perhaps because the dog had the power to command it or because a malign force in the house wished to induce Molly to enter, in the spirit of the spider extending an invitation to the fly.
The dog crossed the threshold. Molly hesitated.
If these were the last hours of her life, she wanted to spend them in the service of children, whether or not she could save them in the long run. She was weary, however, and her eyes were sore from lack of sleep. Too many terrible sights had emotionally drained her. Consequently, between the good intention and the act lay a chasm of self-doubt.
She stiffened her resolve with a line of Eliot’s verse: Life you may evade, but Death you shall not.
Grim courage could be taken from such hard truths.
She entered the house.
Although no one had touched it, the door closed behind her and Virgil.
As in that other house on another street, she heard a rustling in the walls—the teeming of many-legged multitudes or the beating of uncounted wings.
This time she did not have the moral support of Neil, only the guidance of the German shepherd, which might be in the service of some evil. To trust her intuition and her faith, which had never failed her, she must also trust the dog.
Face to windowpanes, the purple day peered in but brightened nothing. She switched on the flashlight and tried not to think about how much—or little—juice might be left in the batteries.
Virgil went to the stairs and climbed.
Ascending behind him, Molly heard the whirling wash of noise in the walls suddenly organize into a rhythmic tide. This repetitive ebb and flow brought her to a halt at the landing.
In the metered susurrations of this thousand-voiced sigh, she detected intention, meaning, and something like desperation. Listening more closely, she twitched with surprise when the soft cadenced rustling resolved into words: “Time to murder…time to murder…time to murder…time to murder….”
Although the voices of this malicious choir were many, each registered hardly louder than a breath. The cumulative effect was a whisper of such insidious subtlety that it almost seemed to arise within her head, less like a real sound than like an auditory hallucination.
Abby had insisted that sometimes the walls talked. The girl had not revealed what they said.
“…time to murder…time to murder…”
Molly could not determine whether this was a threat or a command meant to mesmerize by repetition—or something else entirely.
She told herself that she should ignore this compelling dark chorus. Instead, curiosity drew her nearer to the wall of the landing.
Under the cultivating beam of the flashlight, roses bloomed in the wallpaper, mostly yellow, some pink, thornless, leafy.
She slid one hand across the paper roses, not sure what she expected to feel. Maybe a swelling in the plaster. Evidence of structural deformities.
The wall was flat, dry, and solid. A faint vibration tingled across her palm, nothing more.
“…time to murder…time to murder…”
Among the voices in English, she thought that she detected others speaking a different language.
She leaned her head against the wall, one ear to the yellow roses.
A faint but disturbing smell came from that printed rosarium—perhaps chemicals in the paper or in the paste beneath.
When she focused her attention on the voices in foreign tongues, they clarified as though aware that she had a particular interest in them. She heard the same three-word phrase in French and Spanish. Insistent voices chanted in what might have been Russian, Japanese, Chinese, German, Swedish, and others in languages that she could not hope to identify.
Then the rhythm broke. The metered waves of sound collapsed into a wordless rush of thousands upon thousands of crisp little noises, the pitapatation and swish, the tick and buzz, of a busy nest.
Trying to divine by sound alone what kind of pestilence swarmed behind the plaster, she kept one ear to the wall a moment longer—until a lone voice whispered out of that soft tumult of flutter and squirm: “Molly.”
Startled, she pushed away from the wall.
Tread by tread, the flashlight beam played down the stairs, then riser by riser upward to where the dog waited above, and found no one who could have said her name.
Planetary apocalypse suddenly had become unnervingly personal. Something of unearthly origin, crawling inside the walls to unknown purpose, had spoken her name with a creepy intimacy, filling her with revulsion.
And again, in a needful, yearning tone: “Molly.”
54
EYES RADIANT AND FAMILIAR IN SHADOW, flaring and strange in the flashlight, Virgil greeted Molly at the head of the stairs, not with a wag of his tail but with an urgent whine, and led her directly to the only one of five doors that was closed.
