Captain Quad (36 page)

These thoughts streaked across Rhett's mind in the space of a heartbeat, but it was a precious heartbeat, maybe his last if he didn't light the fuck out of here. The possibility that Gardner had died after all and that his spirit had somehow possessed Jerry Jeter did not seem at all farfetched, not out here in the middle of this arctic no-man's-land, with the wind clawing at his eyes and Mike's mutilated body leaking blood into the crusty snow. But the thought of it; that made Rhett want to sit in a snowdrift and gibber. The thought of it turned his nerves into noodles and made his legs want to drop out from under him.

Run!

Then he remembered his extra key.

He threw off his mittens and ran his already numb fingers along the undersurface of his snowmobile's footboard.

Please. . . please. . .

It was in one of those little magnetic key boxes; he'd stuck it there last winter after installing a whole new ignition system because he'd lost his fucking keys, and where the fuck was it?

Lost the fucker, lost it—

He knew the auger was gone, stalled on the ice and slicked with Mike's blood, but he could feel it coming at his back; the skin tingled where the point would go in. . .

Jerry was close now. Very close. Rhett could hear the creak of the ice beneath his footfalls.

He shifted to the opposite footboard—and his fingers closed around the key box. He jerked it free and scrabbled at the tiny lid—the fucker was frozen solid!—then it opened, and he nearly fumbled the key getting it out.

A sliver of calm pierced Rhett Kiley then, and in his mind he reached out and grabbed it. He threw a leg over the padded seat, slotted the key in the ignition, and turned the engine over.

The snowmobile rattled into life. Engaging the clutch, Rhett cranked the throttle and the machine lunged forward, almost bucking him off as the front end reared off the snow. Throttling back, he swung toward the woods and aimed for a break in the trees. There was a half-tank of gas, enough to take him back through the woods and, if necessary, all the way out to the highway. In the short time they'd been here the wind had obscured their tracks, but he could still make out a few scattered tread marks in the snow. All he had to do now was stay cool, keep to the trail—

Behind him Jerry's snow machine whined into life. Jerry gunned it, and the sound was like a roar, a bellowing, beastly roar. It rose and fell off, rose and fell off, as if the beast paused to scent the air. Then the clutch was engaged, and the insectile buzz of the accelerating snowmobile advanced toward him through the trees.

Something raked Rhett's cheek, and he realized that he'd run off the track. He righted himself, wincing at the sting in his face, aware that the wetness drizzling over his lips was blood, but beyond caring. Head down, he dodged around trees and half-buried stumps, already lost but still alive, alive and intent on remaining that way. He held the throttle wide open, calling on quicksilver reflexes he'd believed long dead.

But it wasn't enough. The bastard was catching up.

Blue smoke began to stream out from the seams of the snowmobile's yellow cowling, and the hot reek of oil filled the air. He was running the sucker too hard, but what choice did he have? Jerry was right up his ass; he could almost feel that evil grin.

Jerry buzzed up beside him, coming in so fast Rhett was hardly aware it had happened; the sucker was just there, cruising along smoothly beside him—then his arm levered out and caught Rhett in the teeth, and he almost lost it right then, his machine careening off into the trees. He managed to wrest back control, but Jerry tracked him like an angry hornet. The cunt was laughing, Rhett could actually hear him laughing—

And suddenly Rhett was furious.

He cut into a dense patch of brush, shielding his face behind the low windscreen, and broke into a clearing. It was a field, a farmer's field; he could see gray buildings in the distance. At a glance the place looked abandoned, the buildings drifted in snow—but if there was a farm, then there must be a road.

Rhett zoomed across the flat in a racer's crouch. Jerry, swinging wide, came into view at the edge of Rhett's vision. The bastard was toying with him, not even bothering to look ahead. Panic rose in Rhett again, trying to douse his clear-headed fury, but he wrestled it back.

Rhett had seen the tumbledown fence. He didn't think Jerry had. Ducking low, he buzzed safely beneath it.

Barbed wire. A single rusty strand.

