By the Light of the Moon

19

Each time the door opened and a customer entered, Dylan tensed. The SUV crowd couldn't have tracked them this fast. And yet…

The waitress brought the second round of beers, and after Jilly drew cold comfort from a swallow of Sierra Nevada, she said, 'So we hole up somewhere around the Petrified Forest and… You said what? You said think?'

'Think,' Dylan confirmed.

'Think about what, besides how to stay alive?'

'Maybe we can figure out how to track down Frankenstein.'

'You forget he's dead?' she asked.

'I mean, track down who he was before they killed him.'

'We don't even have a name, except the one we made up.'

'But he was evidently a scientist. Medical research. Developing psychotropic drugs, psychotropic stuff, psychotropic something, which gives us a key word. Scientists write papers, produce articles for journals, give lectures. They leave a trail.'

'Intellectual breadcrumbs.'

'Yeah. And if I think about it, I might remember more of what the bastard said back there in my motel room, other key words. With enough key words, we can go on the Internet and winnow through the researchers working to enhance brain function, related areas.'

'I'm no tech whiz,' she said. 'Are you?'

'No. But this search doesn't take technical expertise, just patience. Even some of those stuffy science journals run photos of their contributors, and if he was near the top of his field, which it seems he must've been, then he'll have gotten newspaper coverage. As soon as we find a photo, we have a name. Then we can read about him and find out what he's been working on.'

'Unless his research was all top secret, like the Manhattan Project, like the formula for fudge-covered Oreos.'

'There you go again.'

'Even if we get the full skinny on him,' she said, 'how does that help us?'

'Maybe there's a way to undo what he did to us. An antidote or something.'

'Antidote. What – we toss frog tongues, bat wings, and lizard eyes in a big cauldron, stew them up with some broccoli?'

'Here comes Negative Jackson, vortex of pessimism. The folks at DC Comics ought to develop a new superhero around you. They go in for brooding, depressive superheroes these days.'

'And you're a Disney book. All sugar and talking chipmunks.'

In a Wile E. Coyote T-shirt, hunched over his dinner plate, Shep snickered, either because the Disney crack rang his bell or because he found the remaining meat loaf amusing.

Shepherd wasn't always as disconnected as he appeared to be.

'What I'm saying,' Dylan continued, 'is that maybe his work was controversial. And if so, then it's possible some of his colleagues opposed his research. One of them will understand what was done to us – and might be willing to help.'

'Yeah,' she said, 'and if a lot of money is needed to finance the research to find this antidote, we can always get a few billion from your uncle Scrooge McDuck.'

'You have a better idea?'

She stared at him as she drank her beer. One swallow. Two.

'I didn't think so,' he said.

Later, when the waitress brought the check, Jilly insisted on paying for the two beers that she'd ordered.

From her attitude, Dylan deduced that paying her own way was an issue of honor with her. Further, he suspected that she would no more graciously accept a nickel for a parking meter than she would take ten bucks for two beers and a tip.

After putting the tenner on the table, she counted the contents of her wallet. The calculation didn't require much time or higher mathematics. 'I'll need to find an ATM, make a withdrawal.'

'No can do,' he said. 'Those guys who blew up your car – if they have any kind of law-enforcement connections, which they probably do, then they'll be able to follow a plastic trail. And quick.'

'You mean I can't use credit cards, either?'

'Not for a while, anyway.'

'Big trouble,' she muttered, staring glumly into her wallet.

'It's not big trouble. Not considering our other problems.'

'Money trouble,' she said solemnly, 'is never little trouble.'

In that one statement, Dylan could read whole chapters from the autobiography of her childhood.

Although he didn't know for sure that the men in pursuit of her could have connected Jilly to him and Shep, Dylan decided not to use any of his plastic, either. When the restaurant ran his card through their point-of-sale verification machine, the transaction would register in a credit-clearing center. Any legitimate law-enforcement agency or any gifted hacker with dirty money behind him, monitoring that center either with a court order or secretly, might be running software that could track selected individuals immediately upon the execution of a credit-card purchase.

Paying with cash, Dylan was surprised to feel no charge of uncanny energy on the currency, which had passed through uncountable hands before coming into his possession in a bank withdrawal a couple days ago. This suggested that unlike fingerprints, psychic spoor faded completely away with time.

