She put the baby in his bed, grimacing when he began to whimper. “Goddammit,” she muttered, “don’t start in on Mama now, Billy.” Just as if he’d heard her and taken pity, he fell silent, closed his eyes. She looked around the nursery, shaking her head. Bottles with a film of souring milk in them, wet diapers, and pacifiers lay about on the rug. She’d have to clean up, not just here but the whole house, before Evan got home. He was such a stickler about cleanliness. Anal retentive or something. They were always arguing about that. But the more he called her a slob, the less she felt like accommodating him by cleaning up. Better do it anyway, she thought, heading for the kitchen, because I can’t take another fight today. One too many fights.

  At the back of the kitchen was the basement door. Over Evan’s protests, she kept it open, with the light always on in the basement. He couldn’t understand why it scared her to have the door closed. She could feel the darkness behind the door almost like a palpable pressure against it.

  She descended the basement steps, careful because they were steep and their concrete was slick. She stepped onto the basement floor. Where was the baby carrier? She couldn’t see it.

  The light came from a small, yellowish bulb dangling near the wooden underpinnings of the ground floor above her and from the little basement window, through which she could see the dying rosebush she’d planted. She noted with annoyance that someone had broken a pane on the little hinged window. Neighborhood kids with their Frisbees probably. The basement was narrow, with paint cans in one corner and odds and ends of junky furniture taking up most of the remaining storage space. The room was dim and smelled of damp concrete and mildewed cardboard. Every corner, every rafter, sheltered a shadow; and she was sure that every shadow sheltered a spider. The squat black hairy kind.

  The baby carrier. “Where the hell did he put the silly thing?” There it was, in the far right-hand corner. Under the window, where it was in a damn shadow … .

  She stepped over a box of kitchen implements, leaned forward, balanced on one foot, reaching down behind the folding chairs, gingerly feeling for the carrier.

  Something buzzed, abrasively, suddenly, behind her.

  She felt a weird spongy slap at the inside of her knee. She fell forward, making a whimpering sound, a sound like Billy would make. There was a stab of weird, fizzling pain in her right elbow as she struck her funny bone on the corner of an aluminum chair frame. And then she was lying across the box, against the chairs, her left hand entangled in the netting of a folded Ping-Pong table.

  She jerked at the netting, trying to get loose, imagining a thousand bugs crawling on her—and hearing again that buzzing, just overhead. It stopped. There was another noise now: a clicking, scratching coming from the ceiling. Wendy froze, then, slowly, looked up toward the sound. There was something clinging to one of the two-by-fours; it clung to the support beam, hanging upside down, reminding her of those ugly wasp nests you sometimes found in attics. She couldn’t see it very clearly; but now, when it started to move, she knew it was no wasp’s nest. It began to crawl along the beam toward the space directly over her head.

  It looked at first like an immense gray-black spider with wings. But she saw it was more like an enormous housefly, nearly as big as an owl. Creeping upside-down to emerge from a band of shadow, twisting its head impossibly backward to gaze down at her with a face that—it leaped from the rafter, fluttering, its wings a blur like a hummingbird’s wings, dropping directly at her head. The basement swallowed her scream as she ripped free of the netting and twisted around to lurch toward the stairway, falling over the clattering box of pans, feeling her skin contract tightly on her, her hands go cold and clumsy; but all the time the gray insect thing was buzzing, flying around her head. She kicked the box aside, stood, shouting without words, covering her head with her arms, thinking, Where is it? Where is it now? I can’t see it.

  A feathery touch on the back of her neck. It was there.

  It clung to her. She wanted to claw it away but her arms felt heavy, the heaviness spreading out through her from the stinging between her shoulder blades. And she fell. Fell against the stairs, not feeling them.

  All the rest of her thoughts were swept up in the roaring that filled her, a feeling like four days of the flu going through her in one second. Going through and then gone, leaving numbness. And then she slumped against the steps, forgetting about the thing on the back of her neck, the rustling sound it made as it nosed into her hair … .

