“The way Marinville tried to speak to the coyotes is sort of the way we’re speaking now: si em, tow en can de lach. Do you understand?”
“Brian can’t be here,” the dark-haired man said pleasantly. “Brian’s alive, you see.”
“I don’t get you.” But he was afraid he did.
“What did you tell Marinville when he tried to talk to the coyotes?”
It took David a moment to remember, and that wasn’t surprising, because what he’d said hadn’t seemed to come from him but through him. “I said not to speak to them in the language of the dead. Except it wasn’t really me who—”
The man in the sunglasses waved this off. “The way Marinville tried to speak to the coyotes is sort of the way we’re speaking now: si em, tow en can de lach. Do you understand?”
“Yes. ‘We speak the language of the unformed.’ The language of the dead.” David began to shiver. “I’m dead, too, then . . . aren’t I? I’m dead, too.”
“Nope. Wrong. Lose one turn.” The man turned up the volume on his radio—“I said doctor . . . Mr. M.D. . . .”—and smiled. “The Rascals,” he said. “Felix Cavaliere on vocals. Cool?”
“Yes,” David said, and meant it. He felt he could listen to the song all day. It made him think of the beach, and cute girls in two-piece bathing suits.
