Confidence and certainty came flooding back. “Ladies?” he called, a toothy smile between his lips.
A hushed whisper met his ears: pleas for mercy… a prayer to a god who no longer mattered? His rabbits were hiding, shivering against one another in the dark.
“Come out, come out wherever you are!” he called, advancing slowly around a chipped coffee table, his bug-eyed reflection creeping across a gray television screen from left to right.
“Your men are all dead!” he laughed, pausing a moment to enjoy the joke. “Maybe you didn’t hear it, but I just shot the last one upstairs… an old duffer in a gray sweatshirt. Blew his fucking guts out all over the dining room table.”
A strangled sob broke from the darkened doorway, accompanied by more whispers.
“Go upstairs and look if you don’t believe me,” Tad invited, his rifle like a stiff cock in his hands, the thought of shooting it enough to get him off. “Go ahead,” he grinned, filling the doorway. “I can wait.”
A pale, lithe shape moved against the shadows. Far back against the brooding gray box of the furnace, a small child started to cry.
“Leave us alone,” a woman’s voice said, cracked and aged, hidden somewhere in the gloom.
“Sorry,” Tad said sadly, shaking his head, “but I have plans for you ladies. Each and every one of you.”
“Please,” another voice implored, younger and more supple to his ear. “At least let the children go.”
“Where will they go?” Tad wondered. “There’s no one left to take care of them.” He grinned.
Shifting shapes amongst the shadows. Fresh sobs as he stepped with his rifle through the doorway.
“I’m warning you,” the first voice choked, thick with emotion, ready to break into pieces.
Tad laughed softly and took another step.
Then something clicked in the dark and his smile melted clean away.
13
Even before the grinning, troll-shaped monster had come pounding down the stairs, Helen Iverson had known in an essential part of her that something outside had gone wrong. Horribly wrong. Being a practical, level-headed woman of Midwestern stock, she gave little to no credence to the notion of ESP or precognition or whatever nonsense they were calling it these days, but she knew that her partner of 37 years had been taken from her. It was as simple as a familiar hand dropping from her grasp, nothing more and nothing less.
The gray sweatshirt Bud had been wearing…
The thought of facing the world alone…
The troll in the doorway laughed and a piece of her turned silently to stone.
“Leave us alone,” she told it, taking Bud’s pistol from its holster without even realizing what she was doing. She touched the safety, felt it move beneath her finger. Since Rudy and the others had come back from the quick-mart, Bud had fitted her with a shoulder holster and insisted she take the gun with her whenever she left the house. Now it was in her hand and she thanked Bud for that, though in her heart she knew he was dead. She thanked him for teaching her how to shoot when they were younger. When the world was brighter, more vibrant.
The troll blurred in the doorway when Aimee asked it to let the children go.
A tremendous counterbalance tipped inside her, like an old tree coming begrudgingly out of the ground, its long roots torn and black with soil.
“I’m warning you…” Helen sobbed, though by that point she had already made up her mind. To let this creature run amuck, to allow it to take even one step further, would be an affront to everything she and Bud held dear or believed in; to order and decency, to civilization and the ideals of justice and humanity, not to mention God and morality. And if God was somehow responsible for letting this monster loose upon the world, He’d also put the gun in her hand to stop it.
The troll’s head swung her way. It laughed and took a step.
14
Rudy spotted Mike and Keith rounding the far side of the Dawley house and hurried to join them on the front doorstep.
“How many are left?” he wondered, his heart beating rapidly in his chest, his blood bright with adrenaline.
“Just one, we think,” Keith answered, crouched in the shadow of the eaves, eyes sweeping the far side of the street.
“You’re not certain?” Rudy looked ready to run back to his spruce.
Mike put a hand on the front door, as if feeling for fire; divining what lay on the other side. He glanced back at Rudy before grasping the knob. “There are three bodies down at the creek. Shane thought one might have made it to the back of the house.”
“And he’s inside?” Rudy rose from his crouch, the thought of his wife and children trapped inside with such a desperate man suddenly became intolerable, a torment.
“We thought it might be a good idea to check,” Keith said sourly. His eyes narrowed, glimpsing a hitch in the curtains at the Hanna’s across the cul-de-sac. “Where’s Bud and Larry?” he asked.
Rudy swallowed. “Larry panicked and ran back to his house.”
“Motherfuck,” Keith swore.
“I’m not sure where Bud is.”
“Well I’m going in,” Mike said flatly, turning the doorknob and inching forward, his eye to the widening crack between the door and the jamb. His face and jaw went through a series of contortions, like a man shaving with an uncertain razor. He glanced back at Rudy and Keith. “Entry looks clear.”
Keith nodded and the three men crept into the house.
Down a tunnel of silent hallway, they saw Bud’s body splayed beneath the dining room table. His blood was a still pond that reflected the muted sunlight.
“Oh shit,” Mike swore, his voice dry and despondent, a coarse whisper. “I thought he was going to circle around the bridge,” he protested, as if, allowing that, Bud couldn’t possibly be in his dining room, couldn’t possibly be dead.
“He must have seen something that changed his mind,” Keith said, letting it go at that.
A woman’s voice moaned beneath them, muffled to blunted emotion by the carpet and the floorboards, to each man sounding like his wife.
Then a man’s dark laughter rose behind it and they realized they’d come too late.
“Where are the stairs?” Rudy cried, rising to his full height as the first gunshot cracked below.
15
A blast like a sonic boom ripped through the room and Tad felt his face go numb. He reached up and found his hat gone, with something like yolk and broken eggshells running down the right side of his head.
A vengeful angel stepped out of the shadows, pointing a gun at him. His rifle was no longer in his hands. It lay at his feet, miles away. He looked at his hands and saw that they were painted red, with flecks of cottage cheese and hair stuck to his fingers.
The angel bared her teeth in a terrible grimace and shoved the gun into his surprised face.
He heard a distant explosion, like artillery falling, and that was all.
16
If there was any doubt the world had changed, it ended that afternoon on Quail Street, even before they climbed out of the basement and saw Bud Iverson’s body where it had fallen beneath the table.
The basement itself was a crimson stain, a house of horrors that each and every one of them had to walk through, the children included. Helen had done a very thorough job with her husband’s gun, a fact that she made no apologies for.
Upstairs, she took in the dining room as if it were a sight she’d already seen, somewhere deep within a dream. A short sound escaped her, like a seasoned fighter taking a sharp body blow, then her face hardened, as if reminded of the others around her. A single long tear rolled down her cheek, though she seemed unconscious of it.