By the light of the moon

have been reluctant to pull back the tarp
on a woodpile if he suspected that a rattlesnake coiled among the
cords.
    He also wasn't eager to use the fat end of the baseball bat to
lift the bedclothes out of the way. While entangled with the
covers, the bat would be an ineffective weapon, and although this
maneuver would leave Dylan vulnerable for only the briefest moment,
a moment would be all that Kenny needed if he shot off the bed and
out from under the rising covers, armed with a specialty knife well
designed for evisceration.
    Soft light, soft shadows.
    House hushed.
    The shape, twitching.

17
    Jilly in the downstairs hall, archway to archway,
past three lightless rooms, listened at each threshold, detected
nothing, and moved onward to the foyer, past the lamp table, to the
foot of the stairs.
    Starting to climb, she heard a metallic plink behind her,
and halted on the second step. Plink was followed by tat-a-tat and by a quick strumming – zzziiinnnggg – and then by utter stillness.
    The noises had seemed to come from the first room inside the
front door, directly opposite the foyer. Probably the living
room.
    When you were trying to avoid a run-in with a young man whose
own grandmother's best assessment of him boiled down to crazy-drugs-knives , you didn't want to hear peculiar
metallic sounds coming out of a dark room at your back. The
subsequent silence did not have – could never possibly have
– the innocent quality of the silence that had preceded plink .
    With the unknown ahead, but now also behind her, Jilly did not
suddenly discover the elusive inner Amazon, but she didn't freeze
or cringe in fear, either. Her stoic mother and a few bad breaks
long ago had taught her that adversity must be faced forthrightly,
without equivocation; Mom counseled that you must tell yourself
that every misfortune was custard, that it was cake and pie, and
you must eat it up and be done with it. If grinning Kenny lurked in
the pitch-black living room, stropping knives against each other
loud enough to be confident that she would hear him, Jilly had an
entire picnic of trouble laid out for her.
    She retreated from the stairs into the foyer once more.
    Plink, plink. Tick-tick-tick. Zing... zzziiinnnggg!
    * * *
    Short of inhaling a gale like the big bad wolf in the fairy tale
and blowing the covers off the bed, Dylan either had to stand here
waiting for the shrouded figure to make the first move, which
invited disaster more certainly than did taking action, or he must
unveil the twitching form to learn its name and intentions.
    Holding the baseball bat upraised in his right hand, he seized
the bedclothes with his free hand and whipped them aside, revealing
a black-haired, blue-eyed, barefoot teenage girl in cut-off jeans
and a sleeveless blue-checkered blouse.
    'Becky?'
    Fright possessed her face, her electroshock-wide eyes. Tremors
of fear flowed through her in plentiful rillets that repeatedly
backed up into an overspilling twitch, jerking her head, her entire
body, with the force he'd seen translated through the covers.
    Her stricken gaze remained fixed on the ceiling as if she were
unaware that help had arrived. Her obliviousness had the quality of
a trance.
    As he repeated her name, Dylan wondered if she might have been
drugged. She seemed to be in a semiparalytic state and unaware of
her surroundings.
    Then, without glancing at him, she spoke urgently between teeth
more than half clenched: 'Run.'
    With the bat raised in his right hand, he remained acutely aware
of the open hallway door and of the two closed doors, alert for any
sound, movement, swell of shadow. No threat arose on any side, no
brutish figure that clashed with the daisy wallpaper, the yellow
drapes, and the luminously reflective collection of satin-glass
perfume bottles on the dresser.
    'Ill get you out of here,' he promised.
    He reached for her with his free hand, but she didn't take it.
She lay stiff and shaking, attention still focused fearfully on the
ceiling as if it were lowering toward her, a great crushing weight,
as in one of those old movie serials featuring a villain who built
elaborate machines of death when a revolver would have done the job
better.
    'Run,' Becky whispered with a note of greater
desperation, 'for God's sake, run.'
    Her shaking, her paralysis, her frantic admonitions rattled his
nerves, which were already rattling like hailstones on a tin
roof.
    In those old serials, a calculated dose of curare might reduce a
victim to the