The Door To December Part 39

Laura slept with Melanie in the second bed, and Dan lay in the first bed because it was nearer the door, which was the most likely source of trouble. He was wearing his s.h.i.+rt, trousers, shoes, and socks; he was ready to move fast. They had left a single lamp lit because, after the events of the past day, they distrusted the dark. Dan listened to their deep and even breathing.

He could not sleep. He was thinking about Joseph Scaldone's battered body, about all the dead people in that Studio City house, and about Regine Savannah Hoffritz, who was physically and mentally alive but whose soul had been murdered. And as always, when he thought too long about murder in its myriad forms and wondered about humanity's capacity for it, his thoughts led inexorably to his dead brother and sister.

He had never known them. Not alive. They had been dead by the time that he had learned their names and had gone in search of them. As far as his own name was concerned, he had been born with neither 'Dan' nor 'Haldane.' Pete and Elsie Haldane had adopted him when he'd been less than a month old. His real parents had been Loretta and Frank Detwiler, two Okies who had come to California in search of their fortune but who had never found it. Instead, when Loretta had been carrying her third child, Frank had been killed in a traffic accident; and Loretta, whose pregnancy had been plagued by serious complications, died two days after giving birth to Dan. She had named him James. James Detwiler. But because there had been no relatives, no one to take custody of the three Detwiler children, they had been separated and put up for adoption.

Peter and Elsie Haldane had never concealed the fact that they weren't Dan's actual parents. He loved them and was proud to carry their name, for they were good people to whom he owed everything. At the same time, however, he had always wondered about his natural parents and had longed to know about them.

Because of the rules that governed adoption agencies in those days, Elsie and Pete had been told nothing about their baby's real parents, other than the fact that both the natural mother and father were dead. That single fact made Dan more eager to learn what kind of people they had been, for they had not abandoned him by choice but had been taken from him by a whim of fate.

By the time he got to college, Dan had started wrestling with the child-placement bureaucracy in order to obtain copies of their records. The search took time, but after considerable effort and some expense, he learned his real name and the names of his blood parents, and he was startled to discover that he had a brother and a sister. The brother, Delmar, had been four when Loretta Detwiler died, and the sister, Carrie, had been six.

Through the adoption agency's records, which had been partially damaged in a fire and which were not as complete as Dan would have hoped, he began an even more ardent search for his lost siblings. Pete and Elsie Haldane always gave him a deep and abiding sense of family; he thought of their brothers and sisters as his true aunts and uncles, thought of their parents as his grandparents, and felt that he belonged with them. Nevertheless ... well, he was plagued by a peculiar emptiness, a vague and uneasy sense of being adrift, that he knew would be with him until he had found and embraced his kin. A thousand times since then, he wished that he'd never gone looking for them.

Tracking back through the years, he eventually found Delmar, his brother. In a grave. The names on the tombstone weren't Delmar or Detwiler. Rudy Kessman, it said. That was the name Delmar's adoptive parents had given him.

Four years old when their mother died, Delmar had been eminently adoptable and had been placed quickly with a young couple - Perry and Janette Kessman - in Fullerton, California. But the adoption agency had not performed a sufficiently thorough investigation and had not discovered Mr. Kessman's enthusiasm for new, dangerous, and sometimes even unlawful experiences. Perry Kessman drove stock cars, which was legal, of course. He was a motorcycle enthusiast, which was potentially dangerous but certainly not prohibited by law. On paper he was a Catholic, but he frequently experimented with new cults, even attended a pantheists' church for several months, and was for a long while involved with a group that wors.h.i.+ped UFOs; but no one could fault a man who sought G.o.d, even if he sought Him in all the wrong places. Kessman also used marijuana, which had been more of an offense at that time than it was now, though it was still illegal. After a while he started using has.h.i.+sh, uppers, downers, and various other substances. One night, hallucinating in a drug-induced state of paranoia or perhaps making a blood offering to some new G.o.d, Perry Kessman had killed his wife, his adopted son, and then himself.

