John Saul (42 page)

Kneeling by his father’s corpse, Joey Wilkenson’s ears picked up the faint sound of snow crunching under walking feet. His body tensed and he unconsciously sniffed at the air, trying to catch the scent of whatever might be approaching.

A low growl rumbled in his throat, and then he scuttled away, disappearing around the corner of the shed, crouching in the shelter of the little building, all his senses alert as he watched and waited.

The tractor shed was visible now, and Olivia redoubled her efforts, her goal finally clearly in sight, for beyond the shed was the barn, and beyond that she could at last make out part of the house itself. Only a few more yards.

She stopped dead in her tracks, her eyes widening as she saw the pair of feet that stuck out from the corner of the tractor shed.

A pair of feet—bare, their soles thick with calluses, the toes twisted and bent, ending in curving nails that looked almost like claws. Her pulse quickening, Olivia changed course, veering toward the pair of feet, and a moment later found herself staring down at a corpse.

A corpse that was lying in the snow, the great gaping wound in its belly still oozing blood.

Two eyes stared up at her, gazing sightlessly from their sunken sockets.

In the man’s forehead was a deep wound, as if someone had driven a spike into his skull, then torn it loose again.

Olivia gazed at the man’s face, fear building inside her as the twisted features began to look faintly familiar.

But surely she had never seen this man before—if she
had, she would never have forgotten him, for the face had a feral look to it, a strange mixture of something partly human, partly animal.

Suddenly, a menacing snarl penetrated Olivia’s thoughts. She froze, every muscle in her body tensing, then swung around, raising the shotgun to her shoulder, her left hand gripping its stock, her right forefinger curling around the trigger.

A second later Joey Wilkenson sprang at her from the opposite end of the tractor shed, his body smashing into her back with enough force to knock her to the ground.

The shotgun went off, and Olivia felt her right arm rip free from its socket as the weapon kicked back into her shoulder. She screamed at the searing pain that shot out from the dislocated joint, then tried to roll over, tried to free herself from the weight of the creature that had attacked her.

But even as she tried to move, she felt an arm snake around her neck, felt the pressure of it cutting off her breath.

She had to move. Had to do something—anything!—to free herself from her attacker.

She struggled, her good arm flailing in the snow, a keening cry of pain and terror rising from her throat, but it was too late, for the pain from her right shoulder was already draining her energy, and her right arm was worse than useless in her attempts to defend herself.

As Joey Wilkenson’s teeth sank into the back of her neck, Olivia Sherbourne was all but unaware of the new pain that assaulted her body, for her mind had already begun its inevitable withdrawal into the soft, painless darkness of unconsciousness.

When his grisly work was finally done, and he felt Olivia’s body lying still beneath him, Joey stood up.

Fresh blood glistened on his sweater, and he wiped more of it from his face with his sleeve.

His breath was coming in panting gasps, but as he stared down at the corpse of the woman he had known all his life, the woman he had just killed, a surge of heat poured through him.

He felt strong and powerful, energized by the kill. His
nostrils flared as he sucked in the intoxicating aroma of fresh blood, and he finally understood who and what he was.

Turning away from Olivia Sherbourne’s corpse, he made his way through the drifting snow to the fence that separated the yard from the field and the forest beyond.

Vaulting the fence in a single graceful motion, he loped toward the forest, his swift stride carrying him easily across the pasture, which the wind had swept nearly clean of snow. Only when he was at the edge of the forest did he stop to look back.

Through the falling snow, the house was just visible, and he gazed at it for a moment, then turned away.

It was no longer his home, would never be his home again.

From now on, his home would be the mountains, where he would live as his father had lived, hiding during the day, concealing himself from the enemies who lived in the valley below, coming out only at night.

Coming out to hunt in the darkness.

M
aryAnne came awake slowly, her eyes blinking in the bright sunlight that flooded through the large east windows of the living room. For a long moment she resisted awakening at all, for as consciousness returned, so also did the paralyzing fear that had all but immobilized her through the long evening and night that had preceded this oddly sunny morning.

