As she, too, had not been born for solitude.
“This is only a demonstration,” Ed said. “This Jeffrey isn’t the one I’ve found for you. He has cancer and expected to have at most a year to live. And there’s no Amity here, as there is elsewhere.”
On the return trip through the house, Ed extinguished the lights behind them. In the dark of the kitchen, he activated his device and pushed a button labeled Return.
The rushing whiteness of purest light inspired in Michelle an awe in which were twined apprehension and hope.
Then she and Ed were once more in her kitchen, her house, where she had passed more than two thousand days haunted by the memory of her dead husband and child.
43
As the universe relentlessly expanded, the stars moved ever farther from Earth, until in a distant time after the end of the human era, maybe the night sky would no longer be richly diamonded, but would offer blackness relieved solely by the moon that reflected the light of the only star that would ever matter, the sun in its thermonuclear decline.
Sometimes the vastness of creation filled Jeffy less with a sense of wonder than with reverent dread, for he felt small and doubted his ability to protect his child.
Because it was just beyond the town limits, Shadow Canyon Lane had no streetlamps. Sitting sideways on the cushioned bench of a bay window, his legs stretched out and his back against the niche wall, Jeffy alternately studied the sky and peered down at the moonlit two-lane blacktop. The night was so still that the scene seemed to be a diorama enclosed in glass, and no leaf so much as trembled on the majestic live oaks.
Beside him on the bench lay the only pistol he owned, a double-action 9 mm Smith & Wesson model 5946 with a ten-round magazine, a four-inch barrel, and Novak LoMount Carry sights. A spare magazine nestled in a jacket pocket.
He hoped not to have to use either the gun or Ed Harkenbach’s key to everything that was tucked into another pocket of the jacket.
In retrospect, he should have stopped at the bank on the way home to withdraw a few thousand dollars. He’d kept some money in a cash box, a little over five hundred. That wouldn’t get them far if they had to go on the run or hide out for a while.
He couldn’t believe it had come to this, the world turned upside down. A part of him clung to the hope that all would be well.
His mom and dad lived a few towns up the coast, in Huntington Beach, but he dared not call them for help of any kind. If he was still under suspicion, his folks were likely being monitored.
From the bed, where she lay fully clothed in the dark, Amity said, “You’re sure the extra food and water we left for Snowball will be enough?”
“More than enough, sweetheart.”
“I wish I had him with me. We should go back for him.”
“He’s safer in his cage.”
“It’s not right to leave people behind.”
“We haven’t left him behind forever. We’ll get him later.”
“I love him.”
“I know. And he knows. Now try to sleep.”
“Are you going to sleep?”
“Not if I can stay awake. And I will.”
Shadow Canyon Lane, a dead-end street with only seven houses, was a few minutes from the bustling coast where tourists flocked from spring through autumn, and yet it felt like a country road, shielded from the curious by live oaks, quiet and little trafficked.
The day’s adventures had taken such a toll on Amity that she soon slept, snoring softly.
Hour by hour, the moon sailed across the sky on a westward course, like a luminous galleon. In time it passed below the highest branches of the live oaks, its light snared in the leafy boughs as if it were a magic egg swaddled in a nest, waiting for its mystery to hatch, and the night grew yet darker.
The twelfth of April melted into the thirteenth.
They must have been here much earlier, must have been watching perhaps since well before midnight. They had come on foot and with great stealth, stealing closer through the oak groves to take up sentinel positions. A few minutes before one o’clock in the morning, as choreographed as dancers in a dance, they seemed to materialize out of nothing, shadows rising from shadows, hooded and masked and dressed in black. From the second-story window of Marty and Doris Bonner’s residence, which he’d been caring for while they were on vacation, Jeffy had a clear view of his bungalow, diagonally across the street, when suddenly it was besieged by phantoms. They swarmed the house, coming along the lane from the east and west—and no doubt from Oak Hollow Road to the north—at least twelve of them.
The sole sound he heard was the sudden hard knocking of his heart as he slid off the window seat and got to his feet. He stepped back from the glass, removing himself from what meager moonglow might pass through the panes and paint paleness on his face.