By the light of the moon

and barely – by the glow of a lamp behind a door that
had been left half an inch ajar on the right side of the hall.
    As best he could discern, three rooms lay upstairs: the lamplit
chamber at the end, a nearer door also on the right, and a single
room on the left.
    When Dylan took three steps to the first door on the right, fear
crept upon him once more: a manageable anxiety, the judicious
apprehension of a fireman or a cop, not the burden of terror under
which he'd labored from the kitchen, along the lower hall, to the
top of the stairs.
    The psychic spoor of his quarry contaminated the doorknob. He
nearly withdrew his hand, but intuition – his new best friend
– urged him to proceed.
    A faint rasp of the latch, a whisper of dry hinges. A
frosted-glass window lustrous with the cadmium-yellow glow of a
streetlamp, veined by the shadow of an olive branch, allowed enough
light to reveal a deserted bathroom.
    He proceeded to the second room on the right, where a blade of
brighter light cut through the half-inch crack between the door and
jamb. Both instinct and reason prevented him from putting his eye
to that narrow space, lest the metaphorical blade be joined by a
real knife that would blind him for his spying.
    When he cupped his hand around this doorknob, Dylan knew that he
had found the lair of the sick soul he sought, for the spoor was a
hundredfold more potent than what he'd encountered thus far. The
psychic trace left by his quarry wriggled like a centipede against
his palm, squirmed, writhed, and he knew that beyond this door lay
a colony of Hell established on the wrong side of death.

16
    Crossing the threshold at the back door, Marjorie
remembered her take-out dinner, which she'd left behind, and she
wanted to return to the kitchen to fetch the bag 'while the
cheeseburger is still warm.'
    With the patience of a giant bird or other costumed teacher from
Sesame Street defining a new word for a child whose ability to
focus had been atomized by an overdose of Ritalin, Jilly kept the
woman on the move by explaining that a warm cheeseburger would be
no comfort if she was dead.
    Apparently, Dylan had given Marjorie only a vague warning, had
not specified that the four-burner gas oven was about to explode,
had not predicted that an earthquake would at any moment shake her
house into one of those piles of smoking rubble that the gleeful
vultures of the media found so picturesque. Nevertheless, in light
of recent events, Jilly took his premonition seriously, regardless
of its lack of specificity.
    Using happy talk and cunning psychology that Big Bird would have
heartily endorsed, Jilly coddled Marjorie through the door, onto
the back porch, to the head of the steps that led down to the back
lawn.
    At that point the older woman applied her impressive weight to a
squinching maneuver with her feet, creating suction between the
tread on her rubber-soled shoes and the glossy paint on the porch
floor. This clever trick made her as immovable as Hercules had ever
been when, sentenced to be drawn and quartered, he had proved
himself the equal of two teams of torturing horses.
    'Chicky,' the woman said to Jilly, choosing not to address her
by her full fast-food name, 'does he know about the knives?'
    'He who?'
    'Your fella.'
    'He's not my fella, Marj. Don't make assumptions like that. He's
not my type. What knives?'
    'Kenny likes knives.'
    'Who's Kenny?'
    'Kenny junior, not his father.'
    'Kids,' Jilly commiserated, still urging the woman to move.
    'Kenny senior's in a prison in Peru.'
    'Bummer,' Jilly said, referring both to Kenny senior's Peruvian
incarceration and to her own inability to tumble Marjorie down the
porch stairs.
    'Kenny junior, he's my oldest grandson. Nineteen.'
    'And he likes knives, huh?'
    'He collects them. Very pretty knives, some of them.'
    'That sounds swell, Marj.'
    'I'm afraid he's back on the drugs again.'
    'Knives and drugs, huh?' Jilly said, trying to rock the woman to
break the shoe suction and get her moving.
    'I don't know what to do. I don't. He gets crazy on the drugs
sometimes.'
    'Crazy, drugs, knives,' Jilly said, talking the pieces of the
Kenny puzzle into place, glancing nervously toward the kitchen door
that stood open behind them.
    'He's going to have a breakdown sooner or later,' Marj worried.
'He's going to go over the edge someday.'
    'Sweetie,' Jilly said, 'I think today's the day.'
    * * *
    Not just a single centipede but a nest of them, writhing knots
of centipedes, seemed to