Thoughts of Amy St. Pierre and Johnny Irkenham suddenly explode in T.J.'s mind. He hears (or imagines he hears) stealthy footsteps behind the hedge: the Fisherman, having secured dinner, has come back for dessert!
T.J. tries to scream and cannot. His throat has shrunk down to a pinhole. Instead of screaming, he hunches himself over the handlebars of his bike and begins pedaling. He swerves off the sidewalk and into the street, wanting to get away from the dark bulk of that hedge just as fast as he can. When he leaves the curb, the front tire of his Huffy bike squashes through the remains of his Slurpee. As he pedals toward Chase Street, bent over his handlebars like a Grand Prix racer, he leaves a dark and shiny track on the pavement. It looks like blood. Somewhere nearby, a crow caws. It sounds like laughter.
16 Robin Hood Lane: we've been here before, as the chorus girl said to the archbishop. Peek through the kitchen window and we see Judy Marshall, asleep in the rocking chair in the corner. There's a book in her lap, the John Grisham novel we last saw on her bedside table. Sitting beside her on the floor is half a cup of cold coffee. Judy managed to read ten pages before dozing off. We shouldn't blame Mr. Grisham's narrative skills; Judy had a hard night last night, and it's not the first. It's been over two months since she last got more than two hours of sleep in one stretch. Fred knows something is wrong with his wife, but has no idea how deep it runs. If he did, he would be a lot more than frightened. Soon, God help him, he is going to have a better picture of her mental state.
Now she begins to moan thickly, and to turn her head from side to side. Those nonsense words begin to issue from her again. Most of them are too sleep-fuzzy to understand, but we catch abbalah and gorg.
Her eyes suddenly flash open. They are a brilliant, royal blue in the morning light, which fills the kitchen with summer's dusty gold.
"Ty!" she gasps, and her feet give a convulsive waking jerk. She looks at the clock over the stove. It is twelve minutes past nine, and everything seems twisted, as it so often does when we sleep deeply but not well or long. She has sucked some miserable, not-quite-a-nightmare dream after her like mucusy strings of afterbirth: men with fedora hats pulled down so as to shadow their faces, walking on long R. Crumb legs that ended in big round-toed R. Crumb shoes, sinister keep on truckin' sharpies who moved too fast against a city background — Milwaukee? Chicago? — and in front of a baleful orange sky. The dream's sound track was the Benny Goodman band playing "King Porter Stomp," the one her father had always played when he was getting a little shot, and the feeling of the dream had been a terrible darkwood mix of terror and grief: awful things had happened, but the worst was waiting.
There's none of the relief people usually feel upon waking from bad dreams — the relief she herself had felt when she had been younger and . . . and . . .
"And sane," she says in a croaky, just-woke-up voice. " 'King Porter Stomp.' Think of that." To her it had always sounded like the music you heard in the old cartoons, the ones where mice in white gloves ran in and out of ratholes with dizzying, feverish speed. Once, when her father was dancing her around to that one, she had felt something hard poking against her. Something in his pants. After that, when he put on his dance music, she tried to be somewhere else.
"Quit it," she says in the same croaky voice. It's a crow's voice, and it occurs to her that there was a crow in her dream. Sure, you bet. The Crow Gorg.
"Gorg means death," she says, and licks her dry upper lip without realizing it. Her tongue comes out even farther, and on the return swipe the tip licks across her nostrils, warm and wet and somehow comforting. "Over there, gorg means death. Over there in the — "
Faraway is the word she doesn't say. Before she can, she sees something on the kitchen table that wasn't there before. It's a wicker box. A sound is coming from it, some low sleepy sound.
Distress worms into her lower belly, making her bowels feel loose and watery. She knows what a box like that is called: a creel. It's a fisherman's creel.
There is a fisherman in French Landing these days. A bad fisherman.
"Ty?" she calls, but of course there is no answer. The house is empty except for her. Dale is at work, and Ty will be out playing — you bet. It's half-past July, the heart of summer vacation, and Ty will be rolling around the town, doing all the Ray Bradbury–August Derleth things boys do when they've got the whole endless summer day to do them in. But he won't be alone; Dale has talked with him about buddying up until the Fisherman is caught, at least until then, and so has she. Judy has no great liking for the Wexler kid (the Metzger or Renniker kids, either), but there's safety in numbers. Ty probably isn't having any great cultural awakenings this summer, but at least —