A hideous thought came tickling into his mind, I have a beautiful home in an isolated area. What if they were looking for me?
One of the state cops said, “Ma’am, you need to say if this is Mr. Nunnally.”
She nodded. Nodded harder. “I think so. I think so. Ohh God, God—” She clutched at Wiley. “Help me! Help me!” It was horrible to be near her, he could smell her sour sweat. He feared that he would throw up on her.
The boy, his face streaming with tears, said, “What if they come back, what happens to us then, Mr. Dale?”
What, indeed?
He could not be silent, but he had no idea what to say or do. He remembered the creatures he had seen, and the figure Al North had seen in his room, that delicate, hard face, and he knew what this was, what it must be: they were trying to cross the barrier into a universe that had not accepted them as real, and this was a side-effect of their struggle.
The boy leaped at him and suddenly he was on the ground being hammered by powerful fists. He tried to protect himself, but the kid got through his flailing, incompetent arms.
Matt and one of the state cops pulled him off.
“My dad wanted to meet them! Well, he sure did, he sure did, you bastard. Liar! Liar! BLOODY LIAR!”
“Get him out of here,” one of the cops said to Matt. “For God’s sake, get that freak out of here!”
“I thought it would help. He knows about this stuff.”
“Come on, Matt, please,” the state cop said. Then he confronted Wiley. “There’s no law against the kind of crap you dish out, Mister, but I have to tell you, there has to be a special place in hell for scum like you, lying scum! This man died we don’t know how, but it wasn’t little green men, God damn you!”
“No,” Wylie said, and the quietness in his voice drew the attention of all of them. “I am not a liar. And the real shame is, maybe if I had understood this better, or taken it all more seriously, this man would not have died.”
He went to the car, got in, and closed his door. For good measure, he locked it.
Matt drove them away. Wiley looked back at the fabulous house in the middle of nowhere.
“I saw somebody,” Matt said, “at your house.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Last night, buddy.”
“I didn’t see anybody.”
“You were downstairs.”
“But—where were you?”
“On the ridge. I was goin’ out to see if you were fuckin’ with the cigars, and I just happened to see this guy come across your yard. Came right up to the house, looked in the window at you, then went around the back, and a few seconds later your computer comes on.”
“When was this?” Wylie asked.
“About eight.”
“Eight! The whole family was up!”
“Nobody did a thing. He was quiet, man, and fast.”
“Was it an alien? Could you tell?”
“It was a person.”
He turned onto the highway. The storm was closer now. He punched a couple of buttons on his police radio, and a mechanical voice began to deliver National Weather Service warnings. High winds in Hale Center, roofs off houses in Holcomb, tornado sighted in Midwood County, fast moving, dangerous storm.
He increased speed.
“You think we’re gonna take a hit, Wylie?”
“That’s a big mutha out there, you got that right.”
The storm towered, its base black and flashing with lightning. “Matt, I’m so scared it’s beyond scared.”
“I hear ya.”
“You say he was a person? Like us kinda person?”
“He looked like a kid. Nick’s age, twelve, thirteen.”
“So it was a townie? Or someone looking for Nick? Some friend of his, maybe.”
“No. This kid, he steps back, he looks at the house, he peers in windows.”
None of the town kids would do that. There were only maybe a hundred twelve-year-olds in the whole community, and Wylie knew them all. “No kid from around here, then,” he said.
“Absolutely not. He looked—I don’t know, Wylie, but the word is confused. Looking and looking at that house. Like he was trying to figure something out and couldn’t.”
“He couldn’t’ve been trying to get in. The place is unlocked until late. He could’ve just walked in.”
“He went in and went into your office and came out. Then he went down toward the Saunders. So I followed him. I’m right behind him. I thought he was some kid from town, was my impression. But when he walks up to the river bank, he did not cross the stream. He disappeared.”
“Disappeared?”
“Swear to God.”
“Why didn’t you come into the house?”
“You guys were doin’ a screamer.”
“But he disappeared? I mean, in what sense?”
“He took three or four steps into those little rapids. The shallow place where it’s easy to cross. Right in the middle of it, he just simply was gone. Gone, Wylie.”
Dear heaven, it had been Trevor. He’d crossed the boundary between the worlds and he probably didn’t realize it. He’d been going home, but come here instead.
For a long time, Wylie had entertained the notion that the weir-cats people saw around here—the black panthers you saw back in the woods every once in a while—were from a parallel universe. They were animals that had evolved an ability to pass between the worlds as a defense mechanism.
There’d been a book called The Hunt for the Skinwalker, written about a ranch in Utah where scientists had documented the movement of such animals—not between this earth and Martin’s world, but yet another parallel universe, one in which creatures from our ice age still roamed freely.
Wylie’s mind wanted to race, but he didn’t know where it should go.
Silence fell between them. Wylie’s thoughts turned to the poor mutilated guy. What was that about? Something they were doing in their effort to enter this world. No question, but what was it?
They’d cut the guy up—therefore, had taken parts of him.
He shuddered. He had a feeling, if he waited, he was going to find all this out, and it wasn’t going to be good, not at all.
The storm, when it came, brought long, heavy gusts of wind, and the police radio began to burp trailer calls, as they were known. As everybody in Tornado Alley knows, trailers actually attract twisters, which was why the Kan-Sas Trailer Park had been the only thing destroyed by that tornado back in September.
“I know something’s wrong,” Matt said at last. “I just don’t want it to be this—oh, crap, Wiley, this weirdness that seems to follow you everywhere you go. I never told you this, but when we were kids—eleven, twelve, about—I was out on my bike late. I used to like to ride past Sue Wolff’s house and hope I’d see her on the porch and we’d get to talking or I’d get up the courage to ring the bell or whatever, and I turned onto Winkler, and there is this goddamn huge light over your house.”
“Jesus.”
“I thought the place was on fire. But then I felt the thing, Wiley. I felt it looking back at me. And, you know, it did not want me there.”
“When was this?”
“Summer of, uh, eighty-eight, I guess.”
“No, what time?”
“Oh, late. Coulda been after midnight, even. ’Cause I couldn’t risk her actually seeing me, of course. Not fat me, mooning after a cheerleader and all.”
They arrived at Wylie’s place. As he got out of the car, he saw that Matt had tears on his face. He said
