By the Light of the Moon (20 page)

Dylan was too headachy and too wrung-out weary to care about what the psychotropic
stuff
might be doing in his brain, let alone to worry about Shepherd’s socks. He took his turn in the bathroom, wincing at the haggard face that confronted him in the mirror.

Jilly lay in her bed, staring at the ceiling.

Shep lay in his bed, staring at the backside of his eyelids.

The hum and rumble of the air conditioner, at first annoying, settled into a lulling white noise that would mask the bang of car doors and the voices of other guests who might rise with the dawn.

The air conditioner would also ensure that they could not hear the specific engine-noise pattern of a souped-up Suburban or the stealthy sounds of assassins preparing to storm their room.

For a while, Jilly tried to work up a little fear about their vulnerability, but in fact she felt safe in this place, for a while. Physically safe, anyway.

Without an urgent concern for her immediate safety, without active fear to distract her, she couldn’t stave off a discouragement that came close to despair. Dylan believed they had a chance to track down Frankenstein’s identity and learn the nature of the injections, but she didn’t share his confidence.

For the first time in years, she wasn’t in control of her life. She
needed
control. Otherwise, she felt as she had felt for too much of her childhood: weak, helpless, at the mercy of pitiless forces. She loathed being vulnerable. Accepting victimhood, taking refuge in it, was to her a mortal sin, yet it seemed now that she had no choice but acceptance.

Some psychotropic hoodoo elixir was at work in her brain, at work
on
her brain, which filled her with horror when she dared to think about it. She’d never done drugs, had never been drunk, because she valued her mind and didn’t want to lose any significant number of brain cells. During all the years when she’d had nothing else, she’d had her intelligence, her wit, her rich imagination. Jilly’s mind had been a formidable weapon against the world and a refuge from cruelty, from adversity. If eventually she developed the gluteus muchomega that plagued the women in her family, if her ass grew so fat that she had to be driven everywhere on a flatbed truck, she had always figured that she’d still have her mind and all the satisfactions of that inner life. But now a worm crawled through her brain, not a worm in the literal sense, perhaps, but a worm of change, and she could not know what would be left of her or even
who
she might be when the worm of change had finished remaking her.

Although earlier she had been exhilarated when she and Dylan had dealt with the murderous Kenny and Becky, she could not get in touch again with the fine sense of empowerment that for a while had lifted her. Concerned about the oncoming violence foreseen in visions, she could not convince herself that the gift of clairvoyance might again help her to save others—or that it might, in time, leave her more in control of her destiny than she had ever been before.

Negative Jackson. She’d never had much faith in other people, but she’d long had an abiding faith in herself. Dylan had been right about that. But her faith in herself began to desert her.

From his bed, Shepherd whispered, “Here, there.”

“What is it, sweetie?”

“Here, there.”

Jilly raised herself on one elbow.

Shep lay on his back, eyes closed. Anxiety pleated his forehead.

“Are you okay, Shepherd?”

“Shep is scared,” he whispered.

“Don’t be scared.”

“Shep is scared.”

“We’re safe here, now, for a while,” she assured him. “Nobody can hurt you.”

His lips moved, as though he were speaking, but no sound issued from him.

Shepherd was not as big as his brother, but he was bigger than Jilly, a full-grown man, yet he seemed small beneath the sheets. Hair tousled, mouth pinched in a grimace of fear, he looked childlike.

A pang of sympathy pierced her when she realized that Shepherd had lived twenty years without any meaningful control over his life. Worse, his need for routine, the limits he put on what he would wear, his elaborate rules about food: All these things and more revealed a desperate need to establish a sense of dominion wherever possible.

His silence held. His lips stopped moving. The fear did not fade from his face, but it settled into softer lines, as if mellowing from acute fright to chronic dismay.

Jilly settled back upon her pillow, grateful that she had not been born in a trap as inescapable as Shep’s, but she also worried that by the time the worm of change finished with her, she might be more like Shep than not.

A moment later, Dylan came out of the bathroom. He’d taken off his shoes, which he put beside the bed that he would share with his brother.

“You okay?” he asked Jilly.

“Yeah. Just…burnt out.”

“God, I’m sludge.”

Fully clothed, ready for an emergency, he got into bed, lay staring at the ceiling, but did not turn out the nightstand lamp.

After a silence, he said, “I’m sorry.”

Jilly turned her head to look at him. “Sorry about what?”

“Maybe from the motel on, I’ve done all the wrong things.”

“Such as?”

“Maybe we should’ve gone to the police, taken a chance. You were right when you said we can’t run forever. I’ve got an obligation to think for Shep, but I’ve no right to drag you down with us.”

“Accountable O’Conner,” she said, “vortex of responsibility. As broody as Batman. Call DC Comics, quick.”

