her more loquacious moods. “It’s a lot more fun going on a hyderfoil to
see the queen than being in a submarine with a giant squid chomping on
it.”
“The queen is boring,” Charlotte said.
“Is not.”
“Is too.”
“She has a torture chamber under the palace.”
Charlotte turned in her seat again, interested in spite of herself.
“She does?”
“Yeah,” Emily said. “And she keeps a guy down there in an iron nc”
“An
iron mask?”
“An iron mask,” Emily repeated somberly.
“Why?”
“He’s real ugly,” Emily said.
Paige decided both of them were going to grow up to be writers.
They had inherited Marty’s vivid and restless imagination. They would
probably be as driven to exercise it as he was, although what they wrote
would be quite different from their father’s novels, and far different
from the work of each other.
She couldn’t wait to tell Marty about submarines, hyderfoils, giant
squids, french-fried tentacles, and trollops with the queen.
She had decided to take Paul Guthridge’s preliminary diagnosis to heart,
attribute Marty’s unnerving symptoms to nothing but stress, and stop
worrying–at least until they got test results revealing something
worse. Nothing was going to happen to Marty. He was a force of nature,
a deep well of energy and laughter, indomitable and resilient. He would
bounce back just as Charlotte had bounced off her deathbed five years
ago. Nothing was going to happen to any of them because they had too
much living to do, too many good times ahead of them.
A fierce bolt of lightning–which seldom accompanied storms in southern
California but which blazed in plenitude this time crackled across the
sky, pulling after it a bang of thunder, as incandescent as any
celestial chariot that might carry God out of the heavens on Judgment
Day.
Marty was only six or eight feet from the girls’ bedroom door. He
approached from the hinged side, so he could reach across for the knob,
hurl the door inward, and avoid silhouetting himself squarely in the
frame.
Trying not to tread in the blood, he glanced down for just a second at
the carpet, where the spatters of gore were smaller and fewer than at
other points along the hall. He glimpsed an anomaly that registered
only subconsciously at first, and he eased forward another step with his
gaze riveted on the door again before fully realizing what he’d seen, an
impression of the forward half of a shoe sole, faintly inked in red,
like twenty or thirty others he’d already passed, except that the narrow
portion of this imprint, the toe, was pointed differently from all the
others, in the wrong direction, back the way he had come.
Marty froze as he grasped the import of the shoeprint.
The Other had gone as far as the girls’ bedroom but not into it.
He had turned back, having somehow reduced the flow of blood so
dramatically that he was no longer clearly marking his trail–except for
one telltale shoeprint and perhaps a couple that Marty hadn’t noticed.
Swinging around, holding the gun in both hands, Marty cried out at the
sight of The Other coming at him from Paige’s office, moving much too
fast for a man with chest wounds and minus a pint or two of blood. He
hit Marty hard, smashing in under the pistol, driving him into the
gallery railing and forcing his arms up.
Marty pulled the trigger reflexively while he was being carried
backward, but the bullet ploughed into the hallway ceiling. The sturdy
handrail slammed the small of his back, and a half-strangled scream
escaped him as white-hot pain shot horizontally across his kidneys and
played spike-shoed hopscotch up the knuckled staircase of his spine.
Even as he screamed, he lost the gun. It popped out of his hands and
arced back over his head into the empty vaulted space behind him.
The tortured oak railing shuddered, a loud dry crack signaled imminent
collapse, and Marty was sure they were going to crash into the
stairwell. But the balusters did not give way, and the handrail held
fast to the newel post at each end.
Pressing relentlessly forward, The Other bent Marty backward and over