sooner or later he'd be back, just as weird and crazy but even angrier,
better prepared. Marty had to finish what he started before his double
had a chance to do the same.
He glanced at the phone. Dial 911. Get the police, then go after the
wounded man.
But the desk clock was beside the phone, and he saw the time-4,26.
Paige and the girls. On their way home from school, later than usual,
delayed by piano lessons. Oh, my God. If they came into the house and
saw the other Marty, or found him in the garage, they'd think he was
their Marty, and they'd run to him, frightened by his wounds, wanting to
help, and maybe he would still be strong enough to harm them. Was the
pistol that he dropped his only weapon? Can't make that assumption.
Besides, the son of a bitch could get a knife out of the rack in the
kitchen, the butcher's knife, hide it against his side, behind his back,
let Emily get close, then jam it through her throat, or deep into
Charlotte's belly.
Every second counted. Forget 911. Waste of time. The cops wouldn't
get there before Paige.
As Marty rounded the desk, his legs were wobbly, but less so as he
crossed the room toward the hallway. He saw blood splattered on the
wall, oozing down the spines of his own books, staining his name. A
creeping tide of darkness lapped at the edges of his vision again. He
clenched his teeth and kept going.
When he reached the double's pistol, he kicked it deeper into the room,
farther from the doorway. That simple act gave him a surge of
confidence because it seemed like something a cop would have the
presence of mind to do--make it harder for the perp to regain his
weapon.
Maybe he could handle this, get through it, as strange and scary as it
was, the blood and all. Maybe he would be okay.
So nail the guy. Make sure he's down, all the way down and all the way
out.
To write his mystery novels, he'd done a lot of research into police
procedures, not merely studying police-academy textbooks and training
films but riding with uniformed cops on night patrols and hanging out
with plainclothes detectives on and off the job. He knew perfectly well
how best to go through a doorway under these circumstances.
Don't be too confident. Figure the creep has another weapon besides the
one he dropped, gun or knife. Stay low, clear that doorway fast.
Easier to die in a doorway than anywhere else because every door opens
on the unknown. Keep your gun in both hands as you move, arms in front
of you, straight and locked, sweep left and right as you cross the
threshold, swinging the gun to cover both flanks Then slip to one side
or the othe rand keep your back against the wall as you move, so you
always know your back is safe, only three sides to worry about.
All of that wisdom flashed through his mind, as it might have passed
through the mind of one of his hard-nosed police characters--yet he
behaved like any panicked civilian, stumbling heedlessly into the
upstairs hall, holding the pistol in only his right hand, arms loose,
breathing explosively, making more of a target than a threat of himself,
because when you came right down to it, he wasn't a cop, only an asshole
who sometimes wrote about them. No matter how long you indulged the
fantasy, you couldn't live the fantasy, you couldn't act like a cop in a
pressurized situation unless you had trained like a cop. He had been as
guilty as anyone of confusing reality and fiction, thinking he was as
invincible as the hero on a printed page, and he'd been damned lucky the
other Marty hadn't been waiting for him. The upstairs hall was
deserted.
He looked exactly like me.
Couldn't think about that now, no time for it yet. Concentrate on
staying alive, wasting the bastard before he hurt Paige or the girls.
If you survive, there'll be time to seek an explanation for that
astonishing resemblance, solve the mystery, but not now.
Listen. Movement?
Maybe.
No. Nothing.
Keep the gun up, muzzle aimed ahead.
Just outside the office doorway, a smeary handprint in wet blood marred
the wall. A horrid amount of blood was puddled on the light-beige
carpet there. At least part of the time when Marty had stood behind his
desk, stunned and temporarily immobilized by the violence, the wounded
man had leaned against this hallway wall, perhaps trying unsuccessfully
to staunch his bleeding wounds.
Marty was sweating, nauseated and afraid. Perspiration trickled into
the corner of his left eye, stinging, blurring his vision. He blotted
his slick forehead with his shirt sleeve, blinked furiously to wash the
salt out of his eye.
When the intruder had shoved away from the wall and started
moving--perhaps while Marty was still frozen behind his desk--he had
walked through his own pooled blood. His route was marked by
fragmentary red imprints of the ridged patterns on athletic-shoe soles
as well as by a continuous scarlet drizzle.
