Seize the Night

not where it wants me to go. Not to the translation capsule. Not if I can help it. The house. To the house. Did I tell you they all died? The first expedition? When I pull the trigger … will I be closing the door … or opening it to them? Did I tell you what I saw? Did I tell you who I saw? Did I tell you about their suffering? Do you know what flies and crawls? Under that red sky? Did I tell you? How did I get … here? Here?”
    The last words on the tape were not in English.
    I raised the bottle of Corona to my mouth and discovered that I had already emptied it. Bobby said, “So this place with the red sky, the black trees—is it your mom's future, bro?”
    “Sideways, Delacroix said.”
    “But what does that mean?”
    “I don't know.”
    “Did they know?”
    “Doesn't sound like they did,” I said, pressing the rewind button on the remote.
    “I'm having some quashingly funky thoughts.”
    “The cocoons,” I guessed.
    “Whatever spun the cocoons—did they come out of Delacroix?”
    “Or through him, like he said. Like he was a doorway.”
    “Whatever that means. And either way, does it matter? Out of or through, it's the same to us.”
    “I think if his body hadn't been there, the cocoons wouldn't be there, either,” I said.
    “Gotta get some angry villagers together and march up to the castle with torches,” he said, his tone of voice more serious than the words he had chosen to express himself.
    As the tape rewound and clicked to a stop, I said, “Should we take the responsibility on this one? We don't know enough. Maybe we should tell someone about the cocoons.”
    “You mean like authority types?”
    “Like.”
    “You know what they'll do?”
    “Screw up,” I said.
    “But at least it won't be us screwing up.”
    “They won't burn em all. They'll want samples for study.”
    “I'm sure they'll take precautions.” Bobby laughed.
    I laughed, too, with as much bitterness as amusement. “Okay, sign me up for the march on the castle. But Orson and the kids come first. Because once we light that fire, we won't be as free to move around Wyvern.”
    I inserted a blank cassette into the second deck.
    Bobby said, “Making a dupe?”
    “Can't hurt.” When the machines started working, I turned to him.
    “Something you said earlier.”
    “You expect me to remember all the crap I say?”
    “In that bungalow kitchen, with Delacroix's body.”
    “I can smell it vividly.”
    “You heard something. Looked up at the cocoons.”
    “Told you. Must've been in my head.”
    “Right. But when I asked you what you heard, you said, Me. What'd you mean by that?”
    Bobby still had some beer. He drained the remaining contents of his bottle “You were putting the cassette in your pocket. We were ready to leave I thought I heard somebody say stay .”
    “Somebody?”
    “Several somebodies. Voices. All speaking at once, all saying stay, stay, stay. ”
    “Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs.”
    “So you're studying to be a jock at KBAY. The thing is … then I realized the voices were all my voice.”
    “All your voice?”
    “Hard to explain, bro.”
    “Evidently.”
    “For eight, ten seconds I could hear them. But even later … I felt they were still talking, just at lower volume.”
    “Subliminal?”
    “Maybe. Something way creepy.”
    “Voices in your head.”
    “Well, they weren't telling me to sacrifice a virgin to Satan or assassinate the pope.”
    “Just stay, stay, stay, ” I said. “Like a thought loop.”
    “No, these were like real voices on a radio. At first I thought they were coming … from somewhere in the bungalow.”
    “You panned your flashlight over the ceiling,” I reminded him.
    “The cocoons.” The faint glow from the audio equipment was reflected in his eyes.
    He didn't look away from me, but he didn't say anything.
    I took a deep breath. “Because I've been wondering. After I called you from Dead Town, I started to feel vulnerable out in the open. So before I called Sasha, I decide to go into a bungalow, where I wouldn't be so exposed.”
    “Out of all those houses, why did you pick that one? With Delacroix's body in the kitchen. With the cocoons.”
    “That's what I've been wondering,” I said.
    “You hear voices, too? Saying, Come in, Chris, come in, sit down, come in, be neighborly, we'll be hatching soon, come in, join the fun. ”
    “No voices,” I said. “At least not any I was aware of. But maybe it wasn't by chance I chose that house. Maybe