gentle swaying, like a boat on the ocean lost to the waves. She’s holding a gun. A gun he bought her to defend herself—at the time she was working at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in the telemetry unit (he remembers the way she answered the phone there: Alison Cole, 2B Telemetry ), and she sometimes walked a long way to work and he wanted her to have a gun. She never took it. Never used it. And now here she is with it.
Suddenly, a feeling in his mind—different from when he was around E. but the same, too. Like an invasion. Like someone cupping his consciousness in a pair of cold hands. Probing. Looking for something.
“Alison,” he says. He has to get to her. Save her from this.
He turns.
There stands Frank. Gun in one hand, a steak knife in the other, with a silverware drawer open behind him. The gun is leveled at Cason’s head.
“Don’t,” Frank says. “You can’t help her. Not today.”
“That’s my wife.”
“Trust me, I know. And I get it; I do. But this isn’t the day.” Frank takes the hand with the knife and pulls down on the collar of his filthy white t-shirt. Turning it into a v-neck before finally the fabric starts to rip.
A symbol reveals itself. A symbol in scar tissue. Three lines crossing one another, forming a kind of asterisk. Smaller symbols at the six points, dead-ending each line: they look almost like letters (N, M, U), but they’re not quite.
“I gotta carve this into your chest,” Frank says.
“Fuck you. I want my wife.”
“And you’ll get her back. With my help. Not by running off half-cocked.”
Outside, more knocking: wham wham wham . A voice calling:
“I know you’re in there. Your wife and I would like to talk to you.”
The invisible hands cupping Cason’s mind start to squeeze. The urge rises in him, hot and white, to go to the front door. To kneel there. To let his wife put that gun into his mouth so that he may embrace oblivion.
Frank seethes: “She’s in your head already.” He smacks Cason across the face—not with the gun, but with the back of his gun-hand.
Reaction. Cason has Frank’s hand in his own. One twist and the man yelps: the gun drops into Cason’s hand. “I’m not letting you carve that into my chest.”
Frank’s eyes dart around the room. Sees a cup of pens and markers next to a dented toaster and a pile of fraying napkins littered with mouse turds. “Then we’ll do something more temporary.”
H E’S THERE, AND then he’s gone.
Psyche stands on the decrepit porch, feeling tight and tense and unclean, and one second she feels Cason’s mind in the house like a mouse in a maze, and then there’s the light of pain and he’s gone. Not fading like a ghost, but rather as if he was never there in the first place. How dearly, deeply disappointing.
She searches, of course. She pulls Alison along—not by her hand, but by a leash wound around the woman’s mind—and stalks around the outside of the house. The alleys between this house and the row-homes. Past barrels filled with rainwater and thousands of mosquito larvae twisting in the murk. To the house’s back door, long boarded up, beneath eaves thick with wasp combs. No one. Nothing. No trace of human life.
Worse, she can’t feel him at all . It took her a while to find him at first—she had to probe the holes in Alison’s mind, creating an image out of negative space, the Cason Cole-shaped cut-out in her memories, an elegant act of psychic surgery with the fingerprints of Psyche’s husband all over them (incurring in her no small swell of pride). Once she had him, she had him, and it was time to hunt. But now: nothing. Gone again. As if he never existed.
She goes inside the house, of course—no stone left unturned and all that. She finds the splintery wooden dolls in the walls. She sees and smells the residue of the creature that lived here: some foul skunk-ape from the local pantheon, nobody of any consequence, but worryingly dead just the