At dawn, Tim woke before the others but found he could not move from beneath the blanket on the couch. An incapacitating fatigue. Daylight arced across the ceiling, and he watched the whitening surface, thinking, thinking of the man he had seen, the wild white man, first on that night when driving Nick, the amazing shape of the creature crouching by the road. And on the beach, again the hunched-over thing spied from a window. Giving chase, he had stumbled and fallen and came to with blood on his throat. He rubbed the sores and winced. Just when he had found a logical explanation—the dead white dog in the trunk of the policeman’s car—Tim had seen it again. The white man running, but what if it was a hallucination? He never had hallucinations. He lived in the real world. Work to be done, problems to solve.
Through the windows he saw the clouds amassing in the west, and the sky filled with promise. He carried the idea of snow in his mind as he set about his chores. Upstairs, the boys’ bedroom had dried out completely and was warm and snug. The salty residue on the walls had vanished. No ice frosted the windows. He checked for leaks where the winter might come in and furred each window with weather stripping, glancing now and again at the beach below for any signs of the bogeyman. Beside the rocks he found a dark patch of sand that he thought might be the bone spot, but he could have been mistaken. He worked deliberately and quietly, the weight of the past few days lifted by the mundane task. When finished, Tim crept back downstairs and found the bodies at rest where he had left them. Holly and the boys looked like New Year’s revelers on the morning after, crashed in the easy chair and on the floor, sleeping it off. He was grateful for the respite from his anxieties.
As soon as Holly spoke, he knew that she had been awake for some moments staring at him in the crepuscular light. He went to her side and bent to face her when she opened her lips. “What are you thinking about?”
“These strange days. Ghosts and the boys.”
“You think so, too?”
With an arched eyebrow, he conveyed his skepticism. “Jip’s bedroom is just as it always was. Not a trace of the ice or salt. Weird.”
She sat up slowly and stretched her arms straight out and rolled her shoulders as fluidly as a cat. “Like it never happened.”
The boys were sleeping side by side on the floor between the fireplace and the Christmas tree. Chests falling and rising, their breathing synchronized. Twins. In the dimness, they looked alike, their flyaway hair, the way they had wrapped themselves in blankets. Two versions of one boy.
“It’s good that he has Nick,” said Tim.
“He won’t always be here,” Holly whispered. “We need help with Jack.”
“I suppose you are right.” He laid his hands on her shoulders.
“So you’re okay with this? With finding someone to talk with Jack?”
He leaned over and kissed her on the forehead.
Holly held him off. “I’m serious, Tim. I worry about him all the time, about how strong he’s becoming, and how scared I already am of him. And what happens when we’re no longer around to take care of him?”
“Whoa, one step at a time,” he said.
“It doesn’t have to be Miss Tiramaku, but they seem to have already developed a rapport,” she said. “They’re on the same wavelength, the one that never reaches us.”
With the white of his smile, he surrendered. “Okay, okay. What harm can it be to have him talk with her?”
She slid from beneath his hands and wriggled out of the chair. Free, she kissed him and headed off to the bathroom. She sang in the shower, moved with élan through her morning ablutions. At breakfast, he caught himself staring at her, marveling at her newfound energy, and in her moments of grace and beauty, she restored his energy.
*
“Put down that pencil,” Nick said. Jack Peter did not obey, perhaps was not even listening, but instead leaned further into his work, hunching over his paper, the pencil moving in a series of cross-hatchings to indicate the shadowed eyes, a delicate fury in his speed and gestures. In the flow of his innermost thoughts, he worked without hesitation, the lines appearing by destiny, with no consciousness behind them, the picture having existed there on the blank page from the beginning and needing only the instrument in Jack Peter’s hand in order to appear.
“Stop,” Nick insisted. “I will wait here until you stop. You have to quit sometime.”
Jack Peter ignored his friend’s request and began drawing the man’s beard, hair by hair, the full face coming into being, mesmerizing and filled with menace.
The choice became clear: Nick could either remain there looking over Jack Peter’s shoulder until he finished or he could deliberately interrupt the act. Taking the patchwork paper from beneath the mattress, he smoothed the wrinkles and laid it on the desk, just in front of Jack Peter, evidence of the crime. More tape than paper, the image had taken forever to reconstruct from its torn bits. The jigsaw page was all that remained from the ruined picture of the babies. The artist laid down his pencil.
“I want to know,” Nick said. “Whether you draw these things before or after you see them.”
Bristling with anger, Jack Peter tapped the end of the pencil like a jackhammer against the surface of the desk.
“Where do these creatures come from?” Nick demanded.
Jack Peter struck his temple with the soft eraser on the pencil’s other end. He seemed to be beating out some telegraphic code only he could comprehend. A pile of his drawings lay stacked to his left, and Nick picked up the sheets and rifled through them, searching for a particular image.