“I like it better when you’re on top,” he said, and he winked at her. “Have you always had such a dirty mind?”

“No. I’ve had to cultivate it.”

“Joking in the midst of disaster,” she said.

” ‘Laughter is a balm for the afflicted, the best defense against despair, the only medicine for melancholy.'”

“Who said that?” she asked. “Shakespeare?” “Groucho Marx, I think.”

She leaned forward and picked something up from the floor between her feet. “And then there’s this damn thing.”

“What did you find?”

“I brought it from my place,” she said.

In the rush to get out of her house before the gas explosion leveled it, he hadn’t noticed that she’d been carrying anything. He risked a quick look, shifting his attention from the road, but there wasn’t enough light in the car for him to see what she held. “I can’t make it out.”

“It’s a horror-comics magazine,” she said. “I found it when I was cleaning out Danny’s room. It was in a box with a lot of other magazines.”

“So?”

“Remember the nightmares I told you about?” “Yeah, sure.”

“The monster in my dreams is on the cover of this magazine. It’s him. Detail for detail.” “Then you must have seen the magazine before, and you just—”

“No. That’s what I tried to tell myself. But I never saw it until today. I know I didn’t. I pored through Danny’s collection. When he came home from the newsstand, I never monitored what he’d bought. I never snooped.”

“Maybe you—”

“Wait,” she said. “I haven’t told you the worst part.”

The traffic thinned out as they drove farther from the heart of town, closer to the looming black mountains that thrust into the last electric-purple light in the western sky.

Tina told Elliot about The Boy Who Was Not Dead.

The similarities between the horror story and their attempt to exhume Danny’s body chilled Elliot.

“Now,” Tina said, “just like Death tried to stop the parents in the story, someone’s trying to stop me from opening my son’s grave.”

They were getting too far out of town. A hungry darkness lay on both sides of the road. The land began to rise toward Mount Charleston where, less than an hour away, pine forests were mantled with snow. Elliot swung the car around and started back toward the lights of the city, which spread like a vast, glowing fungus on the black desert plain. “There are similarities,” he said.

“You’re damned right there are. Too many.”

“There’s also one big difference. In the story, the boy was buried alive. But Danny is dead. The only thing in doubt is how he died.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

“But that’s the only difference between the basic plot of this story and what we’re going through. And the words Not Dead in the title. And the boy in the story being Danny’s age. It’s just too much,” she said.

They rode in silence for a while.

Finally Elliot said, “You’re right. It can’t be coincidence.” “Then how do you explain it?”

“I don’t know.” “Welcome to the club.”

A roadside diner stood on the right, and Elliot pulled into the parking lot. A single mercury-vapor pole lamp at the entrance shed fuzzy purple light over the first third of the parking lot. Elliot drove behind the restaurant and tucked the Mercedes into a slot in the deepest shadows, between a Toyota Celica and a small motor home, where it could not be seen from the street.

“Hungry?” he asked.

“Starving. But before we go in, let’s check out that list of questions they were going to make you answer.”

“Let’s look at it in the café,” Elliot said. “The light will be better. It doesn’t seem to be busy in there. We should be able to talk without being overheard. Bring the magazine too. I want to see that story.”

As he got out of the car, his attention was drawn to a window on the side of the motor home next to which he had parked. He squinted through the glass into the perfectly black interior, and he had the disconcerting feeling that someone was hiding in there, staring  out at him.

Don’t succumb to paranoia, he warned himself.

When he turned from the motor home, his gaze fell on a dense pool of shadows around the trash bin at the back of the restaurant, and again he had the feeling that someone was watching him from concealment.

He had told Tina that Kennebeck’s bosses were not omniscient. He must remember that. He and Tina apparently were confronted with a powerful, lawless, dangerous organization hell-bent on keeping the secret of the Sierra tragedy. But any organization was composed of ordinary men and women, none of whom had the all-seeing gaze of God.

Nevertheless . . .

As he and Tina walked across the parking lot toward the diner, Elliot couldn’t shake the feeling that someone or something was watching them. Not necessarily a person. Just . . . something . . . weird, strange. Something both more and less than human. That was a bizarre thought, not at all the sort of notion he’d ordinarily get in his head, and he didn’t like it.

Tina stopped when they reached the purple light under the mercury-vapor lamp. .She glanced back toward the car, a curious expression on her face.

“What is it?” Elliot asked. “I don’t know “

“See something?” “No.”

They stared at the shadows.

At length she said, “Do you feel it?” “Feel what?”

“I’ve got this…… prickly feeling.”

He didn’t say anything.

“You do feel it, don’t you?” she asked.

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