By the Light of the Moon

25

Half crazed with worry, Jilly almost snapped completely when the radiant tunnel in front of her appeared to fracture from the center and then folded upon the fracture lines. Although she thought the red passageway folded inward upon itself, simultaneously she had a sense of it blooming toward her, causing her to step backward in alarm.

In place of the tunnel, she was confronted by shifting geometric patterns in shades of red and black, similar to what might be seen in a kaleidoscope, except that these designs were breathtakingly three-dimensional, continually evolving. She feared falling into them, not down necessarily, but also up and around, feared tumbling like a weightless astronaut into blossoming patterns forever, to eternity.

In fact, the awesome structure that loomed in the wall defied her sense of vision, or perhaps defied her mental capacity to grasp and analyze what her eyes revealed. It seemed markedly more real than anything else in the bathroom, real but so infinitely strange that her terrified gaze ricocheted off one peculiar detail after another, as though her mind fled from the consideration of the true complexity of the construct. Repeatedly she perceived a depth greater than three dimensions, but didn't possess the ability to lock on that perception and hold it, even though a small and panicky inner voice of intuition counted five, and then seven, and kept counting after she refused to listen to it anymore.

Almost at once, new colors intruded upon the red and black: the blue of a summer sky, the golden shade of certain beaches and of ripe wheat. Among the countless thousands of tiles in this ceaselessly reforming mosaic, the percentage of red and black rapidly declined as the blue and gold increased. She thought she saw, then knew she saw, then tried not to see fragments of human forms distributed widely through the kaleidoscopic patterns: here a staring eye, and there a finger, and there an ear, as if a stained-glass portrait had been shattered and tossed in the air by a cyclone wind. She thought that she also glimpsed a toothy portion of Wile E. Coyote's grinning visage, then saw the merest scrap of a familiar blue-and-yellow Hawaiian shirt, and another scrap there.

No more than five or six seconds passed from the instant that the tunnel folded upon itself until Dylan and Shepherd unfolded into the bathroom and appeared before Jilly as whole and normal as ever they had been. Behind them, where the tunnel had once churned with red light, there was now only an ordinary wall.

With obvious relief, Dylan exhaled a pent-up breath and said something like, 'No gooey-bloody.'

Shep declared, 'Shep is dirty.'

Jilly said, 'You son of a bitch,' and punched Dylan in the chest.

She hadn't pulled the punch. The blow made a satisfying thwack, but Dylan was too big to be rocked off his feet as Jilly had hoped he would be.

'Hey!' Dylan protested.

Head bowed, Shep said, 'Time to shower.'

And Jilly repeated herself, 'You son of a bitch,' as she hit Dylan again.

'What's wrong with you?'

'You said you weren't going in there,' she angrily reminded him, and punched still harder.

'Ow! Hey, I didn't intend to go.'

'You went,' she accused, and she swung at him again.

With one of his open hands as big as a catcher's mitt, he caught her fist and held it, effectively ending her assault. 'I went, yeah, okay, but I really didn't intend to go.'

Shepherd remained patient but persistent: 'Shep is dirty. Time to shower.'

'You told me you wouldn't go,' Jilly said, 'but you went, and left me here alone.'

She didn't quite know how Dylan had gotten hold of her by both wrists. Restraining her, he said, 'I came back, we both came back, everything's all right.'

'I couldn't know you'd come back. As far as I knew, you'd never come back or you'd come back dead.'

'I had to come back alive,' he assured her, 'so you'd have a fair chance to kill me.'

'Don't joke about this.' She tried to wrench loose of him but couldn't. 'Let go of me, you bastard.'

'Are you going to hit me again?'

'If you don't let go of me, I'll tear you to pieces, I swear.'

'Time to shower.'

Dylan released her, but he kept both hands raised as though he expected that he would have to catch further punches. 'You're such an angry person.'

'Oh, you're damn right I'm an angry person.' She trembled with anger, shook with fear. 'You said you wouldn't go in there, then you went in there anyway, and I was alone.' She realized that she was shaking more with relief than with either fury or fear. 'Where the hell did you go?'

'California,' Dylan said.

'What do you mean "California"?'

'California. Disneyland, Hollywood, Golden Gate Bridge. You know, California?'

