His father was now a shambling skeleton covered with blood and mucus, wrapped in soiled and trailing rags. He lurched from the podium toward Bobby.
Bobby jumped down and ran, away from the adults who reached for him, away from the horrors that had supplanted his parents. He ran away from Mr. Manyteeth, who was now eating the dead duckling, his shroud of cobwebs undamaged by his feeding.
Bobby ran around the front of the house, screaming and crying. He could hear the adults coming for him, could hear them calling his name, their hot breath and grasping hands coming closer.
He had to hide, had to get away. He saw the large pond and made for it, driven by some sense of child logic that he could hide underwater until the bad things went away.
He ran straight into the water, flailing and struggling to get as far out as possible.
He heard his mother and father screaming for him.
Crying, he turned, and saw that they looked like Mommy and Daddy again. The monsters that had taken their place were gone. They were running toward the pond, crying for him, and he answered with a renewed wailing.
Then he sank, and the calm green waters closed over him.
Detective Stan Roberts took a long and satisfying leak off the side of the road in Missouri. The Big Boss was not around but had left a tiny spider strand in his consciousness. If he deviated from the route on the map, it would be back to make him suffer.
Richie’s fourteen-year-old Nathan had been big on video games. Games where you shot monsters and racked up points. Games like Half-Life, Doom, and Resident Evil, these had been favorites of the kid, and he had always enticed his uncle Stan to play. There was always a main monster in those games, a final creature that was the toughest to kill. In game parlance, he was the Big Boss. This was how Stan thought of the thing that rode inside his skull.
Of course, there were lesser monsters in those games, and he realized he had become one of those. He had killed Nathan’s dad, his best friend. He had done horrific things to the attendant at the gas station. Jesus, he still couldn’t believe how long that guy had lived, how he had kept screaming until his vocal cords had become shredded from the trauma. Oh, he tried to rationalize, say that the Big Boss had done all those things with the torch and tools, but he was the one who had picked things up, put them to use. If he had had any real balls, he would have killed himself, driven one of the screwdrivers through his eye before he could hurt the attendant. It was on him, as was the stinking corpse in the trunk.
Stan zipped up and tried to put these thoughts aside. Plenty of time for guilt. He had to try to reason things through while he was lucid. He had to stop the Big Boss before anyone else was hurt. After that, he could think about his crimes in jail or while they were administering the lethal injection. Life was a fucking bowl of cherries all right.
He tried to arrange the facts in his head in a way that wouldn’t send that little mental strand of cobweb zinging to the Big Boss.
Fact 1: Something important was in the package bound for Los Angeles.
Fact 2: He was strictly forbidden to touch the package. The one time he had tried to shake it, the Big Boss had returned and hurled him fifty feet across the road into a ditch. The fact that it needed him for transport had probably saved his life.
Fact 3: The package was going to Steven Slater. This confirmed his suspicions that the Big Boss had something to do with Daniel Slater’s death.
Fact 4: Obviously, the Big Boss was something paranormal. Stan hated all that
X-Files
television bullshit—he thought it was demeaning to real cops—but couldn’t deny that what had happened to him was proof that he was dealing with the supernatural.
Fact 5: Whatever the reason for getting the package to California, it wasn’t good. Stopping that would hamstring the Big Boss, if only for a while.
Fact 6: He might be crazy. He didn’t think he was, but he had no real way of knowing, did he?
Fact 7: Suppose all this shit
was
just in his head? Suppose there was no Big Boss—then stopping himself from whatever he was doing was still a good idea.
Fact 8: He wasn’t allowed to commit suicide. He had tried to drive off a treacherous road in Pennsylvania and watched as his hands guided the car back onto the main road. The Big Boss hadn’t hurt him, just laughed at his impotence and placed those little strands of mental cobweb.
Fact 9: He didn’t like being a puppet, didn’t like being laughed at.
That was the extent of his knowledge, and it was pretty pitiful. He wrote these things on a tiny notepad in his mind, one he could stick into a sort of mental pocket when the Big Boss came back. He had learned to recognize the advent of its return before one of his lesser selves took their turn on the observation deck.
