By the Light of the Moon (22 page)

“Anyway,” Dylan said, “the stupid thing is, I shouted at you because I wanted you to tell me how you got here—but I already knew somehow you must have done it yourself, some new wild talent of your own. I don’t understand the mechanics of what you’ve done. Even you probably don’t grasp the mechanics of it any more than I understand how I feel a psychic trace on a door handle, how I read the spoor. But I knew the rest of what must’ve happened before I asked.”

With an effort, Dylan silenced himself. The surest way to calm Shepherd was to stop jabbering at him, stop overloading him with sensory input, grant him a little quiet.

In the barest breath of ocean-scented breeze, the grass stirred as languidly as seaweed in deep watery gardens. Gnats nearly as tiny as dust motes circled lazily through the air.

High in the summer sky, a hawk glided on thermal currents, in search of field mice three hundred feet below.

At a distance, traffic on the coast highway raised a susurration so faint that even the feeble breeze sometimes erased the sound. When the growl of a single engine rose out of the background murmur, Dylan shifted his attention from the hunting hawk to the graveled driveway and saw a motorcycle approaching his house.

The Harley belonged to Vonetta Beesley, the housekeeper who came once a week, whether Dylan and Shep were in residence or not. During inclement weather, she drove a supercharged Ford pickup perched high on fifty-four-inch-diameter tires and painted like a crimson dragon.

Vonetta was a fortyish woman with the winning personality and the recreational interests of many a Southern good old boy. A superb housekeeper and a first-rate cook, she had the strength and the guts—and would most likely be delighted—to serve as a bodyguard in a pinch.

The hilltop lay so far behind and above the house that Vonetta would not be able to identify Dylan and Shep at this distance. If she noticed them, however, and if she found them to be suspicious, she might take the Harley off-trail and come up here for a closer look. Concern for her own safety would not be an issue, and she would be motivated both by a sense of duty and a taste for adventure.

Maybe Dylan could concoct a half-assed story to explain what he and his brother were doing here when they were supposed to be on the road in New Mexico, but he didn’t have the talent for deception or the time to craft a story to explain the gateway, the motel bathroom here on the hill, and Jilly peering cluelessly out at them as though she were Alice unsuccessfully attempting to scope the nature of the enchanted realm on the far side of the looking glass.

He turned to his little brother, prepared to risk agitating the kid anew by suggesting that the time had come to return to Holbrook, Arizona.

Before Dylan could speak, Shepherd said, “Here, there.”

Dylan was reminded of the men’s restroom at the restaurant in Safford, the previous evening.
Here
had referred to stall number one.
There
had referred to stall number four. Shep’s first jaunt had been short, toilet to toilet.

Dylan recalled no eerie red radiance on that occasion. Perhaps because Shep had closed the gateway behind him as soon as he’d passed through it.

“Here, there,” Shep repeated.

Head lowered, Shep looked up from under his brow, not at Dylan but at the house below the hill, beyond the meadow, and at Vonetta on the Harley.

“What’re you trying to say, Shep?”

“Here, there.”

“Where is there?”

“Here,” said Shep, scuffing the grass with his right foot.

“And where is here?”

“There,” said Shep, tucking his head down farther and turning it to the right, peering back past his shoulder toward Jilly.

“Can we go back where we started?” Dylan urged.

On her motorcycle, Vonetta Beesley followed the driveway around the house to the detached garage.

“Here, there,” Shep said.

“How do we get back to the motel safely?” Dylan asked. “Just reach in from this end, just step into the gateway?”

He worried that if he went through the portal first and found himself back in the motel, Shep wouldn’t follow him.

“Here, there. There, here,” said Shep.

On the other hand, if Shep made the return trip first, the gate might immediately close up after him, stranding Dylan in California until he could get back to Holbrook, Arizona, by conventional means, thus requiring Jilly to fend for herself and the kid in the meantime.

Common sense insisted that everything strange happening to them came out of Frankenstein’s syringes. Therefore, Shepherd must have been injected and must have acquired the power to open the gate. He found it, activated it. Or more likely he created it. Consequently, in a sense, the gate operated according to Shep’s rules, which were unknown and unknowable, which meant that traveling by means of the gate was like playing poker with the devil using an unconventional deck of cards with three additional suits and a whole new court of royals between jack and queen.

