night. And small, intricate waves came farther each time the place shook, the careful water licking the motorbikes and the paper signs and the cold sidewalk bakeries where naan had been sold for a few rupees.
India, some great city, and it was dead and it was sinking.
He was alive in it completely. Standing at an intersection. Down the street a luxury building in the chaos—a Four Seasons hotel with curtains blowing out the windows. He looked down at the sloshing water, how very carefully it licked his bare feet, how clear it was despite being floated with cigarette ends and Fanta bottles and plastic bags and sodden, gray disks of naan from the dead bakery.
Then he was in woods. His woods. And he saw a man.
Nick! Brooke! Kelsey! For the love of heaven, wake up!
Al North was walking and his movements were strange, purposeful but odd. He was flickering as he walked, like he wasn’t entirely there. When he blundered into brush, he would mutter and groan, and there would be blue flashes all around him. Where his feet touched grassy places, there was flickering blue fire.
“Mommydaddy! Mommydaddy!” Kelsey flew in, throwing her arms around Wylie—who still could not stop typing. And Nick slept on.
“Daddy, Papa Bear is in the woods.”
At last Nick woke up. He shook his head. “Hey, Baby,” he said to his sister. “Daddy’s busy.”
Look at the book, Nick! Look this way!
Kelsey went into her brother’s lap. “Yeah, Kelsey, it’s Papa Bear,” Nick said. He reached over and shook Wylie’s shoulder. “Dad, you want to stop for a second? A little girl wants to say good morning.”
“There’s a papa bear in the woods, Daddy.”
With every ounce of strength in him, Wylie tried to react. But his hands swept the keys and his voice remained as paralyzed as it always was when this seizure-like state was upon him.
Look at what I’m writing, for the love of all that’s holy. He tried all caps, LOOK AT THIS! HELLO, NICK, IT’S AL NORTH IN THE WOODS!!!!
“Why don’t we pull out the guns today, Dad,” Nick said, the sleepy calm of his voice revealing that he had NOT looked.
“Oh, no, Nick, it was just Papa Bear!”
“We need the guns to be ready, Kelsey.”
“Mommy, Nick is scaring me!”
“Nick!” Brooke came in. She glanced at Wylie. He could feel her looking at the screen—but then Kelsey ran to her and she was distracted.
DANGER DANGER DANGER!!!!
There was a change, he thought, in the way they moved.
“Dad, we’re gonna go downstairs now.”
The three of them left. A moment later, the clattering of the keyboard stopped. He tried to move his hands —and they pulled away.
At last!
He leaped up and dashed down the stairs. “Get the guns out,” he shouted, “Al North is in our woods!”
They were in the family room, the three of them. The gun cabinet was open. The Magnum lay on the coffee table. Kelsey sat on the couch with her thumb in her mouth and her knees pulled up under her chin. She had saved them all, Wylie thought. He went to her. “What did Papa Bear look like, honey?”
“He’d been eating strawberries!”
“And how do you know that?”
“His mouth was all red.”
The crude surgery.
“Dad,” Nick said, “He was just here. He came right up to the house. I thought he was going to come in but something either went wrong or he changed his mind or something.”
“Because he didn’t come in? You’re sure?”
“Of course I’m not sure! Maybe he’s in the crawlspace, maybe he’s in the attic, maybe he’s invisible or something. I have no idea.”
“But you didn’t hear him come in?” Wylie went to the window.
Nick came beside him. “There,” he said after a moment.
“I don’t see him.”
Then he did—a splash of red in the shadowy woods. His crude surgical wounds. Then he saw also a flash of metal.
There was a figure back among those trees, most certainly, and in its hand was a very big, very ugly gun.
SIXTEEN
DECEMBER 19, MORNING
SOUL HUNT
MARTIN HAD CIRCLED AROUND AWAY from the clearing where he’d seen the moving shapes of the monstrous spiders the kids called outriders. He’d gone up along the ridge line that led eventually to his house. But not in that direction, no way. The idea of going anywhere near that misshapen ruin sickened him.
It had been raining hard, but now that had stopped and second moon was low on the horizon, casting its glare over the tumble of rocks and twisted little trees that he could see below him.
He was trying very hard not to think about the future, of which he obviously had none, and above all not to feel angry at Trevor.
Of course, the son he’d loved, little Trevor, was no more. The strange being who had taken his place knew the world in a whole new way. “But I love you,” Martin whispered to the silence. He always would, the little boy whom he had held tight in the scary nights, who had looked at him with joyous, dependent eyes, who had so admired his dad.
No matter how far beyond the edge of the known world Trevor went, Martin would follow in his heart, trying to understand, trying still to give what he could of love and support.
Then it hit him again: He threw me out. He did it. And he asked himself, what could set a son to do such deep evil?
He had never believed in the devil myth. He’d seen that the Christian devil was the horned god of the old witch cult of Northern Europe, nothing more than that, and the horned god was the old Roman god of festivals, Pan. In other words, a pagan deity had been made into the enemy of the new god. Similar things had been done throughout the history of religion, the gods of yesterday becoming today’s demons.
Still, it did seem as if something had tipped the balance against the good of the world, and that was why Trevor had done what he had done, and why his own soul was about to be captured or, more likely, to die, and his body to become somebody else’s property.
Thunder clapped and the rain came again, and in the lightning Martin saw deer. Then he heard, high above, the cry of a nighthawk. Dawn was coming, but these new clouds were so thick that it was, in effect, still night.
He clapped his hands over his ears, then turned and pressed his face against the rock. The cleft he was in wasn’t even two feet deep and hardly longer than he was tall. Rain splashed against his back, and the wind, now wintry cold, now storm heavy, came in under his torn windbreaker.
He was as miserable, he thought, as it was possible for him to be. And maybe, he thought also, with an upwelling of sorrow, maybe it was, quite simply, time for him to go.
Lindy and little Winnie were gone, something that he was beginning to think of as an always. It had been hard to accept, and Trevor’s rejection on top of it was rawest agony.
But how do you manage to commit suicide when you dare not move a muscle? Perhaps if he tried to force his way back into the tent, the kids would shoot him. But how could he make Trevor participate in such a thing?
Another cry came, full of eagerness now, trembling above the rumble of the thunder. Martin shifted, and
