The darkness seemed to deepen with the old woman’s words. There were mutterings all around the table, and then someone screamed. Another voice picked it up. Jimmy shouted for calm but was drowned out. Chairs tumbled over and feet banged up the stairs. Will tried to jump off the table, but a strong hand seized his wrist.
Murmur, a deep and broken voice rumbled, right up against his ear. Murmur it said again fiercely.
Will tried to pull away. He knew that if a light were to shine that moment, he would see the burned, hideous face inches from his own. Those dead eyes. His flesh prickled at the thought; sickness rose up in him again.
“Let go of me,” he yelled, but the words were lost in the din.
The beast obeyed, and he toppled off the table. His shoulder slammed against a chair and his forehead struck the floor. He was on his feet and stumbling up the wooden stairs before he was even quite coherent. Jimmy was still calling for calm, but there was no calm to be had in any of them. Will stood in the dark room above. With the curtains still drawn, the only light came from the rectangle of the open front door. He gazed at it for several seconds, wondering what to do.
“Get out of the house,” a woman shouted, and Will ran. Barefoot and bleeding, into the night.
Within a handful of strides he was in the trees, his feet scraped and hurting. Through the branches above, he could see the clouds shredding and moving off. Moonlight filled the woods. A car engine started somewhere behind him, but moments later there was a heavy thud. As if, in his or her panic, the driver had hit a tree. Will should check on the driver, but his mind could not wrap around the thought. His feet would not move. Twenty yards away, a figure approached him through the trees. Large, lumbering, unnatural.
A bang, a flash, and he was out of bed. Voices screamed downstairs. A presence lurked. He had to get out. He ran across the muddy field.
“No,” he said out loud, in the night woods, the figure much closer now. Go back, he said to himself, his head ringing with pain, his stomach surging. Go back.
A bang, a flash, and he was out of bed. The voices, the presence. He pushes the door open and enters the hall. A scorched smell burns his nostrils. A figure lies at the top of the stairs, smoke rising from it. He tries to tiptoe past. He tries not to look. But he has to look. And what he sees cannot be real. It’s a Halloween mask; it’s someone playing a trick on him. It is too horrible to be real. It is too terrible to be remembered.
In the woods again, the figure was there before him. Grabbing him by the ears, making him look on its destroyed visage. Will kept his eyes open for as long as he could.
Hello, little man.
He fell to his knees. Pounding the wet leaves with his hands as he retched up his poisoned childhood in hot, acid waves.
After some passage of time he was sitting up again. Pulling deeply for air, but calmer. The fever was burned out of him, and he shivered in the cold night air. The looming figure had vanished, and Will wondered if he would ever see it again. He would have to check on the others in a moment, but for now he just needed to pull himself together. A faint red glow began to touch the trees around him. Will thought at first that it was dawn breaking over the top of Mount Gray. Then he realized it was the wrong direction. He looked through the trees to his left and saw orange flames dancing. The house was on fire.
Sam.
He was up and running before the blood was even back in his cramped legs. The gravel drive was well illuminated as he came out of the trees. He saw the Stafford boy running down the long slope for the road, stumbling on his torn robe. The fire was inside the house, but had burst out of several windows. The green Jeep had been driven straight into the front door, blocking it. The door was open inward, and a figure was trying to crawl onto the vehicle’s hood.
Will rushed over, his feet seeking some purchase on the front tire or fender, his hands reaching across to grab Molly’s. Black smoke poured outward over her head. She clasped his outstretched hands, and Will leaned back with all his strength, dragging her across the hood to him. They fell in a heap on the gravel.
“Who’s still in there?” Will asked, scrambling to his feet again.
“I’m not sure,” Molly gasped. “I think Nancy was behind me.”
With great difficulty, he pulled himself onto the hood and slipped the opposite way, through the dark door. The patch of carpet he landed on seemed to be the only thing not burning. The walls, the furniture, everything was wreathed in flame. The smoke hung thick about four feet off the ground. The heat made his skin begin to blister within seconds. He looked around quickly but could see no one. Then he turned and stepped onto the Jeep’s bumper, climbing back out of the fiery maelstrom. He scrambled across the hood to Molly again.
