Drawn

by James Hankins

  As he lay there, Boone marveled at the fact that he wasn’t at home in his apartment, that he was, in fact, in the middle of the woods, surrounded by nature—heck, a huge lake was just outside the door—and yet he wasn’t curled into fetal position, sweating and dry-heaving and hyperventilating. He was far from cured, far from normal, but he was taking baby steps. He couldn’t help but thank Alice for that, the woman from the rest stop, wherever she was.

  Boone closed his eyes and listened to the wind sighing in the trees. Such a peaceful sound, a sigh…a gentle whoosh…almost rhythmic in cadence…another sigh… “get…out…get…out…”

  Boone snapped his eyes open. He must have imagined that. He closed his eyes and listened hard.

  “…get…out…Boone…get…the…hell…out…”

  The bird cried again in the night, its four-note cry, only now it sounded like “Get out or die, get out or die.”

  “Oh, no,” Boone said.

  NATHAN, SOUND ASLEEP, turned his head from side to side.

  He is there but not really there, not part of the scene, only observing it. Jeremy is pacing the living room of the lake house, limping back and forth as the man-monster pounds and rattles the front door. Jeremy pulls open drawers, searching for something. The door shakes violently on its hinges. Jeremy throws open a closet, searching. The monster howls with bloody rage. Jeremy looks up and Nathan still can’t see his face—though, finally, he is glad about that because he doesn’t want to see the panic, the terror, he knows is there. The door creaks as the wood looks like it’s about to crack. The monster looses a final bellow. Then all is silent.

  Jeremy waits, stone-still.

  The silence stretches. Suddenly, the monster’s black silhouette appears in the big picture window in the living room…then his face is at the glass, his torn cheek pouring blood, his eyes red-rimmed and furious.

  THE CANDLE BLEW out. The windows were closed but the candle suddenly blew out. Boone wasn’t in total darkness, though, because the fat moon over the lake spilled light through the front windows.

  Things began to rattle. Not just things…everything.

  Doors rattled on hinges, glasses rattled in the cabinets, the candle rattled on the table. Lamps shook, the wagon-wheel light over the kitchen table swung, something fell from the mantel and shattered on the wood floor. Something banged against the picture window above his head. Boone rolled off the couch and crawled away as the night bird, now just outside the window, cried again, “Get out or die.” He couldn’t see it, but he heard it out there, its wings and beak and talons snapping against the glass. Another bird joined in, then another. They were right at the window, half a dozen of them now, screaming in at him, “Get out or die, get out or die, get out or die, get out or die…”

  The shaking of the room grew worse, the wind screamed in the night, the birds screeched. Boone stood in the middle of the room with his hands clamped over his ears.

  “What do you want from me?” he cried. “What am I supposed to do?”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  LARRY STOPPED. HE wiped his sleeve against his savaged, bloody cheek and grunted in pain. He was breathing heavily, causing blood to spurt weakly and erratically through the hole in his face. He was in great shape, but he hadn’t run this far in a while. His neck and shoulder ached. His cheek burned hot and wet. He tried to slow his breaths so he could listen to the night. Their footsteps were gone. No leaves crunching. He thought maybe they hadn’t gone this way at all. They’d tricked him. They’d thrown something and tricked him. Which meant he’d been near them.

  “Son of a bitch.”

  He spun and ran back the way he’d come, back toward where he’d fallen for their ploy. He knew they couldn’t have gotten far. The woman was limping badly. And if the kid was still lugging around that twenty-thousand-dollar backpack, which Larry was absolutely certain the greedy little bastard would be, then he’d be moving slowly, too. And Larry knew now the direction they had to be heading. And he knew where it would lead. The first house, he knew, was unoccupied and had been for months. The next place along had been unoccupied for half a century. They’d never get farther than that. Larry would catch them first. He was sure of it.