It shouldn’t have been sunny this morning—given what had come before, there should have been rain falling from the sky. Drizzling rain, dropping from leaden clouds, tapping a mournful dirge on the house’s roof.

For a long time MaryAnne didn’t move at all, even closed her eyes against the sunlight, as if by that simple act she could shut out the reality of yesterday, pretend to herself for a few more minutes that none of it had really happened at all, that it was simply a nightmare lingering in her mind as she slowly awakened, and any second she would realize the truth—that Logan was asleep in his room upstairs, and Joey was back in his, as well.

Perhaps Bill Sikes might even now be coming down from his cabin, tramping through the glistening snow to begin his chores.

And Olivia—perhaps she would call Olivia, ask her to come up for coffee, and tell her about the terrible dream she’d had last night.

The dream in which she’d come back to the house with Alison, huddled with her daughter in the kitchen, her mind spinning as she tried to decide what to do.

Then she’d heard a howl rising from somewhere beyond the barn, and her blood had run cold as the unbidden thought
that Shane Slater—whom she’d shot, then killed with the fireplace poker—had somehow come back to life. She had clung to Alison, cradling her adolescent daughter protectively, almost as if she were still a baby, and stared out the window into the snowstorm, terror building in her as she waited for Slater to appear, his belly torn and bleeding, his chest smeared with Logan’s blood, and an oozing hole in his forehead.

Dead, but not dead, and coming inexorably back toward the house.

Toward her. Toward Alison.

And she’d known that the next time he appeared, she would be able to defend neither her daughter nor herself, for her courage was spent, and her body, as well as her mind, were exhausted.

But he hadn’t come.

Instead, a terrible silence had followed the bestial howl of rage, a silence that seemed to go on forever, and then there had been a shot.

A single blast of a shotgun, its roar echoing off the cliffs high above the mountain, followed only a moment later by a scream of pain and terror.

A woman’s scream.

Olivia Sherbourne’s scream.

From the moment she heard it, MaryAnne knew who had uttered it, knew too that even as the scream’s echoes faded away, Olivia had died. Her arms tightened around Alison, whose face was buried against her bosom, but she had said nothing as she continued to stare out the window, waiting silently for whatever might come next.

Then she had seen Joey.

He appeared from somewhere beyond the barn, running across the field with the grace of a young animal, and even before he stopped at the edge of the woods and turned to face the house, she understood that it was he who had just killed Olivia.

When he paused in his flight and turned to gaze at the house for a moment, the brilliant red stains on the white sweater he was wearing only confirmed the bitter truth that had formed in her mind. She watched him silently as he
gazed at the house, then finally turned away and disappeared into the forest.

MaryAnne had lost track of time after that. She had no idea how long she sat in the kitchen, gently rocking Alison, waiting not only for her daughter’s terror to pass, but for her own fear to release her from its paralytic grip as well.

At some point they’d moved into the living room, nailed a blanket over the smashed window through which the intruder had entered the house, even spread more blankets on the floor to cover the already darkening stains of drying blood.

She’d built a fire on the immense stone hearth in the living room, and the two of them sat silently on the sofa, MaryAnne sitting up, Alison curled on her side, her head on her mother’s lap, neither of them saying anything.

Both of them staring into the flickering flames.

Each of them dealing with what had happened in her own way.

MaryAnne wasn’t sure when they finally fell asleep, couldn’t have said whether night had yet fallen when their exhausted minds and bodies gave themselves up to unconsciousness.

Now, though, as she opened her eyes, at last giving up the wish to retreat back into the warm oblivion of sleep, she knew that it had not been a terrible nightmare at all—it had all happened.

She stirred, her stiff muscles protesting, then eased herself from beneath the weight of Alison’s head, gently slipping a pillow beneath her daughter’s cheek and spreading an afghan over her curled body. A few coals still glowed in the fireplace, and after she checked the telephone—still dead—MaryAnne added three logs to the guttering fire, then used a worn leather bellows to breathe life back into the flames. As the fire flickered up, twisting between the logs, she went to the window and peered out into the brilliance of the morning.

