Finally the floor was dry. I was still wet, though, and needed a towel myself. I edged over to the doorway and stuck my head around the corner. A dim and lonely hall awaited.
I crept down the corridor. I used the barrel of the party gun to nudge open each door as I came to it, and the Phoenician was in every room. He was in the tiny home office, standing motionless in one corner. I spotted him in my peripheral vision, and my pulse did a hectic jig, and I looked again and saw it was only a coatrack. He was in the guest bedroom, too. Oh, at first glance, the place seemed empty. It could’ve been a room in a Motel 6, with its neatly made queen-size bed, striped wallpaper, and modest TV. The door to the closet, though, was slightly ajar, and as I stared at it, it seemed to wobble slightly, as if it had only just been pulled closed. I could feel him in there, holding his breath. It took all the will I possessed to walk the three steps to the closet. When I threw open the door, I was prepared to die. The little cabinet within contained a collection of curious costumes—a pink jumpsuit with a fur collar, white silks of the sort Elvis Presley liked to wear in the seventies—but no psychopaths.
Finally only the door to the master bedroom remained. I gently turned the knob and carefully pushed it inward. The screen door in the kitchen chose that exact moment to bang once again, going off like a pistol shot.
I looked behind me and waited. It came to me then that I was trapped here at the end of the corridor. The only way to get out of the house (without leaping through a window) was to retrace my steps. I swayed, ready for the Phoenician to step into the hall, planting himself between me and escape. One moment turned into another.
No one came. Nothing moved. Rain hammered on the roof.
I stuck my head into the bedroom. Shelly was asleep on her side beneath a puffy white comforter, nothing of her showing except her dandelion puff of white hair. Her snore was a soft, rasping buzz, barely audible over the steady rumble of the downpour.
I inched into the room in mincing little steps, feeling jumpy and weak—but quite a bit less jumpy and weak than I’d been when I first entered the house. I used the party gun to push aside curtains. There was no one behind them. No one in the closet either.
My nerves were still jangly, but I wasn’t scared of the house anymore. I didn’t see why a guy like the Phoenician would hide in a closet anyway. What kind of predator hid from a fat thirteen-year-old with a big plastic gun that looked about as threatening as a bullhorn?
The signal from Radio Adulthood was sharpening by then, making its way through the usual static of adolescence. The newscaster was reading tonight’s report in a dry, droll tone. He reminded me of Carl Sagan’s maxim that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. He pointed out that I had in the past believed that the Zodiac Killer might break into my house and murder me, simply because I’d once read a book about him. He reminded his listeners that Michael Figlione had, when he was twelve, saved his allowance for six months to buy a metal detector because he thought there was a strong chance of finding Spanish doubloons buried in his backyard. Radio Adulthood wanted its audience to know that my current theory—that the Phoenician possessed a camera capable of stealing thoughts—was based on the sturdy evidence of an old lady’s demented ramblings and a random scuffed snapshot discovered beneath a trash can.
But, but, but—what about the fire at the gym? Yes, Radio Adulthood admitted, there’d been a shocking blaze at Mr. Beukes’s gym. Considering the lightning storm that had just rolled in, the Cupertino fire department would probably be responding to a lot of fires that evening. Did I think perhaps that the storm was also the work of the Phoenician? Was that another of his “superpowers”? He had a camera that destroyed minds. Did he also have an umbrella that squirted thunderstorms into the sky? I should count myself lucky he hadn’t used his sorcery to make it rain nails.
That was about all the jeering from Radio Adulthood I wanted to hear at the moment. I was wet, and I was cold, and I was safe, and that was good enough. But later—yes, later—maybe I would be tuning back in to hear the rest of the program. Maybe a part of me was looking forward to tearing myself down, taking a good rip at my own overworked Twilight Zone imagination.
I was sick of my soggy clothes and poked my head into the master bathroom. There was a big white robe trimmed in gold thread hanging off a hook by the shower, the kind of robe you’d expect to find in a five-star hotel. It looked like the next best thing to curling up in a bed somewhere.
I patted the party gun dry, set it down next to the sink, and schlopped off my wet shirt. I left the door open between the bathroom and the bedroom, but I stood behind it so if Shelly Beukes woke, she wouldn’t be startled by the sight of my exposed pink blubber.
The rain was slackening by then, had softened to a deep, lulling crackle on the roof. As I toweled off my boy boobs and back, I felt myself softening with it. I had planned to sit in the kitchen, next to the screen door, ready to run at the first sign of a psycho, but now I was beginning to indulge fantasies of hot cocoa and Girl Scout cookies.
The rain was tapering off, but the lightning was still going full throttle. It flashed, close enough to fill the bathroom with a throb of almost blinding silver light. I wrestled off my pants, which were soaked through. I peeled off my waterlogged socks, too. The lightning blinked again, the brightest flash yet. I wiggled into the robe. It was even softer and fluffier than I’d imagined. It was like wearing an Ewok.
I toweled off my wet hair, my neck, and the lightning snapped for a third time, and Shelly responded to it with a low moan of unhappiness. Then I understood and I wanted to moan myself. All those flashes of lightning and not one crack of thunder.
Fear inflated within me like a balloon, a thing expanding in my midsection, pushing organs out of the way. The white glare flashed again, not outside but from within the bedroom.
There was a single window in the bathroom, but I wasn’t getting out that way: it was made of glass bricks, set inside the shower, and couldn’t be opened. The only way out was past him. I reached for my party gun with a shaking hand. I thought that maybe I could throw it at him—at his face—and run.
I peeked around the edge of the door. My pulse thrummed. The flash flashed.
The Phoenician stood by the bed, bent over Shelly with his camera, peering through the viewfinder. He had pulled the covers completely off her. Shelly was curled on her side, a hand protecting her face, but as I watched, the Phoenician grabbed her wrist and forced her arm down.
“None of that,” he said. “Let’s see you.”
The flash went off again, and the camera whirred. The Solarid spit a photo onto the floor.
Shelly made a low, wounded sound of refusal, a noise that was almost but not quite No.