had been selected for the degree of discomfort that it ensured. Some monks believed that the ability to focus for meditation and prayer was diminished by comfort.
“I sit here a few times each week,” said Bernardo Pastore, “for ten or fifteen minutes usually…but sometimes for hours.”
His voice was thick and slightly slurred. Words were marbles in his mouth, but he patiently polished them and got them out.
Dusty held the tape recorder with the built-in microphone turned toward the rancher, to be sure that his awkward speech was clearly captured.
The right half of Bernardo Pastore’s rebuilt face was incapable of expression, the nerves irreparably damaged. His right jaw and part of his chin had been put back together with metal plates, wire, surgical screws, silicone parts, and bone grafts. The result was reasonably functional but not an aesthetic triumph.
“For the first year,” Bernardo said, “I spent a lot of time in that chair just trying to understand how such a thing could be, how it could happen.”
When he had hurried into this room in response to the gunfire that had killed his sleeping son, Bernardo had been hit by two rounds fired at close range by his wife, Fiona. The first had torn through his right shoulder, and the second had shattered his jaw.
“After a while there seemed to be no sense trying to understand. If it wasn’t black magic, it was as good as. These days, I sit here just thinking about them, letting them know I love them, letting her know I don’t blame her, that I know what she did was as big a mystery to her as it is to me. ’Cause I think that’s true. It must be true.”
His survival, surgeons claimed, was against all odds. The high-powered round that shattered his jaw had been miraculously deflected upward and back by the mandible, had traveled along the mastoid, and had exited his face above the zygomatic arch, without damaging the external carotid artery in the temple, which would have led to death long before medical assistance arrived.
“She loved Dion as much as I did, and all those accusations she made in her note, the things she said I’d done to her and Dion, they were untrue. And even if I’d done those things, and even if she had been suicidal, she wasn’t the kind of woman to kill a child, her own child or any other.”
Hit twice, Pastore had staggered to a tall chest of drawers near the window, which had been open to the summer night.
“And there he was, standing just outside, looking in at us, and the most godawful expression on his face. Grinning, he was, and his face all sweaty with excitement. His eyes shining.”
“You’re talking about Ahriman,” Dusty clarified for the tape.
“Dr. Mark Ahriman,” Pastore confirmed. “Standing there like he knew what was coming, like he had tickets to the killings, a front-row seat. He looked at me. What I saw in those eyes, I can’t put into words. But if I’ve done more bad than good in my life, and if there’s a place where we have to account for all we’ve done in this world, then I’ve no doubt I’ll see eyes like that again.” He was silent awhile, staring at the window that was now empty of everything but the austere light. “Then I fell.”
Down, lying with the undamaged half of his face to the floor, vision swimming in and out, he had seen his wife kill herself and fall inches beyond his reach.
“Calm, so strangely calm. As if she didn’t know what she was doing. No hesitation, no tears.”
Bleeding, nauseous with pain, Bernardo Pastore had washed in and out of consciousness, minute by minute, but during each spell of awareness, he had dragged himself toward the telephone on the nightstand.
“I could hear coyotes outside, far away in the night at first, but then closer and closer. I didn’t know if Ahriman was still at the window, but I suspected he was gone, and I was afraid that the coyotes, drawn by the scent of blood, might come through the window screen. They’re shy creatures alone…but not in a pack.”
He reached the phone, pulled it down onto the floor, and called for help, barely able to torture half- comprehensible words out of his swollen throat and shattered face.
“And then I waited, figuring I’d be dead before anyone got here. And that would have been all right. Maybe that would have been best. With Fiona and Dion gone, I didn’t care much about living. Only two things made me want to hang on. Dr. Ahriman’s involvement had to be uncovered, understood. I wanted justice. And second… though I was ready to die, I didn’t want coyotes feeding on me and my family as if we were no different from chased-down rabbits.”
Judging by how loud their cries became, the pack of coyotes had gathered under the window. Forepaws clawing at the sill. Snarling muzzles pressed against the screen.
As Pastore had grown weaker and his mind had become increasingly muddled, he had begun to believe that these were not coyotes seeking entrance, but creatures previously unknown to New Mexico, having come out of Elsewhere, through a door in the night itself. Brethren to Ahriman, with even stranger eyes than the doctor’s. Pressing at the screen not because they were eager to feed on warm flesh, but drawn instead by a hunger for three fading souls.
The doctor’s sole patient of the day was the thirty-two-year-old wife of a man who had made half a billion dollars in Internet-stock IPOs in just four years.
Although she was an attractive woman, he had not accepted her as a patient because of her looks. He had no sexual interest in her, because by the time she came to him, she was already as neurotic as a lab rat tortured for months by continuous changes in its maze and by randomly administered electric shocks. Ahriman was aroused only by women who came to him whole and healthy, with everything to lose.
The vast wealth of the patient was not a consideration, either. Because he had never experienced a shortage of wealth himself, the doctor harbored nothing but contempt for those who were motivated by money. The finest work was always done for the sheer pleasure of it.
The husband had harried the wife into Ahriman’s care not so much because her condition concerned him as because he intended to run for the United States Senate. He believed that his political career would be jeopardized by a spouse given to eccentric outbursts bordering on lunacy, which was probably an unrealistic concern, considering that such outbursts had been for many years a staple of both politicians and their spouses, across the entire political spectrum, resulting in little negative consequences at the polls. Besides, the husband was as boring as a dead toad and unelectable in his own right.
The doctor had accepted her as a patient strictly because her condition interested him. This woman was steadily working herself into a unique phobia that might supply him with interesting material for future games. He was also likely to use her case in his next book, which would concern obsessions and phobias, and which he had tentatively titled
The would-be senator’s wife had for some time been increasingly obsessed with an actor, Keanu Reeves. She assembled dozens of thick scrapbooks devoted to photographs of Keanu, articles about Keanu, and reviews of Keanu’s films. No critic was half as familiar with this actor’s filmography as she was, for in the comfort of her forty- seat home theater, on a full-size screen, she had watched each of his movies a minimum of twenty times and had once spent forty-eight hours watching
This lovefest had suddenly turned sour, for reasons the patient herself didn’t understand. She began to suspect that Keanu had a dark side. That he had become aware of her interest in him and was not pleased. That he was hiring people to watch her. Then that he was watching her himself. When the telephone rang and the caller hung up without speaking, or when the caller said,
