By the Light of the Moon (8 page)

Chapter Eleven

H
AVING GOTTEN OUT OF THE EXPEDITION TO ALLOW
Dylan O’Conner a degree of privacy with his brother, Jilly parked her not-yet-big butt on the guardrail. She sat with her unprotected back to a vastness of desert, where venomous snakes slithered in the heat of the night, where tarantulas as hairy as the maniacal mullahs of the Taliban scurried in search of prey, and where the creepiest species native to this cruel realm of rock and sand and scraggly scrub were even more fearsome than serpents or spiders.

The creatures that might be stalking Jilly from behind were of less interest to her than those that might approach on the eastbound lanes in synchronized black Suburbans. If they would blow up a mint-condition ’56 Coupe DeVille, they were capable of any atrocity.

Although no longer nauseated or lightheaded, she didn’t feel entirely normal. Her heart wasn’t jumping like a toad in her chest, as it had been during their flight from the motel, but it wasn’t beating as calm as a choirgirl’s, either.

As calm as a choirgirl.
That was a saying Jilly had picked up from her mother. By
calm,
Mom hadn’t meant merely
quiet and composed;
she had also meant
chaste
and
God-loving,
and much more. When as a child Jilly had fallen into a pout or had flung herself high into a fit of pique, her mother reliably recommended to her the shining standard of a choirgirl, and when Jilly had been a teenager excited by the smooth moves of any acne-stippled Casanova, her mother had suggested somberly that she live up to the moral model of the oft-cited and essentially mythical choirgirl.

Eventually Jilly in fact became a member of their church choir, partly to convince her mother that her heart remained pure, partly because she fantasized that she was destined to be a world-famous pop singer. A surprising number of pop-music goddesses had sung in church choirs in their youth. A dedicated choirmaster—who was also a voice coach—soon convinced her that she was born to sing backup, not solo, but he changed her life when he asked, “What do you want to sing for anyway, Jillian, when you’ve got such a big talent for making people laugh? When they just
can’t
laugh, people turn to music to lift their spirits, but laughter is always the preferred medicine.”

Here, now, along the interstate, far from church and mother, but longing for both, sitting as straight-backed on a steel guardrail as ever she had sat on a choir bench, Jilly put one hand to her throat and felt the systolic throb in her right carotid artery. Although the beat was faster than the pulse of a devout choirgirl calmed by hymns of divine love and by a beautifully raised Kyrie eleison, it didn’t race with outright panic. Instead it counted a quick cadence familiar to Jilly from several early turns on comedy-club stages, when her material had not connected with the audience. This was the hurried heartbeat of a rejected performer when humiliating minutes remained in the spotlight before a hostile crowd. Indeed, she felt that telltale clamminess on her brow, that damp chill on the nape of her neck, in the small of her back, and on her palms—an icy moistness that had but one name dreaded from the high proscenium arches of Broadway to the lowest stages of boondocks honkytonks:
flop sweat.

The difference this time was that the troubled heartbeat and the cold sweat weren’t merely the consequences of her standup-comedy act collapsing under her, but arose from a dreadful suspicion that her
life
might be falling apart. Which would make this the
ultimate
flop sweat.

Of course, maybe she was being melodramatic. More than once she had been accused of that tendency. Yet undeniably here she sat in a desolate desert, far from anyone who loved her, in the company of a decidedly odd pair of strangers, half convinced that any authorities to whom she turned would prove to be in league with the men who had blown up her cherished Cadillac. Worse, with every heartbeat, her blood carried an unknown corruption deeper into her tissues.

On consideration, she realized that in this instance, reality involved more frantic action, inspired more exaggerated emotions, and encouraged less respect for cause and effect than any melodrama ever staged. “Melodramatic, my ass,” she muttered.

Through the open back door of the Expedition, Jilly had a clear view of Dylan O’Conner sitting beside Shep and talking—ceaselessly, earnestly talking. The roar and whistle of passing traffic prevented her from hearing anything he said, and judging by Shepherd’s faraway gaze, Dylan might as well have been alone, bending no ear but his own.

