Damaris crossed to the coffee pot and poured herself a cup. Sipping it black, she glanced around the room at the other reporters until her gaze settled on the freelancer, Mitchell Groome. Though he couldn’t be much older than forty-five, Groome’s face was all sad droops, like a hound in mourning. Still, he seemed fit enough-perhaps even athletic. Best of all, he had noticed her gaze, and was looking back at her, albeit with puzzlement.

She set down her empty cup and strolled out of the dining room, knowing, without even a backward glance, that Groome was watching her.

Hicksville had just gotten a little more interesting.

Up in her room, she took a few minutes to review her notes from the interviews she’d conducted over the last few days. Now came the hard part-putting it all together in an article that would make her editor happy and catch the eyes of bored New England housewives cruising past the tabloid stands.

She sat at her desk and stared out the window, wondering how to turn this tragic but nonetheless commonplace tale into something a little more titillating. What made this case special? What new angle would entice a reader to reach for a copy of the Weekly Informer?

She suddenly realized she was staring straight at it.

Across the street was a rundown old building, the windows boarded up. The faded sign said Kimball’s Furniture.

The address was 666.

The sign of the Beast.

As her laptop computer powered up, she quickly shuffled through her notes, searching for the quote she remembered from yesterday. Something a woman had said in the local grocery store.

She found it. “I know the explanation for what happened at the school,” the woman had said. “Everyone knows it, but no one wants to admit it. They don’t want to sound superstitious or uneducated But I’ll tell you what it is: it’s this new Godlessness. People have pushed the Lord out of their lives. They’ve replaced Him with something else. Something no one dares speak of.”

Yes! thought Damaris, and she was grinning as she began to type.

“Last week, Satan arrived in the bucolic town of Tranquility; Maine…

Sitting in her wheelchair before the living room window, Faye Braxton watched her thirteen-year-old son step off the school bus and begin to hike up the long dirt driveway to the house. It was a daily event she usually looked forward to, seeing Scotty’s slight figure at last emerge through the bus doors, his shoulders weighed down by the heavy backpack, his head craned forward with the effort to lug his burden of books up the weedy and sloping front yard.

He was still so small. It pained her to see how little he had grown in the last year. While many of his classmates had shot past him in both height and bulk, there was her Scotty, left behind in pale adolescence, and so anxious to grow up he had nicked his chin last week while trying to shave his nonexistent beard. He was her firstborn, her best friend. She wouldn’t have minded at all if time suddenly stood still, and she could keep him as he’d always been, a sweet and loving child. But she knew the child would soon be gone.

The transformation had already begun.

She’d seen the first hint of it a few days ago, when he had stepped off the bus as usual. She’d been at the window, watching him walk toward the house, when she saw something happen that was both inexplicable and frightening. In the front yard, he had suddenly halted and gazed up at a tree in which three gray squirrels perched. She’d thought he was merely curious. That like his younger sister Kitty; he would try to coax them down to be petted. So she was startled when he bent down, picked up a rock, and flung it at the tree.

The squirrels scampered to higher branches.

As she’d watched in dismay, Scotty had hurled another rock, and another, his thin body winding up like a tautly coiled spring of fury, the stones flying into the branches. When at last he stopped, he was breathing hard and exhausted. Then he’d turned to the house.

The look on his face had made her jerk back from the window. For one horrifying moment she’d thought: That is not my son.

Now, as she watched him approach the house, she wondered which boy would step through the door. Her son, her real son, sweet and smiling, or the ugly stranger who looked like Scotty? In the past, she would have dealt firmly with him for throwing rocks at animals.

In the past, she was never afraid of her own child.

Faye heard Scotty’s footsteps on the porch. Heart pounding, she swiveled her wheelchair around to face him as he came in the door.

Anyone could see that fourteen-year-old Barry Knowlton was his mother’s child.

The resemblance was startling enough to take in with a single glance. Barry and Louise were like a pair of cheerful dumplings, both of them red-haired and apple-cheeked, both with pliant pink mouths. Their smiles of greeting promised to dispel even Claire’s gloom.

Since the classroom shooting nearly a week ago, Claire had awakened each morning to the awful realization that her move to Tranquility had been a mistake. Only eight months ago, she had arrived here full of confidence, had used most of her savings to buy a medical practice she was certain would succeed. And why wouldn’t it? She’d had a thriving practice in Baltimore. But one very public lawsuit would destroy everything.

Every day at work, when she saw the mailman stride up the front walk, she braced herself for the delivery of a letter she dreaded receiving. Paul Dame!! had said she’d be hearing from his attorney, and she had no doubt he’d follow up on his threat.

Is it too late to leave? That was the question she asked herself every day now.

Is it too late to move back to Baltimore?

She forced herself to smile as she stepped into the exam room to see Barry and his mother. Here, at least, was a bright spot in her day.

They both looked genuinely pleased to see her. Barry had already pulled off his boots and was standing on the scale, watching expectantly as the counterweight arm bobbed up and down.

“Hey I think I lost another pound!” he announced.

Claire checked the chart, then glanced at the reading. “Down to two hundred forty-seven pounds. That’s two pounds you’ve lost. Good for you!”

Barry stepped off the scale, which sent the counterweight tilting up with a loud clap. “I think my belt feels looser already!”

“Let me listen to your heart,” said Claire.

Barry waddled over to the exam table, carefully climbed up onto the footstool, and plopped onto the table. He peeled off his shirt, baring folds of pale and sagging flesh. As Claire listened to his heart and lungs and took his blood pressure, she felt his gaze, curious and engaged, following her every move. The first time they’d met, Barry had told her he wanted to be a doctor, and he seemed to relish these bimonthly visits as field trips into his future profession. The occasional blood test, an ordeal for most patients, was a fascinating procedure for Barry, an opportunity to ask in sometimes endless detail about needle gauges and syringe volumes and the purpose of each different colored blood tube.

If only Barry would pay as much attention to what he put in his mouth.

She finished her exam, then stood back and regarded him for a moment. “You’re doing a good job, Barry. How is the diet coming?”

He gave a shrug. “Okay, I guess. I’m trying real hard.”

“Oh, he loves to eat! That’s the problem,” said Louise. “I try my best cooking low-fat meals, But then his daddy comes home with a box of doughnuts and, well.

.. it’s so hard to resist. It just about breaks my heart to see the way Barry looks at us, with those big hungry eyes of his.”

“Could you discourage your husband from bringing home doughnuts?”