who sometimes wrote about them. No matter how long you indulged the
fantasy, you couldn’t live the fantasy, you couldn’t act like a cop in a
pressurized situation unless you had trained like a cop. He had been as
guilty as anyone of confusing reality and fiction, thinking he was as
invincible as the hero on a printed page, and he’d been damned lucky the
other Marty hadn’t been waiting for him. The upstairs hall was
deserted.
He looked exactly like me.
Couldn’t think about that now, no time for it yet. Concentrate on
staying alive, wasting the bastard before he hurt Paige or the girls.
If you survive, there’ll be time to seek an explanation for that
astonishing resemblance, solve the mystery, but not now.
Listen. Movement?
Maybe.
No. Nothing.
Keep the gun up, muzzle aimed ahead.
Just outside the office doorway, a smeary handprint in wet blood marred
the wall. A horrid amount of blood was puddled on the light-beige
carpet there. At least part of the time when Marty had stood behind his
desk, stunned and temporarily immobilized by the violence, the wounded
man had leaned against this hallway wall, perhaps trying unsuccessfully
to staunch his bleeding wounds.
Marty was sweating, nauseated and afraid. Perspiration trickled into
the corner of his left eye, stinging, blurring his vision. He blotted
his slick forehead with his shirt sleeve, blinked furiously to wash the
salt out of his eye.
When the intruder had shoved away from the wall and started
moving–perhaps while Marty was still frozen behind his desk–he had
walked through his own pooled blood. His route was marked by
fragmentary red imprints of the ridged patterns on athletic-shoe soles
as well as by a continuous scarlet drizzle.
Silence in the house. With a little luck, maybe it was the silence of
the dead.
Shivering, Marty cautiously followed the repulsive trail past the hall
bath, around the corner, past the double-door entrance to the dark
master bedroom, past the head of the stairs. He stopped at that point
where the second-floor hall became a gallery overlooking the living
room.
On his right was a bleached oak railing, beyond which hung the brass
chandelier that he’d switched on when he’d passed through the foyer
earlier. Below the chandelier were the descending stairs and the
two-story, tile-floored entrance foyer that flowed directly into the
two-story living room.
To his left and a few feet farther along the gallery was the room Paige
used as a home office. One day it would become another bedroom for
Charlotte or Emily when they decided they were ready to sleep
separately. The door stood half open. Bat-black shadows swarmed
beyond, relieved only by the gray storm light of the waning day, which
hardly penetrated the windows.
The blood trail led past that office to the end of the gallery, directly
to the door of the girls’ bedroom, which was closed. The intruder was
in there, and it was infuriating to think of him among the girls’
belongings, touching things, tainting their room with his blood and
madness.
He recalled the angry voice, touched with lunacy yet so like his own
voice, My Paige, she’s mine, my Charlotte, my Emily . . .
“Like hell, they’re yours,” Marty said, keeping the Smith & Wesson aimed
squarely at the closed door.
He glanced at his wristwatch.
4,28.
Now what?
He could stay there in the hallway, ready to blow the bastard to Hell if
the door opened. Wait for Paige and the kids, shout to them when they
came in, tell Paige to call 911. Then she could hustle the kids across
the street to Vic and Kathy Delorio’s house, where they’d be safe, while
he covered the door until the police arrived.
That plan sounded good, responsible, cool and calm. Briefly, the
knocking of his heart against his ribs became less insistent, less
punishing.
Then the curse of a writer’s imagination hit him hard, a black whirlpool
sucking him down into dark possibilities, the curse of what if, what if,
what if. What if the other Marty was still strong enough to push open
the window in the girls’ room, climb out onto the patio cover at the