Mr. Murder

chance."
        He glances at the front windows. He expects to see the BMW arriving in the snowy street, pulling into the driveway. Not yet.
        They still have time, perhaps only minutes, seconds, but time.
        Dad clears his throat and says, "Marty, I don't know what's happening here-"
        "I told you what's happening!" he shouts. "Damn it, Dad, you don't know what I've been going through." Tears well up again, and he struggles to repress them. "I've been in such pain, I've been so afraid, for as long as I can remember, so afraid and alone and trying to understand."
        His father reaches out, puts a hand on his knee. Dad is troubled but not in a way that he should be. He isn't visibly angry that some alien entity has stolen his son's life, isn't as frightened as he ought to be by the news that an inhuman presence now walks the earth, passing for human. Rather, he seems merely worried and… sad.
        There is an unmistakable and inappropriate sadness in his face and voice. "You're not alone, son. We're always here for you. Surely you know that."
        "We'll stand beside you," Mom says. "We'll get you whatever help you need."
        "If Paige is coming, like you say," his father adds, "we'll sit down together when she gets here, talk this out, try to understand what's happening. Their voices are vaguely patronizing, as if they are talking to an intelligent and perceptive child but a child nonetheless.
        "Shut up! Just shut up!" He pulls his hand free of his mother's grasp and leaps up from the sofa, shaking with frustration.
        The window. Falling snow. The street. No BMW. But soon.
        He turns away from the window, faces his parents.
        His mother sits on the edge of the sofa, her face buried in her hands, shoulders hunched, in a posture of grief or despair.
        He needs to make them understand. He is consumed by that need and frustrated by his inability to get even the fundamentals of the situation across to them.
        His father rises from the chair. Stands indecisively. Arms at his sides. "Marty, you came to us for help, and we want to help, God knows we do, but we can't help if you won't let us."
        Lowering her hands from her face, with tears on her cheeks now, his mother says, "Please, Marty. Please."
        "Everyone makes mistakes now and then," his father says.
        "If it's drugs," his mother says, through tears, speaking as much to his father as to him, "we can cope with that, honey, we can handle that, we can find treatment for that."
        His glass-encased world-beautiful, peaceful, timeless-in which he's been living during the precious minutes since his mother opened her arms to him at the front door, now abruptly fractures.
        An ugly, jagged crack scars the smooth curve of crystal. The sweet, clean atmosphere of that paradise escapes with a whoosh, admitting the poisonous air of the hateful world in which existence requires an unending struggle against hopelessness, loneliness, rejection.
        "Don't do this to me," he pleads. "Don't betray me. How can you do this to me? How can you turn against me? I am your child."
        Frustration turns to anger. "Your only child." Anger turns to hatred.
        "I need. I need. Can't you see?" He is trembling with rage. "Don't you care? Are you heartless? How can you be so awful to me, so cruel?
        How could you let it come to this?"
        At a service station in Bishop, they stopped long enough to buy snow chains and to pay extra to have them buckled to the wheels of the BMW.
        The California Highway Patrol was recommending but not yet requiring that all vehicles heading into the Sierra Nevadas be equipped with chains.
        Route 395 became a divided highway west of Bishop, and in spite of the dramatically rising elevation, they made good time past Rovanna and Crowley Lake, past McGee Creek and Convict Lake, exiting 395 onto Route 203 slightly south of Casa Diablo Hot Springs.
        Casa Diablo. House of the Devil.
        The meaning of the name had never impinged upon Marty before.
        Now everything was an omen.
        Snow began falling before they reached Mammoth Lakes.
        The fat flakes were almost as loosely woven as cheap lace. They fell in such plenitude that it seemed more than half the volume of the air between land and sky was occupied by snow. It immediately began to stick, trimming the landscape in faux