By the Light of the Moon

22

Outside Globe, Arizona, past midnight, they stopped at a service station where the night man had almost finished closing. Nature had given him an unfortunately thin fox face, which he failed to enhance with a hedgehog haircut. In his twenties, he had the surly manner of a fourteen-year-old with a severe hormonal imbalance. According to the tag on his shirt, his name was SKIPPER.

Perhaps Skipper would have switched on the pumps again and would have filled the Expedition's tank if Dylan had offered a credit card, but no bookmaker in Vegas would have been naive enough to quote odds in favor of that outcome. At the mention of cash, however, his crafty eyes sharpened on the promise of an easy skim, and his poor attitude improved from surly to sullen.

Skipper turned on the pumps but not the exterior lights. In the dark, he filled the tank while Dylan and Jilly cleaned bug splatters and dust off the windshield and the tailgate glass, no more likely to offer assistance than he was likely to start reciting Shakespeare's sonnets with a perfect seventeenth-century English accent.

When Dylan caught Skipper watching Jilly with obvious lascivious interest, a low-grade fever of anger warmed his face. Then, with some surprise, he wondered when he'd become possessive of her – and why he thought he had any reason or right to be possessive.

They had known each other less than five hours. True, they had been subjected to great danger, enormous pressures, and consequently they had discovered more about each other's character than they might have learned during a long acquaintance under ordinary circumstances. Nevertheless, the only fundamental thing he knew about Jilly was that she could be depended upon in a pinch, that she did not back down. This wasn't a bad thing to know about anyone, but it wasn't a full portrait, either.

Or was it?

As he finished cleaning the windshield, angered by Skipper's leer, Dylan wondered if this one thing he knew about Jilly might be all he needed to know: She deserved his trust. Perhaps everything else that mattered in a relationship grew from trust – from a tranquil faith in the courage, integrity, and kindness of the other person.

He decided that he was losing his mind. The psychotropic stuff had affected his brain in more ways than he yet knew. Here he was thinking about committing his life to a woman who already thought he was a Disney comic book, all sugar and talking chipmunks.

They were not an item. They weren't even friends. You didn't make a true friend in mere hours. They were at most fellow survivors, victims of the same shipwreck, with a mutual interest in staying afloat and remaining alert for sharks.

Regarding Jilly Jackson, he wasn't feeling possessive. He was only protective, just as he felt toward Shep, just as he would feel toward a sister if he had one. Sister. Yeah, right.

By the time he accepted cash for the gasoline, Skipper brightened from surliness to sullenness to peevishness. Making no pretense of adding the currency to the station receipts, he tucked the money in his wallet with a pinched look of spiteful satisfaction.

The total had been thirty-four dollars; but Dylan paid with two twenties and suggested that the attendant keep the difference. He did not want the change, because those bills would carry Skipper's spoor.

He had been careful not to touch the fuel pumps or anything else on which the attendant might have left a psychic imprint. He didn't want to know the nature of Skipper's soul, didn't want to feel the texture of his mean life of petty thefts and petty hatreds.

Regarding the human race, Dylan was as much of an optimist as ever. He still liked people, but he'd had enough of them for one day.

Traveling north from Globe, through the Apache Mountains, with the San Carlos Indian Reservation to the east, Jilly gradually became aware that something had changed between her and Dylan O'Conner. He wasn't relating to her quite as he had previously. He glanced away from the road more frequently than before, studying her in what he believed to be a surreptitious manner, and so she pretended not to notice. A new energy flowed between them, but she couldn't define it.

Finally she decided she was just tired, too exhausted and too stressed to trust her perceptions. After this eventful night, lesser mortals than Jillian Jackson, Southwest Amazon, might have lost their sanity altogether, so a little paranoia was nothing to worry about.

From Safford to Globe, Dylan had told her about the encounter with Lucas Crocker. He'd also recounted the story of Ben Tanner and his granddaughter, which revealed an application of his sixth sense that was more appealing than being drawn into the depraved psychotic worlds of people like Crocker and like Kenny of the Many Knives.

Now, as the lights of Globe receded, as Shep remained quietly engaged with Great Expectations, Jilly brought Dylan up to speed on the unsettling incident in the women's restroom at the restaurant.

At one of the sinks, as she'd washed her hands, she had looked up at the mirror and had seen a reflection of the bathroom that was accurate in every detail except one. Where the toilet stalls should have been, three dark wood confessionals stood instead; the carved crosses on the doors were brightened by gold leafing.

'I turned around to look directly, and there were only toilet stalls, as there should have been. But when I looked at the mirror again… the confessionals were still reflected in it.'

Rinsing her hands, unable to take her eyes off the mirror, she had been watching when the door of one of the confessionals slowly opened. A priest came out of the booth, not with a smile, not with a prayer book, but in a sliding heap, dead and drenched in blood.

'I got the hell out of the bathroom,' she said, shivering at the memory. 'But I can't turn this off, Dylan. These visions keep coming at me, and they mean something.'

'Visions,' he said. 'Not mirages?'

'I was in denial,' she admitted. She slipped one fingertip under the gauze pad of the Band-Aid that covered the point of injection in her arm, and she gently fingered the sore, slightly swollen puncture wound. 'But I'm not playing that game anymore. These are visions, all right. Premonitions.'

