Drawn Into Darkness (26 page)

•   •   •

Stoat grabbed his shotgun, and I saw my death in his anaconda eyes.

I screamed as I had never screamed before. Shrieking, I jumped up from the sofa and ran with vague ideas of barricading myself in my bedroom. But Stoat, already on his feet, caught me easily. I barely made it halfway across the living room before he grabbed me by the arm and flung me onto the floor as if he intended to stomp me into the carpet.

I kept screaming like a smoke detector going off; I couldn't stop. But I made up my mind that, anything Stoat did to me, he was going to have to face me down. Rolling onto my back, I looked straight up into his eyes, dead leaden things, hiding under the shadow of his brows.

Stoat ranted, “I'm getting out of here on foot if I got to, but first—”

With my big mouth at its most strident, I interrupted. “On
foot
? Stoat, you don't have to do that. The car keys are right on the kitchen table.”

“What?”

“The car keys are in the pottery bowl on the kitchen table.”

“Why the fuck didn't you tell me that in the first place?”

“Because you're not going to just take them and let me be, are you.” This was a statement, not a question. The past few days had made a good Stoic of me. I met his glare with my own level stare, and maybe, just a little, I hoped the truth would be more than he could deal with.

No such luck. “I got to shut you up for good.”

The Stoics were okay but they had no damn sense of humor. I wanted to go out with some flair. Solemnly I reminded Stoat, “Don't shoot me. The cops over at your house might hear.”

His mouth writhed like rattlesnakes, venomous, and I could actually see the blackened, dead part of his face start to open up in a sickening chasm as if to display his necrotic soul. Clutching his shotgun by its twin barrels, he lifted it. “I'm going to beat your tricky-ass brains out, you fucking ugly redhead bitch.” He swung the shotgun butt high.

I am nothing if not crazy when it counts. “Stoat, wait a minute,” I told him earnestly. “I'm concerned, and I think you need to seek medical attention.”

The shotgun swung down, but in a disorganized way, as if I had messed up Stoat's aim and his impetus. I sat up, and the shotgun butt slammed into the carpet behind me. Stoat yelled, “What the fuck you talking about?”

I hoisted myself with my hands to get my feet under me. At the same time I cocked my head back to establish sincere eye contact. I said, “Parts of your face are falling off.”

Stoat didn't say anything, but his mouth moved, twisting ugly as he swung his shotgun up like a golfer ready to tee off. My head being the metaphorical golf ball, I dived for an entirely different part of the carpet and screamed.

The shotgun butt swished over my head, but I kept right on screaming as I scuttled like an oversized cockroach under the coffee table. I grabbed the legs from below and held on hard. In that moment I comprehended to the bone why drowning people grasp at straws. With all the life energy in my body right down to my toes I shrieked, “Help! Somebody help me!”

“Shut the fuck up!” Stoat roared, swinging his shotgun-cum-club at the coffee table. Maybe he thought he could send it flying off me, but I hung on through the first impact and the second. And the third, for all the good it did me. That blow shattered the wood. Or the pressed processed chipboard or whatever the damn cheap thing was made of—Stoat's rifle butt struck like a bomb to send jagged hunks of it flying off me.

Trapped between him and the sofa, I rolled over on my back because, damn his septic guts, if he was going to kill me, he was going to do it to my face. He looked like a homicidal gargoyle, lifting his weapon, and I raised my arms in a futile gesture to defend myself, but at the same time my brain burped and words spurted from my mouth. “Stoat! You know Justin actually told me you're not a bad guy?”

He blinked, barking, “What?”

“Justin! Said! You're not a bad guy, and he'd be right if—there's a term the ancient Greek philosophers used. . . .”

“What the fuck you talking about?”

“He'd be right if you weren't such a consummate ontological asshole!” I ducked.

He struck so swiftly I got out no more than half a scream, fled no more than half an inch, before the butt of the shotgun smashed my upraised arm and bashed the side of my head. I felt no pain, just an odd inner snick, and I heard no whack of impact, not with my ears. My brain registered the bump, and I saw nothing that made any sense, just fireworks behind my eyelids, and then I heard, although I'm not sure it was real, the most clangorous crescendo of sound, crashing shouting yelling pounding bedlam. All my philosophies be damned, there was a hell after all, and it sure seemed as if I was going to it.

“I
saw somebody open the windows over there!” Justin's words hung echoing in Forrest's mind for a moment after he had said them.

“When?” Forrest demanded.

“Around dark.”

“Yesterday?” It must have been when they were burying Schweitzer.

“No! Today! Just a little while ago.”

Quinn leaned forward from his seat on the ground. “Are you sure?”

“Sure I'm sure,” Justin said with a country boy's innate patience. “I was hiding out back, wondering if it was safe to go inside, and I saw somebody over there open the windows.”

