file:///G|/rah/Dean%20R.%20Koontz/Dean%20R.%20Koontz%20-%20Hideaway.txt

Hideaway [067-011-5.0]

by: dean r.      koontz.

Synopsis:

Hatchford harrison is pronounced dead after drowning in an automobile
accident. When he is resuscitated after eighty minutes of freezing
death, he finds himself psychically linked to a sociopathic killer.

Through the killer's eyes, Hatch sees a grewsome world, including a
collection of cadavers hidden in an abandoned amusement park.

Gradually, Hatch comes to know something else. The killer is also aware
of him and he's coming for Hatch's wife and adopted daughter.

Publisher unknown

Copyright unknown

Isbn unknown

Life is a gift that must be given back, and joy should arise from its
possession.

It is too damned short, and that is a fact.

Hard to accept, this earthly procession to final darkness is a journey
done, circle completed, work of art sublime, a sweet melodic rhyme, a
battle won.

An entire world hummed and bustled beyond the dark ramparts of the
mountains, yet to Lindsey Harrison the night seemed empty, as hollow as
the vacant chambers of a cold, dead heart. Shivering, she slumped
deeper in the passenger seat of the Honda.

Serried ranks of ancient evergreens receded up the slopes that flanked
the highway, parting occasionally to accommodate sparse stands of
winter-stripped maples and birches that poked at the sky with jagged
black branches. However, that vast forest and the formidable rock
formations to which it clung did not reduce the emptiness of the bitter
March night.

As the Honda descended the winding blacktop, the trees and stony
outcroppings seemed to float past as if they were only dream images
without real substance.

Harried by fierce wind, fine dry snow slanted through the headlight
beams. But the storm could not fill the void, either.

The emptiness that Lindsey perceived was internal, not external. The
night was brimming, as ever, with the chaos of creation. Her own soul
was the only hollow thing.

She glanced at Hatch. He was leaning forward, hunched slightly over the
steering wheel, peering ahead with an expression which might be flat and
inscrutable to anyone else but which, after twelve years of marriage,
Lindsey could easily read. An excellent driver, Hatch was not daunted
by poor road conditions. His thoughts, like hers, were no doubt on the
long weekend they had just spent at Big Bear Lake.

Yet again they had tried to recapture the easiness with each other that
they had once known. And again they had failed.



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The chains of the past still bound them.

The death of a five-year-old son had incalculable emotional weight. It
pressed on the mind, quickly deflating every moment of buoyancy,
crushing each new blossom of joy. Jimmy had been dead for more than
four and a half years, nearly as long as he had lived, yet his death
weighed as heavily on them now as on the day they had lost him, like
some colossal moon looming in a low orbit overhead.

Squinting through the smeared windshield, past snow-caked wiper blades
that stuttered across the glass, Hatch sighed softly. He glanced at
Lindsey and smiled. It was a pale smile, just a ghost of the real
thing, barren of amusement, tired and melancholy. He seemed about to
say something, changed his mind, and returned his attention to the
highway.

The three lanes of black tone descending, two ascending-were
disappearing under a shifting shroud of snow. The road slipped to the
bottom of the slope and entered a short straightaway leading into a
wide, blind curve. In spite of that flat stretch of pavement, they were
not out of the San Bernardino Mountains yet. The state route eventually
would turn steeply downward once more.

As they followed the curve, the land changed around them: the slope to
their right angled upward more sharply than before, while on the far
side of the road, a black ravine yawned. White metal guardrails marked
that precipice, but they were barely visible in the sheeting snow.

A second or two before they came out of the curve, Lindsey had a
premonition of danger. She said, "Hatch..

Perhaps Hatch sensed trouble, too, for even as Lindsey spoke, he gently
applied the brakes, cutting their speed slightly.

A downgrade straightaway lay beyond the bend, and a beer distributor's
large truck was halted at an angle across two lanes, just fifty or sixty
feet in front of them.

Lindsey tried to say, oh God, but her voice was locked within her.

While making a delivery to one of the area ski resorts, the trucker
evidently had been surprised by the blizzard, which had set in only a
short while ago but half a day ahead of the forecasters' predictions.

Without benefit of snow chains, the big truck tires churned
ineffectively on the icy pavement as the driver struggled desperately to
bring his rig around and get it moving again.

Cursing under his breath but otherwise as controlled as ever, Hatch
eased his foot down on the brake pedal. He dared not jam it to the
floor and risk sending the Honda into a deadly spin.

In response to the glare of the car headlights, the trucker looked
through his side window. Across the rapidly closing gap of night and
snow, Lindsey saw nothing of the man's face but a pallid oval and twin
charry holes where the eyes should have been, a ghostly countenance, as
if some malign spirit was at the wheel of that vehicle. Or Death
himself Hatch was heading for the outermost of the two ascending lanes,
the only part of the highway not blocked.

Lindsey wondered if other traffic was coming uphill, hidden from them by
the truck. Even at reduced speed, if they collided headn, they would
not survive.


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In spite of Hatch's best efforts, the Honda began to slide. The tail
end came around to the left, and Lindsey found herself swinging away
from the stranded truck. The smooth, greasy, out-of control motion was
like the transition between scenes in a bad dream. Her stomach twisted
with nausea, and although she was restrained by a safety harness, she
instinctively pressed her right hand against the door and her left
against the dashboard, bracing herself.

"Hang on," Hatch said, turning the wheel where the car wanted to go,
which was his only hope of regaining control.

But the slide became a sickening spin, and the Honda rotated three
hundred and sixty degrees, as if it were a carousel without callio:
around .around.. . until the truck began to come into view again. For
an instant, as they glided downhill, still turning, Lindsey was certain
the car would slip safely past the other vehicle. She could see beyond
the big rig now, and the road below was free of traffic.

Then the front bumper on Hatch's side caught the back of the truck.

Tortured metal shrieked.

The Honda shuddered and seemed to explode away from the point of
collision, slamming backward into the guardrail. Lindsey's teeth
clacked together hard enough to ignite sparks of pain in her jaws, all
the way into her temples, and the hand braced against the dashboard bent
painfully at the wrist. Simultaneously, the strap of the shoulder
harness, which stretched diagonally across her chest from right shoulder
to left hip, abruptly cinched so tight that her breath burst from her.

The car rebounded from the guardrail, not with sufficient momentum to
reconnect with the truck but with so much torque that it pivoted three
hundred and sixty degrees again. As they spun-glided past the truck,
Hatch fought for control, but the steering wheel jerked erratically back
and forth, tearing through his hands so violently that he cried out as
his palms were abraded.

Suddenly the moderate gradient appeared precipitously steep, like the
water-greased spillway of an amusement-park flume ride. Lindsey would
have screamed if she could have drawn breath. But although the safety
strap had loosened, a diagonal line of pain still cut across her chest,
making it impossible to inhale. Then she was rattled by a vision of the
Honda skating in a long glissade to the next bend in the road, crashing
through the guardrail, tumbling out into the void-and the image was so
horrifying that it was like a blow, knocking breath back into her.

As the Honda came out of the second rotation, the entire driver's side
slammed into the guardrail, and they slid thirty or forty feet without
losing contact. To the accompaniment of a grinding-screeching-scraping
of metal against metal, showers of yellow sparks plumed up, mingling
with the falling snow, like swarms of summer fireflies that had flown
through a time warp into the wrong season.

The car   shuddered to a halt, canted up slightly at the front left
corner,   evidently hooked on a guard post. For an instant the resultant
silence   was so deep that Lindsey was half stunned by it; she shattered
it with   an explosive exhalation.

She had never before experienced such an overwhelming sense of relief.

Then the car moved again.



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It began to tilt to the left. The guardrail was giving way, perhaps
weakened by corrosion or by the erosion of the highway shoulder beneath
it.

"Out!" Hatch shouted, frantically fumbling with the release on his
safety harness.

Lindsey didn't even have time to pop loose of her own harness or grab
the door handle before the railing cracked apart and the Honda slipped
into the ravine. Even as it was happening, she couldn't believe it.

The brain acknowledged the approach of death, while the heart stubbornly
insisted on immortality. In almost five years she had not adjusted to
Jimmy's death, so she was not easily going to accept the imminence of
her own demise.

In a jangle of detached posts and railings, the Honda slid sideways
along the ice-rusted slope, then flipped over as the embankment grew
steeper.

Gasping for breath, heart pounding, wrenched painfully from side to side
in her harness, Lindsey hoped for a tree, a rock outcropping, anything
that would halt their fall, but the embankment seemed clear.

She was not sure how often the car rolled-maybe only twice-because up
and down and left and right lost all meaning. Her head banged into the
ceiling almost hard enough to knock her out. She didn't know if she'd
been thrown upward or if the roof had caved in to meet her, so she tried
to slump in her seat, afraid the roof might crumple further on the next
roll and crush her skull. The headlights slashed at the night, and from
the wounds spouted torrents of snow. Then the windshield burst,
showering her with minutely fragmented safety glass, and abruptly she
was plunged into total darkness. Apparently the headlights blinked off
and the dashboard lights, reflected in Hatch's sweat-slicked face. The
car rolled onto its roof again and stayed there. In that inverted
posture it sledded farther into the seemingly bottomless ravine, with
the thunderous noise of a thousand tons of coal pouring down a steel
chute.

The gloom was utterly tenebrous, seamless, as if she and Hatch were not
outdoors but in some windowless funhouse, rocketing down a rollercoaster
track. Even the snow, which usually had a natural phosphorescence, was
wind drove them through the empty windshield frame, but she could not
see them even as they frosted her lashes.

Struggling to quell a rising panic, she wondered if she had been blinded
by the imploding glass.

Blindness.

That was her special fear. She was an artist. Her talent took
inspiration from what her eyes observed, and her wonderfully dexterous
hands rendered inspiration into art with the critical judgment of those
eyes to guide them. What did a blind painter paint? What could she
hope to create if suddenly deprived of the sense that she relied upon
the most?

Just as she started to scream, the car hit bottom and rolled back onto
its wheels, landing upright with less impact than she had anticipated.

It came to a halt almost gently, as if on an immense pillow.

"Hatch?" Her voice was hoarse.


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After the cacophonous roar of their plunge down the ravine wall, she
felt half deaf, not sure if the preternatural silence around her was
real or only perceived.

"Hatch?"

She looked to her left, where he ought to have been, but she could not
see him-or anything else.

She was blind.

"Oh, God, no.      Please."

She was thirsty, too. The car seemed to be turning, wallowing like an
airborne kite dipping and rising in the thermal currents of a summer
sky.

"Hatch!"

No response.

Her light-headedness increased. The car rocked and wallowed worse than
ever. Lindsey was afraid she would faint. If Hatch was injured, he
might bleed to death while she was unconscious and unable to help him.

She reached out blindly and found him crumpled in the driver's seat.

His head was bent       toward her, resting against his own shoulder. She
touched his face,       and he did not move. Something warm and sticky
covered his right       cheek and temple. Blood. From a head injury. With
trembling the hot       exhalation of his breath between his slightly parted
lips.

He was unconscious, not dead.

Fumbling in frustration with the release mechanism on her safety
harness, Lindsey heard new sounds that she could not identify. A soft
slapping. Hungry licking. An eerie, liquid chuckling. For a moment
she froze, straining to identify the source of those unnerving noises.

Without warning the Honda tipped forward, admitting a cascade of icy
water through the broken windshield onto Lindsey's lap. She gasped in
surprise as the arctic bath chilled her to the marrow, and red she was
not lightheaded after all. The car was moving. It was afloat. They
had landed in a lake or river. Probably a river. The placid surface of
a lake would not have been so active.

The shock of the cold water briefly paralyzed her and made her wince
with pain, but when she opened her eyes, she could see again. The
Honda's headlights were, indeed, extinguished, but the dials and gauges
in the dashboard still glowed. She must have been suffering from
hysterical blindness rather than genuine physical damage.

She couldn't see much, but there was not much to see at the bottom of
the night-raped ravine. Splinters of dimly glimmering glass rimmed the
broken-out windshield. Outside, the oily water was revealed only by a
sinuous, silvery phosphorescence that highlighted its purling surface
and imparted a dark obsidian sparkle to the jewels of ice that floated
in tangled necklaces atop it. The riverbanks would have been lost in
absolute blackness but for the ghostly raiments of snow that cloaked the
otherwise naked rocks, earth, and brush. The Honda appeared to be
motoring through the river: water poured halfway up its hood before


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parting in a "V" and streaming away to either side as it might from the
prow of a ship, lapping at the sills of the side windows. They were
being swept downstream, where eventually the currents were certain to
turn more turbulent, bringing them to rapids or rocks or worse. At a
glance, Lindsey grasped the extremity of their situation, but she was
still so relieved by the remission of her blindness that she was
grateful for the sight of anything, even of trouble serious.

Shivering, she freed herself from the entangling straps of the safety
harness, and touched Hatch again. His face was ghastly in the queer
backsplash of the instrument lights: sunken eyes, waxen skin, color less
lips, blood oozing-but, thank God, not spurting from the gash on the
right side of his head. She shook him gently, then a little harder,
calling his name.

They wouldn't be able to         get out of the car easily, if at all, while it
was being borne down the         river-specially as it now began to move faster.
But at least they had to         be prepared to scramble out if it came up
against a rock or caught         for a moment against one of the banks.

The opportunity to escape might be short-lived.

Hatch could not be awakened.

Without warning the car dipped sharply forward. Again icy water gushed
in through the shattered windshield, so cold that it had some of the
effect of an electrical shock, halting Lindsey's heart for a beat or two
and locking the breath in her lungs.

