and he was grateful to all the powers of Hell for giving her to him. He
thrilled at the prospect of reaching deep within and clasping that
strong young heart as it twitched and thudded into final stillness, all
the while staring into her beautiful gray eyes to watch life pass out of
her and death enter Hatch’s cry of rage, anguish, and terror broke the
psychic connection.
He was in his backyard again, holding his right hand up in front of his
face, staring at it in horror, as if Regina’s blood already stained his
trembling fingers.
He turned away from the back fence, and sprinted along the east side of
the house, toward the front.
But for his own hard breathing, all was quiet. Evidently some of the
neighbors weren’t home. Others hadn’t heard anything, or at least not
enough to bring them outside.
The serenity of the community made him want to scream with frustration.
Even as his own world was falling apart, however, he realized the
appearance of normality was exactly that-merely an appearance, not a
reality. God knew what might be happening behind the walls of some of
those houses, horrors equal to the one that had overcome him and Lindsey
and Regina, perpetrated not by an intruder but by one member of a family
upon another. The human species pose a knack for creating monsters, and
the beasts themselves often had a talent for hiding away behind
convincing masks of sanity.
When Hatch reached the front lawn, Lindsey was nowhere to be seen.
He hurried to the walkway, through the open door-and discovered her in
the den, where she was standing beside the desk, making a phone call.
“You find her?” she asked.
“No. What’re you doing?”
“Calling the police.”
Taking the receiver out of her hand, dropping it onto the phone, he
said, “By the time they get here, listen to our story, and start to do
something, he’ll be gone, he’ll have Regina so far away they’ll never
find her-until they stumble across her body someday.”
“But we need help-” Snatching the shotgun off the desk and pushing it
into her hands, he said, “We’re going to follow the bastard. He’s got
her in a car. A Honda, I think.”
“You have a license number?”
“No.”
“Did you see if-”
“I didn’t actually see anything,” he said, jerking open the desk drawer,
plucking out the box of 12-gauge ammunition, handing that to her as
well, desperately aware of the seconds ticking away. “I’m connecting
with him, it flickers in and out, but I think the link is good enough,
strong enough.”
He pulled his ring of keys from the desk lock, in which he had left them
dangling when he had taken the magazine from the drawer. “We can stay
on his ass if we don’t let him get too far ahead of us.” Hurrying into
the foyer, he said, “But we have to move.”
“Hatch, wait!”
He stopped and swiveled to face her as she followed him out of the den.
She said, “You go, follow them if you think you can, and I’ll stay here
to talk to the cops, get them started-” Shaking his head, he said, “No.
I need you to drive. These… these visions are like being punched, I
sort of black out, I’m disoriented while it’s happening. There’s no way
I won’t run the car right off the damn road.
Put the shotgun and the shells in the Mitsubishi.” Climbing the stairs
two at a time, he shouted back to her: “And get flashlights.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, but we’ll need them.”
He was lying. He had been somewhat surprised to hear himself ask for
flashlights, but he knew his subconscious was driving him at the moment,
and he had a hunch why flashlights were going to be essential.
In his nightmares over the past couple of months, he had often moved
through cavernous rooms and a made of concrete corridors that were
somehow revealed in spite of having no windows or artificial lighting.
One tunnel in particular, sloping down into perfect blackness, into
something unknown, him with such dread that his heart swelled and
pounded as if it would burst. That was why they needed