CHAPTER FOURTEEN
NATHAN’S RUNNING THROUGH the woods again, at dusk again, through thick gray fog again, his breath coming in hoarse gasps. The leaves crunch under his tan suede combat boots. He’s moving as fast as his legs will carry him…faster than he’s moved in years. He’s stronger than he’s been in years. As he runs, the ground shakes with the footsteps behind him, great crashing footsteps, snapping logs, shattering rocks. And they’re getting closer. Nathan nearly slips on a moss-slick log. A small tree cracks in half behind him, like a giant bone snapping in two.
Fog-blind, fear-blind, Nathan feels a blow to his midsection, a stabbing pain in his side. He’s run into a broken tree branch. He feels for blood, looks down at his hand, and sees a hand much younger than his own. He now sees that he’s dressed in brown, tan, and gray camouflage…like the combat utility uniform Jeremy wore in Afghanistan. And his hands are young, like Jeremy’s were. Nathan’s not sure he’s himself anymore. He might be Jeremy. His hand is shiny with blood from the wound in his side.
A log cracks not far behind with the sound of a pistol shot and Nathan, or maybe Jeremy, sees a massive figure burst through the trees toward him. Nathan/Jeremy can’t see him clearly through the fog, but the man is huge—not quite big enough to shake the earth with his steps, though that is what’s happening in this nightmare forest, but far bigger than Nathan. Nathan pushes off the tree and begins to run again. His heart is screaming in his chest, threatening to explode. He can’t suck in enough breath. His legs, though younger than they’ve been in decades, are tiring. The thin layer of leaves under his feet has thickened. The leaves have turned wet and gummy now and he’s sinking up to his ankles in the muck. With each step he must yank his foot until it finally pulls free with a loud sucking sound.
Nathan/Jeremy doesn’t dare look over his shoulder, but he knows if he did he’d see the man-monster not far behind him, gaining on him. He’s running, stumbling, crawling, running again, stumbling…and then, just like that, he’s had it. He can’t run another step. He sees a furrow in the ground, half concealed by a log, and crawls to it, his wounded side crying out in pain. He rolls into the depression and squeezes as far as he can under the log.
The footsteps thud toward him. He holds his breath, wishing he could quiet the deafening pounding of his heart. Above him, the footsteps slow, then stop. Nathan hears labored breathing. Each breath is accompanied by a low, angry, predatory growl. The man is above Nathan now, literally right above him, straddling the furrow where Nathan is hiding. The man is looking around. Nathan can’t see his face clearly but one feature stands out. His mouth is torn. His left cheek has a terrible gash in it several inches long, running from the corner of his mouth to the center of his cheek, as if someone stuck a knife in his mouth and sliced it, elongating the opening by three inches. The wound is fresh and raw and blood drips heavily from it. He’s right on top of Nathan—how is it that he hasn’t seen Nathan down here? A few drops of blood drip from the man’s cheek and land on Nathan’s own cheek and it takes all of Nathan’s will not to recoil, not to reach up and wipe away the blood. Nathan—or is he Jeremy?—is dressed like a soldier, so he must know how to fight. Still, he somehow knows he is no match for the man. The man looks around again, growls in frustration, and stomps off, the ground quaking beneath his feet. Nathan forces himself to count to twenty as the angry footsteps recede, then he rolls out of hiding and begins to run again. He must not have been quiet enough though, because out in the fog the man bellows and the footsteps crash toward Nathan again.
Having seen the man’s awful face, Nathan is more desperate than ever to escape him. And suddenly—
Nathan is standing apart from the other two. A dark dream magic has transformed Nathan from participant to observer. He sees the younger man running, blood seeping through his uniform shirt. Nathan can’t see him well but, yes, it could be Jeremy. Mere steps behind, the big man with the torn face pounds savagely through the trees. Nathan watches as Jeremy stumbles out of the forest onto a riverbank. The river winds through the forest, into fog and trees. Above the forest in the distance, above the hazy tree line on the horizon, looms an incongruous shape—a castle, with crenellated walls and soaring parapets, far away but still visible through the fog, the medieval structure impossibly huge. It doesn’t belong there, that castle. Too big, too dark…it just doesn’t belong there.
Jeremy stumbles toward the river. It could provide safety, Nathan thinks. Please God, maybe the man chasing him can’t swim. Jeremy wades into the water. The current grabs him hard, yanks him downstream. He’s spinning out of control, tumbling under, struggling to keep his head above the roiling surface. The man dives in after him and starts to swim, his smooth, supernaturally powerful strokes pulling him through the water faster than humanly possible. Nathan watches as they head into the fog. Too soon they are gone down the river, gone in the fog. Nathan knows he can’t catch them.
He falls to his knees, crawls across hard rocks and sharp sticks, to the river’s edge. A sense of déjà vu taunts him and he wants to wake up, wants desperately to wake up. But he can’t and it’s killing him, not being able to wake up. So for far too long a time he kneels there, his face in his hands, cold and alone.
