been following for longer than he knows, is very close. Absorbed, he won’t be aware of exquisitely slow movement in the kitchen, as, like a sneak thief intent on stealing a closer look, his stalker fills the doorway at his back. Then the silence splits wide, torn open by a scream.
‘Ou . . . hou . . .’
Thumping.
‘Ouutttt!’
The intruder is gone before Dan whips his head around.
Outside the roar amplifies, half bellow, half subverbal screech, compounded by hammering – blind Furies pounding on steel drums.
Dan leaps to his feet. He shivers at the touch of a sudden breeze blowing in from the back of the house. The muffled roar amplifies. Then something happens and the roaring stops. He grabs the last yearbook and bolts.
Escaping, he runs through the kitchen and leapfrogs the porch rail without noting that the back door is thrown wide, as is the window he thought he secured behind him when he came in. Clearing the house, Dan spins like a dime, scanning his surroundings. He expects to see trembling bushes, moving shapes, some sign that something just happened here, but he quit the house too late to see anything that will make all this make sense.
There is nothing visible, nothing to hear, just a disturbance in the air, as though something tremendous just moved out.
19
Bobby
Now that they’re here, Bobby’s glad Chape called them back to the cabin to regroup after the search. It’s the first time he and these old friends have been together in this room since his life went south. He thought it would be hard, reading the truth about himself in their faces, but, these poor guys! Whatever life did to him, it hasn’t spared them, either – except maybe Chape with his burnished, impregnable smile. This is Bobby’s rehearsal for re-entry, which this party will be, unless it’s death by total immersion, and so far, it’s going pretty well.
Stitch and Buck were uneasy with him at first, but Bobby’s always been good with people, a tremendous asset when he was in finance. A few words, a warm grin and they were his again. The unfamiliar, surprisingly old faces of his friends morphed into the kid-faces he remembers, and Brad? Passed out somewhere. Dead drunk, doubtless, he might as well be in Atlanta or on Mars.
Buck reported, ‘I saw every bartender on Bay Drive. They all claimed he threw up in their toilets.’
Stitch grinned. ‘He punched a guy out at Diggers.’
‘There was breakage at Mook’s Tavern, but I paid.’ Bobby was thinking, Schadenfreude?
‘Brad always was a schmuck.’
‘Face it. Brad is one mean bastard.’
‘We did what we could,’ Chape said.
20
Walker Pike
‘I guarded them, and none of them was lost . . .’ Walker doesn’t know when this verse lodged in his flank like a harpoon but day and night it goads him, trailing implications: ‘. . . except the son of destruction.’
Walker thinks, He can’t mean me. The lines are, after all, two thousand years old, but he can’t shake them. Truth sticks in his flank with the verse trailing behind like a whaler’s line through dark waters. No matter how fast he goes or how deep he dives it follows because – whether as mandate or warning – he knows without knowing that this pertains to him.
Some translations read, ‘except the son of perdition,’ and boy, has he studied the translations. The one he is most comfortable with goes, ‘While I was with them, I protected them in your name that you have given me. I guarded them, and not one of them was lost except the one destined to be lost, so that the scripture might be fulfilled.’
Now, that leaves room for interpretation. With the Redeemer long gone and the language diffused by centuries, who knows the exact meaning?
Hell, he doesn’t even know if he’s still a Christian.
He has spent his life pondering it.
He didn’t live in those times; he was never that person but on bad days he has to wonder, Did Judas ever do a hideous thing and not know it?
Successful, a rich man or close to it, Walker Pike keeps to himself. And he has reasons. What am I? He paces the dock behind his house, considering. Afraid of being destroyed? Or of being the destroyer?
This is what circumscribes his life: the potential for destruction. He saw it once. God, it was an accident! Angry and desperate, grieving for personal reasons, he saw it unleashed and it was terrible. It happened long before Walker had any idea what it