saw at once what had caught her attention: several blue threads,
precisely the color of the sweater. They were now loose, clinging to
the sock. They were woven into the very fabric of it.
Then he noticed Frank’s left shoe. It was a dark brown hiking shoe, but
a few thing, squiggly white lines marred the leather on the toe. When
he studied them closely, he saw that the line appeared to be coming
sparse threads like those in the athletic socks scraping at them with
one fingernail, he discovered they were not stuck to the shoe, but were
an integral part of the surface of the leather.
The missing yarn of the sweater had somehow become a part of both the
khaki pants and one of the socks; the displaced threads of the sock had
become part of the shoe on the other foot.
“What’s wrong?” Frank repeated, more fearfully than before.
Bobby hesitated to look up, expecting to see that the filaments of
displaced shoe leather were embedded in Frank’s face, and that the
displaced flesh was magically entwined with the cable knit of the
sweater. He stood and forced himself to confront his client.
Aside from the dark and puffy rings around is eyes, the sickly pallor
relieved only by the flush on his upper cheeks, and the fear and
confusion that gave him a tormented look, nothing was wrong with his
face. No leather ornamentation. No khaki stitched into his lips. No
filaments of blue yarn or plastic shoelace tips or button fragments
bristling from his eyeballs.
Silently castigating himself for his overactive imagination, Bobby
patted Frank’s shoulder.
“It’s okay. It’s all right. We’ll figure it out later. Come on, let’s
get you out of here.”
IN THE embrace of darkness, enwrapped by the scent of Channel No. five
under the very blankets and sheets that had once warmed his mother and
that he had so carefully served, Candy dozed and awakened repeatedly
with a fear though he could not remember any nightmares.
Between periods of fitful sleep, he dwelt on the incident at the canyon,
earlier that night, when he had been hunting and had felt an unseen
presence put a hand on his head. He’d never before experienced anything
like that. He was disturbed by the encounter, unsure whether it was
threatening or benign, anxious to understand it.
He first wondered if it had been his mother’s angelicence, hovering
above him. But he quickly dismissed that explanation. If his mother
had stepped through the veil between this world and the next, he would
have recognized her spirit, singular aura of love, warmth, and
compassion. He would have fallen to his knees under the weight of her
ghostly hand wept with joy at her visitation.
Briefly he had considered that one or both of his inscrutable sisters
possessed a heretofore unrevealed talent for psychic contact and reached
out to him for unknown reasons. They had, somehow like they controlled
their cats and appeared to have equal influence over other small
animals. Maybe they!” enter human minds as well. He didn’t want that
pale, cold pair invading his privacy. At times he looked at them and
thought of snakes-sinuous albino snakes, silent and filled-with desires
as alien as any that motivated reptiles.
possibility that they could intrude into his mind was chill even if they
could not control him.
But between bouts of sleep, he abandoned that idea. If Violet and
Verbina possessed such abilities, they would have enslaved him long ago,
as thoroughly as they had enslaved the cats. They would have forced him
to do degrading, obscene things; they did not possess his self-control
in matters of the flesh and would live, if they could, in constant
violation of God’s most fundamental commandments.
He could not understand why his mother had sworn him to keep and protect
them, any more than he could understand how she could love them. Of
course her compassion for those miscreant offspring was only one more
example of her saintly nature. Forgiveness and understanding flowed
from her like clear, cool water from an artesian well.
For a while he dozed. When he woke with a start again, he turned on his