Chapter 64

The wind continued to increase in ferocity. It swept over the house, tearing at the eaves, howling around the walls, and punching the windows like a barrage of fists.

Sitting on the steps, Joshua kept his finger on the flashlight, waiting for a blackout. The lights flickered several times, but remained on.

Beside him on the stairs, Rachel put her hand on his arm. “What time is it?”

“Almost six,” Joshua said. “You think the ferry would’ve still run in this wind?”

“It would take something much worse than this to keep the ferry on the mainland. A lot of people depend on it for their livelihood, you know. Children go to school on the mainland, all of the jobs are there . . . trust me, the boat ran.”

He nodded, quiet. He happened to glance at her hair, and on impulse, touched it.

“I found out that your natural color is auburn,” he said.

She gave him a curious look. “How’d you find that out?”

“Tanisha told me.”

“Oh.” Grief stung her face. “Well, she would’ve known, she used to dye it for me. My hair used to be halfway down my back. I cut it and started to color it after I left home. It was part of my disguise, along with the glasses.”

He ran his fingers through her soft, dark curls. “I love how your hair looks now. But I’d like to see it how it used to be. There’s no reason to hide any more, is there?”

“You’re right—” Rachel started to say, but then the lights sputtered. Another gale blew around the house.

The lights flickered, and then died. They didn’t come back on.

Rachel had already lit two kerosene lanterns and placed one of them on a table in the front room, giving them pale light, but the blackness that devoured the rest of the house was so thick it might have been a solid substance. Joshua realized that on a sparsely populated, mostly undeveloped island, there were no streetlamps to light the neighborhoods, no big buildings blazing in the night. He had lost power at their home in Atlanta yesterday, but that had been nothing compared to this. Here, the absence of light was breathtaking.

He switched on his flashlight. Rachel did the same.

Darkness, at last, had come.

* * *

Upon closer inspection, it was a nicer house than Dexter expected. A two-story Cape Cod, in good shape, with a fresh coat of light paint. He could see the beach, and the wind-whipped sea, through the palmettos and live oaks that flanked the property.

The bitch had never told him that her family owned a house on a goddamn island. It had been wise of her to keep it from him. He would have forced her to sell it. Developers were probably frothing at the mouth to get their grubby hands on this prime piece of beachfront real estate, and would have paid a handsome price.

Night had come, and the fierce wind had knocked out power. As he stood at the mouth of the long driveway, he reflected that he probably did not need to cloak himself in order to approach the house. The natural darkness would conceal him.

Keeping to the perimeter of the front yard, he walked through the short, dry grass. He took refuge behind a live oak that bordered the driveway. Wind tore through the boughs overhead, ripping crisp, dead leaves from the branches.

He deliberated his next move. The bitch and her illegitimate husband were likely anticipating his arrival, and would have made preparations. He could not simply walk to the front door, ring the bell, and hope to draw them out. He would have to be more cunning.

Clouds as tattered as cheesecloth scudded across the sky, pushed by the high velocity winds. A nearly full moon, freed of the masking clouds, cast a deathly pale glow.

The silvery luminescence bathed the beach house, making it appear to shimmer like a magical place in a fairy tale. There was actual glitter around the front porch, as if a Christmas party had taken place there a short while ago and they had neglected to clean up.

Dexter looked closer.

Not party glitter. Broken glass. Mixed in with leaves that had been disturbed by the wind.

Cloaking himself again lest the moonlight give him away, he circled to the rear of the house.

There was a wide patio. A set of steps led to a balcony, too. Slivers of crushed glass, half-concealed with a blend of wind-blown leaves, covered both areas.

He didn’t see glass twinkling in the grass beneath the first-floor window on the west side of the house, but he was sure that it was scattered inside, underneath the sill.

“Smart,” he said.

He returned to the oak tree in the front. The long, sturdy branches extended to embrace the roof of the house. A dormer window reflected the ghostly moonlight.

“But I’m smarter.”

He hadn’t climbed a tree since he was a kid. But he made quick work of this one, scaling the trunk and branches with relative ease.

The powerful wind hardly slowed him. He was on a divine mission. It was not his destiny to fall from a tree and crack his skull on the ground. Matter of fact, he’d become so impervious to injury that he doubted falling to the earth from a height fatal to a normal man would have harmed him at all.

