Mr. Murder

Two

1

Dr. Paul Guthridge’s office suite had three examination rooms. Over the years, Marty had been in all of them. They were identical to one another, indistinguishable from rooms in doctors’ offices from Maine to Texas: pale-blue walls, stainless-steel fixtures, otherwise white-on-white; scrub sink, stool, an eye chart. The place had no more charm than a morgue—though a better smell.

Marty sat on the edge of a padded examination table that was protected by a continuous roll of paper sheeting. He was shirtless, and the room was cool. Though he was still wearing his pants, he felt naked, vulnerable. In his mind’s eye, he saw himself having a catatonic seizure, being unable to talk or move or even blink, whereupon the physician would mistake him for dead, strip him naked, wire an ID tag to his big toe, tape his eyelids shut, and ship him off to the coroner for processing.

Although it earned him a living, a suspense writer’s imagination made him more aware of the constant proximity of death than were most people. Every dog was a potential rabies carrier. Every strange van passing through the neighborhood was driven by a sexual psychopath who would kidnap and murder any child left unattended for more than three seconds. Every can of soup in the pantry was botulism waiting to happen.

He was not particularly afraid of doctors—though he was not comforted by them, either.

What troubled him was the whole idea of medical science, not because he distrusted it but because, irrationally, its very existence was a reminder that life was tenuous, death inescapable. He didn’t need reminders. He already possessed an acute awareness of mortality, and spent his life trying to cope with it.

Determined not to sound like an hysteric while describing his symptoms to Guthridge, Marty recounted the odd experiences of the past three days in a quiet, matter-of-fact voice. He tried to use clinical rather than emotional terms, beginning with the seven-minute fugue in his office and ending with the abrupt panic attack he had suffered as he had been leaving the house to drive to the doctor’s office.

Guthridge was an excellent internist—in part because he was a good listener—although he didn’t look the role. At forty-five, he appeared ten years younger than his age, and he had a boyish manner. Today he wore tennis shoes, chinos, and a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt. In the summer, he favored colorful Hawaiian shirts. On those rare occasions when he wore a traditional white smock over slacks, shirt, and tie, he claimed to be “playing doctor” or “on strict probation from the American Medical Association’s dress-code committee,” or “suddenly overwhelmed by the godlike responsibilities of my office.”

Paige thought Guthridge was an exceptional physician, and the girls regarded him with the special affection usually reserved for a favorite uncle.

Marty liked him too.

He suspected the doctor’s eccentricities were not calculated entirely to amuse patients and put them at ease. Like Marty, Guthridge seemed morally offended by the very fact of death. As a younger man, perhaps he’d been drawn to medicine because he saw the physician as a knight battling dragons incarnated as illnesses and diseases. Young knights believe that noble intentions, skill, and faith will prevail over evil. Older knights know better—and sometimes use humor as a weapon to stave off bitterness and despair. Guthridge’s quips and Mickey Mouse sweatshirts might relax his patients, but they were also his armor against the hard realities of life and death.

“Panic attack? You, of all people, suffering a panic attack?” Paul Guthridge asked doubtfully.

Marty said, “Hyperventilating, heart pounding, felt like I was going to explode—sounds like a panic attack to me.”

“Sounds like sex.”

Marty smiled. “Trust me, it wasn’t sex.”

“You could be right,” Guthridge said with a sigh. “It’s been so long, I’m not sure what sex was like exactly. Believe me, Marty, this is a bad decade to be a bachelor, so many really nasty diseases out there. You meet a new girl, date her, give her a chaste kiss when you take her home—and then wait to see if your lips are going to rot and fall off.”

“That’s a swell image.”

“Vivid, huh? Maybe I should’ve been a writer.” He began to examine Marty’s left eye with an ophthalmoscope. “Have you been having unusually intense headaches? ”

“One headache over the weekend. But nothing unusual.”

“Repeated spells of dizziness?”

“No.”

“Temporary blindness, noticeable narrowing of peripheral vision?”

“Nothing like that.”

Turning his attention to Marty’s right eye, Guthridge said, “As for being a writer—other doctors have done it, you know. Michael Crichton, Robin Cook, Somerset Maugham—”

“Seuss.”

“Don’t be sarcastic. Next time I have to give you an injection, I might use a horse syringe.”

“It always feels like you do anyway. I’ll tell you something, being a writer isn’t half as romantic as people think.”

“At least you don’t have to handle urine samples,” Guthridge said, setting aside the ophthalmoscope.

With squiggly ghost images of the instrument light still dancing in his eyes, Marty said, “When a writer’s first starting out, a lot of editors and agents and movie producers treat him as if he is a urine sample.”

“Yeah, but now you’re a celebrity,” Guthridge said, plugging his stethoscope ear tips in place.

“Far from it,” Marty objected.

Guthridge pressed the icy steel of the stethoscope diaphragm against Marty’s chest. “Okay, breathe deeply . . . hold . . . breathe out . . . and again.” After listening to Marty’s lungs as well as his heart, the doctor put the stethoscope aside. “Hallucinations?”

“No.”

“Strange smells?”

“No.”

“Things taste the way they should? I mean, you haven’t been eating ice cream and it suddenly tasted bitter or oniony, nothing like that?”

“Nothing like that.”

As he wrapped the pressure cuff of a sphygmomanometer around Marty’s arm, Guthridge said, “Well, all I know is, to get into People magazine, you’ve got to be a celebrity of one kind or another—rock singer, actor, smarmy politician, murderer, or maybe the guy with the world’s largest collection of ear wax. So if you think you aren’t a celebrity author, then I want to know who you’ve killed and exactly how much damn ear wax you own.”

“How’d you know about People?”

“We subscribe for the waiting room.” He pumped air into the cuff until it was tight, then read the falling mercury on the gauge before he continued: “The latest copy was in this morning’s mail. My receptionist showed it to me, really amused. She said you were the least likely Mr. Murder she could imagine.”

Confused, Marty said, “Mr. Murder?”

“You haven’t seen the piece?” Guthridge asked as he pulled off the pressure cuff, punctuating his question with the ugly sound of a Velcro seal tearing open.

“Not yet, no. They don’t show it to you in advance. You mean, in the article, they call me Mr. Murder?”

“Well, it’s sort of cute.”

“Cute?” Marty winced. “I wonder if Philip Roth would think it was cute to be ‘Mr. Litterateur’ or Terry McMillan ‘Ms. Black Saga.’ ”

“You know what they say—all publicity is good publicity. ”

“That was Nixon’s first reaction to Watergate, wasn’t it?”

“We actually take two subscriptions to People. I’ll give you one of our copies when you leave.” Guthridge grinned impishly. “You know, until I saw the magazine, I never realized what a really scary guy you are.”

Marty groaned. “I was afraid of this.”

“It’s not bad really. Knowing you, I suspect you’ll find it a little embarrassing. But it won’t kill you.”

“What is going to kill me, Doc?”

Frowning, Guthridge said, “Based on this exam, I’d say old age. From all outward signs, you’re in good shape.”

“The key word is ‘outward,’ ” Marty said.

“Right. I’d like you to have some tests. It’ll be on an out-patient basis at Hoag Hospital.”

“I’m ready,” Marty said grimly, though he was not ready at all.

“Oh, not today. They won’t have an opening until at least tomorrow, probably Wednesday.”

“What’re you looking for with these tests?”

“Brain tumors, lesions. Severe blood chemistry imbalances. Or maybe a shift in the position of the pineal gland, putting pressure on surrounding brain tissue—which could cause symptoms similar to some of yours. Other things. But don’t worry about it because I’m pretty sure we’re going to draw a blank. Most likely, your problem is simply stress.”

“That’s what Paige said.”

“See? You could’ve saved my fee.”

“Be straight with me, Doc.”

“I am being straight.”

“I don’t mind saying this scares me.”

Guthridge nodded sympathetically. “Of course it does. But listen, I’ve seen symptoms far more bizarre and severe than yours—and it turns out to be stress.”

“Psychological.”

“Yes, but nothing long-term. You aren’t going mad, either, if that’s what you’re worried about. Try to relax, Marty. We’ll know where we stand by the end of the week.” When he needed it, Guthridge could call upon a demeanor as reassuring—and a bedside manner as soothing—as that of any gray-haired medical eminence in a three-piece suit. He slipped Marty’s shirt from one of the clothes hooks on the back of the door and handed it to him. The faint gleam in his eye betrayed another shift in mood: “Now, when I book time at the hospital, what patient name should I give to them? Martin Stillwater or Martin Murder?”

2

He explores his home. He is eager to learn about his new family.

Because he is most intrigued by the thought of himself as a father, he begins in the girls’ bedroom. For a while he stands just inside the door, studying the two distinctly different sides of the room.

He wonders which of his young daughters is the effervescent one who decorates her walls with posters of dazzlingly colorful hot-air balloons and leaping dancers, who keeps a gerbil and other pets in wire cages and glass terrariums. He still holds the photograph of his wife and children, but the smiling faces in it reveal nothing of their personalities.

The second daughter is apparently contemplative, favoring quiet landscapes on her walls. Her bed is neatly made, the pillows plumped just-so. Her storybooks are shelved in orderly fashion, and her corner desk is free of clutter.

When he slides open the mirrored closet door, he finds a similar division in the hanging clothes. Those to the left are arranged both according to the type of garment and color. Those to the right are in no particular order, askew on the hangers, and jammed against one another in a way that virtually assures wrinkling.

Because the smaller jeans and dresses are on the left side of the closet, he can be sure that the neat and contemplative girl is the younger of the two. He raises the photograph and stares at her. The pixie. So cute. He still does not know whether she is Charlotte or Emily.

He goes to the desk in the older daughter’s side of the room and stares down at the clutter: magazines, schoolbooks, one yellow hair ribbon, a butterfly barrette, a few scattered sticks of Black Jack chewing gum, colored pencils, a tangled pair of pink kneesocks, an empty Coke can, coins, and a Game Boy.

He opens one of the textbooks, then another. Both of them have the same name penciled in front: Charlotte Stillwater.

The older and less disciplined girl is Charlotte. The younger girl who keeps her belongings neat is Emily.

Again, he looks at their faces in the photograph.

Charlotte is pretty, and her smile is sweet. However, if he is going to have trouble with either of his children, it will be with this one.

He will not tolerate disorder in his house. Everything must be perfect. Neat and clean and happy.

In lonely hotel rooms in strange cities, awake in the darkness, he has ached with need and has not understood what would satisfy his longing. Now he knows that being Martin Stillwater—father to these children, husband to this wife—is the destiny that will fill the terrible void and at last bring him contentment. He is grateful to whatever power has led him here, and he is determined to fulfill his responsibilities to his wife, his children, and society. He wants an ideal family like those he has seen in certain favorite movies, wants to be kind like Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life and wise like Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird and revered like both of them, and he will do whatever is necessary to ensure a loving, harmonious, and orderly home.

He has seen The Bad Seed, too, and he knows that some children can destroy a home and all hope of harmony because they are seething with the potential for evil. Charlotte’s slovenly habits and strange menagerie strongly indicate that she is capable of disobedience and possibly violence.

When snakes appear in movies, they are always symbols of evil, dangerous to the innocent; therefore, the snake in the terrarium is chilling proof of this child’s corruption and her need for guidance. She keeps other reptiles as well, a couple of rodents, and an ugly black beetle in a glass jar—all of which the movies have taught him to associate with the powers of darkness.

He studies the photograph again, marveling at how innocent Charlotte looks.

But remember the girl in The Bad Seed. She appeared to be an angel yet was thoroughly evil.

Being Martin Stillwater may not prove as easy as he had first thought. Charlotte might be a real handful.

Fortunately, he has seen Lean on Me in which Morgan Freeman is a high school principal bringing order to a school overwhelmed by anarchy, and he has seen The Principal starring Jim Belushi, so he knows that even bad kids really want discipline. They will respond properly if adults have the guts to insist upon rules of behavior.

If Charlotte is disobedient and stubborn, he will punish her until she learns to be a good little girl. He will not fail her. At first she will hate him for denying her privileges, for confining her to her room, for hurting her if that becomes necessary, but in time she will see that he has her best interests at heart, and she will learn to love him and understand how wise he is.

