TWENTY EIGHT

THE DECISION

Even as the woman's menacing words were echoing from the den walls, Evan threw himself forward, knowing that if he didn't move with lightning speed the others would be upon him like avenging lionesses. He gripped the edge of the coffee table and jerked upward on it, sending it flying backward onto Drago; Harris Demargeon's head spun into shadows, thumped against a wall, the Giles thing screamed a scream of dripping hatred and dashed toward him; Drago slammed out with one hand, her teeth bared, knocking the table aside. But by then Evan had crossed the room, bent, picked up a chair, and used it to shatter the picture window; glass exploded from the casement. When Evan looked back over his shoulder, he saw them reaching, reaching, reaching as if in a slow-motion nightmare, and the Drago-thing had risen to her feet and was pointing toward him in a command to the others. Evan flung the chair into their midst, saw the Giles-thing brush it away as if it were made of papier-mache. And then he spun around and leaped into space through the broken window.

He ran through the down-sloping backyard, not daring to look back. He reached the chain-link fence, climbed it, and leaped over into the concrete-bottomed drainage ditch. Then he glanced back, expecting to see them coming across the yard for him, but saw only the form of Kathryn Drago, standing in the broken window frame, watching him. He stared at her for a few seconds; their eyes met, burned. And then Evan was running into the forest.

His legs pumped. Brush stung his face, and shadows loomed heavily on all sides. His only thought now was to get away, to thread a path out of these woods somehow and get to Spangler or Barnesboro - anyplace with lights, telephones, real people. Anyplace where he could get help. He ran on, the moonlight flashing whitely through the dense overhang of trees like a searchlight stabbing for him. And then he felt his boot catch in a clump of low brush, and he was pitching forward to the ground. He slammed down hard, the breath whooshing from his lungs, and he lay with his face pressed against ashen-smelling earth. He was panting like an animal, his chest burning with the stale heat that pressed at him from all sides like a searing vise. His head throbbing with pain and confusion, he drew himself up against the trunk of a tree and clung to it.

And then, abruptly, he realized what he was doing. Running.

Running again, like all the other times he'd turned his back on the evil that crawled through this world; like the time he'd turned his back on his own brother, lying broken in a golden field while the specter of Death crept closer; like the time he'd turned his back on ragged men behind bamboo cages, leaving them to the mercy of their captors. Evan's mind staggered, like a man trying to run with weights strapped to his shoulders. Yes. The Hand of Evil was real; it was real, and it had been waiting for him all this time in Bethany's Sin. And all these years, when he thought he'd been escaping its grip, he'd only been running nearer and nearer to it. Until now, finally, it was reaching for him again.

And, clinging to the tree, Evan felt his sanity begin to unravel.

Oh God, he breathed. Oh God help me help me help me! Like red slashes of a razor blade, the visions streaked through his mind, one after the other: an Amazon with scorching eyes, reaching for him with one hand while the other raised a blood dripping ax; a place where hollow-eyed statues stood, casting spiderish shadows on stone walls, where the moon burned fiercely down through a ceiling of glass, where Amazons crowded around and came nearer, nearer, nearer; Kay standing with her eyes closed and her breasts bared, and smoke swirling around her; the Drago-thing's face, grinning; and himself burning in what must have been the leaping fires of Hades.

He jerked himself back to reality, sweat dripping from his chin to the ground. God help me. God help me. His sanity ripped, ripped.

No! he screamed at himself. No! Hold on! For God's sake hold on!

Because through the veil of those horrible visions he had seen what he must do. He must go back among them, and get his wife and child away from them. For if he turned away, if he ran on to Barnesboro or Spangler or Marsteller or wherever, they would be forever lost to him. He clung to the tree as if it were the last solid, real thing in his life, and a thought of cold crystal clarity came to him: Why had they let him get away at all? Why had they let him run?

In the next instant he knew.

He heard the high shriek of the Amazon riders off to the right, and he knew they were less than a mile away. They would be able to see in the dark in these woods, and their horses would know the shadowed paths by instinct. So even here, in the silence and darkness, there would be no hiding. His heart pounded; he rose to his feet, looked around. Another shriek, to the left and nearer than the first. They were closing in on him, hunting him down. Bamesboro and Spangler were cut off to him now, and behind him lay Bethany's Sin, an evil-pregnant spider in the center of her web.

Now enfolding his wife and child.

He peered into the darkness a moment longer, listening. Cries from the left and right, as they moved relentlessly toward a vertex where he stood, utterly defenseless. And then his decision was made.

