As the girl shuffled toward the bag, Ramsey turned to Kit. Carefully, he removed his glasses.
She glimpsed something dark snaked around his hand. “No.”
“Don’t worry.” He unraveled the extension cord. “You know I’d never harm you.”
He moved fast, like a big animal. He jumped up, his knees on either side of her, and the chair teetered, groaning. His stomach crushed her, suffocated her, and the rough fabric of his jeans scraped her face. He shifted down. She could barely moan. She’d expected his hands to burn damply on her flesh, but they felt dry as corn husks. With a surprisingly gentle efficiency, he wrapped the cord about her throat.
“No, no, don’t move, dear. That’s it now. Almost done.”
She writhed, twisting against his bulk, as he jerked the cord tight.
The room splintered into clattering fragments. A damp hiss emerged from her mouth, and he smiled tenderly.
“That’s it.” Saliva stringed his lips as they parted. “Just another moment.”
A mumbling shriek shook the room. He jumped up, and Kit gasped brokenly, throat bulging against the cord, as the room throbbed like blood. The cry went on, shatteringly, as though it would never end, a scream of horror and outrage and suffering.
“No, no, Stell, no.” Prone on the floor now, he cradled her. “It’s all right. I won’t let anyone hurt you. Stop. I promise. Oh no, Stell, no, baby, no.” He rocked the girl in his arms, while shrieks rattled through her contorted mouth. Her whole clenched body reddened, muscles twitching, as she screamed until at last all the breath poured out of her. It wouldn’t stop; the convulsion shook her. The cords of her face and neck swelled, while her fingernails ripped splinters from the soft wooden floor. “Perry used to get like this too.” Piteously, he looked up at Kit. “When he was just little.” The girl’s feet pounded the boards.
Kit jerked her head desperately from side to side, scraping her head against the back of the chair until the cord slackened. She sucked a burning gulp of air and savored the agony of it. Slowly, her vision cleared.
He crouched with the girl in his arms, and tears streaked his face, mingling with beads of sweat. “Can you help her?” With his open hand, he wiped froth from the girl’s mouth. “If I untie you, can you…?” His face went white with terror. “What was that? Did you hear it?” His chest heaved. “Who said that? Stop that! Don’t! Stop it, I said!”
She attempted to tell him she heard nothing, but her vocal cords wouldn’t work.
“No, Perry, not like this!” Ramsey shouted. Behind him, a shuttered window exploded. Shards of glass scattered against the far wall, and a bullet gouged wood from above the door.
“Chandler! Let her go, Chandler!” The voice boomed on the wind. “Let her go now, or you’ll never get out of there.”
When he dropped his sister, the girl rolled once, then put her hands out and lifted her face from the floor, shaking her head numbly.
“I won’t let him,” Ramsey yelled. Yanking Kit’s revolver from his belt, he rushed to the window. “Not now.” He fired twice, fragmenting what remained of the glass.
The explosions obliterated Kit’s hearing, and a blueblack cloud singed her lungs.
“He can’t hurt us now.” He peered between the slats.
The shout seemed to come from a different direction. “I’ve got the boy, Chandler.”
Ramsey jerked around. Beyond the walls, the ocean howled.
“If you want him, I’ll trade.” The cry sounded nearer. “You hear me, Chandler? Isn’t that what you wanted?”
“Lying. Trying to trick me.” He mumbled rapidly to himself. “He wants her.” And his fingers scraped the side of his face, as though trying to scratch away the sweat. “He wants her for himself.” In his hand, the revolver trembled. “Don’t worry, Stell. I’m here.” He crouched beside her again. “Ramsey’s here. I won’t let him touch you.” Staying low, he scrambled to the far corner of the room, pausing only to push her down again. “No, Stell—stay there.” He shoved the ancient card table, sent it collapsing against the wall. “Wait.” Frantically, he clawed at the floor.
Kit stared.
