By the light of the moon

potentially volcanic anger seemed
out of character for an easygoing man who believed that even the
most savage heart could be brought out of darkness by the
recognition of the deeply beautiful design of the natural world, of
life. For years he'd turned the other cheek so often that at times
he must have looked like a spectator at a perpetual tennis
match.
    His anger wasn't fueled by what he had suffered, however, nor
even by what he might yet have to endure as his stuff -driven
fate played out in days to come, but by sympathy for the boy and by
pity for all victims in this age of violence. After Judgment,
perhaps the meek would inherit the earth for their playing
field, as promised; but meanwhile, the vicious had their sport, day
after bloody day.
    Dylan had always been aware of injustice in the world, but he'd
never cared as intensely as this, had never before felt the
twisting auger of injustice boring through his heart. The poignancy
and purity of his anger surprised him, for it seemed greatly out of
proportion to the apparent cause. One battered boy was not
Auschwitz, not the mass graves of Khmer Rouge Cambodia, not the
World Trade Center.
    Something profound was happening to him, all right, but the
transfiguration wasn't limited to the acquisition of a sixth sense.
Deeper and more fearsome changes were occurring, tectonic shifts in
the deepest bedrock of his mind.
    Gag removed, free to speak, the boy proved self-controlled and
capable of getting at once to the quick of the situation.
Whispering, his gaze fixed on the open door as if it were a portal
through which the most hideous troops in Hell's army might march at
any moment, he said, 'Kenny's wired at least six ways. Full-on
psycho. Got a girl in Grandma's room, I think he'll kill her. Then
Grandma. Then me. He'll kill me last 'cause he hates me most.'
    'What girl?' Dylan asked.
    'Becky. Lives down the street.'
    'Little girl?'
    'No, seventeen.'
    The chain that wrapped the boy's ankles and bound them together
had been secured with a padlock. The links between the two
bracelets of his handcuffs had been passed behind one of the
vertical rails on the brass headboard, tethering him to the
bed.
    'Keys?' Dylan asked.
    'Kenny's got 'em.' At last the boy's gaze shifted from the open
door, and he met Dylan's eyes. 'I'm stuck here.'
    Lives were in the balance now. Although bringing in the cops
would almost certainly draw the black-Suburban crowd, as well, with
mortal consequences for Dylan and Shep and Jilly, he was morally
compelled to call 911.
    'Phone?' he whispered.
    'Kitchen,' breathed the boy. 'And one in Grandma's room.'
    Intuition told Dylan that he didn't have time to go to the
kitchen to make the call. Besides, he didn't want to leave the boy
up here alone. As far as he knew, premonition was not a part of his
psychic gift, but the air cloyed about him, thickening with the
expectation of violence; he would have wagered his soul that if the
killing had not already begun, it would start before he reached the
bottom of the rose-festooned stairs.
    Grandma's room had a phone, but evidently it also had Kenny.
When Dylan went in there, he would need more than a steady finger
for the touch-tone keypad.
    Once more the blades on the walls drew his attention, but he was
repulsed by the prospect of slashing anyone with sword or machete.
He didn't have the stomach for such wet work.
    Aware of Dylan's renewed interest in the knives, and evidently
sensing his disinclination to use one, the boy said, 'There. By the
bookcase.'
    A baseball bat. One of the old-fashioned hardwood kind. Dylan
had swung a lot of them in his childhood, although never at a human
being.
    Any soldier or cop, or any man of action, might have disagreed
with him, but Dylan preferred the baseball bat to a bayonet. It
felt good in his hands.
    'Full-on psycho,' the boy reminded him, as if to say that the
bat should be swung first, with no resort to reason or
persuasion.
    To the threshold. The hall. Across the hall to the only
second-floor room that he'd not yet investigated.
    This final door, closed tight, wasn't outlined by even a thin
filament of light.
    A hush fell over the house. Ear to the jamb, Dylan listened for
a telltale sound from six-way-wired Kenny.
    * * *
    Some performers eventually confused make-believe with truth, and
to a degree grew into their invented personas, swaggering through
the real world as though they were always on a stage. Over the past
few years, Jilly had half convinced herself