“Isn’t that what you were about to do when I came in?” Val said coldly, and saw the point strike deep, but Mark’s anger was too big to let a little shame deflate it.

“No, Miss Know-it-all! I was not about to attack her. I’m just trying to get things back to the way they were. I mean, hell, there was a time—and it wasn’t all that long ago—when I could actually touch my wife without her going to pieces.”

“Poor baby,” Val said. “Did you stop to think how she feels?”

Mark looked down at Connie, who still had her face buried in her hands, refusing, or unable, to look up. He slowly raised his head to face his sister and there were hot tears in his eyes. “Just what the hell is that supposed to mean? I was there, Val. I saw what he did. I went through it, too, you know. It wasn’t just her. Ruger kicked my ass and tried to screw her right in front of me. Another couple of minutes and I’d have had to watch my wife have sex with another man. Do you know how that makes me feel?”

Val shook her head in disbelief. “Listen to you. Do you even know what you’re saying? You said you would have had to watch Connie have sex with another man. Is that how you see it? That she was going to have sex with him?”

“Well, just what the hell do you think rape is?”

Val’s voice dropped lower in both tone and temperature. “Rape isn’t sex, dumbass. He was going to hurt her, not make love to her, not screw her, not have sex with her. He was going to hurt her, inside and out. If you think what he was going to do was have sex with her, then you are a total jackass!”

“Oh, please, let’s leave feminist propaganda out of this, shall we?”

“Do you really equate rape with sex? Are you actually that stupid? God!”

“You don’t understand—” he began, faltering just a little, but she cut him off with a swift chop of words.

“I don’t understand? Kiss my ass! I’m a woman, and I know what it feels like to be afraid of men just because they’re bigger and stronger. You just can’t imagine it, Mark, to be afraid of walking outside in the dark, of being alone with a man in a parking lot or an elevator or anywhere. To always have to be on your guard! To always realize that your body—your actual body—can be invaded by a man, just because he has the physical power to do it! That’s something every woman lives with all her life. You think women have nightmares of monsters and ghosts? We don’t. We have dreams of being raped and abused because some nasty trick of genetics decided we’d be the smaller, weaker ones, that we were the ones to have vaginas that could be so easily invaded. That’s what almost happened to Connie. Another couple of minutes and he would have invaded her with all his rage and ugliness. Yeah, you would have had to watch, but that would have hurt your male pride more than your heart. You actually have the balls to tell me it would hurt you to have seen your wife have sex with another man. How about imagining what it would have been like to have Ruger’s hands all over your skin, his mouth on you, his cock inside of you, his sweat on your skin, and his semen inside of you. Do you call that having sex? Christ, you are a pathetic excuse for a human being, Mark!”

Mark Guthrie stood there, trembling with rage, fists balled at his sides, glaring at her, his mouth drawn into tight lines that showed a double row of clenched teeth. “Don’t you dare talk to me like that!” he snarled in a deadly whisper. “This is none of your goddamn business! Who the hell do you think you are to talk to me like that? Who the hell do you—”

Val’s hard left hand slapped the rest of the words into silence. It was a hard blow and so fast he never saw it, and it spun him halfway around. For a moment he stood there, eyes wide with shock, a hand pressed to his cheek, head ringing from the blow. He straightened and both of his hands became fists.

“What are you going to do, Mark?” Val asked harshly. “Are you going to hit me back?”

“If you ever do that again,” he said in a fierce whisper, “I’ll—”

“You’ll what?” Val snapped. “Will you do to me what you were threatening to do to Connie if she didn’t stop crying? Is that your only answer? To hurt women instead of being a real man and trying to help?”

He raised one fist, wanting with every fiber of his being to smash her into silence, to shut her mouth, to stop the flow of words. Val stood there and looked at him, ignoring the heavy fist poised above her, just looking at him.

She said, “If it will make you feel like a man, Mark, go on and hit me. You’re bigger than me. Go ahead and do it. Be a man.”

The fist trembled, shaking visibly as every muscle in his body strove one against another, warring with rage and confusion and a mindless compulsion to smash. Then, with a growl of inarticulate rage, he spun away and slammed out of the room. Val heard him stomp down the stairs, heard the sound of the hallway closet door opening and then banging shut, heard the front door slam open, then heard only the silence of the house and the soft sounds of Connie’s sobs.

