They’d have to be looking, though.
“Whatever that . . . thing is,” Seth says, “it’s never come this way before. Trust me. Nothing’s driven down these roads for years.”
Regine hmphs. “I’ll still feel better when we’re in the house.”
“Do you have any food there?” Tomasz asks. Regine shoots him a glance. “What?” he says. “I am hungry.”
“Just cans,” Seth says. “Soups and old beans and custard.”
“Exactly what we’re used to,” Regine says.
They turn the corner at the far end of Seth’s street. “That one there, yes?” Tomasz says, pointing.
Seth stops walking again. “How do you know that? Have you been spying on me?”
Tomasz’s smile falters and even Regine looks uncomfortable.
“What?” Seth says.
Regine sighs. “Tommy saw you standing on top of the train station bridge a few days ago.”
“She did not believe me,” Tomasz says. “Said that I imagined you.” He smiles again. “I did not.”
“We’re in a house a couple miles from here,” Regine says, gesturing northward, “but we were out gathering food and Tommy said he thought he saw someone.”
“We looked for very long time in rain that never stopped,” Tomasz says, nodding. “Got very wet.”
“And then we, uh,” Regine says, and she actually seems to blush, “we saw you showering. In the rain. Out in front of your house.”
Tomasz grins even wider. “You were pulling on your willy!”
“Tommy!” the girl snaps. Then she frowns at Seth. “Well, you were. And we weren’t going to say hello when you were busy, and we were hungry and wet, so we went back home and thought we’d come back when things weren’t so . . .”
“Private,” Tomasz stage-whispers.
“Rainy,” Regine says.
Seth feels a burning in his throat. “I thought I was alone here. I thought I was completely alone.”
“That is what I thought, too,” Tomasz says solemnly. “Until Regine finds me.” He smiles again, shyly this time. “And now you make three.”
“So we got here this morning,” Regine says, “only to find that you were running very, very fast toward something in particular.” She crosses her arms. “Almost like you had somewhere to go. Something to do.”
There’s a silence, which Seth doesn’t fill.
“And we could not let the Driver catch you,” Tomasz says. “So we followed. And here we all are.” He shrugs. “Still outside.”
Seth waits a moment without saying anything more, then heads down the street, leading them toward his house. He’s embarrassed about the shower business, but not as much as he could be. Something’s still not right about this. These two just happened to be there when he was running toward the hill, just happened to stop him before he made contact with the black van, just happened to find the perfect place to hide from the Driver?
He sneaks a peek back as he turns up the path to his front door.
A short, happy Polish kid and a big, suspicious black girl.
Did he create them? Because they’re just about the last and weirdest thing he’d pick to create.
He swings open the front door, and they follow him inside. Regine takes a dining chair and Tomasz slumps on the settee. “This is a very terrible painting,” he says, staring up at the panicked horse above the mantel.
“I’ll make something to eat,” Seth says. “It won’t be much. But while I do, you have to tell me what you know.”
“All right,” Regine says. “But first you have to tell us something.”
“And what’s that?” Seth says, heading toward the kitchen.
And he hears her ask, “How did you die?”
“What did you say?”
“I think you heard the question just fine,” Regine says, looking at him firmly, as if setting him a challenge. A test he has to pass.
“How did I die?” Seth repeats, looking back and forth between her and Tomasz. “So you’re saying . . . You’re saying this place really is –”
“I’m not saying anything,” Regine says. “I’m just asking how you died. And your reaction tells me you know exactly what I mean.”
“I got struck by lightning!” Tomasz volunteers.
Regine makes a loud scoffing sound. “You did not.”
“You do not know,” Tomasz says. “You were not there.”
“Nobody actually gets struck by lightning. Not even in Poland.”
Tomasz’s eyes widen in indignation. “I was not in Poland! How many times I have to say? Mother came over for better working and –”
“I drowned,” Seth says, so quietly he thinks they may not have heard him.
But they stop bickering immediately.
“Drowned?” Regine says. “Where?”
Seth furrows his brow. “Halfmarket. It’s a little town on the coast of –”
“No, I mean, where? The bathtub? A swimming pool –?”
“The ocean.”
She nods, as if this makes sense. “Did you hit your head?”
“Did I hit my –?” Seth says, and then stops. He touches the back of his skull where it smashed into the rocks. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“I . . .” Regine starts, then looks down at the freshly swept floor Seth left behind this morning. “I fell down a flight of stairs. Cracked my head on a step on the way down.”
“And you woke up here?”
She nods.
“It was the lightning for me!” Tomasz says happily. “It is like getting punched on your entire body all at one time!”
“You did not get struck by lightning,” Regine says.
“Then you did not fall down stairs!” Tomasz says, upset bending his voice, a tone Seth recognizes from a hundred and one fights with Owen.
“So you both . . . ?” Seth doesn’t finish the sentence.
“Died,” Regine says. “In a way that caused a specific injury.”
Seth feels the back of his head again, where he hit it on the rocks. He remembers the horrible finality of that collision, could swear he still feels the bones breaking, in a way from which there was no return.
Until he woke up here.
