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embarrasses Him to be praised like around the clock, to be called great and mighty all the time. And maybe it makes Him a little bit nuts the way we’re always asking Him to solve our problems instead of even trying to solve them ourselves, which He made us so we could do. Anyway, so after almost giving up on prayer, and being pretty darned sure that God is too humble to sit around all day listening to us praise Him and beg Him, the funny thing is, I’m praying like crazy for Oddie. I guess I’m hopeless.

TWENTY-FOUR
     
    As I reach the end of the downstairs hall, from behind me comes the sound of the knob rattling in the cellar door. The door is a good mahogany slab, the deadbolt thick, the hinges blackened iron. Great effort will be needed to break it down, and the noise will give me plenty of warning. The rattling stops and all is quiet.
    The six-pane sidelights flanking the front door admit only a dim and wintry light into the foyer, partly because acid-etched patterns of ivy vines frost significant areas of the glass. Also, the front porch faces west, away from the fullest brightness of the morning sun. The windowsills are gray with thick dust, littered with dead gnats, dead flies, dead spiders.
    To the left, a living room is overfurnished with floral-pattern chesterfields laden with decorative pillows, handsome wing chairs with footstools, curio cabinets, and several plant stands in which once-flourishing ferns now hang in brown sprays of parched fronds, the carpet under them littered with dead pinnules. Everywhere there is dust, cobwebs, stillness, and the air seems more humid toward the front of the house than in the back.
    To the right of the foyer, a mahogany-paneled library offers an impressive collection of books, but they emit the odor of mildew. When I switch on the lights, a multitude of moths shiver out of the bookshelves, abandoning their feast of damp dust jacket and rotten binding cloth, by far more of them here than in the study. They swoop this way and that for a moment, agitated but without purpose.
    A few take refuge on the ceiling, others settle upon a pair of club chairs upholstered in a shade of brown leather with which they blend, and the mass of them swarm toward me, past me, out of the room. Their soft bodies and softer wings flutter against my face, which I turn down and away from them, chilled by the contact to a degree that surprises me.
    In the center of the library stands an antique pool table with elaborately carved legs and two carved and gilded lions as the cross supports that connect the legs. Silverfish skitter across the green-felt playing surface, disappearing into the ball pockets.
    Even in the most disturbing environments, in the presence of deeply corrupt people who want nothing less than to kill me, I tend to find a vein of fun in either the rock or the hard place between which I’m trapped. Not this time. The atmosphere in this house is pestilential, poisonous, so unwholesome that I feel as if the most dangerous thing I’ve ever done is breathe the air herein.
    At one end of the pool table lies an object that is no less enigmatical upon close inspection than from a distance. Round but not perfectly so, about five feet in diameter, it resembles nothing so much as a giant version of the medicine ball that men used to throw to one another for exercise before health clubs became high-tech. The object is mottled several shades of gray and is grained like leather, but it has no seams or stitching, and the lacquered sheen is unlike any leather finish I have ever seen. Some of the bulbs are burned out in the chandelier above the pool table, but what light there is glimmers in the surface of this unfathomable construction much the way that moonlight plays on dark water.
    My perception of the object’s nature changes from one instant to the next when the surface proves to be not lacquered but wet. A bead of moisture swells out of it and trickles down the curved form to the carpet.