

The Girl Inside The Wall

Book 1 of Demons Among Us

Patrick Quinlan
Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2012 Patrick Quinlan

A Strawberry Book

Smashwords Edition License Notes

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Praise for Patrick Quinlan's novels:

"Best of Crime Fiction 2006" \-- January Magazine

"Tarantino-esque novel about the past catching up with an ex-criminal turned children's toymaker, and by extension with his young girlfriend Lola. Lots of villains and violent deaths plus likeable characters and some quirky humour. The first chapter – in which Lola busts her way out of a thoroughly nasty rape scenario with karate-kicking panache – would hook anyone."

\-- The Bookseller (UK)

"Graphic action and exhilarating chases ensue as Quinlan's characters play cat-and-mouse through Portland,...makes one hope that Smoke hasn't quit the life entirely. Lola is a fierce delight." \-- Publishers Weekly

"A fast and furious debut thriller notable for a vintage collection of really rotten bad guys. Characters to care about, even the no-goods. Readers... may be bearing early witness to the arrival of a major talent." \-- Kirkus Reviews

"SMOKED should absorb any fan of Bruckheimer blockbusters and everything else that goes boom."

\-- Entertainment Weekly

"A fast-paced thriller...the story moves at warp speed, capped by a cinematic chase...before ending in spectacular fashion."

\-- Los Angeles Times

"Watch out for [SMOKED]. A superb debut. A great crime novel. Brilliant is the word."

\-- The Independent on Sunday (UK)

"[A] strong cross between Elmore Leonard and Quentin Tarantino doing Elmore Leonard. The result is tightly plotted, confidently written and very hip." \-- The Sunday Observer (UK)

"Patrick Quinlan writes with such panache and skill...the ending reminds me of Elmore Leonard at his best." \--The Mail on Sunday (UK)

"A shocking, violent read jam-packed with action and a cast of incredible characters who are so much more than they first appear. It's one of those gripping books that will take you to another world, far removed from any safety net. It's also a book you'll probably want to read slowly because you won't want it to end." 4½ stars out of 5. \- - AAP Newswire (Australia)

"Cue kidnappings, explosions, beatings, murders and car chases aplenty. Pacey, Punchy and raw, this is one self-assured debut." \- - In the Air – inflight magazine of Qantas Airlines (Australia)

"[A] thrilling ride that will keep you hanging on the edge of your seat. It will make you curse the fact that you need sleep."

**-** \- Bullz-Eye.com

"The story combines vicious villainy with threadbare morality to produce a bang that movie producers and script-writers would be sorry to miss. Once you've picked it up, it's hard to put it down." \-- Channel NewsAsia (Singapore)

"THIS is the stuff – violent, pacy, stylish and funny."\-- The Daily Mirror

"Quinlan delights in wrong-footing the reader. A fast-moving, hugely entertaining thriller."

\-- The Observer on Sunday

"[A] Leonardesque thriller. For this top-notch noir entertainment, think Coen Brothers (Blood Simple) in print." \-- Mystery Scene Magazine

"Quinlan brings to glorious life several offbeat, deviant characters from roads less traveled. This hurtles along like an express train to its smashing climax." \-- Publisher's Weekly
The DEMONS AMONG US series:

Book 1: THE GIRL INSIDE THE WALL

Book 2: THE DEMON

By Patrick Quinlan

Evil is easy, and has infinite forms.

- Blaise Pascal

The girl was young, and wearing a white dress. It was such a nice dress. She was a pretty little girl, but she was sad because she was alone and deep in darkness. She had been down here a very long time.

Once, the girl had played outside in the afternoon sun. She had sung a song to herself, and kneeled in the garden at the side of the house, and dreamed of things she could not remember now. She could hear her mother inside the house, through an open window, making dinner. Cooking sounds came to the girl, and good cooking smells. Then a dark shape crossed the sunlight, and the girl looked up.

"Daddy?"

But it wasn't her daddy. It was the man with no face, the man who lived in shadow.
CHAPTER 01

Earlier that day, Jessica James played hooky from school. In the evening, Neil came home and tried to bash her brains in.

It was a Friday, a warm day, unseasonably warm for the start of October in Portland, Maine. Jessica – everybody called her Jessie – had gone downtown to the Old Port, the tourist area along the city's waterfront, to see if she could make some money. She came home with a little over twenty dollars, even after buying herself two sweet Italian sausages and a Coke at the hot dog stand. A slow day, but better than school anytime.

She was eleven years old and still in the fourth grade. She had long, curly red hair, and a smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose. She was cute, even pretty, and she knew it. She was almost a head taller than everyone else in her grade. The teachers thought she was dumb, and bound to get in trouble sooner or later. She overheard them talking about her sometimes. Her mother has a drinking problem. She has no father. She can't keep up in school.

Almost none of what they said was true. She did too have a father. His name was Stephen James. He was the one who named her Jessie, after the famous bank robber. She loved her father, she thought about him every day, but she hadn't seen him in a long time.

She wasn't dumb, either. She was smarter than the teachers. She just hated school. The only part she liked, even a little, was the sports. She was the most athletic person she knew. She was the only girl on the boy's basketball team. She could do summersaults and backflips. She could juggle, and jump over huge piles of stuff on her unicycle, even over small kids lying side by side. The Old Port tourists would laugh and clap and tell her she was wonderful. She was smart enough to let them give her their money.

Actually, there was one other thing she liked about school – learning about medieval knights. She liked to know anything about knights, especially King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Jessie wasn't a very good reader, so mostly she just watched movies about Arthur, and about Robin Hood. She had watched every movie they had about King Arthur and Robin Hood at the school library and at the small public library near her home. She had watched them all ten times each.

One time, her mom, whose name was Gail, had asked Jessie if she watched the King Arthur stories because she wanted to be like Lady Guinevere. It was a funny question. Before then, Jessie had never given Guinevere much thought at all. No, she didn't want to be like Guinevere. She wanted to be like Sir Gawain or Sir Lancelot. She wanted to be like Robin Hood, for sure. She might want to rescue somebody like Guinevere one day, but she didn't want to be like her.

"Jessie, you little whore."

Neil was home now. He was Gail's boyfriend. He had just come in the door. It was six o'clock and full dark outside. Jessie had come home at four, and had waited with a sinking feeling in her stomach the whole time. Sometimes her stomach sank so low during those two hours that she thought she might throw up.

Neil always seemed to know when she skipped school. He knew because he was mostly just a stew bum and a loser. He knew a lot of the other losers and stew bums in town, and they told him what Jessie did out there. There were eyes everywhere on the street.

Jessie was on the living room rug, lying on her stomach. She looked up from her school notebook, where until a moment ago, she had been doodling some pictures. She kept one three-subject notebook for all her classes, and it was mostly filled with her drawings.

Neil stood in the doorway to the living room, tall, gangly, disheveled in workpants and a dark blue windbreaker jacket over a denim work shirt, unruly brown hair, big hands, red nose, angry burst veins in his face. His eyes were blood red. From this angle, he looked very big.

Neil worked day laborer jobs. The motto of the company that hired him out was Work Today, Paid Today. Neil's motto was Paid Today, Drunk Today. When he was very drunk, he could get a wild, dangerous light in his eyes – like now. Things got broken when Neil had that look in his eyes. Like lamps and dishes. Like Jessie's arm one time. She had to lie about it to her teachers and say she fell off a swing.

He had spanked Jessie before – pulled down her pants and spanked her bare ass. More than once. Jessie could remember the hurt and helpless anger, the sting of his rough palm against her flesh. He shouldn't pull her pants down, shouldn't be allowed to do it, but Gail was the only one who could help her and she had done nothing to stop him.

Neil had slapped Gail before, even gave her a black eye once. Gail had gotten him arrested before. In fact, she had an order from the judge against him right now, but somehow he was still here. One more time, Gail told him, one more time and he was out. It went around in circles like that. Around and around and around. But he never seemed to leave.

"Neil?" Gail said from where she sat on the couch. "Honey?"

Jessie's mom Gail was still beautiful. Maybe a little bit lined from all the worry, but still pretty with blonde hair. Before Neil came in, Gail had been watching the news on TV, while smoking a cigarette and having a glass of wine. Now, Jessie glanced at her mother, and saw the fear flash in her eyes like lightning. She was as scared of Neil as Jessie was.

"We need the money he brings in," she often said to Jessie, by way of explaining things. But it wasn't true. They didn't need his money – he didn't bring any money in. He worked all right, but he drank all the money they paid him before he ever made it home. Young as she was, Jessie brought home more money than he did.

The truth was Gail was afraid. She had enough money from her waitress job. It was her name on the lease. She had the order from the judge. But she was afraid what Neil would do if she finally tried to throw him out. Jessie didn't need to be a grown up to know that. And things were complicated. Jessie knew that, too. When Neil wasn't drunk, he could be nice. Her mom liked having him around during those times.

But now wasn't one of those times. Neil pointed down at Jessie. His eyes were wide, huge. His face was haggard and blotched with red. He accused her like a preacher from the pulpit, condemning her to the eternal fire.

"This little girl of yours skipped school again today. A little bird came down and told me. She was in the Old Port, hanging around with boys twice her age. Men, really." His voice rose, full of meaning. It became almost a shout. "Girl, what are you doing down there with those men? You let them touch you?"

Jessie's whole body tensed. Her heart pounded in her chest, and her body coiled like a spring. There was something strange about Neil tonight. It was like a twig in his mind had snapped. He had it all wrong, of course, but that didn't matter. Neil knew what he knew, or thought he knew, and there was no way to tell him different. His face darkened, like a thunderstorm rolling in.

Jessie glanced to her right – there was a second doorway in this room, and it went out to the eat-in kitchen. From there, she could dart through the back door and out to the tiny deck. If she made it that far, she would vault over the railing, drop half a story to the back alley, and be gone. She was in her socks – little white ones that didn't even come up to her ankles, with pink pom-poms dangling off them – that sucked, but it was the best she could do. If she had to run through the streets in her socks, she would run through the streets in her socks.

"Tell me something," Neil said as he shrugged off his jacket. "Are you still a virgin?" His eyes squinted, his voice trembling and cracking.

Jessie knew from experience when something was about to happen. She was a step ahead of everybody. She tried to speak but it came out as a garbled sound in her throat.

"What?" Neil said. "You don't have an answer?" He slammed his jacket on the floor. "You little slut, are you trying to make a laughingstock out of me?"

"Neil!" Gail said. "What's the matter with you?"

Jessie sprang up and bolted for the kitchen door.

"See?" Neil shouted. "She's dirty! She's dirty!"

His heavy footsteps pursued her, shoes thumping, making the small house shake, but Jessie had the jump on him. She darted left, then left again, her feet slipping on the wooden floors. She reached the door to the back porch, yanked it hard, but it wouldn't open. The deadbolt! You had to use a key to unlock the door from either side. The key was in the kitchen cabinet.

She could hear his breathing – she turned, and there he was, coming fast, five feet away. She would never get the back door open in time.

She dashed down the narrow hallway, toward the front door, and the stairs to the two upstairs bedrooms. His shadow was on top of hers. The front door was no good – it would also be locked, impossible to open. Jessie realized that she was laughing. Crazy giggles escaped her.

She stopped at the bottom of the stairs, hooked the banister with her hand, then went right, turning on a dime, 180 degrees.

Somewhere, her mother screamed.

Neil reached for Jessie's wrist, brushed it with his fingers, but she slipped away from his grip. She bounded up the stairs, two at a time. Neil lost a couple of seconds here. He was too drunk to stop and ran right past the staircase.

Jessie breathed hard now, gasped for air, as she emerged in the darkness of the upstairs hallway. Another 180 around the banister, and her room was down the hall on the left. Her thoughts raced, her mind making decisions seconds ahead.

She could get to her room, lock the door behind her, and pull some sneakers and a sweater on fast. Then climb out her window and onto the low roof. From there, shimmy down the drain pipe. She had done it before. It would give the big jerk time to sleep it off, or sober up. Maybe it would give her mom time to get rid of him, once and for all.

Behind her, Neil lumbered up the stairs.

"Jessie!" he howled. "You come here!"

Jessie reached the end of the hall, passed through the door to her tiny room, and slammed it behind her. She turned the lock. Blessed relief. He couldn't get in now. He could pound on it all he wanted. He could scream and yell. He could pick the lock with a paperclip, but in his drunken state it would take him twenty minutes. She was safe for now. She kneeled near the bed, and pulled a pair of pink Skechers from under it. She forced them onto her feet, not bothering to untie the shoelaces first. What else to wear?

She scanned the room, all these familiar things going by in a flash – a King Arthur poster on one wall, Kevin Costner as Robin Hood on another, stuffed animals on the dresser, a stuffed unicorn and a stuffed knight on the bed, a shelf groaning with children's books, all of them about talking animals and knights. Talking animals had been another one of her interests for a while.

The old metal radiator in the corner knocked and wheezed, steam heat coming from it – it was warm today, but it was getting cold again tonight.

She dug into her closet. Jeez – everything was thrown everywhere. Here on the second shelf was an old wool sweater she could wear. She should probably wear her pom-pom hat, too. Where was she going? McDonald's? Sure, she could walk half a mile to McDonald's, get a shake and some fries. Come back, maybe he'd be passed out by then.

A hand tried to turn the knob from the other side of the door. Then a fist pounded on it. The cheap wood rattled in its frame.

"Jessie, open this door!"

She pulled the sweater on. Okay, time to make like the wind and blow. She moved to the window, sorry to leave the warmth of the drafty old house. She took a deep breath. It was high, that was the thing. The roof was high above the street, and the drain pipe was old and rickety. It had been a year since she last climbed down it, and she had grown a lot in that time. Maybe it wouldn't hold her anymore. Maybe she would fall and break her neck.

His voice deepened. "Girl, you open this door right now."

BOOM. A body hit the other side of the door. The wood cracked down the middle like dried earth in the desert. She saw the crack form. BOOM. He hit it again. The wood splintered. A chunk came flying off.

"Jessie!"

She screamed at the guttural bark of his voice. He sounded like a monster. This time was for real. In all his tantrums, in all his anger and drunken craziness, all the pounding, all the cursing, all the slaps and spanks, he had never smashed through the door. She had never imagined that he would do it, or even could. Suddenly, a whole series of comforting fantasies fell apart, and she realized what a fool she had been. Neil could break in here any time he wanted.

Jessie focused on the window lock. The clasp was tight. She had trouble turning it. She got it about halfway, kept turning, kept pushing.

The radiator hissed steam heat.

BOOM – and Neil blasted through the door on the third try. He pushed the shattered remains apart like an entertainer appearing on stage through a curtain. Ladies and Gentlemen...For a second, she was hypnotized by the sight of him. This was how people must feel right before the tornado hits. They watch it approach, unable to move.

Just past him Jessie saw her mother, telephone in hand.

"Neil, I'm calling the police."

"Call the police. Have them come and arrest this young whore."

Poor Gail. She wasn't going to call the police. If she called, they really would take him away this time.

In Jessie's own fevered hand, the window lock suddenly turned all the way. She gaped at it in surprise. Maybe, just maybe, she could still make it. She reached down, grabbed the window by the little knobs at the bottom and yanked it up. Three inches, five inches. God, this window always gets stuck!

Then Neil was there. He pulled the wool hat from her head, and grabbed her by her hair. He got a good grip, his big strong hand deep in there, wrapped up tight.

"Where do you think you're going? Out the window to meet your boyfriends?"

"Neil, stop it," Gail said.

Neil pulled Jessie right off her feet. A weird tingle of pain settled in to her scalp. The room went sideways as she lost her footing. For a moment, she had the sense that she was flying, like she was on some new amusement park ride. Her eyes opened wide and her whole face felt stretched, as if he would pull her face out through the top of her head.

"Neil!"

Her mother rushed into the room now. Jessie saw her jump onto Neil's back. Gail punched at Neil, and tore at him with her nails.

No! – Jessie thought, her feet back on the ground, Neil's hand still curled into her hair – Don't do that! Call the cops! Call the cops!

Neil slapped Gail away and she went stumbling across the room. Jessie watched it all happening in slow motion. Her mom hit the bedpost headfirst, then landed in a crumpled daze.

"Neil," Gail said from the floor, her voice relaxed like she'd been drugged. "Stop it." She fell over on her side.

Neil dragged Jessie to the radiator. She fought him, but it was no use. He was too strong. "How does this feel, you crazy bitch?"

He stuck her head against the hot iron. For a second or two, she didn't feel anything. Then the burn came, and she screamed. It felt like nothing she had ever known before. There were no words for it. She screamed again, a long wail. He took her head away. The burn lessened, but didn't stop. She still felt the hot sting of it. A few seconds passed, and he put her head against the radiator again. He was scorching the flesh right off her. Her hair was burning. She could smell it.

And it was almost okay. She was crying now, and in the heat of all this, she became calm. It wouldn't kill her. If this was all he did, it wouldn't kill her. Soon, he would stop and she would be fine. Even better – her mother would have to get rid of him now. There was no way she could keep him in the house anymore.

Jessie would tell her teachers about this in school on Monday. She would show them the burn marks. Neil was out of here. In a minute, he would lose interest in her, he would wander off downstairs, and tomorrow afternoon, he'd have to be gone. He knew it, too. She sensed that he knew it. Neil had a police record. The cops could put him in jail and hold him there as long as they wanted.

A pause in the action came, while everybody took a second to know everything.

Then he started banging her head against the radiator. The first bang was tentative – a tap, like he was just getting the hang of it.

Then again.

Then again with more authority. And then finally with both hands gripping her head, like he was trying to hammer a nail through the floor. Like he was trying to crack open a coconut.

Bang. Bang. Bang.

It sounded a little bit like a gong. To Jessie, it felt like she was inside the gong. And it felt like Neil was going all the way this time. She reached up and put her hands on top of Neil's hands. She tried to pry them loose from her head, but it was no use. His hands were too big. He was too strong.

Her mom came awake at the turn of events. "Neil! Neil, you're killing her! Stop it, you're killing her!" Gail was up again, across the room, and on top of Neil again. She scratched him, she tore at him. Neil ignored Gail, focusing instead on Jessie, methodically knocking her skull against the sharp, hot metal of the radiator. Jessie stared helplessly into Neil's demented eyes.

Harder now: BANG. BANG.

Then something happened inside Jessie's head. It was the strangest thing. The banging went on and on, but now she knew things. She could almost pinpoint the second it happened – her head hit the radiator, she squeezed her eyes shut, and then suddenly she knew... everything.

A wave of sensation washed over her, and it was like she was looking right through Neil. He was transparent to her. She saw Neil as a boy, his father standing over him, beating him with a leather strap. She did more than see it – she felt it. It was like an electric current running through her body. She felt the lash of the strap, but she also felt the feelings of the boy. He was ashamed. He loved his father so much, even as his father beat him.

Then Jessie saw Neil standing out in the blazing sun at some work shape-up, other men getting picked, but not Neil. Not because Neil couldn't do the work, he could, but because he wasn't like the other men - he couldn't speak, he didn't know what to say. He felt ashamed, not like a man because he was so... shy?

Neil was shy? The force of that pummeled her. Neil was shy. You'd never know it from the way he acted around this house. He acted like he owned the place.

The banging, the pain was no longer up front for her. It was there, it hadn't gone away, but Neil was much closer. His thoughts came to her in a mad, random jumble. He hated her. Oh, how he hated her! But mostly he hated himself.

She looked into his eyes. The rage was softening, and was being replaced with a dawning awareness. What Jessie was feeling - he felt it, too. It had taken him this long, in his drunken haze, to get a clue. His eyes widened as he began to grasp what was happening. He let go of her head and stared at his hands.

"Oh my God," he whispered.

He was on one knee. He fell back, her mother on top of him. He sat, his legs sprawled out in front of him. Gail wept as she held him around the shoulders. His face was bleeding in two long rivers where Gail had scratched him. He stared at Jessie, then stared at his hands again. His hands were streaked with Jessie's blood.

Jessie lay on her side, holding her head.

"The girl is a demon."

His jaw hung open, and a new emotion had entered his eyes. If Jessie didn't know better, she'd say this was the first time she'd ever seen him look afraid.

She could read his mind. While his hands were on her, and her hands were on his, she could read his mind. It had stopped now, the flow of it had stopped when he let go of her, but if they had kept touching, she could have known everything about him. She was sure of it. And what's more, he knew it too. He had felt her inside his thoughts.

Her hands moved along her scalp. Something felt different now. Not the skin, which was cut open and pan-fried and at the moment seared with pain – but something deep inside her head. It was like an itch in there that she couldn't scratch. They would have to dig in there with a power drill to reach it.

"The girl belongs to the Devil," Neil said.

It was too much for him. His eyes rolled back into his head, showing the whites. Then he passed out and collapsed into Gail's arms, his body twitching, his mouth hanging slack. Gail let him fall to the floor, his head bonking against the bare wood. She recoiled at the sight of him, a look of horror frozen on her face.

Jessie lay there. She was dizzy. She didn't know when she would be able to get up again. Neil's pant leg had pulled up to his calf, exposing the skin above his ankle. She sensed that if she reached out and took hold of that leg, she would know what he dreamed about.

An idea started to take shape in her mind. Within a minute, it was fully formed. She realized that she never wanted to touch anyone, ever again.

* * *

Five thousand dead mockingbirds fell from the sky on the day big Victor Strake got out of prison.

Strake had walked through the gray gate of the state penitentiary that morning, guard towers looming behind him, after spending every second of a ten year sentence behind bars. He was in Maine, and the birds had died in Alabama. He sat at the bar in some redneck tavern twenty miles from the prison, and watched the news about it on the overhead TV, while outside the afternoon dwindled into dusk.

The whole flock had come down like a heavy black rain, smashing windshields, thumping on metal awnings, forcing people to run screaming for cover in the main street of a small town. Something mysterious had struck the birds dead in mid-flight, thousands of feet in the air. In the old days, people would have called that an omen.

Strake reflected that modern people didn't believe in omens. That was their loss. Strake could think of times, and they weren't too long ago, when all human decisions were based on superstitions. He missed those days.

He noticed that everyone on the TV – the pretty talking heads, the experts they interviewed, and the local politicians – were at a loss to explain the dead birds. It was a question that their science couldn't answer. How do thousands of birds suddenly die in mid-flight? Three centuries ago, the people would have known the answer right away: Bad times were coming. God was sending His punishment. A demon walks among us.

"It's a sign," Strake said to the other daytime denizens of the tavern. "The end is near." A few people glanced at him and looked away. No one said a word.

He could raise his voice and launch into a fire and brimstone sermon about the meaning of the dead birds. He was a little rusty, but he had preached many times before. He knew how it went. He knew the right cadence. He had the good looks and the charisma. Hell, he could have even charmed those birds, brought them crashing to earth, just by the sound of his voice. Him, or someone like him could.

The thought of someone like him gave him pause, but only for a moment. Sure, someone just like him had probably talked those birds right out of the sky, and probably did it for fun. There were others like him around. There always were.

It was a Friday, and Strake was decked out in the same clothes he wore when they arrested him for assault and attempted murder a decade before. Jeans, black T-shirt, and leather jacket. Black motorcycle boots. An expensive Bulova watch on his right wrist and various rings on his fingers. The watch still worked.

They had handed him back his things that afternoon, one old-timer reading out loud from a list and checking the items off as another old guy handed them to him. All of this happened right at the inside gate, in the musty, high-ceilinged half-light, just before he stepped into the world again. He had changed into the clothes right there in front of the two prison employees. The clothes didn't fit him the way they once did. They were too tight. He had filled out some in the intervening years. The rings didn't really fit anymore either. He'd had them a long, long time.

Now, he felt pleasantly drunk. It had been a long while since he'd tasted alcohol, and he hadn't eaten since breakfast in the prison cafeteria that morning. All the same, it took him a while to put a buzz on – he was a large man. He stood about six foot two, and jacked up with prison muscles, he weighed about 230 pounds. His shoulders were broad, and his hands, his feet, all of his extremities, were huge.

He'd drawn a nice looking blonde to him right away. He had that power. At first, she sat one stool away to his right, and before long, she had moved next to him. He didn't say much. He let her talk. Oh, she had the redneck thing going, all right.

Her hair was dark at the roots. Her fingernails were chewed. She had a pack of cigarettes in front of her, and her face was lined with worry and disappointment and bad nerves. Her voice was deep and husky below, with a twang like a cherry on top. She was drinking whiskey sours.

She had been pretty once, probably from the ages of 11 through 16, and then the ball had started rolling downhill from there. Now she was 35 going on 50. Still, Strake felt an attraction to her. More than that – he felt an affinity for her. He felt like he knew her in his bones. He knew her deep in his loins. He shared the same unquenchable thirst, the same hunger that had driven her to the state she was in.

"I just got out of prison today," he'd said when she first slid closer. "I think you should know all that up front."

She glanced at him. Her eyes were a deep blue. Okay, she was still pretty. Her eyes put her over the top.

"What'd you do?"

"I beat a man until he was half dead. Put him in a coma. He only came out of it a month later, so I hear. They tell me he lost an arm because of it. Also hearsay, but I believe it. I beat him about as bad as you can beat a man."

"What did he do to you?"

Strake smiled. "He wanted to kill me."

She played it straight. "A lot of cons come through here, on their way from nowhere to nowhere. Ninety percent of them say they were innocent."

Strake shook his head. "I wasn't innocent. I wouldn't claim that. I did what I had to do. I didn't have a choice."

She nodded. "That's what the other ten percent say."

"Those are the honest ones," Strake said. He extended his hand. "My name is Luc. And yours?"

She looked at his hand like it was a snake that might bite. Then she took it. He was careful. He didn't try anything. He gave her small hand a gentle squeeze. These were the preliminaries.

"Luc?" she said.

"Yeah. Like luck, but without the K. Maybe that's why I've never been all that lucky." He saw that she suppressed a grin. "And yours?" he said again.

"Candy," she said.

It was almost too good to be true. "Well Candy, you're a very beautiful woman."

That got her. She smiled. They couldn't resist it. Strake knew that the weasels had all these games they played with women, trying to manipulate them. You should ignore women. You should never flatter them. You should pull them close, then push them away. Or push, then pull. Strake didn't know. Maybe those games worked for men like that, men like so many of the ones Strake had killed, the ones that had begged or groveled, their voices hitching with fear, snot running from their noses. A man like Strake didn't need games. He used the direct approach, and in his experience flattery would get him everywhere.

"You're not so bad yourself," Candy said.

Half an hour later, a couple more drinks, and he and Candy were getting along just fine. They stood together, and he had a hand on her waist. They looked into each other's eyes when they spoke. They moved even closer. He was quite drunk, and she was probably more drunk than he was. He would be leaving with her soon, and that was good. He needed a place to stay tonight.

She was saying something. Something serious, something emotional. The words didn't matter – it was all about the eyes and the body language. He sighed. It had been a long time since he'd been to bed with a woman. Man oh man, way too long. It had been a long time since he'd slept in a real bed. A long time since a lot of things.

"Son, can we help you?" a man's voice said.

The voice had a nasal quality, and it cut through Strake's concentration. He noticed now that he and Candy were no longer alone. Four men stood with them. Three of them wore baseball caps. The leader was a big hairy Bubba with a white beard who wore stained coveralls like he worked in a garage. He probably owned the garage.

They were all big guys, as big as Strake, and husky from beer drinking and the kind of strength that comes from years of manual labor. Formidable strength, in Strake's experience, often combined with an ability to accept pain and continue despite it. One of the men had a big old belly. His red flannel shirt jutted way out in front of him.

"Friends of yours?" Strake said to Candy. He smiled wider than ever, showing her how he had no fear, and how when a woman was with him, she was safe. There was never any reason to fear other men, men like these.

She also smiled. "That's the way it is around here. Strangers can get a rough ride."

"Candy, what are you doing?" one of the men said.

"Nothing that should interest you, Sam Turner."

Another of the men poked Strake. "Okay buddy, time for you to head on out. No offense, but Candy here has trouble with her liquor, and she gives people the wrong impression sometimes."

Strake smiled broadly. He felt good, expansive, even magnanimous. He felt like these were reasonable men and he could be patient with them.

"And what impression is that?"

"The impression that she's gonna take some dirtbag four hours out of the penitentiary home with her and give him a welcome. Ain't gonna happen. You're gonna be sleeping on the ground tonight, partner."

Strake addressed Candy. "Have you ever been with any of these men?"

Of course she had to be truthful with him. Everyone had to be truthful with him. He insisted on it. When he first gazed into their eyes, when he first hypnotized them, he passed them the message with his own eyes. You must tell me everything.

"I've been with all of them at one time or another. And I lived with Sam here for three and a half years."