Rudy-Delmar Kessman-Detwiler was seven when he was murdered. He had been a Kessman less time than he had been a Detwiler.

Now, lying on the motel bed in the dim light that dispelled little of the darkness but draped every familiar object in mysterious shadows, Dan did not even have to close his eyes to see the cemetery in which he had, at last, found his older brother. The headstones had been all alike, set flat in the ground, so as not to spoil the lovely contours of the rolling land. Each stone was a rectangle of granite, and centered in each rectangle was a polished copper plate bearing the name of the deceased, date of birth, date of death, and in some instances a line of Scripture or a sentiment. In Delmar's case, there had been no Scripture, no words of tribute, only his name and dates, cold and impersonal. Dan could recall that mild October day in the cemetery: the softness of the breeze, the birch and laurel shadows banding the lush green gra.s.s. But most of all he recalled what he had felt when he had dropped to his knees and had placed one hand on the copper plaque that marked his unmet brother's resting place: a piercing, wrenching loss that drove the breath out of him.

Though many years had pa.s.sed, though he had long ago resigned himself to having a brother forever unknowable, Dan felt his mouth go dry again. His throat tightened. A tightness filled his chest too. He might have wept quietly then, for he had wept other nights when that memory had come to him unbidden; he was so weary that tears would have risen easily. But Melanie murmured and made a small sound of fear in her sleep, and her distress brought him instantly off his own bed.

The girl writhed beneath the sheets, but not like before, not with her previous vitality. She groaned softly in terror, not loud enough to wake her mother. Melanie struggled as if fending off an attacker, but she seemed to lack the strength to resist effectively.

Dan wondered what nightmare monster stalked her. Then the room suddenly grew cold, and he realized that the monster might be stalking her not in a nightmare but in reality.

He stepped quickly to his own bed and picked up the gun that lay on the nightstand.

The air was arctic. And getting colder.

The two men sat at a table by a large mullioned window, playing cards, drinking Scotch and milk, and pretending to be just a couple of guys batching it and having a good time.

Wind soughed in the eaves of the cabin.

The night was bitterly cold and bl.u.s.tery outside, as befitted February in the mountains, but there would be no new snow anytime soon. Beyond the window, a large moon drifted in a star-spattered sky, casting pearly luminescence on the snowcaked pines and firs and on the white-clad mountain meadow.

They were a long way from the busy streets and bright lights of the Big Orange.

Sheldon Tolbeck had fled from Los Angeles with Howard Renseveer in the desperate hope that distance would provide safety. They had told no one where they were going - in the equally desperate hope that the murderous psychogeist would be unable to follow them to a place that it did not know.

Yesterday afternoon, they had driven north and then northeast, into the high Sierras, to a ski chalet near Mammoth, where they had settled in a few hours ago. The place was owned by Howard's brother, but Howard himself had never used it before, had no a.s.sociation with it, and could not be expected to go there.

It'll find us anyway, Tolbeck thought miserably. It'll sniff us out somehow.

He didn't voice the thought because he didn't want to anger Howard Renseveer. Howard, still somewhat boyish at forty, was an outgoing type who, until recently, had been certain that he was going to live forever. Howard jogged; Howard was careful not to eat much fat or refined sugar; Howard meditated half an hour every day; Howard always expected the best from life, and life usually obliged. And Howard was optimistic about their chances. Howard was - or said he was - absolutely convinced that the creature they feared could not journey this far and could not follow them if they took care to cover their trail. Yet Tolbeck couldn't fail to notice that Howard glanced nervously at the window each time that the gusty wind raised a louder protest in the eaves, that he jumped when the burning logs popped in the fireplace. Anyway, the very fact that they were awake at that dead dark hour of the morning was enough to put the lie to Howard's supposed optimism.

