The Servants of Twilight

Henry said, "Mrs. Spivey, will you put an end to this madness? " She said nothing. She lowered her eyes.

"Mrs. Spivey?"

No response.

Charlie said, "Come on, Henry. Let's get out of here."

As they approached the door, it opened, and an enormous man entered the room, ducking his head to avoid rapping it on the frame. He had to be almost seven feet tall. He had a face from a nightmare. He didn't seem real; only images from the movies were suitable to describe him, Charlie thought. He was like a Frankenstein monster with the hugely muscled body of Conan the Barbarian, a shambling hulk spawned by a bad script and a low budget. He saw Grace Spivey weeping, and his face knotted with a look of despair and rage that made Charlie's blood turn to icy slush. The giant reached out, grabbed Charlie by the coat, and nearly hauled him off the floor.

Henry drew his gun, and Charlie said, "Hold it, hold it," because although the situation was bad it wasn't necessarily lethal.

The big man said, "Whatd you do to her? Whatd you do?"

"Nothing," Charlie said." We were-"

"Let them go," Grace Spivey said." Let them pass, Kyle."

The giant hesitated. His eyes, like hard bright sea creatures hiding deep under a suboceanic shelf, regarded Charlie with a pure malignant fury that would have given nightmares to the devil himself. At last he let go of Charlie, lumbered toward the table at which the woman sat. He spotted blood on her hands and wheeled back toward Charlie.

"She did it to herself," Charlie said, edging toward the door.

He didn't like the wheedling note in his own voice, but at the moment there didn't seem to be room for pride. To give in to a macho urge would be ironclad proof of feeble-mindedness." We didn't touch her."

"Let them go," Grace Spivey repeated.

In a low, menacing voice, the giant said, "Get out. Fast."

Charlie and Henry did as they were told.

The florid-faced woman with the protruding green eyes was waiting at the front of the rectory. As they hurried down the hallway, she opened the door. The instant they stepped onto the porch, she slammed the door behind them and locked it.

Charlie went out into the rain without putting up his umbrella.

He turned his face toward the sky. The rain felt fresh and clean, and he let it hammer at him because he felt soiled by the madness in the house.

"God help us," Henry said shakily.

They walked out to the street.

Dirty water was churning to the top of the gutter. It formed a brown lake out toward the intersection, and bits of litter, like a flotilla of tiny boats, sailed on the wind-chopped surface.

Charlie turned and looked back at the rectory. Now its grime and deterioration seemed like more than ordinary urban decay; the rot was a reflection of the minds of the building's occupants.

In the dust-filmed windows, in the peeling paint and sagging porch and badly cracked stucco, he saw not merely ruin but the physical world's representation of human madness. He had read a lot of science fiction as a child, still read some now and then, so maybe that was why he thought of the Law of Entropy, which held that the universe and all things within it moved in only one basic direction-toward decay, collapse, dissolution, and chaos.

The Church of the TWilight seemed to embrace entropy as the ultimate expression of divinity, aggressively promulgating madness, unreason, and chaos, reveling in it.

He was scared.

31

After breakfast, Christine called Val Gardner and a couple of other people, assured them that she and Joey were all right, but didn't tell any of them where she was. Thanks to the Church of the Twilight, she no longer entirely trusted her friends, not even Val, and she resented that sad development.

By the time she finished making her phone calls, two new bodyguards arrived to relieve Vince and George. One of them, Sandy Breckenstein, was tall and lean, about thirty, with a prominent Adam's apple; he brought to mind Ichabod Crane in the old Disney cartoon version of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

Sandy's partner was Max Steck, a bull of a man with bigknuckled hands, a massive chest, a neck almost as thick as his head-and a smile as sweet as any child's.

Joey took an immediate liking to both Sandy and Max and was soon running back and forth from one end of the small house to the other, trying to keep company with both of them, jabbering away, asking them what it was like to be a bodyguard, telling them his charmingly garbled version of George Swarthout's story about the giraffe who could talk and the princess who didn't have a horse.

Christine was not as quick as Joey to place her confidence in her new protectors. She was friendly but cautious, watchful.