One Door Away From Heaven

Chapter 72

Micky had not driven more than sixteen hundred miles just to die. She could have died at home with a bottle and enough time, or by compacting her Camaro against a bridge abutment at high speed if she’d been in a hurry to check out.

When she had regained consciousness, she’d first thought that she was dead. Strange walls enclosed her, like nothing she’d ever seen either waking or in nightmares: structures neither plumb nor plaster-smooth, curving to enfold the space, appearing organic to her blurred vision, as if she were Jonah in the belly of the whale, already beyond the stomach of the leviathan and trapped now within a turn of its intestine. The foul air smelled of mold and mildew, of rodent urine, vaguely of vomit, of floorboards cured with layers of spilled beer dating back beyond Micky’s birth, of cigarette smoke condensed into a sour residue, and underlying all that — and more — was the faint but acidic scent of decomposition. For a breath, for five or six rapid heartbeats, she thought she might be dead because this was what Hell could be like if it turned out not to be as operatic as always portrayed in books and movies, if instead Hell were less about fire than about futility, less about brimstone than about isolation, less about physical torture than about despair.

Then her vision cleared in her left eye. Realizing that these walls were formed of trash and bundled publications, she knew where she must be. Not Hell. Inside the Teelroy house.

She couldn’t have intuited this interior when earlier she’d been standing on the front porch, talking to Leonard Teelroy, but now she could infer the identity of the inhabitant from the evidence.

In addition to all the other aromas in this rich stew of odors, she smelled blood. Tasted it, too, when she licked her lips.

She was having difficulty opening her right eye, because the lashes were stuck together by a wad of congealed blood.

When she tried to wipe the blood away, she discovered that her hands were bound tightly at the wrists, in front of her.

She was lying on her side, on a matted musty brocade-upholstered sofa. Crowded in front of the sofa were a TV and an armchair.

A pulse of tolerable pain beat, beat, beat along the right side of her skull, but when she raised her head, the pulse became a throb, the pain became an agony, and she thought for a moment that she would pass out. Then the torment subsided to a level she could endure.

When she tried to sit up, she discovered that her ankles were bound as securely as her wrists and that a yard-long tether, which connected the wrist and ankle restraints, would not permit her either to stretch out or stand to full height. She swung both legs as one, planted her feet on the floor, and perched on the edge of the sofa.

This maneuver triggered another paroxysm of head pain that made her feel as though one side of her skull were repeatedly swelling and deflating like a balloon. This was familiar to her; call it party head, morning-after head, just worse than she’d ever experienced it before, not accompanied by the usual remorse, but by cold anger. And this wasn’t the irrational anger she’d so long nurtured as an excuse to isolate herself, but was a rage tightly focused on Preston Maddoc.

He had become for her the devil incarnate, and perhaps not for her alone, and maybe not merely metaphorically speaking, but in fact. In the past few days, a new perception of evil had settled on Micky, and it seemed to her that the evil of men and women was — as she would once have ardently denied — a reflection of a greater and purer Evil that walked the world and worked upon it in ways devious and subtle.

When the pain subsided once more, she leaned forward and wiped her blood-plastered right eye against her right knee, swabbing the glutinous clots from lashes to blue jeans. Her vision proved to be fine, the blood hadn’t come from the eye but from a gash on her head, which might still be oozing but was no longer bleeding freely.

She listened to the house. The silence seemed to grow deeper the longer that she waited for it to be broken.

Logic suggested that Leonard Teelroy had been killed. That he had lived here alone. And that now the house was Maddoc’s playpen.

She didn’t cry out for help. The farmhouse sat on a lot of open land and far back from the county road. There were no neighbors to hear a scream.

The doctor of doom had gone somewhere. He would be back. And sooner rather than later.

She didn’t know exactly what he planned to do with her, why he hadn’t killed her in the woods, but she didn’t intend to wait around for the chance to ask him.

He had fashioned impromptu bonds from lamp cords. Copper wires encased in soft plastic.

Considering the material with which they were formed, the knots shouldn’t have been as tight as they were. Looking closely, Micky saw that these makeshift shackles were cleverly and strongly interwoven, employing as few knots as possible — and that each knot had been fused by heat. The plastic had melted, encasing the knots into hard lumps, foiling any attempt to untie them, and making it impossible to loosen the cords by persistently stretching and relaxing them.

Her attention returned to the armchair. On the table beside the chair, an ashtray brimmed with cigarette butts.

Maddoc had probably used Teelroy’s butane lighter to melt the cords. Maybe he’d left it behind. What had been fused with heat might be entirely melted away, freeing her, if she approached the task with caution.

Her wrists were too tightly bound to allow her to hold a lighter in such a way as to apply the flame to the knots between her wrists without also burning herself. The knots between her ankles, however, could be more safely attacked.

She slid off the sofa and, limited by the tether between ankles and wrists, stood hunched, knees slightly bent. The play in the cord that linked her ankles was insufficient to allow her to walk or even shuffle, and when she tried to hop, she lost her balance and fell, nearly striking her head on the table beside the armchair, meeting the floor with teeth-jarring impact.

Had she not avoided the table, she might easily have broken her neck.

Remaining on the floor, lying on her side, Micky squirmed like a snake, searching for the butane lighter beside the chair, behind it.

Close to the floor, the pervading stink pooled thicker than it had been higher up, so thick that she could actually taste it. She had to struggle to repress her gag reflex.

A crack-boom-crash, loud enough to shake the house, caused her to cry out in alarm, because for an instant she thought that she had heard a door being slammed, slammed hard, announcing the return of the demon himself. Then she realized that the sound was a peal of thunder.

The pending storm had broken.

In his rental car, entering Nun’s Lake after having driven south from the airport in Coeur d’Alene, Noah Farrel used his cell phone to ring Geneva Davis. When Micky had called her aunt this morning before leaving Seattle, Geneva would have told her that her nervy three-hundred-dollar ploy to rope the hapless PI into this game had worked and that he was on his way to Idaho. He wanted Micky to wait for him, instead of going off half-cocked. Geneva would have told her niece, per Noah’s instructions, to call home again from Nun’s Lake to leave the name of a local diner or other landmark where he could meet her as soon as he arrived. Now, when he got Geneva on the line to find out where this rendezvous had been set, he discovered that Micky hadn’t called this morning from Seattle and had not rung from Nun’s Lake, either.

“She has to be there by now,” Geneva fretted. “I don’t know whether to be just worried or worried sick.”

The radiant girl is surprisingly quick to trust strangers. Curtis suspects that anyone who shines like she does must possess exceptional insight that allows her to perceive, to some depth, whether those people whom she encounters have hugely good or bad intentions.

She takes with her no suitcase, no personal effects, as though she has nothing in this world but what she wears, as if she needs no mementos and wishes to walk out of her past entirely and forever— though she does remember the journal on the bed. She retrieves it before coming so close to Curtis and Old Yeller that, through the dog, he can feel the warmth of her glorious shine.

“Mother’s giving a great performance as a wasted acidhead. She’s really into the role,” Leilani says softly. “She might not know I’m gone until I’ve published maybe twenty novels and won the Nobel prize for literature.”

Curtis is impressed. “Really? Is that what you foresee happening to you?”

“If you’re going to foresee anything at all, then you might as well foresee something big. That’s what I always say. So tell me, Batman, have you saved other worlds?”

Curtis is tickled to be called Batman, especially if she is thinking of Michael Keaton’s interpretation, which is the only really great Batman, but he must be honest: “Not me. Though my mother saved quite a few.”

“It figures our world would get a novice. But I’m sure you’ll be good at it.”

The girl’s confidence in him, although unearned, makes Curtis blush with pride. “I’m going to try my best.”

Old Yeller moves from between Curtis’s legs to Leilani, and the girl reaches down to stroke her furry head.

By virtue of the boy-dog bond, Curtis almost swoons to the ground when he is swept by the powerful tidal wash of sister-become’s emotional reaction to Leilani. She is as enchanted as any dog ever could be — which is saying a lot, considering that dogs are born to be enchanted every bit as much as they are born to enchant.

“How do you know that a world needs saving?” Leilani asks.

Avoiding a swoon, Curtis says, “It’s obvious. Lots of signs.”

“Are we getting out of here this week or next?” asks Polly, who has climbed all the way into the motor home.

She steps aside to let sister-become, then Leilani and Curtis, precede her to the door. The dog bounds out of the motor home, but the radiant girl descends the steps with caution, planting her good leg on the ground first, then swinging the braced leg down beside it, wobbling, but at once regaining balance.

Descending to Leilani’s side, feeling the dog shiver anew at the spoor of evil that lingers around the motor home, Curtis wonders, “Where’s your stepfather, the murderer?”

“He went to see a man about an alien,” Leilani says.

“Alien?”

“It’s a long story.”

“Will he be back soon?”

Suddenly her fine face darkened from within as she surveyed the shaded campground, where a wind had risen to shake showers of loose needles out of the high boughs of the overarching evergreens. “Maybe any minute.”

Having abandoned her post on the overturned trash can beside the motor home, Cass joins them in time to hear this exchange, which she clearly finds disturbing. “Honey,” she says to the girl, “can you run with that thing weighing you down?”

“I can hurry, but not as fast as you. How far?”

“The other end of the campground,” Cass says, pointing past the dozens of intervening motor homes and travel trailers, all battened down for bad weather, warm lights glowing in their windows.

“I can make it easy,” Leilani assures them, starting to limp in a quick hitching gate, in the direction that Cass pointed. “But I can’t hurry at top speed all the way.”

“Okay,” Polly says, moving with Leilani, “if we’re going to do this crazy thing—“

Cass grabs Curtis by one hand and pulls him with her as though he might otherwise roam off in the wrong direction like a Rain Man or a Gump, and as she heads eastward, she continues Polly’s speech in one of their fractured duologues: “—if we’re really going to do it, and risk being chased down—“

“—as kidnappers—“

“—then let’s—“

“—move ass.”

“Curtis, you run ahead with me,” Cass directs, now treating him less like alien royally than like an ordinary boy. “Help me pull up Stakes. We’ll have to hit the road as quick as we can, storm or no storm, and head for the state line.”

“I’ll stay with you, Leilani,” Polly says.

Reluctant to leave the girl’s side, Curtis digs in his heels and holds Cass back, but only long enough to say, “Don’t worry, you’ll like the Spelkenfelters.”

“Oh,” Leilani assures him, “I like nothing better than a good Spelkenfelter.”

This eccentric answer spawns in Curtis several questions.

Cass denies him further socializing when she hisses, “Curtis!” Her tone of voice is not unlike the one that his mother had used on the three occasions when he’d displeased her.

Lightning spears the sky. The prickly shadows of the evergreens leap, leap across the brightened ground, over the walls of the ranked motor homes and trailers, as though running from those hot celestial forks or from the roar of thunder that after two seconds chases them.

The dog sprints for the Fleetwood, Cass sets a pace that argues for the proposition that she has some canine blood in her veins, too, and Curtis follows where duty calls.

