By the Light of the Moon (5 page)

Chapter Six

J
ILLY OPENED HER EYES AND SAW, BLEARILY, THE
salesman and his identical twin bending over the bed on which she reclined.

Although she knew that she ought to be afraid, she had no fear. She felt relaxed. She yawned.

If the first brother was evil—and no doubt he was—then the second must be good, so she was not without a protector. In movies and often in books, moral character was distributed in exactly that ratio between identical siblings: one evil, one good.

She’d never known twins in real life. If she ever met any, she would not be able to trust both. Your trust ensured that you would be bludgeoned to death, or worse, in Act 2 or in Chapter 12, or certainly by the end of the story.

These two guys looked equally benign, but one of them slipped loose a rubber-tube tourniquet that had been knotted around Jilly’s arm, while the second appeared to be administering an injection. Neither of these interesting actions could fairly be called evil, but they were certainly unsettling.

“Which of you is going to bludgeon me?” she asked, surprised to hear a slur in her voice, as though she had been drinking.

As one, with matching expressions of surprise, the twin salesmen looked at her.

“I should warn you,” she said, “I know karaoke.”

Each of the twins kept his right hand on the plunger of the hypodermic syringe, but simultaneously each snatched up a white cotton handkerchief with his left hand. They were exquisitely choreographed.

“Not karaoke,” she corrected herself. “Karate.” This was a lie, but she thought that she sounded convincing, even though her voice remained thick and strange. “I know karate.”

The blurry brothers spoke in perfect harmony, their syllables precisely matched. “I want you to sleep a little more, young lady. Sleep, sleep.”

As one, the wonderfully synchronized twins swept the white handkerchiefs through the air and dropped them on Jilly’s face with such panache that she expected the cloths to transform magically into doves before they quite touched her skin. Instead, the damp fabric, reeking with the pungent chemistry of forgetfulness, seemed to turn black, like crows, like ravens, and she was borne away on midnight wings, into darkness deep.

Although she thought that she’d opened her eyes an instant after closing them, a couple minutes must have passed in that blink. The needle had been withdrawn from her arm. The twins no longer hovered over her.

In fact, only one of the men was present, and she realized that the other had not actually existed, had been a trick of vision. He stood at the foot of the bed, returning the hypodermic syringe to the leather satchel, which she’d mistaken for a kit of salesman’s samples. She realized that it must be a medical bag.

He droned on about his life’s work, but nothing he said made any sense to Jilly, perhaps because he was an incoherent psychopath or perhaps because the fumes of nepenthe, still burning in her nose and sinuses, rendered her incapable of understanding him.

When she tried to rise from the bed, she experienced a wave of vertigo that washed her back down onto the pillows. She clutched the mattress with both hands, as a shipwrecked sailor might cling to a raft of flotsam in a turbulent sea.

This sensation of tilting and spinning at last stirred up the fear that she knew she ought to feel but that until now had been an inactive sediment at the bottom of her mind. As her breathing grew shallow, quick, and frantic, her racing heart churned currents of anxiety through her blood, and fear threatened to darken into terror, panic.

She had never been interested in controlling others, but she’d always insisted on being the master of her own fate. She might make mistakes,
did
make mistakes—lots, lots—but if her life was destined to be screwed up, then she’d damn well do the job herself. Control had been taken from her, seized by force, maintained with chemicals, with drugs, for reasons that she could not understand even though she strained to remain focused on her tormentor’s line of self-justifying patter.

With the surge of fear came anger. In spite of her karaoke-karate threat and her Southwest Amazon image, Jilly wasn’t by nature a butt-kicking warrioress. Humor and charm were her weapons of choice. But here she saw an ample backside in which she emphatically wanted to bury a boot. As the salesman-maniac-doctor-whatever walked to the desk, to pick up his cola and three bags of peanuts, Jilly tried once more to rise in righteous rage.

Again, her box-spring raft tossed in the flamboyant sea of bad motel decor. A second attack of vertigo, worse than the first, spun a whirlpool of nausea through her, and instead of executing the butt-booting assault that she’d envisioned, she groaned. “I’m gonna puke.”

Retrieving his Coke and peanuts, picking up his medical bag, the stranger said, “You’d better resist the urge. The effects of the anesthesia linger. You could lose consciousness again, and if you pass out
while
regurgitating, you’ll wind up like Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, choking to death on your own vomit.”

Oh, lovely. She’d simply gone out to buy some root beer. Such an innocent undertaking. Not ordinarily a high-risk task. She had fully understood the need to compensate for the root-beer indulgence with a dry-toast breakfast, but she hadn’t gone to the vending machines with any expectation whatsoever that by doing so she would put herself at risk of choking to death on her own upchuck. Had she known, she would have stayed in her room and drunk tap water; after all, what was good enough for Fred was good enough for her.

