"Do I really have to do this?" Lila moaned.
"Only if you want to," Cree said. "It will certainly help me, and I think it would help you, too. But it's up to you. Always."
They had come to the bedroom she and Jack shared, a big room that was now about half furnished. A huge antique canopy bed dominated the wall opposite the fireplace, and two large mirrored armoires stood against the other walls. A pair of French doors opened onto a small balcony that hung among the branches of a magnolia tree. Through the dark green, waxy foliage, Cree could make out the backyard, bounded on the far side by a hedgelike thicket, the iron fence, and then the wall of the next house. Cree noticed that the mirrors on both armoires' doors were broken, big spiderweb cracks from some heavy impact, and in combination with the broken mirror downstairs it struck her as a significant detail. But it wasn't the right moment to ask Lila about it.
Lila was shivering. She reached shakily for one bedpost and sat down on the edge of the mattress.
Jack moved to her side, looking chastened. "I didn't know," he mumbled miserably. "I didn't really… get it. How bad it was. Or I wouldn't have gone."
Lila stared at the coal stove as if she could still see the shadow snake emerging. The separate muscles of her face ticced, one above her eyebrow, another that tugged the corner of her lip.
"I don't have what it takes for the blow-by-blow. I can't give you all the buildup. I can't tell every detail. I can't." Looking up at Jack, Lila took his hand and massaged it lovingly as if, Cree was surprised to see, she were suddenly worried about him. But when she went on, it was in that flat, almost mechanical voice, reciting it to get it over with: "That night I saw a wolf in the house. A black wolf. Yellow-green eyes. He just rounded the corner at a run and came bounding down the hallway. I barely had time to jump back in here and slam the door. I could hear him snuffling all along the crack and at the keyhole. I could see the shadows of his paws and muzzle under the door. And then I could hear him saying my name, this raspy, whispery voice, God help me I could hear the sound of those… long wolf lips kind of fluttering as he called my name over and over, and I thought, Oh, God, just let me be dead! Don't make me listen to this!" Lila's desperation had crescendoed again, and she struggled to find the impassivity that would let her go on. "And of course I knew there aren't wolves in New Orleans, and wolves can't talk. Which meant I was crazy. So I stood in here for a long time. After a while I didn't hear him. So when I got my courage up, I went out again. I was going to leave the house, go sleep at a hotel. But down at the corner, where I'd seen the shoe, there was the edge of someone's clothes again! That awful raggedy jacket. I'd been seeing a little more of him each time, and this time I could see part of his face above the clothes, the side of his cheek, with hair, a beard or something. And I was going to come back in here and get the gun and shoot him, I didn't care if it was a hallucination or whatever, I didn't care if I was going to wreck up the house. But then the face turned, and I realized that what I could see wasn't right, it was sort of… square, shiny but hairy. Not human. More like a bristly snout. And that's what it was. He stepped out, and he had a pig's head. It was a boar-headed man. I peed myself. He had a wet snout and bristles going down into his shirt and these little tiny bright eyes. And he came straight for me. And I ran down the hall, I was going to go for the back stairs. But he came after me so fast, I knew he was going to catch me. So I turned into my old bedroom. I tried to shut the door on him, but he pushed it aside so hard it knocked me down. And – "
Lila stopped, panting shallowly. She sat curled slightly forward, hands tight over her stomach, knees pushed together hard. A defensive posture held so hard the whole bed vibrated with her tension.
The sudden silence startled Cree. Jack's face had flushed red and his eyes bulged as if there was a huge pressure inside him.
Cree gave it a full minute, but Lila didn't move. "And -?" Cree prompted gently.
"And that is all I am up for today," Lila said flatly. She wasn't speaking to either Cree or Jack, just telling it to the world at large: Enough. Still she held herself rigid. The way a hunted rabbit freezes, Cree thought, hoping it will disappear into the background.
And then Lila exploded: "Isn't that enough? I mean, doesn't that give you the general idea? You want more? What is the point?" And she broke suddenly, a tree going over in a gale. She folded over her knees, crying wrenchingly.
Agonized for her, Cree almost went to her side. But some instinct told her to wait. And after a moment Jack took the initiative.
He bent and held her shoulders and rocked her tenderly. "Come on now. Let's get out of here. Let's go home. Come on, darlin'."
For a long time Lila stayed bent double as if her back had cracked under the strain. And then she unfolded without a word and numbly let him lead her out of the house.
9
Cree got back to her hotel room feeling sticky and nauseous. Lila's wrenching tale had shaken her. The tension was contagious, and when they'd emerged from Beauforte House into the baking heat of daylight, Cree realized that she'd been sweating heavily the whole time.
Throughout Lila's narrative, Cree had picked up her feelings, resonated with them to an unprecedented degree. And Lila's experiences were fantastic. They didn't jibe with anything Cree had encountered in her own work or with accounts from any other legitimate researchers of parapsychology.
If Edgar were here, he'd ask her to put words to the feeling – both a good friend's curiosity about her special talents and a scientist's recommendation to try to articulate even the most subjective experience.
The only thing she could compare it to was the one time she'd seen a tornado. She and Mike had been driving to visit his parents in Southern Illinois and had heard the warning on the car radio, telling them that funnel clouds had been sighted nearby. Cree thought it would be fun to witness one of nature's most powerful phenomena. So despite Mike's misgivings, they pulled over and got out to sit on the hood of the car, where they had a good view of seemingly endless wheat fields beneath a troubled sky. First the light turned a sick yellow as the clouds clotted at the horizon, fraught with occluded lightning. Around the car, sudden turbulences followed pockets of calm so still they felt airless. The scattered trees along the road alternately shivered and then sagged submissively, and the grain fields dimpled and cratered and went still again as if some gigantic, invisible creature had landed and rolled and bounded up again. Then an obscene nipple formed in the overcast and suddenly a snake of cloud was there, groping toward the earth a couple of miles away. And as the funnel vortex solidified and began to rove, Cree had recognized her own arrogance: That mindless hunger and power wasn't fun or interesting or anything but terrifying, and there was nothing in her thoughts but a prayer the rooting snout wouldn't turn her way.
That's how Lila's psychic "weather" felt.
And the scariest part was that she knew Lila had quit before recounting the really bad stuff. Lila had a lot more to tell.
The three of them had driven back to the Warrens' lakeside house, where Cree recovered the polygraph harness and other gear. Lila clearly needed to rest, so they didn't discuss anything, but Cree made an appointment to meet them at their residence again later in the afternoon. On the way back to the hotel, she had stopped at a restaurant and stared at the lunch menu for ten minutes before realizing she couldn't eat anything.
Now it was just one o'clock and she felt used up, shaky, sick.
She was about to take a shower, try to scrub away the feeling, when the phone rang.
"I'm just checking in to see how our cash cow is doing." Joyce's pragmatic-sounding New York voice, so good to hear. "Do you think there's something there for us?"