He turned and began to run back for the village, his head turning from side to side to pierce the darkness; he stayed close to the trees, avoiding the white slashes of moonlight, and in a few minutes he had crawled down into the drainage ditch behind his own house. Another war cry, rippling through the night, perhaps a half-mile away and closing in. The sound hammered at his eardrums. He crawled on his belly up against the chain-link fence and stared across his backyard.

His house was full of the night, as if it, too, had been consumed by utter evil. Moonlight sparkled on glass edges in the broken window.

He thought he heard the snapping of a branch just behind him, and he whirled around, ready to leap to the side. But nothing was there.

Then he lay perfectly still, a shadow among a thousand others. His brain burned; of course they were waiting for him, and of course they would expect that he might try to return to his own house when he realized the riders had cut off his escape route, either to seek a weapon or to try to use the telephone to call for help. His eyes, narrowed into slits, slid to the left.

The Demargeon house, dark. He could see the door leading into their basement: four panes of glass, just like his own basement door.

Behind him another war cry rolled across the forest. Near. Very near.

He couldn't stay out in the open any longer. Would they expect him to break into the Demargeon house? Would they expect him to try to hide there until daylight cleansed these streets?

He crawled along the fence, steeled himself and quickly climbed over, dropped down into the yard. Crouched there, listening.

All still, all quiet. Then he was running from shadow to shadow, staying low to the ground; he moved through Mrs. Demargeon's vegetable garden, now withered and dry from the heat. When he reached the basement door Evan balled his fist and struck the bottom glass pane; it starred and cracked. He picked out the pieces, let them fall to the grass, groped for the doorknob. Pressed the button that unlocked the door, twisted the knob, and then he was inside.

Evan closed and locked the door behind him and, breathing raggedly, let himself sink down along one of the basement walls. For a long time he listened and heard nothing but the occasional shrieking of the warriors in the woods; eventually those cries faded and died like half remembered echoes. The basement was about the same as his own, with a wooden stairway leading up to a closed door into the house. There were stacks of boxes with junk in them: old clothes, musty-smelling magazines, a broken lamp, a heap of cracked flower pots. A chair missing its left leg sagged in a corner, and beside it there was a barbecue grill on rollers and a couple of cans of lighter fluid for charcoal. Near the basement door there was a rack with garden implements dangling from it: a Weed-Eater, a hand trowel, a rolled-up green hose. In the corner beside Evan was a sack of chalky-smelling fertilizer.

Now there was nothing to do but wait for dawn, still hours away. He put his face in his hands and tried to sleep, but every few minutes he'd imagine a nightmare shape had slithered down into the basement and was slowly stalking across the floor toward him, and he'd open his eyes with a cry about to burst from his lips. When he did sleep, Evan dreamed of fire. A great roaring red-and-orange conflagration, a sky filled with churning ashes and shards of wood.

And then embers flaming amid ruins, houses black-charred, bricks toppling from walls as a stain of purplish smoke slowly obscured the horizon. And after that, a place of ghosts, where ashes stirred in sluggish spirals and no grass or flowers grew among the cracked, scorched walls and blackened fields. Even as he dreamed, Evan realized that was the fate of Spangler, or Marsteller, or Saint Benedict, or any of the dozens of small towns ringing Bethany's Sin, when the warriors began to ride in full strength. When the Amazons taught their daughters how to wield the fire-edged ax of wrath, and those daughters taught their own, and the legacy of evil and murder and rage passed on from generation to generation, their lust for violence would turn against whole communities. They would strike in the night, swift and without warning, and this would be a place of ghost towns where dogs howled in darkness and the cry of eagles shrilled among the broken ruins. Whispered tales of night terror would make this a desolate, haunted land, but still there would be those who by accident or curiosity drove along the stretch of Pennsylvania Highway 219 that swept past the village of Bethany's Sin. And for those people there would be no turning back.

The dreams faded.

Hot white sunlight striped Evan's face; he came awake as he had during the war - senses sharp and questing, vision clear, his brain already working out the steps needed to stay alive. He pulled himself out of the light, into shadow where he'd be hidden. Birds sang in the trees, and Evan heard the distant sound of a car's horn, probably at the Circle. He glanced through the four-paned door - no, three-paned door - and looked for the sun. It was probably a little before eight o'clock. Something sparkled silver against the blue sky: an airplane, coming in for the airport in Johnstown. He wondered what the things thought of planes, of skyscrapers, of cars and ocean liners, of televisions and electric can openers and lawn mowers and all the thousands of items he took for granted. What could the things understand of the modern world, and how could they cope with it?

