Mild shivers swept through Tommy, and then he was shaken by a series of more profound chills that made his teeth chatter.
As a novelist, he had never written a scene in which a character’s teeth had chattered, because he had always thought it was a cliche; more important, he assumed that it was a cliche without any element of truth, that shivering until teeth rattled was not physically possible. In his thirty years, he had never, for even as much as a day, lived in a cold climate, so he couldn’t actually vouch for the effect of a bitter winter wind. Characters in books usually found their teeth chattering from fear, however, and Tommy Phan knew a good deal about fear. As a small boy on a leaky boat on the South China Sea, fleeing from Vietnam with his parents, two brothers and sister, under ferocious attack.
Thai pirates who would have raped the women and killed everyone if they had been able to get aboard, Tommy had been terrified but had never been so fearful that his teeth had rattled like castanets.
They were chattering now. He clenched his teeth until his jaw muscles throbbed, and that stopped the chattering. But as soon as he relaxed, it started again.
The coolness of the November evening hadn’t yet leached into the Corvette. The chill that gripped him was curiously internal, but he switched on the heater anyway.
As another series of icy tremors shook him, he remem-bered the peculiar moment earlier in the parking lot at the car dealership: the flitting shadow with no cloud or bird that could have cast it, the deep coldness like a wind that stirred nothing else in the day except him.
He glanced away from the road ahead, up at the deep sky, as if he might glimpse some pale shape passing through the darkness above.
What pale shape, for God’s sake?
‘You’re spooking me, Tommy boy,’ he said. Then he laughed drily. ‘And now you’re even talking to yourself.’
Of course, nothing sinister was shadowing him in the night sky above.
He had always been too imaginative for his own good, which was why writing fiction came so naturally to him. Maybe he’d been born with a strong tendency to fantasize - or maybe his imagination had been encouraged to grow by the seemingly bottomless fund of folktales with which his mother had entertained him and soothed him to sleep when he had been a little boy during the war, back in the days when the communists had fought so fiercely to rule Vietnam, the fabled Land of Seagull and Dragon. When the warm humid nights in Southeast Asia had rattled with gunfire and reverberated with the distant boom of mortars and bombs, he’d seldom been afraid, because her gentle voice enraptured him with stories of spirits and gods and ghosts.
Now, lowering his gaze from the sky to the highway, Tommy Phan thought of the tale of Le Loi, the fisherman who cast his nets into the sea and came up with a magical sword rather like King Arthur’s shining Excalibur. He recalled ‘The Raven’s Magic Gem,’ as well, and ‘The Search for the Land of Bliss,’ and ‘The Supernatural Crossbow,’ in which poor Princess My Chau betrayed her worthy father out of love for her sweet husband and paid a terrible price, and the ‘Da-Trang Crabs,’ and ‘The Child of Death,’ and dozens more.
Usually, when something reminded him of one of the legends that he had learned from his mother, he could not help but smile, and a happy peace settled over him, as though she herself had just then appeared and embraced him. This time, however, those tales had no consoling effect. He remained deeply uneasy, and he was still chilled in spite of the flood of warm air from the car heater.
Odd.
He switched on the radio, hoping that some vintage rock-’n’-roll would brighten his mood. He must have nudged the selector off the station to which he had been listening earlier, because now there was nothing to be heard but a soft susurration, not ordinary static, but like distant water tumbling in considerable volume over a sloping palisade of rocks.
Briefly glancing away from the road, Tommy pressed a selector button. At once, the numbers changed on the digital read-out, but no music came forth, just the sound of water, gushing and tumbling, growling yet whispery.
He pressed another button. The numbers on the dis-play changed, but the sound did not.
He tried a third button, without success.
‘Oh, wonderful. Terrific.’
He had owned the car only a few hours, and already the radio was broken.
Cursing under his breath, he fiddled with the controls as he drove, hoping to find the Beach Boys, Roy Orbison, Sam Cooke, the Isley Brothers, or even someone contem-porary like Julianna Hatfield or maybe Hootie and the Blowfish. Hell, he’d settle for a rousing polka.
From one end of the radio band to the other, on both AM and FM, the watery noise had washed away all music, as if some cataclysmic tide had inundated broadcast studios the length of the West Coast.
When he attempted to turn off the radio, the sound continued undiminished. He was certain that he had hit the correct button. He pressed it again, to no effect.
Gradually, the character of the sound had changed. The splash-patter-gurgle-hiss-roar now seemed less like falling water than like a distant crowd, like the voices of multitudes raised in cheers or chants; or perhaps it was the faraway raging babble of an angry, destructive mob.
For reasons that he could not entirely define, Tommy Phan was disturbed by the new quality of this eerie and tuneless serenade. He jabbed at more buttons.
Voices. Definitely voices. Hundreds or even thousands of them. Men, women, the fragile voices of children. He thought he could hear despairing wails, pleas for help, panicked cries, anguished groans - a monumental yet hushed sound, as though it was echoing across a vast gulf or rising out of a black abyss.
The voices were creepy - but also curiously compel-ling, almost mesmerizing. He found himself staring at the radio too long, his attention dangerously diverted from the highway, yet each time that he looked up, he was able to focus on the traffic for only a few seconds before lowering his gaze once more to the softly glowing radio.
And now behind the whispery muffled roar of the multitude rose the garbled bass voice of... someone else someone who sounded infinitely strange, imperial and demanding. It was a low wet voice that was less than human, spitting out not-quite-decipherable words as if they were wads of phlegm.
No. Good God in Heaven, his imagination was running away with him. What issued from the stereo speakers was static, nothing but ordinary static, white noise, electronic slush.
In spite of the chill that continued to plague him, Tommy felt a sudden prickle of perspiration on his scalp and forehead. His palms were damp too.
Surely he had pressed every button on the control panel. Nevertheless, the ghostly chorus droned on.
‘Damn.’
He made a tight fist of his right hand. He thumped the flat of it against the face of the radio, not hard enough to hurt himself, but punching three or four buttons simultaneously.
Second by second, the guttural and distorted words spoken by the weird voice became clearer, but Tommy couldn’t quite understand them.
He thumped his fist against the radio once more, and he was surprised to hear himself issue a half-stifled cry of desperation. After all, as annoying as the noise was, it represented no threat to him.
Did it?
Even as he posed that question to himself, he was overcome by the irrational conviction that he must not listen to the susurration coming from the stereo speakers, that he must clamp his hands over his ears, that somehow he would be in mortal danger if he understood even one word of what was being said to him. Yet, perversely, he strained to hear, to wring clarity from the muddle of sound.