John Saul - The Right Hand of Evil

"It's so you can see your enemies, even when you're drinking," his mama had told him. "Your grandmama always said it was important to keep an eye on your enemies, so they won't catch you by surprise."

Sometimes, when his mama was working her magic, Jake watched her peering into the mug, and knew that even when she wasn't drinking from it, the window in the bottom of the mug let her see what her enemies were doing, no matter where they were. "They can't hide, Jake," she'd said. "Not as long as you got the mug." Even now, whenever Jake drank from the mug, his eyes stayed open as he searched for any threat that might lie beyond the glass.

But never had he seen any Conways through the bottom of the mug. In fact, he'd almost wondered if maybe he'd been wrong before. But when he'd hung around outside the fence of the cemetery this morning, there they were, the man helping carry the old lady's coffin, and the rest of them following after.

He stayed and watched them bury the old lady, and tried to work some of his mama's magic on them, but knew it wouldn't work. You couldn't just work the magic-you had to have a lot of stuff first, but he'd still tried. And he was pretty sure the woman, at least, felt him give her the eye, 'cause she'd looked straight at him a couple of times. But he hadn't flinched. No, sir. He'd stayed right where he was.

Then, after they all left the cemetery, he'd come around through the woods and kept right on watching.

They'd come back here and started taking their stuff out of the truck and putting it into the house. Only then had he decided that it was true, they really were planning to stay.

Shoulda burnt that place down, he thought. Shoulda burnt it down years ago, Finally he'd gone home and waited for nightfall, when it would be safe to creep back to the house and search for the things he'd need to make his mama's magic work.

Jake knew what he needed-knew exactly what he had to do.

And ever since night had fallen over St. Albans, he'd been there, hidden by the shadows, holding perfectly still in the darkness, waiting.

The hours crept by. He could feel the people inside the house, almost see them tossing in their troubled sleep.

His ears, sharpened by a life spent tracking the creatures that roamed the night, could almost hear them breathing, and when, in the small hours of the night, the cat leaped from the windowsill, he heard it clearly, even though its paws struck the ground so lightly they made almost no sound.

As the cat moved through the darkness, Jake tensed, waiting.

His ears and eyes tracked it as it moved through the area, exploring the wilderness that had closed around the house as the years had passed. He waited patiently, knowing that soon it would move in his direction.

Perhaps it would even sense him.

But if he held still-if he made no sound at all-

Yes!

It was coming toward him now.

Jake held his breath as the cat stopped, tensing as it caught his scent. For an instant he thought it was going to bolt, but then, as he silently willed it forward, it dropped low to the ground and began slinking nearer.

Jake waited, every muscle in his body vibrating with the strain of holding perfectly still.

The cat crept closer, its tail twitching.

It paused once more, when it was still just beyond his reach. But then, its curiosity overcoming its caution, it moved still closer.

Closer…

Close enough!

So quickly the cat had no time to react, Jake's arms snaked through the darkness.

His huge hands closed around the cat's neck.

You promise you'll look for Muffin?" Kim asked when Janet pulled the Toyota to a stop in front of St. Ignatius School the next morning.

"Will you stop worrying?" Jared said as he slid out of the backseat. "She's a cat. They do what they want to do. She'll come home when she feels like it."

"But what if she tried to go back to Shreveport?" Kim fretted.

"I'm sure she didn't do that," Janet assured her. "Jared's probably right. But I promise I'll keep an eye out for her." She looked at her watch. "Now let's get you two enrolled so I can get back to the house before your father-" She cut her words short, but it was too late. She saw Kim and Jared glance at each other and was certain they were supplying the words she hadn't uttered: starts drinking.

But maybe, just maybe, he'd really meant what he said about making this work, about starting over again in St. Albans. When she woke up this morning, Ted was already out of bed, and for a fleeting moment-and it had only happened because she wasn't quite awake yet-she felt the same despair that had washed over her at least half a dozen times in the last few months when she woke up to find that Ted hadn't come to bed at all.

Mostly, she'd found him passed out on the sofa in the living room.

Once, she found him in the bathtub.

And once he hadn't come home at all. That morning, she'd been on the verge of calling the police when he'd phoned her with a story-which she chose to believe, although she knew it was undoubtedly a lie-about having worked most of the night and finally collapsing in one of the rooms at the Majestic.

But this morning, Janet had found him downstairs ripping up the worn carpet that covered the dining room floor, in order to expose the intricately inlaid hardwood hidden beneath it. "Will you look at this?" he crowed. "It's incredible! Oak inlaid with cherry, walnut, and God only knows what else. All it needs is sanding and refinishing." He kept working while she put together a makeshift breakfast, and when she left to enroll Jared and Kimberley at St. Ignatius, he was still at it. Molly, in her playpen, had been watching her father work and happily played with a scrap of carpet he'd given her. And for the first time in years, Janet allowed herself to hope that maybe this time things really would change. But even as she let that tiny ray of hope into her consciousness, she reminded herself that he'd made dozens of promises before. None of them had ever been kept.

"Come on," she said now, starting up the steps to the school. "No matter what's happening at home, I still need to be there. I'll keep an eye out for Muffin. I promise."

The moment he stepped through the door, Jared's worst fears about what St. Ignatius might be like were instantly validated. The front door opened onto a long, narrow corridor lit only by a few old-fashioned glass globes that hung at the intersections where other hallways led off to the right and left. The walls were wainscoted, but the wood and plaster had been painted the same color-a sort of beige that looked yellowish and dirty. The floor was covered with a dark linoleum unbroken by any pattern, unless you could count a worn strip down the middle through which the wood of the floor beneath was starting to show. Jared decided the worn strip didn't count.

As they made their way to the office, Jared and Kim glanced uneasily at each other, but neither said anything.

Half an hour later, after their mother had left, the twins started up the stairs to their new homeroom. "You'll like Sister Clarence," Father Bernard, the priest who ran St. Ignatius, had assured them. "She's one of our best teachers, and all the children love her."

"Not exactly like Shreveport, is it?" Jared observed as they emerged from the stairwell onto the second-floor landing. Ahead of them stretched a duplicate of the corridor on the first floor, except this one contained a bank of lockers, two of which had been assigned to them. "They'll need to have locks, of course," Father Bernard had told Janet. "We require combination locks, and the combinations must be on file in the office." He'd fixed Jared with a hard look, as if he expected his charges to try to get away with as much as they could. "We do spot checks, and if the combination has been changed, it is an automatic one-week suspension."