Evan went around the corner with no hesitation. Perry wanted to shout, Go easy, dammit! Slow, quiet, on tiptoes or something!

  But he bit his lip and followed them around the corner.

  On the other side was a concrete patio, which had cracked and settled some, showing puddles dimpled with pine needles. Double glass doors led onto the patio. The doors were curtained on the inside. The light shone through the off white curtains.

  “You guys check it out,” Evan whispered, tilting his head toward the glass. “I’m gonna look around the corner. I think there’s, like, a side door over there.”

  He turned and hurried off, before Perry could object.

  Perry felt a familiar tremulousness in his bones, vibrating in the roots of his teeth. What you felt when the pilots were around, before you heard the actual buzzing.

  His scalp contracted on his head; the hair on the back of his neck rose. “Lois!” he hissed. “Wait!”

  But she was moving to the curtains, peering through the slit into the room on the other side. She looked for two full seconds, then she stepped back and clapped a hand over her mouth, her eyes wide.

  Perry moved toward the glass.

  She reached out and gripped his shoulder painfully. “Don’t,” she said. “Don’t look.”

  15

  June was walking down the road under the stars. It was a walk she might have enjoyed, another time. The stars were bright and abundant; the trees lining the road gave out their own aroma on the gentle breeze. The soft calls of nocturnal birds laced into one another. Bats dove and swooped after insects. She wasn’t afraid of bats. When she was a little girl, her half-brother, Cornelius, ten years her senior, had told her that bats were the swallows of the night.

  Cornelius. She almost laughed, remembering him. She hadn’t thought of him in years. Tall, pale, long mournful face, yellow snaggly teeth, rumpled tweed suits. A pipe he never managed to keep lit; he liked the literary aura. Her father had muttered more than once that “the boy has delusions of grandeur.” Cornelius had been a sort of minor celebrity, for a while, when he’d been writing. He’d written for a pulp magazine called Weird Tales and published a couple of dark fantasy novels. Then he’d stopped writing, taken a job teaching nineteenth-century literature, and devoted his free time to a lodge called the Order of the Golden Dawn. He’d written a letter to her mother saying, “I’m tired of fantasies. I’m going to the heart of fantasy. To the place where magic is real.” Eye-rolling stuff. He had a smug, portentous way about him. “Darkness has its own rules of ethics and esthetics,” he’d said (at a Christmas dinner!), “and it is more than the occlusion of light. It is a kingdom.” He’d died at the age of thirty-eight, supposedly of tuberculosis.

  He’d had his flaws. He didn’t bathe often enough. He was quietly anti-Semitic, given to fits of anxiety about the “poisoning of the race with miscegenation.” But mostly she remembered him as a charming eccentric. Gloomy but always patient with her. Sometimes willing to tell her stories of a dark world that existed in the Hollow Earth, a subterranean land lit only by phosphorescent fungi and streams of lava and occupied by lordly elves. He’d made the night seem a place of baroque fascination. Not scary, but weirdly elegant. And so she’d never been afraid of the dark.

  Until tonight. Tonight she’d seen a living essence of darkness. The darkness of darkness. Or so it had seemed to her.

  Now, only starlight kept the darkness at bay with the feeblest of defenses. She saw blackness all around her, like the walls of water around the tribe of Moses crossing the Red Sea. But she doubted that a Jehovah held the darkness back for her.

  It pressed against the fence of trees lining the road; it tried to get through to her.

  Her feet hurt. How long had she been walking, since she’d left the party? She just hoped she was going the right direction. She’d expected to see the lights of Jasper just ahead. Had expected that for some time now.

  Lights. She saw them now, through the trees. But no: the lights were moving. Headlight beams, swinging around a corner, pointing her way, bearing down on her.

  She stood by the side of the road, paralyzed with indecision. It would be some of them, surely. The ones who moved through the darkness like fish in water. She should run.

  But to run—that would mean running into the woods. Into deeper darkness.

  Did she hear a buzzing, somewhere?

  Run.

  Too late. A Land Rover with a canopy pulled up beside her. Crammed into it were two young white men, and two Indians, and a man about her age behind the wheel. Her heart sank when she saw that one of the Indians carried a shotgun and one of the teenage boys carried a rifle.