  She slid into a warm, gray ooze. A great pit of living glutinosity: she’d fallen into herself. And she kept falling, beyond self, into sleep.

  Perry knew he was dreaming. But it was no use to him, knowing it was a dream, because he was powerless to change the dream’s course. He was dreaming he was in the bathroom, lathering shaving cream over his jaw. The mirrored door was not flat against the medicine cabinet. He reached up, shut the door of the cabinet—doing so, the image reflected in the mirror swung, shifted to catch a different corner of the bathroom: the window.

  Something oval, gray black, blurred, clung to the windowpane from the outside. Then the window shattered, blasted inward, the glass shards flying toward him in slow motion while at the same instant, as he stared at his face in the mirror, he saw his right eye begin to bulge, then explode outward, spattering the mirror with—

  He sat up in bed, his hand clasped over his right eye. He wasn’t quite awake yet, though he sat up with his eyes open. He removed his hand from his eye, stared at the palm. Nothing. No blood. He relaxed, smiled at himself. “Jerk.”

  He stretched. The dream, he supposed, had been suggested to his unconscious by seeing Tetty with her eye missing, and the thing—probably a tired fruit bat—clinging to the window plastic: Making the mark he’d thought looked like Tetty’s face in miniature. Looking at it closer, later, the resemblance had seemed less obvious. He’d probably superimposed her face over the mark because she’d been on his mind. A projection, right out of Psych 101.

  He swung his legs off the cot, peering out through the screened glassless window at the backyard. The shadows of the trees fringing the yard were long. It was nearly evening. He’d taken a nap in the afternoon, after helping Aunt June get rid of the reporter from the Bend newspaper. He felt groggy and hungry, and there was a taut, soundless whining somewhere inside him: the residue of disorientation and anxiety from having seen Tetty dead. Dead and disfigured.

  Don’t think about it, he told himself, and the feeling will go away.

  The smell of food cooking lured him to the kitchen.

  Aunt June was setting the table with two plates, forks, and knives. Apparently Sandra hadn’t come back yet. “How you feeling?” she asked, spooning a steaming vegetarian casserole onto his plate. She looked hollow-eyed; he guessed she hadn’t slept yet. “Oh, I’m okay, I guess,” he said.

  “You look tired.”

  “Uh-huh.” He sat down and, blowing on the hot food to cool it, began to eat. She’d made it herself from fresh ingredients. “Hey, this is good.”

  “Naturally.” She smirked to pretend smugness. “Sandra called, said she’d spend the night in Bend. She’ll be back tomorrow. She begged me to stay awhile. I know it’s depressing but—do you mind?”

  “Staying?” He thought about Lois. “No. I don’t mind.”

  “Have some milk. Slow down, you’ll choke. So tell me what—” She was interrupted by the telephone, ringing from the living room. “I’ll get it.” She spoke to someone for about ten minutes, then returned, sat down, looking distracted. She made no move to finish her dinner.

  “So?” Perry said.

  “Hm? Oh, that was the sheriff. Dawson, I think his name is. Real western sheriff sort of name. He said that apparently Tetty wasn’t the one who killed the little girl; according to the coroner, she died after we’d already called the ambulance for Tetty—after Tetty was dead. That story about the girl’s brother seeing Tetty luring her out into the night is baloney. I think the sheriff knows that too. But he seems to think that two deaths in one night are too coincidental. Especially in light of the fact that the two people who died had some connection with one another.” She broke off, staring at the remains of her casserole. “And the sheriff wants to talk to us. I got him to put it off until tomorrow evening, when Sandra’s back. He wants us to come to the office. ‘Routine questioning.’ You, me, Sandra, and that Stiggins boy.”

  Perry shrugged. “Okay. Sounds like a pointless pain in the ass but I guess we have to.”

  “I suppose he’s connecting the two deaths in the obvious way.”

