The Servants of Twilight

Wind-stirred, a tree branch scraped against the house.

Inside, the funereal silence deepened.

Finally she looked at Joey.

He was bleached white. His hair hung in his face. His eyes looked haunted. In a moment of terror, he had bitten his lip, and a thread of blood had sewn a curving red seam down his chin, along his jawline, and part of the way down his neck. As always, she was shocked by the sight of his blood. However, considering what had almost happened to him, this injury could be home.

The cemetery stillness lost its cold grip on the night. Outside, along the street, there were shouts, not of anger but of fear and curiosity, as neighbors at last ventured out of their homes. In the distance, a siren swelled.

PART THREE: THE HOUNDS

Satan hasn't a single salaried helper;

the Opposition employs a million.

— Mark Twain

The hounds, the hounds

come having at his heels.

The hounds, the hounds!

The breath of death he feels.

— The Book of Counted Sorrows

26

As the authorities went about their work, Christine and Joey waited in the kitchen because that was one of the few rooms in the house that wasn't splashed with blood.

Christine had never seen so many policemen in one place before. Her house was crowded with uniformed men, plainclothes detectives, police lab technicians, a police photographer, a coroner and his assistant.

Initially, she had welcomed the lawmen because their presence gave her a feeling of security, at last. But after a while she wondered if one of them might be a follower of Mother Grace and the Church of the Twilight.

That notion didn't seem far-fetched. In fact, the logical assumption was that a militant religious cult, determined to force its views upon society at large, would make a special point of planting its people in various law-enforcement agencies and converting those who were already employed in that capacity. She remembered Officer Wilford, the born-again Christian who had disapproved of her language and manner of dress, and she wondered if perhaps Grace Spivey had been the mid-wife of his "rebirth."

Paranoia.

But considering the situation, perhaps a measure of paranoia was not a sign of mental illness; maybe, instead, it was prudent, a necessity for survival.

As rain continued to spatter the windows and as thunder shoved its way roughly through the night outside, she watched the cops warily, regarded each unusual move with suspicion. She realized that she couldn't go through the rest of her life distrusting everyone; that would require a constant watchfulness and a level of tension that would utterly drain her physical, emotional, and mental energies. It would be like living a life entirely on a high wire. For the moment, however, she couldn't relax; she remained on guard, alert, her muscles half tensed, ready to spring at anyone who made a threatening move toward Joey.

Again, the boy's resiliency surprised her. When the police had first arrived, he had seemed to be in shock. His eyes had been glazed, and he hadn't been willing or able to speak. The sight of so much bloody violence and the threat of death had left a mark on him that, for a while, had seemed disturbingly profound. She knew this experience would scar him for life; there was no escaping that. But for a time she had been afraid that the harrowing events of the past couple of hours would render him catatonic or precipitate some other dangerous form of psychological withdrawal. But eventually he had come out of it, and she had encouraged him by getting his battery-powered Pac-Man game and playing it with him. The electronic Pac-Man musical theme and the beeping sounds made by the cookie-gobbling yellow circle on the game board made a bizarre counterpoint to the grimness of murder and the seriousness of the homicide investigation being conducted around them.

Joey's recovery had also been helped by Chewbacca's miraculous recovery from the blow to the head that one of the assassins had delivered with the butt of a shotgun. The dog had been knocked unconscious, and his scalp had been skinned a bit, but the mild bleeding had stopped in response to pressure which Christine applied with antiseptic pads. There were no signs of concussion. Now the pooch was almost as good as new, and he stayed close to them, lying on the floor by Joey's chair, occasionally rising and looking up at the Pac-Man game, cocking his head, trying to figure out what the noisy device was.