Scootie led the way, padding through the shallow puddles in the courtyard. In the quartzite paving, specks of mica glinted around the dog’s splashing paws, almost as if his claws were striking sparks from the stone. That phantom fire marked his path along the walkway beside the house, as well.
The Art Deco panels of copper were cold against Tommy’s hand as he pushed open the gate to the street. The hinges rasped like small whispering voices.
On the sidewalk in front of the house, Scootie abruptly halted, raised his head, and pricked his ears. He dropped his rubber hotdog and growled softly.
Alerted by the dog, Tommy brought up the shotgun, gripping it with both hands.
‘What is it?’ Del asked. She held the gate open behind them to prevent it from falling shut, automatically lock-ing, and inhibiting their retreat if they needed to go back to the house.
But for the splatter-splash-gurgle-plink of water, the lamp lit street was silent. The houses were all dark. No
traffic approached from either east or west. Nothing moved except the rain and those things that the rain disturbed.
The white Honda stood fifteen feet to Tommy’s right. Something could be crouched along the far side of it, waiting for them to draw nearer.
Scootie was not interested in the Honda, however, and Tommy was inclined to trust the Labrador’s senses more than his own. The dog was riveted by something directly across the street.
At first Tommy could not see anything threatening -or even out of the ordinary. In the storm, the slumbering houses huddled, and the blackness of their blind windows revealed not even a single pale face of any neighbourhood insomniac. Palms, ficuses, and canopied carrotwoods stood solemnly in the windless downpour. Through the cone of amber light cast by the streetlamp, skeins of rain unravelled off the spool of night above, weaving together into a stream that nearly overflowed the gutter.
Then Scootie stiffened and flattened his ears against his skull and growled again, and Tommy spotted the man in the hooded raincoat. The guy was standing near one of the large carrotwoods across the street, beyond the brightest portion of the lightfall from a streetlamp but still vaguely illumined.
‘What’s he doing?’ Del asked.
Although Tommy couldn’t see the stranger’s shad-owed face, he said, ‘Watching us.’
Del sounded as if she had seen something else that surprised her: ‘Tommy…?‘
He glanced at her.
She pointed east.
Half a block away, on the far side of the street, her battered van was parked at the curb.
Something about the imposing figure under the carrot-wood tree was anachronistic - as though he had stepped through a time warp, out of the medieval world into the late twentieth century. Then Tommy realized that the hooded raincoat was the source of that impression, for it resembled a monk’s robe and cowl.
‘Let’s get to the Honda,’ Del said.
Before they could move toward the car, however, the observer stepped away from the carrotwood, into the glow of the streetlamp. His face remained hidden under the hood, as if he were Death engaged on his nightly collections of those poor souls who perished in their sleep.
Nevertheless, as faceless as he was, the stranger was naggingly familiar to Tommy. Tall. Heavyset. The way he moved.
He was the good Samaritan from earlier in the night, the man who had clumsily descended the embankment from MacArthur Boulevard and crossed the muddy field where the Corvette had crashed. He had been approaching the blazing car when Tommy turned and ran from the fire-enraptured demon.
‘Let’s see what he wants,’ Del said.
‘No.’
How the thing-from-the-doll could now be riding the Samaritan, or hiding inside him, or posing as him - this was a mystery that Tommy was not able to fathom. But the fat man in that muddy field no longer existed; he had been either slaughtered and devoured or conquered and controlled. Of that much, Tommy was certain.
‘It’s not a man,’ he said.
The Samaritan moved ponderously through the lamp-light.
Scootie’s growl escalated into a snarl.
The Samaritan stepped off the curb and splashed through the deep, fast-moving water in the gutter.
‘Get back,’ Tommy said urgently. ‘Back to the house, inside.’
Although his growl had been menacing and he had seemed prepared to attack, Scootie needed no further encouragement to retreat. He whipped around, shot past Tommy, and streaked through the gate that Del was holding open.
Del followed the dog, and Tommy backed through the gate as well, holding the Mossberg in front of him. As the patinated copper panel fell shut Tommy saw the Samaritan in the middle of the street, still heading toward them but not breaking into a run, as if confident that they could not escape.
The gate clacked shut. The electric security lock would buy no more than half a minute, because the Samaritan would be able to climb over the barrier with little trouble.
The portly man would no longer be hampered by his less-than-athletic physique. He would have all the strength and agility of the supernatural entity that had claimed him.
When Tommy reached the courtyard, Del was at the front entrance to the house.
He was surprised that she had been able to fish her keys out of her purse and get the door open so quickly. Evidently Scootie was already inside.
Following Del into the house, Tommy heard the gate rattle out at the street.
He closed the door, fumbled for the thumb-turn, and engaged the deadbolt. ‘Leave the lights off.’
‘This is a house, not a fortress,’ Del said.
‘Ssshhh,’ Tommy cautioned.
The only sounds from the courtyard were rain splat-tering against quartzite payers, rain chuckling through downspouts, rain snapping against palm fronds.
Del persisted: ‘Tommy, listen, we can’t expect to defend this place like a fort.’
Wet and chilled yet again, weary of running, taking some courage from the power of the Mossberg and from the door-buster pistol that Del carried, Tommy hushed her. He remembered a night of terror long ago on the South China Sea, when survival had come only after those refugees in the boat had stopped trying to run from the Thai pirates and had fought back.
Twelve-inch-wide, six-foot-tall sidelights flanked the front door. Through those rain-spotted panes, Tommy was able to see a small portion of the courtyard: wetly glimmering light, blades of darkness that were palm fronds.
The flow of time seemed suspended.
No tick.
No tock.
He was gripping the shotgun so tightly that his hands ached, and the muscles began to twitch in his forearms.
Remembering the green reptilian eye in the torn cotton face of the doll, he dreaded meeting the demon again, now that it was no longer merely ten inches tall.
A moving shadow, swift and fluid and less geometric than those cast by the palm trees and ferns, swooped across one pane of glass.
The fat man didn’t knock, didn’t ring the bell, didn’t leave a note and quietly depart, because he wasn’t a good Samaritan any more. He slammed into the door, which shook violently in its frame, slammed into it again so hard that the hinges creaked and the lock mechanism made a half-broken rattling noise, and slammed into it a third time, but still the door held.
Tommy’s hammering heart drove him across the dark foyer and nailed him against the wall opposite the door.
Although the sidelights were too narrow to admit the fat man, he smashed his fist through one of them. Shattered glass rang across the travertine floor.
Tommy squeezed the trigger. Flame flared from the muzzle of the Mossberg, and the deafening roar of gunfire rebounded from the walls of the foyer.