Mr. Murder

damned lucky the other Marty hadn't been waiting for him. The upstairs hall was deserted.
        He looked exactly like me.
        Couldn't think about that now, no time for it yet. Concentrate on staying alive, wasting the bastard before he hurt Paige or the girls.
        If you survive, there'll be time to seek an explanation for that astonishing resemblance, solve the mystery, but not now.
        Listen. Movement?
        Maybe.
        No. Nothing.
        Keep the gun up, muzzle aimed ahead.
        Just outside the office doorway, a smeary handprint in wet blood marred the wall. A horrid amount of blood was puddled on the light-beige carpet there. At least part of the time when Marty had stood behind his desk, stunned and temporarily immobilized by the violence, the wounded man had leaned against this hallway wall, perhaps trying unsuccessfully to staunch his bleeding wounds.
        Marty was sweating, nauseated and afraid. Perspiration trickled into the corner of his left eye, stinging, blurring his vision. He blotted his slick forehead with his shirt sleeve, blinked furiously to wash the salt out of his eye.
        When the intruder had shoved away from the wall and started moving-perhaps while Marty was still frozen behind his desk-he had walked through his own pooled blood. His route was marked by fragmentary red imprints of the ridged patterns on athletic-shoe soles as well as by a continuous scarlet drizzle.
        Silence in the house. With a little luck, maybe it was the silence of the dead.
        Shivering, Marty cautiously followed the repulsive trail past the hall bath, around the corner, past the double-door entrance to the dark master bedroom, past the head of the stairs. He stopped at that point where the second-floor hall became a gallery overlooking the living room.
        On his right was a bleached oak railing, beyond which hung the brass chandelier that he'd switched on when he'd passed through the foyer earlier. Below the chandelier were the descending stairs and the two-story, tile-floored entrance foyer that flowed directly into the two-story living room.
        To his left and a few feet farther along the gallery was the room Paige used as a home office. One day it would become another bedroom for Charlotte or Emily when they decided they were ready to sleep separately. The door stood half open. Bat-black shadows swarmed beyond, relieved only by the gray storm light of the waning day, which hardly penetrated the windows.
        The blood trail led past that office to the end of the gallery, directly to the door of the girls' bedroom, which was closed. The intruder was in there, and it was infuriating to think of him among the girls' belongings, touching things, tainting their room with his blood and madness.
        He recalled the angry voice, touched with lunacy yet so like his own voice, My Paige, she's mine, my Charlotte, my Emily…
        "Like hell, they're yours," Marty said, keeping the Smith & Wesson aimed squarely at the closed door.
        He glanced at his wristwatch.
        4:28.
        Now what?
        He could stay there in the hallway, ready to blow the bastard to Hell if the door opened. Wait for Paige and the kids, shout to them when they came in, tell Paige to call 911. Then she could hustle the kids across the street to Vic and Kathy Delorio's house, where they'd be safe, while he covered the door until the police arrived.
        That plan sounded good, responsible, cool and calm. Briefly, the knocking of his heart against his ribs became less insistent, less punishing.
        Then the curse of a writer's imagination hit him hard, a black whirlpool sucking him down into dark possibilities, the curse of what if, what if, what if. What if the other Marty was still strong enough to push open the window in the girls' room, climb out onto the patio cover at the back of the house, and jump down to the lawn from there?
        What if he fled along the side of the house and out to the street just as Paige was pulling into the driveway with the girls?
        It might happen. Could happen. Would happen. Or something else just as bad would happen, worse. The whirlpool of reality spun out more terrible possibilities than the darkest thoughts of any writer's mind.
        In this age of social dissolution, even on the most peaceful streets in the quietest neighborhoods, unexpected acts of grotesque savagery could occur, whereupon