She felt rather than saw them enter the room and then heard the man’s woman gasp.
She was staring at the sliding doors. At them. At her people.
She pulled him tight to her. And bit down.
At the very last moment the man resisted, pulled away, and instead of the soft flesh of his neck her teeth found only bone but that was all right too, she knew she would have him anyway and bit down harder, grinding her teeth into the collarbone, working her way
into
him, her eyeteeth sinking into the back of the bone, tasting the salt drool of blood and swallowing as he screamed and took her head in his hands, trying to push her, shake her away.
But the man was soft. Not strong.
Her teeth hooked the back of the bone. She pulled.
At the same time she let go, using his weight.
There was a sound like a tree limb snapping as the man fell to the floor, screaming and clutching the splintered halves of bone pressed together pale and bloody glistening wet outside his body.
Second Stolen looked up and saw Eartheater and Rabbit beside her. The others were busy with the woman.
All except First Stolen, who was turning the corner toward the stairs, going for the child. His ax in one hand, claw hammer in the other.
Eartheater and Rabbit were looking at her, waiting. Rabbit was grinning.
She heard the man’s woman shriek.
“Mine,” she said and bent down over him.
He saw a glimpse of her upside down from the floor, of Amy, his wife, his partner, the flesh he knew so well that it was almost
his
flesh though his own real flesh was screaming now, burning, throbbing so thateach new heartbeat was something to live through, to stay conscious through, to get beyond and by, Amy being hauled back into the kitchen by three filthy boys in rags and a ratty-haired girl in some sort of cracked, pale yellow
(impossible)
skin
. Amy struggling, screaming, while the woman (their mother? a family?
No.) while the woman followed, pointed to the sink with a hunting knife. And the others dragged her forward
.
He saw this and in that instant tried to feel his way into Amy’s mind, to reach into her and pour out strength and hope to her even though he himself had no strength, the pain had drained it, but to reach out and somehow protect her, armor her with the huge grateful armor of his love. He felt for her, but she wasn’t there. She was alone, cut off from him by some terrible black wall of fear.
In the moment before the bright new pain burst like suns before his eyes, he had never felt so lonely.
Amy was in the computer.
The nightmare images played themselves over even as they continued. She was inside the moment and somewhere behind it at the same time, exactly like viewing split screen on the computer, eyes darting back and forth between the old text and the new.
In either place, what she saw was insane.
The girl reaching up to embrace him, something new and cunning on her face as suddenly there was somebody in the
room, seeing them there coming through the door, children, a woman with a checked shirt and a man carrying an ax, the children carrying knives and hatchets and hammers and one of them, the smallest girl, what looked like a garden trowel and
they were on her now, two twin boys at her right arm, a boy and girl at her left, dragging her back to the kitchen sink, strong, so that she struggled hard and kicked but they dragged her anyway, they pulled her away from David bleeding on the carpet next to his desk
and the girl had bitten him, torn him, she saw the bone crack sharp and bloody up through the skin
.
Pulling her away from him, out of David’s sight lines. So she could not see what they were doing to him anymore and—
Melissa! Where was Melissa? Where were Claire and Luke and Melissa and . . . the man with the ax!
The woman was scarred, horribly scarred, taller than any woman she had ever known. She was the first one she had seen
coming at her holding the knife now while she felt the rim of the sink slam hard against her back, aware that her robe was open and she was exposed to them except for the bra and panties, and then there were cords in the woman’s hand, leather cords and she was tying them to her wrists, a grim almost solemn look on her face, tying them too tight, cutting deep, hurting her, the children letting go, the woman turning her around so that the rim of the sink dug into her belly and pulling back the cords first left then right and tying them to the hot and cold taps on the sink while the children jerked her legs out from under her, jamming the edge of sink into her ribs below her breasts so that her ribs and bound wrists supported her weight, not
her legs, they were spreading her legs and tying them to the legs of the kitchen table behind her and she screamed and screamed, twisting, jerking at the cords, and suddenly there was a rag in her mouth and duct tape shoved roughly over her lips and she couldn’t scream, she could hardly even breathe.
