“She wasn’t too smart, that Ella,” Conway said amiably.

  “Conway”—the sheriff’s tone had become sharper—“don’t you wonder now why I didn’t ask your parents to be here? Of course, you have a right to have them here, and a lawyer, but your dad waived those rights because he didn’t see you as under any suspicion. But your mother, well, she wanted to come, but I prevailed on your dad to get her to stay home, because I think she’d be kind of naturally protective of you. Even though she’s a little worried about you, she—”

  “What do you mean, worried?” Conway interrupted. He wasn’t overtly angry or defensive, but there was an edge of aggression in his voice, “Oh, she says you’ve been having some kind of fits lately. And she says she heard you talk to yourself for a long time when you were alone in your room. And she says you were tormenting Ella. So Ella was afraid of you. So maybe it was you Ella was locking the door against.”

  “Why should I torment Ella?” All innocence, utterly convincing.

  “Oh, gee, I tell you, I’m not quite sure—except that I heard you were real tight with your mom and dad before Ella came along. But Ella, far from being what you call ‘not too smart,’ was precocious. Real bright kid. And she was the pride of the home. So your parents started losing interest in what you accomplished in school sports. They were paying lots more attention to Ella than you.”

  “That’s the same with all kids, just ask her.” And he tossed his head toward Aunt June. “When a new kid comes into the family, parents start, y’know, paying more attention to the young one. So big deal. That’s something everybody knows about. So what. Not enough to make me torment her.”

  “Well now, that might be true, but I think for different people, there’s different reactions to a thing. Maybe you reacted too much. And God knows you could’ve had another reason to be mad at her.” Dawson broke off, scowling, as Lancer bustled into the room with a coffeepot and a clean Styrofoam cup.

  “Hot and black, Marvin, right?” Lancer asked, setting the pot and cup on the desk.

  “No. Cream. Get me some of that diet creamer in the freezer. In the coffee room.” He was clearly annoyed at the interruption. And Lancer clenched his jaws at being sent off on another petty errand. But he jangled down the hall again, and the sheriff went on, “Now what I’m wondering is, if maybe you were having some problems, the kind your mom was hinting about—and then maybe you had to find a kind of scapegoat for your problems, someone to blame, and you picked your sister, and decided if she was gone everything would be all right, and you justified that kind of thinking to yourself…” Dawson paused, turning to look directly at Conway, laying both hands flat on the desk as if about to push away from it—as if about to move toward Conway, maybe to put handcuffs on him. “…you justified that by telling yourself, hell, she saw Tetty putting that stuff in my drink—you told me that, right, that your sister saw Tetty put the poison in your shake?”

  “Here you go, Sheriff!” The deputy interrupted, too loudly, as he came in with the little packet of creamer. He set it down next to the coffee cup on the sheriff’s desk, then took a nervous step back, seeing the look on Dawson’s face. “Uh—”

  Dawson had sagged back in his seat. “Lancer, you go and stand in the door, and you wait there. And you be real quiet. Okay?”

  “Yo, you got it, boss,” Lancer said, spreading his hands in an exaggerated just-keep-calm gesture. He resumed his post in the door.

  Conway stood. Everyone snapped about to look at him. He stretched. “Hey—” He seemed amused by the sudden tension. “I ain’t goin’ nowhere. I gotta stretch a little, my leg’s goin’ to sleep.” He did a few quick knee bends. Perry could hear his joints cracking.

  Lancer had gone rigid in the doorway, his right hand haunting the vicinity of his gun butt. Dawson had half risen. He sank back in his seat.

  Lancer stuck his thumbs in his gunbelt and tried to look confident.

  Perry’s palms were sweating. Aunt June was watching Conway fixedly, her eyes following his slightest movement.

  Languidly, Conway strolled toward the window. All eyes swung to follow him. He stood with one hand on his left hip; the other lifted a blind so he could look out the window.

  Perry looked past him and saw there was a heavy iron mesh over the window, on the outside, the space between each interstice no bigger than a silver dollar. There was a jail cell in the building; apparently the mesh was there to keep prisoners from breaking out the window when they were in the office.

  Conway dropped the blind and strolled past Perry, past Aunt June, pausing in front of Lancer.

  He stood with his back to Lancer, gazing distantly at Dawson.

  Perry saw, then, that Conway’s face had gone bone white.

