Demon Child

make Richard look like some dark spirit moving along the walkways of some nightmarish vision of purgatory.
        For the first time in years, Jenny felt utterly at ease and completely self-reliant. She did not fear the night close around her or the arrival of the unexpected, and she did not need artificial havens and shallow “friends” to reassure herself. Before, she had looked to other people to serve as her fixed point in a changing universe. Leona Pitt Brighton, her grandmother, had been such a point after her parents' deaths. Then she had floundered until she found Walter. But now, she had seen the foolishness of her outlook on the world, and she knew that the only stability was what one built for oneself.
        She intended to start building tonight.
        Richard crept along the stone shelf toward Hobarth's slumped form, hands pressed against the ragged, sloping wall of the pit
        The rain seemed to slack, though it was only the wind dropping off. The droplets began striking the earth perpendicularly rather than driven by the mild gale into a viciously angled descent.
        Richard reached the doctor and knelt on the thin path beside him.
        “Is he all right?” Jenny asked.
        Richard looked up and shook his head slowly back and forth. “He's dead,” Richard said.
        She felt her stomach flop over. She was miserably weary of death. She hoped she would not have to see anyone die or hear about anyone dying for the next twenty years. But, at least, this time when she was faced with death, she did not want to run, and she did not feel an unnaturally strong fear for her own safety. She had come to terms with the world this night.
        “How?” she asked. “Are you certain?”
        “I'm certain. He broke his neck in the fall.”
        They looked at the corpse a while, neither of them speaking, the rain providing the only sound.
        “What can we do?” she asked at last.
        “We'll contact the police. Send some people up for him and the dog.”
        “But we can't just leave him there, lying in the rain like that,” Jenny said.
        “We'll have to. I'd kill myself trying to carry him out along these ledges,” Richard said. He turned and felt his way back along the wall, looking for the steps by which he had descended. In five minutes, he had found them and had retraced his path to the surface.
        “Why were you carrying a pistol?” Jenny asked at last, turning reluctantly but relievedly away from the sinkhole where the body lay in an unnatural position.
        “You still mistrust me?” he wanted to know.
        “No, no. It's just that-that it was such a shock. It was as if you expected something. Did you know he was the one?”
        “No,” Richard said. “But I knew someone was doing something that was outside the bounds of legality. And the murder of Lee Symington was only a part of it. So I have been carrying a pistol.”
        “ How did you know? What did I miss that was so obvious?”
        “A number of things. But I'm not being fair. I knew a few things that you couldn't know. For instance, when I had Lee Symington examine Hollycross' corpse, he found some very interesting things. The horse had been put to sleep with a massive injection of sodium pentathol before it had been attacked by the wolf. That was to keep us from hearing Hollycross' outcry . And such a drug is too easily obtainable. It could never be traced to a killer.”
        Shocked, Jenny said, “That was Symington you were talking to on the telephone that morning, when I overheard you mention drugs and killers!”
        “Yes.”
        “I've been utterly stupid!”
        “Not at all, Jenny.”
        “No. I have been.”
        He shook his head adamantly. “You've been confused, true enough. That was obvious from the first moment I picked you up at the bus terminal. But I think that, tonight, you've managed to come to terms with your fear of life. Am I right?”
        She nodded, somewhat embarrassed.
        “But let me continue, Jenny.” He wiped rain from his face. “Besides the drug, Symington found that not all of the claw marks on Hollycross had come from some wolf-like animal. Others had been inflicted with what he suspected might be a carefully sharpened, hand-sized garden rake. The gauge of the slashes matched those that such an implement would make- and there were flecks of green paint, microscopic, lodged in a number of these