She heard pounding from upstairs and knew suddenly where the man with the ax had gone and began to cry. Melissa. Her baby. Claire. Her friend Claire
holding her, Amy sobbing over Danny, her first real boyfriend, in the freshmen dorm in college, her arm soft and strong around her as she sobbed as though her heart would break
and David.
Oh god David.
Don’t cry
, she thought.
You’ll suffocate if you do. You’ll die
.
She heard his tortured scream and then more pounding upstairs and a crash of something falling.
The girl was wearing a skin, she had seen that too right away and now she saw what it was.
The skin was human.
She saw the cracked yellow breasts, the darker nipples. As the girl smiled down at her with filthy yellow teeth and placed Amy’s bright new aluminum lobster pot in the sink below her, and then adjusted it.
Right beneath her neck.
Even as Claire locked the door behind her she knew it wouldn’t hold. She heard David scream, Amy saying no no no and sobbing.
Melissa was crying.
Leading them straight to this room.
Luke stood silent, his face colorless, looking at her. Reading her fear.
What’s happening? What do we do?
“Hold Melissa,” she said and thrust her into his arms. The baby stopped crying for a moment and then began again.
She tried not to hear the sounds downstairs
.
She tried not to hear or think of Amy
.
She went to the window, threw it open and looked down. The bound pile of framing lumber was just below, maybe three feet high by four feet wide. From the window to the pile looked to be a drop of ten feet. Maybe twelve.
She could think of nothing to do but try.
“Mommy . . . ?”
She put her finger to her lips.
She listened. Someone was on the stairs now. Taking his time.
“Luke,” she whispered. “There are people in this house. They want to hurt us, and Melissa. We have to go out the window. We have to hide.”
He glanced at the window and he was beginning to cry, trying hard to hold it in. The crying was the real thing now.
“Mommy? I’m . . .”
“I know you’re scared. It’s okay to be scared. But we have to be brave and I’ll help you. Don’t worry. Put Melissa on the bed and climb up here on the dresser.”
She heard the footsteps again. At the top of the stairs.
Close now.
Luke did as he was told. So gentle with the baby she felt a sudden pang of love for him so powerful it hurt.
“Okay, now hang your legs out the window. Sit on the windowsill and give me your arms.”
Tears were rolling down his cheeks but he trusted her, he did as she asked and she took his wrists and leaned over the dresser and started to lower him down.
“Mom!” She could hear the panic.
And the footsteps in the hall now.
“I’m going to hold you until you’re all the way out the window, do you understand? Then I’m going to let go and it won’t be that far because there’s a big pile of wood down there and you’ll fall on that. You’ll be fine. Be a big boy now. When you fall, try to remember to bend your legs a little, okay?”
Luke nodded. His wrists were cold and sweaty.
She reached out across the dresser until her feet were off the floor, her weight sufficient to balance them, inched out farther until she could see over the rim of the windowsill to the pile below and until his legs stopped swaying.
Could she do this? Could he? Could she possibly let him go?
For a boy—and not an especially athletic boy—ten feet was a terribly long way down.
She saw him, neck broken, sprawled across the pile.
For a moment she wanted desperately to haul him back in again, bring him back through the window and hold him close and hug him until this all went away and they were together again alone and there was no night and not even Steven to harm them.
Melissa was silent.
Downstairs Amy screamed.
Someone was trying the door.
You have to
, she thought.
“Bend your knees, Luke,” she said, sounding calmer than she had imagined she could possibly sound, so calm it shocked her.
For him
. “I love you and I’ll be right behind you. On three, okay? One. Two.”
She felt his hands grip her wrists hard once and then relax again.
“Three!”
