her memory. No shadows loomed or swooped beyond the glass.
If Harry was here, they needed to join forces with him. He was a friend, dependable.
At the foot of the driveway, in the turnaround, Neil parked facing out toward the county road. He switched off the headlights.
As Neil reached for the key in the ignition, Molly stayed his hand. “Leave the engine running.”
They didn’t have to discuss the danger or the wisdom of going together into the house. Wise or not, they earlier had established that henceforth they went nowhere alone.
Their raincoats featured hoods. They pulled them up, and were transformed into monkish medieval figures.
Molly dreaded getting out of the SUV. She remembered how vigorously she had scrubbed her rain-dampened hand with orange-scented soap … and had nevertheless felt unclean.
Yet she could not sit here eternally, paralyzed by the weight of fear or by a lack of faith. She could not sit here, shape without form, gesture without motion, waiting for the world to end.
The 9-mm pistol nestled in a pocket of her coat. She kept her right hand on it.
She got out of the Explorer and closed the door quietly, though a slam would not have carried far in the drumming deluge. Discretion seemed advisable even during an apocalypse.
The tremendous force of the downpour staggered her until she planted her feet wide and moved with conscious attention to her balance.
The rain was no longer ripe with the scent of semen. She could identify a faint trace of that odor, but it was now masked by new and sweet fragrances, reminiscent of incense, hot brass, lemon tea. She detected, as well, smoky essences for which she could think of no familiar comparisons.
She tried to avert her face, but rain found its way past the hood of her coat. The pelting drops were no longer warm, as they had been earlier.
Unthinkingly, she licked her lips. The taste proved to be not salty with the memory of the sea, but faintly sweet, pleasant.
When she thought of the children eating blue snow, however, she gagged and spat, only to drink in more rain.
The driveway drain had been blocked by fallen pine needles and wads of sycamore leaves. A pool of water, six inches deep, churned around their boots, brightened by silver filigrees of dancing eldritch light.
Neil had unzipped his raincoat to be able to carry the shotgun under it. With his left hand, he clutched the front panels of the garment, holding them closed as best he could.
A sloped flagstone walkway led from puddled pavement to front steps.
Sheltered by the porch roof, Molly threw back her hood. She drew the pistol from her coat. Neil held the shotgun with both hands.
The door of Harry Corrigan’s house stood ajar.
An orange spot of light on the casing indicated the illuminated bell push, but these were not circumstances that recommended the customary announcement. With one boot toe, Neil gingerly nudged the door inward.
While it arced wide, they waited. Studied the deserted foyer for a moment. Entered the house.
They had frequently been here as invited guests before Calista’s murder in Redondo Beach, and a few times since. When the kitchen had been remodeled four years ago, Neil had built the new cabinetry. Yet now this familiar place seemed strange, nothing exactly as Molly remembered it, nothing quite in its place.
The first floor offered much evidence of a simple life conducted in longstanding routines: comfortable furniture well used, landscape and seascape paintings, here a pipe left in an ashtray, here a book with the reader’s place marked by a candy-bar wrapper, houseplants lovingly tended and lush with glossy leaves, purple plums ripening in a wooden bowl on a kitchen counter …
They saw no indications of violence. No sign of their friend and neighbor, either.
In the foyer once more, standing at the foot of the stairs, they briefly considered calling out to Harry.
To be heard above the fierce cataracts crashing upon the roof, however, they would have to raise their voices. Someone or something other than their neighbor might come in answer to a shout, a prospect that argued for continued silence.
Neil led the way to the second floor. Molly ascended sideways, keeping her back to the wall, so she could look both toward the top and the bottom of the stairs.
In the upper hallway, the solid-oak door to the master bedroom had been wrenched off its hinges. Cracked almost in half, it lay on the hall floor. Bright fragments of the lock were scattered across the carpet.
Each of the two substantial hinges remained anchored to the jamb by its frame leaf, although each leaf—a quarter-inch steel plate—had been bent by the fearsome force that had ripped away the door. The barrel knuckles joining the frame leaf to the center leaf of each hinge were also deformed, as was the steel pivot pin that connected them.
If Harry had taken refuge behind the locked bedroom door, the barrier hadn’t stood for long.
Not even a steroid-pumped bodybuilder with Herculean slabs of muscle could have torn the door off its hinges without a winch and tackle. The task, accomplished barehanded, would have defeated any mortal man.
Expecting slaughter or an outrage so inhuman in nature that it could not be anticipated, Molly hesitated to follow Neil into the bedroom. When she crossed the threshold, however, she saw no signs of violence.
The walk-in closet stood open. No one in there.
When Neil tried the closed door between the bedroom and the adjacent bath, he found it locked.
He glanced at Molly. She nodded.
Putting his face close to the bathroom door, Neil said, “Harry? Are you in there, Harry?”
If the question had been answered, the reply had been too soft to be audible.
“Harry, it’s me, Neil Sloan. You in there? Are you all right?”
When he received no answer, he stepped back from the door and kicked it hard. The lock was only a privacy set, not a deadbolt, and three kicks sprung it.
How curious that whatever had wrenched off the sturdier door to the bedroom had not torn this one away, as well.
Neil stepped to the threshold, then recoiled and turned away, the features of his face knocked out of true by a seismic jolt of visceral horror and revulsion.
He tried to prevent Molly from seeing what he had seen, but she refused to be turned away. No sight could be worse than some that she had endured on that terrible day in her eighth year.
Eyeless, his head hollowed out as completely as a jack-o’-lantern, Harry Corrigan sat on the bathroom floor, resting against the side of the bathtub. He had sucked on a short-barreled, pump-action, pistol-grip shotgun.
Sickened but not shocked, Molly turned at once away.
“He couldn’t stop grieving,” Neil said.
For