“I’m serious.”

“I know. It’s endearing.”

Still staring at the ceiling, he smiled. “I said a lot of things to you tonight that I wish I hadn’t said.”

“You had provocation. I made you nuts. And I said worse things. Listen…it just makes me crazy to have to depend on anyone. And…especially on men. So this situation, it pushes all my buttons.”

“Why especially men?”

She turned away from him to gaze at the ceiling. “Let’s say your dad walks out on you when you’re three years old.”

After a silence, he encouraged her: “Let’s say.”

“Yeah. Let’s say your mother, she’s this beauty, this angel, this hero who’s always there for you, and nothing bad should ever happen to her. But he beats her up so bad before he goes that she loses one eye and walks with two canes the rest of her life.”

Though weary and in need of sleep, he had the grace to wait for her to tell it at her own pace.

Eventually, she said, “He leaves you to the miseries of welfare and the contempt of government social workers. Bad enough. But then a couple times each year, he’d visit for a day, two days.”

“Police?”

“Mom was afraid to call them when he showed up. The bastard said if she turned him in, when he got bail, then he’d come back and take her other eye. And one of mine. He would have done it, too.”

“Once he’d walked out, why come back at all?”

“To keep us scared. Keep us down. And he expected a share of her welfare money. And we always had it for him because we ate a lot of dinners free at the church kitchen. Most of our clothes came without charge from the church thrift shop. So Daddy always got his share.”

Her father rose in her memory, standing at the apartment door, smiling that dangerous smile. And his voice:
Come to collect the eye insurance, baby girl. You got the eye-insurance premium?

“Enough about that,” she told Dylan. “This isn’t meant to be a pity party. I just wanted you to understand it isn’t you I’ve got a problem with. It’s just…being dependent on anyone.”

“You didn’t owe me an explanation.”

“But there it is.” Her father’s face persisted in memory, and she knew that even as tired as she was, she wouldn’t sleep until she had exorcised it. “
Your
dad must have been great.”

He sounded surprised. “Why do you say that?”

“The way you are with Shep.”

“My dad raised venture capital to help high-tech entrepreneurs start up new companies. He worked eighty-hour weeks. He might’ve been a great guy, but I never spent enough time with him to know. He got in some deep financial problems. So two days before Christmas, near sunset, he drove to this beach parking lot with a great view of the Pacific. Cold day. No swimmers, no surfers. He connected a hose to the tailpipe, put the other end into the car through a window. Then he got in behind the wheel and also took an overdose of Nembutal. He was thorough, my dad. Always a backup plan. He went out with one of the most spectacular sunsets of the year. Shep and I watched it from the hill behind our house, miles away from that beach, and of course we didn’t know he was watching it, too, and dying.”

“When was this?”

“I was fifteen. Shep was five. Almost fifteen years ago.”

“That’s hard,” she said.

“Yeah. But I wouldn’t trade you situations.”

“So where did you learn?”

“Learn what?”

“To take such good care of Shep.”

He switched off the lamp. In the darkness, he said, “From my mom. She died young, too. She was great, so tender with Shep. But sometimes you can learn the right lesson from a bad example, too.”

“I guess so.”

“No need to guess. Look at yourself.”

“Me? I’m all screwed up,” she said.

“Name me someone who isn’t.”

Trying to think of a name to give him, she eventually drifted into sleep.

The first time that she woke, rising out of a dreamless bliss, she heard Dylan snoring softly.

The room was cold. The air conditioner had shut off.

She had not been awakened by Dylan’s snoring, but perhaps by Shepherd’s voice. Three whispered words: “Shep is scared.”

Judging by the direction from which his voice arose, she thought he was still in bed.

“Shep is scared.”

“Shep is brave,” she whispered in reply.

“Shep is scared.”

“Shep is brave.”

Shepherd fell silent, and when the silence held, Jilly found sleep again.

When next she woke, she heard Dylan still snoring softly, but fingers of sunshine pried at every edge of the blackout drapes, not the thinner light of dawn, but the harsher glare of midmorning sun.

She became aware of another light, arising from beyond the half-open bathroom door. A bloody radiance.

Her first thought was
fire,
but even as she bolted out of bed, with that word stuck in her throat, she realized that this was not the flickering light of flames, but something quite different.

Chapter Twenty-Three

S
HAKEN OUT OF DREAMS, DYLAN SAT UP, STOOD UP,
into his shoes, before he was fully conscious, like a firefighter so trained in the routine of an alarm response that he could answer the firehouse bell and shrug into his turnout coat while still asleep, and then wake up sliding down the pole.

According to the travel clock on the nightstand, the morning had crept around to 9:12, and according to Jilly, they had trouble, a message she conveyed to him not in words but in a look, her eyes wide and shining with worry.

