“What?”
They both heard a loud thud on the roof.
“Oh, hell! If that’s another broken branch off Mrs. Appleton’s tree, I swear—” Beatrice stubbed out her cigarette and got up to go to the front door.
Glory sensed something was very wrong. “Bea, wait!” She ran up to her sister and put a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t go out there.”
“Why not? I’ve got to see if there’s a hole or not.” She brushed Glory’s hand away, annoyed, but then she saw the genuine fear in her sister’s eyes. “Glory, what is it? What’s wrong?”
Glory hesitated. She didn’t know where to begin, or whether she should even recount the weird things that had befallen her since her path had crossed with the odd couple of pulp writers back in Thalia. “Beatrice I—”
The radio suddenly went dead, and Archie’s voice awkwardly trailed off into silence. He turned to give Beatrice a questioning look, but before she could reply, all the lights went out in the house, without even a flicker, and everything was pitch-black. And now, through the moaning wind, their ears more sensitive in the dark, they all heard the skittering sound on the roof-like giant clawed footsteps racing across the shingles.
“Momma, where are you?”
Beatrice took a few disoriented steps and bumped into the coffee table, knocking an ashtray halfway across the living room. “Damn!” She fumbled for her lighter and flicked it; sparks flew from the flint, but nothing happened. She flicked the wheel twice more before the wick lit and gave off a reddish yellow flame-barely enough to see by. “I’m over here, Archie.” Guided by the faint light, Archie ran for the safety of his mother’s arms. Beatrice craned her neck to look up at the ceiling. “What in God’s name is that?”
Glory quickly locked the front door. “Beatrice, where are your candles?”
“In the kitchen.”
“Quick, let’s go there. It’ll be safer.”
“Safer?” Beatrice said, guiding them through the dark hall with her lighter. “What do you mean?”
The strange sounds on the roof seemed to follow them into the kitchen, somehow tracking their movement from above. Suddenly, they ceased.
Beatrice found a few candles in a kitchen drawer as Glory picked up the phone. “I’m calling the police. Is the back door locked?”
Beatrice lit one candle and set it on the kitchen table. She lit another for herself before shutting her lighter. “No, I’ll get it.” Candle in hand, she hurried over and locked the back door, which had a small curtained window in its upper panel. The swaying shadows of tree branches jittered and rippled against the fabric as distant lightning flashed outside. Beatrice thought she heard something other than the trees creaking outside, but the roll of thunder obscured the other sounds.
Glory slammed the phone down. “The line’s dead.”
“Phone’s always getting disconnected,” Beatrice said absently as she drew the curtain back to see if the Appletons’ power was also out. For a fraction of a second, the flickering candle illuminated something outside the window. Still blinded by the afterimages of the lightning, Beatrice couldn’t be sure what she had seen. She pressed her face closer, against her better judgment, and squinted to see past the glare of the candle flame on the glass. “Hello?” she said. “Is anyone out there?”
Something moved. Beatrice thought it must be something blown by the wind, something like a textured piece of wet leather, but when it turned and she could make out its unmistakable shape, she let out a shrill scream. It was a featureless head, a head that looked as if its face had been removed, and it was directly behind the glass. Beatrice recoiled, screaming again in revulsion as much as fear, and the candle fell from her hand to snuff itself out on the floor.
“Beatrice?” Glory ran forward with Archie and pulled her sister back. They quickly moved back into the living room.
“Oh, God,” said Beatrice. “What-who was that?” She was trembling violently.
Glory had an idea, but didn’t say anything.
“Momma, I’m scared.”
“I know, darling. Momma is, too.”
“We’ve got to get out of here,” said Glory. “Make a run for one of the neighbors’ houses.”
“But there’s someone out there!”
“I know, but—” Glory stopped in mid-sentence when she saw the dark shadow on the cheap white living room curtains. It was the silhouette of a large winged creature.
“What is it?” said Beatrice. She turned, and she and Archie could see what Glory saw. “Oh, my G—”
Just then another flash of lightning cast the black shadow starkly against the curtains, and in the deafening peal of thunder that followed, the living-room window exploded into a million pieces, scattering splinters of glass and wood. They all shielded their eyes and turned away, so it was only in the afterimages, at first, that they saw the thing that leaped in through the yawning hole in the wall. The wind dashed the curtains left and right, obscuring the thing’s face, and it ripped the fabric away from itself with a black claw, revealing not a face, but the eerie absence of one.
Glory stood there wide-eyed, like a stunned animal. No, she thought, no, never, could such a thing exist. If the earth had ended by some calamity that had produced the most horrid abominations, if the gods had played a game of chance to see which of them could most cruelly insult nature, then perhaps this thing could be. He stood there, looking like some huge, freshly killed thing, his coloring an odd, flat, lamp black, and yet his fur gleamed with the sheen of the bestgroomed Angus cattle. There was something oddly noble about him; she could not explain it, but he exuded authority. His bloodred tongue lolled down as he noticed her, undulating like an eel. He hissed at her and slowly approached.
The thing towered over Glory, even at that distance, and he radiated a cloud of foul odor-his hiss, as he stepped closer, sounded like a snake with the throaty undertone of a lion. The sound and the odor overwhelmed her, and Glory felt as if she were falling-she did fall. Down on her knees, she grabbed for the edge of an end table to raise herself and knocked over another one of Beatrice’s overflowing ashtrays. She knew, with an odd certainty, that she was going to die, and the tranquility of this knowledge soothed her. Death awaited her like a safe refuge that the creature could not enter, and a flood of memories from her past began to flash before her as if she were drowning. When she was ten, still a little girl, she’d had nightmares of standing on a high precipice. She would stand there and consider, too rationally, the cost of living versus the cost of dying. She must have been a philosophically minded girl, rather high-minded for a ten-year-old. She knew this to be true, even through the fog of confusion that overwhelmed her at the moment. On that precipice, she had decided to jump because, after all, there was no God, and if she were dead, she would simply cease to be conscious, and she would feel no pain and know no regret-know, in fact, absolutely nothing, as if she had never existed. But just before she stretched her arms out like wings of flesh, she had looked out into the distance—it was the east, and the faint rosy colors of the dawn were touching the horizon. And it was so breathtakingly beautiful, like nothing that could have come from the mind or the hand of man, and she had suddenly felt the kindness of some creative force. Suddenly she had remembered the beauty of the total eclipse of the sun she had seen in Nova Scotia, the calm quiet of the craters of the moon, the myriad colors of the stars that come out at night. She had decided to live then, if only to experience such beauty in order to divine whether some extrahuman power must have created it all. And she had awakened in a cold sweat in her bed, shaking with the lingering terror—not of having nearly leaped to her death, but of having compromised her faith in the absence of God. And now she was on this weird quest with two men who were little more than strangers to her; she had nearly been devoured, in the night, by desert animals that had surrounded their laughable one-wagon train. How the mighty are fallen, she thought. If she hadn’t fallen into hard times, she might have been someone like her sister, but after she lost Gabriel her heart had solidified into rock.