In fact he can visualize the triumphant moment when, after so much struggle, her rehabilitation is ensured. Her realization that she has been wrong and that he has been a good father will culminate in a touching scene. They will both cry. She will throw herself in his arms, remorseful and ashamed. He will hug her very tightly and tell her it’s all right, all right, don’t cry. She will say, “Oh, Daddy,” in a tremulous voice, and cling fiercely to him, and thereafter everything will be perfect between them.

He yearns for that sweet triumph. He can even hear the soaring and emotional music that will accompany it.

He turns away from Charlotte’s side of the room, goes to his younger daughter’s neat bed.

Emily. The pixie. She will never give him any trouble. She is the good daughter.

He will hold her on his lap and read to her from storybooks. He will take her to the zoo, and her little hand will be lost in his. He will buy her popcorn at the movies, and they will sit side by side in the darkness, laughing at the latest Disney animated feature.

Her big dark eyes will adore him.

Sweet Emily. Dear Emily.

Almost reverently, he pulls back the chenille bedspread. The blanket. The top sheet. He stares at the bottom sheet on which she slept last night, and the pillows on which her delicate head rested.

His heart swells with affection, tenderness.

He puts one hand against the sheet, slides it back and forth, back and forth, feeling the fabric on which her young body has so recently lain.

Every night he will tuck her into bed. She will press her small mouth to his cheek, such warm little kisses, and her breath will have the sweet peppermint aroma of toothpaste.

He bends down to smell the sheets.

“Emily,” he says softly.

Oh, how he longs to be her father and to look into those dark yet limpid eyes, those huge and adoring eyes.

With a sigh, he returns to Charlotte’s side of the room. He drops the silver-framed photograph of his family on her bed, and he studies the kept creatures housed on the bookless bookshelves.

Some of the wild things watch him.

He begins with the gerbil. When he unlatches the door and reaches into its cage, the timid creature cowers in a far corner, paralyzed with fear, sensing his intent. He seizes it, withdraws it from the cage. Although it tries to squirm free, he grips its body firmly in his right hand, its head in his left, and wrenches sharply, snapping its neck. A brittle, dry sound. Its cry is shrill but brief.

He throws the dead gerbil on the brightly colored bedspread.

This will be the beginning of Charlotte’s discipline.

She will hate him for it. But only for a while.

Eventually she will realize that these are unsuitable pets for a little girl. Symbols of evil. Reptiles, rodents, beetles. The sort of creatures witches use as their familiars, to communicate between them and Satan.

He has learned all about witches’ familiars from horror movies. If there was a cat in the house he would kill it as well, without hesitation, because sometimes they are cute and innocent, just cats and nothing more, but sometimes they are the very spawn of Hell. By inviting such creatures into your home, you risk inviting the devil himself.

One day Charlotte will understand. And be grateful.

Eventually she will love him.

They will all love him.

He will be a good husband and father.

Much smaller than the gerbil, the frightened mouse quivers in his fist, its tail hanging below his clenched fingers, only its head protruding above. It empties its bladder. He grimaces at the warm dampness and, in disgust, squeezes with all his strength, crushing the life out of the filthy little beast.

He tosses it onto the bed beside the dead gerbil.

The harmless garden snake in the glass terrarium makes no effort to slither away from him. He holds it by the tail and snaps it as if it is a whip, snaps it again, then lashes it hard against the wall, again, and a third time. When he dangles it before his face, it is entirely limp, and he sees that its skull is crushed.

He coils it next to the gerbil and the mouse.

The beetle and the turtle make satisfying crunching sounds when he stomps them under the heel of his shoe. He arranges their oozing remains on the bedspread.

Only the lizard escapes him. When he slides the lid partway off its terrarium and reaches in for it, the chameleon scampers up his arm, quicker than the eye, and leaps off his shoulder. He spins around, searching for it, and sees it on the nearby vanity, where it skitters between a hairbrush and a comb, onto a jewelry box. There it freezes and begins to change color to match its background, but when he tries to snatch it up, it darts away, off the dresser, onto the floor, across the room, under Emily’s bed, out of sight.

He decides to let it go.

This might be for the best. When Paige and the girls get home, the four of them will search for it together. When they find it, he will kill it in front of Charlotte or perhaps require her to kill it herself. That will be a good lesson. Thereafter, she will bring no more inappropriate pets into the Stillwater house.

3

In the parking lot outside of the three-story, Spanish-style business complex where Dr. Guthridge had his offices, while a gusty wind harried dead leaves across the pavement, Marty sat in his car and read the article about himself in People. Two photographs and a page’s worth of prose were spread over three pages of the magazine. At least for the few minutes he took to read the piece, all of his other worries were forgotten.

The black headline made him flinch even though he knew what it would be—MR. MURDER—but he was equally embarrassed by the subhead in smaller letters: IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, MYSTERY NOVELIST MARTIN STILLWATER SEES DARKNESS AND EVIL WHERE OTHERS SEE ONLY SUNSHINE.

He felt it portrayed him as a brooding pessimist who dressed entirely in black and lurked on beaches and among the palm trees, glowering at anyone who dared to have fun, tediously expounding on the inherent vileness of the human species. At best it implied he was a theatrical phony costuming himself in what he thought was the most commercial image for a mystery novelist.

Possibly he was over-reacting. Paige would tell him that he was too sensitive about these things. That was what she always said, and she usually made him feel better, whether he could bring himself to believe her or not.

He examined the photographs before reading the piece.

In the first and largest picture, he was standing in the yard behind the house, against a backdrop of trees and twilight sky. He looked demented.

The photographer, Ben Walenko, had been given instructions to induce Marty into a pose deemed fitting for a mystery novelist, so he had come with props he assumed Marty would brandish with suitable expressions of malevolent intent: an axe, an enormous knife, an ice pick, and a gun. When Marty politely declined to use the props and also refused to wear a trenchcoat with the collar turned up and a fedora pulled low on his forehead, the photographer agreed it was ludicrous for an adult to play dress-up, and suggested they avoid the usual clichés in favor of shots portraying him simply as a writer and an ordinary human being.

Now it was obvious that Walenko had been clever enough to get what he wanted without props, after lulling his subject into a false sense of security. The backyard had seemed an innocuous setting. However, through a combination of the deep shadows of dusk, looming trees, ominous clouds backlit by the final somber light of day, the strategic placement of studio lights, and an extreme camera angle, the photographer succeeded in making Marty appear weird. Furthermore, of the twenty exposures taken in the backyard, the editors had chosen the worst: Marty was squinting; his features were distorted; the photographer’s lights were reflected in his slitted eyes, which seemed to be glowing like the eyes of a zombie.

The second photograph was taken in his study. He was sitting at his desk, facing the camera. He was recognizably himself in this one, though by now he preferred not to be recognizable, for it seemed that the only way he could maintain a shred of dignity was to have his true appearance remain a mystery; a combination of shadows and the peculiar light of the stained-glass lamp, even in a black-and-white shot, made him resemble a Gypsy fortuneteller who had glimpsed a portent of disaster in his crystal ball.

He was convinced that a lot of the modern world’s problems could be attributed to the popular media’s saturation of society and its tendency not merely to simplify all issues to the point of absurdity but to confuse fiction and reality. Television news emphasized dramatic footage over facts, sensationalism over substance, seeking ratings with the same tools employed by the producers of prime-time cop and courtroom dramas. Documentaries about real historical figures had become “docudramas” in which accurate details of famous lives and events were relentlessly subordinated to entertainment values or even to the personal fantasies of the show’s creators, grossly distorting the past. Patent medicines were sold in TV commercials by performers who also played doctors in highly rated programs, as if they had in fact graduated from Harvard Medical School instead of merely having attended an acting class or two. Politicians made cameo appearances on episodes of situation comedies. Actors in those comedies appeared at political rallies. Not long ago the Vice-President of the United States engaged in a protracted argument with a fictional television reporter from a sitcom. The public confused actors and politicians with the roles they played. A mystery writer was supposed to be not merely like a character in one of his books but like the cartoonish archetype of the most common character in the entire genre. And year by troubled year, fewer people were able to think clearly about important issues or separate fantasy from reality.

Marty had been determined not to contribute to that sickness, but he had been suckered. Now he was fixed in the public mind as Martin Stillwater, creepy and mysterious author of creepy murder mysteries, preoccupied with the dark side of life, as brooding and strange as any of the characters about whom he wrote.

Sooner or later a disturbed citizen, having confused Marty’s manipulation of fictional people in novels for the manipulation of actual people in real life, would arrive at his house in an old van decorated with signs accusing him of having killed John Lennon, John Kennedy, Rick Nelson, and God-alone-knew-who-else, even though he was an infant when Lee Harvey Oswald pulled the trigger on Kennedy (or when seventeen thousand and thirty-seven homosexual conspirators pulled the trigger, if you believed Oliver Stone’s movie). Something similar had happened to Stephen King, hadn’t it? And Salman Rushdie had sure experienced a few years as suspenseful as any endured by a character in a Robert Ludlum extravaganza.

Chagrined by the bizarre image the magazine had given him, flushed with embarrassment, Marty surveyed the parking lot to be sure no one was watching him as he read about himself. A couple of people were going to and from their cars, but they were paying no attention to him.

Clouds had crept into the previously sunny day. The wind spun dead leaves into a miniature tornado that danced across an empty expanse of blacktop.

He read the article, punctuating it with sighs and mutters. Although it contained a few minor errors, the text was generally factual. But the spin on it matched the photographs. Spooky old Marty Stillwater. What a dour and gloomy guy. Sees a criminal’s wicked grin behind every smile. Works in a dimly lighted office, almost dark, and says he’s just trying to reduce the glare on the computer screen (wink, wink).

His refusal to allow Charlotte and Emily to be photographed, based upon a desire to protect their privacy and to guard against their being teased by schoolmates, was interpreted as a fear of kidnappers lurking under every bush. After all, he had written a novel about a kidnapping a few years ago.

Paige, “as pretty and cerebral as a Martin Stillwater heroine, ” was said to be a “psychologist whose own job requires her to probe into the darkest secrets of her patients,” as if she was engaged not in the counseling of children troubled by their parents’ divorces or the death of a loved one but in the deep analysis of the era’s most savage serial killers.

“Spooky old Paige Stillwater,” he said aloud. “Well, why else would she have married me if she wasn’t already a little weird?”

He told himself he was over-reacting.

Closing the magazine, he said, “Thank God I didn’t let the girls participate. They’d have come out of it looking like the children in ‘The Addams Family.’ ”

Again he told himself that he was over-reacting, but his mood didn’t improve. He felt violated, trivialized; and the fact that he was talking aloud to himself seemed, annoyingly, to validate his new national reputation as an amusing eccentric.

He twisted the key in the ignition, started the engine.

As he drove across the parking lot toward the busy street, Marty was troubled by the feeling that his life had taken more than merely a temporary turn for the worse with the fugue on Saturday, that the magazine article was yet another signpost on this new dark route, and that he would travel a long distance on rough pavement before rediscovering the smooth highway that he had lost.

A whirlwind of leaves burst over the car, startling him. The dry foliage rasped across the hood and roof, like the claws of a beast determined to get inside.

4

Hunger overcomes him. He has not slept since Friday night, has driven across half the country at high speed, in bad weather more than not, and has experienced an exciting and emotional hour and a half in the Stillwater house, confronting his destiny. His stores of energy are depleted. He is shaky and weak-kneed.

In the kitchen he raids the refrigerator, piling food on the oak breakfast table. He consumes several slices of Swiss cheese, half a loaf of bread, a few pickles, the better part of a pound of bacon, mixing it all together without actually bothering to make sandwiches, a bite of this and a bite of that, chewing the bacon raw because he doesn’t want to waste time cooking it, eating fast and with single-minded fixation on the feast, ravenous, oblivious of manners, urgently washing down everything with big swallows of cold beer that foams over his chin. There is so much he wants to do before his wife and kids return home, and he doesn’t know quite when to expect them. The fatty meat is cloying, so periodically he dips into a wide-mouth jar of mayonnaise and scoops out thick wads of the stuff, sucking it off his fingers to lubricate a mouthful of food that he finds hard to swallow even with the aid of another bottle of Corona. He concludes his meal with two thick slices of chocolate cake, washing those down with beer as well, whereafter he hastily cleans up the mess with paper towels and washes his hands at the sink.

