The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [69]
A split second later there was a sound like a dozen woodpeckers all hammering at once. Suddenly the water was boiling up all around them. Osborn felt something slap into his thigh and he fell backward. Still the water kept churning. He tried to raise up and saw the man in the hat wade out into the water, the thing in his hand still tap-tap-tapping.
Twisting away, Osborn dove down and swam off. Little noises, like pellets, slapped the water above. Under the water, what little light there was vanished and Osborn had no idea which direction he was going. Something bumped up against him, and seemed to hang there. Then the current caught him and whatever it was hanging with him and swept them away. Osborn’s lungs were bursting for air, but the force of the current was sweeping him down toward the river bottom. Once again he felt the thing bump him and he realized he was entangled with it. Reaching across, he tried to free himself from it. It was bulky, like a grassy log, and seemed stuck to him. His lungs felt as if they were collapsing inward. He had to have air. Whatever it was he was entangled with, he had to ignore, and do nothing but fight his way to the surface. Giving an enormous kick, he swept his arms back and swam upward.
A moment later he broke free of the surface. Gasping, he gulped fresh air furiously into his lungs. At almost the same time he realized he was moving at considerable speed. Looking around, he could just make out the riverbank on the far shore. Turning back, he could see the headlights of cars moving along the river road behind him and he realized he was in midriver, being swept along by the Seine’s swift current.
Whatever had been caught up with him had come loose when he broke the surface, or at least he thought it had, because he no longer felt it. He was riding free with the current when suddenly it bumped into him once more. Turning, he saw a dark object with a grassy clump at the end nearest him. He started to push it away. As he did a human hand came from beneath the surface and clenched onto his arm. Crying out in horror, he tried to wrench free. But the hand held him firmly in its grip. Then he saw that what he’d taken for grass wasn’t grass at all, but human hair. In the distance he heard the rumble of thunder. Suddenly the rain came down in torrents. Reaching out, wildly trying to pry the fingers from his arm, the whole thing bobbed up, and rolled sideways at him. Screaming, he tried to shove it away. But it wouldn’t go. Then lightning flashed and he found himself staring at a bloody eye socket hideously impaled with pieces of shattered teeth. On the other side was no eye at all, just a mangle of flesh where the face had been shot away. A moment later the thing lurched upward and gave a loud groan. Then the hand ever so gently let go of his arm, and what was left of Henri Kanarack floated off with the current.
As Henri Kanarack, or Albert Merriman, who he really was, had looked past Paul Osborn’s shoulder and seen the tall man in the raincoat and hat coming down the ramp toward them, he thought there was something familiar about him, that he had seen him somewhere before. And then he remembered him as the man who had come into Le Bois the night after he’d killed Jean Packard. He recalled seeing him standing in the doorway and looking around, his eyes sweeping the terrace. Then remembered him turning toward the bar, where Kanarack was sitting, and their eyes making contact. He remembered being relieved the man was not Osborn, or the police. He remembered thinking the man was nobody, nobody at all.
He’d been wrong.
37
* * *
Friday, October 7.
New Mexico.
AT 1:55 in the afternoon, 8:55 in the evening, Paris time, Elton Lybarger sat in