999_ Twenty-Nine Original Tales of Horror and Suspense - Al Sarrantonio [242]
Merrick put a hand on Des’s arm. “Don’t let this get to you. It might be nothing. Maybe she was a real slow clotter and that’s why the knife’s still wet. Maybe this happened three hours ago, time enough for the water to go cold.”
“You think maybe?” Hope and doubt struggled on Des’s face. “What the hell, maybe.” He blew out a breath. “I’ll see what labs has to say. I’ll keep you posted.”
“Don’t.”
“Yeah. I guess you had enough of crazy sons of bitches to last you a hfetime.”
Merrick said nothing.
“Sorry for laying this on you.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Say hello to Katie for me,” Des said.
“You bet.” Merrick’s mood lightened a shade. Katie, his life now. At this hour, they should be drinking coffee in the den, talking about her day at the hospital. Then they’d head upstairs. …
But he could not go home yet, not until he was sure.
Merrick pulled to a stop, cut off his headlights and waited while the dust drifted past. Leaning across to the passenger seat, he scanned Zane’s place. The livestock-style gate clung with a tentacle of rusty chain to its post, blocking the driveway. No car, no lights on in the farmhouse, but that meant nothing.
Merrick’s stomach knotted with tension. Pulling to the tilting shoulder, he shut off the engine, got out. The midnight air, heavy and still, was ideal for listening, cold enough to conduct the barest sound. Tuning out the soft tick of the cooling engine block, he detected a rustle in the field by the house and homed on it, eyes prickling as the weeds lightened in a red-tinged semblance of daylight. A raccoon reared up to peer back at him, then hurried away.
He turned back to the house. With the darkness that had cloaked it bleached away, its shabbiness was depressingly apparent. Paint which would be a pale yellow in daylight curled from the porch posts. Masking tape meandered across the front window, patching a crack in the glass with naked indifference. In a few more weeks, the two big maples that flanked the front porch would leaf out to hide some of the flaws, but now the place looked desolate.
“Come.”
Zane’s voice, muffled. Merrick saw him then, a tall, gray shape floating into the rectangle of cracked window. Skirting the gate, he hiked up the grassy incline to the front porch, his chest tight with dread. Boards creaked under his feet, a final alarm system that could not be unplugged. Twanging screen door, and then the knob, cool, resisting. Merrick backed up a few steps. Zane gazed out at him, no expression on the smooth, dark face. He’d cropped his sable hair close as a panther’s pelt. His eyes were chips of jade.
“I got a call tonight. A young woman dead in her bath. Her wrists were slit, a lot of blood missing. You?”
“I don’t do that anymore. I take a little while they sleep. I want to kill them, but I don’t. We are the lions and they are the zebras, but they all wake up the next morning. Because I’m just like you, now. You saw to that.”
Merrick took the lash without flinching, the scars already laid down by his own hand. How could right feel so wrong? He had let the logic trap him: only he could stop Zane, ergo if he did not, the blood was on his hands, too.
So I buried my own son thirteen years ago to save a legion of strangers. Because they look like us. They blaze up and fade in the blink of an eye, yet wear our faces. And we theirs. Has Zane forgotten his own human mother?
Merrick’s heart compressed. Five hundred years, her bones to dust, but he would never forget her. There she was in Zane, now, her dark beauty subtly reshaped into the face of a Bedouin sheik, forever young.
“You got what