Gia looked and gasped. "Tongue with testicles? Jack, don't you dare!"

"You know I always like to try new-"

"Don't. You. Dare."

"Okay. Just for you, my dear, I will forego that epicurean delight." He'd had no intention of dining on a dish that sounded like a sex act anyway. "I guess I'll just settle for a lamb kabab."

Once their orders were in, Jack leaned over the table.

"Let me start at the beginning. It may take a minute or two, but a little patience will pay off. It began last summer when a crazy Hindu sailed a boatload of creatures called rakoshi to the West Side docks. They were big and vicious and they threatened someone I care very much about." He glanced at Gia and their eyes met. They'd come so close to losing Vicky, and Jack himself had barely survived. "But they could be killed, and I killed them."

Not all of them. One still survived, but Jack decided not to go into that.

"I thought that was that. It was the strangest occurrence of my life until then, but I put it behind me and moved on. But then, last spring, I learned that the origin of those creatures was not exactly earthly."

Lyle said, "We're not heading for UFOville, are we?"

"No. This is weirder. While looking for a missing wife I fell in with some strange people who told me that the rakoshi had been 'fashioned'-that was the word-of everything bad in humans. Something took human lust and greed and hate and viciousness and distilled it into these creatures without any leavening factors. They were human evil to the Nth."

"You talkin' demons," Charlie said.

"They'd fit the description, I guess."

"And the 'something' you said did this. You talkin' Satan?"

"No. I was told it's called the Otherness."

"Could be just another name for Satan."

"I don't think so. Satan's a pretty easy concept to grasp. He was thrown out of heaven because of his pride and now he spends his time luring souls away from God and stashing them in hell where they suffer for eternity. That about right?"

"Well, yeah," Charlie said. "But-"

"Fine, then." Jack didn't want to get sidetracked here. "But I've had the Otherness explained to me a couple of times and I still don't have a handle on it. Apparently two vast, unimaginably complex cosmic forces have been at war forever. The prize in this war is all existence-this world, other realities, other dimensions, everything is at stake. Before you start feeling important, I was told that our corner of reality is just a tiny piece of that whole, and of no special importance. But if one side's going to be the winner, it's got to take all the marbles. Even our little backwater."

"Don't tell me," Lyle said, his tone bordering on disdain. "One of these forces is Good and one is Eeeevil."

"Not quite. That would make it easy. The way I understand it, the side that has our reality in its pocket is not good or evil, it's just there. The most we can expect from it is benign neglect."

"'Thou shalt not have false gods before me,' " Charlie intoned.

"It's not a god. It's a force, a state of being, a..." Jack spread his hands in frustration. "I don't know if we can grasp anything that vast and alien."

"Does it have a name?" Lyle said.

Jack shook his head. "No. I've heard someone refer to it as the Ally, but that's not quite right. It will only act on our behalf to keep us in its possession. Other than that it doesn't give a damn about us."

"And the Otherness is... what?" Lyle said. "The other side?"

"Right. And it doesn't have a name either, but people who seem to know about these things call it the Otherness because it represents everything not us. Its rules are different than ours. It wants to convert our form of reality to its own, one that'll be toxic for us-physically and spiritually."

"That Satan, I tell you!" Charlie cried. Lyle rolled his eyes. Charlie caught it and pointed to Jack. "He just nailed Satan dead on, bro, and you know it. Why don't you stop frontin' and cop to it?"

To head off a looming argument, Jack said, "Well, the Otherness could have been the inspiration for the idea of Satan. I've heard it described as vampiric, and it sounds to me as if its idea of reality would create a hell on earth. So maybe..."

"But what does all this have to do with this afternoon?" Lyle said.

"I'm getting to that. This past spring I learned the hard way that the elements in the Otherness responsible for creating the rakoshi wanted my head for killing them. They missed me but a few people and a good-size house vanished from the face of the earth."

"Ay, yo, I remember readin' 'bout that," Charlie said. "Someplace out on Long Island, right?"

Jack nodded. "A little town called Monroe."

"Right!" Lyle said. "I remember trying to think up a way to take credit for it, or at least come up with a way-out explanation that would buy me some PR. But about half a dozen mediums in the city beat me to it." He looked at Jack. "You're telling me that was you?"

"I didn't cause it," Jack said. "I just happened to be on the scene. And I wasn't the only one there. Both sides were represented. On the Otherness team was a guy calling himself Sal Roma. Not his real name-he'd stolen it. He seemed pretty tuned in to the Otherness, like he was its main agent here. His name has popped up a couple of times since then, once I think as an anagram."

"An anagram?" Lyle said. "That's interesting. Means there's a good chance his real name is hidden in those letters. I've read that ancient wizards used to operate under aliases for fear that someone who knew their True Name could have power over them."

"I think this guy's just playing games. But if I ever learn his True Name, I'm going to find him and..." Jack stopped himself. "Never mind."

Charlie said, "You gotta personal beef with this Roma?"

The thought of Kate made the old pain new. "You could say that."

Jack glanced at Gia. She smiled her sympathy and took his hand under the table. They'd talked a lot about this in the past month or so. Gia believed. She'd seen the rakoshi, so she'd been well down the road to acceptance when he'd explained all this to her. But even after what they'd seen today, the Kenton brothers probably thought he was nuts.

He took a breath. "But back to the big hole in Monroe: Sal Roma and some nasty sort of pet of his were there for the Otherness; the anti-Otherness side was represented by a couple of guys who looked like twins. I was caught in the middle, and the twins were ready to sacrifice me for their purposes-which showed me firsthand how unbenign this so-called Ally power is. Things got kind of complicated, but the upshot is, I walked away and the twins didn't."

"You know," Lyle said, "this is all really fascinating, but what's it got to do with our house?"

"I'm getting to that. I've since learned-or at least I was told-that I've been drafted into the service of the anti-Otherness."

"Drafted?" Lyle said. "You mean you don't have any say about that?"

"Not a thing, apparently. My guess is that because I'm somewhat responsible for the demise of the twins, I'm supposed to replace them. But if the Great Whatever that drafted me thinks I'm going to go trotting about putting out Otherness-started fires, it better think again. I don't know about my predecessors, but I've got a life."

"What you mean, 'Otherness-started fires'?" Charlie said.

"Not sure, but I've got an idea that most of the strange things that happen in this world-what people like to call paranormal or supernatural-are really manifestations of the Otherness. Anything that terrifies, confounds, and confuses us, anything that brings out the worst in us makes it stronger."

Charlie banged his fist on the table. "You talking 'bout Satan, dawg! The Father of Lies, the Sower of Discord!"