Thorn sat down in his chair, stunned. Some of what Warren had said was possibly true, to be sure, and it was disconcerting that he'd gotten the information at all; but as for the rest of it...

Thorn shook his head. He felt he had just lost a very good friend, and he could not even say why.

***

In the projection booth, Mark was shaking like a leaf. He reached for the aperture door and pulled it closed as quickly and as quietly as possible.

Damien was helping Ann make sandwiches in the kitchen. They both heard the front door slam, and the sound of Warren starting up his car, the tires squealing on the driveway.

They looked at one another, then at the extra sandwhich they had just made.

'Oh, well,' said Damien brightly, ‘I guess I'll just have to eat two!'

Chapter Eleven

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Damien's sleep was as untroubled as a thirteen-year-old boy's should be.

Ann slept peacefully, too.

But Richard Thorn did not, and neither did Mark.

It was dawn at the house on the lake, and both Thorn and his son were awake.

Thorn, tired and drawn, was still in his clothes from the night before. He sat at the desk in his study, his head in his hands as he tried desperately to think what to do. Spread out before him was the long-delayed letter Bugenhagen had written him, which he had now read and reread several times over. The implications in the letter were too enormous, too unbelievable, for him to be able to absorb it all at once. He needed much more time to think.

He gathered up the pages and locked them away in his desk. Then he stood up and stretched. He walked over to the window. The sun was just beginning to spill light across the distant snow-covered hills. It cannot be true, he said to himself. There is no such thing as the Devil, except as he exists in men's minds.

Then he turned and went upstairs, to try to get at least a couple hours' sleep.

Unknown to Thorn, Mark, too, had been up all night. He had pretended to go to sleep, and when the house was quiet and still, he had slipped out of bed and stolen down into the library. There he had taken the big family Bible off the shelf and had begun to read the Book of Revelation.

And now, as the light of dawn crept in through the library window, Mark looked up from the pages of the book and started to cry, both from weariness at having been up all night and from the terrifying knowledge he had so recently gained.

For Mark now believed totally that Damien was indeed the son of the Devil.