There was light-or something that wasn’t quite light- in the window of Bob’s ground-floor bedroom.
We’re all right here, Arleta Wishart had called through the door in a voice unlike her own. We’re all fine.
And, Bob’s calling me.
Bob, locked for weeks in the silence of his coma?
He has to be dead, she thought. She knew that no battery in the town was working.
So why that prickling down her spine, that animal sense of wrongness when she looked toward the house that Glen Abate apparently didn’t see?
Wilma got to her feet, picked her way through the deep grass toward the house.
The light in the window wasn’t fire. Nothing of the golden warmth of kerosene or beeswax or any flame. It was violet, cold and pulsing rather than flickering, and as she stepped forward into the rank beds of honeysuckle she felt a pressure, a tightness in her chest, as if the air around the house were suddenly hostile and alive.
Anger. Anger and terror.
Go away! Go away! Go away!
She called out cautiously, “Bob?” Edged another step closer, her tall body crouching, limbs drawing together in a sort of lithe feral readiness, to spring or to flee. The air clawed and crinkled on her skin, and she prickled, nostrils twitching. Before her the honeysuckle stirred in the darkness, and from the leaves, from the thin glabrous flowers and the tough vines, came a kind of hissing, as if the plants themselves stirred and lashed against the ground.
She saw it move, ripple and rise, and she thought, Stranglers. The very scent of the flowers changed to a warning stink, the pungence of blood and death.
Slowly she withdrew. On the lawn behind her, Sebastian, Imp and Eleanor crouched in a line like three sphinxes, tails twitching slightly, huge eyes seeming to glow in the dark. Crazy with the craziness of cats in the night. Aware, as she was aware, of the lizards in the ferns, of the birds in the trees.
The honeysuckle stirred again, and Sebastian opened his red mouth and hissed.
Careful, soft-footed, alive to every whisper in the dark, Wilma circled the house to the path by the back door. Something in the house was aware of her. Something in the house followed her around the walls with its consciousness. Some- thing in the house crouched down into itself, gathering darkness.
Arleta was in there, thought Wilma. Arleta and Bob-and Arleta was still alive even if Bob wasn’t. She had a momentary vision of them, the pale chubby, helpless little woman in her pink sweats, her soft fair-haired son helpless in the bed.
Her friends, whom she could not desert.
She edged down the path, tense and ready to flee. Under her feet the concrete shifted suddenly, the ground jerking, breaking. The two slabs of broken path yawned open, and she sprang back as they snapped shut like jaws biting at her ankle; the path jerked again, like a snake’s back rippling. Wilma leaped back, not even fully aware that she shouldn’t have been able to clear eight feet from a standing start. Her feet hit the ground, and she darted forward again in a long-legged springy run.
She grabbed the back door handle, moving fast, dragging on it with all her strength. Though the door had never had a lock on it, not even a hook, it refused to budge. Some terrible strength pulled against her own, though she could look through the screen and see nothing in the dark dusty clutter of old couches and boxes of romances heaped there. Behind her she heard a rustle, a whoosing green-plant heaviness of moving air, and reaching up she slashed and clawed at the screen where it was loose on its crazy old nails, bringing it down in a great tearing curl.
With weightless strength she swung up, through and into the porch, hearing in her mind the screaming desperate voice, GET OUT! GET OUT! GO AWAY! The darkness seemed to slam around her, a crushing fist, smothering. Dust and panic and something else, something terrible. Wilma dodged an instant before a cardboard box slammed heavily against the wall by her shoulder, the violence of the blow splitting the ancient glue. Paperbacks snowed to the plank floor, then rose up again like mad birds, flying at her face, shoving, suffocating. Wilma backed, dodged, nimble and very fast, instinct beyond words telling her to keep moving and changing direction, but whatever was in the porch with her was strong and fast as well.
Fear pounded on her, fear like a whirlwind-her own fear and a fear that seemed to come with that terrified scream. She grabbed the doorknob that would let her into the kitchen, and it was scalding hot under her hand. She jerked back, and one of the old couches swung at her legs like a battering ram. She sprang on top of it, up and over, ran as it tipped, plunged out through the window screen again. Fell, rolled, was on her feet and fleeing.
It was only when she sat once more on her own porch steps, panting and shivering and staring through the darkness at the white house that she could still see perfectly well-see with the preternatural clearness with which she still saw every leaf of the honeysuckle, every blade of the grass, through the night’s gathering gloom-that she thought, How the hell did I survive that?
Softly, silently, the cats padded up to her through the gloom. Clinton levitated in a weightless spring to her shoulder; Mortimer butted the side of her knee gently with his flat furry skull; Isabella coaxingly dropped a mostly dead bug on her foot and touched her with a gentle paw. Wilma scratched scruffs, stroked backs, rubbed chins, drawing from them the comfort of company, the uncomplicated love that never disappointed her, never made demands that she wasn’t prepared to fulfill.
It seemed to her years since the morning whistle had sounded in the mine, since she’d taken her shower and opened cans. She guessed now what the others didn’t, that the lights might not be coming back on.
Good thing I have a manual can opener.
Except, of course, she thought, when we run out of cans. She looked across at the darkness of the Wishart house, at the eerie purplish phosphorescence flickering in its window, and whatever was there looked back at her.
Voices in the street. Shannon Grant and Marcia duPone-friends and neighbors, reminding her that whatever else had changed, there were things that hadn’t.
Wilma closed the back door and returned to the dark of her house, to gather up water, food, blankets for those who would need them. And she felt whatever was in the Wishart house aware of her as she stepped out the front door to join her friends.
Chapter Thirteen
NEW YORK
Big Eddie was cooking, and that was that.
Didn’t make no never mind if it was World War III or the biggest fuckup Municipal or the Man Upstairs had ever pulled. Nothing he could do about it. He’d just left that fucking Metro bus of his on Forty-second and Sixth where it had up and died, come home and hauled the barbecue right out onto the street. Now he stood like some black Moses in a chef’s hat and apron, keeping the coals red hot and dishing out the good stuff.
He’d started the ball rolling by grilling whatever was thawing in his own freezer. Pretty soon folks from next door and down the block and around the corner were popping up with armfuls of burgers and dogs and chicken from their own kitchens. Better to cook it up than let it just rot. And some cats had gotten out their conga drums and saxophones and acoustic guitars, and it was sounding fine. Folks were scared shitless, hell yes, but it was also a damn good party. And not just the folks from the neighborhood: anyone could play; this was New York City. Big Eddie saw Asian dudes in pinstripe suits, a couple of them Orthodox guys, some Italian chicks still clutching their shopping bags from Bloomie’s and Bergdorf ’s. All mixing with the local talent, the brothers and sisters, Puerto Ricans and Vietnamese and just plain white guys. Everybody keeping it cool, right here, right now.