Gone.
He drew his service pistol, a nine-millimeter Beretta, and laid it on the desk before him.
He felt at his pocket. Withdrew a single object: a bullet. It was golden, gleaming with wicked beauty appropriately reminiscent of the day that his family had died: surely a day graced with their beauty before it had ended in such wicked senselessness.
He chambered the bullet. Stared at the gun.
But as it had with the deer, it seemed fate would not allow Jason the respite of death this day: there was a knock at the door. In a smoothly practiced motion, Jason ejected the bullet and pocketed it a half-second before the door swung open.
On the other side of the door was Hatty Cooper, his receptionist. Hatty was in her late sixties, an ex-schoolteacher who had taught most of the children in Rising - including Jason before he had wandered into the fairyland of the Big City and become a police detective with the LAPD and been happy for a time before the fairy tale ended in darkness, as all true fairy tales did. Hatty was a surly soul, a brittle, no-nonsense exterior that hid - barely - a heart the size of the Olympic Mountains and a brain that was every bit its equal. If anyone told you the mayor was in charge of this town, they were either lying or they hadn't met Hatty yet.
Jason opened his mouth to greet her, but before he could she said, brusquely, "Thank the Lord you're finally back."
"Why?" asked Jason, more than a little surprised at Hatty's tone. Usually she had a kind word or two for him upon his return from the hunt.
Her next words explained instantly to him why the normally imperturbable woman was acting so uncharacteristically stressed: "Little Sean Rand's gone missing."
Jason instantly went on full alert. "What?" he said.
"We tried to find you," said Hatty, "but you can be tough to reach when you're communing."
Jason felt the breath leave his body. Sean Rand? Jason knew the boy, as everyone in Rising knew everyone else, and was still reeling inside. The boy was a beautiful, precocious child of seven or eight, he knew. And from what he had seen, the boy was not the type to go wandering off, which was the usual case when someone went missing in Rising - usually to be found only a few hours later. But everything in the way Hatty was speaking, her posture, the way she pursed her lips as she waited for Jason's next words, it all added up to something much worse than a case of a child who had wandered down the wrong path and been lost for a few hours.
"When did this happen?" asked Jason.
"A week ago," said Hatty simply.
"A week?" Jason almost shouted. Before he could follow up with a "What happened?" Hatty was already speaking again. She glanced at the wall clock and said, "Memorial service is about to begin at the cemetery."
Jason blinked. This was all coming at him too fast. "Memorial service?" he said. "You said he was missing, not dead."
Without waiting for a reply, Jason hurried out the door. "Fill me in on the way," he said, and then left the Sheriff's station, Hatty at his heels.
He hustled around to the driver's side of his truck as Hatty opened the passenger's side and got in. Then Jason stopped in his tracks before touching the door.
The truck bed was empty.
No deer.
Bloody ropes lay coiled in messy piles: ample evidence that the buck had been there. But wherever it was, it was no longer in the truck. Nor would the butcher have taken it already. George typically did not do his pickup until help had arrived at the store, usually around ten or eleven in the morning.
But Jason had no time to do more than be disturbed by the absence of the corpse. He hopped in the truck, joining a visibly impatient Hatty. They drove in silence for a short time, a few moments that allowed Jason to notice the funereal gloom that had settled like a fog over the town. Corner store, post office, feed barn, all closed. The houses were shut as well, and there was an unusual absence of children and their mothers playing and walking along the streets.
"Why a funeral service?" Jason finally asked Hatty. "You said he's just missing."
"They...." Hatty began speaking, but her voice petered out into nothing almost instantly.
"What, Hatty?" asked Jason. "Now's not the time to be demure." He looked over at her, his voice softening instantly as he realized that for the first time in his memory Hatty was on the verge of breaking into tears. "Sorry, Hatty," he whispered, and patted her shoulder. "Just-"
She waved him off, drying the tears on a handkerchief that she produced from somewhere in the folds of her coat. "There was blood, Sheriff," she said in answer to his earlier question. "No body, but lots of blood."
