'They don't wrap themselves in ectoplasm that other people can see. Only I can see them.'

'You're so special, huh?'

'Unfortunately, yes.'

'I want to talk to them.'

'The dead don't talk.'

She picked up the remote. 'I'll waste the little s.h.i.t. I really will.'

Taking a calculated risk, I said, 'I'm sure you will. Whether I do what you want or not. You won't risk going to prison for Dr. Jessup's murder.'

She put down the remote. She leaned against the window sill: one hip c.o.c.ked, b.r.e.a.s.t.s thrust forward, posing. 'Do you think I intend to kill you, too?'

'Of course.'

'Then why are you here?'

'To buy some time.'

'I warned you to come alone.'

'There's no posse on the way,' I a.s.sured her.

'Then-buy time for what?'

'For fate to take an unexpected turn. For an advantage I can seize.'

She had the sense of humor of a rock, but this amused her. 'You think I'm ever careless?'

'Killing Dr. Jessup wasn't smart.'

'Don't be thick. The boys need their sport,' she said, as though there was a logical necessity to the radiologist's murder that should be obvious to me. 'That's part of the deal.'

As if on cue, the 'boys' arrived. Hearing them, I turned.

The first looked like a laboratory-manufactured hybrid, half man and half machine, with a locomotive somewhere in his heritage.

Big, solid, the kind of specimen who seemed muscle-bound and slow but who could probably chase you down faster than a runaway train.

Heavy brutish features. A stare as direct as Datura's, but not as readable as hers.

They were not merely guarded eyes, but deeply enigmatic as none others I had ever seen. I had the weird feeling that behind those eyes lay a mind with a landscape so different from that of the ordinary human mind that it might as well have belonged to an ent.i.ty born on another world.

Given his physical power, the shotgun seemed superfluous. He carried it to the window and held it in both hands as he stared at the desert afternoon.

The second man was beefy but not as pumped as the first. Though young, he had a dissolute look, the puffy eyes and ruddy cheeks of a barroom brawler who would be content to spend his life drinking and fighting, both of which he no doubt did well.

He met my eyes, but not boldly as had the human locomotive. His gaze slid away from me, as if I made him uneasy, though that seemed unlikely. A charging bull probably wouldn't make him uneasy.

Although he carried no weapon that I could see, he might have had a handgun holstered under his summer-weight cotton sports coat.

He pulled a chair out from the table, sat, and poured some of the wine that I had declined.

Like the woman, both men dressed in black. I suspected that their outfits matched not by happenstance, that Datura liked black and that they dressed to her instructions.

They must have been guarding the staircases. She had not called them on a phone or sent them a text message, yet somehow they had known that I had gotten past them and was with her.

'This,' she told me, indicating the brute at the window, 'is Cheval Andre.'

He didn't glance at me. He didn't say Pleased to meet you Pleased to meet you.

As the brawler drank a third of a gla.s.s of wine in one swallow, Datura said, 'This is Cheval Robert.'

Robert glowered at the candles on the table.

'Andre and Robert Cheval,' I said. 'Brothers?'

'Cheval is not their last name,' she said, 'as you well know. Cheval Cheval means horse.' As you well know.' means horse.' As you well know.'

'Horse Andre and Horse Robert,' I said. 'Lady, I have to tell you, even considering the strange life I lead, all this is getting too weird for me.'

'If you show me spirits, and everything I want to see, I might not have them kill you, after all. Wouldn't you like to be my Cheval Odd?'

'Gee, I suppose it's an offer most young men might envy, but I don't know what my duties would be as a horse, what the pay is, if there's health insurance-'

'Andre and Robert's duty is to do what I tell them, anything I tell them, as you well know. As compensation, I give them what they need, anytime they need it. And once in a while, as with Dr. Jessup, I give them what they want want.'

The two men looked at her with a hunger that seemed only in part to be l.u.s.t. I sensed in them another need that had nothing to do with s.e.x, a need that only she could satisfy, a need so grotesque that I hoped never to learn its nature.

She smiled. 'They are such needy boys.'

Lightning with a dragon's worth of teeth flashed across the black clouds, sharp and bright, and flashed again. Thunder crashed. The sky convulsed and shook off a million silvery scales of rain, and then millions more.

THIRTY-TWO.

THE HEAVY DOWNPOUR SEEMED TO WASH OUT OF THE air some of the light that managed to penetrate the storm clouds, and the afternoon grew both murky and dismal, as if the rain were not only weather but also a moral judgment on the land.

With less light from the window, the glow of the candles swelled. Red and orange chimeras prowled the walls and shook their manes across the ceiling.

Cheval Andre put down his shotgun on the floor and faced the tempest, placing both enormous hands flat against the window gla.s.s, as if drawing power from the storm.

Cheval Robert remained at the table, gazing at the candles. An ever-shifting tattoo of victory and money played across his broad face.

When Datura pulled another chair out from the table and told me to sit, I saw no reason to defy her. As I had said, my intention was to buy time and wait for fate to take a turn in my favor. As if I were already a good horse, I sat without objection.

She stalked the room, drank wine, stopped again and again to smell the roses, frequently stretched like a cat, ripe and lithe and acutely aware of how she looked.

Whether moving or standing in place, head tipped back and gazing at the nimbuses of candlelight pulsing on the ceiling, she talked and taunted.

'There's a woman in San Francisco who levitates when she chants. Only the select are invited to observe her on the solstices or All Saints' Eve. But I'm sure you've been there, and know her name.'

'We've never met,' I a.s.sured her.

'There's a fine house in Savannah, inherited by a special young woman, willed to her by an uncle, who also left to her a diary in which he described murdering nineteen children and burying them in his bas.e.m.e.nt. He knew that she would understand and not disclose his crimes to the authorities even though he was dead. You've no doubt visited more than once.'

