The Meridians(96)

He covered the girl's eyes.





***





52.

***

Lynette felt the knife bite into her, felt blood sluice down her neck in a thin trickle as the blade passed through the outer layers of her skin.

But when the end came, it did not come as she expected it. She expected to feel the warmth of her blood, followed by a widening coldness that would overtake her and fly her soul on wings of sleet into the heavens. But neither happened. She felt blood, but not as much as she expected. And then she felt...nothing.

There was a popping noise, a pressure in her ears that she recognized.

She opened her eyes -

(God, how can I even be opening my eyes?)

- and looked beside her.

Her son was still there. But he was not looking at her any more. He was looking at something else. A dark figure in the darkness, black on black in the inky shadows of the car where she should be bleeding to death but somehow was not.

The figure was not that of the gray man.

It was someone holding something. A squirming bundle of white-faced fear.

A girl. A little girl.

Her son spoke. "Witten was right," he said, for the first time pronouncing the "r" round as it should have been spoken. Then he added, "Cover Tina's eyes."

The darkness that sat beside her moved, and suddenly the little girl's face disappeared, covered by a hand. A hand that she recognized, for she had memorized its every curve and feature in the hours before this last race against death had begun. She had pondered it, looked at it, burned it into her cerebrum with indelible memory. It was the hand that had held hers during the preceding evening.

It was Scott's hand.

What's going on? she wondered. What's happening?

Then there was a sound.

She looked outside the car, through the glass, and gasped.





***





53.

***

Scott heard the gasp beside him, but did not move. Not until Kevin did, not until the boy moved, and then he followed the boy's gaze with his own, looking outside the car.

And saw unreality made real.

Two forms teetered on the edge of the porch of the nearby house. They swayed, locked in an embrace as close as that of any pair of lovers.

But they were not lovers. They were strangers, they were nightmares made flesh, they were impossibilities and unrealities that had found themselves somehow made real in this most impossible of nights.

The gray man.

Tina's father.

The two men clutched at each other. No, not at each other, Scott suddenly realized. They held the knives. Mr. Gray held the knife that he had been about to slash open Lynette's neck with, and Tina's father was gripping the haft of the knife he had been about to plunge into Scott's chest and heart.

Only instead of plunging it into Scott's heart, the knife had somehow ended up in the chest of Mr. Gray.

And instead of slashing through Lynette's throat, Tina's father now wore an extra smile, one that curved up and gushed blood in a gaping, gasping wound right below the man's chin.

Scott's breath caught in his throat. Somehow the gray man had been transported from his place in the car and had taken Scott's own place. But he had been moved in the middle of his deadly attack, and somehow that attack had still continued, ending in the imminent death of Tina's father rather than in the demise of Lynette.

And Tina's father's own attack had continued unabated by the change, the only difference being that it was Mr. Gray who was now gasping his last breath instead of Scott.

Scott's mouth opened wide. He couldn't understand -

(Kevin's eyes.)

- what was going on. He shook his head as though clearing it of water, of the thick membrane of unreality that seemed to be coating his mind, his body, his very existence.

Outside the car, the two men fell, still holding each other in a grim, grisly, gruesome embrace of death.

"What's going on?" asked Tina.

Scott had no answer for her.

Then there was another sound.

He looked in the other direction, in the direction of the noise, the opposite side of the car from the horrific tableau in the dust beside the house.

It was a tapping. A rapping. A knock-knock-knocking.

It was John Doe.





***





54.

***

The man was still rapping on Scott's window.

Only it's not my window, thought Scott. I should be outside, I should be dead in the dirt and Lynette should be dead in here. What the hell is happening?

John Doe knocked again. The old man looked unhappy for the first time that Scott had seen him.

"What's going on?" said someone beside him. Lynette. She sounded as shocked and strangely calm as he felt. Something was wrong, but more than that, something was right.

He looked at John Doe again. Looked the old man in the eyes.

Kevin's eyes.

"Hello, Kevin," said Scott.

John Doe smiled. He opened the door and gestured for Scott to get out. "You've figured it out, eh?" he said. "I'd forgotten."

Scott's world was spinning. How could this be Kevin? Kevin was sitting next to him in the car.

He shook his head again. Cobwebs, cobwebs everywhere, he thought, and not a drop to drink.