He looks back once, and the radiant girl is rocking along on her braced leg faster than he had expected. This world is as vivid as any Curtis has ever seen, and more dazzling than many, but even among the uncountable glories of this place and even with the fabulous Polluxia at her side, Leilani Klonk is the focus of this scene and seems to trail the whole world behind her as if it were but a cloak.

A private investigator’s license reliably received a snappy response anywhere in the country, regardless of the state in which it had been issued. As often as not, women who had a moment earlier looked through you suddenly found you to be a man of dark mystery and magnetic power. Thousands upon thousands of detective novels, episodes of television programs, and suspense films were a magic brush that painted a romantic veneer over many a wart and wattle.

The male registration clerk at the campground office didn’t flutter his eyelashes with desire when Noah Farrel flashed his PI license, but the guy responded, as did most men, with acute interest and a sort of friendly envy. Fiftyish, he had a pale face wider at the bottom than at the top, and a body that matched the proportions of the face, as though the dullness of his life had distorted him and pulled him down more effectively than gravity could ever manage. He wanted all the vicarious thrills he could get from Noah. Convincing him that cows could sing opera would be easier than getting him to believe that a private detective’s work amounted to a boring parade of faithless-husband and disloyal-employee investigations. He knew that it must be a whirl of hot babes, cool gunplay, fast cars, and fat envelopes full of cash money. He asked more questions than Noah, not only about the current case, but also about the Life. Noah lied baldly in response, portraying this investigation as a grindingly tedious hunt for potentially key claimants in a class-action suit against a major corporation, with a legal filing deadline looming so near that he had to track people on their vacations, and he fabricated glamorous details about his prior adventures.

The helpful clerk confirmed that Jordan Banks had rented a prime campsite earlier in the afternoon. The license number and description of the motor home — a converted Prevost bus — matched the information that Noah had obtained, through police contacts, from the California Department of Motor Vehicles. Bingo.

The clerk also recognized Micky when Noah presented a photograph that he’d obtained from her aunt. “Oh, yeah, absolutely, she come around earlier today, before Mr. Banks arrived, asking had he checked in yet.”

Alarm stiffened Noah’s bones and drew him up from a slump to full height. If Maddoc knew that she had come looking for him…

“She’s his sister,” said the clerk. “Pullin’ a surprise for his birthday, so I didn’t say word one to him when he checked in later.” His eyes narrowed. “Say, she is his sister, you think?”

“Yes. Yes, she is. Has she been back since Mr. Banks arrived?”

“Nope. Hope she comes around ‘fore my shift ends. She’s a tonic to the eyes, that girl.”

“Do I need a visitor’s pass?” Noah asked.

“Don’t work that easy. If he didn’t leave your name, which he didn’t, I have to send one of my grounds boys down there to camp-site sixty-two and ask if I should put you through. Problem is, one of ‘em is off sick today, and the other’s run half-crazy doin’ two jobs.

I got to go down there myself and do the askin’ while you wait here.”

The first lightning of the coming storm flared beyond the office windows, and a hammerfall of thunder rattled every pane, sparing Noah the expense of fishing a C-note from his wallet and playing out one of the most cliched scenes in all of detective fiction.

The clerk winced and said, “Don’t like to leave my station in a storm. Got responsibilities here. Hell, anyway, you’re next thing to the cops, aren’t you?”

“Next thing,” Noah agreed.

“Go on, then. Pull your car up, and I’ll raise the gate.”

The first bolt of lightning, thrown open with a crash, had not unlocked the rain. The longer part of a minute passed before another bolt, brighter than the first, slammed out of the hasp of the heavens and opened a door to the storm.

Scattered drops of rain, as fat as grapes, snapped into the oiled lane that served the many campsites, striking with such force that sprays of smaller droplets bounced a foot high from each point of impact.

Leilani’s best speed was behind her. The cyborg leg might appear to be ass-kicking fearsome, but it cramped sooner than she expected, perhaps because she’d done so little walking these past few days when they had been on the road. She lost the smooth hip action necessary to keep swinging along, and she couldn’t reestablish the rhythm.

The prelude to the symphony of rain lasted only seconds before a Niagara cascaded onto the campground, a concert composed entirely of furious drums. The downpour came so hard that even where the trees arched across the lane, the instantly sodden boughs provided little protection.

She tried to shield her journal against her body, but the wind whipped sheets of rain against her, and she saw the pressboard cover darkening as it sucked up the water. She was already soaked to the skin, as wet as if she’d gone swimming fully clothed, and clutching the notebook against her chest provided it no protection whatsoever.

Putting a hand on Leilani s shoulder and leaning close to be heard over the roar of the rain and over thunder that now came in volleys, Polly said, “Not far! That Fleetwood, thirty yards!”

Pushing the journal into Polly’s hands, Leilani said, “Take this! Go ahead! I’ll catch up!”

Polly insisted they were close, and Leilani knew they were close, but she couldn’t move as fast as Polly because the cramps in her leg had grown painful, and because she was unable to recover the correct hip rhythm no matter how hard she tried, and because the dirt service lane — generously oiled to suppress the dust — proved slippery when wet, adding to her balance problems. No matter how aggressively she insisted on being a dangerous young mutant every day of her life, she was undeniably a disabled little girl in a situation like this, regardless of how much that galled her. She pushed the journal into Polly’s hands, gut-wrenched by the thought that rain was seeping through the pages, smearing the ink, making her elaborate code hard if not impossible to read, gut-wrenched because between these covers were years of her suffering, not merely tales of Sinsemilla and Dr. Doom, but so many memories of Lukipela in detail that she might not be able to perfectly recall. On these pages were the observations and the ideas that would help her to become a writer, to become someone, to take her shapeless life and to impress meaning and purpose upon it, and it seemed to her that if she lost these four hundred pages of tightly written, highly condensed experience, if she allowed them to be reduced to meaningless blurs and smears, then her life would be meaningless, as well. On one level, she knew this fear was unfounded, but that wasn’t the level on which she was operating, so she shoved the journal into Polly’s hands and screamed, “Take it, keep it dry, it’s my life, it’s my LIFE!” Maybe this seemed crazy to Polly, and in fact it was crazy, absolutely loony, but she must have seen something in Leilani’s face or eyes that scared her, shook her, moved her, because maybe twenty-five yards from the Fleetwood, she accepted the journal and tried to jam it in her purse, and when it wouldn’t fit, she ran with it. The sky, an ocean coming down; the wind, a banshee whirling. Leilani slipped and slid, staggered and stumbled, but kept hitching forward, propelling herself toward the Fleetwood, relying as much on the power of positive thinking as on her legs. Polly sprinted ten yards, slowed, looked back, still fifteen yards from the trailer, no longer the vivid figure that she had been, but merely a gray phantom of an Amazon, faded by curtain upon curtain of rain. Leilani waved her onward—“Go, go!”—until Polly turned away and continued running. Polly closed to within ten yards of the motor home, Leilani within twenty, every yard a gazelle leap for the woman and every yard a struggle for the girl, until she wondered why she hadn’t applied the power of positive thinking as determinedly to the healing of her twisted leg as she had to the growth of her breasts.

Down on the floor, Micky was half convinced she could see the rank stench like a faint green-yellow fog eddying in the first few inches above the floorboards.

She sought the butane lighter but couldn’t find it. After less than a minute spent in the search, she took another and longer look at the bizarre walls towering over her, and realized that using fire to undo the knots in her bonds presented a greater danger than a minor skin burn. Shackled and fettered, able to squirm along hardly more efficiently than an inchworm, she dared not risk unintentionally igniting a major blaze.

As a second blast of thunder rocked the day and as the tramp-tramp-tramp of rain marched across the roof, she scanned the walls, seeking some item in the trash that might serve her. Only the coffee cans held promise.

Maxwell House. Four rows of large four-pound cans, each row measuring six cans wide, were wedged between columns of twine-bundled newspapers, with more papers stacked under and atop them. A plastic lid capped each can.

No one would keep twenty-four unopened cans of Maxwell House here instead of in a pantry. People saved empty coffee containers to store things in. Teelroy, who apparently had never thrown out anything in his life, who seemed to have filled his home with an eccentric collection worthy of a chapter in a psychology textbook, surely would not have left any of these twenty-four empty.

Micky inched away from the chair, passed the TV, arrived at the Maxwell House display, rose onto her knees with more than a little effort, got a firm grip on one of the cans in the topmost of the four rows. She hesitated to wrench the container out of the stacks, fearful that she would trigger a sudden collapse of the entire wall, burying herself in a ton of moldering trash.

After studying the structure, assessing its stability, she opted for action, realizing that she had no other choice. At first the can seemed to be as immovable as a stone mortared in a rampart. Then it wiggled a little between the compressed block of newsprint above it and the second row of cans below. Wiggled, slid, and came loose.

Still on her knees, bracing the can between her thighs, Micky pried at the stubborn lid. Over the years, the plastic had pressure bonded to the aluminum. Micky clawed in frustration, but at last tore it off.

At least a hundred small pale crescents, varying in color from white to dirty yellow, spilled out of the can, onto the floor at her knees, before she corrected its tilt. Thousands of little quarter-moons filled the container, and Micky stared in bafflement for a second, not because she failed to identify the contents, but because she couldn’t wrap her mind around the scope of Teelroy’s obsessive hoarding. Fingernail and toenail clippings: years’1 worth.

Not all had come from the same two hands. Some were smaller than others and bright with nail polish: a woman’s trimmings. Maybe the whole family had contributed in years past when there had been more people living here than just poor Leonard with his needful, desperate eyes. Multigenerational obsession.

She set the can aside, worked loose another one. Too light. Not likely to contain anything of use to her. She clawed it open anyway.

Hair. Oily hair clippings.

When Micky popped the lid off a third can, a clean calcium scent wafted up, a sort of seashell smell. Peering inside, she cried out and let the container drop from between her thighs.

The can rolled across the floor, spilling the tiny white skeletons of six or eight birds, all as fragile as sugar lace. They were too small to have been anything but canaries or parakeets. The Teelroys evidently had kept parakeets, and every time one of their little birds had died, they had somehow separated feathers and flesh from the bones,

saving those blanched and brittle remains for…For what?

Sentimental reasons? The papery bones crumbled as the skeletons rattled across the floor, and the skulls, none bigger than a cherry tomato, bounced and tumbled and rattled like misshapen dice.

Maybe she had too quickly dismissed the idea that she was dead and in Hell. This place had surely been a hell of sorts for Leonard Teelroy and evidently for other Teelroys before him.

These coffee cans weren’t going to yield anything of use.

This foul room didn’t contain a clock, but she could hear one ticking nonetheless, counting down to Preston Maddoc’s return.

Clutching the rain-soaked journal, Polly reached the Fleetwood, opened the door, climbed inside, paused on the steps, turned to urge Leilani to hurry — and saw that the girl had vanished.

Having disconnected the utility hookups, Curtis appeared around the front of the motor home just as Cass, ensconced in the driver’s seat, started the engine.

“Trouble!” Polly shouted, tossing the journal into the lounge and then plunging out of the Fleetwood, once more into the downpour.