Beneath his fingers, a section of flooring pulled up with a squeal of rust. The trap crashed open, and a burst of freezing air filled the shack with a thick, fetid stench of waste and rot and dead things churned from the depths. Grabbing Stella by the hand, he yanked her upright. “It’s not very deep.” He dragged Stella to it as she struggled feebly, glassy panic in her eyes. “Truly. See, dear? It goes down under the pier.”
Softly, the sea rumbled below.
“Ramsey?” Another voice probed, thin, urgent. “Ramsey, it’s me, Perry. Don’t hurt her. Ramsey, please, don’t hurt her. You can do anything you want to me. Okay? Stella, can you hear…?” Wind swept the voice away.
“We’ll be all right.” Ramsey jumped down, splashing to his knees. “Just stay with me, Stell.” He sank to his waist, still tugging at her. “There’s just a few steps here. Don’t be afraid. I’ll take care of you.” A wave slapped him, sloshing up into the room, drenching the floor. “Always. I will.”
Though the girl pulled back, he steadied himself against the edge of the trap, holding her with one hand and drawing her down. “It’s so cold. Hurry.” His teeth chattering, he pulled harder until something in her face stopped him.
As though in a trance, she stared down at the water. Her long hair hung motionlessly around her face, and as the wind howled up into the room, her cheeks twisted as though her face were melting. Slowly, she swung one leg forward. Moving like a sleepwalker, she descended into the lapping waves.
“You have to bend down here. Then just keep…”
The thunder of the sea claimed them.
Kit sat alone in the shack. She was alive—that thought alone seemed to rattle in her skull. She was alive. A plume of water rose at the lip of the opening. “Steve.” She choked out his name and then screamed with all her strength. “Steve!” It felt like an explosion of blood in her throat.
The rusted latch rattled, and the door burst at the hinges before falling inward. Steve waved the gun, water rushing in around his ankles.
“Get me the fuck out of here,” she gasped. “I’m freezing to death.” She barely recognized her own grating whisper. “Damn you. What took you so long?”
He stepped warily inside. “Where…?” Following her gaze, he rushed to the trapdoor. A thin ripple stretched after him to trickle over the lip of the opening, seawater joining seawater.
“Now. Please.” She shook against the ropes. “It hurts.”
He flicked his knife open. “I didn’t really believe I’d find you.” The ropes came away, and as she slipped forward he caught her. Somehow her arms went around him, and he pressed her face to his chest. “I didn’t believe.”
“They drowned themselves,” she whispered and felt his body stiffen. She lifted her head.
From the doorway, Perry stared fixedly at the trapdoor. Beyond him, gray chaos raged.
“The boy didn’t run away,” Steve said in a wondering voice.
“…know where they went.” Spinning, Perry fled.
“Wait! Wait a minute!” He rushed to the doorway, then whirled back to her.
“Go,” she told him. “I’m all right now. Go on. Stop him. Save him.”
“No! Come on!” Shaking with urgency, he grabbed at her. “I’m not leaving you here.”
“Steve, I can’t walk. I…”
“Get up!” He yanked her to her feet and wrapped one arm about her waist. “Put your arm over my shoulder.”
She stumbled feebly. “My legs don’t work.”
“That’s it.” He dragged her through the door. “You’re okay.”
A wet mist billowed with each lash of wind. When she saw how close the giant waves heaved, she screamed in terror. The world stunned her, blinded her. Gray light filtered from everywhere, from nowhere, and everything glowed, the water more brightly than the sky. No beach remained, and just this one
tilting section of boardwalk still stood. A flat, foaming surface rushed beneath the pilings.
He pulled her along. Through the mist, she tried to make out the rest of the boardwalk: rocks and splintered pilings poked from the water. A trail of seaweed and pulverized shell sediment covered the sodden boards they slipped across, and the wind staggered them. “My God,” she moaned. Huge waves curled, flinging plumes of foam with each collision. “My God!” A breaker heaved across the dangling rail ahead of her.
He held on to her. “Must have gone this way.” He dragged her toward the ramp. “Do you see him anywhere?”