The front of the car did not rise in the currents, as it had done
previously. It was settling deeper than before, so there was less river
under to provide hIt. The water continued to pour in, quickly rising
past Lindsey's ankles to mid-calf. They were sinking.

"Hatch!" She was shouting now, shaking him hard, heedless of his
injuries.

The river gushed inside, rising to seat level, churning up foam that
refracted the amber light from the instrument panel and looked like
garlands of golden Christmas tinsel.

Lindsey pulled her feet out of the water, knelt on her seat, and
splashed Hatch's face, desperately hoping to bring him around. But he
was sunk in deeper levels of unconsciousness than mere concussive sleep,
perhaps in a coma as plumbless as a mid-ocean trench.

Swirling water rose to the bottom of the steering wheel.

Frantically Lindsey ripped at Hatch's safety harness, trying to strip it
away from him, only half aware of the hot flashes of pain when she tore
a couple of fingernails.

"Hatch, damn it!"

The water was halfway up the steering wheel, and the Honda all but
ceased its forward movement. It was too heavy now to be budged by the
persistent pressure of the river behind it.

Hatch was five-feet-ten, a hundred and sixty pounds, only average in
size, but he might as well have been a giant. As dead weight, resistant
to her every effort, he was virtually immovable. Tugging, shoving,
wrenching, clawing, Lindsey struggled to free him, and by the time she
finally managed to disentangle him from the straps, the water had risen


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over the top of the dashboard, more than halfway up her chest. It was
even higher on Hatch, just under his chin, because he was slumped in his
seat.

The river was unbelievably icy, and Lindsey felt the warmth pumping out
of her body as if it were blood gushing from a severed artery. As body
heat bled from her, the cold bled in, and her muscles began to ache.

Nevertheless, she welcomed the rising flood because it would make Hatch
buoyant and therefore easier to maneuver out from under the wheel and
through the shattered windshield. That was her theory, anyway, but when
she tugged on him, he seemed heavier than ever, and now the water was at
his lips.

"Come on, come on," she said furiously, "you're gonna drown, damn it!"

2

Finally pulling his beer truck off the road, Bill Cooper broadcast a
Mayday on his CB radio. Another trucker responded and, equipped with a
cellular telephone as well as a CB, promised to call the authorities in
nearby Big Bear.

Bill hung up the citizen's-band handset, took a long-handled six-battery
flashlight from under the driver's seat, and stepped out into the storm.
The frigid wind cut through even his fleece-lined denim jacket, but the
bitterness of the winter night was not half as icy as his stomach, which
ha turned sour and cold as he had watched the Honda spin its luckless
occupants down the highway and over the brink of the chasm.

He hurried across the slippery pavement                  and along the shoulder to the
missing section of guardrail. He hoped                   to see the Honda close below,
caught up against the trunk of a tree.                   But there were no trees on that
slope-just a smooth mantle of snow from                  previous storms, scarred by the
passage of the car, disappearing beyond                  the reach of his flashlight
beam.

An almost disabling pang of guilt stabbed through him. He'd been
drinking again. Not much. A few shots out of the flask he carried.

He had been certain he was sober when he'd started up the mountain.

Now he wasn't so sure. He felt... fuzzy. And suddenly it seemed
stupid to have tried to make a delivery with the weather turning ugly so
fast.

Below him, the abyss appeared supernaturally bottomless, and the
apparent extreme depth engendered in Bill the feeling that he was gazing
into the damnation to which he'd be delivered when his own life ended.
He was paralyzed by that sense of futility that sometimes overcame even
the best of men-though usually when they were alone in a bedroom,
staring at the meaningless patterns of shadows on the ceiling at three
o'clock in the morning.

Then the curtains of snow parted for a moment, and he saw the floor of
the ravine about a hundred or a hundred and fifty feet below, not as
deep as he had feared. He stepped through the gap in the guardrail,
intending to crab down the treacherous hillside and assist the survivors
if there were any. Instead he hesitated on the narrow shelf of flat
earth at the brink of the slope because he was whiskey-dizzy but also
because he could not see where the car had come to rest.

A serpentine black band, like satin ribbon, curved through the snow down


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there, intersecting the tracks the car had made. Bill blinked at it
uncomprehendingly, as if staring at an abstract painting, until he
remembered that a river lay below.

The car had gone into that ebony ribbon of water.

Following a winter of freakishly heavy snow, the weather had turned
warmer a couple of weeks ago, triggering a premature spring melt. The
runoff continued, for winter had returned too recently to have locked
the river in ice again. The temperature of the water would be only a
few degrees above freezing. Any occupant of the car, having survived
both the wreck and death by drowning, would perish swiftly from
exposure.

If I'd been sober, he thought, I would've turned back in this weather.

I'm a pathetic joke, a tanked-up beer deliveryman who didn't even have
enough loyalty to get plastered on beer. Christ.

A joke, but people were dying because of him.                      He tasted vomit in the
back of his throat, choked it down.

Frantically he surveyed the murky ravine until he spotted an eerie
radiance, like an otherworldly presence, drifting spectrally with the
river to the right of him. Soft amber, it faded in and out through the
falling snow. He figured it must be the interior lights of the Honda,
which was being borne downriver.

Hunched for protection against the biting wind, holding on to the
guardrail in case he slipped and fell over the edge, Bill scuttled along
the top of the slope, in the same direction as the water-swept car
below, trying to keep it in sight. The Honda drifted swiftly at first,
then slower, slower.

Finally it came to a complete halt, perhaps stopped by rocks in the
watercourse or by a projection of the riverbank.

The light was slowly fading, as if the car's battery was running out of
juice.

3

Though Hatch was freed            from the safety harness, Lindsey could not budge
him, maybe because his            clothes were caught on something she could not
see, maybe because his            foot was wedged under the brake pedal or bent
back and trapped under            his own seat.

The water rose over Hatch's nose. Lindsey could not hold his head any
higher. He was breathing the river now.

She let go of him because she hoped that the loss of his air supply
would finally bring him around, coughing and spluttering and splashing
up from his seat, but also because she did not have the energy to
continue struggling with him. The intense cold of the water sapped her
strength. With frightening rapidity, her extremities were growing numb.
Her exhaled breath seemed just as cold as every inhalation, as if her
body had no heat left to impart to the used air.

The car had stopped moving. It was resting on the bottom of the river,
completely filled and weighed down with water, except for a bubble of
air under the shallow dome of the roof. Into that space she pressed her
face, gasping for breath.



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She was making horrid little sounds of terror, like the bleats of an
animal. She tried to silence herself but could not.

The queer, water-filtered light from the instrument panel began to fade
from amber to muddy yellow.

A dark part of her wanted to give up, let go of this world, and move on
to someplace better. It had a small quiet voice of its own: Don't
fight, there's nothing left to live for anyway, Jimmy has been dead for
so long, so very long, now Hatch is dead or dying, just let go,
surrender, maybe you'll wake up in Heaven with them ... The voice
possessed a lulling, hypnotic appeal.

The remaining air could last only a few minutes, if that long, and she
would die in the car if she did not escape immediately.

Hatch is dead, lungs full of water, only waiting to be fish food, so let
go, surrender, what's the point, Hatch is dead She gulped air that was
swiftly acquiring a tart, metallic taste. She was able to draw only
small breaths, as if her lungs had shriveled.

If any body heat was left in her, she was not aware of it. In reaction
to the cold, her stomach knotted with nausea, and even the vomit that
kept rising into her throat was icy; each time she choked it down, she
felt as if she had swallowed a vile slush of dirty snow.

Hatch is dead Hatch is dead....

"No," she said in a harsh, angry whisper. "No. No." denial raged
through her with the fury of a storm: Hatch could not be dead.
Unthinkable. Not Hatch, who never forgot a birthday or an anniversary,
who bought her flowers for no reason at all, who never lost his temper
and rarely raised his voice. Not Hatch, who always had time to listen
to the troubles of others and sympathize with them, who never failed to
have an open wallet for a friend in need, whose greatest fault was that
he was too damn much of a soft touch. He could not be, must not be,
would not be dead. He ran five miles a day, ate a low-fat diet with
plenty of fruits and vegetables, avoided caffeine and decaffeinated
beverages.

dn't that count for something, damn it? He lathered on sunscreen in the
summer, did not smoke, never drank more than two beers or two glasses of
wine in a single evening, and was too easy-going ever to develop heart
disease due to stress. Didn't self-denial and self-control count for a
Was creation so screwed ere was no justice any more?

Okay, all right, they said the good died young, which sure had been true
of Jimmy, and Hatch was not yet forty, young by any standard, okay,
agreed, but they also said that virtue was its own reward, and there was
plenty of virtue here, damn it, a whole shitload of virtue, which ought
to count for something, unless God wasn't listening, unless He didn't
care, unless the world was an even crueler place than she had believed.

She refused to accept it.

Hatch.    Was.    Not.    Dead.

She drew as deep a breath as she could manage. Just as the last of the
light faded, plunging her into blindness again, she sank into the water,
pushed across the dashboard, and went through the missing windshield
onto the hood of the car.

Now she was not merely blind but deprived of virtually all five senses.


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She could hear nothing but the wild thumping of her own heart, for the
water effectively muffled sound. She could smell and speak only at the
penalty of death by drowning. The anesthetizing effect of the glacial
river left her with a fraction of her sense of touch, so she felt as if
she were a disembodied spirit suspended in whatever medium composed
Purgatory, awaiting final judgment.

Assuming that the river was not much deeper than the car and that she
would not need to hold her breath long before she reached the surface,
she made another attempt to free Hatch. Lying on the hood of the car,
holding fast to the edge of the windshield frame with one numb hand,
straining against her body's natural buoyancy, she reached back inside,
groped in the blackness until she located the steering wheel and then
her husband.

Heat rose in her again, at last, but it was not a sustaining warmth.

Her lungs were beginning to burn with the need for air.

Gripping a fistful of Hatch's jacket, she pulled with all her might-and
to her surprise he floated out of his seat, no longer immovable,
suddenly buoyant and unfettered. He caught on the steering wheel, but
only briefly, then bobbled out through the windshield as Lindsey slid
backward across the hood to make way for him.

A hot, pulsing pain filled her chest.                   The urge to breathe grew
overpowering, but she resisted it.

When Hatch was out of the car, Lindsey embraced him and kicked for the
surface. He was surely drowned, and she was clinging to a corpse, but
she was not repulsed by that macabre thought. If she could get him
ashore, she would be able to administer artificial respiration.

Although the chance of reviving him was slim, at least some hope
remained. He was not truly dead, not really a corpse, until all hope
had been exhausted.

She burst through the surface into a howling wind that made the
marrow-freezing water seem almost warm by comparison. When that air hit
her burning lungs, her heart stuttered, her chest clenched with pain,
and the second breath was harder to draw than the first.

Treading water, holding tight to Hatch, Lindsey swallowed mouthfuls of
the river as it splashed her face. Cursing, she spat it out. Nature
seemed alive, like a great hostile beast, and she found herself
irrationally angry with the river and the storm, as if they were
conscious entities willfully aligned against her.

She tried to orient herself, but it was not easy in the darkness and
shrieking wind, without solid ground beneath her. When she saw the
riverbank, vaguely luminous in its coat of snow, she attempted a one-arm
sidestroke toward it with Hatch in tow, but the current was too strong
to be resisted, even if she'd been able to swim with both arms.

She and Hatch were swept downstream, repeatedly dragged beneath the
surface by an undertow, repeatedly thrust back into the wintry air,
battered by fragments of tree branches and chunks of ice that were also
caught up in the current, moving helplessly and inexorably toward
whatever sudden fall or deadly phalanx of rapids marked the river's
descent from the mountains.

4


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He had started drinking when Myra left him. He never could handle being
womanless. Yeah, and wouldn't God Almighty treat that excuse with
contempt when it came time for judgment?

Still holding the guardrail, Bill Cooper crouched indecisively on the
brink of the slope and stared intently down at the river. Beyond the
screen of falling snow, the lights of the Honda had gone out.

He didn't dare take his eyes off the obscured scene below to check the
highway for the ambulance. He was afraid that when he looked back into
the ravine again, he would misremember the exact spot where the light
had disappeared and would send the rescuers to the wrong point along the
riverbank. The dim black-and-white world below offered few prominent
landmarks.

"Come on, hurry up," he muttered.

The wind-which stung his face, made his eyes water, and pasted snow in
his mustache-was keening so loudly that it masked the approaching sirens
of the emergency vehicles until they rounded the bend uphill, enlivening
the night with their headlights and red flashers. Bill rose, waved his
arms to draw their attention, but he still did not look away from the
river.

Behind him, they pulled to the side of the road. Because one of their
sirens wound down to silence faster than the other, he knew there were
two vehicles, probably an ambulance and a police cruiser.

They would smell the whiskey on his breath. No, maybe not in all that
wind and cold. He felt that he deserved to die for what he'd don-but if
he wasn't going to die, then he didn't think he deserved to lose his
job.

These were hard times.             A recession.       Good jobs weren't easy to find.

Reflections of the revolving emergency beacons lent a stroboscopic
quality to the night. Real life had become a choppy and technically
inept piece of stop-motion animation, with the scarlet snow like a spray
of blood falling haltingly from the wounded sky.

5

Sooner than Lindsey could have hoped, the surging river shoved her and
Hatch against a formation of water-smoothed rocks that rose like a
series of worn teeth in the middle of its course, wedging them into a
gap s-sufficiently narrow to prevent them from being swept farther
downstream.