She surveyed the rain-washed campgrounds, numb with disbelief. The girl had been right behind her. Polly had looked back, and the girl had been trailing by no more than fifteen feet, and Polly had sprinted the rest of the way to the Fleetwood in maybe five seconds, for God’s sake; and yet the girl was gone.

The windshield wipers were barely able to cope with the torrents that streamed down the glass, but Noah piloted his rental car through the campgrounds and located site 62 with little difficulty, though he wondered if he should have made arrangements for an ark instead of a coupe.

He gaped in amazement at Maddoc’s motor home, a behemoth that appeared to be almost as big as the average roadside diner. It rose in the deluge as a galleon might loom out of the mists on a storm-tossed sea, and Noah’s Mazda seemed like a rowboat riding a deep trough windward of the great ship’s starboard hull.

His intention had been to scout site 62 and find a place from which he could maintain surveillance on it at least for fifteen or twenty minutes, until he had gained a better sense of the situation. That plan had to be discarded, however, when he saw that the door to the Prevost stood wide open in the tempest.

The wind pinned the door against the wall of the vehicle. Rain slashed into the cockpit, and during the minute that Noah watched, no one appeared to close up.

Something was wrong.

Lightning bared its bright teeth in the sky, and its reflection gnashed in the mirrored blacktop surface of the county road.

Nun’s Lake lay two miles behind Preston, the farmhouse just a mile ahead.

In spite of having been washed thoroughly by the rain, he felt dirty. The desperate nature of the moment had required that he touch the Hand, including the most deformed parts of her, without a chance to pull on a pair of gloves.

Unless he could find work gloves at the Teelroy house, he would have to touch her again, more than once, before the afternoon drew to a close, if only to carry her into the filthy heart of the living-room portion of the maze, where he had left the Slut Queen. There, he would secure her to the armchair, which would allow her a front-row seat for the murder of her friend.

She herself would die in that armchair, after he had indulged the brute within and had done a satisfying number of hurtful things to her. He had been born for this, and so had she. Both of them were broken spokes in the dumb grinding wheel of nature.

Those tortures could be conducted without touching the Hand directly, using imaginative instruments. Therefore, the moment that he had secured her, he would vigorously wash his hands with a strong soap and lots of water nearly hot enough to scald. He would feel clean then, and the coiling nausea in his stomach would relent, and he would be able to enjoy his necessary work.

He worried at the possibility that the Toad might not have soap, and then he let out a short sharp bark of laughter. Even as slovenly as that bearded geek had been, it was more likely that he would have thousands of slivers of soap-bar remains, carefully stored and maybe even cataloged, than that he would have no soap at all.

Slowly regaining consciousness, the Hand groaned softly on the seat beside him. She was sitting up, restrained by the belt, her head slumped against the window in the passenger’s door.

The plastic Hefty OneZip bag lay on the console, folded but not sealed. Driving with one hand, he fished the anesthetic-saturated washcloth out of the bag and spread it over the girl’s face.

He didn’t want to apply it continuously, for fear of killing her too soon and too mercifully.

Her groaning subsided to an anxious murmur, and her hideous hand stopped twitching in her lap, but she didn’t grow as still as she had been previously. Once exposed to the air, the homemade anesthetic in the cloth had begun to evaporate, and the rain had further diluted the chemical, even though he had quickly returned the cloth to the bag after initially felling her with the fumes.

Repeatedly, he checked the rearview mirror, expecting to see the shimmer of headlights through the silver skeins of rain.

He remained confident that the storm had adequately screened him from observers when he had captured the Hand. Even if other campers, at their windows, had been able to glimpse anything of significance in the bleak light and the occluding cloudburst, they would be likely to interpret what they’d seen as nothing more sinister than a father scooping up his errant child and carrying her through thunderclaps and thunderbolts to safety.

As for the two women and the boy from that Fleetwood, he had no clue who they were or what they had been doing in his motor home. He doubted that they were associates of the Slut Queen, because if she’d come to Nun’s Lake with backup, she probably wouldn’t have stationed herself alone in the woods to watch the farmhouse.

Whoever they were, they could not have gotten past the alarm system unless the Black Hole had let them inside. When Preston had left for the Teelroy farm, he’d told the stupid bitch to keep the Fair Wind buttoned up tight. In the past, she’d always done what he required oilier. ‘Hint was the deal. She knew the deal well,ill the paragraphs and subparagraphs and clauses, knew it as well as if it actually existed in a written form that she could study. It was a good deal for her, a dream contract, providing a fortune in drugs and a quality of life she couldn’t otherwise have known, guaranteeing the aggressive and unrelenting dissolution for which she hungered. In spite of how crazy she was — crazy and venal and sick — she’d always upheld her end of the bargain.

Occasionally, of course, the Hole stuffed herself with so many contraindicated chemicals that she didn’t remember the deal any more than she remembered who she was. Those depths of indulgence rarely occurred this early in the day, but nearly always at night, when he usually arranged to be present to manage her with a whiff of this same homemade anesthetic if she could not be calmed by words or by a little physical force.

He removed the cloth from the girl’s face and threw it on the floor instead of bothering to return it to the plastic bag. She still groaned and rolled her head against the back of the seat, but the job was done: They had reached the turnoff to the Teelroy farm.

The driving wind gave way to hard shifting gusts that blew from more than one point of the compass, causing the door to rattle and bang against the side of the big Prevost, but still no one rushed to secure it.

Drenched during the few seconds that he was exposed while racing from the car to the motor home, Noah Farrel entered cautiously but without pausing to knock. He ascended the steps, stood beside the co-pilot’s seat. He listened to the door thumping behind him and to the mad drumming of the rain on the metal roof, seeking other sounds that might help him to analyze the situation, hearing nothing useful.

An unfolded sofabed occupied most of the lounge. One lamp cast light down upon three hula dolls, two motionless and one rotating its hips, and sprayed light up on a dreamily smiling painted face that filled most of the ceiling.

Disregarding the daylight, which settled as gray as a coat of wet ashes on the windows, the only additional illumination issued from the rear of the vehicle, past the open door to the bedroom. The light back there was subdued and red.

Saturday afternoon, when he’d left Geneva Davis’s place to do some final research on Maddoc and to pack a suitcase, and again this morning during his flight to Coeur d’Alene and then during his drive to Nun’s Lake, Noah mulled over numerous approaches to the problem, each depending on different circumstances that he might encounter when he arrived here. None of his scenarios included this situation, however, and after all his mulling, he was forced to wing it.

The first choice was whether to proceed silently or to announce his presence. He decided on the latter course. Affecting a jolly-fellow-camper voice, he called out, “Hello! Anybody home?” And when he got no reply, he eased past the sofabed, toward the galley. “Saw your door open in the rain. Thought something was wrong.”

More hula dolls on the dining-nook table. On the galley counter.

He glanced toward the front of the Prevost. No one had entered behind him.

Lightning flared repeatedly, and every window flickered like a television screen afflicted by inconstant reception. Ghostly faces, formed of shadows, swarmed the rain-smeared panes and peered into the motor home as though spirits strove to channel themselves from their plane of existence to this one through the transmitting power of the storm. Thunder boomed, and after the last peal had tolled to the far end of the sky, a tinny vibration lingered in the metal shell of the motor home, like the faint screaky voices of haunting entities.

Proceeding toward the back, he called out once more, “You okay, neighbor? Does anybody need help here?”

In the bathroom, hula dolls flanked the sink.

At the open bedroom door, Noah hesitated. He called out again, but received no answer.

He stepped across the threshold, out of the shadowy bath, into the crimson glow, which had been achieved by draping the lamps with red blouses.

Beside the rumpled bed, she waited, standing straight, head held high on a graceful neck, as though she were a titled lady who’d risen to grant an audience to an inferior. She wore a brightly patterned sarong. Her hair appeared windblown, but she had not been out in the storm, for she was dry.

Her bare arms hung slackly at her sides, and although her face was a mask of serenity, like the peaceful countenance of a Buddhist meditating, her eyes were as twitchy as those of a rabid animal. He’d seen this contrast before, and often in his youth. Though she didn’t appear to be amped out on meth, she was operating on a substance more potent than caffeine.

“Are you Hawaiian?” she asked.

“No, ma’am.”

“Why the shirt?”

“Comfort,” he said.

“Are you Lukipela?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Did they beam you up?”

On his long trip to Nun’s Lake, during all his planning, Noah had not anticipated, under any circumstances, that he would boldly reveal his intentions either to this woman or to Preston Maddoc. But Sinsemilla — easily identifiable from Geneva’s description — reminded him of Wendy Quail, the nurse who had killed Laura. Sinsemilla didn’t resemble Quail, but in her serene face and her bird-bright busy eyes, he detected a smugness, a self-satisfaction, a self-adoration that the nurse, too, had worn as though it were the aura of a saint. Her attitude, the atmosphere in this place, the sound of the front door banging in the wind, cranked up the heat under the stew pot of his instinct, and he suspected that Micky and Leilani were someplace beyond mere trouble. He said, “Where’s your daughter?”

She took a step toward him, swayed, stopped. “Luki baby, your mommy’s glad you got healed all righteous and then got fast-grown into a whole new incarnation, been out there to the stars and seen cool stuff. Mommy’s glad, but it scares her, you comin’ back here like this.”

“Where’s Leilani,” he persisted.

“See, Mommy’s got new babies comin’, pretty babies different only in their heads, not like you used to be different, all screwed up in your hips. Mommy’s movin’ on, Luki baby, Mommy’s movin’ on and don’t want her new pretty babies hangin’ with her old gnarly babies.”

“Has Maddoc taken her somewhere?”

“Maybe you been to Jupiter and got healed up, but you still got the gnarly inside you, the little crip you used to be is still like a worm inside your spirit, and my new pretty babies will see all the sad gnarly in you ’cause they’re gonna be true wizard babies, got themselves total psychic powers.”

Until now loosely cupped at her side, Sinsemilla’s right hand tightened into a fist, and Noah knew that she held a weapon.

When he backed off a step, she rushed him. Her right arm came up, and she slashed at his face with what might have been a scalpel.

Past his eyes the keen blade arced, glimmering with red light, two inches short of a blinding cut.

He leaned away from the attack, then came in under it and seized her right wrist.

The scalpel in her left hand, unanticipated, punctured his right shoulder, which was a stroke of luck, pure good luck. She could have slashed instead of jabbed, opening his throat and one or both of his carotid arteries.

The wound registered more as pressure than as pain. Rather than struggle to disarm her, when suddenly she was spitting and screaming like a Tasmanian devil, he kicked her legs out from under her and simultaneously pushed her backward.

As she fell away, she held fast to the scalpel with which she’d scored, yanking it out of him. That was all pain, no pressure.

She landed on the bed and virtually bounced to her feet, not with any grace, but with the jerky energy of a jack-in-the-box.

Noah drew the snub-nosed.38 out of the belt-clipped holster in the small of his back, from beneath his shirt. Loath to use the revolver, he was even less enthusiastic about being carved like Christmas turkey.

