gingerbread.
She glanced at her wristwatch. Almost noon. Ten hours had passed since she'd first seen the luminous rain, the coyotes on the porch. She sensed that they were running out of time and that the final blow of this war, whatever it might be, would be struck soon.
PART SEVEN
'In my end is my beginning.'
– T. S. Eliot, East Coker
53
DORMERS DECORATED WITH CARVED FLORAL-THEME pediments, a wealth of millwork applied with exuberance, primrose gardens surrounded by palisades of wrought iron, fluted porch columns with Italianate capitals, a paneled and intricately painted entry door with stained-glass window: This house was the epitome of architectural order, evidence of humanity's long struggle against chaos and of its search for meaning.
During Molly's lifetime, architects had largely championed sterility, which is order bled of purpose, and celebrated power, which is meaning stripped of grace. By rejecting the fundamentals of the very civilization that made possible its rise, modernism and its philosophical stepchildren offered flash in place of genuine beauty, sensation in place of hope.
All her life, she had watched civilization grow uglier, meaner; now as she followed Virgil up these porch steps, she was overcome by a devastating sense of loss. This beautiful house, on which so much love had been expended in the design and construction, was a symbol of all that would be scoured out of existence by the new ecology and by the brutal new masters of the earth. The destruction that had been wrought in incremental steps by a century of modernism had been exceeded a thousandfold in less than one day; and soon all the works of modernism itself would be obliterated by cold-blooded creatures that embodied the future for which modernism yearned.
All of humanity's follies seemed worth embracing if that were the price to preserve everything beautiful in human civilization. Although the human heart is selfish and arrogant, so many struggle against their selfishness and learn humility; because of them, as long as there is life, there is hope that beauty lost can be rediscovered, that what has been reviled can be redeemed.
Life of the human variety, however, might soon be eradicated as thoroughly as if it had never existed.
With Virgil at the door, Molly looked back at Neil in the street with their six hostages to fortune. Seven years of marriage had gone by so swiftly; seventy would not have been enough.
The kids looked excruciatingly vulnerable. Evil seemed always drawn to children, especially to children. To those through whom flow the strongest currents of evil, the corruption and destruction of the innocent is the greatest bliss.
Virgil made a gruff sound.
As at the residence where they had found Johnny and Abby, the door opened, perhaps because the dog had the power to command it or because a malign force in the house wished to induce Molly to enter, in the spirit of the spider extending an invitation to the fly.
The dog crossed the threshold. Molly hesitated.
If these were the last hours of her life, she wanted to spend them in the service of children, whether or not she could save them in the long run. She was weary, however, and her eyes were sore from lack of sleep. Too many terrible sights had emotionally drained her. Consequently, between the good intention and the act lay a chasm of self-doubt.
She stiffened her resolve with a line of Eliot's verse: Life you may evade, but Death you shall not.
Grim courage could be taken from such hard truths.
She entered the house.
Although no one had touched it, the door closed behind her and Virgil.
As in that other house on another street, she heard a rustling in the walls-the teeming of many-legged multitudes or the beating of uncounted wings.
This time she did not have the moral support of Neil, only the guidance of the German shepherd, which might be in the service of some evil. To trust her intuition and her faith, which had never failed her, she must also trust the dog.
Face to windowpanes, the purple day peered in but brightened nothing. She switched on the flashlight and tried not to think about how much-or little-juice might be left in the batteries.
Virgil went to the stairs and climbed.
Ascending behind him, Molly heard the whirling wash of noise in the walls suddenly organize into a rhythmic tide. This repetitive ebb and flow brought her to a halt at the landing.
In the metered susurrations of this thousand-voiced sigh, she detected intention, meaning, and something like desperation. Listening more closely, she twitched with surprise when the soft cadenced rustling resolved into words: 'Time to murder? time to murder? time to murder? time to murder?'
Although the voices of this malicious choir were many, each registered hardly louder than a breath. The cumulative effect was a whisper of such insidious subtlety that it almost seemed to arise within her head, less like a real sound than like an auditory hallucination.
Abby had insisted that sometimes the walls talked. The girl had not revealed what they said.
'? time to murder? time to murder?'
Molly could not determine whether this was a threat or a command meant to mesmerize by repetition-or something else entirely.
She told herself that she should ignore this compelling dark chorus. Instead, curiosity drew her nearer to the wall of the landing.
Under the cultivating beam of the flashlight, roses bloomed in the wallpaper, mostly yellow, some pink, thornless, leafy.
She slid one hand across the paper roses, not sure what she expected to feel. Maybe a swelling in the plaster. Evidence of structural deformities.
The wall was flat, dry, and solid. A faint vibration tingled across her palm, nothing more.
'? time to murder? time to murder?'
Among the voices in English, she thought that she detected others speaking a different language.
She leaned her head against the wall, one ear to the yellow roses.
A faint but disturbing smell came from that printed rosarium-perhaps chemicals in the paper or in the paste beneath.
When she focused her attention on the voices in foreign tongues, they clarified as though aware that she had a particular interest in them. She heard the same three-word phrase in French and Spanish. Insistent voices chanted in what might have been Russian, Japanese, Chinese, German, Swedish, and others in languages that she could not hope to identify.
Then the rhythm broke. The metered waves of sound collapsed into a wordless rush of thousands upon thousands of crisp little noises, the pita-patation and swish, the tick and buzz, of a busy nest.
Trying to divine by sound alone what kind of pestilence swarmed behind the plaster, she kept one ear to the wall a moment longer-until a lone voice whispered out of that soft tumult of flutter and squirm: 'Molly.'
Startled, she pushed away from the wall.
Tread by tread, the flashlight beam played down the stairs, then riser by riser upward to where the dog