“I don’t see her,” he shouted. “Where is everyone else?”
“I don’t know. Most of them went up the stairs ahead of me.”
The south end of the house was not yet engulfed, and he went that way. Around the corner, he saw a body sliding out of a window. Nancy Chester, coughing and wheezing, being lowered from inside by two strong arms. Will ran over and took hold of her before she fell, laying her gently on the grass. Then he stood and offered his hands and shoulders to Jimmy Duffy, who seemed a part of the gray smoke billowing around him. Jimmy leaned hard on him a moment and then leaped to the ground, falling on his side. His face was covered in soot and he breathed with difficulty.
“You all right?” Will asked. The other man only nodded. “Is anyone left in there?”
“Don’t know,” Jimmy coughed.
“Sam, what about Sam?”
“She ran out right after you. I thought she’d be with you.”
Will stood and turned a slow circle. As if Sam would appear out of the night right there before him.
“Will,” he heard a voice call. “William.” Margaret Price, sounding not at all happy. She was in the woods up the slope, evidently seeking him. Will went the other way, back to the front of the house, looking about desperately in the glow provided by the flames. On impulse he ran back the way he had come, into the woods on the eastern slope.
“Sam” he called, moving quickly but more carefully now. His cut and battered feet were killing him. In fact, just about everything hurt. “Sam.”
He thought he saw movement, parallel to him and a little below. He went around one tree, slapped aside some saplings and came into a small clearing. Her back was to him but there was no mistaking that blond head.
“Sam,” he said again, and she whirled about. He could hardly see her face, but her body was tensed, as if ready for an attack. He had assumed she was looking for him, but she gave no answer, and he did not sense any welcome. Will took a step toward her and she took two steps back. A terrible idea occurred to him. The Jeep. If she was not using her Honda, then she was driving the Jeep, as he had suggested to her days ago. She had left the house right after him. She, or someone in the house, had yelled for him to leave.
“What did you do?” he said. The words—hard, accusatory—were out of his mouth before he thought them through. Before he realized that she had taken a small and cautious step toward him.
“What did I do?” she cried. Her voice high and grief-stricken. “What did you do?”
“No, Sam, listen.”
He staggered toward her and she turned and fled. She was running away. Hurt, or worse, frightened of him. He was too surprised to move at first, but then he rushed after her. The slope fell off steeply just beyond the clearing, and he had to run to keep from plunging forward on his face. After a dozen yards he turned sideways to slow his descent, then took hold of a pine tree to stop himself. The scaly bark bit his palms and smeared pitch on his fingers. Sam was nowhere in sight. Will closed his eyes and listened. The slap of branches, somewhere to the left. He set out that way, slipping and stumbling as he went.
His mind, too, was stumbling. What did you do? Was she simply throwing the accusation back at him, or was there more? He thought he had come to understand himself, minutes before, in his revelation among the trees. That he had come to understand what it was that his mind had been avoiding all this time. But was there more to it than that? Could his body have been up to some mischief while his mind was elsewhere? No, that couldn’t be right. He had not hurt anyone. He had not set the house on fire. How would he have even done it?
“Sam,” he shouted again, but still she made no reply.
The slant of the hill blocked the house from sight, and flames no longer illuminated the woods. He could see very little but a silver strip of ground, twenty or thirty yards below. The road, bathed in moonlight. He could no longer hear any movement around him. He had not been far behind, but somehow he had lost her completely. Lacking a better idea, he made his way down the steep incline to the road.
As soon as he cleared the last trees, Will’s eyes caught a black heap sitting in the center of the moonlit roadway. He went to the object at once and picked it up. Eugene Stafford’s torn robe. He hoped the boy was wearing something underneath. He turned another slow circle, looking and listening with all the poor power of his ragged senses. Nothing. Where was the car? Farther up, near the entry to the driveway. Should he go get it and pursue her that way? But what if she had stayed in the woods?