Water foamed and gurgled around them, but with the rocks behind her, she
was able to stop struggling against the deadly undertow.

She felt limp, every muscle soft and unresponsive. She could barely
manage to keep Hatch's head from tipping forward into the water, though
doing so should have been a simple task now that she no longer needed to
fight the river.

Though she was incapable of letting go of him, keeping his head above
water was a pointless task: he had drowned. She could not kid herself
that he was still alive. And minute by minute he was less likely to be
revived with artificial respiration. But she would not give up. Would
not. She was astonished by her fierce refusal to relinquish hope,
though just before the accident she had thought she was devoid of hope


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forever.

The chill of the water had thoroughly penetrated Lindsey, numbing mind
as well as flesh. When she tried to concentrate on forming a plan that
would get her from the middle of the river to the shore, she could not
bring her thoughts into focus. She felt drugged. She knew that
drowsiness was a companion of hypothermia, that dozing off would invite
deeper unconsciousness and ultimately death. She was determined to keep
awake and alert at all costs-but suddenly she realized that she had
closed her eyes, giving in to the temptation of sleep.

Fear twisted through her.           Renewed strength coiled in her muscles.

Blinking feverishly, eyelashes frosted with snow that no longer melted
from her body heat, she peered around Hatch and along the line of
water-polished boulders. The safety of the bank was only fifteen feet
away.

If the rocks were close to one another, she might be able to tow Hatch
to shore without being sucked through a gap and carried downnver.

Her vision had adapted sufficiently to the gloom, however, for her to
see that centuries of patient currents had carved a five-foot-wide hole
in the middle of the granite span against which she was wedged. It was
halfway between her and the river's edge. Dimly glistening under a
lacework shawl of ice, the ebony water quickened as it was funneled
toward the gap; no doubt it exploded out the other side with tremendous
force.

Lindsey knew she was too weak to propel herself across that powerful
eruption. She and Hatch would be swept through the breach and, at last,
to certain death.

Just when surrender to an endless sleep began, again, to look more
appealing than continued pointless struggle against nature's hostile
power, she saw strange lights at the top of the ravine, a couple of
hundred yards upriver. She was so disoriented and her mind so
anesthetized by the cold that for a while the pulsing crimson glow
seemed eerie, mysterious, supernatural, as if she were staring upward at
the wondrous radiance of a hovering, divine presence.

Gradually she realized that she was seeing the throb of police or
ambulance beacons on the highway far above, and then she spotted the
flashlit cuers had descended the ravine wall. They were maybe a hundred
yards upriver, where the car had sunk.

She called to them. Her shout issued as a whisper. She tried again,
with greater success, but they must not have heard her above the keening
wind, for the flashlights continued to sweep back and forth over the
same section of riverbank and turbulent water.

Suddenly she realized that Hatch was slipping out of her grasp again.

His face was underwater.

With the abruptness of a switch being thrown, Lindsey's terror became
anger again. She was angry with the truck driver for being caught in
the mountains during a snowstorm, angry with herself for being so weak,
angry with Hatch for reasons she could not define, angry with the cold
and insistent river, and enraged at God for the violence and injustice
of His universe.

Lindsey found greater strength in anger than in terror.                    She flexed her


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half-frozen hands, got a better grip on Hatch, pulled his head out of
the water again, and let out a cry for help that was louder than the
banshee voice of the wind. Upstream, the flashlight beams, as one,
swung searchingly in her direction.

6

The stranded couple looked dead already. Targeted by the flashlights,
their faces floated on the dark water, as white as
apparitions-translucent, unreal, lost.

Lee Reedman, a San Bernardino County Deputy Sheriff with emergency
rescue training, waded into the water to haul them ashore, bracing
himself against a rampart of boulders that extended out to midstream.

He was on a half-inch, hawser-laid nylon line with a breaking strength
of four thousand pounds, secured to the trunk of a sturdy pine and
belayed by two other deputies.

He had taken off his parka but not his uniform or boots. In those
fierce currents, swimming was impossible anyway, so he did not have to
worry about being hampered by clothes. And even sodden garments would
protect him from the worst bite of the frigid water, reducing the rate
at which body heat was sucked out of him.

Within a minute of entering the river, however, when he was only halfway
toward the stranded couple, Lee felt as if a refrigerant had been
injected into his bloodstream. He couldn't believe that he would have
been any colder had he dived naked into those icy currents.

He would have preferred to wait               for the Winter Rescue Team that was on
its way, men who had experience               pulling skiers out of avalanches and
retrieving careless skaters who               had fallen through thin ice. They would
have insulated wetsuits and all               the necessary gear. But the situation
was too desperate to delay; the               people in the river would not last until
the specialists arrived.

He came to a five-foot-wide gap in the rocks, where the river gushed
through as if being drawn forward by a huge suction pump. He was
knocked off his feet, but the men on the bank kept the line taut, paying
it out precisely at the rate he was moving, so he was not swept into the
breach. He flailed forward through the surging river, swallowing a
mouthful of water so bitterly cold that it made his teeth ache, but he
got a on the rock at the far side of the gap and pulled himself across.

A minute later, gasping for breath and shivering violently, Lee reached
the couple. The man was unconscious, but the woman was alert. Their
faces bobbled in and out of the overlapping flashlight beams directed
from shore, and they both looked in terrible shape. The woman's flesh
seemed to have both shriveled and blanched of all color, so the natural
phosphorescence of bone shone like a light within, revealing the skull
beneath her skin. Her lips were as white as her teeth; other than her
sodden black hair, only her eyes were dark, as sunken as the eyes of a
corpse and bleak with the pain of dying. Under the circumstances he
could not guess her age within fifteen years and could not tell if she
was ugly or attractive, but he could see, at once, that she was at the
limit of her resources, holding on to life by willpower alone.

"Take my husband first," she said, pushing the unconscious man into
Lee's arms. Her shrill voice cracked repeatedly. "He's got a head
injury, needs help, hurry up, go on, go on, damn you!"




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Her anger didn't offend Lee. He knew it was not directed against him,
really, and that it gave her the strength to endure.

"Hold on, and we'll all go together." He raised his voice above the roar
of the wind and the racing river. "Don't fight it, don't try to grab on
to the rocks or keep your feet on the bottom. They'll have an easier
time reeling us in if we let the water buoy us."

She seemed to understand.

Lee glanced back toward shore.                A light focused on his face, and he
shouted, "Ready! Now!"

The team on the riverbank began to reel him in, with the unconscious man
and the exhausted woman in tow.

7

After Lindsey was hauled out of the water, she drifted in and out of
consciousness. For a while life seemed to be a videotape being
fast-forwarded from one randomly chosen scene to another, with
gray-white static in between.

As she lay gasping on the ground at the river's edge, a young paramedic
with a snow-caked beard knelt at her side and directed a penlight at her
eyes, checking her pupils for uneven dilation. He said, "Can you hear
me?"

"Of course.         Where's Hatch?"

"Do you know your name?"

"Where's my husband?            He needs ...        CPR."

"We're taking care of him.               Now, do you know your name?"

"Lindsey."

"Good.       Are you cold?"

That seemed like a stupid question, but then she realized she was no
longer freezing. In fact, a mildly unpleasant heat had arisen in her
extremities. It was not the sharp, painful heat of flames. Instead,
she fe feet and hands had been dipped in a caustic fluid that was
gradually dissolving her skin and leaving raw nerve ends exposed. She
knew, without having to be told, that her inability to feel the bitter
night air was an indication of physical deterioration.

fast forward...

She was being moved on a stretcher. They were heading along the
riverbank. With her head toward the front of the litter, she could look
back at the man who was carrying the rear of it. The snow-covered
ground reflected the flashlight beams, but that soft eerie glow was only
bright enough to reveal the basic contours of the stranger's face and
add a disquieting glimmer to his iron-hard eyes.

As color less as a charcoal drawing, strangely silent, full of dreamlike
motion and mystery, that place and moment had the quality of a
nightmare. She felt her heartbeat accelerate as she squinted back and
up at the almost faceless man. The illogic of a dream shaped her fear,
and suddenly she was certain that she was dead and that the shadowy men
carrying her stretcher were not men at all but carrion-bearers



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delivering her to the boat that would convey her across the Styx to the
land of the dead and damned.

Fast forward...

Lashed to the stretcher now, tilted almost into a standing position, she
was being pulled along the snow-covered slope of the ravine wall by
unseen men reeling in a pair of ropes from above. Two other men
accompanied her, one on each side of the stretcher, struggling up
through the knee-deep drifts, guiding her and making sure she didn't
flip over.

She was ascending into the red glow of the emergency beacons. As that
crimson radiance completely surrounded her, she began to hear the urgent
voices of the rescuers above and the crackle of police-band radios. When
she could smell the pungent exhaust fumes of their vehicles, she knew
that she was going to survive.

Just seconds from a clean getaway, she thought.

Though in the grip of a delirium born of exhaustion, confused and
fuzzy-minded, Lindsey was alert enough to be unnerved by that thought
and the subconscious longing it represented. Just seconds from a clean
getaway? The only thing she had been seconds away from was death. Was
she still so depressed from the loss of Jimmy that, even after five
years, her own death was an acceptable release from the burden of her
grief?

Then why didn't I surrender to the river?                 she wondered.      Why not just
let go?

Hatch, of course. Hatch had needed her. She'd been ready to step out
of this world in hope of setting foot into a better one. But she had
not been able to make that decision for Hatch, and to surrender her own
life under those circumstances would have meant forfeiting his as well.

With a clatter and a jolt, the stretcher was pulled over the brink of
the ravine and lowered flat onto the shoulder of the mountain highway
beside an ambulance. Red snow swirled into her face.

A paramedic with a weather-beaten face and beautiful blue eyes leaned
over her. "You're going to be all right."

"I didn't want to die," she said.

She was not really speaking to the man. She was arguing with herself,
trying to deny that her despair over the loss of her son had become such
a chronic emotional infection that she had been secretly longing to join
him in death. Her self-image did not include the word "suicidal," and
she was shocked and repulsed to discover, under extreme stress, that
such an impulse might be a part of her.

Just seconds from a clean getaway .

She said, "Did I want to die?"

"You aren't going to die," the paramedic assured her as he and another
man untied the ropes from the handles of the litter, preparatory to
loading her into the ambulance. "The worst is over now. The worst is
over."

Half a dozen police and emergency vehicles were parked across two lanes
of the mountain highway. Uphill and downhill traffic shared the third


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lane, regulated by uniformed deputies. Lindsey was aware of people
gawking at her from a Jeep Wagoneer, but they vanished beyond shatters
of snow and heavy plumes of crystallized exhaust fumes.

The ambulance van could accommodate two patients. They loaded Lindsey
onto a wheeled gurney that was fixed to the left wall by two spring
clamps to prevent it from rolling while the vehicle was in motion.

They put Hatch on another identical gurney along the right wall.

Two paramedics crowded into the rear of the ambulance and pulled the
wide door shut behind them. As they moved, their white, insulated nylon
pants and jackets produced continuous frictional sounds, a series of
soft whistles that seemed to be electronically amplified in those close
quarters.

With a short burst of its sireD, the ambulance started to move. The
paramedics swayed easily with the rocking motion. Experience had made
them sure footed.

Side by side in the narrow aisle between the gurneys, both men turned to
Lindsey. Their names were stitched on the breast pockets of their
jackets: David O'Malley and Jerry Epstein. With a curious combination
of professional detachment and concerned attentiveness, they began to
work on her, exchanging medical information with each other in crisp
emotionless voices but speaking to her in soft, sympathetic, encouraging
tones.

That dichotomy in their behavior alarmed rather than soothed Lindsey,
but she was too weak and disoriented to express her fear. She felt
infuriatingly delicate. Shaky. She was reminded of a surrealistic
painting This World and the Next, which she had done last year, because
the central figure in that piece had been a wire-walking circus acrobat
plagued by uncertainty. Right now consciousness was a high wire on
which she was precariously perched. Any effort to speak to the
paramedics, if sustained for more than a word or two, might unbalance
her and send her into a long, dark fall.

Although her mind was too clouded to find any sense in most of what the
two men were saying, she understood enough to know that she was
suffering from hypothermia, possibly frostbite, and that they were
worried about her. Blood pressure too low. Heartbeat slow and
irregular. Slow and shallow respiration.

Maybe that clean getaway was still possible.

If she really wanted it.

She was ambivalent. If she actually had hungered for death on a
subconscious level since Jimmy's funeral, she had no special appetite
for it now-though neither did she find it particularly unappealing.

Whatever happened to her would happen, and in her current condition,
with her emotions as numb as her five senses, she did not much care
about her fate.

Hypothermia switched off the survival instinct with a narcotizing pall
as effective as that produced by an úalcoholic hinge.

Then, between the two muttering paramedics, she caught a glimpse of
Hatch lying on the other gurney, and abruptly she was jolted out of her
half-trance by her concern for him. He looked so pale. But not just
white.


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Another, less healthy shade of pale with a lot of gray in it. His lab
turned toward her, eyes closed, mouth open slightly-looked as if a flash
fire had swept through it, leaving nothing between bone and skin except
the ashes of flesh consumed.

"Please," she said, "my husband." She was surprised that her voice was
just a low, rough croak.

"You first," O'Malley said.

"No.      Hatch.     Hatch needs ...         help."

"You first," O'Malley repeated.

His insistence reassured her somewhat. As bad as Hatch looked, he must
be all right, must have responded to CPR, must be in better shape than
she was, or otherwise they would have tended to him first. Wouldn't
they?

