Seize the Night

located the door behind which He waits, it opens not on anything divine but on something teratoid.
    In the half bath adjoining the kitchen, Sasha found first-aid supplies and a bottle of aspirin.
    Bobby stood at the kitchen sink, using a fresh dishcloth and liquid soap to clean his wounds, hissing between clenched teeth.
    “Hurt?” I asked.
    “No.”
    “Bullshit.”
    “You?”
    “Bruises.”
    The four cuts in his side weren't deep, but they bled freely.
    Roosevelt settled into a chair at the table. He'd gotten some ice cubes from the freezer and wrapped them in a dish towel. He held this compress to his left eye, which was swelling shut. Fortunately, the bud vase hadn't shattered when it hit him, because otherwise he might have had splinters of porcelain in his eye.
    “Bad?” I asked.
    “Had worse.”
    “Football?”
    “Alex Karras.”
    “Great player.”
    “Big.”
    “He run you down?”
    “More than once.”
    “Like a truck,” I suggested.
    “A Mack. This was just a damn vase.”
    Sasha saturated a cloth with hydrogen peroxide and pressed it repeatedly to Bobby's wounds. Every time she took the cloth away, the shallow cuts bubbled furiously with bloody foam.
    I couldn't have ached in more places if I'd spent the past six hours tumbling around in an industrial clothes dryer.
    I washed down two aspirin with a few sips of an Orange Crush that I found in the Stanwyks' refrigerator. The can shook so badly that I drizzled more soda over my chin and clothes than I managed to drink—suggesting that my folks had been misguided when they allowed me to stop wearing a bib at the age of five.
    After several applications of the peroxide, Sasha switched to rubbing alcohol and repeated the treatment. Bobby wasn't bothering to hiss anymore, he was just grinding his teeth to dust. Finally, when he had ground away enough dental surface to be limited to a soft diet for life, she smeared the still-weeping wounds with Neosporin.
    This extensive first aid was conducted without comment. We all knew why it was necessary to apply as many anti-bacteriological agents as possible to his wounds, and talking about it would only scare the crap out of us.
    In the weeks and months to come, Bobby would be spending more time than usual in front of a mirror, checking himself out, and not because he was vain. He'd be more aware of his hands, too, watching for something … teratoid.
    Roosevelt's eye was swollen to a slit. Nevertheless, he still believed in the ice.
    While Sasha finished wrapping Bobby's cuts with gauze bandages, I found a chalk message slate and pegboard beside the door connecting the kitchen to the garage. Sets of car keys hung on the pegs. Sasha wouldn't have to hot-wire a car, after all.
    In the garage were a red Jaguar and a white Ford Expedition.
    By flashlight, I lowered the rear seat in the Expedition to enlarge the cargo area. This would allow Roosevelt and Bobby to lie down, below window level. We might draw more attention as a group than Sasha would draw if she appeared to be alone.
    Because Sasha knew exactly where we were going out on Haddenbeck Road, she would drive.
    When Bobby entered the garage with Sasha and Roosevelt, he was wearing his pullover and Hawaiian shirt again, and moving somewhat stiffly.
    “You be okay back here?” I asked, indicating the rear of the Expedition.
    “I'll grab some nap time.”
    In the front passenger's seat, when I slumped below the window line in a classic fugitive-on-the-lam posture, I became acutely aware of every contusion, neck to toe. But I was alive. Earlier, I'd been sure we wouldn't all leave the Stanwyk house with beating hearts and brain activity, but I'd been wrong. When it comes to presentiments of disaster, perhaps cats know things, but Christopher Snow's hunches can't necessarily be trusted which is comforting, actually.
    When Sasha started the engine, Mungojerrie scrambled onto the console between the front seats. He sat erect, ears pricked, looking forward, like a misplaced hood ornament.
    Sasha used a remote control to put up the electric garage door, and I said, “You okay?”
    “No.”
    “Good.”
    I knew that she was physically unhurt and that her answer referred to her emotional state. Killing Tom Eliot, Sasha had done the only thing she could do, perhaps saving one or more of our lives while sparing the priest from a hideous frenzy of self-destruction, and yet the firing of those three shots had sickened her, now she was living under a grave