Jerry blew into the half-buried fence at seventy miles an hour. The sagging wire caught him beneath the chin, sinking into flesh the way a hot knife sinks into butter. Suddenly unpiloted, the snowmobile crested off a drift and went braying into the air, doing a backflip before landing on its bumper in the snow. The barbed wire snapped free at one end, and while Jerry was still airborne it coiled around his neck with a sound like a horseman's lashing crop, finishing the job of severing his head. Jerry landed on his back. His head rolled down a smooth drift and came to rest on its stump, facing Rhett, giving the impression of a man buried to the chin in the snow. The grin was still frozen to its face.

Filled with a savage exultation, Rhett gunned his snow machine through a precarious half circle, slewing back toward Jerry's twitching corpse. For the space of an eyeblink it was lost from sight, obscured by a snow-heaped stack of cordwood; then it came into view again.

Its limbs were no longer twitching; now they were flapping. The fucking thing was trying to flap its way up again. Blood was jetting from the stump of its neck, and still it was trying to get up. . .

Just nerves, a sane voice told Rhett Kiley.

Then the head in the snow opened its eyes.

Something slammed shut in Rhett's mind, the doorway to reason, and his exultant whoop pitched upward into the keening registers of terror. Describing a loop that nearly toppled his machine, he swung away from the flapping monstrosity and arrowed blindly across what had once been the dooryard of this forgotten homestead. The swaybacked clapboard overlooked a freshwater lake; seeing it only as a clear path of escape, Rhett went howling toward it.

The sun blinked through the cloud cover then, as if endeavoring to soothe Rhett's cracking nerve, and its brilliance jabbed him in the eyes. In the great gleaming plain of white that ranged out before him, Rhett failed to notice the sharp eight-foot drop to the shoreline.

The snow machine whined into the air at its top end, sixty-two miles an hour. There was a sensation in the pit of Rhett's stomach like that felt in an elevator at the height of its ascent. . . then man and machine parted company, Rhett continuing his climb, the snowmobile falling sharply away. Reaching the top of his arc, Rhett experienced a giddy instant of weightlessness, and in that small space of time he thought he might just drift away on the wind.

Then gravity took over and hauled him down. He struck the twelve-inch thickness of ice feet first, his weight carrying him through into a frigid bath of darkness. He sank like a granite slab, unable to move, his shocked eyes registering nothing but a shifting watery blackness. His boots struck bottom, a barely perceptible thud followed by an abrupt cessation of descent. The impact bent him at the knees, which creaked audibly, the sound transmitted through his stiffening tendons like voices along undersea cables, and now he mustered the last of his sanity, deliberately deepening that bend and pushing off with his feet.

Slowly, his lungs already screaming for air, Rhett bobbed toward the surface, rising through bubbling planes of darkness into a green, thickly filtered light.

The top of his head met something jagged and unyielding.

The ice!

He'd come up under the ice, and now he scrabbled for a handhold on its crystalline undersurface. He found a brittle stalactite and clasped it with nerveless fingers. On the verge of inhaling chill water, he thrust his chin into the three-inch space between the water and the ice and gasped at the miserly air. He was rapidly losing sensation—his legs were already gone, his arms like two burning stakes in his trunk—and he knew that if he didn't either find his point of entry or smash through the ice right now, he was a goner.

He had a minute, maybe two.

Grunting with the effort, Rhett rammed a fist against the ice. The impact was puny, barely disrupting the fenestrated surface, and the contact drew blood.

There was no way he could break through from underneath; that much was immediately apparent. He had to find the hole, and he had to find it now.

But he felt suddenly warmer, tingly, as if he'd lain too long in an overhot bath. It was not a bad feeling. Not bad at all. Sort of dreamy and light, as if during sleep he had magically left his body. The water was shifting around him, swirling in mysterious currents—and now it lapped over his nose and mouth, causing him to cough in a racking spasm.

The shock slapped him into alertness.

Above him the ice suddenly groaned, as if beneath some ponderous weight. Rhett squinted up through the ice and thought he saw a shadow gliding stealthily above him. He had guessed the hole was to the right of him—and that was where the shadow appeared to be heading.

An idea of sheer insanity overwhelmed him.

Jerry!

The headless fucker was coming to get him, just as surely as Rhett's blood was turning to icy raspberry slush; he was up there right now, shambling toward the hole in the ice.