Her thoughts grew fuzzy again. The sense of urgency that had gripped
her now abated. She closed her eyes.

2

Later In Lindsey's hypothermic torpor, the murmuring voices above her
seemed as rhythmic, if not as melodic, as a lullaby. But she was kept
awake by the increasingly painful stinging sensation in her extremities
and by the rough handling of the medics, who were packing small
pillowlike objects against her sides. Whatever the things were-electric
or chemical heating pads, she supposed they radiated a soothing warmth
far different from the fire burning within her feet and hands.

"Hatch needs warmed up, too," she said thickly.

"He's fine, don't you worry about him," Epstein said.                         His breath puffed
out in small white clouds as he spoke.

"But he's cold."

"That's what he needs to be.               That's just how we want him."

O'Malley said, "But not too cold, Jerry. Nyebern doesn't want a Pod
sickle. Ice crystals form in the tissue, there'll be brain damage."

Epstein turned to the small half-open window that separated the rear of
the ambulance from the forward compartment. He called loudly to the
driver: "Mike, turn on a little heat maybe."

Lindsey wondered who Nyebern might be, and she was alarmed by the words
"brain damage." But she was too weary to concentrate and make sense of
what they said.

Her mind drifted to recollections from childhood, but they were so
distorted and strange that she must have slipped across the border of
consciousness into a half-sleep where her subconscious could work
nightmarish tricks on her memories.

... she saw herself five years of age, at play in a meadow behind her
house.

The sloped field was familiar in its contours, but some hateful
influence had crept into her mind and meddled with the details, wickedly
recoloring the grass a spider-belly black. The petals of all the


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flowers were blacker still, with crimson stamens that glistened like fat
drops of blood. .

she saw herself at seven, on the school playground at twilight, but
alone as she had never been in real life. Around her stood the usual
array of swings and seesaws and jungle gyms and slides, casting crisp
shadows in the peculiar orange light of days end. Those machineries of
joy seemed curiously ominous now. They loomed malevolently, as if they
might begin to move at any second, with much creaking and clanking, blue
St. Elmo's fire glowing on their flanks and limbs, seeking blood for a
lubricant, robotic vampires of aluminum and steel. 3

Periodically Lindsey heard a strange and distant cry, the mournful bleat
of some great, mysterious beast. Eventually, even in her semi-delirious
condition, she realized that the sound did not originate either in her
imagination or in the distance but directly overhead. It was no beast,
just the ambulance siren, which was needed only in short bursts to clear
what little traffic had ventured onto the snow-swept highways.

The ambulance came to a stop sooner than she had expected, but that
might be only because her sense of time was as out of whack as her other
perceptions. Epstein threw the rear door open while O'Malley released
the spring clamps that fixed Lindsey's gurney in place.

When they lifted her out of the van, she was surprised to see that she
was not at a hospital in San Bernardino, as she expected to be, but in a
parking lot in front of a small shopping center. At that late hour the
lot was deserted except for the ambulance and, astonishingly, a large
helicopter on the side of which was emblazoned a red cross in a white
circle and the words AMBULANCE SERVICE.

The night was still cold, and wind hooted across the blacktop. They
were now below the snow line, although just at the base of the mountains
and still far from San Bernardino. The ground was bare, and the wheels
of the gurney creaked as Epstein and O'malley rushed Lindsey into the
care of the two men waiting beside the chopper.

The engine of the air ambulance was idling.                  The rotors turned
sluggishly.

The mere presence of the craft-and the sense of extreme urgency that it
represented-was like a flare of sunlight that burned off some of the
dense fog in Lindsey's mind. She realized that either she or Hatch was
in worse shape than she had thought, for only a critical case could
justify such an unconventional and expensive method of conveyance. And
they obviously were going farther than to a hospital in San Bernardino,
perhaps to a treatment center specializing in state-of-the-art trauma
medicine of one kind or another. Even as that light of understanding
came to her, she wished that it could be extinguished, and she
despairingly sought the comfort of that mental fog again.

As the chopper medics took charge of her and lifted her into the
aircraft, one of them shouted above the engine noise, "But she's alive."

"She's in bad shape," Epstein said.

"Yeah, okay, she looks like shit," the chopper medic said, "but she's
still alive. Nyebern's expecting a stiff."

O'Malley said, "It's the other one."

"The husband," Epstein said.



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"We'll bring him over," O'malley said.

Lindsey was aware that a monumental piece of information had been
revealed in those few brief exchanges, but she was not clearheaded
enough to understand what it was. Or maybe she simply did not want to
understand.

As they moved her into the spacious rear compartment of the helicopter,
transferred her onto one of their own litters, and strapped her to the
vinyl-covered mattress, she sank back into frighteningly corrupted
memories of childhood: she was nine years old, playing fetch with her
dog, Boo, but when the frisky labrador brought the red rubber ball back
to her and dropped it at her feet, it was not a ball any longer. It was
a throbbing heart, trailing torn arteries and veins. It was pulsing not
because it was alive but because a mass of worms and sarcophagus beetles
churned within its rotting chambers 4

The helicopter was airborne. Its movement, perhaps because of the
winter wind, was less reminiscent of an aircraft than of a boat tumbling
in a bad tide. Nausea uncoiled in Lindsey's stomach.

A medic bent over her, his face masked in shadows, applying a
stethoscope to her breast.

Across the cabin, another medic was shouting into a radio headset as he
bent over Hatch, talking not to the pilot in the forward compartment but
perhaps to a receiving physician at whatever hospital awaited them.

His words were sliced into a series of thin sounds by the air-carving
rotors overhead, so his voice fluttered like that of a nervous
adolescent.

..... minor head injury no mortal wounds apparent cause of death seems
to be ... drowning On the far side of the chopper, near the foot of
Hatch's litter, the sliding door was open a few inches, and Lindsey
realized the door on her side was not fully closed, either, creating an
arctic cross draught. That also explained why the roar of the wind
outside and the clatter of the rotors were so deafening.

Why did they want it so cold?

The medic attending to Hatch was still shouting into his headset:
mouth-to-mouth . mechanical resuscitator C.O2 and cO-2 without results
epinephrine was ineffective..."

The real world had become too real, even viewed through her delirium.

She didn't like it. Her twisted dreamscapes, in all their mutant
horror, were more appealing than the inside of the air ambulance,
perhaps because on a subconscious level she was able to exert at least
some control on her nightmares but none at all on real events.

... she was at her senior prom, dancing in the arms of Joey Delvecchio,
the boy with whom she had been going steady in those days. They were
under a vast canopy of crepe-paper streamers. She was speckled with
sequins of blue and white and yellow light cast off by the revolving
crystal-and-mirror chandelier above the dance floor. It was the music
of a better age, before rock-and-roll started to lose its soul, before
disco and New Age and hip-hop, back when Elton John and the Eagles were
at their peak, when the Isley Brothers were still recording, the Doobie
Brothers, Stevie Wonder, Neil Sedaka making a major comeback, the music
still alive, everything and everyone so alive, the world filled with
hope and possibilities now long since lost. They were slow-dancing to a


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Freddy Fender tune reasonably well rendered by a local band, and she was
suffused with happiness and a sense of well-being-until she lifted her
head from Joey's shoulder and looked up and saw not Joey's face but the
rotting countenance of a cadaver, yellow teeth exposed between shriveled
black lips, flesh pocked and blistered and oozing, bloodshot eyes
bulging and weeping vile flu from lesions of decay. She tried to scream
and pull away from him, but she could only continue to dance, listening
to the overly sweet romantic strains of 'Before the Next Teardrop Falls,
"aware that she was seeing Joey as he would be in a few years, after he
had died in the Marine-barracks explosion in Lebanon.

She felt death leeching from his cold flesh into hers. She knew she had
to tear herself from his embrace before that mortal tide filled her.

But when she looked desperately around for someone who might help her,
she saw that Joey was not the only dead dancer. Sally Ontkeen, who in
eight years would succumb to cocaine poisoning, glided by in an advanced
stage of decomposition, in the arms of her boyfriend who smiled down on
her as if una ware of the corruption of her flesh. Jack Winslow, the
school football star who would be killed in a drunken driving accident
in less than a year, spun his date past them; his face was swollen,
purple tinged with green, and his skull was crushed along the left side
as it would be after the wreck. He spoke to Lindsey and Joey in a raspy
voice that didn't belong to Jack Winslow but to a creature on holiday
from a graveyard vocal cords withered into dry strings: "What a night!
Man, what a night!"

Lindsey shuddered, but not solely because of the frigid wind that howled
through the partly open chopper doors.

The medic, his face still in shadows, was taking her blood pressure.

Her left arm was no longer under the blanket. The sleeves of her
sweater and blouse had been cut away, exposing her bare skin. The cuff
of the sphygmomanometer was wound tightly around her biceps and secured
by Velcro straps. Her shudders were so pronounced that they evidently
looked, to the paramedic, as if they might be the muscle spasms that
accompanied convulsions. He plucked a small rubber wedge from a nearby
supply tray and started to insert it in her mouth to prevent her from
biting or swallowing her tongue.

She pushed his hand away.           "I'm going to die."

Relieved that she was not having convulsions, he said, "No, you're not
that bad, you're okay, you're going to be fine."

He didn't understand what she meant.               Impatiently, she said, "We're all
going to die."

That was the meaning of her dream-distorted memories. Death had been
with her from the day she'd been born, always at her side, constant
companion, which she had not understood until Jimmy's death five years
ago, and which she had not accepted until tonight when death took Hatch
from her.

Her heart seemed to clutch up like a fist within her breast. A new pain
filled her, separate from all the other agonies and more profound.

In spite of terror and delirium and exhaustion, all of which she had
used as shields against the awful insistence of reality, truth came to
her at last, and she was helpless to do anything but accept it.




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Hatch had drowned.

Hatch was dead.       CPR had not worked.

Hatch was gone forever.

she was twenty-five years old, propped against bed pillows in the
maternity ward at St. Joseph's Hospital. The nurse was bringing her a
small blanket-wrapped bundle, her baby, her son, James Eugene Harrison,
whom she had carried for nine months but had not met, whom she loved
with all her heart but had not seen. The smiling nurse gently conveyed
the bundle into Lindsey's arms, and Lindsey tenderly lifted aside the
satin-trimmed edge of the blue cotton blanket. She saw that she cradled
a tiny skeleton with hollow eye sockets, the small bones of its fingers
curled in the wanting-needing gesture of an infant. Jimmy had been born
with death in him, as everyone was, and in less than five years cancer
would claim him. The small, bony mouth of the skeleton-child eased open
in a long, slow, silent cry 5

Lindsey could hear the chopper blades carving the night air, but she was
no longer inside the craft. She was being wheeled across a parking lot
toward a large building with many lighted windows. She thought she
ought to know what it was, but she couldn't think clearly, and in fact
she didn't care what it was or where she was going or why.

Ahead, a pair of double doors flew open, revealing a space warmed by
yellow light, peopled by several silhouettes of men and women. Then
Lindsey was rushed into the light and among the silhouettes ... a long
hallway ... a room that smelled of alcohol and other disinfectants...

the silhouettes becoming people with faces, then more faces appearing...

soft but urgent voices ... hands gripping her, lifting ... her off the
gurney, onto a bed .. tipped back a little, her head below the level of
her body ...

rhythmic beeps and clicks issuing from electronic equipment of some
kind.

She wished they would just all go away and leave her alone, in peace.

Just go away. Turn off the lights as they went.                     Leave her in darkness.
She longed for silence, stillness, peace.

A vile odor with an edge of ammonia assaulted her.                     It burned her nasal
passages, made her eyes pop open and water.

A man in a white coat was holding something under her nose and peering
intently into her eyes. As she began to choke and gag on the stench, he
took the object away and handed it to a brunette in a white uniform.

The pungent odor quickly faded.

Lindsey was aware of movement around her, faces coming and going.

She knew that she was the center of attention, an object of urgent
inquiry, but she did not-could not manage tare. It was all more like a
dream than her actual dreams had been. A soft tide of voices rose and
fell around her, swelling rhythmically like gentle breakers whispering
on a sandy shore: ..... marked paleness of the skin .. cyanosis of
lips, nails, fingertips, lobes of the ears ,...weak pulse, very rapid
... respiration quick and shallow ... blood pressure's so damned low I
can't get a reading "Didn't those assholes "Sure, all the way in."


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"Oxygen, CO-2 mix.        And make it fast!"

"Epinephrine?"

"Yeah, prepare it."

"Epinephrine? But what if she has internal injuries?                       You can't see a
hemorrhage if one's there."

"Hell, I gotta take a chance."

Someone put a hand over her face, as if trying to smother her. Lindsey
felt something plugging up her nostrils, and for a moment she could not
breathe. The curious thing was that she didn't care. Then cool dry air
hissed into her nose and seemed to force an expansion of her lungs.

A young blonde, dressed all in white, leaned close, adjusted the
inhalator, and smiled winningly. "There you go, honey. Are you getting
that?"

The woman was beautiful, ethereal, with a singularly musical voice,
backlit by a golden glow.

A heavenly apparition.          An angel.

Wheezing, Lindsey said, "My husband is dead."

"It'll be okay, honey. Just relax, breathe as deeply as you can,
everything will be all right."

"No, he's dead," Lindsey said. "Dead and gone, gone forever.                       Don't you
lie to me, angels aren't allowed to lie."

On the other side of the bed, a man in white was swabbing the inside of
Lindsey's left elbow with an alcohol-soaked pad. It was icy cold.

