She got up and stalked out. “Dinner in ten minutes,” she called over her shoulder.
“There’s obviously food on the table,” he muttered—but very softly. Then he went back to his desk, put the Corona aside, and opened the laptop. He began to type.
Outside, the electric sky flashed.
He worked steadily. Thunder began rolling, as the source of the lightning swept closer, rumbling across the gathering night. Outside, the kids, now wearing sheets, swooped in the dark.
It was as if death echoed in the thunder, for he knew that this same storm, across the divide between the worlds, brought with it the body thieves.
Downstairs, Brooke began singing, as she usually did after they’d fought, “Listen to the mockingbird sweetly singing, singing over her grave…”
She knew, that was why she was singing a death song like that. That was also why the kids were playing ghost, they knew in their secret hearts that their counterparts in the other universe had lost their souls.
“Supper’s ready,” Brooke yelled, “and you might think about coming down in a reasonable time for once, Wylie.”
He thought of Martin in his prison cell. Looked, in his mind’s eye, and saw him standing there, just standing in the steel and concrete chamber.
He knew that Martin could hear his friends, most of whom he had known all his life, in the next room—what was left of the town crowded into that small space—arguing about whether or not to kill him.
They didn’t care about the ten million bucks. What was that, anyway, at this point? But they had this warning from the authorities, and they still trusted their authorities.
“You idiots,” he yelled, “he knows something, that’s why General Samson wants him dead. The man knows!”
“Shut up and get down here, your supper’s getting cold!”
“Yessum!”
Texas Max, the local contrabandista, had gotten in some fine absinthe recently, which Wiley had bought, of course, and put in the back of his desk drawer after giving it a taste. Hideous stuff, but it did pack a pop. He got it out now, unscrewed the bottle, and chug-a-lugged.
Fuckaroo.
He went down to his dinner, and ate in silence.
“What’s that smell, daddy?”
“What smell?”
“Ew, Daddy’s been eating licorice.”
Brooke eyed him, but said nothing. In hope of disguising the smell, he gobbled pearl onions. He’d left the damn absinthe on his desk, too. He needed to get that back out of sight. In the past, there had been serious fights over his various excursions into the world of drugs. After discovering that there was not a single official opium den left on earth, he’d set one up in the garage. He’d needed to see what opium was actually like for a book. When she’d found him and Matt out there stupefied, and Matt still in his cop getup, she’d hit the ceiling. And as far as his crack pipe was concerned, even he wasn’t crazy enough to try the stuff, but he had the pipe. Again, research. Like the dominatrix. It had taken some real fast talking when that damn Amazon had burst in on them one night demanding cash for pictures. But it hadn’t looked like him in the contraption, thank God.
Lila hadn’t fazed Brooke. “If you want to get into leather, I’m your girl,” she’d said. “But be careful, because once I start, I ain’t stoppin’.”
She was back in the kitchen starting in on his job, which was the washing up. Kelsey joined her, still in her ghost robe, and their voices as they worked together created in him a joy so gorgeous that he thought he might levitate. He loved this family of his so very, very much.
“Let me do that,” he said, getting up. He took the stew pot from her and set about scouring it. She was not a Teflon user, she preferred iron and copper—anything, in his opinion, that increased the workload of the cleanup crew.
So be it, though, she was one master cook, she could turn twelve carrots and a few pounds of beef into manna, as she just had.
As he worked, he did not see the face that appeared at the window so briefly, the dark mirrors of eyes, the terrible eyes. None of them saw it.
EIGHT
DECEMBER 6
IN THE DEEP OF A MAN
GENERAL AL NORTH WOKE UP to find that his head had been forced back and something was being shoved down his throat. It was a struggle just to draw breath.
Instinct made him try to scream, but he gagged against what tasted sour and cold, and must be metal. His eyes focused on the only thing he could see, which was a white film of some sort. He looked at it, trying to understand what it might be. It undulated slightly, perhaps being moved by a draft. And then he realized that it was a white sheet—that his own bedsheet was drawn over his face.
Every muscle in his body twisted and tightened, until he thought they were going to knot and pop like rubber bands. His lungs bubbled, he began to feel air hunger, and then was lost in a hell of gagging, as the thing in his throat was twisted round and round.
It got dark. There was no warning, no flicker of lights. It simply got dark. Al couldn’t tell if he’d been blinded or the lights had been turned out.
Then he saw a small red glow. He smelled tobacco smoke.
“Who are you?” he tried to ask around the thing in his throat. His voice was a pitiful, choked gabble.
Something brushed against his naked body, first on his face and neck and chest, then his shoulders, his arms, legs, genitals. A soft tickling, like the fingers of a mischievous woman. Then came the most exquisite sensation, an extraordinary, profound relief: the hard, pulsing thing was drawn out of his throat. He felt air roar in, heard gargling, then there came a sound, high, shattered—which stopped when he snapped his mouth closed, determined not to shriek like that, not a general in the United States Air Force.
In the thousand places on his body that the tickling was present, there began a stinging. This sensation deepened fast, and as it did, subtle fire seemed to race through his skin. He groaned, willing the raping fingers to quit, but they would not quit.
Voices murmured in an unknown language, a strangely soft tongue with a twanging music in it, full of lisps and peculiar whistling sounds mixed with ugly gutturals. It was complex with nuance, trembling with emotion, not human.
A face came into view, peering at him, waxy with makeup. The face was female, but the eyes—gold, oddly metallic—stared with a reptile’s empty fury. Implacable. He thought it must be a mask. Yes, plastic. Or no, it was pliant, it was alive, but once again there was a reptilian effect—a shimmering smoothness that suggested that it was composed not of skin, but scales, very delicate ones. The eyes began snapping back and forth like the weak eyes of an albino. They looked like actual metal, like gold teeth might look. They were sickening.
As the figure moved in and out of view, black, curly hair bobbed prettily. It was a woman, he was sure, and she’d just had her hair done.
He did not want to die like this, in ignorant agony, like some lab animal being dissected alive on behalf of an experiment that it could never hope to understand.
He tried to speak, but nothing came out but puffs of air. Then he felt something against his head—spikes. They seemed to drive into his skull. The golden eyes fluttered and darted, the voices pattered on, rapid-fire. He felt, then, something entering his rectum, more as if it was crawling into him than being thrust in.
She said something—“Waluthota.” Said it again, louder. Speaking to him.
“I can’t—”
The thing was pushed back into his mouth, down his throat, he could feel it in his stomach, could feel it meeting the thing that had been sent up his colon, and now there was a sizzling sound and a taste like burnt bacon,
