By the Light of the Moon Read Free

sufficiently clean to serve as an operating theater for a quadruple by-pass in the event that one of the customers at last achieved multiple artery blockages while consuming another double-patty cheeseburger. Of itself, however, mere cleanliness wasn’t enough to induce Jilly to eat at one of the small Formica-topped tables under a glare of light intense enough to cause genetic mutations.
    In the parking lot, in the Coupe DeVille, as Jilly ate a chicken sandwich and French fries, she and Fred listened to her favorite radio talk show, which focused on such things as UFO sightings, evil extraterrestrials eager to breed with human women, Big Foot (plus his recently sighted offspring, Little Big Foot), and time travelers from the far future who had built the pyramids for unknown malevolent purposes. This evening, the smoky-voiced host—Parish Lantern—and his callers were exploring the dire threat posed by brain leeches purported to be traveling to our world from an alternate reality.
    None of the listeners who phoned the program had a word to say about fascistic Islamic radicals determined to destroy civilization in order to rule the world, which was a relief. After establishing residence in the occipital lobe, a brain leech supposedly took control of its human host, imprisoning the mind, using the body as its own; these creatures were apparently slimy and nasty, but Jilly was comforted as she listened to Parish and his audience discuss them. Even if brain leeches were real, which she didn’t believe for a minute, at least she could
understand
them: their genetic imperative to conquer other species, their parasitic nature. On the other hand, human evil rarely, if ever, came with a simple biological rationale.
    Fred lacked a brain that might serve as a leech condominium, so he could enjoy the program without any qualms whatsoever regarding his personal safety.
    Jilly expected to be refreshed by the dinner stop, but when she finished eating, she was no less weary than when she had exited the interstate. She’d been looking forward to an additional four-hour drive across the desert to Phoenix, accompanied part of the way by Parish Lantern’s soothing paranoid fantasies. In her current logy condition, however, she was a danger on the highway.
    Through the windshield, she saw a motel across the street. “If they don’t allow pets,” she told Fred, “I’ll sneak you in.”

Chapter Three
    H IGH-SPEED JIGSAW IS A PASTIME BEST UNDERTAKEN by an individual who is suffering from subtle brain damage and who consequently is afflicted by intense and uncontrollable spells of obsession.
    Shepherd’s tragic mental condition usually gave him a surprising advantage whenever he turned his full attention to a picture puzzle. He was currently reconstructing a complex image of an ornate Shinto temple surrounded by cherry trees.
    Although he’d started this twenty-five-hundred-piece project only shortly after he and Dylan checked into the motel, he had already completed perhaps a third of it. With all four borders locked in place, Shep worked diligently inward.
    The boy—Dylan thought of his brother as a boy, even though Shep was twenty—sat at a desk, in the light of a tubular brass lamp. His left arm was half raised, and his left hand flapped continuously, as though he were waving at his reflection in the mirror that hung above the desk; but in fact he shifted his gaze only between the picture that he was assembling and the loose pieces of the puzzle piled in the open box. Most likely, he didn’t realize that he was waving; and certainly, he couldn’t control his hand.
    Tics, rocking fits, and other bizarre repetitive motions were symptoms of Shep’s condition. Sometimes he could be as still as cast bronze, as motionless as marble, forgetting even to blink, but more often than not, he flicked or twiddled his fingers for hours on end or jiggled his legs, or tapped his feet.
    Dylan, on the other hand, had been so securely taped to a