Turning to face the windows that offered a view of the backyard, she confirmed that of course the panes remained intact.
Recognizing that Jilly was distracted as in past clairvoyant episodes, Dylan said, ‘Hey, are you all right?’
Most likely these were not the windows in her vision. She’d been receiving images of the bloodbath in the church since the previous evening, and that event had not yet transpired. She had no reason to believe that this other violent incident would occur here rather than elsewhere or sooner rather than later.
Dylan approached her. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘I’m not sure.’
She glanced at the clock, the grinning pig.
She knew the porcine smile hadn’t changed in the least. The lips were fixed in their expression under the ceramic glaze. The smile remained as benign as she’d first seen it less than half an hour ago, ten years in the past. Nevertheless, a malevolent energy seethed off the pig, off the clock.
‘Jilly?’
In fact not just the pig but the entire kitchen seemed to be alive with an evil presence, as though a dark spirit had come upon them and, unable to manifest itself in the traditional ectoplasmic apparition, took residence in the furnishings and in the surfaces of the room itself. Every edge of every counter appeared to gleam with a lacerating sharpness.
Shepherd opened the refrigerator door again, and peering into it, he said, ‘Cold. We’re all cold.’
The black glass oven doors watched, watched like hooded eyes.
Dark bottles in a wine rack seemed to have Molotov potential.
Flesh crawled, fine hairs quivered, a chill settled on the nape of her neck when she imagined the steel teeth gnashing silently in the throat of the garbage disposal.
No. Absurd. No spirit possessed the room. She didn’t need an exorcist.
Her sense of alarm – actually a presentiment of death, she realized – was so powerful and growing so rapidly that she desperately needed to discover a cause for it. She superstitiously projected her fear onto inanimate objects – pig clock, oven doors, garbage-disposal blades – when the real threat lay elsewhere.
‘We’re all cold,’ said Shep at the open refrigerator.
This time, Jilly heard those three words differently from the way she had heard them before. She remembered Shepherd’s talent for reeling off synonyms, and now she realized that they might have the same meaning as We’re all dead. Cold as a corpse. Cold as the grave. Cold and dead.
‘Let’s get out of here now, fast,’ she urged.
Dylan said, ‘I’ve got to get the money in the lockbox.’
‘Forget the money. We’ll die trying to get the money.’
‘That’s what you see?’
‘That’s what I know.’
‘Okay, all right.’
‘Let’s fold, let’s go, hurry!’
‘We’re all cold,’ said Shep.
37
Tick-tock, pig clock. Gleaming little eyes squinting out of folds of pink fat. That knowing leer.
Forget the damn clock. The pig clock isn’t a threat. Focus.
Dylan returned to his brother, closed the refrigerator door for the third time, and drew Shep toward Jilly. ‘We’ve got to go, buddy.’
‘Where’s all the ice?’ Shep asked, deeper into this obsession than Jilly had seen him in any other. ‘Where’s all the ice?’
‘What ice?’ Dylan asked.
This clairvoyance, this foreshadowing talent was still new to Jilly, as frightening as it was new, as unwanted as it was new, and she had not been channeling it properly.
‘Where’s all the ice?’ Shepherd persisted.
‘We don’t need ice,’ Dylan told him. ‘Buddy, you’re starting to scare me here. Don’t freeze up on me.’
‘Where’s all the ice?’
‘Shep, be with me now. Listen to me, hear me, stay with me.’
By struggling to identify the cause of her alarm, letting her suspicion hop from object to object, place to place, she had not been allowing the alarm to direct the compass needle of her intuition. She needed to relax, to trust this strange precognition and let it show her precisely what to fear.
‘Where’s all the ice?’
‘Forget about the ice. We don’t need ice, buddy. We need to get out of here, all right?’
‘Nothing but ice.’
Inevitably, Jilly’s attention was drawn toward the windows, and the deep backyard beyond the windows. The green grass, the garage, the golden meadow behind the garage.