She was still fifteen or twenty minutes from Sonomire Way when a disturbing sound rose above the rubber-on-road hum and the drone of the engine. The flapping-flopping noise was like the struggling of a freshly caught fish in a sportsman’s creel, and at first she thought that it must be a tire shedding tread. In that case, she would have felt such a problem translated to the steering wheel, a strong pull toward the deterioration, but she didn’t.
A subsequent silence didn’t reassure Bibi, and after less than a minute, the noise came again, this time perhaps from under the car. Something that had slipped loose must be slapping the pavement. But the Honda continued to purr along, and no warning lights appeared on the instrument panel.
The third time she heard the sound, she realized that the source was within the vehicle. On the backseat. Or on the floor behind the front passenger seat.
Then she understood what it must be.
The previous night, asleep in the armchair in her father’s office, above Pet the Cat, she had dreamed the truth of what had happened in her bedroom when she was not quite six years old. The truth that she had hidden from herself by using Captain’s memory trick of fire and forgetfulness. Not the whole truth, but part of it. In the dream, she had not revealed to herself the source and nature of the threat. Only that something malicious had come for her. Had come for her and crawled her room. Had gotten under the covers with her.
And here it was again.
After a silence in which the thing perhaps nursed its desire and considered its options, the slick and torsional sound rose again, as if this must be some slippery denizen of murky water and swamp mud, out of its element but hardly deterred, determined to make its way through this unfamiliar environment, toward what it wanted, needed. Toward her. To Bibi, it sounded as though the thing was trying to get purchase on the back of the front passenger seat, or to squirm up the transmission hump and onto the console between the seats, which should have been an easy bit of terrain to conquer.
On a straight stretch of highway, Bibi turned her head to look back and down, over the console. The pearly luminosity of instrument-panel gauges did not reach as far as the rear compartment of the car, where shadows pooled and moonlight rushing past the windows revealed nothing. If something coiled or quivered on the back floor, yearning to climb, and if it was watching her, its eyes did not shine in the gloom.
Starboard tires stuttered on the stony shoulder of the roadway. Bibi looked forward, pulled the wheel to the left, and brought the Honda onto the pavement again, just seconds short of a plunge off a low embankment.
Whether it was a sign of madness or common sense—or repressed knowledge guiding her without her understanding—Bibi told herself that if only she refused to hear the creature, refused to grant it existence, imagined it gone now and forever, she would be rid of it. Had that strategy worked for her when she had been a terrified child? She could not remember.
After a minute and the better part of another, the theory seemed to be confirmed, but then a new sound arose from the back of the car, what might have been a voice or an attempt at a voice. Low and wet, a gutteronasal clutch of syllables that formed no words but expressed nonetheless a craving, a coveting, a ferocious need, and such bitter and implacable rancor that mere hatred paled before it.
After calling Bibi a syphilitic little whore, Dr. St. Croix took such pleasure in the idea of her former student being in trouble with agencies dedicated to national security that the hardness went out of her face and the Sunday softness returned, though her smile was akin to a vindictive sneer and would have been regarded with disquiet had she been in a roomful of church folk.
“I knew that deceitful bitch would step into deep shit one day. I hope it’s deep enough for her to drown in it. She thinks she’s more cunning than she is, and she took me for a sap who could be easily intimidated. Imagine a seventeen-year-old neophyte daring to attempt to manipulate a woman as experienced and connected and respected as I am. The little fool.”
Paxton had a moment radically out of character for a Navy SEAL, a Bette Davis moment in which he wanted to throw his drink in the professor’s face and say something so cutting that she would need the rest of the year to rebuild her ego. But that was not an effective technique of interrogation. Loyal Pogo was not as good as he should have been at concealing his rage, and before the professor might glance at the kid and read his revulsion, Pax smiled at him and winked and raised his own glass as if in a toast, though by the gesture he meant to say that taking a drink would be better than throwing a punch.
“I will do anything I can,” St. Croix said, “anything, to help you convict Ms. Blair of whatever she’s done. I don’t need to know anything that’s classified about the case, if only I can hope that she’ll get something between life in prison and the death penalty.”