Forrest felt Quinn's stare and turned to face his brother. He knew how Quinn felt, because he felt the same way: incredulous, afraid to hope. He shook his head. “It's too simple. Why would Mom—”

His words were snatched away by a loud, chilling scream.

It stopped his breath, a woman's scream of deathly terror, coming from the direction of the pink house.

Forrest had never heard anything like that scream, not even in a horror movie. Such extremity, the terror of the valley of the shadow of death, could not be faked. Its primal power catapulted him into a run toward the pink shack, run, run, the fastest he had ever run in his life, during which he heard that piercing scream again, twice; Forrest felt it like a stiletto stabbing his gut. Quite abstractly by comparison he noticed headlights bearing down on him as he pounded across the asphalt road, but the car swerved to miss him, then turned in at the pink shack. With those screams reverberating in his ears, Forrest couldn't think; not until the car stopped right in front of the pink shack, its high beams flooding the front door with much-needed light, did he realize it was his brother, Quinn, the quick thinker. And he had Justin with him. As Forrest sprinted across the front yard, he saw the kid leap out of the car's passenger side, but then limp as he tried to run.

Forrest saw Justin and his brother peripherally, his focus all on Mom's front door. Thinking his momentum would bust him right through it, he rammed it with his shoulder, but the door shrugged him off, made him mad. As Quinn and Justin ran up beside him, Forrest reared back and kicked in the door, right beside the knob, the way cops did on TV.

Those people, though, on TV, they always had guns to point and warnings to roar. Forrest had neither. When the door burst open, he retained just enough sense to flip on the indoor light switch, but then he stood frozen in helplessness at what he saw.

Justin shouted, “Uncle Steve, don't!”

Forrest would not have recognized the man as Steven Stoat. He saw a monster with a grotesquely lopsided, blackened, rotting face, with slits for eyes, a snarl for a mouth, a hollow-chested shambles of a body interrupted in the midst of swinging some sort of a club at—Forrest saw red hair and crimson blood, bruised skin and torn clothes, a face way too still: Mom. On the floor, hurt. Forrest could look at nothing else. Yet somehow he kept getting closer; his feet had carried him through the door and inside the house without his knowing he had moved.

Beside him Quinn yelled, “Forrie, he's got a gun!”

Forrest didn't really care about anything his brother had to say. He just wanted to get to Mom and make sure she—please, God, she had to be alive—but Quinn grabbed him by the arm and yanked so Forrest's head flew up. He saw Stoat fumbling with his club to point—

It wasn't just a club. It was a gun. Long. Big. To Forrest it seemed as big as a cannon.

And he had no weapon with which to fight back, not even a stone to throw. Quinn and Justin looked as helpless as Forrest felt. Quinn still had that stupid jack handle, but what was the use of it against a gun?

One, two, three,
Forrest thought crazily. Three beer cans on a fence rail, three ducks in a shooting gallery. Stoat would take out him and Quinn and Justin just like that.

“Uncle Steve!” Justin screamed. “No, please don't!”

And Forrest yelled, “Mom!”

•   •   •

All I could see were remarkable special effects—lightning flashes, flaring supernovas, comets, and meteor showers—until the dazzling pain was done with my eyes.

Even then, what I saw was hard to interpret from where I lay bleeding on the floor. My main impression was of feet. Stoat's scuffed cowboy boots with their pointy toes turned toward the front of the house. Toward wing tips, work boots, and a pair of Chucks.

With horror as heavy as my love I recognized the three young men instantly. I knew them at once by a single look at their shocked bodies, arms outflung, silhouette targets against a surreal blue-white light blasting through the front door. Stoat would kill them, my sons, all three of them. Why were they here in my wretched pink shack for Stoat to murder? Close to my face I saw his shotgun butt freshly bloodied from clubbing me and his big-knuckled, frenzied hands repositioning the weapon so he could shoot them down, Quinn and Forrest and—and the one I loved like my own child—he would slaughter them like three calves on meat hooks.

And I lay stunned, injured, broken, helpless to prevent it.

I could not move.

“Mom!” cried one of my children.

I moved.

I had to, just like I'd had to get up at night when the babies cried; the summons shocked me with high voltage to the heart and could not be refused. Somehow I moved. I rolled to one side, flung my usable arm around Stoat's ankles, and rolled back with all the kinetic force in my badly compromised body in an attempt to yank his goddamn pointy cowboy-booted feet out from under him.

But the pain of moving made me faint at the same time as I heard the shotgun fire.

•   •   •

Justin felt as if time had pleated and he had somehow slipped across the folds, because once again he was just a little boy begging for his life, “Uncle Steve, no, please don't!” The man with the gun had once again loomed to fill the darkness of night, a deity of evil with death at his command, and the only hope of continued existence was to plead and promise, promise, promise to stay and never disobey and never tell the dark secret, never ever. Shaking with terror, Justin knew he had disobeyed and now he must die. He saw his doom incarnate raising the shotgun toward his shoulder, and he cringed, on the point of closing his eyes—

He saw something trying to rise up from the shadows like a wounded bird trying to lift its wings.

