covering everyone and everything in the room; crystal-clear, bright, breathtaking. He told them about everything he’d seen since that first time with the Fancy Man and the dead little girl, wrapping it up by describing how he’d even seen a different (but not all that different) version of himself and his family, this time with the younger sister he’d never had.
In the process of telling them all of this, he talked about some of the things that had happened to him; the beatings from Dad, the dishrags some of the foster families used on him, the times when he didn’t eat for days until he discovered the Dumpsters behind Riley’s Bakery and The Sparta.
As he spoke, both the Reverend and Bob stared at him with shiny eyes (they weren’t trying not to cry, were they? He hoped not), their faces growing a little more pale with his story of each encounter.
When he was at last finished, he stood there trembling. It had felt good to finally tell someone about this and not have them laugh at him or hit him or pull his dinner plate away and tell him it was time for the clothesline and the locked closet.
“Holy shit,” whispered the Reverend.
“You’d be the one to know,” said Bob.
“Hey,” said Timmy, feeling courageous now that he’d shared his secret with someone. “Is that … I mean, am I like what Bob did with Ricochet Rabbit? Is that kind of stuff like what I’ve been seeing?”
The Reverend smiled and squeezed Timmy’s shoulders. “That’s exactly what it is, and what you are. A Palimpsest Seer. Timmy, I didn’t think people with your abilities still walked this Earth. Your eyes are the window to the world … and the worlds within worlds within worlds that all exist right here, right now, all in the same place, the same moment, just on different planes. Levels. Different levels.”
“Like Ricochet Rabbit?”
“Like Ricochet Rabbit.” The Reverend looked over at Bob.
“Surprised the bejeezus out of me, and that’s no lie,” said Bob.
The Reverend knelt in front of Timmy. “Will you do me a favor? Will you close your eyes and take off your eye patch? I won’t take it from you, I promise. I just want to try something.”
Timmy trusted the Reverend – it seemed like everybody did – so he closed his eyes and slipped off the patch, holding it in his hand.
The Reverend’s voice was a soft lullaby sung by Timmy’s dead mother: “Keep your eyes closed until I tell you to open them and everything will be fine.”
Timmy felt the Reverend’s thumbs press against his closed lids, and for a moment was afraid that it was going to cause the blue glow of the Fancy Man’s world to come back, but it didn’t. There were a couple of bright flashes of light, and he felt a little dizzy for a couple of seconds, but nothing bad or scary happened.
He felt the Reverend pull his thumbs away. “You can open your eyes now, Timmy.”
There weren’t any ghost-rooms or ghost-people or … or ghost-anything.
“How’s everything look to you now?” asked the Reverend.
“Just like a room. There’s isn’t anything else behind it. It’s just a room!” Timmy clapped his hands and laughed and gave the Reverend a great big bear hug. “Thank you!”
“My pleasure, young sir. Now … can I see the Fancy Man’s card?”
Timmy handed it over. The Reverend read what was written on the front, turned it over to see if there was anything on the back, then turned it right-side up again. “And you can read what it says on this?”
“Yessir.”
“Timmy,” said the Reverend, rising to his feet and walking over to a shelf that was piled high and deep with books, “I need you to do something for me, okay?” He rummaged through the books until he found the one he was looking for – a big, dusty, old-looking thing with a thick dark cover that didn’t have any writing on it. The Reverend blew on the book, scattering the dust that had settled on the edges of the pages, and then opened it and flipped around until he found a specific page. He gestured for Timmy to come over and have a seat behind the desk. “I need you to read something out loud for me. It’s not that I don’t believe you, okay? It’s important that you know that. I just need to make sure that … well, you’ll see.”
Timmy sat down in the big but comfortable chair. Bob was occupying himself by tearing off small strips of paper, wadding them up, and making basketball-like shots toward the big cardboard box labeled Recycling in the far corner of the room. He was a terrible shot, but that didn’t stop him.