'California,' said Shep. 'One hundred sixty-three thousand seven hundred and seven square miles.'

With a thick note of disbelief in her voice, Jilly said, 'You went through the wall to California?'

'Yeah. Why not? Where'd you think we went – Narnia? Oz? Middle Earth? California's weirder than any of those places, anyway.'

Shep evidently knew a lot about his native state: 'Population, approximately thirty-five million four hundred thousand.'

'But I don't think we actually went through the wall,' Dylan said, 'or through anything at all. Shep folded here to there.'

'Highest point, Mount Whitney-'

'Folded what to where?' Jilly asked.

'-fourteen thousand four hundred ninety-four feet above sea level.'

As her anger settled and as relief brought with it a measure of calm and clarity, Jilly realized that Dylan was exhilarated. A little nervous, yes, and maybe a little fearful, too, but largely exhilarated, almost boyishly exuberant.

Dylan said, 'He folded reality maybe, space and time, one or both, I don't know, but he folded here to there. What did you fold, Shep? What exactly was it you folded?'

'Lowest point,' said Shep, 'Death Valley-'

'He'll probably be on this California thing for a while.'

'-two hundred eighty-two feet below sea level.'

'What did you fold, bro?'

'State capital – Sacramento.'

'Last night he folded stall one to stall four,' Dylan said, 'but I didn't realize it at the time.'

'Stall one to stall four?' Jilly frowned, working the pain out of the hand with which she'd punched him. 'Right now Shep's making more sense than you are.'

'State bird – California valley quail.'

'In the men's room. He folded toilet to toilet. He went in number one and came out number four. I didn't tell you about it, because I didn't realize what had happened.'

'State flower – golden poppy.'

Jilly wanted to be clear on this: 'He teleported from one toilet to another?'

'No, teleportation isn't involved. See – I came back with my own head, he came back with his own nose. No teleportation.'

'State tree – California redwood.'

'Show her your nose, Shep.'

Shepherd kept his head bowed. 'State motto – "Eureka," which means, "I have found it."'

'Believe me,' Dylan told Jilly, 'it's his own nose. This isn't a David Cronenberg film.'

She thought about that last statement for a moment while Dylan grinned at her and nodded, and then she said, 'I know I haven't even had breakfast yet, but I need a beer.'

Shepherd disapproved. 'Psychotropic intoxicant.'

'He's talking to me,' Jilly said.

'Yeah,' Dylan said.

'I mean not at me. Talking to me. Sort of.'

'Yeah, he's going through some changes.' Dylan lowered the lid on the toilet. 'Here, Shep, sit down here.'

'Time to shower,' Shep reminded them.

'All right, soon, but sit down here first.' Dylan maneuvered his brother to the closed toilet and persuaded him to sit.

'Shep is dirty. Time to shower.'

After kneeling in front of his brother, Dylan quickly examined his arms. 'I don't see anything.'

'Time to shower. Nine minutes.'

Dylan removed Shepherd's bedroom slippers, and set them aside. 'Want to bet which cartoon?'

Bewildered, Jilly wanted that beer more than ever. 'Cartoon?'

Head lowered, Shep watched his brother set aside the slippers. 'Nine minutes. One minute for each arm.'

'Bunny or puppy,' Dylan said.

Examining the adhesive bandage on her arm, Jilly saw that it was loose but that it still concealed the needle mark.

Dylan peeled the sock off Shepherd's right foot.

'One minute,' Shep said, 'for each leg-'

Moving closer, Jilly watched as Dylan examined his brother's bare foot. 'If he was injected,' she said, 'why not in the arm?'

'-and one minute for the head-'

'He was working a jigsaw puzzle at the time,' Dylan said.

'So?'

'-and two full minutes to wash everything else-'

'You've never seen my brother work a puzzle. He's fast. His hands keep moving. And he's focused.'

'-two minutes to rinse,' Shep finished. Then he added, 'Cat.'

'He's so focused,' Dylan continued, 'you can't persuade him to stop until he's completed the puzzle. You can't force him to stop. He wouldn't care what you did with his feet because he doesn't work the puzzle with his feet. But you couldn't immobilize one of his arms.'

'Maybe he was chloroformed, like me.'

