“We looked for very long time in rain that never stopped,” Tomasz says, nodding. “Got very wet.”
“And then we, uh,” Regine says, and she actually seems to blush, “we saw you showering. In the rain. Out in front of your house.”
Tomasz grins even wider. “You were pulling on your willy!”
“Tommy!” the girl snaps. Then she frowns at Seth. “Well, you were. And we weren’t going to say hello when you were busy, and we were hungry and wet, so we went back home and thought we’d come back when things weren’t so . . .”
“Private,” Tomasz stage-whispers.
“Rainy,” Regine says.
Seth feels a burning in his throat. “I thought I was alone here. I thought I was completely alone.”
“That is what I thought, too,” Tomasz says solemnly. “Until Regine finds me.” He smiles again, shyly this time. “And now you make three.”
“So we got here this morning,” Regine says, “only to find that you were running very, very fast toward something in particular.” She crosses her arms. “Almost like you had somewhere to go. Something to do.”
There’s a silence, which Seth doesn’t fill.
“And we could not let the Driver catch you,” Tomasz says. “So we followed. And here we all are.” He shrugs. “Still outside.”
Seth waits a moment without saying anything more, then heads down the street, leading them toward his house. He’s embarrassed about the shower business, but not as much as he could be. Something’s still not right about this. These two just happened to be there when he was running toward the hill, just happened to stop him before he made contact with the black van, just happened to find the perfect place to hide from the Driver?
He sneaks a peek back as he turns up the path to his front door.
A short, happy Polish kid and a big, suspicious black girl.
Did he create them? Because they’re just about the last and weirdest thing he’d pick to create.
He swings open the front door, and they follow him inside. Regine takes a dining chair and Tomasz slumps on the settee. “This is a very terrible painting,” he says, staring up at the panicked horse above the mantel.
“I’ll make something to eat,” Seth says. “It won’t be much. But while I do, you have to tell me what you know.”
“All right,” Regine says. “But first you have to tell us something.”
“And what’s that?” Seth says, heading toward the kitchen.
And he hears her ask, “How did you die?”
34
“What did you say?”
“I think you heard the question just fine,” Regine says, looking at him firmly, as if setting him a challenge. A test he has to pass.
“How did I die?” Seth repeats, looking back and forth between her and Tomasz. “So you’re saying . . . You’re saying this place really is –”
“I’m not saying anything,” Regine says. “I’m just asking how you died. And your reaction tells me you know exactly what I mean.”
“I got struck by lightning!” Tomasz volunteers.
Regine makes a loud scoffing sound. “You did not.”
“You do not know,” Tomasz says. “You were not there.”
“Nobody actually gets struck by lightning. Not even in Poland.”
Tomasz’s eyes widen in indignation. “I was not in Poland! How many times I have to say? Mother came over for better working and –”
“I drowned,” Seth says, so quietly he thinks they may not have heard him.
But they stop bickering immediately.
“Drowned?” Regine says. “Where?”
Seth furrows his brow. “Halfmarket. It’s a little town on the coast of –”
“No, I mean, where? The bathtub? A swimming pool –?”
“The ocean.”
She nods, as if this makes sense. “Did you hit your head?”
“Did I hit my –?” Seth says, and then stops. He touches the back of his skull where it smashed into the rocks. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“I . . .” Regine starts, then looks down at the freshly swept floor Seth left behind this morning. “I fell down a flight of stairs. Cracked my head on a step on the way down.”
“And you woke up here?”
She nods.
“It was the lightning for me!” Tomasz says happily. “It is like getting punched on your entire body all at one time!”
“You did not get struck by lightning,” Regine says.
“Then you did not fall down stairs!” Tomasz says, upset bending his voice, a tone Seth recognizes from a hundred and one fights with Owen.
“So you both . . . ?” Seth doesn’t finish the sentence.
“Died,” Regine says. “In a way that caused a specific injury.”
Seth feels the back of his head again, where he hit it on the rocks. He remembers the horrible finality of that collision, could swear he still feels the bones breaking, in a way from which there was no return.
Until he woke up here.
There are no broken bones now, of course, that was another place, another him, and all he can feel is the still-brutal shortness of his hair, something that Regine and Tomasz have clearly been here long enough to outgrow. There’s nothing else unusual, just the inward curve of his neck leading up to the outward curve of his skull.
Regine looks at Tomasz. “Show him,” she says.
Tomasz leaps up from the settee. “Lean down, please,” he says. Seth stoops to one knee and allows Tomasz to take his hand. He splays Seth’s fingers so the first two are a particular distance apart. Tomasz sticks out a little nubbin of tongue as he concentrates, and once more, he reminds Seth so much of Owen, Seth feels his chest contract.
“Here,” Tomasz says, placing Seth’s fingers on a particular stretch of bone just behind his left ear. “Can you feel that?”
“Feel what?” Seth says. It’s exactly where his head struck the rock, but there’s nothing unusual there, nothing but a stretch of –
There’s something. A rise in the bone so slight as to almost not be present, so slight he didn’t feel it seconds ago when pressing in exactly the same place.
A rise in the bone.
Leading to a narrow notch in that same bone.
“What?” Seth whispers. “How . . . ?”
He swears it wasn’t there before. But there it is now, subtle but clear, the rise and the notch almost like a completely natural extension of his skull.