The Hunter Inside (36 page)

‘Sam said we’re to stay here. He’s
with Sandy’s husband. They’re gonna come back here. Then I suppose we’ll take
it from there.’

‘But what about Sandy? Do we tell
her?’

‘I think we’d better keep it to
ourselves. She’s already restless. This might tip her over the edge. We’ll keep
it to ourselves until they get here.’

‘Okay,’ Bill answered. Mayhew was
probably right. He pointed at the door of the motel room, indicating to Mayhew
that they should go inside. Mayhew nodded, and Bill motioned with his hand,
allowing the smaller, older man to enter the room first. As he followed him
into the room, Bill Arnold looked around. At the same time, Todd Mayhew called
out, ‘Sandy’. She was not there. Bill ran to the bathroom and looked inside. No
sign of her there either.

‘Shit, where’s she gone?’ Arnold asked
Mayhew. It was another rhetorical question; he knew that Mayhew couldn’t have
any idea.

‘She must have heard us on the phone,’
he said. ‘She’s gone to find her kids.’

‘Now what are we gonna do?’

‘We’re gonna wait here for Sam to get
back. We can’t do anything until we know the order in which it took its
victims.’

Both men sat back down on the bed. The
sound of the rain faded into the back of their minds as they thought about
Sandy, out in the storm and trying to find Shimasou. Both men were amazed by
the strength she showed. Despite the knowledge of just what the threat from her
stalker was, her desire to reach her children was stronger than her fear. Her
desire to fight was stronger than her desire to run. Both men waited in
silence.

They were wrong about
Sandy’s reason for leaving the motel room. She hadn’t overheard them out in the
storm as they spoke to O’Neill on the phone. If they stopped and thought about
it they would see it was impossible for any of their conversation to penetrate
the motel room from where they stood; the tumult of the storm beating down on
Atlantic Beach wouldn’t allow it. But they didn’t think about it.

Sandy ran onwards through the rain.
The wind was at her back, which was small mercy, for the huge bombs of rain
that fell onto her reacquainted her with the shivering she’d managed to shake
off while in the motel room. She had no idea what O’Neill had said on the
phone. Her reason for leaving had been the brilliant flash of light that had at
first half blinded her, and had then revealed an image of the huge beast carrying
Sean and David, one of them under each of its huge arms, back towards the
building from where her second dream, or vision, had started earlier in the
day.

All at once she had known that she had
to go to them. She also had a strong feeling that she didn’t need to know where
she was going; she would find them. She would find
it
. She didn’t know
how she would be able to beat it, but she had slipped past the two men as they
spoke on the cell phone to O’Neill anyway. She couldn’t afford to wait around,
she had only seen the legs of her sons, but she knew it was them. Even by the
way they were struggling to get free.

As
she
struggled onwards
through the driving rain, running through puddles and sending waves of water up
her legs and away from her across the asphalt pavement, she thought about
Arnold. She’d hoped he would be ready to fight to beat this beast, but he
seemed happy to sit and wait in the motel room. His fear of dying had paralyzed
his fighting spirit, and she felt a certain amount of resentment towards him,
especially now that she knew it had her children.

My boys
.

As for O’Neill, she didn’t really feel
anything. She didn’t resent him; he wanted to help. He just didn’t seem capable
of doing so. It had taken him thirty minutes to find a phone; hardly a good
advertisement for an FBI Special Agent, and the sign that Sandy took from the
image shown to her of her children was that she would have to go it alone. For
now at least,
everything
seemed to be against her.

Atlantic Beach might as well be
another planet. She had never been here before, and as she ploughed onwards she
groped desperately for some image in her mind that would help her find the
building in which her sons were now held captive.

She had been inside this building. She
had been inside Shimasou inside this building. The image had been so vivid that
she could have been actually standing outside of it when she saw her boys being
carried inside, but she did not know where, or what, it was.

Her legs continued mechanically. One
foot placed itself in front of the other and on she went, almost carried away
several times by the wind as she waited for a message from Shimasou. By now she
fully expected that it would contact her through her mind. It was just a matter
of when.

The small community seemed like a maze
that was filling up quickly with water, and she had to escape from that maze.
She had to find the building. But she also had to stop. She had to get her
breath back and gain a short respite from the punishing storm, and, despite
feeling guilty and being desperate to carry on, she was forced to halt under a
bus shelter.

The stone frame held the wind at bay
and she leant on the cold, damp wall, sucking in air and shivering all over.
She was already completely soaked, and she couldn’t have gone more than half a
dozen blocks from the motel. She wiped her hands across her face and closed her
eyes. The roar around her faded instantly, and was replaced by a feeling of
tiredness that crowded her mind. How could tiredness be crowding in on her now,
when her pulse was racing and she was caught in a storm, looking for a monster
that had killed her parents and taken her boys? She didn’t know. But it was
there all the same, and she could lie down and fall asleep within two minutes
if she would allow herself to do so. She remained with her eyes closed as sleep
toyed with her mind, a comforting sensation that spun gently through her,
upwards in gentle ripples from her stomach. Then the storm was behind her and
above her. She was inside the building again. It was showing her what was
happening at this very moment, and it was so real that she could be forgiven
for thinking that her journey was over and she had reached the place where her
future would be decided.

She looked at the walls around her.
Water dripped down the red brick and huge holes were present at intervals as
her eyes followed a stream of water back up the wall from where it came. The
roof was half missing, and the building was being further ravaged by the storm
that raged around and above it; reaching inside with its rain and wind and
further weakening the already desperately weak structure. This was a dangerous
place to be. But
her
boys were there. And she wasn’t.