He is revitalized.

With the silver-framed photograph in hand, he returns to the second floor, taking the stairs two at a time. He proceeds to the master bedroom, where he clicks on both nightstand lamps.

For a while he stares at the king-size bed, excited by the prospect of having sex with Paige. Making love. When it is done with someone for whom you truly care, it is called “making love.”

He truly cares for her.

He must care.

After all, she is his wife.

He knows that her face is good, excellent, with a full mouth and fine bone structure and laughing eyes, but he can’t tell much about her body from the photograph. He imagines that her breasts are full, belly flat, legs long and shapely, and he is eager to lie with her, deep inside of her.

At the dresser, he opens drawers until he finds her lingerie. He caresses a half-slip, the smooth cups of a brassiere, a lace-trimmed camisole. He removes a pair of silky panties from the drawer and rubs his face with them, breathing deeply while repeatedly whispering her name.

Making love will be unimaginably different from the sweaty sex he has known with sluts picked up in bars, because those experiences have always left him feeling empty, alienated, frustrated that his desperate need for true intimacy is unfulfilled. Frustration fosters anger; anger leads to hatred; hatred generates violence—and violence sometimes soothes. But that pattern will not apply when he makes love to Paige, for he belongs in her arms as he has belonged in no others. With her, his need will be satisfied every bit as much as will his desire. Together, they will achieve a union beyond anything he can imagine, perfect oneness, bliss, spiritual as well as physical consummation, all of which he has seen in countless movies, bodies bathed in golden light, ecstasy, a fierce intensity of pleasure possible only in the presence of love. Afterward, he will not have to kill her because then they will be as one, two hearts beating in harmony, no reason for killing anyone, transcendent, all needs gloriously satisfied.

The prospect of romance leaves him almost breathless.

“I will make you so happy, Paige,” he promises her picture.

Realizing he hasn’t bathed since Saturday, wanting to be clean for her, he returns her silken panties to the stack from which he had plucked them, closes the dresser drawer, and goes into his bathroom to shower.

He strips out of the clothes he took from the motorhome closet of the white-haired retiree, Jack, in Oklahoma on Sunday, hardly twenty-four hours ago. After wadding each garment into a tight ball, he stuffs it into a brass wastebasket.

The shower stall is spacious, and the water is wonderfully hot. He works up a heavy lather with the bar of soap, and soon the clouds of steam are laden with an almost intoxicating floral aroma.

After drying off on a yellow towel, he searches bathroom drawers until he finds his toiletries. He uses a roll-on deodorant and then combs his wet hair straight back from his forehead to let it dry naturally. He shaves with an electric razor, splashes on some lime-scented cologne, and brushes his teeth.

He feels like a new man.

In his half of the large walk-in closet, he selects a pair of cotton briefs, blue jeans, a blue-and-black-checkered flannel shirt, athletic socks, and a pair of Nikes. Everything fits perfectly.

It feels so good to be home.

5

Paige stood at one of the windows and watched the gray clouds roll in from the west, driven by a Pacific wind. As they came, the earth below them darkened, and sunmantled buildings put on cloaks of shadows.

The inner sanctum of her three-room, sixth-floor office suite had two large panes of glass that provided an uninspiring view of a freeway, a shopping center, and the jammed-together roofs of housing tracts that receded across Orange County apparently to infinity. She would have enjoyed a panoramic ocean vista or a window on a lushly planted courtyard, but that would have meant higher rent, which had been out of the question during the early years of Marty’s writing career when she’d been their primary breadwinner.

Now, in spite of his growing success and impressive income, obligating herself to a pricier lease at a new location was still imprudent. Even a prospering literary career was an uncertain living. The owner of a fresh-produce store, when ill, had employees who would continue to sell oranges and apples in his absence, but if Marty became ill, the entire enterprise screeched to a halt.

And Marty was ill. Perhaps seriously.

No, she wouldn’t think about that. They knew nothing for sure. It was more like the old Paige, the pre-Marty Paige, to worry about mere possibilities instead of about only what was already fact.

Appreciate the moment, Marty would tell her. He was a born therapist. Sometimes she thought she’d learned more from him than from the courses she had taken to earn her doctorate in psychology.

Appreciate the moment.

In truth the constant bustle of the scene beyond the window was invigorating. And whereas she had once been so predisposed to gloom that bad weather could negatively affect her mood, all of these years with Marty and his usually unshakable good cheer had made it possible for her to see the somber beauty in an oncoming storm.

She had been born and raised in a loveless house as grim and cold as any arctic cavern. But those days were far behind her, and the effect of them had long ago diminished.

Appreciate the moment.

Checking her watch, she pulled the drapes shut because the mood of her next two clients was not likely to be immune to the influence of gray weather.

When the windows were covered, the place was as cozy as any parlor in a private home. Her desk, books, and files were in the third office, rarely seen by those she counseled. She always met with them in this more welcoming room. The floral-pattern sofa with its variety of throw pillows lent a lot of charm, and each of three plushly upholstered armchairs was commodious enough to permit young guests to curl up entirely on the seat with their legs tucked under them if they wished. Celadon lamps with fringed silk shades cast a warm light that glimmered in the bibelots on the end tables and in the glazes of Lladro porcelain figurines in the mahogany breakfront.

Paige usually offered hot chocolate and cookies, or pretzels with a cold glass of cola, and conversation was facilitated because the overall effect was like being at Grandma’s house. At least it was how Grandma’s house had been in the days when no grandma ever underwent plastic surgery, had herself reconfigured by liposuction, divorced Grandpa, went on singles’ cruises to Cabo San Lucas, or flew to Vegas with her boyfriend for the weekend.

Most clients, on their first visit, were astonished not to find the collected works of Freud, a therapy couch, and the too-solemn atmosphere of a psychiatrist’s office. Even when she reminded them that she was not a psychiatrist, not a medical doctor at all, but a counselor with a degree in psychology who saw “clients” rather than “patients,” people with communication problems rather than neuroses or psychoses, they remained bewildered for the first half an hour or so. Eventually the room—and, she liked to think, her relaxed approach—won them over.

Paige’s two o’clock appointment, the last of the day, was with Samantha Acheson and her eight-year-old son, Sean. Samantha’s first husband, Sean’s father, had died shortly after the boy’s fifth birthday. Two and a half years later, Samantha remarried, and Sean’s behavioral problems began virtually on the wedding day, an obvious result of his misguided conviction that she had betrayed his dead father and might one day betray him as well. For five months, Paige had met twice a week with the boy, winning his trust, opening lines of communication, so they could discuss the pain and fear and anger he was unable to talk about with his mother. Today, Samantha was to participate for the first time, which was an important step because progress was usually swift once the child was ready to say to the parent what he had said to his counselor.

She sat in the armchair she reserved for herself and reached to the end table for the reproduction-antique telephone, which was both a working phone and an intercom to the reception lounge. She intended to ask Millie, her secretary, to send in Samantha and Sean Acheson, but the intercom buzzed before she lifted the receiver.

“Marty’s on line one, Paige.”

“Thank you, Millie.” She pressed line one. “Marty?”

He didn’t respond.

“Marty, are you there?” she asked, looking to see if she had punched the correct button.

Line one was lit, but there was only silence on it.

“Marty?”

“I like the sound of your voice, Paige. So melodic.”

He sounded . . . odd.

Her heart began to knock against her ribs, and she struggled to suppress the fear that swelled in her. “What did the doctor say?”

“I like your picture.”

“My picture?” she said, baffled.

“I like your hair, your eyes.”

“Marty, I don’t—”

“You’re what I need.”

Her mouth had gone dry. “Is something wrong?”

Suddenly he spoke very fast, running sentences together: “I want to kiss you, Paige, kiss your breasts, hold you against me, make love to you, I will make you very happy, I want to be in you, it will be just like the movies, bliss.”

“Marty, honey, what—”

He hung up, cutting her off.

As surprised and confused as she was worried, Paige listened to the dial tone before returning the handset to the cradle.

What the hell?

It was two o’clock, and she doubted that his appointment with Guthridge had lasted an hour; therefore, he hadn’t phoned her from the doctor’s office. On the other hand, he wouldn’t have had time to drive all the way home, which meant he had called her en route.

She lifted the handset and punched in the number of his car phone. He answered on the second ring, and she said, “Marty, what the hell’s wrong?”

“Paige?”

“What was that all about?”

“What was what all about?”

“Kissing my breasts, for God’s sake, just like the movies, bliss.”

He hesitated, and she could hear the faint rumble of the Ford’s engine, which meant he was in transit. After a beat he said, “Kid, you’ve lost me.”

“A minute ago, you call here, acting as if—”

“No. Not me.”

“You didn’t call here?”

“Nope.”

“Is this a joke?”

“You mean, somebody called, said he was me?”

“Yes, he—”

“Did he sound like me?”

“Yes.”

“Exactly like me?”

Paige thought about that for a moment. “Well, not exactly. He sounded a lot like you and then . . . not quite like you. It’s hard to explain.”

“I hope you hung up on him when he got obscene.”

“You—” She corrected herself: “He hung up first. Besides, it wasn’t an obscene call.”

“Oh? What was that about kissing your breasts?”

“Well, it didn’t seem obscene ’cause I thought he was you.”

“Paige, refresh my memory—when was the last time I called you at work to talk about kissing your breasts?”

She laughed. “Well . . . never, I guess,” and when he laughed, too, she added, “but maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea now and then, liven up the day a little.”

“They are very kissable.”

“Thank you.”

“So’s your tush.”

“You’ve got me blushing,” she said, and it was true.

“So’s your—”

“Now this is getting obscene,” she said.

“Yeah, but I’m the victim.”

“How do you figure?”

“You called me and pretty much demanded that I talk dirty.”

“I guess I did. Women’s liberation, you know.”

“Where will it all end?”

A disturbing possibility had occurred to Paige, but she was reluctant to express it: Perhaps the call had been from Marty, made on his car phone while he was in a fugue state similar to the one on Saturday afternoon when he’d monotonously repeated those two words into a tape recorder for seven minutes and later had no memory of it.

She suspected the same thought had just occurred to him because his sudden reticence matched hers.

At last Paige broke the silence. “What did Paul Guthridge have to say?”

“He thinks it’s probably stress.”

“Thinks?”

“He’s setting up tests for tomorrow or Wednesday.”

“But he wasn’t worried?”

“No. Or he pretended he wasn’t.”

Paul’s informal style was not reflected in the way he imparted essential information to his patients. He was always direct and to the point. Even when Charlotte had been so ill, when some doctors might have soft-pedaled the more alarming possibilities to let the parents adjust slowly to the worst-case scenario, Paul had bluntly assessed her situation with Paige and Marty. He knew that no half-truth or false optimism should ever be mistaken for compassion. If Paul didn’t appear to be more than ordinarily concerned about Marty’s condition and symptoms—that was good news.

“He gave me his spare copy of the new People,” Marty said.

“Uh-oh. You say that as if he handed you a bag of dog poop.”

“Well, it isn’t what I was hoping for.”

“It’s not as bad as you think,” she said.

“How do you know? You haven’t even seen it yet.”

“But I know you and how you are about these things.”

“In the one photo, I look like the Frankenstein monster with a bad hangover.”

“I’ve always loved Boris Karloff.”

He sighed. “I suppose I can change my name, have some plastic surgery, and move to Brazil. But before I book a flight to Rio, do you want me to pick up the kids at school?”

“I’ll get them. They’ll be an hour later today.”

“Oh, that’s right, Monday. Piano lessons.”

“We’ll be home by four-thirty,” she said. “You can show me People and spend the evening crying on my shoulder.”

“To hell with that. I’ll show you People and spend the evening kissing your breasts.”

“You’re special, Marty.”

“I love you, too, kid.”

When she hung up, Paige was smiling. He could always make her smile, even in darker moments.

