He looked puzzled.
“You’re a strange man. I never understood you.”
“Well, I know now why you never liked me.”
But even as I said the words, I felt that something was wrong. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. Hansen didn’t belong here.
A puzzled look came across his face, as if he had just realized the same thing. His body stretched, as though he were feeling a twinge at his back. He opened his mouth and a trickle of blood spilled from one corner. He coughed wetly, and more blood came, a cloud of it that sprayed the wall as he was pushed forward, collapsing to his knees. His right hand fumbled at his pocket as he tried to withdraw his gun, but his strength failed him and he fell flat on his stomach, his eyes half closed, his breathing growing shallower and shallower.
The man who had attacked him stepped over his body. He was in his midtwenties: twenty-six years old, to be exact about it. I knew, because I had hired him. I had worked alongside him in the Great Lost Bear. I had seen his kindness to customers, witnessed his easy way with the line chefs and the waitstaff.
And for all that time, he had kept his true nature hidden.
“Hello, Gary,” I said. “Or do you prefer your other name?”
Gary Maser held the sharpened machete in one hand. In the other was a gun.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “They’re just names. I’ve had more of them than you could imagine.”
“You’re deluded,” I said. “Somebody has been whispering lies to you. You’re a nobody. You cut up Jimmy, and you killed Mickey Wallace in that kitchen back there, but that doesn’t make you special. You’re barely human, but that doesn’t mean you’re an angel.”
“Believe that if you like,” he said. “It’s of no consequence.”
But my words sounded hollow to me. I had chosen this place in which to confront what had been hunting me, transforming it in my mind to what it once was, but something in Gary M Z Ang in Garaser seemed to sense that, and respond to it. For an instant, I saw what my father had seen on that night in Pearl River before he pulled the trigger. I saw what had concealed itself within Maser, eating away at him until, at last, there was nothing left of him but an empty shell. His face became a mask, transparent and temporary: behind it, a dark mass moved, old and withered and filled with rage. Shadows curled around it like black smoke, polluting the room, fouling the moonlight, and I knew in my heart that more than my life was at risk here. Whatever torments Maser might inflict upon me in this house, they would be nothing compared with what was to come when my life was ended.
He took another step forward. Even in the moonlight, I could see that his eyes were blacker than I remembered, pupil and iris forming what appeared to be a single dark mass.
“Why me?” I asked. “What have I done?”
“It is not only what you have done, but what you may do.”
“And what is that? How can you know what’s to come?”
“We sensed the threat that you posed. He sensed it.”
“Who? Who sent you?”
Maser shook his head. “No more,” he said, and then, almost tenderly, “Time to stop running. Close your eyes, and I will bring all of your grief to an end.”
I tried to laugh. “I’m touched by your concern.” I needed time. We all needed time. “You’ve been patient,” I said. “How long have you worked with me? Five months?”
“I was waiting,” he said.
“For what?”
He smiled, and his face changed. There was a radiance to it that had not been there before.
“For her,” he said.
I turned slowly as I felt a draft at my back. In the fully open doorway stood the dark-haired woman from the bar. Like Gary’s, her eyes now seemed entirely black. She too held a gun, a silver .22. The shadows that formed around her were like dark wings against the night.
“So long,” she whispered, but her eyes were fixed on the man across from her, not on me. “So very long…”
I understood then that they had come to this place separately, drawn by me and the promise of seeing each other again, but this was the first time they had met, the first time, if Epstein was to be believed, since my father had pulled the trigger on them at a patch of waste ground in Pearl River.
But suddenly the woman broke from her reverie and spun. The gun barked softly twice as she fired into the darkness. Maser, startled, seemed uncertain of what to do, and I knew then that he wanted me to die slowly. He wanted to use his blade on me. But as I moved, he fired the gun, and I felt the ferocious impact as the bullet hit my chest. I stumbled back, striking the door as I fell, and it struck the woman in the back but did not close. A second bullet hit me, and this time there was a searing pain at my neck. I raised my left hand to the wound, and blood pumped through my fingers.
I staggered up the stairs, but Maser’s attention was no longer focused on me. There were voices at the back of the house, Z A the housand he had turned to face the threat. I heard the front door slam shut and the woman screamed something as I reached the top of the stairs and threw myself flat on the floor as more shots came, carving a path through the dusty air above my head. My vision was blurring, and now that I was lying down I found myself unable to rise again. I crawled along the floor, using my right hand like a claw, pushing myself with my feet, my left hand still trying to stem the flow of blood from my neck. I drifted from past to present, so that at times I was moving along a carpeted hallway through clean, brightly lit rooms, and at others there were only bare boards and dust and decay.
There were footsteps coming up the stairs. I heard firing from the kitchen below, but there was no gunfire in response. It was as though Maser were shooting at shadows.
I slipped into our old bedroom and managed to get to my feet using the wall as support, then stumbled through the ghost of a bed and slumped in a corner.
Bed. No bed.
The sound of water dripping from a faucet. No sound.
There were footsteps on the stairs. The woman appeared in the doorway. Her face was clearly visible in the light from the window behind me. She looked troubled.
“What are you doing?” she said.
I tried to answer, but I could not.
Bed. No bed. Water. Footsteps, but the woman had not moved.
She looked around, and I knew that she was seeing what I was seeing: worlds upon worlds.
“It won’t save you,” she said. “Nothing will.”
She advanced. As she did so, she ejected the spent clip and prepared to insert another, then stopped. She looked down to her left.
Bed. No bed. Water.
A little girl was beside her, and then another figure emerged from the shadows behind her: a woman with blond hair, her face now visible for the first time since I had found her in the kitchen, and where once there had been only blood and bone, there was now the wife I had loved as she was before the blade had finished its work upon her.
Light. No light.
An empty hallway. A hallway empty no longer.
“No,” whispered the dark-haired woman. She slammed the full clip home and tried to fire at me, but she seemed to be struggling to maintain her aim, as though she were being hampered by figures I could only half glimpse. A bullet struck the wall two feet to my left. I could barely keep my eyes open as I reached into my pocket and felt my palm close around the compact device. I withdrew it and pointed it at the woman as she wrenched her own weapon free at last, striking out with her left hand to repel what was behind her.
Bed. No bed. A woman falling. Susan. A little girl at Semjaza’s side, tugging at her pants leg, clawing at her belly.
And Semjaza herself as she truly was, a thing hunched and dark, pink skulled and winged: ugliness with a terrible remnant of beauty.
I raised my weapon. It looked like a flashlight to her.
“You can’t kill me,” she said. “Not with that.”
She smiled and raised her gun.
“Don’t. Want. To,” I said, and fired.
The little Taser C2 couldn’t miss from that range. The barbed electrodes caught her in the chest and she went down jerking as fifty thousand volts shot through her, the gun falling from her hand, her body twisting on the floor.
Bed. No bed.
Woman.
Wife.
Daughter.
Darkness.