By the Light of the Moon

16

Crossing the threshold at the back door, Marjorie remembered her take-out dinner, which she'd left behind, and she wanted to return to the kitchen to fetch the bag 'while the cheeseburger is still warm.'

With the patience of a giant bird or other costumed teacher from Sesame Street defining a new word for a child whose ability to focus had been atomized by an overdose of Ritalin, Jilly kept the woman on the move by explaining that a warm cheeseburger would be no comfort if she was dead.

Apparently, Dylan had given Marjorie only a vague warning, had not specified that the four-burner gas oven was about to explode, had not predicted that an earthquake would at any moment shake her house into one of those piles of smoking rubble that the gleeful vultures of the media found so picturesque. Nevertheless, in light of recent events, Jilly took his premonition seriously, regardless of its lack of specificity.

Using happy talk and cunning psychology that Big Bird would have heartily endorsed, Jilly coddled Marjorie through the door, onto the back porch, to the head of the steps that led down to the back lawn.

At that point the older woman applied her impressive weight to a squinching maneuver with her feet, creating suction between the tread on her rubber-soled shoes and the glossy paint on the porch floor. This clever trick made her as immovable as Hercules had ever been when, sentenced to be drawn and quartered, he had proved himself the equal of two teams of torturing horses.

'Chicky,' the woman said to Jilly, choosing not to address her by her full fast-food name, 'does he know about the knives?'

'He who?'

'Your fella.'

'He's not my fella, Marj. Don't make assumptions like that. He's not my type. What knives?'

'Kenny likes knives.'

'Who's Kenny?'

'Kenny junior, not his father.'

'Kids,' Jilly commiserated, still urging the woman to move.

'Kenny senior's in a prison in Peru.'

'Bummer,' Jilly said, referring both to Kenny senior's Peruvian incarceration and to her own inability to tumble Marjorie down the porch stairs.

'Kenny junior, he's my oldest grandson. Nineteen.'

'And he likes knives, huh?'

'He collects them. Very pretty knives, some of them.'

'That sounds swell, Marj.'

'I'm afraid he's back on the drugs again.'

'Knives and drugs, huh?' Jilly said, trying to rock the woman to break the shoe suction and get her moving.

'I don't know what to do. I don't. He gets crazy on the drugs sometimes.'

'Crazy, drugs, knives,' Jilly said, talking the pieces of the Kenny puzzle into place, glancing nervously toward the kitchen door that stood open behind them.

'He's going to have a breakdown sooner or later,' Marj worried. 'He's going to go over the edge someday.'

'Sweetie,' Jilly said, 'I think today's the day.'

Not just a single centipede but a nest of them, writhing knots of centipedes, seemed to squirm against the palm of Dylan's hand.

He didn't release the knob in revulsion because simultaneously he sensed the appealing traces of another and better personality layered with the spoor of the sick soul. He received impressions of a shining but anxious heart whose refuge, curiously, was in the same place as the dragon's lair.

Cautiously he pushed open the door.

A large bedroom had been partitioned exactly at the midpoint as clearly as though a line had been painted across the floor, up the left-hand wall, across the ceiling, and down the right-hand wall. The division had been effected not with any boundary markers, however, but by the dramatic contrast between the interests and the characters of the two residents who shared these lodgings.

In addition to a bed and nightstand, the nearer half of the room featured bookshelves stocked with paperbacks. Wall space remained for an eclectic collection of three posters. In the first, a 1966 A.C. Shelby Cobra convertible rocketed along a highway toward a dazzling red sunset; with its low profile, sensuously rounded lines, and a silver finish that reflected the Technicolor sky, this sports car was the embodiment of speed, joy, freedom. Beside the Cobra hung a solemn portrait of a grumpy-looking C. S. Lewis. The third was a poster of the famous photograph of U.S. Marines raising Old Glory at the summit of a battle-scarred hill on Iwo Jima.

Furnished with another bed and nightstand, the farther half of the room had no books, no posters. There, the walls served as display racks for a bristling collection of edge weapons. Thin poniards and wider daggers, dirks, stilettos, one saber, one scimitar, kukris and katars from India, a skean dhu from Scotland, a short-handled halberd, bayonets, falchions, bowies, yataghans… Many blades were etched with elaborate designs, handles ornately carved and painted, pommels and quillons sometimes plain but often elaborately decorated.

In the nearer half of the room stood a small desk. On it, neatly arranged, were a blotter, a pen set, a canister of pencils, a thick dictionary, and a scale model of the 1966 A. C. Shelby Cobra.

In the far zone, a work table held a plastic replica of a human skull and a collapsed stack of pornographic videos.