  He thought about the kid’s backpack and David’s goddamn wallet inside, along with the metal pipe with David’s DNA on it. Larry had to catch them. If he didn’t get that wallet back, he’d have far more to worry about than Miguel going to the cops. If Miguel shared his story and gave them the evidence to back it up, and if David Rosetti were arrested as a suspected pedophile, and it was Larry’s fault, then nothing—not prison walls, nor guards, nor God himself—would keep David’s Mafia-don father from snuffing Larry out like a candle stub.

  “Little asshole Miguel,” Larry said as he ran, his words garbled by his wound, “I’m gonna chew your heart right out of your chest, you little shit.”

  And he’d force the woman to watch. Then it would be her turn.

  Before any of that, though, there were other things he had planned for them. So many wonderful, terrible things.

  “THANK GOD,” ALICE said, panting, as a house appeared through the trees up ahead.

  They weren’t making good time at all, both of them trudging along, winded. Alice had developed stitches in both sides that jabbed like needles with every breath. Her ankle was starting to swell and burn hot. Miguel didn’t look to be in much better shape. His shirt was soaked with blood and he was clearly exhausted.

  They slowed at the house. The lake was to their right, the moon bright over the water, the ripples shimmering and glittering below. On any other night, Alice would have been transfixed for several minutes before rushing for her paints and a canvas. But not tonight. She looked back at the house. The windows were dark. Alice limped over to the attached garage and peered in through a side window. No car.

  “Damn it.”

  She returned to Miguel, who was up on the porch peering in a small window beside the front door.

  “Let’s look for a key,” she said. “I’ll look for a hide-a-key around the porch stairs, a fake rock or something. You look under the welcome mat.”

  “There’s no welcome mat.”

  “Well, try looking—”

  A soft tinkle of glass interrupted her. Miguel had placed his backpack against the little window and banged his elbow into it. The bag broke the glass while muffling most of the sound. He reached into the house, past the shards still in the window frame, and fumbled around inside for a moment. Then Alice heard a click. He pushed the door open.

  “Nice job,” she said. “Now let’s hurry. He can’t be far behind.”

  They moved inside quickly and Alice closed and locked the door behind her.

  “Look for a weapon of some kind,” she said, “maybe a gun. But if you find one, be careful with it. I’ll look for a phone.”

  She heard Miguel rummaging through a drawer as she limped through the dark house to the kitchen. She spotted a wall phone and headed for it.

  “Please, please, please,” she said as she lifted the receiver and brought it to her ear. Dead silence.

  She closed her eyes and sighed. When she opened them again, they fell on a butcher’s block. She pulled a couple of knives from it and hobbled back to the hallway, where Miguel was searching a closet.

  “Any luck?” she asked.

  “Nope. The phone?”

  She shook her head.

  Miguel nodded. “So now what?”

  Tough little guy, Alice thought. Didn’t cry or whine, just accepted the bad news and was ready to keep fighting. She handed him one of the knives.

  “Be careful with that. Hopefully, you won’t need to use it, but if you get the chance, start stabbing and slicing and don’t stop hacking away until he’s dead.”

  Miguel nodded again. “We should go,” he said. “He’ll be here soon.”

  Alice followed the boy out into the night.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  NATHAN WATCHES THE man-monster beat hi
s fists against the glass of the huge picture window, the window through which Nathan and Maggie watched countless sunrises over the lake while little Jeremy still dreamed in his bed. Those days are gone. Now the man-thing with the terrible eyes and the torn face roars in at Jeremy, who limps to the kitchen and yanks a carving knife from a butcher’s block, then returns to the living room and holds the weapon in front of him. He waits.

  Nathan can only watch as the raging animal rears its fists far, far back and slams them through the window. Glass shatters, showering Jeremy with a thousand glittering shards like shrapnel from a landmine. He’s cut in scores of places on his face and neck and hands. The wind roars in through the window. The man-monster-thing roars louder.