He expected only more of what she’d given him thus far, more

irrational ranting and;in even more determined effort to remake his face and anatomy, hut she surprised him by tossing aside the blades and turning away from him. She went to the dresser, and he stepped farther into the room rather than retreat from it, because he feared that she was going for a handgun. She came up with bottles of pills instead, muttering over them, letting some drop out of her hands, throwing others aside angrily, ransacking the drawer for still more bottles, until at last she found what she wanted.

As though she had forgotten Noah, she returned to the bed and settled down on the tossed sheets, amid the torn and crumpled pages of a book. She crossed her legs and sat like a young girl waiting for her friends to arrive for a pajama party, tossed her head, and laughed insouciantly. As she popped open the bottle of pills, she chanted in a singsong voice: “I am a sly cat, I am a summer wind, I am birds in flight, I am the sun, I am the sea, I am me!” With one of the wanted pills in hand, she allowed the others to spill among the bedclothes. At last looking up at Noah, she said, “Go, go, Luki baby, you don’t have a place here anymore.” And then, as if never she had drawn his blood, she began to rock her head back and forth, shaking her tangled locks, and she sang again: “I am a sly cat, I am a summer wind, I am birds in flight. …”

Noah retreated, backing across the bathroom, keeping a watch on the red-lit bedroom, holding fast to the gun in his right hand, using his left hand to test the wound in his shoulder. The pain was sharp but not intolerable, and though blood had spread across the front of his shirt, the bleeding wasn’t arterial. She hadn’t severed any major blood vessels or punctured a vital organ. His biggest problem would be the risk of infection — assuming he got out of here alive.

As Noah backed into the galley, the woman continued her singsong chant, celebrating her wonderfulness, which reassured him that she remained on the bed where he had left her.

When he reached the dinette, Noah turned, intending to flee with no regard for pride.

A young boy, a statuesque blonde, and a dog stood in the lounge, and as much as that sounded like the opening line of one of those a-priest-a-rabbi-and-a-minister jokes, Noah didn’t have a smile in him. The boy had freckles, the blonde had a 9-mm pistol, and the

dog had a bushy tail that, alter a moment, began to wag so vigorously that its burden of rain spattered opposite walls of the motor home.

Eternally waiting Indians, guardians without power, watched him bring the Hand into the house. He dumped her on the hall floor at the entrance to the maze.

The door had bounced open when he kicked it shut after himself. He closed it and engaged the lock.

With his hands, he pressed some of the water out of his hair, slicking it back from his face.

The girl lay in a sopping mound. The shiny braced leg stuck out at a severe angle from the shapeless rest of her. The runt hadn’t fully regained consciousness. She muttered and sighed — and belched, which disgusted Preston no less than if she’d urinated on herself.

He could feel the microscopic filth of this useless little cripple crawling on his hands, squirming in the webs of his fingers.

Reluctantly, carrying her in from the Durango, he had reached the conclusion that he wasn’t going to be able to spend the time with her that he had allotted. The women and the boy in the Fleetwood were a wild card. He could no longer assume that he would have a long period of privacy here in the Mad Kingdom of Teelroy.

Now he would have to kill the Slut Queen with less finesse than planned. He no longer had the leisure for exquisitely protracted violence. In front of the girl, he would finish her friend as quickly as he might crush the skull of a rat with a shovel.

The runt would try to avoid watching. Therefore, in addition to binding her to the armchair, he would have to fix her head immovable and tape open her eyes.

Preston could risk a few minutes, only a very few, to torment the girl. Then he would leave her bound and would set fire to the maze as he backed out of the hub where she would be left to die with the TV off. No episode of Touched by an Angel to buck her up in her last minutes.

As he left, he would tell her how her brother suffered. He’d ask her where her loving God was now when she needed Him, ask her whether God was maybe off playing golf with angels or taking a snooze. Leave her to the smoke and the flames. Leave her screaming with no one to hear but cigar-store Indians.

Over the years, assisting unto death many who were suicidal and some who were not, he had discovered first that a brute in him took pleasure in extreme violence, and second that killing the young was more thrilling than dispatching the old. Nursing homes were drab playgrounds compared to nurseries. He didn’t know why this should be so; he only knew that it was true. True for him, and thus as true as anything could be. Objective truths don’t exist, after all, only personal ones. As most ethicists agree, no philosophy is superior to that of any other. Morality is not simply relative. Morality doesn’t exist. Experience is relative, and you cannot judge the choice of experiences that others undertake if you have chosen a different path through life. You approve my pleasure in killing the young, and I’ll politely grant you the validity of your peculiar passion for bowling.

He would not have the private hours with the Hand that he had so long anticipated, which was a grievous disappointment, although a disappointment that he could bear in light of the Hole’s pregnancy and considering the likelihood that she was carrying two, three, or even additional brats more twisted than the Hand and the Gimp, all needing more from the world than they could ever hope to give back. For the coming year, his work had been secured, his entertainment brilliantly arranged; and bliss would be his.

The Hand blinked blearily, regaining consciousness. While the girl remained groggy and disoriented, Preston steeled himself for the unpleasant task of carrying her to the hub of the living-room maze. He touched the runt, shuddered, plucked her off the floor, and bore her into the labyrinth, through the lobes and the binding corpus callosum of the Teelroy family’s group brain as modeled here in trash and mold and mouse droppings.

Where the TV stood and the armchair waited, the floor appeared to have been the site of a voodoo ceremony: bird bones scattered in what might have been a meaningful pattern before it had been kicked apart; distributions of human hair; fingernail and toenail clippings cast like bridal rice over all else.

The Slut Queen was gone.

Tied securely, left unconscious, alone for only the twenty minutes — twenty minutes — that Preston required to drive into Nun’s Lake and return with the Hand, this vodka-sucking wad of human debris had nevertheless managed to screw things up. But then screwing things up was the only talent her useless kind possessed.

She couldn’t have gone far. Her car still stood in the driveway, and the keys jingled softly in Preston’s pocket. She probably lay nearby in the maze, still bound and unable to move fast.

He deposited the Hand in the armchair. Cringing with disgust, he uncoupled her brace and stripped it off her leg. If she regained her wits before he returned, she wouldn’t be able to move any faster than the Slut Queen.

Preston took the brace away with him. It made a good club.

An Indian in a red-and-white headdress, standing proud between towering stacks of The Saturday Evening Post, offered no cigars, but brandished a tomahawk.

Clutching at the Indian, Micky pulled herself to her feet. Her ankles were so tightly bound, with less than two inches of play in the cord between them, that she could shuffle each foot no more than a fraction of an inch at a time. But she didn’t have far to go.

Directly across the passageway from the chief, a bay in the maze wall featured a two-foot-diameter round table on which stood a lamp with a bell-shaped yellow glass shade. An ornate bronze finial in the form of a smiling cherub’s head fixed the shade to the lamp rod. Being not merely shackled and fettered, but also hogtied, Micky initially intended to set the lamp carefully on the floor, where she could more easily work with it. On second thought, she knocked it off the table with a sweep of her arm.

The shade smashed, and the bulb, as well, casting this length of the labyrinth into deeper gloom. Shards of glass clinked and rattled as they spun across the floor.

For a moment, Micky froze, listening intently. The breaking lamp had been unnervingly loud in the tomb-still house. She half expected to hear heavy and ominous footsteps, to be set upon by a mazekeeper straight out of Tales from the Crypt, a livid-eyed undead bureaucrat dressed in ragged gravecloth and displeased about being interrupted in its dinner of dead beetles. But if a mazekeeper arrived, he would exceed in grisliness the darkest imaginative efforts of those writers who created the Crypt, for he would be Preston Maddoc, not shudder-evoking in appearance, but harboring the father of all monsters under his skin.

She stooped in the shadows, cautiously explored the floor, found a few large shards, gingerly tested them against her thumb, and found one sharp enough. When she sat on the table, it held her weight.

Sawing with the glass edge, Micky worked first on the length of cord that connected her wrist restraints to those that bound her ankles. The plastic cut easily, and because copper was a soft metal, the twist of wires at the heart of the cord offered only slightly little more resistance than did the coating.

Thankful that she had remained limber by faithfully adhering to an exercise regimen while in prison, she pulled her feet up onto the small table and set to work on the loops of cord that trammeled her. In a few minutes, her feet were free.

As she puzzled over how to hold the cutting edge of the glass to best apply it to her shackles without slicing her wrists, she heard faint noises elsewhere in the house. Then a loud thud was followed by a slamming door.

Maddoc had returned.

Slumped in a grungy armchair, Leilani didn’t know where she was or how she had gotten here, but though her thought processes remained frayed at the edges, she had no illusions that a maid would appear at any moment with a pot of Earl Grey and a tray of tea cakes.

Wherever she might be, the place reeked more nauseatingly than the worst of old Sinsemilla’s toxin-purging baths. In fact, the stink was so offensive that perhaps this was where the years and years of dear Mater’s extracted toxins had been shipped for disposal. Maybe this foul miasma was what the wizard-baby breeder would smell like if she hadn’t soaked away her sins on a regular basis.

Leilani slid to the edge of the chair, stood up — and fell down. The stench at floor level motivated her to get a grip on herself and concentrate to expel the haze that clouded her thoughts.

Her brace had been taken. She’d been mere steps from freedom, from a Fleetwood full of aliens. Boy, dog, Amazons, and the prospect of great adventures without evil pigmen. Now this. The work of the doom doctor was evident. Tiny bird skulls staring with empty sockets.

The Hand’s useless nature, her pathetic dependency, her deep genetic corruption squirmed across every plane and curve and crook of the steel brace as surely as bacteria swarmed the surfaces of a public toilet.

A highly educated man, Preston knew that her uselessness and her dependency were abstract qualities that left no residue on things she touched, and he knew that her genetic corruption could not be passed along like a viral disease. Nevertheless, his right hand, in which he held the brace, grew sticky with sweat, and as he roamed the maze in search of the Slut Queen, he became convinced that the girl’s hideous residues were dissolving in his perspiration and that they would seep deep into him through his traitorous pores. In the best of times, his sweat distressed him no less than did the urine and the mucus and the other offensive products of his metabolism, but in this instance, as his hand grew slimier, his antipathy to the girl swelled into a ripe disgust, disgust into a bile-black hatred that should have been beneath an ethical man like him. With each step that he took into the stinking bowels of the labyrinth, however, what he knew became less important than what he felt.

Hands still bound, holding the wicked shard of glass in front of her as though it were a halberd, Micky eased to an intersection of passageways, keeping her back against one wall of the maze, her head raised to detect faint telltale sounds. She moved as silently as fog, practicing a stealth that she had learned in childhood, when preventing further assaults on her dignity meant avoiding one of her mother’s bad boys by making of herself a living ghost, silent and unseen.

She didn’t pause to saw at the wrist bindings, because that tricky task would take time, at least a few minutes, and would inevitably distract her. She was St. George in the lair, and the awakened dragon prowled.

At the corner, she paused. The next passageway, meeting this one at right angles, continued both to the left and the right. She didn’t want to stick her head out there and find Maddoc watching, listening. She remembered how furtively, how fox-smooth, and with what boldness he had invaded Geneva’s home only a few nights ago, and she did not underestimate him.

