“Thanks a lot, Bobby, really. It’s a load off my mind. With the recent…problems and everything, and that being the same house and all, I just got to thinking…”

He called me Bobby, Bobby thought, even more pissed off now. I hardly know the guy.

“Yeah, okay, sure.”

“Thanks. Listen, let me know how it turns out, will you?”

“Will do.”

Bobby hung up with a bang. “Fuck,” he said softly, and picked up his magazine again. He would get to it later. But goddamn it if he didn’t feel like hell again. Leave it to that doctor to bring everything up, and ruin a perfectly good day.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Jonathan Newman, though he might have been once, was not human anymore.

Only the extensive canned supplies he had stocked earlier that winter had kept him alive. Dr. Seigel would hardly have recognized him; he had lost over thirty pounds, though he still tipped the scales at 230 and retained most of his strength through pure, crazed adrenaline. The weight loss had added to his horrific appearance. The skin of his head was pressed and stretched tightly around his skull, the thin scars on his lips and cheeks purple-white.

A few weeks ago, the auditory hallucinations had begun, high-pitched screaming and loud pops, snapping like broken bones. The normal movements of the muscle and tissue of his inner ear had become a nightmare of sound, and as he slipped deeper into his own private hell, the poppings and whines became whispers. He saw long, black robes of eyes, flowing holes that twisted and spun, the eyes opening and shutting in an obscene wink. The eyes of the Devil lost in shifting faces. And glimpses of a blade, silver and twinkling in the blackness, laced with red, something barely remembered, something from long ago. The blade scared him more than anything, more than the eyes or the whispers, though why that was, he didn’t know. He only knew how it filled him with a deep, despairing fear, the kind that used to grip him while he snuck through jungle shadows and waited for the guns of the enemy to cut him down.

He barely remembered to eat. Sleep, when it came, held no escape. He spent most of his time watching from the woods, wanting desperately to know where THEY were at all times, so THEY could never sneak up on him. Once, after he saw the dog-creature in the pink jacket (when David had searched the woods), he actually climbed a tree and waited like a vulture, knife clenched in his teeth, for one of the Dark Eyes to walk underneath. It had been close, so close, and he was going to pounce, and then it had moved off, running in fear; it had smelled him somehow. He would have to be more careful.