By the light of the moon

fabric.
    Dark anxiety clouded her beauty, and her sable-brown eyes, once
as limpid and sharp with purpose as those of a sentinel eagle, were
muddy with worry. 'Where did you go?' she demanded.
    'Here,' he said, pointing to the clapboard house.
    'I mean on the road. You were a world away. You forgot I was
even with you.'
    'Didn't forget,' he disagreed. 'No time. Stay with Shep.'
    Griffin-tough, she tried to hold him back. 'What's going on
here?'
    'Hell if I know.'
    Maybe he didn't pry Jilly's fingers out of his shirt with
a cruel force uncharacteristic of him, and maybe he didn't shove her violently away from him. He wasn't sure how he tore loose
of the woman, but he got out of the Expedition. Leaving the
driver's door hanging open behind him, he rounded the front of the
SUV, heading toward the house.
    Darkness ruled the first floor, but light shone behind the
curtains of half the upstairs windows. Someone was home. He
wondered if they were aware of his approach, if they were waiting
for him – or if his appearance at their doorstep would come
as a surprise to them. Perhaps they instinctively sensed something
rushing toward them as Dylan himself had been aware of being drawn
to an unknown place, by a power inexplicable.
    He heard a noise that seemed to come from the right, at the side
of the house.
    Halfway along the front walk toward the porch, he veered off the
herringbone bricks. He crossed the lawn to the driveway.
    Attached to the house: a carport. Under the carport, an aging
Buick stood beyond the reach of the waning moonlight as during the
day it would shelter from the fierce desert sun.
    Hot metal pinged and ticked as it cooled. The vehicle had
arrived here only recently.
    Past the open end of the carport, toward the back of the house,
a noise arose: a jangling, as of keys on a ring.
    Though a sense of urgency continued to plague him undiminished,
Dylan stood motionless beside the car. Listening. Waiting.
Uncertain what to do next.
    He didn't belong here. He felt as if he were a lurking thief,
although as far as he knew, he hadn't come to this place to steal
anything.
    On the other hand, the operative phrase was as far as he
knew . Under the influence of the injected stuff , he
might discover himself driven to commit heinous acts of which he
would previously have been incapable. Theft might be the least of
the crimes from which he would be powerless to turn away.
    He thought of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde , the inner beast
released and sent roaming.
    From the moment he had succumbed to the urgent need to drive
west, his fear had been sharp, but also it had been sheathed in a
blunting thickness of compulsion and confusion. Now he wondered if
the substance circulating in him might be the chemical equivalent
of a demon saddling his soul and digging spurs into his heart. He
shuddered, and an icy blade of fear flayed his nerves and caused
the skin to prickle with dread on his arms and on the nape of his
neck.
    Again, not far away, he heard the soft brass ring of keys on
keys. Hinges creaked, perhaps those of a door.
    At the back of the house, light bloomed behind daisy-patterned
curtains at the ground-floor windows.
    He didn't know what to do, and then he did: He touched the
handle on the driver's door of the Buick. Cascades of sparks
whirled across his vision, phantom fireflies in flight behind his eyes.
    Inside his head, he heard a fizzing-crackling electrical sound,
the same as he had heard earlier in the Expedition, when he'd
touched the button that bore the cartoon toad's grinning face. Some
kind of seizure afflicted him, frightening but fortunately less
severe than full convulsions, and as his tongue vibrated against
the roof of his mouth, he heard himself make that queer,
half-mechanical sound again. 'Hunnn-na-na-na-na-na-na-na!'
    This episode proved to be briefer than the first, and when he
attempted to quell the stutter, he at once fell silent, instead of
having to let it run its course, as had been the case
previously.
    With the final na , he was on the move again. Quietly,
quietly through the carport, around the corner of the house.
    Shallower than the veranda at the front of the house, the back
porch also featured plainer posts. The steps were concrete instead
of brick.
    When his hand enfolded the knob on the back door, fireflies flew
inside his head, but this bright swarm numbered fewer than the two
that had flown in advance of it. The accompanying electric crackle
sounded less cataclysmic than before.