  “That boy hated Tetty because of the poisoning, maybe didn’t want to prosecute because he was afraid of her, and—”

  “And killed her. How would he get in?” She shrugged. “I think the coroner’s report will tell us something else. I’ve wired a friend, asked him to send me something express. It’s a book, contains a paper by a Dr. Horescu. Romanian scientist, died years ago. The paper was written in 1906, and no one took it seriously. In fact, it got him certified as a crank. I read it when I was doing research on ESS. It’s related to that.”

  “Are you going to tell me what ESS—”

  “Later. Anyway, there was something in it about a village in which everyone disappeared. Three hundred people, gone. They only found about a dozen bodies. And all of them were missing the right eye—”

  “Aunt June.”

  “—and close examination of the bodies revealed that the brains were underweight by—”

  “Aunt June.”

  She stared at him. “Ye-es?”

  “Tell me. I insist. ESS. What is it? I’m a poor lost soul and I want to know. What is it and what’s it got to do with Tetty?”

  “You want a logical explanation.” She shrugged. “It won’t be that. But Empathy Suppression Syndrome is the biological mechanism for dehumanization. Well—” She spread her hands self-deprecatingly. “Anyway, that’s my theory. Dehumanization is at work in any form of brutality. From treating people in heavy traffic like they’re just obstacles and not people, to genocide. Okay, the classic example, Hitler. How did he persuade thousands of people to, uh, facilitate the Holocaust? Germans aren’t inherently evil people.”

  “Um… sheer charisma? Mass hypnosis? Propaganda?”

  “Those things helped him—set up the right conditions, but there was another force at work. Something Hitler liberated. The same thing that made it possible for the so-called Christian Phalangists to massacre the women and children in a refugee camp in Beirut. You ever hear those stories about concentration camp guards in World War II taking pity on hungry pigeons and tossing them bits of bread on the snow while hundreds of people died of starvation in the camps behind them? It wasn’t only racism; they’d suppressed their empathy for anyone human they didn’t identify with. How did they do it so thoroughly? How do people achieve that pinnacle of ruthlessness? People who kiss their wives and children. It happened in Vietnam, with our side and theirs. And Abu Ghraib. It’s not racial.”

  “I know what you mean. It’s like a switch is thrown in ’em, and their eyes glaze over, and—”

  “Perry?”

  “Huh?”

  “The professor is lecturing here. Don’t interrupt the professor.”

  “Sorry, professor. Go on.”

  “Anyway, I think it’s a biological mechanism, genetically programmed into all of us. Nature errs on the side of excess.”

  Perry raised his hand. “Oh, professor!”

  Aunt June rolled her eyes. “What is it?”

  “How can you call that a survival trait? It makes people aggressive, right? So they lose all interest in cooperating. And that’s not great for survival.”

  “Not now it isn’t, not in our society. But it was once. It was created for primitive humanity, and we still retain it. When primitive men felt threatened, and if all the other conditions are right, the brain referred to the genetic programming that triggers the functioning of a gland I haven’t yet proven exists. This gland produces a hormone that instantly alters the character. Suppresses certain inhibitions. Most of all, removes all ability to identify with or sympathize with potential victims. This way primitive man could react without hesitation to defend himself.”

  “So what’s the connection—with Tetty?”

  “She was a sociopath. I think sociopaths suffer from sporadic bursts in the production of this hormone. It’s a kind of neurological appendicitis.”

  “But you said it was tied in with self-interest. Survival. And if she committed suicide …”

  “I know. That’s the problem. I thought—”

  Perry jumped a little, startled by a knock on the front door. Ashamed of his edginess, he said, “I’ll see who it is.” He went into the living room, opened the door.

  The man standing in the thickening dusk on the porch was very ordinary looking. He had a round face, the long sideburns of middle-aged men who hope to look younger that way, and an obvious hair transplant; friendly brown eyes, brown hair, a brown sports coat. Until he began to talk, he was nearly identical to a million contemporary middle-aged men; right down to the aviator glasses and gold watch. When he spoke, Perry was mildly surprised by his middle European accent. And something intense in his voice.