There are no broken bones now, of course, that was another place, another him, and all he can feel is the still-brutal shortness of his hair, something that Regine and Tomasz have clearly been here long enough to outgrow. There’s nothing else unusual, just the inward curve of his neck leading up to the outward curve of his skull.
Regine looks at Tomasz. “Show him,” she says.
Tomasz leaps up from the settee. “Lean down, please,” he says. Seth stoops to one knee and allows Tomasz to take his hand. He splays Seth’s fingers so the first two are a particular distance apart. Tomasz sticks out a little nubbin of tongue as he concentrates, and once more, he reminds Seth so much of Owen, Seth feels his chest contract.
“Here,” Tomasz says, placing Seth’s fingers on a particular stretch of bone just behind his left ear. “Can you feel that?”
“Feel what?” Seth says. It’s exactly where his head struck the rock, but there’s nothing unusual there, nothing but a stretch of –
There’s something. A rise in the bone so slight as to almost not be present, so slight he didn’t feel it seconds ago when pressing in exactly the same place.
A rise in the bone.
Leading to a narrow notch in that same bone.
“What?” Seth whispers. “How . . . ?”
He swears it wasn’t there before. But there it is now, subtle but clear, the rise and the notch almost like a completely natural extension of his skull.
Almost.
“That’s where you hit your head?” Regine asks.
“Yes,” Seth answers. “You?”
Regine nods.
“And that is where the lightning punched me!” Tomasz says.
“Or whatever happened,” Regine mumbles.
“What is it?
” Seth asks, feeling around on the same spot on his right side to see if there’s another one. There isn’t.
“We think it is a kind of connection,” Tomasz says.
“Connection to what?”
Neither of them answers.
“Connection to what?” Seth says again.
“What have your dreams been like?” Regine says.
Seth frowns at her. Then he has to look away, feeling the vividness of his dreams in a way that causes his skin to flush.
“The dreamings,” Tomasz says, patting Seth’s back sympathetically. “They are not easy.”
“Like you’re not just seeing it all again,” Regine says. “Like you’re actually there, back in time somehow, reliving it.”
Seth is surprised to find his eyes filling, his throat choking. “What is it? Why does it happen?”
She glances at Tomasz, then back at Seth. “We’re not sure,” she says carefully.
“But you have an idea.”
She nods. “The things you dream. They’re important?”
“Yes,” Seth says. “More than I want them to be.”
“Some of it is good,” Tomasz says. “But good in painful way.”
Seth nods.
“But that, all that –” Regine makes a gesture in the air, capturing in a single twist of her fingers all the dreams he’s had –“all that is not your whole life.”
“What?”
“There’s more. There’s much, much more.” She gets a grim set to her mouth. “And you’ve forgotten it.”
For some reason Seth can’t quite put a finger on, this makes him angry. “Don’t tell me I’ve forgotten,” he says, fierce enough to surprise everyone, even himself. “I remember too much, is the problem. If I could forget some of these things, then . . .”
“Then what?” Regine says. “You wouldn’t have drowned?” She says the word with a sarcastic snap, challenging him with her eyes.
“Did you fall down those stairs,” he hears himself saying. “Or were you pushed?”
“Whoa,” Tomasz says, taking a step back. “Something has happened. I have missed it. Why are we fighting?”
“We’re not fighting,” Regine says. “We’re getting to know each other.”
“People who are getting to know each other share information,” Seth says. “All you’re giving me are riddles and hints about how much more you know than I do.” He stands, his voice rising with him. “Why do I have a brand-new notch in my head?”
Tomasz starts to answer, “It is not brand –” but Seth keeps going.
“Why did I crawl out of a coffin in the house where I grew up?”
Regine looks surprised. “You grew up here? In this house?”
But Seth is barely listening. “And where is everyone else? Who are you, anyway? How do I know you’re not working with that thing in the van?”
This causes a lot more outrage than he was expecting.
“We are NOT!” Tomasz shouts.
“You don’t know anything!” Regine says.
“Then tell me!”
“Fine!” she says. “Tomasz isn’t the first person I saw here. He was the second.”
Seth feels strangely victorious. “So there are others?”
“Only the one, before I found Tomasz.”
“And thank the Holy Mother she did,” Tomasz says, nodding vigorously. “Was in very bad way.”
“But before then,” Regine says, “there was another. A woman. I knew her one day. One day. And then I watched her die. She pushed me to safety and let the Driver catch her so it wouldn’t catch me. I watched it kill her. That baton has some kind of charge in it. It kills you. And then the Driver takes your body away.”
Tomasz frowns at Seth. “She does not like to talk about it.”
“So, screw you,” Regine continues. “How do we know you’re not –”
She stops.
Because they’ve noticed the sound.
A distant purring, a sound of the wind that isn’t the wind.
The sound of an engine.
Growing louder as it approaches.
They turn to the windows, though the blinds are still down and nothing can be seen of the street beyond.
“No,” Regine says, standing up. “It never follows this far. If we get away, it always stops.”
The sound of the engine grows louder, two, maybe three streets away.
And getting closer.
