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For a while he drove randomly from one street to another with no idea where he was headed After his laughter faded, when his heart stopped racing, he gradually oriented hieneral direction of his hideaway

If William Cooper could have provided any connection to the woo forever He wasn’t worried He didn’t knoas happening to him, why Cooper or Lindsey or the ht to his attention by these supernatural od, everything would eventually beto wonder if Hell had let hi in order to use hiod of darkness wanted dead Perhaps he’d not been stolen from Hell, after all, but had been sent back to life on acomprehensible If that were the case, he was pleased to make himself the instrued to rejoin, and he anxiously awaited whatever task he ned next

Toward dawn, after several hours in a deep slumber of almost deathlike perfection, Hatch woke and did not knohere he was For a moment he drifted in confusion, then washed up on the shore ofsoftly in her sleep beside hi like a fine silver dust on the panes

When he recalled the inexplicable and inhuh him with paralytic force, Hatch stiffened with fear He tried to reer had led, in what act of violence it had culminated, but his mind was blank It seemed to him that he had simply passed out, as if that unnaturally intense fury had overloaded the circuits in his brain and blown a fuse or two

Passed out--or blacked out? There was a fateful difference between the two Passed out, he ht, exhausted, as still as a stone on the floor of the sea But if he blacked out, re, in a psychotic fugue, God alone knehat he rave danger

Heart hae of his ribs, he sat up in bed and looked at her The dawn light at the as too soft to reveal her clearly She was only a shadowy shape against the sheets

He reached for the switch on the bedside laht see

I would never hurt Lindsey, never, he thought desperately

But he reht, he had not been entirely hier at Cooper had see in a , he finally clicked the switch In the laht he saw that Lindsey was untouched, as fair as ever, sleeping with a peaceful sht of Regina The engine of anxiety revved up again

Ridiculous He would no sooner harina than Lindsey She was a defenseless child

He could not stop shaking, wondering

He slipped out of bed without disturbing his wife He picked up his bathrobe from the back of the armchair, pulled it on, and quietly left the roohts adina’s roohed down by dread as heavy as a pair of iron boots

He had a any bed splashed with blood, the sheets sodden and red For some reason, he had the crazy notion that he would find the child with fraged face The weird specificity of that i unthinkable after he had blacked out

When he eased open the door and looked into the girl’s roo as peacefully as Lindsey, in the saht, when he and Lindsey had checked on her before going to bed No blood No broken glass

Sing hard, he pulled the door shut and returned along the hall as far as the first skylight He stood in the fall of dilass at a sky of indetere across the heavens

No explanation came to him He reina were fine, untouched by whatever presence he had connected with last night

He was reminded of an old vampire movie he had once seen, in which a wizened priest had warned a young woman that the undead could enter her house only if she invited the and persuasive, capable of inducing even the wary to issue that mortal invitation

Somehow a bond existed between Hatch and the psychotic who had killed the young blond punker naer at Williaer was the key that opened the door When he indulged in anger, he was issuing an invitation just like the one against which the priest in thatwoman He could not explain how he knew this to be true, but he did know it, all right, knew it in his bones He just wished to God he understood it