Quicksilver(20)

The hostess tried to seat them near us, but they wanted a booth at the very back of the room, though that meant sitting near the two swinging doors to the kitchen. They didn’t appear to be accustomed to sitting near the kitchen, but they insisted on it.

Bridget said softly, “Screamer alert, Grandpa.”

“Quinn,” Sparky whispered, “don’t stare at them. They’re major bad news.”

As the two glided through the restaurant, they surveyed the customers with what seemed to be amused contempt. I had sometimes wondered what it must be like to be their type, to be so self-assured in all circumstances, so certain of being superior. My imagination was not up to the task.

“We never know what their kind are looking for. We’re afraid it might be Bridget.”

I looked away from the duo as they followed the hostess in our direction.

Bridget reached across the table. “Give me your hand.”

Holding her hand was preferable to taking a punch from her.

She raised her voice and put a little gush in it. “Darling, the Arizona Biltmore is the perfect place for the reception. Yes, it’s expensive, but if Grandfather insists on paying for it—”

“I do,” Sparky said. “I insist. My only grandchild is marrying the son of my best friend on my own wedding anniversary. What could be more romantic? It makes me feel young and in love again. There’s no price too high for that feeling.”

From the corner of my eye, I saw the college boys slow as they passed our booth, perhaps giving us a close inspection. “Sweetums, I want whatever you want,” I declared. I turned my smile on Sparky. “Sir, I’m knocked out by your generosity. Really knocked out. Just totally knocked out.”

The stylish pair moved away from us. I dared to look up—and saw the right hand of the one carrying the tote. His hand was no longer a human hand. The six fingers lacked knuckles and resembled tentacles, gray and sinuous. Wickedly sharp talons gleamed for an instant, but then were gone, retracted as if they did not exist. The hand appeared to be highly articulated and yet amorphous, as if by an act of will the creature could remake that instrument from a tool into a lethal weapon.

As I squeezed Bridget’s hand, she gripped mine tighter and said, “You see?”

“Yes.” I looked after the retreating pair.

These beasts were like menacing presences from those disturbing dreams that have their origins in generations long before our own, those dreams that boil up from the primordiality of our creation. They moved through the restaurant and settled into the booth near the entrance to the kitchen. They lacked anything that could be called a face. Screamer alert, Bridget had told her grandfather. I understood why she would call them Screamers. These things seemed to be perpetually straining to scream, although no sound escaped them. Where a face should have been, there were no apparent eyes or ears or nose, but only a pale-lipped mouth fixed open wide, as circular as a drain, like the mouth of a hookworm. At a distance, I couldn’t be sure, but I thought that a repulsive organ slithered continuously within those disgusting orifices, as though they were greedy for sustenance.

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.”