Cady kills Andy Kersek

Cady kills Andy Kersek is the pivotal, brutal climax of the Bowden family's siege, the moment when the stalker's campaign of psychological terror finally erupts into lethal violence inside the family's own home. The murder of the police corporal assigned to guard the house transforms the long, agonizing wait for Cady's next move into a sudden, chaotic night of bloodshed, and it exposes both the fragility of the official protection the Bowdens had been promised and the narrowness of their escape from far worse. It is the event that finally gives the authorities the unambiguous justification they had lacked, yet it comes at the cost of a good man's life and leaves Carol Bowden physically and emotionally shattered.

The Night of the Attack

The attack came on a night of profound darkness and misty rain, after a day Sam Bowden had spent hiding in the barn, watching the shadows change and lengthen, his worry over the children intensifying by noon. Carol had promised to call him twice a day, and she made her last signal at ten o'clock, her light going out shortly afterward. Sam, exhausted by the long vigil, fell into a fogged dream in a deep sleep, interrupted by the morning alarm clock that was not there. He groped for it, then sat up in absolute darkness, his reactions so blurred by heavy sleep that for long and precious seconds he did not know where he was, nor why his heart should be hammering so heavily. When shrill realization came, he rolled off the cot and tried to scoop up the gun and flashlight, his body clumsy with sleep. He lowered himself hastily through the trap door, found the rungs of the ladder with his toes, but had not anticipated how awkward it would be to climb down in complete darkness carrying a gun and flashlight. His foot slipped, his hand slipped, and he fell an eight-foot drop, landing with his entire weight on his right ankle, a white flare of pain exploding inside it. He fell heavily, faint with pain, a sprawling fall that brought him up against a wheel of the car, rolling in darkness, empty-handed, his sense of direction completely confused.

The Screams and the Gunfire

As Sam pawed around in the darkness, feeling for gun and flashlight, he heard a scream of complete and shocking terror, a scream that seemed to tear a long and ragged strip off his heart, and then the muffled and yet brittle sound of the Woodsman as two shots were fired. He was sobbing with fright and frustration and pain, touched the butt of the revolver and snatched it up, tried to stand, and fell again when he put weight on the ankle. He crawled to the wall and pulled himself up just as he heard the second scream quaver across the night air, a piece of silver wire stretched out to an endurable point, then snap into a silence worse than the scream. From somewhere he found the strength to walk, then to break into a blundering run, the night utterly black, misty rain on his face, his right foot flopping uselessly, each step landing in white-hot coals. He fell on the front steps, struggled up and found the door locked, with no key, and knew in despair it would take an eternity to find his way around the house and find where Cady had broken in. It was another thing they had not considered, another tragic oversight. But where was Kersek?

Just at that moment he heard a sound that must have come from a man's throat, but it was utterly unlike any human sound he had ever heard: a snarling, roaring sound, full of anger and madness and a bestial frenzy. There was the deep, resonant bang of a weapon heavier than the Woodsman, a sound that rattled the windows. Then came an enormous crashing and clanging and thudding of something running or falling down the front stairs, bringing Carol's alarm system of pots and pans and string with it, and a jar that shook the house. Before Sam could move, the locked front door burst open and a half-seen figure, wide and hard and stocky and incredibly quick, came plunging out and smashed into him and drove him back. There was a sick sense of floating as he sailed backward over the steps, landing flat on his back on the wet grass with a great jar that knocked the wind out of him. He had managed to hold on to the revolver, rolled up onto his knees gagging for breath, and heard the pound of running feet on the turf, saw something running toward the corner of the house. He fired three times at it, snap shooting, taking no aim, then got up and wobbled to the corner of the house, still sobbing for breath, and heard something moving with frantic haste, crashing up through the brush on the hillside behind the house. He fired twice at the sound.

