Einstein and Nora were on the verge of coming true, the Cornell Curse again,
because now they were both inside the house, both vulnerable, both possibly
within striking distance of the thing in the kitchen.
She started to speak.
Travis shook his head and raised one hand to his mouth.
Silenced, she bit her lip and glanced from him to the dead man on the floor.
As Travis quietly stepped through the rubble, he was stricken by a feeling that
the intruder had gone out the back of the house and was coming around the side,
heading for the front door, risking being seen by neighbors in the gloom of
twilight, intending to enter behind them, swift and fast. Nora was standing
between Travis and the front door, so he would not have a clear shot at the
creature if it came that way; hell, it would be all over Nora one second after
it reached the door. Trying not to panic, trying not to think of Hockney’s
eyeless face, Travis moved more quickly across the living room, risking the
crackle of some debris underfoot, hoping those small noises would not carry to
the kitchen if the intruder was still out there. Reaching Nora, he took her by
the arm and propelled her toward the front door, out onto the stoop and down the
stairs, looking left and right, half-expecting to see the living nightmare
rushing at them, but it was nowhere in sight.
The gunshots and Nora’s shouting had drawn neighbors as far as their front doors
all along the street. A few had even come outside onto porches and lawns.
Somebody surely would have called the cops. Because of Einstein’s status as a
much-wanted fugitive, the police seemed almost as grave a danger as the
yellow-eyed thing in the house.
The three of them piled into the pickup. Nora locked her door, and Travis locked
his. He started the engine and backed the truck—and the Airstream— out of the
driveway, into the street. He was aware of people staring.
The twilight was going to be short-lived, as it always was near the ocean.
Already, the sunless sky was blackish in the east, purple overhead, and a
steadily darkening blood-red in the west. Travis was grateful for the oncoming
cover of nightfall, although he knew the yellow-eyed creature would be sharing
it with them.
He drove past the gaping neighbors, none of whom he had ever met during his
years of self-imposed solitude, and he turned at the first corner. Nora held
Einstein tightly, and Travis drove as fast as he dared. The trailer rocked and
swayed behind them when he took the next couple of corners at too great a speed.
“What happened in there?” she asked.
“It killed Hockney earlier today or yesterday—”
“It?”
“—and it was waiting for us to come home.”
“It?” she repeated.
Einstein mewled.
Travis said, “I’ll have to explain later.” He wondered if he could explain.
No description he gave of the intruder would do it justice; he did not possess
the words necessary to convey the degree of its strangeness.
They had gone no more than eight blocks when they heard sirens in the
neighborhood that they had just left. Travis drove another four blocks and
parked in the empty lot of a high school.
“What now?” Nora asked.
“We abandon the trailer and the truck,” he said. “They’ll be looking for both.”
He put the revolver in her purse, and she insisted on slipping the butcher’s
knife in there, too, rather than leave it behind.
They got out of the pickup and, in the descending night, walked past the side of
the school, across an athletic field, through a gate in a chain-link fence, and
onto a residential street lined with mature trees.
With nightfall, the breeze became a blustery wind, warm and parched. It blew a
few dry leaves at them and harried dust ghosts along the pavement.
Travis knew they were too conspicuous even without the trailer and truck. The
neighbors would be telling the police to look for a man, woman, and golden
retriever—not the most common trio. They would be wanted for questioning in the
death of Ted Hockney, so the search for them would not be perfunctory. They had