Sandy looked to the left and saw what
remained of the staircase inside the building. Huge sections had fallen as
termites had ravaged the wood, and she saw that it only began about ten feet
from the floor. The weight of a person, she feared, might be enough to bring it
down. Her gaze followed up the staircase, and she saw that it stretched up four
floors. Other parts were missing, probably due to the floors in between being
taken away, and she knew that if she were to try to climb up the failing
structure, she would be putting her life at risk
before
she met Shimasou
for real.

All was quiet inside the building and
Sandy closed her eyes. When she had done so earlier, she had seen her parents.
She had also seen Arnold, and she had seen herself standing, alone and afraid,
inside this building. Now she knew the significance of that vision, and she
waited for the next one to come to her.

It came instantly. They were there,
and they were alive. Three floors up on a ledge that kept them just out of
Sandy’s view as she looked upwards from ground level, their small frames hugged
each other for warmth and comfort, and she was struck by how small they looked
next to the beast that sat and watched them. Their whole life she had looked at
them and been amazed by the speed of their growth. Now it was the speed of the
growth of Shimasou that struck her. Even sitting down it was still huge – the
same size as Arnold standing up.

It must be twelve feet tall
, she thought
incredulously. The children were completely dwarfed by it, and she imagined the
fear they must be feeling as they tried not to look at the still not fully
formed face of Shimasou.

She opened her eyes.
The Atlantic
Beach Herald
, she thought, and she knew where it was. With the name came
the knowledge of the place and its surroundings, and she knew exactly where she
needed to go. She knew that the knowledge was not her own. It was that of
Shimasou. But she ran towards it anyway, because she did not know how much time
she had left, and she did not know whether her boys would live.

‘But I told you not to let
her move.’ O’Neill shook his head as he spoke, not sure whether he was cursing
Mayhew and Arnold who stood in front of him, Joe Myers who stood behind him,
Sandy, himself, or their collective luck. He certainly felt that they
themselves
were cursed, and he couldn’t understand why Sandy Myers would want to go it
alone against this thing. He couldn’t understand how the others had let her go.

‘We didn’t let her move.’ Mayhew said.
‘She moved herself. We went outside because of the signal on the phone. When we
came back in, she’d gone.’

‘Hang on, though.’ Bill Arnold had a
thoughtful tone in his voice as he continued. ‘The more I think about it, the
more I don’t think she could have overheard our conversation from inside this
room.’

All three men turned their attention
towards Arnold’s thoughts. ‘Explain,’ O’Neill said, willing to hear any
theories or explanations that might be forthcoming from Arnold.

‘It must have shown her something. It
must have shown her that is has the kids, and that’s why she went to them.’

‘My kids,’ Joe Myers groaned. ‘Those
kids mean everything to us. You gotta help me.’

O’Neill thought he was probably still
in shock. He had been unable to drive back to the motel, and O’Neill had had to
get behind the wheel of his car. These were the first words he had spoken since
they began their journey back, and it was Mayhew who placed a comforting arm on
his shoulder and said, ‘Don’t worry, we’re
going
to help you.’ He was
defiant, despite seeing a quality in the fear and distress of Joe Myers that
was similar to the one he had seen in Paul Wayans on the night of his death. He
was defiant
because
he saw that same distanced and desperate expression.
An expression that meant he had been touched by Shimasou. But they had all been
touched, and if the Myers family was not saved from Shimasou, then Mayhew
feared that
every
one might be touched, destroyed even, by its growing
strength.

‘Come on then, let’s go,’ Myers said,
now fully back in the land of the living and het up by the immediate
seriousness of the situation in which he found himself.

‘Did you call Hoskins?’ Mayhew asked.

O’Neill winced. He had forgotten to
call. But he had been distracted by the arrival of Joe Myers and the unexpected
turn of events. Hadn’t he? No. He knew that it shouldn’t have been unexpected,
and he knew that he should have remembered to call. They couldn’t beat it if
they didn’t know the information.

Jeez
, he thought.
It’s as if
something’s playing with
my
mind.
He definitely wasn’t his usual
self. In fact, he wondered just if he
was
losing his touch.
Maybe
Hoskins will get his promotion sooner than he thinks
, he thought.

‘We’ve got to make another phone
call,’ Mayhew said, more to Joe Myers than to Bill Arnold, who quietly
contemplated his position.

The feeling of guilt that Arnold
harbored left a bitter taste in his mouth. It felt almost as if Sandy was
reaching out to him from somewhere, calling for his help, but his fear had
turned him to ice. Would anybody else in his position want to face Shimasou? He
didn’t think so. But he knew that if he backed away from fighting it, everybody
else probably
would
have to face it. Mayhew, it seemed, was ready to
fight. O’Neill, while being puzzled by the events, did not appear to be
frightened of Shimasou. He had a duty to do, and to Arnold it looked as though
he were trying hard to do that duty. He just wasn’t having much luck.

‘Phone call?’ Myers asked. His feet
jiggled up and down excitedly on the threshold to the room as he waited to get
moving. He looked to Mayhew like a six year old who
really
needed to
pee, but Mayhew did not smile. He understood his anxiousness, but the call had
to be made.

‘Phone call,’ he said. ‘We can’t just
go after this thing, Joe. If we shoot it, it probably won’t have much effect.
It’s a spirit that we need to invoke to beat it, and we need to know the order
in which it took its victims before we can evoke that spirit.’ Joe Myers’ face
resumed its earlier perplexed look as he absorbed Mayhew’s words. His brow
wrinkled as he thought about what Mayhew said. The old man turned away from him
to face O’Neill. ‘The battery on the phone died when you rang before.’

‘Have you left it switched off since
then?’ O’Neill asked.