Rhett's anchoring stalactite broke away, and the frigid water enveloped him. Fully submerged, he squinted in the slopping green light and saw something breasting through the water toward him. In a mind suddenly floodlit with terror, he watched as that indeterminate shape became Jerry Jeter. His still-grinning head was lashed to his belt by the hair, and it twisted with each stroke he took.

Losing half his air in an unheard scream, Rhett flailed away and tried to swim for it, a dying part of his mind promising that the ice would be thinner near shore; he could reach it ahead of the demon behind him, smash his way through, and then the farmer would take him in. . .

Envisioning himself cutting through the water with Olympian strokes, Rhett Kiley sank to the muddy lake bed. Before he reached it, his heart froze solid to his ribs, the blood inside it hard as rock.

FOUR

INTO THE FAR-OFF,

FAIR FOREVER

THIRTY-THREE

It was time. The wet work was done, and in the four dragging weeks since Christmas, in the face of his maddening inability to reach Kelly, a plan had taken shape in his mind.

He had an objective now.

Still, a single element eluded him: How had she become immune to his invasions? What defense had she acquired that defeated him so easily, making it a torment for him even to look at her? It had been so easy before. She had almost come to welcome him.

A part of him knew the reason, but he rejected it with the whole of his being. There must be something else. . .

But soon none of that would matter anymore. He was strong now. He was ready. He'd evicted her lover from his own thieving hide once before; he could do it again. He'd break through that protective shell or die trying.

And with any luck, this time the eviction would be permanent.

THIRTY-FOUR

Will's lovemaking was like his cooking, unrushed, almost solemn, yet simmering with a passion that grew and grew until, in the instant of their release, it filled the world. Kelly sat astride him, her dark hair obscuring her face in the low winter light of her bedroom. It was a kind of consummation tonight, a celebration of shared feelings, and their movement continued through that instant without pause, seeking yet another peak.

Then a sensation like a chill November wind cut through them both, and they stopped, breathless, eyes wide and searching in this chancy light.

"Did you feel—" Will said.

And then his eyes found a sputtering pocket of light, suspended on the air overhead. As he watched it, it seemed to swell, as their passion had only moments before, and now Kelly saw it, too. Frightened, she pressed herself against Will.

"Will, what is it?"

But Will could only shake his head. It hung there a moment, an eerie blue witch-light that seemed to defy all earthly dimensions, a faltering smudge of luminous air that extended upward through the ceiling, as if bridging this world and some other.

Then it was gone.

"Will, what was that?" Kelly repeated. Her good sweat had turned clammy.

"I don't know," Will said. "I really don't know."

The moon was a hard round porthole at the top of the sky, and Peter took wing toward it, a mute cry of torment shredding him into smoke. He had caught them in the act, rutting like barnyard animals—and still he hadn't been able to touch them! He had been certain he could penetrate her partner (Will, that was his name, he'd heard her breathe it in passion), crush his loathsome spirit, grind it into so much dust and then expel it, claiming the untenanted carcass as his own. He was so powerful now! Look at what he had done to those ice-fishing back-stabbers. . .

But this had been like slamming into a plate-glass window. He couldn't even get close.

A single whining thought thrust him skyward like some impossibly powerful jet fuel.

She loves him.

She really loves him.

But that couldn't be. Not after all they'd been through. Not now that he could be with her again, able to share with her an intimacy hitherto only imagined. What right did that bastard have to interfere? Why had she let him come back?

She loves him. . .

Peter soared like a missile toward the moon. It seemed to be getting bigger now. Brighter. Closer. He wanted to smash into it, hurl himself into its deepest crater. He knew how to die. That was no great secret anymore. He didn't need a runaway wheelchair or a willing hand to unplug a ventilator or a syringe to piston air into his veins. All he had to do was keep going. Ignore the pain that spawned in his skull even now and keep going until that pain roared like Niagara Falls. . . then keep going some more.

There was nothing to live for now, and this realization came as a kind of relief. Kelly had always been at the center of his will to survive, even during his darkest years, when he'd been unable—or unwilling—to admit it. His nightly intrusions into her dreams had caused him no guilt, because in the depths of those dreams he had witnessed the truth. She'd still loved him then. It had been a confused love, a hurt love, but it had been getting better.