52

CANDLES WERE FLOATING IN front of Sharon’s face. Simple, white, three inch tapered candles with brightly burning wicks. And they were floating. She knew what she was seeing was impossible, but the evidence was hard to ignore, suspended as it was in midair a few feet in front of her.

She blinked her eyes rapidly and the candles disappeared, only to be replaced by a decapitated human skull, skin torn away to reveal a bone-white death mask, a terrifying rictus suspended inches in front of her face in the very same space the candles had occupied until seconds ago. She tried to scream and found she could not. Her throat was parched and sore and she was unable to produce even a squeak.

Sharon blinked again, now close to panic, desperate to make the awful grinning skull disappear. When she re-focused her eyes she was relieved to discover the death mask had vanished and in its place was a hazy darkness, with a tantalizing sensation of movement just beyond the edge of her vision. She strained to hear the sound of footsteps to correlate with the perceived motion and could hear nothing.

With a supreme effort, Sharon cleared her head of some of the haziness and confusion. The shadowy darkness remained, lurking at the edges of her vision like a menacing stalker. She knew the candles and the skull she had seen were hallucinations, figments of her fevered imagination. She was dying; she sensed it and was mildly surprised to discover that the notion didn’t bother her all that much.

There was a pang of regret that she would so quickly lose what she had gotten a small taste of with Mike McMahon—his tenderness, humor, and a sensitivity she had never before experienced—but otherwise Sharon Dupont viewed her impending death with an almost clinical detachment. Her arms were broken and useless; she assumed at least one rib was broken and probably more, and she suspected that one or more of those broken ribs had punctured a lung. Undoubtedly she was bleeding internally.

It was becoming harder and harder to remain lucid, as evidenced by the strange hallucinations she had suffered upon regaining consciousness moments ago. She remembered her determination to warn Mike of the strange sight she had seen a few hours before and almost laughed, would have laughed, actually, were it not for the intense pain she knew would result. The idea was ludicrous. She was lying face down and helpless on a filthy floor in a room littered with who knew what sorts of atrocities and she was going to—what? Jump up and charge into Paskagankee to save Mike McMahon? She couldn’t even walk a perimeter around a raging bonfire without getting lost.

Sharon shook her head and a woozy, nauseous sensation rolled up her gullet from her belly and straight into her head: do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars. She concentrated on not throwing up, knowing instinctively that to puke right now would be a very bad idea, given her likely internal injuries. She realized she had been drooling while she was unconscious and looked down on the dirty carpet to discover blood had been leaking out of her mouth, bright and red and terrifying.

Again the perceived sensation of movement felt rather than seen tantalized her, just beyond the edge of her vision. Ignoring the pain and nausea and fear, she willed herself to turn her head, accomplishing maybe half an inch of movement. It was just enough to bring the object she had sensed into her line of sight.

She saw a man, a very familiar-looking man, wearing a red plaid hunting jacket. But something was not right. The jacket was ripped and torn, almost in tatters, hanging off the man in long, stringy cloth strips.

Then she remembered. The man was former Paskagankee Police Chief Wally Court; she had glimpsed him a few hours previously, stumbling around inside this filthy house. His left arm hung askew, bent a full ninety degrees between his wrist and elbow. Sharon couldn’t be sure, but it looked like a fragment of bone had pierced the man’s skin near his elbow. The arm was clearly broken, shattered, really. Court should have been in agony, and yet he moved silently and smoothly—too smoothly, almost as if he were gliding instead of walking. And his hair. His hair looked greasy and matted, with leaves and twigs and something that looked suspiciously like animal excrement smeared throughout it.

Sharon wondered if somehow she was suffering another hallucination. She decided she must be; although she couldn’t imagine how, everything seemed so vivid and real. It was not possible that Chief Court—if it really even was Wally Court sharing this nightmare scenario with her—could be gliding around this house, a few feet away, moving in eerie silence with a shattered left arm and cow shit and matted straw inhabiting his thinning gray hair. That was simply impossible and about as ridiculous as floating candles and grinning skulls.

But there it was.

An overwhelming sense of sadness and confusion overtook her like fog rolling in off the ocean. Sadness for what she had lost and would never regain with Wally Court—the father-figure who had meant so much to her in her formative years—and confusion because she was not entirely convinced that this sight was even real and not just a product of some bizarre and random synapse misfirings occurring in her brain thanks to the severity of her injuries.

Suddenly, Sharon Dupont slid smoothly and completely back into her cocoon of darkness. She felt it coming and wondered for a half-second if she would ever reawaken. Then she was gone.