In that room, a child cried faintly, perhaps a boy, sobbing not as though in immediate jeopardy but as though he had been worn down by long endurance of terror.
She tried the door with the same hand that held the flashlight. The knob would not turn.
For a moment, she waited for the door to open at the command of the dog or whatever presence had let them in downstairs, but it remained closed.
Reluctant to pocket the pistol, she put the flashlight on the floor instead, and tried the door again with her free hand. Locked.
She called out to the weeping child, “Honey, we’re here to help you. You’re not alone anymore. We’ll get you out of there.”
As if her words had been an incantation, the door abruptly swung inward, revealing darkness complete, the blackness of a hungry maw.
Out of the walls and ceiling came her name, whispered with a ravenous eagerness: “Molly, Molly, Molly, Molly…”
She spooked backward a step.
Undaunted, Virgil dashed past her and into the room.
The door crashed shut.
She tried the knob, knowing that it wouldn’t turn, and it didn’t.
Stooping, she retrieved the flashlight from the floor. Rising, she detected movement in the hall, something closing fast from her right side.
He body-slammed her: a man not as big as Neil, but big enough. Hit hard, she fumbled the flashlight, dropped the gun, and went down.
Falling atop her, driving the breath out of her, he said, “You ain’t gettin’ them. They’re my sacrifices.”
The flashlight lay mere inches to their left, revealing him. Close-cropped red hair. A sensuous face—heavily lidded turquoise eyes, full lips. A cord of keloidal scar tissue tied his left ear to the corner of his mouth, souvenir of a long-ago knife fight.
“The little lambs are mine,” he said, his breath a stench—the sourness of beer, the sharpness of garlic, the wretched pungency of rotted teeth.
He cocked a fist the size of a three-pound canned ham and drove it at her face.
She turned her head. His punch mostly missed her, his thumb knuckle cracked the cartilage in her left ear, and he struck the carpeted floor.
They both cried out with pain, and she knew that she wouldn’t be able to dodge another blow. He would smash her nose, her cheekbones, and batter her to death.
He was half again her size, and she could not push him off, so before he could strike again, she raised her head off the floor and bit his face. Would have gone for his throat. Couldn’t thrust her head in at the right angle, had to go higher. Lower teeth under his jawbone, upper teeth sunk in his unscarred cheek.
He howled and reared back from her, and she held on as if she were a terrier. He flailed on her shoulders, on the sides of her head, glancing blows, thrown in panic, and Molly wouldn’t relent.
He reared up farther, just far enough, and she unlocked her bite, spat him out, shoved him off, levered him aside, thrashed away from him.
The savage, shocked by savagery when it was committed against him, rolled onto his side, and clasped both hands to his torn face, assessing the damage with whimpered disbelief.
Spitting out his blood, g
agging on the taste, spitting again, and then again before she would allow herself to gasp for breath, Molly seized the flashlight, scrambled to her feet.
She had seconds, three or four. His shock would be brief, his rage swift, his vengeance brutal.
Lambs, he had said. The little lambs are mine. Mustbe more than one child in the room where Virgil had gone. Sacrifices, he had said.
Phantom bells rang in her damaged ear, and the half-crushed cartilage prickled like glass.
Somewhere the pistol. She had to find it. Her only hope.
Carpet, spatters of blood, carpet, dirty footprint, coins that had perhaps spilled from his pockets, all in the questing beam of light, but no pistol.
Cursing her in a slurred voice, air whistling through his torn cheek with each word, he was on his hands and knees, coming up.
Hoping to buy time to find the handgun, she kicked at his head, missed. He snared her foot, almost toppled her, lost his grip.
Carpet, carpet, blot of blood, more coins, carpet, a hand-rolled cigarette—weed, twisted at both ends—carpet, no gun, no gun. He might have fallen on the pistol.
No more time. She ran to the nearest room, fencing shadows with the flashlight, threw the door shut behind her, fumbled for the lock, hoping there would be one, and there was, just a privacy latch, no deadbolt.
The latch clicked, and he hit the door hard, shook it by the knob. He would kick it next. The latch was flimsy. It wouldn’t hold.
