In the kitchen light, I discover that Ardys Harmony is lovely. Perhaps in her late thirties, she has a complexion as clear as light, and her eyes are the color of creme de menthe, darker green than I would have thought any eyes could be. Her otherwise perfect skin is marked by crow’s-feet, but those tiny wrinkles seem to me to be evidence not of aging but instead of the courage and the steel willpower with which she faces each day in the Corner, as even now her eyes are squinted and her mouth tightly set with determination.
She draws me to the sink, above which is a window that frames a view of the larger house on the hill behind this one. As earlier, lamplight brightens some of the second-floor windows in that imposing residence.
“My husband’s parents bought this property in a foreclosure sale in 1955. It was dilapidated. They revitalized the businesses, turned failure into success, and built additional houses as their children got married and the family grew. They lived in the hilltop house until they died, both of them nine years ago. Bill and I lived up there four years — until everything changed. Five years now, we’ve lived down here.”
Without directly telling me that their controller and tormentor can be found in the highest of the seven houses, without mentioning a name or providing a description, without putting her request into words that might draw unwanted attention, she nevertheless conveys to me by her eyes and her expression what she hopes I might achieve. Maybe I, immune to the powers of the Presence, will be able to enter its lair undetected and kill it. I understand what she wants of me as clearly as if I could read minds.
If the Presence is alone and the Harmonys are many, and if it can control only one person at a time — as the story of Donny’s cut and Denise’s sewing up of his wound seems to indicate — then surely sometime in five years, they might have found a way to overwhelm their enemy. I don’t have enough information, however, to understand their long enslavement or to calculate the odds of my succeeding at the task she hopes that I will undertake.
The need to speak somewhat indirectly of these things and in a subdued manner complicates my information gathering. I ask, “Is it a man I’m looking for or something else?”
She turns from the window. “This line of talk is inadvisable.”
I persist: “A man?”
“Yes and no.”
“What does that mean?”
She shakes her head. She dares not say, for fear the words she would need to describe my quarry might alert him to the fact that we are conspiring against him. This suggests that once he has taken control of someone, even after he departs that person, the two of them remain linked at all times, at least tenuously.
“He’s only one, I assume.”
“Yes.”
She looks at the pistol in my hand.
I ask, “Will this be enough to do the job?”
Her expression is bleak. “I don’t know.”
As I consider how best to word certain other questions without setting off a psychic alarm in the mind of the Presence, I ask if I may have a drink of water.
She plucks a bottle of Niagara from the refrigerator, and as I put down the pistol on the dinette table, I assure her that I don’t need a glass.
For a man closing in on twenty-four hours without sleep, after a long day of exhausting action, too much caffeine is as problematic as too little. Drowsiness and the lack of focus that it promotes could be the death of me, although so could the edginess and the tendency to overreact that come with an overdose of stimulants. But Mountain Dew, candy bars, and a pair of NoDoz have not yet quite cleared the sandman’s dust from my eyes. I swallow one more caffeine tablet.
As I put down the water, Ardys comes to me and takes one of my hands in both of hers. Her eyes seem to express desperation, and her look is beseeching.
Something about her stare, perhaps the intensity of it, makes me uneasy. Because my life is marbled with the supernatural, I’m creeped out frequently enough to be familiar with the feeling that something is crawling on the nape of my neck. This time, however, before I can smooth down those fine hairs with my free hand, I realize that the crawling isn’t on my neck but
As I slam my own private door, rejecting what has sought to enter, Ardys says, “Have you figured out how to express it better, Harry?”
“Express what?”
“The analogy with the porpoise and the prairie dog.”
Alarmed, I twist my hand free of hers.
The form of Jolie’s mother still stands before me, and surely the substance of her — mind and soul — still inhabits the body even if she is no longer in control of it. The Presence and I are face-to-face, as last we were when it challenged me through Donny, and this time its true countenance is concealed by the Ardys mask. Her skin remains clear and radiant, but her expression of utter contempt is one that I doubt is familiar to that lovely visage. Those dark-green eyes are as striking as they were before, like the eyes of a woman in some magic-saturated Celtic myth, but they are no longer haunted or sad, or beseeching; they seem to radiate a palpable, inhuman fury.
I snatch the gun from the table.
She says, “Who are you really, Harry Potter?”
“Lex Luthor,” I admit. “That’s why I had to change my name. The thousandth time someone asked me why I hated Superman, I started wishing my name was just about anything else, even Fidel Castro.”
“You are the first of your kind I’ve ever encountered.”
“What kind is that?” I wonder.
“Inaccessible. I possess everyone who sleeps in the motor court, roam their memories, and embed recurrent nightmares that will destroy their sleep for weeks after I’ve departed them.”
“I’d prefer a free continental breakfast.”
Not stiffly, like a zombie, but with her usual grace, she walks — almost seems to glide — to the counter beside the cooktop and opens a drawer. “Sometimes I seize control of motor-court guests while they’re awake — use a husband to brutalize a wife or use a wife to tell her husband lies about infidelities that I imagine for her in delicious detail.”
Ardys stares into the drawer.
“When they leave,” the Presence says through her, “they’re beyond my control, but what I’ve done will have a lasting effect.”
“Why? What’s the point?”
Ardys looks up from the drawer. “Because I can. Because I want to. Because I will.”
“That’s a tidy little moral vacuum.”
Obeying the beast that rides her, Ardys withdraws a meat cleaver from the drawer. In her voice, the hidden demon says, “Not a vacuum. A black hole. Nothing escapes me.”
I suggest, “Delusions of grandeur.”
Raising the cleaver, Ardys approaches the dinette table, which stands between us. “You’re a fool.”
“Yeah? Well, you’re a narcissist.”
I find it dismaying that we never quite outgrow the schoolyard and the puerile behavior thereof. Even this puppetmaster, with almost godlike power over those it controls, feels the need to belittle me with childish insults, and I feel obliged to respond in kind.
Through Ardys, it says, “You’re dead, shitface.”
“Yeah? Well, you’re probably ugly as hell.”
“Not when I’m in this bitch.”
“I’d rather be dead than as ugly as you.”
“You’re ugly enough, shitface.”
I reply, “Sticks and stones.”
She starts around the table.
I circle in the other direction, taking a two-hand grip on the pistol and aiming it point-blank at her chest.
“You won’t shoot her,” the Presence says.
“I killed a woman earlier tonight.”
“Liar.”