The nearer realm was dusted, swept, more elaborately appointed than a monk's cell but every bit as neat as any friar's habitat.

Disorder ruled in the far kingdom. The bedclothes were tangled. Dirty socks, discarded shoes, empty soda and beer cans, and crumpled candy wrappers littered the floor, the nightstand, and the shelf atop the headboard of the bed. Only the knives and other edge weapons had been arranged with care – if not with loving calculation – and judging by the mirror-bright gleam of every blade, much time had been devoted to their maintenance.

A pair of suitcases stood side by side in the center of the room, on the border between these rival encampments. A black cowboy hat with a green feather in the band was perched atop the luggage.

All this Dylan noted in one quick survey of the scene lasting but three or four seconds, much as he had long been accustomed to absorbing entire landscapes in vivid detail with an initial sweeping gaze, in order to assess at first glance, before his head overruled his heart, whether the subject merited the time and the energy that he would have to expend to paint it and to paint it well. The talent with which he'd been born included instant photographic perception, but he dramatically enhanced it with training, as he imagined that a gifted young cop consciously honed his natural skills of observation until he earned detective status.

As any good cop would have done, Dylan began and ended this initial sweep with the detail that most immediately and strikingly denned the scene: a boy of about thirteen sat in the nearest bed, wearing jeans and a New York City Fire Department T-shirt, shackled at the ankles, cruelly gagged, and handcuffed to the brass headboard.

Marj did her immovable-object shtick far better than Jilly could pull off her irresistible-force act. Still anchored to the porch at the top of the steps, she said worriedly, 'We've got to get him.'

Although Dylan wasn't her fella, Jilly didn't know how otherwise to refer to him, since she didn't want to use his real name in front of this woman and because she didn't know what food he had ordered earlier. 'Don't worry. My fella will get him, Marj.'

'I don't mean get Kenny,' Marj said with more distress than she had shown previously.

'Who do you mean?'

'Travis. I mean Travis. All he's got is books. Kenny has knives, but Travis has just his books.'

'Who's Travis?'

'Kenny's little brother. He's thirteen. Kenny has a breakdown, it'll be Travis who gets broke.'

'And Travis – he's in there with Kenny?'

'Must be. We've got to get him out.'

At the far end of the back porch from them, the kitchen door still stood open. Jilly didn't want to return to the house.

She didn't know why Dylan had come here at high speed, risking life and limb and increased insurance premiums, but she doubted that he'd been compelled by a belated need to thank Marj for her courteous service or by a desire to return the toad button so that it might be given to another customer who would better appreciate it. Based on what little information Jilly possessed and considering what an X-Files night this had become, the smart-money bet was that Mr. Dylan Something's-happening-to-me O'Conner had raced to this house to stop Kenny from doing a bad thing with his knife collection.

If a burst of psychic perception had led Dylan to Kenny of the Many Knives, whom he had apparently never met previously, then logic suggested that he would be aware of Travis, too. When he encountered a thirteen-year-old boy armed with a book, he wasn't going to mistake the kid for a doped-up nineteen-year-old knife maniac.

That train of thought, however, was derailed by the word logic. The events of the past couple hours had thrown baby Logic out the window with the bathwater of reason. Nothing happening to them this night would have been possible in the rational world where Jilly had grown up from choirgirl to comedian. This was a new world, either with an entirely new logic that she hadn't puzzled out yet or with no logic at all, and in such a world, anything could happen to Dylan in a strange house, in the dark.

Jilly didn't like knives. She had become a comedian, not part of a knife-throwing act. She desperately didn't want to go into a house with a knife collection and a Kenny.

Two minutes ago, when Jilly had entered the kitchen and had hung up the telephone one digit short of disaster, poor Marj seemed dazed, numb. Now the candy-striped semizombie was rapidly transforming into an emotionally distraught grandmother capable of reckless action. 'We gotta get Travis!'

The last thing Jilly needed was a knife in her chest, but the next-to-last thing she needed was a hysterical grandmother barging back into the house, complicating Dylan's situation, most likely going for the phone again the moment she caught sight of it and was reminded that the police were always waiting to serve.

'You stay here, Marj. You stay right here. This is my job. I'll find Travis. I'll get him out of there.'

As Jilly turned away, having committed to being braver than she preferred to be, Marj grabbed her by the arm. 'Who are you people?'

You people. Jilly almost reacted to those two innocent words, you people, rather than to the question. She almost said, What do you mean – YOU PEOPLE? You have a problem with people like me?

