person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no maps of the change. You just… come out the other side.
Or you don’t.
I’ve changed somehow, Larry thought dimly. I’ve come out the other side, too.
She said: “I’m Nadine Cross. This is Joe. I’m happy to meet you.”
“Larry Underwood.”
They shook hands, both smiling faintly at the absurdity.
“Let’s walk back to the road,” Nadine said.
They started off side by side, and after a few steps Larry looked back over his shoulder at Joe, who was still sitting over his knees and sucking his thumb, apparently unaware they were gone.
“He’ll come,” she said quietly.
“Are you sure?”
“Quite sure.”
As they came to the highway’s gravel shoulder she stumbled and Larry took her arm. She looked at him gratefully.
“Can we sit down?” she asked.
“Sure.”
So they sat down on the pavement, facing each other. After a little bit Joe got up and plodded toward them, looking down at his bare feet. He sat a little way apart from them. Larry looked at him warily, then back at Nadine Cross.
“You were the two following me.”
“You knew? Yes. I thought you did.”
“How long?”
“Two days now,” Nadine said. “We were staying in the big house at Epsom.” Seeing his puzzled expression she added: “By the creek. You fell asleep by the rock wall.”
He nodded. “And last night the two of you came to peek at me while I was sleeping on that porch. Maybe to see if I had horns or a long red tail.”
“That was Joe,” she said quietly. “I came after him when I found he was gone. How did you know?”
“You left tracks in the dew.”
“Oh.” She looked at him closely, examining him, and although he wanted to, Larry didn’t drop his eyes. “I don’t want you to be angry with us. I suppose that sounds ridiculous after Joe just tried to kill you, but Joe isn’t responsible.”
“Is that his real name?”
“No, just what I call him.”
“He’s like a savage in a
“Yes, just like that. I found him on the lawn of a house—his house, maybe, the name was Rockway—sick from a bite. A rat bite, maybe. He doesn’t talk. He growls and grunts. Until this morning I’ve been able to control him. But I… I’m tired, you see… and…” She shrugged. Marsh-mud was drying on her blouse in what could have been a series of Chinese ideograms. “I dressed him at first. He took everything off but his underpants. Eventually I got tired of trying. The minges and mosquitoes don’t seem to bother him.” She paused. “I want us to come with you. I guess there is no way to be coy about it, under the circumstances.”
Larry wondered what she would think if he told her about the last woman who had wanted to come with him. Not that he ever would; that episode was deeply buried, even if the woman in question was not. He was no more anxious to bring up Rita than a murderer would be to drag his victim’s name into parlor conversation.
“I don’t know where I’m going,” he said. “I came up from New York City, the long way around, I guess. The plan was to find a nice house on the coast and just lie up there until October or so. But the longer I go, the more I want other people. The longer I go, the more all of this seems to hit me.”
He was expressing himself badly and didn’t seem to be able to do better without bringing up Rita or his bad dreams about the dark man. “I’ve been scared a lot of the time,” he said carefully, “because I’m on my own. Pretty paranoid. It’s like I expected Indians to just swoop down and scalp me.”
“In other words, you’ve stopped looking for houses and started looking for people.”
“Yes, maybe.”
“You’ve found us. That’s a start.”
“I do believe you found me. And that boy worries me, Nadine. I have to be up front about that. His knife’s gone, but the world is full of knives just lying around waiting to be picked up.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t want to sound brutal…” He trailed off, hoping she would say it for him, but she said nothing at all, only looked at him with those dark eyes.
“Would you consider leaving him?” There it was, spat out like a lump of rock, and he still didn’t sound like much of a nice guy… but was it right, was it fair to either of them, to make a bad situation worse by burdening themselves with a ten-year-old psychopath? He had told her he was going to sound brutal, and he supposed he had. But they were in a brutal world now.
Meanwhile, Joe’s odd seawater-colored eyes bored into him.
“I couldn’t do that,” Nadine said calmly. “I understand the danger, and I understand that the danger would be primarily to you. He’s jealous. He’s afraid that you might become more important to me than he is. He might very well try to… try to get at you again unless you can make friends with him or at least convince him you don’t mean to…” She trailed off, leaving that part vague. “But if I left him, that would be the same as murder. And I won’t be a party to that. Too many have died to kill more.”
“If he cuts my throat in the middle of the night, you’ll be a party to
She bowed her head.
Speaking so quietly that only she could hear (he didn’t know if Joe, who was watching them, understood what they were talking about or not), Larry said, “He probably would have done it last night if you hadn’t come after him. Isn’t that the truth?”
Softly she replied: “Those are things that might be.”
Larry laughed. “The Ghost of Christmas Yet-to-Come?”
She looked up. “I want to come with you, Larry, but I can’t leave Joe. You will have to decide.”
“You don’t make it easy.”
“These days it’s no easy life.”
He thought about it. Joe sat on the soft shoulder of the road, watching them with his seawater eyes. Behind them, the real sea moved restlessly against the rocks, booming in its secret channels where it had infiltrated the land.
“All right,” he said. “I think you’re being dangerously softhearted, but… all right.”
“Thank you,” Nadine said. “I will be responsible for his actions.”
“That will be a great comfort if he kills me.”
“That would be on my heart for the rest of my life,” Nadine said, and a sudden certainty that all her words about the sanctity of life would someday not too distant rise up to mock her swept her like a cold wind, and she shuddered. No, she told herself. I’ll not kill. Not that. Never that.
They camped that night on the soft white sand of the Wells public beach. Larry built a large fire above the strand of kelp that marked the last high tide and Joe sat on the other side, away from him and Nadine, feeding small sticks into the blaze. Occasionally he would hold a bigger stick into the flames until it caught like a torch and then tear away down the sand, holding it aloft like a single flaming birthday candle. They were able to see him until he was beyond the thirty-foot glow of the fire and then only his moving torch, drawn back in the wind manufactured by his wild sprinting. The seabreeze had come up a little, and it was cooler than it had been for days. Vaguely, Larry remembered the spell of rain that had occurred the afternoon he had found his mother dying, just before the superflu had hit New York like a highballing freight train. Remembered the thunderstorm and the white curtains blowing wildly into the apartment. He shivered a little, and the wind danced a spiral of fire out of the fire and up toward the black starshot sky. Embers cycloned up even higher and flickered out. He thought of fall, still distant but not so far as it had been on that day in June when he had discovered his mother lying on the floor, delirious. He shivered a little. North, far down on the beach, Joe’s torch bobbed up and down. It made him feel