“Lie still,” the crackpot urged, not with any element of command in his voice but with what sounded like concern for her. “Lie still, and the nausea and the vertigo will fade in two or three minutes. I don’t want you to choke to death, that would be stupid, but I can’t risk hanging around here, playing nursemaid. And remember, if they get their hands on me and discover what I’ve done, they’ll come looking for anyone I’ve injected, and they’ll kill you.”

Remember? Kill?
They?

She had no memory whatsoever of any such previous warning, so she assumed that it must have been part of what he’d been talking about when her brain haze, now gradually clearing, had been as thick as London fog.

From the door, he looked back at her. “The police won’t be able to keep you safe from these people who’re coming. There’s no one to turn to.”

On the rolling bed, in this tilting room, she could not help but think about the chicken sandwich, slathered with chipotle mayonnaise, and the greasy French fries she’d eaten. She tried to concentrate on her assailant, desperate to devastate him with words in place of the boot that she hadn’t been able to bury in his bottom, but her gorge kept trying to rise.

“Your only hope,” he said, “is to get out of the search area before you’re detained and forced to have a blood test.”

The chicken sandwich struggled within her as though it retained some of its chicken consciousness, as though the fowl were attempting to take a first messy step toward reconstitution.

Nevertheless, Jilly managed to speak, and she was at once embarrassed by the insult that escaped her, which would have been lame even if she had pronounced it without confusion: “Siss my kass.”

In comedy clubs, she frequently dealt with hecklers, cracked their thick skulls, wrung their geek necks, stomped their malicious hearts till they cried for Mama—metaphorically speaking, of course—using a dazzle of words as effective as the fists of Muhammad Ali in his prime. In postanesthesia disorientation, however, she was about as witheringly funny as chipotle mayonnaise, which right now was the least amusing substance in the known universe.

“As attractive as you are,” he said, “I’m sure someone’ll look after you.”

“Pupid srick,” she said, further mortified by the utter collapse of her once formidable verbal war machine.

“In the days ahead, you’d be best advised to keep your mouth shut about what happened here—”

“Cupid strick,” she corrected herself, only to realize that she had found a new way to mangle the same insult.

“—keep your head down—”

“Stupid prick,” she said with clarity this time, although the epithet had actually sounded more withering when mispronounced.

“—and never speak to anyone about what’s happened to you, because as soon as it’s known, you’ll be a target.”

She almost spat the word at him,
“Hickdead,”
though such crude language, whether or not properly pronounced and clearly enunciated, was not her usual style.

“Good luck,” he said, and then he left with his Coke and his peanuts and his evil dreamy smile.

Chapter Seven

H
AVING CUT HIMSELF LOOSE FROM THE CHAIR,
having taken a quick piddle—deedle-doodle-diddle—Dylan returned from the bathroom and discovered that Shep had risen from the desk and had turned his back on the unfinished Shinto temple. Once he began to obsess on a puzzle, Shep could be lured from it neither with promises nor with rewards, nor by force, until he plugged in the final piece. Yet now, standing near the foot of the bed, staring intently at the empty air as though he perceived something of substance in it, he whispered not to Dylan, apparently not to himself, either, but as if to a phantom visible only to him:
“By the light of the moon.”

During most of his waking hours, Shepherd radiated strangeness as reliably as a candle gave forth light. Dylan had grown accustomed to living in that aura of brotherly weirdness. He had been Shep’s legal guardian for more than a decade, since their mother’s untimely death when Shep was ten, two days before Dylan turned nineteen. After all this time, he could not easily be surprised by Shep’s words or actions, as once he had been. Likewise, in his youth he had sometimes found Shep’s behavior creepy rather than merely peculiar, but for many years, his afflicted brother had done nothing to chill the nape of Dylan’s neck—until now.

“By the light of the moon.”

Shepherd’s posture remained as stiff and awkward as always, but his current edginess wasn’t characteristic. Though usually as smooth as the serene brow of Buddha, his forehead furrowed. His face gave itself to a ferocity he’d never exhibited before. He squinted at the apparition that only he could see, chewing on his lower lip, looking angry and worried. His hands cramped into fists at his sides, and he seemed to want to punch someone, though never before had Shepherd O’Conner raised a hand in anger.

“Shep, what’s wrong?”

If the lunatic physician with a hypodermic syringe could be believed, they had to get out of here, and quickly. A speedy exit, however, would require Shep’s cooperation. He seemed to be teetering on the edge of emotional turmoil, and if he was not calmed, he might prove difficult to manage in an excited state. He wasn’t as big as Dylan, but he stood five ten and weighed 160 pounds, so you couldn’t just grab him by the back of his belt and carry him out of the motel room as though he were a suitcase. If he decided he didn’t want to go, he would wrap his arms around a bedpost or make a human grappling hook of himself in a doorway, hooking hands and feet to the jamb.

