I said, “We need one of you to be on stage to assist one of the magicians with a few totally amazing tricks. It’ll be really cool.”
One sweet-faced boy of about six raised his hand and said, “I’ll do it.”
“I’m sorry, son, but I’m not asking for a volunteer. We’re going to play a fun game, and the winner gets to help the magician. First I need all of you to close your eyes. Come on, now. Close them. Close them tight. You, too. That’s right, that’s good. You have to keep them closed through the whole game, until I tell you to open them.”
I drew one of the Glocks, turned, and shot Ken #1 in the head. His eyes weren’t closed, of course, but they didn’t even have time to widen in recognition of what was happening.
Ken #2 must have been thinking about superdelicious mammaries, because he was slower on the draw than I expected, and I shot him point-blank in the face and throat before he could get his piece out of his shoulder rig. Just to be sure about Ken #1, I leaned down to where he’d fallen and popped him again.
Every shot was a whifff, but the bodies made some hard sounds when they hit the carpet, so I said, “Keep your eyes closed, kids. Keep them closed really tight.”
The butterflies in my stomach were snakes now, slippery masses of serpents squirming over one another.
I knelt beside the first Ken, looked into his eyes, and then pulled his Kermit the Frog sweater over his face like a shroud, to conceal his wounds. I looked in the second Ken’s eyes and drew his Rudolph sweater over his face, as well.
I thought that I heard a noise in the hallway. I froze, stared at the door, waiting for a knock or for the knob to turn. Nothing happened.
In the farther half of the room, there might be chunks of skull and worse. I turned to the kids to be sure that they had their eyes shut, and they all did, except for the girl with the ponytail. Her stare was wide and gray-green and bright.
“Keep your eyes closed,” I told the others. “We’re almost ready to begin the game.”
I went to the lamp that cast light into that part of the room where debris had fallen. I yanked its plug from the wall receptacle.
Returning to the kids, I said, “When you open your eyes, try not to look too close at things. There’s no reason to look close. Okay, you can open them.”
They stared at the dead men. Some of them—but not most—looked away. A few started to cry, but I gently shushed them.
“I’m going to take you out of here and home again,” I told them. “But you have to be quiet, very quiet, and do exactly what I say.”
The girl with the ponytail stared intensely at me, as if she were a living polygraph. She nodded. To the others, she said, “Do what he tells you. If he has to, he’ll die for us.”
The crying children wiped at their eyes, choked back their sobs.
I smiled at the girl. “No horseshit, huh?”
“Zero,” she said.
Thirty-two
INITIALLY, I THOUGHT THAT THE CHILDREN SHOULD BE untied or the ribbons cut, but I quickly realized the advantage of leaving them tethered to those on both sides of them, wrist to wrist. If suddenly they were spooked by something, they could not scatter in a panic. I was more likely to be able to protect them if they remained together, less likely to lose one who, in unthinking terror, might run and hide.
I went once more to the window, to assess quickly the state of things.
Directly overhead, the architecture of the now-parched storm continued to come apart. Through holes in the roof of clouds, more stars appeared moment by moment, as if those distant suns were just now being born by the thousands.
Over the lake or where the lake had been, that other sky, awful and without one flicker, concealed beneath it what had come from some malignant shore to this one. Dark forms, moving and threatening within a deeper darkness, defied the eye and would not be defined.
As I have explained in previous volumes of this memoir, there are other spirits that I sometimes see in addition to those of the lingering dead, though they might never have been human at any stage of their existence. I call them bodachs because, when visiting Pico Mundo many years earlier, an English boy who apparently had talents akin to mine and who could also see these spirits called them bodachs just before he was crushed to death by a runaway truck. They are as insubstantial as fumes but not transparent, instead soot-black and without features, sinuous. Although they can’t pass through walls as ghosts can, they are able to slip through any crevice or crack, or keyhole. Their silhouettes suggest wolf and human both. They slink and slouch, glide and slither, and they have an interest in certain people, especially in those who will soon die by violence and also in those who will murder them.