them, and you are certain to be in the first wave of mass deaths when the inevitable plague strikes.
Preston expects the plague will be first, followed by the death of the oceans. Then the nuclear war arising from a vicious conflict over the shrinking food supply, and finally the asteroid impact. His hope is to survive as many catastrophes as possible, assuming that prescription medications and electricity remain available.
He is eager to return to his video games, pornography, and drug cocktails. But his rider has a task for him first.
Suddenly Preston is inspired to prepare for the day when his parents might attempt to control him financially by scheming to have his SSI disability checks taken away from him. Someone out there is probably foolish enough to employ a thirty-six-year-old man with no skills, but Preston isn’t so foolish as to accept a job. Life is too short for work. Especially with the planet-wide plague coming. One way to replace that lost SSI income would be to steal it. Indeed, theft is the only course of action that makes sense to him.
The homes of prosperous people contain a variety of valuables. Preston’s father and mother manage the household—whatever the hell that means—for a prosperous artist and her husband. They carry keys to their employers’ home.
To this point, even though he has been without drugs and booze for twenty-seven days, Preston is sufficiently clear-minded to follow the sequence of thoughts through which his secret rider guides him. But he arrives at an insoluble dilemma and is so deeply disappointed that he wants only to get wasted and play video games until his eyes bleed. The hitch: There is no way to get at his parents’ keys to the artist’s house. They guard the Calvino keys more closely than they guard those to their own home, and carry them at all times. Walter and Imogene are as obsessive about responsibility and duty as they are about cleanliness. They are so neurotic that an entire thousand-page psychology textbook could be devoted to them. They’re sick, they really are, they make Preston nuts.
This is the problem with life. Nothing is easy. It’s just one damn thing after another. The line between where you are and where you want to be is never straight and simple to follow. There are always walls you have to get around, fences you have to climb over, and when you go around and over all of them, then there’s suddenly a damn ravine in front of you, a canyon, an
Because Walter and Imogene touched many surfaces in the Calvino house while the rider inhabited the place, it knows them to their core. It knows they keep a spare Calvino key taped to the underside of a dresser drawer in the master bedroom of this house. Although Preston doesn’t have any knowledge of this key, his rider induces in him a dim memory of it, and with renewed excitement, Preston ventures upstairs to find this treasure.
With key in hand, Preston sets out for the nearest locksmith to have it copied. He’s not permitted to drive his parents’ second car, but neither he nor his rider hesitates to do so. Because Mrs. Nash’s boy is sober at the moment and because his rider gently represses Preston’s impulse to speed, to run stoplights, and to gesture rudely at other drivers, no cars are struck and no pedestrians are run down.
Although his parents would not be easy mounts, their son is no harder to control than a child’s rocking horse.
After Preston returns to the house, replaces the key that he stole, and hides his three copies in his apartment, he telephones his pill guy, Dr. Charles Burton Glock, who has several medical degrees under different names from a variety of third-world countries. He orders prescriptions for his three favorite mood elevators. Dr. Glock is delighted to hear Preston is safely home from rehab. He generously offers free delivery on this initial order.
Preston’s relationship with Dr. Glock is the most meaningful of his life. His disability caseworker gave him the doctor’s name and number, the doctor certified his disability; and now the doctor assures his freedom from phantom pain and all worry.
Dr. Glock has interests in a few pharmacies around the city, and delivery is faster than you can get a pizza, though of course, the pharmacist doesn’t have to bake anything.
The primly dressed young woman who brings the order looks like a door-to-door witness for an outreach religion, but when the rider conspires to have Preston touch her hand when paying for his order, it finds she will be easy to occupy. Her name is Melody Lane, but there is no melody in her heart, only a thrilling dissonance, and the rider realizes that she will be more than just a means of transport.
At the rider’s direction, Preston asks Melody to wait a moment. He returns to his apartment and retrieves one of the three keys to the Calvino house. Upon returning to the woman, he holds out the key to her.
As it departs one horse to mount the next, the rider leaves a come-to-me curse, but Preston is aware neither of the curse nor of having been ridden.
With genuine bewilderment, as the woman takes the key from him, Preston says, “I don’t know why I’m doing this.”
“I do,” Melody says as she pockets the key. “Surely it’s not the first thing you’ve ever done that seems to make no sense.”
“You’re right about that.”
“I’ll be seeing you,” she says, and leaves the house, closing the door after herself.
Before knowing Melody for what she is, the rider initially intended to use her only to get back to the Calvino house. But she is so interesting that it decides to stay with her a few hours and also to incorporate her into its mission.
Melody is pretty but not strikingly beautiful, fresh-faced, with direct brown eyes, an appealing smile. She is demure, almost shy. She seems modest and gentle. Her quiet voice falls pleasantly on the ear, and altogether her manner charms and inspires trust. Such a disguise serves any monster well, but it is especially helpful in avoiding suspicion if you are, like Melody, a murderer of children.
She may very well be essential to the certain destruction of the Calvino family.
40
HAVING GOTTEN NOT ONE MINUTE OF SLEEP DURING THE night, John claimed at breakfast that he felt weary, out of sorts, as if the flu might be coming on, which was true as far as it went. He allowed Nicky to think he had called in sick, but of course he was already on an unpaid leave.
He retreated to his study on the first floor with an insulated pot of caffeine-free coffee. For a while he stood at a window, gazing at the backyard.
On the grass blazed the leaves of the scarlet oak, like scales shed by a dragon.
The scattering of fallen leaves lay undisturbed. In daylight, no spirit, blithe or otherwise, capered through them.
He didn’t know what to think of the incident with the leaves. In the dark, after a generous serving of Chivas Regal, the presence—first warning, then playful—had seemed as real as the plume of his crystalized breath in that cold air. But now …
He wondered why it was easier to believe in a malevolent spirit than in a benign one. Sometimes it seemed that the human heart, this side of Eden, feared eternal life more than death, light more than darkness, freedom more than surrender.
With a mug of coffee, he sat in his armchair, put his feet on the footstool, and pretended for a while that he would methodically think through the ticking threat of Alton Turner Blackwood until he understood how to disarm it. But weariness was a sea in which he sank, and thinking became as arduous as walking on the ocean floor with a world of water pressing down relentlessly.
He dreamed of a surreal journey in a world of falling scarlet leaves, falling girls, falling blades of guillotines, the leaves no longer leaves at all but laminas of blood cast into the air from the severed neck stumps, and then not either laminas of blood or leaves but sheets of paper, pages from a book, and something important on them that he must read,
