"Now it's over, isn't it?" Lewis asked.
"Yes." She was close enough for him to catch the dark brown smell of death.
Lewis straightened his body against the rough wall. "What did you see in that girl's bedroom?"
"I saw you, Lewis. What you were supposed to see. Like this."
9
As long as Peter was concealed by the underbrush he was safe. A wiry network of branches hid him from the road. On the other side, beginning ten or fifteen yards back, were trees like those before Lewis's house. Peter worked his way back into them to be further screened from the man in the car. The Jehovah's Witness had not moved off the shoulder of the highway: Peter could see the top of his car, a bright acrylic blue shield, over the top of the dry brambles. Peter ducked from the safety of one tree to another; then to another. The car inched forward. They continued in this way for some time, Peter moving slowly over the damp ground and the car clinging to his side like a shark to which he was the pilot fish. At times the Witness's car moved slightly ahead, at times it hung back, but never was it more than five or ten yards off in either direction-the only comfort available for Peter was that the driver's errors proved that he could not see him. He was just idling down the shoulder of the road waiting for a section of cleared ground.
Peter tried to visualize the landscape on his side of the highway, and remembered that only for a mile or so in the vicinity of Lewis's house was there heavy ground cover-most of the rest of the land, until an eruption of gas stations and drive-ins marked the edges of Milburn, was field. Unless he crawled in ditches for seven miles, the man in the car would be able to see him as soon as he left the stretch of woods.
Come out, son.
The Witness was aimlessly sending out messages, trying to coax him into the car. Peter shut his mind to the whispers as well as he could and plunged on through the woods. Maybe if he kept on running, the Witness would drive down the road far enough to let him think.
Come on, boy. Come out of there. Let me take you to her.
Still protected by the high brambles and the trees, Peter ran until he could see, strung between the massive trunks of oaks, double strands of silvery wire. Beyond the wire was a long curved vacancy of field- empty white ground. The Witness's car was nowhere in sight. Peter looked sideways, but here the trees were too thick and the brambles too high for him to see the section of highway nearest him. Peter reached the last of the trees and the wire and looked over the field, wondering if he could get across unseen. If the man saw him on the field, Peter knew he would be helpless. He could run, but eventually the man would get him as the thing back in the Montgomery Street house got Jim.
She's interested in you, Peter.
It was another aimless, haphazard dart with no real urgency in it.
She'll give you everything you want.
She'll give you anything you want.
She'll give you back your mother.
The blue car edged forward into his vision and stopped just past the point where the field began. Peter shuddered back a few feet deeper into the wood. The man in the car turned sideways, resting his arm along the top of the seat, and in this posture of patient waiting looked out at the field Peter would have to cross.
Come on out and we'll give you your mother.
Yes. That was what they would do. They'd give him back his mother. She would be like Jim Hardie and Freddy Robinson, with empty eyes and amnesiac conversation and no more substance than a ray of moonlight.
Peter sat down on wet ground, trying to remember if any other roads were near. He would have to go through the woods or the man would find him when he crossed the field; was there another road, running parallel to the highway, going back to Milburn?
He remembered nights of driving around the countryside with Jim, all of the footloose journeying of high school weekends and summers: he would have said that he knew Broome County as well as he knew his own bedroom.
But the patient man in the blue car made it difficult to think. He could not remember what happened on the other side of this wood-a developer's suburb, a factory? For a moment his mind would not give him the information he knew it had, and instead offered images of vacant buildings where dark things moved behind drawn blinds. But whatever lay on the other side of the woods, the other side was where he had to go.
Peter stood up quietly and retreated a few yards farther into the woods before turning his back on the highway and running away from the car. Seconds later he remembered what he was running toward. There was an old two-lane macadam highway in this direction, in Milburn, called "the old Binghamton road" because once it had been the only highway between the two towns: pitted, obsolete and unsafe, it was avoided by nearly all traffic now. Once there had been small businesses dotted along it, fruit markets, a motel, a drugstore. Now most of these were empty, and some of them had been razed. The Bay Tree Market alone flourished: it was heavily patronized by the better-off people of Milburn. His mother had always bought fruit and vegetables there.
If he remembered the distance between the old and new highways correctly, it would take him less than twenty minutes to get to the Market. From there he could get a lift into town and make it safely to the hotel.
In fifteen minutes he had wet feet, a stitch in his side and a rip in his jacket from a snagged branch, but he knew he was getting near the old road. The trees had thinned out and the ground sloped gently down.
Now, seeing in the blank gray air ahead of him that the woods were ending, he went nearer the fence and crept slowly along it for the final thirty yards. He still was not sure if the fruit market was to the left or the right, or how far off it was. All he hoped was that it would be in sight, and show a busy parking lot.
He squelched forward, peering around the few remaining trees.
You're wasting your time, Peter. Don't you want to see your mother again?
He groaned, feeling the feathery touch of the Witness's mind. His stomach went cold. The blue car was parked on the road before him. On the front seat Peter saw a bulky shape he knew was the Witness, leaning back, waiting for him to show himself.
The Bay Tree Market was in sight about a quarter mile down the old highway to Peter's left-the car faced the other way. If he made a run for it, the man would have to turn his car around on the narrow old road.
That still would not give him enough time.
Peter looked again at the market: there were plenty of cars in the lot. At least one of them would belong to someone he knew. All he had to do was to get there.
For a moment he felt no more than five years old, a shivering boy helpless and with no weapons and with no hope of defeating the murderous creature waiting for him in the car. If he tore his windbreaker into pieces and then tied them together and then put one end in the gas tank-but that was just a bad idea from worse movies. He could never get to the car before the man saw him.
In fact, the only thing he could do, apart from rushing the man, was to go openly across the field to the market and see what happened. The man was looking the other way, and at least he would have some time before he was seen.
Peter separated the strands of wire clipped to the trees and climbed through. A quarter of a mile away, in a straight line, was the rear parking lot of the Bay Tree Market. He held his breath and started walking across the field.