A thick, sturdy bough stretched toward the roof and the dormer window. With the sure-footedness of a ninja, he crept across the bough, and hopped lightly onto the steeply pitched roof, confident that the screeching wind masked the sounds of his drop.

However, the wind did rattle loose a branch. It spun to the ground, snapping against the pool of broken glass around the porch steps.

They might have heard that—the wind had suddenly abated. It would put them on high alert, which the broken glass was obviously designed to do.

He looked inside the dormer window. An attic lay beyond the pane, as he’d known it would.

He waited until the wind howled again.

Then, when it was at its peak, he drew back his elbow and swung it toward the glass.

* * *

Holding their flashlights, Joshua and Rachel waited in the front room, listening for the telling tinkle of glass. The wailing wind, however, posed a problem. If Dexter stepped on the glass shards while the gale was screaming at a high pitch, they might not hear him.

“He’s out there,” Rachel said, suddenly. “I feel him.”

“Feel him, like psychically?”

She nodded. Shivered. “It feels like cold air coming from an open freezer.”

“Can you feel what he’s doing, too?”

“No, I can only sense him. His aura is . . . very strong. Much stronger than it was the last time I saw him.”

The coldness she felt seemed to have transferred to Joshua, as if by psychic osmosis, because he shivered, too.

He removed the .357 from his holster and thumbed off the safety. Rachel followed suit with the .38.

The wind wailed for a few seconds . . . and then faded. In the well-deep silence that followed, Joshua heard a soft crackle. Breaking glass.

It came from near the front porch.

“He’s right outside.” Joshua’s pounding heart felt as if it had crawled into his mouth, making it difficult to breathe. Beside him, Rachel’s jaws were clenched, and her knuckles were milk-white around the flashlight and the gun. “Rachel, I want you to go upstairs.”

“What?” Her whisper was indignant.

His voice was low, but firm. “You’ll be safe up there. You’re the one he really wants. Hide in one of the bedrooms. Please.”

The wind spoke again, a mournful keening. Joshua thought he detected another crackle of breaking glass, somewhere around the front of the house again.

Rachel seemed to hear the sound, too. She turned to the staircase, paused. “What’re you going to do?”

“I’m going to stay down here and hold him off. Cut him down, if I can.”

“Okay. Be careful.”

“I’ll be fine.”

She gnawed her bottom lip. He could tell that she didn’t like what he was asking her to do, but she wasn’t going to debate it with him further. Holding the gun and the flashlight in front of her, she edged past him and climbed the stairs.

Joshua watched the darkness swallow her above. Then he moved away from the staircase, sidled into the hallway, and extinguished the kerosene lantern in the front room. He angled the flashlight toward the floor, too.

From outside, though the blinds were drawn, Dexter might’ve glimpsed light. Joshua wanted him to think that they had left the front room, to lure him into attempting to enter.

In the hallway, he waited in darkness. Heart knocking. Finger tensed around the trigger.

* * *

Rachel didn’t like being separated from Joshua. His strength and clarity of purpose had bolstered her confidence, and leaving his side brought back all of her old fears and worries about Dexter.

She would’ve run, if there was anywhere else to run to. She understood running was not a solution, but it would have delayed the inevitable confrontation. Her old scar was tingling, as if remembering her last violent encounter with Dexter.

I won’t have to fight him this time. Joshua’s going to keep him away from me.

She wanted to believe that was true, but her nightmares were fresh in her thoughts. Nightmares were not necessarily prophetic—they were sometimes only manifestations of deeply-held fears—but it was impossible for her to push them out of her mind. This entire day had the quality of a terrifying dream.

The second-floor hallway was pitch-black. She’d spent some of the best times of her life in this house, but her fear was so sharp that she might have been wandering through a foreign place, where every shadow held a latent threat.

She panned the flashlight around, to ensure that she was alone. Joshua had asked her to hide. But no room—nowhere on the entire planet—was safe from Dexter.

She was so damn tired of running, of living in fear. She wanted to kill the man. She’d never wanted to harm another human being, but she would hurt him, eagerly and gratefully.

Don’t think like that, girl. You’ll lower yourself to his level, and then where will you be?

 Her meditation room was on the right. It was a chamber of peace that held nothing but comforting memories.

