My stomach tightened. We listened for a moment or two, but no sound came from the stairs. I indicated to Walter that he should leave Ellen. If we tried to move her again, we would alert whoever was downstairs. She made a tiny, mewing sound as he drew away from her and tried to hold him back, but he kissed her gently on the cheek to reassure her, then followed me. The front door hung open, and snow billowed in from the darkness beyond. As we approached the final steps, a shadow moved in the kitchen to my right. I turned and put a finger to my lips.

A figure moved across the doorway, not looking in our direction. It was the young man I had met on my first visit to the house: Caspar, the man I believed to be Caleb's son. I swallowed hard and moved forward, my hand up to let Walter know that he should hang back near the front door. I counted three and stepped into the kitchen, my gun raised and pointing to my left.

The kitchen was empty, but the connecting door into the dining room was now fully open. I sprang back to warn Walter, just in time to see a shape move behind him and a knife gleam in the dimness. He saw the look on my face and was already moving when the knife came down and caught him in the left shoulder, causing his back to arch and his mouth to contort in pain. He brought his gun across his body and fired beneath his left arm, but the knife rose and caught him again, this time in a slashing movement across his back as he fell. Caspar pushed Walter hard from behind, and his head impacted with a loud smack on the end of the banisters. He fell to his hands and knees, blood running down his face and his eyes heavy and dazed.

The young man turned to me now, with the knife held blade down in his right hand. There was a fresh bullet wound at his hip, staining his filthy chinos a deep red, but he did not seem to notice the pain. Instead, he curled himself and hurled his body down the hallway toward me. His mouth was open, his teeth were bared and the knife was ready to strike.

I shot him in the chest as he ran and he stopped hard, his body teetering on the soles of his shoes. He put a hand to the wound and examined the blood, as if only then would he believe that he had been shot. He looked at me one more time, cocked his head to one side and then made as if to move at me again. I fired a second shot. This time, the bullet took him straight through the heart and he fell back onto the bare floor, his head coming to rest close to where Walter was trying to raise himself onto his hands and knees. I think he was dead before he hit the ground. Above me, I heard Ellen cry out, "Daddy," and saw her appear at the top of the stairs, dragging herself across the steps toward him.

Ellen's cry saved my life. As I turned to look at her, I heard a whistling sound at my back and saw a shadow move on the floor ahead of me. Something caught me a painful glancing blow to the shoulder, missing my head by inches, then the blade end of a spade swept by me. I grabbed at the wooden handle with my left hand, striking back with my right elbow at the same time. I felt it connect with a jaw, then used the momentum of the spade to pull the man behind me forward, using my right foot to trip him as he moved. He stumbled ahead of me, then fell to his knees. He stayed on all fours for a couple of seconds, then rose up and turned to face me, framed against the night by the open door behind him.

And I knew that this, at last, was Caleb Kyle. He was no longer posing as twisted and arthritic but stood tall and straight, his thin, wiry limbs encased in blue denims and a blue shirt. He was an old man, but I felt his strength, his rage, his capacity to inflict pain and hurt, as almost a physical thing. It seemed to radiate from him like heat and the gun in my hand almost wavered with the impact. His eyes were fierce and glowed with a deep, red fire, and I thought instinctively of Billy Purdue. I thought too of the young women left hanging from a tree and the pain they had suffered at his hands, and of my grandfather, forever haunted by his dreams of this man. Whatever pain Caleb himself had endured, he had visited it a hundredfold on the world around him.

Caleb looked at his dead boy lying close by his feet, then at me, and the intensity of his hatred rocked me on my heels. His eyes shone with a deep, malevolent intelligence. He had manipulated us all, evading capture for decades, and had almost succeeded in evading us again, but it had cost his son his life. Whatever happened after, some small measure of justice had been achieved for those poor, dead girls left hanging from a tree, and for Judith Mundy, who, I believed, had been taken deep into the darkness of Great North Woods by this man.

"No," said Caleb. "No."

It was only then that I began to understand why he had wanted so badly to beget a boy. I think if Judith Mundy had given birth to a daughter then his hatred would have led him to kill the child, and try again for a son. He wanted what so many men wanted: to see himself replicated upon the earth, to see the best part of himself live on beyond him. Except, in Caleb's case, that which he desired to see continue was foul and vicious and would have consumed lives just as its father had before it.

Caleb moved forward a step and I cocked the pistol. "Back up," I said. "Keep your hands where I can see them."

He shook his head, but moved back a few steps, his hands held out from his sides. He didn't look at me but kept his eyes fixed on his dead son. I advanced and stood beside Walter, who had raised himself to a sitting position, his uninjured right shoulder against the wall and blood thick on his face. He held his gun loosely in his right hand, but he was unable to focus and was obviously in severe pain. I wasn't doing so good myself. By now, Ellen was halfway down the stairs, but I held up a hand and told her to stay back. I didn't want her anywhere near this man. She stopped moving, but I could hear her crying.

In front of me, Caleb spoke again. "You'll die for what you did to him," he spat. His attention was now fully directed at me. "I'll tear you apart with my bare hands, then I'll fuck the slut to death and leave the body in the woods for the animals to feed on."

I didn't reply to his taunt. "Keep moving back, old man," I said. I didn't want to be with him in an enclosed space; not in the hallway, not on the porch. He was dangerous. I knew that, even with the gun in my hand.

He retreated again, then slowly moved down the steps until he stood in the yard, snow falling on his exposed head and his outstretched arms, light from the front room bathing him. His hands were held away from his sides and I could see the butt of a gun protruding from the back of his pants.

"Turn around," I said.

He didn't move.

"Turn around or I'll shoot you in the legs." I couldn't kill him, not yet.

He glared at me, then turned to his right.

"Reach around. Use your thumb and forefinger to take the butt of the gun, then throw it on the ground."

He did as I told him, tossing the gun into some pruned rosebushes below the porch.

"Now turn back again."

He turned.

"You're him, aren't you?" I said. "You're Caleb Kyle."

He smiled, a gray, wintry thing like a blight on the living organisms around him. "It's just a name, boy. Caleb Kyle is as good as any other." He spat again. "You afeared yet?"

"You're an old man," I replied. "It's you who should be afraid. This world will judge you harshly, but not as harshly as the next."

He opened his mouth, and the saliva made a clicking sound at the back of his teeth. "Your granddaddy was afeared of me," he said. "You look the spit of him. You look afeared."

I didn't reply. Instead, I tossed my head in the direction of the dead man on the floor behind me. "Your dead boy, was his mother Judith Mundy?"

He bared his teeth at me and made as if to move in my direction, and I fired a shot into the ground in front of him. It kicked up a flurry of dirt and snow, and brought him to a halt.