She willed her fingers open and felt him drop away, and even as the ax splintered the door behind her, watched him plummet down with sudden sickening speed and hit and roll, nearly off the pile but not quite, not quite thank god, just G.I. Joe getting shot again, and then joyfully saw him stand.
She turned for Melissa and this time saw as well as heard the ax come through the door, prying the wood apart enough so that she caught a glimpse of him, a big man naked to the waist and covered with what looked like a layer of grease, grinning, teeth like tiny blackened points, like fangs.
She tore Luke’s comforter off the bed and wrapped it around Amy’s baby as the ax came through again, the man laughing, watching her through the slit in the door and then suddenly realizing what she was going to do, getting the idea now as she pulled herself up on the dresser and over to the windowsill.
He slashed furiously at the door, stroke after stroke thunder and lightning crackling in her ears as she
steadied herself against the upper frame with one hand and clutched Melissa close and pushed off, her back scraping over the frame.
She felt bright quick fire along her spine that was instantly absorbed by the sense of falling, an explosion of absolute freedom so stark and terrifying that her free hand clawed for control, her arm seeking balance as though she were falling through water, not air, and then just as suddenly instinctively returning to Melissa, holding her tight as the impact jolted them and she was on her back, knowing she had got it wrong somehow, and starbursts and night descended upon her all at once along with the scent of spruce and the still, warm air.
David lay numbed with shock staring at the blank computer screen on the desk overhead.
A phrase he recognized—he didn’t know from where—kept loping around in his head.
The woods are dark. Are dark
.
He was aware of voices on the television and then of someone kicking it in, the smell of acrid electrical smoke almost familiar enough to evoke the memory of who he was and where—and who this surgeon was who operated on him now with naked bloody breasts in his anesthetic dream.
He did not remember her opening his shirt but she must have, to get at what was wrong with him, because now she was tracing a thin red line with her scalpel from his collarbone down across his sternum to his stomach, a thin sound of tearing as she tugged the flesh apart.
The anesthetic was amazing. His eyes flickered down and he could see his own organs beneath the film of welling blood, his lungs, his heart, and below them his diaphragm, stomach, liver.
Yet there was no pain.
He felt only an itch around his collarbone and a strange cold feeling, like drinking crushed ice in a tall summer drink—so cold you could feel it all the way down inside you.
And it must have been a heart problem, a transplant, because he saw his surgeon reach in slowly and pull the heart free, the heart still beating firmly . . . and in his dream he saw the impossible, saw her raise it to her lips and bite down while her two assistants reached into him too, scrambling with dirty fingers for his liver.
In his anesthetic nightmare he saw her chewing.
His eyes went back to the computer screen—an empty blank—but it wasn’t a computer screen now, it was a heart monitor. So incredibly still and lifeless that he knew that he was dead.
“Mommy! Wake up! Mommy!”
Luke was shaking her. She still held Amy’s baby.
She’d hit the pile and fallen against the side of the house, hitting her head, and she could not have been dazed for more than a moment because there was Melissa still held tightly in her arms.
She looked up at the window and saw exactly what she had been afraid to see. The man staring down at them. Then suddenly gone.
She got off the pile, grabbed Luke by the arm and started running through the grass.
“I know a place!” he said.
Melissa was crying loudly. There wasn’t a thing she could do.
“Show me,” she said.
The Girl had her knife to the mother of the infant’s throat and was going to cut when First Stolen raced downstairs, running for the double glass doors. The Woman stopped him. A questioning, angry look on her face.
He has failed
, thought the Girl. First Stolen has failed!
It pleased her.
He pointed toward the doors.
“The child . . . a woman, a boy!”
First Stolen was angry too, and confused. Gesturing wildly with the hammer
.
The Woman had not told them there would be any boy, nor any woman other than the one she held here by her curly red hair. Their presence had taken her by surprise.
And that pleased the Girl too. That the Woman could be wrong.
The Woman made a single gesture that encompassed them all—even Second Stolen, Rabbit and Eartheater who were feeding on the kill on the floor.