And yet crouching here in a slant of afternoon light filtered through a filthy window, he felt it.

This part he wasn’t very good at.

It has to be you.

He wiped his mouth. His throat felt parched, his voice husky. “Okay,” he said. “I see you.”

On his way out, he adjusted the charge wrapping the beam in the hall.

Standing in the crowd a few minutes later, another anonymous body jockeying for position behind the sawhorses, he watched the building crumble. A slow-motion cascade, all that rot and mold collapsing inward until nothing remained but a heap and a cloud.

You have to come.

I got here, he thought. I promised I would.

One moment he was in the heat of the crowd. The next he was gone.

This part he was good at.

64. The Slender Man

64

The Slender Man

The slender man always got excited as the hour neared. All the cues for arousal were there. The big cranes, the smell of diesel, the containers lined up like giant dominoes.

It meant that soon he would claim his prize.

Entering JAXPORT, he felt like one of Pavlov’s dogs, salivating at the bell. His heartbeat quickened as he took in the sights, breathed the muggy wet of the St. Johns River, which crept by in the background as dark and lazy as lava. He was perspiring through his dress shirt.

His Town Car purred along the roadway. He sat in the back, a bottle of champagne icing in a bucket. It was a celebration sixteen days in the making. Resting on the seat next to him were a set of fleece-lined wrist cuffs and a ball gag. Also, a chilled bottle of Fiji. Hector Contrell would have arranged nourishment for the journey, but the slender man found that they generally arrived parched.

His bodyguard and driver, Donnell, knew not to speak, not to say anything that might break the spell of this magical time.

The drive up, you see, even this was part of the foreplay.

Donnell turned off the main road to a rear cargo zone, the designated area where a series of under-the-table payments had determined that intermodular Container 78653-B812 would be set down. That was the beauty of it. Most everyone who worked at a port took bribes. No one had any idea what the container held.

It was there waiting, placed alone on an apron of asphalt.

Donnell got out first, his coat jacket shifting around his bulk, pulled tight across the holster.

The slender man emerged and took a moment there in the midnight silence. He tilted his head back and drew in a deep breath of fresh air. It was a starless night, the sky an impenetrable sheet of black, save for the moon, which beamed with an intensity that reminded him of the comic-book illustrations of his youth.