At the tenth chime she was fully awake. The room around her became a realness of machines beeping, tubes dripping, metal gleaming, flowers scenting the air. The tenth chime seemed to echo in her head, and for a few moments she lay there, extending her senses into her corporeal body, feeling the damage and feeling thankful for its realness and weight up there in the light.

There was a soft knock on the door, and after a few tries she managed to find her voice, still weak and hoarse from the assault on her throat.

“Come in!”

She could barely turn her head with the cervical collar, but out of the corner of her eye she could see the door swing silently open, and on the other side of it she could hear the faint scuffling of footsteps. The dragging footsteps of someone, perhaps injured or sick. Immediately she knew who it was.

“Crow?”

The footsteps paused for just the briefest moment, and then resumed. She waited as Crow shuffled into the room, shuffled around the edge of the open door, shuffled into plain view.

Everything in the world froze into a moment of absolute horror.

It was not Crow.

It was Karl Ruger.

He stood there, grinning with wet teeth that were smeared with black mud and dark red blood, his eyes flickering as red as rat’s eyes, his hair in disarray, his skin bled white and crawling with grubs and maggots. He stood swaying at the foot of her bed, his rumpled clothes stained darkly with blood, dotted with bullet holes. With hands that were as white as headstone marble, fingernails that were curiously thick and sharp, Karl Ruger reached for her.

Val felt something heavy in her hand and looked down to see that she was holding Crow’s gun. It hadn’t been there a second ago but it didn’t matter. Fury welled up in her, matching and then overmatching her fear, and she raised the gun, holding it straight out, inches from Ruger’s chest.

“You killed my father!” she shrieked as she pulled the trigger. The bullet slammed into Ruger’s chest. She fired again and again, punching bullet after bullet through his black heart.

All he did was laugh, and when the gun was empty he lunged at her.

Val’s scream burned her damaged throat, and suddenly she was surrounded once again by the damp and swirling darkness. The darkness owned her, engulfed her, and she realized that she had never left the darkness at all, had never found the light. The darkness had simply learned how to fool her.

In the darkness, she tried to flee, but now the self that was in the darkness was as wounded and weak and helpless as the self who lay up there in the light, lay with tubes and drains and stitches.

6

Vic Wingate took an extended lunch break from the shop and was tooling down A-32, smoking a Hav-​a-​Tampa Jewel and listening to Travis Tritt as sunlight sparkled off the polished skin and chrome of his pickup. Vic felt pretty good. Last night he’d been in a foul mood because of the attention focused his way by the goddamn kid, but that matter was settled now. He had done his public duty and gone and fetched the little fucker from that faggoty hayride thing, and when he’d gotten the kid home Vic had eased his tensions by some recreation with the boy. Vic was pleased with the thought that he had “graduated” the kid from slaps and shoves to some real manly duking. It was about time, he thought. Kid had to learn sometime. But he wasn’t pleased about how the beating had ended. Just as he’d worked up a great sweat kicking the living shit out of the punk, something happened that had rattled Vic. The kid had suddenly smiled up at him, bloody lips, black eyes, bloody nose—and there he was smiling at the guy who’d just handed him the worst whipping in his life.

Not only had it taken the real pleasure out of the beating, robbing Vic of a serious high, that smile had been—weird.

He’d never seen the kid give him a look like that. It had damn near cut the legs out from under him because for a moment—just for one really twitchy moment—that smile made the kid look like…well, like Griswold. It was the way the Man used to smile after a kill. As a teenager Vic had seen that smile time and again, and he knew it well. He saw it in his dreams all the time.

He really didn’t like seeing that smile on Mike’s face, and he wanted to ask the Man about it. Frowning he stepped on the gas.

Several police cars whipped past Vic’s truck. Jim Polk was driving one and he waved to Vic, who nodded. Vic made a mental note to call Polk later on; there were some things that had to be taken care of, and Polk was a good gofer.

Four miles shy of the spot on the highway where the police had found the wrecked car, Vic made a sharp left along a narrow country lane. It was a farmer’s road and it cut through several of the major farms on the east side of town before finally branching off into the State Forest. At that point the macadam faded into gravel and then to dirt. The truck took the changes in stride; it was well used to this route.