Silence in the house. With a little luck, maybe it was the silence of
the dead.
Shivering, Marty cautiously followed the repulsive trail past the hall
bath, around the corner, past the double-door entrance to the dark
master bedroom, past the head of the stairs. He stopped at that point
where the second-floor hall became a gallery overlooking the living
room.
On his right was a bleached oak railing, beyond which hung the brass
chandelier that he'd switched on when he'd passed through the foyer
earlier. Below the chandelier were the descending stairs and the
two-story, tile-floored entrance foyer that flowed directly into the
two-story living room.
To his left and a few feet farther along the gallery was the room Paige
used as a home office. One day it would become another bedroom for
Charlotte or Emily when they decided they were ready to sleep
separately. The door stood half open. Bat-black shadows swarmed
beyond, relieved only by the gray storm light of the waning day, which
hardly penetrated the windows.
The blood trail led past that office to the end of the gallery, directly
to the door of the girls' bedroom, which was closed. The intruder was
in there, and it was infuriating to think of him among the girls'
belongings, touching things, tainting their room with his blood and
madness.
He recalled the angry voice, touched with lunacy yet so like his own
voice, My Paige, she's mine, my Charlotte, my Emily . . .
"Like hell, they're yours," Marty said, keeping the Smith & Wesson aimed
squarely at the closed door.
He glanced at his wristwatch.
4,28.
Now what?
He could stay there in the hallway, ready to blow the bastard to Hell if
the door opened. Wait for Paige and the kids, shout to them when they
came in, tell Paige to call 911. Then she could hustle the kids across
the street to Vic and Kathy Delorio's house, where they'd be safe, while
he covered the door until the police arrived.
/>
That plan sounded good, responsible, cool and calm. Briefly, the
knocking of his heart against his ribs became less insistent, less
punishing.
Then the curse of a writer's imagination hit him hard, a black whirlpool
sucking him down into dark possibilities, the curse of what if, what if,
what if. What if the other Marty was still strong enough to push open
the window in the girls' room, climb out onto the patio cover at the
back of the house, and jump down to the lawn from there?
What if he fled along the side of the house and out to the street just
as Paige was pulling into the driveway with the girls?
It might happen. Could happen. Would happen. Or something else just
as bad would happen, worse. The whirlpool of reality spun out more
terrible possibilities than the darkest thoughts of any writer's mind.
In this age of social dissolution, even on the most peaceful streets in
the quietest neighborhoods, unexpected acts of grotesque savagery could
occur, whereupon people were shocked and horrified but not surprised.
He might be guarding the door to a deserted room.
4,29.
Paige might be turning the corner two blocks away, entering their
street.
Maybe the neighbors had heard the gunshots and had already called the
police. Please, God, let that be the case.
He had no conscionable choice but to throw open the door to the girls'
room, go in, and confirm whether The Other was there or not.
The Other. In his office, when the confrontation had begun, he'd
quickly dismissed his initial thought that he was dealing with something
supernatural. A spirit could not be as solid and three-dimensional as
side of the line between life and death would not be vulnerable to
bullets. Yet a feeling of the uncanny persisted, weighed heavier on him
moment by moment. Although he suspected that the nature of this
adversary was far stranger than ghosts or shape-changing demons, that it
was simultaneously more terrifying and more mundane, that it was born of
this world and no other, he nevertheless could not help but think of it
in terms usually reserved for stories of haunting spirits, Ghost,
Phantom, Revenant, Apparition, Specter, The Uninvited, The Undying, The
Entity.
The Other.
The door waited.
The silence of the house was deeper than death.
Already focused narrowly on the pursuit of The Other, Marty's attention
constricted further, until he was oblivious of his own heartbeat, blind
to everything but the door, deaf to all sounds except those that might
come from the girls' room, conscious of no sensation except the pressure
of his finger on the trigger of the pistol.
The blood trail.
Red fragments of shoeprints.
The door.
Waiting.
He was rooted in indecision.
The door.
Something suddenly clattered above him. He snapped his head back and
looked at the ceiling. He was directly under the three-footsquare,
seven-foot-deep shaft that soared up to a dome-shaped Plexiglas sky
clatter of rain.
As if the strain of indecision had snapped him back to the full spectrum
of reality, he was abruptly deluged by all the voices of the storm, of
which he'd been utterly unaware while tracking The Other.
