Connie laughed at that as if Val had just made a great joke, and Val had to grudgingly give her that point. Though she could rebuild the magneto on her 1973 FLH 1200 Electraglide Custom motorcycle or do a tranny job on John Deere 8030, she was no wizard in the kitchen. All thumbs and no sense of what went where. There were family stories about some of her classic dinners, including a brisket that everyone thought was tofu and pizza with cold tomato sauce and a runny crust. Val sighed.
When her cell phone rang she was delighted. It wouldn’t have mattered if it had been a telemarketer.
“Val? It’s Terry—is Crow there?”
“No, he’s out for the day,” she said as she stood up and dusted off the knees of her jeans and strolled out onto the front lawn.
“Val—he didn’t really go out
She turned and looked back at the house, saw that Connie, still on hands and knees, was staring off in the direction of the stand of trees near the barn. Val glanced that way, saw nothing, and didn’t think much about it. She often found Connie standing still, staring out a window or whatever. God only knew what she was seeing. What had Saul called it? Dissociative behavior?
“Val?”
“Yes,” she said at last. “They left a couple of hours ago.”
“Damn it!” Terry snapped, and abruptly hung up. Shocked, Val stared at the phone for several seconds before finally folding down the lid and putting it back into her pocket. “Asshole,” she murmured, and then remembered her promise to Sarah that she would bury the hatchet, but the memory of his rudeness stung her again and she repeated her comment. Frowning, she strolled back to the porch. Connie was standing now, her face still turned toward the barn.
“What’s up, Con? Is that fox back?”
At the sound of her voice Connie jumped, turned, and for a moment looked at Val as if she didn’t know who she was. Then she blinked and smiled self-consciously.
“My…I was a million miles away.” She glanced again at the barn. “I just saw the strangest thing….”
Val stiffened. “What?”
“You’ll think I’m crazy, but…I just saw a snow-white deer. A buck. You know, with all the horns? White as snow.”
Val took a few steps toward the barn, but there was nothing to see and the trees were too thin to hide a full-grown deer. She looked back at Connie.
“Isn’t that just strange?” Connie asked with an enigmatic smile.
“Yeah,” Val agreed. “Strange.”
(2)
It looked like a nest, with the bodies of the creatures tangled and clustered together with no thought of comfort. There were fourteen of them now, all pale and bloated, gorged and somnolent, huddled in the darkness of the basement, secure in the shadows. An onlooker would have thought they were all dead, a mass of murder victims whose bodies had been carelessly disposed of out of sight in that forgotten, half-collapsed house, but every once in a while one of the bloated bodies would turn or shift, the movement inspired by some red dream.
Last night there had only been nine of them, but the number had grown, as it would continue to grow; just as it grew for each of the nests scattered throughout the town. Last week there had been two, but now Adrian and Darien lay sprawled there in the secret, silent darkness, wrapped in each other’s arms, clutched together against the sleeping back of Dave Golub.
The bodies all slept on throughout the burning day. Once, just before noon, a bold and foolish rat scuttled into the basement, following the scent of spoiled meat and fresh blood. It minced down through the spiderwebs and shadows, driven by the nearness of food, hungry beyond caution. In its daring and hunger it came close to Adrian’s outflung hand. The fingers looked fat and pale and full of meat, and the sleeper looked oblivious. The rat considered for a moment and almost fled out of natural fear, but the demands of its belly overrode the logic of its instinct. It darted in toward the little finger, its yellow teeth bared for the bite…but the white hand flashed so fast the rat was a broken-necked corpse before it was even aware that it was in threat. It twitched once, twice, and then lay eternally still in the killing grip of the boy. Adrian’s eyelids never twitched, never opened, but he pulled the corpse close to his chest the way he once would have held a stuffed bear. Beyond the speed of his hand he made no other move. As the hours of the day wore on, he lay there with the dead rat clutched in his hand and a smile of hungry joy on his innocent face.
(3)
“Crow…you’re scaring the crap out of me, here. Why the hell didn’t you tell me this stuff before?”
“Would you have come down here if I had?”
“Hell, no! And I want to turn around and go back right now.”
“Why, do you think I lured you down here for some nefarious purpose?” Crow was smiling when he said it, then his smile faded. “Jesus Christ—you
