Carole pulled out her flashlight. "Let's see if we can find any candles."
"There's three in that little brass candelabra back there," he told her.
"Where?" She flashed her light around.
He pointed. "On the dining room table."
Carole shot him a strange look and moved toward the rear of the house where she retrieved a brass candelabra from the tiny dining room. She lit one of its three candles and set it on the small cocktail table situated before the picture window overlooking the beach and the ocean. Lacey pulled the curtains.
"Let's sit," Carole said.
"I can't sit," Joe told her. "I need to know what happened to me."
"We're about to tell you all we know," Carole said.
So he sat. Carole did most of the talking, with Lacey adding a comment or two. They told him how they'd found him, how his skin had started boiling in the morning sun, and how they'd buried him.
Joe rose and started pacing. He'd held himself still as he'd listened to them, not wanting to believe their tale, yet unable to deny it, and now he had to move. He felt too big for the room. Or was it getting smaller, the walls closing in on him? He didn't know what to do with himself—stand, sit, move about—or where to put his hands ... his body felt different, not quite his own. He'd sensed this since pulling himself out of the sand. He'd washed himself off in the ocean, hoping it would make a difference, but it hadn't. He still felt like a visitor in his own skin.
"So what am I then?" he said to no one on particular, perhaps to God Himself. "Some new sort of creature, some freakish hybrid?" He sure as hell felt like a freak.
"That is what we need to find out," Carole said.
He stared at her and she stared back, her eyes flat, unreadable. This was not the Carole he'd known, not the woman he'd been drawn to. He'd sensed a terrible change in her when he'd run into her outside the church, but now she seemed even further removed from her old self. Cold .. . and she'd been anything but cold in her other life. Had all the sweetness and warmth in her been burned away, or had she merely walled them off?
Unable to hold her gaze any longer, he looked down at himself. He was still wrapped in the damp, sandy sheet. He wasn't cold but he didn't like looking like something that had washed up from the sea.
"I'm going to see if I can find some clothes."
Anything to escape Carole's imprisoning stare. She made him feel like a specimen in a dissection tray.
He turned into the short hallway that was little more than an alcove that divided the bungalow's two bedrooms. A pang shot through his abdomen and he realized he was hungry. Clothes first, then food.
He entered the bedroom on the left and pulled open a dresser drawer. No good. Women's underwear. A thought struck him: What if two old spinsters kept this as a summer place? Under no circumstances was he putting on a house dress. He'd rather keep the sheet.
He tried the other bureau and found an assortment of shirts and Bermudas. He tried a pair of green plaid shorts first and, though a little loose in the waist, they fit. The top shirt on the pile was a yellow-flowered Hawaiian.
After he pulled it on he looked down at himself. Not a big improvement over that old sheet. He must look like the bennie from hell. He stepped to the mirror over the dresser to catch a full view. The mirror was blurred.
This place was in dire need of some spring cleaning.
He leaned forward to wipe away the dust but his hand rubbed across clean glass. He leaned closer and noticed that the room behind him reflected clear and sharp, yet he remained a blur.
"Oh, God!"
"Unk?" he heard Lacey say from the front room. Seconds later she was at his side with the flashlight, her reflection the only distinguishable human in the mirror. "What's wrong?"
Feeling weak—from hunger as well as the horror before him—he leaned against the dresser and pointed to the mirror. "Look at me—if you can."
She gasped. "Is that... ?"
"That's what's left of my reflection."
Carole's image joined them in the glass. He saw her stiffen and stare.
After a moment she said, "You're not completely gone."
"No, but nobody can tell me that's not more proof that I'm no longer human. What have I become? I'm asking you both again: What am I?"
The hunger worsened. He grabbed his abdomen and doubled over.
"Joe?" Lacey asked.
"Hungry. Can't remember the last time I ate."
He turned away and stalked to the kitchen where he began to open the cabinets and paw through their contents. Mostly condiments and spices.
"Damn it all!" he shouted. "Didn't these people eat?"
"It's a summer home," Carole said softly. "Nobody leaves food over the winter."
"God, I'm starving."
"We've got food," Lacey said.
"Right," Carole said. "You remember Mrs. Delmonico, don't you?"
"Of course I do," Joe said. "I only died. I didn't lose my memory." He looked from Lacey's stricken face to Carole's stony expression and back again. "Sorry. That was supposed to be a joke."
"Oh, yeah!" Lacey's forced laugh sounded awful. "Funny!" Her smile cracked and she sobbed. Once.
"Lacey, I'm sorry," Joe said.
She held up a hand as she pulled herself together. "I'm okay. Really."
No, you aren't, he thought. Not a single one of us is anywhere near okay.
"We should eat something," Carole said. "Who knows when we'll get another chance."
Joe looked at her. "What were you saying about Mrs. Delmonico?"
"She baked some bread and made us peanut butter sandwiches."
"Peanut butter! God, I can't remember the last time I had a peanut butter sandwich."
He followed Carole and Lacey to the cocktail table. Carole pulled out the sandwiches, unwrapped them, and handed a half to Joe. Manners reminded him to wait but hunger forced his hands toward his mouth. He took a deep bite and gagged.
His gorge rose in revulsion as he turned and spat it into his hand.
"What's in that? I thought you said it was peanut butter."
Lacey sat across the table with the other half of Joe's sandwich. She'd taken a bite and was staring at him.
He nodded to her. "Tastes awful, doesn't it."
Lacey shook her head. "Tastes fine," she said around her bite.
Carole leaned forward. "What did it taste like to you, Father?"
How could he describe something so awful? "Try to imagine rancid meat... in spoiled milk ... laced with hot tar . . . and you're only part way there."
With a glance at Lacey, Carole pulled the book bag up onto her lap and reached inside. With a single quick movement she removed something and held it under his nose.
"How about this?"
Joe recoiled, almost tipping over backward in his chair. It felt like pure ammonia shoved up his nose.
"Damn! What's that? Get it away!"
Carole showed him the flaky clove between her fingers. "Just garlic."
A queasy nausea slithered through Joe's hunger pains. He'd always loved garlic, the more the better. But now . . .
"I don't understand this!" Lacey cried. She was leaning away from the table with her eyes squeezed shut. "You can stand in sunlight and walk into a home without being invited in, but you don't cast a full reflection and you can't stand garlic. What's going on?"
Joe shook his head. "I wish I knew." Hunger gave him a vicious kick in the abdomen, doubling him over. "I do know I've got to eat. Isn't there anything else around?"