"So it's a jealousy thing then, probably?"

She nodded, calm, as if this conversation were happening elsewhere, in a quiet room, or in a field out in the country. "I'd say so, yes."

"Gentlemen, I'd suggest you all get your own woman tonight. Candy is with me for the foreseeable future."

Their hands were on him then, but only for a few seconds. Big hands grabbed him and yanked him, and Candy backed away. They held his arms. One of the men sucker punched Strake in the side of the head. It made his ears ring. He braced his hands on the polished wood of the bar, waiting for the blows to rain down like dead mockingbirds.

All around the tavern, eyes widened, heads swiveled in slow motion, as people in the crowd turned to look. The place had filled up. When had that happened? Strake hadn't noticed. He'd been too busy talking to Candy. He must be drunk indeed.

The bartender, a graying, crusty type with a ponytail and a beard, and wearing an MIA/POW T-shirt, rushed down the length of the bar. He slammed a baseball bat on the counter.

"You men take that outside. I don't want none of that in here."

One of the four men smiled, showing a mouth with a missing front tooth. He gestured toward the door. "You heard the man."

"Ladies first," Strake said.

The men walked ahead of him. It didn't mean anything to Strake. It didn't give him an advantage. He didn't need or want an advantage. He felt nothing about all this, except his heart skipped a beat as he passed through the doorway.

A crowd of people followed him out – they were coming to watch the fight – and he lost sight of Candy in all the commotion. That was too bad. Maybe she had come to her senses and decided Strake was trouble. Maybe she was the bait, Strake was the fish, and this little throw-down was an every Friday night type of thing. Or maybe she just felt guilty about what was going to happen. Well, he might as well put her out of his mind. No sense fretting.

The parking lot was hard-packed dirt and gravel. There were a lot of cars out here now, unlike this afternoon when there were just a few. The people formed a rough circle around him and the other four combatants. There was a buzz of chatter and excitement. The fresh air was brisk, almost cold. It slapped him alert and awake, like a splash of cold water in the face. It energized him. He took a breath and drank deeply of the night.

Strake scanned the faces. A few of them seemed familiar to him, like this exact incident had happened before. Another life, maybe. Strake believed in these things. Anything was possible, as far as he was concerned. It was the only way to explain some of the things he'd seen, and some of the things he'd done.

His memory was bad, but it wouldn't surprise him if he had been a gladiator in ancient Rome, and these very people had been in the crowd, watching him fight to the death, and cheering for his blood, and for his head.

He measured the men lined up against him. They were all big and strong, but also heavy and out of shape. The men began to fan out, moving to encircle Strake. A couple of them seemed to be wheezing already, and the fight hadn't started yet. They would lack stamina, Strake decided. They would hit hard at first, and gradually they would run out of pow. The fight would be at its most dangerous right after it began.

Strake slipped out of his leather jacket and handed it to a woman standing nearby. "Hold this for me, will you, darling?" He was down to his black T-shirt, jeans and boots.

He turned his attention to the fighters. "You boys sure you want to go through with this?"

They didn't answer. One of them slipped a pair of brass knuckles onto a meaty fist. The knucks gleamed in the yellow overhead lights of the parking lot. The reflection was flat, like on the polished metal along the serving line in the prison cafeteria.

Strake shrugged. "Not very sporting, is it? Four on one?"

Another one smiled, the guy with the missing tooth. He punched his right fist into the open palm of his left hand. "Maybe you should make some friends."

Strake backed away from the closing circle. He was aware of the crowd of onlookers near his back. They were right behind him. "What do you think of all those dead birds?" he said to his assailants. "The ones that fell from the sky today?"

He watched them come, four country boys, big sons-of-bitches, who reckoned they were about to teach him a lesson about messing with the local women. Above them, the moon moved out from behind some skidding clouds. It was a half moon – two weeks until the night of no moon, the night some people called full dark. Strake's night.

"Son," the man with the white beard, the ringleader, said. "Unless it's on my plate, I couldn't give a shit about a dead bird."

The crowd laughed at that.

Suddenly, someone jumped Strake from behind. It was a man with thick, solid arms, and tattoos running the length of his forearms. Not one of the four – someone from the crowd, someone Strake hadn't seen before. The man got a beefy arm around Strake's neck and tried to slip it under his chin for a choke hold.

Strake lowered his chin and turned his head to the left. Then he dropped to one knee and rolled forward, using his momentum to bring the man over his shoulder. It was a very heavy man, and he and Strake wound up in the dust together. Strake didn't even look at him. He rolled away as the four other men attacked.

Strake crawled backwards like a crab, scuttling along, dodging kicks and punches. He got a few feet from them, dropped to his back, rolled onto his shoulders, and kipped up like a gymnast. He dropped into a fighter's crouch, hands out in front of him.

They came for him, a wall of five now, and he waded into them, swinging hard. They surrounded him, punching and kicking. The brass knuckles tore open his face. A rough hand grabbed his hair and pulled his head back, exposing his throat. He twisted and spun, driving the blade of his own hand into the face of the man pulling his hair.

The punches rained down. They hurt him, but he kept going. The world dropped away – no bar, no parking lot, no crowd – just he and those men, driving fists, bloodied faces, hands grasping and tearing, grunts, gasps for air. He lost track of where he ended and they began. They formed a writhing mass, an octopus of limbs. They poked and punched at him. He bit someone's face, tore out a chunk of flesh.

The man shrieked in pain and surprise.

"Stop!" a woman's voice shouted. "Stop! You're killing him."

But she was wrong. They weren't killing him. He was winning. His opponents were slowing down. Strake could sense their energy ebbing away. He could feel it. The fight had become a war of attrition, and he would always win a war of attrition. No one could outlast Victor Strake.

His face bled. His hands bled. His shirt was ripped away. He kept punching. One of his enemies went down – the man with the bitten face – then another. He kicked the second one's head, as two of the three remaining grabbed one of his arms each. The older one, the man with the white beard, appeared in front of him.

"Hold him. Hold him steady now."

The man aimed a kick at Strake's groin, but Strake lifted a knee and blocked it. Strake leapt into the air, using the men holding his arms for balance, and grabbed the old man's head between his legs. He dragged the man to the ground. The other men lost their grip on Strake's arms. Strake landed with the old man, then jumped up and stomped on his head. Now there were two left.

He walked straight up and head-butted one of them in the face.

Now there was one.

He turned to the last one. The man with the missing tooth.

"You can run," Strake gasped.

The man shook his head.

Strake nodded, approving.

They came together one last time. Strake finished him with three straight punches to the head. Then he gazed around the parking lot. Five big men crawled in the dust at his feet. He kicked one of them, the closest to him.

He'd bested five men, drunk in a strange parking lot, the night he left prison. He loved that about himself. His head was ringing. He was half-blind from the blood streaming down his face. He had no shirt on. His hands were raw meat. His breath came in ragged wheezes. He stared at the crowd of Friday night onlookers. The lights of the parking lot dazzled him. The world tilted on its axis.

"Anyone else?" he croaked. A murmur went through the crowd, but there were no takers. A few people were already heading back inside.

Strake reeled over to one of the vanquished, who was writhing in the dust. Strake didn't even recognize the man from before. Calmly, slowly, painfully, with hands that were almost useless for fine motor work, he unzipped his fly.

"I piss on you," he said.

He heard a familiar sound then, one he didn't like. It was the sound of someone cycling a pump shotgun, and slamming a shell into the chamber. Not a pretty sound, especially if you weren't the one holding the gun.

"Okay, that's enough."

Strake looked up. The bartender, the old boy with the POW/MIA T-shirt, stood ten feet away and leveled the gun at him.

"You're going to shoot a man over this?" Strake said. "Over this?" He gestured at the lot, the crowd, the men on the ground.

"Try me."

Strake had half a mind to piss on the guy anyway. "They started it."

"I'm ending it," the old boy said.

Strake took half a moment to really look at him. He found the man's eyes and stared deeply into them. The man had indeed been to war, Strake decided. He'd killed people over less.

"You would do it." Strake said.

"Boy, I would kill someone like you just on general principles."

Strake held the man's gaze. "Can I have my jacket?"

The shotgun never wavered. The eyes never wavered. "Whoever has this man's jacket, hand it back to him."

The woman came forward with the jacket. It was a good thing. Strake wouldn't have found her on his own. He took the jacket from her and shrugged into it. The shirt was probably a bloody rag on the floor somewhere – a total loss. They'd ripped it right from his back.

"How about a cigarette?" Strake said. He smiled, but the man with the shotgun wasn't in a mood for smiling.

"Best thing you can do is start walking down that road," the bartender said. "There's another town in about eight miles. You might find a cigarette there. You might even find a room to let for the night. Might not. Either way, best thing to do in the morning is to keep going. Forget about all this. There's nothing here for you."

Strake nodded. He had no money left, so there wasn't much chance of finding a room to let, but he saw the man's point. Strake had slept on the ground before. He'd slept in the cold. He would be okay. He would survive. It would take a lot more than five men, and a cold night on the hard ground to kill him. Another night, in a different place, four men had stabbed him more than twenty times, and that hadn't killed him. The jury was still out on exactly what would kill Victor Strake.

The thinning crowd parted for him and he started walking. He walked out of the parking lot and onto the side of the road. The streetlight's glow ended a hundred yards further down. After that, there was nothing. Deep Maine blackness. He walked right into it and didn't look back. His head was swimming. He was woozy from the blood loss. It was okay. He had walked before, many times. Thousands of miles, tens of thousands, probably.

He walked in the dark. The occasional pair of headlights appeared, bathed him in light, and then disappeared over the low hills up ahead. He didn't bother sticking his thumb out. As he walked, his head cleared just a little bit. He became confident that he wouldn't pass out.

A breeze blew, and he felt the chill of the coming winter embedded in it. He remembered that his shirt was gone. Blood pounded in his temples. It sounded to him like soldiers marching.

He became aware that he was very hungry. It had been a long time since he had eaten, and nothing burned calories like hand-to-hand combat. His body began to shake, whether from the hunger or the cold or the blood loss, he didn't know. Maybe it was some combination of the three.

Headlights loomed up behind him. A black pick-up truck went past, then slowed, its red brake lights brightening. It pulled to the side of the road fifty yards ahead. He didn't run to it. He couldn't run if he wanted to. He tottered up to the passenger side window and peered in.

Candy was behind the wheel, smoking a cigarette. She had a bottle of beer at her crotch. Her eyes were hard with anger. Tears streamed down her face. "I'm sorry, Luc. I hate those bastards."

Strake smiled. "Candy. Sweet Candy. What took you so long?"

She returned the smile, reached across the cab and opened the door.

"Get in."

"Why not?" he said. "The night is young."

He climbed in and settled into the seat. The sun visor was down, showing him the mirror embedded in the back of it. His face was a fright mask of blood. He looked like a tribesman from some dark jungle.

She lit a cigarette and passed it to him without being asked. He took a long drag, breathed it deep into his lungs. The taste, the sensation of heat, was wonderful. Slowly, he exhaled the smoke.

"Thank you. And please... call me Vic."

He lay his head back, his weary frame resting against the bucket seat, closed his eyes, and felt the sensation of blind speed. It was a beautiful night, and there were surely more to come. All the things he wanted, he could have. He knew that. He could take any woman. He could beat any man. All the money that he wanted was his. All the vengeance he wanted was his. All the depravity, violence and madness were his just for the asking.

The world itself was his.

* * *

"I'll kill him," the black man said to the dog.

Darrence Michaels spoke fast, and a notch or two louder than he normally would. He nodded to himself as he talked. "Tonight's the night, man. If I get the chance, I'll go for it. I've been waiting a long time for this."

He was in the habit of talking to the dog. It was a smart dog – a black and white border collie. Darrence looked for brains first when acquiring a dog, and after that, alertness and energy. This dog practically read the newspaper in the morning. It seemed to understand most, if not all, of what Darrence said.

The dog sat on the front passenger seat of the nondescript rental sedan. On the seat, nestled against the dog, was a silenced .380 caliber pistol. The dog had a red rubber ball in its mouth, a ball Darrence sometimes threw for it to chase and retrieve. The dog looked at Darrence expectantly, eyes sharp and aware and ready for action.

Darrence had swallowed two Dexedrine pills less than a half hour before, and the effects were kicking in. He was wired, getting more ramped up and agitated by the minute, and the dog was following suit. The dog was naturally excitable - it was in his breed - and when Darrence got fired up, the dog took it to another level.

Darrence felt a drop of sweat drip from his hairline. It was a cool night, he had the window open, and he was sweating. He gripped the steering wheel with his left hand – an aluminum claw very much like a human hand.

The claw was part of a robotic prosthetic device extending from his shoulder socket. The aluminum and plastic lower arm was attached to the ruined stump of his upper arm by a series of tight leather straps, as well as a harness that fit over the left part of his chest. A sheath of clear hard plastic, as well as two more sturdy leather straps, all of it molded to and wrapped around his torso, held the whole thing together and in place.

It was state-of-the-art technology, controlled by wireless sensors inside his shoes, which he manipulated with his toes. This arm had been developed for the military, but had never gone into production. Just a handful of them had ever been made. He could pick up a grape with his robot hand, or crush a beer can. He could snap a man's wrist with it, or steady a shotgun. He could easily hold the car pointed straight down the road with it. It was a remarkable piece of machinery.

With his free hand, his human hand, Darrence popped a cigarette into his mouth, scratched a kitchen match against his thumbnail, and lit the smoke. He inhaled deeply, enjoying the burn in his lungs. Smoking was one of his many vices. Once upon a time, he had treated his body like the temple his grandmother always taught him it was. But those days were long gone. Longevity was not in the cards. If he wanted to smoke, he might as well. The odds of Darrence Michaels living long enough to contract lung cancer were slim.

Darrence had followed the taillights of the black pick-up from the time it roared out of the dirt parking lot at the bar, until it pulled up at a squalid block of apartments by the side of the road. He let the pick-up stay a good quarter of a mile ahead of him – it was easy to follow in the dark night.

The driver, a blonde girl who looked like she might have been cute before life ran her over too many times, had signaled to make the left turn into the apartment complex about three hundred yards before the turn itself came up. Either she was a Girl Scout or very drunk. Of course, she had stopped by the side of the road to let Victor Strake in the truck with her. Darrence had a hunch she wasn't a Girl Scout.

Darrence himself rolled right by the apartment complex, drove on for another mile, up one side of a small rise and down the other, then pulled over onto the gravel shoulder. He killed the headlights and settled into darkness. He looked out the window at his side view mirror and stared along the empty stretch of road he had just driven. A corona of faint light from the town reached into the black sky.

He sat and listened to the night. It was very still. Somewhere behind him, he heard two car doors slam. Voices. He couldn't make out anything they said. A woman laughed – it sounded high and weird, like tinkling piano keys that were out of tune. It sounded like breaking glass. A moment later, the voices stopped. A different door creaked open, then slammed – an apartment door.

After a time, Darrence put the car in gear, turned it around, and slowly headed back the way he had come. The road was empty and he kept the lights off, choosing instead to cruise along in darkness. Within moments, he had reached the apartment complex again. He entered the lot and scanned for the black pick-up, the one with the vanity plates that said WLDGRL. He found it parked in front of unit # 15, nose to the door. The sight of the truck made Darrence's heart thump in his chest. Beside him, the dog whined high in its throat.

Darrence focused on the dimly-lit building itself. It was three-stories high, with outside stairwells and a narrow catwalk running along the open second and third floors. It looked like it must have been a motel at one time. The place was in need of a paintjob, or maybe a bulldozer. A sign out front indicated the name of this happy abode: Riverside Estates. That was good for a laugh, but not much of one. There were no estates to speak of, and Darrence couldn't see any river.

The least funny thing about the place was that Strake was inside, which was no laughing matter. It looked like he was planning to become a temporary resident here. Very temporary, if Darrence had anything to say about it.

He pulled to the far end of the lot and backed his rental car into deep darkness beneath a tree and along the edge of some bushes. The car was dark green. Nobody would notice it back here. He watched the building through the windshield. There was no movement anywhere. As his eyes became accustomed to the dark, he became aware that he had parked along a ridge above the stream that gave Riverside Estates its name. The river was a burbling creek.

Darrence had come up here to East Nowhere for one reason only – to pick up Strake's trail as soon as he was released from prison. It couldn't have been easier if Strake was trying to let Darrence know where he was. Strake had done a good job of staying in public places. He had also done a good job of making a spectacle of himself.

Strake hadn't seemed to notice Darrence. Which was interesting – in rural Maine, Darrence stuck out like a thumb that had just taken the brunt of a hammer blow. A one-armed black man with a severe limp moving through an all-white countryside. Nowhere to hide, Darrence played up his presence instead. He kept the robot arm in evidence. He wore his old jacket with the SEAL Team Six patch on the shoulder, and his medals pinned to the front. Good patriotic country people were suckers for a wounded veteran.

In the trunk of his car was a Mossberg pump shotgun. There was also a gun that fired beanbags, in case Darrence needed to subdue any people who were not Strake. There were several other guns in there, including a sniper's rifle. There was some rope. There were four sticks of dynamite. In the left breast pocket of his heavy jacket he carried a pineapple grenade. Three or four more were littered under his seat.

He could do it. He could kill Strake right here. He might not get a better chance than this. Strake was drunk, he had been beaten half to death by five men – and had remained standing almost the whole time, a fact that even now raised goose bumps all along Darrence's back. After a fight like that, Strake might pass out and sleep like the dead for the next twelve or fourteen hours.

"Shit."

Darrence wasn't even sure that Strake had gone into #15. He hadn't seen it with his own eyes, so how could he be sure? Knowing Strake, he might have had the girl park in any empty slot, then gone into a different apartment, hoping that anybody coming for him would go in and kill some innocents instead. Strake would get a laugh out of that.

Darrence took the gun from the passenger seat and climbed out of the car. No light came on when he opened the door – he had taken the bulb out of the overhead light five minutes after driving off the rental lot. He didn't close the door, leaving it half-open instead. The dog followed him out, whining the slightest bit. Darrence raised his hand to it, in a gesture that said STOP. He stared at the dog, making eye contact. Then he lifted a finger to his mouth, like "Shhhhhhh." The dog stopped whining. It understood.

Darrence went around back of the car, opened the trunk, and got the dynamite. He also took the shotgun out and slung it over his left shoulder. He did all of this slowly, quietly, with infinite care – overriding his bodily systems, which were racing along on the Dexies, and screaming, "Go! Go! Go!"

He closed the trunk gently. It made the slightest sound as the latch closed – almost no sound at all. He took a deep breath and began the long trudge across the lot. He walked toward Unit #15, grimacing a bit as he did – his bad leg had stiffened up on him during his long day of waiting around. He gritted his teeth against the pain that came every time he put his left foot on the ground. He carried the sticks of dynamite against his chest like a young girl might carry her schoolbooks.

He puzzled through the problem. He didn't have to kill any innocents on this job. He could blow the room with just one stick of dynamite. All he had to do was make sure Strake was in there. The woman didn't count. Anybody who took up with Strake no longer counted as innocent. Just blow the one room. Strake might come out, confused, maybe on fire. At that point, give him both barrels of the shotgun in the face. It still might not kill him, but it would blind him. After that, stab him in the heart, stab him until he died.

Darrence shuffled to the pick-up, and took a quick look around inside. Nothing much to see – a few small stuffed animals on top of the dashboard, an ashtray overstuffed with cigarette butts, a few empty beer cans on the passenger-side floor. The bed of the pick-up was empty.

Through the heavy curtains, he saw a light on low inside #15. Sure, Strake was in there, celebrating his first night of freedom. For a second, Darrence thought he saw the curtain move, and he froze.

He watched that window carefully. Nothing happened. Strake wasn't in the window. The curtain hadn't moved. Darrence had been seeing things. He was okay – still alive for now. He began to limp toward the window. There wasn't much of a plan. He was going to sidle up, peer through a crack in the curtain, and see if he could spot Strake. He couldn't even stay low because he could barely bend over.

"Darrence," a voice said behind him. "Imagine meeting you here."

Darrence went cold, a shiver passing through his body. A long time had passed since he last heard that voice. He stopped and turned, expecting to die that instant. Strake was behind him, leaning against the pick-up. It was if he had just appeared there, conjured out of thin air. He wore a pair of tight blue jeans and a leather jacket. No shirt, despite the night chill. He'd lost it in the fight. Darrence knew that Strake didn't even own a shirt right now.

Strake lit a cigarette. He took a puff from it and smiled. He took a swig from a beer. The beer can looked small in his huge hand. "Do they call you Gimpy now?" he said. "Or wait, let me guess, the one-armed bandit?"

Strake pushed himself off the pick-up. His face was red and swollen like a boxer's face after twelve hard rounds. To Darrence, he looked alarmingly vital, even with the bruises and welts covering his upper body and his neck.

Darrence could think of nothing witty to say, so instead he told the truth. "Strake, I wish I had killed you last time we met."

Strake walked slowly toward him. His deep voice sounded oddly like music. There was something very, very pleasant about it. It could almost lull a person to sleep.

"My friend, you can't kill me. Somebody might be able to kill me, but it's not you." Strake shook his head. "Look at you, Darrence. You're pathetic. You can't even walk. You have one arm. They gave you a fancy new one, I see that, but what's going to happen when I take it off and beat you with it? I can't believe you even came here."

Strake gestured with his head at the sticks of dynamite Darrence carried. "What were you going to do? Sneak up and destroy the place? Are you proud of yourself, soldier? There must be fifty people asleep inside that building."

"Does what you do make you proud?" Darrence said.

This was how it would end then. A bitter disappointment. It had been suicidal, coming here. Darrence had broken every one of his own rules. Maybe he had wanted to die, had wanted to sacrifice himself to Strake like this. Darrence thought of the grenade in his pocket. The grenade was his last hope. All he had to do was squeeze the safety clip and pull the pin. Maybe he and Strake could go out together. Although unless Darrence was very good, or very lucky, he doubted the explosion would do more than hurt Strake. Meanwhile, it would blow Darrence to pieces.

Strake shook his head and smiled. "I never really think about it. I'm not like you people. All this neurotic wondering and worrying and analyzing results. What's the old slogan? Just do it. That's what I do."

Darrence dropped the sticks of dynamite and slipped his hand inside his jacket. The dynamite rolled this way and that at his feet.

"You're not like a person at all," Darrence said.

He yanked the silenced .380 pistol from his pocket. He didn't hesitate. He didn't tell Strake to put his hands up, or get down on the floor. He didn't talk at all. He simply pulled the trigger and fired into Strake's gut.

Again and again, he fired. The gun made a quiet clacking sound, like an old typewriter key being punched. None of the shots were loud enough to raise an alarm. Darrence hit Strake in the shoulder, in the chest, in the stomach. He fired nine shots, all the rounds the magazine would hold, and he hit Strake every time. He was sure of it. Strake's body jittered at each impact.

A faint smell of gunpowder rose. There was no time to reload the gun, so Darrence dropped it. It clattered to the parking lot.

"Son of a bitch," Strake said. His eyes hardened and his teeth clamped together. He didn't fall down in anguish. He didn't writhe in pain. He had just barely flinched the entire time. But he did put a hand to his stomach. The fingers came away streaked red with blood. He gazed at the blood, paused a moment, then took a deep breath and continued walking toward Darrence.

"I'm not wearing body armor, Darrence. That hurts."

"Good."

"You know, I got out of prison less than twelve hours ago, and all I've done since then is get beaten and shot. I'm beginning to think people don't like me very much."

Darrence grunted. "It took you this long to figure that out, huh?"

He reached across to the front pocket of his jacket. His fingers felt the heavy oblong metal of the grenade.

Strake stopped short. "Don't do that, Darrence. All you're gonna do is make a mess." But he didn't come any closer.

Darrence started to back away. Strake tracked him, moving sideways, keeping several feet between them, not coming any closer. Darrence shuffled on his bad leg. Strake, beaten and gutshot, moved like a ballet dancer. The cigarette dangled from his mouth. He still had the beer in his hand.

Not for the first time, Darrence marveled at how Strake and his kind were made. In a normal man, all kinds of bad things would start kicking in from those belly shots right about now. It was a life threatening injury – especially if any of the bullets had punched a hole in one of his organs. Strake should weaken and become sick. He should collapse to the ground, maybe start talking feverish nonsense. He should bleed to death right in this parking lot. But none of that happened.

Strake smiled instead. "The man with one hand," he said. "The American hero, the one who shoots first and asks questions later. He's got a grenade in there, sure. And he's got a shotgun on his shoulder. But he's only got one hand. If I run up to him now, how will he arm himself in time?"

"I'll manage," Darrence said. His hand floated away from the grenade and toward the strap of the shotgun.

Strake started to whisper. "Which weapon to use? Which to use? It's hard to decide with so much riding on it. Why did you come here, Darrence? To die? Because that's what you're about to do. You're going to die here."

Strake raised his arms out, indicating the bleak, empty parking lot, the rundown apartment house and the sparse woods around it. He raised his voice, the consummate preacher.

"Look at this place. There's nowhere to run. You'll never make it back to your car. You're a cripple. I made you into a cripple. Then you waited ten years to come and get me, just to die on the night we meet again. It's pathetic, I tell you. I don't know whether to laugh or cry."

Darrence slid behind a car, a big yellow Oldsmobile, and put it between them. Tall Strake watched him across the roof. Darrence felt a little better. Strake had scared him at first. Dying had scared him. The prospect of Strake laughing and pulling him apart in this parking lot had scared him. But Darrence was a soldier, he'd seen lots of combat, and now he was settling down.

He was ready to die. It was his calling. He could see the humor in it. He could even enjoy the smack talk, the competitive fire of it. Go out like a man. That was the way to do it. He had put nine bullets into this thing, and still it walked and talked. That was funny. It was kind of fun, actually.

Darrence even managed a smile. "The doorway's gone, Strake."

Strake smirked. He looked up to his left, shook his head and frowned, as if talking to some unseen visitor about all the lies these humans would tell. "The doorway's not gone, you miserable piece of..."

"It's gone, baby. You're stuck here with us now. They blew it up. Not me. A young kid. They just sent me to tell you. To see the look on your face."

Strake shook his head. "You punks don't have any more young kids. Nobody's on your side. Who would ever join? After all, look at you. You're a shining example of your profession. You're the recruiting poster. Where's the reward in it?"

"Even so, the doorway's gone."

Strake threw the beer can. He flicked it, his arm moving so fast Darrence barely saw it happen. He ducked, but too late. The can bounced off his head, a full beer, knocking him backwards into the car behind him. The world went black for a second, then came swimming back into view.

That hurt. That really hurt. His eyes watered. There was a ringing sensation inside his head. He blinked and looked around. Strake was already coming around the front of the car. He was ten feet away, and Darrence couldn't seem to move.

Strake was six feet away, and closing fast.

He was here.

Darrence yanked the shotgun off his shoulder and swung it around. He fired, both barrels at once. Ka-BOOOM!

Missed. Strake had sidestepped, sleek and quick as a cat.

A car window shattered, the door itself shredded like cheese. Instantly, the car alarm started in, very loud, almost as loud as the gun. WAAH, WAAH, WAAH, WAAH...

Strake yanked the shotgun away and flung it. It clattered across the pavement. Then his big hand reached for Darrence's face. Darrence just watched that hand come. It would tear the flesh from him. It would pop his eyes out. It would crush the fragile bones of his face.

A blur appeared from the left. It flew through the air, silent, like a ghost – the dog. Its jaws clamped onto Strake's thick neck. Strake fell to one knee, beating at it. The dog jammed its teeth into Strake's skin, gnawing, renewing its grip, digging the teeth in ever deeper. Strake stood and spun around. The dog flew off, ripping a red gash in Strake's throat.

The dog rolled in the gravel, then regained its footing. Strake feinted toward it, but the dog backed away, snapping and growling.

Strake turned back to Darrence. A flap of raw skin hung down from the front of his neck. It looked like a second, bigger tongue. Where it separated from the neck, the flesh there was red and bloody. Strake winced in pain and anger. He took a step forward. The dog had bought Darrence a few seconds, but no more.

"I'm gonna eat that dog, Darrence," Strake said. "I'm gonna skewer him on a metal rod, and I'm gonna eat him like a shish-kebob."

"Eat this," Darrence said. He jerked the grenade from his pocket. He squeezed the clip, bit the pin out with his teeth, and tossed the grenade itself toward Strake. Strake jumped over it. It bounced off the side of the building and rolled back out into the parking lot. Strake glanced at Darrence. He raised his eyes to Heaven and shook his head. Then he ran, along the building, away from the grenade, away from Darrence.