He told the waitress to keep the change, and he took Shep to the men's room, while Jilly visited the ladies'.

'Pee,' Shep said as soon as they walked into the lavatory and he knew where they were. He put his book on a shelf above the sinks. 'Pee.'

'Pick a stall,' Dylan said. 'I think they're all unused.'

'Pee,' Shep said, keeping his head down, peering up from under his brow as he shuffled to the first of the four stalls. From behind the door, as he latched it, he said, 'Pee.'

A robust seventy-something man with a white mustache and white muttonchops stood at one of the sinks, washing his hands. The air smelled of orange-scented soap.

Dylan approached a urinal. Shep couldn't produce at a urinal because he feared being spoken to while indisposed.

'Pee,' Shep called out from behind his stall door. 'Pee.'

In any public restroom, Shepherd became so uncomfortable that he needed to be in continuous voice contact with his brother, to assure himself that he hadn't been abandoned.

'Pee,' Shep said, growing anxious in his stall. 'Dylan, pee. Dylan, Dylan. Pee!'

'Pee,' Dylan replied.

Shep's spoken pee served a purpose similar to that of a signal broadcast by submarine sonar apparatus, and Dylan's response was equivalent to the return ping that signified the echolocation of another vessel, in this case a known and friendly presence in the scary depths of the men's room.

'Pee,' said Shep.

'Pee,' Dylan replied…

In the mirrored wall above the urinals, Dylan observed the retiree's reaction to this verbal sonar.

'Pee, Dylan.'

'Pee, Shepherd.'

Puzzled and uneasy, Mr. Muttonchops looked back and forth from the closed stall to Dylan, to the stall, as if something not only strange but also perverse might be unfolding here.

'Pee.'

'Pee.'

When Mr. Muttonchops realized that Dylan was watching him, when their eyes met in the mirror above the urinals, the retiree quickly looked away. He turned off the water at the sink, without rinsing the orange-scented lather off his hands.

'Pee, Dylan.'

'Pee, Shepherd.'

Dripping frothy suds from his fingers, shedding iridescent bubbles that floated in his wake and settled slowly to the floor, the retiree went to a wall dispenser and cranked out a few paper towels.

At last came the sound of Shepherd's healthy stream.

'Good pee,' said Shep.

'Good pee.'

Reluctant to pause long enough to dry his soapy hands, the man fled the lavatory with the wad of paper towels.

Dylan went to a different sink from the one that the retiree had used – and then had an idea that led him to the towel dispenser.

'Pee, pee, pee,' Shep said happily, with great relief.

'Pee, pee, pee,' Dylan echoed, returning with a towel to the retiree's sink.

Shielding his right hand with the paper towel, he touched the faucet that the retiree had so recently shut off. Nothing. No fizz. No crackle.

He touched the fixture barehanded. Lots of fizz and crackle.

Again with the paper towel. Nothing.

Skin contact was required. Maybe not just hands. Maybe an elbow would work. Maybe feet. All sorts of ludicrous comic possibilities occurred to him.

'Pee.'

'Pee.'

Dylan rubbed the faucet vigorously with the towel, scrubbing away the soap and water that the retiree had left on the handle.

Then he touched it with his bare hand once more. The senior citizen's psychic spoor remained as strong as it had been previously.

'Pee.'

'Pee.'

Evidently, this latent energy couldn't simply be wiped away as fingerprints could be, but it dissipated gradually on its own, like an evaporating solvent.

At another sink, Dylan washed his hands. He was drying them near the towel dispenser when Shepherd came out of the fourth stall and went to the sink that his brother had just used.

'Pee,' Shepherd said.

'You can see me now.'

'Pee,' Shep insisted as he turned on the water.

'I'm right here.'

'Pee.'

Refusing to be drawn into the sonar game when they were within sight of each other, Dylan tossed his crumpled towels in the waste can, and waited.

A riot of bizarre thoughts tumbled through his head, like an immense load of colorful laundry in a laundromat-size clothes dryer. One of those thoughts was that Shep had gone into the first stall but had come out of the fourth.

'Pee.'

Dylan went to the fourth stall. The door stood ajar, and he shouldered it open.