She refused to think about the strange phone call, about illness or fugues or pictures that made him look like a monster.

Appreciate the moment.

She did just that for a minute or so, then called Millie on the intercom and asked her to send in Samantha and Sean Acheson.

6

In his office, he sits in the executive chair behind the desk. It is comfortable. He can almost believe he has sat in it before.

Nevertheless, he is nervous.

He switches on the computer. It is an IBM PC with substantial hard-disk storage. A good machine. He can’t remember purchasing it.

After the system runs a data-management program, the oversize screen presents him with a “Main Selection Menu” that includes eight choices, mostly word-processing software. He chooses WordPerfect 5.1, and it is loaded.

He doesn’t recall being instructed in the operation of a computer or in the use of WordPerfect. This training is cloaked in amnesiac mists, as is his training in weaponry and his uncanny familiarity with the street systems of various cities. Evidently, his superiors believed he would need to understand basic computer operation and be familiar with certain software programs in order to carry out his assignments.

The screen clears.

Ready.

In the lower right-hand corner of the blue screen, white letters and numbers tell him that he is in document one, on page one, at line one, in the tenth position.

Ready. He is ready to write a novel. His work.

He stares at the blank monitor, trying to start. Beginning is more difficult than he had expected.

He has brought a bottle of Corona from the kitchen, suspecting he might need to lubricate his thoughts. He takes a long swallow. The beer is cold, refreshing, and he knows that it is just the thing to get him going.

After finishing half the bottle, confidence renewed, he begins to type. He bangs out two words, then stops:

The man

The man what?

He stares at the screen for a minute, then types “entered the room.” But what room? In a house? An office building? What does the room look like? Who else is in it? What is this man doing in this room, why is he here? Does it have to be a room? Could he be entering a train, a plane, a graveyard?

He deletes “entered the room” and replaces it with “was tall.” So the man is tall. Does it matter that he is tall? Will tallness be important to the story? How old is he? What color are his eyes, his hair? Is he Caucasian, black, Asian? What is he wearing? As far as that goes, does it have to be a man at all? Couldn’t it be a woman? Or a child?

With these questions in mind, he clears the screen and starts the story from the beginning:

The

He stares at the screen. It is terrifyingly blank. Infinitely blanker than it was before, not just three letters blanker with the deletion of “man.” The choices to follow that simple article, “the,” are limitless, which makes the selection of the second word a great deal more daunting than he would have supposed before he sat in the black leather chair and switched on the machine.

He deletes “The.”

The screen is clear.

Ready.

He finishes the bottle of Corona. It is cold and refreshing, but it does not lubricate his thoughts.

He goes to the bookshelves and pulls off eight of the novels bearing his name, Martin Stillwater. He carries them to the desk, and for a while he sits and reads first pages, second pages, trying to kick-start his brain.

His destiny is to be Martin Stillwater. That much is perfectly clear.

He will be a good father to Charlotte and Emily.

He will be a good husband and lover to the beautiful Paige.

And he will write novels. Mystery novels.

Evidently, he has written them before, at least a dozen, so he can write them again. He simply has to re-acquire the feeling for how it is done, relearn the habit.

The screen is blank.

He puts his fingers on the keys, ready to type.

The screen is so blank. Blank, blank, blank. Mocking him.

Suspecting that he is merely inhibited by the soft persistent hum of the monitor fan and the demanding electronic-blue field of document one, page one, he switches off the computer. The resultant silence is a blessing, but the flat gray glass of the monitor is even more mocking than the blue screen; turning the machine off seems like an admission of defeat.

He needs to be Martin Stillwater, which means he needs to write.

The man. The man was. The man was tall with blue eyes and blond hair, wearing a blue suit and white shirt and red tie, about thirty years old, and he didn’t know what he was doing in the room that he entered. Damn. No good. The man. The man. The man . . .

He needs to write, but every attempt to do so leads quickly to frustration. Frustration soon spawns anger. The familiar pattern. Anger generates a specific hatred for the computer, a loathing of it, and also a less focused hatred of his unsatisfactory position in the world, of the world itself and every one of its inhabitants. He needs so little, so pathetically little, just to belong, to be like other people, to have a home and a family, to have a purpose that he understands. Is that so much? Is it? He does not want to be rich, rub elbows with the high and mighty, dine with socialites. He is not asking for fame. After much struggle, confusion, and loneliness, he now has a home and wife and two children, a sense of direction, a destiny, but he feels it slipping away from him, through his fingers. He needs to be Martin Stillwater, but in order to be Martin Stillwater, he needs to be able to write, and he can’t write, can’t write, damn it all, can’t write. He knows the street layout of Kansas City, other cities, and he knows all about weaponry, about picking locks, because they seeded that knowledge in him—whoever “they” are—but they haven’t seen fit also to implant the knowledge of how to write mystery novels, which he needs, oh so desperately needs, if he is ever to be Martin Stillwater, if he is to keep his lovely wife, Paige, and his daughters and his new destiny, which is slipping, slipping, slipping through his fingers, his one chance at happiness swiftly evaporating, because they are against him, all of them, the whole world, set against him, determined to keep him alone and confused. And why? Why? He hates them and their schemes and their faceless power, despises them and their machines with such bitter intensity that—

—with a shriek of rage, he slams his fist through the dark screen of the computer, striking out at his own fierce reflection almost as much as at the machine and all that it represents. The sound of shattering glass is loud in the silent house, and the vacuum inside the monitor pops simultaneously with a brief hiss of invading air.

He withdraws his hand from the ruins even as fragments of glass are still clinking onto the keyboard, and he stares at his bright blood. Sharp slivers bristle from the webs between his fingers and from a couple of knuckles. An elliptical shard is embedded in the meat of his palm.

Although he is still angry, he is gradually regaining control of himself. Violence sometimes soothes.

He swivels the chair away from the computer to face the opposite side of the U-shaped work area, where he leans forward to examine his wounds in the light of the stained-glass lamp. The glass thorns in his flesh sparkle like jewels.

He is experiencing only mild pain, and he knows it will soon pass. He is tough and resilient; he enjoys splendid recuperative powers.

Some of the fragments of the screen have not pierced his hand deeply, and he is able to pry them out with his fingernails. But others are firmly wedged in the flesh.

He pushes the chair away from the desk, gets to his feet, and heads for the master bathroom. He will need tweezers to extract the more stubborn splinters.

Although he bled freely at first, already the flow is subsiding. Nevertheless he holds his arm in the air, his hand straight up, so the blood will trickle down his wrist and under the sleeve of his shirt rather than drip on the carpet.

After he has plucked out the glass, perhaps he will telephone Paige at work again.

He was so excited when he found her office number on the Rolodex in his study, and he was thrilled to speak with her. She sounded intelligent, self-assured, gentle. Her voice had a slightly throaty timbre that he found sexy.

It will be a wonderful bonus if she is sexy. Tonight, they will share a bed. He will take her more than once. Recalling the face in the photograph and the husky voice on the phone, he is confident that she will satisfy his needs as they have never been satisfied before, that she will not leave him unfulfilled and frustrated as have so many other women.

He hopes she matches or exceeds his expectations. He hopes there will be no reason to hurt her.

In the master bathroom, he locates a pair of tweezers in the drawer where Paige keeps her makeup, cuticle scissors, nail files, emery boards, and other grooming aids.

At the sink, he holds his hand over the basin. Although he has already stopped bleeding, the flow starts again at each point from which he works loose a piece of glass. He turns on the hot water so the dripping blood will be sluiced down the drain.

Maybe tonight, after sex, he will talk with Paige about his writer’s block. If he has been blocked before, she might remember what steps he took on other occasions to break the creative impasse. Indeed, he is sure she will know the solution.

Pleasantly surprised and with a sense of relief, he realizes that he no longer has to deal with his problems alone. As a married man, he has a devoted partner with whom to share the many troubles of the day.

Raising his head, looking at his reflection in the mirror behind the sink, he grins and says, “I have a wife now.”

He notices a spot of blood on his right cheek, another on the side of his nose.

Laughing softly, he says, “You’re such a slob, Marty. You’ve got to clean up your act. You have a wife now. Wives like their husbands to be neat.”

He returns his attention to his hand and, with the tweezers, picks at the last of the prickling glass.

In an increasingly good mood, he laughs again and says, “Gonna have to go out and buy a new computer monitor first thing tomorrow.”

He shakes his head, amazed by his own childish behavior.

“You’re something else, Marty,” he says. “But I guess writers are supposed to be temperamental, huh?”

After easing the final splinter of glass from the web between two fingers, he puts down the tweezers and holds his wounded hand under the hot water.

“Can’t carry on like this anymore. Not anymore. You’ll scare the bejesus out of little Emily and Charlotte.”

He looks in the mirror again, shakes his head, grinning. “You nut,” he says to himself, as if speaking with affection to a friend whose foibles he finds charming. “What a nut.”

Life is good.

7

The leaden sky settled lower under its own weight. According to a radio report, rain would fall by dusk, ensuring rush-hour commuter jam-ups that would make Hell preferable to the San Diego Freeway.

Marty should have gone directly home from Guthridge’s office. He was close to finishing his current novel, and in the final throes of a story, he usually spent as much time as possible at work because distractions were ruinous to the narrative momentum.

Besides, he was uncharacteristically apprehensive about driving. When he thought back, he could account for the time minute by minute since he’d left the doctor and was sure he hadn’t called Paige while in a fugue behind the wheel of the Ford. Of course, a fugue victim had no memory of being afflicted, so even a meticulous reconstruction of the past hour might not reveal the truth. Researching One Dead Bishop, he’d learned of victims who traveled hundreds of miles and interacted with dozens of people while in a disassociative condition yet later could recall nothing they’d done. The danger wasn’t as grave as drunken driving . . . though operating a ton and a half of steel at high speed in an altered state of consciousness wasn’t smart.

Nevertheless, instead of going home, he went to the Mission Viejo Mall. Much of the workday was already shot. And he was too restless to read or watch TV until Paige and the girls got home.

When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping, so he browsed for books and records, buying a novel by Ed McBain and a CD by Alan Jackson, hoping that such mundane activities would help him forget his troubles. He strolled past the cookie shop twice, coveting the big ones with chocolate chips and pecans but finding the will power to resist their allure.

The world is a better place, he thought, if you’re ignorant of good nutrition.

When he left the mall, sprinkles of cold rain were painting camouflage patterns on the concrete sidewalk. Lightning flashed as he ran for the Ford, caissons of thunder rolled across the embattled sky, and the sprinkles became heavy volleys just as he pulled the door shut and settled behind the steering wheel.

Driving home, Marty took considerable pleasure in the glimmer of rain-silvered streets, the burbling splash of the tires churning through deep puddles—and the sight of swaying palm fronds, which seemed to be combing the gray tresses of the stormy sky and which reminded him of certain Somerset Maugham stories and an old Bogart film. Because rain was an infrequent visitor to drought-stricken California, the benefit and novelty outweighed the inconvenience.

He parked in the garage and entered the house by the connecting door to the kitchen, enjoying the damp heaviness of the air and the scent of ozone that always accompanied the start of a storm.

In the shadowy kitchen, the luminous green display of the electronic clock on the stove read 4:10. Paige and the girls might be home in twenty minutes.

He switched on lamps and sconces as he moved from room to room. The house never felt homier than when it was warm and well lighted while rain drummed on the roof and the gray pall of a storm veiled the world beyond every window. He decided to start the gas-log fire in the family-room fireplace and to lay out all of the fixings for hot chocolate so it could be made immediately after Paige and the girls arrived.

First, he went upstairs to check the fax and answering machines in his office. By now Paul Guthridge’s secretary should have called with a schedule of test appointments at the hospital.

He also had a wild hunch his literary agent had left a message about a sale of rights in one foreign territory or another, or maybe news of an offer for a film option, a reason to celebrate. Curiously, the storm had improved his mood instead of darkening it, probably because inclement weather tended to focus the mind on the pleasures of home, though it was always his nature to find reasons to be upbeat even when common sense suggested pessimism was a more realistic reaction. He was never able to stew in gloom for long; and since Saturday he’d had enough negative thoughts to last a couple of years.