Darrence turned and started running. His run was a horrible, shuffling, limping gait, a spike of pain stabbing up his spine with each step. He took five steps then dove to the ground. The impact went through his body like a shockwave. He covered his head with his arms. He saw the dirt and gravel of the parking lot in microscopic close-up. He squeezed his eyes shut.

BOOOOOM.

The grenade blew, much too close. Darrence sensed heat and light, and then flaming bits of metal and plastic cascading onto his back. He could feel them burning through his jacket. He lay there, in a dream world, his head ringing, his thoughts far away.

There was the sound of bells. It was Sunday morning, and Darrence lay in a hammock on a Caribbean beach. Behind him, up the hill in the small village, the church bells were calling the faithful. It was already a hot day, and he lay in the shadow of palm trees. He held an iced rum drink in his hand. His robot arm was back on a shelf in his bright yellow shack.

It was just Darrence out here, feeling good, in no real pain, putting on a good morning buzz. The water was turquoise blue, crystal clear, with some sailboats moored just out from the beach. Right in front of him was a local girl in a green one-piece bathing suit. She wore long, braided hair extensions and her skin was deeply bronzed. She smiled, lighting up her pretty face. Darrence smiled, too.

The gas tank of a nearby car blew, a secondary explosion, smaller than the first. On the quiet night air, came the crackling flames of a fire. Then voices raised in shouts, a woman screaming, people running. A moment later came the sound Darrence longed for: sirens. Far away, but moving closer and coming fast.

Darrence rolled over onto his back and pushed himself up onto his weary legs. He grabbed the nearest car for balance. Smoke rose here and there from his own jacket. He felt sharp little spikes of pain where burning debris had pushed all the way through to his skin. He stood, and surveyed the scene. The building was on fire. A crowd of people, most half-dressed in the cool night air, issued into the parking lot. A few of the women were crying. A few children stood with their moms.

Darrence moved toward the building. The explosion had punched a hole through the wall of one of the apartments.

"Did everyone get out?" Darrence shouted. He projected his voice, filling it with authority, a military voice, a voice accustomed to being answered and obeyed. "Attention! Who lives in that apartment?" He pointed at the burning wall.

A woman raised her hand.

"Did everyone get out of your apartment?"

She nodded.

"Yes or no? Speak!"

"Yes, everybody's out."

He turned to the crowd. "Anyone still in the building?"

Strake walked by, very close. He passed across Darrence's field of vision. His thick muscular arms were wrapped around the blonde lady from earlier. She looked cold in terry cloth shorts, a T-shirt and sandals. She was half-asleep, maybe strung out on booze or drugs. Her eyes were black hollows.

"I've gotta go now," Strake said. He smiled and gestured with his head. "Crowds, police, it's not my thing." That flap of mauled flesh hung down grotesquely from his throat.

"No, it isn't. Secrecy is your thing. Hiding in the dark is your thing."

Strake nodded. "We'll talk again."

"Yes, we will."

"Soon."

"Yes."

"Listen, I'm glad you came," Strake said. "I mean that. It's only right. It's been a long time since I had a worthy adversary. This place..." he shook his head vaguely, indicating their surroundings – maybe the parking lot, maybe the entire planet. "There's nobody here. It's hard when everything is so easy. I mean, it's fun, but it's also a little boring. Lonely. You know what I'm getting at?"

"The doorway's gone, Strake."

Strake grinned broadly. "Sure. I'll take your word for it."

Strake pushed through the crowd, moving down the line of parked cars toward the black pick-up truck. Darrence just watched him go. There was no way to stop Strake, and no one even seemed to notice him. He had a gift. When he wanted, he could be mesmerizing and hypnotic. When he wanted, he could also be almost invisible.

The sirens were louder now. Darrence turned, and the first ambulance pulled into the lot. Behind it, out on the road, police cars raced through the darkness, moving this way. Darrence glanced down and there was the dog, standing by his side.

The first police car pulled into the lot, then the second, then the third. The doors opened and cops took firing positions from their windows. All the guns were pointed at Darrence.

"On the ground!" a cop shouted. "On the ground or I blow your head off!"

Darrence raised his good hand and opened it. Slowly, he went to one knee, then the other. Using the robot arm, he gradually lowered himself face down to the gravel. It must have taken ten seconds or longer. It was as fast as he could go.

Next to him, the dog whined.

"Get down!" Darrence told the dog. "You want to get shot?"

The dog splayed itself on the ground and rested its head glumly on its front paws.

Two cops moved out from behind cover, walking quickly toward Darrence, guns raised and held two-hand style. Behind them, several more cops remained at the windows of the police cars, guns trained on Darrence. It was pretty good technique, Darrence thought. Not world-class, but competent enough.

Behind the cops, a black pick-up truck rolled to the exit of the parking lot. Its license plate said WILDGRL. Darrence watched as the truck turned left out of the lot and drove off down the road. He watched its taillights trail off into the dark distance.

The black boot of a rural cop stepped right next to his face. Somewhere beside him the dog growled.

"Hush now," Darrence said. "Be calm, dog."

He braced himself for the rough hands of the police.

* * *
CHAPTER 02

Later that night, as firemen worked to put out a burning building far to her north, Jessie James woke from a bad dream, alone in her bed.

She covered her mouth with her hand to suppress the scream welling up in her throat. She sat straight up in bed, her eyes wide. Her heart pounded and raced in her chest, like a herd of wild horses. Shadows from a tree outside reached in through the window, like hands grasping, and for a few moments, the small room seemed unfamiliar to her.

Gradually, as her heart slowed, the things she knew began to take shape - the dresser with her small TV on top, her posters on the walls, and her bookcase. She listened for intruders, but the only sounds were her mother's breathing down the hall, and far away, the sound of cars passing on the highway.

The dream was still with her, so real that it unfolded again in front of her eyes. It was a dream she'd been having ever since Neil had gone. A young girl was trapped inside a wall. Not in the past, but right now, very nearby. She was inside a cinderblock wall, but it was like she was floating inside there, underwater, awake and alive. Her skin was bright white, and she wore a white dress and white dressy shoes, like it was Easter. Her eyes were open. Her brown hair undulated like snakes. In the dream, Jessie was on one side of the wall looking in, and the girl was on the other side, looking out. It was like looking inside a fish tank. The girl was maybe five or six years old.

At one point, Jessie held her hand out to the glass – brick, it was really brick – and the girl held out her hand. Their fingers touched, and it was just the same as if the girl were here in real life. Jessie felt the electricity ripple through to her, and saw the eyes of the little girl widen. Then Jessie saw him.

He was a big man, dark, wreathed in shadow, with big shoulders. He was as tall as Neil but much, much wider. Jessie couldn't see his face, but she knew he was smiling. He wore a top hat and a long coat and he smoked a cigar – but somehow the look didn't seem right for him. He had the body of a pro wrestler, but he was decked out like a carnival barker or a traveling medicine salesman.

"Step right up, little girl," he seemed to say. "Step right up." Then the scene changed and he was walking down the side of a two-lane road, late at night, carrying a suitcase. He got bigger and bigger as he approached.

"He's coming," the little girl said from the other side of the wall. She hissed it like a warning. Then her eyes went flat and dead, and her body went limp, her arms floating at her sides. Her mouth hung open like a fish's mouth.

That's when Jessie woke up. She opened her eyes and her room, in shadows, swam into view. It was the same room where Neil had attacked her two weeks before, and the room itself looked much the same. Same stuffed animals on the bed. Same clothes strewn all over the floor. Her trusty steed, her unicycle, parked in the corner, and her bag of tricks in a big old knapsack next to it. These were the things of her life, the things of normalcy, but her life itself had changed. For one, Neil was gone, and Jessie counted that as a good thing.

She had seen him twice this week when she was downtown. He was hanging around in the park, looking pretty raggedy-ass. She thought maybe he was homeless now. He didn't speak to her, but sometimes he lingered at the edge of the crowd when she did her show. It was distracting, having him there. She might be on her unicycle, juggling bowling pins, thirty people surrounding her, all that good tourist money on the line, Neil standing there scowling, and Jessie thinking:

See, you big jerk? This is all it was. This is all it ever was. I wasn't having sex with anybody.

Performing – since the age of nine, she'd been going down there and juggling, dancing, doing acrobatics for the tourists. She loved to get in front of the crowd and do her thing. It brought money into the house, so she could buy the things she wanted and not have to ask her mom. And physically, she had the talent.

She could do flips and splits. She had tremendous balance – she could walk on her hands and even do one-arm handstands. She could walk a wire. She was ambidextrous – anything she could do with her right hand, she could do just about equally well with her left. She could get hoops going around her neck, her waist, both arms, and one leg all at the same time. She could walk on stilts. Sometimes, she went around on stilts in a big red-white-n-blue Uncle Sam outfit, complete with top hat and beard.

She lived for this. She loved the money, and she loved the applause. It was all she ever wanted to do. If she could skip school forever, and just go down to the Old Port and entertain the people, then that's what she would do.

Anyway, it was good to have Neil out of the house. But other things, not so good. Since Neil left, her mom was drinking more and smoking more. She was lonely without Neil in her bed. So far, she hadn't tried to find another Neil somewhere. That was also good – Gail had terrible taste in men. But it made Jessie sad to see her mom moping around all the time.

Even now, the way her mom was breathing worried Jessie. Gail had pretty much drank herself to sleep again tonight. When she did that, her breathing came heavy and ragged. It worried Jessie a bit, this wheezing, gasping breath of her mom's. Gail was past thirty now, and seemed even older. She should really stop smoking and take up exercise.

Jessie knew that Gail was tired, and disappointed by the way her life turned out. She knew that Gail's love for her was one of the few things that kept her going. And all of it gave Jessie this vague sense of a time when her mother would no longer be on this earth. It seemed like it might be soon.

She didn't like to think about it. The most frightening part was there might be some truth in it, because she knew things now. Jessie knew things. Sometimes she thought of it in just that way – Jessie knew things – as if it wasn't even her. That was the big change that had happened that night with Neil. Jessie had always had a strong sense of what might happen next. Her mom had referred to her sometimes as "my little psychic." But now Jessie often knew things she didn't want to know.

If she looked into someone's eyes, sometimes she knew what they were thinking, almost as if they had spoken it aloud. If she touched someone's skin, huge chunks of their life story would flood into her mind in an instant - a tidal wave of emotions, thoughts, incidents. The effect of it was like an electric shock. It could make Jessie come close to passing out, and she had no way of making it stop, except by breaking contact. The other person often felt it as much as she did.

That was the real story with Neil. He didn't want to live here anymore. Gail would let him back in – Jessie knew this. Gail would forgive him for banging Jessie's head against the radiator, even if Jessie never would. Gail wanted him to come back, but Neil wouldn't do it. He was afraid of Jessie now. He thought there was something unnatural about her, that she was possessed. And he was ashamed because of the things she knew about him.

Jessie felt like an outsider now, unable to ever touch anyone, even her mom. She had bought a pair of thin cotton gloves at the drugstore, and she wore them wherever she went, so she never had to touch another person's skin. It was surprising how often people touched each other. She had never thought about it before.

In school, they had watched a movie called The Man without a Country. It was about a man who had committed some crime, and no country would accept him. He was detained and forced to live on a boat, and could never go back on land. They had a word for the man. They called him a pariah. It meant he was an untouchable, someone that no one wanted. Jessie was like that now. She was the girl without a country.

If only that was as bad as it got. But it wasn't. Even worse, she was plagued by visions. Mostly they came in her sleep, but sometimes they even happened when she was awake. The things she saw made no sense, but all the same, they were real. And that, the reality of them, was the absolute worst part.

Like the dream she had tonight, the one that woke her up.

The dream itself was bad enough, but the unbearable thing was Jessie knew where the little girl was trapped. Somehow, although going there was not part of the dream, and it was someplace she had never been anyway, she knew exactly where the dream took place.

The girl was inside a wall on the sub-basement level of an old building not far from here. Jessie could get there in ten minutes by bicycle, fifteen by unicycle. She and Gail often passed it while driving in the car. According to her mom, the building had been a home for deaf people that had gone out of business long ago. No one had ever torn it down. It sat there on its own plot of land, grass growing high all around it, the building itself just rotting away.

It looked like it was all locked up, but Jessie knew there were ways to get inside. It looked empty, but Jessie knew that it wasn't. People lived in there. People who were crazy. People who took drugs. There was all kinds of junk in there. Stained mattresses thrown on the floor. Old beer cans, broken glass, plastic bags. Clothes that nobody wanted. Old, broken down equipment. She had never been inside, but she knew what it looked like in there. The place was... dirty. Also, there was a little girl bricked up inside a wall all the way in the sub-basement, two flights of stairs down from the ground level.

It was hard to imagine that this was true, but Jessie knew it was. As she lay in her bed, staring up through the darkness at the bright fluorescent stars pasted to the ceiling, she decided that tomorrow was the day she would finally go there. She was willing to believe, for the sake of argument, that it wasn't true, even though she knew it was. She felt that if she went there, and actually went inside the building, she could know for sure.

Maybe she would get inside the building and find out that it was nothing like in the dream. She knew this wouldn't happen, but maybe. Maybe there was no sub-basement two flights down (of course there was), and if not, then the dream might be wrong. Maybe she would get to the sub-basement, and find there was no wall like the one she had seen. She was open to these things, but she just didn't think they were true.

Tomorrow was Saturday. She'd been having these dreams and visions for almost two weeks now. She'd had other ones, many of them troubling. One was of a grown woman, very skinny, swimming in the water, seaweed in her hair, beneath the pilings of the fisherman's wharf pier. Jessie knew the woman had disappeared from a bar near the waterfront over a year ago. But somehow the little girl was the worst.

Jessie would never get rid of the girl if she didn't go and see the wall for herself. She didn't want to go there, but that's where the little girl was, so that's where Jessie was going. It scared her, but she tried to think of it like this:

"What would Robin Hood do?"

Robin Hood would go over to the building and check the place out. And he would do it without any fear, and probably a big smile on his face and a song in his heart. So that's what Jessie was going to do.

Saturday was always a good day to hit up the tourists, so she'd have to take care of this dream thing early. Get up, have a quick breakfast, get on the bike and ride over there by 8 o'clock. Bring a flashlight. Run downstairs, see if that wall was there, see if any little girls in white dresses were floating around, then blast out of there and high-tail it over to the Old Port.

It had to be a quick thing. See, because she was busy. It was an afterthought, really, just laying a few questions to rest, then getting back to work, to the important stuff. She told herself these things, but inside she still felt the fear. The blood in her head beat so hard that it sounded like soldiers were marching in her ears.

Tomorrow. It would be easy. Just a quick thing.

Tomorrow. And knowing that she would go there tomorrow also meant knowing that she wasn't going to sleep another minute tonight.

* * *

An empty four lane highway lay ahead like a white ribbon in the darkness.

Strake, tired as he was, drove Candy's truck through the black night. He kept the window open and the radio on. The music and the air kept him alert. It had been a long day. Next to him, Candy curled into the corner of the passenger seat with a thin blanket over her. She grumbled about the noise, and the cold.

"Unh," she said, her voice sluggish. "Can you shut the window?"

"No, baby. I need to keep it like it is."

It was exhilarating for Strake to drive, to cruise down a wide open highway, with only the long-haul truckers and the occasional state trooper on the road with him. It had been exhilarating to beat five men in a dusty parking lot. It had been exhilarating to take Candy after ten long years without a female – prison cell punks being a far cry from the pleasures of a woman.

It was even exhilarating to see Darrence Michaels again after all these years. Darrence was the only man Strake could remember who had ever bested him, if you could call it that. Maybe bested was the wrong word. Darrence had outfoxed him, though. It was that simple. Not tonight – the dog had saved Darrence's life tonight – but ten years ago. He had used Strake's anger against him. He had sacrificed himself to see Strake put behind bars.

The very thought of it, to this day, filled Strake with a sort of outrage, and with something a little bit like fear. It was amazing and a little humiliating for Victor Strake to feel that way – afraid. Spend too long in prison and Strake's doorway could close for good. If that happened... well, nothing good could come of it.

That Darrence. Thinking about him made Strake's neck itch. He had wrapped his neck in one of Candy's bandannas, a black one. The bandanna held the flap of skin back against the raw and red flesh of his exposed throat. He could already feel the skin starting to knit. Tomorrow, it would probably look like a nasty gash. In a few days, it might look like a faint scar, or it might look like it had never happened. All the same, right now it hurt. And it itched.

Strake flashed back to an image of himself earlier today. Outside the looming gray wall of the state prison, he sat on a metal bench and waited for the bus. The autumn sun warmed him, even though there was a slight chill in the air. It was wonderful to be out and free again. There was so much to do, and so many people to do it to. And alas, there were only a couple weeks left to enjoy that kind of activity. The necessary thing to do, after all this time in the slammer, was to go home.

When the bus came, a beat-up model that had probably been sleek and new thirty years ago, he sat at the back and spoke to no one. The bus driver eyed him in the rearview mirror from time to time, of course, because only one type of person caught the bus outside the prison. But Strake was on his best behavior – a polite, quiet, reformed citizen. Why get arrested again before the bus even made it to the next town?

But he was capable of so much more. When he first went in, the first night, two black men had tried to get him in the shower room. That's how it went in prison – he knew that. That's how it went in this life. Survival of the fittest. Law of the jungle. The strong eat the weak. He had known it since his earliest days here. It had never bothered him – after all, he was almost always the fittest, he was almost always the strongest. The only ones that might be stronger were his own kind, and it was rare that he ran across anyone like that.

So the attack in the shower was nothing less than he expected. The fact that several other men stood around and watched the attack surprised him somewhat. They saw it as a form of entertainment. Okay, he gave them what they came for.

He took the two attackers – guys as big as himself – and he broke both their arms. Then he broke both their legs. Then he kicked the teeth out of one of them with his own bare feet. He left them unconscious on the concrete floor of the shower room. Then the onlookers called for the guards to break the fight up. Of course, there was no fight by that time. Strake remembered standing nude amongst the guards, and watching all the blood from his assailants swirl in the steaming water from the showers, and go down the drain.

A week later, four other guys cornered him on a catwalk and stabbed him more than twenty times. It was in retaliation for his little demonstration in the shower. He got the knife away from one of them, and stabbed the four of them ten times between them. One of them lost the use of a hand from severed tendons. The four men managed to lift Strake over the railing and throw him from the catwalk. He fell two stories, was listed in critical condition, but he lived.

When he returned to the cellblock three months later, nobody bothered him again. They'd come to realize what everyone realized eventually – he was impossible to kill. Hardened criminals, murderers and psychopaths, came to that obvious conclusion, and yet somehow the logic of it escaped poor, well-meaning Darrence.

Up ahead, a big green highway sign advertised a rest area. When Strake reached the exit, he pulled in. At the end of a long entrance ramp, he stopped the truck in front of the low, concrete building that housed the bathroom. The place was desolate this time of night. There wasn't another car in the parking lot. Over in the truck lot, a few big semis idled, their cabs dark, their running lights on low.

Candy opened her eyes and watched him. He took the keys out of the ignition and stuffed them in the pocket of his jeans, just in case she got any funny ideas about leaving. That happened sometimes – people changed their minds about things. Earlier, when Candy got a look at the flap of skin hanging down from his neck, her wide eyes had suggested a person who was thinking about changing her mind. But it was too late for Candy. She had bought the ticket and now she was going to take the ride.

"I'll be back in a few minutes," Strake said.

He strode through the chill night air to the men's room. Inside, the light was dim. He went to the row of sinks and the mirror above them. It wasn't much of a mirror. It wasn't even made of glass – it was more like a long, wide strip of metal that gave only a tarnished image of the person looking into it. Strake supposed that was so no one could punch the thing out and hurt themselves with the glass. If he ever came across the person who came up with that idea, he'd make sure to wrap a long piece of metal around the guy's neck.

Strake shrugged out of his jacket. He pulled his folding knife from the inside pocket, and opened the blade. Then he got as close as he could and looked at the damage that Darrence had wrought. Nine bullets, medium caliber but with some punch, had entered various parts of Strake's upper body.

Gingerly, he began to pluck them out of his flesh with the knife. None of them had gone very deep – Strake had tough, thick skin, more like the hide of a cow or a mule than a person – but it still hurt getting them out. It stung. The shoulder was especially bad, but worst of all was the stomach. That one had penetrated pretty good, and Strake had to fish around in there with the knife to get all the pieces.

"Ow, Darrence," he said through gritted teeth. "Darrence!" He nearly shouted it. In the end, he wasn't even sure if he got all of that last bullet. Fine, Strake reflected as he washed out each of his wounds with pink hand soap and water. Let it fester in there. Karl would take care of it tomorrow, while Strake drank whiskey and ignored the pain.

Strake looked at himself in the dirty, scratched-up mirror. He gazed deeply at his eyes. His eyes were like deep wells. They seemed to go down forever. They appeared this way even to Strake. Deep, black wells with no bottom.

Boy, one fine day, he and Darrence were finally going to have a little sit-down. Not today or tomorrow, but one day. Even in his diminished state, Darrence was a dangerous man. He might well be the most dangerous man on Earth. Strake would leave him alone for the rest of his time here, even avoid him if possible. But Strake had a fantasy for Darrence, and Strake knew how powerful fantasies were at creating reality.

One day, in a far off future, it would be a real pleasure to return and find Darrence old and decrepit, resting in some nursing home. It would delight Strake to slide into a chair next to the weak and fragile black man, and read the terror in his eyes when he saw Strake and recognized him again, younger, not older, than the last time they met. To wheel one-armed Darrence along the hallways would be a kind of ecstasy for Strake, like Darrence was an old friend of his father or grandfather. Tut-tutting Darrence's strenuous objections, Strake would stroll right out the front doorway of the place and onto the sunny, manicured grounds. He would bundle Darrence into the car. Then he would bring him somewhere secluded, and eat him alive. Slowly. From the bottom up.

Yes, that would be a very good day.

* * *

They came and woke Darrence after his legal team arrived.

He was actually awake already – had heard the two young lawyers come into the tiny police station and begin arguing with the local cop at the desk. Darrence listened to the whole thing from his cell. The lawyers were angry, theatrical, playing it to the hilt. The rubes had violated their client's rights. They had deliberately humiliated him. They had taken his prosthetic arm away!

It was closely-guarded military hardware, an experimental arm, with one-of-a-kind, pushing-at-the-borders-of-science robotics. Did they have any idea what the thing cost? Try a million dollars, for starters. But forget about that for a minute. The man himself was a former Navy SEAL with top secret clearances, and a hero of multiple foreign wars. Did the cops think the government handed out sensitive prototypes to just anybody? Did they have any idea what they were dealing with here?

"Well," the cop said, in a lazy drawl, "can't really blame us, can you? It looked like we were dealing with a guy who tried to blow up an apartment building. Then we checked his trunk and found an arsenal in there. This ain't the movies, buddy. It's against the law what he did."

The lawyers ganged up on him:

"If it turns out there's any problem with that robotic system at all, I'm going to hold you..." there was a pause while the lawyer probably read the cop's name plate... "Officer Pelletier, personally responsible. Do you understand that?"

"I'm on the phone with Washington, DC," the other lawyer said. "In a moment, you'll be speaking with the Secretary of the Navy. You can explain to him why Mr. Michaels is sitting in a jail cell without his arm."

This was all down a short hallway from where Darrence slept alone on a narrow bunk bolted to the cinderblock wall. He managed to tune most of it out. He knew from experience how it ended, and when – about five or ten minutes from now with the cop opening the cell door and letting him out. Then there was the little matter of running through some tests on the arm, to see if the yokels had broken anything.

Darrence kept his eyes closed for a while and let the sound of the argument wash gently over him. He had used his one phone call to reach a voicemail drop for Sid Gold late last night, and Sid wasn't a famous sleeper. Early this morning he had sent in the troops. They probably came into the state on the first plane. No, they probably came in on a chartered plane and opened the airport when they landed.

It didn't matter much about the arm, as long as the cops didn't hurt it. Darrence woke up most days without it – he could hardly sleep in bed with the thing on, could he? Sometimes, when he was doing car surveillance or things felt dangerous, he left it on, but on those occasions he slept sitting up in a chair. Come to think of it, he'd slept sitting up more times than he cared to count. Man, he'd been uncomfortable in his life.

Darrence had a headache, quite a bad one. The pain radiated up his spine from all over his ruined body and settled inside his skull. His teeth hurt. His shoulder ached. A spike of pain had lodged right behind his jaw, where his neck connected to his head. This was every day when he didn't get his painkillers on time. Pain. It was a constant. The painkillers only subdued it, pushed it off into the distance a little, and only for a short time. Then it came right back.

His favorite time of day was right before he woke up. He found he could pretend, during that early, vague time, that it was long ago. The events of the past fifteen years had never happened. He was a different person, still a young man, still macho, still strong and athletic, still gifted in so many ways, his body intact, and with his whole life ahead of him. There was no pain in those days. Quite the contrary – he felt great.

Every day, he woke up raring to rip, eager to get to it, whatever that day held. Energy, man. He had boundless energy. He could choose to do anything with his life. But not this burden that he carried, and this lonely, painful road he walked. If given the choice to do it all over, he would never pick that again.

The local cops had arrested him last night. Of course they had. He had detonated a grenade in a public place and set a building on fire. He had a gun on him. When they searched his car, they found his weapons. All of them legal for him to have, all of them fully registered to him, but the cops decided not to know that right away.

Darrence couldn't blame them. Any police force would do the same thing – keep him around and see what developed. They were gentle with him, probably because of his missing arm, and that was a blessing. He went quietly, and easily, but that hadn't always guaranteed him safe and easy passage before.

When the cops got him back to the station and checked his record, they were shocked by his pedigree. They thought they might have a terrorist on their hands, a good guy gone bad. The good stuff: Navy SEAL. Jump school at Fort Bragg. Detonations expert. Combat veteran. Bronze Star. Medal of Valor. Three Purple Hearts.

The bad stuff: Darrence was a man who had murdered his commanding officer in Afghanistan, then sat in prison at Leavenworth for a year awaiting trial, and was finally acquitted on grounds of justifiable homicide. He was a man with high-powered lawyers – he'd been arrested for various offenses over the years, in several states and three foreign countries, but nothing stuck. A man with a job at a mysterious security firm based in the Cayman Islands. A man who, ten years ago, had been the victim of an assault so violent that he lost his arm, and almost lost his life.

"Well son," one of the redneck cops had said last night, "looks like you're gonna be our guest for a while."

Wrong. Darrence heard the old-style keys jingle as the cop on duty came to get him. He kept his eyes closed until the door of the cell slid open.

"Wake up," the cop said. "You're free to go."

"You got my dog?"

The cop nodded. "He's waiting for you. We fed him. He's a great dog."

"I only get the best," Darrence said.

Ten minutes later, he was outside in the bright morning sunshine. He stood with the two lawyers on the steps of the Town Hall, sharp young corporate types who had whipped through the rubes in no time flat.

The dog stood at Darrence's side, on alert, scanning the environment, a typical New England town on a weekend morning. It quietly growled at a big man in a blue windbreaker jacket, jeans and sneakers who stood at the bottom of the stairs. The guy had closely cropped hair, military-style, and was looking away, trying to pretend he wasn't here with the lawyers. He was doing a pretty bad job of it. His presence seemed to make the lawyers jumpy. Maybe they didn't go on jobs where they needed a bodyguard very often.

The sun bothered Darrence's eyes, but at least the dog was okay. And the arm was fine, too. He put it through some paces. Working the toe controls in his specially-fitted shoes had become second-nature to him. It was almost as if the arm responded to his thoughts and not what his toes were doing.

He raised the arm in the air, made the Black Power salute. He brought it down and held it straight out, perpendicular to his body. He waved bye-bye to a little girl walking across the town green with her mom.

"Mr. Gold sent us," one of the lawyers said.

Darrence gave the guy the once-over. The man couldn't look more out of place if he were wearing a turban. His hair was slick. He wore a gray pinstriped three-piece suit. The suit probably cost a thousand dollars. The shoes cost maybe five hundred, maybe eight hundred. The watch? More than the shoes and the suit combined. The lawyer himself probably cost five hundred an hour. If he was thirty years old, he sure didn't look it. His face seemed as soft and as hairless as a baby's bottom. He seemed unwilling to look at Darrence directly.

"Harvard?" Darrence said.

"University of Chicago, actually. I went there on a scholarship. I worked in the cafeteria as an undergrad."

"Yeah. Thanks for the background. It's very admirable. Tell Sid I said hi."

"We all have our jobs to do, Mr. Michaels."

"Yes. That much I know."

"Mr. Gold wants to know how the arm is holding up."