To the angel, Lindsey said, "Dead and gone."

Sadly, the angel nodded. Her blue eyes were filled with love, as an
angel's eyes should be. "He's gone, honey. But maybe this time that
isn't the end of it."

Death was always the end.           How could death not be the end?

A needle stung Lindsey's left arm.

"This time," the angel said softly, "there's still a chance. We've got
a special program here, a real" Another woman burst into the room and
interrupted excitedly: "Nyebern's in the hospital!"

A communal sigh of relief almost a quiet cheer, swept those gathered in
the room.

"He was at dinner in Marina Del Rey when they reached him.                      He must've
driven like a bat out of Hell to get back here this fast."

"You see, dear?" the angel said to Lindsey.                  "There's a chance.

There's still a chance.          We'll be praying."

So what?     Lindsey thought bitterly.            Praying never works for me.

Expect no miracles.         The dead stay dead, and the living only wait to
join them.


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Guided by procedures outlined by Dr. Jonas Nyebern and kept on file in
the Resuscitation Medicine project office, the Orange County General
Hospital emergency staff had prepared an operating room to receive the
action the moment the on-site paramedics in the San Bernardino Mountains
had reported, by police-band radio, that the victim had drowned in
near-freezing water but had suffered only minor injuries in the accident
itself, which made him a perfect subject for Nyebern. By the time the
air ambulance was touching down in the hospital parking lot, the usual
array of operating-room instruments and devices had been augmented with
a bypass machine and other equipment required by the resuscitation team.

Treatment would not take place in the regular emergency room. Those
facilities offered insufficient space to deal with Harrison in addition
to the usual influx of patients. Though Jonas Nyebern was a
cardiovascular surgeon and the project team was rich with surgical
skills, resuscitation procedures seldom involved surgery. Only the
discovery of a severe internal injury would require them to cut
Harrison, and their use of an operating room was more a matter of
convenience than necessity.

When Jonas entered from the surgical hallway after preparing himself at
the scrub sinks, his project team was waiting for him. Because fate had
deprived him of his wife, daughter, and son, leaving him without family,
and because an innate shyness had always inhibited him from making
friends beyond the boundaries of his profession, these were not merely
his colleagues but the only people in the world with whom he felt
entirely comfortable and about whom he cared deeply.

Helga Dorner stood by the instrument cabinets to Jonas's left, in the
penumbra of the light that fell from the array of halogen bulbs over the
operating table. She was a superb circulating nurse with a broad face
and sturdy body reminiscent of any of countless steroid-saturated female
Soviet track stars, but her eyes and hands were those of the gentlest
Raphael Madonna. Patients initially feared her, soon respected her,
eventually adored her.

With solemnity that was characteristic in moments like this, Helga did
not smile but gave Jonas a thumbs-up sign.

Near the bypass machine stood Gina Delilo, a thirty-year-old RN and
surgical technician who chose, for whatever reasons, to conceal her
extraordinary competence and sense of responsibility behind a pert,
cute, ponytailed exterior that made her seem to be an escapee from one
of those old Gidget or beach-party movies that had been popular decades
ago.

Like the others, Gina was dressed in hospital greens and a string-tied
cotton cap that concealed her blond hair, but bright-pink ankle socks
sprouted above the elastic-edged cloth boots that covered her shoes.

Flanking the operating table were Dr. Ken Nakamura and Dr. Kari
Dovell, two hospital-staff physicians with successful local private
practices. Ken was a rare double threat, holding advanced degrees in
intern medicine and neurology. Daily experience with the fragility of
human physiology drove some doctors to drink and caused others to harden
their hearts until they were emotionally isolated from their patients;
Ken's healthier defense was a sense of humor that was sometimes twisted
but always psychologically healing. Kari, a first-rate specialist in
pediatric medicine, was four inches taller than Ken's five-feet-seven,
reed-thin where he was slightly pudgy, but she was as quick to laugh as
the internist.


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Sometimes, though, a profound sadness in her eyes troubled Jonas and led
him to believe that a cyst of loneliness lay so deep within her that
friendship could never provide a scalpel long or sharp enough to excise
it Jonas looked at each of his four colleagues in turn, but none of them
spoke. The windowless room was eerily quiet.

For the most part the team had a curiously passive air, as if
disinterested in what was about to happen. But their eyes gave them
away, for they were the eyes of astronauts who were standing in the exit
bay of an orbiting shuttle on the brink of a space walk: aglow with
excitement, wonder, a sense of adventure and a little fear.

Other hospitals had emergency-room staffs skilled enough at
resuscitation medicine to give a patient a fighting chance at recovery,
but Orange County General was one of only three centers in all of
southern California that could boast a separately funded, cutting-edge
project aimed at maximizing the success of reanimation procedures.

Harrison was the project forty-fifth patient in the fourteen months
since it had been established, but the manner of his death made him the
most interesting. Drowning. Followed by rapidly induced hypothermia.

Drowning meant relatively little physical damage, and the chill factor
dramatically slowed the rate at which postmortem cell deterioration took
place.

More often than not, Jonas and his team had treated victims of
catastrophic stroke, cardiac arrest, asphyxiation due to tracheal
obstruction, or drug overdose. Those patients usually had suffered at
least some irreversible brain damage prior to or at the moment of death,
before coming under the care of the Resuscitation Project, compromising
their chances of being brought back in perfect condition.

And of those who had died from violent trauma of one kind or another,
some had been too severely injured to be saved even after being
resuscitated. Others had been resuscitated and stabilized, only to
succumb to secondary infections that soon developed into toxic shock.

Three had been dead so long that, once resuscitated, brain damage was
either too severe to allow them to regain consciousness or, if they were
conscious, too extensive to allow them to lead anything like a normal
life.

With sudden anguish and a twinge of guilt, Jonas thought of his
failures, of life incompletely restored, of patients in whose eyes he
had seen the tortured awareness of their own pathetic condition.

"This time will be different." Kari Dovell's voice was soft, only a
whisper, but it shattered Jonas's reverie.

Jonas nodded. He felt considerable affection for these people. For
their sake more than his own, he wanted the team to have a major,
unqualified success.

"Let's do it," he said.

Even as he spoke, the double doors to the operating room crashed open,
and two surgical orderlies rushed in with the dead man on a gurney.

Swiftly and skillfully, they transferred the body onto the slightly
tilted operating table, treating it with more care and respect than they
might have shown a corpse in other circumstances, and then exited.


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The team went to work even as the orderlies were heading out of the
room. With speed and economy of movement, they scissored the remaining
clothes off the dead man, leaving him naked on his back, and attached to
him the leads of an electrocardiograph, an electroencephalograph, and a
skin-patch digital-readout thermometer.

Seconds were golden. Minutes were beyond price. The longer the man
remained dead, the less chance they had of bringing him back with any
degree of success whatsoever.

Kari DoveIl adjusted the controls of the EKG, sharpening the contrast.

For the benefit of the tape recording that was being made of the entire
procedure, she repeated what all of them could see: "Flat line. No
heartbeat."

"No alpha, no beta," Ken Nakamura added, confirming the absence of all
electrical activity in the patient's brain.

Having wrapped the pressure cuff of a sphygmomanometer around the
patient's right arm, Helga reported the reading they expected: "No
measurable blood pressure."

Gina stood beside Jonas, monitoring the digital-readout thermometer.

"Body temperature's forty-six degrees."

"So low!" Kari said, her green eyes widening with surprise as she stared
down at the cadaver. "And he must've warmed up at least ten degrees
since they pulled him out of that stream. We keep it cool in here, but
not that cool."

The thermostat was set at sixty-four degrees to balance the comfort of
the resuscitation team against the need to prevent the victim from
warming too fast.

Looking up from the dead man to Jonas, Kari said, "Cold is good, okay,
we want him cold, but not too damned cold. What if his tissues froze
and he sustained massive cerebral damage?"

Examining the dead man's toes and then his fingers, Jonas was almost
embarrassed to hear himself say, "There's no indication of vesicles-"

"That doesn't prove anything," Kari said.

Jonas knew that what she said was true. They all knew it. There would
not have been time for vesicles to form in the dead flesh of
frost-bitten fingertips and toes before the man, himself, had died.

But, damn it, Jonas did not want to give up before they had even
started.

He said, "Still, there's no sign of necrotic tissue-"

"Because the entire patient is necrotic," Kari said, unwilling to let go
of it.

Sometimes she seemed as ungainly as a spindly-legged bird that, although
a master of the air, was out of its element on the land. But at of
times, like now, she used her height to advantage, casting an
intimidating
shadow, looking down at an adversary with a hard gaze that seemed to say
better-listen-to me or-I-might-peck-your-eyes-out-mister. Jonas was two


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inches taller than Kari, so she couldn't actually look down at him, but
few women were that close to being able to give him even a level-eyed
stare, and the effect was the same as if he had been five-feet-two.

Jonas looked at Ken, seeking support.

The neurologist was having none of it. "In fact the body temperature
could have fallen below freezing after death, then warmed up on the trip
here, and there'd be no way for us to tell. You know that, Jonas.

The only thing we can say for sure about this guy is that he's deader
than Elvis has ever been."

"If he's only forty-six degrees now Kari said.

Every cell in the human body is composed primarily of water. The
percentage of water differs from blood cells to bone cells, from skin
cells to liver cells, but there is always more water than anything else.
And when water freezes, it expands. Put a bottle of soda in the freezer
to quick-chill it, leave it too long, and you're left with just the
exploded contents bristling with shattered glass. Frozen water bursts
the walls of brain cells-all body cell-in a similar fashion.

No one on the team wanted to revive Harrison from death if they were
assured of bringing back something dramatically less than a whole
person.

No good physician, regardless of his passion to heal, wanted to battle
and defeat death only to wind up with a conscious patient suffering from
massive brain damage or one who could be sustained "alive" only in a
deep coma with the aid of machines.

Jonas knew that his own greatest weakness as a physician was the
extremity of his hatred for death. It was an anger he carried at all
times.

At moments like this the anger could swell into a quiet fury that
affected his judgment. Every patient's death was a personal affront to
him. He tended to err on the side of optimism, proceeding with a
resuscitation that could have more tragic consequences if it succeeded
than if it failed.

The other four members of the team understood his weakness, too.

They watched him expectantly.

If the operating room had been tomb--still before, it was now as silent
as the vacuum of any lonely place between the stars where God, if He
existed, passed judgment on His helpless creations.

Jonas was acutely aware of the precious seconds ticking past.

The patient had been in the operating room less than two minutes.                        But
two minutes could make all the difference.

On the table, Harrison was as dead as any man had ever been. His skin
was an unhealthy shade of gray, lips and fingernails and toenails a
cyanotic blue, lips slightly parted in an eternal exhalation. His flesh
was utterly devoid of the tension of life.

However, aside from the two-inch-long shallow gash on the right side of
his forehead, an abrasion on his left jaw, and abrasions on the palms of
his hands, he was apparently uninjured. He had been in excellent


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physical condition for a man of thirty-eight, carrying no more than five
extra pounds, with straight bones and well-defined musculature.

No matter what might have happened to his brain cells, he looked like a
perfect candidate for resuscitation.

A decade ago, a physician in Jonas's position would have been guided by
the Five-Minute Limit, which then had been acknowledged as the maximum
length of time the human brain could go without blood-borne oxygen and
suffer no diminution of mental faculties. During the past decade,
however, as resuscitation medicine had become an exciting new field, the
Five-Minute Limit had been exceeded so often that it was eventually
disregarded. With new drugs that acted as free-radical scavengers,
machines that could cool and heat blood, massive doses of epinephrine,
and other tools, doctors could step well past the Five-Minute Limit and
snatch some patients back from deeper regions of death. And
hypothermia-extreme cooling of the brain which blocked the swift and
ruinous chemical changes in cells following death old extend the length
of time a patient might lie dead yet be successfully revived. Twenty
minutes was common. Thirty was not hopeless. Cases of triumphant
resuscitation at forty and fifty minutes were on record. In 1988, a
two-year-old girl in Utah, plucked from an icy river, was brought back
to life without any apparent brain damage after being dead at least
sixty-six minutes, and only last year a twenty-year-old woman in
Pennsylvania had been revived with all faculties intact seventy minutes
after death.

The other four members of the team were still staring at Jonas.

Death, he told himself, is just another pathological state.

Most pathological states could be reversed with treatment.

Dead was one thing.         But cold and dead was another.

To Gina, he said, "How long's he been dead?"

Part of Gina's job was to serve as liaison, by radio, with the on-site
paramedics and make a record of the information most vital to the
resuscitation team at this moment of decision. She looked at her
watch-a Rolex on an incongruous pink leather band to match her sock-and
did not even have to pause to calculate: "Sixty minutes, but they're
only guessing how long he was dead in the water before they found him.

Could be longer."

"Or shorter," Jonas said.

While Jonas made his decision, Helga rounded the table to Gina's side
and, together, they began to study the flesh on the cadaver's left arm,
searching for the major vein, just in case Jonas decided to resuscitate.

Locating blood vessels in the slack flesh of a corpse was not always
easy, since applying a rubber tourniquet would not increase systemic
pressure.

There was no pressure in the system.

"Okay, I'm going to call it," Jonas said.

He looked around at Ken, Kari, Helga, and Gnia, giving them one last
chance to challenge him. Then he checked his own Timer wristwatch and
said, "It's nine-twelve P.M Monday night, March fourth. The patient,


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Hatchford Benjamin Harrison, is dead ...                    but retrievable."

