By the light of the moon

in some deep financial problems. So two days before
Christmas, near sunset, he drove to this beach parking lot with a
great view of the Pacific. Cold day. No swimmers, no surfers. He
connected a hose to the tailpipe, put the other end into the car
through a window. Then he got in behind the wheel and also took an
overdose of Nembutal. He was thorough, my dad. Always a backup
plan. He went out with one of the most spectacular sunsets of the
year. Shep and I watched it from the hill behind our house, miles
away from that beach, and of course we didn't know he was watching
it, too, and dying.'
    'When was this?'
    'I was fifteen. Shep was five. Almost fifteen years ago.'
    'That's hard,' she said.
    'Yeah. But I wouldn't trade you situations.'
    'So where did you learn?'
    'Learn what?'
    'To take such good care of Shep.'
    He switched off the lamp. In the darkness, he said, 'From my
mom. She died young, too. She was great, so tender with Shep. But
sometimes you can learn the right lesson from a bad example,
too.'
    'I guess so.'
    'No need to guess. Look at yourself.'
    'Me? I'm all screwed up,' she said.
    'Name me someone who isn't.'
    Trying to think of a name to give him, she eventually drifted
into sleep.
    The first time that she woke, rising out of a dreamless bliss,
she heard Dylan snoring softly.
    The room was cold. The air conditioner had shut off.
    She had not been awakened by Dylan's snoring, but perhaps by
Shepherd's voice. Three whispered words: 'Shep is scared.'
    Judging by the direction from which his voice arose, she thought
he was still in bed.
    'Shep is scared.'
    'Shep is brave,' she whispered in reply.
    'Shep is scared.'
    'Shep is brave.'
    Shepherd fell silent, and when the silence held, Jilly found
sleep again.
    When next she woke, she heard Dylan still snoring softly, but
fingers of sunshine pried at every edge of the blackout drapes, not
the thinner light of dawn, but the harsher glare of midmorning
sun.
    She became aware of another light, arising from beyond the
half-open bathroom door. A bloody radiance.
    Her first thought was fire , but even as she bolted out of
bed, with that word stuck in her throat, she realized that this was
not the flickering light of flames, but something quite
different.

23
    Shaken out of dreams, Dylan sat up, stood up, into
his shoes, before he was fully conscious, like a firefighter so
trained in the routine of an alarm response that he could answer
the firehouse bell and shrug into his turnout coat while still
asleep, and then wake up sliding down the pole.
    According to the travel clock on the nightstand, the morning had
crept around to 9:12, and according to Jilly, they had trouble, a
message she conveyed to him not in words but in a look, her eyes
wide and shining with worry.
    Dylan saw first that Shep wasn't in bed, wasn't anywhere in the
motel room.
    Then he noticed the fiery glow beyond the half-closed bathroom
door. Fiery but not fire. The hellfire-red of a nightmare, scarlet
ocher overlaid on aniline black. An orange-red, muddy-red radiance
with the bristle-at-your-eyes texture of the light in a nocturnal
scene shot with infrared film. The dire-red, hungry-red glow in the
eyes of a night-hunting snake. This had all of those qualities, but
none of them adequately described it, because it defied description
and would defy his talent if ever he tried to render it on
canvas.
    The bathroom had no windows. This couldn't simply be morning sun
filtered through a colorful curtain. The standard fluorescent
fixture above the sink couldn't produce such an eerie shine.
    How odd that mere light could instantly make his gut clench, his
chest tighten, and his heart gallop. Here was a peculiar luminosity
that appeared nowhere in nature, that was not quite like anything
he had seen before in the works of man, either, and therefore it
snagged at every fiber of superstition in the fabric of his
soul.
    As he drew near the bathroom, he discovered that when this glow
touched him, he was able to feel it, and not merely as he
would have felt the heat of the summer sun when stepping out of the
shade of a tree. This light seemed to crawl on his skin, to
bustle like hundreds of ants, initially on his face as he first
stepped into the wedge of out-falling brightness, but then more
busily on his right hand as he put it against the door.
    Although Jilly, at his side, remained less directly illuminated
than Dylan, her face had a faint red sheen. With one glance, he saw
that she, too, experienced the