Her assessment of him immediately proved accurate when suddenly he cursed, his voice arising no more than a few feet from her, around the corner to the left, where he had been standing without so much as a revealing inhalation. But then, in an apparent fit of uncontrolled anger, he threw down something that hit the wood floor with a hard clatter, tumbled, and came to rest in front of the termination point of the passage in which Micky sheltered, only inches from her feet: Leilani’s leg brace.

If he followed the steel contraption, they would be at once face-to-face, and her survival would hinge on her ability to thrust the shard of glass into one of his eyes in the instant of his surprise. Miss, cut only his cheek or his brow, and he would take advantage of her shackled hands to finish her with brutal dispatch.

Micky held her breath. Waited. Shifted her body without moving her feet, turning to face the intersection more directly, glass at the ready.

She wore a cheap and classic Timex. No digital components. Old-fashioned watchworks in the case. She swore she could hear the tick-tick-tick of gear teeth biting time between them. She’d never heard them before, but she detected them now, so acutely heightened were her senses.

Nothing followed the clatter of the tossed leg brace. No sound of Maddoc approaching or departing. Just the expectant silence of a coiled snake, sans rattle.

Loud, her rampant heart stampeded. Her body resonated just as hard ground would vibrate with the thunder of a herd of drumming hooves.

Yet somehow she heard through the tumult of her heart, filtered it, and filtered out also the regiments of rain tramping across the roof, so she could still perceive the silence that otherwise ruled, and would perceive any sound that, however faintly, disturbed it.

Wait here another minute? Two minutes? Can’t wait forever. When you stand still too long, they find you. Ghosts, living and not, must be elusive, in constant drift.

She leaned forward, exposing as little as possible, just the side of her head, one wary eye.

Maddoc had moved on. The next passageway, to the left and right, was deserted.

The brace meant Leilani had been brought here. And she must not be dead yet, because Maddoc wouldn’t have removed the brace from her corpse, only from the living girl with the cold intention of further incapacitating her.

A tough choice here. Leave the brace or try to take it? Getting Leilani out alive would be easier if the girl had two legs to stand on. But the contraption might make noise when Micky tried to gather it off the floor. Besides, with her hands tied, she couldn’t easily carry the brace and also effectively wield the shard of glass as a weapon.

Micky stooped and gripped the appliance anyway, because Leilani would be not only faster and more surefooted with the brace, but also less afraid. She lifted it slowly, carefully. A faint clink and a tick. She held the brace against her body, cushioning it to prevent further noise, and rose to her feet.

Because Maddoc was rain-soaked, Micky could see which way he had gone and where he’d come from. The bare wood floor, its finish long worn away, left no water standing on the surface, but sopped up each of the man’s wet steps, resulting in dark footprints.

She was sure that he must have left the girl in the space with the television, where he had bound Micky herself earlier. Indeed, the trail led to that very place, but Leilani wasn’t there.

Bottles, bottles everywhere, and not one genie in them, nor any message meant to be tossed overboard at sea. They contained only the dried residue of soft drinks and beer, which in spite of its age lent a nose-wrinkling scent to the enclosed back porch.

Stabbed but not disabled, Noah had hurried around the house with Cass and found the porch door unlocked. Guns drawn, they entered.

The three-mile drive from Nun’s Lake had not provided sufficient time for Noah to get a grip on the complete background of the twins. Although he knew that they were ex-showgirls fascinated with UFOs, he remained more mystified than not by their game attitude and by their armaments.

He hadn’t seen either of them fire a weapon, but from the wholly professional way they handled guns, Noah felt as comfortable having Cass for a partner as he’d ever felt about any cop with whom he had partnered during his years in uniform.

The floor of the porch groaned under the weight of a bottle collection that would, redeemed at a nickel apiece, purchase a fine automobile for the owners to put up on blocks in the front yard. When Noah led the way through a narrow walk space, the bottles made fairy music.

The door between the porch and the kitchen was double-locked. One lock could easily be loided with a credit card, but the other was a deadbolt that would not succumb to a slip of plastic.

They had to assume that Maddoc had either heard them drive up, in spite of the wind and rain and thunder, or that he had seen them arrive. Stealth might matter inside, but it didn’t matter when they were getting in.

The bottles encroaching on both sides didn’t allow him a full range of motion, but he kicked the door hard. The shock of the impact expressed itself all the way into the wound in his shoulder, but he kicked again, and then a third time. Half eaten away by dry rot, the jamb crumbled around the lock, and the door flew inward.

Three blows shook the house, and Preston knew at once that his hope of having more than the briefest pleasure with the Hand had in this instant evaporated.

The Slut Queen wouldn’t have made that noise. She was in the farmhouse, seeking an exit, but striving not to draw attention to herself. In the unlikely event that she’d already found a route through the maze, she wouldn’t have needed to hammer her way out of the house.

Preston hadn’t heard sirens, and no one had yelled police. Yet he didn’t delude himself that a burglar would, by chance, have chosen precisely this point in time to force entry. Someone had come to stop him.

He abandoned his search for the Slut Queen hardly before it had begun, and turned back on his trail, eager to get to the armchair in which he’d left the Hand. He might still have time to choke the ugly little bitch to death, although such intimate contact would make his stomach churn, and then use the maze to slip away. He couldn’t allow her to fall under the protection of others, after all, because if at last she was able to convince anyone to listen to her, she would be the only witness against him.

Polly wants Curtis to remain in Noah’s rental car, but galactic royalty will always have its way.

Curtis wants Old Yeller to remain in the car, and he easily wins the issue that Polly lost, because sister-become is a good, good dog.

The grassless yard has turned to mud that sucks at their shoes. They splash through deep puddles as lightning strikes a pine tree in a nearby field, about a hundred feet away, causing a banner of flame to flutter briefly through the boughs before the downpour quenches the fire, and thunder loud enough to announce the Apocalypse shakes the day. It’s all so wonderful.

On the front porch, when she tries the door and finds it locked, Polly draws the pistol from her purse and tells Curtis to stand back.

“It’d be cool to blow down the door,” the boy says, “but my way is easier, and Mother always says the simplest strategy is usually the best.”

He places both hands lightly on the door, wills it to open, and down on the micro level, where it matters, the brass molecules of the deadbolt suddenly prefer to be there rather than here, to be in the lock’s disengaged position.

“Can I learn that?” Polly asks.

“Nope,” he says, pushing the door inward.

“Got to be a spaceboy like you, huh?”

“Every species has its talents,” he says, allowing her to enter first, with her gun drawn, because in fact she edges him aside and gives him no choice.

Mummies line the downstairs hall. Indian mummies, embalmed in standing positions and clothed in their ceremonial best.

At the back of the big house, Noah or Cass is kicking down the door, and seconds later, they appear at the far end of the hallway, gaping in amazement at the mummies.

Polly signals them to check out the rooms on their end, and to Curtis, she says, “This way, sweetie.”

He follows her into chambers more interesting than any he has seen since arriving on this world, but — Oh, Lord — it sure does seem to be the kind of place where serial killers would hang out by the dozen to reminisce about the atrocities they have committed.

Leilani wasn’t in the chamber with the television, but her wet footprints lingered there, with the older, fading prints of Preston Maddoc. Micky could also see where the girl had faltered, fallen, and gotten up again, leaving the damp imprint of her sodden clothes.

Micky followed this trail from one short passageway into another, then around a second blind corner, moving far faster than prudence allowed, terrified that the girl would blunder into Maddoc.

Clearly, the bastard had brought her here to kill her, just as he’d brought Micky for that purpose. Couldn’t wait for Montana. Not with the complications that Micky had brought to his plans.

The house shook with three loud, rapid knocks, not peals of thunder, but hard blows, as though someone had struck the building with a great hammer.

The noise scared Micky, because she had no idea what caused it. A death blow of some kind? Maddoc triumphant? Leilani dead?

Then Micky turned another corner, and the girl was six feet ahead, bracing herself with one hand against the maze wall, limping but making determined progress, such a small figure and yet somehow towering at the same time, her head held high, shoulders thrown back in a posture of absolute resolution.

Sensing a presence, Leilani looked over her shoulder, and her expression at the sight of a faithful friend was a joy that Micky would never forget it she lived to be live hundred and if God chose to take all other memories from her in old age. All other memories, he could have if that day came, but she would never give Him the sight of Leilani’s face at this moment, for this alone would sustain her even in the hour of her death.

When he discovered that the Hand wasn’t in the armchair where he’d left her, wasn’t anywhere in the television annex, Preston began to set the maze on fire.

Ultimately, following what pain he’d wished to put her through, he’d always intended to leave the girl still alive so that she could live her last minutes in terror as the flames encircled her, and as the smoke stole the breath from her lungs. The former cruelty had been denied him; but he might still have the pleasure of standing in the rain outside and hearing her screams as she staggered and crawled helplessly through the baffling, burning labyrinth.

Bundled newspapers and magazines offered the best fuel. The kiss of the butane lighter ignited an immediate passionate response. The publications were so tightly compacted in the lower portions of the walls that, almost as dense as bricks, they would burn fiercely and for hours.

He circled the cramped space, bringing flame to paper in half a dozen places. He had never killed with fire before, except when as a boy he tortured bugs by dropping matches on them in a jar. Licking flames, lavishing bright tongues upon the walls, thrilled him.

When he first found the armchair empty, Preston had noticed the runt’s damp footprints made patterns with his own. Now he followed them, pausing briefly every few steps to apply the lighter to the tinder-dry walls.

Neither of them had time to be weepy, but they wept anyway, even though tough babes like Micky B and dangerous young mutants were both averse to giving anyone the satisfaction of their tears.

Crying didn’t slow Leilani as she used the fragment of yellow glass to cut the loops of lamp cord that shackled Micky’s wrists. She needed perhaps a half minute to do the job, less than a half minute to clamp the brace around her leg.

When they were ready to move again, flames bloomed elsewhere in the maze. Leilani couldn’t yet see the fire itself, but its reflected light crawled the ceiling, like swarms of bright chameleons whipping lizardy tails across the plaster.

Fear nothing. That’s what the surfers said. Yeah, sure, but how long since the last time that any of those dudes had to worry about being burned to death while they were catching a honking big wave?

They started back the way they had come, but simultaneously they noticed the damp footprints, and without discussing the matter, they reached the same conclusion: Preston would follow the spoor as surely as Micky had followed it.

In truth, finding their way out was no harder if they went one direction instead of another. No easier, either.

Already, on the ceiling, slithering salamanders of firelight faded behind rising masses of smoke that were first carried on the updraft but that would soon pour down through the labyrinth in thick, choking clouds.

Micky put one arm around Leilani, lending support, and together they hurried as fast as the cyborg leg would allow. At intersection after intersection, they turned left or right, or continued straight ahead if that option existed, basing every choice on instinct — which brought them eventually to a dead end.

