David Leo Rice
Mr. and Mrs. Feaster found their daughter, June, hanging from the backmost hook in her walk-in closet when they went up to tell her that dinner was ready. They left her there and went down to the kitchen table to think, where they ended up sitting all night, as the chicken pot pie cooled untouched in front of them. They didn't tell her sister, Ava, though both of them knew, without saying anything, that the news would never need to be broken. Ava had surely known that something was wrong sooner than either of them ever could have. What they didn't know until the next morning, after both skipping work, was that they'd find Ava, whom they'd assumed was staying over at a friend's house, hanging in the back of her own closet, in solidarity with or in mockery of her older sister.
The question of which it was hung (no pun intended, Jane Feaster thought, hating herself) unanswered because, as soon as they found her, a commotion on the lawn compelled both parents' attention away from the grisly inches beneath their second daughter's curled toes. The Feasters glided down the stairs and opened the back door to behold the paralyzed faces of the Sudokis, their neighbors from across the grassy lot shared by all the houses on the easternmost edge of the development known as Sandman Crescent.
The two couples stared at one another and, like a four-part pantomime troupe, understood everything that needed to be said without speaking a word. Each had privately hoped that one of the others would break the silence, but now they could all see it was better this way. Mrs. Sudoki pocketed the ominous note she'd carried over, while her question—"Have you seen our son?"—died in her throat.
For a while longer, the two couples stood there, letting the day pass as their children—the Sudokis' son, Tommy, who'd briefly dated the Feasters' daughter, Ava, would later be found hanging from a rafter in the Feasters' basement—drifted away from them, leaving only a set of hard, blue bodies behind.
By the time the Feasters retreated, alone, back into their kitchen, rumors had begun to surface on the Sandman Crescent Homeowners' E-Newsletter, updated twice a day on slow days, and almost constantly, it turned out, in the midst of a crisis. "24 DEATHS OF BOYS AND GIRLS BETWEEN THE AGES OF 13 AND 17," read the headline, above a video-collage of hanging bodies, tilting back and forth, their faces blurred just enough that it wasn't clear how bad the damage, appearance-wise, really was. Jane Feaster wanted to laugh at the blurred faces and the way they triggered an instinct to adjust the resolution on the tablet she was viewing them on, as if the problem with the image was its lack of clarity, rather than what that clarity would've revealed.
When the laugh refused to stay down, she excused herself from her husband, Seth, who was most of the way catatonic in front of the screen that kept auto-refreshing, the bodies expanding silently toward the edges of the frame. She locked herself in the downstairs bathroom and ran the water and then let the laugh out, first in a hiccoughing series of chuckles and then a single ponderous guffaw, so loud and hard it made the skin on the back of her skull bunch up and the tears that hadn't come yet begin to flow. They poured from her face into the running sink.
Then she turned the sink off, patted her eyes dry with a plush hand towel, and walked back through the kitchen, where her husband's screen had now filled with more bodies than it could encompass. Taking her keys from the bowl beside the larger bowl that held the apples and the spotty bananas, she said, "I'm going for a drive," and walked out, into what was now a hot, stagnant day, full of air that no one was breathing.
She got in the blue Peugeot that her job, because it did business with France, had provided her with, and drove out of Sandman Crescent onto the wide-open boulevard which, if you followed it long enough in one direction, would eventually take you to the airport. She drove in the other direction, through a long tunnel of overgrown trees, the abandoned asphalt crunchy with acorns, and then she crossed into the town that Sandman Crescent had, in a manner of speaking, replaced. There was no formal prohibition on entering the town, though there was also no reason for doing so, and thus the journey was never made. Perhaps in this way, then, it was slightly prohibited after all, she thought, considering it in this light for the first time. Nevertheless, she drove this route often in times of stress and agitation, on bleary evenings after a failed day at work, or in the hour before dawn, after a night when she'd given up trying to sleep by two, yet gone on lying in bed until four. This, right now, was obviously worse, even much worse, than any of those times, and yet there was no place to go during a bad time, no matter how bad, other than where she was going now.
