'Can't get my mind around it,' Neil admitted.
'Harry was dead.'
'Yeah.'
'Brains all over the bathroom.'
'That's a memory maybe even Alzheimer's couldn't erase.'
'So how could he be up on his feet again?'
'Couldn't.'
'And talking.'
'Couldn't.'
'But he did, he was. Neil, for God's sake, I mean, what does something like that have to do with Mars?'
'Mars?'
'Or wherever they're from-the other side of the Milky Way, another galaxy, the end of the universe.'
'I don't know,' he said.
'This isn't like ETs in the movies.'
' 'Cause this isn't the movies.'
'Doesn't seem to be real life, either. The real world runs on logic.'
Having fished spare shells from his raincoat pockets, Neil reloaded the shotgun. He didn't fumble the ammunition. His hands were steady.
Never in her memory had his hands been otherwise, or his mind, or his heart. Steady Neil.
'So where's the logic?' Molly asked. 'I don't see it.'
Half as big as pineapples, two objects dropped from overhead, bounced off the hood of the Explorer.
Molly braked before she realized they were pine cones. They resembled hand grenades as they ricocheted off the windshield and arced away into the night.
'Parasites,' Neil said.
She brought the Explorer to a full stop, half on the road, half on the graveled shoulder. 'Parasites?'
'They might be parasites,' he said, 'these things from the far end of the universe or the dark side of the moon, or wherever they're from. Parasites-that's an old theme in science fiction, isn't it?'
'Is it?'
'Intelligent parasites, capable of infecting a host body and controlling it as if it were a puppet.'
'What host body?'
'Anything, any species. In this case, Harry's corpse.'
'You call that logic?'
'Just speculation.'
'But how does this parasite-I don't care if it's smarter than the entire membership of Mensa combined-how does it control a host that's blown out its brains?'
'The corpse still has a jointed skeleton, musculature, intact nerve pathways below the brainpan,' he said. 'Maybe the parasite plugs into all that and can manipulate the host, brain or no brain.'
Her anxiety ebbed just enough to allow for a small amazement. 'You sure don't sound like a guy who was schooled by Jesuits.'
'Oh, but I do. They value nimbleness of thought, imagination, and open-mindedness.'
'And evidently they watch old Star Trek episodes too much. The parasite theory doesn't qualify as logic in my book.'
For a moment, Neil studied the dripping, silvered forest, which darkled to a black void in the distance. With evident uneasiness, he surveyed the rain-washed county road ahead and behind them.
'Let's keep moving,' he said. 'I think we're more vulnerable when we're sitting still like this.'
13
BY VIRTUE OF ITS EXTRAORDINARY VOLUME, ITS numbing roar, and its fearsome spectacle, the ceaseless rain inspired curious psychological reactions. The monotony of the phenomenon and its oppressive force had the power to depress and disorient.
As she drove slowly across the storm-swept western ridge line above Black Lake, toward the town of the same name, Molly Sloan was able to resist depression and disorientation. But she felt that something essential in herself was gradually being washed away.
Not hope. She would never lose hope; like calcium, hope was part of the structure of her bones.
The certainty of purpose that characterized her approach to life seemed, however, to be less firm than usual, turning soggy under the influence of this deluge, so quickly washed thin and bleached of its former intensity.
She didn't know where she was going, other than to town, or why, other than to seek sanctuary with neighbors. She had always planned her life not a month ahead, not even just a year ahead, but a decade or more in advance, setting goals and striving ever toward them. Now she was unable to see as far as the coming dawn, and without a clear purpose, without a long-term plan, she felt adrift.
She wanted to survive, of course. But survival had never before been enough for her, and it wasn't enough now. To be motivated, she needed a more profound purpose and greater meaning.
Pages crystallizing into chapters, chapters accreting into books: The story-painting, spell-casting, truth-telling work of a novelist had seemed to be a lifelong purpose. Her mother had taught her that talent is a gift from God, that a writer has a sacred obligation to her Creator to explore the gift with energy and diligence, to polish it, to use it to brighten the landscape of her readers' hearts.
In her haste to pack food, weapons, and other essentials for whatever perilous journey might be ahead of them, Molly had forgotten to bring her laptop. She had always written on a computer; she didn't know if her talent would flow as easily, or at all, from the point of a pen.
Besides, she had brought no pen, no pencil. She hadn't included any paper in her provisions, either, only the pages of her current, unfinished manuscript.
Perhaps purpose and meaning and ambitious plans would elude her until she better understood the current situation and, based on more hard facts than she now possessed, could begin to imagine what future might await them.
If understanding was to be achieved, questions needed to be answered.
Although driving at only ten miles per hour through the dismal downpour, she didn't look away from the road when she said to Neil, 'Why T. S. Eliot?'
'What do you mean?'
'What Harry? the thing that used to be Harry? what it said to me. 'I think we are in rats' alley, Where the dead men lost their bones.' '
'Eliot is one of your favorites, right? Probably Harry would know that.'
'Harry's body was there in the hall when he spoke to me, but his brains were in the bathroom, all the memories blown out of them.'
Literally riding shotgun and wary of the night, Neil offered neither an explanation nor even a supposition.
Molly pressed: 'How would your alien parasite have tapped the contents of Harry's mind if Harry didn't have a mind anymore?'
Scattered across the roadway were more fallen birds. Although they were clearly dead, she tried her best to drive around rather than over them.
Grimly, she wondered how soon she would encounter human cadavers heaped in similar numbers.
'Some sci-fi writer,' Neil said at last, 'I think it was Arthur C. Clarke, suggested that an extraterrestrial species, hundreds or thousands of years more advanced than us, would possess technology that would appear to us to be not the result of applied science but entirely supernatural, pure magic.'
'In this case, black magic,' she said. 'Evil. What practical purpose could they have for turning a dead man into a marionette-except to terrorize?'
Ahead in the luminous storm, a separate light arose, and grew brighter as they approached it.
Molly slowed further, allowed the SUV to coast forward.