It was the smell of cloves.
There were other bad smells he associated with the Big Boss: shit and vomit, rotting meat and burned toast, rancid milk and scorched metal. But the aroma of cloves was the strongest. He didn’t know why, didn’t care. It was enough that he had that fact and could make use of it. He realized he should write that down in his little notebook when he smelled the odor of cloves and waited for his lucidity to fade.
He felt the Big Boss enter his mind along the strands of spider silk, then rummage through his head, as if looking for something. It seemed frantic, close to panic. Suddenly, it had found whatever it needed from his memories and had gone. He felt nauseous but lucid.
What had it been looking for?
Creeping along in his own mind, Stan Roberts began sifting through his memories, a very small fly in the parlor of a very big spider. Still, he smiled.
It felt good to be a detective again.
Steven ran, his lean body accelerated by adrenaline.
He saw Bobby fling himself out toward the middle of the large pond. He and Liz yelled to the boy, and Bobby turned to face them. For the briefest of moments, he thought the boy might swim to shore.
Then Bobby went down.
Steven reached the water’s edge and dove in, not bothering to strip or remove his shoes.
The water was warm but dark, and he swam to the place where he had seen Bobby go down.
The pond was scheduled to have been mucked out that very weekend, but the service for Daniel Slater had postponed that. It was dark with silt and the use of various ducks and waterfowl.
Steven took a deep breath and dove to the bottom. He saw clumps of long, undulating plants, their gentle swaying upset by his panic. He looked about but saw no sign of his son. He swam in ever-widening circles until he had to come up for air.
He dove again, trying to feel if there was any hint of a current, any indicator where Bobby might be.
He surfaced again, growing more distraught. The others were on the shore, clearly at a loss as to what to do. Jake Sparks was on a cell phone, and he could see Liz crying near the water’s edge. She started to remove her shoes, and he waved her off. He was afraid anyone else might make the muddy water even more difficult to see in.
How long could the little boy hold his breath? How long before he was gone?
He was going to dive again when he saw something golden off to his right.
Blond hair.
He swam toward Bobby, who had risen to the surface. The boy rolled over onto his back. Steven was alarmed to see that the boy’s lips were turning blue. He plunged forward, praying with every stroke that he would be in time.
As he neared the boy, the warm water turned cool, then cold. He grabbed the boy and held him, dimly registering the presence of small chunks of ice floating in the water.
He swam to shore and brought Bobby up onto the grass. Everyone drew back as Steven
laid the boy down.
CPR. He had learned it, hadn’t he? He looked about in wild confusion for a just a second, then focused on saving his son.
He checked Bobby’s airway and removed a glob of mud and algae. He tilted the small head back, and placed his mouth over both the boy’s nose and mouth. He began to breathe into his son, willing him to live. Liz knelt by the boy and began to massage his chest with rhythmic thrusts, timing her efforts with Steven’s.
Suddenly, the boy’s eyes fluttered, and he coughed, spewing up a great quantity of green water. Steven and Liz held him gently as he vomited up the water and detritus of the pond.
Bobby looked at them and began to cry, his weakened mewling tearing at Steven’s heart.
His son was alive, thank sweet Jesus in Heaven, he was alive.
Crying, he and Liz wrapped themselves around the boy.
Minutes later, the ambulance arrived and rushed them to the hospital in Southampton.
“Everything will be all right,” Steven told Liz, as the doctors whisked Bobby away.
Somehow, he didn’t really believe it. Everything felt strange and ominous. It was more than Bobby’s almost drowning. It was the disquiet he had felt ever since he had gotten the news of Daniel’s death. He hugged Liz, seeking an anchor in her warmth and love. He felt that any moment he might be swept away on strange tides into places he dared not go.
Liz hugged him back, crying softly.
“Shhh, shhhh,” he said gently. “He’s okay. He’s our little boy, and he’s okay.”
Liz suddenly straightened and checked her purse. She looked up at Steven with a stricken expression.
“We left Bonomo at Dr. Pollard’s house,” she said. “Bobby’s going to want his bear.”