The Discovery of Kersek's Body

When Sam turned back, his ankle folded again and he fell against the side of the house, hitting his head. He crawled on his hands and knees up the steps and through the open front door, found the light switch in the lower hall and turned it on. He could hear a faint mewling sound, a hopeless sound of fright and pain and heartbreak so like the unforgettable sound he had heard so long ago in a Melbourne alley that it seemed to him his heart would stop. The sound continued as he climbed the stairs on his hands and knees; halfway up he threw the empty gun aside. When he reached the upper hallway, he turned on the light. Kersek lay in the hallway outside the door of Nancy's room, blocking the hall, his gun lying five feet from him. Sam had to clamber over him, trying to be gentle, and Kersek groaned as he climbed over. The door to Nancy's room was open, the room in darkness, the endless whining sound coming from inside. He turned on Nancy's room light. The bedside table was tipped over, the lamp shattered. Carol lay half under the bed, curled in fetal position, wearing her pajama trousers, the top ripped off her, hanging by one sleeve, with two deep, bleeding scratches on her back. She made the endless and broken sound with each breath as he crawled toward her, and when he tried to pull her out from under the bed, she fought him, her eyes squeezed tightly shut.

When Sam asked her what had happened, she told him brokenly that Cady had come in "like an animal," that he smelled like some kind of animal too. She had heard nothing, just a sort of scratching near the door, and she had found the buzzer and pushed it for a long time, and she had the gun, and then he ran right in through the door, right through it like it was paper, and she fired and she screamed and she tried to fight, and he hit her. When Sam asked if Cady had done anything to her, she frowned as though trying to concentrate, then said, "Oh, I know what you mean. No. He was going to. But then... Andy came." She tried to look beyond him and asked, "Where is Andy?" Sam turned and crawled back out into the hall. Kersek was breathing raggedly, blood running from a corner of his mouth. The leather grip of a hunting knife protruded grotesquely from his side, just below his right armpit, and his nose was pulped flat against his face. Sam crawled down the hall to their bedroom, pulled himself up onto his bed, took the bedside phone from the cradle and dialed the operator, identifying himself as Sam Bowden on the Milton Hill Road.

The Aftermath and Investigation

The investigation that followed confirmed the ferocity of the struggle. The police found two twenty-two slugs, one on the door frame at chest level and one in the plaster on the other side of the hallway about six feet high, and one thirty-eight slug in the baseboard in the hallway, which had struck at an angle and knocked a long splinter out. Captain Dutton, who had been certain Kersek could handle himself, listened grimly as the evidence was laid out. The final blow came when the phone rang and Dutton, after listening for a time and speaking in monosyllables, hung up with his face looking older, his eyes pouched and bitter. "We won't know how he got suckered, Ricardo," he said. "He didn't make it. They lost him on the table." Kersek had died of his wounds. The murder gave the manhunt for Cady a new and terrible urgency, and it was later revealed that Cady had made it halfway to his car, hidden off a dirt road up there, covered with brush, containing a scope rifle, food, and liquor. The police started finding blood halfway up the hill, a lot of it, and one of Sam's last two shots must have hit him. When Sam asked, "Did you have to shoot him?" Ricardo looked at him and answered, "All we had to do was bring him down."

The Narrowness of the Escape

The killing of Andy Kersek stands as the darkest point of the entire siege, the moment when the abstract threat Cady represented became concrete and fatal. Carol's account made plain how close she had come to being raped and murdered: Cady had been going to do something to her, but Kersek's arrival had interrupted him. The corporal's sacrifice, however, was not enough to stop the attack on Carol, who was left with two deep, bleeding scratches on her back and a terror so profound she could not stop the endless, broken sound she made with each breath. In the aftermath, as the family tried to recover, Sam's thoughts returned again and again to the nightmare thing that had so nearly happened to her. He reflected that a duller spirit might have survived the crime without too much emotional damage, but Carol never; it would have broken her utterly and forever. When he thought of the narrowness of the escape, it made his eyes sting and blurred the shape and pattern of her. The murder of Kersek thus marks the definitive end of the family's passive endurance and the beginning of the final, fatal confrontation with Cady, and it underscores the novel's central irony: that the official protection the Bowdens had been so grudgingly given proved tragically insufficient, and that it was only through a combination of a brave man's sacrifice and Sam's own desperate, unaimed gunfire that the family survived at all.