Olives littered the sidewalk and squished underfoot, as though recently the neighbors had gathered here for an outdoor martini party but had discarded their cocktail garnishes instead of eating them.
Dylan followed the driveway into the layered tarps of shadow that draped the sedan in the carport, though he remained in sight.
A breath of breeze as dry as stirred gin with a single drop of vermouth inspired a subtle silken rustle from the olive trees. Over this seductive swish, Jilly heard Hunnn-na-na-na-na-na-na-na!
His eerie stutter spiraled down her cochleae to the bottom of her ears and seemed to leap from there into her spine, vibrating from vertebra to vertebra, shaking shivers from her.
With the utterance of the final syllable, Dylan disappeared toward the back of the carport.
Making olive paste underfoot as she crossed the public sidewalk, shuffling through the grass to clean her shoes, Jilly hurried toward the place where he’d been just before darkness swallowed him.
* * *
Her face plump and sweet, ideal for Christmas cards, was in the next instant drawn, bleak, fit for Halloween. In a quiver of shadow cast by something invisible, her white and glossy hair became tangled and matted with blood, but in a shimmer of light that had no apparent source, red tangles smoothed and clarified again into white glossy locks. A face pale pink under snowy hair withered into grainy gray when framed by clotted curls and snarls. Her eyes met Dylan’s with bewilderment, but then shocked wide and filled with cold mortality – and yet an instant later were alert, aware, startled once more.
Dylan saw her alive, dead, alive, dead, one image rising out of the other, briefly asserting its reality, then submerging in its antithesis. He didn’t know beyond doubt what this hideous apparition meant, if in fact it meant anything at all, but he glanced at his hands, expecting them to appear alternately clean and filthy with the woman’s blood. When the vision of violence did not involve his hands, his innards nevertheless remained a clenched mass of dread, and he raised his eyes to her face once more, half convinced that whatever power had driven him to this place would eventually use him as the instrument of her death.
‘Cheeseburgers, French fries, apple pies, and vanilla shakes,’ she said, proving either that he had been memorable during his brief visit to the takeout counter or that her powers of recollection were formidable.
Instead of answering her, Dylan found himself stepping to the kitchen table and picking up one of the empty cans of Budweiser. The fireflies flew again within the bone cave of his skull, but he heard far less of the fizz-and-crackle of arcing electrical current than he had heard before, and behind his clenched teeth, not one convulsive spasm plagued his tongue.
‘Get out of the house,’ he advised the woman. ‘You’re not safe here. Hurry, go, now.’ Whether she went or stayed, he didn’t know, because even as he spoke, he dropped the beer can on the table and at once turned from her. He didn’t look back. Could not.
He hadn’t yet come to the end of this bizarre journey begun in the Expedition and continued here on foot. Beyond the kitchen, past an open door, lay a plank-floored hallway softened by a threadbare, rose-patterned runner. His sense of urgency renewed, Dylan was drawn forward toward some dark destination.
* * *
Reaching the carport, Jilly peered back toward the Expedition, where the streetlamps, filtered through olive branches, revealed Shepherd in silhouette, in the backseat where he had been told to stay.
Past the Buick, out of the carport, she hurried to the rear of the house, stirring up a cloud of pale moths when she brushed against a camellia bush with blooms as full and red as maidens’ hearts.
The back door stood open. A rectangle of outfalling kitchen light revealed a porch floor painted pearl-gray and remarkably free of dust for the porch of a house in a desert town.
Even under these extraordinary circumstances, she might have halted at the threshold, might have politely rapped knuckles against the jamb of the open door. The sight of the familiar white-haired woman in the kitchen, lifting the receiver of a wall-mounted phone, alarmed and emboldened Jilly, however, and she stepped off the porch, onto the freshly polished yellow-and-green basket-weave linoleum.