The first town ahead was Seneca, thirty miles away. Twenty-eight miles beyond Seneca lay Carrizo. Both were just wide spots in the road. Dylan was driving deeper into one of those many areas in the Southwest known separately and collectively as the Big Lonely.

'In my case,' he said, 'I seem to be making connections between people and places, regarding events that happened in the past or that are already underway in current time. But you think you're seeing some event in the future.'

'Yeah. An incident in a church somewhere. It's going to happen. And soon, I think. Murder. Mass murder. And somehow… we're going to be there when it goes down.'

'You see us there? In your visions?'

'No. But why else would these same images keep coming to me – the birds, the church, all of it? I'm not having premonitions about train wrecks in Japan, airplane crashes in South America, tidal waves in Tahiti. I'm seeing something in my own future, our future.'

'Then we don't go anywhere near a church,' Dylan said.

'Somehow… I think the church comes to us. I don't think there's any way we can avoid it.'

A rapid moonset left the night with none but starlight, and the Big Lonely seemed to get bigger, lonelier.

Dylan didn't pilot the Expedition as if it were a wingless jet, but he pushed it hard. He completed what should have been more than a three-hour drive in two and a half hours.

For a town of five thousand, Holbrook boasted an unusual number of motels. It provided the only convenient lodging for tourists who wanted to visit the Petrified Forest National Park or various Native American attractions at nearby Hopi and Navajo Indian reservations.

No five-star resorts were among the accommodations, but Dylan wasn't looking for amenities. All he wanted was a quiet place where the cockroaches were discreet.

He chose the motel farthest from service stations and other businesses likely to get noisy in the morning. At the registration counter, he presented a sleepy-eyed desk clerk with cash in advance, no credit card.

The clerk required a driver's license. Dylan was loath to give it, but refusal would arouse suspicion. He had already given an Arizona license-plate number, and not the one on the plates that he had stolen. Fortunately, the sleepy clerk seemed not to be intrigued by the apparent conflict between a California license and Arizona plates.

Jilly didn't want adjoining rooms. After all that had happened, even if they left the door open between rooms, she'd feel isolated.

They booked a single unit with two queen-size beds. Dylan and Shep would share one, and Jilly would take the other.

The usual decor of bold clashing patterns, calculated to conceal stains and wear, gave Dylan a faint case of motion sickness. He was bone tired, too, and grainy-eyed, suffering from a killer headache.

By 3:10 A.M., they had transferred the essential luggage to the room. Shep wanted to bring the Dickens novel, and Dylan noticed that although the boy had appeared to be absorbed in the book throughout the ride north, he was on the same page that he'd been reading in the restaurant, all the way back in Safford.

Jilly used the bathroom first, and when she came out, teeth brushed and ready for bed, she still wore street clothes. 'No pajamas tonight. I want to be ready to move fast.'

'Good idea,' Dylan decided.

Shep had responded to an evening of chaos and shattered routines with remarkable equanimity, so Dylan didn't want to push him further by making him forgo his customary sleepwear. One straw too many, and Shep might break out of his stoic silence into a hyperverbal mode, which could last for hours, ensuring that none of them got any sleep.

Besides, Shep wore pretty much the same thing in bed and out of it. His daytime wardrobe consisted of a collection of identical white T-shirts featuring Wile E. Coyote, and a collection of identical blue jeans. At night he put on a fresh Wile E. Coyote T-shirt and a pair of black pajama pants.

Seven years ago, in a state of hysterical despair over the decisions required to dress each morning, Shep had rebelled against a varied wardrobe. Thereafter, he would wear only jeans and Wile E.

The nature of his fascination with the infamous coyote was not clear. When in the mood for cartoon mayhem, he watched Road Runner videos for hours. Sometimes he laughed with delight; at other times, he followed the action as solemnly as though it were the moodiest of Swedish cinema; and on still other occasions, he watched quietly, with bottomless sorrow, tears sliding ceaselessly down his cheeks.

Shepherd O'Conner was an enigma wrapped in a mystery, but Dylan wasn't always sure that the mystery had a solution or that the enigma possessed any meaning. The great stone heads of Easter Island, as enigmatic as anything on earth, stared with mysterious purpose toward the sea, but they were stone inside as well as out.

After brushing his teeth twice and flossing twice, after washing his hands twice before toilet and twice after, Shep returned to the bedroom. He sat on the edge of the bed and took off his slippers.

'You're still wearing socks,' Dylan noted.

Shepherd always slept barefoot. But when Dylan knelt to remove the socks, the kid swung his legs into bed and pulled the covers up to his chin.

Deviations from routine were forced on Shep, always to his deep dismay; he never chose to make them.

Dylan worried, 'Are you all right, kiddo?'

Shepherd closed his eyes. There would be no communication on the issue of socks.

Maybe his feet were cold. The in-window air conditioner didn't cool the room evenly, but sent icy drafts chasing along the floor.

Maybe he was worried about germs. Germs on the carpet, germs on the bedclothes, but only germs that infected feet.

Maybe if you excavated around one of those Easter Island stone heads, you'd find the rest of a giant statue buried in the earth, and maybe when you revealed its feet, the statue would be wearing stone socks, for which an explanation would be as hard to come by as an explanation for Shep's new preference for bedtime footwear.

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.