Lee!

Time focused like a laser; everything Justin had ever been or could be was
now
, that moment as Lee rolled sideward with an arm swinging out like a scythe to snatch Stoat around his cowboy-booted ankles, attacking with all her wounded strength.

Stoat leveled his shotgun just as he staggered.

He started to topple.

The shotgun blasted fit to earthquake the house down. Justin did not just hear it fire; he felt it shake him to the bone, and bits of white ceiling snowed down on him from where the blast had struck. Yet he remained standing while Uncle Steve—while Stoat the Goat fell.

Justin did not wait until Stoat hit the floor, or the floor hit Stoat. He lunged to hit him at the same time and grab the shotgun when Stoat lost his grip.

Only the damn creepy strong pervert didn't lose his grip, didn't let go, not for an instant. Justin smelled his so-called uncle's hot and furious breath in his face as he tried to wrench the weapon away from him, but goddamn—no, there was no God and Stoat the pervert was still master, still stronger, still doom, getting the better of Justin—

Wait. Someone was helping. Justin saw someone hammering Stoat across the knuckles with a jack handle and somebody else wrestling Stoat's hard old arms away from the shotgun before he completed the thought,
Quinn, Forrest.
With the death weapon, the shotgun, in his possession, Justin stood up and stepped back while Stoat still lay sprawled on the floor.

Forrest and Quinn left him there, both of them hurrying to tend to their mother. Lee lay far too still, and standing there with the shotgun heavy in his grasp, Justin heard Quinn and Forrest saying to her, “Mom?
Mom?
” but he did not hear her answer. Unconscious?
Dead?
God, please not dead, and he wanted terribly to see whether she was breathing, to go to her like her sons, yet some dark instinct made him glance at Stoat still lying dazed on the floor—

No! Stoat was sitting up, and all in one quick motion he pulled his knife out of his pocket, opened the blade, lifted the weapon—

Justin did not wait to see whether Stoat intended to throw the knife at Quinn, at Forrest, at Lee, or at him. Without wasting time putting the shotgun to his shoulder, he aimed it and pulled hard on both triggers, God help them all, please let there be a round left in one of the barrels—

The concussion smothered the sound of his scream.

Stoat's chest exploded, spraying the room with red.

With the shotgun still hanging in his hands, Justin stood dazed by the din of the gunshot ringing and echoing in his mind, by the spectacle of his all-powerful captor splayed like roadkill before him, by a sense of all solid footing falling away from underneath his sore, sneakered feet. He balanced on a knife-edge of time. His future uncertain, fearsome, the specter of prison bars looming. His recent past gone in a burst of red. He had killed—

Killed Stoat?

“Is he dead?” Justin whispered to the shifting cosmos, shifting between man and boy, the man declaring,
Yes. Yes, it had to be done
, and the boy begging,
No, no, please, I didn't mean it, not Uncle Steve—

Lee's voice said inside his head,
He is SO not your uncle.

“He was going to throw the knife,” Justin said a little bit louder. And what Stoat had done to Lee—would she be all right?

With a sense of tension stretching, then snapping, a bond breaking, Justin shifted his stare from Stoat to Lee and her sons. Forrest knelt beside his mother holding her hand and whispering to her, although she appeared not to hear him. Quinn stood at a window talking rapid-fire on his cell phone. “. . . already on their way? Good, but we need an ambulance also. My mother. Yes, she has a pulse and she's breathing but she's unconscious. No, I can't stay on the line. There are things I have to do.” He snapped his phone shut.

Justin heard this without much comprehension, as if it were background noise, because his ears were still ringing and his mind clamoring. He watched without really seeing as Quinn lifted his mother's feet to place a sofa pillow underneath them, then ran to the bedroom and returned with a blanket, which he spread over her. “Trying to keep her from going into shock,” he told his brother, his voice stretched thin.

Forrest turned on him, shrill. “Kind of late, aren't we? She moves down here all alone and we act like we don't care and now—” He choked, trying to control tears.

“Forrie, we can't help it that we're a pair of jerks too much like our father.”

“But
Mom
!”

“I know. I wish—I want—I hope to God she'll be all right.”

“She will. She's got to.”

“Mom, stay with us, okay, please?” Quinn crouched by Lee Anna's head, stroked her hair, and said tenderly to her still, silent face, “Mom, we're idiots, we—” His voice hitched. “We need you.”

“We love you,” said Forrie, very low. “Hang in, Mom.”

Mom.
Justin heard the word profoundly, and something free-floating within him began to connect, react, and magnify like yeast rising in homemade bread until its warm swelling filled him and displaced all else. He had no room in him for hesitation, none for shame or fear, and no need for a weapon. He let the shotgun drop to the floor with a thud. Startled by the noise, Quinn and Forrest looked at him.

“Could I borrow a phone, please?” asked Justin.