I shifted slightly in my seat, the first of several small moves that
shouldn’t make him suspicious but would put me in a position to shoot
him through my jacket, without having to draw the pistol from the
pocket.
“Last week,” the chief whispered, “Kyra and Brandy came over for dinner
with us, and I had trouble taking my eyes off the girl.
When I looked at her, in my mind’s eye she was naked, as she is in used
by the dreams. So slim. So fragile. Vulnerable. I became aro her
vulnerability, by her tenderness, her weakness, and had to hide my
condition from Kyra and Brandy. From Louisa. I wanted . . .
wanted to . . . needed to His sudden sobbing startled me: Waves of
grief and despair swept through him once more, as they had washed
through him when first he had begun to speak. His eerie needfulness,
his obscene hunger, was drowned in this tide of misery and
self-hatred.
“A part of me wants to kill myself,” Stevenson said, “but only the
smaller part, the smaller and weaker part, the fragment that’s left of
the man I used to be. This predator I’ve become will never kill
himself. Never. He’s too alive.”
His left hand, clutched into a fist, rose to his open mouth, and he
crammed it between his teeth, biting so fiercely on his clenched
fingers that I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had drawn his own
blood; he was biting and choking back the most wretched sobs that I’d
ever heard.
In this new person that Lewis Stevenson seemed to have become, there
was none of the calm and steady bearing that had always made him such a
credible figure of authority and justice. At least not tonight, not in
this bleak mood that plagued him. Raw emotion appeared always to be
flowing through him, one current or another, without any intervals of
tranquil water, the tide always running, battering.
My fear of him subsided to make room for pity. I almost reached out to
put a comforting hand on his shoulder, but I restrained myself because
I sensed that the monster I’d been listening to a moment ago had not
been vanquished or even chained.
Lowering his fist from his mouth, turning his head toward me, Stevenson
revealed a face wrenched by such abysmal torment, by such agony of the
heart and mind, that I had to look away.
He looked away, too, facing the windshield again, and as the laurel
shed the scattershot distillate of fog, his sobs faded until he could
speak.
“Since last week, I’ve been making excuses to visit Kyra, to be around
Brandy.” A tremor distorted his words at first, but it quickly faded,
replaced by the hungry voice of the soulless troll. “And sometimes,
late at night, when this damn mood hits me, when I get to feeling so
cold and hollow inside that I want to scream and never stop screaming,
I think the way to fill the emptiness, the only way to stop this awful
gnawing in my gut . . . is to do what makes me happy in the dreams.
And I’m going to do it, too. Sooner or later, I’m going to do it.
Sooner than later.” The tide of emotion had now turned entirely from
guilt and anguish to a quiet but demonic glee. “I’m going to do it and
do it. I’ve been looking for girls Brandy’s age, just nine or ten
years old, as slim as she is, as pretty as she is. It’ll be safer to
start with someone who has no connection to me. Safer but no less
satisfying.
It’s going to feel good. It’s going to feel so good, the power, the
destruction, throwing off all the shackles they make You live with,
tearing down the walls, being totally free, totally free at last. I’m
going to bite her, this girl, when I get her alone, I’m going to bite
her and bite her. In the dreams I lick their skin, and it’s got a
salty taste, and then I bite them, and I can feel their screams
vibrating in my teeth.”
Even in the dim light, I could see the manic pulse throbbing in his