shower.'
'Why?' Jack said. 'You look perfectly clean.'
'Maybe, but I don't feel clean. You three go ahead. It's a easy walk. I'll catch up with you.'
Jack nodded absently. Lyle's theory was beginning to bother him. Could Gia have been the trigger? The possibility, remote as it was, shot a gout of acid from his gut into his chest.
11
Hasan's turned out to be a small Middle Eastern cafe and restaurant. The orange awning over the natural wooden front sported English and Arabic. The walls inside were white stucco, trimmed with red and green stripes. A widescreen TV was tuned to some Arab CNN-wannabe channel.
The owners, a smiling middle-aged couple with thick accents, greeted Charlie with the deference earned by a regular customer. The place was only a quarter full and, as Lyle had said, they had the pick of the tables. At Jack's nudging-he didn't want anyone eavesdropping-Charlie chose one in a rear corner. It had a marble top and chairs with woven straw backs.
Jack went into the men's room and took off his shirt. He checked his bandage and found blood starting to seep through. The wound ached but didn't seem too much worse, given how he'd mistreated it. He slipped back into his shirt and packed a couple of paper towels over the bandage.
Lyle arrived a few minutes later, his dreads still wet from his shower. The waitress had brought a Diet Pepsi for Charlie, a Sprite for Gia, and a couple of Killian's for Jack and Lyle.
'I suppose I should tell you about the Otherness,' Jack said.
Gia frowned. 'Do you think you should go into that?'
'Well, it should explain why I think if anyone triggered the strangeness in that house, it was me instead of you.'
Somewhere in the back of his head he heard a voice mutter, It's always about you, isn't it. Not true. Most times he didn't want it to be about him, but this time he did. Because he refused to accept Lyle's alternative that Gia had triggered the manifestations. Or maybe he was afraid to accept it. He didn't want Gia involved.
'I know, but it sounds so...' She rubbed a hand over her face. 'What am I thinking? I was going to say it sounds so far out. But after today...'
'Right,' Lyle said. 'After today you're going to have to go some to be too far out for us. I think we left 'far out' in the dust. Or rather, the blood.'
Jack found Charlie staring at him. 'You said 'Otherness'? What that mean?'
Jack noticed that the events in the cellar seemed to have scared some of the hip-hop out of the younger Kenton.
The waitress came with the menus.
'Why don't we order, then talk,' Jack said.
Gia looked at him. 'You can't be hungry after that.'
'I'm always hungry.'
The menu was bilingual-English on the left, Arabic on the right. Throughout the word vegetable was spelled 've-gitible.' Hasan's offered salad, falafel, hummus, tahini, baba ganoush, fatoush, lebneh, fried calamari, tajin eggplant, and tajin calamari.
Tajin... was that like Cajun?
Lots of kababs-lamb, veal, chicken, and kofta, whatever that was.
Jack nudged Gia. 'What are you going to have?'
'I'll have a little hummus and a pita. That's about all I can stomach right now. How about you?'
'I'm thinking about the special.'
Gia looked and gasped. 'Tongue with testicles? Jack, don't you dare!'
'You know I always like to try new-'
'Don't. You. Dare.'
'Okay. Just for you, my dear, I will forego that epicurean delight.' He'd had no intention of dining on a dish that sounded like a sex act anyway. 'I guess I'll just settle for a lamb kabab.'
Once their orders were in, Jack leaned over the table.
'Let me start at the beginning. It may take a minute or two, but a little patience will pay off. It began last summer when a crazy Hindu sailed a boatload of creatures called rakoshi to the West Side docks. They were big and vicious and they threatened someone I care very much about.' He glanced at Gia and their eyes met. They'd come so close to losing Vicky, and Jack himself had barely survived. 'But they could be killed, and I killed them.'
Not all of them. One still survived, but Jack decided not to go into that.
'I thought that was that. It was the strangest occurrence of my life until then, but I put it behind me and moved on. But then, last spring, I learned that the origin of those creatures was not exactly earthly.'
Lyle said, 'We're not heading for UFOville, are we?'
'No. This is weirder. While looking for a missing wife I fell in with some strange people who told me that the rakoshi had been 'fashioned'-that was the word-of everything bad in humans. Something took human lust and greed and hate and viciousness and distilled it into these creatures without any leavening factors. They were human evil to the Nth.'
'You talkin' demons,' Charlie said.
'They'd fit the description, I guess.'
'And the 'something' you said did this. You talkin' Satan?'
'No. I was told it's called the Otherness.'
'Could be just another name for Satan.'
'I don't think so. Satan's a pretty easy concept to grasp. He was thrown out of heaven because of his pride and now he spends his time luring souls away from God and stashing them in hell where they suffer for eternity. That about right?'
'Well, yeah,' Charlie said. 'But-'
'Fine, then.' Jack didn't want to get sidetracked here. 'But I've had the Otherness explained to me a couple of times and I still don't have a handle on it. Apparently two vast, unimaginably complex cosmic forces have been at war forever. The prize in this war is all existence-this world, other realities, other dimensions, everything is at stake. Before you start feeling important, I was told that our corner of reality is just a tiny piece of that whole, and of no special importance. But if one side's going to be the winner, it's got to take all the marbles. Even our little backwater.'
'Don't tell me,' Lyle said, his tone bordering on disdain. 'One of these forces is Good and one is Eeeevil.'
'Not quite. That would make it easy. The way I understand it, the side that has our reality in its pocket is not good or evil, it's just there. The most we can expect from it is benign neglect.'
''Thou shalt not have false gods before me,' ' Charlie intoned.
'It's not a god. It's a force, a state of being, a...' Jack spread his hands in frustration. 'I don't know if we can grasp anything that vast and alien.'
'Does it have a name?' Lyle said.
Jack shook his head. 'No. I've heard someone refer to it as the Ally, but that's not quite right. It will only act on our behalf to keep us in its possession. Other than that it doesn't give a damn about us.'
'And the Otherness is... what?' Lyle said. 'The other side?'
'Right. And it doesn't have a name either, but people who seem to know about these things call it the Otherness because it represents everything not us. Its rules are different than ours. It wants to convert our form of reality to its own, one that'll be toxic for us-physically and spiritually.'
'That Satan, I tell you!' Charlie cried. Lyle rolled his eyes. Charlie caught it and pointed to Jack. 'He just nailed Satan dead on, bro, and you know it. Why don't you stop frontin' and cop to it?'
To head off a looming argument, Jack said, 'Well, the Otherness could have been the inspiration for the idea of Satan. I've heard it described as vampiric, and it sounds to me as if its idea of reality would create a hell on
