Rachel got up and walked quickly to the closet. She opened it quietly, moved two shoe boxes aside, and looked at the small gun safe behind them. She resented the fact that it was even there, and had insisted that it have a five-number combination lock to prevent Sam from gaining access to it, even though it was six feet off the ground on the topmost shelf. She entered the code and heard the bolts slide. Inside were two guns. She removed the smaller of the two, the.38. She hated firearms, but in the aftermath of recent events she had reluctantly agreed to learn how to use this one. She loaded it, using the speed loader, then went back to her bed and knelt. There was a small white box on the wall, with a red button on top. She pressed it just as she heard the window shaking in the next room, as though someone were trying to open it.

“Sam!” she shouted.

The alarm began to sound, tearing apart the silence of the marshes as Rachel ran to Sam’s room, Joan close behind her. She could hear the child crying, terrified by the sudden burst of noise. The door was open, and faced the window. Sam was writhing in her cot, her little hands beating against the air and her face almost purple with the force of her tears. For a fleeting instant, Rachel thought she could see something pale move against the window-then it was gone.

“Take her,” said Rachel. “Get her into the bathroom and lock the door.”

Joan grabbed the child and ran from the room.

Slowly, Rachel approached the window. The gun was a little unsteady in her grip, but her finger no longer rested outside the guard and instead was gently touching the trigger. Nearer now: ten feet, five, four, three…

The sound of crawling again came from above her head, this time moving away from Sam’s room and toward the far side of the house. The noise distracted Rachel, and she lifted her head to follow its progress, as though the intensity of her gaze could penetrate the ceiling and slates and permit her to see what was above.

When she looked back to the window there was a face there, hanging upside down in the night from the top of the glass, dark hair dangling vertically from pale features.

It was a woman.

Rachel fired, shattering the window. She kept firing, even as the sound of the presences on the roof and wall came again, growing fainter now as they fled. She could see blue light scything through the darkness, and heard Sam crying even above the noise of the alarm. And then she was crying with her daughter, howling with fear and anger, her finger still pulling the trigger over and over even as the hammer struck only the empty casings and the night air flooded the room, bringing with it the smell of salt water and marsh grass and dead winter things.

Few people would have described Sandy and Larry Crane as happy individuals. Even Larry’s fellow VFW members, upon whom time was inexorably taking its toll and who now boasted a rapidly dwindling platoon of World War II survivors among their number, tended at best to tolerate Larry and his wife when they occasionally attended a veterans’ social event. Mark Hall, the only other member of their little band who was still alive, often told his wife that in the aftermath of D-day it was really just a question of who was going to kill Larry first: the Germans or his own side. Larry Crane could peel an orange in his pocket and open a candy bar with so little noise as to suggest that his time might have been better served in a special operations unit, except that Larry was a born coward and therefore of little use to his own unit, never mind to an elite group of hardened soldiers forced to operate behind enemy lines in desperate conditions. Hell, Mark Hall could have sworn that he’d seen Larry crouching behind better men during combat in the hope that they would take a bullet before he did.

And sure enough, that was what happened. Larry Crane might have been a cheap sonofabitch, and yellow as a buttercup’s ass to boot, but he was also lucky. In the midst of carnage, the only blood he ever got on him was other men’s. Hall might not have admitted it to anyone later, might even have been reluctant to admit it to himself, but as the war wore on he found himself sticking close to Larry Crane in the hope that some of that luck might rub off on him. He guessed that it had, because he’d lived when others had died.

It wasn’t all good luck, though. He’d paid a price by becoming Larry Crane’s creature, bound to him by the shared knowledge of what they had done in the Cistercian monastery at Fontfroide. Mark Hall didn’t talk about that with his wife, no sir. Mark Hall didn’t talk about that with anyone except his God, and then only in the ultimate secret confessional of his own mind. He hadn’t set foot in church since that day, had even managed to convince their only daughter to have her wedding outdoors by offering her the most expensive hotel in Savannah as a venue. His wife assumed that he’d suffered some crisis of faith over what he’d endured during the war, and he let her believe that, supporting her assumptions by making occasional dark references to “the things I saw over in Europe.” He supposed that there was even a little kernel of truth hidden beneath the shell of the lie, because he had seen some terrible things, and done some terrible things too.

God, they were only children when they went off to fight, virgins, and virgin children had no call to be holding guns and firing them at other children. When he looked at his grandchildren, and saw how cosseted and naive they were despite the pretence of knowingness that they maintained, he found it impossible to visualize them as he had once been. He recalled sitting on the bus to Camp Wolters, his momma’s tears still drying on his cheek, listening while the driver told the Negroes to sit at the back because the front seats were for the white folks, didn’t matter that they were all headed for the same conflict and that bullets were blind to race. The blacks didn’t object, although he could see the resentment simmering in a couple of them, and their fists tightened as some of the other recruits joined in, wisecracking at them as they walked to their seats. They knew better than to respond. One word from them, and the whole situation would have exploded, and Texas was tough back then. Any one of those Negroes raised a hand to a white man, and they wouldn’t have to worry about the Germans or the Japanese, because their own side would take care of them before they had time to break in their boots, and nobody would ever be called to answer for what befell them.

Later, he heard that some of those black men, the ones who could read and write, were told to sign up for Officer Candidates School, on account of the fact that the army was organizing a division of black soldiers, the Ninety-second, to be known as the Buffalo Division after the black soldiers who fought in the Indian wars. He was with Larry Crane by then, the two of them sitting in some god-awful rain-drenched field in England when someone told them about it, and Crane started off bitching about how the niggers were getting the breaks while he was still a grunt. The invasion was imminent, and soon some of those black soldiers found their way to England too, which made Crane bitch even more. It didn’t matter to him that their officers weren’t allowed to enter headquarters by the front door like the white officers, or that the black troops had crossed the Atlantic without any escort because they weren’t considered as valuable to the war effort. No, all Larry Crane saw was uppity Negroes, even after the beach at Omaha was secured, their unit smoking cigarettes on the walls of a captured German emplacement, and they looked down to see the black soldiers walking with sacks along the sand, filling them with the body parts of the men who had died, reduced to the level of collectors of human garbage. No, even then Larry Crane saw fit to complain, calling them cowards who weren’t fit to touch the remains of better men, although it was the army that dictated that they weren’t fit to fight, not then, not until men like General Davis pushed for the integration of black GIs into infantry combat units in the winter of 1944, and the Buffalo Division began fighting its way through Italy. Hall had few problems with Negro soldiers. He didn’t want to bunk with them, and he sure as hell wasn’t about to drink from the same bottle, but it seemed to him that they could take a bullet as well as the next man, and as long as they kept their guns pointed in the right direction he was happy to wear the same uniform as they. By comparison with Larry Crane, this made Mark Hall a bastion of liberalism, but Hall had sufficient self-knowledge to recognize that by making only a cursory effort to contradict Crane or tell him to keep his damn mouth shut he was culpable too. Time and time again, Hall tried to put distance between himself and Larry Crane, but he grew to realize that Larry was a survivor, and an uneasy bond developed between the two men until the events at Fontfroide occurred, and that bond became something deeper, something unspeakable.