Tomasz scowls at Seth. “You were shouting! It heard you!”
“No, it didn’t,” Regine says. “It’s just searching, street by street, trying to find us. Now, be quiet.”
They’re silent, but there’s a shift in the sound as it obviously turns a corner –
And starts driving down the road to Seth’s house.
But Seth is thinking.
They only heard the engine after he spoke the words. After he accused them of working with it.
And now here it is.
I did this, he thinks. Did I do this?
“Our footprints are all over,” Tomasz says. “It will know we are here.”
“It’s driving,” Regine says. “It may pass by too quickly to notice –”
But she doesn’t finish.
Because the engine has come to a stop right outside.
Seth feels Tomasz’s hand slip into his own, gripping it the way Owen did every time they had to cross a street. Seth can feel the tension vibrating up from the little, stubby fingers, can see the nails that are bitten painfully down to the quick, can see the wide-open, terrified eyes looking back up from Tomasz’s face.
So much like Owen.
“It’ll pass,” Regine says. “It’ll drive on and out. Just nobody move, okay?”
They don’t move. Neither does the sound of the engine.
“What is it doing?” Tomasz asks, his voice a desperate whisper.
And Seth sees again the craziness of his hair, an avalanche of wiry tangle. Again, just like Owen’s. Seth looks at Regine, his mind racing.
Everything about this world has felt small. Everything has felt like he was hiding in a tiny pocket of a place with walls that pressed in from every side, in the form of memories he couldn’t shake, a burnt-out wasteland that made a border, and now these two, showing up just in time to stop him from going any farther, bringing him back to this same stupid house at the very moment he tried to leave it for good, and who knows, maybe even bringing this van after them.
“Something about this isn’t right,” he says.
“What?” Tomasz asks.
Seth squeezes Tomasz’s hand, then lets it go. “I’m going to find out what it is.”
“You’re what?” Regine says.
He starts to cross the sitting room toward the blinds. “I’m going to check and see what’s happening.”
Tomasz moves over to Regine and holds her hand now.
Seth stops and looks at them curiously. “You’re not here, are you?” he says, the words coming out, unexpected.
Regine frowns. “Beg pardon?”
“I don’t think you’re really here. I don’t think any of this is really here.”
The engine still thrums outside.
“If we’re not here,” Regine says, holding his stare, “then neither are you.”
“You think that’s an answer?” Seth says. “You think that’s proof?”
“I don’t care what you think. If you let that thing see us, we’re dead.”
But Seth is shaking his head. “I feel like I’m beginning to understand. I’m finally beginning to understand what this place is.” He turns back to the window. “And how it works.”
“What are you doing, Mr. Seth?” Tomasz says. “You said you were just going to check.”
“Seth, please,” Regine says, and he hears her say to Tomasz, “Go, run, there’s got to be a back way –”
“There’s nothing to run from,” Seth says. “There’s nothing here that can hurt me, is there?”
With an almost casual swipe, h
e pulls up the blinds. The sun blasts into the dim room, and Seth squints in the brightness –
And the Driver punches a fist through the window, slamming it into Seth’s chest, sending him flying across the room with seemingly impossible force.
He lands in a tumble at the feet of Regine and Tomasz, who are fleeing to the kitchen. His chest feels as if it’s had a hole punched through it, knocking every bit of air out of his lungs. The Driver smashes out the rest of the glass in the window, throws away the blind in a violently efficient motion and steps over the low window ledge into the sitting room, its feet hitting the floor with a dead thump that feels unnaturally heavy.
It stands there, arms out slightly, feet apart, its sleek featureless head angled so it seems to be looking down at Seth, still curled on the floor, struggling for breath. He can hear Regine and Tomasz as they battle with the door to the back garden, but there’s only high fences and deep grass out there. Nowhere for them to run away from this faceless, horrible, man-shaped thing.
There’s no escape. For any of them.
The Driver moves toward Seth, its steps booming against the floorboards. As it walks, it makes a reaching motion with its arm, and the black, steely baton seems to just appear in its hand. The Driver swings it once, as if to test it. It crackles in the air, emitting a dangerous-sounding hum, tiny spots of light flowing from it as it moves.
Seth’s thoughts jar and tumble as he pushes himself back. What a stupid time to be wrong, he thinks, and Here it is, my death and They just have to pull on it to make the lock work and Will it hurt? Oh, God, will it hurt? and he’s trying to scoot away and the Driver comes on, implacable, baton at the ready –
He is dimly aware of Tomasz in the kitchen saying, “We cannot, we cannot,” and Regine calling out “Tommy!” but all he can see is the merciless, empty face looking back at him, coming for him –
“No,” Seth starts to say –
The Driver leaps, raising the baton to bring it down with a final, terrifying authority –
And is knocked to the ground by a full bookcase tumbling into it.
Seth cries out in surprise, but Tomasz is already running from where he overbalanced the bookcase as Regine scoots her hands under Seth’s arms to help lift him. They drag him into the kitchen, and Seth can see the Driver throwing the bookcase off itself with improbable strength. Tomasz slams the kitchen door behind them, and Regine helps him tip the refrigerator against it.