Quicksilver(28)

Those were the Big Important Thoughts that occupied me as I repressed belches inspired by pork, which escaped as hisses through my clenched teeth.

Meanwhile, we were drawn through Tucson on such a circuitous route that I began to wonder if the benefactor who granted us psychic magnetism was using it to mock us.

In a commercial district, when we stopped at a traffic light, six men, ranging in age from perhaps thirty to fifty, stood under a lamppost on the corner. Dressed in off-the-rack suits and ties, they looked too solemn to be bankers, too lacking in style to be high corporate executives. Judging by their stiff posture and pinch-faced displeasure, they might have been a firm of lawyers anticipating yet another catastrophic accident—and a brace of new clients—at this notoriously unsafe intersection or maybe college presidents in town to attend a conference on the urgent necessity of book banning.

As the light changed and they entered the crosswalk, two by two, I suddenly saw their otherness. Like those at the truck stop, their faces—such as they were—and hands fluctuated between human and not, the truth of them invisible to the other pedestrians whom they encountered in this neighborhood busy with nightlife. My first glimpse of them in the restaurant had shocked and repulsed me. But this second sighting strummed a deeper chord of horror. They were parasites made large, and yet they went about their work with as much secrecy as those roundworms that can invade a human being and attach to the walls of the intestines, there to slowly destroy the host without his knowledge.

“Six Screamers,” Bridget warned Sparky.

Watching them pass in the flux of fully human pedestrians who crossed the street from the far corner, I wondered if the entirety of human history had been infested with these creatures, swimming through civilization like blood flukes navigating arteries and veins, feeding on our pain rather than on our flesh. Or perhaps on both. The shivers that passed through me seemed to originate not in the muscles of the skin, but in my bones.

“Where are they going? What are they up to?” I wondered.

“If we follow them, we draw attention to ourselves,” Sparky said. “No element of surprise. Six wormheads, just three of us. You can bet their briefcases contain something nastier than paperwork.”

Passing in front of our Buick, three of the Screamers turned their heads toward us, those gaping maws working as if they might be lined with olfactory receptors, in which case the same organ gave them the sense of smell and the sense of taste. The apparent absence of eyes reminded me of what I’d once read about scallops, which are covered with scores of eyes so tiny that we don’t recognize them as such. Perhaps these creatures were equipped in the same manner; the flesh around the always-open always-questing mouth might be prickled with numerous eyes as small as pencil points, presenting them with a strange view of the world that conceivably conveyed more data than our eyes brought us. Or maybe the human form in which the parasite concealed itself wasn’t merely a disguise but also a functioning avatar with which it perceived the world through the same five senses that we do.

Of the three whose attention we’d drawn, two glanced at us and then moved on. However, the third came to a stop in front of our car and stared at us through the windshield. Lacking features, the face of its hidden nature produced no expressions that could be read. However, the face of its human disguise, which I saw alternately come into focus and fade, expressed puzzlement verging on suspicion, as if the creature sensed something wrong with us, a wrongness to which it was unable to apply a name.

Although the light had not yet changed, I said, “Blow the horn, get him to move.”

“Not rude enough,” Sparky said. “Show it that you’re number one, Bridget.”

She put a hand to the windshield and favored the beast with her middle finger.

The Screamer remained inscrutable, but the puzzlement on its human face dissolved into a sneer. It turned from us and hurried to catch up with the others in its group.

“Why did that work?” I asked.

From behind me, Sparky said. “Misdirection. If they’re the essence of evil and suspect that guardians like you and Bridget are in the world . . . then they won’t expect you to be crude, obscene.”

“Guardians?” I said. The word unsettled me no less than had being scrutinized by the Screamer. “Guardians of what?”

The traffic light changed to green, and Bridget motored on.

When neither she nor Sparky answered my question, I repeated it. “Guardians of what?”

“Maybe of everything,” she said.

“‘Everything’ as in . . . ?”

“Everything as in everything,” she said. “Now isn’t the time to discuss our theory of all this, Quinn.”

“When will it be time?”

“It’ll be time when it’s time, sweetheart.”

“When will I know it’s time?”

“When I tell you.”

“That’s what I thought you’d say.”

She smiled at me. “Maybe you’re becoming psychic yourself.”

After we traveled awhile in silence, I said, “‘Guardians’ sounds like a full-time lifetime job. Maybe we’re not guardians. Maybe instead we’re just being sent on a quest.”

“We’re guardians,” Bridget said.

I didn’t want to give up on the idea of a limited commitment. “I mean like a great and noble quest, the kind knights in medieval romances set out upon. They traveled far, into strange lands, until they found the Holy Grail or the Ark of the Covenant or whatever, and then they went home and spent a few years drinking mead, eating roast haunch of wild boar, competing in lance-throwing contests.”