Three miles into the woods, the road petered out and died. Vic rolled the truck to a stop and got out. Even though there was no one around, he scanned the dense forest and listened for human sounds, heard none, and nodded. He walked over to a thick clump of brush that stood in a gnarled tangle beside the end of the road. Vic looked around again, then squatted, took hold of a length of knotted rope that was cleverly hidden by weeds, and pulled on it as he stood. He backed up and a whole section of the shrubbery shifted with him, opening outward like a door and swinging on a pair of sturdy hinges. It took a lot of effort for Vic to shift the barrier, and as it moved the deception became obvious. The shrubs were actually seated in a long, low, flat-​bottomed trough that was carefully camouflaged; from the outside the facade was perfect, from the inside it was clearly a kind of door. Vic pulled it wide, then got back in the truck and moved it twenty feet down the pathway revealed by the open barrier; then he went back and painstakingly pulled the foliage back into place. Anyone passing by would be fooled unless they knew exactly where to look and knew what they were looking for. Vic made sure that the shrubs were always overgrown and healthy, and he had chosen evergreens for the job because he wanted the deception to remain constant year-​round, as it had for many, many years.

Back in the truck he drove a serpentine route that seemed composed of nothing but hairpin turns. The lane was just barely big enough for the truck to pass, and Vic liked it that way. Any larger and it would be too visible from the main road.

He drove for several miles, singing country along with the radio. Eventually, the tortuous route became wider as the hidden road joined with an actual lane, though one that had been left to grow wild decades ago. Vic kept it just trimmed enough to allow a clear passage for the truck, but that was it. The lane led him deep into the forest, past huge old oaks and maples, and then fed into an area that was populated with much younger trees, most of them less than thirty years old. He threaded his way through these until the lane brought him out into a field beside a deserted stone farmhouse. Vic drove up and parked outside the house.

As he killed the engine he caught movement out of the corner of his eyes.

He tensed for a second and then in the next moment he was out of the truck, a Remington .30-30 held at port arms. He dashed along the front of the house, following the hint of movement he’d seen, and then rounded the corner, bringing the rifle up and looking along the barrel. The figure continued to move away from him but then it seemed to sense him and stopped, turning slowly toward him. Vic studied it, his green eyes narrowed.

He lowered the rifle and looked back at the front porch. There were two dark bundles on the top step. Vic nodded to himself, understanding, then glanced back at the figure.

The figure stood there at the edge of the forest wall, nearly invisible against the tall weeds. Vic knew what it was, though he had never actually seen one before, except in the strange and wild dreams that the Man sometimes sent him. He knew that the thing was alive, in a manner of speaking. A homunculus. It stood in man-​shape, but that shape twisted and fought to change, bound into that man-​pattern by a will, Vic knew, greater than the sum of its parts. The homunculus wore shabby old clothes, rough canvas gloves, castoff shoes. The clothes were splashed with long streaks and splotches of old, dried blood. Less than a day old, Vic reflected. On its shoulder squatted a huge carved pumpkin—a jack-​o’-lantern with a wicked grin. Vic thought it was a nice touch, and he grinned in return. Through all of the openings in the face, Vic could feel himself being watched by a thousand coal-​black eyes. The carved smile seemed to Vic to be a reflection not of the things of which it was made, but of the mind that directed all such things in this place. He felt as if he was seeing the Man’s real smile this time—not the weird imitation of it he’d seen on Mike’s battered face last night—but a real reflection of the Man and his power.

He really missed the Man, missed being with him, running with him the way he had done thirty years ago.

A sound rent the air, and both Vic and the creature turned toward it, knowing the sound. Vic frowned. Dogs. Probably police dogs.

“Shit,” he said aloud. Now he wouldn’t be able to head down to the swamp and commune with the Man. That really blew.

The barking was a good mile off, but it was coming closer, probably following the blood scent clinging to the creature’s clothes. “We can’t let them find a scrap of anything around this place.”

The homunculus stood there amid the corn for a moment longer as if considering. It nodded its monstrous head just once. Then, as if a switch had been thrown or a door slammed shut, the power of will that held it in its parody of human form was abruptly withdrawn. In an instant it no longer had the strength to maintain that shape, even if it had wanted to. In that instant the body collapsed into tens of thousands of smaller shapes that wrestled and fought and fluttered and scurried to be free of the suffocating press and the closeness of the other shapes. The huge and misshapen jack-​o’-lantern it had worn for disguise when it had come for Boyd and had gone in answer to Karl Ruger’s dark prayers wobbled and toppled and fell to the ground, exploding on impact into fragments of orange pulp, just as the man-​shape exploded into rat-​shape and roach-​shape and worm-​shape and mouse-​shape and weevil-​shape and beetle-​shape, and poured outward among the weeds and tangled undergrowth.