The Homing

by John Saul

  He’d refused to give in to the pain in his lungs, the pounding of his heart, the agony in his legs. When his coach had come over to find out if he was all right, he’d tossed it off, claiming he’d just gotten a cramp, then rubbed the muscles of his right calf as if to prove the lie. The coach had bought it—or at least pretended to, which was just as good—and he’d stood up and gone back to the track.

  He’d made it through the four laps, but by the last one he’d only been able to maintain a pace that was little more than a fast walk.

  The coach had told him to try harder or go home.

  He’d tried harder, but in the end he’d gone home.

  And each day it had grown worse.

  Each day, he’d struggled a little harder against the pain.

  The day before yesterday he’d gone to the doctor for the fourth time since New Year’s, and once again the doctor hadn’t been able to find anything wrong. Once again he’d answered all the questions: Yes, he was fine when he came back from Maui with his mom after New Year’s. No, his father hadn’t been there; he’d gone to Grand Cayman with his new wife and their baby. No, it didn’t bother him that his dad hadn’t gone to Maui with them—in fact, he was glad his mom had dumped his dad, since his dad seemed to like hitting both of them when he got drunk, which had been practically every night the last couple of years before he finally left. No, he didn’t hate his dad. He didn’t like him much, and was glad he was gone, but he didn’t hate him.

  What he hated was the way he felt.

  The doctor had said maybe he should see a shrink, but he wasn’t about to do that. Only geeks and losers went to shrinks. Whatever was wrong, he’d get over it by himself. But during the last two days the pain had become almost unbearable. He was having nightmares, and waking up unable to breathe, and his whole body had started hurting all the time.

  This afternoon, when he’d started feeling that maybe it might be better just to die if he couldn’t get away from the pain, he’d cut out after school and driven around for a while until finally a cop had stopped him and given him a ticket for having a broken muffler. So now what the hell was he going to do? He couldn’t afford to pay for the ticket, let alone get the damn muffler on the car fixed. Besides, what was the big deal? It didn’t make that much noise, and hardly stank up the inside of the car at all. But his mom was going to give him hell for the ticket anyway, and his dad would only launch into an endless lecture about how much it costs to raise two families if he asked to borrow the money to fix the muffler.

  What a goddam mess!

  Turning into the tree-lined block on which he’d lived all his life, he pressed the button on the sun visor that would activate the garage door opener while he was still two houses away, and turned into the driveway just as the door opened fully. Automatically starting the game he played against himself every afternoon, he pressed the button again, trying to gauge it so that the descending garage door would barely miss the rear end of the car as he pulled it inside.

  Today he missed, and the car jolted sharply as the garage door glanced off the rear bumper. So now there would be scrapes on the car and the garage door, as well as the ticket and the bad muffler.

  And he still hurt.

  Maybe, instead of going into the house, he’d just sit here a while.

  Sit here and see what happened.

  A feeling of warmth spread through him, washing away the pain he’d been enduring, and suddenly everything began to seem better.

  Maybe he’d finally found the answer to his problems.

  Without his mother.

  Without his coach.

  Even without his doctor.

  The boy closed his eyes, breathed deeply, and, for the first time in weeks, felt no pain.

  For the woman, the day had been no better than it had for her son, starting with an early call from her ex-husband suggesting that they renegotiate his child support payments. Translation: the bimbo he’d run off with wanted more money to spend on herself. Well, she’d disabused him of that idea pretty quickly. At noon she’d discovered that an associate who was a full year junior to her was going to get the partnership slot that should have been hers. So now she was faced with a decision: sit it out for another year, or start job hunting. But she knew the answer to that one: she wasn’t going to be made a partner, ever, so she might as well start checking with the headhunters.

  Then, just when things looked as though they couldn’t get any worse, the doctor had called to recommend a good psychiatrist for her son. Well, before she sent him off to a shrink, she’d have him checked out by someone else. Except that the HMO probably wouldn’t pay for it, and the trip to Maui at New Year’s had strained the budget as far as it would go.

  Still, she’d figure out something.

  Turning into the driveway, she jabbed the remote on the visor, bringing the car to a complete stop as she waited for the garage door to open.

  It was the noise of her son’s car more than the fumes that poured out of the garage that told her that something was wrong. Slamming the gear lever into Park with one hand as she opened the door with the other, she slid out of her car and ran into the garage.

  Now she could see her son slumped inside the car, his legs up on the front passenger seat, his back resting against the driver’s door. His head was lolling on his chest.

  Stifling a scream, she grabbed the driver’s door handle.

  Locked!

  She ran around the car and tried the other door, then called her son’s name.

  Nothing!

  Wait!

  Had something moved inside the car?

  She cupped her hands over her eyes and peered into its shadowy interior.

  His chest was moving! He was still breathing!

  Coughing as the fumes in the garage filled her lungs, she fumbled for the extra key that hung from a nail under the workbench, shoved open the door to the kitchen, and grabbed the phone. “My son!” she cried as soon as the 911 operator answered. “Oh, God, I need an ambulance!”

  A carefully measured voice calmly asked for her address.

  Her address!

  Her mind was suddenly blank. “I can’t—oh, God! It’s—” Then it came back to her, and she blurted out a number. “On North Maple, between Dayton and Clifton. Oh, God, hurry! He locked himself in the car in the garage, and—”

  “It’s all right, ma’am,” the calm voice broke in. “An Aid car is already on its way.”

