She will hate him for it. But only for a while.
Eventually she will realize that these are unsuitable pets for a little girl. Symbols of evil. Reptiles, rodents, beetles. The sort of creatures witches use as their familiars, to communicate between them and Satan.
He has learned all about witches’ familiars from horror movies. If there was a cat in the house he would kill it as well, without hesitation, because sometimes they are cute and innocent, just cats and nothing more, but sometimes they are the very spawn of Hell. By inviting such creatures into your home, you risk inviting the devil himself.
One day Charlotte will understand. And be grateful.
Eventually she will love him.
They will all love him.
He will be a good husband and father.
Much smaller than the gerbil, the frightened mouse quivers in his fist, its tail hanging below his clenched fingers, only its head protruding above. It empties its bladder. He grimaces at the warm dampness and, in disgust, squeezes with all his strength, crushing the life out of the filthy little beast.
He tosses it onto the bed beside the dead gerbil.
The harmless garden snake in the glass terrarium makes no effort to slither away from him. He holds it by the tail and snaps it as if it is a whip, snaps it again, then lashes it hard against the wall, again, and a third time. When he dangles it before his face, it is entirely limp, and he sees that its skull is crushed.
He coils it next to the gerbil and the mouse.
The beetle and the turtle make satisfying crunching sounds when he stomps them under the heel of his shoe. He arranges their oozing remains on the bedspread.
Only the lizard escapes him. When he slides the lid partway off its terrarium and reaches in for it, the chameleon scampers up his arm, quicker than the eye, and leaps off his shoulder. He spins around, searching for it, and sees it on the nearby vanity, where it skitters between a hairbrush and a comb, onto a jewelry box. There it freezes and begins to change color to match its background, but when he tries to snatch it up, it darts away, off the dresser, onto the floor, across the room, under Emily’s bed, out of sight.
He decides to let it go.
This might be for the best. When Paige and the girls get home, the four of them will search for it together. When they find it, he will kill it in front of Charlotte or perhaps require her to kill it herself. That will be a good lesson. Thereafter, she will bring no more inappropriate pets into the Stillwater house.
3
In the parking lot outside of the three-story, Spanish-style business complex where Dr. Guthridge had his offices, while a gusty wind harried dead leaves across the pavement, Marty sat in his car and read the article about himself in People. Two photographs and a page’s worth of prose were spread over three pages of the magazine. At least for the few minutes he took to read the piece, all of his other worries were forgotten.
The black headline made him flinch even though he knew what it would be—MR. MURDER—but he was equally embarrassed by the subhead in smaller letters: IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, MYSTERY NOVELIST MARTIN STILLWATER SEES DARKNESS AND EVIL WHERE OTHERS SEE ONLY SUNSHINE.
He felt it portrayed him as a brooding pessimist who dressed entirely in black and lurked on beaches and among the palm trees, glowering at anyone who dared to have fun, tediously expounding on the inherent vileness of the human species. At best it implied he was a theatrical phony costuming himself in what he thought was the most commercial image for a mystery novelist.
Possibly he was over-reacting. Paige would tell him that he was too sensitive about these things. That was what she always said, and she usually made him feel better, whether he could bring himself to believe her or not.
He examined the photographs before reading the piece.
In the first and largest picture, he was standing in the yard behind the house, against a backdrop of trees and twilight sky. He looked demented.
The photographer, Ben Walenko, had been given instructions to induce Marty into a pose deemed fitting for a mystery novelist, so he had come with props he assumed Marty would brandish with suitable expressions of malevolent intent: an axe, an enormous knife, an ice pick, and a gun. When Marty politely declined to use the props and also refused to wear a trenchcoat with the collar turned up and a fedora pulled low on his forehead, the photographer agreed it was ludicrous for an adult to play dress-up, and suggested they avoid the usual clichés in favor of shots portraying him simply as a writer and an ordinary human being.
Now it was obvious that Walenko had been clever enough to get what he wanted without props, after lulling his subject into a false sense of security. The backyard had seemed an innocuous setting. However, through a combination of the deep shadows of dusk, looming trees, ominous clouds backlit by the final somber light of day, the strategic placement of studio lights, and an extreme camera angle, the photographer succeeded in making Marty appear weird. Furthermore, of the twenty exposures taken in the backyard, the editors had chosen the worst: Marty was squinting; his features were distorted; the photographer’s lights were reflected in his slitted eyes, which seemed to be glowing like the eyes of a zombie.
The second photograph was taken in his study. He was sitting at his desk, facing the camera. He was recognizably himself in this one, though by now he preferred not to be recognizable, for it seemed that the only way he could maintain a shred of dignity was to have his true appearance remain a mystery; a combination of shadows and the peculiar light of the stained-glass lamp, even in a black-and-white shot, made him resemble a Gypsy fortuneteller who had glimpsed a portent of disaster in his crystal ball.
He was convinced that a lot of the modern world’s problems could be attributed to the popular media’s saturation of society and its tendency not merely to simplify all issues to the point of absurdity but to confuse fiction and reality. Television news emphasized dramatic footage over facts, sensationalism over substance, seeking ratings with the same tools employed by the producers of prime-time cop and courtroom dramas. Documentaries about real historical figures had become “docudramas” in which accurate details of famous lives and events were relentlessly subordinated to entertainment values or even to the personal fantasies of the show’s creators, grossly distorting the past. Patent medicines were sold in TV commercials by performers who also played doctors in highly rated programs, as if they had in fact graduated from Harvard Medical School instead of merely having attended an acting class or two. Politicians made cameo appearances on episodes of situation comedies. Actors in those comedies appeared at political rallies. Not long ago the Vice-President of the United States engaged in a protracted argument with a fictional television reporter from a sitcom. The public confused actors and politicians with the roles they played. A mystery writer was supposed to be not merely like a character in one of his books but like the cartoonish archetype of the most common character in the entire genre. And year by troubled year, fewer people were able to think clearly about important issues or separate fantasy from reality.
Marty had been determined not to contribute to that sickness, but he had been suckered. Now he was fixed in the public mind as Martin Stillwater, creepy and mysterious author of creepy murder mysteries, preoccupied with the dark side of life, as brooding and strange as any of the characters about whom he wrote.
Sooner or later a disturbed citizen, having confused Marty’s manipulation of fictional people in novels for the manipulation of actual people in real life, would arrive at his house in an old van decorated with signs accusing him of having killed John Lennon, John Kennedy, Rick Nelson, and God-alone-knew-who-else, even though he was an infant when Lee Harvey Oswald pulled the trigger on Kennedy (or when seventeen thousand and thirty-seven homosexual conspirators pulled the trigger, if you believed Oliver Stone’s movie). Something similar had happened to Stephen King, hadn’t it? And Salman Rushdie had sure experienced a few years as suspenseful as any endured by a character in a Robert Ludlum extravaganza.