Breathless

Nineteen

Off the south side of the downstairs hall lay the dining room, which Grady had lined with shelves to store the book collection that spilled over from his study. He didn’t need a dining room. He always ate at the two-chair table in the kitchen, and on the rare occasions when he had company for an evening, he invited only one guest.

Following the wolfhound’s cry of excitement, Grady crossed the threshold of the library.

In silhouette, Merlin stood with his paws on the windowsill, as he had in previous rooms.

Grady took three steps before he froze at the sight of what lay beyond the window, unable to make sense of it.

In relation to the house, the moon was farther to the east than to the west, farther north than south. No porch roof overhung this side of the residence, but moonlight was no more able to reach these southern panes than those in the living room.

Suspended as if weightless in the darkness beyond the glass, slightly higher than the dog’s burly head, were four luminous golden spheres, each approximately three inches in diameter, as bright as candlelight but constant in their radiance, without any throb or flicker. Two were side by side on a horizontal plane, and two floated at an angle.

Bubbles, he thought, not only because they seemed to levitate but also because their color was less constant than their brightness. They revealed a subtle iridescence. Shades of gold played through them, and quivers of copper, and streams of silver, much the way that a more complete spectrum of colors manifested across the surface of a soap bubble.

As easy as it was to think of the floating objects as bubbles, he intuited that they were not that ephemeral. They possessed more substance than a first impression suggested.

Although full of light, the spheres seemed to emit none. The panes took no shine from them, and neither did the wolfhound on this side of the glass. The tarnished-silver cedar frame of the window remained uniformly dark. These globes weren’t truly radiant, weren’t luminous in the sense that they shared their light and color, but somehow contained them.

Grady moved toward the window, and as he drew close to Merlin, the iridescence of the objects increased. In two, sapphire washed through the gold, and then many shades of blue at once, and the gold repeatedly bloomed through the other hues, like the base-weave color in a rippling garment of lustrous silk. The third and fourth spheres changed entirely from gold to blues and greens.

The wolfhound continuously expressed excitement and eagerness in a voice pinched so thin that he sounded like a much smaller dog.

As beautiful as the spheres were, their most affecting quality was strangeness. A perpetual aurora borealis in gem-bright colors, captured in weightless globes the size of tennis balls, hovering to no apparent purpose … They seemed to be so far beyond anything in Grady’s experience, so mysterious, so resistant to explanation, so dazzling, that the longer he contemplated them, the more disoriented he became.

He began to feel light-headed and curiously weightless, as though he might suddenly break the bonds of gravity and rise off the floor, float in the darkness on this side of the glass as the four spheres floated in the outer dark.

Then one of the pair blinked, and the other blinked, blinked, and this suggestion of function gave Grady a fresh perspective that resolved the mystery. Eyes. A darkness at the center of each, the irises open wide. Impossibly huge, luminous, color-changing eyes.

The creatures were crowded onto the windowsill. One held its head upright, and the other cocked its head: two eyes aligned on a horizontal plane, two at an angle.

For a minute, the iridescent orbs had so captivated Grady, so riveted his attention, that he was all but mesmerized by them. Now he was able to register the totality of the window, everything that it framed. Dimly, he saw their pale forms, the faintest suggestion of faces, perhaps a forepaw clinging to the casing.

The pair dropped away from the glass.

Constrained to stalk from behind windows but nonetheless full of enthusiasm for the hunt, with a rough growl to express confidence in his prowess, Merlin abandoned his post.

Grady pressed past the dog to the panes that were still partly feathered with the fog of canine breath.

Bearing their lantern eyes, the animals fled into the night.

Merlin galloped out of the library and thundered toward the kitchen.

Grady stood as if concussed, shocked into immobility, not by a physical blow but by a mental one. Having at last seen the pair from the meadow more clearly, he should have understood them better, but he was more mystified than ever.

Merlin rarely barked. He barked now.

Twenty

Henry Rouvroy picked up shotgun-shattered fragments of his face from the bathroom floor and dropped the pieces of broken mirror into a heavy-duty plastic trash bag.

He paused repeatedly to study reflections of his stare in the silvery shards before throwing them away. He saw nothing in his eyes, certainly nothing like guilt. No such thing as guilt existed, except in the weak minds of those who believed in the false gods of various authorities. He saw the same nothing he had seen in the eyes of Nora Carlyle’s corpse, the universal nothing of the human gaze.

The eyes were not the windows of the soul, and what could be seen beyond them was only a thousand hungers, needs, desires, and one thing more — fear. Henry knew his hungers and did not need to discover them in his eyes. His needs and desires were insatiable, and he would feed them, feed them as no glutton ever born had ever fed. The first woman in the potato cellar would not be the last, and if he lived long enough, the fields of his brother’s farm would be a six-acre cemetery without headstones.

Henry challenged himself to acknowledge the fear in his eyes, and he saw it clearly. He was not afraid of any variety of authority. He feared only others like himself, monsters in the making or already made. He knew that legions of them stalked the world. He knew of what they were capable, because he knew of what he was capable: anything.

He saw nothing exalted about the human animal, nothing elevated or dignified, or exceptional. Only two roles existed for any human being: prey or predator. Rule or be ruled. Act or be acted upon.

Somewhere nearby, a predator intended to prevent Henry from establishing a survivalist retreat on this property. The unknown adversary could have but one motivation: to seize the property for himself and live there to ride out the coming storm.

If that was the case — and it had to be the case — then he must be someone who knew the storm was coming, someone who traveled the same Washington circles in which Henry had once moved. He must have discovered that Henry had stolen a fortune from the operation, and he must have put Henry under observation to discover what further intentions he might have.

Those circles were infested with people who possessed limitless resources for investigating and tracking a subject of interest. Henry had taken great care to conceal his theft and to cover his trail when he came west, but evidently he had not been careful enough.

He didn’t for a moment believe that his brother, Jim, might be stalking him. Jim was dead. Shot three times. The third time in the face. Even if Jim survived — which he had not — he would be blind and brain-damaged.

After picking up the last of the broken mirror, Henry carried the bag to the kitchen and put it in the trash can. He took the shotgun with him.

At the cellar door, the chair remained wedged securely under the knob.

Putting one ear to the space between door and jamb, he held his breath and listened. No sound rose from below.

Perhaps some people would have been superstitious enough to wonder if Jim might have returned from the