Two of Preston’s three university degrees were in philosophy; consequently, he had taken numerous logic courses. He remembered one class that, in part, had dealt with the logic of mazes. When these three-dimensional puzzles were designed by educated mathematicians or logicians, who drew upon all their learned cunning to deceive, the result was usually a labyrinth that few could find their way through in a timely manner, and from which a certain percentage of frustrated challengers had to be rescued by guides. On the other hand, when the maze was designed by anyone other than a mathematician or a logician — by ordinary folk, that is — these more mundane mazemakers followed a startlingly predictable pattern, because the design flowed from instinct rather than from intelligent planning; evidently, embedded in every human psyche was an affinity for a basic pattern that rarely failed to be asserted in the designing of a maze. Perhaps this was the pattern of the network of caves and tunnels in which the first extended family of mankind had dwelled; perhaps the map of that earliest of all human homes had been imprinted in our genes, and represented comfort and security when we re-created it. The mystery intrigued psychologists as well as philosophers, though Preston had never spent much time brooding on the subject.

The Toad of Teelroy Farm might not have been ordinary by the standard definition of the word, but when his thought processes were compared to those of a Harvard-educated mathematician, he must be judged ordinary beyond argument. Having followed the Toad through this labyrinth once, without giving a thought to whether it conformed to the classic design, Preston suspected in retrospect that it did.

Following the scheme as he remembered it from that long-ago class, he repeatedly set fire to the stacks behind him, essentially barring his retreat. In this fashion, as the first thin gray smoke settled into the tunnels of the warren, with a heavier black soot soon to press after it, and as waves of heat began to wring noxious sweat from him, he arrived at the dead end in which the Hand and the Slut Queen had trapped themselves.

He would not have turned into that passageway, but he did hurry past it, catching sight of them peripherally. When he reversed course and blocked their retreat, the woman and the girl cowered together in their blind alley, coughing, squinting at him through the descending veil of smoke, clearly fearful of what he would do next.

What he did next was step into the passage, forcing them to retreat further to the end of it. Then from the midpoint, he backed out, setting fire to the walls at several places on both sides.

This seemed like old times. Bugs in a jar.

When fire suddenly appears and grows with explosive speed, Polly wants to plunge at once deeper into the maze, perhaps having bought her own image too completely, seeing herself as a superhero without cape.

Curtis restrains her.

“The girl’s in there,” she reminds him, as if he’s such a Gump that he’s forgotten why they are here. “And Cass, Noah — they might have gone too far in from the other end to reverse out.”

“You head back the way we came before the smoke gets too thick to see the signs we left.” At every turn, he had marked the walls with Polly’s lipstick: STRAWBERRY FROST said the label on the tube. “I’ll find the others.”

“You, ” Polly says, disbelieving, because though she knows that he is an ET, she also knows that he’s a boy, and in spite of all he’s told her, she can think of a boy as having but one basic form, and a vulnerable form at that. “Sweetie, you’re not going in there alone. Hey, you’re not going in there at all.”

“I can’t imagine a Spelkenfelter turning spooky on me,” Curtis assures her, “but promise you won’t.”

“What’re you talking about,” she demands, shifting her attention between him and the fire ahead.

He shows her what he’s talking about by ceasing to be Curtis Hammond, reverting not to any of the many forms in his repertoire, but to the shape in which he was born, an incarnation that allows him to move faster than he can move as Curtis, and with senses more acute. This is quite a performance, even if he does say so himself.

He would not be surprised if Polly fainted. But after all, she is a Spelkenfelter, and though she sways, she does not fall. Indeed, flashing back on part of the story that he told them after their Chinese dinner in Twin Falls, she says, “Holy howlin’ saints alive!”

Micky, at the back of the dead end, didn’t want to confront Preston Maddoc in part because of his greater strength and in part because of his lighter. He would probably use it to set their clothes afire.

Flames seethed over the walls along the forward half of the passageway. In a minute, the hungrily feeding fires would join from side to side, creating an impassable wall of death.

The haze of smoke thickened second by second. She and Leilani were coughing. Already, a rawness burned in her throat. Soon they wouldn’t be able to breathe unless they dropped to the Hour. The moment they were forced to the floor in search of clean air, however, they were as good as dead.

She turned to the back wall of this blind alley and tried to claw newspapers and magazines out of the construction, hoping to burrow through to another passageway where the flames had not yet reached. The bundled publications were so tightly packed that she couldn’t pry them loose.

Okay. All right. Topple the damn thing. All this crap was just piled here, wasn’t it? No one had cemented it in place. No one had reinforced it with rebar.

When she pushed against the palisade, however, it felt every bit as solid as anything the pharaohs had built. At the end caps of some passages, she’d been able to see that the maze walls were always at least two and sometimes three stacks thick, with sheets of Masonite and plyboard between layers. Perhaps more support structure existed than met the eye. She put everything she had into a shove, without effect, and then tried to rock the wall, attacked it with rhythm, pressing and relenting and pressing again, hoping to start the trash swaying, but it wouldn’t sway.

Turning to face Maddoc beyond the flames, she pulled Leilani to her side and gathered her courage. She saw no option now but to rush the entrance, get out before the flames closed the way, and try to take Maddoc down before he could harm them. Bowl him over, try to kick his head if he fell — because if she fell, he would be trying to kick hers.

Paper whispered when it burned in great volume, crackled and popped and hissed, as well, but whispered, as if divulging secrets printed on it, naming names, citing sources.

Preston realized that he had lingered too long in the smoke and heat when the burning paper began to whisper the names of those whom he had killed.

The foul air remained breathable. Yet even before the smoke grew dense enough to clog the lungs, the air assailed with lethal toxins spewed out by burning materials, gases that were invisible compared to the roiling soot, but no less dangerous. The manufacture of paper required numerous chemicals, which fire liberated and transformed into even more effective poisons.

If he were hearing the names of those he killed, he had inhaled enough toxins to half unscrew his mind. He’d better get out of here before he became disoriented.

He hesitated, however, because the sight of the Hand and the Slut Queen, trapped in the blind alley, thrilled him. He hoped they would run the fiery gauntlet before their sole escape route closed forever. Maybe they’d misjudge the moment, be caught by the shifting flames, and go up like torches — a spectacle he was loath to miss.

The vodka-sucking whore pulled the girl against her. She seemed to be trying to work out a way to use her body to shield the kid when they made their run for it, as if a few burn scars could possibly render the Hand any uglier than she already looked.

Abruptly, a section of the stacks on one side of their passage collapsed onto the floor between them and Preston, releasing clouds of sparks like fireflies and great black moths of paper ash. They could no longer exit without wading through knee-deep, furiously blazing debris.

Fate sealed, the woman and the girl retreated to the back of the cul-de-sac.

They would live another three minutes, five at most, before smoke flooded through here in smothering tides, before they became a pair of animate candles. Preston dared not wait for the final act, lest he be trapped in the house with them.

A heavy weight of disappointment lay on his heart. Their final throes, witnessed firsthand, would have given him much pleasure and thus would have added to the total amount of happiness in the world. Now their deaths would be nearly as useless as their lives.

He consoled himself with the thought that the Black Hole’s batch of lumpy cupcakes was baking in her oven.

As Preston turned away, leaving these two wads of living tallow to the mercy of the fire, the woman began to cry out for help at the top of her voice. Excited by the note of desperation in her pleas, he lingered a moment longer.

An answering shout, arising elsewhere in the maze, startled he had forgotten the three loud blows, likely the sounds of someone breaking down a door — further proof that the polluted air was already affecting his thinking, clouding his judgment.

Heartened, the woman cried out again, again, making a beacon of her voice.

Another answering shout rang above the rapidly rising chant of a million tongues of flame, and to Preston’s left, about ten feet away, a big man in a colorful Hawaiian shirt appeared out of the mouth of another passageway. He carried a revolver.

With a shocking disregard for ethical conduct, the sonofabitch shot Preston. They were strangers; neither of them had the informed perspective necessary to judge the other’s usefulness to the world; yet the ruthless bastard squeezed the trigger without hesitation.

When he saw the stranger raising the gun, Preston realized that he should fling himself backward and to the right, but he was more a man of thought than action, and before he could move, the impact of the slug punished his hesitation. He staggered, fell, rolled onto his stomach, and scrambled away from the shooter, away from the cul-de-sac in which the woman and the girl awaited burning, around a corner, into another run of the maze, shocked by the intensity of his pain, which was worse than anything he’d experienced before or had expected to be forced to endure.

‘We’re here!” Noah shouted to Micky and the girl. “Hold on, we’ll get you out!”

Only a few minutes old, the blaze had grown astonishingly fast throughout the front of the house. Not a man who had often — or ever — suspected that uncanny forces were afoot in the world, never having gotten so much as a single nape-hair bristle at a scary movie, Noah Farrel couldn’t shake the feeling that this fire was different, that it was somehow alive, aware, cunning. Prowling the maze with strange purpose. Seeking more than just fuel to feed its bottomless appetite. He knew that firefighters sometimes felt this way, that they called it the Beast. When flames hissed at him, when from morn distant and fully involved corridors rose what sounded like grumbling, snarling, and thick-throated cackling, Beast seemed a fitting name.

The door to the enclosed porch and the back door between porch and kitchen had been left open when he and Cass broke in. Interior doors had been removed a long time ago. Now the superheated air in the house sought the cool day beyond the bottle collection, and the accelerating draft drew smoke and ashes and hot embers through the labyrinth, and coaxed the conflagration toward a richer supply of oxygen.

Largely, the fire remained confined to the front half of the house. That wouldn’t be the case much longer.

With smears of wet blood from his oozing scalpel wound, Noah had left markers on the stacked-paper walls along the route they’d followed. He was afraid that if they didn’t begin to retrace their path soon, smoke would blind them to those crimson signs.

He squinted into the mouth of the dead-end passage where but a moment ago Maddoc had been posted. About ten feet long. The first four feet of both walls were afire. On the floor, a deep threshold of burning debris barred entrance. Micky and the girl, visible beyond shimmering curtains of fire, couldn’t be reached from here.

Grabbing a fistful of Hawaiian shirt, Cass pulled Noah to one side and pointed out that only one of the cul-de-sac’s flanking walls towered all the way to the nine-foot ceiling. The other wall, shared with the parallel corridor that she and Noah had recently followed, was two feet shorter.

Returning to that passage, out of which he had stepped before shooting Maddoc, Noah bolstered his revolver and allowed Cass to give him a boost. She was tall and strong, and with an assist from her, he levered himself onto the top of the barrier that separated them from the dead end where Micky and the girl were trapped.

Going up, acutely sensitive to the stability of the stacks, Noah prepared to drop away at the first indication that his ascent might cause the trash to collapse upon the very people he hoped to rescue. The construction wasn’t as supportive as a concrete-block wall, but it didn’t shift under him.

At the summit, in the narrow space between the stacks and the ceiling, with his feet sticking out in the aisle- where Cass waited, with his chest flat on the top of the wall, he was in thicker — though far from blinding — smoke that irritated his eyes and pricked tears from them. Better hold each breath as long as possible. Minimize the amount of crap he sucked in. He couldn’t, however, perform the entire operation on a single inhalation.

In the Valley of the Shadow. Every second, a tick closer to Death.

A coiled bramble of pain twisted its thorns back and forth in the scalpel wound. He almost welcomed the pain, hoping it would help compensate for the sense-dulling effect of the fumes, keeping him alert.

