Carsten Stroud - The Shimmer

Becca: Yes, Daddy, we just checked.

Daddy: Okay be good love you both.

Rebecca put the phone away, looking up to catch a strange, almost hungry expression on Diana’s face, a kind of pale yellow light in her green eyes.

But then Diana smiled and it was gone.

“Was that your parents, Rebecca?”

“Yes. They’re going out to dinner.”

“So late? Without you?”

“Yes,” she said. “They like to eat late. Alyssa won’t go to sleep unless she has something later on in the evening—”

“She’s so spoiled ,” said Karen.

Rebecca ignored that. “We can stay for now, but we have to be home by midnight.”

Diana looked at her watch.

“That’s a while away. Perhaps we can have a quick dinner? Room service? In my suite?”

The words were innocent, but both Karen and Rebecca understood what wasn’t being said.

“We’d love to,” they said in one voice.

“How perfect you both are,” said Diana, taking them in. “How simply...delicious.”

the lady in the lake

As soon as the three cops disappeared back into the tree line, she surfaced. She was two hundred feet away, in the heart of the swamp, neck deep in the stinking water, hidden behind an island of seagrass, her face coated in lagoon muck.

She slowly lifted her head up, her black hair matted to her skull. She had a pretty good idea of what had happened back there at the Walkers’ truck, what the gunshots really meant, why the cops had bolted, and it warmed her through and through.

The girls had done what she had asked them to do. Well, they had done what Diana Bowman had asked them to do, but she was no longer the woman called Diana Bowman. She was Selena.

* * *

She had never actually been Diana Bowman, but she had met the original at a resort in the Keys last year, a lonely older woman without family or close friends, looking for affection, or at least kindness, which Selena had freely given her with all of her loving heart.

And they lived happily ever after, until late one shining afternoon while they were out cruising in Diana’s boat, when Selena had shoved her over the side into shark water.

Four minutes later, while Selena fended the terrified woman off with a boat hook, a big whitetip, attracted by her thrashing struggle, flashed in, hit her hard and took her under in an explosion of bloody foam.

Other sharks arrived, and things got nasty, the way they do when sharks disagree. For a brief moment Diana’s horrified face reappeared in the middle of a churning vortex of pink water, staring wide-eyed at Selena, her open mouth filled with blood. Then she was jerked back under, the sharks shredded what was left of her and it was over.

Selena had watched the whole thing, fascinated, wishing she had thought to film it for YouTube. But it was too late for that now, and anyway it would have been a risky thing to do.

Amusing, certainly, but risky.

Since Diana, being newly dead, didn’t need her life anymore, Selena took it over, maxing out all of her credit cards and discreetly liquidating her assets—which were considerable, since she was a very successful dealer in estate jewelry and antiques—over a few months.

She banked the results in one of her accounts in the Caymans. Selena was good at that sort of thing because she had been doing it for years and had pretty much perfected it. Bowman’s banker was troublesome, but nothing Selena couldn’t finesse. You could say it was her profession, what she did for a living, but it wasn’t her purpose .

That was something else entirely. And it had to do with finding something she had lost somewhere in time, something perfect and round and made of gold, a locket, and inside the locket was peace and her last childhood memory of loving kindness.

* * *

Selena thought about the cops, the way they had run back up the slope and into the trees, three big heavy men, slow and clumsy and stupid. They had been easy to outrun.

She felt a smile coming but suppressed it. Her teeth were very white and they would show. Some kind of crawling sucking things were up under her clothes and digging into the flesh of her back and her lower belly. She could feel them starting to feed on her. Leeches.

A tiny carp-like fish was nipping at the side of her neck but she didn’t try to drive it away. A large red centipede was moving slowly across the exposed skin of her left wrist. She could feel the feathery tickle of its feet. Mosquitoes and midge flies hovered in a cloud around her face and neck, biting and stinging whatever they could get at through the mud she had smeared all over herself.

She had a long filleting knife in a sheath at the nape of her neck, so if there was a big snake or a gator in this water, she could probably kill it. But killing it would require movement and movement would show the police where she was.

Her long and complicated time in this world had taught her many things, and one of them was that the secret of the hunt was not to run. It was to be still . Humans were born predators. Some of them, anyway, the ones who weren’t born prey. But, like dogs, they were attracted to motion. They would chase anything running. They never saw the thing that was perfectly still.

Cats were different. Cats could be still far longer than their prey. Fear made the prey run to meet its death when it could have been still and lived a little while longer. This was why cats were better hunters than dogs. This was why cats could hunt alone. It was in their nature to hunt alone.

But she had learned that all police officers were like wolves. They hunted in packs. That was their nature. Like those three cops. They heard the gunshots; they all ran off together. In a wolf pack. But they would come back.

The rain was drumming on her skull and she could feel her body heat draining away into the swamp all around her. In a while she’d be shivering badly. She considered the sky. The clouds were breaking up. The white squall would end soon and then the sun would come out.

Full dark was hours away.

They would bring boats to search the swamp but that would take a while. They might call in police dogs but Selena had learned that police dogs were no threat to her. They would set up a perimeter with their cars, a few blocks out, and then wait for her to move. If they caught her, they would put her in a concrete box for the rest of her life.

No. Not right. This was the South.

They would kill her.

She suppressed a sudden flaring of rage, and the fear that shivered underneath it. She couldn’t just die , she couldn’t just be ended . Not before she had accomplished her mission , her reason for being alive. It wouldn’t be fair.

It wouldn’t be right .

So...be still.

She lowered her face into the reeds, made herself go limp, sinking deeper into the little island, becoming a part of it. She visualized herself as a shapeless patch of black mud in a cluster of reeds. And soon that was what she was. It was one of her particular gifts, to blend into the background, to seem to disappear. To vanish.

She ignored the clouds of mosquitoes and the leeches that were crawling on her flesh and feeding on her, and all the tiny fish that had come to nip at her, and the fat white snake that was staring at her from his nest in the clump of marsh grass. She ignored the miasmic reek of the swamp itself. She went inward and shut down. She waited.

—* * *

Halliday was right beside Redding and Marsh as they broke through the trees and came out onto the roadway. Julie Karras was sitting on the ground beside the Suburban, leaning back against it, blood running down the side of her face. She had her Glock out and was holding it on one of the teenage girls who had been cuffed in the back of the truck.