Partitions separated the stalls, with twelve or fourteen inches of air space at the bottom. Shepherd could have dropped flat on the floor and wriggled from stall one to number four, under intervening partitions. Possible but highly unlikely.

'Pee,' Shep repeated, but with less enthusiasm, reluctantly coming to the conclusion that his brother would not participate any longer.

As fastidious about personal cleanliness as he was about the geometrical presentation of his meals, Shep had a post-toilet routine from which he never deviated: vigorously scrub the hands once, rinse them thoroughly, then scrub and rinse again. Indeed, as Dylan watched, Shep began the second scrub.

The kid had a special concern about the sanitary conditions in public lavatories. He regarded even the most well-maintained restroom with paranoid suspicion, certain that all known diseases and some not yet discovered were busily festering on every surface. Having read the American Medical Association Encyclopedia of Medicine, Shep could recite a list of virtually all known diseases and infections if you were foolish enough to ask him to do so, and if he happened to be relating to the outer world well enough to hear your request – and if you had a sufficient number of hours to listen, since he would be all but impossible to stop once he got started.

Now, with the second rinse completed, Shep's hands were red from excessive scrubbing and from water turned up so hot that he'd hissed in discomfort as he had endured it. Mindful of the deadly and cunning microorganisms hiding in plain sight on the chrome faucet handle, he turned the water off with his elbow.

Dylan could not imagine any circumstances under which Shepherd would lie facedown on a lavatory floor and slither under a series of partitions between toilet stalls. In fact, if it ever were to happen, you could be certain that simultaneously, in a sporting-goods store somewhere, Satan would be buying ice skates.

Besides, his white T-shirt remained immaculate. He hadn't been mopping the floor with it.

Holding his hands high, like a surgeon expecting an assisting nurse to sheath them in latex gloves, Shep crossed the room to the towel dispenser. He waited for his brother to turn the crank, which he would not touch with clean hands.

'Didn't you go into the first stall?' Dylan asked.

Head lowered in his customary shy posture, but also cocked so he could look up sideways at the towel machine, Shepherd frowned at the handle and said, 'Germs.'

'Shep, when we came in here, didn't you go straight into the first stall?'

'Germs.'

'Shep?'

'Germs.'

'Hey, come on, listen to me, buddy.'

'Germs.'

'Give me a break, Shep. Will you listen to me, please?'

'Germs.'

Dylan cranked out a few towels, tore them off the perforated roll, and handed them to his brother. 'But then didn't you come out of the fourth stall?'

Scowling at his hands, drying them energetically, obsessively, instead of merely blotting them on the paper, Shep said, 'Here.'

'What'd you say?'

'Here.'

'What do you hear?'

'Here.'

'I don't hear anything, little bro.'

'H-e-r-e,' Shep spelled with some effort, as if pronouncing each letter at an emotional cost.

'What do you want, bro?'

Shep trembled. 'Here.'

'Here what?' Dylan asked, seeking clarification even though he knew that clarification wasn't likely to be granted.

'There,' said Shep.

'There?' Dylan asked.

'There,' Shep agreed, nodding, though continuing to focus intently on his hands, still trembling.

'There where?'

'Here.' The note in Shep's voice might have been impatience.

'What're we talking about, buddy?'

'Here.'

'Here,' Dylan repeated.

'There,' said Shep, and what had seemed to be impatience matured instead into a strained note of anxiety.

Trying to understand, Dylan said, 'Here, there.'

'Here, th-th-there,' Shep repeated with a shudder.

'Shep, what's wrong? Shep, are you scared?'

'Scared,' Shep confirmed. 'Yeah. Scared. Yeah.'

'What're you scared of, buddy?'

'Shep is scared.'

'Of what?'

'Shep is scared,' he said, beginning to shake more violently. 'Shep is scared.'

Dylan put his hands on his brother's shoulders. 'Easy, easy now. It's okay, Shep. There's nothing to be scared about. I'm right here with you, little bro.'

'Shep is scared.' The kid's averted face had faded as pale as whatever haunting spirits he might have glimpsed.

'Your hands are clean, no germs, just you and me, nothing to be afraid of. Okay?'

Shepherd didn't reply but continued to shake.

