Trying to trick the creature, hoping that it would react without hesitation to the first sign of movement in the doorway, Travis tucked the revolver under his belt, quietly picked up one of the dining-room chairs, eased to within six feet of the kitchen, and pitched the chair through the open door. He snatched the revolver out of his waistband and, as the chair sailed into the kitchen, assumed a shooter’s stance. The chair crashed into the Formica-topped table, clattered to the floor, and banged against the dishwasher.
The lantern-eyed enemy did not go for it. Nothing moved. When the chair finished tumbling, the kitchen was again marked by a hushed expectancy.
Einstein was making a curious sound, a quiet shuddery huffing, and after a moment Travis realized the noise was a result of the dog’s uncontrollable shivering.
No question about it: the intruder in the kitchen was the very thing that had pursued them through the woods more than three months ago. During the intervening weeks, it had made its way north, probably traveling mostly in the wildlands to the east of the developed part of the state, relentlessly tracking the dog by some means that Travis could not understand and for reasons he could not even guess.
In response to the chair he had thrown, a large white-enameled canister crashed to the floor just beyond the kitchen doorway, and Travis jumped back in surprise, squeezing off a wild shot before he realized he was only being taunted. The lid flew off the container when it hit the floor, and flour spilled across the tile.
Silence again.
By responding to Travis’s taunt with one of its own, the intruder had displayed unnerving intelligence. Abruptly Travis realized that, coming from the same research lab as Einstein and being a product of related experiments, the creature might be as smart as the retriever. Which would explain Einstein’s fear of it. If Travis had not already accommodated himself to the idea of a dog with humanlike intelligence, he might have been unable to credit this beast with more than mere animal cleverness; however, events of the past few months had primed him to accept-and quickly adapt to-almost anything.
Silence.
Only one round left in the gun.
Deep silence.
He had been so startled by the flour canister that he had not noticed from which side of the doorway it had been flung, and it had fallen in such a fashion that he could not deduce the position of the creature that had hurled it. He still did not know if the intruder was to the left or right of the doorway.
He was not sure he any longer cared where it was. Even with the .357 in hand, he did not think he would be wise to enter the kitchen. Not if the damn thing was as smart as a man. It would be like doing battle with an intelligent buzz saw, for Christ’s sake.
The light in the east-facing kitchen was dwindling, almost gone. In the dining room, where Travis and Einstein stood, the darkness was deepening. Even behind them, in spite of the open front door and window and the corner lamp, the living room was filling with shadows.
In the kitchen, the intruder hissed loudly, a sound like escaping gas, which was immediately followed by a click-click-click that might have been made by its sharply clawed feet or hands tapping against a hard surface.
Travis had caught Einstein’s tremors. He felt as if he were a fly on the edge of a spider’s web, about to step into a trap.
He remembered Ted Hockney’s bitten, bloodied, eyeless face.
Click-click.
In antiterrorist training, he had been taught how to stalk men, and he had been good at it. But the problem here was that the yellow-eyed intruder was maybe as smart as a man but could not be counted on to think like a man, so Travis had no way of knowing what it might do next, how it might respond to any initiative he made. Therefore, he could never outthink it, and by its alien nature the creature had a perpetual and deadly advantage of surprise.
Click.
Travis quietly took a step back from the open kitchen door, then another Step, treading with exaggerated care, not wanting the thing to discover that he was retreating because only God knew what it might do if it knew he was slipping out of its reach. Einstein padded silently into the living room, now equally eager to put distance between himself and the intruder.
When he reached Ted Hockney’s corpse, Travis glanced away from the dining room, searching for the least littered route to the front door-and he saw Nora standing by the armchair. Frightened by the gunfire, she had gotten a butcher’s knife from the kitchenette in the Airstream and had come to see if he needed help.
He was impressed by her courage but horrified to see her there in the glow of the corner lamp. Suddenly it seemed as if his nightmares of losing both
Einstein and Nora were on the verge of coming true, the Cornell Curse again, because now they were both inside the house, both vulnerable, both possibly within striking distance of the thing in the kitchen.
She started to speak.
Travis shook his head and raised one hand to his mouth.
Silenced, she bit her lip and glanced from him to the dead man on the floor.
As Travis quietly stepped through the rubble, he was stricken by a feeling that the intruder had gone out the back of the house and was coming around the side, heading for the front door, risking being seen by neighbors in the gloom of twilight, intending to enter behind them, swift and fast. Nora was standing between Travis and the front door, so he would not have a clear shot at the creature if it came that way; hell, it would be all over Nora one second after it reached the door. Trying not to panic, trying not to think of Hockney’s eyeless face, Travis moved more quickly across the living room, risking the crackle of some debris underfoot, hoping those small noises would not carry to the kitchen if the intruder was still out there. Reaching Nora, he took her by the arm and propelled her toward the front door, out onto the stoop and down the stairs, looking left and right, half-expecting to see the living nightmare rushing at them, but it was nowhere in sight.
The gunshots and Nora’s shouting had drawn neighbors as far as their front doors all along the street. A few had even come outside onto porches and lawns. Somebody surely would have called the cops. Because of Einstein’s status as a much-wanted fugitive, the police seemed almost as grave a danger as the yellow-eyed thing in the house.
The three of them piled into the pickup. Nora locked her door, and Travis locked his. He started the engine and backed the truck-and the Airstream- out of the driveway, into the street. He was aware of people staring.
The twilight was going to be short-lived, as it always was near the ocean. Already, the sunless sky was blackish in the east, purple overhead, and a steadily darkening blood-red in the west. Travis was grateful for the oncoming cover of nightfall, although he knew the yellow-eyed creature would be sharing it with them.
He drove past the gaping neighbors, none of whom he had ever met during his years of self-imposed solitude, and he turned at the first corner. Nora held Einstein tightly, and Travis drove as fast as he dared. The trailer rocked and swayed behind them when he took the next couple of corners at too great a speed.
“What happened in there?” she asked.
“It killed Hockney earlier today or yesterday-”
“It?”
“-and it was waiting for us to come home.”
“It?” she repeated.
Einstein mewled.
Travis said, “I’ll have to explain later.” He wondered if he could explain.
No description he gave of the intruder would do it justice; he did not possess the words necessary to convey the degree of its strangeness.