At the same time, it unnerved him that this maniac could somehow tell that he and Nix had killed people. Since that terrible night when Mrs. Riley was murdered, Nix and Benny had been in several bloody confrontations, first with Charlie Pink-eye’s gang and then with Preacher Jack’s killers at Gameland. They had plenty of blood on their hands; and the fact that the men they’d killed were absolutely evil did very little to help either of them sleep at night. The fact remained that they had both taken human lives. That fact had gouged marks into each of their souls that no amount of justification could remove.

And this man could see that.

How? Who was he?

Run, warned Tom again, get away from him. Go—now!

“Have you come to let the darkness take you?” The man wore a strange little smile as he spoke those words, and he seemed oblivious to Nix’s pistol and Benny’s sword. “The darkness wants to take you. The darkness wants to take us all. Do you not agree?”

“Um . . . no?” replied Benny uncertainly. “Not today, thanks.”

Saint John’s eyes were filled with a strange light, as if he could read Benny’s thoughts. Benny thought it might have been ordinary madness, but there was something else, too. Something he had never seen before, and it chilled him to the bone. It was a light of absolute fanatical belief. Not a simple faith, like Benny had seen in the eyes of way-station monks like Brother David, nor the desperate hope that was always present in the eyes of Pastor Kellogg back home. No, this was something else. This was a kind of insanity. And this man seemed to be engaged in his own inner conversation with things only he could see. Gods? Monsters?

Chong had quoted a passage to Benny after the Gameland affair was over. It was something a German philosopher named Nietzsche had written more than a century ago. “‘He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster,’” Chong recited as the four of them walked away from Tom’s grave and the column of smoke that rose above the dust and fire and ash of Gameland. “‘And when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.’”

The very thought of that had chilled Benny back then, and it returned now as a cold breath on the nape of his neck, because he was absolutely positive that it explained what he was seeing right now. This man—this complete stranger and utter wacko—was someone who had looked far too long into the abyss. Benny knew this with an intuitive flash, because looking into his eyes was like looking into the very same abyss. Into a bottomless well of horror and death. These thoughts, complex as they were, tumbled through his mind in less than a second.