Two more tarantulas were scuttling along a white tile counter, near the edge, keeping a watch on the teeming serpents below.
“What the hell happened here?” Harry wondered, and was not surprised to hear a tremor in his voice.
The snakes began to notice Harry and Connie. Most of them were disinterested, but a few slithered forth from the churning mass to investigate.
A pocket door separated the kitchen from the hall. Harry quickly slid it shut.
They checked the garage. Ricky’s car. A damp spot on the concrete where the roof had leaked earlier in the day, and a puddle that had not entirely evaporated. Nothing else.
Back in the hallway, Harry finally knelt beside the body of his friend. He had delayed the dreaded examination as long as possible.
Connie said, “I’ll see if there’s a bedroom phone.”
Alarmed, he looked up at her. “Phone? No, for God’s sake, don’t even think about it.”
“We’ve gotta put in a homicide call.”
“Listen,” he said, checking his wristwatch, “it’s going on eleven o’clock already. If we report this, we’re going to be tied up here for hours.”
“But—”
“We don’t have the time to waste. I don’t see how we’re ever going to find this Ticktock before sunrise. We don’t seem to have a chance in hell. Even if we find him, I don’t know how we could deal with him. But we’d be foolish not to try, don’t you think?”
“Yeah, you’re right. I don’t just want to sit around waiting to be whacked.”
“Okay then,” he said. “Forget the phone.”
“I’ll just… I’ll wait for you.”
“Watch out for snakes,” he said as she moved up the hall.
He turned his attention to Ricky.
The condition of the corpse was even worse than he anticipated. He saw the snake head fixed by deep-sunk fangs to Ricky’s left hand, and he shivered. Pairs of small holes on the face might have been bite marks. Both arms were bent backward at the elbows; the bones were not just broken but pulverized. Ricky Estefan was so battered that it was difficult to specify one injury as the cause of death; however, if he had not been dead when his head had been wrenched a hundred and eighty degrees around on his shoulders, he had surely died in that savage moment. His neck was torn and bruised, his head lolled loosely, and his chin rested between his shoulder blades.
His eyes were gone.
“Harry?” Connie called.
Staring into the dead man’s empty eye sockets, Harry was unable to answer her. His mouth was dry, and his voice caught like a burr in his throat.
“Harry, you better look at this.”
He had seen enough of what had been done to Ricky, too much. His anger at Ticktock was exceeded only by his fury with himself.
He rose from the body, turned, and caught sight of himself in the silver-leafed mirror above the shrine table. He was ashen. He looked as dead as the man on the floor. A part of him had died when he’d seen the body; he felt diminished.
When he met his own eyes, he had to look away from the terror, confusion, and primitive rage that he saw in them. The man in the mirror was not the Harry Lyon he knew — or wanted to be.
“Harry?” she said again.
In the living room, he found Connie crouching beside the pile of mud. It was not sloppy enough to be mud, actually, just two or three hundred pounds of moist, compacted earth.
“Look at this, Harry.”
She pointed to an inexplicable feature that he had not noticed during the search of the house. For the most part, the pile was shapeless, but sprouting from the formless heap was one human hand, not real but shaped from moist earth. It was large, strong, with blunt spatulate fingers, as exquisitely detailed as if it had been carved by a great sculptor.
The hand extended from the cuff of a coat sleeve that was also molded from the dirt, complete with sleeve strap, vent, and three mud buttons. Even the texture of the fabric was well realized.
“What do you make of it?” Connie asked.
“Damned if I know.”
He put one finger to the hand and poked at it, half expecting to discover that it was a real hand coated thinly with mud. But it was dirt all the way through, and it crumbled at his touch, more fragile than it appeared, leaving only the coat cuff and two fingers.
A pertinent memory swam into Harry’s mind and out again before he could catch it, as elusive as a half-glimpsed fish quickening with a flash of color into the murky depths of a koi pond. Staring at what remained of the dirt hand, he felt that he was close to learning something of tremendous importance about Ticktock. But the harder he seined for the memory, the emptier his net.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said.
Following Connie into the hallway, Harry didn’t look toward the body.
He was walking a thin line between control and derangement, filled with a rage so intense that he could barely contain it, like nothing he had ever felt before. New feelings always troubled him because he could not be sure where they might lead; he preferred to keep his emotional life as ordered as his homicide files and his CD collection. If he looked at Ricky just once more, his anger might grow beyond containment, and hysteria of a sort might grip him. He felt the urge to shout at someone, anyone at all, scream until his throat ached, and he needed to punch someone, too, punch and gouge and kick. Lacking a deserving target, he wanted to turn his wrath on inanimate objects, break and smash anything within reach, stupid and pointless as that would be, even if it drew the desperately unwanted attention of neighbors. The only thing that restrained him from venting his rage was a mental image of himself in the throes of such a frenzy, wild-eyed and bestial; he could not tolerate the thought of being seen that far out of control, especially if the one who saw him was Connie Gulliver.
Outside, she closed the front door all the way. Together, they walked to the street.
Just as they reached the car, Harry stopped and surveyed the neighborhood. “Listen.”
Connie frowned. “What?”
“Peaceful.”
“So?”
“It would’ve made one hell of a lot of noise,” he said.
She was with him: “The explosion that tore up the hall floor. And he would have screamed, maybe called for help.”
“So why didn’t any curious neighbors come out to see what was happening? This isn’t the big city, this is a fairly tight little community. People don’t pretend to be deaf when they hear trouble next door. They come to help.”
“Which means they didn’t hear anything,” Connie said.
“How’s that possible?”
A night bird sang in a tree nearby.
Faint music still came from one of the houses. He could identify the tune this time. “A String of Pearls.”
Perhaps a block away, a dog let out a lonely sound between a moan and a howl.
“Didn’t hear anything…. How’s that possible?” Harry repeated.
Farther away still, a big truck started up a steep grade on a distant highway. Its engine made a sound like the low bellow of a brontosaurus displaced in time.
8
His kitchen was all white — white paint, white floor tile, white marble counters, white appliances. The only relief from white was polished chrome and stainless steel where metal frames or panels were required, which reflected other white surfaces.
Bedrooms should be black. Sleep was black except when dreams were unreeling in the theater of the mind. And although his dreams always seethed with color, they were also somehow dark; the skies in them were always black or churning with contusive storm clouds. Sleep was like a brief death. Death was black.