Darrence raised the robot hand, bent the arm at the elbow, turned the palm inward, and stuck its middle finger up at the lawyer. "What do you think? Seems to be working pretty good."

"You still have your rental car," the kid said. "Here are the keys. But they've seized your weapons pending the disposition of this case."

Darrence held the robot hand out and accepted the keys. The kid grimaced, probably unconsciously, and tried not to touch the metallic hand.

"Okay," Darrence said. "I can get more." He looked out at the town. A white church steeple towered in the distance. Victorian houses faced the town green. The place probably hadn't changed much since the Devil and Daniel Webster were around. Hopefully, Strake was long gone. Darrence didn't like the idea of being anywhere near Strake without weapons.

"Mr. Gold would like to see you," the kid said.

"Yeah? When does he want to do that?"

"Today. There's a plane waiting for you at the Augusta airport. Mr. Smith here will be your escort and bodyguard."

Darrence would have laughed, but nobody was joking. Mention of a waiting airplane and an escort cued the guy at the bottom of the stairs. He came up and extended a hand to Darrence. It was a big hand. The guy himself probably went six and a half feet tall. He had hard, flat eyes. He had no problem with eye contact. He looked at Darrence like Darrence was a bug, or a tasty morsel to be eaten. Escort and bodyguard, sure. The man wasn't here to protect Darrence – Darrence was on a clock that was quickly running down, and nobody alive could protect him. The man was here to make sure Darrence went where Sid Gold wanted him.

Darrence ignored the hand. "Don't do that, man."

"Don't do what?" the big guy said, half smirking.

"Don't look at me like that. You don't own me. I'll send you home to your momma in an envelope."

The guy shrugged. "Whatever you say, chief."

The lawyers stared at Darrence now, itchy to be away from the two nutty murderers for hire, itchy to be gone from rural Maine and back in Manhattan or Chicago, or wherever the women were beautiful, the black men shined shoes and everything was just fabulous.

"Do you need anything more from us?" one of them said.

Darrence nodded. "Yeah, I do. You got something for the pain?"

* * *

Jessie rode her unicycle onto the grounds of the abandoned deaf school. There were several smaller buildings on the land, but of course Jessie knew exactly which one she was headed toward. It was the main building, which loomed up ahead like Frankenstein's castle. It was long and low, three stories high, and was a dull shade of dirty gray, though it looked like it might once have been white. Large windows lined the side of it like giant blank eyes.

The road in was long and curved, cut between gentle rolling hills covered in high grass. The old campus was quiet, and far off to the left there were some earth movers and construction equipment sitting idle. Naturally, it was Saturday and all the construction men were home. They were either building something over there, or knocking something down. For a moment, Jessie saw the place as it had once looked – a new, gleaming building, set back against green manicured lawns. That must have been a long time ago.

As she approached the building, she saw that it was surrounded by a tall fence topped with circular razor wire. The fence was impossible to climb over. Jessie's stomach – with her mom's runny eggs and half-burnt bacon sitting uneasily inside – told her that was good enough, the place was locked up tight, nothing to see here. Anyway, there was no way in.

But she knew better. Somewhere there would be a cut in the fence, probably more than one. She hopped off the unicycle and walked the last 30 yards to the fence. The road was littered with broken glass. There was a locked gate where the road met the fence – it was high, as tall as the fence itself, and blocked off what had at one time been the driveway.

A rusty metal sign hung on the gate. DANGER – KEEP OUT.

Beneath that was another sign, also rusty and in smaller block letters. This building has been condemned by the Department of Code Enforcement. It is prone to collapse. There has been no asbestos abatement performed. There may be hazardous materials on site. For your own safety, KEEP AWAY.

Jessie turned left and walked along the edge of the fence. She ran her hand along the fence as she walked. She stepped over the curb and onto the grass. Bushes and vines had grown up against the fence, and no one had bothered to cut them back. She moved along, rolling the unicycle by her side, straining a little against the weight of her backpack, watching the building for signs of life all the while. It was very dark in there. Most of the big windows had been smashed out long before.

She didn't see anyone inside the fence. Maybe there really was no way in. The grass was knee-high here, and probably hadn't been mown all summer. She stopped for a second and turned back the way she came. Between the bushes and the grass, the road itself was no longer visible. She listened for any sounds, heard none. She was all alone out here, just a little girl trying to find a way into a condemned building.

Her mother would say she was a fool. No matter, she had come here, she might as well do a circuit around the place, satisfy herself that there was no opening in the fence, then hightail it downtown. She walked another ten yards before she spotted the hole.

It was right up ahead, tucked behind some thick bushes. It looked like someone had just cut away the fence there with some bolt cutters, then peeled it back like you might peel the skin away from an onion. It had been open a long time – there was a narrow dirt path that went in behind the bushes, through the hole, and out the other side. There was garbage here – crushed beer cans, a couple of empty cigarette packs, potato chip bags, the shredded remnants of a girlie magazine. A lot of traffic seemed to pass this way. No one was even trying to hide the entrance. It was practically a highway.

Jessie frowned. She already knew that grownups were a mess. She knew it even before the change that had come over her. She knew that no one was really in charge, and that most grownups were afraid, or confused or just so into themselves and their own problems that they really weren't paying attention. But even so, why bother to put up this fence, and those scary signs back there, then leave this hole here where people were obviously coming and going? It didn't make sense.

She passed the hole and walked along a little further. Maybe fifty yards down, there were some very dense bushes. She glanced around to make sure no one was watching, then ducked into the bushes. Here, she shrugged off her knapsack, took the flashlight out of it, then shoved the whole knapsack as far back into the bushes as she could. Then she did the same with the unicycle. If she came across anyone inside the building, she was going to have to be light on her feet. She couldn't be burdened with all this stuff. At the same time, she'd hate to come back here and find out someone had stolen her things. Hiding them seemed like the best solution.

A minute later, she returned to the hole in the fence. She stopped. In the front pocket of her jeans was a small stuffed animal, about three inches high. Its name was Felix, and Felix was a tree sloth. His soft pelt of fur made him look almost like a monk or a Jedi knight wearing a brown and black robe with the hood covering his head, but if you looked at the faded tag in the back, you could clearly see the words tree sloth. Jessie knew tree sloths lived in the jungles of South America. She also knew that it was silly kid stuff to think of Felix as a person, but she sometimes did just that. She carried him along with her when she was lonely or afraid, and somehow things didn't seem as bad. It worked, even now, at eleven years old, long after she knew that he wasn't alive. Felix was still her friend.

She took him from her pocket and held him tightly in one hand. She surveyed the fence with the ugly building squatting on the other side. A long minute passed. "What do you think, Felix?" she said quietly. She waited a moment, just long enough for Felix to have made his answer.

"No, I don't like it either," she told him as she tucked him back into her pocket. "But I guess we better go ahead."

She took a deep breath and slipped through the hole in the fence. Here on the other side, it was almost like another world. The fence was behind her now. The ground was bare, hard-packed earth. Without the fence and the bushes between her and the building, she felt exposed, like someone was watching her, maybe many people. Quickly, she moved close to the building, getting right next to its wall and down under the windows. There was a lot of junk along the side of the building – wrecked couches, wrecked shopping carts, bucket seats torn from cars. A lot of smaller stuff, too – empty diaper boxes, various old, destroyed pieces of machinery, broken glass, shredded rubber from tires. The walls were a riot of spray-painted graffiti.

Soon, she found a green metal door. There was a round hole where the doorknob had been, and it was nothing to push the door open. The hallway inside was dark. Before she allowed herself to think better of it, she slipped inside.

She realized she didn't want to turn her flashlight on. Instead, she moved quickly through the shadows. She heard noises now, people talking, people laughing, something metal scraping along the floor. There were people in here. She had known there would be, but it was one thing to think about them, and quite another to hear them.

Light came through the windows, just enough light to see by. She padded softly in her Skechers. The last thing she wanted to do was make the slightest sound. She came to a stairwell. She peeked inside. Nobody there. She stepped in. Bird shit or bat shit was all over the stairs. More daylight streamed down from the broken window on the landing above. She wasn't going that way – she was going down. The stairs disappeared into darkness below her.

She listened. The sounds of people seemed far away now, tucked off in some other part of the building. But that didn't mean there was nobody down there in the black abyss. She almost wanted to shout down into the darkness.

"Hello?"

That would be a big mistake.

What was she doing here? She could turn around and run. She could just get out of here. No one had seen her yet. She could run back down that hall, out the door, out through the fence and away from this horrible place. She could be downtown in twenty minutes, doing the thing she loved to do, and forget all about this. It was nuts! There was no girl. There was no cinderblock wall that was also like a fish tank. She couldn't read people's minds. Neil had knocked a screw loose in her brain, and that was all. She was going crazy, or had already gone there.

She couldn't look at people. She couldn't touch anyone. She wore gloves everywhere. They wanted to put her in Special Ed because she was so far behind in school, and now because of the gloves. She screamed and fought when they tried to take them off her. She ran away from them, out into the streets. She hated school. She hated hated hated it. She really had lost her marbles.

Now this. She was going to die in here. She tried to swallow the lump in her throat, but it wouldn't go down. Her body started trembling. She had to leave. She had to get out. She had to get away. This place wasn't safe.

GO NOW!

"Oh Felix," she whispered. "What are we doing?"

With a groan she plunged down the first flight of stairs, drawn by something more powerful than her fear, something she didn't understand. She slid her white-gloved hand along the banister. Her eyes were blind from the darkness, but she kept moving. Down a flight, turn, down another flight. At the bottom, there was yet another flight. Oh God, there was a sub-basement. It was too dark to keep going.

She kept going. She started crying now, silently but with terrible force. Her whole body was wracked by the sobs. Down another flight, turn, then down another. A door here had been torn off its metal hinges. Somebody strong must have done that. It made her think of a giant ripping trees up by their roots.

She went into the hallway without even looking – she couldn't see anything anyway. She moved down a hall, stumbling over unseen pieces of junk. Water dripped from somewhere. Even in the dark, she could make out her own reflection below her. The whole floor was half an inch deep in fetid water. She moved slowly, trying not to make a splashing sound.

The wall was just up ahead. She knew where she was now. She had always known where she was. She had come straight here. No one needed to tell her. Her dream was real. The hallway ended. It was a dead end. She stopped, listened again. Something skittered in the dark. A rat, probably. Not a person. Not a monster.

She was completely alone in total darkness. She was no longer bad girl Jessie James. She was no longer Robin Hood. She was nobody now. Empty. A nothing. She could die down here and no one would ever find her.

She remembered she still had her flashlight in her left hand. She flicked it on. The weak light cast crazy shadows in this evil place. Against one wall was an old boiler, half ripped from its moorings. In the gloom, the puddle on the ground seemed like deep water. She was walking on it, but she could fall through and it would have no bottom.

She turned and here was the wall, exactly as she had imagined it. It was white cinderblock up to the ceiling, except down here near the floor, where the cinderblocks had been pulled out, then put back and covered over with some kind of plaster. Someone had made a hole here, then closed it up again. A person or people had scribbled graffiti on the plaster in huge block letters.

EAT ME

I SEE DEAD PEOPLE

GIVE HER SOME AIR

Jessie crouched near the bottom, and took her gloves off. She touched the plaster covering the stone. Except now it was see-through, like glass, not like stone at all. On the other side of the glass, the girl in the white dress came awake. Her head popped up like it was on a string, and her eyes flew wide open. Her eyes were dark with deep black rings around them. Her skin was as white as her dress. Her hair was like a nest of snakes. She floated there, looking right at Jessie, alive and dead at the same time.

* * *

Strake liked to walk, and he liked to remember things.

He and Candy had arrived here early this morning, before first light. "Here" was Portland, Maine, in Dirty Karl's old place on a dirt road tucked away at the far west edge of town. Strake lay in bed that morning at Karl's rambling, ramshackle house, in the upstairs master suite that Karl always kept ready for him. Candy was curled up next to him on the big king-sized bed, one arm around his powerful torso, her head against his shoulder. They were both nude under the heavy blanket. The only stitch of clothing Strake wore was Candy's black bandanna, still tied smartly around his neck. He could feel the flesh mending there, healing quickly after a good night's sleep.

The sun streamed in through the tall window, along with a cool draft of October from outside. The house was more than a hundred years old. The floorboards creaked and groaned. Field mice got in and ran around at your feet. The wallpaper was peeling. Karl had inherited the house from his dear departed mother, and for 30 years, Strake had been coming here. In all that time, Strake didn't think Karl had ever put a dime into maintaining the place.

As Strake lay there, he mused about an event that happened on another pleasant autumn day long ago, before he'd ever even met Karl. Maybe it was the early 1960s. He'd been a hunter then, not here in Maine, but in upstate New York. He had lived in New York City at that time, and a new acquaintance had invited him on a weekend deer hunting trip.

The day was cool and bright. He and his new friend, Arnold was the man's name, walked through hilly, new-growth woods, deer rifles slung over their shoulders. The leaves had turned, and many had fallen, but many were still on the trees. The ground was carpeted in gold and brown, and some of the trees were still dressed in gold and red and orange. Even though they weren't far from the rapidly expanding suburbs, the colors and the sunlight streaming in from above reminded Strake of a medieval forest. There was magic in the air. As they walked, the two men passed a small flask of whiskey back and forth.

They hadn't seen a deer all morning. That didn't upset Strake – he didn't care about killing deer. But it seemed to bother Arnold. Of course it did. Arnold wanted to impress Strake, show him what a man he was. That didn't interest Strake, either. In fact, Strake had smelled some deer while they were out, and was pretty sure he could track one down just by the scent. But helping Arnold fell a deer wasn't what this trip was about. Strake was in it for bigger game.

These woods abutted a new housing development. They were close to the houses now. Strake caught a glimpse of one from time to time, obscured by the trees. Arnold didn't seem to notice. Arnold wasn't much of a woodsman, in Strake's estimation. He was actually a fat real estate executive who talked too much. He wore the thick black glasses that everyone wore during that era. Strake had met him in a bar one night. Arnold probably should have stuck with that – real estate manipulations and telling tall tales in bars.

"I tell you," Arnold said, a little breathlessly. "I've usually bagged one by this time of day. I don't know what..."

In a clearing up ahead, something moved. It was small, with brown hair. It wore a dark flannel shirt and blue jeans. Strake squinted and could make it out clearly now, against the backdrop of a raised ranch house with brown siding. The sun peeked over the top of the house, giving off a subtle glare, making it harder to see.

Strake reached a hand out to Arnold. "Shhhhh...." Strake said. "I see one."

Strake made a motion as if to unsling his rifle. Arnold really did unsling his. He lifted the rifle to his shoulder, squinting against the sunlight through the scope. He worked the lever to load a fresh cartridge into the chamber, and his index finger moved to the trigger. Strake moved his own hand to Arnold's fleshy neck, and began softly massaging there.

"Vic, uh..."

"Shhhh. Wait a second. It's there. I promise." His voice was gentle, cooing.

Fifty yards away, the child came into view again. Strake could see the kid clearly now, right out in the open, a boy of three or four, toddling along.

"Do you see it?" Strake said. "It's a deer."

Arnold stared through the scope. His voice drifted, like a balloon on a light breeze. "I think it's a..."

"It's a deer," Strake said again, this time with force.

"It is. It's a deer."

"Do you have it in your sights?"

Arnold swallowed hard. His voice sounded dull and robotic. "I... yeah. I got it. But the sun is in my eyes. It looks like..."

"It's a deer. Shoot it!"

Arnold pulled hard on the trigger. The sound of the gunshot echoed through the woods and off the surrounding houses. Somewhere a dog howled and started barking. The scent of gunpowder rose from Arnold's gun.

The boy had disappeared. "Did you get it?" Strake whispered.

"Yeah... I think I got it. I..."

That's when the screaming began. It came from out of a nearby house, a high, female wail. It grew louder and louder and louder. The dog kept on barking. The boy reappeared from behind some bushes. Adults were running now, running toward the boy, who was frightened by the loud noise, and suddenly started to cry.

"He missed," Strake said, surprised even now, all this time later.

He opened his eyes. Standing in the doorway to the bedroom was the owner of the house himself, Karl. He was a sight to behold. It always took Strake aback a little bit, when he didn't see someone for several years, and then saw them again. People aged very quickly. Karl must be in his late sixties now, Strake guessed, and he looked every minute of it. He was short, and monstrously overweight. He had always been balding, and now the hair that was left was thin and white. He had an unkempt, scraggly beard shot through with streaks of gray and white. It was the kind of beard you would find crumbs in. He wore loose-fitting work pants that were filthy with stains. They looked like Karl had worn them for a year straight. He wore a patched-up gray work shirt over a grimy V-neck T-shirt. The T-shirt had probably been white once. He wore sandals on his feet, over a pair of red socks.

In his big hands he held a tray of food. "I heard somebody come in last night," Karl said. "I figured it was you." The tray had metal legs on either side. It held two plates of eggs and sausage, a plate piled with biscuits, the doughy kind that came in a little cylinder you popped open, a coffee pot, a quart of milk, maybe some other things as well. Butter. Jam. Sugar.

Strake indicated the tray. "Is that breakfast?"

"It's better than that. It's breakfast in bed. I missed you, partner. Welcome home."

Strake nudged Candy. She grumbled and then surfaced from under the blankets. She looked around and blinked. At first, she didn't seem to know where she was. Her face looked older in the cold light of morning. That's how Strake liked them, anyway – a little used up, a little run over.

"Jesus," she said.

"Well, not quite," Karl said from the doorway.

"Candy, I'd like you to meet my good friend and familiar, Karl. He's the owner of this fine establishment where we find ourselves. He's a master of hospitality, and he's prepared a breakfast fit for a king and queen."

She lay back on the pillow and pulled the blanket up to her chin. "Hi, Karl."

Karl waddled over and put the tray before them. "Hi Candy." He laughed to himself. To Strake, he said, "Hi Candy rhymes with eye candy, doesn't it?"

"Sure does, old buddy."

"Should I assume the party starts now?"

"Same as always. I'll be here just a couple weeks, but until our time is up, let's have some fun, shall we?"

"Very good," Karl said. "That's very good, indeed. I'll get your wardrobe together immediately."

"That'll be fine. I'll need a car, too. Whatever's top of the line in rentals these days. Something readily available. A Mercedes or BMW convertible will do. But I probably won't need it until tomorrow. I think I'll take a nice long walk today."

"Of course. And if you are out walking, there is a man you might want to see."

"A man?"

"Yes. A man stopped by here recently. It was very curious. He said he lives here now, but was a good friend of an acquaintance of yours in another city some years ago. He gave me his number, and asked that you might call him the next time you found yourself free."

Karl dug into his pocket and came out with half a sheet of loose leaf paper. He handed it to Strake. Strake looked at what was written there:

Mr. Abel 415-3578

"This was all he left?" Strake said.

"That's all."

"But he seemed on the up and up?"

Karl nodded. "Very much so. In fact, he's a police officer."

When Karl went away again, Strake and Candy dug into the food. Strake was left puzzling over the proactive Mr. Abel. Or should he say Officer Abel?

Candy gestured at the door with her head, her mouth full of food. "Is he your servant or slave or what?"

Strake was already tiring of Candy and her backward ways. He felt himself getting short with her, and was careful to contain it. Someone with a mind like hers could never understand his relationship to Karl. The relationship was entirely reciprocal. Karl was the person Strake had felt closest to since Candy was probably a little girl. His bond with Karl wouldn't last forever, but it would last much longer than his bond with Candy. That bond would be severed soon.

"Karl's my good friend," he said simply. "And Karl's going to be your friend, too. Now hush, and eat your breakfast."

As he ate, he tried to put Candy out of his mind. Instead, he thought about walking. Today would be a walking day. A good one, something to get the feeling in his legs again, to get the blood flowing and the brain working.

Sometimes in the past he would walk for days and days. He'd go eighteen hours straight, cover seventy miles or more in a day, walking until he could barely take another step. Then he might lie down in some bushes and sleep. When he woke, he would get up, eat breakfast in a nearby diner, and start walking again. Walking and thinking. He'd be gone so long sometimes, his people would grow worried and fall to fighting amongst themselves. Sometimes he'd gather other people to him as he walked. Someone he met in an eatery would be mesmerized by him.

"What are you doing today?" the person might say to him.

"Walking."

"Where to?"

"Nowhere. Just walking. See what I find."

"Can I come?"

Then Strake would flash the winning smile. "Of course. You're just the type of person I like to walk with me." He gathered them like that, wherever he went. People were drawn like magnets to his power.

He had that urge today, to just get out of the house and walk. He'd been cooped up in a tiny space for ten years. The cell, the cellblock, the showers, the yard. There'd been almost nowhere to go. Now, with his newfound freedom, the world was a big place again. Of course, the time was close when he would be leaving altogether, and his doorway was near here. But that didn't mean he couldn't take a walk.

Indeed, he had a possible new friend to meet. Maybe he could walk to a little rendezvous with Mr. Abel.

* * *

Sid Gold rubbed and petted the back of the dog's neck with a thin, liver-spotted hand. The dog seemed to like it. He lifted his chin so Sid could rub him under there. Darrence wished Sid wouldn't do that. This was a working dog. Darrence didn't want it spoiled.

"What do you call him?" Sid said.

It was a warm, sunny day. The two men sat at a table on Sid's back patio. The brick patio was across a short stone bridge from the rolling grounds of the house. The patio itself was maybe thirty feet square, surrounded on four sides by Sarasota Bay. Tucked in a corner away from the table where they sat, a huge round hot tub was built into the stonework. It looked like it could fit about eight.

Darrence planned to sample that hot tub for a little while later this afternoon. He would just sit back with a rum drink, let that steaming water soothe his bones, and dig the million dollar views. Sailboats were everywhere on the bay, and distant islands, shimmering in blue, sun-dappled water.

Darrence felt good. He didn't mind coming here for the day. He liked it here. What wasn't there to like? The sky? The sea? Living in the lap of luxury? The lawyer had also given him a vial of morphine pills this morning, courtesy of Sid, of course. So the pain was all the way in the background right now. And Darrence had already downed a couple of glasses of red wine since he got here. He felt good, indeed.

He sighed. Tomorrow he would be back on the job – living rough, hunting and being hunted, the smell of fear on him, the smell of impending death, his or someone else's. That was his life. He stayed away from it for long periods now, but he had to admit that it still called to him. It validated him. It drew him back. If he lived that life, it gave meaning to how he was. It hadn't been a mistake. His ruined body, his ruined mind, his destroyed morals, it was just the price he paid for saving the world.

Ten months before, Darrence had killed eight people in one house. He had mowed them down with an MP5 submachine gun on full auto, jacked with armor-piercing bullets. There was a demon in the house, and those eight people were protecting her. She was getting ready to leave. Her power was strong. Darrence shot her in the head at point-blank range, but she didn't die. So he shot her again. And again. Over and over, standing above her while she writhed on the floorboards of the old house, until her head finally split apart.

He shook that image away. The sea. The sky. Remember?

"I call him Dog," Darrence said.

Sid grunted. He patted the dog along the back. The dog shivered and tensed a bit, like he might start running around at any second. "You always call them Dog. Why don't you ever give them a name? It seems like the least you can do."

Darrence shook his head. "They never live long enough to bother with a name."

He glanced back at the house, from which the Hispanic girl, the help, was now coming, pushing their wheeled lunch tray along the stone walkway. The house was a big, bone white, ultra-modern monstrosity. It was hard to say what shape it was. It might have been a square, but then sharp angles here and there suggested it was a triangle. A stone waterfall emptied into the in-ground swimming pool, which itself overlooked the bay. Inside the house, massive floor-to-ceiling windows gave Sid panoramic water views from just about every room. Sid was the richest man Darrence had ever met. This was Sid's Florida retirement house.

The only thing that marred the bucolic scene were the two gunmen in sunglasses and sports jackets positioned on the back lawn, talking into headsets from time to time. Darrence never knew Sid to have a security detail before. Then again, Strake hadn't been on the loose in a decade.

"Where'd you get him?" Sid said.

"The dog? Got him from an Irish guy in New York. He's a border collie. The guy told me he kills the bottom half of every litter he gets. Only keeps the three smartest, fastest dogs. It helps keep the breed up. Unlike, say, Dalmatians, who are as dumb as stumps. This dog was number one in his litter. The best. I paid three grand for him."

Darrence paused and smiled. "Well, actually, you paid three grand. In any case, that's about the smartest dog I've seen. He's smarter than most people. And he hates the demons, man. He can smell them half a mile away. He probably saved my life last night."

Sid's face darkened at the mention of demons. "All the more reason to give him a name," he said.

Darrence shrugged. "I'll think about it."

The food came. Nice. Wild caught salmon steaks on a bed of rice. Asparagus tips. A tray in the middle with various cheeses and olives. The girl never said a word the whole time she served them. She topped up Darrence's wine glass, then left the bottle on the table. Darrence picked up the bottle with his robot hand, ignoring Sid's raised eyebrows. Screaming Eagle Cabernet Sauvignon. 1992. Darrence had no idea about wines. All he knew was this: if it wasn't a good year, if it wasn't an exceptional wine, it wouldn't be on Sid's table.

Darrence placed the bottle down and looked at Sid, really looked at him. Sid wore an open-throated white dress shirt, tan slacks and sandals. He wore a Breitling watch that probably cost five thousand dollars. He seemed to swim in his clothes. Even the fancy watch seemed about to fall off. How old was Sid? He had to be at least eighty. He looked every minute of it. He was skinny almost to the point of emaciation, he had the gentlest wisps of sparse hair left on his bald head, and there were weird, dark discolorations all over his deeply tanned skin.

"Did I ever tell you," Darrence said through a mouthful of fish, "the one about the old Jew and the crippled black boy?"

"I thought you had retired," Sid said. "Last I heard, you were living in St. Vincent, spending your time sailing and snorkeling. I was surprised to learn that you were back on the job. More than surprised. I was disappointed."

"I'm thirty-five, Sid. That's a little early for retirement. I was just taking a break after what happened last year. The islands are great, but there's only so much tranquility one man can handle. Anyway, I like to earn my money."

Sid took a sip of his wine. "You earned it already. No one can adequately repay you for the things you've done, and the things you've lost. If the world were fair, you'd be known as a hero and they'd throw you a parade down Broadway. Instead of a parade, you get enough money to live on the rest of your days." He shrugged. "It may not be a fair trade, but it's the closest I can make it."

Darrence shook his head. "This ain't about money, man. It's not about parades. It's about finishing something. I'll tell you the truth. I thought I was retired. I was down there eight, nine months. You think I wanted to come back? No way. You think I want to tangle with these things again? Unh-uh. But look at me, Sid. I'm ruined for easy living. There's nothing left of me. I'm a fighter. That's the only thing I still have. I can't sit down there in the islands forever, whiling away my days. You know why? Not because these things are evil and they have to be stopped. That's true, but I could overlook that. I really could. Just leave it to somebody else. Of course, there is nobody else, and there's always plenty more demons, but never mind that. The reason I have to go back is there's nothing else for me. What am I gonna do, get a girlfriend? Have a couple of kids? And when Strake finds me down there..."

Sid visibly cringed at the mention of Strake's name. Darrence noticed it but kept going.

"...or some of his people find me, or some other demon, some word gets out where I am, and that I have people close to me, that I'm vulnerable, that I've grown soft, what happens then, Sid? Do I wait around until the bad guys come and kill the people around me? Probably torture them right in front of me? I don't think so. I think I need to be on the move, I need to stay sharp, keep a low profile, and I need to kill or trap me some demons. That's about all that's left to me."

"Are you planning to trap him here?" Sid said, his voice even.

"Who, Strake?"

Sid ran a hand over the top of his head. "Yes."

"If I can't kill him right away, I'm going to trap him. Then I'm going to kill him or die trying."

"What if you can't kill him at all?"

"Then he'll die of old age."

Sid took a desultory bite of his fish. "Do you really think you're up for this, Darrence? When you were in your prime you couldn't kill him. Now..." Sid shook his head.

"Say it, Sid. I'm a cripple. I have one arm. I can barely walk. I creak around like an old man. If I go twenty-four hours without my painkillers, I start to cry like a little girl. We can agree on all that. But I can still get Strake. I know I can. If I didn't know it, I wouldn't try."

"I don't think that's what it is," Sid said.

"Okay. What do you think it is?"

Sid gazed directly into Darrence's eyes. "I think you're committing suicide, Darrence. It saddens me to think it. You'll say no, but you're putting yourself in a situation you can't handle anymore." Gingerly, Sid picked up the bottle and poured himself another two fingers of wine.

"Listen, I have loved you like a son. And it pains me to see you do this to yourself."

