The Hunter Inside (32 page)

Before she realized what she was
doing, Sandy threw her arms around Bill Arnold’s neck. ‘Thank God. Thank God
I’ve found you.’ Her eyes filled up with tears and she tried to blink them away
before releasing her hold on him. He was rigid. Sandy stepped back, remembering
that this was somebody who had probably never seen her before.

‘Your name is Sandy, right?’ Bill
Arnold was shocked at this knowledge. It was given to him by a voice inside his
head, a voice that wasn’t his.

Sandy Myers knew what had happened.
It
had told him. It was watching their every move. Maybe it was close too. She
would have to tell Arnold everything she knew, quickly. Maybe he would
understand some of it. Maybe the things that had happened to him were different
to the things that had happened to her. Maybe by combining their knowledge and
strength they would first be able to understand, and then fight and beat
whatever was hunting them.

Together.

When
the wind is around you

When
the rain beats down on you

When
you feel fear surround you

Walk
onwards, and keep hope in your heart

Monty the bartender looked
first at the lady, before turning his glance towards the guy who’d just entered
the bar (and who also dripped water on his floor). As he watched the pair, who
stood in front of one another, both with a certain amount of bemusement etched
onto their faces, he relaxed his grip on the cloth in his hand.

Something wasn’t right.

He wondered if the woman was maybe a
little mad. She certainly looked a wreck, and the man had not seemed to respond
when she hugged him.

‘You two old friends?’ He offered the
question cautiously, with a tone reflecting hesitancy in his voice.

Sandy – he had overheard
her name spoken – half-turned to look at Monty. Her cheeks flushed, a blotchy red
the color of raspberry sauce on top of an ice cream, and it was Arnold – or at
least it
sounded
like she’d called him Arnold – who answered the
bartender’s question.

‘Yeah, but we haven’t seen
each other for maybe five, six years.’ He smiled broadly, flashing his golf
ball white teeth, before cutting the bartender dead by ushering Sandy away from
the bar and over towards the table where she had earlier sat. Her drink sat
waiting on the wooden tabletop, and she picked it up swiftly enough to spill a
quarter of its contents.

Monty won’t be happy,
she thought, and glanced
over to make sure he wasn’t watching or attempting to eavesdrop on the
conversation that they were about to have. He wasn’t. He had stooped to
continue whatever it was he was doing under the bar.

‘I know who you are, and I
know what you’ve been going through,’ Sandy said as she put the glass back on
the table.

‘What do you mean? How do
you know me? More to the point, how do I know
your
name when I can’t
remember ever meeting you before?’ She was obviously drunk or on the way to
being so. Bill himself felt drunk with the surreal quality of the sudden
meeting.

He had only wanted a beer.

Now it looked as though he was going
to have to plunge headfirst back into a lake in which he didn’t want to swim.
The surroundings of the bar faded as he fixed an inquisitive stare on the
woman’s face and waited for answers to his questions, the beer forgotten and
left on the bar.

‘I’ve been getting the
letters too.’

Bill Arnold froze. The
letters. The letters that he hadn’t had to think about since his arrival in
Atlantic Beach. And the photograph of the corpse. He hadn’t told a soul, yet
here was someone sitting in front of him who said she knew about the foul
threats.

What’s more, she said she’s
a victim. A victim like me. Like my father.

‘How do you know I’ve been
receiving letters?’

She didn’t look like a killer. She
wasn’t particularly strong looking, but he was cautious nevertheless. She had a
mother’s cast to her face, sort of like a dripping out of youth. The blue in
her eyes looked faded to Bill, and she looked like she needed a damn good rest.
Underneath her jaded eyes were dark rings, testament to a lack of proper rest,
which stood out and were made more apparent by the pale cast of her face. Her
hair was unkempt; frizzy and dirty looking, and rearranged by the wind and rain
that had left Bill damp while tempering his more optimistic mood of earlier in
the day.

‘Listen, I know all of this
is weird. I think we might be the only two left to fight this thing.
We’ve
got to work together
.’ Sandy stared hard into the eyes of the man in front
of her.

Bill stared back, and
something told him that what she was saying was true: she
was
on his
side. ‘Yeah, okay. I have been getting letters. But not since I arrived in
Atlantic Beach. Whoever it is, they don’t know I’m here.’

She had said
fight. She obviously
hasn’t seen the photograph,
he thought.
Or she wouldn’t want to fight;
she’d want to run.

‘You’re wrong, Bill.’ She
paused in acknowledgement of the fact that she had known his first name without
being told, by
him
at least. ‘It
does
know you’re here.
It’s
here, and that’s why I’m here, because it
brought
me here. It brought me
here in the same way as it brought you here.’

‘What do you mean, Sandy?’
He had known her name the moment she had spoken his, but his continuing
unwillingness to accept the peculiarity of the situation had made him attempt
to put this
voice
out of his head. ‘I don’t understand you. Nothing
brought me here; I brought my
self
here. It was a free choice.’

‘It wasn’t, Bill. Believe
me, I wish that were true but it’s not. It knows where we are, all of the
time.’ Sandy could see that the big man in front of her was struggling against
the reality of the situation he was in. She knew he had to accept the fact that
it was real, like she had been forced to do, before they could think about
fighting it.

‘Did it take someone else from your
family, Bill?’ She didn’t want to evoke bad memories for him. Telling him about
her own parents was the only way of proving to him that she wasn’t just
empathizing with him, but was actually sharing his experience, and had done so
for a long, long time.

Bill Arnold reeled at her
words. The link that
he
had made had been spoken in conversation for the
first time. And by someone else. ‘Yeah, it took my father, the fucker. Sorry.’