At first he held his younger brother’s hands to put a stop to the self-administered blows that had brought a thin flow of blood from the kid’s left nostril. In time, he released Shep and simply sat beside him, bent forward, head lowered, forearms on his thighs, hands clasped, but still talking, talking.

Jilly’s inability to hear Dylan over the traffic noise created the impression that he spoke in a discreet murmur to his brother. The dim light in the SUV and the posture of the men—side by side, close and yet apart—brought to mind a confessional. The longer that she watched the brothers, the more completely the illusion developed, until she could smell the wood polish with which the confessional booths of her youth had been maintained and also the steeped-in scent of decades of smoldering incense.

A strangeness overcame her, a sense that the scene before her possessed meaning beyond what the five senses could perceive, that within it wound layers of mysteries and that at the core of all the mysteries lay…something transcendent. Jilly was too firmly rooted to this world to be a medium or a mystic; never before had she been seized by such a peculiar mood as this.

Although the night could not possibly be redolent of anything more exotic than the astringent alkaline breath of the Sonoran desert and the exhaust fumes of passing vehicles, the atmosphere between Jilly and the two O’Conners nevertheless appeared to thicken with a thin haze of incense. This enwrapping spicy perfume—cloves, myrrh, olibanum—was no longer a mere
memory
of fragrance; it had become as real and as true to this moment as were the star-shot sky above her and the loose gravel of the highway shoulder under her feet. In the cloistered interior of the Expedition, the fine particles of aromatic smoke in the gauzy air refracted and reflected the ceiling light, painting blue and gold aureoles around the O’Conners, until she might have sworn that the two brothers, rather than the small lamp above them, were radiant.

In this tableau, she would have expected Dylan to fulfill the role of priest, for of the two, Shepherd seemed to be the lost soul. But Dylan’s expression and posture were those of a penitent, while Shep’s blank stare appeared to be not empty but contemplative. As the younger brother began to nod slowly, rhythmically, he acquired the gracious aspect of a cassocked padre spiritually empowered to grant absolution. Jilly sensed that this unexpected reversal of roles revealed a truth of deep significance, but she could not grasp what it might be, and she could not understand why the subtleties of the relationship between these two men should be of such intense interest to her or should, in fact, impress her as being key to her salvation from her current circumstances.

Strangeness upon strangeness: She heard the sweet silvery laughter of children, although no children were present, and immediately as these musical peals of merriment arose, a flutter of wings soared after them. Surveying the vault of stars, she glimpsed no birds silhouetted against the constellations, yet the turbulence of wings increased and with it the laughter, until she rose to her feet and turned slowly around, around, in bafflement, wonderment.

Jilly knew no word to describe the extraordinary experience unfolding for her, but
hallucination
didn’t seem to be applicable. These sounds and scents had neither the dreamlike insubstantiality nor the hyperrealistic intensity that she might have expected of hallucinations, but were of a vividness precisely matched to the elements of the night that she knew to be real: neither more nor less resonant than the grumble and swish of passing traffic, neither more nor less sweet-smelling than the traffic fumes were odorous.

Still turning to the encircling sound of wings, she saw tiers of candles in the desert south of her position, perhaps twenty feet beyond the guardrail. At least a double score of votive candles, racked in small ruby glasses, jeweled the darkness.

If this was dreamlight, it played on reality with a remarkable respect for the laws of physics. The metal rack stood at the foot of a smooth dune, among scattered clumps of struggling sage, casting a precise and accurate shadow made possible by the bright votives that it supported. Prowling chimeras of reflected fire shook their lions’ manes and wriggled their serpents’ tails across the sand, while the silvery-green leaves of the vegetation lapped at the wine-red light, glistening as though they were tongues savoring a crimson zinfandel. The illumination didn’t imprint irrationally on the landscape, as the supernatural radiance of a vision might have been splashed in gaudy disregard for reason, but integrated logically with every element of the scene.

