Forever Odd

my line of sight, I was well out of his.
        Even if he turned his head to look sideways, his peripheral vision might not pick me up behind him. Should instinct warn him, however, the shadows in which I stood weren’t deep enough to blind him to me if he turned around.
        The gloom didn’t reveal enough of his features to allow me to identify him by looks alone. He was big rather than massive, which ruled out Andre.
        In the thrashing garden of the storm, more lightning put out roots, and the jarring crash of thunder was the sound of an entire forest felled.
        He continued across the room, looking neither left nor right. I began to think that he had entered here not in search of me, but for some other reason.
        Judging by his behavior, even more somnambulant than usual, he had been drawn by the call of the storm. He stopped in front of the balcony doors.
        I dared to think that if this current escalation of the storm’s pyrotechnics continued for as much as a minute, distracting Robert and covering what sounds I made, I might be able to come out from hiding, slip quickly into the hall without alerting him, avoid this confrontation, and make that break for the stairs, after all.
        As I eased forward, intending to peer around the entry door to be sure that Datura and Andre were searching elsewhere and that the hall was safe, an effect of the next barrage of thunderbolts stunned and arrested me. Each flare bounced off Robert and cast his ghostly reflection in the glass of the balcony doors. His face shone as pale as a Kabuki mask, but his eyes were even whiter, bright white with the reflected lightning.
        I thought at once of the snaky man, fished from the flood tunnel, his eyes rolled far back in his head.
        Three more flares repeatedly revealed a reflection with white eyes, and I stood immobilized by a marrow-freezing chill, even as Robert turned toward me.

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    FORTY-FIVE
        
        DELIBERATELY, NOT WITH THE QUICK REFLEXES OF violent intent, Robert turned toward me.
        The inscrutable semaphore of the storm no longer brightened his face, but silhouetted him. The sky, one great galleon with a thousand black sails, signaled, signaled, as if to regain his attention, and thunder boomed.
        Averted from the lightning, his eyes no longer shone a moonish white. Nevertheless… though his features were deeply shadowed, his gaze still seemed vaguely phosphorescent, as milky as that of a man blinded by cataracts.
        Although I could not see him well enough to be certain, I felt that his eyes were turned back in his head, no color revealed. This might have been a shiver of imagination born of the chill that had seized me.
        Having assumed the stance that I recalled Chief Porter taking, I brought the shotgun to bear on him, aiming low because the kick might pull the muzzle higher.
        Regardless of the condition of Robert’s eyes, whether they were as white as hard-boiled eggs or the sullen bloodshot beryl-blue they had been earlier, I felt sure that he was not merely aware of my presence but that he could see me.
        Yet his demeanor and his slump-shouldered posture suggested that the sight of me failed to shift him into psycho-killer gear. If not confused, he appeared to be at least distracted, and weary.
        I began to think that he had not come in search of me, but had wandered in here either for another purpose or without any purpose. Having found me inadvertently, he stood as if in resentment of the need to resolve the confrontation.
        Curiouser and curiouser: He let out a long sigh of exhaustion, with a thin plaintive edge that seemed to express a sense of being harassed.
        As far as I could recall, these were the first sounds that I had heard issue from his lips: a sigh, a plaint.
        His inexplicable malaise and my disinclination to use the shotgun in the absence of a clear threat to my life had brought us to a bizarre impasse that, just two minutes ago, I could never have imagined.
        A sudden sweat greased my brow. The situation was not tenable. Something had to give.
        His arms hung at his sides. Lambent storm light licked the shape of a pistol or a revolver in his right hand.
        When he first turned from the window, Robert could have whipped toward me, squeezing off shots, dropping and rolling as he fired to avoid the 12-gauge. I had no doubt that he was a practiced