This episode proved to be briefer than the first, and when he attempted to quell the stutter, he at once fell silent, instead of having to let it run its course, as had been the case previously.
With the final na, he was on the move again. Quietly, quietly through the carport, around the corner of the house.
Shallower than the veranda at the front of the house, the back porch also featured plainer posts. The steps were concrete instead of brick.
When his hand enfolded the knob on the back door, fireflies flew inside his head, but this bright swarm numbered fewer than the two that had flown in advance of it. The accompanying electric crackle sounded less cataclysmic than before. Clenching his teeth, pressing his tongue firmly against the roof of his mouth, he avoided making any sound this time.
The lock was not engaged. The knob turned when he tried it, and the door opened when he pushed inward.
Dylan O’Conner crossed a threshold that was not his to cross, entered uninvited, appalled by this bold trespass, yet compelled to proceed.
The plump, white-haired woman in the kitchen wore a candy-striped uniform. She looked weary and troubled, different from the fresh and cheerful Mrs. Santa Claus that she’d been when, a couple hours ago, she had taken his order for burgers and had fixed the toad pin to his shirt.
A large white bag of takeout, discount dinner from her job, stood on the counter near the cooktop. This potpourri of grease and onion and cheese and charbroiled meat had already flooded the room with a delicious melange of aromas.
She stood beside the kitchen table, her once-pink face fading toward gray, captured by an expression between worry and despair. She stared down at an arrangement of objects on the Formica tabletop, a still life unlike any that the old masters had ever painted: two empty cans of Budweiser, one upright, one on its side, both partly crushed; a scattered collection of pills and capsules, many white, some pink, a few green giants; an ashtray containing two roaches – not the kind that had ever crawled or nested under the warm motor of a refrigerator, but the butt ends of two marijuana joints.
The woman didn’t hear Dylan enter, didn’t glimpse the movement of the door from the corner of her eye, and for a moment she remained unaware of him. When she realized that she had a visitor, she shifted her gaze from the table to his face, but she seemed to have been too numbed by the tableau on the Formica to be immediately surprised or alarmed by his unexpected arrival.
He saw her alive, dead, alive, dead, and the faint cold fear that thrilled through his veins thickened into terror.
15
Dylan crossing in front of the Expedition, through the headlight beams, his yellow-and-blue shirt as bright as any afternoon on Maui, might have vanished before Jilly’s eyes, stepping out of this world into an alternate reality, and she would have been surprised but not astonished. The hazardous return drive to town had been a high-speed journey squarely into the Twilight Zone, and after her vision in the desert and the river of spirit doves, she might not be capable of astonishment again this side of the grave.
When Dylan didn’t vanish in front of the truck, when he reached the brick walkway and started toward the house, Jilly turned her head to look at Shepherd in the backseat.
She caught him watching her. They locked stares. His green eyes widened at the shock of contact, and then he closed them.
‘You stay here, Shep.’
He didn’t answer.
‘Don’t move out of that seat. We’ll be right back.’
Under his pale lids, his eyes twitched, twitched.
When Jilly glanced toward the house, she saw Dylan angling from the brick walk toward the driveway.
Leaning across the console, she doused the headlights. Switched off the engine. Plucked the keys from the ignition.
‘Did you hear me, Shep?’
His shuttered eyes appeared to be full of dreams, marked by more REM than those of a sleeping man thrashed by nightmares.
‘Don’t move, stay here, don’t move, we’ll be right back,’ she counseled as she opened the passenger’s door and swiveled on her seat, keeping her legs up to spare Fred from injury.