By the light of the moon

changes.
Precognition was the first curse.'
    'We call them curses, too,' Jilly said.
    'By Wednesday, I began to foresee some of what would happen here
today. That our Frankenstein would return to learn how I was doing,
to receive my praise, my gratitude. The clueless fool expected me
to feel indebted to him, to receive him as a hero and shelter him
here.'
    Proctor's faded-denim eyes were as hard and icy as on the night
that he had killed Dylan's mother in 1992. 'I'm a man of many
faults, grievous faults. But I've never been gratuitously insulting
to people who have meant well toward me. I can't understand your
attitude.'
    'When I told him I'd foreseen your visit here on this same day,'
Lantern continued, 'he became terribly excited. He expected all of
us to kneel and kiss his ring.'
    'You knew we'd come here even before he'd connected with us in
Arizona and given us the injections,' Jilly marveled.
    'Yes, even though I didn't quite know who you were at first. I
can't easily explain to you how all this could be,' Lantern
acknowledged. 'But there's a certain harmony to things—'
    'The round and round of all that is,' Jilly said.
    Parish Lantern raised his eyebrows. 'Yes. That's one way to put
it. There are things that might happen, things that must happen,
and by feeling the round and round of all that is, you can know at
least a little of what will occur. If you're cursed with vision,
that is.'
    'Cake,' said Shepherd.
    'In a little while, lad. First, we have to decide what we must
do with this reeking bag of shit.'
    'Poopoo, kaka, crap.'
    'Yes, lad,' said the maven of planetary pole shifts and alien
conspiracies, 'all that, too,' and he moved toward Lincoln
Proctor.
    The scientist thrust the gun more aggressively at Lantern. 'You
stay away from me.'
    'I told you that precognition was the extent of my new talents,'
Lantern said as he continued to cross the living room toward
Proctor, 'but I lied.'
    Perhaps remembering Manuel the firestarter, Proctor fired
point-blank at his adversary, but Lantern didn't flinch from the
sound of the shot, let alone from the impact of the slug. As if the
round had ricocheted off their host's chest, it lodged – with
a crack! – in the living-room ceiling.
    Desperately, Proctor fired twice more as Lantern approached him,
and these two rounds were also deflected into the ceiling, forming
a perfect triangular grouping with the first slug.
    Dylan had become so accustomed to miracles that he observed this
dazzling performance in a state better described as amazement,
short of genuine awe.
    For Parish Lantern, taking the gun from the stunned scientist's
hand required no struggle. Proctor's eyes swam as if he'd been
pole-axed, but he didn't collapse.
    Dylan, Jilly, and shuffling Shep moved to Lantern's side, like a
jury gathering to pass judgment.
    'He's got another full syringe,' Lantern said. 'If he likes what
the new generation of nanogunk has done to us, he intends to work
up the courage to inject himself. You think that's a good idea,
Dylan?'
    'No.'
    'What about you, Jilly? Do you think that's a good idea?'
    'Hell, no,' she said. 'He's definitely not better clay. It'll be
Manuel all over again.'
    'You ungrateful bitch,' said Proctor.
    When Dylan took a step toward Proctor, reaching for him, Jilly
grabbed a fistful of his shirt. 'I've been called worse.'
    'Any ideas about how we deal with him?' Lantern asked.
    'We don't dare turn him over to the police,' said Jilly.
    'Or his business partners,' Dylan added.
    'Cake.'
    'You are admirably persistent, lad. But first we deal with him,
and then we have the cake.'
    'Ice,' said Shep, and folded here to there.

48
    All the way back in the kitchen of the house on the
lonely coast well north of Santa Barbara, when peering into the
refrigerator, Shep might not have been expressing a desire for a
cold drink, but might have had a prescient awareness of their final
encounter with Lincoln Proctor. In fact, Jilly remembered now that
Shepherd didn't like ice in his soft drinks.
    Where's all the ice? he'd asked, trying to identify a
landscape of which he'd had a foretelling glimpse.
    North Pole has a lot of ice , Jilly had told him.
    And it sure did.
    Under a lowering sky that appeared to be as hard as the lid of
an iron kettle, from horizon to horizon, somber white plains
receded into a semitwilight and a gray haze. The only points of
elevation were the jagged pressure ridges, and the slabs of ice
– some as large as caskets, some bigger than entire