pallor and the blotches beneath his eyes.
'It's the concussion,' Kit began. 'I'm sure in a few days...'
He shook his head--a barely perceptible motion--then grimaced. 'A thing. That's all I remember. The thing I always knew was there. When I was a little kid. In the closet. Under the bed.'
'How did you know?' Steve leaned forward.
'Steve, don't.'
'You're with the police now?' Tully looked him over with dull curiosity. 'And you have a different name.' His face seemed dead flesh pulled taut. All his gawky charm had been stripped away, and his body seemed entirely composed of fragile points. 'It picked me up. Like a doll.'
She edged closer, pressed his hand. 'It's all right.'
Slowly, painfully, he pulled his hand away. 'It carried me.' His stare pivoted from her to the wet dimness beyond the window. 'I fought.' The eyes alone seemed alive as they twitched with wild suffering. 'I kicked, screamed.'
'Listen,' Steve began, 'you don't have to...' 'I knew...what it wanted was worse than anything...any nightmare.' The noise in his chest might have been the ghost of a laugh. 'I guess monsters are like that.' He held a bandaged hand over his face. 'What do I do now?' A sob shook him. 'Knowing it's real? You tell me. How do I go on?'
Havoc unfurled in the sky. They stared through the glass walls of the hospital lobby, and Steve gave a bewildered grunt.
'Some storm.' Grimly, she shook her head. 'It's funny. He's someone else I used to be friends with. But I haven't seen him at all since I came back. Never called him. Nothing. He does seem a bit better, doesn't he?' They watched rain beat the fog to the ground. 'Don't you think so?' Without turning, she examined the reflection of his face in the glimmering glass.
'They say he's well enough to leave,' he told her, haltingly. 'Doesn't want to go...talks about signing himself into the psych ward.' He pushed at the door, and damp wind stirred his hair. 'Might be the best thing.'
Fog still drifted low near the entrance.
'You don't believe that,' she said, following him out. The snow had begun to melt, then freeze again: it was like walking on wet glass. As they slipped through the parking lot, rain settled heavily. Brittle tracings of snow still crusted the canvas roof of the jeep. 'What do you think, should we put the top down?' The steam from her mouth mingled with the mist as she clambered in the passenger side. 'That was a joke,' she explained. Behind them, the hospital entrance deliquesced into a smear of light, and the snow on the ground looked soaked and dangerous. 'God, I'm freezing.'
'Yeah?' Droplets beaded his leather jacket. 'It's warmer than it's been in weeks.' He revved the engine, then let it idle while the windshield defogged.
'That's not saying much.' Turning one glove inside out, she wiped it across her window. 'You sure you don't mind driving?' She peered through the clear spot at the growing puddles. 'My shoulder's still bothering me a little.'
He clicked on the headlights, backed into a river of slush.
'You're silent again.' She bit her lip, combed fingers through her damp hair. The box on the backseat held the new revolver she'd bought that morning, and an awareness of its presence obsessed her, seemed to fill the jeep. 'We're not doing too well, are we?' Billowing rain swept around them as the jeep pulled out, and the headlights sifted through alternating layers of vapor and water. 'I mean, there's been no sign of anyone at the apartment. No sign of them period.' Mist clung thickly to the ground and the splattering water mingled with it, but soon rain slashed down and broke it into drifting fragments that settled into the streams at the edge of the road. 'Maybe it's time we call the authorities, don't you think?' she asked. 'Maybe it's time. He could get away if we don't. Couldn't he?'
'It.'
'What?'
'It could. Get away.'
The jeep swayed slowly, and water sheeted up behind them. As the engine thrummed, she fancied they were falling, plummeting back to Edgeharbor. Usually, she expected some sense of release whenever she left the town limits behind her, but today she'd experienced no lightening of tension, and it occurred to her that perhaps such respite no longer existed for her. Tires crunched over a crust of ice in the dirt-scaled snow. Patches of rubber from the tires of some passing eighteen-wheeler littered the road like the fallen scales of a dinosaur.
Ahead of them, other tires had rutted the wet snow, but gray ice already filled the curving furrows, making their slow progress even more arduous. Isolated objects stood out in the haze. A boulder. A call box. Then a bank of trees pressed close, coalescing into a single mass. A minivan growled by, and gouts of slush hit their salt- streaked windshield. Cursing, Steve braked as the roads merged. They waited for an opening, listening to the slush-clogged sounds of traffic. It would have been a natural moment for him to look at her.
Particles of ice clotted on the windshield, and he stared through them at smudges of light, swirls of motion. Finally, they shot forward. 'Turn here,' she said.
'I see it.' Melting snow clogged the old highway, and mottled water lashed up at the windows. Suddenly, the rain sluiced down in blinding sheets, and the windshield wipers splashed ineffectually. 'Going to have to pull over.'
Water hissed up from the tires. An expanse of gray spread onto a field, submerging the rest area. This pool bled into an ocean that seemed to roll from the surrounding pines, smeared with green and carrying a primeval scent of moss and mud and twisted roots. 'Christ.' They passed other cars on the shoulder, and he chose a spot, braked. The leaden swirl soaked rapidly through snow at the side of the road, until beer cans and other debris bloomed. Slush hung heavily in the nearer trees, meshed in the webbing of needles, bowing the branches, a diamond casing of ice on the boughs. The windshield wipers slapped loudly, and the interior of the vehicle began to seem like a small cave.
'Have you ever seen fog on the beach?' she asked him softly. 'It looks like the end of the world. Especially at night. You can't tell where the land ends and the sea begins.'
After a time, the downpour slowed to a drizzle, and a car passed, then another. Without speaking, he started the jeep.
She bit her lip. 'When we get back to town...' The jeep surged to one side. 'If we get back to town...'
'No cracks about my driving.' Finally, his glance veered to her, and he tried to smile. 'You're going to tell the authorities finally, right? You've been threatening to all day. Go ahead, if you feel you need to. But do you really think it's such a good idea?'
'I've seen it now.' The glittering curve of their headlights preceded them along the road. 'Whatever it is. It's not a game anymore.'
'Nobody was ever playing games, Kit.' He turned to her, fully taking in her appearance: the soaked ringlets, clinging to her skull like a cap, the tense intelligence of her eyes. 'Nobody.' He returned his full attention to the road. 'Besides, I thought you'd decided it was just some guy in a mask?' A casino bus swerved at them, spraying water on all sides, and she gasped as he jerked the wheel. 'Try to relax,' he said.
'Just shut up and drive.' The tires hummed wetly over the asphalt. 'So this is what it feels like to want something again,' she said. 'All right. I want something. I want to hope for something and work for something, and I hadn't even realized I'd let go of all that. Until I met you.'
Rain shuddered on the roof.
'Steve, please? We need to talk.' Suddenly, she couldn't look at him. Rivulets snaked across the glass, and she forced herself to watch the drowned forest. 'I hate this.' Pines sagged, bunching together against the freezing drizzle, the thinner branches vibrating until the trees seemed to shiver, the whole forest twitching. Moments later, the woods thinned, and the first drab buildings rose. 'What are we going to do?'
The slick road ranged into town without apparent strategy. Sometimes it swerved to avoid rocky outcroppings; sometimes it plowed straight through boulders that reared like ancient sentinels. From the first steep rise, she glimpsed the gray hump of the sea; then the streets of Edgeharbor engulfed them. The road climbed so that they seemed to be level with the upper stories of the houses they passed, and the windows of those houses reflected the stony havoc of the sky. 'Steve, I'm scared.' The clouds looked solid, mountainous, like the contours of