Entering his office, he reached for the wall switch to flick on the overhead light but left it untouched, surprised that the stained-glass lamp and a work lamp were aglow. He always extinguished lights when leaving the house. Before he’d gone to the doctor’s office, however, he’d been inexplicably oppressed by the bizarre feeling of being in the path of an unknown Juggernaut, and evidently he’d not had sufficient presence of mind to switch off the lamps.

Remembering the panic attack at its worst, in the garage, when he’d been nearly incapacitated by terror, Marty felt some of the air bleeding out of his balloon of optimism.

The fax and answering machines were on the back corner of the U-shaped work area. The red message light was blinking on the latter, and a couple of flimsy sheets of thermal paper were in the tray of the former.

Before he reached either machine, Marty saw the shattered video display, glass teeth bristling from the frame. A black maw gaped in the center. A piece of glass crunched under his shoe as he pushed his office chair aside and stared down at the computer in disbelief.

Jagged pieces of the screen littered the keyboard.

A twist of nausea knotted his stomach. Had he done this, too, in a fugue? Picked up some blunt object, hammered the screen to pieces? His life was disintegrating like the ruined monitor.

Then he noticed something else on the keyboard in addition to the glass. In the dim light he thought he was looking at drops of melted chocolate.

Frowning, Marty touched one of the splotches with the tip of his index finger. It was still slightly tacky. Some of it stuck to his skin.

He moved his hand under the work lamp. The sticky substance on his fingertip was dark red, almost maroon. Not chocolate.

He raised his stained finger to his nose, seeking a defining scent. The odor was faint, barely detectable, but he knew at once what it was, probably had known from the moment he touched it, because on a deep primitive level he was programmed to recognize it. Blood.

Whoever destroyed the monitor had been cut.

Marty’s hands were free of lacerations.

He was utterly still, except for a crawling sensation along his spine, which left the nape of his neck creped with gooseflesh.

Slowly he turned, expecting to find that someone had entered the room behind him. But he was alone.

Rain pummeled the roof and gurgled through a nearby downspout. Lightning flickered, visible through the cracks between the wide slats of the plantation shutters, and peals of thunder reverberated in the window glass.

He listened to the house.

The only sounds were those of the storm. And the rapid thud of his heartbeat.

He stepped to the bank of drawers on the right-hand side of the desk, slid open the second one. This morning he had placed the Smith & Wesson 9mm pistol in there, on top of some papers. He expected it to be missing, but again his expectations were not fulfilled. Even in the soft and beguiling light of the stained-glass lamp, he could see the handgun gleaming darkly.

“I need my life.”

The voice startled Marty, but its effect was nothing compared to the paralytic shock that seized him when he looked up from the gun and saw the identity of the speaker. The man was just inside the hallway door. He was wearing what might have been Marty’s own jeans and flannel shirt, which fit him well because he was a dead-ringer for Marty. In fact, but for the clothes, the intruder might have been a reflection in a mirror.

“I need my life,” the man repeated softly.

Marty had no brother, twin or otherwise. Yet only an identical twin could be so perfectly matched to him in every detail of face, height, weight, and body type.

“Why have you stolen my life?” the intruder asked with what seemed to be genuine curiosity. His voice was level and controlled, as if the question was not entirely insane, as if it was actually possible, at least in his experience, to steal a life.

Realizing that the intruder sounded like him, too, Marty closed his eyes and tried to deny what stood before him. He assumed he was hallucinating and was, himself, speaking for the phantom in a sort of unconscious ventriloquism. Fugues, an unusually intense nightmare, a panic attack, now hallucinations. But when he opened his eyes, the doppelganger was still there, a stubborn illusion.

“Who are you?” the double asked.

Marty could not speak because his heart felt as if it had moved into his throat, each fierce beat almost choking him. And he didn’t dare to speak because to engage in conversation with a hallucination would surely be to lose his final tenuous grasp on sanity and descend entirely into madness.

The phantom refined its question, still speaking in a tone of wonder and fascination but nonetheless menacing for its hushed voice: “What are you?”

With none of the eerie fluidity and ghostly shimmer of either a psychological or supernatural apparition, neither transparent nor radiant, the double took another step into the room. When he moved, shadows and light played over him in the same manner as they would have caressed any three-dimensional object. He seemed as solid as a real man.

Marty noticed the pistol in the intruder’s right hand. Held against his thigh. Muzzle pointed at the floor.

The double advanced one more step, stopping no more than eight feet from the other side of the desk. With a half-smile that was more unnerving than any glower could have been, the gunman said, “How does this happen? What now? Do we somehow become one person, fade into each other, like in some crazy science-fiction movie—”

Terror had sharpened Marty’s senses. As if looking at his doppelganger through a magnifying glass, he could see every contour, line, and pore of its face. In spite of the dim light, the furniture and books in the shadowed areas were as clearly detailed as those items on which the glow of lamps fell. Yet with all his heightened powers of observation, he did not recognize the make of the other’s pistol.

“—or do I just kill you and take your place?” the stranger continued. “And if I kill you—”

It seemed that any hallucination he conjured would be carrying a weapon with which he was familiar.

“—do the memories you’ve stolen from me become mine again when you’re dead? If I kill you—”

After all, if this figure was merely a symbolic threat spewed up by a diseased psyche, then everything—the phantom, his clothes, his armament—had to come from Marty’s experience and imagination.

“—am I made whole? When you’re dead, will I be restored to my family? And will I know how to write again?”

Conversely, if the gun was real, the double was real.

Cocking his head, leaning forward slightly, as if intensely interested in Marty’s response, the intruder said, “I need to write if I’m going to be what I’m meant to be, but the words won’t come.”

The one-sided conversation repeatedly surprised Marty with its twists and turns, which didn’t support the notion that his troubled psyche had fabricated the intruder.

Anger entered the double’s voice for the first time, bitterness rather than hot fury but rapidly growing fiery: “You’ve stolen that too, the words, the talent, and I need it back, need it now so bad I ache. A purpose, meaning. Do you know? You understand? Whatever you are, can you understand? The terrible emptiness, hollowness, God, such a deep, dark hollowness.” He was spitting out the words now, and his eyes were fierce. “I want what’s mine, mine, damn it, my life, mine, I want my life, my destiny, my Paige, she’s mine, my Charlotte, my Emily—”

The width of the desk and eight feet beyond, eleven feet in all: point-blank range.

Marty pulled the 9mm pistol from the desk drawer, grasping it in both hands, thumbing off the safety, squeezing the trigger even as he raised the muzzle. He didn’t care if the target was real or some form of spirit. All he cared about was obliterating it before it killed him.

The first shot tore a chunk out of the far edge of the desk, and wood splinters exploded like a swarm of angry wasps bursting into flight. The second and third rounds hit the other Marty in the chest. They neither passed through him as if he were ectoplasm nor shattered him as if he were a reflection in a mirror, but instead catapulted him backward, off his feet, taking him by surprise before he could raise his own gun, which flew out of his hand and hit the floor with a hard thud. He crashed against a bookcase, clawing at a shelf with one hand, pulling a dozen volumes to the floor, blood spreading across his chest—sweet Jesus, so much blood—eyes wide with shock, no cry escaping him except for one hard low “uh” that was more a sound of surprise than pain.

The bastard should have fallen like a rock down a well, but he stayed on his feet. In the same moment that he slammed into the bookcase, he pushed away from it, staggered-plunged through the open doorway, into the upstairs hall, out of sight.

Stunned more by the fact that he’d actually pulled the trigger on someone than that the “someone” was the mirror image of himself, Marty sagged against the desk, gasping for breath as desperately as if he hadn’t inhaled since the double had first walked into the room. Maybe he hadn’t. Shooting a man for real was a whole hell of a lot different from shooting a character in a novel; it almost seemed as if, in some magical fashion, part of the impact of the bullets on the target redounded on the shooter himself. His chest ached, he was dizzy, and his peripheral vision briefly succumbed to a thick seeping darkness which he pressed back with an act of will.

He didn’t dare pass out. He thought the other Marty must be badly wounded, dying, maybe dead. God, the spreading blood on his chest, scarlet blossoms, sudden roses. But he didn’t know for sure. Maybe the wounds only looked mortal, maybe the brief glimpse he’d had was misleading, and maybe the double was not only still alive but strong enough to get out of the house and away. If the guy escaped and lived, sooner or later he’d be back, just as weird and crazy but even angrier, better prepared. Marty had to finish what he started before his double had a chance to do the same.

He glanced at the phone. Dial 911. Get the police, then go after the wounded man.

But the desk clock was beside the phone, and he saw the time—4:26. Paige and the girls. On their way home from school, later than usual, delayed by piano lessons. Oh, my God. If they came into the house and saw the other Marty, or found him in the garage, they’d think he was their Marty, and they’d run to him, frightened by his wounds, wanting to help, and maybe he would still be strong enough to harm them. Was the pistol that he dropped his only weapon? Can’t make that assumption. Besides, the son of a bitch could get a knife out of the rack in the kitchen, the butcher’s knife, hide it against his side, behind his back, let Emily get close, then jam it through her throat, or deep into Charlotte’s belly.

Every second counted. Forget 911. Waste of time. The cops wouldn’t get there before Paige.

As Marty rounded the desk, his legs were wobbly, but less so as he crossed the room toward the hallway. He saw blood splattered on the wall, oozing down the spines of his own books, staining his name. A creeping tide of darkness lapped at the edges of his vision again. He clenched his teeth and kept going.

When he reached the double’s pistol, he kicked it deeper into the room, farther from the doorway. That simple act gave him a surge of confidence because it seemed like something a cop would have the presence of mind to do—make it harder for the perp to regain his weapon.

Maybe he could handle this, get through it, as strange and scary as it was, the blood and all. Maybe he would be okay.

So nail the guy. Make sure he’s down, all the way down and all the way out.

To write his mystery novels, he’d done a lot of research into police procedures, not merely studying police-academy textbooks and training films but riding with uniformed cops on night patrols and hanging out with plainclothes detectives on and off the job. He knew perfectly well how best to go through a doorway under these circumstances.

Don’t be too confident. Figure the creep has another weapon besides the one he dropped, gun or knife. Stay low, clear that doorway fast. Easier to die in a doorway than anywhere else because every door opens on the unknown. Keep your gun in both hands as you move, arms in front of you, straight and locked, sweep left and right as you cross the threshold, swinging the gun to cover both flanks. Then slip to one side or the other and keep your back against the wall as you move, so you always know your back is safe, only three sides to worry about.

All of that wisdom flashed through his mind, as it might have passed through the mind of one of his hard-nosed police characters—yet he behaved like any panicked civilian, stumbling heedlessly into the upstairs hall, holding the pistol in only his right hand, arms loose, breathing explosively, making more of a target than a threat of himself, because when you came right down to it, he wasn’t a cop, only an asshole who sometimes wrote about them. No matter how long you indulged the fantasy, you couldn’t live the fantasy, you couldn’t act like a cop in a pressurized situation unless you had trained like a cop. He had been as guilty as anyone of confusing reality and fiction, thinking he was as invincible as the hero on a printed page, and he’d been damned lucky the other Marty hadn’t been waiting for him. The upstairs hall was deserted.

He looked exactly like me.

Couldn’t think about that now, no time for it yet. Concentrate on staying alive, wasting the bastard before he hurt Paige or the girls. If you survive, there’ll be time to seek an explanation for that astonishing resemblance, solve the mystery, but not now.

Listen. Movement?

Maybe.

No. Nothing.

Keep the gun up, muzzle aimed ahead.

Just outside the office doorway, a smeary handprint in wet blood marred the wall. A horrid amount of blood was puddled on the light-beige carpet there. At least part of the time when Marty had stood behind his desk, stunned and temporarily immobilized by the violence, the wounded man had leaned against this hallway wall, perhaps trying unsuccessfully to staunch his bleeding wounds.

Marty was sweating, nauseated and afraid. Perspiration trickled into the corner of his left eye, stinging, blurring his vision. He blotted his slick forehead with his shirt sleeve, blinked furiously to wash the salt out of his eye.

