The Burning

'Stop!' 'Get back here!' 'Don't!'

They were all yelling at him now, but the call of the train was even stronger and he continued on. No one tried to stop him, and he realized that it was because they were afraid to get any closer.

Why wasn't he afraid?

He didn't know.

The smoke smell was strong, the temperature somewhere around freezing and falling with each

step, but neither of those elements deterred him, and he forged ahead until he was standing before the passenger car. The others had all gotten aboard; there was no one waiting in line. Through the windows he could see nothing, no faces, no silhouettes, only impenetrable darkness.

He had a moment of hesitation.

Then he thought of the woman holding the hand of the little girl, heard in his ears and felt in his mind the soothing voice of the railroad and grabbed hold of the metal bar to pull himself up the steps.

Only the bar wasn't metal.

'Dennis!' Jack yelled from somewhere far behind him.

And he was on the train.

Twenty-one

Bear Flats, California

Jolene, sitting in Leslie's living room, slammed the leather-bound diary shut with trembling fingers.

Was it really bound with leather¹?

She had the sudden urge to drop the book and wash her hands, her arms, her entire body, but she forced herself to remain as she was. She was just being paranoid-although it was hard not to be paranoid after what she'd seen, after what she'd read. Surreptitiously, she looked down at the cover of the diary to see if she could spot veins, hair, fingerprints.

Skylar lay asleep on the couch next to her, his fingers clutching her blouse and holding on to the material tightly, as though he was afraid to let go. Across the room, her mother, completely sober, sat unmoving in her chair, the expression on her blanched face not exactly concerned and caring, but definitely less self-absorbed than Jolene had ever seen it. Leslie stood in the kitchen doorway, leaning on the frame, a drink in her hand. The sound of ice cubes clinking in the glass was loud in the stillness. She was trembling, too. 'I thought you were going to read it out loud,' she said.

Jolene took a deep breath. She looked down at her son, brushing a wisp of hair from his forehead to calm herself down.

'They want revenge,' Skylar had told her after he'd been brought to the hospital and sedated, after a doctor had confirmed that no bones were broken and he had not been sexually assaulted. She wasn't sure he understood the concept of 'revenge,' wasn't even sure he knew who 'they' were. But she was sure of one thing: this was why he'd been abducted; this was why he'd been released.

To relay this message.

They want revenge.

But who had taken him? And how had he ended up in the cellar?

That, she still didn't know.

Despite the circumstances, the police, in all of their literal-mindedness, had not seen any harm in allowing Jolene to take the diary out of the Williams house, and she had done so hoping it would provide some clues. But after reading one random page, she'd been so horrified that she'd shut the book, refusing to read more.

'I don't want to read it aloud,' she said. 'Skylar might wake up. He might hear it.'

Leslie's voice was uncharacteristically solemn. 'Is it that bad?'

Jolene nodded. The page she'd read, near the back of the diary, had described a man who had been killed and gutted for no reason other than he'd trespassed on the Williams land. The man's innards had been fed to hogs, and the hands and feet had been hung out to dry with the beef jerky in order to make chew toys for the hounds. There had not been much graphic detail, at least not by today's slasher-movie standards, but there'd been an obvious joy in the telling, in the remembering of what was clearly a satisfying event, and the tone had turned her stomach. She thought of her last sight of Anna May, an image that would remain burned forever in her mind, the old woman's body beaten and slashed, a spreading puddle of blood on the floor.

They want revenge.

'Let me read it,' Leslie said, walking over.

'It's all yours.' Jolene handed her the diary, once again experiencing an instinctive desire to wash her hands or at least wipe them on her pants. Leslie sat down on the floor in front of her, opened the elaborately bound book and started quickly skimming pages.

Jolene looked across the room at her mother, who met her glance with a small apologetic smile, then turned her gaze down at her son. Asleep, he sgemed smaller than he did when awake, and it broke her heart to see a furrowed brow where there should have been only smooth skin and an angelic expression. She touched his fist, which was still holding tightly to her blouse, and could feel the tension in his muscles. Life had been tough enough for the little guy already. Now this. Could he ever hope to emerge unscathed?

Counseling, the doctor had told her, and while that carried its own stigma, it was probably the only way through this.

'Jesus,' Leslie breathed. She glanced quickly over to make sure Skylar was still asleep.

'What is it?' Jolene said tiredly. 'Hit me.'

'I know who's in those graves,' Leslie said. 'The ones on the path.' She looked up from the diary.

There were goose bumps on Jolene's arms.

'It's a Chinese woman and her half-and-half daughter. They were discovered living with a miner up in Hells Canyon and Chester Williams gleefully rallied the town and had all three of them lynched. I gather it happened quite a while before the other events in this diary, when he was younger, but it seems to have been some kind of turning point in his life because he doesn't just mention it; he goes into detail. 'I pulled the rope hard and the girl flew up into the tree,' he writes. 'We laughed as her legs continued to dance.' ' Leslie turned the page. 'After that, the man was buried in the cemetery, the one by the golf course, and the mother and daughter, not being Christians, were buried out in the woods, where the path is now.'

Jolene shivered.

The family in the gulch

Yes. That's exactly what it reminded her of. Strangers in a strange land who, looking for a better life, found only death. She wondered who had been hanged first, the woman or the girl. She hoped the woman had gone first. As a mother, she could think of no fate so horrible as being forced to watch one's child killed.

Unconsciously, her arm snaked around Skylar's shoulders, held him tight.

Leslie was looking at her, face pale. 'He cut off their thumbs after they were dead, and kept them. It says here that all these years later, he still liked to take them out and look at them.'

Jolene glanced over at her mom, expecting some sort of reaction, but there was nothing. Her mom had actually known the most recent Chester Williams, this man's grandson. She would have expected her mom to have some sort of emotional response to these revelations.

'There were more than two thumbs in that basement,' Leslie said.

Jolene thought of what her son had said- They want revenge -and for the first time thought she might know who 'they' were.

'Those two weren't the only ones,' Jolene said softly. 'There were more.'

Leslie nodded. 'I'll keep reading.'

He dreamed of the face from the window, that brown wrinkled head and those horrible grinning teeth. Only the face wasn't at the window. It was directly above his, looking at him from inches away, and Skylar realized from the gentle side-to-side movement of the head and the corresponding sway of his own prone form that the man was carrying him.

Except it wasn't a man.

It had been at one time, but that was long, long ago. The thing that held him now, that had taken him from the bathroom at school and was now bringing him somewhere else, was a corpse but more than a corpse, a