As the well-dressed pair perused their menus, their double identities faded back and forth from human to fiend to human, as if in sympathy with the slow pulse of an alien heart. The expressions that occupied their human faces now conveyed the arrogance of those who considered humanity to be the dispossessed, who sneered at our corrupted nature, though our wickedness was a risible and pathetic reflection of their own much darker desires and impulses. The longer I watched these beasts, the more palpable their evil became. For all their strangeness, the Screamers grew more familiar by the minute, as if I’d known their kind all my life, in fact had known them even before I was born. This eerie familiarity chilled me to the marrow.
My understanding of the true nature of the world was undergoing a seismic shift. Or was I merely shedding adult illusions for the fantastic truth that every child knows? In spite of one bizarre turn of events after another, in spite of all my rushing around and my reckless surrender to the pull of mysterious forces, I sensed that I wasn’t falling away into a new reality. Instead, I felt as though I might be coming home to the world I knew a long time ago, where the monsters lurking in the closet weren’t always imaginary, where a desperate but secret war was being waged by two armies in disguise, where victory had nothing to do with conquering territory, where the battlefield was the human heart, the spoils of war the human soul.
When Bridget withdrew her hand from mine, I thought I would see the college boys only as they had first appeared to me, but instead the monstrous faceless “faces” continued to come and go. I don’t know if Bridget, by her touch, passed to me the power to see through their masquerade or whether my gift had evolved without her aid.
In any case, when I looked at Sparky, he said, “Whatever you two are, I’m not. I can’t see them as they really are, but I always believed her when she told me about them.”
A thin sweat greased the nape of my neck. “What in God’s name are those things?”
Bridget said, “I don’t know. I didn’t see the first one until two years ago. I’ve seen quite a few since. There was a really hairy incident with one of them a few months ago.”
“What incident?”
Instead of explaining, she said, “Maybe they’re from another world, another dimension, another time. Whatever they are, my sense is they’re nothing new, that they’ve been among us for a long time.”
If the events of the day had been profoundly disturbing, they had also inspired in me a pleasing sense of adventure, a tentative longing for a life flavored with more excitement than that enjoyed by a magazine writer who’d spent most of his years in an orphanage. Suddenly, excitement struck me as being the pursuit of fools, and adventure seemed to have become a synonym for suicide.
Darlene arrived with our plates balanced on her left arm, from hand to shoulder. With her right hand, she dealt the three orders of pork sliders onto the table, spilling not one drop of sauce or a single French fry. “Enjoy yourselves, children. I’ll be right back to refill your drinks.”
I thought the repellent pair of masqueraders must have killed my appetite. But even condemned men on death row eat a hearty dinner before the lethal injection, in denial of their mortality. It is human nature to know we die and still to disbelieve it; otherwise, we might not carry on. When the aroma rising from the sliders made my mouth water, I picked up the first of the two small sandwiches and finished it by the time Darlene returned with a Pyrex coffeepot in one hand and a fresh cherry Coke in the other. I ordered a second plate of sliders, and so did my companions.
Darlene beamed at us. “I like folks who know what eatin’ is all about. Some come in here, they don’t want dressin’ on their salad, don’t want butter on their baked potato. They want a plantburger. They should just save themselves some money, go on out in a field, and graze.”
“We haven’t eaten here in a while,” Bridget said. “Is José still the head chef? I think it was José or Juan or maybe just Joe.”
“There was a José back when. He was good. But now it’s one of us—Paloma—and she’s even better than he was. Don’t you think?”
“A woman cooking at a truck stop!” Bridget clapped her hands with delight.
Darlene said, “There was a time I never thought I’d see it, what with the good-old-boy management you get in this business.”
I couldn’t understand why Bridget cared a whit who the chef was when there were monsters in the room.