  SHADOWS HAVE TAKEN on substance around Boone, growing thick, pushing against him, prodding him, sliding between his feet, curling up and around his legs, climbing sinuously, wrapping around him, tightening, pulling him, drawing him toward the window, toward the window where the wind howled its warning, “Get…out…get…out…” and a dozen night birds rat-tatted against the glass with their beaks and claws, screeching “Get out or die, get out or die, get out or die…” The room shook, everything rattling and thumping. The wind roared, the birds cried, things crashed and broke, the shadows tugged at Boone and, finally, he could take it no longer. He screamed as loud as he could—no words, just sound, confused, frightened, angry sound.

  And the huge picture window shattered. It blew in like someone had set off a grenade on the sill outside. A thousand shards of glass stung Boone like a giant swarm of angry hornets.

  NATHAN WATCHES JEREMY stagger back, bleeding from head to toe from a thousand little cuts. As the monster climbs in through the window, Jeremy stumbles for the door, throws it open and heads out into the darkness. And somehow Nathan is flying along beside him, still nothing more than an observer, as his son crashes through the night forest. The fog has melted away. The moon is nearly full. Jeremy hobbles in a panic on his injured ankle, swatting branches aside as he stumbles on. A savage animal cry rips through the night behind him like sharp talons tearing through black velvet. Jeremy limps along as the earth-shaking footsteps pound the ground behind him. A tree snaps with the sound of a pistol shot, then another.

  As happens in dreams, time passes in a blink, skips ahead, and they are suddenly in a clearing outside a huge stone castle. Crenellated walls rise a hundred feet above them, gargoyles leer down, towering turrets stretch to the dark clouds scudding now across the moon. The drawbridge is down and Jeremy limps over it, over the moat, his boots thudding on the thick wood below his feet. Across the bridge now, Jeremy reaches two huge oak doors bound with thick bands of iron and studded with nail heads the size of half-dollars. He pushes but the doors won’t budge. Trees bend and break and crash in the forest, falling closer and closer. Jeremy puts his shoulder against one of the doors and groans and strains and, finally, it begins to move. Behind him, the last of the trees gives way and the monster bursts into the clearing.

  “I’ll chew your heart out of your little chest,” the man-thing screams in a terribly strange, terribly garbled voice thick with blood and fury. Nathan has never heard the thing speak before and he wishes he never had. That voice is a nightmare within this nightmare.

  With a final shove, the door opens just enough for Jeremy to slip through. Nathan, invisible, follows, and Jeremy puts his shoulder to the door from the other side. As it closes, Nathan sees the creature thundering toward it, reaching out its massive hands, hands ending in dirty yellow claws, then the door slams closed and Jeremy lowers a steel bar in place, locking it.

  BOONE WAS BLIND again, though not from panic. The candles had blown out and something—clouds, Boone hoped, not some new creature come to threaten him, only clouds—had blocked the moon.

  Wind swirled around him like water in a whirlpool. Shadows tugged at him. The wind and the night birds screamed at him.

  Boone should have been reduced to a cowering puddle of panic symptoms. He should have been on his knees, shaking and suffocating and retching while his heart banged harder and harder and threatened to burst. But he stood in the center of the room and screamed back at the night raging around him, “Just tell me what you want from me.”

  TIME SKIPS AHEAD again and Nathan watches from a distance, maybe twenty yards away, watches his son from behind as Jeremy stands in the middle of the castle courtyard and the monster slams again and again into the castle doors, shaking them on their giant hinges…only Jeremy isn’t the Jeremy he was just moments ago. Nathan still can’t see his face, but his son is much smaller now, much younger, not the strapping man he was seconds ago, but just ten years old now, eleven at the most. No longer in his Marine uniform, he’s wearing a T-shirt, shorts, and sneakers. He’s standing there, skinny, small-shouldered, knobby-kneed, standing all alone, so small and alone, just a small boy all alone in the castle as a monster pounds away at the doors. A crack echoes through the courtyard sounding like a pistol shot, then another, as the thick oak planks crack in the middle, the iron bands begin to bow, and the doors crash open. Finally, inevitably, the monster rushes in.