55
MANDOLIN AND FLUTE AND TAMBOURINE AND French horn on a bed of holly, encircled with ribbons, formed the motif on the seat of the straight-backed needlepoint chair to the left of the door.
In the hall, the bitten man kicked the door. The latch twanged but didn’t spring, though one more kick would pop it.
Molly tipped the chair onto its back legs and quickly wedged the headrail under the doorknob.
A second kick shattered the latch mechanism, but the bracing chair held the door and resisted a third kick as well, exquisite needlepoint proving a match for savagery, as ought to be the case in a properly ordered world.
He cursed her, pounded on the door with a fist. “I’ll be back at you,” he promised. “I’ll be back when I’m done with my lambs.”
Then maybe he went away.
Whether he was waiting for her or not, he was just a man, not something from another world. He hadn’t been able to phase through the barricaded door.
Numerous encounters with threats unearthly and unthinkable had left her unharmed, yet an ordinary man had wounded her. In this fact was a significance that she could sense but not grasp, and once more she felt herself to be on the doorstep of a revelation of enormous importance.
She had no time to connect the puzzle pieces to which intuition had called her attention. Contemplation required peace and time, and she had none of either.
The beast she’d bitten had said the lambs, the children, were his sacrifices. To what, to whom, on what altar, for what purpose did not matter, only his intention—and stopping him.
Her crushed and bleeding ear ached, but it no longer rang. She could hear well enough.
The only sound was the ceaseless movement inside the walls, the rustle and slither. No voices rose from the whispery throng.
Through her rolled waves of nausea. Saliva flooded her mouth. She could still taste blood, so she spat instead of swallowing, and spat again.
Turning from the door, probing with the flashlight, the first thing she saw was a hatchet embedded in the side of a tall wooden cabinet. Blood on the blade, on the handle.
Sickened, she didn’t want to look further, but she had to, and did.
She was in a home office, unrevealed by two windows looking out on moss-strangled trees in the purple noon. A door stood open to an adjacent bathroom.
She shared the room with two chopped bodies—a man on the floor, a woman tumbled in an armchair. She had become inured to horror, yet she didn’t look at them too closely or too long.
Family photos on the wall behind the desk revealed that these were the parents of the children locked in the room near the head of the stairs. The kids in the pictures were a dimpled boy and an older sister with black hair and Cleopatra bangs.
Appearing in none of the photos, the scarred man must be an intruder. She had known that Michael Render would not be the only sociopath to embrace the chaos of a crumbling civilization.
Sacrifices.
Hurriedly, she searched the desk drawers, seeking a weapon. She hoped to find a handgun. The best she could come up with was a pair of scissors.
Behind her, the scarred man said, “Drop them,” and pressed the muzzle of a gun, probably her own 9-mm pistol, against the nape of her neck.
56
THE NEEDLEPOINT CHAIR REMAINED BRACED under the knob; but the killer had not phased through that barrier or any other.
The adjacent bath was shared between this study and a bedroom. He had been in the house long enough to know it well, and he had come into the study by way of the bath and the neighboring room.
Molly didn’t at once drop the scissors, as commanded. Her vivid imagination painted a tableau of rape and torture that made it worth the risk of twisting around on him, trying to put the scissors in his guts, hoping to dodge the shot.
But she didn’t know the future and could not act on a fear of what it might be. The past and future are equally unredeemable, and the only time of consequence is this moment, now, where life occurs, where choices are made for reasons practical and philosophical.
Dropped, the scissors clattered on the desk top.
He shifted the muzzle of the pistol to her throat, encircled her with one arm, pawed her breasts through her sweater, motivated not by lust but by the desire to hurt her, which he did, squeezing hard.
“You like to bite, huh?” His voice was strangely affected by his punctured cheek, his breath reeking as before but now also redolent of blood. “You eat lamb?”
If she screamed, Neil would come, but he would leave the six children in the street, protected only by the dogs, which were now under suspicion.
“You eat lamb?” he repeated, squeezing her with such cruelty that she almost gave him the satisfaction of crying out in pain.
