Hauser was outside throwing up and Jake hoped he was pointed downwind. It was one of those back-of-the-mind things that came to him while he examined the top of the girl’s head, thrown carelessly onto the newel post like a winter cap, a little lopsided.

Hauser and his deputy had found Jake floating near the road. The drag of the heavy water-filled poncho had acted like a sea-anchor and saved him from being washed away in the surge that sloshed across the lawn. He had been unconscious and Hauser had slapped him, yelled, shook him. His eyes had fluttered open, and that first big breath hit him in the chest like an atom bomb. He sat up, screamed Emily Mitchell’s name. Hauser had run for the house. Taken the screen door off the hinges. Stumbled out fifteen seconds later and barfed in the swamp that used to be a garden.

Jake lifted himself from the water, his brain actually making a cartoon spring sound as he tried to keep the world from spinning. He fought to his feet and lurched across the lawn and fell up the steps like a drunk trying to make it to the toilet in time.

Mother and daughter were in the living room. Mostly.

68

Jake shuffled up the emergency-lit stairs of the hospital on autopilot, his feet taking him from one dim pool of light to the next. He was soaked through now, and the wet leather of his boots rubbed against his shins and every time he took a step the storm squished between his toes to remind him just how unfinished all of this was. He had very little left in him and the only thing that kept his heart beating and his legs pumping was the chance that he could somehow save Kay and Jeremy. He wondered if there was anything remotely rational in this line of thinking or if it was just blind hope. After all, there were no bodies. That was something, wasn’t it? Because this guy liked to leave behind—Jake stopped the image from welling up in his head. He couldn’t—refused to—think like that. Not with his wife and son.

He opened the steel door and stepped out into the hallway.

The third floor of the Southampton Hospital throbbed with the collective voice of the bedridden, the frightened, the infirm. The lights had been reduced to thirty percent power, an engineering decision made to cut strain on the generator. In the dim half-light, the hallway linoleum looked like a cancerous supermarket pizza that couldn’t be identified by the age-old question of Animal, vegetable, or mineral? All the patients who could travel had been moved after a mountain of releases had been signed and those who remained were mostly palliative care and ICU trauma cases. Accompanying the murmur of the patients was the sound of windows shifting in their frames and the unmistakable krang of metal flashing being tortured by the wind somewhere outside.

Frank was at the nurses’ station, trying to get a Tylenol to combat the headache that the incessant wail of the storm and the patients had brought on.

Jake moved by him, the dim light morphing his shadows into a long spiderlike animation that headed down the hall.

The passage was darker than it had been two hours ago and the sounds coming from the rooms were more like the animal grunts at some midnight petting zoo than a place where human beings were sent to mend. The taste in the atmosphere was unmistakable and every breath he took in stunk of fear.

The door to his father’s room was the only one closed. He opened it and Jacob Coleridge was harnessed in, the nylon straps and bright chrome buckles gleaming dementia in the dark room. With the sound of his footsteps, his father’s head turned on the pillow like a lifeless dime-store mannequin being run on rudimentary mechanics. His hair scraped the pillow as his face rotated, his eyes deep screws of terror. The soft shimmer of a noise began at the back of his throat, a low, bubbling sound.

Out of the corner of his eye, at the edge of his peripheral vision, Jake saw the spattered nightstand, something dull and dead on top and the bright gleam of steel. He didn’t deflect his vision, didn’t take his eyes from the old man’s face, although every fiber in his brain was screaming for him to look at the thing at the edge of his sight.

Jacob Coleridge’s face, barely visible in the dim light of the room, was smeared with the same bloody graffiti that had decorated Jeremy that morning. His sockets and cheeks smeared in red-black lines that outlined the skull beneath his flesh. The bloody teeth finger-painted over his mouth unzipped, and his lips formed into a black O, a sightless eye socket. The soft rasp simmering in his throat grew into a howl, like the distant call of an injured animal, and blood bubbled out and down his chin, splattering his chest.

Jake took a step toward his father and the mournful howl rose to a bright scream of panic that was supposed to be the word No, but only came out as a long tortured vowel. Without having to look, Jake knew that Jacob Coleridge’s tongue lay on the nightstand, lines of blood and mucus gleaming on the surface of the safety razor lying in the slop beside it.

69

After they rushed his father off to emergency surgery, Jake grabbed Frank’s arm and led him into the stairwell.

“Where the fuck were you?” It was anger again, not real language.

Frank had the shell-shocked expression of a plane-crash survivor. “I…I was there the whole time, Jakey.” The old man bit his bottom lip and his teeth made a soft, scraping sound against his whiskers. “I didn’t even go out for a smoke.” To illustrate his point, he held up a cigarette. The filter was chewed and the shaft bent. Then he paused, and the mechanics of his face jittered. “Wait a minute! Just wait a fucking minute!” He pointed at Jake. “You don’t think—!”

Jake’s eyes were dead black points nailed to his head. In the weak light and dark shadows, he was expressionless. He thought about the question for a second. “No, I don’t.”

“So what’s going on, Jakey?” Frank rolled up on the balls of his feet.

Jake shook his head. It was a defeated movement powered by a long string of failures on his part. “Someone wants to keep something from me.” He paced the small landing.

Frank finally fired up the cigarette he had been chewing for the past two hours. The snap of the lighter sounded like a gunshot in the small confines of the stairwell and the flame was brighter than the dull bulb illuminating the space. “Jakey, I wasn’t away from that room more than five minutes before you showed up. No one went in.” He wrapped his face around the cigarette and pulled in a deep chestful of smoke. “No one, Jakey.” The old man’s eyes narrowed and his face tightened up. Jake saw a little fear in there and he wondered what Frank wasn’t telling him.

Jake paced the welded boilerplate floor. Thunder shook the building and drowned out the clunk of his boots on the painted steel. He did jail-cell laps while Frank smoked his cigarette, his hand cupped around the butt, like a kid smoking in school. “What did that little girl draw? Did you have time to look at it?”

Jake stopped, lifted his head. “She used my father’s concept but her drawing had nothing to do with what he painted. She got the shapes right.”

Frank dropped the cigarette and crushed it out with the heel of his boot.

“She’s dead, Frank.”

Frank winced. “Dead? Who—” And then he got it. “Jesus. How?”

Jake took a cigarette from Frank’s pocket and fired it up. “The same way, Frank. Her mother, too. It’s what this guy does.”