Darrence shook his head. "That's not how it is." He looked at Sid, and Darrence didn't need to touch his old friend to know what was in his heart.

"You know what I think it is? I think you're afraid. Look at this place. You've got armed guards standing around in your yard. You want Strake to go back. You're scared of him and you want him to get away. You want it even though you know the cost to an innocent child. Tell me I'm wrong."

Sid's eyes hardened. He rose on unsteady feet. "You're welcome to stay here as long as you want. When you're ready, a plane will meet you at the airport. It will take you wherever you want to go. Please take it back to St. Vincent."

Sid walked away from the table and back toward the house, his frail trembling body jittering and jiving across the bridge.

"It's too late, Sid," Darrence called, raising his voice. "I already rented an apartment up in Maine. It's too late to just walk away."

Sid raised a hand, but did not turn around or stop walking.

Darrence looked at the dog, who lay on the ground near where Sid had just been sitting. "What's done is done," Darrence told the dog. "It's too late to turn back now."

The dog rested its head on its paws. It didn't look convinced.

* * *

Jessie rode her unicycle down a quiet, tree-lined side street.

The houses were small, but kept tidy with little front yards and trimmed hedges. This was a step up from Jessie's neighborhood. As she rode along the street, she began to slow down. In a moment, she hopped off the unicycle, picked it up, and carried it as she walked. She was looking for something, but didn't know quite what it was. For no reason at all, she stopped at a white house with gray trim, a two-story, with a narrow driveway running down the right side.

She stood in front of it. The upstairs window was round, like a porthole on a ship. That was the little girl's room. This was her house. Jessie was sure of it. She had come straight here, as if she were tied to a string. She hadn't known the address or anything about the place. She just knew it when she saw it. And she had come straight here.

She moved over to the top of the driveway. There was a low metal fence here. Down the right side of the driveway, all along a fence that ran beside it, was a little garden. The garden was mostly bare this time of year. A woman knelt in the garden about halfway down the driveway. She had a sun hat on, obscuring her features.

Jessie's hand moved as if it didn't belong to her. She lifted the latch on the gate and pushed it. It swung slowly open, making a creaking sound as it did so. Jessie walked down the driveway toward the woman. She walked all the way and stood directly behind her. The woman wore an old yellow pullover. Jessie stood and faced the woman's back, the woman clipping something, hunched over her work, speaking softly to herself. Gray and brown hair fell from beneath the sunhat.

"Hello?" Jessie said.

The woman froze. She did not turn around.

"Hello?" Jessie said again.

Slowly, the woman turned to look at who had addressed her. Her face was at once young and old, pinched, and lined with worry. Her eyes widened as though she expected a blow across the head. They settled on Jessie and relaxed a little, but not too much. She looked down at her own gloved hands, the clippers in one hand, some cuttings in the other, as if they were foreign to her. She looked back at Jessie. She noted the unicycle and the knapsack. She didn't say anything.

"Do you have a daughter?" Jessie said.

The woman gazed at Jessie quizzically, but still said nothing. She cocked her head just slightly to the side, as if listening to sounds that were far away, and which only she could hear.

Jessie took off one of her thin white gloves and held her small hand out to the woman. She hated to do it, but she needed to know. She had to find out. It seemed like this woman might never speak, and Jessie needed to know if what she had seen was real. There were many reasons why. She needed to know what her next steps were. She needed to know what the limits to her power were. She needed to know what was going on. Most of all, she needed to know if she could save the little girl.

"Will you take my hand?" she said.

Slowly, gingerly, the woman took off the leather gardening glove from her right hand. The hand was bony and gnarled. The fingernails had been chewed down to the quick. She reached out to Jessie, and the hand shook just slightly.

Jessie held it and gave it a gentle squeeze.

She saw everything. A young family, a husband, wife and daughter, living in this very house. She saw this same driveway, years ago. Everything looked hazy and indistinct. The girl was young, and wearing a white dress. White shoes, a white barrette in her hair. She was excited because it was Easter Sunday. She was a pretty little girl. Everything seemed happy, but there was a shadow over the house. The sunlight couldn't reach it. The woman was home one day, not Easter, the husband gone for the day, at work. The girl played outside. She sang a song to herself out here, right along here, right along this driveway. But there was a shadow, and then the girl was gone. A shadow came to the fence, to the edge of the property. The woman was inside, doing the dishes, cleaning, making dinner, and some time passed before she realized the singing had stopped. She could hear the child singing, and the woman daydreamed...

"I made you dream," the shadow said.

...and only later did she realize she could no longer hear the child. The child. Where was the child? The child was a beautiful daughter, the woman could still see her in the hospital when they laid the beautiful baby on her breast, and the woman could hear and feel the tiny heart beating, the heart of her daughter. Margaret was the daughter's name, and one day the other kids would call her Peggy. One day, when she was married long years from now, her husband would call her Peg.

"It's a girl," the doctor said, "and she's beautiful."

The woman raced out of the house, going as fast as she could, but moving too slow, moving as though she were somehow underwater. A shadow had passed, she was sure of that. And a car door had closed. A car was down the block, a black car or maybe a dark green one, impossible to tell because it was all the way down the block. The woman turned to look down the driveway, but the girl wasn't there. The woman ran down the driveway, because of course the girl was in the yard and not in that dark car that was now already gone. There was no way the little girl was in that car.

"Peggy!" she screamed. She ran for the garage. "Peggy, come out here this minute!"

But of course Peggy wasn't in the backyard or the garage, because Peggy was in the dark car. The shadow had taken her, and the shadow left no trace. The police turned up no leads. They were terrible. They searched the house again and again – the house! As if the woman and the husband were the guilty parties.

After a time, they broadened their search, looked elsewhere, but they never found a single clue. No witnesses. No make or model of the car. No little girl returned, and no body ever found. Nothing was left for the woman and her husband. Just long nights and endless days, sitting quietly in the living room, saying nothing.

One night the husband died. He

(blew his brains out in a car on a deserted farm road)

just died of heartbreak. His little daughter was gone and that girl was everything to him, the apple of his eye. Life just didn't seem worth living with her gone, with her dead and hidden and rotting away somewhere.

Then the woman was alone in this house. She left everything the way it had been. The little girl's room was just the same. It was like a museum in there. Nothing was touched, nothing would ever be touched until the day she came home. In the dark dead night, there was no sound except the steady tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock, of the old grandfather clock in the hallway, all night long it went.

Then one night the shadow came. The woman had dozed, but now she was awake. The shadow stood at the foot of her bed. It had a man's shape, a tall man, very broad. Its face wasn't there, just a blank, a dark space where a face would be.

"I took your daughter," the shadow said. "It was a sacrifice."

"What... what did you do?"

"I consumed her."

The woman could not move because her fear was too great. She could not speak. The shadow moved closer. She could smell him, smell the musky scent of him. It was powerful and filled her with longing.

"I took your husband. He was weak, and I took him."

"He blamed me," she said, but could barely mouth the words.

"Yes. And why shouldn't he? You weren't there. It was your job to watch over her, but you left her to be sacrificed."

"I made a mistake."

"Yes, you did. A tragic mistake. A mistake so big that simple remorse will never make up for it."

With one yank, a magician's trick, he suddenly pulled the bed covers away from her. "I'll take you whenever I want. I took them, and I'll take you. I was watching you. I chose you, you and your daughter. Didn't you know that? Didn't you feel it?"

"Yes," she said.

He moved closer still. His very presence was overwhelming. He wasn't a shadow, he was an actual man. He touched her with hands that were impossibly strong. This close, his smell was rank, like the smell of wild animal.

Jessie let the woman's hand go before she could see any more. Jessie's hand had gone numb and her entire arm tingled. She had no idea if one second had passed, or one minute, or one hour. She stared at the woman. The woman's mouth hung open, and she gazed in wonder at her own hand. Then her eyes narrowed and she stared hard at Jessie.

"She's alive," Jessie said. "Peggy. I saw her. I know where she is."

"Get away," the woman snarled. "You get away from me, you devil!" She squinted, and her entire face contorted into the face of a mad dog. She rose unsteadily to her feet. She still had the sharp clippers in her gloved hand. Jessie backed away, up the driveway, the way she had come.

The woman pointed at her. "You did it. You took her!"

Jessie reached the gate and passed through onto the street. The woman stopped halfway to the fence. Her arm was still raised, the finger still pointing. "You!" the woman shouted. "It was you!"

Jessie slung her book bag across her back, hopped on the unicycle, and took off down the street, the same way the dark car had once gone. Even now, it was almost as if she could see the car, just up ahead.

* * *

"Mr. Abel, I presume?"

Strake stood on top of Bradbury Mountain, a medium-sized hill with a grandiose name several miles outside the city. It had taken him less than four hours to walk here, then hike up the small mountain itself. It was a decent walk, though in the annals of Strake's life, little more than an afternoon jaunt. The view from the top was of surrounding countryside, dressed in fall colors of red and orange and yellow. It was pretty, Strake supposed. That's what people would say about it.

A cop stood near him, to the right and about ten feet away, a state trooper in black boots with reflector sunglasses on. The cop was bald and very fit, and of indeterminate age. His face was clean shaven and chiseled at hard right angles. He could have been thirty, or he could have been fifty. Both men gazed out at the view, though Strake imagined neither one of them cared much about it.

"Mr. Strake, I presume?"

"Yes."

The cop moved closer, still looking out at Maine in autumn. In the far distance, Strake could just make out a blue line that was probably the ocean.

"It's quite a view, isn't it Mr. Strake?"

Strake shook his head. Maybe they should skip the preliminaries and get right to the matter at hand. "What can I do for you, Mr. Abel? Or should I say, Officer Abel?"

The cop smiled. "Mr. Abel is fine. And I think the question that should be asked is what can I do for you?"

Strake waited.

"You see, I was valuable to an acquaintance of yours at one time. He was someone very similar to you in outlook, and shall we say, physical composition? Before he was tragically murdered, he and I shared many adventures. We carried out many... I'm searching for a word... interesting... tasks together."

Strake glanced at the cop. "You consider yourself a familiar?"

The cop shrugged. "If you say so. I prefer the word friend."

"But you know about us? Where we're from? How we live?"

"Yes. I know a lot about you. I admire you and your kind quite a bit."

"And your friend was murdered?" Strake said.

"Yes, by a certain one-armed Negro you might know. It was a cowardly act, to say the least. The man thinks nothing of shotgunning people in their bed, while they sleep."

Strake grimaced, despite himself. The very mention of Darrence made Strake's throat itch beneath Candy's bandanna. That was just like Darrence to shoot someone in their sleep. Darrence was underhanded. He was sneaky. He didn't believe in a stand-up fight. Of course he didn't. He would lose any stand-up fight he was in.

"You can't be too careful these days," Strake said.

As he watched the sky, he noticed the light starting to fade. It was a long walk back to the house. Strake felt the cold sweat under his clothes. It was a pleasant feeling, even on a chilly day like today. Strake loved to walk. After a moment, the cop still hadn't responded, so Strake said: "What's in it for you?"

For the first time, the cop turned and looked directly at Strake. "The bloodletting," he said. "And the vengeance." He shook his head and gestured out at the world. "These people... the scum. Most of them don't deserve to live. They're vermin. They're rats. And my job is to exterminate them. Do you understand?"

Now Strake smiled. He understood completely. Mr. Abel was a psychopath. He had joined the police for that very reason. Cops could get away with many things, without suspicion, that other people could not. A thorough investigation into Mr. Abel's past would likely unearth a large pile of bodies.

"Mr. Abel, I'm only here for a short time, but I think you and I can do beautiful things together."

It was the cop's turn to smile. "That's why I contacted you, Mr. Strake."
CHAPTER 03

"Candy, darling, I think you're starting to get hooked on that stuff."

Strake said it with an air of amusement, but actually it annoyed him. They were lying nude on Karl's king-sized bed, sharing a cigarette between them. Strake liked the king-sized. The bigger the bed, the more women he could fit on it. In fact, a fine little piece of action named Carla had just exited the room after a two-hour session between the three of them. Carla was a sometime prostitute, and Strake suspected that it was girls like Carla who were giving Candy the drugs.

He had begun to notice it over the past day or two. Candy, less and less alert, on the nod, checking out of reality whenever she got the chance. Heroin. She'd had trouble with it before. He knew that about her. He glanced at her arms from time to time, and she didn't seem to be shooting it, at least not yet. But it wouldn't be long. Just five days had passed since they came down here to Portland, and already Candy was falling apart.

She shook her groggy head. "Nah, baby. I'm okay. I'm not doing that much. Just a little something to make me feel good."

Strake grunted. He knew where things were going with Candy.

He decided to put it out of his mind. He leaned back on the pillows and checked out the view in the ceiling-mounted mirror. They were in the center of the big bed. Candy was curled up next to him, her arm across his chest. But Candy wasn't what he was interested in right now. He was more interested in himself – the very sight of him!

In the mirror, Strake looked gigantic and exceptionally healthy. His pectoral muscles were like the hoods of two Ford Mustangs parked together. His six-pack stomach rippled like the back of an armadillo. His legs were as well-muscled as frog legs – bullfrogs, jumpers, contest-winners. Veins rippled everywhere - in his legs, in his arms, across his stomach.

Strake couldn't get over his body. It was amazing, even to him. He smiled at himself for possessing such a powerful machine as this human body. He smiled because he could feel his power growing all the time, more and more as the night of full dark approached. His body itself seemed to grow larger and become ever more invincible, ever more incredible.

Unlike many of the people who became his followers, Strake didn't do drugs, except for cigarettes and a little booze to lighten his mood. Instead, he worked out. Old Man Karl – who was long past any ability to work out – kept a weight set and bench in the basement of this place for Strake. While living here, Strake went downstairs and pumped the iron every day. He was into fitness. He was into strength. He was into full-spectrum dominance. In the short time he had left here, dominance was a big part of his plans.

He liked the weight room. It was just a shabby basement, with exposed pipes running along the ceiling, cinderblock walls dripping moisture, a naked light bulb hanging on a wire, the occasional mouse darting here and there on the floor. The weights he pushed were raw metal plates that he loaded onto a heavy bar. It was the perfect weight room for someone such as himself. The stripped-down starkness of it brought out the savage beast in him.

Strake sighed. He felt great. Everything pleased him today.

This was a good house for his headquarters. It was dilapidated and obscured behind bushes. Although it was close to many things – shopping malls, car dealerships, motels, the highway, even a certain abandoned home for the deaf – it was also set back at the dead end of a short, little-used side street. The street itself wasn't even paved, and there were no other houses close by. In fact, the place came with a big piece of land, and there were woods behind the property. High-tension electrical wires ran through back there, and by law those wires had to be at least a quarter of a mile from the nearest home. This was the nearest home.

The location of the house meant that even though they were technically in the city, there were no neighbors. Loud noises didn't mean phone calls to the police. There was a driveway where various vehicles could be parked without attracting much attention. The house itself was big – six upstairs rooms and four bathrooms, three of which were still operational. It was a good place to have a bunch of people over and let them loose.

And a bunch of people were indeed over. A little community had begun to sprout up around Strake, as it did everywhere he went. It never took long. A certain breed of people were attracted to him, and once under his spell, they proved willing to do whatever he wanted. Many years ago he had stopped marveling at the power and influence he could have over others. People who were broken or wounded in some way – angry people, sad people – those were the ones who tended to become his disciples.

Already here were Candy, Carla, and two or three other girls that came and went. Strake had tasted them all, and he was just getting started. A young man named Leonard was also here. Once upon a time, Leonard had been a male model for underwear ads, but those days were over. Now he was a sometime drug dealer, sometime pimp, and non-stop ladies' man. Strake had met him in a nightclub three evenings ago.

Right now, Leonard was out on a mission for Strake that would change everything. In fact, it was the whole reason Strake had come back to this city, and Leonard had taken care of everything. Strake just told Leonard what he was looking for, and Leonard went out and found it for him. Leonard had reeled the fish all the way in. All that was left was to bring her on board the boat. She was Strake's ticket to greener pastures.

Candy shifted on the bed, and Strake's smile faded just a bit at the sight of Candy again. Everything pleased him, he should say, except one thing. This Candy situation was beginning to stick in his side. They'd been together just a short time. For a little while, she seemed like she was having a ball. She was physically strong, ripe and randy, and ready for action. She was happy to get out of her one-horse town and go on the road with Strake. They came down here to Karl's house. They ate like a king and queen. They drank and screwed every night. They went out on the town.

But very quickly, Candy got drunker at night and slept later in the day. She started snorting the H, and now Strake was convinced she was skin-popping it, probably somewhere he wouldn't notice, like between her toes. Soon, if history was any guide, she would start mainlining and the tracks would appear. After that, she would become a zombie, fixated only on her next hit and what it took to get it. By then, she would be no more use to him.

"You're not shooting that stuff?" he said.

"No, baby. I'm afraid of needles. Remember?"

"Promise?"

She raised a thin and languid hand. She was pale and there were big, dark rings around her eyes. She had started to look like a corpse. "Scout's honor."

Of course, things hadn't gone exactly the way Candy had probably planned. They had spent all of her money, about $1,500 she had saved toward the down payment on a house. Hell, $1,500 wasn't any kind of down payment anyway. Then Strake had found and brought Leonard aboard. Now, Leonard was bringing new girls to the house every day, and Strake was partaking of these new girls. Of course he was. And Candy was starting to wither.

She didn't seem upset with him. But he'd rather she be angry than become a junkie. He'd rather she show some spunk. When it came right down to it, Strake had begun to suspect that Candy didn't have what it took to live this lifestyle with him. He no longer thought she was going to make the team.

The door to the room opened and Carla tip-toed in. She always walked on her toes. She wore a pink t-shirt and white panties with the words Spoiled Brat across the back. She had a thick white drink in her hand, with ice – Strake guessed it was vodka and milk. That was Carla's drink of choice. She had a nice little body, and was looking quite a bit healthier than Candy here. Carla had blond hair but her eyebrows were black and bushy. Something about that combination drove Strake crazy with lust.

"Vic?" she said. "Leonard's back. He brought a new girl with him."

Strake's smile came back full force. That was the news he had been waiting for all day. This new girl with Leonard could only mean one thing – that she was ready to meet him now.

"Carla," Strake said. "You are the most beautiful creature."

She took a sip of her drink and nodded. "Don't I know it?"

Strake got up and dressed. As he did, he felt a nervous sensation in his belly – very unusual for him. A tingle ran along his spine as he buttoned a white dress shirt and tucked it into his jeans. Carefully, he folded the sleeves to three quarter length. He hung a gold medallion on his chest. He kept the shirt unbuttoned three buttons down. He slipped his huge feet into a pair of moccasins. He checked his look in the full-length mirror bolted to the top of the wooden bureau. It was an old bureau, probably half a century old. The mirror gave a reflection that was almost a funhouse reflection. All the same, he liked what he saw. The scar on his throat was long gone.

"How do I look?" he said.

Carla was sprawled on the bed, arm draped over a sleepy Candy.

"You look hot."

He hoped so. He hoped he looked more than that – he hoped he looked calm, confident, in control, but above all welcoming.

The girl downstairs was a babysitter. In fact, she was a nanny to a five-year-old boy, and during the week she lived with the family she worked for. It was a family of three. A man in his late fifties, a real estate developer who was very wealthy, his wife, twenty years his junior, and the little boy in question, whose name was Ethan. Ethan was important to Strake's plans. Ethan might be the one to help Strake open the doorway.

That's why Strake was nervous. It was very important that this go well. He had done many things in his time, amazing things, terrible things, wonderful things, but opening the door was always the most important thing.

He looked in the mirror at Candy and Carla, their bodies wrapped up together on the bed behind him. Then he gazed into his own glowing eyes. They glittered and sparkled. Nervous or not, he was electric with excitement.

"Let's go meet this young lady," he said to his reflection.

* * *

"Pass the ball, James!" the coach shouted. "Open man! Pass it!"

Jessie dribbled the ball up the court, moving fast. She heard the coach shouting from the sideline, and ignored him. Ahead and to her right, she saw the open red jersey inside the paint, her man, and decided not to pass. The defense was not back yet, not set. Everything was in motion. She had no one on her. She pulled up short from three-point range and launched a bomb.

Her shot was lopsided, too much right hand. It arced through the air, hit the rim, then the backboard and went wide. A white jersey came down with it. Jessie raced back on defense, squeals and squeaks of sneakers on the wooden floor, shouts and taunts echoing crazily around the gym, everybody flushed, everybody breathing heavy.

Jessie was drenched in sweat. She wore shorts that came down past her knees. Her socks came up to her knees. She wore her team jersey, and beneath that a long-sleeved t-shirt that came down to her wrists. She wore thin white gloves on her hands with little leather grippy-things on the fingertips. She looked ridiculous - she knew that. There was a lot of contact in this game, and she didn't want to touch anybody for more than a second.

The white jerseys were slow to bring the ball up on offense. If they always moved this slow, it was going to be a long season. She had so much time that random thoughts flowed through her mind. A little girl was trapped behind a cinderblock wall. The image appeared, but Jessie shook it away. She had to stay alert. They were mean to Jessie, these boys. They didn't want her there.

Jessie was on the basketball team. The boy's basketball team.

Last year, she had played with the girls, but the level of competition was too low. They won every game by 50 points or even more. The school thought she should try playing with the boys instead – to start getting her ready for how it would be in high school. The principal said it would challenge her and keep her interested in school, but Jessie thought maybe it was more because it looked good that the school had a girl who could compete with boys. Her mom went along with it, probably because the principal told her it was a good idea. But Jessie thought the whole thing sucked.

Today was only their third practice of the season. Already she knew how it would go. The boys in the white jerseys, opponents in practice but her own teammates in real life, hacked her and fouled her every chance they got. The boys in the red jerseys, her teammates both in practice and in real life, ignored her existence. They never passed her the ball. They'd probably hack her too if they thought they could get away with it. The only time she touched the ball was when she stole it from someone on the other side – which was like every other play.

Here they came now – the white jerseys on offense. Better late than never. Ryan Clarke, short, skinny and with a crazy head of blond hair, had already hacked her three times. He brought the ball up, moving as fast as a loaded-down mule. He was her opposite number on that squad - the point guard.

He made a bounce pass to the inside. Instantly, Jessie sidestepped two paces to her right and got a hand on it. She shouldered the kid behind her off the ball, took control of it, and headed back up court. Steal! Ha! Another one! These boys sucked!

She accelerated into the open court. She dribbled fast, full speed, the ball out in front. There was no one back on defense, nothing but basket. She crossed the key and drove for the lay-up. She leapt for the basket, but a hand gripped her shoulder from behind and pulled back hard. She lost the ball. She fell, her feet out from under her.

A long moment passed as she flew through the air, her whole body parallel to the floor. Sunlight shone through the high windows of the gym. Above that, the rafters were dim and dusty. There were small birds in the rafters. She noticed these things before she landed. Then she hit the wood hard, on her back, the shock going through her body.

The whistle blew. Boys came running, shouting and laughing.

She'd had enough. She climbed to her feet. The coach was there, tall Mr. Hamler with his funny beard and his glasses. Ryan Clarke stood near him, barely taller than Mr. Hamler's waist. She hadn't seen who fouled her, but she knew it was Clarke. She stole his pass. She'd done it five times. She was better than him, and he didn't like it. He was smiling now.

She walked up and punched him in the face.

"James!" Mr. Hamler shouted.

Clarke's head snapped back. She hurt him with that punch. For a split second, he looked like he might cry. But then he jumped on her. She fell backwards, pulling him to the hardwood floor. She got him in a headlock. He squirmed and punched at her. Somewhere, her skin touched his and she felt his desperation – it was everything to him, overloading his system. He had no thoughts. He had no memories. It was just pure emotion. There was no way he could lose a fight to a girl, not in front of the whole team. It was the only impression she got from him.

"Break it up. Break it up, you two."

Mr. Hamler tried to separate them, but she and Clarke wrestled grimly on. He was stronger – she felt his strength. He had more to lose. He began to overpower her. She let him go, pretending the fight was over, but he took advantage of the moment and slapped her on the side of the head. The slap stung. She was crying now, she realized. Just a little bit. She wanted to hit him back.

Mr. Hamler picked her up by the arm. The boys were all standing around, a few of them trying not to grin. Ryan Clarke's face was red and his hair was mussed.

"You boys keep playing," Mr. Hamler said. He shouted toward the bench. "Morgan, in for James."

Jessie shrugged loose from the grip the coach had on her wrist. It was a reflex. He didn't try to stop her. She walked side by side with him to the far side of the gym. Maybe he would kick her off the team now. She didn't really care.

She glanced up at him. The sight of him made her smile, just a little. Mr. Hamler, truth be told, was a little ridiculous. He was very tall and had a thick, bushy beard. He wore old-school horn-rimmed glasses which made his eyes look like fish inside a fish tank. He had curly hair with a bald patch in the middle. He wore tight green shorts that her mom said had been out of style for a long time. He had thick curly hair on his legs. He wore knee-high socks. It was kind of embarrassing, the way Mr. Hamler looked.

But he had a way about him. He also coached the after-school fencing club. Not only had he convinced Jessie to play for the boys' basketball team, now she was dancing around with a fencing foil once a week. Fencing had to be about the geekiest sport there was. But Mr. Hamler had started a club for it because he liked fencing, and he liked old black and white Three Musketeers movies from long before Jessie was born.

All this, and Jessie's mom told her Mr. Hamler was only about thirty years old. Jessie felt bad for him sometimes. The way he was, he was never going to find a girlfriend. Somebody pretty like her mom would never go for Mr. Hamler. A lot of the kids called him Hammy or Ham Sandwich or Mr. Hamster behind his back.

They sat on the bleachers and looked back the way they had just come, across the empty gym. On the other side, the boys kept going, running plays from the book, moving from spot to spot on the floor like robots.

"What's the story, Jessie James?" Mr. Hamler said. He had a very deep speaking voice, much deeper than when he shouted on the court. It sounded like a fog horn. It sounded like he must be joking.

"You saw him foul me, right?"

"Yes. I also saw you punch him instead of just shooting your free throws. You know, when somebody fouls you, you get to shoot free throws, right? You can score points for your team that way. But the way you like to do it is you like to get ejected from the game for punching people."

Jessie shook her head. "You don't have to be sarcastic, Mr. Hamler. I know all about free throws. It's just that I hate this team. I hate all these boys. They don't want me here. They never pass me the ball. This team sucks. Half these boys can't even play. It's like watching paint dry waiting for them to bring the ball up the court. We're gonna be the worst team in town."

"So what do you want to do?"

Jessie shrugged. "I want to play for the girls' team."

"I want you to know something," he said. "Nobody wants you on the girls' team. Naturally, the other schools don't want you on that team. The parents don't want you on the team. The other girls don't even want you on the team. The only person who does want you is the coach. Why? Because she gets to win every game if you're on the team. But is that a good enough reason? I don't think so. It's just not fair to anyone if you play on that team, least of all you."

Jessie didn't answer. She thought about it, and she could see why the other girls wouldn't want her. She didn't really like them any more than she liked the boys. Prissy girlie girls, for the most part. All they wanted to talk about was the stuff they bought at the mall, what was on TV, and of course boys. The whole game plan on that team was if by some accident anybody ended up with the ball, pass it to Jessie.

"I want to tell you something else," Mr. Hamler said. "You have a lot of control over what happens to you and what people think of you. You have a lot more control than you seem to think you do. You are exactly who you think you are. If you think you're a winner, you are one. If you think you're a loser, you are one. You can step up and be a leader on this team. You can influence whether this team wins or loses. You're the fastest person we have and our best ball handler by far. Right now, the boys are just responding to the attitude you're bringing to the table. This situation isn't happening to you. You're happening to it."

Jessie wasn't sure what he was getting at. Generally speaking, she liked to think of herself as Sir Lancelot, or maybe Robin Hood. She would like to have some other knights in her life or maybe even just a Little John type – she'd been looking around for people like this for quite a while now. She glanced up at Mr. Hamler. He would hardly qualify. And this team of boys was the farthest thing from a group of knights that she could imagine.

"You can probably be our best overall player," Mr. Hamler said. "These guys will respect you if you reach out to them. We can have a great team. But you have to make them believe in you."

"How can I do that when they won't even pass me the ball?"

"Be bigger than that. Be a team player. Don't be a ball hog. When you were with the girls, you used to take the ball from one end of the court to the other. I know. I used to watch you. The boys know that, too. You won't be able to do that here. But you still try. Try this instead: When you get the ball, don't take it to the basket yourself. Feed it to an open man. If you can do that consistently, the boys will respect you and I'll make you my starting point guard. Then you'll touch the ball on every play. Can you do that? Can you pass the ball?"