Dylan saw first that Shep wasn’t in bed, wasn’t anywhere in the motel room.

Then he noticed the fiery glow beyond the half-closed bathroom door. Fiery but not fire. The hellfire-red of a nightmare, scarlet ocher overlaid on aniline black. An orange-red, muddy-red radiance with the bristle-at-your-eyes texture of the light in a nocturnal scene shot with infrared film. The dire-red, hungry-red glow in the eyes of a night-hunting snake. This had all of those qualities, but none of them adequately described it, because it defied description and would defy his talent if ever he tried to render it on canvas.

The bathroom had no windows. This couldn’t simply be morning sun filtered through a colorful curtain. The standard fluorescent fixture above the sink couldn’t produce such an eerie shine.

How odd that mere light could instantly make his gut clench, his chest tighten, and his heart gallop. Here was a peculiar luminosity that appeared nowhere in nature, that was not quite like anything he had seen before in the works of man, either, and therefore it snagged at every fiber of superstition in the fabric of his soul.

As he drew near the bathroom, he discovered that when this glow touched him, he was able to
feel
it, and not merely as he would have felt the heat of the summer sun when stepping out of the shade of a tree. This light seemed to
crawl
on his skin, to bustle like hundreds of ants, initially on his face as he first stepped into the wedge of outfalling brightness, but then more busily on his right hand as he put it against the door.

Although Jilly, at his side, remained less directly illuminated than Dylan, her face had a faint red sheen. With one glance, he saw that she, too, experienced the extraordinary tactility of this light. With a start and with a little grimace of revulsion, she wiped at her face with one hand, as though she had walked into the clingy spokes and spirals of a spider’s web.

Dylan wasn’t a science buff, except as knowledge in the fields of biology and botany served to improve the accuracy of his depiction of the natural world in his paintings, and he didn’t qualify as even an armchair physicist. But he knew that deadly types of radiation, including that from a nuclear bomb, never stimulated the sense of touch, just as the less mortal X-rays administered in a dentist’s office never caused the slightest tingle when passing through your jaw; the survivors of the historic blast in Hiroshima, who later died of radiation poisoning, had never felt the many billions of subatomic particles piercing their bodies.

Although he doubted that the flesh-prickling effect of the light represented a danger, he hesitated anyway. He might have pulled the door shut, might have turned away, leaving his curiosity unsatisfied, if Shep had not been on the other side and perhaps in need of help.

When he spoke his brother’s name, he didn’t receive a reply. This came as no surprise. While Shep was more talkative than your average stone, he often proved no more
responsive
than granite. Dylan called out again, and pushed open the door after the second silence.

He was prepared for the sight of the shower stall. The toilet, too. The sink, the mirror, the towel rack.

What Dylan had not been prepared for, what caused his adrenal gland to squirt another dose of epinephrine into his bloodstream, what caused his guts to tweak in a less than pleasant fashion was the doorway in the wall beside the sink, where earlier no door had been. The source of the strange red light lay beyond this postern.

Hesitantly, he crossed the threshold into the bathroom.

Doorway
didn’t accurately convey the nature of this mysterious opening. It wasn’t rectangular, but round, like a hatch in a bulkhead between two compartments in a submarine.
Hatch
didn’t qualify as the
mot juste,
either, because no architrave surrounded the hole in the wall.

Indeed, the six-foot-diameter opening itself appeared to lack depth, as though it had been painted on the wall. No header, no jamb, no threshold. And yet the scene beyond appeared convincingly three-dimensional: a radiant red tunnel dwindling to a disc of blue light.

Dylan had seen masterpieces of trompe l’oeil in which artists, relying on nothing more than paint and their talent, had created illusions of space and depth that completely deceived the eye. This, however, was not merely a clever painting.

For one thing, the murky red glow from the luminous walls of the tunnel penetrated to the motel bathroom. This queer light glimmered in the vinyl floor, reflected off the mirror—and
crawled
on his exposed skin.

Furthermore, those tunnel walls ceaselessly turned, as if this were a passage in a carnival funhouse, a sideshow monkey barrel in which to test your balance. Trompe l’oeil painting could produce the illusion of depth, texture, and reality—but it could not provide an illusion of motion.

Jilly stepped into the bathroom beside Dylan.

He placed a restraining hand on her shoulder.

Together they marveled at the tunnel, which appeared to be at least thirty feet long.

Impossible, of course. Another motel unit backed up to this one; plumbing-to-plumbing design saved construction costs. A hole cut in the wall would reveal only another bathroom identical to theirs. Not a tunnel, never a tunnel. There was nothing to bore a tunnel
through;
the bathroom had not been built into the side of a mountain.

Nonetheless, a tunnel. He closed his eyes. Opened them. Tunnel. Six feet in diameter. Glowing, revolving.