"How much?" asked Jason, and a chill settled over him, a gloomy sense of despair that was quite different from the lifeless sense of isolated disconnection he had come to accept as his lot.
"Too much," was all Hatty said.
Jason felt his mouth thin to a bloodless slash, his lips pressed together so tightly he could literally feel the blood rushing from them. "Any witnesses?"
"One. Amy-Lynn. Little Sean's momma."
"What's she got to say about it?"
Hatty quieted again, and Jason could sense without looking that she was growing even more disturbed when asked about the boy's mother. "She hasn't said much of anything since it happened," said Hatty at last. "Locked herself in her bedroom, mumbling nonsense."
"What kind of nonsense?"
Hatty paused pregnantly, long enough that Jason wondered if he was going to have to ask the question again. Then she spoke, and her voice was raspy and dry. "She said, 'Monster got my boy. Monster stole my baby.'"
Jason blinked, then turned into the lane that led to the Rising Cemetery. It was an old-fashioned kind of place, misty and heavily treed. Beautiful in the full light of day, but in the morning when the fog still hung on it, or at night when the moon illuminated the older headstones that hunched like evil guardians in the midst of the newer and more well-maintained markers, this was the kind of cemetery that children would dare each other to enter.
"What about Sean's father?" asked Jason. He turned up a small hill, following a line of cars that were obviously here for the funeral: the cemetery was small enough that there were only a few places where new burials might occur, and as the Sheriff of Rising, Jason knew them all.
"He was at Poker night with Bill Thompson and Fred Whittaker when it happened. Ron came home and found the basement..." and here Hatty gulped as though it had been she that had made the horrifying discovery, "...looking like it did, his wife curled up on the floor."
Jason stopped the car and got out, trudging up to the large group that stood just up the hill, clearly in the middle of the service. Christ, he thought, looks like the whole town is here. Out loud, he said, "What's the FBI said about this?"
"Not a damn thing," answered Hatty. "First they wouldn't talk to me, just the Sheriff."
Jason snorted. "I was on my vaca-"
"Which I dutifully told them," Hatty interrupted. "They weren't interested. Then when I finally got through to someone who'd listen, reception on the phones started going all fuzzy. The FBI guy I talked to told me to fax him the details."
"Did you?"
"Day before yesterday."
"And?"
"No response."
They quieted as they approached the mourners at the service, Jason whispering quietly, "Why would they do this?"
Hatty looked at the assembled townsfolk. "Afraid. It's a way to keep the ghosts at bay."
"He might not even be dead," said Jason, and his voice was loud enough that some of the group turned and stared at him.
Hatty laid a hand on his arm. "Sheriff, I saw the place. Believe me, the boy is dead."
"Not until I find him, he's not," said Jason through clenched teeth. But he said it quietly, recognizing Hatty's wisdom in not voicing such opinions aloud, particularly without having any kind of a handle on what had happened here.
Daniel Wells, the pastor at Rising's one and only church, was speaking. "And though he has not been found," said
the portly gentleman, "we know that all will once more be found, at the morning of the First Resurrection, when the innocent and the just will be called to Christ's side. Amen."
Whispered "amen"s greeted the end of the pastor's homily. Jason glanced around as the pastor uttered a short benediction. He noticed little Sean Rand's mother, sitting beside her husband. Ron was on his feet along with most of the rest of the assemblage, but Amy-Lynn was in a wheelchair, vacant eyes staring at nothing. She twitched occasionally, as though minute electrical shocks were being run through her body, but other than that she looked as though she were already dead herself. Ron, for his part, clearly was trying to understand what had happened to his life. Jason felt his heart tug in sympathy. He knew what it was to lose a child. To lose a son. To lose -
Stop it, he told himself. Now is not the time. Not the time.
Never the time.
