Read Odd Interlude Part Two for Free Online

comes on. I wait, but it isn’t getting closer, it’s a fixed lamp somewhere, and maybe someone turned it on to let me know where I need to go and all, because they know I don’t have a clue, which I don’t mean as a put-down of myself, it’s just the truth in this particular case.
    When I cross the threshold, the floor in this new place is like hard rubber, you almost bounce along it. When I say my name again just to see if maybe we can’t start some conversation after all, my voice sounds as though I’ve got a flannel sack over my head and am talking from the bottom of a dry stone well, though I don’t know why I’d ever be in such a situation unless some maniac serial killer stashed me down there for some unspeakable reason.
    Also when I talk, the walls throb with blue light, so that I can see the room is maybe forty feet on a side. Those throbbing blue walls are covered with hundreds of cones sort of like what I saw once in a TV series where this guy was a talk-show host working in a sound booth in a radio station or somewhere. It’s like the big cones are soaking up my voice but at the same time turning the sound of it into blue light, which didn’t happen in the TV show. The faster and more I talk, the brighter the light becomes, sort of pulsing in time with my words.
    If you want my opinion, it’s a weird room, but it doesn’t feel like a dangerous place. It’s even kind of peaceful, though it does make you feel half deaf and makes your skin look blue like the freaky people on the planet in that movie
Avatar
. I mean, it’s not the kind of room where you think maybe you’ll find dead naked people hanging on chains from the ceiling. Anyway, there’s plenty of blue light as long as I keep talking, so I start reciting a couple of Shel Silverstein poems I’ve memorized, and I verse myself all the way across the room to a big round opening you could drive a Mack truck through if you knew how to drive, which I don’t. I can see through it to the yellow light that first drew me in here, if you remember, and it’s still as far away as it ever was, as if it must be moving from me as fast as I head toward it.
    When I try to go through this big round door, it turns out to be more of a window but not glass. It’s cold and clear and kind of gummy, and when I try to step back from it, I can’t. I’m not stuck in the stuffexactly, but it holds me, and then it seems to fold around me, which you can imagine sort of freaks me out, as if the stuff is going to seal me up in a clear cocoon and suffocate me. But then it turns out to be a door after all, and after it folds around me, the stuff unfolds, and I’m on the other side. I don’t know, that doesn’t quite explain how it feels. Maybe it’s more like the clear stuff that fills the doorway is some giant amoeba that sucks you in from one room and spits you out into the next, except it isn’t that, either.
    Anyway, in the next room are six dead people all in those bulky white hazmat suits like you see on TV news when there’s been a toxic-chemical spill or clouds of acid vapor or something else that always reminds you why you shouldn’t watch the news. I pick them out one by one with my flashlight. Maybe these aren’t exactly hazmat suits but more airtight, like space suits, because the helmets aren’t like hazmat hoods, they actually lock into this rubber seal thing on the neck of the suit. They’ve all got tanks of air on their backs, like scuba divers. If you really need to know, through the faceplates on their helmets, I can see what’s left of their faces, which isn’t much, and they’ve been dead a long time. The room with the cones on the walls was weird but okay. This room isn’t okay. It’s trouble, and I’m all over covered with gooseflesh, and then someone says, “Jolie Ann Harmony.”

TWELVE
    As the eighteen-wheeler turns onto the county road, I weave off the shoulder and onto the blacktop, trying not to look inebriated, trying instead