Mr. Murder

4:28.

Now what?

He could stay there in the hallway, ready to blow the bastard to Hell if the door opened. Wait for Paige and the kids, shout to them when they came in, tell Paige to call 911. Then she could hustle the kids across the street to Vic and Kathy Delorio’s house, where they’d be safe, while he covered the door until the police arrived.

That plan sounded good, responsible, cool and calm. Briefly, the knocking of his heart against his ribs became less insistent, less punishing.

Then the curse of a writer’s imagination hit him hard, a black whirlpool sucking him down into dark possibilities, the curse of what if, what if, what if. What if the other Marty was still strong enough to push open the window in the girls’ room, climb out onto the patio cover at the back of the house, and jump down to the lawn from there? What if he fled along the side of the house and out to the street just as Paige was pulling into the driveway with the girls?

It might happen. Could happen. Would happen. Or something else just as bad would happen, worse. The whirlpool of reality spun out more terrible possibilities than the darkest thoughts of any writer’s mind. In this age of social dissolution, even on the most peaceful streets in the quietest neighborhoods, unexpected acts of grotesque savagery could occur, whereupon people were shocked and horrified but not surprised.

He might be guarding the door to a deserted room.

4:29.

Paige might be turning the corner two blocks away, entering their street.

Maybe the neighbors had heard the gunshots and had already called the police. Please, God, let that be the case.

He had no conscionable choice but to throw open the door to the girls’ room, go in, and confirm whether The Other was there or not.

The Other. In his office, when the confrontation had begun, he’d quickly dismissed his initial thought that he was dealing with something supernatural. A spirit could not be as solid and three-dimensional as this man was. If they existed at all, creatures from the other side of the line between life and death would not be vulnerable to bullets. Yet a feeling of the uncanny persisted, weighed heavier on him moment by moment. Although he suspected that the nature of this adversary was far stranger than ghosts or shape-changing demons, that it was simultaneously more terrifying and more mundane, that it was born of this world and no other, he nevertheless could not help but think of it in terms usually reserved for stories of haunting spirits: Ghost, Phantom, Revenant, Apparition, Specter, The Uninvited, The Undying, The Entity.

The Other.

The door waited.

The silence of the house was deeper than death.

Already focused narrowly on the pursuit of The Other, Marty’s attention constricted further, until he was oblivious of his own heartbeat, blind to everything but the door, deaf to all sounds except those that might come from the girls’ room, conscious of no sensation except the pressure of his finger on the trigger of the pistol.

The blood trail.

Red fragments of shoeprints.

The door.

Waiting.

He was rooted in indecision.

The door.

Something suddenly clattered above him. He snapped his head back and looked at the ceiling. He was directly under the three-foot-square, seven-foot-deep shaft that soared up to a dome-shaped Plexiglas skylight. Rain was beating against the Plexiglas. Only rain, the clatter of rain.

As if the strain of indecision had snapped him back to the full spectrum of reality, he was abruptly deluged by all the voices of the storm, of which he’d been utterly unaware while tracking The Other. He’d been intently listening through the background racket for the stealthier sounds of his quarry. Now the wind’s gibbering-hooting-moaning, the rataplan of rain, fulminant thunder, the bony scraping of a tree limb against one side of the house, the tinny rattle of a loose section of rain gutter, and less identifiable noises flooded over him.

The neighbors couldn’t have heard gunshots above the raging storm. So much for that hope.

Marty seemed to be swept forward by the tumult, along the blood trail, one hesitant step, then another, inexorably toward the waiting door.

8

The storm ushered in an early twilight, bleak and protracted, and Paige had the headlights on all the way home from the girls’ school. Though turned to the highest speed, the windshield wipers could barely cope with the cataracts that poured out of the draining sky. Either the latest drought would be broken this rainy season or nature was playing a cruel trick by raising expectations she would not fulfill. Intersections were flooded. Gutters overflowed. The BMW spread great white wings of water as it passed through one deep puddle after another. And out of the misty murk, the headlights of oncoming cars swam at them like the searching lamps of bathyscaphes probing deep ocean trenches.

“We’re a submarine,” Charlotte said excitedly from the passenger seat beside Paige, looking out of the side window through plumes of tire spray, “swimming with the whales, Captain Nemo and the Nautilus twenty thousand leagues beneath the sea, giant squids stalking us. Remember the giant squid, Mom, from the movie?”

“I remember,” Paige said without taking her eyes from the road.

“Up periscope,” Charlotte said, gripping the handles of that imaginary instrument, squinting through the eyepiece. “Raiding the sea lanes, ramming ships with our super-strong steel bow—boom!— and the crazy captain playing his huge pipe organ! You remember the pipe organ, Mom?”

“I remember.”

“Diving deeper, deeper, the pressure hull starting to crack, but the crazy Captain Nemo says deeper, playing his pipe organ and saying deeper, and all the time here comes the squid.” She broke into the shark’s theme from the movie Jaws: “Dum-dum, dum-dum, dum-dum, dum-dum, da-da-dum!”

“That’s silly,” Emily said from the rear seat.

Charlotte turned in her shoulder harness to look back between the front seats. “What’s silly?”

“Giant squid.”

“Oh, is that so? Maybe you wouldn’t think they were so silly if you were swimming and one of them came up under you and bit you in half, ate you in two bites, then spit out your bones like grape seeds.”

“Squid don’t eat people,” Emily said.

“Of course they do.”

“Other way around.”

“Huh?”

“People eat squid,” Emily said.

“No way.”

“Way.”

“Where’d you get a dumb idea like that?”

“Saw it on a menu at a restaurant.”

“What restaurant?” Charlotte asked.

“Couple different restaurants. You were there. Isn’t it true, Mom—don’t people eat squid?”

“Yes, they do,” Paige agreed.

“You’re just agreeing with her so she won’t look like a dumb seven-year-old,” Charlotte said skeptically.

“No, it’s true,” Paige assured her. “People eat squid.”

“How?” Charlotte asked, as if the very thought beggared her imagination.