When the intruder had shoved away from the wall and started moving—perhaps while Marty was still frozen behind his desk—he had walked through his own pooled blood. His route was marked by fragmentary red imprints of the ridged patterns on athletic-shoe soles as well as by a continuous scarlet drizzle.

Silence in the house. With a little luck, maybe it was the silence of the dead.

Shivering, Marty cautiously followed the repulsive trail past the hall bath, around the corner, past the double-door entrance to the dark master bedroom, past the head of the stairs. He stopped at that point where the second-floor hall became a gallery overlooking the living room.

On his right was a bleached oak railing, beyond which hung the brass chandelier that he’d switched on when he’d passed through the foyer earlier. Below the chandelier were the descending stairs and the two-story, tile-floored entrance foyer that flowed directly into the two-story living room.

To his left and a few feet farther along the gallery was the room Paige used as a home office. One day it would become another bedroom for Charlotte or Emily when they decided they were ready to sleep separately. The door stood half open. Bat-black shadows swarmed beyond, relieved only by the gray storm light of the waning day, which hardly penetrated the windows.

The blood trail led past that office to the end of the gallery, directly to the door of the girls’ bedroom, which was closed. The intruder was in there, and it was infuriating to think of him among the girls’ belongings, touching things, tainting their room with his blood and madness.

He recalled the angry voice, touched with lunacy yet so like his own voice: My Paige, she’s mine, my Charlotte, my Emily . . .

“Like hell, they’re yours,” Marty said, keeping the Smith & Wesson aimed squarely at the closed door.

He glanced at his wristwatch.

4:28.

Now what?

He could stay there in the hallway, ready to blow the bastard to Hell if the door opened. Wait for Paige and the kids, shout to them when they came in, tell Paige to call 911. Then she could hustle the kids across the street to Vic and Kathy Delorio’s house, where they’d be safe, while he covered the door until the police arrived.

That plan sounded good, responsible, cool and calm. Briefly, the knocking of his heart against his ribs became less insistent, less punishing.

Then the curse of a writer’s imagination hit him hard, a black whirlpool sucking him down into dark possibilities, the curse of what if, what if, what if. What if the other Marty was still strong enough to push open the window in the girls’ room, climb out onto the patio cover at the back of the house, and jump down to the lawn from there? What if he fled along the side of the house and out to the street just as Paige was pulling into the driveway with the girls?

It might happen. Could happen. Would happen. Or something else just as bad would happen, worse. The whirlpool of reality spun out more terrible possibilities than the darkest thoughts of any writer’s mind. In this age of social dissolution, even on the most peaceful streets in the quietest neighborhoods, unexpected acts of grotesque savagery could occur, whereupon people were shocked and horrified but not surprised.

He might be guarding the door to a deserted room.

4:29.

Paige might be turning the corner two blocks away, entering their street.

Maybe the neighbors had heard the gunshots and had already called the police. Please, God, let that be the case.

He had no conscionable choice but to throw open the door to the girls’ room, go in, and confirm whether The Other was there or not.

The Other. In his office, when the confrontation had begun, he’d quickly dismissed his initial thought that he was dealing with something supernatural. A spirit could not be as solid and three-dimensional as this man was. If they existed at all, creatures from the other side of the line between life and death would not be vulnerable to bullets. Yet a feeling of the uncanny persisted, weighed heavier on him moment by moment. Although he suspected that the nature of this adversary was far stranger than ghosts or shape-changing demons, that it was simultaneously more terrifying and more mundane, that it was born of this world and no other, he nevertheless could not help but think of it in terms usually reserved for stories of haunting spirits: Ghost, Phantom, Revenant, Apparition, Specter, The Uninvited, The Undying, The Entity.

The Other.

The door waited.

The silence of the house was deeper than death.

Already focused narrowly on the pursuit of The Other, Marty’s attention constricted further, until he was oblivious of his own heartbeat, blind to everything but the door, deaf to all sounds except those that might come from the girls’ room, conscious of no sensation except the pressure of his finger on the trigger of the pistol.

The blood trail.

Red fragments of shoeprints.

The door.

Waiting.

He was rooted in indecision.

The door.

Something suddenly clattered above him. He snapped his head back and looked at the ceiling. He was directly under the three-foot-square, seven-foot-deep shaft that soared up to a dome-shaped Plexiglas skylight. Rain was beating against the Plexiglas. Only rain, the clatter of rain.

As if the strain of indecision had snapped him back to the full spectrum of reality, he was abruptly deluged by all the voices of the storm, of which he’d been utterly unaware while tracking The Other. He’d been intently listening through the background racket for the stealthier sounds of his quarry. Now the wind’s gibbering-hooting-moaning, the rataplan of rain, fulminant thunder, the bony scraping of a tree limb against one side of the house, the tinny rattle of a loose section of rain gutter, and less identifiable noises flooded over him.

The neighbors couldn’t have heard gunshots above the raging storm. So much for that hope.

Marty seemed to be swept forward by the tumult, along the blood trail, one hesitant step, then another, inexorably toward the waiting door.

8

The storm ushered in an early twilight, bleak and protracted, and Paige had the headlights on all the way home from the girls’ school. Though turned to the highest speed, the windshield wipers could barely cope with the cataracts that poured out of the draining sky. Either the latest drought would be broken this rainy season or nature was playing a cruel trick by raising expectations she would not fulfill. Intersections were flooded. Gutters overflowed. The BMW spread great white wings of water as it passed through one deep puddle after another. And out of the misty murk, the headlights of oncoming cars swam at them like the searching lamps of bathyscaphes probing deep ocean trenches.

“We’re a submarine,” Charlotte said excitedly from the passenger seat beside Paige, looking out of the side window through plumes of tire spray, “swimming with the whales, Captain Nemo and the Nautilus twenty thousand leagues beneath the sea, giant squids stalking us. Remember the giant squid, Mom, from the movie?”

“I remember,” Paige said without taking her eyes from the road.

“Up periscope,” Charlotte said, gripping the handles of that imaginary instrument, squinting through the eyepiece. “Raiding the sea lanes, ramming ships with our super-strong steel bow—boom!—and the crazy captain playing his huge pipe organ! You remember the pipe organ, Mom?”

“I remember.”

“Diving deeper, deeper, the pressure hull starting to crack, but the crazy Captain Nemo says deeper, playing his pipe organ and saying deeper, and all the time here comes the squid.” She broke into the shark’s theme from the movie Jaws: “Dum-dum, dum-dum, dum-dum, dum-dum, da-da-dum!”

“That’s silly,” Emily said from the rear seat.

Charlotte turned in her shoulder harness to look back between the front seats. “What’s silly?”

“Giant squid.”

“Oh, is that so? Maybe you wouldn’t think they were so silly if you were swimming and one of them came up under you and bit you in half, ate you in two bites, then spit out your bones like grape seeds.”

“Squid don’t eat people,” Emily said.

“Of course they do.”

“Other way around.”

“Huh?”

“People eat squid,” Emily said.

“No way.”

“Way.”

“Where’d you get a dumb idea like that?”

“Saw it on a menu at a restaurant.”

“What restaurant?” Charlotte asked.

“Couple different restaurants. You were there. Isn’t it true, Mom—don’t people eat squid?”

“Yes, they do,” Paige agreed.

“You’re just agreeing with her so she won’t look like a dumb seven-year-old,” Charlotte said skeptically.

“No, it’s true,” Paige assured her. “People eat squid.”

“How?” Charlotte asked, as if the very thought beggared her imagination.

“Well,” Paige said, braking for a red traffic light, “not all in one piece, you know.”

“I guess not!” Charlotte said. “Not a giant squid, anyway. ”

“You can slice the tentacles and sauté them in garlic butter for one thing,” Paige said, and looked at her daughter to see what impact that bit of culinary news would have.

Charlotte grimaced and faced forward again. “You’re trying to gross me out.”

“Tastes good,” Paige insisted.

“I’d rather eat dirt.”

“Tastes better than dirt, I assure you.”

Emily piped up from the back seat again: “You can also slice their tentacles and french-fry ’em.”

“That’s right,” Paige said.

Charlotte’s judgment was simple and direct: “Yuch.”

“They’re like little onion rings, only squid,” Emily said.

“This is sick.”

“Little gummy french-fried squid rings dripping gooey squid ink,” Emily said, and giggled.

Turning in her seat again to look at her sister, Charlotte said, “You’re a disgusting troll.”

“Anyway,” Emily said, “we’re not in a submarine.”

“Of course we’re not,” Charlotte said. “We’re in a car.”

“No, we’re in a hypofoil.”

“A what?”

Emily said, “Like we saw on TV that time, the boat that goes between England and somewhere, and it rides on top of the water, really zoooooming along.”

“Honey, you mean ‘hydrofoil,’ ” Paige said, taking her foot off the brake when the light turned green, and accelerating cautiously across the flooded intersection.

“Yeah,” Emily said. “Hyderfoil. We’re in a hyderfoil, going to England to meet the queen. I’m going to have tea with the queen, drink tea and eat squid and talk about the family jewels.”

Paige almost laughed out loud at that one.

“The queen doesn’t serve squid,” Charlotte said exasperatedly.

“Bet she does,” said Emily.

“No, she serves crumpets and scones and trollops and stuff,” Charlotte said.

This time Paige did laugh out loud. She had a vivid image in her head: The very proper and gracious Queen of England inquiring of a gentleman guest if he would like a trollop with his tea, and indicating a garish hooker waiting nearby in Frederick’s of Hollywood lingerie.

“What’s so funny?” Charlotte asked.

Stifling her laugh, Paige lied: “Nothing, I was just thinking about something, something else, happened a long time ago, wouldn’t seem funny to you now, just an old Mommy memory.”

The last thing she wanted was to inhibit their conversation. When she was in the car with them, she rarely turned on the radio. Nothing on the dial was half as entertaining as the Charlotte and Emily Show.

As the rain began to fall harder than ever, Emily proved to be in one of her more loquacious moods. “It’s a lot more fun going on a hyderfoil to see the queen than being in a submarine with a giant squid chomping on it.”

“The queen is boring,” Charlotte said.

“Is not.”

“Is too.”

“She has a torture chamber under the palace.”

Charlotte turned in her seat again, interested in spite of herself. “She does?”

“Yeah,” Emily said. “And she keeps a guy down there in an iron mask.”

“An iron mask?”

“An iron mask,” Emily repeated somberly.

“Why?”

“He’s real ugly,” Emily said.

Paige decided both of them were going to grow up to be writers. They had inherited Marty’s vivid and restless imagination. They would probably be as driven to exercise it as he was, although what they wrote would be quite different from their father’s novels, and far different from the work of each other.

She couldn’t wait to tell Marty about submarines, hyderfoils, giant squids, french-fried tentacles, and trollops with the queen.

She had decided to take Paul Guthridge’s preliminary diagnosis to heart, attribute Marty’s unnerving symptoms to nothing but stress, and stop worrying—at least until they got test results revealing something worse. Nothing was going to happen to Marty. He was a force of nature, a deep well of energy and laughter, indomitable and resilient. He would bounce back just as Charlotte had bounced off her deathbed five years ago. Nothing was going to happen to any of them because they had too much living to do, too many good times ahead of them.

A fierce bolt of lightning—which seldom accompanied storms in southern California but which blazed in plenitude this time—crackled across the sky, pulling after it a bang of thunder, as incandescent as any celestial chariot that might carry God out of the heavens on Judgment Day.

9

Marty was only six or eight feet from the girls’ bedroom door. He approached from the hinged side, so he could reach across for the knob, hurl the door inward, and avoid silhouetting himself squarely in the frame.

Trying not to tread in the blood, he glanced down for just a second at the carpet, where the spatters of gore were smaller and fewer than at other points along the hall. He glimpsed an anomaly that registered only subconsciously at first, and he eased forward another step with his gaze riveted on the door again before fully realizing what he’d seen: an impression of the forward half of a shoe sole, faintly inked in red, like twenty or thirty others he’d already passed, except that the narrow portion of this imprint, the toe, was pointed differently from all the others, in the wrong direction, back the way he had come.

Marty froze as he grasped the import of the shoeprint.

