Relentless

backseat, scout.”
    “I should ride shotgun.”
    “That’s your mother’s job.”
    “She doesn’t have a shotgun.”
    “Neither do you.”
    “So let’s draw straws.”
    “Can you kick someone’s butt?” I asked.
    “Whose butt?”
    “Whoever’s. I need a butt-kicker riding shotgun.”
    “Mom could kick anyone’s butt.”
    “So get in the backseat.”
    “Guess I will.”
    “That’s my boy.”
    “Northern Hemisphere is important.”
    Climbing into the car, he looked so small that I couldn’t help thinking about Emily and Sarah Clitherow. The possibility of losing Milo pulled my nerves as taut as violin strings.
    Penny seemed to be taking a long time. I began to feel that I had not properly conveyed to her the grim nature and importance of the new development or the greater urgency that it imposed on us.
    The big garage door had not been raised. The side door remained locked. Milo would be as safe here as anywhere. Yet I was reluctant to leave him.
    Penny had gone upstairs alone. At least Milo had Lassie.
    “Stay put,” I shouted to the boy, and I sprinted into the house.
    As I strode through the laundry room, a telephone rang.
    This shrill call tone was different from that of our house phone and that of the cell in my shirt pocket.
    In the kitchen, I heard the unfamiliar ring again. It seemed to come from the utility closet that backed up to the laundry room.
    The closet contained no phone—unless it belonged to someone hiding there.

   In the nearest corner stood a broom, and I seized it, judging that stiff bristles jammed in the eyes would be as effective as any thrust I might make with a knife, which in any case was not as near at hand as this more domestic weapon and would require a closer engagement with Waxx than I relished.
    As the call tone shrilled a third time, I opened the utility-closet door, revealing a twelve-foot-deep, five-foot-wide space with a gas furnace against the back wall. Fluorescent light from the kitchen intruded far enough to confirm that no one crouched in wait for me.
    Using the broom, I brushed up the light switch and stepped into the closet as the phone rang a fourth time.
    A common gas furnace is to me a mystery of engineering no less complex than a 747 and no less intimidating than a nuclear reactor. My incompetence with mechanisms and machines, and my deep wariness of them, are exacerbated, in the case of a furnace, by the presence of pressurized gas lines.
    Yet even I knew that the furnace had not come from the factory with a cell phone epoxied to the face of it, and that in fact no phone had been there previously.
    Wires trailed from the phone to a curious construction on the floor, beside the furnace. This ominous assemblage included a digital clock displaying the correct time, several items that I might not have been able to identify even if I’d had time to study them, and what appeared to be a block of clay of the kind with which children played, gray and oily.
    On the fifth ring, the display screen lit, and the phone somehow accepted the call. Then it produced—or received—a rapid series of varied tones that might have been a coded message.
    On the digital clock, the time changed from the correct 7:03:20 A.M. to the incorrect 11:57:00 P.M.
    Even I, ignorant of most things mechanical, knew that our best interests would not be served if we were still in the house when the clock displayed midnight three minutes hence.
    Suffering no heroic delusion that I could safely dismantle this device, I backed out of the utility closet and threw down the broom. I raced up the back stairs, shouting for Penny.
    As I reached the top of the stairs and stepped into the short arm of the L-shaped upstairs hall, Penny turned the corner from the longer hall that served her studio and the master suite. She carried an artist’s portfolio large enough to hold several paintings of the size that she had lately been creating for
The Other Side of the Woods
, the book she would publish next autumn.
    She said, “Cubby, a phone’s ringing, but it’s not ours.”
    Our house had two furnaces, one for each floor. When I pulled open the door of the nearby utility closet and switched on the light, a phone like the one downstairs answered itself; wired to another clay-brick package, it produced a series of varied tones that surely werecoded instructions. A digital clock identical to the one in the first closet switched from the correct time to 11:57:30 P.M.
    Two and a half