disposal. It happens now and then. Hitchhikers, drifters…there’s always been lots of them moving up and down the California coast. These days, some of them don’t get farther than Moonlight Bay.”
“And you live with that, too.”
“I do what I’m told,” he said coldly.
Toby put his arms around his father as if to protect him, giving me a look of dismay because of the way that I’d challenged his dad.
Manuel said, “We do what we’re told. That’s the way it is here, these days, Chris. Decisions have been made at a very high level to let this business play out quietly. A very high level. Just suppose the President of the United States himself was something of a science buff, and suppose that he saw a chance to make history by putting huge funds behind genetic engineering the way Roosevelt and Truman funded the Manhattan Project, the way Kennedy funded the effort to put a man on the moon, and suppose he and everyone around him — and the politicians who’ve come after him — are now determined to cover this up.”
“Is that what’s happened?”
“No one at the top wants to risk the public’s wrath. Maybe they’re not just afraid of being booted out of office. Maybe they’re afraid of being tried for crimes against humanity. Afraid of being torn apart by angry mobs. I mean…soldiers from Wyvern and their families, who might’ve been contaminated — they’re all over the country now. How many have they passed it to? Could be panic in the streets. An international movement to quarantine the whole U.S. And for no good reason. Because the powers that be think the whole thing might run its course without a major effect, peak soon and then just peter out.”
“Is there a chance of that?”
“Maybe.”
“I don’t think there’s a chance of that.”
He shrugged and with one hand smoothed Toby’s hair, which was spiky and disarranged from the strap on the goggles that he’d been wearing. “Not all the people with symptoms of change are like Lewis Stevenson. What’s happening to them has infinite variety. And some who go through a bad phase…they get over it. They’re in flux. This isn’t an event, like an earthquake or a tornado. This is a process. If it had ever gotten to be necessary, I would’ve dealt with Lewis myself.”
Admitting nothing, I said, “Maybe it was more necessary than you realized.”
“Can’t have just anybody making those judgment calls. There’s got to be order, stability.”
“But there is none.”
“There’s me,” he said.
“Is it possible you’re infected and don’t know it?”
“No. Not possible.”
“Is it possible you’re changing and don’t realize it?”
“No.”
“Becoming?”
“No.”
“You scare the hell out of me, Manuel.”
The owl hooted again.
A faint but welcome breeze stirred like a ladle through the soupy fog.
“Go home,” Manuel said. “It’ll be light soon.”
“Who ordered Angela Ferryman killed?”
“Go home.”
“Who?”
“No one.”
“I think she was murdered because she was going to try to go public. She had nothing to lose, she told me. She was afraid of what she was…becoming.”
“The troop killed her.”
“Who controls the troop?”
“No one. We can’t even
I thought I knew one place where they hung out: the drainage culvert in the hills, where I’d found the collection of skulls. But I wasn’t going to share this information with Manuel, because at this point I couldn’t be sure who were my most dangerous enemies: the troop — or Manuel and the other cops.
“If no one sent them after her, why’d they do it?”
“They have their own agenda. Maybe sometimes it matches ours. They don’t want the world to know about this, either. Their future isn’t in undoing what’s been done. Their future is the new world coming. So if somehow they learned Angela’s plans, they’d deal with her. There’s no mastermind behind this, Chris. There’re all these factions — the benign animals, the malevolent ones, the scientists at Wyvern, people who’ve been changed for the worse, people who’ve been changed for the better. Lots of competing factions. Chaos. And the chaos will get worse before it gets better. Now go home. Drop this. Drop it before someone targets you like they targeted Angela.”
“Is that a threat?”
He didn’t reply.
As I started away, walking the bicycle across the backyard, Toby said, “Christopher Snow. Snow for Christmas. Christmas and Santa. Santa and sleigh. Sleigh on snow. Snow for Christmas. Christopher Snow.” He laughed with innocent delight, entertained by this awkward word game, and he was clearly pleased by my surprise.
The Toby Ramirez I had known would not have been capable of even such a simple word-association game as this one.
To Manuel, I said, “They’ve begun to pay for your cooperation, haven’t they?”
His fierce pride in Toby’s exhibition of this new verbal skill was so touching and so deeply sad that I could not look at him.
“In spite of all that he didn’t have, he was always happy,” I said of Toby. “He found a purpose, fulfillment. Now what if they can take him far enough that he’s dissatisfied with what he is…but then they can’t take him all the way to normal?”
“They will,” Manuel said with a measure of conviction for which there could be no justification. “They will.”
“The same people who’ve created this nightmare?”
“It’s not got only a dark side.”
I thought of the pitiful wails of the visitor in the rectory attic, the melancholy quality of its changeling voice, the terrible yearning in its desperate attempts to convey meaning in a caterwaul. I thought of Orson on that summer night, despairing under the stars.
“God help you, Toby,” I said, because he was my friend, too. “God bless you.”
“God had His chance,” Manuel said. “From now on, we’ll make our own luck.”
I had to get away from there, and not solely because dawn was soon to arrive. I started walking the bike across the backyard again — and didn’t realize that I’d broken into a run until I was past the house and in the street.
When I glanced back at the Nantucket-style residence, it looked different from the way that it had always been before. Smaller than I remembered. Huddled. Forbidding.
In the east, a silver-gray paleness was forming high above the world, either sunrise seeping in or Judgment coming.
In twelve hours I had lost my father, the friendship of Manuel and Toby, many illusions, and much innocence. I was overcome by the terrifying feeling that more and perhaps worse losses lay ahead.
Orson and I fled to Sasha’s house.
31
Sasha’s house is owned by KBAY and is a perk of her position as general manager of the station. It’s a small
