The brute was slow: she was nimble. He was heavy: she was light to the point of invisibility. Instead of clinging to the walls of the house, which would only take her around to the front eventually, where the lawn was illuminated, she struck out away from the building, and hoped to God the beast couldn’t see in the dark.
Marty stumbled down the stairs, still shaking sleep from his head. The cold in the hall slapped him fully awake. He followed the draft to the kitchen. He only had a few seconds to take in the glass and the blood on the floor before Carys started screaming.
From some unimaginable place, someone cried out. Whitehead heard the voice, a girl’s voice, but lost as he was in a wilderness, he couldn’t fix the cry. He had no idea how long he’d been weeping here, watching the damned come and go: it seemed an age. His head swam with hyperventilation; his throat was hoarse with sobs.
“Mamoulian . . .” he pleaded again, “don’t leave me here.”
The European had been right-he didn’t want to go alone into this nowhere. Though he had begged to be saved from it a hundred times without result, now, at last, the illusion began to relent. The tiles, like shy white crabs, scuttled back into place at his feet; the smell of his own stale sweat reassaulted him, more welcome than any scent he’d ever smelled. And now the European was here in front of him, as if he had never moved.
“Shall we talk, Pilgrim?” he asked.
Whitehead was shivering, despite the heat. His teeth chattered.
“Yes,” he said.
“Quietly? With dignity and politeness?”
Again: “Yes.”
“You didn’t like what you saw.”
Whitehead ran his fingers across his pasty face, his thumb and forefinger digging into the pits at the bridge of his nose, as if to push the sights out. “No, damn you,” he said. The images would not be dislodged. Not now, not ever.
“Perhaps we could talk somewhere else,” the European suggested. “Don’t you have a room we could retire to?”
“I heard Carys. She screamed.”
Mamoulian closed his eyes for a moment, fetching a thought from the girl. “She’s quite all right,” he said.
“Don’t hurt her. Please. She’s all I’ve got.”
“There’s no harm done. She simply found a piece of my friend’s handiwork.”
Breer had not only skinned the dog, he’d disemboweled it. Carys had slipped in the muck of its innards, and the scream had escaped before she could stop herself. When its reverberations died she listened for the butcher’s footsteps. Somebody was running in her direction.
“Carys!” It was Marty’s voice.
“I’m over here.”
He found her staring down at the dog’s skinned head.
“Who the fuck did this?” he snapped.
“He’s here,” she said. “He followed me out.”
He touched her face. “Are you all right?”
“It’s only a dead dog,” she said. “It was just a shock.”
As they returned to the house, she remembered the dream she’d woken from. There’d been a faceless man crossing this very lawn-were they treading in his footprints now?-with a surf of shit at his heels.
“There’s somebody else here,” she said, with absolute certainty, “besides the dog-killer.”
“Sure.”
She nodded, face stony, then took Marty’s arm. “This one’s worse, babe.”
“I’ve got a gun. It’s in my room.”
They’d come to the kitchen door; the dog’s skin still lay discarded beside it.
“Do you know who they are?” he asked her. She shook her head.
“He’s fat,” was all she could say. “Stupid-looking.”
“And the other one. You know him?”
The other? Of course she knew him: he was as familiar as her own face. She had thought of him a thousand times a day in the last weeks; something told her she had always known him. He was the Architect who paraded in her sleep, who dabbled his fingers at her neck, who had come now to unleash the flood of filth that had followed him across the lawn. Was there ever a time when she hadn’t lived in his shadow?
“What are you thinking?”
He was giving her such a sweet look, trying to put a heroic face on his confusion.