By the light of the moon

Clenching his teeth, pressing
his tongue firmly against the roof of his mouth, he avoided making
any sound this time.
    The lock was not engaged. The knob turned when he tried it, and
the door opened when he pushed inward.
    Dylan O'Conner crossed a threshold that was not his to cross,
entered uninvited, appalled by this bold trespass, yet compelled to
proceed.
    The plump, white-haired woman in the kitchen wore a
candy-striped uniform. She looked weary and troubled, different
from the fresh and cheerful Mrs. Santa Claus that she'd been when,
a couple hours ago, she had taken his order for burgers and had
fixed the toad pin to his shirt.
    A large white bag of takeout, discount dinner from her job,
stood on the counter near the cooktop. This potpourri of grease and
onion and cheese and charbroiled meat had already flooded the room
with a delicious melange of aromas.
    She stood beside the kitchen table, her once-pink face fading
toward gray, captured by an expression between worry and despair.
She stared down at an arrangement of objects on the Formica
tabletop, a still life unlike any that the old masters had ever
painted: two empty cans of Budweiser, one upright, one on its side,
both partly crushed; a scattered collection of pills and capsules,
many white, some pink, a few green giants; an ashtray containing
two roaches – not the kind that had ever crawled or nested
under the warm motor of a refrigerator, but the butt ends of two
marijuana joints.
    The woman didn't hear Dylan enter, didn't glimpse the movement
of the door from the corner of her eye, and for a moment she
remained unaware of him. When she realized that she had a visitor,
she shifted her gaze from the table to his face, but she seemed to
have been too numbed by the tableau on the Formica to be
immediately surprised or alarmed by his unexpected arrival.
    He saw her alive, dead, alive, dead, and the faint cold fear
that thrilled through his veins thickened into terror.

15
    Dylan crossing in front of the Expedition, through
the headlight beams, his yellow-and-blue shirt as bright as any
afternoon on Maui, might have vanished before Jilly's eyes,
stepping out of this world into an alternate reality, and she would
have been surprised but not astonished. The hazardous return drive
to town had been a high-speed journey squarely into the Twilight
Zone, and after her vision in the desert and the river of spirit
doves, she might not be capable of astonishment again this side of
the grave.
    When Dylan didn't vanish in front of the truck, when he
reached the brick walkway and started toward the house, Jilly
turned her head to look at Shepherd in the backseat.
    She caught him watching her. They locked stares. His green eyes
widened at the shock of contact, and then he closed them.
    'You stay here, Shep.'
    He didn't answer.
    'Don't move out of that seat. We'll be right back.'
    Under his pale lids, his eyes twitched, twitched.
    When Jilly glanced toward the house, she saw Dylan angling from
the brick walk toward the driveway.
    Leaning across the console, she doused the headlights. Switched
off the engine. Plucked the keys from the ignition.
    'Did you hear me, Shep?'
    His shuttered eyes appeared to be full of dreams, marked by more
REM than those of a sleeping man thrashed by nightmares.
    'Don't move, stay here, don't move, we'll be right back,' she
counseled as she opened the passenger's door and swiveled on her
seat, keeping her legs up to spare Fred from injury.
    Olives littered the sidewalk and squished underfoot, as though
recently the neighbors had gathered here for an outdoor martini
party but had discarded their cocktail garnishes instead of eating
them.
    Dylan followed the driveway into the layered tarps of shadow
that draped the sedan in the carport, though he remained in
sight.
    A breath of breeze as dry as stirred gin with a single drop of
vermouth inspired a subtle silken rustle from the olive trees. Over
this seductive swish, Jilly heard Hunnn-na-na-na-na-na-na-na!
    His eerie stutter spiraled down her cochleae to the bottom of
her ears and seemed to leap from there into her spine, vibrating
from vertebra to vertebra, shaking shivers from her.
    With the utterance of the final syllable, Dylan disappeared
toward the back of the carport.
    Making olive paste underfoot as she crossed the public sidewalk,
shuffling through the grass to clean her shoes, Jilly hurried
toward the place where he'd been just before darkness swallowed
him.
    * * *
    Her face plump and