Ashman reflected a minute. “All right,” he said.
He was about to sign off when the study door opened. “Hold it,” a -voice ordered. I turned on my heel, jerkily, uselessly fast.
The hard brown face and hard rangy frame of Robert Shining Knife confronted me. The head of the local FBI office had discarded the conservative business suit of his organization for working clothes. His feather bonnet seemed to brush the ceiling; a gourd stuck into his breechclout rattled dryly to his steps, the blanket around his shoulders and the paint on his skin were patterned in thunderbirds, sun discs, and I know not what else.
“You listened in,” I accused.
He nodded. “Couldn’t take chances, Mr. Matuchek. Dr. Ashman, you’ll observe absolute secrecy. No running off to any blabbermouth some shaman or goodwife think should be brought in consultation.”
Ginny blazed up. “See here—”
“Your cat’ll be repaired for you,” Shining Knife promised in the same blunt tone. “I doubt he’ll prove of assistance, but we can’t pass by the smallest possibility. Uncle Sam will pick up the tab—on the QT—and Dr. Ashman may as well head the team. But I want to clear the other members of it, and make damn sure they aren’t told more than necessary. Wait in your office, Doctor. An operative will join you inside an hour.”
The physician bristled. “And how long will he then take to certify each specialist I may propose is an All-American Boy?”
“Very little time. You’ll be surprised how much he’ll know about them already. You’d also be surprised how much trouble someone would have who stood on his rights to tell the press or even his friends what’s been going on.” Shining Knife smiled sardonically. “I’m certain that’s a superfluous warning, sir. You’re a man of patriotism and discretion. Good-bye.”
The phone understood him and broke the spell.
“Mind if I close the windows?” Shining Knife asked as he did. “Eavesdroppers have sophisticated gadgets these days.” He had left the door ajar; we heard his men move around in the house, caught faint pungencies and mutterings. “Please sit down. He leaned back against a bookshelf and watched us.
Ginny controlled herself with an effort I could feel. “Aren’t you acting rather high-handed?”
“The circumstances require it, Mrs. Matuchek,” he said.
She bit her lip and nodded.
“What’s this about?” I begged.
The hardness departed from Shining Knife. “We’re confirming what your wife evidently suspects,” he said with a compassion that made me wonder if he had a daughter of his own. “She’s a witch and would know, but wouldn’t care to admit it till every hope of a less terrible answer was gone. This is no ordinary kidnapping.”
“Well, of course-!”
“Wait. I doubt if it’s technically any kind of kidnapping. My bureau may have no jurisdiction. However, as your wife said the case may well involve the national security. I’ll have to communicate with Washington and let them decide. In the last analysis, the President will. Meanwhile, we don’t dare rock the boat.”
I looked from him to Ginny to the horror that was again without form, not a thing to be fought but a condition of nightmare. “Please, I whispered.
Shining Knife’s mouth contorted too for an instant. He spoke flatly and fast: “we’ve ascertained the blood is entirely the cat’s. There are some faint indications of ichor, chemical stains which may have been caused by it, but none of the stuff itself. We got better clues from scratches and gouges in floor and furnishings. Those marks weren’t left by anything we can identify, natural or paranatural; and believe me, our gang is good at identifications.”
“The biggest fact is that the house was never entered. Not any way we can check for—and, again, we know a lot of different ones. Nothing was broken, forced, or picked. Nothing had affected the guardian signs and objects; their fields were at full strength, properly meshed and aligned, completely undisturbed.
Therefore nothing flew down the chimney, or oozed through a crack, or dematerialized past the walls, or compelled the babysitter to let it in. 3
“The fact that no one in the neighborhood was alerted is equally significant. Remember how common, hex alarms and second-sighted watchdogs are. Some thing paranatural and hostile in the street would touched off a racket to wake everybody for three blocks around. Instead, we’ve only got the Delacorts next door, who heard what they thought was a catfight.”
He paused. “Sure,” he finished, “we don’t everything about goetics. But we do know enough about its felonious uses to be sure this was no forced entry.”
“What, then?” I cried.
Ginny said it for him: “It came in from the hell universe.”
“Theoretically, could have been an entity from Heaven.” Shining Knife’s grin was brief and stiff. “But that’s psychologically-spiritually-impossible. The M.O. is diabolic.
Ginny sat forward. Her features were emptied of expression, her chin rested on a fist, her eyes were half-shut, the other hand drooped loosely over a knee. She murmured as if in a dream:
“The changeling fits your theory quite well, doesn’t it? To the best of our knowledge, matter can’t be transferred from one space-time plenum to another in violation of the conservation laws of physics. Psychic influences can go, yes. Visions, temptations, inspirations, that sort of thing. The uncertainty principle allows them. But not an actual object. If you want to take it from its proper universe to your own, you have to replace it with an identical amount of matter, whose configuration has to be fairly similar to preserve momentum. You may remember Villegas suggested this was the reason angels take more or less anthropomorphic shapes on earth.”
Shining Knife looked uneasy. “This is no time to be unfriends with the Most High,” he muttered.
“I’ve no such intention,” Ginny said in her sleepwalker’s tone. “He can do all things. But His servants are finite. They must often find it easier to let transferred matter fall into the shape it naturally wants to, rather than solve a problem involving the velocities of ten to the umpteenth atoms in order to give it another form. And the inhabitants of the Low Continuum probably can’t. They aren’t creative. Or so the Petrine churches claim. I understand the Johannine doctrine includes Manichaean elements.
“A demon could go from his universe to a point in ours that was inside this house. Because his own natural form is chaotic, he wouldn’t have to counter-transfer anything but dirt, dust, trash, rubbish, stuff in a high-entropy condition. After he finished his task, he’d presumably return that material in the course of returning himself. It’d presumably show effects. I know things got generally upset in the fight, Mr. Shining Knife, but you might run a lab check on what was in the garbage can, the catbox, and so forth.”
The FBI man bowed. “We thought of that, and noticed its homogenized condition,” he said. “If you could think of it, under these circumstances—”
Her eyes opened fully. Her speech became like slowly drawn steeclass="underline" “Our daughter is in hell, sir. We mean to get her back.”
I thought of Valeria, alone amidst cruelty and clamor and unnamable distortions, screaming for a Daddy and a Mother who did not come. I sat there on the bed, in the night which has no ending, and heard my lady speak as if she were across a light-years-wide abyss:
“Let’s not waste time on emotions. I’ll continue outlining the event as I reconstruct it; check me out. The demon—could have been more than one, but I’ll assume a singleton—entered our cosmos as a scattered mass of material but pulled it together at once. By simple transformation, he assumed the shape he wanted. The fact that neither the Adversary nor any of his minions can create—if the Petrine tradition is correct—wouldn’t handicap him. He could borrow any existing shape. The fact that you can’t identify it means nothing. It could be a creature of some obscure human mythology, or some imaginative drawing some where, or even another planet.