She broke down again, as if she had failed their son.
He gently held her face in his hands and tilted her head up so their eyes met.
“Honey, it’s okay. There was too much going on for us to remember Bonomo. We’ll swing by Pollard’s when we leave, or maybe he’ll have one of his staff drop it off.”
“You think he’d do that?”
“Of course he would.”
Besides
, he thought,
he’ll do everything to keep this from turning into a lawsuit
. That seemed a harsh tangent, but part of him was angry that there had been no safety fence surrounding the pond. Of course, Pollard probably never got visitors as young as Bobby. Still, one could never predict when a hazard might hurt someone. What the hell was he thinking? His mind seemed to be going in circles, passing over irrelevancies and lapses of logic.
The appearance of the doctor attending Bobby helped Steven focus. He was in his late thirties, dressed in light blue scrubs. He smiled at them pleasantly.
“Mr. and Mrs. Slater? I’m Dr. Rolnick, pediatrics. You folks performed the CPR?”
They nodded, and he smiled his approval.
“Perfect job, textbook.”
“How is he, Doctor?” Liz asked, biting her lower lip.
“He’s fine. We want to keep him overnight for observation, but he’s doing great.”
“Can we see him?” Steven asked.
“Sure. I did have a question,” Rolnick said, his brow furrowing slightly.
“What?” they asked in unison.
“You folks haven’t been up around any snow or ice lately, have you?”
They looked at him.
“We came here from California. It’s almost as hot here as it was there,” said Steven.
“Why do you ask?” said Liz.
“We found some lesions consistent with frostbite on Bobby’s torso.”
“Frostbite?” Liz was shocked.
Steven started to comment, then remembered the bright shards of ice in the green water, gleaming like emeralds around Bobby’s unconscious form. Had he imagined that? He felt he hadn’t, yet it seemed insane. It was the middle of July, for Christ’s sake. The doctor would certainly think he was crazy. And what proof did he have? Even if there had been ice, it would have melted by now.
“It’s nothing severe, just puzzling,” the doctor said.
“Could it be something besides frostbite?” asked Liz.
“No, the symptoms are consistent with extreme cold. You’re sure he wasn’t playing in a walk-in freezer or something?” The doctor was looking at them intently. “Of course not,” said Liz, shocked at the implication.
He thinks we’re hiding something
, Steven thought. And actually, he was. Still, there was no way he could relate what he had seen without coming accross as a liar—possibly an abusive parent.
“Well, I would have been surprised if you had said ‘yes,’ ” Dr. Rolnick said. “The patches are small and localized, and all on the torso. None of them are on the extremities or face, where frostbite is prone to appear.”
“Will he have scars?” Liz asked, on the verge of tears.
Dr. Rolnick shook his head. “It’s only first stage, and that’s treatable with warm compresses. There’s no permanent damage. I’m just puzzled, is all,” he said.
There was ice, there was ice
, Steven thought, but stayed silent on the subject.
Dr. Rolnick looked at them one last time. It was clear he couldn’t reconcile Bobby’s symptoms with some sort of abuse on their parts, and so he was left with a mystery.
He doesn’t like mysteries
, Steven thought.
He likes things neat and tidy, cause and effect,
diagnosis and cure
.
Rolnick led them down the corridor to Bobby’s room.
The boy looked so tiny in the large bed. He saw them and sat up, seemingly no worse for wear.
“Mommy! Daddy!” They rushed to him and hugged him gratefully.
Rolnick, seeing no hint of fear or submission in the child, left them alone.
“How are you, sport?” Steven asked.
“My chest is a little sore,” Bobby said, pointing. This would have been from expelling the water from his lungs. He might have torn some of the muscles there from the effort.
Bobby pulled up his shirt.
“And I got these spots,” Bobby said.
Liz bit her lip, trying not to cry. The marks on Bobby’s pale skin were livid red ringed with gray.
Steven tried to smile reassuringly, but his mind was reeling. No one was seeing what he was because what he was seeing was impossible. Whether he was seeing it because of his penchant for fantasy or the events of the last few days was unclear, but he knew that he was perceiving a greater truth.