him, and the knife was flashing at him. Again and again. Soon he saw nothing. He wondered why he felt no pain. It should hurt, he thought; dying should hurt. But it did not hurt, and Jeff Stevens drifted slowly into death. As the fog began to close over his mind, Jeff began to pray.
Elizabeth continued to slash at him long after he died, and when she was done his body was no longer recognizable. It lay in pieces, scattered across the floor of the cavern, mixed with the dismembered corpses of Jimmy Tyler and Kathy Burton. And then her rage was spent, and Elizabeth sat in the midst of the gore and stared curiously around her.
“Why did you do that?” she said softly. “I don’t understand why you had to do it They didn’t do anything to you. They were your friends. And besides, it all happened so long ago. So very long ago.” She crawled across the floor of the cavern, and knelt over the skeleton.
“You shouldn’t have done it, Beth,” she said, her voice a little stronger. “You should have left them alone. They weren’t who you thought they were. He wasn’t your father. Your father died a long time ago. And the others. They weren’t my parents, and that cat wasn’t Sarah. It was only a cat, Beth. A poor, helpless cat Why did you make me do it? I don’t hate them, Beth. I don’t. It’s you who hate them. It’s you who hate all of them. Why can’t you leave them alone? They didn’t do anything to you. None of them did. None of them.” And she was angry again, but now she was angry at Beth, poor Beth, who had died so long ago.
Elizabeth grabbed one of the arm bones and raised it over her head.
“Die!” she screamed. “Why won’t you die and leave us alone?” She brought the bone down, crushing the skull. “Die,” she whispered once more. “Please die, and leave me alone.”
And then it was over. Elizabeth stood up and walked to the rope ladder. She didn’t blow out the candles; they would die of their own accord. Nor did she pull the ladder up from the shaft. There was no need to now; she would not be coming back, nor would anyone use the ladder to escape. Elizabeth crept through the tunnel and emerged from the hole in the embankment She began climbing upward, away from the cave.
In the darkness, Sarah stared down into the flickering yellow light below. Then, slowly, she began making her way down the ladder.
Sarah worked slowly in the pit, trying to fit the pieces back together. When she was finished, she found the canteen of water she had dropped down the shaft so long ago. She put the mouth of the bottle to the lips of each of the dead children, and tried to make them drink.
Then she sat down, and looked around her.
She sat for a long time, waiting.
24
It was four thirty when Dr. Charles Belter wound up the meeting with Jack and Rose Conger. He was not convinced that anything had been accomplished, nor was he convinced that anything needed to be accomplished. He had spent the better part of the afternoon not in attempting to second-guess the direction that Sarah’s illness might be taking, but in reassuring her worried parents. That was half the battle, he had discovered, in dealing with a case like Sarah’s. The parents read too many books, and of the wrong sort. They were convinced that their children were turning into some sort of monsters, and no matter what happened, they projected the worst. His job, he had found, was not so much to treat the child as to calm the parents.
And he had succeeded. As they drove home through the rain they felt better about everything. Dr. Belter had told them not to worry. They had faith in the doctor; they wouldn’t worry. The rain came down harder, and they could feel the temperature dropping.
“Early winter this year,” Jack commented as he turned off the Conger’s Point Road. “This could turn into snow any time.”
“I always like the first snow out here,” Rose said. “Sometimes I think the house was designed for winter. The snow seems to soften it somehow.” She looked through the rain to the old house, looming up ahead, and felt a strange sense of foreboding. It’s the weather, she thought. Rain always makes the place so gloomy.
The phone started ringing as they