  “Conway,” Dawson said suddenly, “I wonder if you’d like to make a statement.”

  “A statement,” Conway said, rolling the word around in his mouth. “A statement. A statement. A statement. Is that a statement—saying, ‘a statement’?” He smiled thinly. He looked almost asleep.

  “We’re going to have to detain you, Conway. Suspicion of murder. I think if I can prove it, the judge will rule for insanity, if that’s any comfort.”

  “Insanity is no comfort to anyone,” said Conway. His manner of speaking had changed. He’d shed his boyish, country phrasing, his uncertainty. “Sanity is another matter: it is a thing of crystalline perfection.”

  Dawson’s jaw dropped.

  Conway went on. “But not everyone can recognize sanity. They don’t know it when they see it, unless it’s the action of a government. If a government sends out an army to kill the enemy, no one calls that insane. Or few do. But if one man kills an enemy—” He shrugged. “Yes, I’ll make a statement.”

  And he twisted around, swiveling like a basketball player. His fist darted out, jabbed Lancer hard in the belly. Lancer doubled over, gasping.

  What happened next was all broken up in Perry’s perception. He saw things jerkily, as if he were watching a badly edited film or a scene under a strobe light.

  Perry saw Conway’s hand on the butt of Lancer’s gun. Then he saw Aunt June standing beside her chair—he somehow hadn’t seen her rise—and driving her shoulder into Conway’s ribs. Conway sprawled, the gun clattering to the floor, Dawson standing over Conway, gun in hand, shouting.

  Conway on his knees. His head raised, looking at the light fixture. His eyes glazed over.

  A splash of red, at Conway’s left eye. When Perry had been a small boy, he’d had a water-propelled rocket he’d shoot off from under water in his wading pool; once, he’d added red dye to the propellant chemical to make it look as if its tail end were spitting rocket flame. That’s what came to his mind when he saw the eruption at Conway’s left eye, that small plastic rocket flying up out of wetness and leaving a brief trail of red on the air.

  The thing that shot out of Conway’s eye was a blur, trailing blood droplets, until it reached the ceiling. And then, an inch before impact, it stopped—and opened out, expanding like a parachute, in one second becoming eight times larger.

  It performed a complicated midair stunt, turning upside down, then moved impossibly, defying gravity, to slap onto the ceiling; it clung there, between the light fixture and the wall, something roughly fly-shaped but big as a pigeon, fanning itself furiously with its wings.

  Perry, Aunt June, and Dawson stared. Squatting, Lancer clasped his stomach with one hand, the other shakily feeling for the gun on the floor. He wouldn’t take his eyes off the living gray-black blot on the ceiling.

  Perry looked down at Conway. He lay on his stomach, arms askew beneath him, like a scarecrow dropped from its post. His left eye was missing; in its place was a welling pool of blood. His lips were faintly smiling. He twitched, twice, and then didn’t move.

  The buzzing. The room resounded with it; it seemed to growl out of the walls and floor; the sound grew, until it was loud as the buzz saw in the lumber mill.

  And then the window shattered.

  They heard it burst outward, tinkling on the parking lot outside; the blinds were flung down, rattling, so that the room blazed abruptly with sunlight. There was a creaking, grinding sound.

  “It’s bending that wire!” Perry blurted. Something had broken loose in him. He could talk about the insect things. “I wanted to tell you but I couldn’t—one of those things came at me last night! They can move small things without touching them! It’s going to bend that wire and go out the window, Sheriff, you’d better—”

  He was interrupted by a detonation, so loud his ears rang. He smelled gunpowder; there was a hole in the ceiling and the insect thing was buzzing, flying, whipping around Dawson’s head in angry ellipses. Dawson fired again, and again missed; pale blue gunsmoke stung Perry’s nostrils; plaster filtered down from the ceiling. He was aware that Lancer and Dawson were both yelling, and had been yelling for a full minute, but what they said didn’t register on him; he couldn’t quite make out anything over the buzzing, the noise that was growing to be more than a buzzing, a kind of roar.

  The office door slammed. Aunt June had shut it from the inside to keep the Gray Pilot from getting out that way.

  The gray-black blur dove at Dawson; he ducked, flailing, and slipped. He fell heavily behind the desk.

  The gray blur dropped like a stone. For a full second, the sheriff and the flying thing were hidden behind the desk. Then the flying thing was in the air again. It shot toward the window. The metal mesh creaked, bending outward.