“No! That’s the ocean!” Leaning on his shoulder, she tensed as he pulled her down the ramp. “We can’t go that way!”
XXIX
The sky churned. Clapping in the wind like a gull, one yellow pennant still trailed from a high cable. Beyond the remnants of the boardwalk, the amusement park sank in a murky tide, and ruined metal structures protruded from the mud like dinosaur bones.
As they splashed into the lot, she leaned heavily against him. “What is this?” A twisted loop of metal blocked the path.
“Used to be a Ferris wheel I think.” He pulled her along. “They can’t be far.”
Something zinged past them; then an explosion echoed faintly. “Get down!” He shouted into the wind, but she heard only a garbled flurry of words. “Stay there!” he barked, shoving her behind a tilting barricade.
She sprawled in the muck. “You jerk!” She spit brackish water and sand.
“Shut up and stay down!”
“Don’t tell me what to…!” Her anger dissipated into the general haze along with her clouding breath. “Do you see them?” Her wrists still flamed where the blood pounded back.
Crouching beside her, he peered over a sheet metal partition, the other end of which ribboned out of the earth to wave in the wind. “Keep your head down, I said.” Beyond the barricade, one of the cars on a broken ride spun continuously in the wind. “What? I can’t hear you.”
“I used to love the tilt-a-whirl.”
“Shut up. You’re hysterical. And keep still.”
“I know I’m hysterical. And stop telling me to shut up.” A shiver began in her stomach, and what little strength she’d been able to muster seemed to drain from her limbs. She let her gaze roam over the ruins of the arcade. Behind them, a fragment of a carousel sloped into a deep pool: galloping animals frozen in panicked flight, drowning. A wooden horse reared, patches of gilt paint still shining, exposing corroded teeth in a silent scream.
Another shot echoed. It sounded faint, harmless.
“Steve?” She had to shout above the wind. “Can you tell where it’s coming from?” She peered over the edge.
“He’s back there,” he yelled, pointing to the edge of the sunken field. Between a pair of concrete outbuildings, a delicate line of white smoke hung briefly in the air. “Keep your head down.”
“Can you see the boy?”
Clutching the gun, Ramsey hazarded a peek around the corner. He couldn’t risk wasting more bullets, but if he could just hold them there long enough for him to find Perry…
Movement! He saw the man leap behind the carousel, and something flashed, bright as an acetylene torch. The bullet spat against the wall by his ear, and particles of concrete lashed his cheek. He cowered. “I don’t know who you are, I must admit,” Ramsey called out. “But I know what you are, what you’ve become.” He pulled the trigger, and his own gun jerked in his hand, roaring, the stench of sulfur blazing into his lungs. “You hunt the boy,” his voice murmured, becoming part of the wind. “Would you even exist without him? Without the hunt? Ask yourself. And what wasteland do you go to now? Look around you. Does not this—at long last—resemble a final destination?” He turned away, staying low. Pressing his bulk against the wall, he slid around the corner. “They’re right out there,” he told her. “We shall have to flee.”
One hand on a drainpipe, the girl hid her face in her arms.
“Do not be afraid, my Stell.”
She trembled, seawater dribbling from the nightgown that clung to her legs.
“My poor Stell. You might get sick now. You could even die. After all this, I might yet lose you.”
She let her arms drop. Her lips had gone blue, and nothing of sanity remained in her expression, as though terror had reduced her to something barely human.
“It will be over soon. I promise.” Fury contorted his face as he whirled away. “Come out to me, Perry! I’ve got Stella here. We will all be together.” He panted loudly, like a wounded animal. “It’s your fault she’s like this! I know where you are. Do not force me to come for you.”
Wind slapped wetly along the ground, echoing the pounding rush of the surf, unseen yet all around them. “…why…?” An exhausted pleading drifted on the wind. “…want to hurt me…?” The wail seemed to fall from the empty sky. “…hate me?” The words clapped hollowly against empty buildings.
“Help him, Steve.” Beside him, she crouched.
