“And it’s weirdly judgmental,” Leigh Ann said. “Calls us vermin, pestilence, says we’ve got to die. It’s so not Spielberg.”
Joanna said, “It’s been here for centuries, observing. Maybe millennia. It seems virtually immortal. It was rational once. Not now. Something’s happened to it.”
Leigh Ann hugged herself. “It’s psychotic. Totally apeshit.”
“We think part of what happened to it is a freak named Asher Optime,” Wyatt said.
Ganesh looked up from his phone. “Optime. If we survive the next hour, I’ll want to know how you figured Optime.”
He had left the door ajar; and now everyone startled as two strangers entered from the veranda. A teenage boy with a backpack, said, “Optime? He’s the piece of shit who killed my father.”
Hesitating for a moment, but then closing the door behind her, the woman with the kid said, “The crazy fuck has a church basement full of corpses in Zipporah.”
The two were drenched, dripping, pale with exhaustion but taut with fear.
Wyatt said, “What’s Zipporah?”
The woman’s attention flicked from face to face. Her voice was sharp with suspicion. “How do you know Asher Optime?”
Joanna sensed that time was running out. She could see they all sensed it. In spite of a fear that was winding her nerves as tight as clock springs, she was nonetheless puzzled by the familiarity of the moment, as if she’d been here before. And then she understood. It’s the traditional drawing room scene, for God’s sake. It’s Agatha Christie, the next to last chapter, when the cast is gathered for the big revelation, for the solution to the mystery. Except in this case, none of us is a killer. We’re here not to witness the killer brought to justice but instead to be killed. A tremor of blackest amusement fluttered through her. If she hadn’t repressed the laugh, it would have had such an icy, mad quality that everyone in the room might have regarded her with cold apprehension, wondering if the Other had just taken possession of her.
She realized there was something that Ganesh Patel might not know and that it could be important for him to hear it. “The Other can read minds.”
Clearly alarmed, he said, “Without doubt? You’re certain? Hey, Artimis, did you hear that?” He held his phone toward Joanna. On the screen was a woman’s face. “Say it again for Artimis?”
“The Other can read minds,” Joanna declared, wondering who the hell Artimis might be. “Just one mind at a time. It said it was never going to do that again because our thoughts disgust it, and maybe that’s true, but it can read minds.”
“Is it here now?” Ganesh asked.
“I don’t . . . I don’t think so.”
“How would you know?”
“I wouldn’t.”
Of all the possible dramatic entrances that might then have occurred, none would have been more likely to convince most of those assembled that Death itself had come among them than did the abrupt entrance of Jimmy Two Eyes. He threw open the door and staggered in from the storm, a bizarre figure to anyone who had never seen him before, brother to the Phantom of the Opera, evidence that Victor Frankenstein might currently be at work in Montana, fantasticated by the Brothers Grimm and now escaped from a book of dark fairy tales. With his deeply hooded and mismatched eyes, he surveyed everyone gathered in the large living room. He swayed as though he must be at the end of his resources, and his gnarled hands worked the air like those of an impassioned preacher calling down God’s wrath or mercy.
In the shocked silence of those in the room, with the wind chorusing beyond the open door, Joanna didn’t know whether to fear Jimmy or pity him, and she was gripped by both emotions. His gaze moved past her to the others. Then, as if belatedly realizing that he had seen her, his attention snapped back to Joanna, one eye as clear and blue as the water in Eden but the other black, bloody, and demonic.
“Please Jojo help Jimmy.”
The fact that he spoke was sufficient to shrink her pity and expand fear into terror, for it seemed to mean that the Other was in him. Then Joanna realized that his voice, while issuing rough and thick-tongued, was not precisely the same as it had been when he’d been used like a puppet, was in fact different enough to suggest that this was his true voice, somehow freed after a lifetime of mute incapacity, and not the voice forced out of him when he’d been the Other’s avatar.
He worked his mouth, rolled his head, strained his throat, and with effort said, “Father hurt. Gone God. To God. Help Jimmy?”