"Oh," said DeAnne.
Step had studied folklore in college and he knew from the start how the story would end. They all ended that way. "That actually happened to your wife? Or didn't you hear it from a friend of a friend?"
Douglas laughed softly. "You're the man who called me up because you had that list, and you're asking me if this is just some fairy tale? Yeah, we're always skeptical about the other guy's story. But I don't really care whether you believe me because that's not what I'm trying to tell you anyway. What I'm telling you is, there's some people who do things so bad it tears at the fabric of the world, and then there's some people so sweet and good that they can feel it when the world gets torn. They see things, they know things, only they're so good and pure that they don't understand what it is that they're seeing. I think that's what's been happening to your boy.
What's going on here in Steuben is so evil and he is so good and pure that he can't help but feel it. The minute he got to Steuben he must have felt it, and it made him sad. My wife was like that, always sad. The rest of us, we've got good and evil mixed up in us, and our own badness makes so much noise we can't hear the evil of the monster out there. But your Stevie, he can hear it. He can hear the names of the boys. Only, just like my wife made a dream out of it, a dream of trying to put on a dress, your Stevie takes those names and he makes friends out of them. And to him those friends are real because the evil that pushed those names into his mind, that is real."
"So you don't think Stevie is crazy," said Step.
"Hell, you know he ain't crazy. You got the list, don't yo u?"
"Is there something we should do?" asked DeAnne.
"I can't think of anything, except hold on to your children, hold them tight, keep them safe."
"Yes sir," said Step.
Douglas got up. "I need me a cigarette now, so I'll be on my way."
"I'm sorry we bothe red you about something that turned out not to be helpful to you," said Step.
"Oh, this helped me a lot."
"It did?"
"Sure," said Douglas. He stood in the open doorway. Step and DeAnne stepped out onto the porch with him. "Before you called," said Douglas, lighting a cigarette, "we weren't a hundred percent sure that there even was a serial killer. But now-well, now I know. Because otherwise your son wouldn't have known those names, now, would he? They wouldn't have been all together in a list, would they, unless they all had something in common with each other and with no one else. There's a few kids disappear every year, and it's not evil, it just happens. It's part of the order of nature. Your son never noticed those. These he noticed. So now I know."
"You can't use this to prove it to anybody else," said Step.
"Don't have to prove it to anybody else," said Douglas. "I know it. So now I'll never rest till I find this guy and stop him."
"And then will Stevie stop having these- imaginary friends?"
"When the source of his affliction is gone, then there won't be any need for him to deal with it anymore, will there? My wife never dreamed the same dream twice."
He started to walk toward his car, when DeAnne called after him. "Do you still want us to give you a list of people we think might've sent that record?"
"Why not?" he said. "Might turn out to be useful."
"We'll phone you this afternoon, OK?"
"Fine," he said. "If I'm not there, tell it to whoever answers the phone, they'll be expecting it."
He got in his car and drove off. DeAnne and Step went back in the house, sat down at the kitchen table, and wrote down their list of names. People who had reason, or thought they had reason, to hate the Fletchers as of the time they got that record in the mail. Mrs. Jones, Dicky Northanger, Lee Weeks, Roland McIntyre. They debated back and forth about including Dolores LeSueur's name, but they finally did. It was ludicrous to think of Dolores LeSueur as a serial killer- it was ludicrous to think of a woman as a serial killer-but the list had to be complete or why make it?
They phoned it in. As Douglas had said, the man on the phone was expecting them, and he was thorough and businesslike. And then it was done.
Step and DeAnne faced each other across the table. "What a Sunday," said Step.
"This is going to sound awful," said DeAnne, "because that serial killer is still out there somewhere, but ... I feel better now."
"Me too," said Step. And then he laughed in relief. "Stevie isn't crazy. All that shit from Dr. Weeks-forgive me, but a spade's a spade-that's all back in the crock it came from. Whatever's going on in Stevie's life, it isn't made up and we didn't cause it and he isn't crazy. It's the real world that he's living in, only just as we thought, he sees it more deeply and truly than the rest of us. And when you think about it, it's kind of sweet, isn't it? I mean, whatever happened to these lost boys, they still live on in Stevie's mind. He imagines them and he's made playmates out of them, he's made friends out of them. And I'm not afraid of them anymore."
"I'm still afraid," said DeAnne. "I can't help that."
"Well, so am I-of the killer."
" I wish we lived somewhere else," said DeAnne. "I wish we could take Stevie away from this place."
"Me too," said Step. "But this is the place where the doctors know about Zap. This is the ward that fasted and prayed for him. The rest of us can live anywhere, but Zap is already part of the life of this place. Those people in our ward, you think they're going to watch Zap grow up and think, What a strange- looking kid, why can't he hold his head up? No. They're going to say, we know that boy, he's one of us. We'll never find that anywhere else, DeAnne."
"I know," she said. "I know." But she was not yet comforted.
"The danger is still here," said Step, touching the newspaper article again. "But it's not pointed at us. I mean, it's like the article says, a child in Steuben is still far more likely to be killed in a traffic accident or a gunshot accident than to be a victim of this killer. Parents have to be less trusting of strangers for a while, that's all. And we were already nearly paranoid, so I think we'll be fine."
She nodded.
"And we can't afford to move, DeAnne. Unless you think it's worth abandoning everything and scurrying home to your parents' basement."
"I guess I'm just thinking, I don't want to be a grownup anymore. I want to go home and have mom and dad take care of me." She laughed at herself. "It's hard to be mom and dad. Isn't it? Because anything you decide might be wrong."
"Heck, everything we decide will be wrong," said Step, "because no matter what we do, something bad will happen later. So I refuse to regret any of it. I don't regret taking the job with Eight Bits and I don't regret quitting. I don't regret all those expensive tests they ran on Zap, because we had to know. I especially don't regret that day when I saw you talking on the phone and I thought I had never seen anything so beautiful as my wife being kind to someone else who was in need."
She leaned over to him and put her arms around him and rested her head on his chest for a moment. "You make me feel so good."
"And think of this," said Step. "We not only got some assur ance that nobody in our house is crazy, but we also got our bedroom cleaned for the first time since we moved in."
She pretended to bite him through his shirt, and then sat back up. "Well, no matter what I feel, it's time to feed Zap, if I can wake him up. I'm beginning to think if I didn't wake him up for meals he'd sleep the rest of his life away."