The Reverend placed the opened book on the desk and pointed to a paragraph that started halfway down the first column and continued into the second. The first line of the paragraph – just like the rest of it – looked like this:
“‘Hermes,’” said Timmy, speaking the word clearly, as he would all the words following. “‘ The Agathosdaimon , the psychopompos , god of the underworld , daimon of reincarnation, or re - making the flesh into a different form. He is the god of flocks and herds. He was given the name Trismegistus – “… thrice-greatest Intelligencer …” – because he was the 1 st Fallen Angel to communicate celestial knowledge to human beings from The Book of Forbidden Knowledge. He is feared, yet he cannot kill, only create life or assist in its creation.
“‘Last residing in Hell on the north side of the Third Heaven, Trismegistus controls and creates all psychopomps – a specific spirit, angel, or deity whose responsibility it is to escort newly-deceased souls to the afterlife. The name comes from the Greek word ψυχοπομπός (psychopompos), meaning the “guider of souls.” Their role is not to judge the deceased, but simply provide safe passage. Psychopomps have been associated at different times and in different cultures with horses, whippoorwills, ravens, dogs, crows, owls, sparrows, harts, and dolphins.
“‘In Jungian psychology, the psychopomp is a mediator between the unconscious and conscious realms. It is symbolically personified in dreams as a wise man or woman, or sometimes as a helpful animal. In many cultures, the shaman also fulfills the role of the psychopomp. This may include not only accompanying the soul of the dead, but also vice versa: to help at birth or re-birth, to introduce the newborn's soul to the world.
“‘It is believed now that Trismegistus dwells neither in Heaven nor Hell nor Purgatory, but in the spaces between the three, where it is said he creates psychopomps from lost or discarded human beings whose souls still reside in their bodies, and for whom Death is still a distant fate. The angel at his side is Pthahil, a Mandaen demiourgos; an angel who rules the lesser stars and is said to have assisted God in the Creation. Pthahil created Adam’s body but could not give it life. He is a powerful prince of evil, who draws his strength from all the planets and all the demons. Pthahil rules over Trismegistus’s armies, and his soldiers are called Φύλακες, custodis, nghadwyr, якорь магнита, gardienne —’”
“—Keepers,” whispered the Reverend, patting Timmy’s shoulder and closing the book. “That’s fine, Timmy, thank you.”
“Did I do okay?”
The Reverend nodded. “You did fine. More than fine.”
“He did great,” said Bob making another shot and grumbling as it bounced off the edge of the box. “Think I need to make a bigger wad. That sounded almost pornographic, didn’t it? I’ll be quiet now.”
Timmy looked back at the Reverend. “He gave me a message for you.”
The Reverend took a deep breath, replaced the book on the shelf, then steadied himself by leaning against the wall. “What did he say?”
“He said to tell you, ‘The gaps are getting too wide, and I can only be in so many places at the same time.’”
“That’s a threat if I ever heard one,” said Bob.
The Reverend smacked the back of Bob’s head, but not hard, not in a mean way. “What happened to ‘I’ll be quiet now’?”
“My attention wanders sometimes.” He made another shot and this one went in. “Oh, yeah! He aims, he shoots, he scores!”
Timmy walked over and began gathering up the other wads of paper while the reverend and Bob talked to each other.
“You know what this means, don’t you?” asked the Reverend.
“It means that good old H. Trismegistus, Pthahil the Boy Wonder, and their armies are either planning – or have already started – to slip through the gaps and gather a fresh batch of raw material to make more servant psychopomps.” Bob was about to try another shot but then paused, thinking. “Hey, do you suppose Trismegistus still feeds people that bullshit story about the one animal that wasn’t taken onto Noah’s Ark?”
“I don’t doubt it. It’s a brilliant lie, and if those he takes have any faith at all in God and the stories in the Bible, they probably accept it as fact.”
Bob smiled but his eyes didn’t. “That’s quite the fairy tale, that story. Somebody ought to write a book about it sometime.”
Timmy laughed as he dropped his armload of paper wads into the recycling box. One of them fell away. He turned around, picked it up, reached over the top of the box to drop it in, and as the Reverend and Bob continued talking about what they were going to do a strong pale hand shot up from somewhere far beneath all the cardboard and paper and glass bottles, grabbing Timmy’s wrist, and before he could call out or try to pull away the hand wrenched him off of his feet, dragging him head-first into the box where a distant soft blue glow winked at him as it grew larger, rushing closer and closer, making so much noise that Timmy just knew nobody could hear him scream for help.
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