all a kind of game to them, this funny thing with the light. Vorhees raced down the rows, shouting their names, his breath heaving with panic, trying to home in on their voices. The sound was behind him, it was ahead, it was on either side. It seemed to be coming from everywhere, even inside his head.
“Nit! Siri! Where are you?”
Then there was a woman. She was standing in the middle of the row. She was draped in a dark cloak, like a woman in a fairy tale, some dweller of the forest; her head was covered by a hood, her eyes by dark glasses that concealed the upper half of her face. So total was Vorhees’s surprise that for a moment he thought he might be imagining her.
“Are they your daughters?”
Who was she, this woman of the corn? “Where are they?” he panted. “Do you know where they are?”
With a languid gesture she removed her glasses, revealing a face sensuously smooth and youthfully beautiful, with eyes that glinted in their sockets like diamonds. He felt a surge of nausea.
“You’re tired,” she said.
Suddenly, he was. Curtis Vorhees had never been so tired in his life. His head felt like an anvil; it weighed a thousand pounds. It took every ounce of will for him to remain standing.
“I have a daughter. Such a beautiful daughter.”
Behind him he heard the final, random pops of panicked gunfire. The field and sky had sunk into an unearthly darkness. He felt the urge to weep, but even this seemed beyond his command. He had dropped to his knees; soon he would fall.
“Please,” he choked.
“Come to me, beautiful children. Come to me in the dark.”
Somebody yanked him to his feet: Tifty. His face was very close. Vorhees could barely focus on it. The man was pulling him by the arm.
“Vor, come on!”
His tongue was thick in his mouth. “The woman …” But there was no one; the place where she had stood was empty. “Did you see her?”
“There’s no time! We have to get to the tower!”
Vorhees would have none of it; with the last of his strength he jerked away.
“I have to find them!”
It was the butt of Tifty’s rifle that brought everything to a halt. A single, crisp blow to the head, expertly aimed; Vorhees’s vision swarmed with stars. Then the world turned upside down as Tifty grabbed him by the waist and hurled him to his shoulder and began to run. Fat leaves streamed past, slapping his face. Vorhees was calling, “Nit! Siri! Come back!” But he had no strength to resist. His family was dead, he knew that; Tifty would not have come for him if they were still alive. More gunfire, the shouts of the dying all around. The hardboxes, a voice said. They came from the hardboxes. Who would survive this day? And Vorhees knew, to his infinite sorrow, that once again he would be one of the lucky ones.
They burst from the corn onto open ground. The shelter was wrecked, the tarp torn away, everything scattered. Bodies strewn everywhere, but he saw no children; the little ones were gone. Come to me, beautiful children. Come to me in the dark. And as the door of the tower slammed behind him and he tumbled to the floor, slipping at last into a merciful unconsciousness, his final thought was this:
Why did it have to be Tifty?
24
Wolgast had come to Amy at last. He had come to her in dreams.
They were sometimes in one place and sometimes another. They were stories of things that had happened, events and feelings from the past replayed; they were a jumble, a pastiche, an overlap of images that in their reconfiguration felt entirely new. They were her life, her past and present commingling, and they occupied her consciousness with such completeness that upon awakening she would startle to discover herself existing in a simple reality of firm objects and ordered time. It was as if the waking world and the sleeping world had exchanged positions, the latter possessing a superseding vividness that did not abate as she moved into the traces of her day. She would be pouring water from a pot, or reading to the children in circle, or sweeping leaves in the courtyard and without warning her mind would drown with sensation, as if she had slipped beneath the surface of the visible world into the currents of an underground river.
A carousel, its gyring lights and ringing, bell-like music falling. A taste of cold