Mr. Murder

prerequisite of sleep.
        Events had slipped the chains of reality, and his own home had become a dark dreamscape. As surreal as the confrontation had been, he hadn't seriously doubted its actuality while it had been playing out.
        And he didn't doubt it now, either. He hadn't shot a figment of the mind, been strangled by an illusion, or plunged alone through the gallery railing. Lying incapacitated in the foyer, The Other had been as real as the shattered balustrade still scattered on the tiles.
        Alarmed by the possibility that Paige and the girls had been attacked in the street before they had gotten to the Delorios' house, Marty turned to the front door. It was locked. From the inside. The security chain was in place. The madman hadn't left the house by that route.
        Hadn't left it at all. How could he, in his condition? Don't panic.
        Be calm. Think it through.
        Marty would have bet a year of his life that The Other's catastrophic injuries had been real, not pretense. The bastard's back had been broken. His inability to move more than his head and the fingers of one hand meant his spine probably had been severed, as well, when he had done his gravity dance with the floor.
        So where was he?
        Not upstairs. Even if his spine hadn't been damaged, even if he'd escaped quadriplegia, he couldn't have dragged his battered body up to the second floor during the short time Marty had been in the kitchen.
        Opposite the entrance to the living room, a small den opened off the study. The dishwater-gray light of the storm-washed dusk seeped between the open slats of the shutters, illuminating nothing. Marty stepped through the doorway, snapped on the lights. The den was deserted. At the closet, he slid open the mirrored door, but The Other wasn't hiding in there, either.
        Foyer closet. Nothing. Powder bath. Nothing. The deep closet under the stairs. Laundry. Family room. Nothing, nothing, nothing.
        Marty searched frantically, recklessly, heedless of his safety.
        He expected to discover his would-be killer nearby and essentially helpless, perhaps even dead, this feeble attempt at escape having depleted the last of the man's resources.
        Instead, in the kitchen, he found the back door standing open to the patio. A gust of cold wind swept in from outside, rattling the cupboard doors. On the rack by the entrance to the garage, Paige's raincoat billowed with false life.
        While Marty had been returning to the foyer via the dining room and living room, The Other had headed for the kitchen by another route. He must have gone along the short hall that led from the foyer past the powder bath and laundry, and then crossed one end of the family room.
        He couldn't have crawled that far so quickly. He had been on his feet, perhaps unsteady, but on his feet nonetheless.
        No. It wasn't possible. Okay, maybe the guy didn't have a severed spine, after all. Maybe not even a fractured spine. But his back had to have been broken. He couldn't simply have sprung to his feet and scampered off.
        The waking nightmare had displaced reality again. It was time once more to stalk-and be stalked-by something which enjoyed the regenerative powers of a monster in a dream, something which said it had come looking for a life and which seemed fearfully equipped to take it.
        Marty stepped through the open door onto the patio.
        Renewed fear lifted him to a higher state of awareness in which colors were more intense, odors were more pungent, and sounds were clearer and more refined than ever before. The feeling was akin to the inexpressibly keen sensations of certain childhood and adolescent dreams especially those in which the dreamer travels the skies as effortlessly as a bird, or experiences sexual communion with a woman of such exquisite form that, later, neither her face nor body can be recalled but only the essential radiance of perfect beauty.
        Those special dreams seemed not to be fantasies at all but glimpses of a greater and more detailed reality beyond the reality of the waking world. Stepping through the kitchen door, passing out of the warm house into the cold realm of nature, Marty was strangely reminded of the ravishing vividness of those long-forgotten visions, for now he experienced similarly acute sensations, alert to every nuance of what he saw-heard-smelled-touched.
        From the thick