Tolbeck was pouring more Scotch and milk for himself, and Howard Renseveer was shuffling the cards when the room turned cold. They glanced at the fireplace, but the flames were leaping high; the fans in the Heatolator were purring, driving currents of hot air outward from the hearth. No window or door had come open. And in a moment it became frighteningly clear that the chill they felt was not merely a vagrant draft, for the air grew rapidly colder, colder.

It had come. A miraculous, malevolent advent. One moment it was not there, and the next moment it was in their midst, a demonic and deadly coalescence of psychic energy.

Tolbeck got to his feet.

Howard Renseveer leaped up so abruptly that he knocked over his Scotch and milk, then his chair, and dropped the deck of cards. The interior of the cabin had become a freezer, although the fire continued to blaze undiminished.

A large round rag rug lay on the floor between the two hunter-green sofas, and now it rose into the air until it was six feet off the floor. It hung there, not floppy and rumpled the way it should have been but stiff, rigid. Then it spun around faster and faster, as though it were a giant phonograph record whirling on an unseen turntable.

With fevered thoughts of escape that seemed foolish and hopeless even as they took possession of him, Tolbeck backed toward the rear door of the cabin.

Renseveer stood by the table, transfixed by the sight of the spinning rug, apparently unable to move.

Abruptly, the rug dropped in a lifeless heap. One of the sofas was pitched across the room with such force that it knocked over a small table and lamp, snapped off two of its own legs, and smashed a magazine rack, sending glossy publications tumbling and flapping along the floor, like a flock of birds incapable of taking flight.

Tolbeck had retreated from the living room of the cabin into the kitchen annex, which was really part of one large chamber that const.i.tuted the entire ground floor of the structure. He had almost reached the rear door. He was beginning to think he might make it. Not daring to turn his back to the invisible but undeniable ent.i.ty in the living-room area, he extended one arm behind him, scrabbling at the empty air with his hand, seeking the doork.n.o.b.

Around Renseveer, the dropped cards whirled up from the floor, full of a magical and menacing life not unlike that which had made mere brooms such a tribulation for the Sorcerer's Apprentice. They swarmed around Renseveer as if they were leaves caught in a wind devil, clicked and sc.r.a.ped against one another in a dizzying dance. Something about the sound made Tolbeck think of small knives being sharpened. Even as that unsettling image occurred to him, he saw that Howard Renseveer, who was frantically flailing at the storm of plastic-coated rectangles, was bleeding from both hands and was nicked all over the head and face. Surely, cards were neither rigid enough nor sharp enough to inflict even minor wounds ... yet they slashed, slashed, and Renseveer shrieked in pain.

Groping behind him with one hand, Tolbeck found the doork.n.o.b. It wouldn't turn. Locked. He could have swung around, found the thumb latch, and been out of the cabin in a wink, but he was half mesmerized by the spectacle in the living room. Fear both energized and paralyzed him, filled him with an urgent desire to flee but simultaneously numbed his mind and his legs.

The cards collapsed into lifelessness as the rug had done before them. Howard Renseveer's wounded hands appeared to be encased in tight crimson gloves.

Even as the cards were falling, the fire screen was pitched off the stone hearth. A blazing log erupted from the fireplace, shot across the room, and struck Renseveer, who was too dazed to attempt to dodge that projectile. The log was half eaten away by flames, a missile composed of wood and crumbly coals and ashes and licking fire. When it struck Renseveer in the gut, the charred and brittle part of the log dissolved into black smoking rubble that rained down on his shoes. The unburned core of the wood, however, was hard and jagged, a crude and particularly s.a.d.i.s.tic spear that punctured his stomach and stabbed brutally, not merely severing blood vessels and rupturing organs as it went, but also carrying fire deep into him.

That grotesque and heart-freezing sight was sufficient to cure the paralysis of fear that had left Tolbeck standing at the kitchen door for long, precious seconds. He found the lock, twisted the k.n.o.b, threw open the door, burst out into the night and wind and darkness, and ran for his life.

