9
Marty was only six or eight feet from the girls’ bedroom door. He approached from the hinged side, so he could reach across for the knob, hurl the door inward, and avoid silhouetting himself squarely in the frame.
Trying not to tread in the blood, he glanced down for just a second at the carpet, where the spatters of gore were smaller and fewer than at other points along the hall. He glimpsed an anomaly that registered only subconsciously at first, and he eased forward another step with his gaze riveted on the door again before fully realizing what he’d seen: an impression of the forward half of a shoe sole, faintly inked in red, like twenty or thirty others he’d already passed, except that the narrow portion of this imprint, the toe, was pointed differently from all the others, in the wrong direction, back the way he had come.
Marty froze as he grasped the import of the shoeprint.
The Other had gone as far as the girls’ bedroom but not into it. He had turned back, having somehow reduced the flow of blood so dramatically that he was no longer clearly marking his trail—except for one telltale shoeprint and perhaps a couple that Marty hadn’t noticed.
Swinging around, holding the gun in both hands, Marty cried out at the sight of The Other coming at him from Paige’s office, moving much too fast for a man with chest wounds and minus a pint or two of blood. He hit Marty hard, smashing in under the pistol, driving him into the gallery railing and forcing his arms up.
Marty pulled the trigger reflexively while he was being carried backward, but the bullet ploughed into the hallway ceiling. The sturdy handrail slammed the small of his back, and a half-strangled scream escaped him as white-hot pain shot horizontally across his kidneys and played spike-shoed hopscotch up the knuckled staircase of his spine.
Even as he screamed, he lost the gun. It popped out of his hands and arced back over his head into the empty vaulted space behind him.
The tortured oak railing shuddered, a loud dry crack signaled imminent collapse, and Marty was sure they were going to crash into the stairwell. But the balusters did not give way, and the handrail held fast to the newel post at each end.
Pressing relentlessly forward, The Other bent Marty backward and over the balustrade, trying to strangle him. Hands of iron. Fingers like hydraulic pincers driven by a powerful motor. Compressing the carotid arteries.
Marty rammed a knee into his assailant’s crotch, but it was blocked. The attempt left him unbalanced, with just one foot on the floor, and he was shoved farther across the balustrade, until he was both pinned against and balanced on the handrail.
Choking, unable to breathe, aware that the worst danger was the diminution of blood to his brain, Marty clasped his hands in a wedge and drove them upward between The Other’s arms, trying to spread them wider and break the strangulating grip. The assailant redoubled his efforts, determined to hold tight. Marty strained harder, too, and his overworked heart pounded painfully against his breastbone.
They should have been equally matched, damn it, they were the same height, same weight, same build, in the same physical condition, to all appearances the same man.
Yet The Other, though suffering two potentially mortal bullet wounds, was the stronger, and not merely because he had the advantage of a superior position, better leverage. He seemed to possess inhuman power.
Face to face with his duplicate, washed by each hot explosive breath, Marty might have been gazing into a mirror, though the savage reflection before him was contorted by expressions he’d never seen on his own face. Bestial rage. Hatred as purely toxic as cyanide. Spasms of maniacal pleasure twisted the familiar features as the strangler thrilled to the act of murder.
With lips peeled back from his teeth, spittle flying as he spoke, impossibly but repeatedly tightening his strangle-hold to emphasize his words, The Other said, “Need my life now, my life, mine, mine, now. Need my family, now, mine, now, now, now, need it, NEED IT!”
Negative fireflies swooped and darted across Marty’s field of vision, negative because they were the photo-opposite of the lantern-bearing fireflies on a warm summer night, not pulses of light in the darkness but pulses of darkness in the light. Five, ten, twenty, a hundred, a teeming swarm. The looming face of The Other vanished in sections under the blinking black swarm.
Despairing of breaking the assailant’s grip, Marty clawed at the hate-filled face. But he couldn’t quite reach it. His every effort seemed feeble, hopeless.
So many negative fireflies.
Glimpsed between them: the vicious and wrathful face of his wife’s demanding new husband, the domineering face of his daughters’ stern new father.
Fireflies. Everywhere, everywhere. Spreading their wings of obliteration.
Bang. Loud as a rifle shot. Second, third, fourth explosions—one right after another. Balusters breaking.
The handrail cracked. Sagged backward. It no longer received support from the balusters that had gone to splinters under it.
Marty stopped resisting the attacker and frantically tried to wrap his legs and arms around the railing in the hope of clinging to the anchored remains instead of hurtling out through the opening gap. But the center section of the balustrade disintegrated so completely, so swiftly, he couldn’t find purchase in its crumbling elements, and the weight of his clutching assailant lent gravity more assistance than it required. As they teetered on the brink, however, Marty’s actions altered the dynamics of their struggle just enough so The Other rolled past him and fell first. The assailant let go of Marty’s throat but dragged him along in the top position. They dropped into the stairwell, crashed through the outer railing, instantly making kindling of it, and slammed into the Mexican-tile floor of the foyer.
The drop had been sixteen feet, not a tremendous distance, probably not even a lethal distance, and their momentum had been broken by the lower railing. Yet the impact knocked out what little breath Marty had drawn on the way down, even though he was cushioned by The Other, who hit the Mexican tiles back-first with the resounding thwack of a sledgehammer.
Gasping, coughing, Marty pushed away from his double and tried to scramble out of reach. He was breathless, lightheaded, and not sure if he had broken any bones. When he gasped, the air stung his raw throat, and when he coughed, the pain might not have been worse if he’d tried to swallow a tangled wad of barbed wire and bent nails. Scrambling cat-quick, which was what he had in mind, actually proved to be out of the question, and he could only drag himself across the foyer floor, hitching and shuddering like a bug that had been squirted with insecticide.
Blinking away tears squeezed out of him by the violent coughing, he spotted the Smith & Wesson. It was about fifteen feet away, well beyond the point at which the transition from tile floor to hardwood marked the end of the entrance foyer and the beginning of the living room. Considering the intensity with which he focused on it and the dedication with which he dragged his half-numb and aching body toward it, the pistol might have been the Holy Grail.
He became aware of a rumble separate from the sounds of the storm, followed by a thump, which he blearily assumed had something to do with The Other, but he didn’t pause to look back. Maybe what he heard was a death twitch, heels drumming on the floor, one final convulsion. At the very least the bastard must be gravely injured. Crippled and dying. But Marty wanted to get his trembling hands on the gun before celebrating his own survival.