She would hide in there.

* * *

Joshua’s finger trembled on the revolver’s trigger. Dexter was outside—he’d heard him. But the asshole hadn’t tried to break-in yet. What was he doing?

Perhaps he had figured out Joshua’s broken light bulb ploy. Perhaps he was looking for another way inside the house.

But there was no other way inside. They had covered every entrance.

Joshua cut off the flashlight. He moved to a front window on the right of the doorway.

With one finger, he lifted one of the slats in the blinds, giving himself a narrow side-view of the porch.

A large tree branch had landed at the bottom of the steps, in the midst of the glass shards and leaves.

That was all they had heard. The branch crackling against the glass. Not Dexter.

But Rachel had been so confident that she’d sensed him nearby. Could she have been mistaken?

Joshua squinted outside again.

One branch fell. But we heard glass shatter twice, didn’t we?

It was hard to be sure. The noisy wind was conspiring against them.

He backed away from the window. Logic provided a comforting explanation. Intuition, however, offered another, much more disturbing possibility.

Resolve hardening his face, Joshua cocked the hammer of the .357 and flung open the front door.

Cold wind gusted inside and struck him like a many-armed beast. But there was no attack from Dexter.

Silvery moonlight illuminated the porch. Checking both ways, Joshua went down the steps. At the bottom, his shoe crunched on the blend of glass slivers and leaves.

He kicked aside the offending branch. Then he swung around, and looked up, knowing what he was going to see, and dreading it.

The dormer window, which led to the attic, was broken.

* * *

On the threshold of her meditation room, Rachel played the flashlight beam around. All clear.

She locked the door, leaned against it.

Her heart hammered. There was a chair beside the doorway, which she used sometimes during her meditations. She brought levered the top of the seat back underneath the door knob, a little extra reinforcement. Better.

Beyond the white cone of her flashlight, the room was tomb-dark. During their preparations, they had drawn the Venetian blinds on the big window that gave the panoramic ocean view.

She decided to open the blinds. It would make her feel better, to be able to observe the ceaselessly rumbling tides.

She pulled the lift cord, raising the blinds to the top of the windowpane. Pale moonlight fell inside. On the beach below, the waves, lashed by strong winds, crashed violently on the shore, as if some gigantic sea creature were thrashing to the surface to devour her.

Disturbed, she was about to close the blinds again, preferring the comfort of the flashlight to this sight, when she heard a sound behind her. Like creaking metal hinges.

In the far corner of the room, there was a rectangular ceiling panel that granted entry to the attic. As she watched, it opened slowly, a set of retractable wooden stairs lowering from the attic to the floor, like the widening jaws of an immense beast.

He’s already in the house, oh, Jesus . . .

A sharp stench assailed her nostrils, a blend of offensive odors. Damp earth . . . unchecked male sweat . . . old, spilled blood . . .

Terror bolted her feet in place. She wanted to run. But she couldn’t order her muscles to work.

There was a thud, and a creak: the weight of a body dropping onto the hardwood floor.

I smell him, I hear him, but I can’t see him. What the hell?

“I kept my promise, baby,” a familiar voice said, which had an effect on Rachel like an ice pick piercing her spine. “I found you.”

Run, Rachel thought, wildly. Run, run, run.

But she couldn’t. She wouldn’t.

Not any more.

She trained the flashlight in front of her.

Dexter materialized in the space, as if magically taking shape from the darkness itself. He looked the same, like the man who had haunted her nightmares for so long, but different. Crazier, if that were at all possible. Madness glinted in his eyes.

She had no idea how he did the invisibility trick. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that she was going to put an end to this.

“Aren’t you going to run?” He nodded toward the doorway. “There’s the door. Make me chase you, baby, make it sweeter for me. You know I love it when you fight.”

“Then I’m happy to disappoint you, asshole.”

She dropped the flashlight, raised the gun, and pulled the trigger.

* * *

He got in through the attic, Joshua thought. Why didn’t I think of that?

Dexter had out-foxed him. The man had a singular, twisted brilliance.

Joshua rushed up the porch steps and through the front door. Like a fool, he had sent Rachel upstairs, thinking that he was going to protect her from harm. But he might as well have sent her away to die.

“Rachel!” He took the steps two and three at a time. “Rachel! Where are you?”

