Smiling, smiling all the while, smiling like an idiot.
We’ll be out of here in fifteen minutes, he told himself. Maybe as few
as ten. Out of here and on our way and safe.
The dark wave hit him.
At a Denny’s, he uses the men’s room, then selects a booth by the
windows and orders an enormous breakfast.
His waitress is a cute brunette named Gayle. She makes jokes about his
appetite. She is coming on to him. He considers trying to make a date
with her. She has a lovely body, slender legs.
Having sex with Gayle would be adultery because he is married to Paige.
He wonders if it would still be adultery if, after having sex with
Gayle, he killed her.
He leaves her a good tip and decides to return within a week or two and
ask her for a date. She has a pert nose, sensuous lips.
In the Camry again, before he starts the engine, he closes his eyes,
clears his mind, and imagines he is magnetized, likewise the false
father, opposite poles toward each other. He seeks attraction.
This time he is pulled into the orbit of the other man quicker than he
was when he tried to make a connection in the middle of the night, and
the adducent power is immeasurably greater than before. Indeed, the
pull is so strong, so instantly, he grunts in surprise and locks his
hands around the steering wheel, as if he is in real danger of being
yanked out of the Toyota through the windshield and shooting like a
bullet straight to the heart of the false father.
His enemy is immediately aware of the contact. The man is frightened,
threatened.
East.
And south.
That will lead him back in the general direction of Mission Viejo,
though he doubts the imposter feels safe enough to have returned home
already.
A pressure wave, as from an enormous explosion, smashed into Marty and
nearly rocked him off his feet. With both hands he clutched the
countertop in front of the teller’s window to keep his balance. He
leaned into the counter, bracing himself against it.
it.
The sensation was entirely subjective. The air seemed compressed to the
point of liquefaction, but nothing disintegrated, cracked, or fell over.
He appeared to be the only person affected.
After the initial shock of the wave, Marty felt as if he’d been buried
under an avalanche. Weighed down by immeasurable meg tons of snow.
Breathless. Paralyzed. Cold.
He suspected that his face had turned pale, waxy. He knew for certain
that he would be unable to speak if spoken to. Were anyone to return to
the teller’s window while the seizure gripped him, the fear beneath his
casual pose would be revealed. He would be exposed as a man in
desperate trouble, and they would be reluctant to hand so much cash to
someone who was so clearly either ill or deranged.
He grew dramatically colder when he experienced a mental caress from the
same malignant, ghostly presence that he’d sensed yesterday in the
garage as he’d been trying to leave for the doctor’s office. The icy
“hand” of the spirit pressed against the raw surface of his brain, as if
reading his location by fingering data that was Brailled into the
convoluted tissues of his cerebral cortex. He now understood that the
spirit was actually the look-alike, whose uncanny powers were not
limited to spontaneous recovery from mortal chest wounds.
He breaks the magnetic connection.
He drives out of the restaurant parking lot.
He turns on the radio. Michael Bolton is singing about love.
The song is touching. He is deeply moved by it, almost to tears.
Now that he finally is somebody, now that a wife waits for him and two
young children need his guidance, he knows the meaning and value of
love. He wonders how he could have lived this long without He heads
south. And east.
Destiny calls.
Abruptly, the spectral hand lifted from Marty.
The crushing pressure was released, and the world snapped back to
normal–if there was such a thing as normality any more.
He was relieved that the attack had lasted only five or ten seconds.