  Dropping the phone on the counter, she raced back to the garage. She had to get the car open—she had to! A hammer! There used to be a sledgehammer at the end of the workbench! Squeezing between the front of her son’s car and the wooden bench, she uttered a silent prayer that her ex-husband hadn’t simply helped himself to the big maul. He hadn’t—it was right where she remembered it. Grasping its handle with both hands, she hoisted it up, then slammed its huge metal head into the passenger window of her son’s car. The safety glass shattered into thousands of tiny pieces, and instantly the woman dropped the hammer to the floor, snaked a hand through the broken window, and pulled the door open. Reaching across her son’s body, she switched the ignition off, and the loud rumble of the motor died away, only to be instantly replaced by the wail of a fast-approaching siren. She grasped her son’s ankles and started trying to pull him out of the car, but before she’d managed to haul him even halfway through the door, two white-clad medics were taking over, gently easing her aside as they pulled the boy out of the car and clamped an oxygen mask over his face. As he began to stir, her panic at last began to ease its grip.

  “He’s coming around,” one of them assured her as they carried him out of the garage and put him on a stretcher. “Looks like he’s going to make it okay.”

  Her son began struggling as the medics put him into the ambulance and started to close its rear door.

  “I want to come,” the woman begged. “For God’s sake! He’s my son!”

  The door to the ambulance reopened, and the woman scrambled i
nside. With the siren wailing, the ambulance raced toward Cedars-Sinai Hospital, nearly twenty blocks away.

  The ride seemed to take forever, with the woman watching helplessly as her son struggled against the two medics, one of whom was trying to hold the boy still while the other kept the oxygen mask pressed firmly over his nose and mouth. Clutching her son’s hand, the woman tried to soothe him, and finally his struggles eased. But then, just as the ambulance pulled to a stop at the hospital’s emergency entrance, she felt his hand suddenly relax in hers. His whole body went limp on the stretcher.

  She heard one of the medics curse softly.

  Her body went numb, and when the doors were yanked open from the outside, she climbed out of the ambulance slowly, as if she’d fallen into a trance.

  The crew rushed her son into the emergency room, where a team of doctors waited to take over for the medics.

  She followed the stretcher into the hospital.

  Silently, she watched the doctors work, but already knew what was coming.

  And in the end, she heard the same words she’d heard first from her son’s doctor, then from the ambulance crew: “I don’t understand—he should be doing fine!”

  But her son—her sweet, handsome only son—wasn’t doing fine.

  Her son was dead.

  In The Presence, John Saul—bestselling master of nineteen previous chilling works of fiction in addition to the six volumes of The Blackstone Chronicles—delivers his most terrifying novel to date.

  Don’t miss John Saul’s new novel

  of breathtaking suspense—available in

  bookstores everywhere.

  THE PRESENCE

  A master of supernatural suspense, John Saul knows what transpires in the black folds of night—and who will be touched by

  THE RIGHT HAND OF EVIL

  by

  JOHN SAUL

  The hellish day of

  reckoning has arrived

  at bookstores everywhere

  from Ballantine Books.

  More tales of chilling horror from

  JOHN SAUL

  GUARDIAN

  A telephone rings in the dead of night with shocking news for single mother MaryAnne Carpenter: Her friends, the Wilkensons, are suddenly, inexplicably, dead, leaving MaryAnne’s godchild abruptly orphaned.

  But as MaryAnne rushes to the Wilkensons’ ranch to embrace her young charge, disturbing questions mount. Was it an accident that killed her friends? Or murder?

  Now, as winter batters the ranch with blinding, dangerous storms, a series of horrific murders bearing the marks of a wild animal draws closer to MaryAnne and her young family.

  GUARDIAN

  by John Saul

  Published by Fawcett Books.

  Available in your local bookstore.

  DON’T MISS JOHN SAUL’S CHILLING SERIALIZED TALE

  The Blackstone

  Chronicles

  Master of terror in all its forms, John Saul now thrills us with a serial novel that brings to terrifying life the small New England town of Blackstone—and the secrets and sins that lay buried there.

  From the top of Blackstone’s highest hill the old Blackstone Asylum casts its shadow over the village. Built in the 1890s to confine the town’s misfits, the Asylum has stood vacant for decades. But now, the wrecker’s ball is about to strike, smashing into stone—and unleashing a terrible evil, an unholy fear long locked within these walls.

  Soon, strange gifts will begin to appear on the doorsteps of Blackstone’s finest citizens.

  Each bears a mysterious history.

  Each brings a horrifying power to harm.

  Each reveals another thread in the suspensefully woven web of…

  The Blackstone Chronicles

  The Serial Thriller Complete in One Volume

  Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group.

  Available in bookstores everywhere.

  BLACK LIGHTNING

  by

  JOHN SAUL

  For five years Seattle journalist Anne Jeffers has pursued the horrifying story of a sadistic serial killer’s bloody reign, capture, trial, and appeal—crusading to keep the wheels of justice churning toward the electric chair.

  Now the day of execution has come. A convicted killer will meet his end. Anne believes her long nightmare is over. But she’s dead wrong.…

  BLACK LIGHTNING

  by John Saul

  Published by Fawcett Books.

  Available in bookstores everywhere.

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