seem to make sense only in a Lewis Carroll world, with Alice at the
bottom of a magical rabbit hole.
At the back door, I tried the dead bolt again. Locked.
I drew the curtain aside and surveyed the night. I could not see
Orson.
Trees were stirring. The wind had returned.
Moonlight was on the move. Apparently, new weather was coming in from
the Pacific. As the wind flung tattered clouds across the face of the
moon, a silvery radiance appeared to ripple across the nightscape. In
fact, what traveled were the dappling shadows of the clouds, and the
movement of the light was but an illusion.
Nevertheless, the backyard was transformed into a winter stream, and
the light purled like water moving under ice.
From elsewhere in the house came a brief wordless cry. It was as thin
and forlorn as Angela herself.
The cry was so short-lived and so hollow that it might have been no
more real than the movement of the moonlight across the backyard,
merely a ghost of sound haunting a room in my mind. Like the monkey,
it possessed both a quality of wasness and notness.
As the door curtain slipped through my fingers and fell silently across
the glass, however, a muffled thump sounded elsewhere in the house and
shuddered through the walls.
The second cry was briefer and thinner than the first-but it was
unmistakably a bleat of pain and terror.
Maybe she had merely fallen off a step stool and sprained her ankle.
Maybe I’d heard only wind and birds in the eaves. Maybe the moon is
made of cheese and the sky is a chocolate nonpareil with sugar stars.
I called loudly to Angela.
She didn’t answer.
The house was not so large that she could have failed to hear me. Her
silence was ominous.
Cursing under my breath, I drew the Glock from my jacket pocket. I
held it in the candlelight, searching desperately for safeties.
I found only one switch that might be what I wanted. When I pressed it
down, an intense beam of red light shot out of a smaller hole below the
muzzle and painted a bright dot on the refrigerator door.
My dad, wanting a weapon that was user-friendly even to gentle
professors of literature, had paid extra for laser sighting. Good
man.
I didn’t know much about handguns, but I knew some models of pistols
featured “safe action” systems with only internal safety devices that
disengaged as the trigger was pulled and, after firing, engaged
again.
Maybe this was one of those weapons. If not, then I would either find
myself unable to get off a shot when confronted by an assailant-or,
fumbling in panic, would shoot myself in the foot.
Although I wasn’t trained for this work, there was no one but me to do
the job. Admittedly, I thought about getting out of there, climbing on
my bike, riding to safety, and placing an anonymous emergency call to
the police. Thereafter, however, I would never be able to look at
myself in a mirror-or even meet Orson’s eyes.
I didn’t like the way my hands were shaking, but I sure as hell
couldn’t pause for deep-breathing exercises or meditation.
As I crossed the kitchen to the open door at the dining room, I
considered returning the pistol to my pocket and taking a knife from
the cutlery drawer. Telling the story of the monkey, Angela had shown
me where the blades were kept.
Reason prevailed. I was no more practiced with knives than I was
expert with firearms.
Besides, using a knife, slashing and gouging at another human being,
seemed to require a ruthlessness greater than that needed to pull a
trigger. I figured I could do whatever was necessary if my life-or
Angela’s-was on the line, but I couldn’t rule out the possibility that
I was better suited to the comparatively dry business of shooting than
to the up-close-and-personal wet work of evisceration. In a desperate
confrontation, a flinch might be fatal.
As a thirteen-year-old boy, I had been able to look into the
crematorium. Yet all these years later, I still wasn’t ready to watch
the grimmer show in an embalming chamber.