She shrugged. "I can do it."

"Okay. Then do it."

"Okay. I will."

They sat quietly for a few moments, watching the action out on the court. To Jessie, it all seemed to move in slow motion. If she were back out there, things would speed up a lot. She thought about how a point guard runs the offense. She had never run an offense before. She never needed to. She thought of a little girl bricked up behind a cinderblock wall. She turned to Mr. Hamler again. What would he say if Jessie told him about the girl?

"There's something else I need to talk to you about," Hamler said with a sigh.

Jessie didn't say anything. It was a bad sign when teachers needed to talk to you about something.

"A couple of the teachers think you've been cheating on their tests. They say they don't know how you're doing it, but they know you're doing it."

His saying it sent a cold tingle along her spine. "I know."

"Have you been cheating?"

"No. Not really."

"Not really?"

She wanted to tell him what was going on with her. She wanted to tell him that she didn't have to study for tests anymore. That she didn't even have to go to school anymore. She knew what the answers were on the tests without even trying – she didn't know how. She wanted to tell him that all these tests and sudden pop quizzes that used to make her nervous and sick to her stomach with terror, they just seemed silly now. Most of all, she wanted to tell him that there was a little girl trapped behind a cinderblock wall in an old, not exactly abandoned building just a short way from here. She wanted to tell him that someone really needed to rescue that girl.

"Well, I'll tell you what, Miss Not Really, I can protect you for now. But if I find out that you have been cheating, I'll have to put you off the team. I won't want to do it, but I also won't have any choice. So do us both a favor – if you are cheating, stop. If you need help with your schoolwork, I'll get you the help you need. Just tell me."

Getting kicked off the basketball team for cheating was really the least of her worries. Still, starting point guard could be okay. She made a mental note to score a little lower on her exams. Maybe fail one now and then. But the question of the little girl remained. This coach – maybe he was the one person she could tell.

"Mr. Hamler?" she began.

"Yes?"

She tried to say it, but it was no use. Half a minute passed. It seemed like an hour. It was as if there was some kind of blockage in her throat. She couldn't make the words come out. Instead of telling him everything she needed to tell him, she said:

"Thanks."

"Jessie, it's my pleasure. I think we're going to have a really good season this year. If I get my way, we're not going to suck at all. But do me one more favor, okay?"

"What's that?"

He gestured at her hands. "Lose those crazy gloves. You won't be allowed to play in the games with them on."

* * *

Within minutes of meeting the babysitter named Donna, Strake felt very good about his prospects. His nervousness had subsided. He was almost sure that Donna's charge - innocent little Ethan – was the one who would help him open the doorway. Ethan's caregiver wasn't happy with the conditions of her employment, and that was a good place to start.

"I don't feel good about working for them," Donna said. "I used to like it there, but now it makes me uncomfortable."

Strake soaked her in. She was young, clean cut, and sexy in a freshly-scrubbed, all-American way. She had long, straight brown hair, which she repeatedly brushed back away from her eyes. Her breasts pushed against a clean white T-shirt and her legs fit snugly in a pair of denim jeans. She held Leonard's hand the whole time the interview took place. Strake guessed she was about nineteen. Strake would like to have her. Not now, but soon.

The three of them sat in the first-floor room Karl used as his office, the least ramshackle and most professional room in the house. It had a Lucite table, a couple of chairs, a new computer and an old fax machine that wasn't even plugged in. The rug was threadbare. A bulletin board hung on one wall, yellowing papers and junk mail announcements stuck to it with pushpins. Many of the items on the bulletin board were a decade old, or older.

Strake could sense the girl's apprehension about the place, and about Strake himself. She sat in Karl's tall leather office chair – the seat of honor. Leonard stood just to her side. Strake sat across from her, subtly mirroring her body movements, crossing and uncrossing his legs as she did, not looking directly at her because she did not look directly at him.

Instead, Strake watched Leonard while Donna talked. With facial expressions and vocal exhalations, Leonard feigned deep concern and seriousness. It was a compelling performance, and Leonard himself was quite a sight to behold. He wore jeans and an Italian dress shirt. He was thin, almost willowy, but also well-muscled. It made an odd, but attractive combination. His black hair was perfect, with a little curl that hung down on his forehead. He had a two-day growth of beard – he always had a two-day growth of beard, leading Strake to wonder if it was somehow painted on there. He had pale blue eyes and very white, very straight teeth.

Strake had to admit it: Leonard was one of the best-looking men he had ever met. Leonard was so good-looking that his manhood wouldn't have lasted 24 hours inside the walls of a prison. He looked like a young Elvis Presley, or a soap opera actor. Strake would have owned him in prison, and after a while, perhaps he would have traded him for some cigarettes. He could own him even now, but there were already lots of nice girls around, and Leonard was always bringing more. The ladies flocked to Leonard, and Leonard brought them right to Strake. He offered them like sacrifices to a god. Strake suspected that Leonard would do anything Strake asked, and never bat an eye.

Indeed, Strake intended to test that theory. Leonard had a friend named Russ. Russ was a skinny kid with tattoos and a shaved head that Strake hadn't really gone to work on yet. Soon, Leonard and Russ were going to carry out a little task for Strake that was going to initiate them into his world a bit more. They were going to help Strake settle an old score. That would be fun, and Strake supposed that Leonard would come through it just fine.

In the meantime, the girls were great, but they were mere sideshows to the main event, the little boy Ethan. Strake was eager to know more about him. Ethan was the final destination, so to speak, although Strake would have to arrive there in roundabout fashion.

"Why don't you like them?"

"It's not that. I do like them. I like Melinda, in any case. And I like little Ethan. But Tom? Well, I used to like him. Or maybe I still like him. I don't know." She looked at her sneakers, as though something interesting was happening with them.

She nodded to herself. "I used to like him, I guess."

Strake knew better than to speak at this point. He looked up at Leonard and raised his eyebrows.

"The old man seduced her," Leonard said. He gently ran a hand through the girl's hair, as if he were petting a cat. "He practically raped her."

"Well, I don't know," Donna said. She snorted out a short burst of laughter. "It wasn't like that. I wouldn't go that far."

"Baby," Leonard said. "I love you. You know that. You're a good girl. But you're really just innocent and naive. You're just out of childhood a couple of years. That old man is in his fifties. He knew what he was doing. I know how guys like this operate. He gave you the job because of how beautiful and sexy you are. He hired you with the intention of getting inside your pants." Here Leonard looked at Strake. "We happen to know that he's done this type of thing before."

"This is what he always does," Strake said quietly and with sympathy. He said it with certainty, as though he'd been watching this Tom person for some time. Naturally, it was all lies. Before yesterday, he'd had no idea who the man even was.

"He takes advantage of young women."

Donna looked up and held Strake's gaze for the first time. "I know. I don't mean anything to him. Not really. It's totally stupid. That's why I feel bad about it. That... and Melinda. She's mostly been nice to me."

"Mostly?"

"Sure, she's not always nice. But a lot of the time she is."

"You told me she screams at you and makes you cry," Leonard said.

Donna shrugged. Her voice sounded small. "She does that sometimes, too." She sighed. "I feel trapped there. I never should have dropped out of school."

"They've got you right where they want you," Leonard said.

Strake raised a hand to Leonard as if to say STOP. He turned back to Donna. "Where do you and Tom..." Strake began. He let the question trail off.

"Have sex? Around the house sometimes. On the couch in the living room, mostly. When Melinda isn't home, or even sometimes when she's upstairs asleep. Tom says Melinda doesn't like to have sex anymore – she's on prescriptions that make it hard for her – but what she doesn't know won't hurt her. I think he has sex with one of the maids, too. But I'm not sure. They don't speak English around me."

Strake looked at Leonard. This was the first he'd heard of the maids.

"He treats you like a toy, doesn't he?" Leonard chimed in. He sounded angry, legitimately angry, like he wasn't faking anything. Or maybe he really meant it. It was hard to tell. Like most conmen, Leonard was a convincing actor. "He uses you."

"Yes," she said calmly. "And I let him do it. And I really only make $12 an hour. It's not like he gives me anything extra. I don't even know why I do it."

"Donna, I wonder if you can do me a small favor?" Strake said.

She smiled a coy smile. Not as innocent as she seemed. No, not so very innocent. "Depends on what it is."

"Well, it's nothing much. But I think it will really help you begin to come to terms with this. All I need you to do is to say it out loud – 'he uses me' – so you yourself can hear it and know that you don't have any responsibility in this, and he has all the responsibility. He's the one who took advantage. You are the victim here. Do you think you can do that?"

She blushed just a bit. "I can try."

"Well, then just repeat after me. He uses me."

"He uses me."

"He took advantage of me."

"He took advantage of me."

"He has all the responsibility here, not me."

"He has all the responsibility here, not me."

Strake smiled, to show her how pleased he was with her. "How does that feel?"

"I have to admit, it does feel a little better. It feels a little bit better."

"Good," Strake said. "That's all Leonard and me want for you – to feel better." He glanced out the window at the late afternoon sun dwindling in the sky. Soon it would be evening. Maybe this would be a good night to see Ethan.

He turned back to Donna. "Tell me a little about the boy you take care of."

* * *

"I'm thinking we should get a dog," Jessie's mom said.

They sat at the counter in the narrow kitchen of their apartment. Jessie still wore her uniform from basketball practice, to which she had added a red hoodie sweatshirt. She had the hood pulled up over her head. Gail was dressed in the white skirt, apron and sensible white shoes of her waitress outfit. She had put out an apple pie for the two of them to eat. On nights when she worked, she usually let Jessie eat dessert first. Tonight, dinner was apple pie, followed by hot dogs and baked beans.

Gail was drinking a glass of white wine. Jessie was drinking a glass of milk. In a little while, Gail would leave for the diner to work the night shift. Jessie dreaded it as she always did. It was almost enough to make her wish Neil was still with them. Her mom worked nights a couple of times a week, and Jessie stayed home alone in the house. Outside the kitchen window, the day faded quickly into evening. Once the darkness came in, the hours would slow to a crawl.

"A dog?" Jessie said, making a face of mock disgust. "What would we want a slobbery old dog for?"

"I don't know," her mom said.

"I don't know, either," Jessie said. She tried to make it sound funny, but it wasn't. Jessie hated dogs. In fact, she more than hated dogs. She was terrified of them. It surprised her a little that her mom hadn't thought of that.

"It could be fun," her mom went on. "I think we get kind of lonely around here by ourselves. The dog could be our friend. It could also be a good watchdog for when I have to work at night and you're here alone."

Jessie shrugged. In the days before Neil had lived with them, a man named Brent had lived there. He had a dog – a big one. It was like a mixture of a Rottweiler and a Doberman, with maybe a little pit bull thrown in for good measure. It was a terrible dog, and had bitten Jessie three times.

The first two were just flesh wounds. The dog was jealous and possessive about food, and would growl and snap around meat, even meat that didn't belong to it. So it snapped at Jessie, probably because Jessie was smaller than it was, and on two occasions it had broken her skin. That was bad enough.

But the worst was one time when the dog had just grabbed Jessie's ankle in its teeth. It held on and wouldn't let go. Brent tried to get it to loosen its grip by punching it in the ribs, but the dog just chomped down harder. Jessie was very young when that happened, and she cried the whole time. It must have gone on for an hour or more. It sure seemed that long, though sometimes Jessie thought that maybe it wasn't.

Eventually, Brent put a stick of butter on the floor. The dog loved butter so much that he decided to let go of Jessie's leg for a time while he lapped up the entire stick of butter. It was disgusting to watch. And when Jessie couldn't stop crying afterward, Brent called her names.

Gail was on her knees, with Jessie sitting on a stool. Gail worked to wrap some gauze around the bloody ankle. The teeth marks went all the way around, from one side to the other.

Brent patted the dog. Brent was a big, good-looking guy who worked in a garage. He wore oily coveralls with his name on them. His hands were always dirty and grimy. He seemed proud of his job.

"Can't you get her to shut up?" he said to Gail.

"Well, what do you expect her to do?" Gail said. "She got bitten by the dog." She sounded exasperated, but not so much that she would draw a line in the sand. It wasn't going to be either the dog goes, or we go. None of that. Gail liked having a boyfriend too much. Gail could get very lonely. Jessie was never enough for her.

Brent laughed. "She didn't get bitten. He was just holding her by the ankle." He stared hard at Jessie. She was trying to stop crying, she really was. She didn't want to give the dog the satisfaction. But she couldn't stop. Her ankle hurt, and it was very scary having his teeth digging in to her bone. It was scary to bleed so much. His wet slobber had gotten into her blood. She was probably going to get a disease from that.

Brent kept looking right at Jessie. Jessie didn't like to look at Brent. His face was handsome, but something in his eyes wasn't right. He seemed to be laughing at you with his eyes. So she looked down at her mom.

"Don't be a weakling," Brent said. "When you cry like that, it means you're a weakling."

"Am not."

"You are too! You're a weakling. You're a baby."

"Brent!" Gail said from her knees.

Brent shrugged. "Okay, it's your daughter. You raise her however you want. But if you let her be weak like that, the world's going to walk all over her."

Now, a long time after Brent and his dog had left, long enough that Jessie really didn't know how much time had passed, she sat at the counter and stared at her mother. "Dogs bite," she said, trying to give Gail a subtle hint about what had happened the last time they had a dog.

Her mom drank down half the wine in her glass and laughed. "Oh, dogs don't really bite that much, Jessie. They bite strangers sometimes."

Was it possible that her mom didn't remember the Brent Incident, as Jessie had come to think of it? She decided it was possible. Brent was just another face in the parade of men that had marched through their lives. Jessie thought it might be possible that Gail didn't remember Brent at all.

"Anyway," Gail said. "We'd get a nice dog, one that didn't bite. One that just barked a lot."

What Gail didn't know, and couldn't know, was that Jessie spent part of her days avoiding dogs. She knew where all the dogs in the neighborhood were, she knew which ones people let outside, and which ones were inside dogs. Whenever possible, she went the long way around to avoid dogs that were let out into fenced-in areas. These were usually big dogs, who would bark and growl and jump when they saw Jessie coming. She tried to never go past dogs like that.

Only one time had she bested one of these dogs. Back when Neil was still here, she had been in a rush to get home one time before dark. Three blocks away, some people always let a big German Shepherd roam their small front yard in the evenings. Probably the person got home from work, and let the dog out to go to the bathroom.

Jessie always went around this dog. She would be a tiny snack to the dog, like an after-dinner mint. But this night she was in such a hurry that she was left with no choice – she had to pass the dog.

She rode along on her unicycle, and as she approached where the dog always was, where it always jumped along the fence and scared her, she found herself getting mad. She was mad at the dog, and she was mad at all dogs everywhere, and she was mad at the very fact of dogs. She was tired of them.

When the dog saw her, it came right to the fence, as always. Jessie balled up her fists and shook them at the dog. "You! Dog!" she shouted. "If you bother me I'm gonna kill you! I'm gonna punch you with these fists!"

For the first time ever, the dog backed away. Then it turned around and ignored her. It looked away as if she wasn't there. To date, it was Jessie's only victory over the tyranny of dogs. She didn't want to jinx her luck, so she started avoiding the dog again immediately afterward.

"I don't know," she said to her mom now, sounding as doubtful as she could. There had to be a way to derail this dog plan early, to nip it in the bud, as her mom liked to say. "Who's gonna walk the dog?"

"We'd take turns walking him," Gail said. "You could walk him before you go to school in the morning. And I could walk him in the afternoons when I get home from work, or in the evenings right before I leave, if I'm working the night shift."

Jessie didn't say anything. The idea of not only having the dirty mongrel in the house, but also having to walk it, was not an idea that she wanted to dignify with an answer.

"You know, I just want to do it for you," Gail said. She gently pulled Jessie's hood down, and tousled Jessie hair with her free hand. At first, Jessie flinched, but it was subtle. She was always wary of human touch, but her mom's hands touching her head – that wasn't bad. The power was mostly in Jessie's hands. The sensations she got from her mom's hands were vague and no images came – just a feeling of sorrow, tiredness, and also of love.

The tousling itself was something Jessie liked and wished her mom would do more often. It felt nice. Jessie imagined that this was why cats liked to be petted so much. More hair tousling would make up for a lot of things. More tousling and Jessie could even look past these misguided ideas Gail got hooked on sometimes, like the idea of getting a dog. But the hair tousling didn't come very often, and usually only after Gail had a few drinks.

"I hate leaving you here alone at night, sweetheart. I would feel better if you had a dog here to keep you company, and to protect you."

"Oh, I'm all right, Mom. I'm not scared being here."

It wasn't true. When Gail went to work, and after Jessie finished eating whatever her mother left for her, Jessie usually went straight upstairs to her room. She would put the little 13-inch TV set on upstairs, and watch whatever was on, even though she didn't like many TV shows. She would turn off the overhead light.

As the night settled in, sometimes the old house made creaking noises, as if somebody were walking around downstairs. When she heard sounds like that, Jessie would turn the sound on the TV all the way down. The new, heavy-duty door to her room would be locked, but it wasn't enough. She would take the TV onto the bed with her, and she would cover her head and the TV with a blanket. She would bring Felix the tree sloth under the blanket with her, and make a cave for the two of them under there.

And that's how she would live through the night – under the covers with the TV, in total silence, in a dark house, listening to the sounds downstairs. Even worse, sometimes she would peek out from under the covers. Across the room was the door to her closet. The door didn't close – it was always open just a crack.

Sometimes, as she watched, it seemed as if that crack grew wider as the door slowly opened. And sometimes, it seemed as if there were two red glowing eyes in there, near the floor, looking up at her on the bed, watching her. At those times, she would become paralyzed with fear, unable to move, unable to do anything but stare at those glowing eyes and imagine the creature they belonged to, a hunched-over beast, a boogeyman that lurked in her closet. In the daytime, when the lights were on, she had checked and re-checked that closet countless times. She never found anything. But still, it was impossible to shake the feeling that something lived in there.

When the 11 o-clock news finally came on, Jessie knew that her mom would be home soon. Knowing that was enough to scare away any monsters. She would climb quietly out from under the covers, put the TV back on the dresser, then creep over and unlock her door. She would open the closet and look inside – there was never anyone in there. Then she would get back under the covers and try to sleep, though she never could.

When she heard her mom come in, then she would pretend to sleep. Gail would always come in the room sometime later, maybe after a glass of wine, and shut off the TV. It always looked like Jessie had fallen asleep watching it. Then Gail would kiss her on the head, and go into her own room. For Jessie, it was a scary and lonely little tradition. But it was better than having a dog.

Now, as her mom put her lipstick on and got ready to go out the door, the shadows grew long in the kitchen. The coming darkness made Jessie think of the girl inside the cinderblock wall. Goose bumps popped up along both of her arms. She wanted to mention the girl to her mom, but there didn't seem to be a right way to do it. How could she tell her mom about the girl, without telling her mom that she had gone to a condemned building by herself?

All of a sudden, it seemed very important to get an answer about the girl. Jessie was okay. The scary dark house was okay – she had survived it many times before. She would survive it tonight, and she would survive it the next time, and the next time. But the little girl was trapped behind that stone. She was going to be down there in a sub-basement again tonight, alone, in the dark. And that building was full of crazy people.

"Mom," Jessie said. "Do you believe in ghosts?"

Gail came and kissed Jessie on the forehead. Gail's perfume smelled nice, like lavender. "Honey, there are no ghosts in this house. You don't have to worry about that. Let's get a dog, okay? Let's try it. If we don't like it, we can always bring it back. But if we do like it, we can keep it. Then you won't have to think about any silly old ghosts."

With that, her mom walked down the hall toward the front door. Her keys jingled as she took them out of her pocketbook. Jessie watched her mom's back. An emotion flooded her then. It felt so strong. It was a feeling of yearning, of emptiness, and of loss. She almost raised her arms, reaching out, but she didn't. She felt like a little girl who wanted her mommy. She felt like an orphan.

"I'm locking the door, Jessie. I'll see you later tonight. Please don't stay up too late. I love you."

"I love you too, Mom."

Once the door closed, Jessie sat alone for a few minutes more, then began the hurry-up work of putting the pie away, and heading upstairs to the bedroom.

* * *

The smell was overwhelming.

Strake was in the house, the little boy's house. It had turned out to be a perfect night to see Ethan after all. It was Thursday night, and the parents were out. The parents were out a lot in the evenings, often to charitable banquets or business award dinners. Tonight, though, was a sushi restaurant and then a movie. The end of another long week was coming, and they were enjoying a few hours to themselves. That demonstrated how much they trusted their live-in babysitter Donna. Just enough, Strake would say. Just the right amount.

For a little while, Strake watched through the kitchen doorway. He stood along the wall in the darkened kitchen, the hum of the refrigerator behind him, the tick of a clock nearby. Tick, tick, tick, tick... He stayed very still and quiet in the darkness and hid himself behind the angle of the open doorway, and watched the little boy out in the well-lit living room. Strake's heart quickened with every move the boy made.

Ethan and Donna were on the deep pile carpet, pushing toy trains around a plastic track designed to look like wood. A cartoon about trains with expressive eyes and faces and human personalities played on the big flat-panel TV set. The boy was blonde, five years old, talking a lot about rabbits. He wanted to have rabbits in the house.

Donna humored him. Strake had told her to be nice, to be all sweetness and light from now on. There could be no suspicions raised. Strake couldn't afford it. The parents had to think Donna was just the most wonderful babysitter, and from what Strake saw, she was acting like it.

"I bet your daddy will buy you a rabbit," she said.

"Will he?"

"I think he will, if you ask him."

"Oh yes. Daddy will buy me a rabbit. Daddy will buy me two rabbits."

"Two rabbits," Donna said.

Strake didn't know what to think about Donna. Leonard had told her they planned to kidnap the boy, hold him for ransom, and then give him right back again, as soon as Daddy paid. Maybe she believed it, and maybe she even believed the other lie Leonard had told her, which was that she would get a cut of the ransom. Maybe she really didn't know that Daddy was running out of time to buy the boy a rabbit. Maybe she didn't realize that her own clock was quickly running down.

Strake inhaled deeply. He usually liked little girls over little boys. What was the old saying? Sugar and spice and everything nice. Girls really were sweeter. But somehow this boy was almost as good as a little girl. Yes, almost as good. Almost... perfect.

The scent evoked a powerful lust in Strake. Maybe it was all the time Strake had been locked up. The smells in prison had been adult smells of sweat and body odor, disease taking root, and of corruption, fear, and rage. Those smells were fine, but they weren't like this. He wasn't used to this smell – the clean, fresh smell of innocence. He was drunk on it. He was practically drowning in it.

As Strake watched, Ethan became mesmerized by something going on in the TV show, and he stopped playing completely. He stopped talking about rabbits. He simply stood up, went to the TV, and gazed at it with his jaw agape.

Strake swallowed with difficulty. He almost groaned aloud. He had to work to control his breathing. This was how they became when he took them to the doorway. They went into a sort of dream state, with eyes wide and mouth hanging open. Fear did it, not the TV, but the results looked very similar. The sight of Ethan staring like that evoked powerful body memories in Strake. He began to salivate, just like the dogs in the famous Pavlov experiment. He realized he didn't want to be down here anymore. It wasn't safe – not for Ethan, and not for Strake himself.

Strake slipped out of the kitchen, moved along a darkened hall, and slowly climbed the carpeted stairs, testing each stair for creaks before putting his weight on it. At the top, he turned right and went down the upstairs hallway. He moved quietly from room to room. It was a big house – the father made good money.

Up here, there were four bedrooms. A master suite where the parents stayed. A bedroom where Donna lived, which was also a suite, with its own bathroom and sitting room. An extra bedroom that someone used as a nondescript office. And then the little boy's room. There was also, as Donna had described to him, a guest house on the other side of the pool and the gardens, and that was where the maids went in the evening after their day was over.

But the father and the mother, and the maids, and the house itself, weren't really on Strake's mind. It was the boy. His smell was everywhere. Downstairs, the smell was merely strong. Up here, it was as thick as fog. Strake almost shook from it. He couldn't even go into the boy's room. Indeed, he pulled the door shut – the smell in there was the smell of whiskey to a struggling alcoholic. It was a siren call, luring Strake toward disaster.

DO IT, some part of him said. Take the boy. Kill the babysitter. No matter. You'll find another child. Take the boy tonight.

TAKE HIM NOW.

Strake closed his eyes. His body swayed, the hunger was so strong. A thrumming passed through him, an electricity, a massing of energy that almost gave off a buzzing sound. His entire body tensed up, as if to rend flesh and tear open blood vessels. He reached out and clung to the handrail until the feeling began to pass. It took several moments, and only then did he open his eyes.

He felt a little better now. He took a deep breath to steady himself. It was too soon to take the boy. He knew that. It would throw all his plans into jeopardy. A missing child raised the general alarm. Taking this one now would make it very hard to find and take another in the short time left.

There were only a few days before full dark. Full dark – that period of two, sometimes three nights when there was no moon. It was the only time Strake could open the doorway. He needed the blood of an innocent – like little Ethan – to do it. He had this child guaranteed, it seemed. There were no such guarantees with another child. No. Strake needed to control himself and wait.

On the wall in front of him was a framed portrait of the family. Mommy, Daddy, and Ethan. It was the type of photo that Strake despised – where the smug, self-satisfied family was dressed in casual elegance, sweaters and slacks, and there was some vague sense of an outdoor scene behind them, when in reality the whole thing took place in a photographer's studio against a fake backdrop. Normally, Strake was amused by the foibles of humans. But this photo roused a sense of malice in him. It was only right to take the boy away. It was a kind of rude justice to smash this couple, these hypocrites, to destroy their lives and toss them to the winds.

It would be easy. Tomorrow, Strake would go and inspect the doorway. Karl had vouched that it was intact – Strake had no reason to suspect otherwise. But he would check it himself nonetheless.

Then, on the first night of full dark, his people would come here with Donna and take the child. They would bring the child to Strake, and he would open the child's veins at the threshold of the doorway. The door would open and Strake would pass through with the child.

There, on the other side, in darkness so total that few on this side could possibly imagine it, Strake would devour the child completely, utterly.

* * *

Sid Gold was awake long before dawn.

He lay in his king-sized bed in the shadowy near-dark of his room, listening to the sounds the waterfront house made. He heard the steady hum of the refrigerator, with the occasional heavy plunk of new ice dropping from the ice maker into the plastic container. At some point, the central air conditioning kicked in, meaning the temperature had gone above 73. Here and there other sounds came, sounds he couldn't always place. A creak, a groan. Those were the sounds that made him nervous. The house was five years old, and built to exacting standards. It should be whisper quiet.

Once upon a time, Sid had been proud of this house. He knew to the penny what the place was worth – what all his homes were worth. Nowadays, he had no idea. He didn't care about that kind of thing anymore. He spent most of his time thinking about his life, and about the inevitability of death.

Julia was dead these past three years. She had only enjoyed two years here before the cancer had taken her. Sid never seemed to sleep much since she was gone. Julia had been his protector. She watched over him while his guard was down.

Sid was old. He felt it more and more every day. At eighty-one, his legs and arms were like sticks. He had no strength. He felt tired and grumpy much of the time. He didn't mind the prospect of dying – he even welcomed it. Death meant he might see Julia again, some of his old friends, people he did business with over the years, his parents, even people he knew from his old village in Poland.

As a child, he'd been a devout Jew. As a young man, and a middle-aged man, he'd been a devout atheist. He had never allowed himself to become bitter about it. He had always remained an optimist. Yes, human existence was an accident, a cosmic joke, and the heavens were empty. Even so, a man could make a life on this Earth, and find goodness, and great love, and a sense of contribution. Now, as an old man, Sid didn't know what was true. But he had seen and heard of so many strange things during his time here that he thought there must at least be a chance of an afterlife.

As such, he didn't fear death. He watched it approach with a sort of curiosity. Death had no hold on him. What did frighten him was the thought that one of them would find him before he died – one of the demons.

Darrence Michaels was out there right now, doing combat with a demon that called itself Victor Strake. And Darrence knew Sid's name. He knew where Sid lived, had indeed been to this house several times, had stayed here as a guest. If Darrence were captured, if he were tortured, and if the demon wanted to know who paid Darrence to do the work he did, the answers would lead here. Sid didn't believe the two-man, 24-hour security detail outside would stand much chance against someone like Strake.

Sid should know. He had met Strake before. In the camp.