“I think the kid’s in that ticket booth,” he mouthed into her ear. “I’m going to try to get to him. Promise me you’ll stay here.”
“I can’t move anyway. Ssh. Listen.”
The voices swirled.
“…hate you?”
They soared, disembodied, like the moaning of specters.
“…know how much I love you? Little Perry, you can’t die thinking I don’t love you.”
She watched Steve crawl away, while the wind howled like demented goblins.
“You’re my brother,” Ramsey called softly, inching farther along the wall. “Family is all we have now.”
He twisted around the corner to peer through the rough tunnel of a window swept clear of glass and casement. “Why do you run from us?”
The wind floated an answer to him. “…want to hurt me?” It came finally in the voice of a child—without toughness or cunning—the voice of a small lost boy, so near.
“Perry? Come to me.”
Steve crawled along the base of the tilt-a-whirl, his elbows sinking into the soft ground as he tried to hold the revolver up out of the muck. He got to his feet, and bolted for the ticket booth, trying to gauge the boy’s exact position, but the voices veered again.
Cautiously, he peered about. Now the voices seemed to drift from behind the fun house. He turned toward a hint of movement.
The earth undulated.
Beyond the broken derricks and the fallen Ferris wheel, a cloud rolled slowly into the lot. He felt his body go rigid. Solid blankness, the cloud oozed nearer, obliterating everything in its path.
Panic tightened in his chest. If the fog reached them, they would vanish. Steve knew he had to move now.
“…won’t make it hurt, Perry.” Fading wind slapped the words away. “I am sorry, but you know I have to do it. And you know why. Trust me—I don’t want to. But it’s up to me now. My responsibility. You must see that. You’re out of control. Soon everyone will see. Everyone will know.” The voice grunted with sudden exertion. “…know I don’t want this. Even when you were only an infant, you were the one I took the beatings for. Always you. You were the reason I let him…to keep him off you.” The words droned faster, became a searing monotone. “…thought you would be the one untouched by it all. But when I read about the killings, I knew. Knew you took after his family—the stories he used to tell us. And I could not allow you to hurt her.”
Then the fog swept over them all. Impossibly, it seemed to move against the wind, sliding inexorably between eddies of air. It buried them.
“Hurt her?”
The boy’s reply came from somewhere quite near, and Steve crawled blindly.
“…would never hurt her.”
Now the voices seemed to emanate from the same point in the mist, and he headed toward it.
“…not able to help yourself…must know…tears my heart out. Don’t prolong this, dear boy. If you come now, I’ll let you see her one last time. She…”
Through a thinner patch—a sort of opaque tunnel—Steve glimpsed sudden movement.
Perry sprang up behind the shattered gate to the fun house. “Run away!” the boy shouted. Behind him, a huge green head tilted, grinning with weathered malevolence, carved teeth yawning cavernously in the wind. “I’m not the one!”
As the mist seemed to solidify around him, Steve froze. Certainty grew in his mind…finally…like the fragment of a forgotten tune…slowly recalled…gaining pattern and rhythm with each heartbeat. He plowed forward. He understood now. He could stop this.
Gurgling screams pierced the mist.
“No!” Blundering toward the screams, he made out the dim shape of the boy. “Stay there!” Wraithlike, the form disappeared between the buildings. “No, wait!” It seemed Steve ran against the cries, pumping his legs but unable to progress, while the howls rasped into a wet, hoarse choke of agony, interspersed with loud panting.
Silence settled thickly.
“Get back, Perry!” Spinning around the corner, Steve leveled the gun. Nothing stirred in the muddy field behind the buildings. Then he saw him.
Drenched and bedraggled, Ramsey lay on his back in the gravel, one shoulder propped awkwardly against a wall. His chest heaved, and his twitching legs splayed brokenly. Thick fluid puddled around him on the muddy concrete.
Steve gaped at the red ruin of the man’s groin.
Ramsey stared up with lids at half-mast. His mouth hung slackly, his expression full of sadness and pain. He twitched again, a hiss gurgling in his open mouth.
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