‘This not good?’ Tommy half shouted. ‘What do you mean this not good?’
Rising from the sofa, Del said, ‘I think she means we turned down the last cup of tea we’re ever going to have a chance to drink.’
Mother Phan got up from the Berger. She spoke to Quy Trang Dai in rapid Vietnamese.
Keeping her eyes on the demon at the broken window, Mrs. Dai answered in Vietnamese.
Looking distressed at last, Mother Phan said, ‘Oh, boy.’
The tone in which his mother spoke those two words affected Tommy in the same way as an icy finger drawn down his spine would have affected him.
At the window, the Samaritan-thing at first seemed shocked by its own boldness. This was, after all, the sacred domain of the hairdresser witch who had summoned it from Hell – or from wherever Xan River magicians summoned such creatures. It peered in amazement at the few jagged fragments of glass that still prickled from the window frame, no doubt wondering why it had not instantly been cast back to the sulphurous chambers of the underworld.
Mrs. Dai checked her wristwatch.
Tommy consulted his as well.
Ticktock.
Half snarling, half whining nervously, the Samaritan-thing climbed through the broken window into the living room.
‘Better stand together,’ said Mrs. Dai.
Tommy, Del, and Scootie moved out from behind the coffee table, joining his mother and Mrs. Dai in a tight grouping.
The serpent-eyed fat man no longer wore the hooded raincoat. The fire from the yacht should have burned away all attire, but curiously the flames had only singed its clothes, as though its imperviousness to fire extended somewhat to the garments it wore. The black wingtip shoes were badly scuffed and caked with mud. The filthy and rumpled trousers, the equally dishevelled and bullet-torn shirt and vest and suit jacket, the acrid smell of smoke that seeped from the creature, combined with its gardenia-white skin and inhuman eyes, gave it all the charm of a walking corpse.
For half a minute or more, the demon stood in indecision and evident uneasiness, perhaps waiting to be punished for violating the sanctity of Mrs. Dai’s house.
Ticktock.
Then it shook itself. Its plump hands curled into fists, relaxed, curled into fists. It licked its lips with a fat pink tongue – and it shrieked at them.
The deadline is dawn.
Beyond the windows the sky was still dark – though perhaps more charcoal grey than black.
Ticktock.
Mrs. Dai startled Tommy by raising her left hand to her mouth and savagely biting the meatiest part of her palm, below her thumb, drawing blood. She smacked her bloody hand against his forehead, in the manner of a faith healer knocking illness out of a penitent sufferer.
When Tommy started to wipe the blood away, Mrs. Dai said, ‘No, leave. I safe from demon because I summon into rag doll. Can’t harm me. If you smell like me, smell like my blood, it can’t know who you really are, think you me, then not harm you either.’
As the Samaritan-thing approached, Mrs. Dai smeared her blood on Del’s forehead, on Mother Phan’s forehead, and after hesitating only briefly, on Scootie’s head as well.
‘Be still,’ she instructed them in an urgent whisper. ‘Be still, be quiet.’
Grumbling, hissing, the creature approached to within a foot of the group. Its fetid breath was repulsive, reeking
of dead burnt flesh and curdled milk and rancid onions – as though, in another life, it had eaten hundreds of
cheeseburgers and had been plagued with indigestion even in Hell.
With a wet crackling sound, the plump white hands metamorphosed into serrated pincers that were designed for efficient slashing and rending.
When the radiant green eyes fixed on Tommy’s eyes, they seemed to look through him, as if the beast were reading his identity on the bar code of his soul.
Tommy remained still. Silent.
The demon sniffed him, not as a snorting pig might revel in the delicious stink of its slops, but as a master viniculturist with an exquisitely sensitive nose might seek to isolate and identify each of the many delicate aromas rising from a glassful of fine Bordeaux.