From the Corner of His Eye

Junior was concerned, the creep most definitely deserved to be burned at the stake.
        "Now, I'm doubtless," Vanadium said, his voice returning to the uninflected drone that Junior had come to loathe but that he now preferred to the unsettling voice of quiet passion. "No matter what the situation, no matter how knotty the question, I always know what to do.
        And I certainly know what to do about you."
        Weirder and weirder.
        "I've put my hand in the wound."
        "What wound? Junior wanted to ask, but he recognized bait when he heard it, and he did not bite.
        After a silence, Vanadium opened the door to the corridor.
        Junior hoped that he hadn't been betrayed by eyeshine in the fraction of a second before he closed his eyes to slits.
        A mere silhouette against the fluorescent glare, Vanadium stepped it the hall. The bright light seemed to enfold him. The detective shimmered and vanished the way that a mirage of a man, on a fiercely hot desert highway, will appear to walk out of this dimension into another, slipping between the tremulous curtains of heat as though they hang between realities.
        The door swung shut.

Chapter 14
        
        A SEVERE THIRST INDICATED to Agnes that she wasn't dead. There would be no thirst in paradise.
        Of course, she might be making an erroneous assumption about her sentence at Judgment. Thirst would likely afflict the legions of Hell, a fierce, never-ending thirst, made worse by meals consisting of salt and sulfur and ashes, nary a blueberry pie, so perhaps she was indeed dead and forever cast down among murderers and thieves and cannibals and people who drove thirty-five miles per hour in a twenty-five-mile-per hour school zone.
        She was suffering from chills, too, and she'd never heard that Hades had a heating problem, so perhaps she hadn't been condemned to damnation, after all. That would be nice.
        Sometimes she saw people hovering over her, but they were just shapes, their faces without detail, as her vision was blurred. They might have been angels or demons, but she was pretty sure they were ordinary people, because one of them cursed, which an angel would never do, and they were trying to make her more comfortable, whereas any self respecting demon would be thrusting lit matches up her nose or jabbing needles in her tongue or tormenting her in some hideous fashion that it had learned in whatever trade school demons attended before certification.
        They also used words that didn't fit the tongues of angels or demons: hypodermoclysis… intravenous oxytocin… maintain perfect asepsis, and I mean perfect, at all times… a few oral preparations of ergot as soon as it's safe to give her anything by mouth More than not, she floated in darkness or in dreams.
        For a while, she was in The Searchers She and Joey were riding with a deeply troubled John Wayne while the delightful David Niven floated along overhead in a basket suspended from a huge, colorful hot-air balloon.
        Waking from a starry night in the Old West into electric light, gazing up into a blur of faces sans cowboy hats, Agnes felt someone moving a piece of ice in slow circles over her bare abdomen. Shivering as the cold water trickled down her sides, she tried to ask them why they were applying ice when she was already chilled to the bone, but she couldn't find her voice.
        Suddenly she realized-Good Lord!-that someone else had a had inside her, up the very center of her, massaging her uterus in the same lazy pattern as that made by the piece of melting ice on her belly.
        "She'll need another transfusion."
        This voice she recognized. Dr. Joshua Nunn. Her physician.
        She'd heard him earlier but hadn't identified him then.
        Something was very wrong with her, and she tried to speak, but again her voice failed her.
        Embarrassed, cold, abruptly frightened, she returned to the Old West, where night on the low desert was warm. The campfire flickereded welcomingly. John Wayne put an arm around her and said, "There are no dead husbands or dead babies here," and though he intended only to reassure her, she was overcome by misery until Shirley MacLaine took her aside for some heart-to-heart girl talk. Agnes woke again and was no longer chilled, but feverish. Her lips were cracked, her tongue rough and dry.
        The hospital room was softly lighted, and shadows roosted on