So she followed the usual route, past the boarded-up movie theater, the vacant storefronts that might've once sold toys, or lingerie, past the town hall whose entire staff had disbanded after the Sandman Crescent land deal went through, and out to the woods behind the town on the far side, along an access road she'd first discovered after a sleepless night when she nodded off behind the wheel and woke up in front of a one-story cabin with a pile of Coke signs jammed into its weedy lawn, bundled together by spiderwebs. She'd pushed the rotten door open and let herself in and sat alone at the linoleum-topped kitchen table, watching motes hover and listening to distant wind chimes, thinking, and then not thinking, and then thinking again.
It had, since that day, become a habit, a ritual even, the kind of non-work, non-home other place that, she'd read once in a magazine at the dentist's office, everyone needed and too few people ever found.
She, Jane Feaster, had found it, and it had accounted, in no small part, for her ability to get through the last ten years in Sandman Crescent, to bide her time without losing herself entirely. Over those years, she'd planted a little garden—nothing fancy, but parsley and mint and a few wildflowers—and even stocked the cabin's shelves with the occasional bottle of wine or box of cookies, and thereby made of it a refuge, a place for herself alone.
She was back in the refuge now, stepping out among the pile of Coke signs, then checking her parsley and mint, then pushing the front door open, which, though it seemed slightly more ajar than she'd left it, she didn't think anything of until she was already in the dim kitchen, regarding the slumped shape of an old man in a blue jumpsuit.
She knew, in the same half-smothered part of her mind that remembered why today was unlike any other, that she should leave—even if he didn't look dangerous, the odds that staying here with him was a bad idea were much higher than the odds that it was a good one—but she didn't leave. Instead, she stood where she was, her back to the open door, and waited for him to look her way. She did this, it occurred to her, because some yet-deeper part of her mind had known he was going to be here, and was thus reassured to find that he was.
When he still hadn't moved after all this time, however long it had been, she considered the possibility that he was dead or in a coma, and again considered leaving. But when she didn't leave this time, she decided there was nothing to do but walk into his line of sight.
She stood before him, watching a strand of spittle hang between his bottom lip and his left knee. Then, bracing herself for the possibility of a violent retaliation, she kicked his right leg, first softly, then hard, then, finally, very hard.
He looked up, his eyes milky, his cheeks and chin spotted with stubble fighting for purchase among deep rows of scar tissue, his mouth puckered off to the left.
Jane Feaster could tell that she would, yet again, have to initiate the next step in the interaction. There would never, she could see now, be a back and forth between them.
She closed her eyes and pictured the paramedics swarming her house, bypassing her inert husband in the kitchen to cut her daughters down from their closets upstairs, then dragging their zipped-up bodies out of the house for the last time. She shivered and felt her bones liquify, then re-freeze at jagged angles, making standing almost more painful than she could bear.
To take her mind off it, she looked down into the milky eyes that had already begun to drift away from her, and said, "They're dead. Both of them. My daughters."
It was the first time she'd said it aloud and thus, she realized, the first time she'd heard it said. Now it was true.
"Who killed them?" the man asked, through his side-mouth, his voice high and strained.
Jane Feaster looked at him and the first thing that moved through her head was you did. The word themselves, surely the truth, hung somewhere in the air, but it felt foreign. Unsayable. As useless as the hanging bodies.
So, instead of saying it, she simply turned and walked through the rotten front door, not bothering to fit it back into its frame, and got back in her car and drove down the overgrown boulevard in the direction of the airport this time, and didn't stop until she was pulling into Sandman Crescent.
The cul-de-sac in front of her house was choked with emergency vehicles and news vans, all of them bearing the Sandman Crescent logo, all of them idling, contributing to the sense she had, as she searched for a place to park, that the constant movement of the scene had reached a kind of anxious equilibrium, everyone in motion but no one going anywhere. Paramedics dragged full stretchers out of the houses while others dragged empty stretchers in, trading places with a nod, and all around them newscasters and parents shuffled back and forth, giving statements or refusing to give statements, which were also, in essence, a kind of statement, and looked identical from even a few feet away.