The air temperature had risen as quickly as it had fallen. The motel room was warm again.

Dan Haldane wondered what the h.e.l.l had happened - or had almost almost happened. What did the change of temperature signify? Had some occult presence been there for a few seconds? If so, why had it come, if not to attack Melanie? And what had made it leave? happened. What did the change of temperature signify? Had some occult presence been there for a few seconds? If so, why had it come, if not to attack Melanie? And what had made it leave?

Melanie seemed to sense the dissipation of the threat, for she grew still and quiet under the covers.

Standing by the bed, Dan stared at the gaunt child and, for the first time, realized that she would grow up to be as beautiful as her mother. That thought made him turn to Laura, who was lying beside her daughter, fast asleep, undisturbed by the girl's brief spate of soft murmuring and unaware of the bitter cold that had gripped the room for half a minute or more. In repose, her lovely face reminded him of the faces of Madonnas that he'd seen in paintings in museums. Fanned out across the pillow in the pale-amber light of the single lamp, Laura's thick, silky auburn hair looked as if it had been spun from the red-gold light of an autumn sunset, and Dan had an urge to put his hands into it and let it spill through his fingers.

He returned to his own bed.

He lay on his back, staring at the ceiling.

He thought of Cindy Lakey. Dead at the hands of her mother's crazy-jealous boyfriend.

He thought of his brother, Delmar. Dead at the hands of his drug-blasted, hallucinating, adoptive father.

He thought of his sister too, of course. It was an inevitable progression of memory, the same on any night when he had trouble sleeping: Delmar, Carrie, Cindy Lakey.

Eventually, through the records of the child-placement agency that had dispersed the Detwiler family on the death of their mother, Dan had found the sister from whom he had been separated when he had been a month-old infant and she had been six. Like Delmar, she was in a graveyard by the time Dan finally tracked her down.

Six years old when their mother died, Carrie had not reacted or adapted well to the dissolution of her family. She was emotionally and psychologically damaged by the experience, and her behavioral problems made her a difficult candidate for adoption. She drifted from an orphanage to a series of foster homes, back to the orphanage, then to another series of foster homes, apparently with a growing sense that she belonged nowhere and was wanted nowhere. Her att.i.tude grew worse, until she began running away from her foster homes, and each time that she ran away, the authorities found it increasingly difficult to locate her and bring her back. By the time that she was seventeen, she knew how to dodge those searching for her, and she stayed free, on her own, thereafter. All available photographs revealed that Carrie was a lovely girl, but she didn't do well in school, and she had no job experience, and like a lot of other lovely girls from broken homes, she chose prost.i.tution as the best way to support herself - or, rather, prost.i.tution chose her, for she had little choice.

She was twenty-eight years old and a high-priced call girl by the time her short unhappy life came to an end. One of her johns wanted something kinkier than she was willing to provide, and the argument swiftly led to violence. She was killed five weeks before Dan located her, and she was one month in the ground by the time that he paid a visit. He had missed meeting his brother by twelve years, and that had been sad but not as painful as missing a meeting with his sister by only thirty days.

He told himself that she would have been a stranger to him. They would have had little or nothing in common. She might not have been glad to see him, what with him being a cop and her a call girl. And he very well might have been sorry to meet the woman his sister had become. Almost certainly, given the circ.u.mstances, a reunion and any subsequent relations.h.i.+p would have been filled with much anguish and little joy. But he had been only twenty-two, a rookie on the force, when he had found his sister's grave, and at twenty-two he hadn't been as tough emotionally as he was now; he had wept for her. h.e.l.l, even these days, after more than fifteen years of policework, fifteen years of seeing people who'd been shot and knifed and beaten and strangled, after being considerably roughened by the work he did, he still sometimes wept for her and for his lost brother when, in the darkest hour of a sleepless night, he dwelt too intently upon the past that might have been.

