F. Paul Wilson: Hosts

Kate's stomach lurched.

A man? Not Jeanette! Anyone but Jeanette! It simply wasn't in her!

Stunned, she watched Jeanette follow him inside. No, this couldn't be. Kate moved out from behind her tree and approached the house. Her sneaker slipped on a wet tree root and she nearly fell, but kept going, stumbling on until she reached the foot of the front stoop. She saw the name Holdstock on the mailbox and fought a mad urge to hammer on the door.

Then she noticed silhouettes moving back and forth within the front windows. More than two. What was going on in there?

Kate started toward the nearer of the two windows but changed her mind. Too much light out here. Wouldn't do to have a neighbor pass by and catch her peeking in. She backed away and moved around to the shadowed side of the house. There she crouched between a pair of azalea bushes and peered through the screen into the Holdstock living room.

Six… seven—no, eight people in the room. Three men, five women, of varying ages, shapes, and sizes, all taking turns embracing Jeanette as if she were a long-lost relative. And Jeanette was smiling—oh, God, how Kate missed that smile. Days since she'd seen it, days that felt like a lifetime.

An odd group. And even odder that no one seemed to be speaking. Not a word. Apparently they'd been waiting for Jeanette, for immediately after greeting her they all seated themselves in the circle of chairs set up around the room. And still no one spoke. Everyone seemed to know what to do: they joined hands, closed their eyes, let their heads fall back… and smiled. Jeanette and all the rest wore beatific smiles, so full of peace and contentment that Kate, for an instant, envied them. They looked as if they were viewing God herself.

And then they began to hum. Not a transcendental "oum," this was a single note, and it went on and on, without a trace of harmony. Everyone humming the same note.

What are you into, Jeanette? A prayer group? Is that what's happened? Your old pantheism couldn't handle a malignant glioma so now you've joined some rapturous fundamentalist sect?

Kate heard a sob and realized it had come from her. She sagged against the bricks, weak with relief.

This I can handle, this I can deal with. As long as you don't reject me… us… what we've built over the years, I know we can come through this.

She backed away from the window, turning when she reached the front lawn. She gasped as she found a woman standing not two feet away.

"You have had fears, and now they are eased, yes?" A deep voice with a Russian accent.

She looked middle-aged and wore a white hooded cape that fell below her knees. Dark hair framed her face. Kate stepped back when she saw the big white dog standing at her side. It looked like some sort of husky. Its eyes reflected light from the street as it stared at her, but she sensed no hostility.

"You startled me," Kate stammered, not sure how to explain her presence here. "I… I was just—"

"You think is perhaps religious group? At worst a cult, yes?" Her dark eyes flashed, her lipsticked gash of a mouth tightened into a thin line as she raised a crooked index finger; she used it to emphasize her words by jabbing it at Kate. "Not cult. Worse than cult. Much worse. If you wish to save the loves of your life you must stop them."

"What?" Kate said, baffled. What was she talking about? "I can't—"

"Of course not. You will need help. Here is number to call." Her other hand wormed from under the cape and held out a card.

Kate hesitated, not knowing what to make of this woman. She seemed composed but her patter was paranoid. And yet… she seemed to know about her… and Jeanette.

"Take it," the woman said, thrusting the card at her. "And do not waste time. Time is short. Call him tonight. No one else… only him."

Kate squinted at the card in the dim light. Getting so hard to read lately—the price to pay for passing forty—and her glasses were tucked away in her bag. She pushed the card to arm's length and angled it for a better view. A phone number and a name, handwritten in an old-fashioned cursive style. She couldn't make out the number but the name was written larger: Jack .

That was it—no last name, no address, just… Jack.

"Who—?"

She looked up and found herself alone. She hurried out to the sidewalk but the woman and her dog were nowhere to be seen, vanished as if they'd never been.

Am I going crazy? she wondered. But the card in her hand was real.

The woman's words echoed back to her: If you wish to save the loves of your life …

She'd said loves , hadn't she? Yes, Kate was sure of it… the woman had used the plural. Kate could think of only three loves in her life: Jeanette, of course, but even before her came Kevin and Elizabeth.

Something twisted in Kate's chest at the thought of her children being in some sort of danger… needing to be saved .

But how could that be possible? Kevin and Lizzie were safe in Trenton with their father. And what possible danger could the hand-holding, regular middle-class folks in the Holdstock living room pose to her children?

Still the mere hint from someone, even an addled stranger, that they might be in danger jangled Kate's nerves. Danger from what? Attack? They were both teenagers now, but that didn't mean they couldn't be molested.

She glanced back at the house and thought she saw a curtain move in one of the front windows. Had one of the worshipers or whatever they were been watching her?

This was too creepy. As she turned and hurried back toward her waiting cab, more of the old woman's words pursued her.

And do not waste time. Time is short. Call him tonight.

Kate looked at the card. Jack . Who was he? Where was he?

2

Riding the Niner.

Sandy Palmer wondered what percentage of his twenty-five years he'd spent bumping and swaying along this particular set of subway tracks back and forth to Morningside Heights. And always in the last car, since that left him a few steps closer to his apartment.

Got to save those steps. He figured everyone was allotted only so many, and if you use them up too fast you're looking at early death or a wheelchair. Obviously marathoners and the hordes of joggers crowding the city parks either were unaware of or gave little credence to the Sandy Palmer theory of step preservation and reclamation. They'd regret it later on.

Sandy glanced around the car at his fellow passengers. Seven years now riding either the Nine or the One, starting with his first semester at Columbia Journalism and the frequent trips down to the Village or SoHo, now every damn day getting jammed in on the way down to midtown and back for his job with The Light . And in all that time his fellow riders still looked pretty much the same as they always had. Maybe a few more whites in the mix these days, but not many.

Take this car, for instance: Relatively crowded for a post-rush-hour run, but not SRO. Still a couple of empty seats. Working people—nurse's aides, bus drivers, jackhammer operators, store clerks, short order cooks, garment workers. Their skin tones ran a bell curve, starting with very black, peaking in the mid-browns, and tapering off into lily-white land. After growing up in Caucasian Connecticut, Sandy had had to get used to being a member of a minority on the subway. He'd been a little uneasy at first, thinking that people were staring at him; it took months before he felt comfortable again in his white skin.

The white guy dozing diagonally across from him on the L-shaped plastic bench they shared mid-car looked pretty comfortable. Talk about generic pale male—if Sandy hadn't been thinking about white people he probably wouldn't have noticed him. Clean shaven, brown hair sticking out from under the dark blue knit cap pulled down to his eyebrows, an oversized white Jets shirt with a big green 80, jeans, and scuffed work boots. The color of his eyes was up for grabs because they were closed.