He was just being overly dramatic. The plants were dead because there was no one here to water them.
Without daily attention, everything except cactus and sagebrush died in the desert, and Kristen was no longer here to take care of the property.
That meant that Billings was gone.
It felt as though a weight had been lifted off his chest.
From what Roy had said, it sounded as though the assistant was no longer here, but Roy was obviously not the most reliable of witnesses and Mark had always been a hope-for the best and expect the-worst kind of guy. There was no way Billings would have allowed the plants to die, though, and to Mark that was as good a proof as any that the assistant was gone.
That meant his daughter wouldn't be here either.
"Fuck me in the ass."
His gaze swept involuntarily to the window where he'd last seen the girl, but it was as flat and lifeless as the rest of the house and he saw nothing there.
He walked slowly forward, rippling heat waves creating a mirage puddle on the drive ahead and filtering the bottom of the house through a wavy mirror. In back of the house and to the side were the chicken coops, but Mark could see even from this far away, even through the heat waves, that they'd fallen into a state of disrepair and were no longer used. More proof that Billings was not here.
Why was he so concerned about the assistant?
Because Billings frightened him. He did not know why, and it had never been the case when he'd lived here, but he was terrified of running into the assistant again. In his mind, Mark saw the man looking exactly the same as he had all those years ago, and that, more than anything else, engendered a feeling of dread within him. The assistant's kindness and bland passivity now seemed to him to be masking an unnatural patience and an unfathomable intent. He could imagine Billings waiting, biding his time, picking off the family one by one until there was only Mark left and he was drawn back to the house.
God, he wished The Power hadn't deserted him.
Even more frightening was the prospect of running into Billings' daughter, of seeing the girl again. He remembered how she hadn't aged before, and he could easily imagine her unchanged, bending over a chair in that dark endless hallway and flipping up her shift.
"/ like it hard. Fuck me hard."
He should've gone to the mortuary first, the cemetery, the sheriff's office. It was a mistake to have come here unprepared and all alone. What the hell could he have been thinking?
Still, he continued forward, down the dual-rutted drive with its ever-retreating mirage water, past the sandstone boulders that lined the ragged, shallow, irregularly shaped hole his father had intended to be a pond. The sweat was dripping down the sides of his face, and he had to keep wiping his forehead with his sleeve, but inside he was cold, and the ice within him kept the goose bumps alive on his arms.
He reached the house, walked up the deep porch steps, aware suddenly of how quiet it was. There were no whirs, hums, or other mechanical sounds, none of the noises of civilization. That was to be expected. The ranch was far from town, and the house was empty, everything shut off. But even nature was silent, and that he found more than a little creepy. In this heat, there should have been cicada buzzes, snake rattles, hawk cries.
But there was nothing.
Only the sound of his own feet on the porch boards and the wheeze of his overheated breath.
He no longer had a key for the front door--he'd tossed it off the edge of the Rio Grande Gorge in his own private exorcising ritual several years back--but he knew where his parents had kept a spare, and sure enough, Kristen had continued the tradition. It was on the top of the porch light, just behind the lip edge, and he felt around up there until his fingers found the dusty object.
Once again, he considered turning back, leaving, but he reminded himself that he was not doing this for his own peace of mind, he was doing it for Kristen. He had failed her, and if he was a little uncomfortable at the moment, well, that was just too damn bad. She'd put up with a hell of a lot worse, and it was the least he could do.
The chill in his body intensified as he opened the door and walked inside the house. It was exactly as he'd remembered.
Kristen had not altered even the arrangement of the pictures on the walls. Everything was untouched: furniture in place, throw rugs unmoved. It took his breath away, this sudden wholesale immersion in the past, and he stood there for a moment, stunned.
The heavy wood, the dark walls and floor and ceiling, all seemed horribly oppressive to him, a reminder of his childhood, and he wondered how his sister had put up with it. Could she have possibly found this atmosphere pleasant? Comforting?
The thought of Kristen living in this unchanging house, all alone, tugged at his heart, and his fear abated somewhat, replaced by an aching sense of loss.
Why hadn't he come back earlier?
Why hadn't he taken her away from this?
He walked slowly forward. To his left, out of the corner of his eye, he saw something out of place in the front sitting room, and he turned in that direction, the blood freezing in his veins even before he recognized what he saw.
Billings.
Sitting in his father's high-backed smoking chair.
As he'd feared, as he'd known, the assistant had not changed at all.
Billings smiled. "Welcome back, Mark. I've been waiting for you."
Daniel It was raining, a heavy fall Pennsylvania rain that drew a curtain over the city and blurred even the houses across the street into indistinct shadows of gray. The snow would be coming soon, and Daniel knew that as tough as it was trying to find a job in good weather, it was absolute hell in the winter. He might as well just write off the next five months and hibernate until spring.
From down the hall, he heard Margot and Tony laughing about something. He'd been getting the cold shoulder from both of them ever since he'd disposed of the doll, and he was getting pretty damn sick of it. He and Margot hadn't made love in a week, and she seemed to be dead serious about wanting him to seek psychological help. He'd tried to explain to her how he felt, what he'd seen, why he was acting this way, but his far-flung concerns had no connections, there were no discernible bridges between the disparate elements of his only partially tied-together tale, and he had to admit that his story sounded loony even to himself.
Tony seemed to be afraid of him.
Daniel sighed. Maybe he did need help. Maybe everything was in his mind, and nothing out of the ordinary was going on. The world was a logical, rational straightforward place, and the thoughts he'd been thinking had a place only in pulp fiction and B movies.
Margot walked into the kitchen, looked at him, and for the first time this week, the sight of him did not knock the smile off her face. She was finally beginning to thaw. He attempted a halfhearted grin and was grateful when she passed by and touched his shoulder.
"Are we pals again?" he asked.
"We're always pals."
He reached for her hand, gave it a small squeeze.
There was a lot more he wanted to say, a lot more he wanted to ask, a lot more he wanted to tell her, but while he was in her good graces again, it was only by a slim margin, and the slightest misstep could send him back. He'd have to broach things slowly, subtly, carefully for the next few days.
Margot opened the refrigerator, took out a plastic bag of tomatoes from the vegetable drawer. "Brian's coming over for dinner tonight," she said.
The last thing he wanted right now was to spend the evening with her brother, but he smiled and nodded and said, "Great."
The evening didn't turn out to be that bad. Brian didn't bring up Daniel's job status even once, and he left early, just after nine-thirty. While he was there, he was pleasant, playful with Tony, cheerful with Margot, and after dinner, when the two of them were alone--Tony having disappeared into his bedroom, Margot washing the dishes--even he found Brian entertaining and fun to be around. The two of them would never be best buds, but Daniel thought that he'd probably been too hard on his brother-in-law, and he vowed to be nicer to him in the future.