Part 2: Red Rover
Chapter 8
Distantly, he heard a voice outside. Barnabas dragged his eyes away from the luminous sleeping young woman on the table and stared about the dark, tiny room in distraction. There were people approaching the cottage from outside. There was nowhere to hide in here. He gasped, his respiration trying to keep pace with his frenzied heartbeat. Roxanne. Oh, my love. Oh, dear God.
His cheeks wet, he viciously wiped his eyes with his arm, and quickly sidled into a shadowy corner of Roxanne's chamber, trying to become part of its darkness.
Sounds of approach, of complaint. A quarrel. Two men?
"But I will," announced a very deep, very low voice outside, nearing the door. Barnabas held still and turned his face into the darkness, resisting the sobs that shook his chest, trying to control himself. The voice came yet closer. The men were going to enter the cottage.
"Then do so," came a higher, grittier voice. "If he's seen something, he has to be caught. I can deal with him. Or I should say, I know someone who can."
"When I bring you the boy, you won't have to do that," the low voice said. It was a young man speaking. Hiding in the dark, Barnabas' facial features clenched in a painful attempt to remember. Yes, yes, that was young Claude North speaking, wasn't it? He had always sounded as though he were speaking underwater. A syrupy, subterranean voice. This was the young man who had given over the trusting Roxanne to bondage.
North's voice continued.
"The boy can take her place," he coaxed. "Just don't use him for one of her emergency kills." The men were through the front door and inside the kitchen portion of the cottage now, their shuffling feet rasping on the wooden floorboards.
"You don't seem to understand," observed the imperious higher voice, which Barnabas, fisting his hands tightly in the dark, recognized as Timothy Stokes, the vile father of Angelique and Alexis Stokes of parallel time. "I don't just waken your girlfriend and lay the boy down in her place. There is infinitely more to it than that. His being the indistinguishable double of David Collins is going to cause a rather ugly problem, have you realized? What if someone gets in here and sees?"
"Nobody has ever found their way into this place, and they won't," North cajoled. "Give me the money you owe us—and I want more, too, since I've not only given you Roxanne to use for so long, but now I am also supplying her substitute. Come, Stokes! Who has more energy than a twelve- or thirteen-year-old boy? He'll last your daughter forever!"
"You paint a rosy picture. But I do not yet have the boy, do I? How is it that you haven't caught him?"
"I will! Look, we're just talking in circles. He has nowhere to go. He won't go into Collinwood because the real David Collins is already there. I couldn't believe it when I saw this kid skulking in the woods, watching David Collins arguing with Carolyn Loomis. He was watching himself argue with Carolyn Loomis! He was stunned, terrified, I could see it. I don't know where he came from, but he doesn't belong here, probably nobody knows that he is here, and nobody will miss him. All he has is the woods, and he has to sleep sometime. And I will find him." The bass voice lowered and became gentle. "And you will give us more money, and we'll leave this place, Roxanne and I, and you'll forget we ever existed. And that kid will keep your precious daughter alive for the next eighty years."
Barnabas listened in horror. So, David was here, smack in the middle of parallel time. The boy had taken the dumbwaiter ride and wound up just where Barnabas had—outdoors—and encountered the people of the other Collinwood—the one from which he, Barnabas, and Julia, when trapped there not very long ago, had barely escaped.
Barnabas thought to himself, My David has seen the David of this place—the boy who truly belongs in parallel time—and realizes that he dare not venture into Collinwood, nor speak to any of its inmates. He's hiding in these woods, fearful. Does he know that Claude North is stalking him?
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