Seize the Night

be logical about,” Bobby said, “but yeah, it sure looks like part of the same phenomenon.”
    “They're moving,” Roosevelt noted.
    Indeed, the squirming legions were, so to speak, on the march.
    They began to move across the two-lane blacktop, across the narrow dirt shoulder, vanishing into the tall grass and wildflowers to the right of the highway.
    The complete procession, however, consisted of more than the eighty or one hundred specimens that we had been watching. As scores of snakes disappeared into the grass beyond the right-hand shoulder, scores of others appeared out of the field to the left of Haddenbeck Road, as if they were pouring out of a perpetual-motion, snake-making machine. Perhaps three or four hundred rattlers, increasingly quarrelsome and agitated, crossed into the southern wilds before the blacktop was clear at last. When they were gone, when not a single wriggling form remained on the highway, we sat in silence for a moment, blinking, as if we had awakened from a dream.
    Mom, I love you, and I always will. But what the hell were you thinking?
    Sasha shifted gears and drove forward.
    Mungojerrie made that sound of loathing again. He changed positions in my lap, so his forepaws were on the door, and he gazed out the side window, at the dark fields into which the serpent horde had slithered toward whatever oblivion it was seeking.
    A mile later, we reached Crow Hill, beyond which Doogie Sassman should be waiting for us. Unless the snakes had crossed his path before they crossed ours.
    I don't know why Crow Hill is named Crow Hill. The shape of it in no way suggests the bird, nor do crows tend to flock there more than elsewhere.
    The name isn't in honor of a prominent local family or even a colorful scoundrel. Crow Indians are located in Montana, not California.
    No crowfoot grows there. And history has no record of braggarts regularly trekking to the top of this mound to gloat and boast.
    At the crown of the hill, an enormous outcropping of rock rises from the surrounding gentle contours of the loamy land, a solitary gray-white knob like a partially exposed bone in the skeleton of a buried behemoth.
    Carved on one face of this monument is the figure of a crow, which is not, as I once thought, the source of the name. Crude but intriguing, this carving captures the cockiness of the bird yet somehow has an ominous quality, as though it is the totem of a murderous clan, a warning to travelers to find a route around their territory or risk dire consequences. On a July night forty-four years ago, the image of the crow was scored into the stone by a person—or persons—unknown.
    Until curiosity had led me to learn the origins of the carving, I'd assumed that it dated from another century, that perhaps it had been chiseled into the rock even before Europeans set foot on this continent.
    There is a disquieting aspect to the image of the crow, a quality that speaks to mystics, who have been known to travel considerable distances to view and touch it. Old-timers say this place has been called Crow Hill since at least the time of their grandparents, however, and references in time-yellowed public records confirm their claim. The carving seems to embody some primitive knowledge long lost to civilized man, yet the name of the hill predates it, and evidently the anonymous carver meant only to create a pictorial landmark sign.
    This image was not like the bird on the message left with Lilly Wing, except that both seemed to radiate malevolence. As Charlie Dai had described them, the crows—or ravens, or blackbirds—left at the scenes of the other abductions were also unlike this carving. Charlie would have remarked on the resemblance if there had been one.
    Nevertheless, the coincidence was creepy.
    As we approached the crest, the crow in the stone appeared to be watching us. The raised planes of the bird's body reflected white in the headlights, while shadows filled the deep lines that had been cut by the carver's tools. This was a colloidal stone, and chips of some shiny aggregate—perhaps nuggets of mica—were scattered through it. The carving had been artfully composed to position the largest of these chips as the eye of the bird, which was now filled with an imitation of animal eye shine and with a peculiar quality that some visiting mystics insist is forbidden knowledge, although I've never understood how an inanimate hunk of rock can have knowledge.
    I noticed that everyone in the Expedition,