By the Light of the Moon by Dean Koontz Page B

than just the men in the black Suburbans. “No matter how fast you drive, Shep’s still in the backseat.”
    “Quite as it should be, m’lord.”
    Dylan said, “The lunatic doctor gives you an injection, and an hour later, or whatever, you experience an altered state of—”
    “I
said
I want a time-out from that.”
    “And I don’t want to talk about
this,
” he declared emphatically, “about institutions, sanitariums, care homes, places where people might as well be canned meat, where they’re put on a shelf and dusted from time to time.”
    “Quite as it should be, m’lord.”
    “All right,” Jilly relented. “Sorry. I understand. It’s really none of my business anyway.”
    “That’s right,” Dylan concurred. “Shep isn’t
our
business. He’s
my
business.”
    “All right.”
    “Okay.”
    “Quite as it should be, m’lord.”
    “Twenty,” Jilly counted.
    Dylan said, “But your altered state of consciousness
is
our business, not just yours, but yours and mine, because it’s related to the injection—”
    “We don’t know that for sure.”
    Certain expressions took exaggerated form on his broad rubbery face, as if he were in fact a cartoon bear who had stepped out of an animated realm into the real world, had shaved his furry mug, and had set himself the tricky task of passing for human. In this instance, his disbelief pulled his features into a configuration worthy of Sylvester the cat on those occasions when the scheming feline had been tricked by Tweety bird into walking off the edge of a cliff. “Oh, but we
do
know that for sure.”
    “We do not,” she insisted.
    “Quite as it should be, m’lord.”
    Jilly continued: “And I don’t like the term
altered state
any more than I like
hallucination.
It makes me sound like a doper.”
    “I can’t believe we’re arguing over vocabulary.”
    “I’m not arguing. I’m just saying what I don’t like.”
    “If we’re going to talk about it, we have to call it
something.
”
    “Then let’s not talk about it,” she suggested.
    “We
have
to talk about it. What the hell are we supposed to do—drive at random the rest of our lives, here and there and everywhere, keeping on the move, and
not
talking about it?”
    “Quite as it should be, m’lord.”
    “Speaking of driving,” Jilly said, “you’re going way too fast.”
    “I am not.”
    “You’re doing over ninety.”
    “It only looks that way from your angle.”
    “Oh, yeah? What’s it look like from
your
angle?”
    “Eighty-eight,” he admitted, and eased up on the accelerator.
    “Let’s call it a…
mirage.
That doesn’t imply mental instability, drug use, or religious hysteria.”
    “Quite as it should be, m’lord.”
    “I was thinking maybe
phantasm,
” Jilly said.
    “I can live with
phantasm.
”
    “But I think I like
mirage
better.”
    “Great! Fantastic! And we’re in the desert, so it fits.”
    “But it wasn’t actually a mirage.”
    “I know that,” he hastened to assure her. “It was its own thing, special, unique, impossible to properly name. But if you were hit by this mirage because of the stuff in the damn needle—” He interrupted himself, sensing her rising objection: “Oh, get real! Common sense tells us the two things
must
be related.”
    “Common sense is overrated.”
    “Not in the O’Conner family.”
    “I’m not a member of the O’Conner family.”
    “Which relieves us of the need to change our name.”
    “Quite as it should be, m’lord.”
    She didn’t want to argue with him, for she knew that they were in this together, but she couldn’t restrain herself: “So there’s not room in the O’Conner family for people like me, huh?”
    “There’s that ‘people like me’ business again!”
    “Well, it seems to be an issue with you.”
    “It’s not an issue with me. It’s an issue with
you.
You’re way too sensitive or something, like a boil just waiting to burst.”
    “Lovely. Now I’m a bursting boil. You’ve