hands deep into her jacket pockets.
His gait slowed even further, and he leaned on one of the weathered benches. 'I don't expect you to understand this.' He sank heavily onto the bench. 'Or to believe it. Not at first.' The wind stirred, and his hair fluttered heavily across his forehead.
She saw a few gray streaks, and the morning sun revealed lines in his face she'd never noticed. 'You know I'll...'
'No, don't say anything. Not yet.' His shoulders tensed. 'Not till I'm finished. It's the only way I'll be able to get it out.' Suddenly, his teeth chattered audibly. 'You don't know how much I've wanted to tell somebody. Anybody. For years now.' The wind seemed to tear his words away, to fling them along the boards. 'To begin with, Ernie Leeds was a demented creep who tortured and killed at least six people that I'm aware of, but he didn't kill Barry Hobbes.'
'Then who did?'
He watched gulls caught in the upward sweep of the wind. 'Me.' The cries of the birds scrambled overhead, and the cold stung him to tears.
She wanted to shout at him not to tell her, but her lips formed no words.
'I left him unarmed, stranded in the pines. Knowing what was out there, I left him.'
'What do you mean?'
He rubbed a gloved hand across his face. 'We got into a fight. I jumped in the car and drove around till I cooled off. Maybe half an hour altogether. When I went back for him, I found his body--didn't even know what it was at first.'
She touched his arm, but he didn't seem to notice.
'My fault--as sure as if I'd disemboweled him myself. But Leeds didn't do it. He took the heat to protect someone, a lover probably. At least that's what we think. It fits with his history. And, no, the authorities don't know about it. No reason they should. The real killer's dead too.' Suddenly, he got up. 'Hell. How do you explain something like this? Without sounding like a raving lunatic?'
'Barry, I mean, Steve...'
'No, wait till you've heard it all, then decide if you still trust me so much. The kid, the killer I mean, he had a--how do I say this?--a condition, a genetic condition, like a mutation. Do you follow me?'
Hesitantly, she shook her head.
'No, I don't suppose you do. I'm not sure I do myself half the time. Sometimes I wake up and think we must all be insane. I do know this boy wasn't the only one. Something to do with the gene pool in that part of the barrens. Isolated. Inbred for generations. It--the condition--was rampant.' His tone of voice told her he was quoting someone. 'We think they brought it with them, the people who settled the area, I mean. Some ancient European affliction. Probably the same thing that started the werewolf legends in Europe all those centuries ago. So maybe there've always been people like this. Every country has legends.' His arm swept back inland. 'And here. In the pines, I mean. Every generation or so, there'd be another one. It started a different legend.'
'You're telling me what? This guy was some kind of a monster?'
He got up and headed down the wooden stairs.
'I'm sorry.' She leaned over the rail and called down to him as he reached the beach. 'Tell me.' She watched him pick his way across the wedge of pebbled sand. 'Oh hell, right into the wind again.' With a sigh, she followed him. Instantly, cold numbed her flesh, and she plodded unsteadily. Graveled earth looked churned and lumpish, and her exhaustion seemed to make her see every grain too distinctly. The beach hardly existed here. With little more than a single stride, they were at the water's edge. The sand looked black.
They watched waves roll into the shattered lighthouse. Once, the fence had kept the curious away from the dangerous ruins, until the promontory itself had given way. A few yards in, nubs of broken posts protruded in a row, waves sucking around them, and farther out, rust red tentacles broke the water--the ribboned remnants of iron supports. One clutched dried seaweed above the waves like a nest of straw; others twisted coils around hunks of concrete. The top of a cyclone fence protruded from the wash, seaweed and barnacles clogging the links. Spray exploded from a concrete pillar. From along the halfsubmerged wall of stone, terns rose in a shrieking flurry to float in the sunlight, dipping for the uneven glint.
'Sand dollar,' he muttered, stooping. He studied it a moment. 'You never see them alive.' He held it out to her. 'Only after they're dead, after they wash up onshore.' His words came out in a rush of sound. 'You don't know me.' Wind buffeted them, rolled over them, blowing clouds of fine gray sand around their legs. 'You only know what's left.'
She pulled off her glove. 'It's really beautiful, isn't it?' Like a splinter of ice, the sand dollar lay in her palm. Beyond the breakers, birds had settled on the water, mere flashes of white, indistinguishable from the flickering surface. The pale rind of the moon hung above the water.
'...never really brave.' Hoarseness grated in his voice. 'It kills in secret--the young, the defenseless.'
'It?'
'They. We think they mostly die young themselves. There are convulsions that come with the changes. Or else they're killed by the people around them, family, whatever, unless they just run off to the woods and starve or die of exposure.'
A wave collided with the closest rock and droplets sprayed them. 'Monsters.' She turned and wandered along the edge of the surf. Clumps of vegetation mottled the mud, and she found a stick of driftwood almost buried in sand.
'They can't help what they do. It takes them at puberty, when they're still children practically, and...'
She threw the driftwood far out into the shimmering whitecaps, watched it crest a hill of water. 'I can't hear you.'
'...like a disease. They need help. But other things go along with it. Gifts. Special abilities. I've seen them do things.'
'Them.' The word hovered. 'I can't believe how cold it is. I can't believe I'm freezing on the beach, talking about what? Mutants? Werewolves? Ever since I met you, I feel like I'm out of my mind. For one thing, I must be crazy just to be out here.'
Splinters jutted from the sand at their feet: a short distance away, more shreds of wood seemed to sprout from the gravel. 'What the hell's buried under here?'
'A piece of the old dock maybe,' she answered. 'Don't make conversation. Just tell me. How many?'
'How many?' he repeated.
'Monsters or whatever.'
'We've found...a few.'
The thunderous slap of another wave startled her. 'Hell, I'm getting wet. Where do you have them?'
'A house. Far away from anybody who might get hurt. I can tell you that much. And they're well supervised.'
'In the barrens, you mean? My God. Just like the stories. Monsters in the woods. Look, just give me a minute here, all right? Let me just make sure I've got it straight. You want me to believe these kids are...'
'Demons. Changelings. Whatever you want to call them. She says it can be a gift. I don't know. Sometimes I think she's...'
'Delusional? Swell. This is the woman I remind you of, right? Assuming for a moment that you're not a stark raving maniac--and I'm trying to--aren't you, well, apart from everything else, aren't you scared?'
The cloud of his breath dissipated. 'Every second of every day.'
She touched his arm.
'I've been...close to them.' The muscles in his face tightened. 'She believes they can be helped, that they're the future.'
'This woman,' she murmured, 'that's why you're here. Am I right? You collect monsters for her?' She watched him flinch, watched the thoughts untangle themselves on his face. 'I knew you were just using me,' she added before he could respond. 'I knew it. You don't care about stopping any killer. You couldn't care less about saving any hostage.'
'You don't understand. I do want to help the girl...if there is a girl...if she's alive. That's the biggest part of it. For me. Keeping them from hurting anybody. You don't...'
'I don't know if I can believe anything you say.'
