have any romantic feelings left for Naomi and Seraphim. They were the past, and he loathed the past, and if they wouldn't let him alone, he would never be able to live in the future.
He pressed the muzzle of the weapon against the girl's forehead and said, 'Naomi, Seraphim, you were exquisite lovers, but you've got to be realistic. There's no way we can have a life together.'
'Hey, who's there?' said the blind boy, whom Junior had nearly forgotten.
He turned from the cowering girl and studied the boy, who stood a few steps inside the room, holding a can of soda in each hand. The artificial eyes were convincing, but they didn't possess the knowing look that so troubled him in the strange girl.
Junior pointed the pistol at the boy. 'Simon says your name's Bartholomew.'
'Simon who?'
'You don't look very threatening to me, blind boy.'
The child didn't reply.
'Is your name Bartholomew?'
'Yes.'
Junior took two steps toward him, sighting the gun on his face. 'Why should I be afraid of a stumbling blind boy no bigger than a midget?'
'I don't stumble. Not much, anyway.' To the girl, Bartholomew said, 'Angel, are you okay?'
'I'm gonna have the trots,' she said.
'Why should I be afraid of a stumbling blind boy?' asked Junior again. But this time the words issued from him in a different tone of voice, because suddenly he sensed something knowing in this boy's attitude, if not in his manufactured eyes, a quality similar to what the girl exhibited.
'Because I'm a prodigy,' Bartholomew said, and he threw the can of root beer.
The can struck Junior hard in the face, breaking his nose, before he could duck.
Furious, he squeezed off two shots. Passing the living-room archway, Tom saw Jacob in the armchair, under the reading lamp, slumped as if asleep over the book. His crimson bib confirmed that he wasn't just sleeping.
Drawn by voices on the second floor, Tom took the stairs two at a time. A man and a boy. Barty and Cain. To the left in the hallway, and then to a room on the right.
Heedless of the rules of standard police procedure, Tom raced to the doorway, crossed the threshold, and saw Barty throw a can of soda at the shaved head and pocked face of a transformed Enoch Cain.
The boy fell and rolled even as he pitched the can, anticipating the shots that Cain fired, which cracked into the doorframe inches from Tom's knees.
Raising his revolver, Tom squeezed off two shots, but the gun didn't discharge.
'Frozen firing pin,' Cain said. His smile was venomous. 'I worked on it. I hoped you'd get here in time to see the consequences of your stupid games.'
Cain turned the pistol on Barty, but when Tom charged, Cain swung toward him once more. The round that he fired would have been a crippler, maybe a killer, except that Angel launched herself off the window seat behind Cain and gave him a hard shove, spoiling his aim. The killer stumbled and then shimmered.
Gone.
He vanished through some hole, some slit, some tear bigger than anything through which Tom flipped his quarters.
Barty couldn't see, but somehow he knew. 'Whooooaa, Angel.'
'I sent him someplace where we aren't,' the girl explained. 'He was rude.'
Tom was stunned. 'So? when did you learn you could do that?'
'Just now.' Although Angel tried to sound nonchalant, she was trembling. 'I'm not sure I can do it again.'
'Until you are sure? be careful.'
'Okay.'
'Will he come back?'
She shook her head. 'No way back.' She pointed to the sketch pad on the floor. 'I pushed him there.'
Tom stared at the girl's drawing-quite a good one for a child her age, rough in style, but with convincing detail-and if skin could be said to crawl, his must have moved all the way around his body two or three times before settling down again where it belonged. 'Are these??'
'Big bugs,' the girl said.
'Lots of them.'
'Yeah. It's a bad place.'
Getting to his feet, Barty said, 'Hey, Angel?'
'Yeah?'
'You threw the pig yourself.'
'I guess I did.'
Shaking with a fear that had nothing to do with Junior Cain and flying bullets, or even with memories of Josef Krepp and his vile necklace, Tom Vanadium closed the sketch pad and put it on the window seat. He opened the window, and in rushed the susurration of breeze-stirred oak leaves.
He picked up Angel, picked up Barty. 'Hold on.' He carried them out of the room, down the stairs, out of the house, to the yard under the great tree, where they would wait for the police, and where they would not see Jacob's body when the coroner removed it by way of the front door.
Their story would be that Cain's gun had jammed just as Tom had entered Barty's bedroom. Too cowardly for hand-to-hand combat, the Shamefaced Slayer had fled through the open window. He was loose once more in an unsuspecting world.
That last part was true. He just wasn't loose in this world anymore. And in the world to which he'd gone, he would not find easy victims.
Leaving the children under the tree, Tom returned to the house to phone the police.
According to his wristwatch, the time was 9:05 in the morning on this momentous day.
Chapter 82
As meaningful as Jacob's death had been within the small world of his family, Agnes Lampion never lost sight of the fact that there were more resonant deaths in the larger world before 1968 ended and the Year of the Rooster followed. On the fourth of April, James Earl Ray gunned down Martin Luther King on a motel balcony in Memphis, but the assassin's hopes were foiled when, because of this murder, freedom grew more vigorously from the richness of a in martyr's blood. On June 1, Helen Keller died peacefully at eighty-seven. Blind and deaf since early childhood, mute until her adolescence, Miss Keller led a life of astonishing accomplishment; she learned to speak, to ride horses, to waltz; she graduated cum laude from Radcliffe, an inspiration to millions and a testament to the potential in even the most blighted life. On June 5, Senator Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Unknown numbers died when Soviet tanks invaded Czechoslovakia, and hundreds of thousands perished in the final days of the Cultural Revolution in China, many eaten in acts of cannibalism sanctioned by Chairman Mao as acceptable political action. John Steinbeck, novelist, and Tallulah Bankhead, actress, came to the end of their journeys in this world, if not yet in all others. But James Lovell, William Anders, and Frank Borman-the first men to orbit the moon-traveled 250,000 miles into space, and all returned alive.
Of all the kindnesses that we can do for one another, the most precious of all gifts-time-is not ours to give. Bearing this in mind, Agnes did her best to guide her extended family through its grieving for Harrison and for Jacob, into happier days. Respect must be paid, precious memories nurtured, but life also must go on.
In July, she went for a walk on the shore with Paul Damascus, expecting to do a little beachcombing, to watch the comical scurrying crabs. Somewhere between the seashells and the crustaceans, however, he asked her if she could ever love him.
Paul was a dear man, different from Joey in appearance but so like him at heart. She shocked him by insisting they go at once to his house, to his bedroom. Red-faced as no pulp hero ever had been, Paul stammered out that he
