giggling again, Milo said, “I shook and zipped, Dad. You can put me down.”
A squeak of hinges revealed that Waxx had opened the door to the hallway.
Putting Milo on his feet, I turned toward the exit.
My hope was that Waxx had not recognized me from my book-jacket photograph.
The eminent critic was staring at me. He said one word, and then he departed.
He had recognized me, all right.
After using paper towels to mop up Milo’s small puddle, I washed my hands at a sink. Then I lifted Milo so he could wash up, too.
“Almost sprinkled him,” Milo said.
“That’s nothing to be proud of. Stop giggling.”
When we returned to the restaurant, Shearman Waxx sat once more at his table. The waiter was just serving the entrée.
Waxx did not look our way. He seemed determined to ignore us.
As we passed his table, I saw the device that imprisoned the book was clever but wicked-looking, as though the critic were holding the work—and its author—in bondage.
Outside, the November afternoon waited: mild, still, expectant. The unblemished sky curved to every horizon like an encompassing sphere of glass, containing not a single cloud or bird, or aircraft.
Along the street, the trees stood as motionless as the fake foliage in an airless diorama. No limb trembled, no leaf whispered.
No traffic passed. Milo and I were the only people in sight.
We might have been figures in a snow-globe paperweight, sans snow.
I wanted to look back at the restaurant, to see if Shearman Waxx watched us from his window seat. Restraining myself, I didn’t turn, but instead walked Milo to the car.
During the drive home, I could not stop brooding about the single word the critic had spoken before he stepped out of the men’s room. He transfixed me with those terrible maroon eyes and in a solemn baritone said, “Doom.”
That afternoon, while Penny finished a painting for her next children’s book, while Milo and Lassie worked on a time machine or a death ray, or whatever it might be, I sat in an armchair in my study, reading “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor, a short story that I much admired.
One of the most disturbing pieces of fiction ever written, it remains as affecting on the tenth pass as on the first. This might have been my twentieth reading, but Miss O’Connor inspired in me a greater dread than ever before.
I did not understand why phantom spiders crawled the nape of my neck, why chills shivered through my bowels and stomach, why my palms grew damp and my fingers sometimes trembled when I turned a page—all to a degree that I had never experienced previously with this work of fiction or any other. Later, I figured it out.
After I finished the story and as I sat staring at the page, where the words blurred out of focus, a disquiet rose in me that had nothing to do with “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” I told myself that my uneasiness related to my career, to concern about what Waxx would write in his review of my next novel, which he seemed to have promised to savage when he spoke the word doom in a portentous tone.
But surely that could not be the entire cause of the nameless worry that crawled my mind. I had not yet finished my next novel. It would not be published for a year. At my request, my publisher would withhold an advance review copy from Waxx. We had time to devise a strategy to thwart him. Yet my current uneasiness seemed to anticipate a more immediate jeopardy.
Peripheral vision alerted me to movement. I raised my eyes from the page, turned my head toward the open study door, and saw Shearman Waxx pass by in the downstairs hall.
I do not recall rising from the armchair or letting the book of short stories fall from my hands. I seemed to have imagined myself onto my feet in a thousandth of a second.
Now erect, I couldn’t imagine myself moving. Shock paralyzed me.
My heart continued to beat at the pace of a man reading in an armchair. Disbelief forestalled a sense of jeopardy.
O’Connor’s story had cast over me a pall of apprehension. In that altered state, my mind must have played a trick on me, must have conjured an intruder where none existed.
This phantom Waxx had not even glanced at me, as certainly he would have if he had been real and had come here to confront me for whatever reason. Perhaps Penny passed by in the hall, and the limber imagination of a novelist remade her into the critic.
The possibility that I could mistake my luminous and slender Penny for the dour hulk of Shearman Waxx was so absurd that my disbelief dissolved. I broke my paralysis.
Suddenly my heart mimicked iron on turf, the frantic thud of racing horses’ heels. I hurried to the open door, hesitated at the threshold, but then crossed it. The hallway was deserted.
Waxx had been headed toward the back of the house. I followed the shorter length of the hall to the kitchen, half expecting to find him selecting a blade from the knife drawer beside the cooktop.
Even as that image crossed my mind, I was embarrassed by my near hysteria. Shearman Waxx would surely disdain such melodrama in real life as much as he scorned it in fiction.
He lurked neither in the kitchen nor in the adjacent family room that flowed from it. One of the French doors to the back patio stood open, suggesting that he had departed by that exit.
Standing in the doorway, I surveyed the patio, the swimming pool, and the backyard. No sign of Waxx.
That eerie stillness had befallen the world again. The water in the pool lay as smooth as a sheet of glass.
While I had been reading, gunmetal clouds had armored the sky. They did not billow, neither did they churn, but looked as flat and motionless as a coat of paint.
Because we lived in the safest neighborhood of a low-crime community, we were in the habit of leaving our most-used doors unlocked during the day. That would change.
Bewildered by Waxx’s intrusion, I closed the French door and engaged the deadbolt.
Abruptly, I realized that the critic might have done more than pass through the house. If he had left by the family room, he could have entered elsewhere—and could have done some kind of damage.
Engaged in strange science, Milo was upstairs in his bedroom with Lassie.
In her second-floor studio, Penny painted the wide-eyed, sharp-beaked owl that hunted the band of heroic mice in her current book.
Although the dog had not barked and though no one had cried out in pain or terror, my mind insisted on the most unlikely scenario, on bludgeoned heads and cut throats. Our modern world is, after all, full of flamboyant violence; as often as not, the evening news is as disturbing as any slasher film.
I climbed the back stairs two at a time.
Milo’s bedroom door stood open, and he sat at his desk, alive and beguiled by electronic gizmos that meant less to me than would ancient tablets of stone carved with runes.
On the desk, watching her master at work, sat Lassie. She looked up as I entered, but Milo did not.
“Did you see him?” I asked.
Milo, who can multitask better than a Cray supercomputer, stayed focused on the gizmos but said, “See who?”
“The man…a guy wearing