The Other had gone as far as the girls’ bedroom but not into it. He had turned back, having somehow reduced the flow of blood so dramatically that he was no longer clearly marking his trail—except for one telltale shoeprint and perhaps a couple that Marty hadn’t noticed.

Swinging around, holding the gun in both hands, Marty cried out at the sight of The Other coming at him from Paige’s office, moving much too fast for a man with chest wounds and minus a pint or two of blood. He hit Marty hard, smashing in under the pistol, driving him into the gallery railing and forcing his arms up.

Marty pulled the trigger reflexively while he was being carried backward, but the bullet ploughed into the hallway ceiling. The sturdy handrail slammed the small of his back, and a half-strangled scream escaped him as white-hot pain shot horizontally across his kidneys and played spike-shoed hopscotch up the knuckled staircase of his spine.

Even as he screamed, he lost the gun. It popped out of his hands and arced back over his head into the empty vaulted space behind him.

The tortured oak railing shuddered, a loud dry crack signaled imminent collapse, and Marty was sure they were going to crash into the stairwell. But the balusters did not give way, and the handrail held fast to the newel post at each end.

Pressing relentlessly forward, The Other bent Marty backward and over the balustrade, trying to strangle him. Hands of iron. Fingers like hydraulic pincers driven by a powerful motor. Compressing the carotid arteries.

Marty rammed a knee into his assailant’s crotch, but it was blocked. The attempt left him unbalanced, with just one foot on the floor, and he was shoved farther across the balustrade, until he was both pinned against and balanced on the handrail.

Choking, unable to breathe, aware that the worst danger was the diminution of blood to his brain, Marty clasped his hands in a wedge and drove them upward between The Other’s arms, trying to spread them wider and break the strangulating grip. The assailant redoubled his efforts, determined to hold tight. Marty strained harder, too, and his overworked heart pounded painfully against his breastbone.

They should have been equally matched, damn it, they were the same height, same weight, same build, in the same physical condition, to all appearances the same man.

Yet The Other, though suffering two potentially mortal bullet wounds, was the stronger, and not merely because he had the advantage of a superior position, better leverage. He seemed to possess inhuman power.

Face to face with his duplicate, washed by each hot explosive breath, Marty might have been gazing into a mirror, though the savage reflection before him was contorted by expressions he’d never seen on his own face. Bestial rage. Hatred as purely toxic as cyanide. Spasms of maniacal pleasure twisted the familiar features as the strangler thrilled to the act of murder.

With lips peeled back from his teeth, spittle flying as he spoke, impossibly but repeatedly tightening his strangle-hold to emphasize his words, The Other said, “Need my life now, my life, mine, mine, now. Need my family, now, mine, now, now, now, need it, NEED IT!”

Negative fireflies swooped and darted across Marty’s field of vision, negative because they were the photo-opposite of the lantern-bearing fireflies on a warm summer night, not pulses of light in the darkness but pulses of darkness in the light. Five, ten, twenty, a hundred, a teeming swarm. The looming face of The Other vanished in sections under the blinking black swarm.

Despairing of breaking the assailant’s grip, Marty clawed at the hate-filled face. But he couldn’t quite reach it. His every effort seemed feeble, hopeless.

So many negative fireflies.

Glimpsed between them: the vicious and wrathful face of his wife’s demanding new husband, the domineering face of his daughters’ stern new father.

Fireflies. Everywhere, everywhere. Spreading their wings of obliteration.

Bang. Loud as a rifle shot. Second, third, fourth explosions—one right after another. Balusters breaking.

The handrail cracked. Sagged backward. It no longer received support from the balusters that had gone to splinters under it.

Marty stopped resisting the attacker and frantically tried to wrap his legs and arms around the railing in the hope of clinging to the anchored remains instead of hurtling out through the opening gap. But the center section of the balustrade disintegrated so completely, so swiftly, he couldn’t find purchase in its crumbling elements, and the weight of his clutching assailant lent gravity more assistance than it required. As they teetered on the brink, however, Marty’s actions altered the dynamics of their struggle just enough so The Other rolled past him and fell first. The assailant let go of Marty’s throat but dragged him along in the top position. They dropped into the stairwell, crashed through the outer railing, instantly making kindling of it, and slammed into the Mexican-tile floor of the foyer.

The drop had been sixteen feet, not a tremendous distance, probably not even a lethal distance, and their momentum had been broken by the lower railing. Yet the impact knocked out what little breath Marty had drawn on the way down, even though he was cushioned by The Other, who hit the Mexican tiles back-first with the resounding thwack of a sledgehammer.

Gasping, coughing, Marty pushed away from his double and tried to scramble out of reach. He was breathless, lightheaded, and not sure if he had broken any bones. When he gasped, the air stung his raw throat, and when he coughed, the pain might not have been worse if he’d tried to swallow a tangled wad of barbed wire and bent nails. Scrambling cat-quick, which was what he had in mind, actually proved to be out of the question, and he could only drag himself across the foyer floor, hitching and shuddering like a bug that had been squirted with insecticide.

Blinking away tears squeezed out of him by the violent coughing, he spotted the Smith & Wesson. It was about fifteen feet away, well beyond the point at which the transition from tile floor to hardwood marked the end of the entrance foyer and the beginning of the living room. Considering the intensity with which he focused on it and the dedication with which he dragged his half-numb and aching body toward it, the pistol might have been the Holy Grail.

He became aware of a rumble separate from the sounds of the storm, followed by a thump, which he blearily assumed had something to do with The Other, but he didn’t pause to look back. Maybe what he heard was a death twitch, heels drumming on the floor, one final convulsion. At the very least the bastard must be gravely injured. Crippled and dying. But Marty wanted to get his trembling hands on the gun before celebrating his own survival.

He reached the pistol, clutched it, and let out a grunt of weary triumph. He flopped on his side, eeled around, and aimed back toward the foyer, prepared to discover that his dogged pursuer was looming over him.

But The Other was still flat on his back. Legs splayed out. Arms at his sides. Motionless. Might even be dead. No such luck. His head lolled toward Marty. His face was pale, glazed with sweat, as white and shiny as a porcelain mask.

“Broke,” he wheezed.

He seemed able to move only his head and the fingers of his right hand, though not the hand itself. A grimace of effort, rather than pain, contorted his features. He lifted his head off the floor, and the still-vital fingers curled and uncurled like the legs of a dying tarantula, but he appeared incapable of sitting up or bending either leg at the knee.

“Broke,” he repeated.

Something in the way the word was spoken made Marty think of a toy soldier, bent springs, and ruined gears.

Steadying himself against the wall with one hand, Marty got to his feet.

“Gonna kill me?” The Other asked.

The prospect of putting a bullet in the brain of an injured and defenseless man was repulsive in the extreme, but Marty was tempted to commit the atrocity and worry about the psychological and legal consequences later. He was restrained as much by curiosity as by moral considerations.

“Kill you? Love to.” His voice was hoarse and no doubt would be so for a day or two, until he recovered from the strangulation attempt. “Who the hell are you?” Every raspy word reminded him of how fortunate he was to have lived to ask the question.

The low rumble came again, the same noise he had heard when he’d been crawling toward the pistol. This time he recognized it: not the convulsions and drumming heels of a dying man, but simply the vibrations of the automatic garage door, which had been going up the first time, and which now was coming down.

Voices arose in the kitchen as Paige and the girls entered the house from the garage.

Less shaky by the second, and having caught his breath, Marty hurried across the living room, toward the dining room, eager to stop the kids before they saw anything of what had happened. For a long time to come, they would have trouble feeling comfortable in their own home, knowing an intruder had gotten in and had tried to kill their father. But they would be more seriously traumatized if they saw the destruction and the bloodstained man lying paralyzed on the foyer floor. Considering the macabre fact that the intruder was also a dead-ringer for their father, they might never sleep well in this house again.

When Marty burst into the kitchen from the dining room, letting the swinging door slap back and forth behind him, Paige turned in surprise from the rack where she was hanging her raincoat. Still in their yellow slickers and floppy vinyl hats, the girls grinned and tilted their heads expectantly, probably figuring that his explosive entrance was the start of a joke or one of Daddy’s silly impromptu performances.

“Get them out of here,” he croaked at Paige, trying to sound calm, defeated by his coarse voice and all-too-evident tension.

“What’s happened to you?”

“Now,” he insisted, “right away, take them across the street to Vic and Kathy’s.”

The girls saw the gun in his hand. Their grins vanished, and their eyes widened.

Paige said, “You’re bleeding. What—”

“Not me,” he interrupted, belatedly realizing that he’d gotten the blood of The Other all over his shirt when he’d fallen atop the man. “I’m okay.”

“What’s happened?” Paige demanded.

Yanking open the connecting door to the garage, he said, “We’ve had a thing here.” His throat hurt when he talked, yet he was all but babbling in his urgent desire to get them safely out of the house, incoherent for perhaps the first time in his word-obsessed life. “A problem, a thing, Jesus, you know, like a thing that happened, some trouble—”

“Marty—”

“Come on, over to the Delorios’ place, all of you.” He stepped across the threshold, into the dark garage, hit the Genie button, and the big door rumbled upward. He met Paige’s eyes. “They’ll be safe at the Delorios’ place.”

Not bothering to pull her coat off the rack, Paige shepherded the girls past him, into the garage, toward the rising door.

“Call the police,” he shouted after her, wincing at the pain that a shout cost him.

She glanced back at him, her face lined with worry.

He said, “I’m all right, but we got a guy here, shot bad.”

“Come with us,” she pleaded.

“Can’t. Call the police.”

“Marty—”

“Go, Paige, just go!”

She moved between Charlotte and Emily, took each of them by the hand, and led them out of the garage, into the downpour, turning to look back at him only once more.

He watched until they reached the end of the driveway, checked left and right for traffic, and then started across the street. Step by step, as they moved away through the silver curtains of rain, they looked less like real people and more like three retreating spirits. He had the disconcertingly prescient feeling that he would never see them alive again; he knew it was nothing more than an irrational adrenaline-hyped reaction to what he’d been through, but the fear took root in him and grew nevertheless.

A cold wet wind invaded the deepest reaches of the garage, and the perspiration on Marty’s face felt as if it had been instantly transformed into ice.

He stepped back into the kitchen and pushed the door shut.

Though he was shivering, half freezing, he craved a cold drink because his throat burned as if it harbored a kerosene fire.

Maybe the man in the foyer was dying, having convulsions right that second, or a heart attack. He was in damned bad shape. So it would be a good idea to get in there and watch over him, in case CPR was necessary before the authorities arrived. Marty didn’t care if the guy died—wanted him dead—but not until a lot of questions were answered and these recent events made at least some sense.

But before he did anything else, he had to get a drink to soothe his throat. Right now, every swallow was torture. When the cops arrived, he would have to be prepared to do a lot of talking.

Tap water didn’t seem cold enough to do the trick, so he opened the refrigerator, which he could have sworn was a lot emptier than it had been earlier in the day, and grabbed a carton of milk. No, the idea of milk made him gag. Milk reminded him of blood because it was a bodily fluid, which was ridiculous, of course; but the events of the past hour were irrational, so it followed that some of his reactions would be irrational as well. He returned the carton to the shelf, reached for the orange juice, then saw the bottles of Corona and sixteen-ounce cans of Coors. Nothing had ever looked more desirable than those chilled beers. He grabbed one of the cans because it contained one-third more ounces than a bottle of Corona.

The first long swallow fueled the fire in his throat instead of quenching it. The second hurt slightly less than the first, the third less than the second, and thereafter every sip was as soothing as medicated honey.

With the pistol in one hand and the half-empty can of Coors in the other, shivering more at the memory of what had happened and at the prospect of what lay ahead than because of the icy beer, he went back through the house to the foyer.

The Other was gone.

Marty was so startled, he dropped the Coors. The can rolled behind him, spilling foamy beer on the hardwood floor of the living room. Although the can had slipped out of his grasp so easily, nothing short of hydraulic prybars could have forced him to let go of the gun.

Broken balusters, a section of handrail, and splinters littered the foyer floor. Several Mexican tiles were cracked and chipped from the impact of hard oak and Smith & Wesson steel. No body.

