74
It was a subtle change, barely noticeable, even to Mark's enhanced synapses. One second the tiny disturbance was there, hanging in the air three feet from his bed; then it was gone. Without having to look around, he knew it had departed. As strange as his room had felt only a moment earlier, the space now radiated normality.
If he hadn't been able to replay the events in his mind, Mark might have thought that he had just experienced a waking dream. But the aberration had been all too real, a tiny window to another place. Mark had peered through it, although his glimpse had been severely limited by his narrow field of view. With such a small, short look, he didn't have any idea what the purpose was of the equipment he had seen, nor of the strange cables that snaked around it.
Mark did know one thing. Someone had been watching him from the far side, and he had to assume that their view was superior to his.
Walking to the window, Mark looked out across the fifty feet of lawn that separated the side of his house from Heather's. The sky had lightened to the point that the predawn contrast made the ground look darker than before.
Outside, the darkness seemed to thicken as he watched, moving between the two homes like a living thing, coiling around Heather's house, seeking entrance. The burned-out bulb of the nearest streetlamp provided no opposition to the encroaching blackness.
Mark shook his head to clear the illusion. Unable to shake the morbid sense of dread that assailed him, Mark grabbed his sweats from the back of the chair, dressing quickly. He left the room and made his way silently downstairs, then out the front door into his driveway.
The eastern sky was much lighter now, laced with streaks of pale lavender where it touched the mountains. A car moved along the street headed toward the main highway, its headlights sweeping past his house in twin beams that pushed at the shadows. Then it was by, its twin red taillights flashing brighter at the stop sign before disappearing around the corner.
As the car’s headlights receded, the sense that the darkness was a living thing flowing back between the houses returned stronger than before. Mark turned toward the McFarland house, making his way toward the gap he had observed from his window. Unlike some of the newer residential areas, no wall separated the two houses.
An unofficial lawnmower boundary was barely visible, its location changing from week to week depending on whether Mark's dad or Heather's had been the last to operate their riding mowers. Mark paused at the grass boundary.
To his eyes, the darkness hid nothing, merely providing a different spectrum than daylight, a detailed grayscale image lacking the warmth of the daylight colors. Standing here in the grass, looking out across the lawn at Heather's house, the dark feeling acquired a name: fear. Not for himself, but for her.
He moved around behind the McFarland house, letting his feet take him where they would. With every passing second, the sky lightened, fading the predawn shadows into the background. Heather's back lawn, like his own, ran back about fifty feet from the house before descending steeply into the rocky canyon below. There was a point just before the edge where the lawn refused to venture, the abundance of pine needles making the soil too acidic for growth.
When this neighborhood had first been built, the trees had been cut back away from the houses, so that now only one huge pine remained, rising up outside of Heather's window, just around the far corner of the house. Mark moved toward it, his thoughts involuntarily turning to the Rag Man. Odd. Maybe it was because this was the tree he had climbed to kidnap her from her room.
It didn’t really matter. That bastard wasn’t going to threaten anyone, ever again. Jack Gregory had seen to that.
As he moved behind the McFarland's back deck and rounded the corner, Mark glanced up at Heather's window. Her bedroom light was on. Not surprising. Heather had always been an early riser, and even though she was sleeping again, the antipsychotic drugs had not changed that.
Searching for anything that might have elevated his concern to its current level, Mark spun in a slow circle. Nothing. Not a God damn thing out of the ordinary.
Yeah right—nothing but a tiny hole in the fabric of the universe materializing in his bedroom. That was damn sure enough to freak anybody out.
Now that he thought about it, it was a miracle he wasn't running around waving his arms and screaming, “Oh my God! We’re all gonna die!”
Not that most people would believe him. Heather would. But he wasn't going to tell her, at least not yet. She’d been through so much lately he wasn’t about to lay more stress on her. Besides, whatever it was had been looking at him.
Something like that had to have its origins in the Rho Project. But why would they look in on a high school kid? Maybe Jennifer had been right about his attracting too much attention to himself. Whatever it was, Mark wanted to have a theory before he discussed this with the two girls.
With one more glance up at Heather’s window, Mark turned back toward his house. At least for now, this was his problem and he would figure it out on his own.