Mr. Murder

salvation.
        His ability to call a truce with sleep whenever he wishes is so unusual that he shies away from thinking about it. He senses there are things about himself that he is better off not knowing, and this is one of them.
        Another lesson he has learned from movies is that every man has secrets, even those he keeps from himself. Therefore, secrets merely make him like all other men. Which is precisely the condition he most desires.
        To be like other men.
        In the dream, Marty stood in a cold and windswept place, in the grip of terror. He was aware that he was on a plain as featureless and flat as one of those vast valley floors out in the Mojave Desert on the drive to Las Vegas, but he couldn't actually see the landscape because the darkness was as deep as death. He knew something was rushing toward him through the gloom, something inconceivably strange and hostile, immense and deadly yet utterly silent, knew in his bones that it was coming, dear God, yet had no idea of the direction of its approach.
        Left, right, in front, behind, from the ground beneath his feet or from out of the sable-black sky above, it was coming. He could feel it, an object of such colossal size and weight that the atmosphere was compressed in its path, the air thickening as the unknown danger drew nearer. Closing on him so rapidly, faster, faster, and nowhere to hide.
        Then he heard Emily pleading for help somewhere in the unrelenting blackness, calling for her daddy, and Charlotte calling, too, but he could not get a fix on them. He ran one way, then another, but their increasingly frantic voices always seemed to be behind him.
        The unknown threat was closer, closer, the girls frightened and crying, Paige shouting his name in a voice so freighted with terror that Marty began to weep with frustration at his inability to find them, oh dear Jesus, and it was almost on top of him, the thing, whatever it was, as unstoppable as a falling moon, worlds colliding, a weight beyond measure, a force as primal as the one that had created the universe, as destructive as the one that would someday end it, Emily and Charlotte screaming, screaming-West of the Painted Desert, outside Flagstaff, Arizona, shortly before five o'clock Monday morning, flurries of snow swirl out of the predawn sky, and the cold air is a penetrating scalpel that scrapes his bones. The brown leather jacket that he took from the dead man's closet in the motorhome less than sixteen hours ago in Oklahoma is not heavy enough to keep him warm in the early-morning bitterness.
        He shivers as he fills the tank of the Honda at a self-service pump.
        On Interstate 40 again, he begins the three-hundred-fifty-mile trip to Barstow, California. His compulsion to keep moving westward is so irresistible that he is as helpless in its grip as an asteroid captured by the earth's tremendous gravity and pulled inexorably toward a cataclysmic impact.
        Terror propelled him out of the dream of darkness and unknown menace, Marty Stillwater sat straight up in bed. His first waking breath was so explosive, he was sure he had awakened Paige, but she slept on undisturbed. He was chilled yet sheathed in sweat.
        Gradually his heart stopped pounding so fearfully. With the glowing green numerals on the digital clock, the red cable-box light on top of the television, and the ambient light at the windows, the bedroom was not nearly as black as the plain in his dream.
        But he could not lie down. The nightmare had been more vivid and unnerving than any he'd ever known. Sleep was beyond his reach.
        Slipping out from under the covers, he padded barefoot to the nearest window. He studied the sky above the rooftops of the houses across the street, as if something in that dark vault would calm him.
        Instead, when he noticed the black sky was brightening to a deep gray-blue along the eastern horizon, the approach of dawn filled him with the same irrational dread he had felt in his office on Saturday afternoon. As color crept into the heavens, Marty began to tremble.
        He tried to control himself, but his shivering grew more violent. It was not daylight that he feared, but something the day was bringing with it, an unnameable threat. He could feel it reaching for him, seeking him-which was crazy, damn it-and he shuddered so viol windowsill to steady himself.
        "What's wrong with me?" he whispered