Devoted(46)
From his pocket he extracts the photographs. They slip from his fingers. He tramples them underfoot as he leaves the room.
His metamorphizing vision amplifies the most meager sources of light, so that he navigates the rooms and hallways with increasing agitation, but without knocking against anything, as silent as a silverfish that has slithered out of a crack in the baseboard to explore in the darkness that it prefers.
In spite of the wondrous nature of his becoming or because of it, he cannot sit and wait. He fidgets even as he moves from one place to another, wringing his hands and running them through his hair, plucking at the spots on his T-shirt that are crusted with Justine’s blood, sucking at his teeth for a remaining taste of her.
He finds himself in Megan’s art studio, standing at a window, with no memory of having come here. Tall, slender yard trees are bent severely toward the southeast, as though the very rotation of Earth has so violently accelerated that all things rooted in its crust will be torn loose and sent tumbling. The wind’s ferocity excites Shacket, calls for him to break things as it shatters fragile limbs, to tear things as it shreds leaves and sends them swarming through the night like colonies of deformed bats.
Then he’s on the move again, through a bizarre architecture, as if the house is transforming in sympathy with him. Hallways are now tunnels, although not carved out of earth or rock, but rather shaped by legions from some secreted organic material resembling coarse paper, windowless rooms roughly rounded like chambers in an enclosed nest. As strange as it is, he nonetheless feels he belongs here, and he is drawn toward some communion with a horde of his own kind.
But that proves to be a hallucination—or a memory born not of experience but of instinct—because then he finds himself in the kitchen, hungrier than he has ever been. He puts his pistol on the table and searches through the contents of the freezer drawer in the bottom of the refrigerator. He finds four steaks—filet mignon—in sealed packets bearing the name of a high-end mail-order purveyor of meats. He tears open one package and chews on the raw product, but it is frozen and doesn’t satisfy.
Not bothering with a dish, he places the steak in the microwave and presses the control labeled Defrost and stands looking through the oven window while the carousel turns in the bath of radiation. As the filet begins to weep a watery serum tinted with blood, Shacket hears himself making a thin keening sound similar to one of the many voices of the wind.
Taken from the microwave, the meat is cool but no longer icy, malleable in his eager hands, wet and tender between his teeth. The taste does not offend, the texture is not repulsive, but it also is not what he hoped it would be, what he needs. The limp mass of beef doesn’t struggle in his hands, nor does it cry out as it is torn, nor does it satisfy as did Justine in the meadow grass.
He wanders the house again, window to window, coveting the wind and the dark, wanting to be out there in the tumult, which speaks to him, excites him. His heart races. His pulse pounds in his temples.
He finds himself in the kitchen again, staring at the steaks that are defrosting on the floor.
He finds himself at the front door, staring at the word under the tiny red indicator light: Home.
He turns away from the keypad, from the door.
He ascends the stairs.
In the upstairs hall, following the Persian runner, he arrives at the master suite. A blade of light slices through the quarter inch between the door and mahogany floor. The bitch is still awake, reading. He wants to take her while she sleeps. While she sleeps.
He stands there for a while, staring down at the light that shines like a razor’s edge, his thoughts urgent and lustful and chaotic. With one hand, he rubs the crotch of his jeans. His other hand pulls at his face as though it’s a mask he feels compelled to strip off, clamps over his trembling mouth to repress a cry that he yearns to let out. The wind that harrows the night encourages him to join it in a rampage, and multiple hungers besiege him.
He turns from her suite and retreats toward the front stairs.
He halts at the door to the boy’s room, where only a strip of pale light purls on the polished mahogany floor. If any sound rises from within, it is too faint to be heard above the wind.
Change of plans. The boy first. Shacket opens the door. He steps inside. He quietly closes the door behind him.
49
The Four Square Diner stood directly across the town square park from the Pinehaven County courthouse, sheriff’s department HQ, and morgue. At peak business hours, the mélange of aromas could make anyone on a strict diet weep, but at this late hour, the air was redolent of only bacon and coffee.
A sheriff’s deputy, Bern Holland, who was on duty from 8:00 p.m. until 5:00 a.m. and therefore ate according to a contrarian schedule, sat at the counter, having a lunch of bacon-and-egg sandwiches with fries. The other two men at the counter were here for the coffee.
Carson Conroy sat in a window booth with black coffee and a wide slice of raisin-and-plum pie.
By the time he’d finished the autopsies of Painton Spader and Justine Klineman, the dinner hour had long since come and gone—as had his appetite. Over the years, the condition of people killed in accidents or murdered had ceased to sicken him or to have any effect on him other than sometimes to elicit pity. The morgue was a world of the dead, who were beyond help and hope, as segregated from the world of the living as any dream was separate from reality. When he left work, he did so as if arising from a sleeper’s phantasms, and in his busy after-work life, Carson usually didn’t dwell on what he’d seen on the autopsy table any more than he would repeatedly rerun a dream in memory after waking from it. Usually. But this one was far from an ordinary case. He had no appetite for his long-delayed dinner, certainly not for meat of any kind or for anything savory, only for coffee and the sweetness of fruit pie.