'I don't travel,' I said.

'I've been invited several times. If the planets are properly aligned and the guests are of the right caliber, you can hear the voices of the dead speaking from their graves in the floor and walls. Lost children pleading for their lives, as if they don't know they're dead, crying for release. It's a riveting experience, as you well know.'

Andre stood and Robert sat, eyes on the storm in the first case, on the candles in the second, perhaps mesmerized by Datura's singular voice. Neither had yet spoken a word. They were unusually silent men, and uncannily still.

She came to my chair, leaned toward me, and extracted a pendant from her ample cleavage: a teardrop stone, red, perhaps a ruby, as large as a peach pit.

'I have captured thirty in this,' she said.

'You told me on the phone. Thirty thirty something in an amulet.'

'You know what I said. Thirty ti bon ange ti bon ange.'

'I imagine that took a while, collecting thirty.'

'You can see them in there,' she said, holding the stone close to my eyes. 'Others can't, but I'm sure you can.'

'They're cute little things,' I said.

'Your pretense of ignorance would be convincing to most people, but you don't fool me. With thirty, I am invincible.'

'You said before. I'm sure being invincible is comforting.'

'I need one more ti bon ange ti bon ange, and this one must be special. It must be yours.'

'I'm flattered.'

'As you know, there are two ways I can collect it,' she said, tucking the stone between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s again. She poured more wine. 'I can take it from you through a water ritual. That is the painless method of extraction.'

'I'm glad to hear it.'

'Or Andre and Robert can force you to swallow the stone. Then I can gut you like a fish and take it from your steaming stomach as you die.'

If her two horses had heard what she proposed, they were not surprised by it. They remained as still as coiled snakes.

Picking up the gla.s.s of wine, moving toward the roses, she said, 'If you show me ghosts, I'll take your ti bon ange ti bon ange the painless way. But if you insist on playing ignorant, this is going to be a very bad day for you. You're going to know agony of a degree that few men ever experience.' the painless way. But if you insist on playing ignorant, this is going to be a very bad day for you. You're going to know agony of a degree that few men ever experience.'

THIRTY-THREE.

THE WORLD HAS GONE MAD. YOU MIGHT HAVE ARGUED against that contention twenty years ago, but if you argue it in our time, you only prove that you, too, live in delusion.

In an asylum world, the likes of Datura rise to the top, the crme de la crme of the insane. They rise not by merit but by the force of their will.

When social forces press for the rejection of age-old Truth, then those who reject it will seek meaning in their own truth. These truths will rarely be Truth at all; they will be only collections of personal preferences and prejudices.

The less depth a belief system has, the greater the fervency with which its adherents embrace it. The most vociferous, the most fanatical are those whose cobbled faith is founded on the shakiest grounds.

I would humbly suggest that collecting someone's ti bon ange ti bon ange-whatever that might be-by forcing him to swallow a gemstone, then eviscerating him and collecting the stone from his stomach, is proof that you are fanatical, mentally unsteady, no longer operating within cla.s.sic Western philosophy, and not suitable to be a contestant in the Miss America Pageant.

Of course, because it was my stomach threatened by the s.e.xy eviscerator, you might feel that I am biased in this a.n.a.lysis. It's always easy to charge prejudice when it's the other guy who's being disemboweled.

Datura had found her truth in a mishmash of occultisms. Her beauty, her fierce will to power, and her ruthlessness drew to her others, like Andre and Robert, whose secondary truth was her weird system of magical thinking and whose primary truth was Datura herself.

As I watched the woman restlessly circle the room, I wondered how many of the employees in her business operations-the on-line p.o.r.n store, the phone-s.e.x operation-had gradually been replaced with true believers. Other employees, with empty hearts, might have been converted.

I wondered how many men like these two she could call upon to murder in her name. I suspected that although they were strange, they were not unique.

What must the women be like who were their gender's equivalents of Andre and Robert? You wouldn't want to leave your children with them if they ran a day-care center.

If an opportunity arose for me to escape, disarm the package of explosives, get Danny out of this place, and finger Datura for the police, I would be hated by the fanatics devoted to her. If that circle proved to be small, it might quickly fragment. They would find other belief systems or settle back into their natural nihilism, and soon I would mean nothing to them.

If on the other hand her cash-gushing enterprises served as the fountainhead of a cult, I would have to take more precautions than just relocating to a new apartment and changing my name to Odd Smith.

As if energized by the swords of lightning ripping through the sky, Datura pulled a fistful of long-stemmed red roses from one of the vases and gestured with them, lashing the air, as she shared her supernatural experiences.

'In Paris, in the sous-sol sous-sol of a building that occupying Germans used as a police headquarters after the fall of France, a Gestapo officer named Gessel raped many young women in the process of his interrogations, whipped them, too, and killed some for pleasure.' of a building that occupying Germans used as a police headquarters after the fall of France, a Gestapo officer named Gessel raped many young women in the process of his interrogations, whipped them, too, and killed some for pleasure.'

Crimson petals flew from the roses as she emphasized Gessel's brutality.

'One of his most desperate victims fought back-bit his throat, tore open his carotid artery. Gessel died there in his own abattoir, which he haunts to this day.'

An entire tattered bloom broke from its stem and landed in my lap. Startled, I brushed it to the floor as though it had been a tarantula.

'At the invitation of the current owner of that building,' said Datura, 'I've visited that sous-sol sous-sol, which is actually a sub-bas.e.m.e.nt two floors below the street. If a woman disrobes there and offers herselfI felt Gessel's hands all over me-eager, bold, demanding. He entered me. But I couldn't see him. I had been promised I would see him, a full-blown apparition.'