37

The night wore on. I lay in a foreign box, immobilized and furious—helpless and hopeless, and I waited. I waited. My fingers became intimately familiar with the little gold cross as I lay there, waiting.

I waited through the night. No one entered the house, no one drew near. I fanned my consciousness out, roaming the house, the neighborhood, searching for Boyd, for surely he was behind this degradation. The mounting swirl of fear maddened me in my impotent state.

Can’t you face me, Boyd? Must you send a child to do your work in the daytime, to chain me as I sleep? You follow me, hunt me, dog my trail for years, Boyd, with your self-serving attitude, and when the final moment comes, you care not to see for yourself?

I have little interest in your piddling ways, Boyd. Better men than you have died under my loving touch, and were grateful for it. Release me and let us meet.

If you dare.

“Will and I talked into the middle of the night, then we got some blankets from Mrs. Haskill and slept on the daybeds out on the porch. I listened to the boy breathe for a long time before he fell asleep. I stayed awake a lot longer than that. Knowing that Angelina was crated up and helpless was somehow of no comfort. I knew the town was safe from her for the night, but I felt her presence, felt her awful, almost-­inhuman wrath, and I knew that when we released her, she would be very difficult to deal with. We just had to do it right—carefully, and without causing a panic in the town.

“When we can show them that it’s just Angelina, just a warped little girl and not some legendary monster from Transylvania, then they’ll settle down. But if they mobbed Will’s basement, we’d have a big problem.

“I could see her, almost, locked inside that dark box. Every time I closed my eyes I could see her face—eyes wide open and glittering with a luminescence of their own, skin thin and glossy, stretched too tightly, too whitely, over sharp bones. I saw her and saw her lips—bloodless they were—saw those terrible white lips curl up in a smile as her eyes flashed in recognition and she said my name. ‘Boyd.’

“I sat up quickly, feeling bile rise, the perspiration running down my face. I must have gone to sleep, although I couldn’t remember nodding off. The voice of my dream kept bouncing around inside my head, but it had been just a bad dream. Angelina didn’t look anything at all like that . . . that . . . grotesque living skull I imagined in my sleep.

“I wrapped the blanket around me a little closer and lay back down. Tomorrow would come soon enough to settle this whole thing.

“The next day the townspeople were frantic with relief. For the first time in over four months, a night had gone by with no killings. I tried to enjoy their pleasure without letting on the reason. I begged with them to not relax their vigil, but it was to no avail. Like oppressed citizens who never lose their hope, their optimism, they were all convinced that the plague had ended, the bad dream was over, and they came up joviously for air, anxious to return to their previous way of life. I tried to convince them that caution was advised here, but they weren’t hearing me and I couldn’t exactly tell them what I knew. Not, at least, until after Will and I had taken care of Angelina.”