Damaris Horne was stuck in purgatory, and all she could think about was how to get back to Boston. So this is how my editor punishes me, she thought. We get into a tiff, and he assigns me to the story no one else wants. Welcome to Hicksville-by-the-Lake, otherwise known as Tranquility; Maine. Good name. The place was so tranquil, they should issue it a death certificate. She drove up Main Street, thinking that this was the perfect model for how a town would look after a neutron bomb hit it: no people, no signs of life, just standing buildings and deserted sidewalks. Nine hundred ten residents supposedly lived in this town, so where were they all? In the woods, gnawing lichen off the trees?
She drove past Monaghan’s Diner, and through the front window she caught a glimpse of a plaid shirt. Yes! A sighting of the local natives in their ceremonial dress. (What was the mystical significance of plaid, anyway?) Further up the street, she had another sighting: a shabbily dressed old geezer came out of Cobb and Morong’s, clutching his grocery sacks. She stopped to let him cross the street, and he shuffled past, head bent in a look of permanent weariness. She watched him walk along the lakeshore, a slow-moving silhouette laboring across a bleak backdrop of bare trees and gray water.
She drove on, to the Lakeside Bed and Breakfast, her home for the indefinite future. It was the only local inn still open this late in the year, and although she sneeringly referred to it as the Bates Motel, she knew she was lucky to have found any room at all, what with the other regional reporters arriving in town.
She walked into the dining room and saw that most of her competition were still stuffing themselves at the breakfast buffet. Damaris always skipped breakfast, which put her ahead of the game this morning. It was eight A.M., and she’d already been up for two and a half hours. At six, she’d been at the hospital to observe the boy being transferred out to his new home, the Maine Youth Center.
At seven-fifteen, she’d driven over to the high school. There she’d sat in her parked car and watched the kids in their baggy clothes gather in front of the building, waiting for first bell, looking like teenagers everywhere.
Damaris crossed to the coffee pot and poured herself a cup. Sipping it black, she glanced around the room at the other reporters until her gaze settled on the freelancer, Mitchell Groome. Though he couldn’t be much older than forty-five, Groome’s face was all sad droops, like a hound in mourning. Still, he seemed fit enough-perhaps even athletic. Best of all, he had noticed her gaze, and was looking back at her, albeit with puzzlement.
She set down her empty cup and strolled out of the dining room, knowing, without even a backward glance, that Groome was watching her.
Hicksville had just gotten a little more interesting.
Up in her room, she took a few minutes to review her notes from the interviews she’d conducted over the last few days. Now came the hard part-putting it all together in an article that would make her editor happy and catch the eyes of bored New England housewives cruising past the tabloid stands.
She sat at her desk and stared out the window, wondering how to turn this tragic but nonetheless commonplace tale into something a little more titillating. What made this case special? What new angle would entice a reader to reach for a copy of the Weekly Informer?
She suddenly realized she was staring straight at it.
Across the street was a rundown old building, the windows boarded up. The faded sign said Kimball’s Furniture.
The address was 666.
The sign of the Beast.
As her laptop computer powered up, she quickly shuffled through her notes, searching for the quote she remembered from yesterday. Something a woman had said in the local grocery store.
She found it. “I know the explanation for what happened at the school,” the woman had said. “Everyone knows it, but no one wants to admit it. They don’t want to sound superstitious or uneducated But I’ll tell you what it is: it’s this new Godlessness. People have pushed the Lord out of their lives. They’ve replaced Him with something else. Something no one dares speak of.”
Yes! thought Damaris, and she was grinning as she began to type.
“Last week, Satan arrived in the bucolic town of Tranquility; Maine…
Sitting in her wheelchair before the living room window, Faye Braxton watched her thirteen-year-old son step off the school bus and begin to hike up the long dirt driveway to the house. It was a daily event she usually looked forward to, seeing Scotty’s slight figure at last emerge through the bus doors, his shoulders weighed down by the heavy backpack, his head craned forward with the effort to lug his burden of books up the weedy and sloping front yard.
He was still so small. It pained her to see how little he had grown in the last year. While many of his classmates had shot past him in both height and bulk, there was her Scotty, left behind in pale adolescence, and so anxious to grow up he had nicked his chin last week while trying to shave his nonexistent beard. He was her firstborn, her best friend. She wouldn’t have minded at all if time suddenly stood still, and she could keep him as he’d always been, a sweet and loving child. But she knew the child would soon be gone.
The transformation had already begun.
She’d seen the first hint of it a few days ago, when he had stepped off the bus as usual. She’d been at the window, watching him walk toward the house, when she saw something happen that was both inexplicable and frightening. In the front yard, he had suddenly halted and gazed up at a tree in which three gray squirrels perched. She’d thought he was merely curious. That like his younger sister Kitty; he would try to coax them down to be petted. So she was startled when he bent down, picked up a rock, and flung it at the tree.
The squirrels scampered to higher branches.
As she’d watched in dismay, Scotty had hurled another rock, and another, his thin body winding up like a tautly coiled spring of fury, the stones flying into the branches. When at last he stopped, he was breathing hard and exhausted. Then he’d turned to the house.
The look on his face had made her jerk back from the window. For one horrifying moment she’d thought: That is not my son.
Now, as she watched him approach the house, she wondered which boy would step through the door. Her son, her real son, sweet and smiling, or the ugly stranger who looked like Scotty? In the past, she would have dealt firmly with him for throwing rocks at animals.
In the past, she was never afraid of her own child.
Faye heard Scotty’s footsteps on the porch. Heart pounding, she swiveled her wheelchair around to face him as he came in the door.
7
Anyone could see that fourteen-year-old Barry Knowlton was his mother’s child.
The resemblance was startling enough to take in with a single glance. Barry and Louise were like a pair of cheerful dumplings, both of them red-haired and apple-cheeked, both with pliant pink mouths. Their smiles of greeting promised to dispel even Claire’s gloom.
Since the classroom shooting nearly a week ago, Claire had awakened each morning to the awful realization that her move to Tranquility had been a mistake. Only eight months ago, she had arrived here full of confidence, had used most of her savings to buy a medical practice she was certain would succeed. And why wouldn’t it? She’d had a thriving practice in Baltimore. But one very public lawsuit would destroy everything.
Every day at work, when she saw the mailman stride up the front walk, she braced herself for the delivery of a letter she dreaded receiving. Paul Dame!! had said she’d be hearing from his attorney, and she had no doubt he’d follow up on his threat.
Is it too late to leave? That was the question she asked herself every day now.
Is it too late to move back to Baltimore?
She forced herself to smile as she stepped into the exam room to see Barry and his mother. Here, at least, was a bright spot in her day.
They both looked genuinely pleased to see her. Barry had already pulled off his boots and was standing on the scale, watching expectantly as the counterweight arm bobbed up and down.