But it seemed to Evan that in possessing the body they must possess also the memory, the intelligence, and to some degree the personality as well; he'd seen the woman sitting before him in the den slip back and forth between two worlds, from Kathryn Drago to the power that had lodged itself within her. Possibly the Amazon entity lay hidden away, using Drago's personality as a disguise, until there was the need for its savagery to surface from that pool of flesh in full force.

Perhaps that was true of all the rest of them, too. Even the language lay between two worlds, the English speaking voice and that guttural, chilling growl

And now he thought of Kay, lying in a bed in the clinic while the Amazon known as Oliviadre slowly claimed her soul. He ran his hands over his face. When the transformation was complete, would the Kay he knew and loved still be locked within that form, or would Oliviadre crush out her life-spark entirely? I've got to go to her! a voice screamed inside him .I've got to go now and get her out of there! No. No, not yet. They'll kill you before you can get away from McClain Terrace. But how, then? How in God's name am I going to get my wife free of them? And what's happened to Laurie? He was confident they hadn't harmed her, but the idea of what they might be planning for her made his flesh crawl.

He jumped suddenly. He'd heard a phone ringing up stairs.

Ringing. Ringing. Ringing. Then a door-muffled voice.

Evan quietly rose and moved toward the stairway. Then stopped, realizing he needed some kind of weapon; he reached over to the rack of garden tools and took the trowel. He slipped up the stairs carefully and put his ear against the door.

"...I've heard nothing from any of them." Not-Mrs. Demargeon was speaking in her Mrs. Demargeon voice now, and Evan pictured her in a robe and slippers; the Amazon entity within her lay submerged now, waiting. A long pause. "Yes, that's right." Another pause. "He could not have gotten very far from the village. This we know. They've been searching the forest between his house and the highway all night. If he's there, they'll find him." Pause. She cleared her throat. Evan started to crack the door open and decided against it. "No. Cybella says we're in no danger; I stayed with her until early this morning, waiting for reports. The man has not reached the highway."

Come here and open this door, bitch, Evan breathed. Come here.

The woman listened, said, "No." Listened again. "No,"

emphatically. Then, in a more soothing tone of voice, "We shall wait and see. The man poses no problem. In the meantime, we shall proceed with the Rite of fire and Iron. Tonight; Oliviadre grows restless."

Evan's throat tightened. What was that about a rite? And Oliviadre? He leaned forward, pressed his ear tightly against the door. The wood made a slight creaking noise, and Evan winced.

"...met a young couple at the Westbury Mall yesterday," the woman was saying. "The Daniels. He's an insurance executive with Hartford in Bamesboro; she's a housewife, five months' pregnant.

Very nice people, I understand. Bremusa believes they would fit into the village very well; she's going to show them that empty house on Deer Cross Lane next week." A pause. "Yes. Yes, I will." Then, "I have to go now. Good-bye." The sound of the receiver being placed on its cradle, footsteps moving away.

Evan stood pressed against the door for another moment.

Bethany's Sin was going to beckon and ensnare a couple called the Daniels; Bremusa - Mrs. Giles? had plans for them. Oh, yes; just as she'd had plans for Kay and Evan. Show them a beautiful house on a beautiful street in a beautiful village, offer it to them at an unbelievable price, and then -

The door came open so quickly Evan had no time to react, and there stood the woman, her face still lined with sleep, wearing a bright canary yellow robe. Her eyes were dark and staring, but in a split second the power began to flood into them, fierce and blue and wild with the unleashed strength of the Amazon; in another instant they were orbs of flaming hatred, and with a guttural snarl of pure rage the woman lifted the ax she held and brought it whistling down toward Evan's shoulder.

But he hunched over and drove himself into her with all his strength; the ax crashed down and split the railing at the top of the stairway. They clawed at each other, falling to the floor and rolling, upsetting table and lamp and telephone. As she retrieved the ax he grasped at her wrist, caught it before she could strike at him again; she twisted, snarling like an animal, gripped the wrist of his hand that held the trowel, and began to squeeze. He dropped the trowel as he felt his bones grind together, and he cried out in pain. They rolled back and forth, slammed into a wall. She spat into his face and tried to jerk her arm free, but he held onto it for dear life. Then she twisted again and got one slippered foot between them; she kicked out, throwing Evan off her and halfway into the living room. He fell over a chair, regained his footing and picked up the trowel just as she leaped at him, the ax flashing for his head.