Resorting to the singsong cadences with which his brother most often could be calmed in moments of emotional turmoil, Dylan said, 'Good clean hands, no dirty germs, good clean hands. Gonna go now, go now, hit the road now. Okay? Gonna roll. Okay? You like the road, on the road again, on the road, goin' places where we never been. Okay? On the road again, like old Willie Nelson, you and me, rollin' along. Like always, rollin'. The old rhythm, the rhythm of the road. You can read your book, read and ride, read and ride. Okay?'

'Okay,' said Shep.

'Read and ride.'

'Read and ride,' Shep echoed. The urgency and tension drained out of his voice even though he still shivered. 'Read and ride.'

As Dylan had calmed his brother, Shep had continued to dry his hands with such energy that the towels had shredded. Crumpled rags and frayed curls of damp paper littered the floor at his feet.

Dylan held Shep's hands until they stopped trembling. Gently, he pried open the clenched fingers and removed the remaining tatters of the paper towels. He wadded this debris and threw it in the nearby trash can.

Placing a hand under Shep's chin, he tipped the kid's head up.

The moment their eyes met, Shep closed his.

'You okay?' Dylan asked.

'Read and ride.'

'I love you, Shep.'

'Read and ride.'

A pinch of color had returned to the kid's wintry cheeks. The lines of anxiety in his face slowly smoothed away as crow tracks might be erased from a mantle of snow by a persistent breeze.

Although Shep's outer tranquility became complete, his inner weather remained troubled. Shuttered, his eyes twitched behind his pale lids, jumping from sight to sight in a world that only he could see.

'Read and ride,' Shep repeated, as if those three words were a calming mantra.

Dylan regarded the bank of toilet stalls. The door of the fourth stood open, as he had left it after he'd checked on the nature of the partitions. The doors of the two middle stalls were ajar, and that of the first remained tightly closed.

'Read and ride,' said Shep.

'Read and ride,' Dylan assured him. 'I'll get your book.'

Leaving his brother beside the towel dispenser, Dylan retrieved Great Expectations from the shelf above the sinks.

Shep stood where he'd been left, head still raised even though Dylan's supporting hand had been removed. Eyes closed, but busy.

Carrying the book, Dylan went to the first stall. He tried the door. It wouldn't open.

'Here, there,' Shep whispered. Standing with his eyes closed, arms slack at his sides, and hands open with both palms facing front, Shepherd had an otherworldly quality, as though he were a medium in a trance, bisected by the membrane between this world and the next. If he had risen off the floor, his levitation would have conformed to his appearance so completely that you would not have been much surprised to see him floating in the air. Although Shep's voice remained recognizably his own, he almost seemed to speak for a seance-summoned entity from Beyond: 'Here, there.'

Dylan knew that no one could be in the first stall. Nevertheless he dropped to one knee and peered under the door to confirm what he understood to be a certainty.

'Here, there.'

He got up and tried the door again. Not just stuck. Locked. From the inside, of course.

A faulty latch, perhaps. Loose, the drop bar might have fallen into the latch channel when no one had been in the stall.

Maybe Shepherd had approached this first compartment, as Dylan had seen him do, but had found it inaccessible, and had at once moved to the fourth without Dylan noticing.

'Here, there.'

The chill found bone first, not skin, and radiated through Dylan from the core of every limb. Fear iced his marrow, although not fear alone; this was also a chill of not entirely unpleasant expectation and of awe inspired by some mysterious looming event that he sensed much in the manner that a storm petrel, winging under curdled black clouds, senses the glorious tempest before being alerted by either lightning or thunder.

Strangely, he glanced at the mirror above the sink, prepared to see a room other than the lavatory in which he stood. His expectation of wonders outstripped the capacity of the moment to deliver them, however, and the reflection proved to be the mundane facts of toilet stalls and urinals. He and Shep were the only figures occupying the reversed image, though he didn't know who or what else he might have expected.

With one last puzzled glance at the locked stall door, Dylan returned to his brother and put one hand on his shoulder.

At Dylan's touch, Shepherd opened his eyes, lowered his head, let his shoulders slump forward, and in general reassumed the humble posture in which he shuffled through life.

'Read and ride,' Shep said, and Dylan said, 'Let's roll.'