He held himself, in part, responsible for Carrie's death. He felt that he should have worked harder to track her down, should have located her in time to save her. Yet he also knew that he deserved none of the blame. Even if he had found her sooner, no words or actions would have influenced her to give up life as a call girl; nothing he could have done would have kept her from that rendezvous with the homicidal john. The guilt that nagged at him wasn't earned. It was, instead, just one more example of his Atlas complex: He had a tendency to take the whole world on his shoulders. He understood himself; he could even laugh at himself, and sometimes he said that (considering his capacity and enthusiasm for guilt) he should have been Jewish. But being able to laugh at himself did not in any way lessen his sense of responsibility.

Therefore, when sleep remained teasingly beyond his reach, his thoughts often went to Delmar, Carrie, and Cindy Lakey. In the dark he would ponder humanity's capacity for murder, and he would consider his own frequent inability to save the living, and sooner or later he would even explore the idea that his mother had died at his own hands because complications from childbirth had taken her life. Crazy. But the subject made him a little crazy. The fact of death. The fact of murder. The fact that a violent savage hid deep within every man and woman. He wasn't able to come to terms with those inescapable facts, and he supposed he never would. He persisted in believing that life was precious and that humanity was n.o.ble - or at least was meant for n.o.bility. Delmar to Carrie to Cindy Lakey: that was the usual late-night progression of memories. When he got that far, he often found himself teetering on the edge of an abyss of irrationality and guilt and despair, and he would sometimes - not often but sometimes - get up, switch on a lamp, and drink until he knocked himself unconscious.

Delmar, Carrie, Cindy Lakey.

If he failed to save the McCaffreys, their names would be added to that list, and henceforth the progression of unwanted memories would be longer: Delmar, Carrie, Cindy Lakey ... Melanie, and Laura.

He wouldn't be able to live with himself then. He knew he was only one cop, only a man like any other, not Atlas, not a knight in s.h.i.+ning armor, but deep inside, there was a part of him that wanted wanted to be that knight; and it was that part - the dreamer, the n.o.ble fool - that made living worthwhile. If that part of him were ever snuffed out, he couldn't imagine going on. That was why he had to protect Laura and Melanie as if they were his own family. He had come to care for them, and if he let them die now, he too would be dead - at least emotionally and psychologically. to be that knight; and it was that part - the dreamer, the n.o.ble fool - that made living worthwhile. If that part of him were ever snuffed out, he couldn't imagine going on. That was why he had to protect Laura and Melanie as if they were his own family. He had come to care for them, and if he let them die now, he too would be dead - at least emotionally and psychologically.

Delmar, Carrie, Cindy Lakey. .. The progression ran its course, and at last he drifted off to sleep with the soft breathing of Laura and Melanie in the background, like the susurration of a faraway sea.

Sheldon Tolbeck ran into the night, across the white meadow, through snow that was almost knee-deep in places. The mountainside was doubly frosted by both severe cold and frigid lunar light. As he raced from the cabin, he exhaled plumes of vapor and kicked up clouds of snow that drifted away like ghosts behind him; the appearance of ectoplasm was imparted to them by the phantasmagorical radiance of the moon.

From the cabin came Renseveer's screams, which carried well on the bitter air and echoed back from some far-off vale. The clarity of the air and the peculiarities of the terrain were such that even the echo re-echoed, again and again, until there was a hideous chorus of screams. From that unnerving cacophony, one might have thought the door of h.e.l.l itself lay in this high fastness and was open wide. The screams put the fear of the devil in Tolbeck, and he ran as if the hounds of h.e.l.l were nipping at his heels.

He was wearing boots but no coat, and at first the piercingly cold wind was painful. But then, as he persisted in his mad plunge toward the far end of the meadow, the wind became like a thousand needles delivering a dose of powerful anesthetic. Within fifty or sixty yards of the cabin, his face and hands went half numb. The sharp air penetrated his flannel s.h.i.+rt and his jeans, and within a hundred yards his entire body seemed to be under the influence of Novocaine. He knew this merciful lack of feeling would not last more than a few minutes; it was nothing more than shock. Soon, the pain would return, and the cold would be like a crab moving through his bones and tearing out bits of his marrow with its icy claws.