During the past couple years, however, as she had gained some acceptance with her act and had achieved at least a small measure of success, her hot-tempered knee-jerk reactions to perceived insults had seemed increasingly stupid. Even in response to Dylan – who for some reason had the power to push her go-nuts button as no one before him – even in response to him, the knee-jerk reactions were stupid. And under current circumstances, they were dangerously distracting, as well.

'Police,' she lied with surprising ease for a former choirgirl. 'We're police.'

'No uniforms?' Marj wondered.

'We're undercover.' She didn't offer to produce a badge. 'Stay here, sweetie. Stay here where it's safe. Let the pros handle this.'

The boy in the FDNY T-shirt had been overpowered, beaten, and most likely knocked unconscious, although he had revived by the time Dylan entered his room. One blackened and swollen eye. Abraded chin. Blood caked in his left ear from a blow to the side of the head.

Pulling strips of adhesive tape off the kid's face, prying a red rubber ball from the pale-lipped mouth, Dylan vividly recalled being helpless in the motel-room chair, remembered gagging on the athletic sock, and he discovered in himself a settled anger like long-banked coals ready to flare white-hot when fanned by one breath of righteous outrage. This potentially volcanic anger seemed out of character for an easygoing man who believed that even the most savage heart could be brought out of darkness by the recognition of the deeply beautiful design of the natural world, of life. For years he'd turned the other cheek so often that at times he must have looked like a spectator at a perpetual tennis match.

His anger wasn't fueled by what he had suffered, however, nor even by what he might yet have to endure as his stuff-driven fate played out in days to come, but by sympathy for the boy and by pity for all victims in this age of violence. After Judgment, perhaps the meek would inherit the earth for their playing field, as promised; but meanwhile, the vicious had their sport, day after bloody day.

Dylan had always been aware of injustice in the world, but he'd never cared as intensely as this, had never before felt the twisting auger of injustice boring through his heart. The poignancy and purity of his anger surprised him, for it seemed greatly out of proportion to the apparent cause. One battered boy was not Auschwitz, not the mass graves of Khmer Rouge Cambodia, not the World Trade Center.

Something profound was happening to him, all right, but the transfiguration wasn't limited to the acquisition of a sixth sense. Deeper and more fearsome changes were occurring, tectonic shifts in the deepest bedrock of his mind.

Gag removed, free to speak, the boy proved self-controlled and capable of getting at once to the quick of the situation. Whispering, his gaze fixed on the open door as if it were a portal through which the most hideous troops in Hell's army might march at any moment, he said, 'Kenny's wired at least six ways. Full-on psycho. Got a girl in Grandma's room, I think he'll kill her. Then Grandma. Then me. He'll kill me last 'cause he hates me most.'

'What girl?' Dylan asked.

'Becky. Lives down the street.'

'Little girl?'

'No, seventeen.'

The chain that wrapped the boy's ankles and bound them together had been secured with a padlock. The links between the two bracelets of his handcuffs had been passed behind one of the vertical rails on the brass headboard, tethering him to the bed.

'Keys?' Dylan asked.

'Kenny's got 'em.' At last the boy's gaze shifted from the open door, and he met Dylan's eyes. 'I'm stuck here.'

Lives were in the balance now. Although bringing in the cops would almost certainly draw the black-Suburban crowd, as well, with mortal consequences for Dylan and Shep and Jilly, he was morally compelled to call 911.

'Phone?' he whispered.

'Kitchen,' breathed the boy. 'And one in Grandma's room.'

Intuition told Dylan that he didn't have time to go to the kitchen to make the call. Besides, he didn't want to leave the boy up here alone. As far as he knew, premonition was not a part of his psychic gift, but the air cloyed about him, thickening with the expectation of violence; he would have wagered his soul that if the killing had not already begun, it would start before he reached the bottom of the rose-festooned stairs.

Grandma's room had a phone, but evidently it also had Kenny. When Dylan went in there, he would need more than a steady finger for the touch-tone keypad.

Once more the blades on the walls drew his attention, but he was repulsed by the prospect of slashing anyone with sword or machete. He didn't have the stomach for such wet work.

Aware of Dylan's renewed interest in the knives, and evidently sensing his disinclination to use one, the boy said, 'There. By the bookcase.'

A baseball bat. One of the old-fashioned hardwood kind. Dylan had swung a lot of them in his childhood, although never at a human being.

Any soldier or cop, or any man of action, might have disagreed with him, but Dylan preferred the baseball bat to a bayonet. It felt good in his hands.

'Full-on psycho,' the boy reminded him, as if to say that the bat should be swung first, with no resort to reason or persuasion.

To the threshold. The hall. Across the hall to the only second-floor room that he'd not yet investigated.

This final door, closed tight, wasn't outlined by even a thin filament of light.