From a room upstairs, gunfire rang out.

* * *

His wife looked juicy, delectable. She had kept herself up well for him, her first and only husband. As Dexter looked at her, and thought about what he was going to do to her, how he was going to take her, he got a massive hard-on.

Then the bitch shot him. Point blank in the chest. It was like getting punched by a heavyweight champ. He rocked backward on his heels, fiery pain fanning across his torso.

But he didn’t fall. A man would have fallen, but he was greater than a man.

“Try again,” he said.

He charged her.

* * *

Joshua had told her that when he’d fought Dexter, Dexter had taken three rounds point blank from a .38 and had gotten up only a few minutes later and walked away. She should have known that shooting him would be a waste of energy and ammo.

But she tried it anyway. She fired, scoring a direct hit in his chest, and he only tilted backward on his heels, as if she’d merely punched him.

How was this possible? It wasn’t. The invisibility, the immunity to bullets . . . it just wasn’t possible. Perhaps she was asleep and experiencing her worst nightmare ever about him.

“Try again,” he said. He thundered forward.

Outside the room, Joshua was shouting her name. He couldn’t help her as she’d hoped he would. It was only the two of them, her and Dexter, as it had been in the beginning.

She aimed for his head and pulled the trigger. His head snapped sideways, and thick blood oozed down his face. But he kept coming, like an indestructible monster. Closing in fast.

Backing up against the wall, she went to squeeze off another shot, and he snarled and swiped at her, knocking the gun out of her hand. She screamed, spun to the doorway.

He seized her arm and threw her across the room as if she weighed no more than a doll. She smacked against the wall, rapping her head hard against the plaster, and slid to the floor.As if from a great distance, she heard Joshua pounding on the door, calling her name.

I’m sorry, baby. I’m so sorry for everything.

Grinning, Dexter descended on her like a spider that had trapped a fly in its web. He put his cold hands around her neck, and started choking.

* * *

The gunshots came from Rachel’s meditation room. Joshua tried frantically to open the door, but it was locked.

“Rachel! I’m coming!”

He took a few steps backward, and then lowered his shoulder and rammed against the door like a mad bull. He hit the door hard enough to rattle his teeth. Wood splintered, and the door buckled in the frame, but it remained intact.

Inside, Rachel screamed.

Joshua thought of using the .357 to blow the door open, but his father had warned him that the .357 was such a powerful caliber that a round could punch through walls and kill someone inadvertently. What if he shot at the door, blew away the lock—and hit Rachel, too?

He couldn’t risk it. He had to knock the door down. He was strong, a big man. He could do this. He had to. She needed him. His baby needed him. His future lay in that room, his only hope of lasting happiness, and this was his last chance, his only chance, to take hold of the future and blast away the darkness forever.

He slammed against the door again. And again. And again . . . .

* * *

He had his hands on her soft, warm flesh. Wrapped around her delicate, slender neck. Her big, pretty eyes bulging, lovely mouth lolling open, pink tongue wagging.

He hadn’t planned to kill her, not yet, not until he’d fucked her and she’d had his baby, but he couldn’t contain his rage, it was overpowering him, taking over. The bitch had robbed him of everything—because of her, he’d been sent to live like a caged animal for four years, and he’d lost it all, his law license, his home, his life, while she went and brazenly married someone else.

He had to choke the life out of the bitch, he had to kill her, kill her.

Till death do us part . . . .

And after he killed her, he would kill himself.

* * *

He was going to kill her. Through her dimming vision, she could see the murderous intent in his lunatic eyes, could feel his overwhelming desire to murder her in his trembling hands.

Across the room, Joshua was banging against the door, attempting to knock it down, but the chair wedged under the doorknob was holding him back.

Above her, Dexter grinned maniacally. Darkness pulled at her, a fathomless darkness that would never relinquish her once she surrendered to it.

“Gonna do you . . .” he said, his fetid breath washing over her. “Then do myself. Together forever . . .”

Her arm was twisted behind her. Her fingers brushed against the handle of the knife she’d had Joshua tape to the small of her back, her secret weapon.

“Till death do us part, bitch . . .”

Using the last of her remaining strength, she ripped the knife away from her back, brought it around, and plunged the blade into Dexter’s throat.

