He shook his head, nothing.
Bat wing shadows swooped along one wall, across the ceiling.
Sasha spun toward the movement.
I reached under my jacket, but there was no shoulder holster, no gun.
The shadows were only shadows, sent flying through the room by a sudden
flurry of action on the television screen.
The third corpse was slumped in a huge armchair, legs propped on a
matching footstool, arms on the chair arms. Bobby stripped away the silk
hood, I flashed the light on and off, and Roosevelt whispered, “Colonel
Ellway.” Colonel Eaton Ellway had been second in command of Fort Wyvern
and had retired to Moonlight Bay after the base was closed.
Retired. Or engaged in a clandestine assignment in civilian clothes.
With no additional dead men to investigate, I finally registered what
was on the television. It was tuned to a cable channel that was running
an animated feature film, Disney’s The Lion King.
We stood for a moment, listening to the house.
Other music and other voices came from other rooms.
Neither the music nor the voices were made by the living.
Death lives here.
From the living room a chamber grossly misnamedwe cautiously crossed the
front hall to the study. Sasha and Roosevelt halted at the doorway.
A tambour door was open on an entertainment center incorporated into a
wall of bookshelves, and The Lion King was on the television, with the
volume low. Nathan Lane and company were singing “Hakuna Matata.
” Inside, Bobby and I found two more members of this suicide club with
squares of black silk over their heads. A man sat at the desk, and a
woman was slumped in a Morris chair, empty drinking glasses near each of
them.
I no longer had the heart to strip away their veils. The black silk
might have been cult paraphernalia with a symbolic meaning that was
comprehensible only to those who had come together in this ritual of
self-destruction. I thought, however, that at least in part, it might be
meant to express their guilt at being involved in work that had brought
humanity to these straits. If they felt remorse, then their deaths had a
degree of dignity, and disturbing them seemed disrespectful.
Before we had left the living room, I had once more covered the faces of
Sparkman, To regard, and Ellway.
Bobby seemed to understand the reason for my hesitancy, and he lifted
the veil on the man at the desk, while I used the flashlight with the
hope of making an identification. This was no one that either of us
knew, a handsome man with a small, well-trimmed gray mustache.
Bobby replaced the silk.
The woman reclining in the Morris chair was also a stranger, but when I
directed the light at her face, I didn’t immediately switch it off.
With a soft whistle, Bobby sucked air between his teeth, and I muttered,
“God.” I had to struggle to keep my hand from shaking, to keep the light
steady.
Sensing bad news, Sasha and Roosevelt came in from the hall, and though
neither of them spoke a word, their faces revealed all that needed to be
said about their shock and revulsion.
The dead woman’s eyes were open. The left was a normal brown eye.
The right was green, and not remotely normal. There was almost no white
in it. The iris was huge and golden, the lens a gold-green. The black
pupil was not round but ellipticallike the pupil in the eye of a snake.
The socket encircling that terrifying eye was badly misshapen.
Indeed, there were subtle but fearsome deformities in the entire bone
structure along the right side of her once lovely face, brow, temple,
cheek, jaw.
Her mouth hung open in a silent cry. Her lips were peeled back in a
rictus, revealing her teeth, which for the most part appeared normal.
A few on the right side, however, were sharply pointed, and one eyetooth
seemed to have been in the process of reshaping itself into a fang.
I moved the beam of the flashlight down her body, to her hands, which
were in her lap. I expected to see more mutation, but both her hands