“Shit,” Val said softly to herself as she sat down on the edge of the bed and stroked Connie’s hair, listening to her tears. After a while, she, too, wept.

(5)

The storm clouds encircling the sun closed ranks and blotted out the sky. They were thick clouds, swollen with cold rain and drooping low over the town. In just minutes day turned to an early twilight so thick that streetlamp sensors triggered and the sodium vapor lights flickered on. Drivers turned on their headlights. None of this stopped the celebrations. Little Halloween rolled through the town thicker and heavier than the clouds overhead.

Deep in the cellar of the house, down in the darkness below old floorboards, the white things in their nest stirred, knowing that the sunlight had faded. Sleep, for now, was ended. Night had come early to Pine Deep.

Chapter 25

(1)

As the sky darkened overhead with the coming storm Crow continued to hack his way through the dense vine-choked brush. Then he broke through a wall of stinking vines and beyond it the path abruptly widened and the way ahead was unobstructed. They walked around the bushes rather than battling them. The ground, though, was marshy, soft, and unpleasantly spongy under their feet, sometime yielding inches under their weight, sometimes unexpectedly firm, but always requiring care. Crow was troubled about Newton, who was clearly not a woodsman. The thought of having to carry a broken-legged Newton up the hill was un-appealing.

“Move slow,” he said, “this muck’ll pull your boot right off.”

Newton stopped and pointed. “What’s that? Is that a wall?”

Crow stopped and looked where Newton was pointing. Their marshy path broadened even further and then spilled out into a field. On the near side of the field, crowded back against the forest wall, was a flat mass of gray-white. “Sure as hell is,” he said, his throat going dry.

They moved through the forest with great caution, watching as the gray flatness took shape, became defined, resolved into walls and bricks and window frames. After a few dozen paces it was clear to them that they were approaching the place from the side, through a wall of trees that probably once stood as a backpiece to the house, in woods that would have remained untouched even as the forward acres were converted into farmlands and fields.

They crept closer, breathing shallowly, careful of the sound of each footfall as they studied the house. It was a huge old three-story pile of a place that looked like something out of a Charles Addams drawing, with a pitched and shingled roof surrounded by a decorative wrought-iron railing and improbable gables that looked like they had been attached as an afterthought. A broad-aproned porch ran completely around the house, the rail overgrown with ivy. Beginning at the edge of what had probably once been a path leading from the front yard and into the woods where they now stood was a wall made from rough-cut blocks that were about a cubic foot each; the wall began in the front as a knee-high double layer of stone and climbed, layer upon layer, until it reached its full height equal with the bottom of the house’s rear windows. The effect was that the wooden part of the house looked like it had been fitted into a huge stone socket.

Ivy and wisteria climbed all over the stone and sent tendrils up the wooden planks all the way to the roof. Some kind of dense weed that looked like onion grass covered most of the visible parts of the roof, sprouting right up between the faded shingles. The wooden walls were brown with old paint and age, but they were still whole and looked strong. There were no holes in the walls, no crumbled sections of the wall, no evidence that any part of the roof might have collapsed. Except for the proliferation of the vegetation, the house might have been abandoned only a year ago, not three decades past.

“Are you sure this is the place?” Newton asked. “You said it’d be some kind of old hovel.”

As they moved closer Crow started shaking his head. “This can’t be right,” he said. “But—it has to be. The map I looked at only showed one house on this lot, and this whole parcel belonged to him.”

They moved closer, stopping again within twenty yards. There were thick sheets of plywood covering all of the windows on their side of the house. The side yard was a tangle of rowdy pumpkin vines, and all the pumpkins were obscenely swollen with disease. Crow squinted at the house, said nothing, but when he moved closer he drew the machete again. Newton followed him, holding his hiking stick at an angle across his chest as if it formed some kind of barrier between him and what he was feeling because of that house.

The house stood almost in a clearing except for four huge oaks that leaned so close to the house that their outstretched limbs and branches effectively kept the whole place in shadow. The first sunlight Crow and Newton had seen since entering the Hollow came no closer than the front yard and they glanced up to see that the whole sky was an almost solid mass of purple clouds except for a single hole up in the southern quadrant, beyond the tree line. A solitary ray angled down and its light glimmered on the brown tips of the grass like a promise of hope, but it was surrounded by despair, and it seemed badly overmatched by the gloom.