  “Ma’am …” the man behind the wheel said.

  If I run now, she thought, they’ll shoot me in the back.

  The man behind the wheel said, “I’m Marv Rutherford. Lois’s uncle? Unless I’m mistaken, you’re Perry’s Aunt June. Lois and I drove by you the opposite way when you were carrying some groceries the other morning; she pointed you out to me. She chewed my ears for not offering you a ride. Like to make up for it now if you don’t mind jamming in with us. It ain’t safe out tonight.”

  Perry had to know.

  He brushed past Lois and looked through the slit for a full minute, maybe two, trying to understand what he was seeing.

  Seven people, lying on the floor and on the sofa. Lying very still, in various positions. And the Gray Pilots crept over them. Seven of them … Two of the bodies were sprawled on the sofa, frozen in midconvulsion. The others on the floor, some facedown, some faceup, some with arms thrown over their faces. United in one thing: a puddle of blood looking purplish brown in the light. The light came from the long, silvery high-powered flashlight propped on a stack of books—paperbacks of Ego Truth—so it pointed at the ceiling. The light reflected down on the room more or less uniformly. Blood matted the rug, half dried. In every visible face, the right eye was missing.

  One of them was Rofocale. Dead.

  Perry couldn’t see a Gray Pilot on Rofocale—but a moment later a small, pale, triangular face, its features a miniature blur of Rofocale’s, crept up from the far side of his head. The insect thing crept onto his face, making his cheek wobble with its movements; Perry could see a dimple in the man’s flesh where its feet pressed.

  On each body the things moved, restless, looking like flies roaming across something rotten. But each fly was at least six inches long and three across. Moving around with the alien purposefulness of flies, as if considering the corpse with their feet, thinking about it with the rooting motions of their heads. Their wings were still—then they fanned nervously. They were still again … they fanned

  The motion of the things over the dead was primally ugly in the way they moved on the corpses: as if expressing contempt, at the same time enjoying the touch of dead flesh, communing with decay itself.

  Perry gagged and his shoulders hunched as he fought to keep from throwing up. The glass of the doors vibrated with their buzzing. He wanted to run before they noticed him. But he made himself look again, trying to understand what had happened.

  There were several people he’d seen before. Rofocale, his perky assistant—what was her name? Lola?—the Japanese boy, Tommy. All of them dead. Others he’d never seen. Wendy wasn’t there. A man in a suit and tie lay beside his briefcase.

  There was blood on a corner of the briefcase, and specks of bluish tissue. As if it had been used as a weapon. He saw, now, a shattered table lamp in the blue-white hand of the girl Lola; shards of its bulb glass were lodged in the face of the man who lay beside her. Blood crusted under fingernails.

  Perry understood, then.

  Pilots had come, had changed them. They’d all been together in the house, transformed more or less at the same time. Their savagery released, one of them had lashed out at another, a third had become involved, and it had spread like a fire through dry tinder. Perhaps there had been others, victors, long since departed. And the pilots had erupted from the corpses of the fallen.

  He was about to turn away, but hesitated, afraid to move, as a surge of buzzing and restlessness in the pilots had them hopping up, wings flurrying, making threatening half charges at one another. He had an impression that three of them were aligning, as if held together in some hidden magnetic field, their lipless mouths opening and shutting like the mouths of puppets, murmuring pieces of what they communicated telepathically. He heard it riding on the swell and ebb of the background buzzing. “… to kill alone is freedom … to kill together efficiency … to kill alone is safety … to kill in group is power …” As the buzzing grew louder, louder.

  The light cast a shadow to one side of the sofa. Something flowed from the shadow; a dark corner spreading. Eclipsing part of the light in the room. It flowed up the wall, onto the ceiling, like dry-ice fog crossed with soot; it flowed into a sort of benedictory shape above the three insect things moving in alignment. As if it were the medium that connected them—a slow-motion gray-edged black smoke. But it wasn’t smoke. It was more like …

  Like a sick feeling. When you have the flu and you try to imagine what sickness made visible would look like.

  Rofocale’s body was one of those under the slow-motion black fog. A sudden surge of buzzing and the corpse’s arm twitched, jerked by an invisible hand, and blood oozed from a place where two of the corpse’s fingers had been—as the fingers, torn off, flew across the room to slap the wall.