  A double thud, too close to Perry’s ear, a flash on his left: Lancer firing his .45 at the thing clinging to the mesh.

  There was a long, attenuated squeal, like high-pitched feedback from a big PA speaker—viciously loud, painfully shrill. Afterward, no one was sure if it had been a sound or something they’d heard mentally. It hurt. It made them clap their hands to their ears and cry out. It was a squeal of primeval frustration, and it resonated brutally with a chord buried in each of them.

  And then the thing was dead.

  It stuck to the mesh, as a smashed fly will stick to the wall. But the last bullet had caught it in the center of its thorax and split it open; it dripped something like spinal fluid. Its head was twisted around to look over its miniature shoulder, past its stilled, translucent wings, Its eyes were black obsidian; its face was a stylized miniature of Conway’s. As they watched, it began to crumble into oozing fragments. What was left of it fell on the floor, a puddle, shapeless. It might have been anything.

  “Oh Christ,” Lancer said sobbing.

  “What happened to the sheriff?” Aunt June stood behind the desk, leaning on it heavily. Her shoulders were shaking; her voice sounded very old. “He’s out cold. I guess he hit his head when he fell.”

  “Oh man, oh shit, are you sure that thing’s dead?” Lancer asked, turning to Perry. He stood in the door, the gun still raised, pointed toward the window, his hand trembling.

  “Put that gun down, man,” Perry said. He felt a strange calmness. He knew they had a respite, now. But only a respite.

  Lancer looked at the gun, then lowered it. “Goddammit, I hope there ain’t no more of them.” His voice breaking, high-pitched.

  Perry looked at him and took a deep breath. “More? Oh—” He laughed bitterly. “There are a lot more. A lot more where that one came from.”

  “You mean”—Lancer gestured at Conway—“from him?”

  “No. No, I mean from everyone.”

  For a while after that, no one said anything.

  10

  It was a relief, really, what had happened in the sheriff’s office. Perry had lived through the premature burial of his conscience. The eruption of the Gray Pilot had pried off the lid. Now he could talk about it.

  Except that he was so tired. He sat on the back-porch stoop, with his feet on the dead grass, wondering if it were any safer inside. Feeling the heat of the day radiating from the ground as the sunset sucked the desert light away. It was getting dark outside, gradually but visibly, and it was the kind of dusk that was like the coming of unconsciousness; as if the darkness was coming from faltering eyesight and not the going of the sun. Like it was coming from inside.

  It’s because I’m tired, Perry thought. You feel this way, it colors how things look. Like you’re hollow and the world is sucking down into the hollowness.

  “Perry?”

  He heard the scrape of Aunt June’s shoes on the wood of the porch. “Yeah?”

  “You’d better come inside.” She stood just behind him, looking out at the gathering darkness, webs of shadows in the trees. He couldn’t see her but he knew that’s what she was looking at. The shadows.

  “I don’t think they ‘only come out at night,’ do they?”

  “No. But you can’t see them coming so well at night.”

  “I know when they’re around.” He stood up and turned toward her.

  She reacted to that with just a trace of fear, a flicker around the eyes.

  He asked, “Did you get a report on the sheriff?”

  “He’s in the hospital. Resting well. Under observation, they said.”

  “I certainly hope so.”

  She followed him into the kitchen. On the kitchen table was a brown, academic-looking book, titled, Apocrypha of the Brain Sciences. She sat down in front of it and, without looking at it, put a hand on the book. She was staring into space, and he saw that she was pale, and her eyes were smudged with the gloomy mascara of sleeplessness.

  “Looks like you didn’t get that nap,” Perry said, looking for the instant coffee. He pushed bottles aside in the cabinet, pushed them back into their original place again, and pushed them aside once more, until at last he realized the coffee was on the counter directly in front of him. “Christ. I’m spaced.”

  “I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “I was thinking … a person’s so vulnerable when they sleep …”

  Something in her tone made him look at her. Her eyes were wide. “God,” she said. “One of my patients said that to me. A classic paranoid. This guy wore sheets of thin lead under his clothing to protect him from The Rays. Said he didn’t like to sleep because you’re so vulnerable when you—when you sleep.” She shook her head, and looked at the book. “This thing is making paranoids of us all. And justifiably. Or maybe there’s some kind of group hallucination going on. Something in the water.”