Jane Feaster left the car on the first stretch of curb she could find past the crush of ambulances and news vans and walked toward the gift shop and cafeteria that served as one of the hubs of Sandman Crescent, the other being on the far side of a long row of storage depots and garages, farther out than she'd ever been. The longer she walked in this direction, the quieter things became, so that, before long, it wasn't difficult to imagine she'd left not only the news of the travesty, but the travesty itself behind, and found her way into a zone of quarantine, where nothing could touch her.
She bought a bowl of green Jell-O and a room temperature coffee from the self-service cafeteria line, and sat alone in the buzzing white room to choke them down. A muted TV was hooked up to the ceiling, radiating the news that was being recorded in a studio up the street. Jane Feaster looked at it only intermittently, looking down the rest of the time into her green Jell-O, and then into her room temperature coffee, checking each substance, as if one might reveal something the other couldn't. She sensed that, once both were gone, she'd have nowhere left to look, and then the news would sink in unfiltered.
So, she ate and drank slowly, watching her face break apart and then grow back together in the mottled green surface as her spoon disturbed the Jell-O and then waited until all movement ceased before taking the next bite. Once, as she was picking up her coffee cup, she heard footsteps in the prep area behind her, and, before she could stop it, her head filled with the image of the man from the cabin, his milky eyes overflowing, leaking fluid down his cheeks and onto his shirt. She turned to face him and saw only a young woman in a hairnet stretching plastic wrap over a tray of rolls, but the man's image lingered. He seemed to be toying with her, announcing that he could appear whenever he wanted, and perhaps that he'd been appearing for years. Perhaps, she thought, he's been flitting around, stealing into our closets with a coil of rope, ever since Sandman Crescent opened and started luring in couples of a certain class from all over the otherwise-collapsing country. Perhaps he's caused all the deaths that have so far occurred here; perhaps without him, we'd all be immortal.
When all the time that could pass in the cafeteria had passed, she bused her dishes into an empty plastic tray and went out the way she'd come in, walking by her car where it was parked, and where it would remain until she stumbled into it—she could already see herself doing this—sometime before dawn tomorrow, and drove down the tree-choked boulevard and back to the cabin, which, she thought, she might as well do now, since it was bound to happen anyway.
She walked to her car and reached out to the latch to open the driver's side door, but then pulled her hand back, and put it in her pocket. No, she thought, as she began to walk toward her house instead. My behavior so far has been eccentric but, most likely, comprehensible within the allowances that people make for grief. But to push it further, to not go home at all tonight, to leave my husband in the house alone, that's something else. That's a new low, for which people would likely cease to grieve with me and begin to grieve against me. An eventuality best not pursued.
So, she put her keys into the pocket that didn't already have her hand in it, and walked through the silence of Sandman Crescent at dusk, past house after house with the TV on in its front window, until she arrived at her own, with the same TV on in the same front window. She stopped outside, registering that this would be the first time she walked through the front door without the prospect of greeting her daughters—without, she thought, the prospect of greeting any aspect of the life I've lived in this house the whole time I've lived in it—and then, having pictured what this would be like, she walked in, and found it was exactly how she'd pictured it.
Her husband was sitting alone at the kitchen table eating from a takeout container of Lucky Dragon Chinese, one of Sandman Crescent's seven gourmet takeout options, all prepared by the same kitchen, staring at a tablet that showed the same newsfeed as the TV, perched on the counter a few feet away. Jane Feaster stood behind him and watched the updates—"37 SANDMAN CRESCENT TEENAGERS FOUND DEAD IN ONE DAY, MOTIVE NOT YET DETERMINED"—crawl across both screens, or both versions of the screen.
She stood behind him and watched him eat, a bottle of red wine empty next to a pile of napkins, and she hoped he wouldn't turn and ask or say anything. For a while, he didn't. When he finally did, looking her over and gesturing with his greasy chopsticks at whatever was left of the noodles he'd ordered, she held up her hand, palm out, an unambiguous sign for him to stop trying to communicate. It was too soon. He stopped. "I'm gonna watch by myself," she said, picking up the tablet he'd been staring at without inviting him to follow. Though his eyes lingered on the screen, he didn't protest. There is, she thought, at least that much to be said for him.