Vonetta brought the Harley to a stop near the garage. The engine swallowed its growl.

Dylan was reluctant to take Shepherd’s hand and plunge together into the gateway. If they had come to California by teleportation—and what else but teleportation could explain this?—if each of them had been instantaneously deconstructed into megatrillions of fellow-traveling atomic particles upon falling out of the motel bathroom and had then been perfectly reconstructed upon emerging onto this hilltop, they might find it necessary or at least wise to make such a journey one at a time, to avoid…commingling their assets. Dylan had seen the old movie
The Fly,
in which a teleporting scientist had undertaken a short trip from one end of his laboratory to the other, hardly farther than Shepherd’s toilet-to-toilet experiment, unaware that a lowly housefly accompanied him, resulting in disaster on a scale usually achieved only by politicians. Dylan didn’t want to wind up back at the motel wearing Shepherd’s nose on his forehead or with Shepherd’s thumb bristling from one of his eye sockets.

“Here, there. There, here,” Shep repeated.

Behind the house, Vonetta put down the kickstand. She climbed off the Harley.

“No here. No there. Herethere,” Shep said, making a single noun from two. “Herethere.”

They were actually conducting a conversation. Dylan had only the dimmest understanding of what Shepherd might be trying to tell him; however, for once he felt certain that his brother was listening to him and that what Shep said was in direct response to the questions that were asked.

With this in mind, Dylan sprang to the most important question pending: “Shep, do you remember the movie
The Fly
?”

Head still lowered, Shep nodded. “
The Fly.
Released to theaters in 1958. Running time—ninety-four minutes.”

“That’s not important, Shep. Trivia isn’t what I’m after. What I want to know is do you remember what happened to the scientist?”

Far below them, standing beside the motorcycle, Vonetta Beesley took off her crash helmet.

“The cast included Mr. David Hedison as the scientist. Miss Patricia Owens, Mr. Vincent Price—”

“Shep, don’t do this.”

“—and Mr. Herbert Marshall. Directed by Mr. Kurt Neumann who also directed
Tarzan and the Leopard Woman
—”

Here was the kind of conversation that Dylan called
Shepspeak.
If you were willing to participate, involving yourself in patient give-and-take, you could spend an entertaining half-hour together before you reached data overload. Shep had memorized prodigious quantities of arcane information about subjects that were of particular interest to him, and sometimes he enjoyed sharing it.

“—
Son of Ali Baba, Return of the Vampire
—”

Vonetta hung her helmet from the handlebars of the bike, peered up at the hawk that circled to the east of her, and then spotted Shep and Dylan high on the hill.

“—
It Happened in New Orleans, Mohawk,
and
Rocketship X-M
among others.”

“Shep, listen, let’s get back to the scientist. You remember the scientist got into a teleportation booth—”

“
The Fly
was remade as
The Fly
in 1986.”

“—and there was a fly in the booth too—”

“Running time of this remade version—”

“—but the scientist didn’t know—”

“—is one hundred minutes.”

“—it was there with him.”

“Directed by Mr. David Cronenberg,” said Shepherd. “Starring Mr. Jeff Goldblum—”

Standing down there beside her big motorcycle, Vonetta waved at them.

“—Miss Geena Davis, and Mr. John Getz.”

Dylan didn’t know whether or not he should wave at Vonetta. From this distance, she couldn’t possibly know who he and Shep were, but if he gave her too much to work with, she might recognize him by his body language.

“Other films directed by Mr. David Cronenberg include
The Dead Zone,
which was good, a scary but good movie, Shep liked
The Dead Zone
—”

Vonetta might be able to see the suggestion of a third person on the hilltop—Jilly—but she wouldn’t be able to discern enough of the gateway to understand the full strangeness of the situation up here.

“—
The Brood
and
They Came from Within.
Shep didn’t like those ’cause they were too bloody, they were full of sloppy stuff. Shep doesn’t ever want to see those again. None of that stuff anymore. Not again. None of that stuff.”

Deciding that to wave at the woman might be to encourage her to come up the hill for a visit, Dylan pretended not to see her. “Nobody is going to make you watch another Cronenberg movie,” he assured his brother. “I just want you to think about how the scientist and the fly got all mixed up.”

