Stephen Gallagher - Valley of lights

I turned to the ghoul. He seemed to have given up on the last few feet and had simply rolled over, exhausted, to rest with what was left of his head. propped, against the open barn door. The windshield glass appeared to have flayed most of his face away so that he'd actually come to resemble the image of malleable clay that I'd tried to create in my mind.

As I was opening the driver's door of the St Regis, I said, 'I suppose you realise that this was a bad move. You should have kept him in another place, another town altogether. But then, I can imagine you being scared out of the idea of another long journey the last time we did this.'

And then I crouched down and put my arm around Michaels' shoulders, and tipped him forward so that his head bent over the wheel. A few seconds passed, and then I could feel him shudder as he began the final stage of the drawn-out death process.

The ghoul was watching me with his one, bloody, murderous eye, too weak to interfere and too hurt to make the leap unaided. Only the ending of this body's life could release him, and right now he was like a man at the deck rail of a burning ship, watching the last of the lifeboats pulling away. Michaels was shivering hard now and I kept my arm around him, using his throes to help me resist any temptation to pity that I might feel for this broken creature on the ground before me. I had to remind myself that this mutilated shell was no more than a temporary habitation and that within seconds, given the chance, he'd be coming at me in another frame madder than any dog.

When Michaels was gone I gave his shoulder a final squeeze and then eased him back in the seat. From over by the door I heard a despairing groan, the first sound of any kind that the ghoul had made in the last ten minutes or so. I went and knelt down beside him and he looked at me, his eye a tiny pinpoint of fury that he hadn't the strength to express.

So here we were, one-to-one, and at last the ghoul lay naked and defenceless.

I said, 'You've made me do things a man should never have to do. I've seen things that no-one should ever have to see.' And as I spoke I was putting the Colt into his hand, smearing my prints to replace them with his own; and even as I was doing this he was weakly but gamely trying to pull the trigger on me, and the hammer fell on an empty chamber exactly as I'd set it. When I let go of his hand, it fell by his side. He didn't even have the strength to raise it again.

I thought he had maybe a couple of minutes longer, if he was lucky. It took everything he had to manage at last a faint, hoarse whisper.

He said ' No, Alex. Not this. Not to me.'

Perhaps it was the way he used my name, I don't know, but I felt a tug of something inside. Something that I knew I didn't dare pay much attention to. I said, 'I know, you're a strange and wonderful thing. But you never took a step without walking on somebody.'

' I didn't hurt the child. '

'No. But you would have, in the end,'

The glimmer in his dying eye told me that I'd spoken the truth, and that both of us knew it.

I leaned closer.

'I could let it end for you here,' I said. 'But there's something I want you to understand before you go.'

When Angela Price came out a few minutes later, the farm caretaker lay dead with my untraceable Colt Special in his hand. For anybody who wanted to work it out, it would look as if he'd committed mass slaughter in the house and then crawled over here with the notion of escaping in one of the cars. That didn't leave me exactly free and clear, but it took me a lot of the way.

I looked up from beside him and said to Angela, 'Did you call the sheriff?'

She looked once at the body beside me, and then looked away again. None of the dead inside the house had been quite as messy as this, and what had been the ghoul was also lying out in full daylight. She said, 'Right after I called the network. There's a news crew on its way down here in a helicopter.'

Yeah, I could bet on it. I could also bet that she'd spent at least half of the time negotiating a television contract for herself before she'd disclosed the location of the story. Straightening up and dusting myself off, I said, 'Well, I'm going to disappear.'

Her eyes widened. 'What?' she said. 'You can't!'

'Only for as long as it takes to get Georgie to her mother. Tell the sheriff I'll be turning around and coming straight back, and then I'll tell him anything he wants to know.'

'He won't like it.'

'You're right, he won't.'

And I probably didn't have much time before he'd get here. I picked up the bird box from the hood of the St Regis and took it around to the Toyota, which was the only other car that could be rolled out of the barn without a lot of manoeuvring. The engine turned over easily and started on the third try. Angela followed me out around the side of the house, and in the rearview mirror I could see her standing at the top of the drive as she watched me go. She probably didn't want to go back into the house alone, and I couldn't blame her. Before I turned out onto the main road I checked in my mirror again, only now she was shading her eyes and watching the sky.

The bird in its pet store box was on the passenger seat now. I'd held it in place with the seat belt, otherwise it would have slid around every time I hit the brakes. As the outskirts of the town approached, I could hear it tearing at the cardboard from the inside.

'Either you stop that,' I said, 'or I tape over the airholes.'

That quietened him for a while.

Georgie was asleep on the back seat of Angela's car when I got there, but she woke up as I was carrying her over. I'd decided to stick with the Toyota, which seemed to be fine apart from a tendency to jump out of gear on a stop. Georgie sat in the back, yawning and blinking as I drove another two blocks in search of a pay phone; I saw a lot of activity around the county sheriff's compound, in addition to the three cars that had passed me at speed on their way out to the farm. From the phone I called Loretta's number, and left a message on Heilbron's answering machine. His taped message said that he was at the hospital, so that would be where I'd go. When I got back to the car Georgie was leaning forward on the back of the passenger seat so that she could look over at the bird box, and she was frowning. But she didn't say anything, and dropped back as we moved out.

I took no chances on the way back, no speeding or anything, and just before we reached the city outskirts I turned off down a side road. Once we were out of sight of the rest of the traffic, I stopped. I walked off the track for about two hundred yards, and there after wiping my leather holster I scraped a hole in the dust and buried it. Looking back as I returned to the car, I found that it was already impossible to say where the hole might be.

Georgie seemed to be holding up pretty well. She certainly wasn't the distressed wreck that I might have expected her to be after a week as a captive and in strange company. When we were moving again, I said, 'How did he treat you?'

'He was okay,' she said, coming forward to lean on the back of the passenger seat again. She could barely reach to see over. 'He was explaining stuff all the time. Like he'd never had anyone to talk to before.'

'What kind of things did he say?'

'Weird stuff,' she said, and when I glanced at her I don't think I'd ever seen a kid looking so thoughtful, and so troubled, I asked her to tell me what kind of weird stuff.

So she told me about how he never slept if he could help it; how when a body grew tired he'd move to another, even if it was only for a few hours. She'd asked him why and it had emerged that he was terrified by his own dreams. He'd told her about another time when he'd been forced to take refuge in a bedridden soldier who'd been so sick and so feverish that he'd been unable to get out again until almost a year later, when a nurse had come along at four o'clock on a Christmas morning and injected him with a massive dose of morphine, silent tears silvering her face in the moonlight. He'd said that food had no taste for him, but that every life tasted different. He'd said that young life gave him a hit like cocaine. Georgie thought that he'd meant like Space Dust, only stronger, and I didn't try to explain it to her. Apparently she'd quickly begun to recognise him through whatever mask he was wearing when he came up to her loft with some new comic books or a TV Guide or some piece of loot that he'd thought she might like; she'd told him that she always knew him because of his eyes. Whoever he was in, she'd said, his eyes were always sad.