  “Good evening, my friend,” said the man at the door. “I wonder if I could please speak to Sandra Cummings. You might tell her that Dr. Arthur Rofocale is here.”

  5

  Wendy Marsteller woke in the early evening. And then again, she didn’t wake at all.

  She found herself coming into a sort of self-awareness, though, as she was climbing the stairs. There was nothing wrong with that, with waking up to find herself standing, climbing the stairs. Nothing weird about it. She climbed the stairs to the kitchen, walked through the kitchen to the living room—and stopped.

  She stood in the center of the living room, between the sofa with its sickeningly geometrical throw pillows and the portable color TV. She stood there waiting. She knew that things were happening inside her. She was waiting for those happenings to come to their conclusion. For the next step.

  She was aware of a strange objectivity, as if she were watching a movie of herself and not experiencing things directly. The way a person feels in a dream, and yet she was awake, and aware. All her physical sensations were very sharp. But mentally she was distanced.

  She was aware of another sensation. A kind of inner seething, like a pot of water on its way to a boil. The sensation wasn’t part of her yet but it was coming at her from somewhere inside, like a truck on a freeway at night, the headlights growing as it bore down, and when it hit her—there. A flood of warmth as it hit her. The feeling of distance was gone, completely replaced by the heat of that boiling. And it had radiated its heat onto everything around her. All that she saw—her canary yellow kitchen, her olive-green living room—was now tinted burning red or throbbing rose, like one of those pictures taken with infrared film. The clock’s ticking sounded like a hammer pounding. The neighbor’s dog started to bark, just then. That damn German shepherd who snarled at her from his chain when she walked by, who woke her at night with his howls. She pictured wrapping him in barbed wire and then leaving him to dangle, alive and gouged, from the top of a telephone pole, somewhere far away where his yelps wouldn’t disturb her. She wanted quiet now. So she could think coolly and make plans.

  But her ears, her nerves, were ripped by an explosive sound from another room. The nursery. A quintessentially human sound: a baby crying at the top of its lungs. The way she felt just then, the baby’s yowl for attention was as terrible, as loud, as a supersonic jet’s takeoff. It was the sound of the engine that had hijacked her life. And there was pure, uncut demand in it. I want now, I want NOW.

  How dare he make such demands of her? She knew, at that moment, that the boiling sensation was anger. It had seemed like a new sensation because she’d never felt it unadulterated, untempered before. This was anger at its purest and most absolute. Anger at its most satisfying. Anger like the best cognac in the world.

  Drink deeply, Wendy, all you want. It’s all yours now. Everything is yours!

  A voice. Whose?

  Just a friend, Wendy.

  “Where are you?” she asked, looking around. Not at all afraid, or surprised. She had sensed this other one too, she realized. It was a sort of living background she’d taken for granted. It belonged there.

  Lots of places, the voice said. Look at the basement stairs. That’s one place you’ll see me.

  She looked. Just shadow down there, edging the stairs. But as she watched, the ordinary shadows, where the light was blocked, began to thicken, and then to shift. Becoming like smoke whorled into just the hint of a bestial face.

  I helped you become a Higher person, Wendy. I sent the liberator, the flying thing you saw.

  She felt a surge of suspicion. “You think that means I work for you?”

  What put that idea in your head? Not at all. I just like to see people get free. I was bound up with guilt once too. Now I’m free from everything. Wendy, that kid is yelling again. How can you stand it?

  The baby yowling. The walls vibrating with it. Selfish little pig. It did make her angry. The anger like a silky liquor.

  It was funny about the anger, though. One part of her felt it profoundly. The other part—the part that used to make decisions for her, but which was now in the backseat—experienced the anger only impartially, dreamily. But the new side of her, the new Wendy, the one who had sat in the back and who now had taken the driver’s seat, that part of Wendy let the heat propel her along like a hot current from the living room, down the hail, into the nursery. And dimly she remembered the flying thing in the basement. She wondered what it was she’d been so scared of. The flying thing had been simply one step, one stage in the process. The process of liberation. Of becoming Higher.