Gingerly but quickly, he eased forward until he could peer down into the dead-end passage. One yard to his right, seething fire ate at the floor and fed all the way up the vertical surface of the cul-de-sac. He flinched from the heat, and felt the sweat stiffen on the skin of his right forearm as it flash-dried in an instant.

The portion of the seven-foot-high wall directly below him had not yet caught fire. As Noah appeared and at once reached down with both arms, Micky looked up. Wheezing. Her face less than two feet from his. Right profile stained with thick dried blood, hair matted with blood along that side of her head.

Without hesitation, Micky boosted Leilani, and Noah could see from the woman’s wrenched expression that the effort unleashed tribes of tiny devils that jabbed their pitchforks in her scalp wound.

He grabbed the girl. Muscled her up toward him. She helped as much as she could, seizing his left shoulder as though it were a ladder rung, clutching at the top of the partition. Pulled from above, pushed from below, she squeezed between Noah and the corner of the cul-de-sac, up and into the smoky crawlspace between the stacks and the ceiling.

As he felt Leilani squirm past him toward the passageway where Cass waited to lift her down, Noah hooked his hands under Micky’s arms, and she followed the girl’s example. She was heavier than the child, and no one pushed her from below. She gave herself as much of a boost as she could by toeing off the wall once, twice, then again, and each time she did so, Noah felt the stacks shudder under them.

Now he held his breath not merely to minimize smoke inhalation, but in expectation that the wall would shift and collapse, either burying Micky in the burning cul-de-sac or crushing him, Cass, and Leilani in the passage that they were trying to reach.

Aware of the danger, she eased quickly but judiciously past him, eeling across the two-foot-wide top of the palisade.

To his right, bright teeth of fire chewed through the stacks, almost a foot closer than when he’d first come up here. The hairs on that forearm, stiff with dried sweat, bristled like hundreds of tiny torches waiting to be lit.

Edging backward, Noah rapped his head against the ceiling. He froze as the compacted mass trembled under him. Remained frozen until it grew still once more. Then he dropped into the safe passageway, joining the others.

Safe like the Titanic. Safe like Hiroshima, 1945. Safe: like Hell.

The rescue operation had taken at most a minute and a half, but conditions had worsened noticeably in the meantime. Night seemed to have arrived toward the front of the maze, though it wasn’t night: more like a tsunami of black water, suspended by the magical stoppage of time, powerful and roiling within itself, but not yet advancing. Veins of red fire opened in that thick blackness, bled for a moment, closed up, and new veins ruptured elsewhere. And here, the cloying air pressed upon him, heavier with portent than with smoke, pregnant with a sense of tremendous forces rapidly building beyond restraint. Blackened pages of old magazines, little more than large flakes of ash, glided lazily toward them through the air, like stingrays seeking prey, and great schools of tiny lanternfish swam overhead in sinuous parades, sometimes extinguishing themselves when they collided with the maze walls, but in other places sparking small new fires, not yet attracted downward to the hair and clothes that they would eventually find so tasty. The heat demanded a toll of greasy sweat, but then parched Noah’s mouth and cracked his lips and seared the linings of his nostrils.

They were all coughing and clearing their throats, sneezing and wheezing, hawking black spit and gray phlegm.

Cass declared, “Outta here, now!” and led the way, followed by Leilani and Micky.

Last man in line, 38 revolver drawn in case Maddoc still had something to prove, Noah saw the throb of firelight toward the back of the house, where they had encountered none on the way in. Maybe there would be a path around it.

Turn by turn, through the convolutions of the labyrinth, as if exploring the gyri and the sulci on the surface of a brain, Preston chose his route according to his understanding of the classic maze pattern imprinted in the human racial memory, to which all ordinary maze-makers unfailingly resorted. Maybe the Toad, in spite of bib and bristle, wasn’t ordinary, after all — subhuman seemed more likely — or maybe Preston’s recollection of what he’d learned in that long-ago logic class was flawed, because he seemed to be getting nowhere, and he suspected that more than once he had doubled back and crossed his path.

Blame might best be placed on the bullet wound, which steadily drained him, or on the quality of the air, rather than on faulty memory or on the Toad’s failure to get in touch with his inner primitive. The Black Hole worried frequently about the ever worsening quality of the planet’s air, which was under continuous assault by barbecue grills and flatulent cows and SUVs and bathroom deodorizing cakes and, oh, so many things, so many. The air in here had gotten more disgusting than the air in a vomitorium. It probably contained more psychoactive chemical toxins than the Hole kept in her entire drug supply. The Hole, the good old Hole, mess that she might be, she sometimes got a thing or two right. Preston had a buzz on, a paper-chemical buzz, exacerbated by heat and by the thin haze of smoke that lent these wooden-Indian catacombs some of the atmosphere of an opium den, though the smell was not as pleasant, and no bunks were provided for those who had toked the pipe and felt wasted, as he felt ever more wasted, step by step.

He attempted to determine which of these coral-reef accretions of trash might be piled against an outer wall of the house, because windows lay behind those stacks, windows offering escape and clean air, or as clean as air ever got in a world full of barbecue grills. Unfortunately, he couldn’t stay focused on the task. One moment he would be searching urgently for concealed windows, and the next thing he knew, he’d find himself standing at a bafflingly complex juncture of passages, muttering, spitting on his shoes. Spit. Disgusting. So many fluids in the human body. Noxious fluids. He felt sick. He felt sick… but then he found himself peering warily around corners, searching not for windows but for the mysterious damn, sneaky damn extraterrestrials that had been eluding him for years.

For most of his life, he hadn’t needed to believe in a superior intelligence. His own intelligence seemed, to him, to be as superior as anyone could expect. But he was a profound thinker, a philosopher, and a respected academic whose view of the world had been shaped — and could be reshaped — by other academics, the elite of the elite, whose value to society tin his estimation and generally in theirs, too was of unparalleled importance. Five years ago, when he discovered that some quantum physicists and some molecular biologists had begun to believe that the universe offered profuse and even incontrovertible evidence of intelligent design, and that their numbers were slowly growing, his comfortable worldview had been shaken, had been too deeply disturbed to allow him to shrug off this information and blithely go on with his killing. He continued killing, yes, but not blithely. He could not accept any God hypothesis whatsoever because it was too limiting; it resurrected the whole business of right and wrong, of morality, which the enlightened community of utilitarian ethicists had largely succeeded in purging from society. A world created by a superior intelligence, who had imbued human life with purpose and meaning, was a world in which Preston Maddoc didn’t want to exist; it was a world he rejected, for he had always been and forever would be the only master of his fate, the only judge of his behavior.

Fortunately, in the midst of his intellectual crisis, Preston had come across a most useful quote by Francis Crick, one of the two scientists who won the Nobel prize for the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA. In a crisis of his own, Crick had reached a point at which he no longer believed that a sound scientific case could be made for evolution through natural selection. All life at even a molecular level was so irreducibly complex that it argued for intelligent design, which convinced Crick, who also wasn’t too keen on this God business that every form of life on Earth — all flora and fauna, the entire ecosystem — had been created not by God, but by an alien race of incomprehensibly vast intelligence and powers, a race that might also have created this universe itself, and others.

Extraterrestrials.

Extraterrestrial worldmakers.

Mysterious extraterrestrial worldmakers.

If that theory satisfied Francis Crick, Nobel laureate, it was plenty damn good enough for Preston Claudius Maddoc. Extraterrestrial worldmakers were no more likely to care what their creations did with their lives, in a moral sense, than any nerdy kid with an ant farm cared whether the ants inhabiting it were behaving their itty-bitty selves according to a posted set of rules.

In fact, Preston had a theory to explain why an alien race of incomprehensibly vast intelligence and powers might skip across the universe making worlds and seeding them with infinite varieties of life, intelligent and otherwise. It was a good theory, a fine theory, a brilliant theory.

He knew it was brilliant, pure genius, but as he stood here spitting on his shoes, he could not remember his splendid theory, not a word of it.

Spitting on his shoes? Disgusting.

He shouldn’t be standing around, spitting on his shoes, when he hadn’t found a window yet. The windows of any house were arranged in certain classic patterns dating back to the Stone Age and seeded in the human racial memory, so they ought to be easy to find even in this bizarre and rambling opium den.

Windows. Hidden windows. Find one of the mysterious hidden windows. Most likely, an extraterrestrial will be behind the damn thing, big grin on its worldmaker face.

He had their number. He knew what they were about. Perverse bunch of incomprehensibly intelligent and vastly powerful old farts.

His theory — yes, he remembered it now — his brilliant theory was that they built worlds and seeded life on them because they got off on the suffering of the species that they created. Not necessarily got off on in the sense of experienced orgasms. This was a brilliant theory, not a tacky one. But they built us to die, to die by the tens of billions over the centuries, because our deaths did something for them, provided them with something of value. Maybe there was a form of energy released every lime a creature perished, an energy beyond the human ability to detect, which they employed to power their star-ships and toasters, or which they personally absorbed in order to guarantee themselves eternal life. Oh, they were the ultimate utilitarians, ethical in all their undertakings, creating us to be of use to them and using every one of us fully, wasting none of us.

Move over, Francis Crick. Move over, all you other lame Nobel laureates. The academy would award him not just the coveted prize, but all of Sweden, if he could prove what he had theorized.

Seeking to confirm his theory, Preston had spent the past four and a half years ricocheting around the country, from one UFO sighting to another, meeting with gaggles of alien abductees, everywhere from Arkansas backwaters to Seattle, to purple mountain majesties, across the fruited plain, yearning to be beamed up and to have a chance to present his theory to the incomprehensibly intelligent worldmakers themselves in their bib overalls and straw hats, which is why he came here to Nun’s Lake, only to be disappointed again, only to wind up in want of a window, spitting in his lap.

Spitting in his lap? What a repulsive act. Next thing you knew, he’d be pissing his pants. Maybe he already had.

Yet in spite of his fastidiousness, it was true: Here he sat in a peculiar corner of an odd sort of place, repeatedly and vigorously hawking up clots of vile black phlegm and spitting them in his lap. He was also ranting aloud about his theory. Deeply humiliated to hear himself raving like a booze-addled street person, he nevertheless could not shut up because, after all, deep intellectual analysis and philosophical rumination were the essence of his work. That’s what he did. That’s who he was. Analyzer, ruminator, killer. The only thing that perhaps he needed to be embarrassed about was that he had been talking aloud to himself… but then he realized that he wasn’t alone, after all.

He had company.

The pall of smoke retreated like a gray tide, and the air in the immediate vicinity grew clean, and into this sudden clarity came a visitor of extraordinary appearance. It was about the size of the Hand, but not the Hand, not anything that Preston had ever previously seen or dreamed about. Feline, but not like a cat. Canine, but not

like a dog. Covered in lustrous while fur, glossy as ermine, but fur that sometimes appeared to be feathers, yes, that certainly was both fur and feathers — and yet neither. Round and golden eyes, as large as teacups, pellucid and luminous eyes that in spite of their beauty struck fear in him, even though he understood that the visitor meant him no harm.

