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and as ugly as he was, he was nevertheless the motel manager with the fire extinguisher, Blackwood was the fire, and fire was fast, fire could change everything in one bright screaming minute.
    He was halfway across the graveyard, dodging around headstones, when he saw the raven fly across the full moon. He hurried under the sheltering limbs of the immense oaks, and in an autumn memory he saw the cemetery in drifts of scarlet leaves, but in his mind’s eye, the leaves rippled like a lake of blood. He said, “No, no, no,” because he feared, he knew , he would find his mother and his sister as blood-red as the autumn ground under a scarlet oak.
    He had to resist the urge to sprint full-tilt. His pounding feet and his ragged breathing might alert Blackwood. Running could get him killed.
    His footsteps were soft and swift through the moonshadows of the old beech, past the garage, across the yard, to the back-porch steps. As Howie fumbledhis key from his pocket, he saw that one of the French panes in the kitchen door had been cut out.
    He didn’t need his key. The lock wasn’t engaged anymore.
    Howie quietly opened the door, started to cross the threshold, but hesitated. The kitchen was as dark as the old department store from which he had fled moments earlier. There was no sound, real or imagined, no phantom scrape of a steel-toed boot, but the silence seemed unnatural. He felt that Blackwood was listening for him just as he was listening for Blackwood. Intuition told him this was not the way to go, this was equivalent to the moment, back in the day, when he woke to the cold wetness and the smell of gasoline, the instant before the match was struck. Death was in the kitchen or in the hallway beyond, and there was no motel manager this time, only Death and Howie, and Death was big and strong and meaner than a million Ron Bleekers.
    With all the stealth that he could manage, he eased the door shut and backed across the porch to the stairs. Still relying on intuition, he hurried around the house.
    He made noise only when he passed too close to a Japanese maple in the front yard and raised a soft clatter from the loose ornamental river stones that encircled its base. He halted, snatched up two of the stones, each about the size of a lemon, and then continued to the front porch.
    He glanced at the house next door, at the houses across the street. If Howie shouted for help, ifBlackwood realized he wouldn’t get a chance to do to these women what he had done to others, then the killer might nevertheless risk staying just long enough to stab them, slash them, and then run.
    The frosted-glass sconce beside the front entrance was on a timer, lit now, denying Howie the cover of darkness as he approached. Holding both stones in his left hand and the key in his right, he unlocked the door. The sliding deadbolt made a whispery scraping noise as it retracted. Howie silently eased the door open, pocketed the key, and transferred one of the stones to his right hand.
    The porch light dimly revealed the foyer but not the pitch-black hall beyond, which led past other rooms to the kitchen. To the left lay the archway to the lightless living room, and to the right were stairs ascending from shadows into inky gloom. He realized that he was backlighted, that every second he stood there, he was exposed, yet he hesitated. Taking a chance that Blackwood was still on the ground floor, toward the back of the house, Howie intended to sprint for the staircase, yelling for his mother to get her gun, which she kept in a bureau drawer.
    Fearful of going forward, furious with himself for not taking the plunge, at last he crossed the threshold, into the foyer.
    A tall figure stepped out of the hallway, darkness moving in darkness. “Hello, son.”
    With a mortal thunk , the thrown knife embedded in the door frame, two inches to the left of Howie’s head.
    He threw the stone in his right hand, heard it thwack something even as he turned to flee, heard