  “You don’t believe that. You have some of that kid’s blood on your clothing.”

  Her shoulders twitched and she smoothed out her dress, though she’d changed her clothing since the boy’s blood had arced and sprayed from his eye socket, from the con trail of the thing launched from his eye.

  Perry’s stomach lurched, and he dropped the coffee spoon. The spoon rang on the floor, and Aunt June jerked around to look at it. Perry picked up the spoon and ran it under some water at the sink. A cockroach scurried from under a dish toward the drain, and, hand shaking, he crushed it under the spoon with a satisfying crunch. “Little insect bastard,” he muttered. “Little fucker.” He tossed the spoon aside and took the coffee jar over to the table with two cups. He dumped the brown crystals directly from the jar into the cups. “What’s with the book?” he asked.

  “It contains a couple of papers by a Dr. Horescu.”

  “Why’s it called Apocrypha of the—”

  “Oh, it’s a sort of entertainment for academics. And a what-not-to-do. Examples of wildly jumping to conclusions, making out-of-left-field inferences, some of them quite funny. Like the one that attempts to prove that people who use ‘electrical’ light become hypnotized by the constant glow and turn into zombies of some kind.”

  “I’ll buy that. I’ll buy anything now,” Perry said, putting the teapot on.

  Aunt June didn’t say anything for a few minutes. Her response came so late it was almost a non sequitur. “I know what you mean. Everything I thought was true, a lot of it looks pretty shaky now. I mean, they’re ridiculing Horescu, but he was writing about the Gray Pilots—sometimes he calls them the Waiting Ones—and he sounds like a lunatic, but everything he said about them jibes with what you experienced, with what we saw in the sheriff’s office.”

  “Aunt June—” Perry felt the panic rise in harmony with the rising pitch of the teapot’s whistle as it went from a trill to a scream. He jerked the pot off the stove, and hot water splashed from the spout onto his hand. It burned him, and it hurt, but he was so preoccupied he hardly noticed the pain. “Aunt June, let’s get the hell out of town. You see people in movies, they’re in some kind of scary situation, there’s a monster on their tail, it’s sucking the spinal fluid from people or something, and they just keep hanging around.” He turned to look at her. “Aunt June, let’s not act like jerks in a movie. Let’s get the hell out of town.”

  She opened her mouth—and then closed it. After a moment she said, “You’d better run your hand under some cold water.”

  “Aunt June—”

  “I can’t, Perry. I’m a doctor, I’m a professional, and people here need me, Sandra needs me. You can go.”

  “I would, if I could get Lois to.”

  “But don’t go, Perry, Jesus, don’t leave me with this.”

  He was amazed to see tears in her eyes. He turned away. He went to fill the coffee cups. He knew he should hug her, give her that kind of support, but he couldn’t. He was too coiled up inside to make the effort. Selfish prick, he told himself.

  He put the teapot back on the stove, went to the table, sat down and stared at his cup. Undissolved lumps of brown crystal floated in it, each with its little oily corona. He picked up the cup and swirled the coffee in it. “What does Horescu say?” He heard the resignation in his own voice and realized he was going to stay.

  She opened the book, and thumbed through it. “He says the body of the Gray Pilot is mostly brain. Made of a highly compressed, ephemeral plasma. Composition unknown. He cites the severe instinctive inhibition against talking about them. He describes the stage we saw.” She let out a long slow breath and sipped her coffee. She made a face, and in the tension of the moment they both laughed at her sour expression. “God. Tomorrow I’m going to the supermarket to get some decent coffee. Uh—the stage of the ‘externalized’ Gray Pilot, its insect form, during which—after ‘interbreeding via stinger with a number of people’—they burrow into a final subject and dissolve into their tissues. When killed before this stage they simply dissolve and he says, ‘Hence, no fossil evidence has been found.’ Uh, he says the sort of Gray Pilot that actually emerges from the body is very rare and ‘have almost been eliminated by nature as they are prone to the augmentation of extreme sociopathy in those with whom they interbreed. Indeed, they bring out and cultivate even the slightest native propensity for sadistic violence. Sometimes they subdue themselves for strategic reasons.’ He theorizes they have telepathic and telekinetic powers. They manifest in outbreaks after a carrier—” Her voice had begun to go hoarse. She paused to sip the acrid coffee. “Um, after a carrier—like Tetty, I guess, one of the rare people who can produce a Breeder—”