He had a feeling that this night was one of the most important of his life. The long loneliness after Linda’s passing was finally drawing to an end. Here, with Rebecca, he was making a new beginning. A good beginning. Few men were fortunate enough to find two good women and be given two chances at happiness in their lives. He was very lucky, and he knew it, and that knowledge made him exuberant. In spite of a day filled with blood and mutilated bodies and threats of death, he sensed a golden future out there ahead of them. Everything was going to work out fine, after all. Nothing could go wrong. Nothing could go wrong now.
10
“Kill them, kill them,” Lavelle said.
His voice echoed down into the pit, echoed and echoed, as if it had been cast into a deep shaft.
The indistinct, pulsing, shifting, amorphous floor of the pit suddenly became more active. It bubbled, surged, churned. Out of that molten, lavalike substance—which might have been within arm’s reach or, instead, miles below—something began to take shape.
Something monstrous.
11
“When your mother was killed, you were only—”
“Seven years old. Turned seven the month before she died.”
“Who raised you after that?”
“I went to live with my grandparents, my mother’s folks.”
“Did that work out?”
“They loved me. So it worked for a while.”
“Only for a while?”
“My grandfather died.”
“Another
death?”
“Always another one.”
“How?”
“Cancer. I’d seen sudden death already. It was time for me to learn about slow death.”
“How slow?”
“Two years from the time the cancer was diagnosed until he finally succumbed to it. He wasted away, lost sixty pounds before the end, lost all his hair from the radium treatments. He looked and acted like an entirely different person during those last few weeks. It was a ghastly thing to watch.”
“How old were you when you lost him?”
“Eleven and a half.”
“Then it was just you and your grandmother.”
“For a few years. Then she died when I was fifteen. Her heart. Not real sudden. Not real slow, either. After that, I was made a ward of the court. I spent the next three years, until I was eighteen, in a series of foster homes. Four of them, in all. I never got close to any of my foster parents; I never allowed myself to get close. I kept asking to be transferred, see. Because by then, even as young as I was, I realized that loving people, depending on them,
needing
them, is just too dangerous. Love is just a way to set you up for a bad fall. It’s the rug they pull out from under you at the very moment you finally decide that everything’s going to be fine. We’re all so ephemeral. So fragile. And life’s so unpredictable.”
“But that’s no reason to insist on going it alone,” Jack said. “In fact, don’t you see—that’s the reason we
must
find people to love, people to share our lives with, to open our hearts and minds to, people to depend on, cherish, people who’ll depend on us when
they
need to know they’re not alone. Caring for your friends and family, knowing they care for you—that’s what keeps our minds off the void that waits for all of us. By loving and letting ourselves be loved, we give meaning and importance to our lives; it’s what keeps us from being just another species of the animal kingdom, grubbing for survival. At least for a short while, through love, we can forget about the goddamned darkness at the end of everything.”
He was breathless when he finished—and astonished by what he had said, startled that such an understanding had been in him.
She slipped an arm across his chest. She held him fast.
She said, “You’re right. A part of me knows that what you’ve said is true.”
“Good.”
“But there’s another part of me that’s afraid of letting myself love or be loved, ever again. The part that can’t bear losing it all again. The part that thinks loneliness is preferable to that kind of loss and pain.”
“But see, that’s just it. Love given or love taken is
never
lost,” he said, holding her. “Once you’ve loved someone, the love is always there, even after they’re gone. Love is the only thing that endures. Mountains are torn down, built up, torn down again over millions and millions of years. Seas dry up. Deserts give way to new seas. Time crumbles every building man erects. Great ideas are proven wrong and collapse as surely as castles and temples. But love is a force, an energy, a power. At the risk of sounding like a Hallmark card, I think love is like a ray of sunlight, traveling for all eternity through space, deeper and deeper into infinity; like that ray of light, it never ceases to exist. Love endures. It’s a binding force in the universe, like the energy within a molecule is a binding force, as surely as gravity is a binding force. Without the cohesive energy in a molecule, without gravity, without love—chaos. We exist to love and be loved, because love seems to me to be the only thing that brings order and meaning and light to existence. It must be true. Because if it isn’t true, what purpose
do
we serve? Because if it isn’t true—God help us.”
