Relentless

wonderful haven.”
    I loved the sound of her voice as much as the sight of her face. Eyes closed, I couldn’t see her beauty, but I could hear it.
    “More than a haven,” she said. “It’s a sanctuary, where you can decide who you are, what you think about the world, before the world
tells
you who you are and what you ought to think of it.”
    “You had your talent, writing and drawing, just like Milo has a talent for … something. Don’t you wonder if less isolation and more experience in the early years might’ve made you a different artist?”
    “One I wouldn’t want to be. By the time I went to art school, all I wanted was better technique. I already had my own theories of art, so those of the most opinionated professors didn’t corrupt me.”
    We rode in silence. Then I said, “What a magical world it is—folks like yours, living like they do, raising a wonder like you.”
    “I’m no more a wonder than anyone. And that’s what makes the world magical. Every baby’s a seed of wonder—that gets watered or it doesn’t. As a kid, I loved going down into the stronghold. It was like something out of Tolkien, a hobbit’s home.”
    I opened my eyes. The bracketing hills and the six-lane highway seemed not to await illumination by the headlights but to dissolve before those beams could reveal more. The pavement, other traffic, the guardrails, the landscape deliquesced into the solvent rain, and we appeared to be rushing always toward a brink and an abyss.
    “Seventy percent of people in prison were raised without a dad in the home,” she said. “I was lucky—I had a father and a half.”
    When I closed my eyes, the image of the melting world stayed with me, and carried me into sleep.
    In my lost-and-alone dream, I walked a deserted highway that led through featureless salt flats, and not a single cloud graced the sky, and no currents moved the air nor did a single bird move through it, and no lines divided the blacktop into lanes, and the only salient detail was the blood trail that led toward a horizon that could not be clearly discerned.
    The ringing of my cell phone woke me. It was my regular phone, not the disposable.
    As I fished it from my shirt pocket, Penny said, “Should you?”
    I hesitated, but then took the call.
    John Clitherow—author of the Waxx-savaged
Mr. Bluebird
and writer on the run—said, “Cullen, I have to tell you how my wife and daughters died.”

   “I have to tell you,” John Clitherow repeated. “I have to.” Having slumped in sleep, I sat up straighter in the passenger seat, and saw that we were on a lonely stretch of highway with few lights visible on the flanking hills. Into the phone, I said, “I’m sorry for your losses. I did some research, I know about your folks. It’s all so … it’s horrible.” The torment in his voice was thin, yet no less affecting for its thinness, just as the stropped edge of a knife is thin but cuts.
    “Right after the Michigan police phoned me to say my parents’ bodies had been found—the condition, such brutality—I told them about Waxx, the review, my dead cat. They did nothing with that, Cullen.
Nothing
. Why? And then Waxx called again. He just said ‘Next?’ and hung up. He was insane—and serious. He’d said ‘doom,’ now my folks were dead. But who’s going to believe it … fast enough to save the rest of my family? Not the cops. So I took Margaret, my wife, the two girls, we ran. I wanted them someplace secure before I went to the police again. We weren’t followed. I
know
we weren’t.”
    I heard him swallow hard, then swallow again.
    When I glanced at Penny, she glanced at me. “Clitherow?” she asked, and I nodded.
    “We drove over a hundred miles,” he continued, “no destination, getting away from where he expected to find us. It was worse than fear, Cullen, it had nothing to do with intellect or imagination, it was undiluted
fright
, raw nerves. Fear can be controlled by an act of will, but I couldn’t control what I was feeling. Then … a hundred miles made me feel better. God help me, I felt kind of safe.”
    The rain grew heavier and seemed to rush at us more urgently than before. Penny adjusted the wiper speed, and the blades arced faster, thumped louder.
    John said, “We stopped at this nothing motel. A room with two queen-size beds. Not the kind of place we would have stayed before— which made it seem even safer, so anonymous. Margie and I could think things through there,