he has failed Kakonis as he failed his parents and, even more
profoundly, his grandmother, he subconsciously longs to live out Jim
Jamison’s courageous and redeeming adventure, which means freeing The
Friend.
But when he frees The Friend, he frees The Enemy as well. And after all
these years of being bottled inside him, his rage has only intensified,
become blacker and more bitter, utterly inhuman in its intensity. The
Enemy is something even more evil now than it was twenty-five years ago,
a creature of singularly murderous appearance and temperament. . . .
So Jim was like any victim of multiple-personality syndrome.
Except for one thing. One little thing. He created nonhuman entities
to embody aspects of himself, not other human identities-and had the
power to give them flesh of their own. He hadn’t been like Sally Field
playing Sybil, sixteen people in one body. He had been three beings in
three bodies, and one of them had been a killer.
Holly turned on the car heater. Though it must have been seventy
degrees outside, she was chilled. The heat from the dashboard vents did
nothing to warm her.
The clock behind the registration desk showed 1:11 P.M. when Holly
checked them into a Quality motor lodge in Santa Barbara. While she
filled out the form and provided her credit card to the clerk, Jim
continued to sleep in the Ford.
When she returned with their key, she was able to rouse him enough to
get him out of the car and into their room. He was in a stupor and went
directly to the bed, where he curled up and once more fell instantly
into a deep sleep.
She got diet sodas, ice, and candy bars from the vending-machine center
near the pool.
In the room again, she closed the drapes. She switched on one lamp and
arranged a towel over the shade to soften the light.
She pulled a chair near the bed and sat down. She drank diet soda and
ate candy while she watched him sleep.
The worst was over. The fantasy had been burned away, and he had
plunged completely into cold reality.
But she did not know what the aftermath would bring. She had never
known him without his delusions, and she didn’t know what he would be
like when he had none. She didn’t know if he would be a more optimistic
man-or a darker one. She didn’t know if he would still have the same
degree of superhuman powers that he’d had before. He had summoned those
powers from within himself only because he had needed them to sustain
his fantasy and cling to his precarious sanity; perhaps, now, he would
be only as gifted as he had been before his parents had died-able to
levitate a pie pan, flip a coin with his mind, nothing more. Worst of
all, she didn’t know if he would still love her.
By dinnertime he was still asleep.
She went out and got more candy bars. Another hinge. She would end up
as plump as her mother if she didn’t get control of herself He was still
asleep at ten o’clock. Eleven. Midnight.
She considered waking him. But she realized that he was in a chrysalis,
waiting to be born from his old life into a new one. A caterpillar
needed time to turn itself into a butterfly. That was her hope, anyway.
Sometime between midnight and one o’clock in the morning, Holly fell
asleep in her chair. She did not dream.
He woke her.
She looked up into his beautiful eyes, which were not cold in the dim
light of the towel-draped lamp, but which were still mysterious.
He was leaning over her chair, shaking her gently. “Holly, come on.
We’ve got to go.”
Instantly casting off sleep, she sat up. “Go where?”
“Scranton, Pennsylvania.”
“Why?”
Grabbing up one of her uneaten candy bars, peeling off the wrapper,
biting into it, he said, “Tomorrow afternoon, three-thirty, a reckless
schoolbus driver is going to try to beat a train at a crossing.
Twenty-six kids are going to die if we’re not there first.”
Rising from her chair, she said, “You know all that, the whole thing,