“You got my imagination working.”
“I wish I’d kept my mouth shut.” He stared for a long moment at the shadow-blanketed jumble of rocks, then sighed and said, “All right, but I’m the one who’ll go out there. You’ll stay in here with the girls.”
She shook her head. “It doesn’t work that way, baby.”
“Don’t pull a feminist number on me.”
“I’m not. It’s just that . . . you’re the one he’s got a psychic bead on.”
“So?”
“He can sense where you are, and depending on how refined that talent is, he might sense you’re in the rocks. You have to stay in the cabin so he’ll feel you in here, come straight for you—and right past me.”
“Maybe he can sense you too.”
“Evidence so far indicates it’s only you.”
He was in an agony of fear for her, his feelings carved in every hollow of his face. “I don’t like this.”
“You already said. I’m going out.”
5
By the time Oslett and Clocker left the Stillwater house and crossed the street, Spicer was getting behind the wheel of the red surveillance van.
The wind accelerated. Snow was driven out of the sky at a severe angle and harried along the street.
Oslett walked to the driver’s door of the surveillance van.
Spicer had his sunglasses on again even though the last hour or so of daylight was upon them. His eyes, yellow or otherwise, were hidden.
He looked down at Oslett and said, “I’m going to drive this heap away from here, clear across the county line and out of local jurisdiction before I call the home office and get some help with body disposal.”
“What about the delivery man in the florist’s van?”
“Let them haul their own garbage,” Spicer said.
He handed Oslett a standard-size sheet of typing paper on which the computer had printed a map, plotting the point from which Martin Stillwater had telephoned his parents’ house. Only a few roads were depicted on it. Oslett tucked it inside his ski jacket before either the wind could snatch it out of his hand or the paper could become damp from the snow.
“He’s only a few miles away,” Spicer said. “You take the Explorer.” He started the engine, pulled the door shut, and drove off into the storm.
Clocker was already behind the wheel of the Explorer. Clouds of exhaust billowed from its tailpipe.
Oslett hurried to the passenger side, got in, slammed the door, and fished the computer map out of his jacket. “Let’s go. We’re running out of time.”
“Only on the human scale,” Clocker said. Pulling away from the curb and switching on the wipers to deal with the wind-driven snow, he added, “From a cosmic point of view, time may be the one thing of which there’s an inexhaustible supply.”
6
Paige kissed the girls and made them promise to be brave and to do exactly what their father told them to do. Leaving them for the uncertainty of what lay ahead was one of the hardest things she had ever done. Pretending not to be afraid, in order to help them with their own quest for courage, was even harder.
When Paige stepped out the front door, Marty went with her onto the porch. Blustery wind hissed through the screen walls and rattled the porch door at the head of the steps.
“There’s one other way,” he said, leaning close to her to be heard above the storm without shouting. “If it’s me that he’s drawn to, maybe I should get the hell out of here, on my own, lead him as far away from you as I can.”
“Forget it.”
“But without you and the girls to worry about, maybe I can deal with him.”
“And if he kills you instead?”
“At least we wouldn’t all go down.”
“You think he won’t come looking for us again? He wants your life, remember. Your life, your wife, your children.”
“So if he finishes me off and comes after you, you’d still have a chance to blow his brains out.”
“Oh, yeah? And when he shows up, during that little window of opportunity I’ll have before he gets close to me, how would I know whether it was him or you?”
“You wouldn’t,” he admitted.
“So we’ll play it this way.”
“You’re so damned strong,” he said.
He couldn’t know that her bowels were like jelly, her heart was knocking violently, and the faint metallic taste of terror filled her dry mouth.
They hugged but briefly.
Carrying the Mossberg, she went through the porch door, down the steps, across the shallow yard, past the BMW, and into the woods without looking back, worried that he would become aware of the depth of her fear and insist on dragging her back into the cabin.