‘Huh? Don’t apologize Bill.
It
is
a fucker. It took
both
my parents.’

‘Jesus, Sandy, that’s
tough.’ He paused and looked around for his drink. Realizing that it was still
on the bar, he decided it could stay there for now – he had more pressing
matters to consider.

‘I suppose it took both of mine too.
My mother left two years after my father died, and I haven’t seen her since.’
He didn’t like to think of the possibility that whatever was hunting both of
them had killed his mother. Rather that she had gone somewhere where she could
put the murder of her husband, his father, behind her.

‘Do you know what’s going
on, Sandy? Do you know what this thing is?’

She saw fear in his eyes.
She knew they couldn’t run much longer. It was more a sensing than actual
knowledge, but she knew she had to have Arnold totally on board if she were to
stand any chance of surviving and seeing Sean and David again. And Joe. But
there were only so many answers that she could give, her own head was full of
enough questions to fill an encyclopedia. ‘I don’t know what it is, no. But I
know it’s not human.’

‘What?’

‘Come on, Bill. It can read
your mind and tell you things. It’s even showed me things, in dreams. It has
the power to put thoughts in our heads. It has the power to take us through its
mind and actions, though our bodies don’t actually move. It’s trying to control
us.’

‘What d’you mean, dreams?’
This was one experience that Bill Arnold had been spared.

‘I’ve had two dreams. I had
the first last night. I saw it hunt down a man and kill him. I stood right
there in the room and watched it butcher him.’ She paused, self-conscious in
the telling of something that hadn’t seemed real to
her
at first,
wondering how long it would take for him to accept what she had told him. It
was evident to her that she knew more than he did.

‘But that’s just a dream,
Sandy.’ He stated the obvious to her, knowing by the concentrated look in her
eyes that she believed what she had said to be true.

‘I know. I thought it was
just a dream. The second dream proved to me that it was real.
You
proved
to me that it was real.’

‘What? How?’

Sandy decided to tell him
the second dream from the beginning. She knew that he would believe her when he
heard of the journey on which she had been taken.

‘At lunchtime today I had the second
dream. It was different to the first. This time I was seeing the world through
its
eyes, watching as it delivered its last letter to me, and then to you.’

Bill Arnold held onto his
question.

‘The reason I knew your
name was because I saw it on the front of the envelope it delivered to your
motel room.’

‘
My
motel room?’ He
shivered.

‘Yes. Thirteen B at the
Sleep-Easy Motel, right?’

‘Yeah, that’s right. But
what makes you think it was real?’

‘During the dream I closed
my eyes and saw you walking near a lake. Did you walk near a lake this
afternoon?’

‘Yes, but…’
She could
have watched me. It could be a trap
. He was pretty sure the subconscious
voice that spoke this time was his own; his paranoia was growing.

‘I’m on your side,
remember,’ Sandy said, raising her voice enough to make Monty look across.

Both Sandy and Bill smiled
at Monty, and he resumed his wiping down of the old wooden bar-top. Sandy
waited a moment before continuing, ‘Just listen, Bill. I promise you, if you
just listen you’ll believe me.’

Bill nodded. He
would
listen, but he would reserve judgment until she had finished recounting the
dream.

‘It went to your motel
room, and it pushed the envelope under the door. I was terrified that it was
going to kill you. I thought I was going to be forced to watch it kill you. But
it had another envelope, one with my name on it. Everything blurred. When it
cleared it was standing outside my friend’s house; where I lay asleep. It
posted the envelope with my name on it through the door of the house, and then
it went around back. I could see myself through the window, Bill. I was
powerless. It stood and looked through the window. I thought it would kill me.
I thought about my boys. But it didn’t. It stepped back and I saw its
reflection in the glass.’

Her grimace showed that she held a
powerful image of what she had seen in her mind.

‘It was hideous. It looked as though
it wasn’t fully formed. And it had sores on its face and hands that seemed to
heal as my terror grew. It looked like it had been in a head-on car smash. I
recoiled away from it. When I did I was standing in the garden, behind it. But
I woke as it turned around.’

‘And was it there, watching you
through the window?’

‘I don’t know. I was too scared to
look. I crawled to the side of the sofa. It felt as if my heart would burst,
and I just wanted to get away from it. I knew I couldn’t hide, because I knew
it was inside
my
head as much as I had been inside
its
head. But
I was just so shocked.’

‘So how do you know it was real if you
never actually saw it?’ He had failed to consider the obvious link, and Sandy
knew that this was the detail that would make him believe the rest of her
account.

‘The envelope. It was in the hallway
when I checked, and when I opened it there was a photograph of the man from the
first dream, dead.’

‘Jesus,’ Arnold uttered.

The time had come for him to believe.
But first of all he would have to see if there was an envelope waiting in his
motel room. Then he would have no choice
but
to believe she was telling
the truth. The only other possibility was that his paranoia was correct. The
way she had told him about the dreams made him feel that she was either
speaking the truth or going mad; he didn’t think she could be the killer. That
didn’t mean that he wouldn’t be on his guard around her. He didn’t want to
trust anybody, not with a killer pursuing him.

‘So, there’s an envelope waiting for
me then?’

‘Yes. But we can’t go there, Bill. It
might be a trap. It could be setting a trap for us.’

‘It’s the only way, Sandy.’ He felt a
nervous excitement in his stomach, kneading away like a baker’s hands in dough.
From a feeling of calm and tranquility had sprung a threat of maybe almost
immediate action, and he felt as he had when undertaking surveillance of the
area surrounding his house the previous day.