Upstairs, she got in bed and fixated on the news, which had cut to an image of a lone teenager in a white room, a boy about June's age, though not one who looked familiar. He sat on a bed and hugged himself as a team of doctors, or TV-men in doctor suits, asked, again and again, if he knew why this had happened. "LAST SURVIVING SANDMAN CRESCENT TEENAGER: OUR ONLY HOPE TO LEARN WHAT WENT WRONG," read the banner, which boiled at the bottom of the screen while the boy squirmed on the bed.
Jane Feaster turned it off and placed it on the pillow next to her and closed her eyes, still half-sitting against the headboard. She could hear the house creaking all around her, and couldn't help transposing the sound onto that of her daughters creaking on their nooses, turning in slow semi-circles in the dark backs of the closets they'd been found in. The fact that she'd seen them carried out by paramedics—and had she really seen this, or only assumed it must've occurred?—did nothing to dispel the growing sense that, were she to check the backs of the closets now, she'd find them, as if for the first time. It almost seemed as though—she was partly asleep now, beginning to dream—her finding them would set in motion the news cycle that was already, she knew, in motion, like two orders of time would diverge and then converge, and it was up to her to decide when and how this should happen.
She slumped lower in bed, squinting at the overhead lights that were still on. She knew, in the part of herself that was still awake, that she should brush her teeth, wash her face, put in her nightguard, change into her pajamas, and then go back to bed with the lights off, but the rest of her was deep in the rift between timelines, exploring a realm in which it was neither the case that she'd found her daughters nor that she hadn't, in which they were both alive and dead at the same time, and only opening those closets could seal their fate. Down in this part of herself, she unlocked the tablet, which had also gone to sleep, and watched the paramedics cleaning the room in which the last surviving teenager had been quarantined, the walls now spattered with blood, and this, too, felt like an occurrence she'd ordained.
Terrified of what she might, without quite meaning to, cause to happen next, she forced herself to wake up and get out of bed. She began to get dressed and then, realizing that she already was dressed, simply took a pair of shoes from the floor, stepped into them, and walked downstairs, past her husband, swaddled in a blanket on the couch, another TV projecting news across his face, and back up the street and into her car, exactly as she'd pictured herself doing last night. She tweezed the keys from her pocket, where they'd luckily remained throughout her half-sleep, and began to roll up the silent curves of the cul-de-sac, toward the boulevard which, if you followed it in the other direction long enough, would take you all the way to the airport.
She drove back toward the abandoned town, and, beyond it, the abandoned cabin. Or, she thought, the formerly abandoned cabin. She closed her eyes, relying on the sound of crunching acorns to keep her on the road. She could see the two worlds, the one in which all of this hadn't happened and the one in which it had, coming apart, at first gently, as if there were merely a loose thread in the weave between them, but then more and more violently, as if something, or someone, were forcing the rift open. She saw a scabby pair of hands, then a gnarled, scarred arm, then another, then a head with no hair and two milky eyes, and she understood, even if only because she wanted to, that this man, whoever he was, had emerged in tandem with the deaths, and was thus a piece of the same phenomenon. Or not just a piece, she thought, as the car ground to a halt in the thick grass in front of the cabin. A version of it. A man-sized embodiment of something otherwise too vast to comprehend. She closed her eyes again and saw herself, inside her own vision, helping this man through, hauling him out of the rift and into the world that she was forced to go on inhabiting.
Our children didn't kill themselves, she thought, as she forced her way through the rotten door. They couldn't have. They'd have no reason to. Their role was to live. His role, on the other hand, she thought, as she entered the cabin and began looking for him, was to kill. That's what he came here to do.
It all made sense now. Maybe too much sense, but that was better than not enough.
Despite the dawn beginning to break outside, it was dark in the cabin, which, she realized now, had no electric lighting. Probably no electricity at all. He wasn't at the table, which meant that he must be sleeping, or gone. Part of her wanted to leave before finding out which it was, but then she was in the bedroom, brooding over the body where it lay clutching a too-small sheet to its chest.