Not sure where he was going, driven not by reason but by stark terror, he floundered through a drift that was piled up along one edge of the meadow, and then he was into the woods. Ma.s.sive firs and spruces and pines towered over him. The phosphoric moonlight reached the forest floor only through a few scattered holes between the giant and closely packed trees. Where the rays of the moon got through, they were like wan searchlight beams, and everything in those shafts of faint luminescence seemed unreal, otherworldly. Elsewhere, the forest was wrapped in darkness that varied from pitch black to blue, to purple, to charcoal gray.

Tolbeck staggered forward, his hands held out in front of him. He walked into trees. He tripped over rocks and exposed roots. He plunged unexpectedly down the side of a gully, fell on his face, got up, went on. His eyes were adjusting to the darkness but not quickly, and for the most part he could see little of the land ahead of him, yet he rushed forward at a fast walk, often at a run, for Renseveer's screams had come to an end a few minutes ago - which meant that Tolbeck himself was now the prey. He stumbled and dropped painfully to his knees. He got up. He went on. He blundered through ice-sheathed brush that crackled, poked at him, scratched, and sc.r.a.ped. He went on. He ran into a low-hanging pine branch that lacerated his scalp, and the blood that flowed down his face seemed boiling hot by contrast with his half-frozen skin. He went on.

He found himself in a wide, shallow wash bottomed with rocks, pieces of deadwood, and occasional heaps of withered brush and silt deposited by the runoff from the last rain before autumn had phased into winter. There was some ice, a little snow where the densely packed boughs of the trees parted to let it in, but for the most part the going was easier than it had been outside the wash. He followed it upward for a few hundred yards until it narrowed and then choked off near the top of the ridge.

He scrambled up a short steep slope, into an area where the trees thinned out, clutching at brush and granite outcroppings that were partly crusted with snow and partly swept clean by the wind. His hands were so cold and stiff that he could not feel the cuts and bruises that he surely had sustained in the climb.

Finally, on the high crest of the ridge, his total exhaustion overcame his panic. Tolbeck crumpled in a heap, unable to go another step.

The trees were spa.r.s.e, the wind found him again, and moonlight and snow were all around. After a moment in which he unsuccessfully tried to catch his breath, Tolbeck crawled into the shelter and the shadows afforded by a nearby tooth of granite. He slumped there, peering down the wall of the ravine, squinting with bleak expectation into the lightless lower slopes of the wash through which he had ascended.

The only sound was the wind hissing through the needled branches of the evergreens and whispering across the rocky crag of the ledge. Of course, that didn't mean the psychogeist was not stalking him. It might be down there, coming toward him out of the trees, but it would make no sound as it approached.

Nothing moved except occasional snow devils whirling across the crest of the ridge and evergreen boughs stirred by the wind. But even as he squinted into the darkness below, Tolbeck realized that watching for his enemy was pointless, stupid, for if the psychogeist was moving in on him, he would not see it. It had no substance, but infinite power. It had no form, only strength. It had no body, just consciousness and will ... and a maniacal thirst for vengeance and blood.

He would not detect it until it was upon him.

If it found him, he could do nothing to defeat it.

However, he was not a quitter, never had been and never would be, so he was unable to accept the hopelessness of his situation. Hugging himself and s.h.i.+vering, pressing up against the sheltering granite formation, Tolbeck peered intently into the forest below, strained to hear any sound that was not produced by the wind - and told himself, over and over, that the thing would not come, would not find him, would not tear him limb from limb.