Also to the south but a few yards east of the candles and even closer to the guardrail, a single pew stood in want of a church, and if it faced a sanctuary and a high altar, both remained invisible. One end of this long wooden bench was buried in the slope of a dune; a woman in a dark dress anchored the other end.

This very vista, without pew and candles, had in distant times known the thunder of wild horses; and now Jilly’s heart galloped with a sound that seemed to be as loud as hooves pounding across a desert plain. Her flop sweat had become an even icier perspiration than any she had known in failure on a stage, and instead of a mere dread of humiliation, she had been seized by the fear that she might be losing her mind.

The woman in the blue or black dress, perched upon the pew, wore her raven hair to the small of her back. In respect of God, a white lace mantilla draped her head, and incidentally hung forward along the side of her face, concealing her features. Lost in her prayers, she seemed to be oblivious of Jilly and to be unaware that her house of worship had disappeared around her.

Always the air was battered by wings, even louder than before, and ever closer, so that Jilly could clearly identify the particular feathery flutter of pinions and thus be certain that she heard birds rather than the leathery flight of bats. So close they swooped, with an air-cutting
thrum
and the eerie whisklike sound of wing vanes spreading, folding, spreading like the ribs of a Japanese fan, and yet she couldn’t see them.

She turned, turned, she turned in search of birds, until before her once more stood the open door of the SUV, beyond which Dylan and Shep were still elevated on the seat of the false confessional, as radiant as apparitions. Dylan remained unaware of Jilly’s encounter with the uncanny, as disconnected from her as his younger brother was perhaps forever lost to him, and she could not call his attention to the candles or to the worshiping woman because fear had stolen her voice, had nearly robbed her of breath, as well. The squall of wings became a storm, more tempestuous by the second, a spiraling rataplan that rapped all the way through her and drummed upon her bones. These sounds, hard as ratcheting gears, turned her, turned her, as did the whirlwind stirred by the ghostly wings, a turbulence that tossed her hair and buffeted her face, until she rotated again to the sight of the votive candles and to the penitent on the pew.

Flash,
a pale something flared before her face, followed at once by a brighter flash, by a feathery flicker as luminous as a lambent flame. In but a blink, a frenzied scintillation of doves or pigeons became visible, beating all around her. This fury of wings implied a wickedness of beaks, and Jilly feared for her eyes. Before she could raise her hands to protect herself, a hard
crack
lashed the night, as loud as a god’s whip, terrifying the flock into a greater tempest. A wave of wings splashed her face, and she cried out, but soundlessly because no cork had ever stoppered a bottle as effectively as terror plugged her throat. Dashed by this spray of wings, she blinked, expecting to be blinded, but all the birds were instead banished by the blink, gone as abruptly as they had appeared, not merely invisible as before, but gone with all their sound, with all their fury.

Gone, too, the rack of candles in the dunes. And the mantilla-mantled woman, cast back to an unknown church with the pew on which she had arrived.

A short sharp bark of pent-up air popped from Jilly’s uncorked throat. With the first shuddery inhalation that followed, she detected what might have been the dead-last smell that she would have wanted if she’d been asked to make a list of a thousand odors. Blood. Subtle but distinctive, unmistakable, here was the scent of slaughter and of sacrifice, of tragedy and glory: faintly metallic, a whiff of copper, a trace of iron. More than a white wave of wings had splashed her face. With trembling and tentative hands, she touched her throat, chin, cheeks, and as she gazed with revulsion at the evidence on her fingers, she recognized a matching wetness on her lips and tasted the same substance that her fingertips revealed. She screamed, this time not silently.

Chapter Twelve

B
LACKER THAN THE BARREN LAND IN THIS MOONLIT
gloom, the highway sometimes seemed to unravel ahead of the Expedition, leading Jilly and the brothers O’Conner into chaos and oblivion. At other times, however, it appeared instead to be raveling itself up from chaos and into an orderly ball, steadily winding them toward a rigorously plotted and inescapable destiny.