To their credit, whatever their doubts might have been, no one on the
team hesitated once the call had been made. They had the right-and the
duty-to advise Jonas as he was making the decision, but once it was
made, they put all of their knowledge, skill, and training to work to
insure that the "retrievable" part of his call proved correct.

Dear God, Jonas thought, I hope I've done the right thing.

Already Gina had inserted an exsanguination needle into the vein that
she and Helga had located. Together they switched on and adjusted the
bypass machine, which would draw the blood out of Harrison's body and
gradually warm it to one hundred degrees. Once warmed, the blood would
be pumped back into the still-blue patient through another tube feeding
a needle inserted in a thigh vein.

With the process begun, more urgent work awaited than time to do it.

Harrison's vital signs, currently nonexistent, had to be monitored for
the first indications of response to therapy. The treatment already
provided by the paramedics needed to be reviewed to determine if a
previously administered dose of epinephrina heart-stimulating
hormone-was so large as to rule out giving more of it to Harrison at
this time. Meanwhile Jonas pulled up a wheeled cart of medications,
prepared by Helga before the body had arrived, and began to calculate
the variety and quantity of ingredients for a chemical cocktail of
free-radical scavengers designed to retard tissue damage.

"Sixty-one minutes," Gina said, updating them on the estimated length of
time that the patient had been dead. "Wow! That's a long time talking
to the angels. Getting this one back isn't going to be a weenie roast,
boys and girls."

"Forty-eight degrees," Helga reported solemnly, noting the cadaver's
body temperature as it slowly rose toward the temperature of the room
around it.

Death is just an ordinary pathological state, Jonas reminded himself.

Pathological states can usually be reversed.

With her incongruously slender, long-fingered hands, Helga folded a
cotton surgical towel over the patient's genitals, and Jonas recognized
that she was not merely making a concession to modesty but was
performing an act of kindness that expressed an important new attitude
toward Harrison. A dead man had no interest in modesty. A dead man did
not require kindness- Helga's consideration was a way of saying that she
believed this man would once more be one of the living, welcomed back to
the brotherhood and sisterhood of humanity, and that he should be
treated henceforth with tenderness and compassion and not just as an
interesting and challenging prospect for reanimation.

2

The weeds and grass were as high as his knees, lush from an unusually
rainy winter. A cool breeze whispered through the meadow.

Occasionally bats and night birds passed overhead or swooped low off to
one side, briefly drawn to him as if they recognized a fellow predator
but immediately repelled when they sensed the terrible difference
between him and them.



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He stood defiantly, gazing up at the stars shining between the steadily
thickening clouds that moved eastward across the late-winter sky- He
believed that the universe was a kingdom of death, where life was so
rare as to be freakish, a place filled with countless barren planets, a
testament not to the creative powers of God but to the sterility of His
imagination and the triumph of the forces of darkness aligned against
Him. Of the two realities that coexisted in this universe-life and
death-life was the smaller and less consequential. As a citizen in the
land of the living, your existence was limited to years, months, weeks,
days, hours. But as a citizen in the kingdom of the dead, you were
immortal.

He lived in the borderland.

He hated the world of the living, into which he had been born. He
loathed the pretense to meaning and manners and morals and virtue that
the living embraced. The hypocrisy of human interaction, wherein
selflessness was publicly championed and selfishness privately pursued,
both amused and disgusted him. Every act of kindness seemed, to him, to
be performed only with an eye to the payback that might one day be
extracted from the recipient.

His greatest scorn and sometimes fury-as reserved for those who spoke of
love and made claims to feeling such a thing. Love, he knew, was like
all the other high-minded virtues that family, teachers, and priests
blathered about. It didn't exist. It was a sham, a way to control
others, a con.

He cherished, instead, the darkness and strange anti-life of the world
of the dead in which he belonged but to which he could not yet return.

His rightful place was with the damned. He felt at home among those who
despised love, who knew that the pursuit of pleasure was the sole
purpose of existence. Self was primary. There were no such things as
"wrong" and sin.

The longer he stared at the stars between the clouds, the brighter they
appeared, until each pinpoint of light in the void seemed to prick his
eyes.

Tears of discomfort blurred his vision, and he lowered his gaze to the
earth at his feet. Even at night, the land of the living was too bright
for the likes of him. He didn't need light to see. His vision had
adapted to the perfect blackness of death, to the catacombs of Hell.
Light was not merely superfluous to eyes like his; it was a nuisance
and, at times, an abomination.

Ignoring the heavens, he walked out of the field, returning to the
cracked pavement. His footsteps echoed hollowly through this place that
had once been filled with the voices and laughter of multitudes.

If he had wanted, he could have moved with the silence of a stalking
cat.

The clouds parted and the lunar lamp beamed down, making him wince.

On all sides, the decaying structures of his hideaway cast stark and
jagged shadows in moonlight that would have seemed wan to anyone else
but that, to him, shimmered on the pavement as if it were luminous
paint.

He took a pair of sunglasses from an inside pocket of his leather jacket
and put them on. That was better.


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For a moment he hesitated, not sure what he wanted to do with the rest
of the night. He had two basic choices, really: spend the remaining
predawn hours with the living or with the dead. This time it was even
an easier choice than usual, for in his current mood, he much preferred
the dead.

He stepped out of a moon-shadow that resembled a giant, canted, broken
wheel, and he headed toward the moldering structure where he kept the
dead. His collection.

3

"Sixty-four minutes," Gina said, consulting her Rolex with the pink
leather band. "This one could get messy."

Jonas couldn't believe how fast time was passing, just speeding by,
surely faster than usual, as if there had been some freak acceleration
of the continuum. But it was always the same in situations like this,
when the difference between life and death was measured in minutes and
seconds.

He glanced at the blood, more blue than red, moving through the
clear-plastic exsanguination tube into the purring bypass machine. The
average human body contained five liters of blood. Before the
resuscitation team was done with Harrison, his five liters would have
been repeatedly recycled, heated, and filtered.

Ken Nakamura was at a light board, studying head and chest X rays and
body-sonograms that had been taken in the air ambulance during its
hundred-eighty-mile-per-hour journey from the base of the San
Bernardinos to the hospital in Newport Beach. Kari was bent close to
the patient's face, examining his eyes through an ophthalmoscope,
checking for indications of dangerous cranial pressure from a buildup of
fluid on the brain.

With Helga's assistance, Jonas had filled a series of syringes with
large doses of various free-radical neutralizers. Vitamins E and C were
effective scavengers and had the advantage of being natural substances,
but he also intended to administer a lazeroid-tirilazad mesylate-and
phenyl tertiary butyl nitrone.

Free radicals were fast-moving, unstable molecules that ricocheted
through the body, causing chemical reactions that damaged most cells
with which they came into contact. Current theory held that they were
the primary cause of human aging, which explained why natural scavengers
like vitamins E and C boosted the immune system and, in long-term users,
promoted a more youthful appearance and higher energy levels. Free
radicals were a by-product of ordinary metabolic processes and were
always present in the system. But when the body was deprived of
oxygenated blood for an extended period, even with the protection of
hypothermia, huge pools of free radicals were created in excess of
anything the body had to deal with nsrmally. When the heart was started
again, renewed circulation swept those destructive molecules through the
brain, where their impact was devastating.

The vitamin and chemical scavengers would deal with the free radicals
before they could cause any irreversible damage. At least that was the
hope.

Jonas inserted the three syringes in different ports that fed the main
intravenous line in the patient's thigh, but he did not yet inject the


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contents.

"Sixty-five minutes," Gina said.

A long time dead, Jonas thought.

It was very near the record for a successful reanimation.

In spite of the cool air, Jonas felt sweat breaking out on his scalp,
under his thinning hair. He always got too involved, emotional. Some
of his colleagues disapproved of his excessive empathy; they believed a
judicious perspective was insured by the maintenance of a professional
distance between the doctor and those he treated. But no patient was
just a patient.

Every one of them was loved and needed by someone. Jonas was acutely
aware that if he failed a patient, he was failing more than one person,
bringing pain and suffering to a wide network of relatives and friends.

Even when he was treating someone like Harrison, of whom Jonas knew
virtually nothing, he began to imagine the lives interlinking with that
of the patient, and he felt responsible to them as much as he would have
if he had known them intimately.

"The guy looks clean," Ken said, turning away from the X rays and
sonograms. "No broken bones. No internal injuries."

"But those sonograms were taken after he was dead," Jonas noted, "so
they don't show functioning organs."

"Right. We'll snap some pictures again when he's reanimated, make sure
nothing's ruptured, but it looks good so far."

Straightening up from her examination of the dead man's eyes, Kari
Dovell said, "There might be concussion to deal with. Hard to say from
what I can see."

"Sixty-six minutes."

"Seconds count here.         Be ready, people," Jonas said, although he knew
they were ready.

The cool air couldn't reach his head because of his surgical cap, but
the sweat on his scalp felt icy. Shivers cascaded through him.

Blood, heated to one hundred degrees, began to move through the clear
plastic IV line and into the body through a thigh vein, surging
rhythmically to the artificial pulse of the bypass machine.

Jonas depressed the plungers halfway on each of the three syringes,
introducing heavy doses of the free-radical scavengers into the first
blood passing through the line. He waited less than a minute, then
swiftly depressed the plungers all the way.

Helga had already prepared three more syringes according to his
instructions. He removed the depleted ones from the IV ports and
introduced the full syringes without injecting any of their contents.

Ken had moved the portable defibrillation machine next to the patient.

Subsequent to reanimation, if Harrison's heart began to beat erratically
or chaotically fibrillation it might be coerced into a normal rhythm by
the application of an electric shock. That was a last-hope strategy,
however, for violent defibrillation could also have a serious adverse


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effect on a patient who, having been recently brought back from the
dead, was in an exceptionally fragile state.

Consulting the digital thermometer, Kari said, "His body temperature's
up to only fifty-six degrees."

"Sixty-seven minutes," Gina said.

"Too slow," Jonas said.

"External heat?"

Jonas hesitated.

"Let's go for it," Ken advised.

"Fifty-seven degrees," Kari said.

"At this rate," Helga said worriedly, "we're going to be past eighty
minutes before he's anywhere near warm enough for the heart to kick in."

Heating pads had been placed under the operating-table sheet before the
patient had been brought into the room. They extended the length of his
spine.

"Okay," Jonas said.

Kari clicked the switch on the heating pads.

"But easy," Jonas adv1.

Kari adjusted the temperature controls.

They had to warm the body, but potential problems could arise from a
too-rapid reheating. Every resuscitation was a tightrope walk.

Large doses of vitamins E and C, tirilazad mesylate, and phenyl tertiary
butyl nitrone.

The patient was motionless, pale. He reminded Jonas of a figure in a
life-size tableau in some old cathedral: the supine body of Christ
sculpted from white marble, rendered by the artist in the position of
entombment as He would have rested just prior to the most successful
resurrection of all time.

Because Kari Dovell had peeled back Harrison's eyelids for the
ophthalmoscopic examination, his eyes were open, staring sightlessly at
the ceiling, and Gina was putting artificial tears in them with a
dropper to insure that the lenses did not dry out. She hummed "Little
Surfer Girl" as she worked. She was a Beach Boys fan.

No shock or fear was visible in the cadaver's eyes, as one might have
expected. Instead, they held an expression that was almost peaceful,
almost touched by wonder. Harrison looked as if he had seen something,
in the moment of death, to lilt his heart.

Finishing with the eyedrops, Gina checked her watch.                       "Sixty-eight
minutes."

Jonas had the crazy urge to tell her to shut up, as though time would
halt as long as she was not calling it out, minute by minute.

Blood pumped in and out of the bypass machine.



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"Sixty-two degrees." Helga spoke so sternly that she might have been
chastising the dead man for the laggardly pace of his reheating.

Flat lines on the EKG.

Flat lines on the EEG.

"Come on," Jonas urged.             "Come on, come on."

4

He entered the museum of the dead not through one of its upper doors but
through the waterless lagoon. In that shallow depression, three
gondolas still lay on the cracked concrete. They were ten-passenger
models that had long ago been tipped off the heavy chain--drive track
along which they'd once carried their happy passengers. Even at night,
wearing sunglasses, he could see they did not have the swan-neck prows
of real gondolas in Venice, but sported leering gargoyles as
figureheads, hand-carved from wood, garishly painted, perhaps fearsome
at one time but now cracked, didn't need them in that gloom.

Neither did he require a flashlight.                  Where an ordinary man would have
been blind, he could see.

The concrete sluiceway, along which the gondolas had once moved, was
three feet deep and eight feet wide. A much narrower channel in the
sluiceway floor contained the rusted chain-drive mechanisms long series
of blunt, curved, six-inch-high hooks that had pulled the boats forward
by engaging the steel loops on the bottoms of their hulls.

When the ride had been in operation, those hooks had been concealed by
water, contributing to the illusion that the gondolas were actually
adrift. Now, dwindling into the dreary realm ahead, they looked like a
row of stubby spines on the back of an immense prehistoric reptile.

The world of the living, he thought, is always fraught with deception.

Beneath the placid surface, ugly mechanisms grind away at secret tasks.

He walked deeper into the building. The gradual downward slope of the
sluiceway was at first barely perceptible, but he was aware of it
because he had passed that way many times before.

Above him, to either side of the channel, were concrete service walks,
about four feet wide. Beyond them were the tunnel walls, which had been
painted black to serve as a non-reflective backdrop for the moments of
half-baked theater performed in front of them.

