‘He did,’ said Janie. ‘He can.’
‘Janie— who? ’
‘Who made the generator?’
He leaped to his feet and released a shout that went rolling down and across the dark field.
‘Hip!’
‘Don’t mind me,’ he said, shaken. ‘I just realized that the only one who would dare to destroy that machine is someone who could make another if he wanted it. Which means that—oh, my God! —the soldier and the half-wit, and maybe Thompson—yes, Thompson: he’s the one made me get jailed when I was just about to find him again—they’re all the same!—Why didn’t I ever think of that before?’
‘I told you. You weren’t allowed.’
He sank down again. In the east, dawn hung over the hills like the loom of a hidden city. He looked at it, recognizing it as the day he had chosen to end his long, obsessive search and he thought of Janie’s terror when he had determined to go headlong into the presence of this—this monster—without his sanity, without his memory, without arms or information.
‘You’ll have to tell me, Janie. All of it.’
She told him—all of it. She told him of Lone, of Bonnie and Beanie and of herself; Miss Kew and Miriam, both dead now, and Gerry. She told how they had moved, after Miss Kew was killed, back into the woods, where the old Kew mansion hid and brooded, and how for a time they were very close. And then…