For minutes, they lay in silence, touching.
Jack was exhausted by the flood of words and feelings that had rushed from him, almost without his volition.
He desperately wanted Rebecca to be with him for the rest of his life. He dreaded losing her.
But he said no more. The decision was hers.
After a while she said, “For the first time in ages, I’m not so afraid of loving and losing; I’m more afraid of not loving at all.”
Jack’s heart lifted.
He said, “Don’t ever freeze me out again.”
“It won’t be easy learning to open up.”
“You can do it.”
“I’m sure I’ll backslide occasionally, withdraw from you a little bit, now and then. You’ll have to be patient with me.”
“I can be patient.”
“God, don’t I know it! You’re the most infuriatingly patient man I’ve ever known.”
“Infuriatingly?”
“There’ve been times, at work, when I’ve been so incredibly bitchy, and I knew it, didn’t want to be but couldn’t seem to help myself. I wished, sometimes, you’d snap back at me, blow up at me. But when you finally responded, you were always so reasonable, so calm, so damned patient.”
“You make me sound too saintly.”
“Well, you’re a good man, Jack Dawson. A nice man. A damned nice man.”
“Oh, I know, to you I seem perfect,” he said self-mockingly. “But believe it or not, even I, paragon that I am, even
I
have a few faults.”
“No!” she said, pretending astonishment.
“It’s true.”
“Name one.”
“I actually like to listen to Barry Manilow.”
“No!”
“Oh, I know his music’s slick, too smooth, a little plastic. But it sounds good, anyway. I like it. And another thing. I
don’t
like Alan Alda.”
“Everyone
likes Alan Alda!”
“I think he’s a phony.”
“You disgusting fiend!”
“And I like peanut butter and onion sandwiches.”
“Ach!
Alan Alda
wouldn’t eat peanut butter and onion sandwiches.”
“But I have one great virtue that more than makes up for all of those terrible faults,” he said.
She grinned. “What’s that?”
“I love you.”
This time, she didn’t ask him to refrain from saying it.
She kissed him.
Her hands moved over him.
She said, “Make love to me again.”
12
Ordinarily, no matter how late Davey was allowed to stay up, Penny was permitted one more hour than he was. Being the last to bed was her just due, by virtue of her four-year age advantage over him. She always fought valiantly and tenaciously at the first sign of any attempt to deny her this precious and inalienable right. Tonight, however, at nine o’clock, when Aunt Faye suggested that Davey brush his teeth and hit the sack, Penny feigned sleepiness and said that she, too, was ready to call it a night.
She couldn’t leave Davey alone in a dark bedroom where the goblins might creep up on him. She would have to stay awake, watching over him, until their father arrived. Then she would tell Daddy all about the goblins and hope that he would at least hear her out before he sent for the men with the straitjackets.
She and Davey had come to the Jamisons’ without overnight bags, but they had no difficulty getting ready for bed. Because they occasionally stayed with Faye and Keith when their father had to work late, they kept spare toothbrushes and pajamas here. And in the guest bedroom closet, there were fresh changes of clothes for them, so they wouldn’t have to wear the same thing tomorrow that they’d worn today. In ten minutes, they were comfortably nestled in the twin beds, under the covers.
Aunt Faye wished them sweet dreams, turned out the light, and closed the door.
The darkness was thick, smothering.
Penny fought off an attack of claustrophobia.
Davey was silent awhile. Then: “Penny?”
“Huh?”
“You there?”
“Who do you think just said ‘huh?’”
“Where’s Dad?”
“Working late.”
“I mean ... really.”
