“Threemonths?” Rose clamped a hand over her mouth. Jackson swore, hard and heartfelt, and put a hand on Saul’s shoulder.
“After I got shot, I was out of commission for… well, quite a long time,” Saul said. “I was half out of my mind with fever and I just knew I had to get away. Wound up in a jail out in Tennessee, after I knocked somebody down that I shouldn’t. They dug the bullet out of me and I pulled through, but it was a pretty miserable time. When I finally got out, I came back here, thinking Louisa must still be here, but that bastard Phelps caught sight of me, and…” He spread his hands. “You can guess the rest.”
Rose reached out and took Saul’s hand, while Jackson tightened his grip, their heads bowed as if in prayer. “I’m sorry,” Jackson said finally. “Shit, Saul. I’m so sorry.”
“Miss Wilson here saved my life,” Saul said. “If she hadn’t found me down there, I don’t know how much longer I would have lasted.”
I looked away, recognizing the meaning of those words. Much, much longer. Years, perhaps.
“The hero of the hour,” said Jackson, beaming, and Rose reached out her other hand and took mine.
We sat like that for a little while, and of course it was Rose who was the practical one. She stirred and said, “What are we going to tell the sheriff?”
“Can we just hide the bodies?” asked Saul.
“Not smart,” said Jackson. “Halder may be a recluse but they’ll notice Phelps isn’t at church. And Phelps has animals on his farm that somebody’s gotta tend to, and they’ll wonder why I knew to go feed ’em.”
“Then we’d best get all our stories straight,” said Rose, and got up to put on another pot of coffee.
Jackson went for the sheriff late that night, and I went up to bed to snatch what sleep I could before I had to lie to the authorities. Saul went with me, stopping just inside the studio door.
“Are you going to tell them the truth?” he asked.
“The truth?” I looked at him blearily. “We just got done rehearsing that story three times over.”
“Not the sheriff. The Kents.”
I was so tired that it actually took me a moment to realize what truth he meant. “Oh, that you didn’t spend the last year in a Tennessee jail?”
One corner of his mouth lifted, showing perfectly ordinary blunt teeth. “I did spend some time in one once, you know. Just not that recently.”
I snorted. “No one would believe me. I don’t even know thatIbelieve it, and I saw all of it happen.”
He nodded. At the doorway, he added, “Thank you. You saved my life once, and this… this saves it again.”
“You saved mine, so I suppose we’re even.” I didn’t want to ask the next question, but I knew that I needed to. “Was it true, what Halder said? About how your people reproduce?”
The shadows through the windows were blue-black, the color of bruises, the color of the shadows under Saul’s eyes. “It’s true enough.” He gripped the doorframe and I heard the wood creak slightly. “But even a parasite may come to understand its own nature, and choose to live another way.”
There didn’t seem to be anything to say to that. We nodded to each other, and he turned to go.
“Hey, Saul?”
He stuck his head back through the doorway. “Yes?”
I dredged up a smile. “I promise not to treat you like a bizarre specimen or an experiment, but if you don’t eventually show me how your teeth work, I’m going to go out of my head wondering.”
He laughed, for once without that awful clicking sound. “Remind me, and I’ll show you.”
He let himself out of the studio, and I fell down on the bed and into a dark and dreamless sleep.
The story we cooked up about Halder and Phelps was a simple one in the end. Jackson went for the sheriff, saying that there was some kind of big animal in the woods and it had killed Halder but he’d shot at it and run it off. A couple of deputies came out and we let them discover Phelps and the dead animals. I said that something had chased me and I’d spent the night up a tree, hoping not to be eaten. No, I hadn’t gotten a good look at it, just that it was big. I’d finally come down and was trying to find the house when I heard the gunshots and shouted for help, and Jackson found me.
The sheriff asked a bunch of questions about the shed and I told them that Phelps had been awfully eager to keep people away from it. With the record of the telegram at the station calling Halder urgently to come deal with a problem in the shed, the sheriff concluded, logically enough, that Halder had been keeping some kind of dangerous animal and that it had gotten out and savaged him. They scoured the woods for a week and told people to be on their guard, but when nobody else showed up with their throat torn out, people started to relax.
(I’m pretty sure Saul and Jackson went down into the shed first and cleaned up a few things that might have led to awkward questions, but I didn’t ask. I did ask what they did about the botflies down there, and Jackson showed me a bag of Paris Green insecticide. There wasn’t much we could do about the ones that had gotten out, but at least the sheriff didn’t get infected when he went down to check it.)
A couple reporters did turn up to ask questions, but it was so difficult to find the house at all that most of them just lay in wait for Jackson when he went into town. The one who showed up on the property got a very chilly send-off. The Kents’ hound had a remarkably bloodcurdling bay that did not betray his desperate desire to be loved by everyone and everything.