“No. I don’t like it.”
“You’re gonna acquire a taste for it,” he said. “I’m gonna take you down the hall, see my two lambs, gonna watch while you bite those tender babies.”
In the walls, in the ceiling, the unknown presences churned with greater frenzy.
“The harder you bite them, the more fun places you think to bite them, the better your chances I’ll let you live.”
Vamping for time, expecting his answer to be one kind of crazy or another with no enlightening content, Molly said, “Sacrifices, you called them. To what, why?”
“They want the kids, kids more than anything, but they can’t touch them.”
“Who?”
“Them that rule the world now.”
“Why can’t they touch the kids?”
“Don’t you know nothing? Kids ain’t for sifting,” he said. “But ain’t no rules apply to me. If I do the kids, them with the power will be good to me.”
Molly felt like a blind woman reading lines of Braille in which random dots had been omitted. Some vital understanding loomed just beyond the limits of her vision.
He withdrew his arm from around her, but he dug the muzzle of the pistol harder against her throat, just under the hinge of the jawbone. “You pick up the flashlight on the desk and move slow and easy with me. Don’t try nothin’ or I’ll blow your pretty head off.”
The bleak afternoon brightened beyond the windows. Cold white radiance streamed down, rinsing the purple out of the air.
She recognized the quality of light. One of the silent, glowing craft must be hovering over the house.
As before, she felt closely observed, examined, but more than merely examined: She felt known in heart and mind and body, known in terrifying completeness.
br /> Her assailant apparently felt the same thing, because his body stiffened and he shrank a step back from the windows, pulling her with him. “What’s this shit?”
Fear distracted him, and when the pressure of the muzzle eased at Molly’s throat, she knew this was the time to act, for she was in the moment as seldom before, clear-eyed and quick of mind, all the experience of her past and all the hopes of her future focused here at the still point that was now.
From the desk she snatched the scissors. Simultaneously she pulled away from him and heard the double click of the trigger but not the boom of a shot.
She swung toward him. The pistol a foot from her face. Muzzle so huge, so dark. He pulled the trigger again. The gun didn’t fire.
As ruthless as any Fate snipping a lifeline, she slashed at his gun hand with the scissors. He cried out and dropped the weapon.
She threw the scissors at him, stooped, and snatched the pistol off the floor.
Rising to full height, she saw him reach for her. She squeezed the trigger, and the gun bucked in her hand.
He served as the sacrifice that he had intended to make of the children. The bullet found his heart with such accuracy that he was dead before he could look surprised, a cooling corpse before he hit the floor.
His two misfires followed by her point-blank shot were not a series of coincidences, and the gun was not defective. Some power was at work on her behalf, some agency uncanny.
Behind the plaster, the teeming hive had fallen silent.
57
THE BRILLIANCE OF THE HOVERING UFO, POURING through the windows, brought too much revealing light to this body-strewn abattoir. Molly retrieved her flashlight from the desk and departed by way of the bath that connected this study to another room.
A high window in the shower stall admitted light, which revealed her moving figure in the mirror—and the figure of another who was not present. She saw the other in a glance, halted in shock to look again, but only she herself was now reflected.
She didn’t know if her mother, Thalia, glimpsed in the mirror, had actually been there or whether this vision had been merely the ephemeral expression of her fondest wish, hallucination, even perhaps a flicker of madness.
She wanted to linger, studying the mirror, but the lambs, having been spared from sacrifice, needed her. Through the next room, into the hall, her way was lighted by the vessel above, by virtue of windows and skylights.
When she reached the door near the head of the stairs, it swung open wide in front of her.
This was a girl’s bedroom. Stuffed animals reclined against the headboard of a bed skirted in flounces. Satiny drapes trimmed with rickrack. Posters of teen idols on the walls, polished boys with an androgynous quality. Frills and thrills.
Two chairs stood back to back. The girl with the Cleopatra bangs, perhaps ten or eleven, and her dimpled brother sat in them, secured at wrists and ankles by duct tape.
Virgil guarded the children, and he had something formidable to guard against.