When it spoke, he was not surprised, though its voice — that of a young boy, mellifluous enough for the Vienna choir — was not what he expected. Evidently it had listened to his ranting, for it said, “One problem with the theory. If incomprehensibly intelligent aliens made this world and everything in it — who made the aliens?”

An answer eluded Preston, and he could come up with nothing but another glutinous wad of black phlegm.

The gray tide flooded over him again, and the visitor retreated into the gloom, dissolved into a white blur, moving away, and then a final glimmer of luminous gold as just once it glanced back.

He felt an inexpressible loss at its departure.

The thing had been a figment of his imagination, of course, born of blood loss and toxic fumes. Figments seldom spoke. This one had spoken, though Preston couldn’t remember what it had said.

The firelight dimmed as thickening haze screened it. Evidently, too many pipes were being smoked here in the old opium den.

From a far corner came a peculiar sound, a protracted thuuuuuud. Then again: thuuuuuuud. And yet a third time: thuuuuuuud. Like giant dominoes toppling into one another in slow motion. Ominous.

He felt death coming. A wave. Sudden darkness, absolute. And no air, only soot that his lungs sought to store up by the pound.

Preston Maddoc screamed into a black pillow, screamed in terror at the realization that his time had come to provide a little power for the starship.

Thuuuuuuud…

Last in line, moving toward the rear of the house, toward fire where fire had not been earlier, Noah worriedly looked back in the direction that they had come, back into air where blackened magazine pages glided like stingrays, back into the schools of lanternfish, and he saw the suspended black tsunami abruptly pour forward through the maze, and he cried out much as he had cried out when his aunt Lilly shot him so many years ago.

Thuuuuuuud…

Maze walls were collapsing, stacks of bundled newspapers and other trash falling into the walls beside them, triggering further collapses.

Thuuuuuuud…

The floor shook with the third crash, which proved to be the last one for the time being, but the tsunami kept coming, racing toward them, a smothering tide of smoke, so dense that as it came, it muffled the voice of the fire that continued to rage behind it.

“Down!” Noah shouted.

They couldn’t outrun this. They could only hit the floor, press their faces to the well-worn tongue-and-groove, and hope that an inch of sustaining air might be compressed beneath the black cloud.

Here, now. Oh, God. Darkness as deep as caves and crypts. And only a thin sour air even at the floor. Then thinner and more sour. And then no air at all, and then—

The black tide relented, dissolved away from them, until they huddled together in a miraculous clearing, where the air tasted as sweet as that in a primeval forest, lacking the slightest scent of soot. The tsunami of smoke still rushed at them, over them, and past them, providing this impossible refuge, this saving eye of calm in the tumult.

And unto them, out of the blinding masses, came a creature of such heart-stopping beauty that Noah might have fallen to his knees before it if he had not already been on the floor. As white as a fresh winter mantle in a pristine wilderness, the entity arrived utterly un-soiled by the storm of filth through which it had passed. The huge luminous golden eyes, which should have terrified Noah by virtue of their strangeness and by the directness of their regard, did not instill terror, however, but fostered a sense of peace. He was overcome by the humbling perception that this visitor saw him as no one previously had ever seen him, gazed into the secret heart of him, and was not offended by what it discovered there. No terror, no fear troubled him except the reverential fear called awe; instead, set loose was a joy that he hadn’t been aware he contained, that all his life had been caged in his breast, and now flew free.

Rising slowly to his feet, he looked wonderingly at Cass… Micky… Leilani. They were in the grip of the same emotions by which he himself had been overwhelmed. Magic was the moment, as when doves are delivered from thin air, but these wings were Noah’s, the wings of pure elation.

The enchanted being had arrived like a leopard, but it rose now and stood like a man, barely taller than Leilani, whom it approached and to whom it spoke, incredibly, in the voice of a young boy. In fact, this was perhaps the voice of Curtis Hammond: “You still shine, Leilani Klonk.”

“You too,” said the girl.

“You can’t be broken.”

“I came broken.”

“Not in the heart.”

Tears overwhelmed the girl, and Noah — with Micky and Cass— moved to her. He didn’t know what was happening here, didn’t understand how this magical entity and Curtis Hammond could be one and the same, but his long-worn yoke of despair had lifted, and for the moment, he did not need to understand more than that the world had changed for him, forever. He touched Leilani’s shoulder, Cass touched Noah’s arm, and Micky took the girl’s withered hand in hers.

The golden eyes regarded each of them before lowering to Leilani once more. “Not in the heart,” the apparition repeated. “Suffering can’t crack you. Evil can’t turn you. You’re going to do great things in your life, Leilani Klonk, great and wonderful things. And I ain’t just shovelin’ horseshit at you, neither.”

Leilani laughed through her tears. Self-consciously, as though embarrassed by what had been said of her, she looked away from her enchanted rescuer, blinked up at the sea of soot and fumes churning across the top of their protective bubble, and said, “Hey, spaceboy, this sure is some neat trick with the smoke.”

“Smoke is just fine particles of matter. On the micro level, where will can win, I can move some of the particles from where they are to where I want them to be. It’s really fewer molecules than in a deadbolt. It’s a little trick. I only have three tricks, really, and they’re all little ones, but useful.”

“Better than Batman,” Leilani said.

The apparition’s smile proved to be as luminous as his eyes. “Gee, thanks. But it’s an energy-intensive trick, uses up a lot of frankfurters and moo goo gai pan, so we better get out of here.”

Through a tempest of smoke and fire, they traveled in cool clean air, following the signs in blood that Noah had left to mark the true path.

Along angular passageways, around a cochlear spiral, into the kitchen, through the vault of empty bottles…

Breathtaking gray sky, the beautiful shades of silver polished and of silver patinated. Rain, rain falling less forcefully than when they’d gone inside, rain as Noah had never felt it before: pure, fresh, exhilarating.

Polly waited in the backyard, holding Curtis Hammond’s soaked clothes and shoes. Soaked herself, mud-spattered, bedraggled, she grinned like a holy fool oblivious of the storm.

As graceful as water flowing, his white fur appearing to repel the rain, the golden-eyed apparition went to Polly, recovered the boy’s clothes from her, and then turned to meet the stares of all assembled until they took the hint and, as one, turned their backs to grant him privacy.

For a moment they stood in silence, still stunned, struggling to wrap their minds around the enormity of their experience, and then Leilani giggled. Her mirth infected the twins, Micky, and even Noah.

“What’s so funny?” asked the apparition.

“We already saw you naked,” Leilani said through her laughter.

“Not when I’m being Curtis Hammond, you didn’t.”

“It’s sure nice to know,” Leilani said, “you’re not the kind of tacky alien, come to save the world, who has to shake his booty at everybody.”

As they leave the Teelroy farm in their two cars, only wisps of smoke escape from under the eaves, as well as from a few chinks here

and there. Then the firestorm in the house begins to blow out windows, and great black plumes churn upward through the rain.

They reach the county road and head toward Nun’s Lake without encountering any traffic.

By stepping out of his human disguise and then returning to it, the motherless boy has reestablished the original biological tension that made him easier to trace during his first few eventful days of being Curtis Hammond. For a while, if worse scalawags come scanning for him, his unique energy signal will be detectable and quickly recognized.

Immediately upon their return to the Fleetwood, they must break camp and roll out, keep moving. Motion is commotion, and all that, but he will regret departing Nun’s Lake without having seen any nuns water-skiing, parasailing, or jet-boat racing. Perhaps when the world is saved, they can return here to visit, for in those better days to come, the nuns are more likely to be lighthearted and in a mood for recreation.

He looks through the back window of the Camaro to be sure that Polly and Cass are still following in Noah’s rental car. Yes, Polly is behind the wheel, and Cass is riding shotgun. No doubt they have their purses on the seat beside them, open for easy access.

If ever he loses the twins, his fabulous sisters, he will be heartbroken beyond endurance, and therefore he must never lose them. Never. He has lost too much already.

Micky drives the Camaro, and Noah rides up front beside her. Leilani shares the backseat with Curtis, and Old Yeller lies between them. Exhausted from an eventful day, the dog dozes.

They ride in silence, each occupied with his thoughts, which Curtis entirely understands. Sometimes socializing is easy, sometimes hard, and sometimes socializing does not require words.

By the time they arrive at the campground, the rain stops. The washed pine trees are an enthralling green; the graceful boughs have been diamond-strung; saturated trunks and limbs as dark as chocolate shed singing birds and inquisitive squirrels into the aftermath of the storm. This is an exquisite world, and the motherless boy loves it desperately.

To reach the Fleetwood, they must pass the Prevost, and as they approach that vehicle, which had been Leilani’s prison, Curtis sees emergency vehicles parked near it. The swiveling, roof-racked beacons on a police car cannot chase off the beauty of the overarching trees, but they do remind him that, although exquisite, this world turns in turbulence and is not at peace.

A uniformed police officer, standing by his cruiser, motions for Micky to drive past, to keep moving.

An ambulance stands ready, its back door open.

Two paramedics, flanking a gurney, guide it along the oiled lane, through puddles, to the ambulance.

On the stretcher lies a woman. Though Curtis has never seen her, he knows who she must be.

For her own safety and most likely for the safety of those who want to help her, Leilani’s mother is strapped to the gurney. She rages against her restraints, strains furiously to slip free of them. Wildly tossing her head, she curses the paramedics, curses onlookers, and screams at the sky.

Leilani looks away, lowers her head, and stares at her hands, which are folded in her lap.

On the seat between them, sister-become has not been roused from her nap by the scene at the Prevost. Her damp flank rises and falls with her slow breathing.

As the Camaro rolls past the ambulance, Curtis reaches out and lifts the girl’s deformed hand from her lap.

She looks up, and misery clouds her eyes.

He says, “Shhhhhh,” and he gently places her palm against the sleeping dog, covering her hand with his.

Every world has dogs or their equivalent, creatures that thrive on companionship, creatures that are of a high order of intelligence although not of the highest, and that therefore are simple enough in their wants and needs to remain innocent. The combination of their innocence and their intelligence allows them to serve as a bridge between what is transient and what is eternal, between the finite and the infinite.

Of the three little tricks that Curtis can do, the first is the ability to exert his will on the micro level, where will can win. The second is the lovely ability to form the boy-dog bond. The third is the ability to teach the second trick to anyone he meets, and it is this third trick with which he can save a world.

“Shhhhh,” he repeats, and as Leilani’s eyes widen, he takes her with him into the dog’s dreams.

For those who despair that their lives are without meaning and without purpose, for those who dwell in a loneliness so terrible that it has withered their hearts, for those who hate because they have no recognition of the destiny they share with all humanity, for those who would squander their lives in self-pity and in self-destruction because they have lost the saving wisdom with which they were born, for all these and many more, hope waits in the dreams of a dog, where the sacred nature of life may be clearly experienced without the all but blinding filter of human need, desire, greed, envy, and endless fear. And here, in dream woods and fields, along the shores of dream seas, with a profound awareness of the playful Presence abiding in all things, Curtis is able to prove to Leilani what she has thus far only dared to hope is true: that although her mother never loved her, there is One who always has.