Immobility meant less body heat, and within minutes the cold had sunk numberless talons into his flesh. He shuddered uncontrollably, and his teeth chattered, and he found that he couldn't completely uncurl the bent fingers of his gloveless hands. His skin was not only cold but dry, and his lips were cracking, bleeding. His misery was so complete that he couldn't restrain his tears, which collected in his mustache and beard stubble, where they quickly froze.

With all his heart, Tolbeck wished that he had never met Dylan McCaffrey and w.i.l.l.y Hoffritz, wished that he had never seen that gray room or the girl who had been taught to find the door to December.

Who would have imagined the experiments could get this far out of hand or that such a thing as this would be unleashed?

Something moved below.

Tolbeck gasped, and the sudden intake of subfreezing air hurt his throat and made his lungs ache.

Something cracked, thudded, snapped.

A deer, he thought. There are deer in these mountains. But it wasn't a deer.

He remained on his knees, cowering against the rocks, hoping that he might still be able to hide, although he knew that he was deluding himself.

Something rattled below. The queer noise grew louder, closer. A small, hard object snapped against Tolbeck's chest, startling him, then clattered to the frozen ground.

He saw it roll away from him and come to rest in the moonlight. A pebble.

From below, the malign, psychotic spirit-thing had thrown a pebble at him.

Silence.

It was playing with him.

More rattling. He was struck again, twice, not hard, but harder than he had been struck the first time.

He saw another stone drop to the ground in front of him: a white pebble about the size of a marble. The clattering was made by pebbles rolling and bouncing and skipping up the side of the ravine, snapping against larger stones and rebounding as they came.

The psychogeist pitched with unerring accuracy. Tolbeck wanted to run. He had no strength.

He looked wildly left and right. Even if he had possessed the strength to run, he had nowhere to go.

He looked at the night sky. The stars were sharp and cold. He had never seen a sky so forbidding.

He realized that he was praying. The Lord's Prayer. He hadn't prayed in twenty years.

Suddenly a lot more rattling arose, a torrent of up-rus.h.i.+ng pebbles, dozens, scores, hundreds of little stones, a rattle-tick-snick-snap-click-clack-crack that built until it was like the sound of a hailstorm on a concrete parking lot. Abruptly a squall of stones burst over the crest of the ridge, spewing out of the darkness, waves of half-glimpsed missiles in the pale moonlight, spinning at Tolbeck, ricocheting off his skull, rapping his face and arms and hands and body. None of the projectiles was traveling at the speed of a bullet or even half fast enough to be lethal, but all of them were painful.

And now it was not as if the pebbles were being thrown at him but as if the laws of gravity had been suspended on the slope, at least in respect to small stones, for they came up in a veritable river, Jesus, hundreds of them, and he was caught in the center of those punis.h.i.+ng currents. He drew his knees up. He tucked his head down and covered it with his arms. He tried to squeeze even farther into the granite niche where he had hoped to hide, but the pebbles found him.

Occasionally, he was pummeled by pieces of stone too large to be called pebbles. Small rocks. And some that were not so small. He cried out each time that one of those found him, for it was worse than taking a blow from a fist.

He was bleeding and bruised. He thought one of the rocks had broken his left wrist.

The hard music on the slope, a deadly song of pure percussion, changed: The hailstorm patter of upwardly cascading pebbles was now punctuated by heavier thuds and cracks. Those noises were made by the small rocks bounding along the ridge wall to take their whacks at him. He was being stoned to death by something he could not see, and he was no longer praying but was screaming instead. However, even above his screams, he could hear the distant and terrible sound of boulders boulders rolling inexorably toward the top of the ridge. rolling inexorably toward the top of the ridge.

The entire slope below seemed to be tearing loose and churning upward, cataclysmically divorcing itself from the crust of the earth, as though divine judgment had required the planet to disperse its substance, and as though the fulfillment of that harsh judgment was beginning here. The ground shook with a series of violent concussions transmitted through the rough granite beneath him, as each bounce of each oncoming boulder generated the energy equivalent to a grenade explosion.