each other. Their heads audibly knocked, and they crashed down onto the frozen mud where the truck had been only an instant before.
Except it wasn’t gone. Not entirely. The floodlights remained, two circles of light floating in midair. The dogs sprang back up, wheeled toward the lights, then began barking furiously at them. Bon’s spine was humped up, her fur bristling, and she backed away from the floating, disembodied lights as she yapped. Angus had no throat left for barking, each roaring yawp hoarser than the one before. Jude noted that their shadow twins had vanished, fled with the truck, or had gone back inside their corporeal bodies, where they’d always been hiding, perhaps. Jude supposed—the thought seemed quite reasonable—that those black dogs attached to Bon and Angus had been their souls.
The round circles of the floodlights began to fade, going cool and blue, shrinking in on themselves. Then they winked out, leaving nothing behind except faint afterimages printed on the backs of Jude’s retinas, wan, moon- colored disks that floated in front of him for a few moments before fading away.
20
Jude wasn’t ready until the sky in the east was beginning to lighten with the first show of false dawn. Then he left Bon in the car and brought Angus inside with him. He trotted up the stairs and into the studio. Georgia was where he’d left her, asleep on the couch, under a white cotton sheet he’d pulled off the bed in the guest room.
“Wake up, darlin’,” he said, putting a hand on her shoulder.
Georgia rolled toward him at his touch. A long strand of black hair was pasted to her sweaty cheek, and her color was bad—cheeks flushed an almost ugly red, while the rest of her skin was bone white. He put the back of his hand against her forehead. Her brow was feverish and damp.
She licked her lips. “Whafuck time is it?”
“Five.”
She glanced around, sat up on her elbows. “What am I doing here?”
“Don’t you know?”
She looked up at him from the bottoms of her eyes. Her chin began to tremble, and then she had to look away. She covered her eyes with one hand.
“Oh, God,” she said.
Angus leaned past Jude and stuck his snout against her throat, under her jaw, nudging at it, as if telling her to keep her chin up. His great staring eyes were moist with concern.
She jumped when his wet nose kissed her skin, sat the rest of the way up. She gave Angus a startled, disoriented look and laid a hand on his head, between his ears.
“What’s he doing inside?” She glanced at Jude, saw he was dressed, black Doc Martens, ankle-length duster. At almost the same time, she seemed to register the throaty rumble of the Mustang idling in the driveway. It was already packed. “Where are you going?”
“Us,” he said. “South.”
RIDE ON
21
The daylight began to fail when they were just north of Fredericksburg, and that was when Jude saw the dead man’s pickup behind them, following at a distance of perhaps a quarter mile.
Craddock McDermott was at the wheel, although it was hard to make him out clearly in the weak light, beneath the yellow shine of the sky, where the clouds glowed like banked embers. Jude could see he was wearing his fedora again, though, and drove hunched over the wheel, shoulders raised to the level of his ears. He had also put on a pair of round spectacles. The lenses flashed with a weird orange light, beneath the sodium-vapor lamps over I-95, circles of gleaming flame—a visual match for the floods on the brush guard.
Jude got off at the next exit. Georgia asked him why, and he said he was tired. She hadn’t seen the ghost.
“I could drive,” she said.
She had slept most of the afternoon and now sat in the passenger seat with her feet hitched under her and her head resting on her shoulder.
When he didn’t reply, she took an appraising look at his face and said, “Is everything all right?”
“I just want to get off the road before dark.”
Bon stuck her head into the space between the front seats to listen to them talk. She liked to be included in their conversations. Georgia stroked her head, while Bon stared up at Jude with a look of nervous misgiving visible in her chocolate eyes.
They found a Days Inn less than half a mile from the turnpike. Jude sent Georgia to get the room, while he sat in the Mustang with the dogs. He didn’t want to take a chance on being recognized, wasn’t in the mood. He hadn’t been in the mood for about fifteen years.
As soon as Georgia was out of the car, Bon scrambled into her empty seat, curled up in the warm ass print Georgia had left in the leather. As Bon settled her chin on her front paws, she gave Jude a guilty look, waiting for him to yell, to tell her to get in the back with Angus. He didn’t yell. The dogs could do what they wanted.
Not long after they first got on the road, Jude had told Georgia about how the dogs had gone after Craddock. “I’m not sure even the dead man knew that Angus and Bonnie could go at him like that. But I do think Craddock sensed they were some kind of threat, and I think he would’ve been glad to scare us out of the house and away from them, before we figured out how to use the dogs against him.”
At this, Georgia had twisted around in her seat, to reach into the back and dig behind Angus’s ears, leaning far enough into the rear to rub her nose against Bon’s snout. “Who are my little hero dogs? Who is it? Yeah, you are, that’s right,” and so forth, until Jude had started to feel half mad with hearing it.
Georgia came out of the office, a key hooked over one finger, which she wiggled at him before turning and walking around the corner of the building. He followed in the car and parked at an empty spot, in front of a beige door among other beige doors, at the rear of the motel.
She went inside with Angus while Jude walked with Bon along a tangle of scrub woods at the edge of the parking lot. Then he came back and left Bon with Georgia and took Angus for the walk. It was important for neither of them to stray far from the dogs.
These woods, behind the Days Inn, were different from the forest around his farmhouse in Piecliff, New York. They were unmistakably southern woods, smelled of sweet rot and wet moss and red clay, of sulfur and sewage, orchids and motor oil. The atmosphere itself was different, the air denser, warmer, sticky with dampness. Like an armpit. Like Moore’s Corner, where Jude had grown up. Angus snapped at the fireflies, blowing here and there in the ferns, beads of ethereal green light.
Jude returned to the room. In the ten minutes it took to pass through Delaware, he had stopped at a Sunoco for gas and thought to buy a half dozen cans of Alpo in the convenience store. It had not occurred to him, however, to buy paper plates. While Georgia used the bathroom, Jude pulled one of the drawers out of the dresser, opened two cans, and slopped them in. He set the drawer on the floor for the dogs. They fell upon it, and the sound of wet slobbering and swallowing, harsh grunts and gasps for air, filled the room.
Georgia came out of the bathroom, stood in the door in faded white panties and a strappy halter that left her midriff bare, all evidence of her Goth self scrubbed away, except for her shiny, black-lacquered toenails. Her right hand was wrapped in a fresh knot of bandage. She looked at the dogs, nose wrinkled in an expression of amused disgust.
“Boy, are we livin’ foul. If housekeepin’ finds out we been feedin’ our dogs from the dresser drawers, we will
