Part 1 (2/2)

3.

A man stood on an empty plateau in a brief, but undisturbed wilderness, overlooking a placid silver lake.

It was a day of winds, a good sign as far as he was concerned. He carried his burden through the tall gra.s.s that twisted as the breeze whiffled through it. His boots went into the mud deep, and he pressed slowly through the swampy land until he'd reached the slight rise of the bank.

He set the man down, relieved to be free of the heaviness.

The man looked up at him, drowsily.

He felt the push of wind at his back; he knelt down beside the man, reached into his breast pocket for the blade, and set about his grim task.

The man beneath him. Eyes open. Watching. He matched his victim, breath for breath.

The killer caught his breath as he brought the small blade down with the precision of a surgeon.

He closed his eyes and went inside the mind of his victim, just as surely as his knife went into the man's sternum: The sweetness of the air. Electrical impulses sparking. The smell of ozone-a whiff of ecstasy, and then, gone, thrown into the other.

Penetrating.

He broke through the barrier.

The blade went into his chest. He looked down at it; his vision went to pinp.r.i.c.ks of darkness, and his victim could barely see the face of the one who had stabbed him.

He experienced what his victim felt.

Burning pain. Along his neck and the back of his head. But not in his chest area. Instead, that was a dull throbbing ache. Then, another went in-stabbing close to his heart-and he lost his vision entirely. Weakness flooded him. The pain was located in his head-a screaming. But he had already begun to disconnect from it, as if a cord had been snapped from its power source, and he had pulled back into the source itself. But still, he had a lingering connection to his body. He felt, but the feelings did not concern him.

A numbness was followed by the dead stop of the heart. Yet he had the curious sensation of still being aware.

Not precisely lucid, but aware.

He felt as if his breath contained his essence, and it coughed into a darkness-he moved, propelled, through some dark void. All the while, he was aware of the others, there, around his body, as if his memory still held them, and the place, the last moments of his life-held them in perfect balance with this new feeling.

It wasn't a sense of being a physical body, but of being a solid form, undefined by material barriers but kept in place, an ent.i.ty.

He moved through the darkness, half expecting to open his eyes. Any anger or resentment he'd felt had run its course just as his blood had trickled from his body. He was on a new voyage now, and knew that the thread was slender, holding him between his last breaths and the doorway through Death.

Then, he felt a s.h.i.+ft-as if something weren't working right. He kept waiting to be brought back into life, but instead, he felt a general weakness, as if his mind were growing tired.

A steep descent. Falling. Smells came up, almonds and peaches, wonderful odors that he hadn't experienced in years-since childhood-of jasmine and fresh, running river water, orange blossom and even a sharp vinegar bite of a stink. His senses felt as if they were releasing memories, of tastes and scents, all exploding as he fell.

Fear came, as well.

Fear that leaked into madness, and he tried to cling to his memory, and tried to shout himself back to consciousness.

The killer kept the knife in his victim's chest, and his eyes closed, experiencing everything with his victim, feeling the descent into death, trying to stay with his victim so that there was no fear of what was to come.

Chapter Two.

1.

In the early afternoon, off the path along one of the trails of the Jenny Jump Mountain of northern New Jersey, deep in the woods bursting with new green growth beyond the slight hills above a placid brown lake, a woman and her young daughter hunted for fossils alongside a creek. The outcroppings of rock between patches of forest had fascinated the little girl as they'd wandered, and her mother pointed out what she'd remembered from her college years about the area. ”Some of these rocks are 1.6 billion years old.”

”That's old,” her daughter said, making her mother chuckle at how mature Livy could sound, even at six and a half.

”That's why you can sometimes find fossils.”

”Like you used to with Gramma. When you were little.”

”Yep. Right along here.”

”I love days like this,” Livy said.

Julie chuckled. ”Why's that?”

Livy hesitated, then sighed a little. ”Well, just you and me, Mommy. After school. And you don't have to go to work today. And Matty doesn't come home 'til later. I just...I just sorta like it.”

”Me, too, sweetie.”

The view beyond them, over the ridge, was of the Kittatinny Mountains, and Great Meadows. The sky was damp with the recently pa.s.sed rain, and the fresh, pungent smell of the wild permeated the countryside.

They'd found a possum skull, two arrowheads, and what they thought might be a small cracked trilobite print on a rock fragment. ”This was once part of a glacier,” she told her daughter. ”That's why we have all these lakes.”

”Like Ghost Lake. And Forest Lake. And...Lake Pesomething.”

”Lake Pequest.”

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