back of the house, and jump down to the lawn from there?
What if he fled along the side of the house and out to the street just
as Paige was pulling into the driveway with the girls?
It might happen. Could happen. Would happen. Or something else just
as bad would happen, worse. The whirlpool of reality spun out more
terrible possibilities than the darkest thoughts of any writer’s mind.
In this age of social dissolution, even on the most peaceful streets in
the quietest neighborhoods, unexpected acts of grotesque savagery could
occur, whereupon people were shocked and horrified but not surprised.
He might be guarding the door to a deserted room.
4,29.
Paige might be turning the corner two blocks away, entering their
street.
Maybe the neighbors had heard the gunshots and had already called the
police. Please, God, let that be the case.
He had no conscionable choice but to throw open the door to the girls’
room, go in, and confirm whether The Other was there or not.
The Other. In his office, when the confrontation had begun, he’d
quickly dismissed his initial thought that he was dealing with something
supernatural. A spirit could not be as solid and three-dimensional as
side of the line between life and death would not be vulnerable to
bullets. Yet a feeling of the uncanny persisted, weighed heavier on him
moment by moment. Although he suspected that the nature of this
adversary was far stranger than ghosts or shape-changing demons, that it
was simultaneously more terrifying and more mundane, that it was born of
this world and no other, he nevertheless could not help but think of it
in terms usually reserved for stories of haunting spirits, Ghost,
Phantom, Revenant, Apparition, Specter, The Uninvited, The Undying, The
Entity.
The Other.
The door waited.
The silence of the house was deeper than death.
Already focused narrowly on the pursuit of The Other, Marty’s attention
constricted further, until he was oblivious of his own heartbeat, blind
to everything but the door, deaf to all sounds except those that might
come from the girls’ room, conscious of no sensation except the pressure
of his finger on the trigger of the pistol.
The blood trail.
Red fragments of shoeprints.
The door.
Waiting.
He was rooted in indecision.
The door.
Something suddenly clattered above him. He snapped his head back and
looked at the ceiling. He was directly under the three-footsquare,
seven-foot-deep shaft that soared up to a dome-shaped Plexiglas sky
clatter of rain.
As if the strain of indecision had snapped him back to the full spectrum
of reality, he was abruptly deluged by all the voices of the storm, of
which he’d been utterly unaware while tracking The Other.
He’d been intently listening through the background racket for the
stealthier sounds of his quarry. Now the wind’s gibbering-hooting
moaning, the rataplan of rain, fulminant thunder, the bony scraping of a
tree limb against one side of the house, the tinny rattle of a loose
section of rain gutter, and less identifiable noises flooded over him.
The neighbors couldn’t have heard gunshots above the raging storm. So
much for that hope.
Marty seemed to be swept forward by the tumult, along the blood trail,
one hesitant step, then another, inexorably toward the waiting door.
The storm ushered in an early twilight, bleak and protracted, and Paige
had the headlights on all the way home from the girls’ school.
Though turned to the highest speed, the windshield wipers could barely
cope with the cataracts that poured out of the draining sky.
Either the latest drought would be broken this rainy season or nature
was playing a cruel trick by raising expectations she would not fulfill.
Intersections were flooded. Gutters overflowed. The BMW spread great
white wings of water as it passed through one deep puddle after another.
And out of the misty murk, the headlights of oncoming cars swam at them
like the searching lamps of bathyscaphes probing deep ocean trenches.
“We’re a submarine,” Charlotte said excitedly from the passenger seat
beside Paige, looking out of the side window through plumes of tire
spray, “swimming with the whales, Captain Nemo and the autihis twenty
thousand leagues beneath the sea, giant squids stalking us.