Part 3 (1/2)

Drawn to her side, Neil reached out to touch the vanity mirror, as though he expected to find that the image in it was not merely a flat reflection, but a three-dimensional reality, a world beyond beyond the mirror. the mirror.

Irrationally, Molly stayed his hand. ”No.”

”Why?”

”Because...”

She had no credible reason to stop him, only a superst.i.tious fear of what would happen when his fingertips met the silvered surface of the looking gla.s.s.

With his free hand, he touched the mirror, which proved to be solid.

Then, in that other other bedroom, something moved. A shadow proved not to be a shadow, after all, but a figure sinuous and dark, darting so fast across the mirror's breadth of view and out of sight that it might have been a man in a cloak, a man with membranous wings-or not a man at all. bedroom, something moved. A shadow proved not to be a shadow, after all, but a figure sinuous and dark, darting so fast across the mirror's breadth of view and out of sight that it might have been a man in a cloak, a man with membranous wings-or not a man at all.

With a gasp of surprise, Neil s.n.a.t.c.hed his hand back as if the ent.i.ty on the other side surely had the power to reach through the mirror as he himself could not.

In the same instant, Molly spun off the bench, exploded to her feet, crazily certain that something had crossed over, through the veil of gla.s.s and quicksilver. But no unwanted visitor had entered the bedroom.

She glanced at the clock just as the sideways scroll of numbers abruptly halted. The time was 2:44.

Checking her wrist.w.a.tch, she discovered that the hour and the minute hands had stopped spinning. Her timepiece agreed with the digital clock-2:44.

The music boxes fell silent.

The miniature carousel horse went from gallop to full stop in a plink, plink, and the dancing figurines froze in midwaltz. and the dancing figurines froze in midwaltz.

Molly felt suddenly relieved of the real or imagined weight that had been suspended overhead like a giant sword of Damocles.

The half-heard, fully felt, deep pulsations of sound stopped throbbing through her.

”The mirror,” Neil said.

The reflection that it now offered was of the room in which they stood. No ruins, no mold-textured walls, no crawling vine.

Neil s.h.i.+fted his attention from the mirror to the ceiling. Then he went to a window. He peered less at the surrounding forest than at the obscured night sky from which rain poured in great cascades.

”Gone,” he said.

”I felt something,” she admitted. ”But...what was it?”

”Don't have a clue.”

He was not being candid with her, nor she with him.

They had been formed by a culture drunk with the yearning for intergalactic contact, the bedrock of a new faith in which G.o.d was but a supporting player. Everyone knew the doctrines of this quasi-religion better than most people remembered the words of the Lord's Prayer: We are not alone...watch the skies...the answer is out there.... We are not alone...watch the skies...the answer is out there.... They had been Spielberged and Lucased and Shyamalaned. A thousand movies and TV shows, ten thousand books, had convinced the world that the new magi would be scientists riding not to Bethlehem on camels but to a UFO landing site in mobile labs with satellite dishes on the roofs, and that the salvation of humanity would come from another planet rather than from a higher realm. They had been Spielberged and Lucased and Shyamalaned. A thousand movies and TV shows, ten thousand books, had convinced the world that the new magi would be scientists riding not to Bethlehem on camels but to a UFO landing site in mobile labs with satellite dishes on the roofs, and that the salvation of humanity would come from another planet rather than from a higher realm.

Molly knew the signs as prophesied by Hollywood and by science fiction writers. Neil knew them, too.

This September night lay deep inside the Close Encounter Zone. In this territory, alien technology was the only font of miracles.

She didn't want to put this understanding into words, however, and apparently neither did Neil. A pretense of bewilderment felt safer than candor.

Perhaps their reticence had its roots in the fact that on this subject Hollywood offered two familiar scenarios-one in which the extraterrestrials were benign G.o.ds, one in which they were full of wrath and cruel judgment. Thus far, these recent events lacked the sweetness and the twinkle of G-rated family entertainment.