He'd been intently listening through the background racket for the
stealthier sounds of his quarry. Now the wind's gibbering-hooting
moaning, the rataplan of rain, fulminant thunder, the bony scraping of a
tree limb against one side of the house, the tinny rattle of a loose
section of rain gutter, and less identifiable noises flooded over him.
The neighbors couldn't have heard gunshots above the raging storm. So
much for that hope.
Marty seemed to be swept forward by the tumult, along the blood trail,
one hesitant step, then another, inexorably toward the waiting door.
The storm ushered in an early twilight, bleak and protracted, and Paige
had the headlights on all the way home from the girls' school.
Though turned to the highest speed, the windshield wipers could barely
cope with the cataracts that poured out of the draining sky.
Either the latest drought would be broken this rainy season or nature
was playing a cruel trick by raising expectations she would not fulfill.
Intersections were flooded. Gutters overflowed. The BMW spread great
white wings of water as it passed through one deep puddle after another.
And out of the misty murk, the headlights of oncoming cars swam at them
like the searching lamps of bathyscaphes probing deep ocean trenches.
"We're a submarine," Charlotte said excitedly from the passenger seat
beside Paige, looking out of the side window through plumes of tire
spray, "swimming with the whales, Captain Nemo and the autihis twenty
thousand leagues beneath the sea, giant squids stalking us.
Remember the giant squid, Mom, from the movie?"
"I remember," Paige said without taking her eyes from the road.
"Up periscope," Charlotte said, gripping the handles of that imaginary
instrument, squinting through the eyepiece. "Raiding the sea lanes,
ramming ships with our super-strong steel bow--boom!-and the crazy
captain playing his huge pipe organ! You remember the pipe organ, Mom?"
"I remember."
"Diving deeper, deeper, the pressure hull starting to crack, but the
crazy Captain Nemo says deeper, playing his pipe organ and saying
deeper, and all the time here comes the squid." She broke into the
shark's theme from the movie Jaws, "Dum-dum, dum-dum, dumdum, dum-dum,
da-da-dum!"
"That's silly," Emily said from the rear seat.
Charlotte turned in her shoulder harness to look back between the front
seats. "What's silly?"
"Giant squid."
"Oh, is that so? Maybe you wouldn't think they were so silly ùf you
were swimming and one of them came up under you and bit you in half, ate
you in two bites, then spit out your bones like grape
"Squid don't eat
people," Emily said.
"Of course they do."
"Other way around."
"Huh?"
"People eat squid," Emily said.
"No way."
"Way."
"Where'd you get a dumb idea like that?"
"Saw it on a menu at a restaurant."
"What restaurant?" Charlotte asked.
"Couple different restaurants. You were there. Isn't it true,
Mom--don't people eat squid?"
"Yes, they do," Paige agreed.
"You're just agreeing with her so she won't look like a dumb
seven-year-old," Charlotte said skeptically.
"No, it's true," Paige assured her. "People eat squid."
"How?" Charlotte asked, as if the very thought beggared her
imagination.
"Well," Paige said, braking for a red traffic light, "not all in one
piece, you know."
"I guess not!" Charlotte said. "Not a giant squid, anyway."
"You can slice the tentacles and saute them in garlic butter for one
thing," Paige said, and looked at her daughter to see what impact that
bit of culinary news would have.
Charlot
te grimaced and faced forward again. "You're trying to gross me
out."
"Tastes good," Paige insisted.
"I'd rather eat dirt."
"Tastes better than dirt, I assure you."
Emily piped up from the back seat again, "You can also slice their
tentacles and french-fry 'em."
"That's right," Paige said.
Charlotte's judgment was simple and direct, "Yuck."
"They're like little onion rings, only squid," Emily said.
"This is sick."
"Little gummy french-fried squid rings dripping gooey squid ink," Emily
said, and giggled.
Turning in her seat again to look at her sister, Charlotte said, "You're
a disgusting troll."
"Anyway," Emily said, "we're not in a submarine."
"Of course we're not," Charlotte said. "We're in a car."
"No, we're in a hypofoil."
"A what?"
Emily said, "Like we saw on TV that time, the boat that goes between
England and somewhere, and it rides on top of the water, really
zoooooming along."