Well, you are full. Don’t need more food.
Doesn’t mean you can’t want more.
So wait anyway. At the door.
He’s a nice man. He’ll come back. How can he forget you, your little dance and wagging tail and begging whine?
Wait.
Wait.
Wait. Wait.
Gradually he remembers that he was doing something interesting when he came upon the fat man with the food. But what?
Interesting…
Then he remembers: the stinky man.
The strange stinky man is at the far end of the alley, at the corner, sitting on the ground between two shrubs, his back against the wall of the food place. He is eating out of a bag, drinking out of a big bottle. Coffee smell. Food.
Food.
He trots toward the stinky man because maybe he can get some more to eat, but then he stops because he suddenly smells the bad thing. On the stinky man. But on the night air, too. Very strong again, that scent, cold and terrible, carried on the breeze.
The thing-that-will-kill-you is outside again.
No longer wagging his tail, he turns away from the stinky man and hurries through the night streets, following that one scent among thousands of others, moving toward where the land disappears, where there is only sand and then water, toward the rumbling, cold, dark, dark sea.
3
James Ordegard’s neighbors, like those of Ricky Estefan, did not acknowledge the commotion next door. The gunfire and shattering glass elicited no response. When Harry opened the front door and looked up and down the street, the night remained calm, and no sirens rose in the distance.
It seemed as if the confrontation with Ticktock had taken place in a dream to which only Harry and Connie were privy. However, they had plenty of proof that the encounter had been reaclass="underline" expended shell casings in their revolvers; broken glass all over the master-bedroom balcony; cuts, scrapes, and various tender spots that would later become bruises.
Harry’s first urge — and Connie’s too — was to get the hell out of there before the vagrant returned. But they both knew that Ticktock could find them as easily elsewhere, and they needed to learn what they could from the aftermath of their confrontation with him.
In James Ordegard’s bedroom again, under the malevolent stare of the ghoul in the Goya painting, Harry looked for one more proof. Blood.
Connie had shot Ticktock at least three times, maybe four, at close range. A portion of his face had been blown away, and there had been a substantial wound in his throat. After the vagrant had thrown Connie through the sliding glass door, Harry had pumped two rounds into his back.
Blood should have been splattered as liberally as beer at a frat-house party. Not one drop of it was visible on the walls or carpet.
“Well?” Connie asked from the doorway, holding a glass of water. The Anacins had stuck in her throat. She was still trying to wash them all the way down. Or maybe she had gotten the pills down easily enough, and something else had stuck in her throat — like fear, which she usually had no trouble swallowing. “Did you find anything?”
“No blood. Just this… dirt, I guess it is.”
The stuff certainly felt like moist earth when he crumbled it between his fingertips, smelled like it, too. Clots and sprinkles were scattered across the carpet and the bedspread.
Harry moved around the room in a crouch, pausing at the larger clumps of dirt to poke at them with one finger.
“This night’s going too fast,” Connie said.
“Don’t tell me the time,” he said without looking up.
She told him anyway. “Few minutes past midnight. Witching hour.”
“For sure.”
He kept moving, and in one small mound of dirt, he found an earthworm. It was still moist, glistening, but dead.
He uncovered a wad of decaying vegetable matter, which seemed to be ficus leaves. They peeled apart like layers of filio dough in a Mideastern pastry. A small black beetle with stiff legs and jewel-green eyes was entombed in the center of them.
Near one of the nightstands, Harry found a slightly misshapen lead slug, one of the rounds that Connie had pumped into Ticktock. Damp earth clung to it. He picked it up and rolled it between his thumb and forefinger, staring at it thoughtfully.
Connie came farther into the room to see what he had discovered. “What do you make of it?”
“I don’t know exactly… though maybe…”
“What?”
He hesitated, looking around at the soil on the carpet and the bedspread.
He was recalling certain folk legends, fairy tales of a fashion, although with even a stronger religious overtone than those of Hans Christian Andersen. Judaic in origin, if he wasn’t mistaken. Tales of cabalistic magic.
He said, “If you gathered up all this dirt and debris, if you packed it together real tight… do you think it would be just exactly the right amount of material to fill in the wound in his throat and the hole in the side of his face?”
Frowning, Connie said, “Maybe. So… what’re you saying?”
He stood and pocketed the slug. He knew that he didn’t have to remind her about the inexplicable pile of dirt in Ricky Estefan’s living room — or about the exquisitely sculpted hand and coat sleeve sprouting from it.
“I’m not sure what I’m saying just yet,” Harry told her. “I need to think about it a little more.”
As they passed through Ordegard’s house, they turned off the lights. The darkness they left behind seemed alive.
Outside in the post-midnight world, ocean air washed the land without cleansing it. Wind off the Pacific had always felt crisp and clean to Harry, but no longer. He had lost his faith that the chaos of life was continuously swept into order by the forces of nature. Tonight the cool breeze made him think of unclean things: graveyard granite, fleshless bones in the eternal embrace of gelid earth, the shiny carapaces of beetles that fed on dead flesh.
He was battered and tired; perhaps exhaustion accounted for this new somber and portentous turn of mind. Whatever the cause, he was drifting toward Connie’s view that chaos, not order, was the natural state of things and that it could not be resisted, only ridden in the manner that a surfer rides a towering and potentially deadly wave.
On the lawn, between the front door and the driveway where he had parked the Honda, they almost walked into a large mound of raw earth. It had not been there when they had first gone inside.
Connie got a flashlight from the glove compartment of the Honda, returned, and directed the beam on the mound, so Harry could examine it more closely. First he carefully circled the pile, studying it closely, but he could find no hand or other human feature molded from it. Deconstruction had been complete this time.
Scraping at the dirt with his hands, however, he uncovered clusters of dead and rotting leaves like the wad he had discovered in Ordegard’s bedroom. Grass, stones, dead earthworms. Soggy pieces of a moldering cigar box. Pieces of roots and twigs. Thin parakeet bones, including the fragile calcium lace of one folded wing. Harry wasn’t sure what he expected to find: maybe a heart sculpted from mud with all the detail of the hand they had seen in Ricky’s living room, and still beating with strange malignant life.
In the car, after he started the engine, he switched on the heater. A deep chill had settled in him.
Waiting to get warm, staring at the black mound of earth on the dark lawn, Harry told Connie about that vengeful monster of legend and folklore — the golem. She listened without comment, even less skeptical about this astonishing possibility than she had been at her apartment, earlier in the night, when he had raved on about a sociopath with psychic abilities and the demonic power to possess other people.