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“Uh-huh,” he said and continued to stare at his precious gnome. It was a fat gnome, as gnomes go, and as far as Marge could tell it was also a jolly gnome, or at least his cherubic red cheeks gave the impression that he was jolly, as did the smile on his bearded little face. Still there was something sinister about him. Somehow Gnome #16 reminded her of an evil clown, only in the form of a gnome. An evil gnome, if you will. If Stephen King hadn’t yet written a book about the species, she felt that he should, and would probably pack a great punch when he did.

“Let’s go to bed, honey,” she said as she slipped under the duvet. “I’m beat, and tomorrow is another day.”

“Sure,” said Tex, still continuing to not be fully present.

“So what did you think about Fido’s presentation?”

“Mh?”

“Fido’s presentation? If he’s to be believed we’re all living in the matrix, and ruled by a Cookie Monster named Roger.” She laughed. “Poor guy. He’s really lost it, hasn’t he?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I guess you’re right,” said Tex, then he finally got up and joined her under the covers. “But I’ll say this for him, though,” he continued as he put his ice-cold feet against hers—a habit she hadn’t been able to cure him from even after all those years.

“What’s that?” she asked, checking if her alarm clock was set at seven.

“Well, there are things in this world that we don’t know about, aren’t there? I mean, the government doesn’t always tell us everything, and that makes people suspicious, and wonder what else they might be keeping from us.”

“Like what?”

“Like… I don’t know. UFOs for instance, or aliens. Stuff like that.”

She glanced over to her husband with a frown.“Aliens, Tex? Really?”

“Well, it’s certainly possible that they’re out there. Theoretically speaking, at least.”

A tinge of worry niggled at her.“What’s gotten into you all of a sudden? You never used to believe in aliens. You always said that was just a bunch of nonsense.”

“I never believed in that kind of stuff before, but now I’m thinking… maybe I should.” And with these words, he switched off the light on his nightstand, turned over and muttered, “Night, hon.”

She blinked and her frown deepened. Usually Tex liked to cuddle before going to sleep. But then she shrugged. At least it gave her the opportunity to read some more of The Sheikh’s Passion. She picked up the book, flicked off the light in the room, turned on the small reading light attached to the headboard, and was soon engrossed once again in the story of Sheikh Bab El Ehr and the love of his life: Laura.

Laura wasn’t like the other women the Sheikh had met and married. For one thing, Laura wasn’t a woman from his own country but hailed from the West. Her parents had moved to Khemed when she was a little girl, and had settled there, her dad an expat for a big oil company, and Laura had grown up surroundedby a culture that wasn’t her own, but which she’d adopted with a passion. By the time she met the Sheikh, at a palace party her parents had been invited to, she was a beautiful young woman of nineteen, with the face of an angel and the body of a goddess, or at least that’s the way the Sheikh had described her to his right-hand man Sharif the next day. Sharif had seen that the Sheikh’s eyes were shining, and that the lovelight was strong in this one, and had immediately raised the alarm: the Sheikh of Khemed couldn’t possibly take a western woman as his wife. That kind of break with tradition was simply out of the question.

But love listened to no reason, and the Sheikh had invited Laura to the palace under the pretext of wanting to ask her opinion about a pagoda he’d received as a present from the Chinese, and soon the two of them had been wandering around the gardens, without a chaperone, and their love had blossomed—a very unorthodox but powerful love, that had taken them both by surprise.

And by the time Marge closed the book, since the next day was a working day and she needed to get up early, she was already dreaming of a love so deep and so passionate that it consumed all.

Five minutes later she was fast asleep, spooning with her husband and dreaming of her own Sheikh, who may or may not have had a shock of white hair and the face of a certain small-town doctor with a weird penchant for garden gnomes.

So when in the middle of the night she was awakened by a strange sound, it took her a few moments to realize that the man standing in her bedroom, backlit by the full moon, wasn’t the Sheikh of her dreams, but a burglar! And then she was screaming bloody murder.

16

We’d just returned from cat choir when we heard a scream so loud it cut through us like a knife.

“That’s Marge!” said Harriet, alarmed. We were in the front yard when the scream rang out, which meant it must have been pretty loud, since Marge and Tex’s bedroom is at the back.