“Opal, you have to stop this .” Wyatt placed his hand on his wife’s shoulder. He steered her back into the bedroom. They made it as far as the hallway. She wouldn’t go farther. Her steeliness never failed to impress him. It was one of the reasons he married her, though in this case he didn’t need impressing. He needed cooperation. She felt like a railroad spike driven into the floor.
Unmovable.
“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” she called over Wyatt’s shoulder.
“Whatever,” Vera answered.
“My mother hasn’t been well.” Adam swept clinking shards of broken mug into a dustpan. “She doesn’t realize how she sounds when she gets worked up—”
Opal stormed into the kitchen again. “I know how I sound ... crazy.”
Vera nodded.
“I’m sorry if I scared you,” Opal said.
“You don’t scare me that much. But those people you mentioned ... the ones looking for me? I think they want to kill me.”
Three pairs of eyes popped wide at her.
“What did you say?” Opal began to collapse to the floor. Wyatt caught her and helped her into a chair. Her limbs hung loose. But her gaze was expectant.
“I don’t know if I can explain it.”
“You’d better try,” Adam said.
He set the dustpan on the counter and pulled up a seat.
Wyatt sat, too. Elbows anchored on the Formica. He couldn’t remember the last time four people gathered around this table. It made the room shrink, as if the walls were compacting. He tented his fingers over his mouth and blew out a deep sigh. The elastic from his eye patch had gotten rearranged atop his head after the melee in the office and his hair crested into a rooster’s comb.
“How can my wife know anything about people following you?”
“Beats me,” Vera said.
As Adam filled up the coffeemaker, he said, “Mom thinks evil people are coming to our town. Demons, she calls them.”
“Uh-huh.”
Wyatt pointed to the window swamped with pale flakes.
“She says demons are across the street at the Totem. A couple of them are inside a mobile home in the woods conducting science- fictional experiments. Downstairs they’re breaking in . . . but it makes absolutely no sense. How am I supposed to believe this? She claims they’ll hurt my son.”
“Sounds like demons to me.”
“I’m not joking,” Wyatt said. “Who’s after you? What do they want?”
Vera stared at him.
“They call themselves the Pitch.”
She told them everything. How she was running away. From Chan at first though now she thought the others were coming, too. How Chan told her he had been hired for an unusual theft by a group of freaks who followed occult rules, met at midnight, and stopped at nothing. She took them through the slaughter at the witches’ house. The aftermath she had witnessed. Bodies ripped apart and presented in lewd mocking poses. Blood splashed everywhere. The box that wasn’t a box and left scorch marks on wood and changed her boyfriend into a panicked coward who slapped her in the face; this stone that made her feel eyes glued to
the back of her neck, and turned her room into a sauna, and killed the lights and even burned the Christmas strings above her door, and made the phone go dead, attracting the attention of that friendly strange old man who had a room here, too, and who drew chalk spirals and boxes on his door and she knew that he knew more about this than he was saying, she really couldn’t put her finger on it, but Max had special knowledge ...
“Max Caul?” Opal asked.
“He was outside with me when I came up the stairs. Oh my God, I forgot about him. We were worried about the man with the ax I saw coming out of the office and we came to check on you. Max was at the bottom of the steps.”
Adam leaned over the sink, peering into the alleyway below.
“Well, he’s gone now.”
Vera was up and running for the back door.
“We have to look for him. That man with the ax could still be out there.”
“This way,” Adam said.
Their quick footsteps rumbled in the closed stairwell. Wyatt, behind them, at the top of the steps, asked, “What man with an ax?”
Adam answered, “She saw a tall man in a raincoat leaving the office. He was carrying an ax and acting—”
“Totally robotic,” Vera finished.
Raincoat?
Wyatt didn’t have a premonition. He didn’t believe in demons. But he had vivid memories of a man in a raincoat and a bloodletting visited upon this town.
Adam tried the door, grasping the knob and shaking the panel in its frame. He twisted sideways and banged his shoulder into it. Once, twice.
“The stupid thing won’t budge,” he said.
“Don’t go out there,” Wyatt told them.
Opal slipped past her husband. Standing between Vera and Adam, she danced her fingers on the door’s painted wood. The same door she had felt was unusually warm under her touch this
morning. Now coldness lived there. Just on the other side. A hard block of ice or iron shoved against the door. They wouldn’t be going out this way.
“We can’t pass through here,” she said.
\
“Down the back steps then,” Vera said. And she was already moving around Wyatt. Adam followed on her heels.
Opal struggled into her snow boots. With her winter coat on, and a wool tasseled cap snugged down over her ears, she looked like a kid late for the school bus in her rush to make it outside.
Wyatt, dizzied, trapped in his own apartment, watched them. He was unable to put it into words, but felt that here and now was likely the safest it was ever going to be in American Rapids this Christmas Eve.
The eager three went out the back.
He chased after them.