She watched him like that, cooing slightly in his sleep. Then she took out her phone and snapped a picture of him where he lay. Though it made no sound, he stirred as his likeness was absorbed, and rolled onto his back and then, after she snapped another picture, he opened his eyes. It was unclear how well he could see through them, but he seemed to register her presence. He flinched and sat up, drawing his knees to his chest and beginning to shake.
Much as she wanted to loathe him, even needed to loathe him, she couldn't just then. Whatever this man has done, she thought, he bears no mark of it. He's as innocent as anything alive can be. Still, something had been decided, and now her duty was to see it through. In a sense, she had as little say in what was about to happen as he did.
Given this, she decided that the least, and perhaps also the most, she could do was to warn him. "Do you have a name?" she asked, by way of beginning to speak.
He looked at her so long she repeated the question. After she'd repeated it again, he pulled down his collar to reveal a red web of scar tissue just beneath his right clavicle. Leaning in, she could make out the word GARY.
"Gary?" she asked.
He pulled his collar back up without nodding, and she decided this was what he'd be called. Gary. Drifter Gary. Fine.
"Look, Gary," she began. "Some kids have died in the place where I live. Many kids, my own included." Her voice was measured and slow, loose gravel holding back an ocean of tears. "Nobody knows why this happened, but there has to be a reason. So," her voice quavered, and she could taste the first drops of salt, "I'm going to tell them you did it. I'm going to say," her eyes were streaming now, turning her vision as filmy as she assumed Drifter Gary's must be, "that you came here from far away for the sole purpose of going on a murder spree. You made it look like suicide, of course, but that's what you do. You go place to place murdering children, and you get away with it, because the parents blame themselves. But not anymore. Now it's . . ." She fell against the bed, weeping.
She wept, convulsing into the sweaty mattress, until a hand, firm and cool, landed on her neck, and she seized up, terrified that he was about to strangle her. Also, in a sense, hoping he would. But the hand remained gentle, stroking her skin, kneading the muscles in her upper back just a little, enough to soothe her.
This went on until she stopped weeping, and then she sat back on her haunches and regarded Drifter Gary who, despite his deformed mouth, was smiling. An expression she'd never seen from him before. Oh God, she thought, he has no idea what I just told him. He thinks I'm his friend.
Getting back to her feet, she forced down the vulnerability that had surfaced along with the tears, and said, "Look, please try to understand me." She made her voice as even as she could. "I'm going to tell them you killed our kids. They're going to believe me, because they want to. Your picture," she held up her phone, "is going to be all over the Sandman Crescent news in a few hours. And I'm going to tell them where you live. They're going to come for you. So," her voice began to quaver again, "please leave now. Get out of here and never come back. You must've come from somewhere. Go back there."
He sat on the bed, grinning like a puppy. She'd rarely seen anyone so happy. Part of her wanted to shoo him away, to viscerally express that he needed to run, in case he truly couldn't understand a word she'd said, but she felt that such an act would only dehumanize them both. So she said it one last time—"Seriously, pack your things and walk out of this cabin and never return"—and then, as if by way of example, she too turned and walked out.
On the drive back, once again in the direction of the airport, she prepared her story. It would be terse and emphatic, shot through with grief and disorientation so that it wouldn't have to make sense. No one would expect that. It only needed to connect, which, she thought, it could hardly fail to. And where, after all, had Drifter Gary come from, if not the rift through which all badness enters the world, with the express purpose of ruining all that is good? The longer she thought about it, the truer it rang.
By the time she'd made it back, into the front office of Sandman Crescent's 24-hour news station, and communicated that she had a story of crucial import to tell, the thing she'd decided to set in motion was already in motion. Now all she had to do—and all she could do—was sit back and watch it unfold. It was as if the story she'd prepared for the news was on the news already, and she was at home watching it, shaking her head in a combination of horror and relief to learn that the rash of deaths hadn't been suicides after all, but rather the work of a malicious and deranged stranger, envious of the lives they'd made for themselves here at Sandman Crescent, while the rest of the country, to say nothing of the world, was growing unlivable.