  As if this were the opening shot of a fusillade, the other bodies began to jerk, torsos lurching, legs drawing up and snapping out straight again, arms flapping like dying fish, the buzzing louder, louder.

  The girl’s face exploded as if it were a mask with a charge set off under it, flying off her head in twirling scraps and a spray of blood and bone … The buzzing grew louder and louder.

  The pilots aligned with the dark cloud fought against the others; group rage against independent rage; using telekinesis, working together sometimes for a strength they didn’t have individually, shielding themselves with that same strength so that the bodies they perched on took the punishment from the diverted energies.

  Rofocale’s legs twisted around backward, knees popping out, blue and white bone ends tearing through fabric; his face peeled away in strips, ripped methodically from his skull like peeling a fruit.

  The insect thing on the body with the business suit was caught in three prongs of invisible pressure; the body twisted around it as if trying to squirm away, and then began to rip down the middle, blood erupting—and the insect thing was caught, crushed like a thing of papier-mâché balled up in an invisible fist, glutinous clear fluid squirting.

  As the Japanese boy’s gut ballooned and exploded, blood and feces spattering the glass in front of Perry … followed a moment later by a severed tongue that stuck to the glass and began to skid slowly down it leaving a smear of red and brown.

  Perry backed away. The buzzing behind him peaked as he looked for Lois. Where had she—

  She came running around the corner, her face contorted by sobbing, gasping, “I saw Wendy through another window, she’s dead, all crushed.”

  The buzzing was intolerably loud as he grabbed her wrist. “We got to get out now, where’s Evan?”

  Two men stepped around the corner. Evan and a man with long, braided red hair, a forked red beard, a limp grin.

  “Charlie Myers,” Lois whispered, staring at them. Myers had a hammer in one hand and a chisel in the other. The chisel was wet.

  Evan pointed the shotgun at them.

  He grinned and spoke to Charlie without looking away from them, having to yell over the growing buzz, a sound like a sawmill’s grinding roar: “I told you it’d be simpler if I brought ’em here this way.”

  “Wise guys. The wise guys,” Myers said. “Where’s Tetty’s old lady and the old doctor biddy?”

  “They weren’t there. But we got these two. We can change them first.”

  Feeling like a man in a blizzard having to force himself to move to keep from freezing to death, Perry began to edge away from them, pulling Lois after him.

  The shotgun swiveled to follow him and Myers started toward them, shouting something lost over the grinding all-consuming buzz from the room to their right.

  Two things happened fast. The flashlight beyond the glass doors exploded and then the glass doors themselves shattered outward, glass shrapnel flying, a curtain billowing, blood droplets in an aerosol haze, Evan screaming, dropping the shotgun, Myers cursing, staggering, the buzzing all around them, gray flutterings, Perry feeling lances of pain in his right shoulder and thigh from splinters of glass.

  Lois was pulling him away from there, shouting at him to come on, come on! as they ran around the corner. Something—maybe several somethings—darting after them in the air, clutching at them with unseen fingers, but still fighting among themselves at the same time, getting in each other’s way.

  Perry and Lois sprinted out toward the jeep. They could see it out on the road, but it didn’t seem to get any closer as they ran, and they felt telekinetic fingers tugging at their ankles. Lois pitched forward, fell, skidding on her face.

  “Owww!”

  Perry bent and helped her, and the buzzing swarmed around them. Something darted at him, and he ducked. It missed him, and he heard it cursing him through the buzz buzz buzz. In the starlight, as he slung an arm around Lois and pulled her to her feet, Perry saw red marks appear on her face, and she screamed—the things were pummeling her with their telekinetic fists. Her nose spurted blood. As if of its own accord, a cut opened on her chin.

  “Mine,” something said.

  “Mine,” said something else.

  There was a flurry of energy discharge overhead, a sense of unseen pressures releasing in the air, a furious buzzing. They were fighting among themselves again, and Perry used the opportunity, pulled Lois into a run.

  “Come on!”

  She jerked her hand away from him, her panic gone for a moment as she focused on reaching the jeep.

  “I can start the jeep!” she was yelling. “It’s like my uncle’s, there’s a wire you—”

  He couldn’t hear the rest for the buzzing. They were coming again. We’re not going to make it, he thought.

