end of Chef Shilshom.
The limits imposed by reality on all of us were now apparent even to those here who believed that they lived with no limits, no rules, no fear.
I could not pity them, because true pity is joined with a desire to help. I had no intention of putting myself and Timothy at risk for any of them.
But I was unexpectedly moved by the despairing recognition of the inescapable void, which was a note that twisted through the long, tortured death cry. The worst and best of humanity stand in the same cold shadow, and even a deserved death can send a shiver of sympathy through me from skin to marrow.
In the wake of the scream, the silence in the house pooled deep.
If we were contending only with the Outsiders, we might try to hide somewhere exceedingly clever for a few minutes, until it seemed that all the freaks must have ascended in the house, and then return to the basement. But the swine things would probably smell us out everywhere except in the airtight walk-in refrigerator off the kitchen.
Besides the possibility of being trapped inside the walk-in, I didn’t want to hide in a refrigerator for the same reason I wouldn’t have hidden in the communal cookpot in a village of cannibals.
To Timothy, I whispered, “Freaks inside the house, there’s no longer any reason not to go outside, more places to run. Where are the controls for the security shutters?”
“I d-don’t know.”
“Any guess at all?”
“No,” he said. “N-n-none.”
He reached for me. I took his hand. It was small and cold and damp with sweat.
In the ninety-five years of his singular existence, he had read thousands of books, which together comprised most of his experience. Thousands of lives in thousands of books, lived vicariously, plus so many years of grim familiarity with the many horrors of Roseland, yet he not only kept his sanity but also, in some part of his mind and heart, he remained a little boy, having held tightly to a kernel of innocence. Under the most oppressive and depressing circumstances, he had preserved at least a measure of the purity with which he was born.
I could not have done as much in his position, and I dreaded failing him, which I had been certain I would since that trusting smile he had given me on the service stairs.
The continuing silence seemed both to invite us to get moving and to warn us against rash action.
Diagonally across the vast room, near the southeast corner, the hidden service door in the paneling opened, and Mrs. Tameed entered like an experienced cop clearing a threshold: staying low, pistol in a two-hand grip, sweeping the muzzle left to right.
Although we were at the farther end of the room and in shadow, she saw us, and I could almost feel her fury before she spoke.
“You scum-sucking sonofabitch,” she hissed, perhaps so chastened by the current peril that she felt obliged to clean up her language at least to some extent. “You let them into the house.”
As I’d done with Timothy in the basement, I held a finger to my lips to convey my belief in the desirability of silence, because no matter how much we might despise each other, trading insults right now might bring upon us the fate of Jam Diu and Shilshom.
She took a shot at me.
Forty-four
Just because Mrs. Tameed was to wickedness what Albert Einstein was to modern physics, just because she had never met a vice that she didn’t embrace, just because she wallowed in depravity, just because she was insane, didn’t mean that she shouldn’t have the common sense to recognize what behavior was called for in the current situation. Ranting at me and shooting at me would draw the freaks to us.
Most insane people with a taste for homicide are cunning if not wise. They are as concerned with their survival as they are with finding a virgin to decapitate or a child to strangle. Mrs. Tameed’s noisy antics were foolish. I was of a mind to tell her as much.
She shot at Timothy and me again. At a distance of sixty feet, especially in a cluttered and shadowy environment, you have to be a good marksman to plug your target. She missed.
I couldn’t hit her from sixty feet, especially because guns are always a last resort with me, even if I am often given no choice but to use them.
Her third shot buzzed wasplike past my right ear, an inch from a bad sting.
Turning my back on the Amazon, expecting her to put a lucky shot through my spine, I pulled Timothy with me toward the second service door that was nearly hidden in the paneling, which I had used before when I’d gone to the library. As we approached it, the door started to open, and I drew the boy at once toward the hinge side, so that we were concealed behind it as it swung wide.
Although I couldn’t immediately see who had entered, a low growl identified the newcomer as one of the yellow-eyed pack. When it took two steps into the room, its immense muscular back was toward us.
The door began ever so slowly to ease shut, further exposing the boy and me. Because it was a door intended not to disrupt the lines of the paneling, it had no knob or lever that I could easily grasp to prevent it from arcing away from us. When you wanted to open it, you pushed on it to disengage a touch latch, and you pulled it open with a finger groove concealed under a strip of molding.
The freak stopped where it was and stared across the drawing room at Mrs. Tameed, whom I could still see in the shadowy distance. Muttering to itself, the beast brandished its hatchet at her.
Mrs. Tameed fired two more rounds. She seemed to be aiming at me rather than at the brute that should have been of more concern to her.
The slugs cracked into the wood paneling. I supposed that no sooner had the wounds in the wall opened than the Methuselah current began rewinding the damage.
The freak issued a noisy challenge, half bleat and half roar.
Mrs. Tameed began shouting at it, calling it a stupid pig, though she tossed the F word in both before and after
I never imagined that the freaks could understand English, and I guess they couldn’t, because this one just shrieked at her again and raised its hatchet high.
The wide-set eyes on its long skull provided it with excellent peripheral vision. If Timothy or I made the slightest move, the creature might become aware of us.
In that case, I would need a lot of luck to take it down before it could fully turn and swing the hatchet at me. Its arms were long enough to reach me if it lunged just one step.
Slowly, so the movement might not draw its attention, hoping to shoot it before it sensed us, I raised the Beretta.
The service door that had been drifting shut was suddenly thrust open. A second freak entered behind the first. This one didn’t entirely clear the door, which rested against its flank.
The new arrival was so close that I could have touched it without completely extending my arm. I had no hope of killing both of them before one of them could kill us.
If the excitement of the recent slaughter hadn’t caused the creatures to mutter continuously and to growl low in their throats, they would have heard me trying — and failing — not to breathe.
Mrs. Tameed fired another round, perhaps this time at one of the freaks.
The brute in the lead threw his hatchet at her with such force and accuracy that it spun across the drawing room and embedded its blade in her chest.
Mrs. Tameed’s claim to immortality and the absolute license of a god had been declared invalid. Her death came so suddenly that she didn’t have a chance to cry out in protest.
As the woman dropped, the hatchet-throwing freak loped toward her, shrieking in triumph as it crossed the drawing room. There was something apelike about it, too, perhaps because it moved rather like a man but was not a man, though also because its emotions were always at the surface and instantly expressed in action, as were