Under the Quonset curve of sheltering evergreen boughs, the wind sounded hollow and distant except when she passed beneath a couple of flue-like openings that soared all the way up to the blind sky. Pummeling drafts shrieked down those passages, as cold as ectoplasm and as shrill as banshees.
Although the property sloped, the ground beneath the trees was easy to traverse. Underbrush was sparse due to a lack of direct sunlight. Many trees were so old that the lowest branches were above her head, and the view between the thick trunks was unobstructed all the way out to the county road.
The soil was stony. Tables and formations of granite broke the surface here and there, all ancient and smooth.
The formation she had pointed out to Marty was halfway between the cabin and the county road, only twenty feet upslope from the driveway. It resembled a crescent of teeth, blunt molars two to three feet high, like the fossilized dental structure of a gentle herbivorous dinosaur much larger than any ever before suspected or imagined.
Approaching the granite outcropping, in which shadows as dark as condensed pine tar pooled behind the “molars,” Paige suddenly had the feeling that the look-alike was already there, watching the cabin from that hiding place. Ten feet from her destination, she halted, skidding slightly on the carpet of loose pine needles.
If he was actually there, he would have seen her coming and could have killed her any time he wished. The fact that she was still alive argued against his presence. Nevertheless, as she tried to get moving again, she felt as if she had plunged to the bottom of a deep ocean trench and was struggling to make progress against the resisting mass of an entire sea.
Heart pounding, she circled the crescent formation and slipped into its shadowed convexity from behind. The look-alike wasn’t waiting for her.
She stretched out on her stomach. In her dark-blue ski jacket with the hood covering her blond hair, she knew that she was as good as invisible among the shadows and against the dark stone.
Through gaps in the stone, she could monitor the entire length of the driveway without raising her head high enough to be seen.
Beyond the shelter of the trees, the storm swiftly escalated into a full-scale blizzard. The volume of snow coming down into the driveway between flanking stands of trees was so great that it almost seemed as if she was looking into the foaming face of a waterfall.
Her ski jacket kept her upper body warm, but her jeans couldn’t ward off the penetrating cold of the stone on which she lay. As body heat leached away, her hip and knee joints began to ache. She wished she were wearing insulated ski pants, and she realized she should have at least brought a blanket to put between herself and the granite.
Under the influence of the building gale, the highest branches of the firs and pines creaked like scores of doors easing open on rusty hinges. Not even the muffling boughs of the evergreens could soften the rising voice of the wind.
The gradually dimming light of the day’s last hour was the steely shade of ice on a winter pond.
Every sight and sound was cold and seemed to exacerbate the chill that pressed into her from the granite. She began to worry about how long she could hold out before she would need to return to the cabin to get warm.
Then a deep-blue Jeep station wagon came uphill on the county road and made a hard, sharp turn into the driveway. It looked like the Jeep that belonged to Marty’s parents.
Rheostat at seven degrees. South from Mammoth Lakes, through billowing curtains of snow, through whirling snowdevils, through torrents and lashes and blasts and cataracts and airborne walls of snow, along a highway barely defined beneath the deepening mantle, passing slow-moving traffic at high speed, flashing his headlights to encourage obstructionists to pull over and let him go by, even passing a county snowplow and a cinder-spreading truck crowned with yellow and red emergency beacons that briefly transform the millions of white flakes into glowing embers. A left turn. Narrower road. Uphill. Into forested slopes. Long chain-link fence on the right, capped with spiral razor wire, broken down in places. Not there yet. A little farther. Close. Soon.
The four gasoline bombs stand in a cardboard box on the floor in front of the passenger seat, wedged into the knee space. The gaps between them are packed with folded newspapers, so the bottles will not clatter against one another.
Pungent fumes arise from the saturated cloth wicks. The perfume of destruction.
Guided by the magnetic attraction of the false father, he makes an abrupt right turn into a single-lane driveway already half hidden by snow. He brakes as little as possible, cornering in a slide, and moving his foot to the accelerator again even as the Jeep is still finding purchase and both rear tires are spinning-squealing fiercely.