She said all this to the newscaster in front of her, in a private room with trays of grapes and cups of water lined up along one wall. She explained her minor transgression of driving alone to the cabin in the woods behind the abandoned town, and how this led to her discovery of the larger transgression, that of Drifter Gary's arrival, seemingly out of nowhere, on the exact day that all their children died, and then she handed over her phone with the photo of Drifter Gary sleeping, milky fluid dripping from his partly-closed eyes. And then, almost before the newscaster handed the phone back, the photo was live, the story was out, Jane Feaster had been thanked for her courage, and then she was in front of the cameras, telling the same story she'd told in the private room, and then she was being escorted out, through a phalanx of volunteer troops already massing in the cul-de-sac, piling weapons into the trunks of their cars while another news team circulated with cameras, asking what they were going to do when they found him.
Amidst this confusion, Jane Feaster managed to walk unseen. She cut away from the main road and toward the wooded path that led to the Sandman Crescent Golf Course and Swimming Pool Complex, where she'd sat with her daughters last summer and read the then-anodyne Sandman Crescent Homeowners' E-Newsletter on her tablet, while they did likewise on theirs. Everything was dark except for sporadic lamps recessed in the flowerbeds to show off the roses and peonies at night. She followed this trail as far as she could, hoping only to put the rumbling of engines and clinking of firearms out of earshot. She walked and walked, unsure how far she could get. Now she found herself walking through the Sandman Crescent Cemetery, past the fresh gravesites reserved for the children, then past the graves of the generation that had lived here before, and then into an open field, marked with plots yet to be filled. Here, it seemed to her, whatever she'd been trying to escape was waiting, claiming the unclaimed ground.
Her breath grew short and her heart sped up as she pictured the horde of armed parents kicking down Drifter Gary's door and shooting him dead, or taking him alive, gagged and bundled in one of their trucks, back to some soundproof chamber in the heart of the Sandman Crescent News and Entertainment Complex, where his slow death of torture and starvation, or his even slower death of imprisonment and loneliness, would expiate the guilt that was otherwise crackling in the air around her, building charge.
She sped up. As her trot turned into a run, she realized that another decision had been made, down in the back of her brain where, perhaps, all decisions were made, on their own in the dark.
You've got to save him, was the decision. You've got to at least try. You'll never leave this cemetery, not really, if you don't try. It will claim you, just as it claimed June and Ava and the Sudokis' son. Maybe you'll live on, but not as something human. Not as a person within reality, but as a thing hovering above it, or just off to the side.
She sped up, fighting to keep pace with a path that had begun to appear in front of her, a little brighter than the surrounding darkness. At the same time, another path extended behind her, perhaps back to Sandman Crescent, but more likely off to someplace else. Someplace only accessible today, right now. A place where she'd become someone new. As she ran, she could see herself taking that path instead, away from the house she'd lived in, the car she'd driven, and the company that did business with France.
She ran as fast as she could, and then, somehow, faster than that. At this pace, she made it out of the open fields, through a stand of trees, and into the ruins of the town in less than an hour—an hour that, she hoped, the troops had wasted in stockpiling arms and mugging for the camera. There were times when the two paths seemed to tangle, overlapping and then diverging again, but there was no time to consider which one she was on. The only imperative now was to not slow down as she ran past gutted storefronts and caving-in strip malls, then past a church without a spire and an office complex with a circle of roller-chairs jammed together in the parking lot out front.
When Jane Feaster dead-ended on the weedy lawn for the first time on foot, there were no vehicles in sight. She hadn't given precise directions in the newsroom, so, as she stepped through the rotten doorway, she couldn't help but entertain the thought that perhaps they weren't coming after all. Perhaps, she thought, as she stepped into the musty, dawn-lit kitchen, this cabin is here for me alone. Perhaps they are, right now, driving in circles, growing restless with their loaded guns in their laps, cursing me for wasting their time. And perhaps there never was any Drifter Gary and thus, though I will grieve the death of my children for the rest of my life, I will be spared further contact with whatever forces almost transfigured me on the way over here.
This hope proved so compelling that she didn't notice Drifter Gary, sitting at the table with a beatific dummy grin on his face, until he shifted his weight, causing the ancient chair to creak. Then it all began to descend on her again. Her lips began to quiver and she had to sit down. As soon as she'd landed in the seat across from him, with a creak similar to the one he'd made a moment ago, she sensed that she'd never leave the cabin. They'll find us here, she thought, like we'd forgotten they were coming.