“Shep? Hey, Shep, you hear me?”

The boy appeared to be no more aware of Dylan now than when he’d been working the puzzle. Interaction with other human beings didn’t come to Shepherd as easily as it came to the average person, or even as easily as it came to the average cave-dwelling hermit. At times he could connect with you, and as often as not, that connection would be uncomfortably intense; however, he spent most of his life in a world so completely his own and so unknowable to Dylan that it might as well have revolved around an unnamed star in a different arm of the Milky Way galaxy, far from this familiar Earth.

Shep lowered his gaze from an eye-level confrontation with the invisible presence, and although his stare fixed upon nothing more than a patch of bare carpet, his eyes widened from a squint, and his mouth went soft, as though he might cry. A progression of expressions fell across his face in swift succession, like a series of rippling veils, quickly transforming his grimace of anger to a wretched look of helplessness and tremulous despair. His tightly gripped ferocity swiftly sifted between his fingers, until his clenched fists, still at his sides, fell open, leaving him empty-handed.

When Dylan saw his brother’s tears, he went to him, gently placed a hand on one shoulder, and said, “Look at me, little bro. Tell me what’s wrong. Look at me, see me, be here with me, Shep. Be here with me.”

At times, without coaching, Shep could relate almost normally, if awkwardly, to Dylan and to others. More often than not, however, he needed to be guided toward communication, constantly and patiently encouraged to make a connection and to maintain it once it had been established.

Conversation with Shep frequently depended on first making eye contact with him, but the boy seldom granted that degree of intimacy. He seemed to avoid such directness not solely because of his severe psychological disorder, and not merely because he was pathologically shy. Sometimes, in a fanciful moment, Dylan could almost believe that Shep’s withdrawal from the world, beginning in early childhood, had occurred when he had discovered that he could read the secrets of anyone’s soul by what was written in the eyes…and had been unable to bear what he saw.

“By the light of the moon,”
Shep repeated, but this time with his gaze fixed on the floor. His whisper had fallen to a murmur, and with what sounded like grief, his voice broke more than once on those six words.

Shep seldom spoke, and when he did, he never spouted gibberish, even if sometimes it seemed to be gibberish as surely as cheddar was a cheese. Within his every utterance lay motive and meaning to be discerned, although when he was at his most enigmatic, his message could not always be understood, in part because Dylan lacked the patience and the wisdom to solve the puzzle of the boy’s words. In this case, his urgent and fiercely felt emotion suggested that what he meant to communicate was unusually important, at least to him.

“Look at me, Shep. We need to talk. Can we talk, Shepherd?”

Shep shook his head, perhaps in denial of what he seemed to see on the motel-room floor, in denial of whatever vision had brought tears to his eyes, or perhaps in answer to his brother’s question.

Dylan put one hand under Shepherd’s chin, gently lifted the boy’s head. “What’s wrong?”

Maybe Shep read the fine print on his brother’s soul, but even eye to eye, Dylan glimpsed nothing in Shepherd but mysteries more difficult to decipher than ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics.

As his eyes clarified behind waning tears, the boy said, “Moon, orb of night, lunar lamp, green cheese, heavenly lantern, ghostly galleon, bright wanderer—”

This familiar behavior, which might be a genuine obsession with synonyms or which might be just another technique to avoid meaningful communication, still occasionally annoyed Dylan, even after all these years. Now, with the unidentified golden serum circulating through his body and with the promise of ruthless assassins riding this way on the warm desert breeze, annoyance quickly swelled into irritation, exasperation.

“—silvery globe, harvest lamp, sovereign mistress of the true melancholy.”

Keeping one hand under his brother’s chin, tenderly insisting upon attention, Dylan said, “What’s that last one—Shakespeare? Don’t give me Shakespeare, Shep. Give me some real feedback. What’s wrong? Hurry now, help me here. What’s this about the moon? Why’re you upset? What can I do to make you feel better?”

Having exhausted his supply of synonyms and metaphors for the moon, Shep turned next to the subject of
light,
speaking with an insistence that implied a greater meaning in these words than they otherwise seemed to possess: “Light, illumination, radiance, ray, brightness, brilliance, beam, gleam, God’s eldest daughter—”

“Stop it, Shep,” Dylan said firmly but not harshly. “Don’t talk
at
me. Talk
to
me.”

Shep made no effort to turn away from his brother. Instead, he simply closed his eyes, putting an end to any hope that eye contact would lead to useful communication. “—effulgence, refulgence, blaze, glint, glimmer—”

“Help me,” Dylan pleaded. “Pack up your puzzle.”

