“Are you shaking your head? You know I can’t hear that over the phone? Yes, Jack, but listen, I’m not at work. I’m at the church, where Miss Tiramaku lives. Star of the Sea. Can you remember or write that down? Tell him right when he comes back inside.”
“Wait.” He dropped the receiver again and went to the kitchen where his drawings and pencils had been abandoned. On the back of a picture of the man from the sea, he wrote the name of the church in careful block letters. When he came back to the phone, he could hear her talking to someone else in the room, so he waited until she had finished.
“Jack, are you there? Where did you go? Don’t let the phone clunk like that. Did your father come back?”
“You told me to write it, so I had to get a pencil.”
“Read it back to me, Jack. So you’ll remember.”
“Star of the Sea,” he said. “Get Mommy in the Jeep.”
“You’re a good boy,” she said.
“You’re a good mother,” he said.
She laughed again and hung up. For a long time, there was only silence, and then the reassuring dial tone hummed in his ear, but when an angry sound, like an alarm, began to chatter, he dropped the receiver to the floor and stepped away.
Outside, the wind blew the showers across the sky, and the snow had subsumed Nick and his father. Jack Peter pressed his forehead against the windowpane as he peered through the flowing eddies, anxious for sight of them, but they were gone as surely as had they been erased. The trail from the sea to the house was vanishing, too, little more than an impression, and he went from window to window, seeking a sign of where they might have gone. He made a circuit around to the front of the house and there saw a figure approaching, white on white, as though a snowman had come to life and was struggling to find shelter from the storm. As it drew nearer, the figure gained clarity. It was not Jack’s father but the drawing man, ghastly thin and naked, his wild hair blowing in the wind, the snow caked in his beard around the horrid mouth. Come for him at last, come to take him away. Take Nick instead, he thought, and realized in the same moment that Nick was outside with his father, leaving him all alone. On bandy legs, the monster crept closer to the house.
His every thought was falling away and let loose into the world. The figure in the window got bigger and bigger, and just as Jack stepped back, the white man reached out both long arms as if to grab at him and pull him through the glass. His long bony fingers stretched and slapped at the windowpane with a report as sharp as gunfire. His face came fully into view, a wretched expression in his black eyes, threatening and imploring, a grimace full of teeth as ruined as tombstones. Jack had seen that face many times before, and now he realized his mistake in drawing it. He screamed, and the creature heard him through the glass. Turning its head as if mounted on a spit, the man glanced over its right shoulder, aware of another presence nearby. The creature quickly retreated, running away from its pursuers. Jack withdrew to the heart of the house, waiting in the kitchen for what was next to come. He was frightened by the uncertainty.
*
Tim and the boy had stood at the tideline, puzzling over what might have made the footprints that had risen from the sea. These weren’t the marks of a coyote or even the paw prints as big as that dead white dog’s. They were clearly evidence of a two-legged gait, a man. Tim’s mind jumped to the white man. He felt sure that Nick knew it, too, though he dared not ask for fear that he would worry him, for the boy was already anxious in his movements, casting his gaze up and down the shore, anticipating something emerging from the storm.