The Dark Need by Stant Litore

warm, clean clothes from that closet.
    “At the door,” he said, “what did he look like to you?”
    “My mother.” She pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes.
    “That’s a nice trick,” Matt muttered.
    “His victims have to invite him in. He wears a mask so they will.”
    “That’s messed up.” Matt chewed the inside of his cheek a moment. Thinking. “So he gets you to see him, that way, like someone you love, so you’ll open the door? How does he do that? Some kind of hypnosis?”
    “He has.… There’s this thing. He found it in the desert, in Iraq somewhere.”
    “An artifact,” he murmured.
    “I saw it once. After he got back. A lion carved out of stone.”
    Matt had seen enough to know that the world most people believed to be safely and even crushingly mundane was littered with ruins of a more supernatural past. He glanced at his ax on the bed. Splicing apart fact and myth was not as easy as most people supposed.
    “That’s why you thought I might be him out on the dock,” Matt realized. “Because he wears other people’s faces.”
    “Usually faces they know. You looked familiar, but… I was just scared.” Her voice went very quiet. “I’m always scared now.”
    Matt wondered what that must be like: months trailing someone who could look like anyone. Who might look like someone you trusted or someone you loved. Or someone you’d passed on the street.
    “Okay,” he said. “An artifact from another place, an old place. And it lets him look like other people, people we remember, or people we regret. That piece of rock didn’t make him a killer, though.”
    “You don’t understand,” she said, and there was pain in her voice. “He wasn’t always this way.”
    Or you want to believe that.
But Matt suddenly remembered Andy, how he had changed when Mr. Dark got to him. How an impulse that wasn’t evil in and of itself had become twisted and corrupted into a drive to kill and destroy.
    “He went to the war as a surgeon,” Adette said softly. “Army. The youngest in his unit. He was so proud, and I was so proud for him. When he deployed I made him a cake in the shape of a cadaver—I know that sounds sick, but he loved it. He cut it open with a scalpel. It was just us two, he never had many friends. We ate half that cake, and then had a food fight with the rest, just like when we were little.
    “He thought he could patch people up. They needed a lot of patching up in Iraq—their people and ours. But he didn’t come back the same man.”
    “No one does,” Matt said. There had been men in his town who went away to war. When they came back on furlough, they’d all had that haunted, serious, earnest look.
    But none of them came back as serial killers. Or face-changers.
    “He really didn’t. The first time he… The first time he killed, I was there. I caught him. He said he’d seen what was inside people and it was red and beautiful, and if they would only let him inside, he would…”
    After a moment, Matt prodded: “He would what?”
    “Give them peace,” she whispered.
    Matt considered her. “He was your lover.”
    She laughed quietly, bitterly. “He was my brother.”
    Matt stared at her.
    “My twin.” She rubbed at her eyes as though exhausted. “I’m older than I look, Samaritan. You didn’t think I was a virgin in the barn?”
    “Not polite to ask a woman her age,” Matt said.
    “Thirty-one,” she said. “I just don’t look it. Richard is my brother, and—”
    “And that’s why you’re connected. Why you know when he kills. Why you have those dreams.” Matt had heard of such things: the connectedness of twins.
    She nodded shakily.
    Matt glanced at the spilled cup, his mind working fast. She didn’t just know when he killed. She felt it. Felt—what he felt, maybe. Keenly enough to want in on it. His stomach turned.
    “You’re hunting him. With a knife. So you do want him dead. Why?”
    “Because I can’t bear it,” she whispered. “It’s