All these decades later – a lifetime later – Sid had nearly perfected ways of thinking about those days. His subconscious had sanitized the images. He could remember much, and there was also a lot that he just couldn't picture. The camp was teeming with humanity, people who were sick and starving, people who would soon be dead, people whose lives had been ripped from them with sudden, total, terrifying force. Sid had trouble conjuring images of them. It was almost as if he were one of a very few people who actually lived in the camp.

The German officers used Sid as their shoeshine boy. He couldn't remember how or why they had picked him, only that they had. He was young. Maybe they thought he was too young to understand the things they talked about.

He walked to the commandant's house once a day. He remembered this walk as a pleasant time. It took perhaps fifteen minutes, and he would pass through two checkpoints. The soldiers, who stood with machine guns all day long, would raise the gate and let him through with a wave. Past the second gate, he traveled a footpath that wound up a hillside to the house, which sat on the very top of the hill. Everything in the camp was brown and tramped upon and dead, but here there was grass, and nearby was a tall, dense stand of narrow birch trees, dull white with black markings.

And there were blackbirds here, sometimes a whole flock of them dark against the gunmetal sky. Sid could remember the sound of the birds, hidden in a certain bush, talking among themselves. The sky was gray with soot from the smokestacks, and even the grass seemed discolored with it. But if you could tear your eyes away form the camp, the hill revealed views of the surrounding countryside. Out there, not that far away, was a green and blue world.

The house was an old mansion, a place from an earlier era, long before they built the camp. Why was it there? As a boy, Sid didn't know, but he had since found out. A factory had once existed on the site of the camp, and the factory owner had built his house on a hill overlooking his investment. Put all your eggs in one basket, a wise man had once said, and then watch that basket. They had built the camp where they did because several old freight train lines, still usable, converged there. At one time, the trains had carried manufactured goods out into the world on those tracks. Now, the trains carried people to the camp.

Sid spent an hour or more in the mansion each day, shining the big black boots of the officers. Indeed, he would linger there as long as he could. It was a fine house, spotlessly clean, with elegant furnishings. The windows were huge, with lovely white satin curtains tied back to allow in the light of late afternoon. The house made Sid yearn for a time he had never known, a time when dashing men and beautiful ladies threw parties and danced the night away to a live orchestra. Sid, who spent his nights in a bare wooden bunk, in a barracks where rats squabbled in dark corners and the people stared with glass eyes like rag dolls, could yet imagine such a life for himself.

There were always a few people staying there with the commandant, important guests, and they always had some pretty young Jewesses living there, too. The girls would slip Sid extra food when the men weren't looking. Half a cake here, a bit of meat there, even a glass of milk sometimes.

"Live long, little one," they might say to him, with big sad eyes. And he did as they instructed.

They took pity on Sid, except Sid knew what they didn't know – their time in the house was temporary. When the officers grew bored of them, they would be sent away and replaced with a new crop of pretty young girls. More were coming off the trains all the time.

One day, a new officer moved into the house. Herr Strak. Sid was certain that was the name. Even now, so many years later, he was sure of it. Herr Strak was tall and broad, hugely strong, with massive feet and hands. Sid polished his boots many times – they were the boots of a giant, especially compared to those of the other men.

Something changed when Strak arrived. The commandant, so confident, so strong and hearty and reliably Aryan, became ill. Stern and merciless when in the camp reviewing the prisoners, the commandant always seemed relaxed and smiling while at home. But that changed in the presence of Strak. Gradually, the commandant grew apprehensive, and began to wither. He lost weight, and his uniform no longer fit quite right. He would startle at an unexpected sound. Meanwhile, the girls, who used to at least act like they were enjoying themselves, had given up pretending. Their pretty eyes seemed haunted by knowledge too terrible to reveal. Strak alone maintained his good cheer.

One afternoon, Sid kneeled in front of Strak. Strak relaxed in a soft chair, smoking a cigar, while Sid worked on his boots. The aroma from the cigar reached Sid's nostrils and was very pleasant. Behind them, a Victrola phonograph played some Mozart. The sound was sweet to Sid's ears. A girl stood in the corner, cranking the player so it would not wind down.

Rumors raged in the camp. The war was ending soon, and the Nazis were losing badly. The Russians were coming, moving very fast, mowing down all opposition. The thought of Russians coming filled Sid's chest with a feeling so boundless, and so triumphant, that at times he couldn't breathe. Russians! They had broken the back of the German war machine and were killing Nazis by the millions. Sid had never seen a Russian, but he imagined supermen, healthier and stronger even than Germans, supermen driving the Nazis like rats into holes in the ground. He would hug a Russian if he lived long enough to see one.

"Boy," Herr Strak said.

Sid froze. He stared down at the boot he was working on. The boot shined so brightly, Sid could see himself in its polished black surface.

"Look at me."

Slowly, Sid shook his head. He had never looked directly at Herr Strak before. For some reason, he had never wanted to look at Herr Strak.

"Look at me, boy."

The voice was like a cold river flowing beneath a crust of ice. It could not be denied. Sid's head came up like it was on a string. His eyes met Herr Strak's eyes. The man's eyes were deep and black, like twin holes in which a tiny little someone like Sid could fall and fall. There would be no bottom.

"What are you thinking about?" Herr Strak said.

"Nothing," Sid said. He held up his rag and his can of black shine, as if that explained everything.

Herr Strak smiled. "Don't go into business, boy. You're a terrible liar."

Sid looked down at the boots again.

"I have to leave here soon. You know this, right?"

Sid nodded. He did not look up.

"Do you also know that all this trouble with Germans and Jews, and Russians, and Americans... this means nothing to me?"

Sid just stared at the boots. He didn't know. He couldn't know.

"How old are you, boy?"

"T-t-ten. Ten years."

Herr Strak grunted. "Too old. Anyway, I don't imagine there's such a thing as innocence in those wretched barracks, is there? That's all right. I'll look elsewhere."

Strak paused, as if considering something. He took a thoughtful puff on his cigar. Then he decided. "Come, I want to show you something. May you always remember it."

He took Sid by the hand. Sid looked at the girl turning the hand crank on the phonograph. She wore a revealing, low-cut dress. It made her look cheap. The girl averted her gaze as Strak took Sid away. Herr Strak and Sid walked together back through the kitchen, and into another part of the house, a place where Sid had never been. In a narrow hallway, they passed the commandant, who sat slumped in a wicker chair and stared straight ahead. Strak patted the commandant on the top of the head.

"Good boy," Strak said. "Good dog."

Sid watched, astonished. The commandant would have prisoners killed just for speaking in his presence. And now his jaw hung slack. His uniform was rumpled. He made no response to Strak's pat. He just sat there, staring dumbly into space.

Strak led Sid into a bare room. A table and chair sat in the middle of the floor. On the center of the table was a large glass ashtray. A tall cabinet with pull-out drawers stood against one wall. Strak gestured at the chair.

"Please sit," he said, showing Sid more courtesy than he had shown the commandant. Sid did as he was told. Herr Strak went to the cabinet and opened a drawer. He moved some papers around inside the drawer.

"You know, I've taken an interest in you," he announced. "You seem a very bright boy, much brighter than you would like to let on."

Strak came back from the cabinet with some photographs in his hand. He squatted next to Sid, very close. Sid could smell the big man's cologne. It reeked, an acid smell, like sour apples, and beneath it, a different, muskier smell. It was the smell of wet earth, the smell of the grave.

Strak's eyes were bloodshot. Thick, short whiskers stuck out from the pores of his face. His breath smelled like whiskey and coffee and cigarettes. He smiled. For a second, Sid felt that Strak might bite him on the face. He thought he might pass out. The smells of Herr Strak made him sick. Sid trembled and turned away. Out in the hall, the once fearsome commandant stared after them, his eyes like saucers.

Strak began to lay the photos on the table, face up. "You've had some questions that you don't dare ask. I have the answers."

Sid glanced at the first photo and his heart stopped beating. It was a formal portrait of his father. His father wore a wool suit coat, and his hair was slicked tightly to his head. He wasn't smiling. The next was a picture of his mother, also formal. Then his sister Rebekka, two years older than he, in a smiling school picture. Then came a picture of his beloved grandparents, standing together on a country road. Soon, the four photos made a rough square on the table before him.

He'd been separated from his family early on. He had no idea what became of them. He had held out hope all this time that he would be reunited with them. Now the fighting was almost over. And this man, this Herr Strak, seemed to know...

Sid looked up at Strak.

Strak smiled. "All gone," he said.

"All gone?"

Strak shrugged. He took the first photo, the one of Sid's father. He placed it in the ashtray. A small box of matches appeared in his hand, almost as if he were a magician doing a trick. He lit a match and held it to the edge of the photo. Sid watched helplessly as the fire caught and the photograph burned.

"Dead," Strak said. "After all, this is a war. People die."

He placed each picture in turn upon the small fire. He looked hard at Sid, his eyes full of meaning.

"I know you," he said. "And I'll be curious to see what becomes of you. Never forget that."

Sid sat straight up in his bed. His breath caught in his throat, and an electric current of fear ran through him. His eyes darted around the room, looking for evidence of where he was. For a moment, he could still see the whiskers poking out of Strak's leathery face. He could smell the whiskey and the cigarettes and the coffee. He could smell the pictures burning. The conversation with Herr Strak could have taken place moments before.

But it hadn't. It was many years later, the sun was rising, and Sid was in the bedroom of his waterfront home in Sarasota. He had married and raised a family. He had lived an entire lifetime, and had become a wealthy man. He'd had the freedom that such wealth brought. He'd enjoyed the power that a businessman in his prime wields – the power in the marketplace, the power to make things happen, the power over the lives of his workers. But at one time, he'd been a small boy, smaller still because of malnutrition, alone and afraid.

It was Strake. The man in the camp, the mysterious visitor who had broken the commandant, and who had known of Sid's family, was Strake. He disappeared soon after that day. When the first Russian troops came into the camp three weeks later, the commandant still hadn't arisen from his stupor. The Russians (not supermen, no, but skinny and dirty instead, with fierce angry eyes, eyes like razor blades) hung a sign around the commandant's neck with chicken wire, one simple word scrawled there:

Rat.

They beat him and mock-executed him, and afterwards, they left the crying, sniveling shell for the prisoners – the ones with enough strength left – to murder. But the Russians didn't catch Herr Strak. They didn't know anything about him. He was long gone and his presence just a rumor.

Only later did anyone learn of Herr Strak and his kind. The Nazi hunters discovered them after the war. Sid, already a millionaire by 1960, had funded much of that work, and he was privy to its results. At one point, they were using psychics to track down the fugitives, but the psychics were getting odd impressions. They felt that some of the Nazis weren't really Germans. One day, a woman who had the gift touched one of them and recoiled in terror.

"It isn't human," she said.

This was why Sid wanted Darrence to stay retired. Strake was a monster, one who knew Sid, one that Sid never wanted to see again. He wanted Strake to leave this world, and if that meant one more sacrifice...

Sid shook his head. The sacrifice was too terrible to contemplate.

Sid's great shame was that he had considered, during his sleepless nights, having Darrence eliminated. Darrence would never stop. Darrence would die before letting Strake take another child. Darrence would set himself on fire if he thought the flames would burn Strake. But Darrence had nothing left in the tank. Strake was going to capture him and torture him and make him talk. He was going to make Darrence tell him everything, including who had been financing his work all these years.

It really was that simple. The easy answer, the only answer, was to put a stop to Darrence. Just one thing kept Sid from doing so.

Loyalty.

Sid loved Darrence as if he were his own son. If possible, it went even deeper than that. Sid's own son had lived his entire life in wealth and privilege. He was a good man, with beautiful children, but he had never known poverty, nor terror, nor sacrifice. He had never suffered. He had rarely experienced even simple discomfort.

Meanwhile, Darrence had made profound sacrifices to carry out work that Sid had recruited him and paid him to do. Darrence had shouldered burdens, and had shown courage and resourcefulness to compare with anyone Sid had ever known. And Darrence had come here to this home and broken bread with Sid as a friend.

Sid looked out through the curtains at the bay. The sun was up now, the sky was a pale blue, and the morning was bright. Another day in paradise. Sid sat up by the side of the bed, his old body moving slowly. His feet found their slippers by themselves.

He sighed heavily. If Darrence wanted to go after Strake again, Sid respected his decision, and would live with the consequences. If it meant Sid had to die the way so many others had, then so be it. He just prayed, if there was a God, that none of this be visited upon his family.

* * *

Jessie couldn't stop herself.

In the afternoon, when school was over for the day, she went to the dark place again. It was an overcast day, clouds low in the sky, threatening rain. She crept there like before, stashing her unicycle and her bag in the bushes, moving quickly through the debris that littered the grounds outside the building, relying on blind luck that no eyes looked out from the dark and broken windows. The building reminded her of a skull, lying bleached and dead in the dirt. Still, it didn't hold the same terror for her as before. She went to the sub-basement in a businesslike way, careful, quiet, intent.

In one way, it was funny. In her imagination, if left on her own, she would go to a big white house, with manicured lawns and beautiful gardens, and lots of pretty flowers. She would take her gloves off and touch the flowers, and the flowers would send to her messages of love and happiness. Cats were there, too. They roamed those lawns by the dozens. A few of them would let her pick them up. She would pet them and they would purr in her hands. That's where she would go when she had a choice – the gardens in her mind. But in real life, there didn't seem to be any choice, and she went instead to the bottom of the abandoned deaf school.

She stood in the darkness near the wall where the little girl was imprisoned. She waited, her eyes adjusting to the lack of light. She listened to the sounds of the building – water dripping nearby, breaking glass and mad cackles somewhere far away. It seemed that the people who lived in this building didn't even venture this far down. The white cinderblock wall loomed in front of her, its obscene slogans beginning to come into focus. The wall itself almost seemed to glow.

She moved closer, but hesitated to touch it. She didn't want the girl to appear, not just yet. Jessie wasn't ready to see her again. Gradually, Jessie became aware that the wall did glow – it wasn't just in her mind. It glowed an eerie, unearthly white. The glow seemed to grow stronger every moment. She held her hands out, fingers splayed, but still an inch from the wall itself. She held them in the shimmering light, feeling the hum of the energy. She wore her white gloves and got nothing from the energy field itself.

She heard a noise behind her, closer than the earlier sounds. She peered into the darkness back the way she had come. What was that sound? Soon, it resolved into something she could understand. Heavy footfalls in the stairwell. Someone in boots was coming down those stairs and making no effort to hide their approach. This person came down like they owned the place.

He's coming.

Jessie's head swiveled, looking for a way out – but the hallway was a dead-end. The only hiding place was behind the wrecked old boiler. She darted to the boiler, moving light on her feet and praying that she was quiet. She squeezed in behind it. There were only a few inches between it and the wall. The boiler was wet and rusty and corroded. She pressed against it.

It wasn't much of a hiding space. From where she stood, she could look directly at the white, glowing wall. If she craned her neck to the right, she could see just a sliver of the way down the hallway. The footsteps had reached the hallway now, had turned and were coming this way. The steps were slow, unhurried, but not shuffling – just somebody who was taking their time. Jessie's mind went numb. Who could be coming to a place like this? Why would anybody come here? It was a dead-end down here. There was nowhere to go.

Then it hit her: The person must know she was here.

She slid to the floor in the cramped space between the boiler and the wall. The floor was wet with slime. She would be filthy dirty if she escaped from here, but it didn't matter. It did not matter. The most important thing was escape. She squirmed beneath the boiler like an eel. The fit was tight, the ragged edges of the boiler's underside tearing at her back through her flannel shirt, her face pushed against the greasy floor. Her view was sideways now, and all she could see, ten feet away, was the wall.

A pair of boots appeared just in front of her face. The boots seemed huge, more than a foot long, longer than that, wide, with pointed toes. A big man's boots. In the dim light they appeared blood red, and made from snake or some other scaly creature. They stopped inches from her, side by side, and waited a moment. She held her breath. Her heart beat so loud that the man must hear it.

"There you are," a deep voice said.

Jessie fought the urge to scream.

"It's been a long, long time, but I'm back now."

She squeezed her eyes shut. She lay there in the muck, pressed to the concrete floor, her whole body shaking. She knew that not seeing, that pretending she wasn't there, wouldn't help her. She had to see, she had to be ready to run if the chance came. She took a deep, silent breath, and opened her eyes again. The man had moved away and now she had a better view of him.

"I came back for you," she heard him say.

From her worm's eye view, the man appeared gigantic. He was very tall. He wore a dark work shirt, and his shoulders were huge, like the pro wrestlers she sometimes watched when nothing else was on TV. In the shadows, his arms seemed to hang down as far as his knees, like the arms of an ape. He wore tight jeans, and each of his legs was like the trunk of a medium-sized tree. If he found her, there'd be nothing she could do against him. He was too powerful – she felt he could rip this boiler in half with his bare hands.

But his back was to her, and it was clear that he wasn't looking for her. All his attention was taken up by that glowing cinderblock wall, the same one she was here to see. He looked strong enough to punch a hole in it. Instead, he stepped very close, inside the glow. He seemed to sniff the wall, like a dog, or a wolf. Then he breathed deeply, his face moving along the wall. He exhaled slowly, and breathed in deeply again.

He ran a hand along the wall – it seemed almost like a caress. His hand was massive. His fingernails were longish – like claws. He pressed himself against the wall now, his face, his chest, his whole body, his hands just slightly above his head. For a second, Jessie thought he might melt into it.

CHAPTER 04

Strake was lost in reverie.

The pretty little girl was here, yes, here but not here, on the other side of this wall, trapped like a bug in amber just as he had left her years ago. Still there, in a kind of dream state, suspended animation, waiting to be consumed by him when full dark finally came and he once again passed through this doorway. She was a tasty morsel and the thought of her electrified him. He could almost smell her through the wall.

A cloud passed across his mind, ruining the pleasure of being here. He had been stupid that night, much too confident. He would be more careful this time. He had opened the doorway, placed the girl on the other side, then come back for what he imagined would be a quick talk with Darrence Michaels. The doorway would remain open until sunrise.

Instead, Darrence had tricked him, the doorway closed, and Strake wasted ten years in prison, aging like humans aged, becoming weaker and older and less vital with the passage of time. It wasn't obvious on the outside, but he felt it. He wasn't the man he once had been. And he had come very close to being trapped here. Darrence had nearly found the doorway.

If that had happened... Strake wasn't sure what. As far as he understood it, if the doorway was somehow destroyed, and he was trapped on this side of it, that was the end. He would be doomed to live his life out as a human – a powerful human, no doubt, half a god in fact – but with the same ticking clock that all humans faced. On the other side he could regenerate and become young again. And on the other side could he rebuild the doorway.

The door was a magic door. Only the spilled blood of an innocent could open it, and only on a night with no moon. There were two such nights, sometimes three, and they came just once a month. When the door opened, Strake could pass through it, and then his true identity would be revealed.

The real Strake would strike terror in the heart of any human, even more so then he did now. In fact, the human version paled in comparison to the real thing. Here, he was almost impossible to kill – he had confounded the attempts of many a hard human man, men who were strong, men who were brutal, men without fear. There, on the other side, he was immortal.

In his mind's eye, he pictured himself as he had last experienced it – more than ten years ago now. He was monstrous in size. Fifteen feet tall. He had a long, thick tail, and horns on his head, just like the way humans imagined demons, or the devil. His skin was like armor, thick and scaly, black in places and red in others. He had massive wings, and he could fly. He remembered many a night when he was very young, soaring through the black sky, flames erupting in the distance. He had powerful jaws which he would use to rip out the throats of his victims. He would drink their hot blood. He would smear it on his chest. He would practically bathe in blood.

He was a petty king in his land, living in an ancient dark castle, his fortress, a castle far more ancient than himself, with massive paving stones and cracks and fissures in the floor through which flames and foul smoke sometimes erupted from some unnamed and unknown hell below. He had no idea who had built the castle or how he had come to own it. But he sat bedecked in jewels on a giant throne nevertheless, and he feasted on the rotten flesh of dead animals, and he lorded over the imps and jackals and myriad deformed creatures that were his subjects, a mad cackling court of sycophants that carried out his whims.

He took great pride in how he was, but like all the rest of his kind, he always had the urge to come here. In his dark world, there was no goodness, no love and no happiness. Only here could he cause corruption, only here could he contrast the bad with the good, the darkness with the light, and so revel all the more in the stain. Only here could he find innocence to turn, to destroy, to totally devour.

Like this girl – encased on the other side of the door, so young, so fresh, waiting for him all these long days and nights, aware of him here now, yes, so close, aware that soon he would come and take her. He couldn't smell her through this doorway, not yet, but he could smell the coming of full dark, and he could smell the rank odor coming off his body in waves. God, it all turned him on so much that sometimes he wished he could just pass back and forth every day, catching and devouring fresh young flesh.

But alas, it didn't work that way.

He opened his eyes and found himself once again in a bleak hallway, pressed against a white cinderblock wall. He looked around the room where he had built this doorway. It was a dark and barren and disgusting place, with debris scattered in fetid water, and the only thing of note a smashed boiler. But it hadn't always been so.

He had worked here long ago, right in this building. Once upon a time, at least upstairs, the walls and rooms and floors had gleamed. Deaf children had lived here. Deaf children who could not speak, who could not explain their fears about the big strange orderly who worked the overnight shift and sometimes brought them downstairs to play games in the dark sub-basement. He smiled at the memory.

He had to go home. He had long overstayed his welcome on this side. If he stayed here any longer, he would die. He might live a long time in human years, but he would die nonetheless. He had a prison record now. If this society captured him again, they would put him away for a long, long time. There might be no going back then.

As it happened, it was good to go back. Innocence could only be completely devoured on the other side. He could... do things... to them here. He could play with them and torture them and bleed and kill all he wanted, and it was good fun while it lasted, but it always left him vaguely unsatisfied. It didn't sate him. The only way to take innocence into himself, to fully consume it, was on the other side. He didn't understand why. He only knew from long experience that it was so.

A few nights from now, when the night of full dark came, he would go back. He would take Ethan and open the little boy's veins right at this threshold, and he would pass through. He would devour the boy, of course, probably immediately, and then, after he had teased himself with the delay a bit – just a little more waiting after a wait that had already been exquisitely long – he would devour the girl. Little girls were so very tasty.

Then he would be satisfied, and he would sleep. Sometime later, a year, ten years, a hundred years in human terms, when he was rested, he would make a new doorway, return to this world, and start again.

He turned away from the glowing cinderblock wall, and without a backward glance, he strode down the hall to the stairwell. At the bottom, he looked up at the weak daylight filtering down, and he listened for a moment to the demented laughter and howling of the denizens of this building. They sounded a lot like his own subjects in that dark world that was at once so far away, and yet right nearby.

He started climbing. There was so much left to do.

* * *

Jessie lay face down on the muddy floor until she heard the man begin to walk up the stairs. He had taken no notice of her at all. Instead, he had just pressed himself against that wall, harder and harder, his breath becoming stranger and stranger all the while. By the end, he was breathing so hard it almost sounded like he was shrieking. Before it was over, Jessie had shoved a finger in each ear to block it out.

She waited there under the boiler, her heartbeat beginning to slow. The air went out of her lungs in a long, slow hiss. Of everything she had experienced so far, that was the weirdest, and the scariest. Yet somehow, it didn't surprise her. She knew things now. She knew secrets – secrets that she didn't want to know. She might wonder at them, she might be in awe of them, but they didn't surprise her.

He was the carnival barker she had seen in her dreams, the man walking down the highway. Jessie had been right all along – there was a little girl trapped inside that wall, and the man knew about it. He knew and he wanted to get inside there, but for some reason he couldn't do it. He seemed dangerous, almost more animal than man, and he knew about the little girl behind the wall. He knew the secret.

If Jessie was to help the girl, she had to know the secret, too. And that meant she had to follow the man. It was the last thing she wanted to do. Right now, all she wanted was to lay here against this grimy floor, revel in the relief that he was gone, and in a little while, sneak back out to the street and go home. She never wanted to come back here. She wanted to forget all about this.

But she couldn't do it. She had to save the girl if she could. It was her responsibility. She sighed, a child taking on a heavy load, letting the weight of it settle onto her, and she slowly squirmed out from under the boiler. She stood, her legs shaking, the entire front of her shirt and pants stained black with the mud from the floor.

She padded softly down the hall in pursuit of the big man. She moved like a cat, staying close to the wall, ready to dart away if the man should appear again. Her heart, which had begun to settle down, began to pound in her chest. All this pounding couldn't be good for it. She wondered if eleven-year-olds ever had heart attacks.

At the bottom of the stairs, she stopped and listened. Somewhere upstairs, she heard footsteps, moving away. But that could mean anything – it didn't even have to be him. She listened harder, harder than she ever listened before, and became aware that she wasn't really listening at all. Instead, she was using some other sense to feel whether the man was there. She was like an insect with its antennae out, sensing vibrations. The feeling said the man was definitely moving away.

She tip-toed up the stairs, taking them two at a time, her hand moving lightly along the banister, barely touching it. She reached the next floor, and didn't pause. She went straight up to the first floor. She peeked around the corner of the stairwell, just in time to see the man push open the big double doors at the end of the hall. A flood of late afternoon light came in – it was late in the day, the sun was lost behind heavy clouds, and the light was weak, but in this dark place it was almost as if the heavens had opened and angels had come pouring in.

Jessie went to the side window where she had come in. She glanced around outside – the man strolled away down the entrance road, not doing anything to hide himself. He moved casually but quickly, arms swinging a bit, big legs carrying him along like a piece of junk in a fast-moving river. Jessie slid out the window, dropped to the gravel, and ducked low behind a destroyed commercial oven.

She would just have to walk, and follow him. She moved out from behind the oven. In the fading light, Jessie felt more confident now. She felt like an old Native American tracker, following and hunting down a dark spirit. He was easy to follow. He walked quickly, but even as the shadows lengthened, it was nothing to keep an eye on him. He was so big and broad it would be hard to miss him.

The man walked along a busy road, crowded with rush hour traffic. She followed him maybe a mile. She was stealthy about it. Sometimes, she stopped to tie her sneaker. Sometimes, she ducked into doorways and peered out at him. Now and then, a passing adult would look at her and do a double-take. She was caked and coated in mud. She knew the thoughts that would run through their minds without anyone having to tell her.

Where was that girl's mother?

A light, cold rain began to fall. She'd left her unicycle and her bag in the bushes back at the deaf school, and now they were going to get wet – there was no way she was going back to that place today. But it didn't matter. This was more important.

From a bus kiosk where she sat on the bench, she watched the man make a right turn down a side street. There was something hypnotic about him, a fact she realized only after he disappeared from view. It was like a spell was broken. Suddenly, she could look around and notice her surroundings more clearly. Okay, that was good to know – she had to be careful around him. But she also couldn't let him get out of sight.

She ran from the bus kiosk to the side street. She turned the corner and there was no sign of the man. The street was short, with vacant lots on the right side, fenced in, cracked pavement, all becoming overgrown with thick underbrush. A couple of junked step-up vans were parked in one of the lots. They looked like vans someone would have once delivered bread in. On the left side of the street, across from the vacant lots was an old house. It was the only house on the street.

The house was big, rambling, three stories high, with twin turrets in front. It sat up on a knoll above the street. The bushes in front were overgrown, blocking much of it from view. In the gathering dark, it was hard to say what color the house was. Jessie would say blue, with a lot of peeling paint revealing some other, earlier color. Lights were on all over the house, upstairs, downstairs, and she could hear music coming from there as well. A couple of cars and a motorcycle were parked out front.

She moved toward the house. As she got closer, the music grew louder, a heavy, pounding bass line that made the house almost seem to pulsate outwards with each beat. There was a fenced-in alley along the left side of the house, and on instinct, she decided to follow the alley to the backyard. The man must have come to this house – either that, or he ducked into the tangle of woods at the end of the block.

Jessie moved along the side of the house, ducking below the windows. There were garbage cans here, brimming over with trash. The music was very loud. The air seemed to vibrate with it. She shouldn't be here. She should just go home. Instead, she kept going, almost inching along the alley. It was light inside the house, dark out here, so she knew that she could see in but they couldn't see out. That was her advantage.

She peeled off her gloves and put them in the back pocket of her jeans. She took a deep breath. Lightly, just with a couple of fingertips on her right hand, she touched the house. She got some feelings, vague, unformed, wood, forests, workmen, an old house crumbling away, some sense of rot and old age. A sense of the man? Not the man she had seen.

But there was something. He was close. Where was that sense coming from? From her head? It was hard to tell because of the noise. People inside laughed. They shouted. A bottle broke. It reminded her of the people who lived inside the abandoned building. It reminded her of the people Neil used to know.

She had to be careful. She had to pay attention. She was almost to the back of the house now. The last light of day had faded from the sky. She reached the back edge, hand still touching the shingles. Her head tingled like mad. It was too dark to see into the yard.

