Shadowfires

more prominent now than it had been an hour ago. The illusion of prominence was just an indication of how much he feared losing her.

In the car, on the drive up from the lake, he had tried his best to persuade her to remain behind and let him handle Eric alone. She was opposed to that idea — possibly because she feared losing Ben as much as he feared losing her.

They started up the lane.

Ben looked nervously left and right as they went, uncomfortably aware that the heavily forested mountainside, gloomy even at midday, provided countless hiding places — ambush points — very close to them on both sides.

The air was heavily laced with the odor of evergreen sap, the crisp and appealing fragrance of dry pine needles, and the musty scent of some rotting deadwood.

Reeeeee, reeeeee, reeeeee…

* * *

He had returned to the armchair with a pair of binoculars that he had remembered were in the bedroom closet. Only minutes after settling down at the window, before his dysfunctioning thought processes could take off on yet another tangent, he saw movement two hundred yards below, at the sharp bend in the road. He played with the focus knob, pulling the scene in clearer, and in spite of the depth of the shadows at that point along the lane, he saw the two people in perfect detail: Rachael and the bastard she had been sleeping with, Shadway.

He had not known whom he expected — other than Seitz, Knowls, and the men of Geneplan — but he had certainly not expected Rachael and Shadway. He was stunned and could not imagine how she had learned of this place, though he knew that the answer would be obvious to him if his mind had been functioning normally.

They were crouched along the bank that flanked the road down there, fairly well concealed. But they had to reveal a little of themselves in order to get a good look at the cabin, and what little they revealed was enough for Eric to identify them in the magnified field of the binoculars.

The sight of Rachael enraged him, for she had rejected him, the only woman in his adult life to reject him — the bitch, the ungrateful stinking bitch! — and she turned her back on his money, too. Even worse: in the miasmal swamp of his deranged mind, she was responsible for his death, had virtually killed him by angering him to distraction and then letting him rush out onto Main Street, into the path of the truck. He could believe she had actually planned his death in order to inherit the very fortune on which she'd claimed to have no designs. Yes, of course, why not? And now there she was with her lover, with the man she had been fucking behind his back, and she had clearly come to finish the job that the garbage truck had started.

They pulled back beyond the bend, but a few seconds later he saw movement in the brush, to the left of the road, and he caught a glimpse of them moving off into the trees. They were going to make a cautious indirect approach.

Eric dropped the binoculars and shoved up from the armchair, stood swaying, in the grip of a rage so great that he almost felt crushed by it. Steel bands tightened across his chest, and for a moment he could not draw his breath. Then the bands snapped, and he sucked in great lungsful of air. He said, “Oh, Rachael, Rachael,” in a voice that sounded as if it were echoing up from hell. He liked the sound of it, so he said her name again: “Rachael, Rachael…”

From the floor beside the chair, he plucked up the ax.

He realized that he could not handle the ax and both knives, so he chose the butcher's knife and left the other blade behind.

He would go out the back way. Circle around. Slip up on them through the woods. He had the cunning to do it. He felt as if he had been born to stalk and kill.

Hurrying across the living room toward the kitchen, Eric saw an image of himself in his mind's eye: He was ramming the knife deep into her guts, then ripping it upward, tearing open her flat young belly. He made a shrill sound of eagerness and almost fell over the empty soup and stew cans in his haste to reach the back door. He would cut her cut her cut. And when she dropped to the ground with the knife in her belly, he would go at her with the ax, use the blunt edge of it first, smashing her bones to splinters, breaking her arms and legs, and then he would turn the wondrous shiny instrument over in his hands — his strange and powerful new hands! — and use the sharp edge.

By the time he reached the rear door and yanked it open and went out of the house, he was in the grip of that reptilian fury that he had feared only a short while ago, a cold and calculating fury, called forth out of genetic memories of inhuman ancestors. Having at last surrendered to that primeval rage, he was surprised to discover that it felt good.

22 WAITING FOR THE STONE

Jerry Peake should have been asleep on his feet, for he had been up all night. But seeing Anson Sharp humiliated had revitalized him better than eight hours in the sheets could have. He felt marvelous.

He stood with Sharp in the corridor outside Sarah Kiel's hospital room, waiting for Felsen Kiel to come and tell them what they needed to know. Peake required considerable restraint to keep from laughing at his boss's vindictive grousing about the farmer from Kansas.

“If he wasn't a know-nothing shit-kicker, I'd come down so hard on him that his teeth would still be vibrating next Christmas,” Sharp said. “But what's the point, huh? He's just a thick-headed Kansas plowboy who doesn't know any better. No point talking to a brick wall, Peake. No point getting angry with a brick wall.”

“Right,” Peake said.

Pacing back and forth in front of Sarah's closed door, glowering at the nurses who passed in the corridor, Sharp said, “You know, those farm families way out there on the plains, they get strange 'cause they breed too much among themselves, cousin to cousin, that sort of thing, which makes them more stupid generation by generation. But not only stupid, Peake. That inbreeding makes them stubborn as mules.”

“Mr. Kiel sure does seem stubborn,” Peake said.

“Just a dim-witted shit-kicker, so what's the point of wasting energy breaking his butt? He wouldn't learn his lesson anyway.”

Peake could not risk an answer. He required almost superhuman determination to keep a grin off his face.

Six or eight times during the next half hour, Sharp said, “Besides, it's faster to let him get the information out of the girl. She's a dim bulb herself, a drugged-up little whore who's probably had syphilis and clap so often her brain's like oatmeal. I figured it'd take us hours to get anything out of her. But when that shit-kicker came into the room, and I heard the girl say 'Daddy' in that happy-shaky little voice, I knew he'd get out of her what we needed a lot faster than we could get it. Let him do our job for us, I thought.”

Jerry Peake marveled at the deputy director's boldness in trying to reshape Peake's perception of what had actually happened in Sarah's room. Then again, maybe Sharp was beginning to believe that he had not backed down and had cleverly manipulated The Stone, getting the best of him. He was fruitcake enough to buy his own lies.

Once, Sharp put a hand on Peake s shoulder, not in a comradely manner but to be sure of his subordinate's attention. “Listen, Peake, don't you get the wrong idea about the way I came on with that little whore. The foul language I used, the threats, the little bit of hurt I caused her when I squeezed her hand… the way I touched her… didn't mean a thing. Just a technique, you know. A good method for getting quick answers. If this wasn't a national security crisis, I'd never have tried that stuff. But sometimes, in special situations like this, we have to do things for our country that maybe neither we nor our country would ordinarily approve of. We understand each other?”

“Yes, sir. Of course.” Surprised by his own ability to fake naivete and admiration, and to do it convincingly, Peake said, “I'm amazed you'd worry that I'd misunderstand. I'd never have thought of such an approach myself. But the moment you went to work on her… well, I knew what you were doing, and I admired your interrogation skills. I see this case as an opportunity, sir. I mean, the chance to work with you, which I figured would be a very valuable learning experience, which it has been — even more valuable than I'd hoped.”