“Teleportation.”

Apparently suspicious, Vonetta put on her helmet.

“Teleportation!” Dylan agreed. “Yes, that’s exactly right. The fly and the scientist teleported together, and they got mixed up.”

Still addressing the ground at his feet, Shepherd said, “The 1986 remake was too icky,”

“You’re right, it was.”

“Gooey scenes. Bloody scenes. Shep doesn’t like gooey-bloody scenes.”

The housekeeper mounted her Harley once more.

“The first version wasn’t gooey-bloody,” Dylan reminded his brother. “But the important question is—”

“Nine minutes in the shower is just right,” said Shepherd, unexpectedly harking back to Dylan’s critical tirade.

“I suppose it is. Yes, I’m sure it is. Nine minutes. You’re absolutely right. Now—”

“Nine minutes. One minute for each arm. One minute for each leg. One minute—”

Vonetta tried to fire up the Harley. The engine didn’t catch.

“—for the head,” Shepherd continued. “Two full minutes to wash everything else. And two minutes to rinse.”

“If we jump back to the motel together,” Dylan said, “right now, the two of us hand-in-hand, are we going to wind up like the fly and the scientist?”

Shep’s next words were saturated with an unmistakable note of wounded feelings: “Shep doesn’t eat crap.”

Baffled, Dylan said, “What?”

When Vonetta keyed the ignition again, the Harley answered with proud power.

“Shep doesn’t eat a narrow little list of crap like you said, a narrow little list of crap. Shep eats food just like you.”

“Of course you do, kiddo. I only meant—”

“Crap is shit,” Shepherd reminded him.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean any of that.”

Straddling the Harley, both feet still on the ground, Vonetta gunned the throttle a few times, and the roar of the engine echoed across the meadow, through the hills.

“Poopoo, kaka, diaper dump—”

Dylan almost cried out in frustration, but he swallowed hard, and maintained his composure. “Shep, listen, buddy, bro, listen—”

“—doodoo, cow pie, bulldoody, and all the rest as previously listed.”

“Exactly,” Dylan said with relief. “As previously listed. You did a good job previously. I remember them all. So are we going to wind up like the fly and the scientist?”

With his head bowed so far that his chin touched his chest, Shep said, “Do you hate me?”

The question rocked Dylan. And not solely the question, but the fact that Shepherd had spoken of himself in the first person instead of the third. Not do you hate
Shep,
but do you hate
me.
He must feel deeply wounded.

Behind the house, Vonetta turned the Harley out of the driveway and rode across the backyard toward the meadow.

Dylan knelt on one knee in front of Shep. “I don’t hate you, Shep. I couldn’t if I tried. I love you, and I’m scared for you, and being scared just made me pissy.”

Shep wouldn’t look at his brother, but at least he didn’t close his eyes.

“I was mean,” Dylan continued, “and you don’t understand that, because you’re never mean. You don’t know how to be mean. But I’m not as good as you, kiddo, I’m not as gentle.”

Shepherd appeared to boggle at the grass around his bedroom slippers, as though he had seen an otherworldly creature creeping through those bristling blades, but he must instead be reacting to the astonishing idea that, in spite of all his quirks and limitations, he might in some ways be superior to his brother.

At the end of the mown yard, Vonetta rode the Harley straight into the meadow. Tall golden grass parted before the motorcycle, like a lake cleaving under the prow of a boat.

Returning his full attention to Shepherd, Dylan said, “We have to get out of here, Shep, and right away. We have to get back to the motel, to Jilly, but not if we’re going to end up like the scientist and the fly.”

“Gooey-bloody,” said Shep.

“Exactly. We don’t want to end up gooey-bloody.”

“Gooey-bloody is bad.”

“Gooey-bloody is very bad, yes.”

Brow furrowed, Shep said solemnly, “This isn’t a Mr. David Cronenberg film.”

“No, it isn’t,” Dylan agreed, heartened that Shep seemed to be as tuned in to a conversation as he ever could be. “But what does that mean, Shep? Does that mean it’s safe to go back to the motel together?”

“Herethere,” Shep said, compressing the two words into one, as he had done before.