Dean Koontz - By the Light of the Moon

'I just meant he might be better off in an institution.'

'That'll never happen.'

'Quite as it should be, m'lord.'

Jilly said, 'Not all those places are snake pits.'

'The only thing he's got is me. Drop him in an institution, and he won't have anything.'

'It might be good for him.'

'No. It would kill him.'

'For one thing, maybe they could keep him from hurting himself.'

'He won't hurt himself.'

'He just did,' she noted.

'Quite as it should be, m'lord.'

'That was a first and a fluke,' Dylan said with what sounded more like hope than like conviction. 'It won't happen again.'

'You never imagined it would happen the first time.'

Although they were already exceeding the legal limit and though traffic conditions were not conducive to even greater speed, Dylan accelerated steadily.

Jilly sensed that he was trying to outrun more 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 sure got a talent for getting under people's skin.'

'Me? I'm the easiest guy in the world to get along with. I've never gotten under anyone's skin in my life – until you.'

'Quite as it should be, m'lord.'

'You're doing over ninety again,' she warned him.

'Eighty-nine,' he disagreed, and this time he didn't ease up on the accelerator. 'If you were hit by that mirage because of the stuff in the injection, then I'll probably be hit with one, too.'

'Which is another reason you shouldn't be doing over ninety.'

'Eighty-nine,' he corrected, and reluctantly allowed the speed of the SUV to fall.

'The crazy son-of-a-bitch salesman jacked the stuff into your arm first,' Jilly said. 'So if it always causes mirages, you should have had one before I did.'

'For maybe the hundredth time – he wasn't a salesman. He was some lunatic doctor, some psycho scientist or something. And come to think of it, he said the stuff in the needle does lots of different things to different people.'

'Quite as it should be, m'lord.'

'Different things? Like what?'

'He didn't say. Just different. He also said something like… the effect is always interesting, often astonishing, and sometimes positive.'

She shuddered with the memory of whirling birds and flickering votive candles. 'That mirage wasn't a positive effect. So what else did Dr. Frankenstein say?'

'Frankenstein?'

'We can't keep calling him a lunatic doctor, psycho scientist, crazy son-of-a-bitch salesman. We need a name for him until we can find out his real name.'

'But Frankenstein…'

'What about it?'

Dylan grimaced. He took one hand off the steering wheel to make a gesture of equivocation. 'It feels so…'

'Quite as it should be, m'lord.'

'Feels so what?'

'Melodramatic,' he decided.

'Everyone's a critic,' she said impatiently. 'And why's this word melodramatic being flung at me all the time?'

'I never flung it before,' he objected, 'and I wasn't referring to you personally.'

'Not you. I didn't say it was you. But it might as well have been you. You're a man.'

'I don't follow that at all.'

'Of course you don't. You're a man. With all your common sense, you can't follow anything that isn't as perfectly linear as a line of dominoes.'

'Do you have issues with men?' he asked, and the self-satisfied, back-at-you look on his face made her want to smack him.

'Quite as it should be, m'lord.'

Simultaneously and with equal relief, Jilly and Dylan said, 'Twenty-eight!'

In the backseat, all teeth tested and found secure, Shep put on his shoes, tied them, and then settled into silence.

The speedometer needle dropped, and gradually so did Jilly's tension, although she figured she wouldn't again achieve a state of serenity for another decade.

Cruising at seventy miles an hour, though he probably would have claimed that he was only doing sixty-eight, Dylan said, 'I'm sorry.'