The Meridians(71)

Her house had been invaded by a stranger. The stranger now sat beside her in her own car. How much worse then, how much more fraught with strange doings and danger, would the world be away from her possessions, away from the very limited areas she could claim as her own?

But.... "Gray man's going to kill Scott."

She couldn't live with that. Not after having lost Robbie, she couldn't lose the kind man with the scarred face but perfectly whole heart. She couldn't lose another special man.

She couldn't lose another man she loved.

Lynette grasped the handle of the door with newfound courage, with a strength she did not know she had possessed.

She opened the door.

It cracked open with a shriek that sounded far too loud in her ears, and at the same moment the boy/boys beside her fell silent, as though the need for silence for the first time in these latest minutes was overriding the need for speech, for screaming, for the voice of fear.

Silence gripped her with its all-encompassing embrace. The night seemed shallow and dim, a faithless reproduction of reality into which all the details of a normal Meridian street had not been included. No birds tweeted in the night, no babies cried in the distance, no dogs barked behind dark hedgerows.

As though giving voice to her observations, one of the versions of the boy in the car spoke. "All is silent, all is deep, all the world is fast asleep." Then the voice dropped into a whisper. "Hurry, Mommy. Gray man's going to kill Scott. Going to kill Scott. Going to kill him and gut him and rip him up and make him be gone forever."

Lynette felt tears sting behind her eyes, fear so concentrated within her that it had to find some physical avenue of escape and so was causing her to weep. She wiped the tears away. She did not have time for them.

Her boy - or the boy that her boy had become - inhaled to speak again, but Lynette knew that if she heard that strange whisper one more time, if she heard any more horrific predictions about Scott's fate, she would lose her nerve. So before Kevin could speak, she got out of the car as quickly and quietly as possible and pulled the door shut behind her.

She was alone in this place, a solitary figure in this cruel version of a kind world.

She crept toward Scott's car.

Not toward the alley, don't think of the alley, don't go there, she thought. Just go to the car, just get to the car, just get to the -

And at that moment a shot rang out. It sounded far away, distant as a shot echoing through a vast mountain range, impossible to pinpoint with her ears. But she knew instinctively where the sound had come from.

The alley. It had come from the alley.

Still she moved to the car first. She looked inside it, half-expecting to find Scott there, dead, a gruesome victim of Mr. Gray's talents.

There was nothing. Only the keys, still hanging from the steering column, and the glove box hanging open, the small light inside it illuminating the car's interior just enough to highlight the fact that she could barely see anything at all inside it.

But she could see enough. She could see that Scott was not inside the car. She could see she would have to look elsewhere to find the man who had come into her life so suddenly and become such an important part of it so completely.

She dropped to her knees beside the car, looking over the hood and trying to pierce the darkness of the alleyway beyond. It was no use. She couldn't see anything past the open mouth of the alley. It was as though the passage was some kind of creature that sucked light into it, a black hole in downtown Meridian, a singularity such as the one that had caused the universe to exist. Only this singularity brought not a big bang and life, but the harsh ring of a gunshot, and inevitable death.

Lynette crept around the side of the car, and then danced, catlike, to the alley opening. She stepped across the threshold of the alleyway, knowing that she was also stepping across something more solid and dangerous than the mere line of demarcation between a street and its offshoot, but knowing also that if she hesitated, Scott would be lost.

And there he was. Kneeling. Kneeling in front of...

The gray man.

Mr. Gray.

Death come to visit, come to call again, come to steal from her another love, another life.

Mr. Gray was standing in front of Scott, his back to her thank goodness, that was one small blessing in this horrific night. But he was holding a gun to Scott's head. Not so good.

The two were speaking.

"You're a champion screwup, Mr. Gray," said Scott, his tone one of defiance in the face of certain death that made Lynette want to shout out, to comfort him. But she held her tongue.

"Mr. Gray?" said the killer. "I rather like that. Mr. Gray."

"I started out with Mr. Shitforbrains, but it took too long to say," said Scott.

"No, I've always been Mr. Gray to you, haven't I? Always the man who killed your family. Always the man who was destined to kill you." Mr. Gray looked around then, and Lynette barely had time to throw herself behind a trash barrel before he spotted her.

"Not much time left," she heard Mr. Gray say. "So I guess I won't get to reproduce history exactly after all. But it's the end of a story that people remember anyway, isn't it?"

And Lynette knew that this was the moment. This was the moment that her son - and her son's twin - had warned her of. "Gray man's going to kill Scott," she whispered to herself, and cast around desperately for some way to stop what she knew was going to happen.