Directly ahead, at least a hundred yards into the woods, stands a cabin. Soft light at the windows. Roof capped with snow.
Even if the BMW was not parked to the left of the place, he’d know he’d found his quarry. The imposter’s hateful magnetic presence pulls him forward.
At first sight of the cabin, he decides to make a full frontal assault, regardless of the wisdom or consequences. His mother and father are dead, wife and children probably long dead, too, forms and faces mockingly imitated by the vicious alien species that has stolen his own name and memories. He seethes with rage, hatred so intense it’s physically painful, anguish like a fire in his heart, and only swift justice will bring desperately needed relief.
The churning tires bite through the snow into dirt.
He rams his foot down on the accelerator.
The Jeep bolts forward.
A cry of savage fury and vengeance escapes him, and the mental rheostat spins from seven degrees to three hundred and sixty.
Marty was at the front window when headlight beams pierced the falling snow out on the county road, but at first he couldn’t see the source. Coming uphill, the vehicle was hidden by trees and roadside brush. Then it burst into sight—a Jeep—turning hard into the driveway at high speed, the back end fishtailing, plumes of snow and slush erupting behind its spinning rear tires.
An instant later, as he was still reacting to the arrival of the Jeep, he was stricken by a brutal psychic tidal wave as strong as anything he had previously experienced but of a different quality. This was not merely the urgent, questing power that had hammered him on other occasions, but a blast of black and bitter emotion, raw and uncensored, which put him inside the mind of his enemy as no human being ever before could have been inside the mind of another. It was a surrealistic realm of psychotic rage, desperation, infantile self-absorption, terror, confusion, envy, lust, and urgent hungers so vile that a flood of sewage and rotting corpses could not have been as repulsive.
For the duration of that telepathic contact, Marty felt as if he had been pitched into one of the deeper regions of Hell. Though the connection lasted no more than three or four seconds, it seemed interminable. When it was broken, he found himself standing with his hands clamped against his temples, mouth open in a silent scream.
He gasped for breath and shuddered violently.
The roar of an engine brought his eyes back into focus and drew his attention to the day beyond the window. The Jeep station wagon was accelerating up the driveway, toward the cabin.
Maybe he was misjudging the degree of The Other’s recklessness and insanity, but he had been
in
that mind, and he thought he knew what was coming. He spun away from the window, toward the girls.
“Run, get out the back,
go!”
Having already scrambled up from the living-room floor and the two-hand card game in which they’d been pretending to be engrossed, Charlotte and Emily were sprinting toward the kitchen before Marty had finished shouting the warning.
He ran after them.
All in a second, spinning through his mind, an alternate strategy: stay in the living room, hope the Jeep got hung up in the porch and never made it to the front wall of the cabin, then rush outside, after the impact, and shoot the bastard before he climbed out from behind the steering wheel.
And in another second, the dark potential of that strategy: maybe the Jeep
would
make it all the way—cedar siding, shattered two-by-fours, electrical wiring, chunks of plaster, broken glass exploding into the living room with it, rafters buckling, ceiling collapsing, murderous slate roof tiles thundering down on him—and he would be killed by flying debris, or survive but be trapped in the rubble, legs pinned.
The kids would be on their own. Couldn’t risk it.
Outside, the roar of the engine swelled nearer.
He caught up with the girls as Charlotte grasped the thumb-turn of the dead-bolt lock on the kitchen door. He reached over her head, slapped open the latch-bolt as she disengaged the lower lock.
The scream of the engine filled the world, curiously less like the sound of a machine than like the savage cry of something huge and Jurassic.
The Beretta. Rattled by the telepathic contact and the hurtling Jeep, he had forgotten the Beretta. It was on the living-room coffee table.
No time to go back for it.
Charlotte twisted the knob. The howling wind tore the door out of her hand and shoved it into her. She was knocked off her feet.