They listened to the town. Nothing. Just the breeze.
Lisa finally said, “It's dead.”
“We can't be sure,” Bryce said.
“Don't you feel it?” Lisa insisted, “Feel the difference. It's gone! It's dead. You can feel the change in the air.”
Bryce realized the girl was right. The shape-changer had not been merely a physical presence, but a spiritual one as well; he had been able to sense the evil of it, an almost tangible malevolence. Apparently, the ancient enemy had emitted subtle emanations — Vibrations? Psychic waves? — that couldn't be seen or heard but which were registered on an instinctual level. They left a stain on the soul. And now those vibrations were gone. There was no menace in the air.
Bryce took a deep breath. The air was clean, fresh, sweet.
Tal said, “If you don't want to get in a car just yet, don't worry about it. We can wait awhile. I'm okay. I'll be fine.”
“I've changed my mind,” Bryce said, “We can go. Nothing's going to stop us. Lisa's right. It's dead.”
In the patrol car, as Bryce started the engine, Jenny said, “You remember what Flyte said about the creature's intelligence? When he was speaking to it, through the computer, he told it that it had probably acquired its intelligence and selfawareness only after it had begun consuming intelligent creatures.”
“I remember,” Tal said from the back seat, where, he sat with Lisa, “It didn't like hearing that.”
“And so?” Bryce asked, “What's your point, Doc?”
“Well, if it acquired its intelligence by absorbing our knowledge and cognitive mechanisms… then did it also acquire its cruelty and viciousness from us, from mankind?” She saw that the question made Bryce uneasy, but she plunged on. “When you come right down to it, maybe the only real devils are human beings; not all of us; not the species as a whole; just the ones whore twisted, the ones who somehow never acquire empathy or compassion. If the shape-changer was the Satan of mythology, perhaps the evil in human beings isn't a reflection of the Devil; perhaps the Devil is only a reflection of the savagery and brutality of our own kind. Maybe what we've done is… create the Devil in our own image.”
Bryce was silent. Then: “You may be right. I suspect you are. There's no use wasting energy being afraid — of devils, demons, and things that go bump in the night… because, ultimately, we'll never encounter anything more terrifying than the monsters among us. Hell is where we make it.”
They drove down Skyline Road.
Snowfield looked serene and beautiful.
Nothing tried to stop them.
Chapter 45
Good and Evil
On Sunday evening, one week after Jenny and Lisa found Snowfield in its graveyard silence, five days after the death of the shape-changer, they were at the hospital in Santa Mira, visiting Tal Whitman. He had, after all, suffered a toxin reaction to some fluid secreted by the shape-changer and had also developed a mild infection, but he had never been in serious danger. Now he was almost as good as new — and eager to go home.
When Lisa and Jenny stepped into Tal's room, he was seated in a chair by the window, reading a magazine. He was dressed in his uniform. His gun and holster were lying on a small table beside the chair.
Lisa hugged him before he could get up, and Tal hugged her back.
“Looking' good,” she told him.
“Looking' fine,” he told her.
“Like a million bucks.”
“Like two million.”
“You'll turn the ladies' heads.”
“And you'll make the boys do back-flips.”
It was a ritual they went through every day, a small ceremony of affection that always elicited a smile from Lisa. Jenny loved to see it; Lisa didn't smile often these days. In the past week, she hadn't laughed not once.
Tal stood up, and Jenny hugged him, too. She said, “Bryce is with Timmy. He'll be up in a little while.”
“You know,” Tal said “he seems to be handling that situation a whole lot better. All this past year, you could see how Timmy's condition was killing him. Now he seems able to cope with it.”
Jenny nodded. “He'd gotten it in his head that Timmy would be better off dead. But up in Snowfield, he had a change of heart. I think he decided that, after all, there wasn't a fate worse than death. Where there life, there's hope.”
“That's what they say.”
“In another year, if Timmy's still in a coma, Bryce might change his mind again. But for the moment, he seems grateful just to be able to sit down there for a while each day, holding his little boy's warm hand.” She looked Tal over and demanded: “What's with the street clothes?”
“I'm being discharged.”
“Fantastic!” Lisa said.
Timmy's roommate these days was an eighty-two-year-old inn who was hooked up to an IV, a beeping cardiac monitor, and a wheezing respirator.
Although Timmy was attached only to an IV, he was in the embrace of an oblivion as complete as the octogenarian's coma.
Once or twice an hour, never more often, never for longer than a minute at a tim, the boy's eyelids fluttered or his lips twitched or a muscle ticked in his cheek. That was all.
Bryce sat beside the bed, his hand through the railing, gently gripping his son's hand. Since Snowfield, just this meager contact was enough to satisfy him. Each day he left the room feeling better.
There wasn't much fight now that evening had come. On the wall at the head of the bed, there was a dim lamp that cast a soft glow only as far as Timmy's shoulders, leaving his sheet-covered body in shadow. In that wan illumination, Bryce could see how his boy had withered, losing weight in spite of the IV solution. The cheekbones were too prominent. There were dark circles around his eyes. His chin and jawline looked pathetically fragile. His son had always been small for his age. But now the hand Bryce held seemed to belong to a much younger child than Timmy; it seemed like the hand of an infant.
But it was warm. It was warm.
After a while, Bryce reluctantly let go. He smoothed the boy's hair, straightened the sheet, fluffed the pillow.
It was time to leave, but he couldn't go; not yet. He was crying. He didn't want to step into the hall with tears on his face.
He pulled a few Kleenex from the box on the nightstand, got up, went to the window, and looked out at Santa Mira.
Although he wept every day when he came here, these were different tears from those he had cried before. These scalded, washed away the misery, and healed. Bit by bit, slowly, they healed him.
“Discharged?” Jenny said, scowling, “Says who?”
Tal grinned. “Says me.”
“Since when have you become your own doctor?”
“I just thought a second opinion seemed called for, so I asked myself in for consultation, and I recommended to me that I go home.”
“Tal—”
“Really, Doc, I feel great. The swelling's gone. Haven't run a temperature in two days. I'm a prime candidate for release. If you try to make me stay here any longer, my death will be on your hands.”
“Death?”
“The hospital food is sure to kill me.”
“He looks ready to go dancing,” Lisa said.
“And when'd you get your medical degree?” Jenny asked. To Tal she said, “Well… let me have a look. Take off your shirt.”
He slipped out of it quickly and easily, not nearly as stiff as he'd been yesterday. Jenny carefully untaped the bandages and found that he was right: no swelling, no breaks in the scabs.
“We've beaten it,” he assured her.
“Usually, we don't discharge a patient in the evening. Orders are written in the morning; release comes between ten o'clock and noon.”