Although the rain had stopped, runoff still fed the gutters. Dirty water, thickened by a jetsam of leaves and litter, surged over his hands.
A low growl from Virgil counseled caution again.
Molly and Neil stopped, said nothing, waited for the man to sense their presence.
His gibbous posture, the intensity of his focus, the curious nature of the task to which he was committed- these things brought to Molly's mind disturbing fairy tales of hateful trolls indulging unholy hungers.
With the hard scrape of metal on blacktop, the grate came loose. The troll slid it aside.
He raised his head, but had no head. He looked over his shoulder at Molly and Neil, but even if he knew they were behind him, he could not see them, because he was Ichabod Crane's nemesis, minus a horse.
The knock-knock-knock of Molly's heart might also have been the fist of madness rapping on the door of her mind.
In this unearthly purplescent morning and sky-shrouding fog, where the laws of nature seemed to have dissolved entirely in some instances and to have been remade in others, Molly half expected that day would not follow dawn. Sunset might swiftly succeed sunrise, without the intervening hope of light, and the next night would then be endless, moonless, starless, and filled with the furtive sounds of a thousand creeping deaths.
The urge to shoot the headless atrocity proved difficult for both Molly and Neil to resist, but if the guillotining blade had not convinced the thing that it was dead, a 9-mm round through the heart wouldn't persuade it to lie down and expire.
The decapitated body of Ken Halleck-manipulated by a parasite puppeteer or by some extraterrestrial power that, based on effect, might as well have been sheer sorcery-lowered itself through the open hole into the storm drain. It dropped out of sight, landing with a splash below.
For an instant the night was still except for the gurgle from the gutters and the drip-drip-drip of sodden trees.
Then Molly heard the sloshing and the hollow thumping of the headless wonder as it slogged through deep water, under the streets of Black Lake, with unimaginable intent. Perhaps it would find a ledge in the storm drain, lie down above the rushing torrents, and offer its flesh as the spore bed for a colony of fungi or another life form of more sinister purpose.
PART FIVE
'We are born with the dead:
See, they return and bring us with them.'
– T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding
33
WAGLESS, ALL BUSINESS, AND AS QUICK AS THE FOG allowed, Virgil led them to a residence on La Cresta Avenue, which was neither near the crest of the mountain nor an avenue, but halfway between the lake and the ridge line, a two-lane street not appreciably different from all the others in town.
The single-story house, in the Craftsman style, looked cozy and welcoming, in spite of the fact that the fierce rain had stripped all the leaves from the trumpet vines that climbed its trellises and had battered beds of cyclamens into red-and purple-petaled ruin.
As they approached the front porch along handsome flagstones, Neil suddenly stepped off the walkway, squished three steps across the soggy lawn, and said, 'Look at this.'
The object of his interest was a stone pine, and not the tree itself so much as what clustered on its fissured bark. Squinting in the bruised light, Molly saw patches of a blackish thallus, flecked with green, growing on the trunk in crustlike forms.
She'd seen lichen similar to this, although no earthly lichen featured luminous elements to equal these. Every emerald-green fleck was softly radiant; the glow pulsed in what she suspected might be a sympathetic rhythm that matched the long, slow throbs of the engines powering the airborne leviathan that had only recently passed over them.
Along the perimeter of every thallus, the aggressive lichen grew at a visible rate, outward in all directions, as if she were watching time-lapse photography. During the minute that she and Neil studied it, the crust advanced almost half an inch.
At this rate, the trunk and every branch would be covered in this scaly scab in only a few hours.
Lichen were themselves complex symbiotic organisms composed of a fungus in union with an alga. They frequently thrived without damage to the host tree.
In this instance, Molly suspected that the stone pine would not survive the encrustation. Either it would perish and fall, hollowed out by a species of rot as alien as the organism colonizing its bark, or it would be invaded, mutated, and remade into the genetic image of a plant from another world.
The radiant emerald pulse that stippled the blackish thallus had a jewel-bright gleam. In different circumstances, the tree might have appeared to be inlaid with a wealth of precious gems, glittering and magical.
No aura of fairyland wonder surrounded the pine, however. Quite the opposite: In spite of its bejeweled aspect, and though the lichen infestation had only recently begun, the tree appeared cancer-ridden, mottled with malignancies.
Virgil had not approached the pine, but had remained on the flagstone walkway, watchful and tense.
Molly shared the dog's wariness. She didn't touch the lichen, fearing that it might transfer to her fingertip and prove able to colonize human skin as readily as it did tree bark.
On the other side of the walkway stood a matching pine, and from a distance, even in this half-light, she could see the luminous lichen thriving on that specimen.
Virgil led them up the porch steps to the front door.
No candles, oil lamps, or other emergency lighting shone inside. The windows were dark except for dim reflections of the purple glow that suffused the lazily stirring mist.
If they entered without knocking, they were inviting gunfire.
On the other hand, if children inside were already in any kind of danger-from Michael Render or from something even less human-Molly and Neil might raise the level of jeopardy by announcing themselves.
Their dilemma was resolved, in part, when the front-door lock clicked and disengaged.
Reflexively, they stepped back and to the side, making less obvious targets of themselves.
Virgil stood his ground.
The door opened in a swift, inward sweep. Although only the influx of fog-filtered morning sunshine illuminated the small foyer, visibility was sufficient for Molly to discern that the space was deserted, as though they were being welcomed by a ghost.
The hallway beyond the foyer remained as dark as a snake hole.
To leave both of Neil's hands free for the shotgun, Molly produced her flashlight.
Stout-hearted, Virgil boldly entered in advance of the light.
From the porch, with the flash, Molly probed past the foyer. A narrow hall table, two vases atop it. A door at the far end. She saw no immediate threat.
Although all of the dogs had exhibited extraordinary behavior this night, though Virgil in particular had astonished with the rose and with his apparent understanding of Molly's mission, entering a stranger's house, uninvited and unannounced, required nerve and full trust in the animal's reliability. For a moment, she couldn't summon either, and Neil hesitated, too.