The benediction ended, and mourners started shuffling past the small gravestone that had no casket beneath it. Flowers fell to the mown grass, and Jason noticed how many of the mourners were children: the Rand family was well liked in Rising, and Sean had been a rare delight.
Pastor Wells came over to Jason as the mourners filed past, and Jason felt his gut clench. He didn't have anything against the pastor as a person, but he was damned if he could see why he would ever want to attend church again. Not after what had happened. The way Jason saw it, either there was no God, or if there was then the Devil was not only real, but also much stronger than any other deity. Neither was a particularly good reason to go to church in Jason's mind. But the pastor insisted on trying to get him there every time the two bumped into one another. It was too bad, because Jason had heard that Wells played a mean game of poker and was a genuinely fun person to spend time with. But, again, if that came at the cost of having to listen to repeated invitations to church, then it wasn't worth it in Jason's mind.
"Good to see you here, Sheriff," said Wells, holding out his hand. Jason shook it. "We've missed you at church," he continued.
Jason broke off the handshake at that. "Hard to see how you could miss me, considering I've never been to your church."
"That's why we miss you, of course," said Wells with a grandfatherly grin. "Why don't you come down this week?"
"Not much to believe in these days, Pastor," said Jason. Wells opened his mouth - no doubt to dole out some platitude about the importance of believing even when it appeared there was nothing to believe in - but the sheriff cut him off before he could speak. He pointed at Sean's parents, and said, "How's the family holding up?"
Again the pastor opened his mouth to speak, and again he was interrupted. This time, however, it was by Sean Rand's mother, Amy-Lynn. The woman began shrieking. "Give him back! Bring back my baby!" She erupted from her wheelchair, throwing off her husband's restraining arm and rushing at the gravestone that marked Sean's empty grave. She began slamming the marker stone with her fists. "He's not there!" she shouted. "He's not down there! He's dead but not down there, he's down there but gone, now give him back!" The smack of her fists could be clearly heard in the calm air of the cemetery, and soon they were leaving bloody smears on the marker as her hysterical strength caused her to pound her fists to pieces against the gravestone.
Ron rushed to his wife's side and tried to pry her away from the marker, but couldn't. Jason rushed through the confused and horror-struck crowd, adding his strength to Ron's, the two of them struggling vainly against Amy-Lynn. The woman only weighed perhaps one hundred fifteen pounds, and should have been easily overpowered by the two of them, but Jason felt like he was trying to pull a mother grizzly off a honey tree.
One of the mourners, Doc Peabody, an older man who had grown up at a time when doctors still made house calls, rushed forward. "Hold her tight, Sheriff," said the doctor. He produced the black bag that he carried with him whenever he went out to visit a patient. That in itself told Jason volumes about how badly off Amy-Lynn was: the doctor had clearly come prepared for such an outbreak as this.
Doc Peabody withdrew a syringe from his bag. "She's been doing this all week," he said to the sheriff, then injected Amy-Lynn as Jason and Ron held the woman tight while she shrieked. "I was worried this would happen," said the old man as he pushed down the plunger and injected Amy-Lynn. A moment later the woman's panicked screaming had become a muted sobbing. Then she closed her eyes.
Jason felt himself - and everyone else - relax a bit as the medication took hold of the bereft mother. Then he jumped in fright as her eyes slapped suddenly open. The pupils were wide and unnaturally dark, and Jason was reminded of the buck that had charged him - had it been only a few hours ago? It already seemed like a lifetime had passed since The Dream and since the deer had attacked him.
Amy-Lynn spoke, and the voice that emerged was not entirely her own. It was dark and guttural, as though she were herself speaking from below the ground, as though she had taken the place of her son and volunteered to be buried, but had then come back from the grave with a sinister, recondite message. "The dark," she said, almost angrily. "The clocks. Time slows down. And you're all alone."
Then she shrieked, and her entire body spasmed, muscles locking in a death-like rictus. A moment later she relaxed suddenly. She slept.