When he jerked his head back, he saw the reflection of his own face in the ax blade, and he was certain it had cleaved away the hair that hung over his forehead. He gritted his teeth, feeling rage and anguish screaming with in him, feeling the killer instinct rising within him now, rising, rising. Evan stepped in, drove upward with the trowel. But the woman was faster; she gripped that wrist again, twisted his arm to the side. Pain flooded through him, and his fingers involuntarily opened, dropping the trowel again. The woman-thing struck a backhanded blow at him that caught him alongside the jaw and almost broke his neck. Evan staggered. She rushed in, gripped at his shoulder with flesh-clawing nails, and tore half his shirt away, exposing the plain of ragged scars. He fell backward, his head still ringing from her blow, and dropped down to his knees. The thing that had been Janet Demargeon loomed over him, lifting the ax for a death blow. When he was able to look up into her face, he saw the blood hunger in her eyes, saw the way she stared at the scars crisscrossing his chest; it was the way she'd looked at them that night in the entrance foyer, and he realized now those scars must've brought back memories of gore-splattered battle to the entity within her, and she'd gotten away quickly that night before she'd been compelled to attack him. Now the ax rose, rose; its shadow fell across him, and he felt too weak and beaten to move.

The killer instinct took over. It bared his teeth in a snarl, made his right hand whip out to grasp the trowel that lay only a few feet away. Made him dig his heels into the carpet and plunge toward her even as the ax reached its gleaming zenith and hesitated there for a fraction of a second. Made him thrust out and upward with that garden trowel with all the strength of his shoulders and back behind it. Canary yellow cloth stopped his hand.

The woman threw her head back and screamed, a scream not entirely of pain but of anger as well. The canary yellow reddened.

Reddened quickly.

She tried to stagger back to deliver her blow, but Evan chopped at her ankles with his free hand, and she fell, still gripping the ax in waxen white hands. At once he withdrew the trowel and, snarling, drove it in again. She screamed, struggled, screamed, clawed at his face and missed; Evan threw his weight against the makeshift weapon and felt it sink deeper. The body beneath him thrashed wildly, seemingly stronger now; her arm came up with the ax and slashed wickedly past his left shoulder. Then her other hand flashed out, caught his cheek, nails digging rents in the flesh. He shook away from her; struck again and again and again.

Until finally he realized he was stabbing a dead woman.

He fell back away from her, his hands sticky with blood; the trowel was buried in her midsection up to the handle, and a pool of red had collected around it. Evan crawled away, shaken and sick, and threw up in a corner of the living room. For a long time he lay on his back, unable to move, thin red rivulets trickling down his cheek from three deep scratches. He realized the woman must have heard that door creak, and sensed him hiding there; perhaps she'd smelled his sweat or fear. When he could look at the corpse again, he saw that her eyes were dark and lifeless, the face shrunken and skull-like, all the terrible power gone now. But still he was afraid to turn his back on her. He stared down at his bloody hands; the fingers twitched and trembled. After a while he staggered into the bathroom to clean himself, and saw in the medicine-cabinet mirror a face that shocked him: hollow eyed, pale, a blackening bruise at his jawline, another on his right cheek, the three bloody scratches. Red gouges in both shoulders, a long, jagged scratch across his chest. His torn shirt flagged around him. He washed his face in cold water, almost threw up again, and then explored the rest of the Demargeon house.

The rooms were small, neatly decorated, as if from a Sears furniture catalogue. In a room at the very back of the house he found Harris Demargeon's headless body, still sitting in that wheelchair.

There were no windows in the room, and no furniture but a bed with a dark brown spread.

Evan closed the door quickly.

In the living room he sat down on the sofa and found himself staring with curiosity at the woman's corpse. So, he told himself.

When the body dies, they die. Or do they? He couldn't be certain.

But he knew one thing for sure: there must be a physical hand to hold the ax, and this woman's hand would never hold another one.

He rose up from the sofa, bent beside the body, and loosened the robe.

The left breast sagged, the nipple flattened and gray looking; where the right breast had been there was a brown, starlike scar that indicated a severe burn.

The Rite of Fire and Iron, this woman had said. Tonight; Oliviadre grows restless. Evan closed the robe because he didn't want to look at that scar anymore. The woman's dead eyes, half-closed, stared at the ceiling.

And now Evan, sitting on the floor in the presence of Death, put his head in his hands and saw clearly what it was be must do to save his wife and child.