not be much of a man anymore, but I’ve got some pride left.”
Pride? Stupid male ego.
“Why couldn’t you tell me all this before?”
“I wanted to. I tried to. I’ve never meant to keep anything from you, but I didn’t have the words … no, that’s not true, I had the words but I couldn’t say them. Some kind of mental block … I don’t know, I can’t explain it …”
He was getting himself worked up, the worst possible thing for his heart. “All right, that’s enough,” she said. “There’s no time for any more of this now. I have to go and you have to rest.”
“… What’re you going to do?”
“The only thing I can do.” She had her raincoat rebuttoned, was pulling the hood up over her head again. “Hoof it out to the highway and flag down the first car that comes along. Or walk all the way into Seacrest if I have to.”
“Dangerous,” he said. “Woman alone on a night like this, lunatic running around loose—”
“I can take care of myself.” Can of Mace in her purse, self-defense tactics learned and internalized in a police-sponsored class she’d taken a few years ago. And the flashlight to keep the darkness from swallowing her.
He said, “I love you, Shel. No matter what happens, I’ll always love you.”
She said, “I love you, too,” because it was what he wanted to hear and it would help keep him calm, let him rest more easily. Then she turned quickly away, went back out into the hell-black night.
N I N E T E E N
MACKLIN DOZED. PULSES OF heat from the stoked-up fire, the smother of the blanket and comforter, the immobility, the recuperative demands of his body, the now-monotonous ravings of the storm—all combined to push him toward the edge of a deeper sleep. He struggled against it, blinking himself awake every time he reached the edge, because sleep was also an easy escape, another way of hiding, and he wasn’t going to hide anymore.
How much time had passed since Shelby left the second time? It seemed like an hour, probably wasn’t more than a handful of minutes. Out there braving the storm and her fear of the dark and Christ knew what else for him, while he lay here warm and comfortable and waited for her to come back with help.
The black despair had left him a while ago, replaced by a resignation that was no longer quite so fatalistic. Whatever happened, it was pretty much out of his hands now.
One good thing about the heart attack: He’d finally been able to tell Shelby about Dr. Prebble and the need for the bypass operation. The words, so clogged and clotted in him every time he’d tried before, had come spewing out tonight like dammed-up water released through a spillway. And he had a sense that the spillway would remain open; that the attack had rewired him somehow and if he was given the chance, he’d be able to confide some of the other private thoughts and feelings that he’d kept locked away from her. Even though it had taken a freakish set of circumstances and a faceup look at his own mortality to make it happen, it let him feel a little better about himself, gave him a measure of hope.
His eyelids grew heavy, too heavy to keep raised. He dozed again. Snapped awake. Dozed.
Slept, in spite of himself.
And rode the nightmare again.
The same, yet not the same this time. All the familiar components, only they were broken up into out-of- sequence fragments, like film clips spliced together by a child or a drunk. It wasn’t as though he were living it but as if he were an observer watching the spliced bits unroll across a screen. The terror was there, but muted and without the usual ravaging intensity. And it didn’t end with those yellow fangs devouring his body while his torn-off head looked on in horror; it ended with the monster’s roaring words jumbled but recognizable, sentence chunks that no longer fell like whispers but like cushioned blows against his ears.
For the first time he didn’t scream himself free of it; he was simply awake, tense, but not sweating or shaking or struggling for breath. An accelerated pulsebeat was the only physical effect. The dream creature’s words echoed and reechoed in his mind. He lay piecing them together, arranging them in a semblance of order, until with a mixture of awe and anger he began to comprehend what they meant, what the nightmare signified and why he’d kept having it all these years—
The sound of the door opening, the sudden inrush of frigid air, chased it all aside, compartmentalized it.
Shelby, he thought. Back already.
He lifted his head, and then blinked and stared because it wasn’t Shelby who came stalking across the room, dripping rainwater and leaving muddy splotches on the carpet, waving a lighted torch as if it were a weapon.
Brian Lomax.
There was no expression on the man’s blocky, beard-stubbled face, but his eyes had a distended look, as if from some internal pressure. Crazy eyes. Crazy drunk, Macklin thought. They held briefly on him, then shifted and darted from one point to another, following the erratic, tracerlike patterns of the flash beam around the living room, over into the kitchen. Lomax wore a heavy mackinaw buttoned to the throat but no hat; rain glistened on his spiky hair and pink scalp, dribbled down around the edges of his mouth and off the tip of his chin.
“Where’s my wife?” he said.
It wasn’t what Macklin expected to hear. He pushed himself up gingerly until he was half sitting against the pillows. “How should I know?”
“Has she been here?”
“No. I thought she was sick, couldn’t leave the house—”
“That’s right, she is, but she got out anyway. The front door … damn her, she must’ve found an extra key.”
That sounded as if Lomax had been holding her against her will. Beating on her again, probably, keeping her prisoner—and now she’d managed to escape. If he found her, then what?
Macklin said, trying to keep his voice neutral, “What makes you think she’d come here?”
“No place else for her to go.”
Except out to the highway. But if that thought hadn’t occurred to Lomax, Macklin wasn’t about to put it into his head.
He said, “Then she must be hiding somewhere in the woods.”
“We’ll see about that.”
Lomax took the flashlight into the kitchen, then down the hall. The drumbeat of rain on the roof seemed to have let up a little; the gusts buffeting the cottage weren’t quite as strong as before. Macklin could hear him in the guest bedroom, then the master bedroom, banging closet doors. Probably down on all fours, too, looking under the beds.
He sat up a little straighter, swung one leg off the couch. But he was afraid to try getting up. And what could he do if he did, against a healthy man of Lomax’s bulk? For all he knew, the bastard had brought that gun of his with him.
When Lomax came stalking back into the room, Macklin said, “What’s the idea, barging in here like this? My wife told you I had a heart attack—”
“Might be dying, she said. You look all right to me.”
“You’re not an EMT.”
“She’s the reason Claire got out.”
“… What’re you talking about?”
“Your damn wife. Trespassing on my property, pounding on the doors and windows, distracting me. It’s her fault.”
Nothing would ever be Lomax’s fault, always somebody else’s. “Yeah, well, you’re the one trespassing now.”
“No. She wanted me to come here.”
“Not like this, she didn’t.”
“Where is she?”
“Where do you think, Lomax? Gone to bring help because you refused to do anything—”
“Take Claire with her?”