From the moment the double entered Marty’s office, the waking day had drifted into nightmare without the usual prerequisite of sleep. Events had slipped the chains of reality, and his own home had become a dark dreamscape. As surreal as the confrontation had been, he hadn’t seriously doubted its actuality while it had been playing out. And he didn’t doubt it now, either. He hadn’t shot a figment of the mind, been strangled by an illusion, or plunged alone through the gallery railing. Lying incapacitated in the foyer, The Other had been as real as the shattered balustrade still scattered on the tiles.

Alarmed by the possibility that Paige and the girls had been attacked in the street before they had gotten to the Delorios’ house, Marty turned to the front door. It was locked. From the inside. The security chain was in place. The madman hadn’t left the house by that route.

Hadn’t left it at all. How could he, in his condition? Don’t panic. Be calm. Think it through.

Marty would have bet a year of his life that The Other’s catastrophic injuries had been real, not pretense. The bastard’s back had been broken. His inability to move more than his head and the fingers of one hand meant his spine probably had been severed, as well, when he had done his gravity dance with the floor.

So where was he?

Not upstairs. Even if his spine hadn’t been damaged, even if he’d escaped quadriplegia, he couldn’t have dragged his battered body up to the second floor during the short time Marty had been in the kitchen.

Opposite the entrance to the living room, a small den opened off the study. The dishwater-gray light of the storm-washed dusk seeped between the open slats of the shutters, illuminating nothing. Marty stepped through the doorway, snapped on the lights. The den was deserted. At the closet, he slid open the mirrored door, but The Other wasn’t hiding in there, either.

Foyer closet. Nothing. Powder bath. Nothing. The deep closet under the stairs. Laundry. Family room. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

Marty searched frantically, recklessly, heedless of his safety. He expected to discover his would-be killer nearby and essentially helpless, perhaps even dead, this feeble attempt at escape having depleted the last of the man’s resources.

Instead, in the kitchen, he found the back door standing open to the patio. A gust of cold wind swept in from outside, rattling the cupboard doors. On the rack by the entrance to the garage, Paige’s raincoat billowed with false life.

While Marty had been returning to the foyer via the dining room and living room, The Other had headed for the kitchen by another route. He must have gone along the short hall that led from the foyer past the powder bath and laundry, and then crossed one end of the family room. He couldn’t have crawled that far so quickly. He had been on his feet, perhaps unsteady, but on his feet nonetheless.

No. It wasn’t possible. Okay, maybe the guy didn’t have a severed spine, after all. Maybe not even a fractured spine. But his back had to have been broken. He couldn’t simply have sprung to his feet and capered off.

The waking nightmare had displaced reality again. It was time once more to stalk—and be stalked—by something which enjoyed the regenerative powers of a monster in a dream, something which said it had come looking for a life and which seemed fearfully equipped to take it.

Marty stepped through the open door onto the patio.

Renewed fear lifted him to a higher state of awareness in which colors were more intense, odors were more pungent, and sounds were clearer and more refined than ever before. The feeling was akin to the inexpressibly keen sensations of certain childhood and adolescent dreams—especially those in which the dreamer travels the skies as effortlessly as a bird, or experiences sexual communion with a woman of such exquisite form that, later, neither her face nor body can be recalled but only the essential radiance of perfect beauty. Those special dreams seemed not to be fantasies at all but glimpses of a greater and more detailed reality beyond the reality of the waking world. Stepping through the kitchen door, passing out of the warm house into the cold realm of nature, Marty was strangely reminded of the ravishing vividness of those long-forgotten visions, for now he experienced similarly acute sensations, alert to every nuance of what he saw-heard-smelled-touched.

From the thick thatching of bougainvillea overhead, scores of drips and drizzles splashed into puddles as black as oil in the fading light. Upon that liquid blackness floated crimson blossoms in patterns that, though random, seemed consciously mysterious, as portentous and full of meaning as the ancient calligraphy of some long-dead Chinese mystic.

Around the perimeter of the backyard—small and walled, as in most southern California neighborhoods—Indian laurels and clustered eugenias shivered miserably in the brisk wind. Near the northwest corner, the long and tender trailers of a pair of red-gum eucalyptus lashed the air, shedding oblong leaves as smoky-silver as the wings of dragonflies. In the shadows cast by the trees—and behind several of the larger shrubs—were places in which a man could hide.

Marty had no intention of searching there. If his quarry had dragged himself out of the house to cower in a chilly, sodden nest of jasmine and agapanthus, weak from loss of blood—which was most likely the case—finding him was not urgent. It was more important to be sure he was not at that moment escaping unpursued.

Long adapted to dry conditions and accustomed to only the water provided by the sprinkler system, choruses of toads sang from their hidden niches, scores of shrill voices that were usually charming but seemed eerie and threatening now. Above their aria rose the wail of distant but approaching sirens.

If the intruder was trying to get away before the police came, the possible routes of escape were few. He could have climbed one of the property walls, but that seemed unlikely because, regardless of how miraculous his recovery, he simply hadn’t had sufficient time to cross the lawn, push through the shrubs, and clamber into one of the neighbors’ yards.

Marty turned right and ran out from under the dripping patio cover. Soaked to the skin in half a dozen steps, he followed the rear walkway along the house, then hurried past the back of the attached garage.

The downpour had lured snails from moist and shadowy retreats where they usually remained until well after nightfall. Their pale, jellied bodies were stretched most of the way out of their shells, thick feelers questing ahead. Unavoidably, he stepped on a few, smashed them to pulp, and through his mind flashed the superstitious notion that a cosmic entity would at any second crush him underfoot with equal callousness.

When he turned the corner onto the service walkway flanked by a garage wall and eugenia hedge, he expected to see the look-alike limping toward the front of the property. The walkway was deserted. The gate at the end stood half open.

The sirens were much louder by the time Marty sprinted into the driveway in front of the house. He sloshed through a gutter filled with four or five inches of fast-flowing water as cold as the Styx, stepped into the street, looked left and right, but as yet no police cars were in sight.

The Other was nowhere to be seen, either. Marty was alone on the street.

In the next block south, too far off for him to recognize the make and model, a car was speeding away. In spite of the fact that it was moving too fast for weather conditions, he doubted it was driven by the look-alike. He was still hard-pressed to believe the injured man had been able to walk, let alone reach his car and drive away so quickly. Surely they would find the son of a bitch nearby, lying in shrubbery, unconscious or dead. The car turned the corner much too fast; the thin squeal of its protesting tires was audible above the plink, plop, and susurration of the rain. Then it was gone.

From the north, the banshee shriek of sirens abruptly swelled much louder, and Marty turned to see a black-and -white police sedan negotiate that corner almost as fast as the other car had rounded the corner to the south. Revolving red and blue emergency beacons threw bright Frisbees of light through the gray rain and across the blacktop. The siren cut off as the sedan fishtailed to a stop twenty feet from Marty in the center of the street, with stunt-driver dramatics that seemed excessive even under the circumstances.

The siren of a backup cruiser warbled in the distance as the front doors of the first black-and-white flew open. Two uniformed officers came out of the cruiser, staying low, sheltering behind the doors, shouting, “Drop it! Now! Do it! Drop it right now or die, asshole! Now!”

Marty realized he was still holding the 9mm pistol. The cops knew nothing more than what Paige had told them when she’d called 911, that a man had been shot, so of course they figured he was the perp. If he didn’t do exactly what they demanded, and do it fast, they would shoot him and be justified in doing so.

He let the gun fall out of his hand.

It clattered on the pavement.

They ordered him to kick it away from himself. He complied.

As they rose from behind the open car doors, one of the cops shouted, “On the ground, facedown, hands behind your back!”

He knew better than to try to make them understand that he was the victim rather than the perpetrator. They wanted obedience first, explanations later, and if their positions had been reversed he would have expected the same thing of them.

He dropped to his hands and knees, then stretched full length on the street. Even through his shirt, the wet blacktop was so cold that it took his breath away.

Vic and Kathy Delorio’s house was directly across the street from where he was lying, and Marty hoped Charlotte and Emily had been kept away from the front windows. They shouldn’t have to see their father flat on the ground, under the guns of policemen. They were already scared. He remembered their wide-eyed stares when he’d burst into the kitchen with the gun in his hand, and he didn’t want them frightened further.

The cold leached into his bones.

The second siren suddenly grew much louder from one second to the next. He guessed the backup black-and-white had turned a corner to the south and was approaching from that end of the block. The piercing wail was as cold as a sharp icicle in the ear.

With one side of his face to the pavement, blinking rain out of his eyes, he watched the cops approach. They kept their guns drawn. When they tramped through a shallow puddle, the splashes seemed huge from Marty’s perspective.

As they reached him, he said, “It’s okay. I live here. This is my house.” His speech, already raspy, was further distorted by the shivers that wracked him. He worried that he sounded drunk or demented. “This is my house.”

“Just stay down,” one of them said sharply. “Keep your hands behind your back and stay down.”

The other one asked, “You have any ID?”

Shuddering so badly that his teeth chattered, he said, “Yeah, sure, in my wallet.”

Taking no chances, they cuffed him before fishing his wallet out of his hip pocket. The steel bracelets were still warm from the heated air of the patrol car.

He felt exactly as if he were a character in one of his own novels. It was decidedly not a good feeling.

The second siren died. Car doors slammed. He heard the crackling static and tinny voices of police-band radios.

“You have any photo ID in here?” asked the cop who had taken his wallet.

Marty rolled his left eye, trying to see something of the man above knee-level. “Yeah, of course, in one of those plastic windows, a driver’s license.”

In his novels, when innocent characters were suspected of crimes they hadn’t committed, they were often worried and afraid. But Marty had never written about the humiliation of such an experience. Lying on the frigid blacktop, prone before the police officers, he was mortified as never before in his life, even though he’d done nothing wrong. The situation itself—being in a position of utter submission while regarded with deep suspicion by figures of authority—seemed to trigger some innate guilt, a congenital sense of culpability in some monstrous transgression that couldn’t quite be identified, feelings of shame because he was going to be found out, even though he knew there was nothing for which he could be blamed.

“How old is this picture on your license?” asked the cop with his wallet.

“Uh, I don’t know, two years, three.”

“Doesn’t look much like you.”

“You know what DMV photos are like,” Marty said, dismayed to hear more plea than anger in his voice.

“Let him up, it’s all right, he’s my husband, he’s Marty Stillwater,” Paige shouted, evidently hurrying toward them from the Delorios’ house.

Marty couldn’t see her, but her voice gladdened him and restored a sense of reality to the nightmarish moment.

He told himself that everything was going to be all right. The cops would recognize their error, let him up, search the shrubbery around the house and in neighbors’ yards, quickly find the look-alike, and arrive at an explanation for all the weirdness of the past hour.

“He’s my husband,” Paige repeated, much closer now, and Marty could sense the cops staring at her as she approached.

He was blessed with an attractive wife who was well worth staring at even when rain-soaked and distraught; she wasn’t merely attractive but smart, charming, amusing, loving, singular. His daughters were great kids. He had a prospering career as a novelist, and he profoundly enjoyed his work. Nothing was going to change any of that. Nothing.

Yet even as the cops removed the handcuffs and helped him to his feet, even as Paige hugged him and as he embraced her gratefully, Marty was acutely and uncomfortably aware that twilight was giving way to nightfall. He looked over her shoulder, searching countless shadowed places along the street, wondering from which nest of darkness the next attack would come. The rain seemed so cold that it ought to have been sleet, the emergency beacons stung his eyes, his throat burned as if he’d gargled with acid, his body ached in a score of places from the battering he had taken, and instinct told him that the worst was yet to come.

No.

No, that wasn’t instinct speaking. That was just his overactive imagination at work. The curse of the writer’s imagination. Always searching for the next plot twist.

Life wasn’t like fiction. Real stories didn’t have second and third acts, neat structures, narrative pace, escalating denouements. Crazy things just happened, without the logic of fiction, and then life went on as usual.

The policemen were all watching him hug Paige.

He thought he saw hostility in their faces.

Another siren swelled in the distance.

He was so cold.