He's here. He's here. Go! RUN!

The man stepped around the corner. He was huge. He blocked the entire alley. His barrel chest was like a towering brick wall. His eyes were red, glowing, on fire. In the darkness, the eyes were like tiny metal windows to a raging furnace. He didn't look real. That was the thought that would stay with her, the last thought, even if she lived forever – the man didn't look real.

Jessie screamed.

"Can I help you, little girl?"

The man reached out and grabbed her hands in his.

* * *

Burning.

Strake's palms felt like they were on fire. A jolt of heat went up his arms, across his shoulders, and into his head. His jaw locked and a stab of pain pierced his skull. For a fleeting moment, it felt like he had grabbed a downed electricity wire. For half of that moment, he thought his heart might stop.

He let go of the girl. She backed away, a wide-eyed look of horror on her face. For several precious seconds, he found himself in a fog. He noticed the girl's features, yes – long red hair, freckles. But when she turned tail and ran, all Strake did was look down at his hands. He half-expected them to burst into flames. The sensation lasted several seconds, and subsided into a tingling and numbness. He squeezed his hands into fists, then stretched his fingers out, working a little feeling back into them.

The girl had read his mind.

That was the clearest sensation he took away from their little meeting. She knew what he was thinking. She knew... many things about him. It was a queer sensation, to say the least. Strake had heard tell of it, but never experienced it directly. Even so, he knew what it meant. The girl was one of these mind readers.

Just like Darrence Michaels. Terrific news.

Strake sighed heavily, and gazed down the alley at her retreating figure. She reached the front of the house, turned right, and ran for the street.

He had known for a while that she was behind him. He wasn't sure when she started following him – if he was unlucky, it was all the way back at the old deaf home. It wasn't out of the question. She could know about the home, and she could know about his doorway. He stifled a burst of rage. Is that what these idiots were going to do? Send a little girl after him? Now they'd gone beyond the pale. Sending a girl to do a man's job. If he could get his hands around Darrence's neck right now, he would squeeze until the head popped off.

Strake bent over, put his hands on his knees, and took a deep breath, getting his focus back again. In a brief moment, he felt better and stood up straight again. He started to walk down the alley. Then he started to run. If the girl didn't get too far ahead, if he didn't lose sight of her, then he could catch her. When he did, he would find out everything. The nights of full dark were coming, the plan had already been set in motion, and this was no time for a ragged bunch of clowns to step in his way.

The thing that was unfair here was the feeling he was left with – the vague sense that she had penetrated his very mind. He couldn't have stopped her from doing that, whether he wanted to or not. He didn't like that feeling at all.

He'd like to kill someone with a power like that.

* * *

No thoughts came to her – no thought of escape, no thought of wonder, no curiosity. Just two words that repeated over and over again:

Please God, please God, please god, pleasegod, please...

Jessie ran blindly, going as fast as she could, her breath coming in gasps, her lungs burning. She would run until she dropped. Nothing, none of the things that had happened, none of the people whose mind she had read, the deaf school, the girl behind the wall, none of it had prepared her to know the mind of that man. Man? Beast? She didn't know. She didn't care. She ran through the drizzling rain for the lights of the busy street up ahead.

The images came, and she tried to hold them back. She couldn't. They tumbled and flowed over her in a tidal wave, a torrent of horror. There were so many impressions that it was impossible to sort them out. It was impossible to escape from them.

A black land. A dark castle. The girl behind the wall. Many girls before her. A long line of silent, downcast children. Many adults, writhing and howling in agony. Being burned. Being shot. Towers on fire. Dark rain. People hanging. Decapitated heads on stakes and more heads littering the ground. Torture, murder, impossible atrocities. And lording over all of it, a giant demon. Then right at the end, very clear, very quiet, a little boy with blond hair, playing with some toys.

Jessie didn't want to save the girl in the wall anymore. She didn't want to save the little boy. All she wanted to do was get away. She could run. She was the fastest girl in the whole school. She ran for that street ahead of her. She'd give anything to make it to the lights, to the cars, to the people. She'd give anything to be at school, in History class, in Math class. In a boring world where none of this was real. Anywhere but here.

She glanced back, and now he was there, coming after her. She almost couldn't see him. He was like a giant shadow. But his red eyes seemed to glow in the darkness, like laser beams searching for her.

She reached the street. The traffic was heavy, moving fast, bright lights beaming, windshield wipers going \- people were driving home from work. She had to get across. She burst out, not waiting, not timing anything. She crossed the first lane, traffic coming in from the left. She reached the second lane, stumbled, and a car was coming.

Blue headlights filled her vision. She caught a glimpse of a big Mercedes logo on the grill of the car, looming larger, coming straight at her. She screamed as the driver laid on the horn. She heard the screech of brakes and she leapt into the air. The car skidded on the rain-slicked street. A second later the impact came.

Jessie jumped high. She slid right over the hood and thumped loud against the windshield, but didn't go through. It didn't feel like anything. She rolled up and over the top of the car instead, then back down the trunk and onto the street. When she hit the pavement, her first instinct was to get up and keep running. Then the next car came sliding and grinding to a halt, its headlights blinding her, its front bumper stopping inches from her face. She lay bathed in the strange light of the headlights, nearly wedged between the cars. She put her hand on the grill of the second car – warm, wet metal, no feelings, vague, neutral.

Somewhere back in the line, a car crashed into another car. Then another. Then another. She could hear the heavy metal crunch of a succession of cars smashing into each other. People were running now. A woman appeared. Jessie caught a flash of her: short brown hair, a dark business suit. She was crying.

"Is she alive?" the woman screamed. "Is she alive?"

A crowd gathered. It happened instantly, in seconds. Jessie looked across the street. Through the traffic, across from the excited crowd, she saw it. A large shadow was there, black against the dark of night, glowing red eyes watching.

"Are you hurt?" someone said.

"What's your name?" said another.

"You could have died, do you know that?"

The crowd closed around her. Hands reached for her. Quickly, she yanked her gloves from her back pocket and pulled them on. What could she say to these people? That the man over there, across the street, is the Devil?

She stared through a forest of legs. Across the way, the red eyes were gone.

* * *

Strake hovered at the edge of the crowd, circling closer to the little girl.

An ambulance had already pulled up, lights flashing, driving along the sidewalk to get through the stopped traffic. People in the crowd murmured, holding black umbrellas in the rain. Strake moved closer still. The girl was alive, of course. He had seen her moving after the car hit her. The question was how alive? Getting hit by a car like that would have killed a lot of people. But this was no ordinary little girl, was it? Her reflexes and agility were incredible – for a human.

Jessie, her name is Jessie.

Strake was delighted to find that this little bit of information had somehow transferred across to him. What else did he know about her? Hmmm. She lived with her mom. No man was in the picture. What else? Not much... some things just beyond the sight of his mind, things almost on the tip of his tongue, but he didn't have them. Mostly, he had received her terror when they were touching – she'd discovered a lot about him. Maybe everything.

He approached the knot of people from the back. Jessie was looking the other way, away from him. She seemed fine. Agitated, upset, afraid, but also all in one piece. A shame. He'd have been happier if the crash had split open her skull – some injury that might kill her before she made it to the hospital.

An ambulance worker gave her a shot of something. Within half a minute, she had calmed right down. Strake took the time to notice her features. Freckle-faced kid. Button nose. Long red hair. She was cute. That's what the parents would say. "What a cute little girl!" Maybe one day people would say she was pretty, or even beautiful, if she lived that long.

They put her on a stretcher, stabilized her head, picked her up, and slid her into the back of the ambulance. One of the workers climbed in there with her and pulled the door shut behind him. Just before the doors shut, Strake noticed how dirty the girl was. She looked like she'd been rolling around in the mud.

Strake walked up to the driver before the man could get into the ambulance. Already the crowd was thinning – people climbing into their cars. Nothing more to see here. It was time to go home to dinner.

Some cops had arrived. Their lights were red and blue against the black night and the bright white of all the headlights. Traffic was backed up in both directions. The cops stood in the street wearing rain slickers, directing the people whose cars hadn't crashed to clear out.

"Listen, how is she?" Strake said to the ambulance driver.

"She should be fine. A little banged up. Very upset. We're taking her in for a few tests, make sure she doesn't have any fractures or internal injuries."

"I know the woman who hit her," Strake said. "She's in bad shape. Hysterical. Terrified the girl's going to die. I'll check on the girl and let my friend know how she's doing. Where are you taking her?"

"Mercy Hospital's the closest. We'll be there in five minutes."

"Okay. I might even pop over there myself."

"You want to follow me?" the driver said.

"No need. I know the way."

"Okay."

The driver slid into his seat, and was about to pull the door shut.

"Say, did you get the girl's name?" Strake said.

"Yeah, but I have no idea if it's real. She's a kid, and she's not carrying any identification."

"What's the name she gave you?"

"Get this. She says it's Jessie James."

Strake laughed. The driver pulled the door shut, and slowly eased the ambulance off the sidewalk and into traffic. He hit the siren, and immediately the cars in front started pulling over for him.

Strake watched the ambulance disappear into the night. Rain dripped from the end of his nose.

"The outlaw Jessie James is at Mercy Hospital," he said aloud. "I guess we'll see her there."

* * *

An hour later, Strake arrived at the hospital. He wore a blue dress shirt, slacks, and a tie. He parked Candy's black pickup in the lot, and strode across the street to the emergency room. Inside, it was bright and the lights were a sickly yellow. He walked up to the woman manning the reception booth. She was heavyset and pale. The overhead lights made her face seem doughy. There were dark shadows under her eyes. Strake gave her his serious, concerned face.

"Can I help you, sir?"

"My niece was brought in earlier today. She got hit by a car. I'm wondering if she's still here and if she's okay?"

"What's the name?"

"Jessie James."

The woman turned and looked at something on the computer. She made a few keystrokes, clicked on a couple of things.

"Jessica James?"

"Uh, yes. We call her Jessie. Like the bank robber."

"With a name like that, she must get up to some stuff."

Strake smiled. "She sure does."

"Well, what I have here is she's not scheduled to be admitted. She's had a couple of X-rays taken, and a few other tests. Seems like she's due to be released any time now. Her mother came in a little while ago and is in the back with her, if you want to go in there."

"Oh, no. That's fine. I left the car in a no parking zone. I should run out and bring it around."

Strake went out, crossed the street in the rain, and climbed into the pickup again. He started the engine and turned on the windshield wipers, but he kept the headlights off. He slunk down low behind the dashboard and watched the entrance to the hospital. Karl had acquired a Mercedes for him, but he'd barely managed to get in it yet. He only had a short time left here, and he really ought to have some fun. This truck, for example, really was the pits. It belched white smoke when you started it. The interior smelled. The seats were falling apart, the stuffing coming out of them. But if anyone saw him, he wanted them to remember this truck, not his nice new luxury car.

Strake was impatient for the girl – his little train robber Jessie James – to appear.

After a time, the girl came out of the emergency room exit with a woman Strake guessed was her mother. He watched them through the windshield, the wipers beating back and forth. They crossed the parking lot quickly, practically running. Hmmmm. Mom wasn't bad looking, as it turned out. Also, the body language said that Mom was more than just a little annoyed at her daughter. Mom walked a few feet ahead, and spent most of the time turned away from her daughter.

They got into a car. It looked like an old Honda. The car was probably almost as old as this one. There was a dent and a long scrape along one side. The rear bumper hung askew. Mom started it up and the headlights seemed to brighten and dim, depending on whether Mom was giving it gas or not.

When the car pulled out, Strake followed. He didn't need to follow them all the way home. No need to raise suspicions or risk little Jessie spotting him again. Strake's friend Mr. Abel had the awesome resources of the state at his disposal. All Strake had to do was get the license plate number, and Mr. Abel would find out who the car was registered to, and where that car was normally parked.

Strake pulled up behind them at a stoplight. He was right – it was a Honda. A green Honda Accord, to be exact. Not new. In fact, it was pretty well beat to hell. Even had a shattered taillight, shining white, which meant that sooner or later the cops would pull the woman over. She'd better have her papers in order.

Strake took a pen and paper from the glove compartment and jotted down the license plate number. When the light turned green, he let the car go straight without him. He turned left instead. He drove a block and pulled over.

Strake took out the phone Karl had given him and dialed a number. During his time in prison, the mobile telephone had gone from a curiosity reserved for businessmen and people hoping to seem important, to a must-have accessory for nearly every single person in the society, from eight-year-olds to eighty-year-olds. And the advancements they had made! From big, dumb clunky cell phones to these wonderful _smart phones._ Strake had to admit that this was a positive development. He loved his new smart phone.

The call was answered on the second ring. "Yes, Mr. Strake?" It was Abel.

Strake read the license plate number into the phone, and told Abel what he needed. The policeman said he would call back in a few moments.

While waiting, Strake mused a little about that beat up car of theirs. If this girl Jessie turned into any kind of problem at all, Mr. Abel could always pull over the mother and legally detain her. He could do anything he wanted with her. Well, not exactly, not in this country, but Strake had experience with the extraordinary police powers in some other countries. That was the kind of police work he enjoyed most – the kind where you arrested someone, and then they were yours to do with as you saw fit. Strake had lots of ideas about what to do with people who were under arrest. He was excited by these kinds of thoughts.

In fact, it was really more than excitement that he felt. It was glee.

* * *

Gail was talking, but Jessie wasn't listening. The sound of the windshield wipers sweeping back and forth was louder and somehow more important. She remembered how she used to love that sound. It was comforting, once upon a time.

Thunk, thunk.

Thunk, thunk.

"Jessie, this is what I want you to know," Gail said. "I'm relieved that you're okay. I was terrified when they called me. But I want some answers. I just don't understand what's going on with you. You were halfway across town. You ran out into the road and got hit by a car. Your clothes are caked in mud. You don't have your bookbag or your unicycle. And when I ask you what happened, you say it's nothing."

Jessie didn't say a word. She just rode in the car with her mom, staring out at the dark, rain-slicked streets with new eyes. There were monsters out there, something she had often suspected, but now finally knew for 100% real.

"Jessie, will you answer me?"

She was no longer in terror. She had gone numb instead. Sitting in the room at the hospital, being poked and prodded, she had looked into the eyes of each new adult that came in. Their eyes were blank, moving from one thing to the next, figuring out problems, reading labels, measuring levels of things, waiting for the shift to end. They might not be having any fun, they might be stressed out, but they weren't scared. They had no idea what was really going on in this world.

They had made her strip down to a hospital Johnny and her underwear, but mercifully, everyone who came in, everyone who touched her, was wearing rubber gloves. She didn't want to know any more thoughts. She didn't want any more ugly surprises. Each time the door opened, she half-expected to look up and see the demon there, come to kill her. But instead, it would be some nurse or doctor, bustling around, completely absorbed in the boring details of their work and the machinery that told them all the answers they needed to know.

"Jessie, I'm your mother!"

There were things the machines couldn't measure. There was a monster out there, and he was after her. He was older than old, older than this whole country. He had tortured and killed people, he delighted in it, he loved to drink blood and feast on human flesh. He loved to defile the innocent. Jessie didn't even have words for some of the things he loved to do. All she had was brief flashes – pictures in her mind – that she was trying hard to blot out.

She had gone numb because there was no way to defeat this thing. There was no way to avoid it. There was no hope at all. She glanced at her mother behind the wheel, talking away, admonishing her. She was still talking right now, and Jessie couldn't even hear her. She could see her mouth moving, and there were sounds, but they no longer hung together in any way that made sense.

Her Mom had never mentioned things like this. She loved her Mom, but unfortunately, and their history had borne this out over and over again, her Mom didn't really know much about anything.

"You might think it's nothing," her Mom said. "You probably even think it's funny. But what's not funny is I'm going to get a bill from that hospital. It's going to be a lot of money, and we don't have any health insurance right now. That's not going to be funny at all, and it won't surprise me if that bill runs to over a thousand dollars."

What if it isn't real?

Jessie had to admit that she hadn't thought about that before. It was possible, wasn't it? Had she somehow made it all up in her head? A grown-up would call it all a hallucination. The impressions she got when she touched people, those seemed to be real. But what if they weren't? What if even the easy stuff, the small stuff, wasn't real? That would certainly call into question the idea of the girl inside the wall, or the demon man who came and smelled the girl, the demon man who had done so many horrible things and wanted to do even more.

Jessie knew there were people who were sick, mentally ill, and who would lose touch with reality. They would see things that weren't there. Or they would hear voices, or come to believe that they were important people from the past. Some believed that the government, or that aliens from outer space, were watching them or had inserted tracking devices under their skin. These people were crazy. Sometimes they got locked up inside mental hospitals, sometimes for a long, long time. Maybe Jessie was one of these people.

A crazy person. The idea was scary, for sure. If she was making these things up in her head and then believing them, that was bad. But then again, it was actually better than the other possibility, which was that the demon was real. Better he should be a figment of her imagination. Even better she should be locked in a hospital, where the demon couldn't get at her.

"Mom, what if I'm going crazy?"

They were pulling up to the house. Her mom looked at her as she turned the car off, sighed heavily, and then smiled.

"Babe, that would make two of us."

Jessie smiled too. She liked that idea. Maybe both she and her mom could be safely locked up until all of this somehow passed.

* * *

The rain was really coming down now. It drummed like dozens of heavy fingers on the roof of the car.

Darrence Michaels sat in his rental sedan fifty yards back from where the girl's mother had parked her Honda. He had watched them go into the beaten and ugly house. It was a narrow two-story place in a fading neighborhood of homes that had seen their better day. Fifty-year-old houses made from cheap materials to begin with – they hadn't been built to last.

Darrence was uncomfortable tonight. His stump itched. His head, his neck and his hips all ached. He had taken a couple of pills before he left the apartment tonight, but for some reason they weren't kicking in. And now the robot arm was starting to really bother him. The plastic molding didn't seem to sit correctly against his torso. The arm wasn't tight and secure, and even that was causing him some pain. In fact, he realized now that he was gritting his teeth over it.

He glanced at the dog, who sat in the front passenger seat as always, looking wired and ready for action. "It hurts tonight, Dog," Darrence said. "It really hurts." The dog whined.

Darrence wondered about all the pain. There had been times when the arm didn't hurt at all. Two weeks ago today, he had been down in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, sipping Remy Martins on a veranda overlooking the warm waters of the Caribbean as the day slowly faded. It was hot, sure, but he liked hot. And he was in no pain at all.

In the back of his mind, he knew that this Strake thing was coming up, that Strake would be out of prison anytime, and that Darrence would be the one who would have to come up here and deal with it. Who else was there?

Darrence had awesome powers of mind control. He kept Strake far on a back burner, and as long as Strake was back there, Darrence's pain was minimal. But now, up here, Darrence hurt every day. And seeing Strake up close and personal again, that seemed to have brought the pain on full blast.

Darrence sighed. Maybe Sid was right. Maybe he should just retire and live full-time in the Caribbean, where the sun was hot and the drinks were strong and the local girls were kind to a semi-crippled black man who was a bona fide war hero and who had money to spend. Why die over this? Why do it? He had fought the good fight. He was done. No one would blame him. No one could blame him.

And yet still he went on.

He'd known about Karl for years. He had been standing back in the woods near Karl's house when Strake came home today. It was just getting dark, and Darrence was well back in the trees. There was almost no chance that Strake could see him. Even so, the sight of Strake, and the fact of Strake's speed, his agility, his brutality, had given Darrence that sinking feeling again. Darrence had an MP-5 submachine gun in his right hand, and another grenade in his breast pocket. And even so, he was afraid of Strake. He didn't dare take a shot at him. It wouldn't be enough. So what was he doing out there?

He shook his head. He didn't know. But he had been there when the girl came up the street. He watched her go in the back of Karl's house. When that happened, Darrence had no idea what he was looking at. He still didn't. Strake turns up, goes around back, then moments later, a little white girl shows up. Darrence couldn't see what took place in the alley, he was in the wrong position, but he saw what happened next. The girl came out of there going full tilt, ran out into the street and got hit by a car.

Darrence had followed the ambulance to the hospital. He had seen Strake appear there, of course. Strake hadn't bothered to follow the girl here, and maybe that was a good sign. But he had bothered to go to the hospital. It was hard to say what was going on. What did the girl know about Strake, and how did she know it? She was too old to open the doorway, but Strake was obviously interested in her.

Darrence had one responsibility and one only – to find the doorway and destroy it. Failing that, to prevent Strake from leaving and then kill him some other way. Now the little girl was a loose end to keep track of. Time was running out and she made things messy. Darrence longed for a way to eliminate her from consideration. But what could he do, just walk up to the front door, ring the bell, and say:

"What do you know about Strake?"

Not too likely. A one-armed black man comes to your door and spouts some crazy gibberish, what do you do? You call the cops, that's what.

Darrence took a deep drag on his cigarette. The smoke felt good in his lungs. Okay. He would watch the girl for a day or so, but no more than that. Maybe she knew something, and if so, he would try to find out what that was. But he would avoid contacting her, and if Strake came after her, it wasn't Darrence's job to save her. He damn sure wasn't going to die over her. Darrence was here for the doorway, and that was all. The girl and her mom were on their own.

"Dog," he said. "This is really the shit detail, you know that?"

The dog groaned and stared out at the rain.

* * *

Strake stood in the pouring rain outside the back window of the small house.

The gifted Mr. Abel had sent a digital map of the neighborhood right to Strake's phone. Strake had walked down an alley and climbed a fence to arrive here. He had come from a street away, approaching the house from the back rather than the front. It was a dark, dismal night. He wore a black rain slicker with the hood up. He didn't imagine anyone had noticed him.

Yellow light flooded from the window, giving Strake a clear view of everything going on inside. Jessie and her pretty mother sat at a table, with milk and pie in front of them. They sat talking and eating, oblivious to Strake. He was less than ten feet away.

As Strake watched, the mother poured herself a glass of red wine. Both mother and daughter were wet and flushed from being out in the weather.

Rain dripped from the end of Strake's nose. He could join them inside, if he liked. The back door was locked – it was the first thing he tried when he arrived here – but he could also go through this window. Just smash it apart with his body and step right through. But the girl had quick reflexes, didn't she? Yes, very quick. The way she jumped when that car was about to hit her today... not many could react like that. Strake could picture a scenario where he burst through the window without warning and the girl escaped anyway.

Hhhmmm. Maybe Strake could enter in a quieter, less spectacular way. Perhaps he could enter the house without them knowing. It would be nice to sneak inside, catch them with their guard down, and put all his concerns about little Jessie to rest this very evening.

He gazed up at the second floor. A window up there was open just a crack. The opening was a blacker darkness against the dark of the window itself. The window was open perhaps three inches. On any other night, it would be perfectly safe to keep that window open. No ordinary intruder could possibly reach it. But this was tonight, and Strake was no ordinary intruder.

It wouldn't take much for him to scale the wall of this house. He had... unusual abilities in that regard. He could slip quietly through that window and stand there in the dark, waiting for the ladies of the house to come upstairs to bed.

A tiny thrill ran along his spine. Yes, he had another appointment tonight. Yes, he was pressed for time. But he could do both things. He could honor both commitments. His next appointment wasn't for a little while. Right now, he could spend a little quality time here with Jessie and her mom. It wouldn't take long. A few pointed questions, a few moments of blood and exhilaration, and then Strake could move on to the next gathering.

He smiled in the darkness. He could practically smell how the terror would be when the ladies found him inside their home.

He moved silently away from the bright first floor window, and the heart-warming scene within. He dug his powerful fingers into the brickwork of the house, and like a spider, he climbed the wall toward the open second floor window. The rain beat down as he climbed. When he reached the window, it seemed as if only a second later he had passed through it and appeared in the upstairs hall.

It was dark inside the house, and threadbare. He stood at the top of the stairs, gazing down at the empty first floor landing. Just around the corner would be the kitchen where the little girl and her mom were sitting. He could hear their voices from here, but he couldn't make out what they were saying.

Something about this house seemed very, very familiar. He felt drawn down this narrow hallway to the room at the end. He didn't recognize the force that was drawing him there. He couldn't explain it, only that he felt an attraction, a pull, a feeling from outside himself.

He moved through the shadows toward the room. He knew he should take care to go quietly, there must be many creaks and groans in a house such as this, things that would alert the occupants to his presence, but he needn't have worried. He glided silently down the hall as if his feet were inches above the worn carpeting.

He found himself in the room, a little girl's room. Rain spat against the window. A weak light came from the streetlamp outside. There were stuffed animals on the bed. Movie posters on the walls. An old, outdated portable television on the dresser. There was a closet in the corner, the door half-closed. This, he realized, was what had attracted him to the room. He was supposed to go in the closet. He belonged in the closet. It was a curious feeling.

He opened the closet door. It was very dark in there, black as pitch. He couldn't see anything inside it. Even so, he stepped inside, turned, and pulled the door close behind him. He left it open just a crack, little more than a slit. Then, he crouched down near the floor, and he gazed through the crack. In the gloom of the bedroom, he was looking directly at the bed, right where the little girl would lay her head. Yes, this was a very familiar feeling, a very familiar place. Everything about it felt so right.

There was no sound in here except the sound of his heavy breathing. He was aware of a powerful sensation. He craved the little girl, the girl he had watched from here so many times before. He was still Strake, yes, but he was also...

Someone else.

He was someone who crept in dark places, and someone who watched.

He was the boogeyman. And he had known this little girl for so very long, yearning for her, and when she came upstairs tonight, this time he would finally have her.

* * *

It had been a long day.

When Jessie came upstairs, she was very tired. She and her mom had made their specialty for dinner tonight, store-bought apple pie. Wine for her mom, milk for Jessie. That particular combination, milk and apple pie, often seemed to make Jessie sleepy.

Jessie didn't ask her mom to come upstairs with her. She knew that Gail was going to have a glass or two more of wine in the living room, and watch some TV. Later, when Jessie was asleep or almost asleep, she would come up and kiss her on the forehead.

It was okay. Jessie could put her own self to bed. There was nothing her mom could do about the demon man. Jessie hadn't even tried to mention him. It sounded too far-fetched, too crazy. Jessie didn't want her mom to think that she had lost all her marbles. In the meantime, she had escaped from him, the house was locked up, and that would have to be enough for tonight. In the morning, maybe things would seem clearer.

Jessie turned her bedroom light on. All her familiar things blinked into view. Her stuff. Her blankets. Her stuffed animals. Her posters. Her basketball. It was all so normal. The only thing about the room that was wrong was the closet. It was open just a tiny crack, and she was sure she had left it half open.

But the closet was always wrong. No matter how she left it, it always seemed to be open just that tiny amount. A monster lived in there, that's why, and it always pulled the door closed. That's what she had always believed. But after what she had seen today, after seeing real horror, the monster in the closet seemed kind of silly now.

Even so, it was always best to make sure.

* * *

The boogeyman watched as the girl approached.

He tensed in his crouch, his leg muscles poised to spring, hands splayed out, long spindly fingers ready to seize the girl when she opened the door, close over her mouth so she couldn't scream, and pull her down in here, down, down, down into the darkness. He longed to touch her. He would take her away where they could be as one, where she could be his forever.

His razor sharp teeth clicked together in anticipation, though he wasn't aware of that. The door opened, at first only slightly. She was hesitant to come to him. Then the door opened wide, light from the room streaming in, an explosion of white, blinding, burning light. The boogeyman leapt for the girl, reaching, grabbing, wanting.

But the girl wasn't there.

Continued in:

THE DEMON

Book 2 of Demons Among Us

By Patrick Quinlan

Buy it at your favorite e-book retailer.
About the Author

Patrick Quinlan is the author of six novels.

These books include the crime novels Smoked, The Takedown (renamed The Falling Man for ebook publication), The Drop Off, and The Hit. Smoked made numerous bestseller lists in various parts of the world and was translated into four languages.

His thrillers also include the two books of the Demons Among Us horror series, The Girl Inside the Wall and The Demon.

Patrick is the co-author, with legendary film actor Rutger Hauer (Blade Runner, Nighthawks, The Hitcher), of Rutger's memoir, All Those Moments. Available in English and Dutch, All Those Moments was a Los Angeles Times bestseller.

Patrick has been featured or reviewed in major media throughout the world, including _the_ _Boston_ _Globe_ , _the New York Times_ , _the London Times,_ _the Daily Mail_ , _Entertainment Weekly_ , Maine Public Radio, BBC Radio News, and many others. He divides his time between Maine and Florida.

You'll laugh, you'll cry, there might be prizes to win. Check out Patrick's blog at www.theeoptimist.com

And follow Patrick on Twitter:

patricksquinlan

"I'm thinking, but it ain't easy."
