before encountered so many bodachs at one time.
Although, from my position in the kitchen, I couldn't see around the living-room archway and down the hall, I knew where the intruders must have entered the house. They had not arisen spontaneously from among the gray dust balls and the moldering socks under Fungus Man's unmade bed. Nor had they manifested out of a boogeyman-infested closet, out of a bathroom faucet, from the toilet bowl. They had arrived in the house by way of the black room.
They seemed eager to leave this place behind them and to explore Pico Mundo- until one of them separated from the churning swarm. It abruptly halted in the center of the living room.
In the kitchen, I considered that no available cutlery, no toxic household cleanser, no weapon known to me would wound this beast that had no substance. I held my breath.
The bodach stood so hunched that its hands, if they were hands, dangled at its knees. Turning its lowered head from side to side, it scanned the carpet for the spoor of its prey.
No troll, crouched in the darkness beneath its bridge, relishing the scent of a child's blood, had ever looked more malevolent.
At the gap between jamb and door, my left eye felt pinched, as though my curiosity had become the serrated jaws of a vise that held me immobile even when it seemed wise to exit at a sprint.
As others of its kind continued to roil and ripple past it, my nemesis rose from its crouch. The shoulders straightened. The head lifted, turned slowly left, then right.
I regretted using peach-scented shampoo, and suddenly I could smell the meaty essence that the greasy smoke from the griddle had deposited upon my skin and hair. A short-order cook, just off work, makes easy tracking for lions and worse.
The all but featureless, ink-black bodach had the suggestion of a snout but no visible nostrils, no apparent ears, and if it had eyes, I could not discern them. Yet it searched the living room for the source of whatever scent or sound had snared its attention.
The creature appeared to focus on the door to the kitchen. As eyeless as Samson in Gaza, it nevertheless detected me.
I had studied the story of Samson in some detail, for he was a classic example of the suffering and the dark fate that can befall those who are… gifted.
Standing very erect now, taller than me, the bodach was an imposing figure in spite of its insubstantiality. Its bold poise and a quality of arrogance in the lift of its head suggested that I was to it as the mouse is to the panther, that it had the power to strike me dead in an instant.
Pent-up breath swelled in my lungs.
The urge to flee became almost overpowering, but I remained frozen for fear that if the bodach had not for certain seen me, then even the small movement of the swinging door would bring it at a run.
Grim expectation made seconds seem like minutes-and then to my surprise, the phantom slumped into a crouch once more and loped away with the others. With the suppleness of black silk ribbon, it slipped between window sash and sill, into sunlight.
I blew out my sour breath and sucked sweet air, watching as a final score of bodachs spilled through the hallway arch.
When these last foul spirits had departed for the Mojave heat, I returned to the living room. Cautiously.
At least a hundred of them had passed through this room. More likely, there had been half again that many.
In spite of all that traffic, not one page of any magazine or romance novel had been ruffled. Their passage had left no slightest impression in the nap of the carpet.
At one of the front windows, I peered out at the blighted lawn and the sun- scorched street. As far as I could determine, none of the recently departed pack lingered in the neighborhood.
The unnatural chill in this small house had gone the way of the bodachs. The desert day penetrated the thin walls until every surface in the living room seemed to be as radiant as the coils of an electric heater.
During their passage, that tumult of purposeful shadows had left no stain on the hallway walls. No trace of the burning-electrical-cord smell remained, either.
For the third time, I stepped up to that doorway.
The black room was gone.
THIRTEEN
BEYOND THE THRESHOLD LAY AN ORDINARY CHAMBER, not infinite in its dimensions, as it had seemed earlier, measuring no more than twelve by fourteen feet.
A single window looked out through the branches of a lacy melaleuca that screened much of the sunlight. Nevertheless, I could see well enough to determine that no source existed for a sullen red light either in the center of this humble space or in any corner.
The mysterious power that had transformed and controlled this room-casting me minutes back, and then forward, in time-was no longer in evidence.
Apparently, this served as Fungus Man's study. A bank of four-drawer filing cabinets, an office chair, and a gray metal desk with a laminated imitation-wood-grain top were the only furnishings.
Side by side on the wall opposite the desk hung three black-and-white, poster-size photographs that appeared to have been printed on a draftsman's digital plotter. They were head shots, portraits of men-one with feverish eyes and a gleeful smile, the other two glowering in the gloom.
All three were familiar, but I could at first put a name to only the one with the smile: Charles Manson, the vicious manipulator whose fantasies of revolution and race war had exposed a cancer at the core of the flower-power generation and had led to the demise of the Age of Aquarius. He had carved a swastika on his forehead.
Whoever the other two might be, they didn't have the look of either Vegas comics or famous philosophers.
Perhaps my imagination, as much as the melaleuca-filtered sunlight, imparted a feint silvery luminescence to each man's intense gaze. This glow reminded me of the milky radiance that informs the hungry glare of animate corpses in movies about the living dead.
In part to alter the quality of those eyes, I switched on the overhead light.
The dust and disorder that characterized the rest of the house were not in evidence here. When he crossed this threshold, Fungus Man left his slovenliness behind and became a paragon of neatness.
The file cabinets proved to contain meticulously kept folders filled with articles clipped from publications and downloaded from the Internet. Drawer after drawer contained dossiers on serial killers and mass murderers.
The subjects ranged from Victorian England's Jack the Ripper to Osama bin Laden, for whom Hell had prepared a special suite of fiery rooms. Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer. Charles Whitman, the sniper who killed sixteen in Austin, Texas, in 1966. John Wayne Gacy: He liked to dress up as a clown at children's parties, had his picture taken at a political event with First Lady Rosalyn Carter, and buried numerous dismembered bodies in his backyard and under his house.
A particularly thick file had been assembled for Ed Gein, who had been the inspiration for both Norman Bates in