She didn’t know which possibility scared her more: running into an ever thornier and more tangled thicket of troubles, into a briar patch where every prickling turn brought her to another sanity-shaking encounter with the unknown—or discovering the identity of the smiling man with the needle and laying open the mystery of the golden liquid in the syringe.

In twenty-five years of life, she had learned that understanding didn’t always—or even often—bring peace. Currently, since returning to her motel room with root beer, she existed in a purgatory of ignorance and confusion, where life resembled a waking nightmare or at least a bad and edgy dream. But if she found answers and a final resolution, she might discover that she was trapped in a living hell that would make her yearn for the comparative serenity and comfort of even this nerve-fraying purgatory.

As before, Dylan drove without his full attention on the road, repeatedly checking the rearview mirror and periodically glancing over his right shoulder to assure himself that Shep was not in any way harming himself, but now
two
worries distracted him from his driving. Following Jilly’s dramatic roadside performance—her babble of birds and blood—the attention that Dylan paid to her had the same brother’s-keeper quality that colored his attitude toward Shepherd.

“You actually tasted it—the blood, I mean?” he asked. “Actually smelled it.”

“Yeah. I know it wasn’t real. You didn’t see it. But it seemed real enough.”

“Heard the birds, felt their wings.”

“Yeah.”

“Do hallucinations usually involve all five senses—or involve them so completely?”

“It wasn’t any hallucination,” she said stubbornly.

“Well, it for sure wasn’t real.”

She glared at him and saw that he wisely recognized the mortal danger of continuing to insist that she—Southwest Amazon, fearless cactuskicker—was susceptible to hallucinations. In her estimation, hallucinations were only one step removed from such quaint female complaints as the vapors, fainting spells, and persistent melancholy.

“I’m not an hysteric,” she said, “or an alcoholic in withdrawal, or a consumer of psychedelic mushrooms, thank you very much, so the word
hallucination
doesn’t apply.”

“Call it a vision, then.”

“I’m not Joan of Arc, either. God isn’t sending me messages. Enough already. I don’t want to talk about this anymore, not right now, not for a while.”

“We’ve got to—”

“I said not now.”

“But—”

“I’m scared, all right? I’m scared, and talking it to death isn’t going to make me less scared, so time-out. Time-out.”

She understood why he would regard her with new concern and even with a measure of wariness, but she didn’t like being the object of his solicitude. Even the compassion of friends was difficult for her to bear; and the sympathy of strangers could easily curdle into pity. She would not tolerate pity from anyone. She bristled at the thought of being perceived as weak or unfortunate, and she had no capacity whatsoever for being patronized.

Indeed, Dylan’s glances, each of which glistened with dewy commiseration, so deeply annoyed Jilly that she soon grew desperate to distract herself from them. She unhooked her safety harness, drew her legs under herself, leaving potted Fred in full possession of the passenger’s foot space, and turned half sideways in her seat to watch over Shep, making it possible for his brother to pay more attention to the road.

Dylan had left a first-aid kit with Shep. Much to Jilly’s surprise, the young man opened it on the seat beside him and made proper use of its contents, although in a state of such intense concentration and with an expression of such blank detachment that he seemed to be machinelike. With swabs soaked in hydrogen peroxide, he patiently removed the obstructing clots of blood from his left nostril, which had played like a whistle with each breath he took, proceeding so delicately that the crimson flow did not resume. His brother had said this was a mere bloody nose, not a broken one, and Shep seemed to confirm the diagnosis, tending to his injury without one wince or hiss of pain. Employing cotton balls moistened with rubbing alcohol, he scrubbed the dried blood from his upper lip, out of the corner of his mouth, and off his chin. He had skinned a couple knuckles on his teeth; he treated these minor abrasions with alcohol followed by dabs of Neosporin. With the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, he tested his teeth, one by one, molar to molar, top and then bottom; each time he confirmed that a tooth was firmly in place, he paused to say, “Quite as it should be, m’lord.” Judging by every indication—by his refusal to make eye contact; by his otherworldly air; by the absence of any nobleman in the SUV, either lord or duke, or prince-in-waiting—Shep wasn’t speaking to anyone present. “Quite as it should be, m’lord.” His ministrations were methodical to the point of robotism, and often his movements had an awkwardness that suggested a robot from which the mechanical kinks and the programming errors had not yet been entirely eliminated.