Having found no obvious puncture mark on Shepherd's right foot, Dylan said, 'No. When I went across the street to get takeout, he was doing jigsaw, and when I woke up taped to the chair, Shep was still flying through the puzzle.'

Inexplicably, Shep interjected, 'Cat.'

'If he'd been chloroformed, he wouldn't have gotten over the effects that quickly,' Jilly said, remembering the disorientation that had lingered after she'd awakened.

'Cat.'

'Besides, having a chloroform-soaked rag clamped to his face would have been even more traumatic for Shep than it was for you. A lot more. He's fragile. After regaining consciousness, he'd have been either highly emotional or he'd have curled up in the fetal position and refused to move. He wouldn't have gone back to the puzzle as if nothing had happened.'

Dylan stripped the sock from Shepherd's left foot.

Shepherd's Band-Aid featured a cartoon cat.

'Cat,' said Shep. 'Shep bet cat.'

Carefully Dylan peeled off the tape.

'Shep wins,' said Shep.

More than half a day after the injection had been administered, the puncture remained inflamed and slightly swollen.

The sight of Shep's stigmata sent a shiver through Jilly that she could not entirely explain.

She removed her bunny-decorated bandage. The site of her injection looked identical to Shepherd's.

Dylan's cartoon puppy proved to conceal a needle puncture that matched his brother's and Jilly's wounds. 'He told me the stuff does something different to everyone.'

Glancing at the wall where the tunnel had been, Jilly said, 'In Shepherd's case, something way different.'

'"The effect is without exception interesting,"' Dylan quoted Frankenstein, as he had quoted him before, '"frequently astonishing, and sometimes positive."'

Jilly saw the wonder in Dylan's face, the shining hope in his eyes. 'You think this is positive for Shep?'

'I don't know about the talent to… to fold things. Whether that might be a blessing or a curse. Only time will tell. But he's talking more, too. And talking more directly to me. Now that I look back on it, he's been changing ever since this happened.'

She knew what Dylan was thinking and what he dared not say, for fear of tempting fate: that by virtue of the injection, with the aid of the mysterious psychotropic stuff, Shep might find his way out of the prison of his autism.

Negative Jackson might be a name she'd earned. Perhaps at her worst she was, as well, a vortex of pessimism, never regarding her own life and prospects, but often regarding the likelihood that most people and society in general would always find a hellbound hand-basket in which to be carried to destruction. But she didn't think she was being pessimistic – or even negative – when she looked upon this development with Shep and sensed more danger in it than hope, less potential for enlightenment than for horror.

Staring down at the tiny red point of inflammation on his foot, Shepherd whispered, 'By the light of the moon.'

In his heretofore innocent face, Jilly saw neither the vacant stare nor the benign expression, nor the wrenching anxiety, that had thus far pretty much defined his apparent emotional range. A hint of acrimony colored his voice, and his features tightened in a bitter expression that might have represented something more caustic than mere bitterness. Anger perhaps, rock-hard and long-nurtured anger.

'He said this before,' Dylan revealed, 'as I was trying to get him out of our motel room last night, just before we met you.'

'You do your work,' Shep whispered.

'This too,' Dylan said.

Shepherd's shoulders remained slumped, and his hands lay in his lap, palms up almost as if he were meditating, but his clouded face betrayed an inner storm.

'What's he talking about?' Jilly asked.

'I don't know.'

'Shep? Who're you talking to, sweetie?'

'You do your work by the light of the moon.'

'Whose work, Shep?'

A minute ago, Shepherd had been as connected to them and to the moment as she had ever seen him. Now he had gone away somewhere as surely as he had stepped through the wall to California.

She crouched beside Dylan and gently took one of Shep's limp hands in both her hands. He didn't respond to her touch. His hand remained as slack as that of a dead man.

His green eyes were alive, however, as he stared down at his foot, at the floor, perhaps seeing neither, seeming to gaze instead at someone or something that, in memory, profoundly troubled him.

'You do your work by the light of the moon,' he whispered once more. This time the suggestion of anger in his face was matched by an unmistakable raw edge to his voice.

No clairvoyant vision settled upon Jilly, no vivid premonition of terror to come, but ordinary intuition told her to be alert and to expect deadly surprises.