NATHAN OPENED HIS eyes and blinked away the tears pooling in them. He remembered every terrible detail of the dream. The shaking of the forest floor, the snapping of branches, the sight of that horrible, torn face. He remembered the man’s savage, angry grunts and the warm, wet stickiness of his blood on Nathan’s cheek. And he remembered kneeling by that river, the river that took his Jeremy away, with that monster right behind. He remembered kneeling by that river for what seemed like hours. He could still feel the stones biting into his knees, the fog dampening his skin, and, of course, the tears stinging his eyes.
He rolled over without the faintest hope of falling back to sleep.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
ALICE CLOSED HER eyes and rested her forehead against the cool tile of the shower wall, letting the hot water beat down on her shoulders. She’d already showered after her late-afternoon run through the park, but she was tense and the best way for her to relieve tension had always been a hot shower. She wasn’t sure she could bring herself to do it, frankly, not after she saw the little boy’s handprints on the outside of her fifth-floor window. And certainly not after she’d sketched the little bastard staring at her while she’d slept. But it was late now and she was exhausted and she wanted desperately to fall asleep so she wouldn’t have to think about the boy until morning. She figured a hot shower was her best bet. So she checked the apartment one more time to make sure no mysterious little first graders were lurking anywhere, confirmed that both locks on the apartment door were engaged, and turned on the shower. Before stepping under the water, she made sure the bathroom door was locked, too.
She let the water massage her neck for another minute, then straightened up, grabbed the shampoo, and lathered her hair. She dug her fingernails into her scalp, massaging the shampoo into her roots, enjoying the sensation. With a full lather, she stuck her head directly under the nozzle. The water roared in her ears, making it hard to think, which was perfect because she didn’t want to think at the moment. She just wanted to stand there listening to the water, just the sound of the water and…a small squeak. She tilted her head, listening for a sound that wasn’t water. There it was again. She opened her eyes and tried to swipe the suds from them, blinking at the shampoo-sting.
Squeeeeeeak. Long and slow, sounding like something dry sliding across something moist. Another squeeeeeak. The sound was close, almost like it was right there in the shower with her.
Alice wiped her eyes furiously and, when she was able to see, almost wished she still had her eyes closed. Through the bumpy, wavy glass of the shower door she saw a figure in silhouette—a boy-sized one. It was fuzzy, blurred by both the condensation on, and pebbly surface of, the glass of the door, but it was most definitely there. And it stood only a foot outside the shower.
She heard another squeak and saw a line appear in the condensation. It was like the boy—because that was who was out there, of course, the blond boy—was writing on the door with his finger, drawing something in the misted glass. He added a line to the several that she now saw were already there. As Alice watched, the marks faded away. As they did, she realized they were letters. Two of them. An H, then an N, only the N was backward, the way a lot of young kids write it, with the slanting line running from lower left to upper right instead of the reverse. Then they were gone, faded away.
Alice’s heart banged almost painfully in her chest. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t even move. Finally she blinked, which was a start. She’d been certain that when she opened her eyes the boy would be gone, but he was still there.
Alice had never been so frightened. Part of her wanted to close her eyes until the boy went away. Another part of her wanted to throw the door open and grab the kid and shake him until he told her what the hell he wanted with her.
She did neither. Instead, she reached a shaky hand toward the glass and put her palm against it. She held it there, waiting, not breathing. Then the silhouette reached its hand up and placed it on the glass opposite hers. She still couldn’t see any detail through the glass and she wasn’t sure she wanted to. Nonetheless, she squatted down and moved her face closer to the glass. The figure did the same. Through the pebbled glass, the featureless face changed shape slightly, again and again, rhythmically, and she realized it was opening and closing its mouth. It was speaking. Or trying to. Without taking her hand from the glass, without turning her head, she reached with her other hand and turned off the water. The boy’s mouth still moved but she couldn’t hear words. Not even a single sound but the water dripping.
She slowly took her hand away from the glass. She sucked in a breath, grasped the handle of the door, and slid it open in one quick jerk. She hadn’t known what she would do when she was finally face-to-face with the boy. She’d simply acted.
It didn’t matter. The boy was gone.
“WHAT ARE H AND N, kid?” she asked the empty room.
Alice stood in her studio, her hands wrapped around a hot mug of tea, her body wrapped in a plaid flannel bathrobe. Every light in the apartment blazed. She had stacked most of her art in one corner. What remained was spread out on the floor around her—every painting or sketch she’d done in which the blond boy appeared.
“What are you trying to tell me?”
In the painting he was pointing to the right of the frame. His left. What was he pointing at? The clouds? A building in the distance? Was he simply pointing east or north or whatever direction he was pointing?
“Help me out here, kid.”
He was pointing again, toward somewhere or at something, in the pastel sketch of the boathouse. In one of the pencil drawings he was waving at her. Looked like he was waving in another, too. And in the flip cartoon she’d made, of course, he was beckoning her to follow him.
The more she stared at the artwork, the more she became convinced that the boy was somehow familiar to her. She had no clue where she’d ever seen him, if indeed she had, but he really seemed familiar.