Snow must have been falling all night, for now a blanket nearly two feet deep covered the yard, the roofs of the barn and outbuildings, even the top rail of the pasture fence. A single line of deer tracks broke the glistening surface of
sparkling crystals, and the branches of the trees bordering the stream were sagging under heavy loads, for their leaves, barely starting to change color, had caught far more of the glittering flakes than the naked branches alone could have supported.

Overnight, the valley had been transformed from early fall into deep winter. MaryAnne shivered as she gazed out on the monochromatic fantasy. But the chill, she instantly realized, stemmed more from her certain knowledge of the nightmare the snow now covered than from the cold beyond the window.

“Mommy?” Alison said, her voice sounding sleepy. MaryAnne turned to face her daughter, who this morning looked much younger than her thirteen years. “It all really happened, didn’t it?” Alison breathed, her eyes fearful, her face pale.

MaryAnne could only nod, unable to summon any words at all.

“What are we going to do?” Alison went on. “Are we going to go home? Are we going to go back to Daddy?”

Mommy … Daddy …

Only yesterday morning Alison had still been calling her “Mom,” and it had been years since she’d referred to her father as anything but “Dad.” Now, after the terrible trauma of the previous day, she had reverted to the terms of her babyhood. Her heart going out to the girl who was now all she had left, MaryAnne went back to the sofa, sat down, and put her arms around Alison once more. “I don’t know what we’re going to do, darling,” she said quietly. “All I know is that right now there isn’t anything we can do at all. We’re snowed in, and the telephone isn’t working yet. We have to wait for someone to come and help us.”

“What if no one comes?” Alison asked.

“They will,” MaryAnne promised her daughter. “As soon as they can, someone will come to help us.” She started toward the kitchen, knowing that she had to do something—anything—before the horror of last night closed in on her all over again.

But as she started fixing a pot of coffee, she glanced out
the window, out across the field to the spot where Joey had disappeared into the woods.

A thought came into her mind.

What if Joey comes back?

What if no one comes to help us, and Joey comes back?

High up in the mountains, Rick Martin stirred, then came slowly awake. Every bone in his body ached with cold, but he had survived the night. The small fire he had built had long ago died away, and he shoved his hand in his pocket, feeling for the hard plastic case that contained his meager supply of matches. He finally found it, pulled it out, then realized his fingers were too numb even to unscrew the cap of the small gray cylinder. He began massaging the fingers of his right hand, then unzipped his jacket and slipped his hands inside, burying them in the warmth of his armpits. While the feeling slowly began to seep back into his fingers, and the agonizing itch of frostbite settled in as well, he glanced around for something to add to the black coals that were all that was left of last night’s fire. A moment later he began with pain-curled fingers to break up one of the branches he’d used as a makeshift bed, piling the pieces carefully to allow as much air as possible to circulate through the damp pine needles. When he was at last satisfied, he struck the first match and held it in the center of the small pile. The flame burnt brightly. Some of the needles sputtered, started to catch, then died away as the match burnt down to a smoking stub.

He was down to the next to the last match when the fire finally caught. He cupped his hands around the tiny flame, blowing gently on it as it spread through the needles. Only when it was burning strongly did he risk adding more fuel, but the fire held, and it wasn’t long before he felt the heat begin to seep through his clothing.

He broke up the rest of the branches that had both cushioned him from the hard ground and helped insulate him from the snow that had fallen through the night, adding it all to the fire, building it up until finally the heat grew intense enough that he had to stand up and back away from it a pace or two. Finally he turned away from it altogether
and began kicking down the snow barrier he’d built to protect himself from yesterday’s gale winds. The barrier was far thicker than he’d built it: snow had drifted as long as the wind had blown, Its base was now almost four feet thick, and it rose nearly as far above the ground. But the snow was soft, and within a few seconds he had leveled the wall, freeing himself from the tiny cavern in which he’d weathered the storm. He gazed out over the valley, covered now in a thick layer of white, only the sheer granite outcroppings still free of snow. Far below him, barely visible in the distance, was the village, looking for all the world like a tiny hamlet caught in a crystal paperweight, its roofs forever buried in white, candles eternally glowing in tiny painted windows.