“—shine, luster, sheen—”

Dylan looked down at Shep’s stocking feet. “Put on your shoes for me, kiddo.”

“—incandescence, candescence, afterglow—”

“Pack your puzzle, put on your shoes.” With Shepherd, patient repetition sometimes encouraged him to act. “Puzzle, shoes. Puzzle, shoes.”

“—luminousness, luminosity, fulgor, flash,” Shep continued, his eyes jiggling behind his lids as though he were fast asleep and dreaming.

One suitcase stood near the foot of the bed, and the other lay open on top of the dresser. Dylan closed the open bag, picked up both pieces of luggage, and went to the door. “Hey, Shep. Puzzle, shoes. Puzzle, shoes.”

Standing where his brother had left him, Shep chanted, “Sparkle, twinkle, scintillation—”

Before frustration could build to head-exploding pressure, Dylan opened the door, carried the suitcases outside. The night continued to be as warm as a toaster oven, as parched as a burnt crust.

A dry drizzle of yellow lamplight fell on the largely empty parking lot, soaked into the pavement, was absorbed as efficiently by the blacktop as light might be captured by the heavy gravity of a black hole in space. Broad blades of sharp-edged shadows lent the night a quality of guillotine expectancy, but Dylan could see that the motel grounds did not yet seethe with the squads of promised pistol-packing killers.

His white Ford Expedition was parked nearby. Bolted to the roof, a watertight container held artist’s supplies as well as finished paintings that he had offered for sale at a recent art festival in Tucson (where five pieces had sold) and would offer also in Santa Fe and at similar events thereafter.

As he opened the tailgate and quickly loaded the suitcases into the SUV, he looked left and right, and behind himself, leery of being assaulted again, as though crazed physicians armed with enormous syringes full of
stuff
could be expected to travel in packs as surely as did coyotes in desert canyons, wolves in forests primeval, and personal-injury attorneys at any prospect of product liability.

When he returned to the motel room, he found Shep where he had left him: standing in his stocking feet, eyes closed, exhibiting his annoyingly impressive vocabulary. “—fluorescence, phosphorescence, bioluminescence—”

Dylan hurried to the desk, broke apart the finished portion of the jigsaw, and scooped double handfuls of Shinto temple and cherry trees into the waiting box. He preferred to save time by leaving the puzzle, but he felt certain that Shep would refuse to go without it.

Shepherd surely heard and recognized the distinctive sound of pasteboard pieces being tumbled together in a pile of soft rubble. Ordinarily, he would have moved at once to protect his unfinished project, but not this time. Eyes closed, he continued urgently to recite the many names and forms of light: “—lightning, fulmination, flying flame, firebolt, oak-cleaving thunderbolts—”

Fitting the lid on the box, Dylan turned away from the desk and briefly considered his brother’s shoes. Rockport walkers, just like Dylan’s, but a few sizes smaller. Too much time would be required to get the kid to sit on the edge of the bed, to work his feet into the shoes, and to tie the laces. Dylan snatched them off the floor and placed them atop the puzzle box.

“—candlelight, rushlight, lamplight, torchlight—”

The point of injection in Dylan’s left arm began to feel hot, and it itched. He resisted tearing off the cartoon-dog Band-Aid and scratching the puncture wound, because he feared that the colorful bandage concealed awful proof that the substance in the syringe had been worse than dope, worse than a mere toxic chemical, worse than any known disease. Under the little rectangle of gauze might wait a tiny but growing patch of squirming orange fungus or a black rash, or the first evidence that his skin had begun metamorphosing into green scales as he underwent a conversion from man to reptile. In full
X-Files
paranoia, he didn’t have the courage to discover the reason for the itch.

“—firelight, gaslight, foxfire, fata morgana—”

Burdened with puzzle box and sibling footgear, Dylan hurried past Shep to the bathroom. He hadn’t yet unpacked their toothbrushes and shaving gear, but he’d left a plastic pharmacy bottle, containing a prescription antihistamine, on the counter beside the sink. Right now, allergies were the least of his problems; however, even if he were being eaten alive by a vile orange fungus and simultaneously morphing into a reptile, while also being hunted by vicious killers, a runny nose and a sinus headache were complications best avoided.

“—chemiluminescence, crystalloluminescence, counterglow, Gegenschein—”

Returning from the bathroom, Dylan said hopefully, “Let’s go, Shep. Go, now, come on,
move
.”

“—violet ray, ultraviolet ray—”

“This is serious, Shep.”

“—infrared ray—”

“We’re in trouble here, Shep.”

“—actinic ray—”

“Don’t make me be mean,” Dylan pleaded.

“—daylight, dayshine—”

“Please don’t make me be mean.”

“—sunshine, sunbeam—”