'You feel it, too,' he insisted, and he padded barefoot to a window.
The low amber light from the nightstand lamp was insufficient to disguise the luminous nature of the torrents that tinseled the forest and silvered the ground.
'What's happening?' he asked.
'Unusual mineral content, pollution of some kind,' she replied, resorting to the explanations that she had already considered and largely rejected.
The curiosity and wonder that earlier compelled her to venture among the coyotes had curdled into trepidation. With uncharacteristic timidity, she yearned to return to bed, to shrink among the covers, to sleep away the freak storm and wake by the light of a normal dawn.
Neil disengaged the latch on the casement window and reached for the handle to crank it open.
'Don't,' she warned with more urgency than she had intended.
Half turning from the window, he faced her.
She said, 'The rain smells strange. It feels? unclean.'
Only now he noticed her robe. 'How long have you been up?'
'Couldn't sleep. Went downstairs to write. But?'
He looked at the ceiling again. 'There. Do you feel that?'
Maybe she felt something. Or maybe her imagination was building mountains in the air.
His gaze tracked across the ceiling. 'It's not falling toward us anymore.' His voice quieted to a whisper. 'It's moving eastward? west to east.'
She didn't share his apparently instinctual perception, though she found herself wiping her right hand on her robe-the hand that she had held out in the rain and had later washed so vigorously with orange-scented soap.
'As big as two mountains, three? so huge,' whispered Neil. He made the sign of the cross-forehead to breast, left shoulder to right-which she had not seen him do in years.
Suddenly she felt more than heard a great, deep, slow throbbing masked by the tremulous roar of the rain.
'? sift you as wheat?'
Those words of Neil's, so strange and yet disturbingly familiar, refocused her attention from the ceiling to him. 'What did you say?'
'It's huge.'
'No. After that. What did you say about wheat?'
As if the words had escaped him without his awareness, he regarded her with bewilderment. 'Wheat? What're you talking about?'
A flickering at the periphery of her vision drew Molly's attention to the clock on her nightstand. The glowing green digits changed rapidly, continuously, as though racing to keep pace with time run amok.
'Neil.'
'I see it.'
The numbers were sequencing neither forward toward morning nor backward toward midnight. Rather, they resembled the streaming mathematics of high-speed computer calculations rushing across a monitor.
Molly consulted her wristwatch, which was not a digital model. The hour hand swept clockwise, counting off a full day in half a minute, while the minute hand spun counterclockwise even faster, as though she were stranded on a rock in the river of time, with the future flowing away from her as swiftly as did the past.
The mysterious deep pulses of sound-almost below the threshold of human hearing but felt in blood and bone-seemed to swell her heart as they pushed through it.
The mood and moment were unique, like nothing that she had previously experienced, but the atmosphere was as unmistakably hostile as it was unprecedented.
With the coyotes, Molly's instinct had seemed to divorce itself from her common sense. She had acted on the former, recklessly stepping onto the front porch.
Now instinct and common sense were married again. Both intuition and cold reason counseled that she and Neil were in serious trouble even though they could not yet grasp the nature of it.
In his eyes, she saw the recognition of this truth. During their years together, serving alternately as confessor and redeemer to each other, they had arrived at an intimacy of mind and spirit that often made words superfluous.
At her nightstand, she withdrew the 9-mm pistol from the drawer. She always kept it loaded; nevertheless, she ejected the magazine to confirm that it lacked no rounds. The gleam of brass. Ten cartridges.
After locking in the magazine again, she put the weapon on the vanity, beside her hairbrush and hand mirror, within easy reach.
Across the room, on the dresser, stood a collection of half a dozen antique music boxes inherited from her mother. Spontaneously, a steely plink-and-jangle issued from them: six different melodies woven into a bright discordance.
On the lids of two boxes, clockwork-driven porcelain figurines suddenly became animated. Here, a man and woman in Victorian finery danced a waltz. There, a carousel horse turned around, around.
The cacophony of brittle notes abraded her nerves and seemed to cut like a surgical saw through her skull bone.
These familiar objects, a part of her life since childhood, became in an instant strange, disquieting.
Neil stared at the tiny dancers for a moment, at the circling horse, and appeared to be unsettled by them. He made no attempt to switch off the music boxes.
Instead, he turned to the window once more, but he didn't crank it open, as he had been prepared to do a minute ago. He engaged the latch that previously he had unlocked.
4
AS THEY HURRIEDLY DRESSED IN JEANS AND SWEATERS, Molly told him about the coyotes.
The somber drone of the rain, the manic plinking of the music boxes, and the almost subliminal pulsation of unknown source served as a musical score, without coherent melody, that made the adventure on the front porch seem far more ominous in the telling than it had been in actual experience. She tried-but knew that she failed-to convey to Neil the sense of wonder and the reverential awe that had characterized the incident.
Seated on the vanity bench, striving to describe the bond with nature that she had felt as she'd stood among the coyotes, she worked her feet into a pair of waterproof walking shoes. Her hands trembled. She fumbled with the laces, finally managed to tie them.
Still talking, she picked up, by habit, the brush that lay beside the pistol. Although she realized the absurdity of trying to deny the weirdness of the moment by resorting to mundane tasks, she turned to the mirror to assess the state of her hair.
Her reflection was as it should be, but everything else in the mirror was wrong. Behind her lay not the lamplit and cozy bedroom, neat except for the disarranged bedclothes; instead, she saw filth and ruin.
Her voice broke off in midsentence, and she dropped the hairbrush. She swung around on the bench to confirm that the room had changed. It was as it had always been.
In reality, only the bedside clock was out of order. A chaos of radiant green numbers continued to spill across the readout window.
In the mirror, however, stained walls were textured by moss or mold. One lamp remained, the shade cocked and rotting. Across the headboard of the broken-down bed crawled vines too succulent to be native to these California mountains; gray-green and glistening with moisture, the leaves hung like a host of panting tongues.
She was tempted again to believe that she had never risen from bed and gone downstairs, that instead she had been asleep through these events-and still slept. The rain and all the strangeness that began with it-from the coyotes to this mirror-made more sense if they were the fantasies of sleep.
Drawn to her side, Neil reached out to touch the vanity mirror, as though he expected to find that the image in it was not merely a flat reflection, but a three-dimensional reality, a world beyond the mirror.
Irrationally, Molly stayed his hand. 'No.'
