Relentless

organization, whatever its nature, included at least one good surgeon and others with medical knowledge.
    I could not believe that a large group, including highly skilled health-care professionals, could come together to assist one another in their secret lives as serial killers. This was something else—and worse—than we had thought.
    The more that we learned, the more the odds of our survival seemed poor.
    Researching the artists whom Waxx had savaged under his pen name, Russell Bertrand, Penny had found another who seemed to have been a victim of more than the critic’s words.
    “Cleveland Pryor, a painter. He was found dead in a Dumpster in Chicago, where he lived.”
    His body was so tightly wound in so much barbed wire that he appeared almost mummified. According to the coroner’s report, the wire had been cinched to Pryor while he had been alive.
    “Cleveland never knew his father,” Penny said. “His mother died when he was nineteen. Never married, no children, so at least he didn’t have to see everyone he loved destroyed before Waxx murdered him.”
    In her research, she also discovered that some writers and artists of a new philosophical movement were relocating to Smokeville or were considering doing so. They hoped to establish a creative community.
    Like Henry Casas and Tom Landulf, these people rejected both the nihilism and utopianism of our time and of the previous 150 years. They sought a future based not on the theories of one man or on onenarrow ideology, but on the centuries of tradition and wisdom from which their civilization had grown.
    “Which explains,” I said, “why Waxx might have had two targets in the same small town.”
    “He probably has more,” Penny said. “And … here
we
are.”

    Having gone to bed at nine o’clock, exhausted, I woke at 11:10 P.M. Before retiring, we switched off only one of the two nightstand lamps. Penny remained asleep beside me.
    The cottage bedroom offered two double beds with mattresses that were no doubt provided free by a chiropractor in need of business. The second bed was empty.
    Remembering John Clitherow’s vanished daughters, I hurried out to the living room. Milo remained at work on the floor. He sat at the center of what seemed to be a much larger array of gadgets, gizmos, thingamajigs, and thingamadoodles than had been there previously.
    My laptop rested on a footstool, and Milo gazed at the screen, on which streamed a mystifying video of complex but unidentifiable constructs.
    “When are you coming to bed, kiddo?”
    “Not yet.”
    “You need your sleep.”
    “Not really.”
    Lassie sat under a straightback chair. The legs and stretcher bars formed a cage around her. She barely fit in the cramped space, but she was grinning, her tail wagging.
    As surely as Costello knew what Abbott would reply when asked “Who’s on first?” I knew the answer when I asked, “Did you put the dog under the chair?”
    “No,” Milo said. “She did it to herself.”
    “That can’t be comfortable.”
    I lifted the chair straight up, off the dog, and set it aside.
    Lassie stood, shook herself, and cocked her head at me as if to say that I remained, in her view, by far the most curious part of this family.
    Looking at the video on the laptop, I said, “What is that?”
    “Structure,” Milo said.
    “Is there any point in my asking what structure?”
    “No.”
    The image enlarged as the camera appeared to descend into it, much like a microscope probing a tissue sample at an ever-increasing power of magnification—and then a new pattern arose where the previous one had been.
    “What’s that?”
    “Deeper structure.”
    “That’s what I thought. Come to bed soon.”
    “Okay.”
    “Is that a sincere okay?”
    “Okay.”
    At the doorway between the living room and bedroom, I glanced back. Milo raised one hand to the computer screen, as if he wanted to reach into the image of the deeper structure and feel it. The dog was caged under the chair again, and grinning.

    When I woke at 1:22, Penny was asleep beside me, and Milo’s bed remained empty.
    I was at once aware of the whorls and pulses and radiating fingers of blue and red light that shimmered beyond the open door, as if someone had parked a police cruiser in the cottage.
    When I entered the front room, I found that the entire ceiling hadbecome a projection screen on which were displayed patterns more complex and dimensional than those that had been on the computer during my