  NATHAN’S EYES SHOT open. He hurried down the hall to the living room, where he stopped dead. Boone stood in the middle of the room bleeding from dozens—no, hundreds—of tiny cuts, a thousand shards of glass carpeting the floor around his feet. The picture window looking out onto the lake had shattered—somehow it had shattered inward—just like in Nathan’s dream. Boone was wounded in countless places, like Jeremy had been.

  “Boone, are you all right?”

  “Do you hear them?”

  “Hear what?”

  “The birds? The wind?”

  Boone seemed almost to be in shock.

  “Boone, let’s get you—”

  “Do you hear them?” Boone asked again, more urgently.

  Nathan saw half a dozen black birds—he had no idea what species they were—fluttering just outside the window. They made some sort of cawing-shrieking sound. And the wind? It blew through the trees as it often did on blustery nights.

  “Do you hear them?” Boone repeated.

  “I do.”

  “What are they saying?”

  “Saying?”

  “Yes,” Boone said. “What are they saying?”

  “I don’t…I don’t know what they’re saying.”

  Boone nodded. “Something wants me out of here,” he said.

  Something…?

  “I don’t understand,” Nathan said.

  “I don’t either, Nathan, but something wants me out of here.”

  Nathan was worried about the poor man standing before him. “What happened here, Boone?”

  “I can’t stay here. I don’t know why, but I can’t stay here. Something wants me out of here. I’m sorry about all this, Nathan, I really am. But I have to go.”

  “Go? Where?”

  Boone shook his head. “I don’t know. Something will guide me there, wherever it is. But I have to get out of here. Something wants me out of here.”

  He started for the door.

  Nathan thought about the window, shattering in on Boone like it had shattered in on Jeremy. He thought about Jeremy telling him that he’d need Boone, not to let Boone go.

  “Boone, wait.”

  Boone shook his head and kept walking.

  “I think I know where you need to go.”

  Boone stopped and turned. “How could you—?”

  “I know it sounds strange, Boone, but I know where it is you need to go. And this is gonna sound even stranger, but…I think I have to go with you.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t either, but I’m pretty sure I’m right.”

  “I don’t get it. How could you know where I need to go?”

  “It’s complicated. You just have to trust me.”

  Boone stood there, blood trickling from a dozen wounds on his face and neck, a dozen more on his arms, the trails of blood looking like little red wor
ms wriggling down his skin. Earlier tonight, he’d been mugged and thrown out of a car, left on the side of the highway. And though Nathan had tried to show him kindness, he knew his own motives were more than a little selfish. He wondered if Boone had enough of a capacity for trust left inside him. Nathan prayed that he did. Finally, Boone nodded and Nathan exhaled in relief.

  “Okay, then,” Nathan said, “let’s get going, because I’m pretty sure we have to hurry.” On his way to the door, he stepped into the kitchen and pulled the two biggest knives from a butcher’s block on the counter. He grabbed Boone’s hand and placed the handle of a carving knife in it. “Take this. I’ve got one, too.”

  “Think we need them?”

  “I don’t know, but if we do, I’d rather they be in our hands than back here at the house.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  LARRY TROTTED UP to his neighbors’ house without the slightest attempt at stealth. Either the woman and Miguel were inside, or they weren’t. Either way, stealth was unnecessary. If they were inside, they’d be alone and relatively defenseless, because he knew that the Greenlands were not the kind of people to have a gun in the house. So at best, the woman and the kid would be armed with steak knives while he had his .45. And they’d certainly never killed before, while he certainly had.

  He saw the broken window by the door. They’d at least been there. But were they still there? His guess was that they weren’t, that rather than wait for him, hiding in a closet or under a bed with only knives to defend themselves, they’d prefer to try the next house along the lake, hoping to find someone home, someone with a working phone and, preferably, a shotgun. If that was the case, they were going to be sorely disappointed.