“What are you doing to her?” An expression of profound disgust came over his face. His question became an outraged yell. “What are you creeps doing to her?”

“It’s none of your damn business, boy!”

“Look at her! Oh, God. You’re torturing her!”

“Go home, boy!” Bill said, a dangerous growl in his voice. “If you don’t, you’ll be sorry.”

“I already am. I thought you’d changed, but you haven’t. You’re . . . bad. Rotten inside! That’s what you are.”

“Thompson, grab him!”

The burly Thompson pushed through the other witnesses to go and grab Ricky. But Ricky had no intention of being caught. He backed up along the center aisle, picking up one of the folding wooden chairs from the end of the row and throwing it at Thompson, who was quick enough to swat it away before it struck him, but not fast enough to see the second chair coming. It struck him hard, and it was he who folded up, not the chair, taking several more chairs with him when he went down.

Candy knew she would not get another chance to undo the harm her father had done. She let her head loll as though she was barely conscious, and the ruse seemed to work. She caught a sideways glimpse of her father glancing up at her and—apparently deciding she was in no state to cause him problems—turning his back on her and starting to clamber over the litter of overturned chairs to get Ricky.

“I need some help here!” he yelled to his little congregation. “He’s just a kid! He can’t hurt you!”

He’d no sooner spoken than Ricky made a liar of him, picking up one of the folded chairs in both hands and swatted at Miss Schwartz with it. She was thrown off her feet by the blow, knocking over the man called Elliot on her way to the ground.

Candy needed to pull the wretched Silters out of her, she knew, and be quick about it. Bill wouldn’t be distracted for long. In a matter of seconds he could be back to finish his work. She lifted her hand up toward her mouth as far as the restraints allowed, and bent so that she could remove the invading Silters with her teeth. But she had to be quick. There was no time to be squeamish.

Do it! she told herself, and giving her mind no chance at second thoughts, she bit down, taking off their heads.

They tasted like rotting, slimy flesh, but as soon as she bit into them, the flowing tentacles shrieked and withered. She pulled them out with her teeth and spat them onto the ground.

The machine was not happy with this sudden change in events. In the few seconds it took Candy to remove the Silters she’d glanced back to see that just about every element of the device capable of motion was registering this unexpected reversal; its gauges fluttering, its warning lights ticking, and the phials in which the loot of Candy’s mind was stored, rattling in their metal cages. Her luck could not hold for very much longer. It was only a matter of time before her father took his eyes off the messy struggle going on in the pile of folded chairs, and saw her escaping.

It was not Bill Quackenbush who raised an alarm, however. It was Mr. Futterman, who had been crying, forgotten on the ground in his faint until now. When he opened his eyes he saw Candy biting into the slimy Silters and spitting them out.

“I’m going to be sick!” he said, his comment by chance finding a window in the general racket of shouts and chairs that echoed around the church.

Candy slid off the edge of the altar and by the time the soles of her feet were on the ground the clatter of conflict died away almost entirely. She looked up. Her father was turning, his eyes already fixed upon her. Candy couldn’t make any sense of the string of curses he then unleashed, but there was no doubting the raging fury that fueled them. Bill drew back his right arm, at belly level, to the side of his body, his hand raised, palm out, fingers bent. He made a quick counterclockwise flick of his wrist, then reversed the motion. As a result, the overturned chairs that lay between father and daughter divided. The chairs squealed on the polished boards and were whipped away by an invisible force, thrown up and over one another by the power of Bill’s gesture.

There were shrieks from several of the minister’s flock (the shrillest from Mr. Elliot) as they apparently decided that they’d witnessed quite enough for one day. They started to walk, then race toward the front door. They weren’t fast enough. Bill turned his back on the altar and threw the force of his attention at the exits. Candy did not know if he made another gesture or if it was simply his will that caused the huge doors to slam shut and the bolts to slide noisily home to seal the contract.

Norma Lipnik had been closest to the doors when they closed. Now, shaken by the noise, she retreated from the entrance, calling to her minister as she did so.

“Please, Reverend!” she said, putting on the warm, unflustered voice she always used when things went awry at the hotel, “I really have to go.”

“It doesn’t work that way, woman!”

“But you don’t understand . . .”

That’s it, Candy thought, keep talking, Norma. Every second that Norma Lipnik wasted distracting Bill Quackenbush was another second Candy could devote to figuring out how to undo the theft of her treasured knowledge.

She stumbled, her legs weak and aching, around the altar to the device itself. The phials that contained her memories seemed to already know that she intended to reclaim them, as though some tenuous thread of thought between her mind and these stolen experiences still existed. The substance in the phials—was it liquid or gaseous? Perhaps both—sensed her proximity and it raced around the glass. It had been colorless, but it had darkened in its agitated state, until it was the purple-gray of a thunderhead, in the belly of which multicolored lightning rods bloomed.

She was still staring at it in dazed wonder when she heard the voice of her father from across the church: “If you touch my machine, I’ll kill you where you stand!”

Chapter 32

Sacrilege

CANDY LOOKED BACK AT her father, just in time to see him conjure a trinity of thin, silver-tipped arrows. With their silver tips glinting, they flew at her and she felt a nauseating tug in her belly, as though they were homing in on her innards.

She let them get to the other side of the altar before she made her move, forcing her less-than-eager legs to shift her out of their path at the very last moment. The needles were too close to change direction, and struck at the spot where she had been standing seconds before. The first needle hit the middle of the device, causing an arc of yellow-green lightning to leap from it, while the other two struck the phials causing a few of them to explode instantly. Their contents emptied like flowering clouds, the colors they contained suddenly blazing like glorious fires. They returned instantly to their owner, performing a celebration dance of liberation by circling Candy three or four times, then without warning, leaping back into her.

Oh, the bliss of that! The unadulterated joy of being reunited with herself. Her head was like a pail into which a dam was pouring its contents, images that she had forgotten she’d owned blazing for a tiny perfect instant in her mind’s eye before another came to show its beauty to her. A bird, a tower, a slave, a face, ten faces, a thousand faces, a moon in a tree, a glass of water, a wave, a tear, a laughing moth, her mom, Ricky, Don, Diamanda, Carrion, the Dead Man’s House, the Yebba Dim Day, a bottle of rum, Kaspar, Malingo—oh, Malingo, Malingo, Malingo—

k

She was laughing now, in her sleep, and saying his name.

“Malingo! Malingo! Malingo!”

“I think the worst might be over,” Geneva said cautiously.

“Let’s hope so,” said John Mischief. “Because my heart can’t take much more of this.”