24

Sounds seemed suddenly louder. The pounding of his own heart, the heavy rain against the window. He began to see as his eyes drank in the dim evening light, and he felt his way to the wall switch.

He snapped it on and off, idly. “Well,” he said, rubbing his hands together. “Lines are always going down during these storms. We have the fireplace, and I think I saw a flashlight in one of the kitchen drawers.”

“I’m not spending the night here.”

“You’re going to swim the flood? You’ll drown.”

“I’ll sleep in the car.”

“No.”

“It’s better than in here.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t think it’s safe.”

“Not safe?”

“The bank might collapse. Get eaten away. And wash the car away.”

“I’ll move the car to high ground. What’s the matter? You agree with me, don’t you? You see that we’re in trouble.”

He studied what he could see of her face, a pale oblong across the room. “It’s a little Volkswagen. It just doesn’t seem strong enough.”

“For what?”

Paul did not speak for a while. He found a chair and sat slowly. “I don’t think we should panic. We should behave like rational people. Sleeping in the car is a stupid thing to do. It’s too much an admission of terror.” He made a short, joyless laugh.

“I admit it. I’m terrified.”

“We have to act as a team. We can’t disagree with each other.”

“Then we have to agree on what it is we face here.”

Paul stepped carefully into the living room and knelt at the fireplace. A box of matches rattled in his hand, and he wadded a sheet of newspaper. “I don’t think Len has lived in this cabin for maybe a week. Or two. Or even longer.”

“But he left his camera. His toothbrush.”

“We’ll argue forever. We don’t know. We are ignorant. His whereabouts are unknown. Some people shiver when they hear the word unknown. You could call a scary book The Unknown and people would be terrified just of the title.”

A wooden match struck with a spurt of fine, white sparks, and a flame danced. Paul touched it to the crumpled paper, and the fire spread like black ink across the newsprint. Lise sighed and sat beside him, watching the fire.

“We’ll be all right,” Paul said, beginning to believe it himself. “Len is weird. We have no reason to believe he’s dangerous.”

“I know he is,” she said softly.

Paul knew it too. The dream told him that. He had never paid any attention to his dreams before, and had always felt that people who preoccupied themselves with dreams were foolish. But this one was different.

“There is something you should know,” he said at last. “Something I haven’t told you. About the nightmares that I’ve had. They are the same as the ones you have had. A house. Like this place. Dark, like this. Someone in the house, walking slowly through it, as a paralysis grips you and you can’t move or even cry out.”

She looked into the fire.

“Aunt Mary has had the same dream. I put it out of my mind. I thought it was a coincidence. Well, it was. But I thought it was a meaningless coincidence.”

“I don’t want to stay here.”

He felt weary. He couldn’t argue anymore. “All right. We’ll sleep in the car. I think it’s a crazy thing to do, but I can’t argue.”

“You knew about these dreams, but you didn’t tell me.”

“They seemed meaningless.”

“What else do you know that you aren’t telling me?”

“I know that if we leave this house he can come back into it.”

“That doesn’t matter. We can stay in the car for days.”

“It’s awfully small.”

“We’ll only spend the nights there. And it can’t rain forever.”

Paul rose. “All right. Here’s your raincoat. We’ll sleep in the car.”

Before leaving the cabin he stood before the fire. It threw huge shadows around the room, and his own shadow was a dark, quaking giant that flowed across the floor. He knelt quickly and put his hand around the handle of the hatchet. It wrenched out of the block of wood with a squeak, and he examined it in the firelight.

The wedge-shaped head was battered, and the shaft of the handle had once been covered with red paint. Now, the blond grain of the wood was exposed. The hatchet was the sort of tool that accumulated punishment, belonging to no one, used for one, quick violent act, then cast aside until the next task.

Paul tucked the hatchet into his belt, and covered it with his raincoat, zipping the nylon jacket, so Lise would not see it.

She had found the flashlight in the kitchen. It threw a brown oblong across the wet redwood needles, and spears of rain glittered in its beam from moment to moment. Their breath made clouds.

The river clattered somewhere ahead of them, and a wet branch whipped Paul’s face, soaking him. The flashlight beam illuminated a fungus erupting from the side of a redwood, pale and moist as bone.

Lise stopped.

Ahead of them, tire tracks gouged the mud like claw marks. Rain pocked the slash-shaped puddles that had formed in the tracks, water as brown as milk chocolate. The light from the flashlight expanded upward until rain fell in its beam, fine and impeccable as a shower of needles. Then the beam tightened to a circle at their feet.

One of them had to say it, although it was so obvious they could not breathe for a moment.

Paul stepped forward and crouched, touching the long sierra of mud along one edge of a tire track. He stood, and turned to face the dimming light of the flashlight. “It’s gone.”