Mr. Murder

herself.
        "She does?"
        "Yeah," Emily said. "And she keeps a guy down there in an iron nc"
        "An iron mask?"
        "An iron mask," Emily repeated somberly.
        "Why?"
        "He's real ugly," Emily said.
        Paige decided both of them were going to grow up to be writers.
        They had inherited Marty's vivid and restless imagination. They would probably be as driven to exercise it as he was, although what they wrote would be quite different from their father's novels, and far different from the work of each other.
        She couldn't wait to tell Marty about submarines, hyderfoils, giant squids, french-fried tentacles, and trollops with the queen.
        She had decided to take Paul Guthridge's preliminary diagnosis to heart, attribute Marty's unnerving symptoms to nothing but stress, and stop worrying-at least until they got test results revealing something worse. Nothing was going to happen to Marty. He was a force of nature, a deep well of energy and laughter, indomitable and resilient. He would bounce back just as Charlotte had bounced off her deathbed five years ago. Nothing was going to happen to any of them because they had too much living to do, too many good times ahead of them.
        A fierce bolt of lightning-which seldom accompanied storms in southern California but which blazed in plenitude this time crackled across the sky, pulling after it a bang of thunder, as incandescent as any celestial chariot that might carry God out of the heavens on Judgment Day.
        Marty was only six or eight feet from the girls' bedroom door. He approached from the hinged side, so he could reach across for the knob, hurl the door inward, and avoid silhouetting himself squarely in the frame.
        Trying not to tread in the blood, he glanced down for just a second at the carpet, where the spatters of gore were smaller and fewer than at other points along the hall. He glimpsed an anomaly that registered only subconsciously at first, and he eased forward another step with his gaze riveted on the door again before fully realizing what he'd seen, an impression of the forward half of a shoe sole, faintly inked in red, like twenty or thirty others he'd already passed, except that the narrow portion of this imprint, the toe, was pointed differently from all the others, in the wrong direction, back the way he had come.
        Marty froze as he grasped the import of the shoeprint.
        The Other had gone as far as the girls' bedroom but not into it.
        He had turned back, having somehow reduced the flow of blood so dramatically that he was no longer clearly marking his trail-except for one telltale shoeprint and perhaps a couple that Marty hadn't noticed.
        Swinging around, holding the gun in both hands, Marty cried out at the sight of The Other coming at him from Paige's office, moving much too fast for a man with chest wounds and minus a pint or two of blood. He hit Marty hard, smashing in under the pistol, driving him into the gallery railing and forcing his arms up.
        Marty pulled the trigger reflexively while he was being carried backward, but the bullet ploughed into the hallway ceiling. The sturdy handrail slammed the small of his back, and a half-strangled scream escaped him as white-hot pain shot horizontally across his kidneys and played spike-shoed hopscotch up the knuckled staircase of his spine.
        Even as he screamed, he lost the gun. It popped out of his hands and arced back over his head into the empty vaulted space behind him.
        The tortured oak railing shuddered, a loud dry crack signaled imminent collapse, and Marty was sure they were going to crash into the stairwell. But the balusters did not give way, and the handrail held fast to the newel post at each end.
        Pressing relentlessly forward, The Other bent Marty backward and over the balustrade, trying to strangle him. Hands of iron.
        Fingers like hydraulic pincers driven by a powerful motor. Compressing the carotid arteries.
        Marty rammed a knee into his assailant's crotch, but it was blocked.
        The attempt left him unbalanced, with just one foot on the floor, and he was shoved farther across the balustrade, until he was both pinned against and balanced on the handrail.
        Choking, unable to breathe, aware that the worst danger was the diminution of blood to his brain, Marty clasped his hands in a wedge and drove them upward between