Welcome to the monkey barrel. Buy a ticket, test your balance.

In fact, someone had already entered the barrel. Silhouetted against a disc of azure light, a man stood at the far end of the passageway.

Dylan had no doubt that the distant figure was Shep. Out there past the terminus of the tunnel, his back to them, Shepherd gazed into the blue beyond.

So if under Dylan the floor seemed to shift, if he felt that he might drop through a hole into a shaft as deep as eternity, this was not an associated effect of the tunnel. This was just a psychological response to the sudden perception that reality, as he’d always known it, was less stable than he had assumed.

Breathing hard, exhaling words in a hot rush, Jilly sought an explanation for the impossible: “The hell with this, the hell with it, I’m not awake, I can’t be awake.”

“You’re awake.”

“You’re probably part of the dream.”

“This isn’t a dream,” he said, sounding shakier than she did.

“Yeah, right, not a dream—that’s exactly what you’d say if you were part of the dream.”

He had put a restraining hand on her shoulder not because he feared that she would rush forward into the tunnel, but because he half expected that she would be swept into it against her will. The revolving walls suggested a whirlpool that might inexorably swallow anyone who ventured too close to the mouth of it. Second by second, however, his fear of a cyclone suction receded.

“What’s happening,” she asked, “what is this, what the
hell
is this?”

Not a whisper of sound issued from the realm beyond the wall. The turning surface of the tunnel looked as though it ought to be emitting a noisy scrape and rumble, or at least the liquid sound of churning magma, but it revolved in absolute silence.

No air escaped the opening, neither a breath of heat nor the faintest cool draft. No scent, either. Only the light.

Dylan moved closer to the portal.

“Don’t,” Jilly worried.

At the brink, he tried first to examine the transition point between the bathroom wall and the entrance to the tunnel, but the junction of the two proved to be…fuzzy…a blur that would not resolve into concrete detail no matter how hard he squinted at it. In fact, his hackles rose and his gaze repeatedly slid away from the joint line as though some deep primitive part of him knew that by looking too directly at such a thing, he would risk glimpsing a secret kingdom of fearsome entities behind the veil of this world, beings that operated the machinery of the universe itself, and that such a sight invited instant madness.

When he’d been thirteen, fourteen, he’d read H. P. Lovecraft and thrilled to those macabre tales. Now he couldn’t shake the unnerving feeling that Lovecraft had written more truth than fiction.

Abandoning an attempt to examine the point of transition between bathroom and tunnel, he stood at the brink and squinted at a spot on the revolving walls, trying to determine the nature of the material, its solidity. On closer study, the passage seemed to be formed from shining mist, or maybe he was peering along a tunnel of pure energy; this was not unlike a god’s-eye view down the funnel of a tornado.

Tentatively, he placed his right hand on the wall beside the mysterious gateway. The painted sheetrock felt slightly warm and gratifyingly normal.

Sliding his hand to the left, across the bathroom wall, toward the opening, he hoped to be able to
feel
the point of transition from motel to tunnel and to understand how the connection was made. But as his hand slid off the sheetrock and into the apparently open doorway, he detected no details of structure, nothing but a coldness—and also the red light crawling more vigorously than ever across his upraised palm.

“No, don’t,
no!
” Jilly warned.

“No, what?”

“No, don’t go in there.”

“I’m not going in there.”

“You look like you’re going in there.”

“Why would I go in there?”

“After Shep.”

“No way am I going in there.”

“You’d jump off a cliff after Shep.”

“I wouldn’t jump off a cliff,” he impatiently assured her.

“You’d jump off a cliff,” she insisted. “Hope to catch him on the way down, hope to carry him down into a haystack. You’d jump, all right.”

He just wanted to test the reality of the scene before him, to confirm that indeed it had true dimension, that it was a gateway and not just a window, an actual entry point to some otherworldly place rather than merely a view of it. Then he would retreat and think over the situation, try to arrive at a logical course of action with which to approach this monumentally illogical development.

Firmly pressing his right hand against the plane where the wall should have been, he discovered no sheetrock underlying the image of the tunnel, encountered no resistance whatsoever. He reached out of the bathroom, into that forbidding other realm, where the air proved to be icy, and where the baleful light squirmed over and around his fingers not like hundreds of ants any longer but like thousands of hard-shell beetles that might strip the flesh from his bones.

If he’d allowed himself to be guided by instinct, he would have withdrawn his hand at once; but he believed that he needed to explore this incredible situation more fully. He reached farther through the gateway, extending his hand in there to the wrist, and although he winced at the bitter cold, was nearly overwhelmed by revulsion at the hideous crawly sensation, he reached in still farther, all the way to his elbow, and then, of course, as instinct might have warned him if he had been listening, the tunnel
took
him.