As if the strain of indecision had snapped him back to the full spectrum of reality, he was abruptly deluged by all the voices of the storm, of which he'd been utterly unaware while tracking The Other.

He'd been intently listening through the background racket for the stealthier sounds of his quarry. Now the wind's gibbering-hooting moaning, the rataplan of rain, fulminant thunder, the bony scraping of a tree limb against one side of the house, the tinny rattle of a loose section of rain gutter, and less identifiable noises flooded over him.

The neighbors couldn't have heard gunshots above the raging storm. So much for that hope.

Marty seemed to be swept forward by the tumult, along the blood trail, one hesitant step, then another, inexorably toward the waiting door.

The storm ushered in an early twilight, bleak and protracted, and Paige had the headlights on all the way home from the girls' school.

Though turned to the highest speed, the windshield wipers could barely cope with the cataracts that poured out of the draining sky.

Either the latest drought would be broken this rainy season or nature was playing a cruel trick by raising expectations she would not fulfill.

Intersections were flooded. Gutters overflowed. The BMW spread great white wings of water as it passed through one deep puddle after another.

And out of the misty murk, the headlights of oncoming cars swam at them like the searching lamps of bathyscaphes probing deep ocean trenches.

"We're a submarine," Charlotte said excitedly from the passenger seat beside Paige, looking out of the side window through plumes of tire spray, "swimming with the whales, Captain Nemo and the autihis twenty thousand leagues beneath the sea, giant squids stalking us.

Remember the giant squid, Mom, from the movie?"

"I remember," Paige said without taking her eyes from the road.

"Up periscope," Charlotte said, gripping the handles of that imaginary instrument, squinting through the eyepiece. "Raiding the sea lanes, ramming ships with our super-strong steel bow-boom!-and the crazy captain playing his huge pipe organ! You remember the pipe organ, Mom?"

"I remember."

"Diving deeper, deeper, the pressure hull starting to crack, but the crazy Captain Nemo says deeper, playing his pipe organ and saying deeper, and all the time here comes the squid." She broke into the shark's theme from the movie Jaws, "Dum-dum, dum-dum, dumdum, dum-dum, da-da-dum!"

"That's silly," Emily said from the rear seat.

Charlotte turned in her shoulder harness to look back between the front seats. "What's silly?"

"Giant squid."

"Oh, is that so? Maybe you wouldn't think they were so silly f you were swimming and one of them came up under you and bit you in half, ate you in two bites, then spit out your bones like grape "Squid don't eat people," Emily said.

"Of course they do."

"Other way around."

"Huh?"

"People eat squid," Emily said.

"No way."

"Way."

"Where'd you get a dumb idea like that?"

"Saw it on a menu at a restaurant."

"What restaurant?" Charlotte asked.

"Couple different restaurants. You were there. Isn't it true, Mom-don't people eat squid?"

"Yes, they do," Paige agreed.

"You're just agreeing with her so she won't look like a dumb seven-year-old," Charlotte said skeptically.

"No, it's true," Paige assured her. "People eat squid."

"How?" Charlotte asked, as if the very thought beggared her imagination.

"Well," Paige said, braking for a red traffic light, "not all in one piece, you know."

"I guess not!" Charlotte said. "Not a giant squid, anyway."

"You can slice the tentacles and saute them in garlic butter for one thing," Paige said, and looked at her daughter to see what impact that bit of culinary news would have.

Charlotte grimaced and faced forward again. "You're trying to gross me out."

"Tastes good," Paige insisted.

"I'd rather eat dirt."

"Tastes better than dirt, I assure you."

Emily piped up from the back seat again, "You can also slice their tentacles and french-fry 'em."

"That's right," Paige said.

Charlotte's judgment was simple and direct, "Yuck."

"They're like little onion rings, only squid," Emily said.

"This is sick."

"Little gummy french-fried squid rings dripping gooey squid ink," Emily said, and giggled.

Turning in her seat again to look at her sister, Charlotte said, "You're a disgusting troll."

"Anyway," Emily said, "we're not in a submarine."

"Of course we're not," Charlotte said. "We're in a car."

"No, we're in a hypofoil."

"A what?"

Emily said, "Like we saw on TV that time, the boat that goes between England and somewhere, and it rides on top of the water, really zoooooming along."

"Honey, you mean 'hydrofoil,"

" Paige said, taking her foot off the brake when the light turned green, and accelerating cautiously across the flooded intersection.

"Yeah," Emily said. "Hyderfoil. We're in a hyderfoil, going to England to meet the queen. I'm going to have tea with the queen, drink tea and eat squid and talk about the family jewels."

Paige almost laughed out loud at that one.

"The queen doesn't serve squid," Charlotte said exasperatedly.

"Bet she does," said Emily.

"No, she serves crumpets and scones and trollops and stuff," Charlotte said.

This time Paige did laugh out loud. She had a vivid image in her head, The very proper and gracious Queen of England inquiring of a gentleman guest if he would like a trollop with his tea, and indicating a garish hooker waiting nearby in Frederick's of Hollywood lingerie.

"What's so funny?" Charlotte asked.

Stifling her laugh, Paige lied, "Nothing, I was just thinking about something, something else, happened a long time ago, wouldn't seem funny to you now, just an old Mommy memory."

The last thing she wanted was to inhibit their conversation.

When she was in the car with them, she rarely turned on the radio.

Nothing on the dial was half as entertaining as the Charlotte and Emily Show.

As the rain began to fall harder than ever, Emily proved to be in one of her more loquacious moods. "It's a lot more fun going on a hyderfoil to see the queen than being in a submarine with a giant squid chomping on it."

"The queen is boring," Charlotte said.

"Is not."

"Is too."

"She has a torture chamber under the palace."

Charlotte turned in her seat again, interested in spite of 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 The Other's arms, trying to spread them wider and break the strangulating grip. The assailant redoubled his efforts, determined to hold tight. Marty strained harder, too, and his overworked heart pounded painfully against his breastbone.

They should have been equally matched, damn it, they were the same height, same weight, same build, in the same physical condition, to all appearances the same man.

Yet The Other, though suffering two potentially mortal bullet wounds, was the stronger, and not merely because he had the advantage of a superior position, better leverage. He seemed to possess inhuman power.

Face to face with his duplicate, washed by each hot explosive breath, Marty might have been gazing into a mirror, though the savage reflection before him was contorted by expressions he'd never seen on his own face.