By the light of the moon

sweet, ideal for Christmas cards, was in the
next instant drawn, bleak, fit for Halloween. In a quiver of shadow
cast by something invisible, her white and glossy hair became
tangled and matted with blood, but in a shimmer of light that had
no apparent source, red tangles smoothed and clarified again into
white glossy locks. A face pale pink under snowy hair withered into
grainy gray when framed by clotted curls and snarls. Her eyes met
Dylan's with bewilderment, but then shocked wide and filled with
cold mortality – and yet an instant later were alert, aware,
startled once more.
    Dylan saw her alive, dead, alive, dead, one image rising out of
the other, briefly asserting its reality, then submerging in its
antithesis. He didn't know beyond doubt what this hideous
apparition meant, if in fact it meant anything at all, but he
glanced at his hands, expecting them to appear alternately clean
and filthy with the woman's blood. When the vision of violence did
not involve his hands, his innards nevertheless remained a clenched
mass of dread, and he raised his eyes to her face once more, half
convinced that whatever power had driven him to this place would
eventually use him as the instrument of her death.
    'Cheeseburgers, French fries, apple pies, and vanilla shakes,'
she said, proving either that he had been memorable during his
brief visit to the takeout counter or that her powers of
recollection were formidable.
    Instead of answering her, Dylan found himself stepping to the
kitchen table and picking up one of the empty cans of Budweiser.
The fireflies flew again within the bone cave of his skull, but he
heard far less of the fizz-and-crackle of arcing electrical current
than he had heard before, and behind his clenched teeth, not one
convulsive spasm plagued his tongue.
    'Get out of the house,' he advised the woman. 'You're not safe
here. Hurry, go, now .' Whether she went or stayed, he didn't
know, because even as he spoke, he dropped the beer can on the
table and at once turned from her. He didn't look back. Could
not.
    He hadn't yet come to the end of this bizarre journey begun in
the Expedition and continued here on foot. Beyond the kitchen, past
an open door, lay a plank-floored hallway softened by a threadbare,
rose-patterned runner. His sense of urgency renewed, Dylan was
drawn forward toward some dark destination.
    * * *
    Reaching the carport, Jilly peered back toward the Expedition,
where the streetlamps, filtered through olive branches, revealed
Shepherd in silhouette, in the backseat where he had been told to
stay.
    Past the Buick, out of the carport, she hurried to the rear of
the house, stirring up a cloud of pale moths when she brushed
against a camellia bush with blooms as full and red as maidens'
hearts.
    The back door stood open. A rectangle of outfalling kitchen
light revealed a porch floor painted pearl-gray and remarkably free
of dust for the porch of a house in a desert town.
    Even under these extraordinary circumstances, she might have
halted at the threshold, might have politely rapped knuckles
against the jamb of the open door. The sight of the familiar
white-haired woman in the kitchen, lifting the receiver of a
wall-mounted phone, alarmed and emboldened Jilly, however, and she
stepped off the porch, onto the freshly polished yellow-and-green
basket-weave linoleum.
    By the time Jilly surprised her, the woman had pressed 9,
pressed 1, on the telephone keypad. Jilly took the receiver from
her grasp, and hung up before the second 1 could be entered.
    If the police had been summoned, eventually the men in the black
Suburbans would have followed.
    No longer the cheerful purveyor of fast food and have-a-nice-day
sentiments, wearied by a long day's work, haggard by worry,
confused by the events of the past minute, this Disneyesque
grandmother wrung her hands as though to squeeze the nervous
tremors from them. With a note of amazed recognition, she said,
'You. Chicken sandwich, French fries, root beer.'
    'Big man, Hawaiian shirt?' Jilly inquired.
    The woman nodded. 'He said I wasn't safe here.'
    'Not safe why?'
    'He said get out of the house now .'
    'Where did he go?'
    Although well wrung, her hand remained sodden with tremors as
she pointed shakily toward the open door to the downstairs hallway,
where soft rose-colored light glowed at the far end, past a
gauntlet of shadows.
    * * *
    Walking on roses, green leaves, and thorns, he passed openings
arched like the entrances to arbors, with dark rooms