Chapter thirty-six

I killed the flashlight. The moonlight at the window faded completely. We were in the dark again.

He was coming up the stairs methodically. Unhurried. Step by step.

He was almost to the landing.

“He knows we’re here.” Susannah’s body was rigid in my arms.

He crested the stairs. We heard the floor creak outside the room. He was heading for the door. Methodical. Unhurried. Step by step.

“Stand by the wall,” I hissed. “There.” I figured I had about thirty seconds.

Susannah did not argue. She moved to the wall next to the door. She pressed herself against it. Her body disappeared in the shadows.

I stepped over Ben’s body and went to the window.

It was the same window. The old oak tree was still out there. Its branches waved crazily in the wind, swaying this way and that like a ballerina’s arms. That was the tree I had climbed down the last time he had come for me, scrambling to the earth as he came through the door with his gun.

He was almost at the door now. Maybe five steps away.

I braced my hands against the windowsill. The moaning wind battered me through the broken panes. I shoved—and the casters screamed as the window flew open.

In three swift and silent steps I was at the door again, at the wall beside the door, pressed hard against it as if I would push myself through. My shoulder was brushing Susannah.

The scarred man came in. He was cradling a rifle in his arms.

I could’ve touched him easily. He was maybe a foot away. But I couldn’t see him, not really. He was just a huge shadow looming in the doorway; crossing the threshold then with a long stride. He was standing right beside me where I was clinging to the wall. I was afraid to breathe lest he feel it on his cheek. He had to remember. I kept saying that to myself. He had to remember how I went out the window last time. How he hunted me. How I got away …

He paused. I sensed the motion of his head toward the window. He saw that it was open. He crossed over to it.

I grabbed Susannah by the arm and we bolted out the door behind him.

The black corridor tipped and yawed as we stumbled through it, racing for the stairs. Half blind, we fought the walls off with our shoulders, with our splayed hands. The landing opened before us. We were at the stairway.

But it was too dark, it was just too dark. My hip slammed into the newel post. I was spun halfway around. The flashlight flew out of my hand as I shouted in pain.

“Shit!”

“Michael!” She reached for me.

“Go down, baby!”

She started down in a mad clatter of footsteps. I swiveled back and forth, searching desperately for the flash. The faint light of the bedroom doorway was behind me. Then, as I turned, I saw that light blotted out.

I grabbed the newel, whipped myself around it. Tumbled after Susannah, my feet barely touching the stairs. I was one step behind her. My head was thrumming with the sound of my own breathing. I could not hear him following, but his footsteps seemed to pound inside my brain. I knew he was after us. I could feel him moving to the top of the stairway. I could feel him lifting the rifle. I could feel the black bore of it centered on my back.

I was at the second stair from the bottom. Susannah was ahead of me. I had it in my mind—the leap—I could see myself hurtling after her out the front door.

Then she fell. She miscalculated that last step, and tumbled down. She spilled sideways and out of my sight.

I came off the stairs and stooped to the side to grab her. The house seemed to erupt around me. The air seemed to swell and explode as if we were inside a balloon. He’d fired at us—he’d fired just at the moment I’d dodged to the side. I heard the front door splinter as the slug slammed into it.

I grabbed Susannah. She clutched at my shirt, gasping, as she scrambled to her feet. If we broke for the door, he would gun us down for certain. We took off—into nothing, into the blackness.

I felt her hands on me. We ran. I heard her breath, her panting cries. We were in a narrow hall, running. We slammed and rocketed off the walls. We grunted and cursed and the sounds seemed to echo around us. We ran, we just kept running. At the end of the hallway there was a small square of gray light. I watched it bounce and shimmer and grow larger as we neared it. Behind us, where the corridor began, there was another patch of gray. I looked behind me, watching for him; running.

We spilled out into a larger room. I couldn’t really see it, but I knew it had been the kitchen once. I tried to pause, to get my bearings. There had to be a way out.

“Michael!”

Susannah’s scream tore through me. I saw his shadow at the corridor’s end. He was coming at us. I saw him raise the gun.

She screamed my name once more. “Michael!” And I threw myself against her as the scarred man fired again.

The event played itself out slowly, every second of it a small eternity. I saw a gout of fire from the hallway. I felt my body slamming into Susannah’s. I felt us both tumbling toward the wall and had time to think with some satisfaction that when we hit it, it would probably be me who wound up in the line of fire. I imagined the slug hurtling at me. I waited for it to hit my chest.

And then we were falling and falling through empty space. At first that’s all there was. Then there was noise and pain everywhere. I was reaching out for purchase. I was being battered. I saw stars. I was tangled up with Susannah and I kept on falling. I thought I’d been hit. I thought This is dying. In another moment I realized: I had shoved Susannah through an open doorway and followed after. We were both tumbling down a flight of stairs.

