Standing in the kitchen door and waiting for him to come back, she can't remember all the things she said, only that each one was a little worse, a little more perfectly tailored to hurt. At one point she was appalled to hear how much she sounded like Darla at her worst
- just one more hectoring Debusher - and by then his smile was no longer even hanging in there. He was looking at her solemnly and she was terrified by how large his eyes were, magnified by the wetness shimmering on their surfaces until they seemed to eat up his face. She stopped in the middle of something about how his fingernails were always dirty and he gnawed on them like a rat when he was reading. She stopped and at that moment there were no engine sounds from in front of The Shamrock and The Mill downtown, no screeching tires, not even the faint sound of this weekend's band playing at The Rock. The silence was enormous and she realized she wanted to go back and had no idea how to do it. The simplest thing - I love you anyway, Scott, come to bed - will not occur to her until later. Not until after the bool.
"Scott...I - "
She had no idea where to go from there, and it seemed there was no need. Scott raised the forefinger of his left hand like a teacher who means to make a particularly important point, and the smile actually resurfaced on his lips. Some sort of smile, anyway.
"Wait," he said.
"Wait?"
He looked pleased, as if she had grasped a difficult concept. "Wait."
And before she could say anything else he simply walked off into the dark, back straight, walk straight (no drunk in him now), slim hips slinging in his jeans. She said his name once - "Scott?" - but he only raised that forefinger again: wait. Then the shadows swallowed him.
17
Now she stands looking anxiously down the lawn. She has turned off the kitchen light, thinking that may make it easier to see him, but even with the help of the pole-light in the yard next door, the shadows take over halfway down the hill. In the next yard, a dog barks hoarsely. That dog's name is Pluto, she knows because she has heard the people over there yelling at it from time to time, fat lot of good it does. She thinks of the breaking-glass sound she heard a minute ago: like the barking, the breaking sounded close. Closer than the other sounds that populate this busy, unhappy night. Why oh why did she have to tee off on him like that? She didn't even want to see the stupid Swedish movie in the first place! And why had she felt such joy in it? Such mean and filthy joy?
To that she has no answer. The late-spring night breathes around her, and exactly how long has he been down there in the dark? Only two minutes? Five, maybe? It seems longer. And that sound of breaking glass, did that have anything to do with Scott?
The greenhouse is down there. Parks.
There's no reason that should make her heart beat faster, but it does. And just as she feels that increased rhythm she sees motion beyond the place where her eyes lose their ability to see much of anything. A second later the moving thing resolves itself into a man. She feels relief, but it doesn't dissipate her fear. She keeps thinking about the sound of breaking glass. And there's something wrong with the way he's moving. His limber, straight walk is gone.
Now she does call his name, but what comes out is little more than a whisper: "Scott?"
At the same time her hand is scrabbling around on the wall, feeling for the switch that turns on the light over the stoop.
Her call is low, but the shadowy figure plodding up the lawn - yes, that's a plod, all right, not a walk but a plod - raises its head just as Lisey's curiously numb fingers find the light-switch and flick it. "It's a bool, Lisey! " he shouts as the light springs on, and could he have planned it better if he had stage-managed it? She thinks not. In his voice she hears mad jubilant relief, as if he has fixed everything. "And not just any bool, it's a blood-bool!"