window.
Neil shook his head. “No. Not just rain. Something behind it … above it.”
His demeanor further unsettled Molly. He seemed to be half in a trance, unable fully to shake off his nightmare.
He shuddered. “There’s a mountain coming down.”
“Mountain?”
Tipping his head back, studying the bedroom ceiling with evident anxiety, the initial roughness in his voice smoothing into a solemn silken tone of mesmerizing intensity, he said, “Huge. In the dream. Massive. A mountain, rock blacker than iron, coming down in a slow fall. You run and you run … but you can’t get out from under. Its shadow grows ahead of you faster … faster than you can hope to move.”
Soft-spoken, yet as sharp as a harpist’s plectrums, his words plucked her nerves.
Intending to lighten the moment, Molly said, “Ah. A Chicken Little dream.”
Neil’s stare remained fixed on the ceiling. “Not just a dream. Here. Now.” He held his breath, listening. Then: “Something behind the rain … coming down.”
“Neil. You’re scaring me.”
Lowering his gaze, meeting her eyes, he said, “A crushing weight somewhere up there. A growing pressure. You feel it, too.”
Even if the moon itself had been falling, she would have been reluctant to acknowledge that its gravitational influence stirred powerful new tides in her blood. Until now, she had been a rider who kept tight reins on life, letting emotion break into full gallop only in the pages of her books, saving the drama for fiction.
“No,” she said. “It was just the sound of the rain getting to you in your dream, and your mind spun it into something weird, made a mountain of it.”
“You feel it, too,” he insisted, and he padded barefoot to a window.
The low amber light from the nightstand lamp was insufficient to disguise the luminous nature of the torrents that tinseled the forest and silvered the ground.
“What’s happening?” he asked.
“Unusual mineral content, pollution of some kind,” she replied, resorting to the explanations that she had already considered and largely rejected.
The curiosity and wonder that earlier compelled her to venture among the coyotes had curdled into trepidation. With uncharacteristic timidity, she yearned to return to bed, to shrink among the covers, to sleep away the freak storm and wake by the light of a normal dawn.
Neil disengaged the latch on the casement window and reached for the handle to crank it open.
“Don’t,” she warned with more urgency than she had intended.
Half turning from the window, he faced her.
She said, “The rain smells strange. It feels … unclean.”
Only now he noticed her robe. “How long have you been up?”
“Couldn’t sleep. Went downstairs to write. But …”
He looked at the ceiling again. “There. Do you feel that?”
Maybe she felt something. Or maybe her imagination was building mountains in the air.
His gaze tracked across the ceiling. “It’s not falling toward us anymore.” His voice quieted to a whisper. “It’s moving eastward … west to east.”
She didn’t share his apparently instinctual perception, though she found herself wiping her right hand on her robe—the hand that she had held out in the rain and had later washed so vigorously with orange-scented soap.
“As big as two mountains, three … so huge,” whispered Neil. He made the sign of the cross—forehead to breast, left shoulder to right—which she had not seen him do in years.
Suddenly she felt more than heard a great, deep, slow throbbing masked by the tremulous roar of the rain.
“… sift you as wheat …”
Those words of Neil’s, so strange and yet disturbingly familiar, refocused her attention from the ceiling to him. “What did you say?”
“It’s huge.”
“No. After that. What did you say about wheat?”
As if the words had escaped him without his awareness, he regarded her with bewilderment. “Wheat? What’re you talking about?”
A flickering at the periphery of her vision drew Molly’s attention to the clock on her nightstand. The glowing green digits changed rapidly, continuously, as though racing to keep pace with time run amok.
“Neil.”
“I see it.”
The numbers were sequencing neither forward toward morning nor backward toward midnight. Rather, they resembled the streaming mathematics of high-speed computer calculations rushing across a monitor.
Molly consulted her wristwatch, which was not a digital model. The hour hand swept clockwise, counting off a full day in half a minute, while the minute hand spun counterclockwise even faster, as though she were stranded on a rock in the river of time, with the future flowing away from her as swiftly as did the past.
The mysterious deep pulses of sound—almost below the threshold of human hearing but felt in blood and bone—seemed to swell her heart as they pushed through it.
The mood and moment were unique, like nothing that she had previously experienced, but the atmosphere was as unmistakably hostile as it was unprecedented.
With the coyotes, Molly’s instinct had seemed to divorce itself from her common sense. She had acted on the former, recklessly stepping onto the front porch.
Now instinct and common sense were married again. Both intuition and cold reason counseled that she and Neil were in serious trouble even though they could not yet grasp the nature of it.
In his eyes, she saw the recognition of this truth. During their years together, serving alternately as confessor and redeemer to each other, they had arrived at an intimacy of mind and spirit that often made words superfluous.
At her nightstand, she withdrew the 9-mm pistol from the drawer. She always kept it loaded; nevertheless, she ejected the magazine to confirm that it lacked no rounds. The gleam of brass. Ten cartridges.
After locking in the magazine again, she put the weapon on the vanity, beside her hairbrush and hand mirror, within easy reach.
Across the room, on the dresser, stood a collection of half a dozen antique music boxes inherited from her mother. Spontaneously, a steely plink-and-jangle issued from them: six different melodies woven into a bright discordance.
On the lids of two boxes, clockwork-driven porcelain figurines suddenly became animated. Here, a man and woman in Victorian finery danced a waltz. There, a carousel horse turned around, around.
The