Then she thought: No, not us. Just me.
She turned to Drifter Gary and said, "You have to leave. Now."
He didn't respond, though his milky eyes were on her, some flicker of life discernible within them. Whether or not he can understand, she thought, he's listening. She decided to raise her voice. "You have to leave now!" she shouted, loud enough that he flinched.
Still, he didn't get up. He just smiled wider, a look of genuine contentment on his face. It unnerved her far more than any sign of evil would have.
"I said you did something you didn't do," she shouted, in the same register as before. "I told them you killed my children, and many people's children. I told them you were a killer. They're going to torture you."
Drifter Gary continued to smile.
"But you're not a killer!" she shouted, shaking the table. "Maybe, for a moment, you were, but you're not anymore." She paused, building up the energy to shout again. Then she resumed: "You're not a killer! You're not a killer!! You're not anything at all!!!"
She was near her maximum volume now. Luckily, it seemed to be working. At last, a look of confusion and then fear came over him. The grin was gone.
Emboldened, she continued, "That's right! Run. Run now, while you can! They'll torture you if they find you here. You'll die in a locked room, maybe soon, maybe years from now. Whatever happened to you before," she let her eyes play over the scars covering his face and neck, "will be nothing compared to what they'll do. Every last parent will take a turn. They've been waiting all their lives for the opportunity. Please leave before that has to happen!"
The lips on his contorted mouth began to quiver as he rose to his feet, milky fluid leaking again from his eyes. Leaning over her, he forced his mouth open and said, wincing with the effort, "Not . . . a . . . killer. Not . . . anything."
He looked down at her, horrified.
She shook her head. "No, Gary. You're not. I'm sorry I said you were. Something happened, and I just couldn't . . ." She began to weep again, and feared that this would compel him to start comforting her, and that the troops would find the two of them like that, locked in embrace, and draw whatever conclusion a mass of armed men in their condition was likely to draw.
She recoiled at the imagined touch, but it didn't come. When she'd stopped weeping long enough to dry her eyes and look up, Drifter Gary was gone. She looked at the door and thought, I exonerate you. Part of her envied him his escape, his freedom from what was coming, while the rest of her accepted whatever that was with a kind of newly earned pride, a sense that she had, at the very least, saved one life.
She waited until he was out of earshot, then got up, walked into the side room where she'd found him sleeping, and got into bed. She no longer thought of it as his bed, though certainly it wasn't hers, either. It was, she thought, simply a bed. The one that happened to be here.
Closing her eyes under the stuffy sheets, she fell into a black, quiet space, perhaps the same space she'd come close to entering in the cemetery, and in this space she could see Drifter Gary running, and she could hear some of his thoughts.
He stumbled through the woods that surrounded this dark space, knocking into brambles and tripping over roots as the world decomposed around him, releasing him back into innocence and obscurity. The fact that he'd killed thirty-seven children—and he had, he was sure of it—boiled off of him, rising through the woods in waves that turned the air sticky and sweet. The fact that it had been true, that she, whoever she was, had made it true, and now it wasn't, ripped him in half. He was exonerated and yet now, once again, nameless, without history, without menace, without purpose. He ran onward, gagging on the thick air, and pictured the other fate he would've suffered, the confinement and torture and slow death in the knowledge that he'd done what he'd done, and been repaid for it in kind. He ran up to the far edge of Sandman Crescent and peered inside as if across a desert that had opened there for him alone, and he thought he could see, on the far edge, the fathers unloading him from a van and marching him at gunpoint into the compound.
He could see it, and he could believe that it was occurring, but he could come no closer. So, he merely watched until he'd been shut away, the bunker doors sealed, and then he stood, turned his back on the desert, and walked deeper into the woods, to discover some other use for the time he had left, leaving Jane Feaster alone in the cabin that had briefly been his. He wished her no ill as she stirred in his old bed in the dawn sunlight, but neither did he have any hope that her story would end well. It was simply, he thought, as he vanished from view, her turn to wait there to be found.