itself on at a preselected time. Yet the dial glowed with green light,
and strange music issued from the speakers.
The chains of notes and overlapping rhythms were not music, actually,
just the essence of music in the sense that a pile of lumber and screws
amounted to the essence of a cabinet. She could identify a symphony of
instruments--flutes, oboes, clarinets, horns of all kinds, violins,
timpani, snare drums--but there was no melody, no identifiable cohesive
structure, merely a sense of structure too subtle to quite hear, waves
of sound that were sometimes pleasant and sometimes jarringly
discordant, now loud, now soft, ebbing and flowing.
'Maybe,' Toby said.
Heather's attention had been on the radio. With surprise, she turned
to her son.
Toby had gotten off his chair. He was standing by the table, staring
across the room at the radio, swaying like a slender reed in a breeze
only he could feel. His eyes were glazed. 'Well ... yeah, maybe ...
maybe ...'
The unmelodious tapestry of sound coming from the radio was the aural
equivalent of the ever-changing masses of color that she had seen
swarming across the television, computer, and Game Boy screens: a
language that evidently spoke directly to the subconscious.
She could feel the hypnotic pull of it herself, although it exerted
only a small fraction of the influence on her that it did on Toby.
Toby was the vulnerable one. Children were always the easiest prey,
natural victims in a cruel world.
'... I'd like that ... nice ... pretty,' the boy said dreamily, and
then he sighed.
If he said 'yes,' if he opened the inner door, he might not be able to
evict the thing this time. He might be lost forever.
'No!' Heather said.
Seizing the radio cord, she tore the plug out of the wall socket hard
enough to bend the prongs. Orange sparks spurted from the outlet,
showered across the counter tile.
Though unplugged, the radio continued to produce the mesmerizing waves
of sound.
She stared at it, aghast and uncomprehending.
Toby remained entranced, speaking to the unseen presence, as he might
have spoken to an imaginary playmate. 'Can I? Hmmm? Can I . . .
will you . . . will you?'
The damn thing was more relentless than the drug dealers in the city,
who did their come-on shtick for kids at schoolyard fences, on street
corners, in videogame parlors, outside movie theaters, at the malls,
wherever they could find a venue, indefatigable, as hard to eradicate
as body lice.
Batteries. Of course. The radio operated off either direct or
alternating current.
'... maybe ... maybe ...'
She dropped the Uzi on the counter, grabbed the radio, popped open the
plastic cover on the back, and tore out the two rechargeable
batteries.
