The Influence(49)

Next to it, in the other mound of mud, the corpse of the bird laughed like a boy.

And then there was nothing but pain.





SIXTEEN




Jill poured herself a cup of green tea, popped in an old Tori Amos CD, took out a pencil and opened up her sketchbook.

She hadn’t felt much like painting since meeting Ross, although she did not think the two had anything to do with each other; the timing was completely coincidental as far as she was concerned. She’d continued to sketch, however, and she paused for a moment to glance over her recent work, frowning as she turned the pages. Now that she looked at them, the subjects of her drawings were all sort of…gruesome.

There was a detailed rendering of an eviscerated lizard she had found on her doorstep; a depiction of a dead child inspired by a recent news story; a close-up of a bloody eyeball; several examples of grotesquely deformed genitalia, and a fantastical landscape populated by hairy monsters recalled from childhood nightmares.

Unusual, to say the least, but Jill had never been one to censor or second guess herself, and, turning to a blank page, she started to sketch something new. An instinctive artist, she liked to draw whatever came to her, without thinking about it or planning it out, and this time she found herself penciling in a dark room filled with cobwebs and farming implements. She worked from the outside in, the opposite of her usual method, sketching the room, its walls and roof, leaving an empty white space at the center. Whatever was supposed to fill that hole was the focal point of the drawing, was the reason she had started the sketch, but now that she was here, she was afraid to continue on. She had no idea what she would draw if she kept going, but she was afraid to find out, and she quickly flipped the page, starting instead on a purposefully benign picture: the mountains visible through the window behind her house.

The CD ended, and for several seconds the house was silent save for the scratching of her pencil on paper. Then, from the kitchen, came the familiar sound of paws padding across linoleum, accompanied by the equally familiar jangle of dogtag on collar.

“Puka?” Jill said. She stopped drawing, put down her pad and pencil, and hurried out to the kitchen.

Where the back door was open.

And Puka, her golden retriever, was walking in a circle in the middle of the floor.

She almost didn’t recognize him. Most of his fur had fallen out, and what remained were spiky tufts. One of his eyes had been burned out of his head, leaving only a blackened cauterized socket, and the other rolled around uncontrollably, while, beneath it, bone showed through an exposed nasal cavity.

“Puka!” she cried, rushing to the dog and falling to her knees next to him. How had this happened? And when? She hadn’t seen her missing pet since he’d swooped in and taken the crow that had crashed into her window, but he’d looked fine then. Had some psycho been torturing him? Had he been involved in a series of unique and unfortunate accidents?

She tried to hug him, but he backed away from her, growled, then sped out the door.

How the dog could see with one eye gone and the other rolling around randomly in its socket she had no idea, but he did not bump into the cupboard or the wall, and he sped surefootedly through the brush away from the house as she frantically called his name. “Puka! Puka!”

She almost called someone—Ross was the first person she thought about, interestingly—but the dog was already out of sight, and no one would be able to find him and bring him back. There were tears in her eyes as she realized that this might be the last time she ever saw Puka. In the shape he was in, the odds that he would be able to survive on his own in the wild were virtually nil.

How did he get to be in the shape he was in? she wondered. What had happened to him?

And how had he gotten into the house? That door had been closed and locked since yesterday afternoon. If she hadn’t opened it, who had?

Jill suddenly wished she had called someone. What if the same sicko who’d tortured Puka had brought him back home and purposely placed him in the kitchen?

Even if it were possible, she was sure the person wasn’t in the house. She’d walked past every room, and she would have seen him or heard him. Still, just in case, she took a cleaver from the knife rack and opened every closet and cupboard in the house, even those too small for someone to hide inside. As she’d known, the rooms were all empty, there was no one there, and she locked the doors, taking a moment to peek out each of the windows to make sure she saw no one unfamiliar anywhere near the house. Most of her neighbors were out, but Shan Cooper was home—she saw his battered El Camino in the carport—and she gave him a quick call to find out if he’d seen anything unusual. He hadn’t (he sounded as though he’d either just woken up or was drunk), but she warned him that there was a possible dognapper in the area and told him to keep his eyes open.