As if in answer to his thoughts, he heard a car engine rumbling above. A moment later headlights descended the winding road from the hilltop. Will stepped to the edge of the narrow lane, but was caught in the beams before he could decide whether to jump back into the trees. He stood his ground as the familiar car pulled up alongside of him. The driver’s window rolled down.
“Get in,” said Muriel.
“What are you doing here?” he asked in surprise.
“Looking for you.”
“I’ve got to find Sam.”
“Good, we’ll find her. Now get it the car, quick. That lunatic is right behind me.”
On impulse, he went around the car and got in. Muriel pulled away before he had even closed the door. There was a determined look on her face. The interior smelled of cigarettes, and something more pungent.
“You didn’t leave,” said Will.
“No,” she agreed. “You lying little shit, I knew you would come up here.”
“It’s not your job to look out for me.”
“Yeah, whose is it? ’Cause they should be fired.”
“Which lunatic?” he asked.
“Margaret Price. Man, the way she was cursing me, I should have grown a tail and horns.” Muriel looked in the rearview mirror. “Speak of the devil.”
Will twisted around in his seat to see headlights bearing down on them swiftly.
“I’m not afraid of her,” he said. “Stop and let’s see what she wants.”
“I don’t think that would be smart.”
They reached the bottom of the hill and Muriel was forced to slow before the turn onto Seaview Road. The headlights raced up behind until their white glare filled the car. There was a bang and Will lurched forward, slamming against the dashboard.
“Crazy bitch,” Muriel yelled, accelerating into the turn. The tires screeched and Will was knocked sideways against the door. “Put your seat belt on, for Christ sake.”
He did so. The collision had not been that hard, but still he was shaken. He looked back and saw that the Volvo had turned with them, but it was rapidly falling behind.
“What was she cursing about?”
“You,” Muriel replied, accelerating through the sharp curves of Seven Corners.
“What about me?”
“Hey, if you don’t know, I sure don’t.”
“I didn’t do anything,” he insisted, praying it was true.
“No one said you did.”
“I think it was an accident.”
“What was?”
“Her hitting us. You stopped suddenly and she just—”
“Of course you think that,” Muriel snapped. “In thirty years you haven’t figured out how dangerous these people are. They killed your father. God knows what they tried to do tonight. Look at you. Where are your shoes?”
His sneakers, right. Melted, most likely.
“You look terrible,” she said.
He gazed down at himself. Feet dirty and bleeding. Stains and rips on his jeans and shirt. He could only guess what his face looked like. How did he explain to her that most of it was self-inflicted? How did he begin to speak of the things he had come to understand this night? Before he could try, she turned the wheel hard to the left.
At first he thought she was driving straight into the trees. Then he realized it was a narrow, unlit road. The far end of Old Forest Lane, in fact. He had forgotten they were near it. When the car was twenty or thirty yards in, Muriel killed the engine. Darkness enveloped them. Will twisted in his seat again and looked back. About eight seconds later Margaret’s Volvo went tearing by on Seaview. They had lost her.
“Clever move,” said Will. He turned to see Muriel staring at him oddly. “What?”
“It’s not enough that you have the same voice. Now you’re using his words.”
“Johnny?”
“You’ve said a bunch of things in the last couple of days that sound just like him.”
“Clever move? That was a Johnnyism?”
“Yeah,” she replied, smiling vaguely. “‘Clever move, Brownie.’”
“Brownie?” he laughed.
“Oh yeah, he had a dozen nicknames for me. Brownie. Teen Queen. Mure-Mure.”
There was a rushing sensation in his ears. As if he had stood up too quickly, though of course he had not moved.
“What?” he heard himself say.
“That was his favorite. ‘Aren’t you the clever one, Mure-Mure.’”
And why not? It was a perfectly obvious nickname. And perfectly logical that Johnny would pronounce it the same way that Abby did, or any of the old gang. Not Mure, but Murr. Murr-Murr.
Murmur.