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CHAPTER 18
In the cold, bright glare of the subway station, Heather Randall could clearly see how worn Keith Converse looked. His face seemed to have aged ten years since the day before, when she'd seen him in the oddly similar brightness of the morgue. The gentler light in Jeff's apartment had softened the creases that were etched not only in his forehead but in his cheeks and jowls as well. The crinkles around his eyes had deepened into crow's-feet, as if all the worry, anger, and frustration that he'd managed to bottle up through the months leading up to Jeff's trial had now broken through.
The platform was deserted except for a solitary man who had apparently just gotten off a train that was now roaring into the tu
"She must have gotten on that train," Keith muttered.
But even as he spoke, Heather pointed toward the far end of the platform. "Down there!"
For a second Keith saw nothing, then a flicker of movement caught his eye. It was the woman.
She wasn't on the platform, but on the track itself, backing slowly away from the bright light of the station, painstakingly pulling her cart behind her.
"What's she doing?" Keith asked. "Where's she going?"
Heather was already ru
The woman's eyes widened, but instead of pausing, she moved a little faster, stumbling and almost collapsing onto the gravel beneath the tracks before she caught herself.
Now Keith was ru
Suddenly, all the emotions churning inside Keith erupted in a single desperate howl.
"JEFF!"
Then once more, even louder: "JEFF…"
His son's name, twisted and contorted with Keith's own anguished frustration, resounded off the concrete walls of the subway tu
Turning away from the dark maw, Keith headed back toward Heather, his shoulders slumped, his step slowed. Then, his desperate cry into the darkness having faded away, he heard something.
Faint-so faint as to be barely audible-he thought he heard a single word drift out of the darkness:
"Dad…"
It was a whisper that died away so quickly, Keith wasn't sure he heard it at all, but when he turned to look at Heather, her eyes were wide and her face had gone pale.
"You heard it, didn't you?" he whispered, almost afraid to ask the question.
Time stopped as he waited for Heather to reply. Just when he thought he could stand the silence no longer, she said, "I heard… something, but I'm not sure what."
Three more times, Keith called out Jeff's name, and after each shout died slowly away, they waited to hear a response. There was none.
Though it seemed impossible, the light was even worse than the darkness.
The brilliant halogen beam felt like a knife that had been jabbed directly into his brain, a searing brightness that was physically painful. When it first lashed out of the darkness, he had been shocked into absolute stillness-that same instinctive motionlessness wild animals use as their first defense against a predator. An instant later, though, instinct had given way to reason and he braced himself for the shot he was certain would follow the light. When it didn't come and he heard a voice ordering him not to move, he raised a hand to shield his eyes from the light.
"I said freeze, motherfucker." The voice reverberated off the walls of the tu
The shot didn't come, but from somewhere above them, there was a muted rumbling as a subway train passed in another tu
"Who are you?" the voice demanded as the sound of the train died away.
Jeff glanced over at Jagger, who was standing beside him, squinting tightly as he attempted to pierce the glare, his huge hands clenched into fists.
"We're just trying to find our way out," Jeff called back, not quite answering the question.
The light began to move closer, the brilliance of its beam holding them at bay as effectively as if it had been a shotgun.
Then, as suddenly as the light went on, it blinked off, and Jeff was plunged into yet a new kind of blindness. Now a black circle hung directly in front of his eyes, a circle that moved wherever his eyes moved, blotting out everything behind it. The halogen beam had burned into his retinas, leaving behind a negative image of the light that was no longer there.
"Can't see much, can you?" the voice taunted, so close now that Jeff shrank back. "Fuck with me, and I'll make sure you never see anything again. Got it?"
Jeff opened his mouth, ready to agree to anything that might push back the shroud of darkness that had fallen over him once again. But before he could speak, he heard a sound, drifting out of the darkness, then flitting away again so quickly he thought he must have imagined it.
But no! There it was again.
A memory rose unbidden from his mind, a memory from when he was a little boy, no more than four or maybe five. He'd been outside after supper one night, chasing fireflies, not paying any attention to where he was going. When the last firefly had finally vanished, flitting away from his grasping hands, he'd realized he was lost. A wave of terror washed over him, and he looked around frantically in the darkness, trying to see where he was. Then, just as he was about to start sobbing, he'd heard a voice.
His father's voice.
Calling out to him in the darkness.
It had been his father's voice that led him home that night.
Now, in the terrible blackness of the tu
"DAD!" The single word burst from his throat before he even thought about it.
A flash of brilliance slashed into his eyes, and an instant later a fist sank deep into his gut.
The light went out again.
"I said don't fuck with me," the unseen man grunted as Jeff dropped to his knees, clutching his gut. "So I'm go
"I-I got it," Jeff managed to mutter.
Jagger, meanwhile, hadn't spoken. The man said to him: "Make up your mind, big boy-behave yourself, or start wandering around in the dark all alone. Even guys like you get afraid of the dark. So I'm asking you for the last time-you got it?"
"I got it," Jagger replied, but Jeff could hear the fury in his voice.
"So here's what's go
The light flashed back on, and the invisible man circled around until he was behind them. Now the beam of light slashed through the blackness of the tu
The tu