Before Stormy spoke, I knew the essence of what she would say. "Might be more of a crowd in a cool theater on a summer afternoon than at a Little League game."

I asked Viola, "What did you plan after the movie?"

"Terri said bring them to the Grille, dinner on her."

The Grille could be noisy when all the tables were filled, but I didn't think that the enthusiastic conversation of the patrons in our little restaurant could be mistaken for the roar of a crowd. In dreams, of course, everything can be distorted, including sounds.

With the open window at my back, I suddenly felt vulnerable to an extent that made the skin pucker on the nape of my neck.

I looked out into the side yard again. All appeared to be as it had been a minute ago.

The graceful branches of the peppers hung in the breathless, jasmine-scented night air. Shadows and shrubs plaited their different darknesses, but as far as I could tell, they didn't give cover to Bob Robertson or anyone else.

Nevertheless, I stepped away from the window, to the side of it, when I turned once more to Viola. "I think you ought to change your plans for tomorrow."

By saving Viola from this destiny, I might be sentencing someone else to die horribly in her place, just as might have been the case if I had warned off the blond bartender at the bowling alley. The only difference was that I didn't know the blonde… and Viola was a friend.

Sometimes complex and difficult moral choices are decided less by reason and by right than by sentiment. Perhaps such decisions are the paving stones on the road to Hell; if so, my route is well paved, and the welcoming committee already knows my name.

In my defense, I can only say that I sensed, even then, that saving Viola meant saving her daughters, too. Three lives, not one.

"Is there any hope…" Viola touched her face with the trembling fingers of one hand, tracing the bones of jaw and cheek and brow, as if discovering not her skull but instead Death's countenance in the process of replacing her own. "… any hope this can pass from me?"

"Fate isn't one straight road," I said, becoming the oracle that earlier in the day I had declined to be for her. "There are forks in it, many different routes to different ends. We have the free will to choose the path."

"Do whatever Oddie says," Stormy advised, "and you'll be all right."

"It's not that easy," I said quickly. "You can change the road you take, but sometimes it can bend back to lead you straight to that same stubborn fate."

Viola regarded me with too much respect, perhaps even awe. "I was just sure you knew about such things, Odd, about all that's Otherly and Beyond."

Uneasy with her admiration, I went to the other open window. Terri's Mustang stood under a streetlamp in front of the house. All quiet. Nothing to be alarmed about. Nothing and everything.

We had taken steps to be sure we weren't being followed from the bowling center. I remained concerned, anyway, because Robertson's appearance at Little Ozzie's house and again in the churchyard had surprised me, and I could not afford to be surprised a third time.

"Viola," I said, turning to her once more, "changing all your plans for tomorrow isn't enough. You'll also need to remain vigilant, alert to anything that seems… wrong."

"I'm already as jumpy as a cricket."

"That's no good. Jumpy isn't the same as vigilant."

She nodded. "You're right."

"You need to be as calm as possible."

"I'll try. I'll do my best."

"Calm and observant, prepared to react fast to any threat but calm enough to see it coming."

Poised on the edge of the chair, she still appeared to be as ready to leap as any cricket.

"In the morning," Stormy said, "we'll bring you a photo of a man you ought to be on the lookout for." She glanced at me. "Can you get her a good picture of him, Oddie?"

I nodded. The chief would provide me with a computer-printed blow-up of the photo of Robertson that the DMV had released to him.

"What man?" Viola asked.

As vividly as possible, I described Fungus Man, who had been at the Grille during the first shift, before Viola had arrived for work. "If you see him, get away from him. You'll know the worst is coming. But I don't think anything will happen tonight. Not here. From all indications, he's intending to make headlines in a public place, lots of people__"

"Tomorrow, don't go to the movies," Stormy said.

"I won't," Viola assured her.

"And not out to dinner, either."

Although I didn't understand what could be gained from having a look at Nicolina and Levanna, I suddenly knew that I should not leave the house without checking on them. "Viola, may I see the girls?"

"Now? They're sleeping."

"I won't wake them. But it's… important."

She rose from the chair and led us to the room that the sisters shared: two lamps, two nightstands, two beds, and two angelic little girls sleeping in their skivvies, under sheets but without blankets.

One lamp had been set at the lowest intensity on its three-way switch. The apricot-colored shade cast a soft, inviting light.

Two windows were open to the hot night. As insubstantial as a spirit, a translucent white moth beat its wings insistently against one of the screens, with the desperation of a lost soul fluttering against the gates of Heaven.

Mounted on the inside of the windows, with an emergency-release handle that couldn't be reached from outside, were steel bars that would prevent a man like Harlo Landerson from getting at the girls.

Screens and bars could foil moths and maniacs, but neither could keep out bodachs. Five of them were in the room.

TWENTY-SIX

TWO SINISTER SHAPES STOOD AT EACH BED, VISITORS from one hell or another, travelers out of the black room.

They hunched over the girls and appeared to be studying them with keen interest. Their hands, if they had hands, floated a few inches above the sheets, and seemed slowly to trace the shrouded contours of the children's bodies.

I couldn't know for sure what they were doing, but I imagined that they were drawn to the very life energy of Nicolina and Levanna- and were somehow basking in it.

These creatures seemed to be unaware that we had entered the room. They were enthralled if not half hypnotized by some radiance that the girls emitted, a radiance invisible to me but evidently dazzling to them.

The fifth beast crawled the bedroom floor, its movements as fluid and serpentine as those of any reptile. Under Levanna's bed it slithered, seemed to coil there, but a moment later emerged with a salamandrian wriggle, only to glide under Nicolina's bed and whip itself silently back and forth, like a thrashing snake in slow-mo.

Unable to repress a shudder, I sensed that this fifth intruder must be savoring some exquisite spoor, some ethereal residue left by the passage of the little girls' feet. And I imagined-or hope I did-that I saw this squirming bodach repeatedly lick the carpet with a cold thin tongue.

When I would not venture far past the doorway, Viola whispered, "It's all right. They're deep sleepers, both of them."

"They're beautiful," Stormy said.

Viola brightened with pride. "They're such good girls." Seeing in my face a faint reflection of the abhorrence that gripped my mind, she said, "What's wrong?"

Glancing at me as I summoned an unconvincing smile, Stormy at once suspected the truth. She squinted into the shadowy corners of the room-left, right, and toward the ceiling-hoping to catch at least a fleeting glimpse of whatever supernatural presence revealed itself to me.

At the beds, the four hunched bodachs might have been priests of a diabolic religion, Aztecs at the altar of human sacrifice, as their hands moved sinuously and ceaselessly in ritualistic pantomime over the sleeping girls.