Her face was pale and streaked with tears. Her eyes were wide.
“Lovely,” he said.
“I don’t want you touching me.”
“Miriam used to say that. But with Miriam it was an order. She never begged.” He touched her.
She was covered with gooseflesh.
“Don’t stop crying,” he said. “I like you crying.”
She wept, not quietly but uncontrollably and unashamedly, as if she were a child — or as if she were in agony.
As he prepared to enter her, he heard someone shout just beyond the window. Startled, he said, “Who —”
The kitchen door crashed open. A boy, no older than Jeremy Thorp, came inside, shouting at the top of his voice and windmilling his thin arms.
At the edge of the Thorp property, Rya tossed the key and missed it again.
Two errors out of forty catches isn’t so bad, she thought. In fact that’s major league talent. Rya Annendale of the Boston Red Sox! Didn’t sound bad. Not bad at all. Rya Annendale of the Pittsburgh Pirates! That was even better.
This time she saw where the key fell in the grass. She went straight to it and picked it up.
When the door flew open and the boy charged in like a dangerous animal breaking free of its cage, Salsbury stepped away from the woman and pulled up his trousers.
“You let go of her!”
The boy collided with him.
“Get
Under attack, Salsbury staggered backwards. He was strong enough to handle the boy, but he was suffering from surprise and confusion; and he had lost his balance. When he backed into the refrigerator, still trying to button the waistband of his slacks, the boy pummeling him, he realized that it was ridiculous for him, of all people, to retreat. “I am the key.”
The boy hit him. Called him names.
Desperate, Salsbury fought back, seized him by the wrists and struggled with him. “I am the key!”
“Mr. Thorp! Jeremy! Help me!”
“Stay right where you are,” Salsbury told them.
They didn’t move.
He swung the boy around, reversing their positions, and slammed him against the refrigerator. Bottles and cans and jars rattled loudly on the shelves.
Very young children would not have been affected by the subliminal program that had been played for Black River. Below the age of eight, children were not sufficiently aware of death and sex to respond to the motivational equations that the subceptive films established in older individuals. Furthermore, although the vocabulary had been made as simple as possible since the Holbrook-Rossner-Picard indoctrination, a child had to have at least a third- grade reading ability to be properly impressed by the block-letter messages that established the key-lock code phrases. But this boy was older than eight, and he should respond.
Through clenched teeth Salsbury said,
Halfway across the lawn, atop the grape arbor, a robin bounced along the interlocking vines, stopped after every second or third hop, cocked its head, and peered between the leaves. Rya paused to watch him for a moment.
Panic.
He had to guard against panic.
But he had made a fatal mistake, and he might have the power taken away from him.
No. It was a serious mistake. Granted. Very serious. But not fatal. He must not panic. Keep cool.
“Who are you?” he asked.
The boy squirmed, tried to free himself.
“Where are you from?” Salsbury demanded, gripping him so tightly that he gasped.
The boy kicked him in the shin. Hard.
For an instant Salsbury’s whole world was reduced to a bright bolt of pain that shot from his ankle to his thigh, coruscated in his bones. Howling, wincing, he almost fell.
Wrenching loose, the boy ran toward the sink, away from the table, intent on getting around Salsbury.
Salsbury stumbled after him, cursing. He grabbed at the boy’s shirt, hooked it with his fingers, lost hold of it in the same second, tripped and fell.
“Bob!” Panic. “Stop him.” Hysteria. “Kill him. For God’s sake,
The canary cage was on the lawn by the kitchen window.
Rya heard Buster chattering — and then she heard someone shouting in the house.
Salsbury got up.
Sick. Scared.
The naked woman wept.
Crazily, he thought of the refrain from the rhyme that went with a child’s game that he had once played: all fall
Thorp blocked the door.
The boy tried to dodge him.
“Kill him.”
Thorp caught the intruder and drove him backwards, knocked him against the electric range with devastating force, clutched him by the throat, and pounded his head into the stainless steel brightwork that ringed the four burners. A frying pan fell to the floor with a
Jeremy was crying.
“Stop that,” Salsbury said sharply.
The boy stopped, reluctantly.
On his way to the bloodied child, Salsbury saw a girl in the open door. She was staring at the blood, and she seemed mesmerized by the sight. He started toward her.
She looked up, dazed.
“I am the key.”
She turned and fled.
Salsbury ran to the door — but when he got there, she was already gone around the corner of the house, out of sight.
PART TWO
Terror
1
Friday, August 26, 1977
9:45 A.M
Rya sat in the front seat of the station wagon between Paul and Jenny, silent and unmoving, gripped by what
