was such a mess that he could only say it to the deer, so he learned to live with that, too.
When your mother’s arms around you were the best feeling in the world, then you knew that, if you could just put your arms around her in return, it would be even better yet, but you learned to live with not being able to hug anyone. He had told himself that she knew how he felt even without the hugs, and most of the time he really believed she did know. But sometimes, like now, he thought maybe she didn’t know, that she only hoped he loved her—and he’d even learned to live with that doubt.
He wasn’t able to live with this: that his mother was almost raped, almost shot, and he did nothing. Nothing, nothing. Not only was he incapable of helping her; in his paralysis, he had been a burden to her, had almost gotten her killed because he couldn’t bring himself to touch—to strike out at—the bad man. He couldn’t even run for help. And all this that had happened was maybe because he had visited Tragedy on the Dark Web and had written “The Son’s Revenge: Faithfully Compiled Evidence of Monstrous Evil.”
Something else the bad man said was true.
You know how hot your mommy is? Way too hot to waste her life with a dummy like you.
If he never went home, she would be free of him. If he stayed here in Castle Wyvern, his mom could have a better life with someone who could tell her that he loved her. She could travel places she liked to go and not worry anymore about what might happen to her dummy child. He was smart, but he was nevertheless a dummy: dumb, mute, speechless, full of learning and full of so many feelings that mattered not at all because he couldn’t share any of what he knew and felt with anyone.
In the throbbing of the silent storm light, under the soundless flights of dragons, in the unearthly quiet of the high tower room, where he could no longer hear the crackle of the reeds under him or his own heartbeat or his breath drawn and expelled, he suddenly heard a voice.
“I’m coming, boy, I’m almost there.”
He lowered his stare from the windows without glass panes and saw the dog again, not curled on the floor this time, but sitting up, a harness around it as if it was riding in car.
“Don’t cry, boy, don’t be afraid. I’m almost there.”
65
Upon being told of the extraordinary home invasion and violence at the Bookman residence, the sheriff had assumed that this incident and the Spader-Klineman murders might involve the same perpetrator. He at once ordered blockades on Greenbriar Road. They were looking for a red Dodge Demon fleeing the scene, a high-end aftermarket job with the power to outrun any vehicle in law-enforcement’s fleet.
Four men had been assigned to each roadblock, the first one approximately two miles south of the Bookman property, the other a mile and a half to the north. The southern post was fully manned almost at once, and two deputies with one car established a half-adequate barrier at the northern position.
Nathan Palmer, if it was Nathan Palmer, had been harried from the Bookman house by the sound of approaching sirens. It was thought that he had gone west on foot, across the backyard of the property and into the forest rather than risk the highway with patrol cars swarming it. He’d surely arrived in his Dodge Demon, however, and secreted it somewhere in the vicinity; he would attempt to circle through the trees to the vehicle.
For the past half hour, traffic on Greenbriar Road had been halted and subjected to inspection. Now deputies Walter Colt and Freeman Johnson, the first to arrive at the Bookman residence, departed the house and drove north to fortify that roadblock.
Freeman rode shotgun. An ardent woodsman—hiker, fisherman—as well as a deputy, he possessed an acute awareness of the patterns of nature. The forest-service road they passed on the right appeared as dark in its depths as the bowels of a leviathan. The sidewash of the headlights penetrated only a few feet, yet Freeman detected a visual discordance amid an otherwise vertical blackness of night-shrouded trees.
“Hold it, turn around,” he said. “Something back there on that forest-service road.”
Walter Colt slowed, hung a U-turn, cruised south for a short distance, turned left onto the narrow dirt lane, and clicked the