* * *

On Joshua’s seventh or eighth try, the door gave way. He stumbled inside, a chair spinning away—that was what had made it so hard to get in.

Dexter and Rachel were on the other side of the room, revealed in the pale moonshine and the backsplash of the flashlight that lay on the floor. Rachel was curled up, gagging violently. Dexter lay on his side, gasping, too, fingers plucking at a knife embedded deep in his throat.

She’d stabbed the bastard. He felt a flash of savage triumph.

Dexter saw Joshua, and hatred twisted his face. He ripped the blade out of his neck, an arc of blood spouting from the wound and splashing against the wall. As if indifferent to the pain and blood loss, Dexter got to his feet, gripping the knife.

“She’s mine,” Dexter said, in a guttural, blood-choked voice. He trudged forward, slowed but deadly as ever.

Joshua trained the .357 on him.

“She was never yours.”

Dexter lunged at him.

Joshua fired, the gun’s report like an explosion in the small room. A round blasted Dexter’s shoulder and spun him around.

He staggered, but didn’t fall.

Joshua fired again, blowing a fist-sized hole in Dexter’s blood-spattered chest. Dexter swayed backward like a man trying to stay aloft on a balance beam. Joshua loosed another round, and this one shaved across Dexter’s head, ripping away half his scalp and shattering the glass on the big window behind him. Another round in the head drove Dexter backward, reeling.

But not dead, dammit.

Lips drawn into a firm line, Joshua fired the last two cartridges. They tore through Dexter’s chest and sent him hurtling through the window, to the beach below.

* * *

He wasn’t supposed to die. He was superhuman, invincible. Bullets and knives couldn’t defeat him.

But when the bitch stabbed him, she must’ve severed his carotid artery, because he started spouting blood like a ruptured water hose. And when her illegitimate husband began shooting him with that damn elephant gun, it ripped deep plugs in his flesh that brought to surface a rare emotion for Dexter: fear.

Maybe he was going to die.

That thought stayed in his mind as he dropped through the window and fell to the hard-packed sand.

* * *

Standing at the shattered window, wind swirling around him, Joshua nervously peered below. Dexter lay sprawled in the sand, bits of glass sprinkling him like party glitter. He wasn’t moving.

He appeared to be dead. But it would be wise to make sure.

First, Joshua went to check on Rachel. She was sitting up against the wall. Breathing laboriously, she massaged her throat.

“You okay?” he asked.

She nodded, and asked in a croaking voice, “Is he dead?”

“It looks like it. He hasn’t moved.”

“Better make sure.”

“I thought the same thing.”

He had left the Molotov cocktail in the hallway. He retrieved it and returned to the window.

Lying on the beach, still, Dexter’s fingers appeared to twitch, but that might have been due to the stiff wind.

Rachel made her way to the window. She had picked up her gun.

“Let’s end this,” Joshua said.

He waited a moment for the wind to subside, and then he thumbed the Bic lighter, conjuring a flame, and touched it to the oil-soaked wick of the hand grenade. The fire tasted the rag, and began to devour it hungrily.

He let the bomb drop, the flaming wick fluttering like wings as it arced through the air. The bottle struck Dexter and exploded in an orb of flames and glass shrapnel, the heat so intense that Joshua felt it from his vantage point twenty feet above.

Engulfed in fire, Dexter screamed. He rolled across the sand and clambered to his feet, covered in rippling flames from soles to crown, but somehow still alive.

He lurched blindly toward the ocean.

“Oh, shit,” Joshua said. “He’s gonna jump in the water and put out the fire.”

“No, he’s not.” Rachel raised her gun and aimed, teeth clenched in concentration.

Dexter was less than ten feet away from the roaring tide. But perhaps thirty feet away from them. If Rachel missed . . . .

Joshua held his breath. She pulled the trigger.

Dexter wobbled as if slapped upside the head, stumbled, and fell to the sand, out of reach of the saving tide. He finally lay lifeless, and still.

Joshua exhaled, explosively and gratefully.

“That was for everyone and everything you took away from me,” Rachel said softly. She bowed her head, whispered a prayer, and dropped the gun to the floor.

They stood at the window for several minutes. The strong wind fanned the flames, the corpse that had once been Dexter Bates burning brightly in the night, keeping the darkness at bay.