More than once, Jilly tried to chat with Shepherd, but every effort at communication failed. He spoke only to the Lord of Teeth, dutifully making his report.

“He’s capable of conversation,” Dylan told her. “Although even at his best, what he lays on you isn’t the kind of sparkling repartee that’ll make him a hit at cocktail parties. It’s his own brand of conversation, what I call Shepspeak, but it’s not without interest.”

In the backseat, Shep tested a tooth and announced, “Quite as it should be, m’lord.”

“But you won’t be able to get a dialogue going with him anytime soon,” Dylan continued, “not when he’s rattled like this. He doesn’t handle commotion well, or deviation from routine. He’s best when the day goes exactly as he expects it to, right on schedule, quiet and boring. If breakfast, lunch, and dinner are always exactly on time, if every dish at every meal is on the narrow menu of foods acceptable to him, if he doesn’t encounter too many new people who try to talk to him…then you might make a connection with him and have yourself a real gabfest.”

“Quite as it should be, m’lord,” Shep declared, ostensibly not in confirmation of what his brother had said.

“What’s wrong with him?” Jilly asked.

“He’s been diagnosed autistic, also high-functioning autistic. He’s never violent, and sometimes he’s highly communicative, so he was once even diagnosed with Asperger syndrome.”

“Ass burger?”

“A-S-P-E-R-G-E-R, emphasis on
per.
Sometimes Shep seems totally high-functioning and sometimes not so high as you would hope. Mostly, I don’t think easy labels apply. He’s just Shep, unique.”

“Quite as it should be, m’lord.”

“He’s said that fourteen times,” Dylan noted. “How many teeth in the human mouth?”

“I think…thirty-two, counting four wisdom teeth.”

Dylan sighed. “Thank God his wisdom teeth were pulled.”

“You said he needs stability. Is it good for him to be bouncing around the country like a Gypsy?”

“Quite as it should be, m’lord.”

“We don’t bounce,” Dylan replied with an edge that suggested he had taken offense at her question, though she intended none. “We have a schedule, a routine, goals to be attained. Focus. We have focus. We drive in style. This isn’t a horse-drawn wagon with hex signs painted on the sides.”

“I just meant he might be better off in an institution.”

“That’ll never happen.”

“Quite as it should be, m’lord.”

Jilly said, “Not all those places are snake pits.”

“The only thing he’s got is me. Drop him in an institution, and he won’t have anything.”

“It might be good for him.”

“No. It would kill him.”

“For one thing, maybe they could keep him from hurting himself.”

“He won’t hurt himself.”

“He just did,” she noted.

“Quite as it should be, m’lord.”

“That was a first and a fluke,” Dylan said with what sounded more like hope than like conviction. “It won’t happen again.”

“You never imagined it would happen the first time.”

Although they were already exceeding the legal limit and though traffic conditions were not conducive to even greater speed, Dylan accelerated steadily.

Jilly sensed that he was trying to outrun more than just the men in the black Suburbans. “No matter how fast you drive, Shep’s still in the backseat.”

“Quite as it should be, m’lord.”

Dylan said, “The lunatic doctor gives you an injection, and an hour later, or whatever, you experience an altered state of—”

“I
said
I want a time-out from that.”

“And I don’t want to talk about
this,
” he declared emphatically, “about institutions, sanitariums, care homes, places where people might as well be canned meat, where they’re put on a shelf and dusted from time to time.”

“Quite as it should be, m’lord.”

“All right,” Jilly relented. “Sorry. I understand. It’s really none of my business anyway.”

“That’s right,” Dylan concurred. “Shep isn’t
our
business. He’s
my
business.”

“All right.”

“Okay.”

“Quite as it should be, m’lord.”

