in the lightless aisles of the dream library, and Waxx could not be sure that I heard him say it the second time.
Letting out a soft groan, then murmuring wordlessly, I pretended to be negotiating a nightmare. Using this anxious muttering as cover, I eased off the bed and, falling silent, crouched beside it.
Breathing through my open mouth, I made no slightest sound. If I decided to move, I felt confident that my pajamas were too soft to betray me with a rustle.
Although silent to the intruder’s ears, I was not quiet to my own. My heart knocked like a savage fist upon all the doors of my defenses, chasing out my expectations of civilization and letting in the fear of anarchy and barbaric violence.
If Waxx made subtle sounds, I was not certain that I could hear them above this inner drumming. The rhythmic pressure waves of hard-pumped blood raised surf sounds in the nautilus turns of my inner ears.
The longer Waxx waited to speak again, the more I wondered what his game might be. I had no doubt that he had come here to harm us. That he wanted first to terrorize us seemed obvious, as well. But his boldness, the risks he took, and his eerie patience in the dark gave me the impression that his purpose was more complex than the psychotic thrill of torment and murder.
Before he spoke again, and especially before he switched on a flashlight, I needed to put some distance between myself and the bed. He would expect to find me there, and when he did not, when his light revealed his position but not mine, I might be able to catch him off guard, rushing at him from the side or from behind as he initially regarded the tangle of abandoned sheets.
Crouched and barefoot, in a slow-motion shamble that required tension in every muscle and that tested balance, I ape-walked toward where I expected to find an armchair. It ought to be just to the right of that point on the wall where the alarm-system keypad should have been softly glowing.
Shoulders slumped, arms low, I let my fingertips slide lightly, soundlessly across the carpet. If a knee buckled or a muscle cramped, I could steady myself with my hands.
I feared making a sound less than I dreaded colliding with Waxx in the blackness. My strategy would then be worthless, though I would still surprise him and might be able to overpower him before he shot or stabbed me.
I am five feet eleven and in acceptable physical condition. But I did not delude myself that his formidable bulk would prove to be flab. He would be difficult to take down.
In retrospect, I realize that in my desperation, I thought I could plot the scene as if I were writing fiction. Suspense novels are not my genre. Fate had dropped me into a real-life tale of peril, however, and because I lacked tough-guy experience, I had fallen back on imagination and craftsmanship to sculpt this narrative toward a twist that would not leave me dead in an early chapter.
Blinded, I nevertheless found the armchair where I expected it would be, which gave me hope that I remained the protagonist and had not become a supporting character destined for a bloody end in Part 1.
Elsewhere in the room, his position impossible to fix from a single word, the critic said quietly, “Hack.”
He might be describing what he intended to do to me with an axe or cleaver, but I suspected that instead the word was intended as an insult, a judgment of my writing skills.
Separating the first armchair from another was an art-deco sideboard. The highly lacquered amboina wood felt cool against my fingertips as I aped onward.
Our sleigh bed stood against the east wall of the room. Logic suggested that Waxx had positioned himself at the foot of the bed, where his flashlight, when he switched it on, could cover both me and Penny.
Now near the south wall, I hoped to circle to the west, where I most likely would be behind him when at last he revealed himself.
Wondering at Waxx’s failure to take quick and deadly action after penetrating the house so effectively, I halted at the second armchair, suddenly fearful of proceeding. I began to suspect that I had missed something, that the implicit meaning of the moment was different from what I imagined it to be.
This happens often when writing fiction. Outlines are a waste of time. If you give your characters free will, they will grow in ways you never anticipated, and they will take the story places you could not have predicted, raising themes you might or might not have intended to explore. Characters shape events; events illuminate the characters. The people in a story begin as seeds, become buds, and blossom in ways that surprise the author, precisely as real people frequently surprise him with their intentions and capacities.
As I crouched by the second armchair, Shearman Waxx electrocuted me.
Out of the darkness, something thrust against the nape of my neck—two metal pegs, positive and negative poles. Before I could flinch away, hot needles stitched the length of my spine and then sewed through every branch of my peripheral nervous system to toes, to fingertips, to scalp.
My eyes rolled back in my skull, dazzled by an inner vision of gold and crimson fireworks, and I dropped out of my crouch. Facedown on the carpet, I twitched as a puppeteer jerked on the threads that the needles had sewn through me.
The words that came from me were none that I intended, slurred and meaningless.
Although coherent speech eluded me, I clearly heard Penny, who had been awakened by my cry.
“Cubby?” The click-click of her lamp switch. “What’s happening?”
I resisted the twitching, but spasmed all the more for my resistance. Yet I marshalled the clarity of mind and tongue to tell her what seemed most important: “He can see in the dark.”
The bronze hardware on her nightstand rattled as Penny jerked open drawers in search of the flashlight that Waxx had confiscated.
She let out a thin shriek, like the plaint a bird in flight might issue if pierced by an arrow. The hard knock of her fall suggested that she might have struck her head on furniture.
The physical effects of the shock faded quickly. The twitching diminished to a nervous trembling, which was not a consequence of extreme voltage but an expression of my terror at Penny’s suffering.
From full collapse, I rose onto all fours, then to my knees, my mind a jigsaw-puzzle box full of fragmented thoughts from which I could not fit together a defensive tactic.
The word Taser sizzled into my mind. And Waxx Tasered me again.
I fell from my knees onto my right side. My skull rapped the floor. I bit my tongue, tasted blood.
For a moment, I thought Waxx was tearing at my pajama shirt, but the clawing hands were mine. I tried to close them into fists.
Stuttering Penny’s name, infuriated by my inability to protect her, I tried to jackknife off my side, onto my knees. The post-shock spasms facilitated this change of position. Probing the darkness, I found an armchair, used it for support, got to my feet.
I cursed myself that I was not prepared for this—not for Waxx in particular, but for someone lethal in the night. I knew well the capacity for cruelty in the human heart.
A groan of convulsive misery came from Penny as she was Tasered a second time.
A homicidal rage, of which I would never have imagined myself capable, focused me. Murderous fury more than terror cracked the dam of adrenaline, flooding me with sudden strength, animal determination.
I moved unsteadily toward where I thought Penny might be.
As invisible as the wind—and like the wind revealed only by his effects—Waxx came in from my left side, stinging me in the neck. The shocks were no longer hot but as cold as driven sleet.
Although I struck him, it seemed to be a glancing blow. My legs buckled, and I knew I would not get another chance to hit him.