Reeeeee, reeeeee, reeeeee… The one-note songs of the cicadas, monotonous to the human ear but most likely rich in meaning to other insects, echoed shrilly yet hollowly through the high forest.
Standing beside the rental car, keeping a wary eye on the woods around them, Ben distributed four extra shotgun shells and eight extra rounds for the Combat Magnum in the pockets of his jeans.
Rachael emptied out her purse and filled it with three boxes of ammunition, one for each of their guns. That was surely an excessive supply — but Ben did not suggest that she take any less.
He carried the shotgun under one arm. Given the slightest provocation, he could swing it up and fire in a fraction of a second.
Rachael carried the thirty-two pistol and the Combat Magnum, one in each hand. She wanted Ben to carry both the Remington and the.357, but he could not handle both efficiently, and he preferred the shotgun.
They moved off into the brush just far enough to slip around the padlocked gate, returning to the dirt track on the other side.
Ahead, the road rose under a canopy of pine limbs, flanked by rock-lined drainage ditches bristling with dead dry weeds that had sprung up during the rainy season and withered during the arid spring and summer. About two hundred yards above them, the lane took a sharp turn to the right and disappeared. According to Sarah Kiel, the lane ran straight and true beyond the bend, directly to the cabin, which was approximately another two hundred yards from that point.
“Do you think it's safe to approach right out on the road like this?” Rachael whispered, even though they were still so far from the cabin that their normal speaking voices could not possibly have carried to Eric.
Ben found himself whispering, too. “It'll be okay at least until we reach the bend. As long as we can't see him, he can't see us.”
She still looked worried.
He said, “If he's even up there.”
“He's up there,” she said.
“Maybe.”
“He's up there,” she insisted, pointing to vague tire tracks in the thin layer of dust that covered the hard-packed dirt road.
Ben nodded. He had seen the same thing.
“Waiting,” Rachael said.
“Not necessarily.”
“Waiting.”
“He could be recuperating.”
“No.”
“Incapacitated.”
“No. He's ready for us.”
She was probably right about that as well. He sensed the same thing she did: oncoming trouble.
Curiously, though they stood in the shadows of the trees, the nearly invisible scar along her jawline, where Eric had once cut her with a broken glass, was visible, more visible than it usually was in ordinary light. In fact, to Ben, it seemed to glow softly, as if the scar responded to the nearness of the one who had inflicted it, much the way that a man's arthritic joints might alert him to an oncoming storm. Imagination, of course. The scar was no more prominent now than it had been an hour ago. The illusion of prominence was just an indication of how much he feared losing her.
In the car, on the drive up from the lake, he had tried his best to persuade her to remain behind and let him handle Eric alone. She was opposed to that idea — possibly because she feared losing Ben as much as he feared losing her.
They started up the lane.
Ben looked nervously left and right as they went, uncomfortably aware that the heavily forested mountainside, gloomy even at midday, provided countless hiding places — ambush points — very close to them on both sides.
The air was heavily laced with the odor of evergreen sap, the crisp and appealing fragrance of dry pine needles, and the musty scent of some rotting deadwood.
Reeeeee, reeeeee, reeeeee…
He had returned to the armchair with a pair of binoculars that he had remembered were in the bedroom closet. Only minutes after settling down at the window, before his dysfunctioning thought processes could take off on yet another tangent, he saw movement two hundred yards below, at the sharp bend in the road. He played with the focus knob, pulling the scene in clearer, and in spite of the depth of the shadows at that point along the lane, he saw the two people in perfect detaiclass="underline" Rachael and the bastard she had been sleeping with, Shadway.
He had not known whom he expected — other than Seitz, Knowls, and the men of Geneplan — but he had certainly not expected Rachael and Shadway. He was stunned and could not imagine how she had learned of this place, though he knew that the answer would be obvious to him if his mind had been functioning normally.
They were crouched along the bank that flanked the road down there, fairly well concealed. But they had to reveal a little of themselves in order to get a good look at the cabin, and what little they revealed was enough for Eric to identify them in the magnified field of the binoculars.
The sight of Rachael enraged him, for she had rejected him, the only woman in his adult life to reject him — the bitch, the ungrateful stinking bitch! — and she turned her back on his money, too. Even worse: in the miasmal swamp of his deranged mind, she was responsible for his death, had virtually killed him by angering him to distraction and then letting him rush out onto Main Street, into the path of the truck. He could believe she had actually planned his death in order to inherit the very fortune on which she'd claimed to have no designs. Yes, of course, why not? And now there she was with her lover, with the man she had been fucking behind his back, and she had clearly come to finish the job that the garbage truck had started.
They pulled back beyond the bend, but a few seconds later he saw movement in the brush, to the left of the road, and he caught a glimpse of them moving off into the trees. They were going to make a cautious indirect approach.
Eric dropped the binoculars and shoved up from the armchair, stood swaying, in the grip of a rage so great that he almost felt crushed by it. Steel bands tightened across his chest, and for a moment he could not draw his breath. Then the bands snapped, and he sucked in great lungsful of air. He said, “Oh, Rachael, Rachael,” in a voice that sounded as if it were echoing up from hell. He liked the sound of it, so he said her name again: “Rachael, Rachael…”
From the floor beside the chair, he plucked up the ax.
He realized that he could not handle the ax and both knives, so he chose the butcher's knife and left the other blade behind.
He would go out the back way. Circle around. Slip up on them through the woods. He had the cunning to do it. He felt as if he had been born to stalk and kill.
Hurrying across the living room toward the kitchen, Eric saw an image of himself in his mind's eye: He was ramming the knife deep into her guts, then ripping it upward, tearing open her flat young belly. He made a shrill sound of eagerness and almost fell over the empty soup and stew cans in his haste to reach the back door. He would cut her cut her cut. And when she dropped to the ground with the knife in her belly, he would go at her with the ax, use the blunt edge of it first, smashing her bones to splinters, breaking her arms and legs, and then he would turn the wondrous shiny instrument over in his hands — his strange and powerful new hands! — and use the sharp edge.
By the time he reached the rear door and yanked it open and went out of the house, he was in the grip of that reptilian fury that he had feared only a short while ago, a cold and calculating fury, called forth out of genetic memories of inhuman ancestors. Having at last surrendered to that primeval rage, he was surprised to discover that it felt good.
22
WAITING FOR THE STONE
Jerry Peake should have been asleep on his feet, for he had been up all night. But seeing Anson Sharp humiliated had revitalized him better than eight hours in the sheets could have. He felt marvelous.