Ron looked at Doc Peabody with eyes that Jason again recognized: the eyes of someone who has lived a dream, only to be wakened suddenly and brought into the angry nightmare of life.
"What do I do?" asked Ron.
"I'm going to take her back to my office, keep her there for observation," answered Doc. "If that's all right with you, that is."
Ron nodded. He laughed, and Jason could tell that the man was rapidly closing in on hysteria himself.
The mourners started trickling away, made too uncomfortable by this string of events to stay and pay any further respects.
Doc helped Ron get Amy-Lynn's limp body back into the wheelchair, then the young father made as if to follow Doc back to the medical van that was parked nearby.
Doc shook his head. "You get some rest, Ronny. She's just going to sleep for a few hours; you can come see her when she wakes."
Doc wheeled Amy-Lynn away, and the rest of the mourners dispersed. Within moments Jason was alone at the graveside with Hatty, Ron, and Pastor Wells. The pastor held Ron's arm tightly for a moment, then said, "I'll be home all day. Come by and visit if you want."
Ron nodded, but didn't really seem to see what was going on around him as the pastor departed. Jason waited until Wells was gone before he looked at Ron and said, uncomfortably, "Ron, I'm sorry. I...I know nothing will help, but I'm truly sorry."
Strangely, as he had this morning with the deer, Jason suddenly felt more connected than he usually did. This time there was an obvious reason, though: he had suddenly found a brother, one born not of the same mother, but one born of blood and loss. He and Ron both belonged to an exclusive and horrible club: the group of men who had had to bury their own children.
Ron looked at him, and saw that the man seemed to understand the same thing, because Ron suddenly embraced him tightly, then released him just as quickly, seeming almost embarrassed at his sudden display of emotion.
After an uncomfortable moment of silence, Jason said, "I'm going to come by later, if that's all right. Look around the house?"
Ron nodded, looking numb. "I won't be there, staying at my brother's place," he answered. "But the door's unlocked. Go on in."
Jason touched Ron's shoulder, then he and Hatty turned to leave.
"It got him."
Jason turned back to look at the other man. "What did you say?" he asked Ron.
"Sean was always afraid of the monster in the basement," said Ron. He giggled again, and Jason was dismayed to see the hysteria he had sensed in the man bubbling to the surface. Ron quelled it though, at least partially. "Always afraid of that monster," he repeated, and then grinned lopsidedly.
"I guess it finally got him."
***
THREE
*
**
Lenore Harris stood in an empty classroom, and thought about what a difference a boy could make. Sean Rand, beautiful little Sean, who so loved to draw and color and read, was gone.
Gone.
Lenore drew her gray sweater tighter around her shoulders, and shivered.
Her sweater was not the only thing that was gray about her. From her shapeless skirt to her equally unflattering blouse, from the tips of her orthopedic shoes to the scrunchy she used to pull her hair back into a severe bun, all of it was a featureless gray. An observer might think she was trying to melt into the scenery. Nor was that far from the truth. Lenore had been born extremely extroverted; the kind of child who would yell hellos to strangers a half block away, and not only that but would keep yelling until the person or people turned around and said hello back. And she had continued that way through high school, where she was the captain of the cheerleading team in a busy Chicago public school, the captain of the drama club, and a county champion on the debate team.
But all that had changed. On a single night, she had gone from a proud peacock, strutting and boasting of her beautiful plumage to all the world, to a voiceless raven, dark and hovering at the edges of life, hopeful that none would notice her. Her dress merely reflected her deep desires to remain anonymous and invisible.
Invisible was good. The monsters couldn't find you if you were invisible.
Lenore knew she was like a child, afraid in the night and pulling her covers over her head in the vain hope that the monsters that she suspected - that she knew - were out there would pass her by and leave her, this time, unmolested.
The only people that she hoped would notice her now were the children. And to them - and them alone - she could come alive. She could show herself to them because, quite simply, at eight years old they were too young to hurt her, or even to threaten her.
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