“Twenty,” Jilly counted.

Dylan said, “But your altered state of consciousness
is
our business, not just yours, but yours and mine, because it’s related to the injection—”

“We don’t know that for sure.”

Certain expressions took exaggerated form on his broad rubbery face, as if he were in fact a cartoon bear who had stepped out of an animated realm into the real world, had shaved his furry mug, and had set himself the tricky task of passing for human. In this instance, his disbelief pulled his features into a configuration worthy of Sylvester the cat on those occasions when the scheming feline had been tricked by Tweety bird into walking off the edge of a cliff. “Oh, but we
do
know that for sure.”

“We do not,” she insisted.

“Quite as it should be, m’lord.”

Jilly continued: “And I don’t like the term
altered state
any more than I like
hallucination.
It makes me sound like a doper.”

“I can’t believe we’re arguing over vocabulary.”

“I’m not arguing. I’m just saying what I don’t like.”

“If we’re going to talk about it, we have to call it
something.
”

“Then let’s not talk about it,” she suggested.

“We
have
to talk about it. What the hell are we supposed to do—drive at random the rest of our lives, here and there and everywhere, keeping on the move, and
not
talking about it?”

“Quite as it should be, m’lord.”

“Speaking of driving,” Jilly said, “you’re going way too fast.”

“I am not.”

“You’re doing over ninety.”

“It only looks that way from your angle.”

“Oh, yeah? What’s it look like from
your
angle?”

“Eighty-eight,” he admitted, and eased up on the accelerator.

“Let’s call it a…
mirage.
That doesn’t imply mental instability, drug use, or religious hysteria.”

“Quite as it should be, m’lord.”

“I was thinking maybe
phantasm,
” Jilly said.

“I can live with
phantasm.
”

“But I think I like
mirage
better.”

“Great! Fantastic! And we’re in the desert, so it fits.”

“But it wasn’t actually a mirage.”

“I know that,” he hastened to assure her. “It was its own thing, special, unique, impossible to properly name. But if you were hit by this mirage because of the stuff in the damn needle—” He interrupted himself, sensing her rising objection: “Oh, get real! Common sense tells us the two things
must
be related.”

“Common sense is overrated.”

“Not in the O’Conner family.”

“I’m not a member of the O’Conner family.”

“Which relieves us of the need to change our name.”

“Quite as it should be, m’lord.”

She didn’t want to argue with him, for she knew that they were in this together, but she couldn’t restrain herself: “So there’s not room in the O’Conner family for people like me, huh?”

“There’s that ‘people like me’ business again!”

“Well, it seems to be an issue with you.”

“It’s not an issue with me. It’s an issue with
you.
You’re way too sensitive or something, like a boil just waiting to burst.”

“Lovely. Now I’m a bursting boil. You’ve sure got a talent for getting under people’s skin.”

“Me? I’m the easiest guy in the world to get along with. I’ve never gotten under anyone’s skin in my life—until you.”

“Quite as it should be, m’lord.”

“You’re doing over ninety again,” she warned him.

“Eighty-nine,” he disagreed, and this time he didn’t ease up on the accelerator. “If you were hit by that mirage because of the stuff in the injection, then I’ll probably be hit with one, too.”

“Which is another reason you shouldn’t be doing over ninety.”

“Eighty-nine,” he corrected, and reluctantly allowed the speed of the SUV to fall.

“The crazy son-of-a-bitch salesman jacked the stuff into your arm first,” Jilly said. “So if it always causes mirages, you should have had one before I did.”

“For maybe the hundredth time—he wasn’t a salesman. He was some lunatic doctor, some psycho scientist or something. And come to think of it, he said the stuff in the needle does lots of different things to different people.”

“Quite as it should be, m’lord.”

“Different things? Like what?”

“He didn’t say. Just different. He also said something like…the effect is always interesting, often astonishing, and
sometimes
positive.”

She shuddered with the memory of whirling birds and flickering votive candles. “That mirage wasn’t a positive effect. So what else did Dr. Frankenstein say?”