Turning away from the window and from his inspection of the rain-choked sky, Neil said, ”Not that we'll need it...but I'll get the shotgun.”

Recalling the half-glimpsed, sinuous figure that had flashed darkly across the moldering room in the mirror, Molly retrieved her handgun from the vanity and said, ”I'll get some spare cartridges for this.”

5.

ON THE KITCHEN TABLE LAY THE SHOTGUN and a box of sh.e.l.ls. Beside it were the pistol, a spare magazine, and a box of 9-mm cartridges.

Pleated window shades in the kitchen and the adjacent family room held back the night and the sight-though not the omnipresent sound-of the luminous rain.

Molly couldn't shake the feeling that the surrounding forest, previously a friendly woods, now harbored unknown hostile observers. Neil apparently shared her paranoia; he had helped her lower the shades.

They both intuited that the mysterious forces at work in this drenched night were not restricted to these mountains. Simultaneously they reached for the TV remote, and Neil got it first.

They stood in front of the big screen, watching, too agitated to settle into chairs.

Television reception was not what it should be. Some channels were so afflicted with electronic snow that only ghostly images could be seen through the blizzard. Broken voices spoke distorted words.

One of the twenty-four-hour cable-news networks offered better sound and a relatively clear picture that rolled and flickered only occasionally.

The young woman-Veronica something-anchoring the news desk was as lovely as any movie starlet. Her eyes were avaricious, her smile as genuine as that of a mannequin.

She traded unscripted commentary with a young man, Jack, who might have been a successful underwear model for Calvin Klein if he had not gone to journalism school and majored in broadcasting. His smile, quick to come and quick to falter, revealed bleached-white teeth as square as those of a cow.

War, politics, crime, and even the doings of Hollywood royalty had been washed entirely off the news wires by freakish weather of an unprecedented nature and ferocity.

During the night, unpredicted, the largest continuous storm front ever recorded had formed at sea with impossible speed. It had moved ash.o.r.e along the entire west coast of the Americas-South, Central, and North.

Reports of a curiously scented rain falling at the rate of four, five, and even six inches an hour had been received, corroborated. Within a few hours, low-lying cities all the way from Argentina to Alaska had begun suffering various degrees of flooding.

Live satellite feeds from both exotic and familiar metropolitan areas, sometimes distorted or grainy, showed cars and trucks afloat in city streets that resembled ca.n.a.ls. Families on the roofs of their half-submerged houses. Soggy hillsides sliding away in rivers of mud.

Through every image, like pure-silver threads subtly woven in a tapestry, the luminous rain glimmered, so that Argentina and Alaska, and every point between, seemed unreal, revealed by dream light.

Molly had never been a fan of catastrophic news. She found neither enlightenment nor entertainment value in watching disaster befall others. Usually she would have turned away from the TV, half sick with pity. In this case she sensed that her future was tied to the fate of the strangers on the screen.

More recently, torrential rains had begun falling across Europe. Asia. Africa. From the arid Middle East, even from the parched sands of Saudi Arabia, came reports of rain in unprecedented volume. Video was expected shortly.

Nothing in the breaking news warranted a smile. Manning their anchor desk, Veronica and Jack were nevertheless guided by the first rule of electronic journalism: Establish rapport with the audience; ingratiate yourself and make yourself welcome in their homes; be authoritative but nice, nice, dignified but dignified but fun. fun.

Neither of them could entirely conceal the excitement of being junior talent, consigned to the graveyard s.h.i.+ft, yet suddenly on-air as a huge story began breaking. Minute by minute, their audience was growing from maybe a hundred thousand insomniacs to perhaps millions of riveted viewers. You could almost hear them calculating the boost their careers would receive from this lucky timing.

Although the precise nature and the seriousness of the current crisis remained unclear, field reports compensated with dramatic content for what they lacked in coherency.