The walkways widened occasionally to form niches, in some places even
whole rooms. When the ride had been in operation, the niches had been
filled with tableaus meant to amuse or horrify or both: ghosts and
goblins, ghouls and monsters, ax-wielding madmen standing over the
prostrate bodies of their beheaded victims. In one of the room-sized
areas, there had been an elaborate graveyard filled with stalking
zombies; in another, a large and convincing flying saucer had disgorged
blood-thirsty aliens with a shark's profusion of teeth in their huge
heads. The robotic figures had moved, grimaced, reared up, and
threatened all passersby with tape-recorded voices, eternally repeating
the same brief programmed dramas with the same menacing words and
snarls.

No, not eternally. They were gone now, carted away by the official
salvagers, by agents of the creditors, or by scavengers.


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Nothing was eternal.

Except death.

A hundred feet beyond the entrance doors, he reached the end of the
first section of the chain-drive. The tunnel floor, which had been
sloping imperceptibly, now tilted down sharply, at about a
thirty-five-degree angle, falling away into flawless blackness. Here,
the gondolas had slipped free of the blunt hooks in the channel floor
and, with a stomach-wrenching lurch, sailed down a
hundred-and-fifty-foot incline, falling into the pool below with a
colossal splash that drenched the passengers up front, much to the
delight of those fortunate or smart enough to get a seat in the back.

Because he was not like ordinary men and possessed certain special
powers, he could see part of the way down the incline, even in that
utterly lightless environment, although his perception did not extend to
the very bottom. His catlike night vision was limited: within a radius
of ten or fifteen feet, he could see as clearly as if he stood in
daylight; thereafter, objects grew blurry, steadily less distinct,
shadowy, until darkness swallowed everything at a distance of perhaps
forty or fifty feet.

Leaning backward to retain his balance on the steep slope, he headed
down into the bowels of the abandoned funhouse. He was not afraid of
what might wait below. Nothing could frighten him any more. After all,
he was deadlier and more savage than anything with which this world
could threaten him.

Before he descended half the distance to the lower chamber, he detected
the odor of death. It rose to him on currents of cool dry air. The
stench excited him. No perfume, regardless of how exquisite, even if
applied to the tender throat of a lovely woman, could ever thrill him as
profoundly as the singular, sweet fragrance of corrupted flesh.

5

Under the halogen lamps, the stainless-steel and white-enameled surfaces
of the operating room were a little hard on the eyes, like the geometric
configurations of an arctic landscape polished by the glare of a winter
sun.

The room seemed to have gotten chillier, as if the heat flowing into the
dead man was pushing the cold out of him, thereby lowering the air
temperature. Jonas Nyebern shivered.

Helga checked the digital thermometer that was patched to Harrison.

"Body temperature's up to seventy degrees."

"Seventy-two minutes," Gina said.

"We're going for the brass ring now," Ken said. "Medical history, the
Guiness Book of World Records, TV appearances, books, movies, T-shirts
with our faces on 'em, novelty hats, plastic lawn ornaments in our
images."

"Some dogs have been brought back after ninety minutes," Kari reminded
him.

"Yeah," Ken said, "but they were dogs. Besides, they were so screwed
up, they chased bones and buried cars."


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Gina and Kari laughed softly, and the joke seemed to break the tension
for everyone except Jonas. He could never relax for a moment in the
process of a resuscitation, although he knew that it was possible for a
physician to get so tightly wound that he was no longer performing at
his peak. Ken's ability to vent a little nervous energy was admirable,
and in the service of the patient; however, Jonas was incapable of doing
likewise in the midst of a battle.

"Seventy-two degrees, seventy-three."

It was a battle.           Death was the adversary: clever, mighty, and
relentless.

To Jonas, death was not just a pathological state, not merely the
inevitable fate of all living things, but actually an entity that walked
the world, perhaps not always the robed figure of myth with its skeletal
face hidden in the shadows of a cowl, but a very real presence
nonetheless. Death with a capital D.

"Seventy-four degrees," Helga said.

Gina said, "Seventy-three minutes."

Jonas introduced more free-radical scavengers into the blood that surged
through the IV line.

He supposed that his belief in Death as a supernatural force with a will
and consciousness of its own, his certainty that it sometimes walked the
earth in an embodied form, his awareness of its presence right now in
this room in a cloak of invisibility, would seem like silly superstition
to his colleagues. It might even be regarded as a sign of mental
imbalance or incipient madness. But Jonas was confident of his sanity.
After all, his belief in Death was based on empirical evidence. He had
seen the hated enemy when he was only seven years old, had heard it
speak, had looked into its eyes and smelled its fetid breath and felt
its icy touch upon his face.

"Seventy-five degrees."

"Get ready," Jonas said.

The patient's body temperature was nearing a threshold beyond which
reanimation might begin at any moment. Kari finished filling a
hypodermic syringe with epineplrrine, and Ken activated the
defibrillation machine to let it build up a charge. Gina opened the
flow valve on a tank containing an oxygen-carbon dioxide mixture that
had been formulated to the special considerations of resuscitation
procedures, and picked up the mask of the pulmonary machine to make sure
it was functioning.

"Seventy-six degrees," Helga said, "seventy-seven."

Gina checked her watch.             "Coming up on seventy-four minutes."

6

At the bottom of the long incline, he entered a cavernous room as large
as an airplane hangar. Hell had once been related there, according to
the unimaginative vision of an amusement-park designer, complete with
gas-jet fires lapping at formed-concrete rocks around the perimeter.

The gas had been turned off long ago.                   Hell was tar-black now.         But not


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to him, of course.

He moved slowly across the concrete floor, which was bisected by a
serpentine channel housing another chain-drive. There, the gondolas had
moved through a lake of water made to look like a lake of fire by clever
lighting and bubbling air hoses that simulated boiling oil. As he
walked, he savored the stench of decay, which grew more exquisitely
pungent by the second.

A dozen mechanical demons had once stood on higher formations, spreading
immense bat wings, peering down with glowing eyes that periodically
raked the passing gondolas with harmless crimson laser beams.

Eleven of the demons had been hauled away, peddled to some competing
park or sold for scrap. For unknown reasons, one devil remained silent
and unmoving agglomeration of rusted metal, moth-eaten fabric, torn
plastic, and grease-caked hydraulic mechanisms. It was still perched on
a rocky spire two-thirds of the way toward the high ceiling, pathetic
rather than frightening.

As he passed beneath that sorry funhouse figure, he thought, I am the
only real demon this place has ever known or ever will, and that pleased
him.

Months ago he stopped thinking of himself by his Christian name.                          He
adopted the name of a fiend that he had read about in a book on
Satanism.

Vassago. One of the three most powerful demon princes of Hell, who
answered only to His Satanic Majesty. Vassago. He liked the sound of
it.

When he said it aloud, the name rolled from his tongue so easily that it
seemed as if he'd never answered to anything else.

"Vassago."

In the heavy subterranean silence, it echoed back to him from the
concrete rocks: "Vassago."

7

"Eighty degrees."

"It should be happening," Ken said.

Surveying the monitors, Kari said, "Flat lines, just flat lines."

Her long, swan-like neck was slender that Jonas could see her pulse
pounding rapidly in her carotid artery.

He looked down at the dead man's neck.                   No pulse there.

"Seventy-five minutes," Gina announced.

"If he comes around, it's officially a record now," Ken said. "We'll be
obligated to celebrate, get drunk, puke on our shoes, and make fools of
ourselves."

"Eightyne degrees."

Jonas was so frustrated that he could not speak for fear of uttering an
obscenity or a low, savage snarl of anger. They had made all the right
moves, but they were losing. He hated losing. He hated Death. He


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hated the limitations of modern medicine, all circumscriptions of human
knowledge, and his own inadequacies.

"Eighty-two degrees."

Suddenly the dead man gasped.

Jonas twitched and looked at the monitors.

The EKG showed spastic movement in the patient's heart-"here we go,"
Kari said.

8

The robotic figures of the damned, more than a hundred in Hell's heyday,
were gone with eleven of the twelve demons; gone, as well, were the
wails of agony and the lamentations that had been broadcast through
their speaker-grille mouths. The desolate chamber, however, was not
without lost souls. But now it housed something more appropriate than
robots, more like the real thing: Vassago's collection.

At the center of the room, Satan waited in all his majesty, fierce and
colossal. A circular pit in the floor, sixteen to eighteen feet in
diameter, housed a massive statue of the Prince of Darkness himself.

He was not shown from the waist down; but from his navel to the tips of
his segmented horns, he measured thirty feet. When the funhouse had
been in operation, the monstrous sculpture waited in a thirty-five-foot
pit, hidden beneath the lake, then periodically surged up out of its
lair, water cascading from it, huge eyes afire, monstrous jaws working,
sharp teeth gnashing, forked tongue flickering, thundering a
warning-"Abandon hope all ye who enter here! "and then laughing
malevolently.

Vassago had ridden the gondolas several times as a boy, when he had been
one of the wholly alive, before he had become a citizen of the
borderland, and in those days he had been spooked by the handcrafted
devil, affected especially by its hideous laugh. If the machinery had
overcome years of corrosion and suddenly brought the cackling monster to
life again, Vassago would not have been impressed, for he was now old
enough and sufficiently experienced to know that Satan was incapable of
laughter.

He halted near the base of the towering Lucifer and studied it with a
mixture of scorn and admiration. It was corny, yes, a funhouse fake
meant to test the bladders of small children and give teenage girls a
reason to squeal and cuddle for protection in the arms of their smirking
boyfriends.

But he had to admit that it was also an inspired creation, because the
designer had not opted for the traditional image of Satan as a
lean-faced, sharp-nosed, thin-lipped Lothario of troubled souls, hair
slicked back from a widow's peak, goatee sprouting absurdly from a
pointed chin.

Instead, this was a Beast worthy of the title: part reptile, part
insect, part humanoid, repulsive enough to command respect, just
familiar enough to seem real, alien enough to be awesome. Several years
of dust, moisture, and mold had contributed a patina that softened the
garish carnival colors and lent it the authority of one of those
gigantic stone statues of Egyptian gods found in ancient sand-covered
temples, far beneath the desert dunes.



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Although he didn't know what Lucifer actually looked like, and though he
assumed that the Father of Lies would be far more heart-thrilling and
formidable than this funhouse version, Vassago found the plastic and
polyfoam behemoth sufficiently impressive to make it the center of the
secret existence that he led within his hideaway. At the base of it, on
the dry concrete floor of the drained lake, he had arranged his
collection partly for his own pleasure and amusement but also as an
offering to the god of terror and pain.

The naked and decaying bodies of seven women and three men were
displayed to their best advantage, as if they were ten exquisite
sculptures by some perverse Michelangelo in a museum of death.

9

A single shallow gasp, one brief spasm of the heart muscles, and an
involuntary nerve reaction that made his right arm twitch and his
fingers open and close like the curling legs of a dying spider-those
were the only signs of life the patient exhibited before settling once
more into the still and silent posture of the dead.

"Eighty-three degrees," Helga said.

Ken Nakamura wondered: "Defibrillation?"

Jonas shook his head. "His heart's not in fibrillation.                         It's not
beating at all. Just wait."

Kari was holding a syringe.               "More epineplrrine?"

Jonas stared intently at the monitors. "Wait. We don't want to bring
him back only to overmedicate him and precipitate a heart attack."

"Seventy-six minutes," Gina said, her voice as youthful and breathless
and perkily excited as if she were announcing the score in a game of
beach volleyball.

"Eighty-four degrees."

Harrison gasped again. His heart stuttered, sending a series of spikes
across the screen of the electrocardiograph. His whole body shuddered.

Then he went flatland again.

Grabbing the handles on the positive and negative pads of the
defibrillation machine, Ken looked expectantly at Jonas.

"Eighty-five degrees," Helga announced.                    "He's in the right thermal
territory, and he wants to come back."

Jonas felt a bead of sweat trickle with centipede swiftness down his
right temple and along his jaw line. The hardest part was waiting,
giving the patient a chance to kick-start himself before risking more
punishing techniques of forced reanimation.

A third spasm of heart activity registered as a shorter burst of spikes
than the previous one, and it was not accompanied by a pulmonary
response as before. No muscle contractions were visible, either.

Harrison lay slack and cold.

"He's not able to make the leap," Kari Dovell said.

Ken agreed.         "We're gonna lose him."


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"Seventy-seven minutes," Gina said.

Not four days in the tomb, like Lazarus, before Jesus had called him
forth, Jonas thought, but a long time dead nevertheless.

"Epinephrine," Jonas said.

Kari handed the hypodermic syringe to Jonas, and he quickly administered
the dosage through one of the same IV ports that he had used earlier to
inject free-radical scavengers into the patient's blood.

Ken lifted the negative and positive pads of the defibrillation machine,
and positioned himself over the patient, ready to give him a jolt if it
came to that.

Then the massive charge of epinephrine, a powerful hormone extracted
from the adrenal glands of sheep and cattle and referred to by some
resuscitation specialists as "reanimator juice," hit Harrison as hard as
any electrical shock that Ken Nakamura was prepared to give him.

The stale breath of the grave exploded from him, he gasped air as if he
were still drowning in that icy river, he shuddered violently, and his
heart began to beat like that of a rabbit with a fox close on its tail.

Vassago had arranged each piece in his macabre collection with more than
casual contemplation. They were not simply ten corpses dumped
unceremoniously on the concrete. He not only respected death but loved
it with an ardor akin to Beethoven's passion for music or Rembrandt's
fervent devotion to art. Death, after all, was the gift that Satan had
brought to the inhabitants of the Garden, a gift disguised as something
prettier; he was the Giver of Death, and his was the kingdom of death
everlasting. Any flesh that death had touched was to be regarded with
all the reverence that a devout Catholic might reserve for the
Eucharist. Just as their god was said to live within that thin wafer of
unleavened bread, so the face of Vassago's unforgiving god could be seen
everywhere in the patterns of decay and dissolution.

