superfluous matters. His plan would work only if he was allowed to carry it out, if he maintained the element of surprise. He couldn’t waste time penning a letter to his family—and he couldn’t explain in the letter what he wanted to explain, because then it would know, too.
Besides, Claire and the kids wouldn’t know he had committed suicide. They would think that the creature in their house had killed him. As hard as that would be for them to accept, it was still better than the truth.
He looked to his left. On the sideboard was a photo he had taken of Claire and the kids at the hot-air-balloon festival a few years back. Claire had had longer hair, and was wearing jeans shorts that no longer fit her and a T- shirt that her sister had brought back from Santa Fe. James was missing his two front teeth, and Megan was smiling in that innocent way she used to have but that she’d lost sometime in the past few years. The picture made him sad, not only for what he was going to miss but for what was already gone.
He took out the picture of Miles he’d been carrying in his pocket, leaning it up against the balloon-festival photo. Miles was next to James, and when seen together, it was obvious the two of them were brothers.
Julian started crying. The tears burned hot on his cheeks, and he plopped down on the couch, feeling an odd lurch in his chest as he did so.
What was the last thing he had said to Claire? he wondered. It hadn’t been, “I love you,” though it should have been. It was something more mundane, like, “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” or, “Is there anything else you want me to bring back?”
He should call her now, say it to her, tell her that he loved her, but his cell phone was still in the car, where he’d thrown it on the seat, and even if the phones in the house worked, which was doubtful, his fingers weren’t up to the task of dialing. They felt fat, like overstuffed sausages, and when he tried to wiggle them, he found that he couldn’t.
He couldn’t move his left arm at all.
As his vision blurred, as he started to fade, he looked over at the pictures of his wife, his daughter, his sons. A final tear rolled down his cheek.
Good-bye, he thought.
Thirty-five
Struggling.
He was not himself anymore. There was no himself anymore. He grasped for purchase, trying to remember what he had been and figure out what he was now. He was a part of something but he was lost in it, sightless, adrift, with only the most rudimentary senses to guide him. Then he was touched and touching, energy flowing into him, through him, connecting him to everything, to all of it. The form he had taken was enormous and powerful, and he could sense within it the competing wills of the thousands who had come before him. He was them, they were he, and while this new form was unwieldy, almost ungovernable, he was determined to take charge, to be in control. It was imperative that he do so, though he could not remember why it was so important.
He stretched out.
There was no time here. Seconds could have passed or minutes or hours or days or months or years. It could be today, tomorrow or yesterday.
And suddenly …
He could see the house. He was in it, around it, part of it. He knew where he was and what he was and why he was here. In the living room, his body was still on the couch, where it had died, and he took care of it, made it disappear so no one would be able to find it, so his family would not have to see his corpse.
His family.
Claire.
Megan.
James.
He knew instantly what had been done to them and what was planned for them. For the first time since becoming, he understood what he was supposed to do, what he had to do.
He remembered.
But he didn’t know how to go about it. He couldn’t shoot himself, couldn’t jump off a bridge, couldn’t even take pills or poison, the way he had before.
How powerful was he? he wondered. He reached out, saw the street outside, felt the other houses on the block. A police car drove by, and he touched the man inside, made sure that as he drove on he thought there was nothing unusual in the sight of all these empty homes and dead yards.
How far could he spread out? Could he reach all the way to the hospital? Of course he could. Megan had been made to cut herself and James had been taken, both in their grandparents’ house. So he needed to go farther than that, needed to stretch as far as he could.
To the breaking point.
That was it. He knew from everything he was and everyone who was here that it was the link to this spot that kept his form alive, that granted it power. He needed to leave, to sever all ties. If he could move from this location, he could break the connection off at the source. It would be like pulling the plug on an appliance. Whatever was left would dissipate, float away.
Already he felt resistance. John Lynch. Jim Swanson. The man before him. And the man before him, and the man before him …
He needed to maintain control. It was hard, but it was possible. He was the newest and the strongest, and what he had become was what it had become. They were one and the same; that was how it worked, and he tamped down the other voices even as he moved away from the house, away from the neighborhood, through the town.
Stretching.
Thirty-six
The lights in the hospital flickered.
Claire had been about to fall asleep. Maybe she had been asleep. But the sudden sputtering of the overhead fluorescents in what almost looked like a lightning flash jerked her wide-awake. She was in a modern hospital, in a room filled with expensive diagnostic equipment, with medical professionals hard at work throughout the building, yet she was filled with the same sense of dread she’d felt back at their house.
Frightened, she checked on James, lying asleep on the bed before her, then dashed down the corridor to Megan’s room in order to make sure her daughter was all right. She passed two nurses at the station between the rooms, but that didn’t make her feel any less uneasy. She knew what was going on. She’d experienced this before.
The hospital was haunted.
Where was Julian? He should have been back—she looked at her watch, shocked at the time—hours ago! Her heart felt like it stopped for a second. Something had happened to him. She didn’t know how, didn’t know where, didn’t know when, but it had, and she was almost hysterical as she ran back to the nurses’ station.
She stopped, taking a deep breath before she spoke so she wouldn’t seem crazy. “I need one of you to go into room one twenty-eight and watch my daughter, Megan Perry. I’m with my son in one twenty-four. I’m afraid something might happen to one of them.”
The lights flickered again, the ones in the corridor, the ones above the nurses’ station, the ones in the rooms,