A hush fell over the house. Ear to the jamb, Dylan listened for a telltale sound from six-way-wired Kenny.

Some performers eventually confused make-believe with truth, and to a degree grew into their invented personas, swaggering through the real world as though they were always on a stage. Over the past few years, Jilly had half convinced herself that she was the ass-kicking Southwest Amazon whom she claimed to be when she appeared before an audience.

Returning to the kitchen, she discovered much to her dismay that in a crunch, image and reality were not, in her case, the same thing. As she searched quickly for a weapon, drawer to drawer, cupboard to cupboard, the bones in her legs jellified, while her heart hardened into a sledge that hammered against her ribs.

By any standard of law or combat, a butcher knife qualified as a weapon. But the nearly arthritic stiffness with which her right hand closed on the handle convinced her that she'd never be comfortable wielding it on anything more responsive than a chuck roast.

Besides, to use a knife, you had to get in close to your enemy. Assuming that she might have to thump Kenny enough to stop him, if not actually waste him, Jilly preferred to thump him from as great a distance as possible, preferably with a high-powered rifle from a neighboring rooftop.

The pantry was just a pantry, not also an armory. The heaviest weaponry on its shelves were cans of cling peaches in heavy syrup.

Then Jilly noticed that Marj apparently had been plagued by an ant problem, and with a flash of inspiration, she said, 'Ah.'

Neither the baseball bat nor his righteous anger made Dylan sufficiently brave or sufficiently foolish to crash into a dark room in search of a dope-crazed, hormone-crazed, just-plain-crazed teenager with more types of edge weapons than Death himself could name. After easing the door open – and feeling the tingle of psychic spoor – he waited in the hallway, his back to the wall, listening.

He heard enough nothing to suggest that he might be adrift in the vacuum of deep space, and as he began to wonder if he had gone deaf, he decided that Kenny must be no less patient than he was full-on psychotic.

Although Dylan wanted to do this about as much as he wanted to wrestle a crocodile, he edged into the open doorway, reached around the casing into the room, and felt the wall for the light switch. He assumed that Kenny stood poised to respond to such a maneuver, and his expectations of having his hand pinned to the wall with a knife were so high that he was not far short of astonished when he still had all his fingers after flipping the switch.

Grandma's room didn't have a ceiling fixture, but one of two night-stand lamps came on: a ginger jar painted with tulips, crowned by a pleated yellow shade in the shape of a coolie hat. Soft light and soft shadows shared the space.

Two other doors served the room. Both were closed. One most likely led to a closet. A bathroom might lie behind the other.

The drapes at the three windows were neither long enough nor full enough to conceal anyone.

A freestanding, full-length, oval-shaped mirror occupied one corner. No one lurked behind it, but Dylan's reflection occupied its face, looking less frightened than he felt, bigger than he thought of himself.

The queen-size bed was positioned so that Kenny might be hiding on the far side, lying on the floor, but no other furniture offered concealment.

Of more immediate concern was the figure on the bed. A thin chenille spread, a blanket, and a top sheet were tossed in disarray, but someone appeared to be lying under them, concealed head to foot.

As in countless prison-escape movies, this might actually have been pillows arranged to mimic the human form, except that the bedclothes trembled slightly.

By opening the door and switching on the light, Dylan already had announced his presence. Cautiously approaching the bed, he said, 'Kenny?'

Under the tumbled bedding, the ill-defined figure stopped shaking. For a moment it froze and lay as still as any cadaver beneath a morgue sheet.

Dylan gripped the baseball bat with both hands, ready to swing for the fences. 'Kenny?'

The hidden form began to twitch, as though with uncontainable excitement, with nervous energy.

The door that might lead to a closet: still closed. The door that might lead to a bathroom: still closed.

Dylan glanced over his shoulder, toward the hall door.

Nothing.

He grappled for the name that the shackled boy mentioned, the name of the threatened girl from down the street, and then he had it: 'Becky?'

The mysterious figure twitched, twitched, so alive beneath the covers, but it did not reply.

Although he dared not club what he could not see, Dylan was loath to put his hand to the bedclothes to toss them aside, for the same reason that he would have been reluctant to pull back the tarp on a woodpile if he suspected that a rattlesnake coiled among the cords.

He also wasn't eager to use the fat end of the baseball bat to lift the bedclothes out of the way. While entangled with the covers, the bat would be an ineffective weapon, and although this maneuver would leave Dylan vulnerable for only the briefest moment, a moment would be all that Kenny needed if he shot off the bed and out from under the rising covers, armed with a specialty knife well designed for evisceration.

Soft light, soft shadows.

House hushed.

The shape, twitching.