“Drink some of it, Emma.” She drank from the empty glass.
He laughed aloud. The power. . . It was going to work. He could make her remember whatever he wished. “How does it taste?”
She licked her lips. “Delicious.”
Lovely animal, he thought, suddenly giddy. Lovely, lovely little animal.
3
NOON
IN BUDDY’S NIGHTMARE two men were filling the town’s reservoir with cats. In the deepest shadows of the night, just before sunrise, they were standing at the edge of the pool, opening cages and pitching the animals into the water. The felines squalled about this assault on their dignity and comfort. Soon the reservoir was teeming with cats: alley cats, Siamese cats, Angora cats, Persian cats, black cats and gray cats and white cats and yellow cats, striped cats, spotted cats, old cats and kittens. Below the reservoir, in Black River, Buddy innocently turned on the cold water tap in his kitchen-and cats, dozens upon dozens of fiercely angry cats, began to spill into the sink, full-sized cats that had somehow, miraculously, passed through the plumbing, through narrow-gauge pipe and rat traps and elbow joints and filter screens. Screeching, wailing, hissing, biting, scratching cats fell over one another and clawed the porcelain and scrambled inexorably out of the sink as new streams of cats poured in behind them.
Cats on the counter. Cats on the breadbox. Cats in the dish rack. They leapt to the floor and clambered atop the cupboards. One of them jumped on Buddy’s back as he turned to run. He tore it loose and threw it against the wall. The other cats were outraged by this cruelty. They Swarmed after Buddy, all of them spitting and snarling. He reached the bedroom/living room inches ahead of them, slammed and locked the door. They threw themselves against the far side of the barrier and yammered incessantly, but they weren’t strong enough to force their way through it. Relieved that he had escaped them, Buddy turned-and saw ten-yard-square cages full of cats, scores of green eyes studying him intensely, and behind the cages two men wearing shoulder holsters, holding pistols, and dressed in black rubber scuba suits.
He woke up, sat up, and screamed. He flailed at the mattress, wrestled with the sheets, and pounded his fists into the pillows for a few seconds until, gradually, he realized that none of these things was a cat.
“Dream,” he mumbled.
Because Buddy slept in the mornings and early afternoons, the drapes were heavy, and there was virtually no light in the room. He quickly switched on the bedside lamp.
No cats.
No men in scuba suits.
Although he knew that he had been dreaming, although he’d had this same dream on each of the last three days, Buddy got out of bed, stepped into a pair of slippers that were as large as most men’s boots, and lumbered into the kitchen to check the water faucets. There were no cats streaming out of them, and that was a good thing to know.
However, he was badly shaken. He was no less affected by the dream for having endured it on two other occasions. All week his sleep had been disturbed by dreams of one sort or another; and he never was able to fall back to sleep once brought awake by a vivid nightmare.
The wall clock showed 12:13. He came home from the mill at half past eight and went to bed at half past nine, five days a week, as if he were a clockwork mechanism. Which meant that he had gotten barely three hours of sleep.
He went to the kitchen table, sat down, and opened the travel magazine that he had bought at the general store last Monday. He studied the photographs of divers in scuba suits, why? he thought. Divers. Seamen. Guns. At the reservoir. Why? So late. Late at night. Dark. Divers. ‘Why? Figure it. Come on. Figure it. Can’t. Can. Can’t. Can. Can’t. Divers. In woods. Night. So crazy. Can’t figure it.
He decided to shower, get dressed, and walk across the street to Edison’s General Store. It was time he asked Sam to figure it for him.
At 12:05 Rya watched a man in thick glasses, gray trousers, and a dark blue shirt enter Pauline Vicker’s rooming house. He was the man who had ordered Bob Thorp to kill Mark.