He looked…hmm…yup, he looked a bit like Daniel. Was that possible? She knelt down and squinted at the first of the flip sketches. Though mostly in profile, it was the most detailed face she’d drawn.
Could that have been Daniel when he was…what? Six? Maybe seven? She tried to remember pictures of her husband at that age. She knew she’d seen them. She would have looked for them right then but didn’t want to interrupt her thinking and she knew their photo albums of older pictures were in their assigned storage facility in the basement of the building, along with the clutter of their lives, the kinds of things that most people never use again, or even look at, but can’t bring themselves to throw away.
“Is that you, Daniel?”
It wasn’t close to a slam dunk, but she thought it could have been a young Daniel.
“And what about the H and N?”
Were they initials? If so, whose? Not Daniel’s. Their last name was Norville, so the N worked, but if the boy was Daniel, wouldn’t he have written “DN?”
So maybe the boy wasn’t Daniel. Why would a boy haunt her specifically? There had to be some sort of connection, right? Either the boy knew her or was family, right? So if the familiarity she felt was indeed due to a family resemblance, who could the boy be? Alice’s maiden name was Cutler, so it wouldn’t have been someone from her side of the family. She ran down a list of Daniel’s male ancestors, the ones she could remember. Father John, older brother Richard, oldest brother Donald, Grandpa Nicholas, and…it was on the tip of her tongue…oh, yeah, great-grandfather Frederick.
“Well, no one with H for a first initial and that’s as far back as I can go,” she said. “But that’s probably far enough, right? I can’t see Daniel’s great-great-grandfather haunting me. And if he did, he certainly wouldn’t wear a Welcome Back Kotter T-shirt, would he? No, he’d be in knickers and suspenders or something. So either they aren’t initials, or there’s some kid with the initials HN that I haven’t —”
She stopped. Thought about it. Shook her head. Thought about it some more. It would explain the resemblance to Daniel and maybe in some mystical way, her strong sense of familiarity. In a small voice, she asked, “Is that you, Henry?”
A teardrop landed on the pastel drawing, shed for an unborn baby, a fetus miscarried three years ago…a baby boy that Alice and Daniel Norville were going to call Henry.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
BOONE OPENED HIS eyes. He was lying on the sofa in his living room. Something had awakened him. A sound? His DVD book was playing. He had no idea what chapter he was on, but he thought he might have drifted off during chapter eleven. He pushed a button on his watch and a little mechanical voice told him it was 2:16 a.m. He’d been asleep for a while and during that time, nothing in the book woke him up. The guy who sounded like Morgan Freeman had a soothing voice. There were no noises or sound effects in the audiobook, not even background music, merely narration. Boone wondered what had jarred him from his sleep. He mentally shrugged. It could have been anything. He reached up behind his head, grabbed the DVD player’s remote control from the arm of the sofa, and turned off the book. He debated whether to go to bed or just spend the night right where he was. He was reasonably comfortable, so he closed his eyes.
He snapped them open. There it was again. A sound. A…voice? It was in his apartment. Coming from down the hall. From his bedroom. How had people gotten into the apartment without his hearing? His apartment had only one door. Boone supposed that whoever it was could have gotten in through a window—he was only on the second floor, after all—but he kept his windows locked and he would have heard glass breaking. So how had they gotten in? If they came in through the door, how had they sneaked past him? He was a light sleeper and, probably as compensation for his reduced sight, he had excellent hearing.
He heard the voice again. A man’s voice. Deep and…weird.
Boone’s first instinct was just to get the hell out of the apartment. But if someone had wanted to hurt him, he could have done so while Boone was lying there asleep and vulnerable. He decided instead to call 9-1-1 and whisper that he had an intruder. Then he’d yell that he’d called 9-1-1 and whoever was in the apartment had better get out.
It actually galled Boone to feel—no, to be—so helpless. Before his accident, he’d have marched down the hall armed with nothing more than a golf club and defended his home himself. But his ruined sight made him cautious. He knew his limits. He wasn’t stupid.
He heard talking again from down the hall and quietly reached for the phone that he knew was on the end table. He was about to dial when he paused. He couldn’t make out the words he heard, but something about the voice was familiar.
Phone in hand, he stood and took a few silent steps toward his bedroom. The words grew louder. They had a strange cadence. They weren’t strung into sentences; they wer
e disjointed, coming in small groups.
Boone took a few more steps and something dark flitted through the shadows on the edge of his vision. Instinctively, he turned his head to look but realized he could see far less that way. He cocked his head to the side and wished, after all, that he’d grabbed a long-unused five iron from the front hall. Then he thought, crazily, that a shorter seven iron would be better in these close quarters. Boone moved his head around, searching the shadows with his peripheral vision. It was frustrating to be so nearly blind. He regretted not turning on a light when he’d entered the hallway, but he hadn’t wanted to alert the intruder to his presence. He stood rigid and ready, one hand fisted, the other holding the phone. Finally, he decided that he must have imagined seeing movement. He realized, however, that the time had come to call the police. He was about to retreat to the living room and dial the phone when he paused again. Suddenly, he recognized the voice and he nearly laughed. He blew out a shaky breath.
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