Lightning

furnished for a child. At three-thirty in the morning, he heard Sheener returning. Stefan moved silently behind the bedroom door. A few minutes later Willy Sheener entered, switched on the light, and started toward the mattress. He made a queer sound as he crossed the room, partly a sigh and partly the whimper of an animal escaping from a hostile world into its burrow.
    Stefan closed the door, and Sheener spun around at the sound of lightning movement, shocked that his nest had been invaded. "Who… who are you? What the hell are you doing here?"

    From a Chevy parked in the shadows across the street, Kokoschka watched Stefan depart Willy Sheener's house. He waited ten minutes, got out of the car, walked around to the back of the bungalow, found the door ajar, and cautiously went inside.
    He located Sheener in a child's bedroom, battered and bloody and still. The air reeked of urine, for the man had lost control of his bladder.
    Someday, Kokoschka thought with grim determination and a thrill of sadism, I'm going to hurt Stefan even worse than this. Him and that damned girl. As soon as I understand what part she plays in his plans and why he's jumping across decades to reshape her life, I'll put both of them through the kind of pain that no one knows this side of hell.
    He left Sheener's house. In the backyard he stared up at the star-spattered sky for a moment, then returned to the institute.
9
    Shortly after dawn, before the first of the shelter's residents had arisen but when Laura felt the danger from Sheener had passed, she left her bed in the game room and returned to the third floor. Everything in her room was as she had left it. There was no sign that she'd had an intruder during the night.
    Exhausted, bleary-eyed, she wondered if she had given the Eel too much credit for boldness and daring. She felt somewhat foolish.
    She made her bed—a housekeeping chore every Mcllroy child was expected to perform—and when she lifted her pillow she was paralyzed by the sight of what lay under it. A single Tootsie Roll.

    That day the White Eel did not come to work. He had been awake all night preparing to abduct Laura and no doubt needed his sleep.
    "How does a man like that sleep at all?" Ruth wondered as they gathered in a corner of Mcllroy's playground after school. "I mean, doesn't his conscience keep him awake?"
    "Ruthie," Thelma said, "he doesn't have a conscience."
    "Everyone does, even the worst of us. That's how God made us."
    "Shane," Thelma said, "prepare to assist me in an exorcism. Our Ruth is once again possessed by the moronic spirit of Gidget."
    In an uncharacteristic stroke of compassion, Mrs. Bowmaine moved Tammy and Rebecca to another room and allowed Laura to bunk with Ruth and Thelma. For the time being the fourth bed was vacant.
    "It'll be Paul McCartney's bed," Thelma said, as she and Ruth helped Laura settle in. "Anytime the Beatles are in town, Paul can come use it. And I'll use Paul!"
    "Sometimes," Ruth said, "you're embarrassing."
    "Hey, I'm only expressing healthy sexual desire."
    "Thelma, you're only twelve!" Ruth said exasperatedly.
    "Thirteen's next. Going to have my first period any day now. We'll wake up one morning, and there'll be so much blood this place will look like there's been a massacre."
    "
Thelma!"

    Sheener did not come to work on Thursday, either. His days off that week were Friday and Saturday, so by Saturday evening, Laura and the twins speculated excitedly that the Eel would never show up again, that he had been run down by a truck or had contracted beriberi.
    But at Sunday morning breakfast, Sheener was at the buffet. He had two black eyes, a bandaged right ear, a swollen upper lip, a six-inch scrape along his left jaw, and he was missing two front teeth.
    "Maybe he
was
hit by a truck," Ruth whispered as they moved forward in the cafeteria line.
    Other kids were commenting on Sheener's injuries, and some were giggling. But they either feared and despised him or scorned him, so none cared to speak to him directly about his condition.
    Laura, Ruth, and Thelma fell silent as they reached the buffet. The closer they drew to him, the more battered he appeared. His black eyes were not new but a few days old, yet the flesh was still horribly discolored and puffy; initially both eyes must have been nearly swollen shut. His split lip looked raw. Where his face was not bruised or abraded, his usually milk-pale skin was gray. Under his mop of frizzy, copper-red hair, he was a