The bitch hasn’t stopped tearing at Preston’s left arm. But suddenly she seizes the handle of the hammer, ferociously twists it, so surprises him that she takes the weapon. Trying to snatch it away from her, he unintentionally relaxes the arm around her throat. She starts to slip down and away. He grabs a fistful of her hair to yank her back. For a moment his head is fully exposed.
Face flushed and clenched with the effort to squeeze farther into the room, Calvino gains two inches. He thrusts the shotgun forward, over his wife’s head, into Preston’s face. The flash—
Backed against his desk, Zach desperately blocked every swing of the cleaver with the Marine Corps sword, but was given no opportunity to draw it from its scabbard. The crazed woman chopped high, chopped low, lunging with every slash of the wicked blade, which could probably render an entire chicken in five seconds flat. His heart pounded so hard he could hear it, a hollow
Minnie had backed away to the hall door. But she seemed frozen in fear.
Zach shouted at her, “Get out! Get help!”
Reminded of Minnie, the whack job with the cleaver relented for a moment, glancing at her, maybe thinking she should chop the easier target first and demoralize Zach by killing his sister. He instantly took advantage of her mistake, didn’t attempt to draw the sword from the stupid scabbard, but just swung the whole thing at her head. The sound of the blow was hugely satisfying, one of the best things ever. Dropping the cleaver, the freaking lunatic collapsed to the floor on her back, possibly dead but probably unconscious.
Zach snatched up her weapon and stowed it in a desk drawer. He dropped onto one knee beside her, pressed fingertips to her throat, and found a pulse. He was relieved. He didn’t want to kill her if he didn’t have to. Maybe she was only crazy, not evil. And he was just thirteen, not ready for this. Maybe he could drag the nutcase into the closet, brace the door shut, and then call the cops.
Only as he pulled open the closet door did he realize that Minnie was gone.
As Minnie stepped into the hallway to shout for help, the LEGO wheel-thing was heavy, at least ten or twelve pounds when it ought to have weighed maybe twelve
Exiting Zach’s room, she opened her mouth to shout for help—and saw Professor Sinyavski, his wild hair wilder than ever, lurching out of the storage room at the east end of the hall. But he’d said he was leaving early because of the snow.
With his bushy eyebrows, rubbery nose, and big belly, he usually looked funny in a nice way, but he didn’t look any kind of funny now. His lips were skinned back from his teeth in a snarl, his face was twisted and hateful, and his eyes seemed to be burning and icy at the same time. Maybe Professor Sinyavski was peering out at Minnie from somewhere behind those eyes, but she knew at once, for sure, Ruin looked at her from within the mathematician—and it wanted her.
Voice rough with anger and slurred as if he had been drinking, the professor said, “Piggy pig. Come here, you dirty piggy pig, you dirty pig.” He started toward her, staggering, and for the first time Minnie realized how big the Russian was, not just overweight but big in the chest and shoulders, his neck thick, more muscle under the fat than she had realized before.
This was extreme danger, all right. Reluctantly but without hesitation, she put the LEGO wheel on the floor and ran toward the front stairs.
“I’m Roger Hodd of the
The inside of the bathroom door had a thumb-turn deadbolt, but that wasn’t holding it shut. No matter how furiously Naomi wrenched at the knob, jerked on it, the door didn’t even rattle against the jamb, as if it was steel and was welded in place.
She glanced back at Roger Hodd, still on the floor, doing his pill-bug imitation. No less terrified, the man now appeared deranged, too. This time, a shaky humorless laugh punctuated “
As Minnie reached the stairs, a shotgun boomed on the ground floor. She had intended to go down. Instead she went up to the third-floor landing. Into Mother’s studio. Across the studio to the back stairs. Don’t glance behind. Looking over your shoulder wasted time, slowed you down. She just prayed and ran, hoping God would help her if she helped herself by running her butt off. She had to be faster than big old Professor Sinyavski. She could do the math, he’d taught her to do it. She was eight years old, he was maybe seventy, so she should be almost nine times faster than he was.
The door released John, and Nicky embraced him. She didn’t look back, didn’t want to see faceless Preston Nash or the room fouled by a spray of blood and brains.
“The kids,” she said, and together they hurried once more along the hall toward the front stairs.
A dark primitive part of her despaired that this would never stop, that Nature was a pagan beast that devoured everyone in the end, that the unrelenting idiot evil of Ruin-and-Blackwood had the power to turn the entire world against her family, one person at a time, until finally it got what it wanted. But a more profound part of her, the believer who was an artist and who
In the front hall, she retrieved her pistol. John hurried toward the second floor. Nicky followed him, realizing that the nape of her neck still felt cold where the convex curve of the hammer claw had slid along it, and she shivered.
Once, in a true-crime book, while browsing in a bookstore, Naomi saw a picture of a murdered girl. A police photo or something. A girl younger than Naomi. She had been raped. Punched in the face, stabbed. Her eyes in the photo were the worst thing Naomi had ever seen. Wide pretty eyes. They were the worst thing because they were the saddest thing, they brought tears to her own eyes there in the store, and she quickly closed the book and put it back on the shelf and told herself to forget she ever saw that poor face, those eyes. She worked hard to forget it, but it showed up in a dream once in a while, and now as she struggled with the bathroom door, the dead girl’s face haunted her once more.
Breathing raggedly, making strange noises, little whimpers, which frightened her because she sounded like someone wholly different from herself, Naomi figured-hoped-prayed she might be all right as long as Roger Hodd continued to drone about who he was and where he worked, showing no interest in her. But then she heard him moving, and when she turned, she saw him rising to his feet from the floor.
She gave up on the door, she couldn’t get it open anyway, and if Hodd was on the move, she didn’t dare turn her back to him. He swayed as he chanted, not looking at her or at anything in the room, for that matter, but his words had a different rhythm from the way he’d been saying them, and a new tone entered his voice. The self- pitying note and confusion became impatience and petulance, and he emphasized the word
Minnie raced down four flights to the landing at the ground floor, where she halted at the door to the kitchen, held her breath, and listened. The stairs were quiet. Professor Sinyavski—or the thing that had once been the professor—wasn’t thundering after her.
She looked down the next flight of stairs. All remained quiet—but then something drip-drip-dripped onto the
