I will be fed! it told him. You will destroy for me. I will feed on the destruction you bring.
In the dream, Dillon saw himself raising the gun to shoot it, knowing what was about to happen, unable to stop it. He pulled the trigger, the beast stepped aside . . . and there was Deanna.
The bullet struck the chest of the girl Dillon himself would die for.
He ran to her, took her in his arms, while his beast flexed its muscles, absorbing this act of destruction, feeding on Deanna’s dying breaths.
“I’m not afraid,” coughed Deanna; “I’m not afraid”— for after she had purged the parasite of fear from her own soul, terror had no hold on her.
Suffer the weight, Dillon, the creature said, as Deanna died in his arms. Suffer the weight of destruction . . . and every moment you suffer is a moment I grow strong . . .
Dillon was shaken awake by small hands on his shoulders. He opened his eyes to see Carter standing above him. By now this had become a regular routine.
“The monster again?”
Dillon nodded. The thing was still alive out there, Dillon knew. Both his beast and Deanna’s still stalked the sands of the Unworld. The other four shards had killed their parasites, and Dillon suspected that if his were dead too, it wouldn’t invade his dreams with such alarming regularity.
“My dog had worms once,” said Carter. “They got to his heart and ate him from the inside out. Was that what it was like having that thing inside you?”
“Something like that,” said Dillon. He sat up, taking a moment to orient himself. Where was he this time? What had he done here? He was in the Jessups’ home. Yes—that was it. Kelly Jessup had been dead almost a year now, and her parents driven insane. Dillon had undone all that damage.
Dillon looked at his watch. Three in the morning.
“Get back to bed,” Dillon told Carter. “We need an early start tomorrow.”
Carter returned to the couch across the guest room. “Who do we see tomorrow?”
“A family called the Bradys. There’ll be more work than here.”
“What about my father?” asked Carter.
Like so many others, Carter’s father had gone insane, and died a nasty death last year. Dillon’s failure to find his grave was something Carter loved to hang over Dillon’s head, and was a constant reminder to Dillon that there were still a million and one things and people screaming to be fixed.
“I’ll find him,” said Dillon. “And I’ll fix him, just like I promised.”
Carter shrugged. “No rush,” he said, far too pleasantly. “I like being called Carter instead of Delbert anyway.”
The thought unsettled Dillon. When the boy had been found last year, wandering the streets, he had been a mumbling, maddened lunatic, just like everyone else left alive here in Burton, Oregon. He hadn’t even known his own name.
“Carter was the tag on your T-shirt. Do you want to be named after an underwear company?”
“I don’t care.”
And that was the problem. Since Dillon had fixed the boy’s mind, he had latched on to Dillon like a puppy. Dillon didn’t mind the company, but he knew it just wasn’t right. Life with Dillon was a poor substitute for life with his real family.
Dillon, knowing he would not sleep again tonight, turned to leave the room, but Carter stopped him.
“You were calling her name out in your sleep,” Carter said.
Dillon sighed, wishing he could forget the dream. “Was I?”
Carter rolled over on the couch to face him. “You know,” said Carter, “you could bring her back now . . .”
Dillon grimaced to hear the words spoken aloud. When Deanna had died, Dillon had had no skill in bringing chaos from order, life out of death. All he knew was how to see patterns of destruction and act upon them. But a year had honed his skills. Now it would be so easy to take Deanna’s broken body in his arms and bring her back to life, cell by cell. He imagined that moment when he could gather her life back and see her smile at him again. Hear the gentle forgiveness in her voice.
But he could not get to her. She was sealed away in the Unworld—a place Dillon could not reach. He was trapped in the here-and-now, and the people around him were constant reminders that he didn’t deserve Deanna. All he deserved was the endless, exhausting task of fixing the disasters he had created—because he’d never be able to forgive himself for willfully feeding his parasite—until he had repaired every last bit of his decimation. From the moment the other four surviving shards had left him, he knew what his job was going to be. And one of the first things he bought was a shovel.
“Yes, I know I could bring her back,” he told Carter. “Now go to sleep.”
Carter rolled over, and in a few moments, he was sleeping peacefully. And why not? thought Dillon. He had repaired the boy’s psyche so well, he never had nightmares, in spite of the horrors he had been through.
Dillon slid noiselessly out of the guest room. Downstairs he found Carol Jessup sitting in the family room. The air smelled of sweet cocoa and smoke from the smoldering fireplace. The woman lovingly held her sleeping daughter in her arms, absorbed in stroking the little girl’s hair as she hummed a lullaby. She had been doing this for hours, unable to believe that her daughter was alive again. She stopped humming the moment Dillon stepped into the room. It took her a few moments until she could speak to him.
“I’m afraid to ask who you are,” she said, “or how you did what you did.”
“It’s just patterns, Carol,” Dillon answered. “My mind can see patterns no one else can see, and my soul can repair them. That’s all I can do.”
“That’s all you can do?” she said incredulously. “That’s everything. It’s creation. It’s reversing time!”
“Space,” said Dillon calmly. “Reversing space.”
The woman looked down at her daughter and her eyes became teary. “Maybe I don’t know who you are,” she said to Dillon, looking at him with the sort of holy reverence that made him uncomfortable, “but I know what you are.”
Dillon found himself getting angry. “You don’t know me,” he told her. “You don’t know the things I’ve done.”
But clearly she didn’t care what Dillon had done in the past. All that mattered to her was what he had done here, today. “When the virus came,” she said, “my husband and I got lost in the woods, wandering insane like all the others in town. When we finally came out of it, we were told that Kelly had drowned in the river. I wanted to die along with her.”
“What if I told you there was no virus?” Dillon said to her. “That they call it a ‘virus’ because they don’t know what else to call it? What if I told you that I destroyed this town last year—shattered everyone’s mind—and that, in a way, I was the one who killed your daughter in the first place?”
Dillon thought back to the time of his rampage. It had taken so little effort for Dillon to shatter the minds of everyone in town. All he had to do was find the weakest point in the pattern, then simply whisper the right words into the right ear to set off a chain reaction, like a ball-peen hammer to a sheet of glass. Just a single whispered phrase, and within a few short hours, every last man, woman, and child in town was driven insane.
“In fact, what if I told you that I was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of people . . . including my own parents?”
“If you told me that,” said Carol Jessup, “I wouldn’t believe you. Because I know that a spirit as great as yours isn’t capable of such evil.”