“Really working late.”
“What if he’s been hurt?”
“He hasn’t.”
“What if he got shot?”
“He didn’t. They’d have told us if he’d been shot. They’d probably even take us to the hospital to see him.”
“No, they wouldn’t, either. They try to protect kids from bad news like that.”
“Will you stop worrying, for God’s sake? Dad’s all right. If he’d been shot or anything, Aunt Faye and Uncle Keith would know all about it.”
“But maybe they do know.”
“We’d know if they knew.”
“How?”
“They’d show it, even if they were trying hard not to.”
“How would they show it?”
“They’d have treated us different. They’d have acted strange.”
“They
always
act strange.”
“I mean strange in a different sort of way. They’d have been especially nice to us. They’d have pampered us because they’d have felt sorry for us. And do you think Aunt Faye would have criticized Daddy all evening, the way she did, if she’d known he was shot and in a hospital somewhere?”
“Well ... no. I guess you’re right. Not even Aunt Faye would do that.”
They were silent.
Pénny lay with her head propped up on the pillow, listening.
Nothing to be heard. Just the wind outside. Far off, the grumble of a snowplow.
She looked at the window, a rectangle of vague snowy luminosity.
Would the goblins come through the window?
The door?
Maybe they’d come out of a crack in the baseboard, come in the form of smoke and then solidify when they had completely seeped into the room. Vampires did that sort of thing. She’d seen it happen in an old Dracula movie.
Or maybe they’d come out of the closet.
She looked toward the darkest end of the room, where the closet was. She couldn’t see it; only blackness.
Maybe there was a magical, invisible tunnel at the back of the closet, a tunnel that only goblins could see and use.
That was ridiculous. Or was it? The very idea of goblins was ridiculous, too; yet they were out there; she’d seen them.
Davey’s breathing became deep and slow and rhythmic. He was asleep.
Penny envied him. She knew she’d never sleep again.
Time passed. Slowly.
Her gaze moved around and around the dark room. The window. The door. The closet. The window.
She didn’t know where the goblins would come from, but she knew, without doubt, that they would come.
13
Lavelle sat in his dark bedroom.
The additional assassins had risen out of the pit and had crept off into the night, into the storm-lashed city. Soon, both of the Dawson children would be slaughtered, reduced to nothing more than bloody mounds of dead meat.
That thought pleased and excited Lavelle. It even gave him an erection.
The rituals had drained him. Not physically or mentally. He felt alert, fresh, strong. But his
Bocor’s
power had been depleted, and it was time to replenish it. At the moment, he was a
Bocor
in name only; drained like this, he was really just a man—and he didn’t like being just a man.
Embraced by the darkness, he reached upward with his mind, up through the ceiling, through the roof of the house, through the snow-filled air, up toward the rivers of evil energy that flowed across the great city. He carefully avoided those currents of benign energy that also surged through the night, for they were of no use whatsoever to him; indeed, they posed a danger to him. He tapped into the darkest, foulest of those ethereal waters and let them pour down into him, until his own reservoirs were full once more.
In minutes he was reborn. Now he was more than a man. Less than a god, yes. But much, much more than just a man.
He had one more act of sorcery to perform this night, and he was happily anticipating it. He was going to humble Jack Dawson. At last he was going to make Dawson understand how awesome was the power of a masterful
Bocor.
Then, when Dawson’s children were exterminated, the detective would understand how foolish he had been to put them at such risk, to defy a Bocor. He would see how easily he could have saved them—simply by swallowing his pride and walking away from the investigation. Then it would be clear to the detective that he, himself, had signed his own children’s death warrants, and
that
terrible realization would shatter him.
14
Penny sat straight up in bed and almost shouted for Aunt Faye.
She had heard something. A strange, shrill cry. It wasn’t human. Faint. Far away. Maybe in another apartment, several floors farther down in the building. The cry seemed to have come to her through the heating ducts.