We hit bottom. For a second, or maybe for an hour, I didn’t think about anything. I lay flat on my back on a floor that seemed to be half concrete and half dirt. I watched a dozen little lights of different colors dancing above me on the face of the dark. I liked them. They were pretty.

But Susannah kept hissing at me. She kept hissing my name. She was tugging at my arm, cursing at me, straining to drag me to one side. I wanted her to leave me alone. My head was spinning like a gyroscope. It wasn’t pleasant. All the same, I fought to my knees and tried to follow her. I tried—but I went over and knocked her down instead. She tugged at me still. I could hear her sobbing with the effort. I got to my knees. I crawled as she tugged at me. After a few moments, we collapsed again. Susannah leaned back against a pillar. She helped me prop myself against her. She had her arm around me. Dazed, I drew in breath, felt the loamy, cool air of the cellar come into me. I turned my head a little, swept my eyes over the vast and shadowy expanse around me. I could see why Susannah had taken so much trouble to get us away from the bottom of the stairs. He could’ve come to the door, aimed down, and popped us like targets. Now, he would have to come and get us.

In another instant his shadow snuffed the dim light in the cellar doorway above.

I struggled to sit up. I struggled to think. He’d be down here in seconds. I had to clear my head, remember the layout of the place. It was one room, divided only by the iron supports here and there. But there were niches; crevices and corners: a huge boiler somewhere in the far reaches, a forest of pipes and boxes and cylinders; a washing machine; a broom closet. I couldn’t know how much of it remained, but I had to find a spot for us to hide, a way to outmaneuver him.

I was still trying to figure it out when the door at the top of the stairway closed, very gently. We heard him bolt it from the other side. We heard his footsteps receding.

Susannah’s breath was harsh in my ear. She whispered: “What’s he doing?”

“I don’t know. Going away, it sounds like.”

“What’s he—”

“I don’t know. Be quiet. Listen.”

His footsteps faded. They were gone.

I started to get to my feet. My knees buckled. I dropped to the floor like dead weight. Dirt and pebbles bit into my palms.

I heard Susannah’s sudden whisper behind me. “What’re you doing?”

“Help me up,” I mumbled.

“You’re hurt.”

“Hell, I know I’m hurt. Help me up.” I pushed off the floor again. Again I fell. The shock of it went up my spine. I stared ahead stupidly.

Susannah grabbed me under the arm. I reached out and braced my hand against the pillar. She hoisted me, grunting. My feet sought a place to stand, found it. I straightened. A wave of nausea passed over me. When it receded, I was standing at Susannah’s side. Her hands were on my face, her fingers running over it in the dark.

“Don’t go,” she said. “Where are you going? Don’t go.”

“I want to try the door. There’s got to be windows too. A way out.”

“This is the cellar, isn’t it?” Her voice was strained.

“Yeah,” I said. I stumbled forward a step. “Yeah.”

“This is the cellar. Where we hid. Where we hid together. Where you held me in the little room. This is the cellar.”

I paused, looked at her. I could only make out the violet outline of her in the darkness.

“Sue?” I said.

“This is where he comes, where he always comes, this is where you hold me, waiting for him, where he … this is the cellar.”

“Susannah.”

“This is the place, the place, I remember, I dreamed, this is …” Her voice was rising—slowly, steadily, louder, higher. I could hear the hysteria expanding under it. I could sense she was about to break.

I took her by the shoulders.

“Susannah.”

“Oh, Michael. Oh, Michael, he’s going to kill us. He’s waited all this time, he’s waited for us here, it was always here, and now he’s going to kill us …”

“No, no, no,” I said, as calmly as I could. “Wrong movie, angel. We kill him. He dies.”

“No, don’t you see, don’t you see who he is, what he is … he’s been waiting, and he called us, in the stories, in the dreams, when he was ready … he waited and then he—”

I shook her. I didn’t mean to but I lost control and I did. I shook her hard.

“Damn it, damn it,” I hissed. “He’s a man, that’s all. He’s a man with a gun and a twisted mind. We take him, we take him out, that’s all, angel, it’s in the Big Book, remember?”

I said something like that. I don’t know what it was. I didn’t know at the time. I just shook her and kept talking. It seemed to calm her down. She slumped in my hands. Her head came forward.

“Oh God,” she whispered. But the hysteria was gone.

I took a breath. I felt her slender shoulders in my hand. I drew her to me and laid my cheek against her hair. Her soft hair. Her red hair. It did not smell of shampoo now. I smelled the sweat in it and the dirt. I smelled the blood. But I pressed against its softness and closed my eyes and I could see, almost see, for a second, the figure of her in bright sunlight as it moved ahead of me up a rising slope of snow.

“Susannah,” I said.

She gasped and jolted and jerked away. “Oh please!” she sobbed.

“Susannah, what is it?”

“He’s come back.”