Ig was so surprised at himself he stepped back and thumped a hip into the night table. A glass of water clashed softly against the lamp. Terry shut his eyes again but began to stir feebly, as if in another moment he might sit up.

“Mom,” he said. “What time is it?”

Ig stared down at his brother, not wondering how he’d done it-how he had summoned Lydia’s voice-but only if he could do it again. He already knew how he’d done it. The devil could, of course, speak in the voice of loved ones, telling them the things they most wanted to hear. The gift of tongues…the devil’s favorite trick.

“Shh,” Ig said, and the horns were filled with pressure, and his voice was the voice of Lydia Perrish. It was easy-he didn’t even have to think about it. “Shh, dear. You don’t need to do anything. You don’t need to get up. Rest. Take care of yourself.”

Terry sighed and rolled away from Ig, turning a shoulder to him.

Ig had been prepared for anything except to feel sympathy for Terry. There was no cheapening what Merrin had been put through, but in a sense-in a sense Ig had lost his brother that night, too.

He crouched in the darkness, looking at Terry lying on his side under the sheets, and thought for a spell, considering this newest manifestation of his powers. Finally he opened his mouth, and Lydia said, “You should go home tomorrow. Get back to your life, dear. You’ve got rehearsals. You’ve got things you need to do. Don’t you worry about Grandma. Grandma is going to be fine.”

“What about Ig?” Terry asked. He spoke in a low murmur, with his back turned. “Shouldn’t I stay until we know where Ig went? I’m worried.”

“Maybe he needs to be alone right now,” Ig said in his mother’s voice. “You know what time of year it is. I’m sure he’s fine and would want you to take care of work. You need to think about yourself-for once. Straight back to L.A. tomorrow, Terry.” Making it an order, pushing the weight of his willpower behind the horns so they tingled with delight.

“Straight back,” Terry said. “Okay.”

Ig retreated, backing for the door, for daylight.

Terry spoke again, before Ig could go.

“Love you,” he said.

Ig held up in the door, his pulse tripping strangely in his throat, his breath short.

“I love you, too, Terry,” he said, and gently shut the door between them.

IN THE AFTERNOON IG DROVE up the highway to a small country grocery. He picked out some cheese and pepperoni, brown mustard, two loaves of bread, two bottles of red table wine, and a corkscrew.

The shopkeeper was an old man with a scholarly look, in granny glasses and a sweater that buttoned up the front. He slumped behind the counter with his chin on his fist, leafing through the New York Review of Books. He glanced at Ig without interest and began to ring up his purchases.

As he pressed the keys of the cash register, he confessed to Ig that his wife of forty years had Alzheimer’s, and he had been thinking about luring her to the basement stairs and pushing her down them. He felt sure a broken neck would be ruled an accident. Wendy had loved him with her body, and written him letters every week while he was in the army, and given him two fine daughters, but he was tired of listening to her rave and washing her, and he wanted to go live with Sally, an old friend, in Boca Raton. When his wife died, he could collect an insurance payment of almost three-quarters of a million dollars, and then there would be golf and tennis and good meals with Sally for however many years he had left. He wanted to know what Ig thought about it. Ig said he thought he would burn in hell. The shopkeeper shrugged and said of course-that went without saying.

He spoke to Ig in Russian, and it was in this language that Ig gave his reply, although he didn’t know Russian, had never studied it. Yet he was entirely unsurprised by his sudden, undeserved fluency. After speaking to Terry in their mother’s voice, it seemed a small enough thing. Besides: The language of sin was universal, the original Esperanto.

Ig started away from the cash register, thinking how he’d fooled Terry, how something in him had been able to bring forth just exactly the voice Terry wanted to hear. He wondered at the limits of such a power, wondered how completely he could lead another mind astray. He stopped at the door and looked back, staring with interest at the shopkeeper, who sat behind the counter looking at his paper once again.

“Aren’t you going to answer your phone?” Ig asked.

The shopkeeper lifted his head to stare at him, his eyebrows bunched together in puzzlement.

“It’s ringing,” Ig said. The horns pounded with a feeling of pressure and weight, entirely pleasurable.

The shopkeeper frowned at the silent phone. He picked it up and put it to his ear. Even from across the room, Ig could hear the dial tone.

“Robert, it’s Sally,” Ig said-but the voice that came from his lips was not his own. It was hoarse, deep, but unmistakably female, and with a Bronx twang; a voice entirely unfamiliar, and yet he was sure it was the one that belonged to Sally Whoever.

The shopkeeper screwed up his face in confusion and said to the empty line, “Sally? We just talked a few hours ago. I thought you were trying to save on the long distance.”

The horns throbbed, in a state of sensual exhilaration.

“I’ll save money on long distance when I don’t have to call you every day,” Ig said in the voice of Sally in Boca Raton. “When are you coming down here? This waiting is killing me.”

The shopkeeper said, “I can’t. You know I can’t. Do you know what it would cost to put Wendy in a home? What would we live on?” Speaking to a dead line.

“Who said we need to live like Rockefellers? I don’t need oysters. Tuna salad will do. You want to wait until she dies, but what if I go first? Then where are we? I’m not a young woman, and you aren’t a young man. Put her in a place where people will care for her, and then get on a plane and come down here so someone can care for you.”

“I promised her I wouldn’t put her in a home while she was alive.”

“She isn’t the person you made that promise to anymore, and I’m scared what you might do if you stay with her. Pick a sin we can both live with, is what I ask. Give me a call when you’ve got a ticket, and I’ll come get you at the airport.”

Ig broke the connection then, let go; the painful-sweet feeling of pressure drained from the horns. The shopkeeper drew the phone away from his ear and stared at it, lips parted slightly in confusion. The dial tone droned. Ig eased himself out the door. The shopkeeper didn’t look up, had forgotten all about him.

IG BUILT A FIRE in the chimney, then opened the first bottle of wine and drank deeply, without waiting for it to breathe. The fumes filled his head, dizzying him, a sweet asphyxiation, loving hands around his throat. He felt he ought to be working on a plan, ought to have decided by now the proper way to deal with Lee Tourneau, but it was hard to think while staring into the fire. The ecstatic movement of the flames transfixed him. He marveled at the whirl of sparks and the orange tumble of falling coals, marveled at the bitter-harsh taste of the wine, which peeled away thought like paint stripper going to work on old paint. He tugged restlessly at his goatee, enjoying the feel of it, glad for it, felt that it made his thinning hair more acceptable. When Ig was a child, all his heroes had been bearded men: Jesus, Abraham Lincoln, Dan Haggerty.

“Beards,” he muttered. “I am blessed in facial hair.”

He was on the second bottle of wine when he heard the fire whispering to him, suggesting plans and schemes, offering encouragement in a soft, hissing voice, putting forth theological arguments. Ig canted his head and listened to it, listened carefully, in a state of fascination. Sometimes he nodded in agreement. The voice of the fire said the most sensible things. Over the next hour, Ig learned a great deal.