He woke before dawn and shaved, showered, dressed. When he went into the kitchen and turned on the lights, the box sat in the center of the breakfast table, precisely where he’d left it. It was not distorted, and no sound came from it.

Jeffy didn’t find Ed threatening. He remained certain that the box contained an ordinary item that the old man thought significant only because of his delusions. How curious, therefore, that Jeffy’s subconscious should torment him with disturbing dreams—some almost nightmares—involving this innocuous package.

The Art Deco kitchen conveyed him to a time when the world had seemed more welcoming, and his lingering uneasiness faded. A floor of large white ceramic tiles joined by small black diamond-shaped inlays. Glossy white cabinetry. Stainless-steel countertops and backsplash. A restored O’Keefe and Merritt stove with its several compartments. A replica of a 1930s Coldspot refrigerator. A Krazy Kat cookie jar, black with huge whites of the eyes. A poster of a Charm magazine cover from 1931, featuring a coffeepot and cup.

As the first light of the day brought a pink blush to the sky over the canyon, Jeffy poured a freshly brewed cup of a Jamaican blend. Standing at the kitchen sink, gazing out at the lane that curved up canyon, he had taken two sips when a rhythmic mechanical sound rose in the distance, quickly swelled in volume, and began to shudder through the house. He looked at the ceiling as a helicopter passed overhead, then glanced at the window in time to get a glimpse of the chopper above the oak trees: larger than a police helo, two engines, eight-or ten-passenger capacity, high-set main and tail rotors, maybe ten thousand pounds of serious machinery. It seemed menacing because it was far below minimum legal altitude for this area and moving fast, as if on an attack mission.

In the wake of the aircraft came the sound of big engines. One, two, three, four black Suburbans raced past on Shadow Canyon Lane, without flashing lights or wailing sirens, but with the urgency of an FBI contingent in a movie about terrorists armed with a nuke.

As the sound of one rotary wing receded, another racketed louder in the distance. Jeffy put down his coffee mug and hurried through the house to the front door. He stepped onto the porch just in time to see a second helo approaching from the west, out of a cloudless sky, the morning sun painting a pink cataract on the advanced glass cockpit.

Maybe fifty yards away, where Shadow Canyon Lane connected with Oak Hollow Road, a fifth Suburban stood alongside the pavement, and a sixth angled across the roadway to form a blockade. Six men had gotten out of the two vehicles and were conferring.

Barefoot, wearing Rocket Raccoon pajamas, yawning and blinking sleep from her eyes, Amity came out of the house and onto the porch as the second chopper passed low overhead. The palm fronds tossed, and the limbs of the live oaks shuddered. The enormous oaks were green throughout the year, though perpetually shedding their browner leaves, a swarm of which now beetle-clicked down through the black branches, small oval forms as crisp as cockroach carapaces.

Amity said, “What’s happening?”

“I don’t know.”

She said, “Something big.”

“Sure looks like it.”

“Are you freaked out? I am, a little.”

“A little,” he agreed.

“Who are they?”

“Maybe FBI. The Suburbans are black, the choppers were black, but no markings on any of them.”

“Don’t police cars and stuff have to be marked?”

“I thought so.”

After a silence, Amity said, “I better get dressed.”

“Good idea.”

On the doorstep, before returning to the house, she said, “And maybe you better hide the package that Ed left.”

7

Until Amity suggested a relationship between Ed’s visit the previous evening and the sudden appearance of the black-helicopter crowd, Jeffy hadn’t made a connection. When an old and delusional vagrant said he was being hunted, you imagined the stalker—if one actually existed—must be from the same community as his hapless quarry: a burnt-out drug addict who believed in the existence of something called “the key to everything,” or maybe a psychopath who targeted homeless men wearing polka-dot ties with plaid shirts. You didn’t leap to the conclusion that the posse would number more than a dozen men, some in SWAT gear, equipped with a few million dollars in ordnance.

Sometimes, however, common sense required paranoia. It seemed that the political elites were striving, with admiration for George Orwell and rare unanimity, to ensure that the totalitarian state in the novel 1984 would be realized no later than fifty years after the author predicted.

In the kitchen, Jeffy plucked the box off the table. It wasn’t heavy, suggesting that most of the contents were Styrofoam peanuts or some other kind of packing material.

Indecisive, he stood listening to the helicopters—one whisking the air in the distance, one louder and nearer—considering where to conceal the package. He didn’t quite believe that the “swine” of whom Ed had spoken, whoever they might be, would storm into the house and ransack it room by room, drawer by drawer. However, every hidey-hole that he thought of seemed obvious if in fact those men boldly crossed his threshold.

At last, he hurried into his workroom, one half of which was entirely devoted to the restoration of highly stylized Deco-period Bakelite radios.

To the left of his workbench, shelves held eight radios of fabled brands—Fada, Sentinel, Bendix, Emerson, DeWald—that had been cleaned and polished; with their vibrant colors restored, they were objects of beauty and high style. They had been rewired, and new vacuum tubes had been installed. They could pull in AM stations as they had in the 1930s, although once you switched them on, the tubes had to warm up before a broadcast could be received.

To the right of the bench, another set of shelves contained six scarred and discolored radios on which he had yet to begin work. He had bought them at swap meets, country auctions, and from a network of hoarders who collected all manner of items that other people thought were junk. He had paid as little as forty dollars and as much as two thousand per radio, depending on the knowledge of the seller who set the price. After he had restored it, passionate collectors would pay five, six, even ten thousand for a rare and beautiful specimen.

The largest radio awaiting his attention was a Bendix model that appeared to be muddy brown. When cleaned and polished, however, it would be a rich butterscotch yellow with buttercup-yellow tuning knobs and tuning-window frame. The guts of the Bendix were on his workbench, and only the empty Bakelite shell stood on the shelf: eleven inches wide, eight inches tall, seven inches deep, not large enough to conceal the box that Ed had entrusted to him, although it might be large enough to hide whatever was in the box.

He heard Ed’s warning voice in memory. You must not open it. Never!

A helicopter swept over the house, so low that slabs of carved air like giant fists slammed the roof and rattled the windows.

Even as unimpressive as the package looked, it would draw attention from searchers precisely because it was unusual.

Never open the box, Jeffrey. Never touch the thing in it.

Jeffy had difficulty getting his head around the idea that rumpled, rheumy-eyed Ed hadn’t been sliding into dementia, after all. That something of great value and importance must be in the box. That a “demonic posse” might be after the old man. Even if all that was true, as the choppers and Suburbans suggested, nevertheless Ed must be exaggerating his enemies’ ruthlessness. Beasts? Murderers who would make an innocent man and his daughter disappear?

The doorbell rang.

He was pretty sure it wasn’t the postman with a certified-mail form that required a signature.

The aircraft that had passed over the house now returned and hovered. In the downdraft from the rotary wing, palm trees thrashed so noisily that they could be heard in spite of the racket made by the helo.

Jeffy’s heart thumped like that of a rabbit in the shadow of a predator. “Sorry, Ed. I should’ve taken you seriously.”

He put the package on the workbench and tugged at the knot and stripped away the string.

As someone on the front porch rang the doorbell again, someone began to hammer insistently at the back door.

He took the lid off the box and then hesitated. The object was swaddled in plastic bubble wrap.

Hide it well, Jeffrey. Save yourself and your girl!

A man appeared at the window, veiled by the sheer curtain, a shadowy form backlit by the bright morning sun.