  “You boys are just playing,” Mrs. Chilton said. “I know that.” Her voice quavered. She tried to smile. Clement, Louis, and Terry tittered and pushed her closer to the edge of the pit.

  “Snake Ranch,” Terry said to himself, loving the sound of it. “Snake Ranch. They call it a Snake Ranch.”

  “Snake Ranch!” Clement said, pushing the lever on the little box that operated Mrs. Chilton’s electric wheelchair. The chair hummed forward to the edge of the pit, and the rustling from below seemed to increase, as if they were eager for her.

  “Scorpion Ranch,” Louis pointed out. Adding, “Gila Monster Ranch. Tarantula Ranch. Dead Lady Ranch.” Sticking the hat pin into Mrs. Chilton’s thigh again.

  She squealed with pain and tried to wrench free of the lamp wires they’d tied her with.

  “She feels the needle,” Clement said. “She ain’t paralyzed.”

  “Polio,” Mrs. Chilton wailed. “Ain’t that enough hurt in my life you got to do this to me too?”

  She was a dried-up rag of an old woman, her face seamed as sunbaked hide, her lower parts spindly, her upper shapeless; her hair thinning out, its few remaining wisps pathetically dyed red blond, as they had been once. “I was a beauty queen,” she’d told the boys, with a snapping nod of her head that dismissed all unbelievers.

  “I was Miss Pendleton Rodeo. And Bubba, he was a rodeo star.” The boys had come up to the ranch after dark, all alone, which was strange, but they had their pockets stuffed with money, and they’d asked to be shown around the Snake Ranch. Well. Paying customers. Their parents would probably show up, were probably down the road at the store. Dirty little kids, all grubby, one of them with some blood on his shirt, must’ve cut himself. None of Mrs. Chilton’s business how their parents took care of them. Paying customers, show ’em the exhibit. Never mind the lights. Use the flashlight and the electric portalamps out in the exhibit sheds. Bubba usually did the showing but he wasn’t here, and there were wooden ramps for her wheelchair out to all the exhibits. Showing almost everything advertised on the sun-faded signs out in the highway.

  SEE! A HUNGRY SIX-FOOT RATTLER FED His LIVING DINNER!

  SEE! A NEST OF BLACK SCORPIONS, KILLER OF THE DESERT!

  SEE! THE INJUN SNAKE PIT!

  SEE! THE COYOTE CAGE! THE TARANTULA BIN! VAMPIRE BATS! THE SNARLING PUMA!

  SEE! THE DREAD GILA MONSTER! DESERT SNAKES OF ALL KINDS! INDIAN ARTIFACTS! PROSPECTOR’S EQUIPMENT!—WE ALSO HAVE FRESH WORMS FOR BAIT—

  Well. The vampire bats were actually ordinary insect-eating bats. The six-foot rattler, the puma and coyote had died of old age and ennui. But anyway you could see them stuffed.

  They had all the others, alive. Smaller rattlers, sidewinder, gopher snakes, numerous scorpions, several Gila monsters, the spiders, plenty to see. Worth the four dollars admission.

  The boys had paid four dollars each, and she’d taken them out to see the scorpions and snakes. They were sort of funny kids, not just being identical, but snickering and acting like they had a big secret. They went out behind the stucco ranch house, her complaining about the power going out, having to use the flashlight as she rolled along the ramps to the old gray wooden building that contained the main exhibits. She’d switched on the battery portalamps, and then rolled along the exhibit cases, pointing out the scorpion terrarium, grudgingly getting a white mouse from the mouse cage to show the boys how the stingers worked—white mice were expensive and that exhibit was usually for a bigger crowd—and then they’d asked to see the Injun Snake Pit.

  “Snake Pit’s closed,” she told them. “We only do that for groups with a reservation. Fill it with snakes. Scorpions. Tell the people how the Apaches would dig ’em, fill ’em up with snakes and scorpions, throw prisoners in.” She always felt a little guilty telling about it. It was Bubba’s invention, “for a little color.” Far as she knew the Indians had never done any such thing. “I can show you the pit but without the snakes it’s just a hole in the ground with a dummy of a U.S. cavalryman in it. Not much of a dummy.”