The first body at the base of the thirty-foot Satan was that of Jenny
Purcell, a twenty-two-year-old waitress who had worked the evening shift
in a recreation of a 1950s diner, where the jukebox played Elvis Presley
and Chuck Berry, Lloyd Price and the Platters, Buddy Holly and Connie
Francis and the Everly Brothers. When Vassago had gone in for a burger
and a beer, Jenny thought he looked cool in his black clothes, wearing
sunglasses indoors at night and making no move to take them off. With
his baby-faced good looks given interest by a contrastingly firm set to
his jaw and a slight cruel twist to his mouth, and with thick black hair
falling across his forehead, he looked a little like a young Elvis.
What's your name, she asked, and he said, Vassago, and she said, What's
your first name, so he said, That's it, the whole thing, first and last,
which must have intrigued her, got her imagination going, because she
said, What, you mean like Cher only has one name or Madonna or Sting? He
stared hard at her from behind his heavily tinted sunglasses and said,
Yeah-you have a problem with that?

She didn't have a problem. In fact she was attracted to him. She said
he was "different," but only later did she discover just how different
he really was.

Everything about Jenny marked her as a slut in his eyes, so after
killing her with an eight-inch stiletto that he drove under her rib cage
and into her heart, he arranged her in a posture suitable for a sexually



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profligate woman. Once he had stripped her naked, he braced her in a
sitting position with her thighs spread wide and knees drawn up. He
bound her slender wrists to her shins to keep her upright.

Then he used strong lengths of cord to pull her head forward and down
farther than she could have managed to do while alive, brutally
compressing her midriff; he anchored the cords around her thighs, so she
was left eternally looking up the cleft between her legs, contemplating
her sins.

Jenny had been the first piece in his collection. Dead for about nine
months, trussed up like a ham in a curing barn, she was withered now, a
Indeed, in her peculiar posture, having contracted into a ball as she
had dyed and dried out, she resembled a human being so little that it
was difficult to think of her as ever having been a living person,
therefore usually difficult to think of her as a dead person.

Consequently, death Bed no longer to reside in her remrins. To Vassago,
she had ceased to be a corpse and had become merely a curious object, an
impersonal thing that might always have been inanimate. As a result,
although she was a part of his collection, she was now of minimal
interest to him.

He was fascinated solely with death and the dead. The living were of
interest to him only insofar as they carried the ripe promise of death
within them.

The patient's heart oscillated between mild and severe tachycardia, from
a hundred and twenty to over two hundred and thirty beats per minute, a
transient condition resulting from the epinephrine and hypothermia
Except it wasn't acting like a transient condition. Each time the pulse
rate declined, it did not subside as far as it had previously, and with
each new acceleration, the EKG showed escalating arrhythmia that could
lead only to cardiac arrest.

No longer sweating, calmer now that the decision to fight Death had been
made and was being acted upon, Jonas said, "Better hit him with it."

No one doubted to whom he was speaking, and Ken Nakamura pressed the
cold pads of the defribulation machine to Harrison's chest, bracketing
his heart. The electrical discharge caused the patient to bounce
violently against the table, and a sound like an iron mallet striking a
leather sofawhom!-slammed through the room.

Jonas looked at the electrocardiograph just as Kari read the meaning of
the spikes of light moving across the display: "Still two hundred a
minute but the rhythm's there now ... steady ... steady."

Similarly, the electroencephalograph showed alpha and beta brain waves
within normal parameters for an unconscious man.

"There's self-sustained pulmonary activity," Ken said.

"Okay," Jonas decided, "let's respirate him and make sure he's getting
enough oxygen in those brain cells."

Gina immediately put the oxygen mask on Harrison's face.

"Body temperature's at ninety degrees," Helga reported.

The patient's lips were still somewhat blue, but that same deathly hue
had faded from under his fingernails.



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Likewise, his muscle tone was partially restored. His flesh no longer
had the flaccidity of the dead. As feeling returned to Harrison's
defiled extremities, his punished nerve endings excited a host of tics
and twitches.

His eyes rolled and jiggled under his closed lids, a sure sign of REM
sleep. He was dreaming.

"One hundred and twenty beats a minute," Kari said, "and declining ...

completely rhythmic now ...            very steady."

Gina consulted her watch and let her breath out in a whoosh of
amazement. "Eighty minutes."

"Sonofabitch," Ken said wonderingly, "that beats the record by ten."

Jonas hesitated only a brief moment before checking the wall clock and
making the formal announcement for the benefit of the tape recorder:
"Patient successfully resuscitated as of nine-thirty-two Monday evening,
March fourth."

A murmur of mutual congratulations accompanied by smiles of relief was
as close as they would get to a triumphant cheer of the sort that might
have been heard on a real battleground. They were not restrained by
modesty but by a keen awareness of Harrison's tenuous condition. They
had won the battle with Death, but their patient had not yet regained
consciousness. Until he was awake and his mental performance could be
tested and evaluated, there was a chance that he had been reanimated
only to live out a life of anguish and frustration, his potential
tragically circumscribed by irreparable brain damage.

Enraptured by the spicy perfume of death, at home in the subterranean
bleakness, Vassago walked admiringly past his collection. It encircled
one-third of the colossal Lucifer.

Of the male specimens, one had been taken while changing a flat tire on
a lonely section of the Ortega Highway at night. Another had been
asleep in his car in a public-beach parking lot. The third had tried to
pick up Vassago at a bar in Dana Point. The dive hadn't even been a gay
hangout; the guy had just been drunk, desperate, lonely-and careless.

Nothing enraged Vassago more than the sexual needs and excitement of
others. He had no interest in sex any more, and he never raped any of
the women he killed. But his disgust and anger, engendered by the mere
perception of sexuality in others, were not a result of jealousy, and
did not spring from any sense that his impotency was a curse or even an
unfair burden. No, he was glad to be free of lust and longing. Since
becoming a citizen of the borderland and accepting the promise of the
grave, he did not regret the loss of desire. Though he was not entirely
sure why the very thought of sex could sometimes throw him into a rage,
why a flirtatious wink or a short skirt or a sweater stretched across a
full bosom could incite him to torture and homicide, he suspected that
it was because sex and life were inextricably entwined. Next to
self-preservation, the sex drive was, they said, the most powerful human
motivator. Through sex, life was created. Because he hated life in all
its gaudy variety, hated it with such intensity, it was only natural
that he would hate sex as well.

He preferred to kill women because society encouraged them, more than
men, to flaunt their sexuality, which they did with the assistance of
makeup, lipstick, alluring scents, revealing clothes, and coquettish



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behavior. Besides, from a woman's womb came new life, and Vassago was
sworn to destroy life wherever he could. From women came the very thing
he loathed in himself: the spark of life that still sputtered in him and
prevented him from moving on to the land of the dead, where he belonged.

Of the remaining six female specimens in his collection, two had been
housewives, one a young attorney, one a medical secretary, and two
college students. Though he had arranged each corpse in a manner
fitting the personality, spirit, and weaknesses of the person who had
once inhabited it, and though he had considerable talent for cadaver
art, making especially clever use of a variety of props, he was far more
pleased by the effect he had achieved with one of the students than with
all of the others combined.

He stopped walking when he reached her.

He regarded her in the darkness, pleased by his work.

Margaret...

He first saw her during one of his restless late-night rambles, in a
dimly lighted bar near the university campus, where she was sipping diet
cola, either because she was not old enough to be served beer along with
her friends or because she was not a drinker. He suspected the latter.

She looked singularly wholesome and uncomfortable in the smoke and din
of the tavern. Even from halfway across the room, judging by her
reactions to her friends and her body language, Vassago could see that
she was a shy girl struggling hard to fit in with the crowd, even though
in her heart she knew that she would never entirely belong. The roar of
liquor-amplified conversation, the clink and clatter of glasses, the
thunderous jukebox music of Madonna and Michael Jackson and Michael
Bolton, the stink of cigarettes and stale beer, the moist heat of
college boys on the make-none of that touched her. She sat in the bar
but existed apart from it, unstained by it, filled with more secret
energy than that entire roomful of young men and women combined.

She was so vital, she seemed to glow. Vassago found it hard to believe
that the ordinary, sluggish blood of humanity moved through her veins.

Surely, instead, her heart pumped the distilled essence of life itself.

Her vitality drew him. It would be enormously satisfying to snuff such
a brightly burning flame of life.

To learn where she lived, he followed her home from the bar. For the
next two days, he stalked the campus, gathering information about her as
diligently as a real student might have researched a term paper.

Her name was Margaret Ann Campion. She was a senior, twenty years old,
majoring in music. She could play the piano, flute, clarinet, guitar,
and almost any other instrument she took a fancy to learn. Perhaps the
best-known and most-admired student in the music program, she was also
widely considered to possess an exceptional talent for composition. An
essentially shy person, she made a point of forcing herself out of her
shell, so music was not her only interest. She was on the track team,
the second fastest woman in their lineup, a spirited competitor; she
wrote about music and movies for the student paper; and she was active
in the Baptist church.

Her astonishing vitality was evident not merely in the joy with which
she wrote and played music, not just in the almost spiritual aura that
Vassago had seen in the bar, but also in her physical appearance. She


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was incomparably beautiful, with the body of a silver-screen sex goddess
and the face of a saint. Clear skin. Perfect cheekbones.

Full lips, a generous mouth, a beatific smile. Limpid blue eyes. She
dressed modestly in an attempt to conceal the sweet fullness of her
breasts, the contrasting narrowness of her waist, the firmness of her
buttocks, and the long supple lines of her legs.

But he was certain that when he stripped her, she would be revealed for
what he had known her to be when he had first glimpsed her: a prodigious
breeder, a hot furnace of life in which eventually other life of
unparalleled brightness would be conceived and shaped.

He wanted her dead.

He wanted to stop her heart and then hold her for hours, feeling the
heat of life radiate out of her, until she was cold.

This one murder, it seemed to him, might at last earn him passage out of
the borderland in which he lived and into the land of the dead and
damned, where he belonged, where he longed to be.

Margaret made the mistake of going alone to a laundry room in her
apartment complex at eleven o'clock at night. Many of the units were
leased to financially comfortable senior citizens and, because they were
near the University of California at Irvine, to pairs and trios of
students who shared the rent. Maybe the tenant mix, the fact that it
was a safe and friendly neighborhood, and the abundance of landscape and
walkway lighting all combined to give her a false sense of security.

When Vassago entered the laundry room, Margaret had just begun to put
her dirty clothes into one of the washing machines. She looked at him
with a smile of surprise but with no apparent concern, though he was
dressed all in black and wearing sunglasses at night.

She probably thought he was just another university student who favored
an eccentric look as a way of proclaiming his rebellious spirit and
intellectual superiority. Every campus had a slew of the type, since it
was easier to dress as a rebellious intellectual than be one.

"Oh, I'm sorry, Miss," he said, "I didn't realize anyone was in here."

"That's okay.      I'm only using just one washer," she said.                 "There're two
others."

"No, I already did my laundry, then back at the apartment when I took it
out of the basket, I was missing one sock, so I figure it's got to be in
one of the washers or dryers. But I didn't mean to get in your way.
Sorry about that."

She smiled a little broader, maybe because she thought it funny that a
would-be James Dean, black-lad rebel without a cause, would choose to be
so politer would do his own laundry and chase down lost socks.

By then he was beside her. He hit her in the face-two hard, sharp
punches that knocked her unconscious. She crumpled onto the vinyl-tile
floor as if she were a pile of laundry.

Later, in the dismantled Hell under the moldering funhouse, when she
regained consciousness and found herself naked on the concrete floor and
effectively blind in those lightless confines, tied hand and foot, she
did not attempt to bargain for her life as some of the others had done.
She didn't offer her body to him, didn't pretend to be turned on by his


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savagery or the power that he wielded over her. She didn't offer him
money, or claim to understand and sympathize with him in a pathetic
attempt to convert him from nemesis to friend. Neither did she scream
nor weep nor wail nor curse. She was different from the others, for she
found hope and comfort in a quiet, dignified, unending chain of
whispered prayers. But she never prayed to be delivered from her
tormentor and returned to the world out of which she had been torn-as if
she knew that death was inevitable.

Instead, she prayed that her family would be given the strength to cope
with the loss of her, that God would take care of her two younger
sisters, and even that her murderer would receive divine grace and
mercy.

Vassago swiftly came to loathe her. He knew that love and mercy were
nonexistent, just empty words. He had never felt love, neither during
his time in the borderland nor when he had been one of the living.

Often, however, he had pretended to love someonlather, mother, a girl-to
get what he wanted, and they had always been deceived. Being deceived
into believing that love existed in others, when it didn't exist in you,
was a sign of fatal weakness. Human interaction was nothing but a game,
after all, and the ability to see through deception was what separated
the good players from the inept.

To show her that he could not be deceived and that her god was
powerless, Vassago rewarded her quiet prayers with a long and painful
death. At last she did scream. But her screams were not satisfying,
for they were only the sounds of physical agony; they did not
reverberate with terror, rage, or despair.

He thought he would like her better when she was dead, but even then he
still hated her. For a few minutes he held her body against him,
feeling the heat drain from it. But the chilly advance of death through
her flesh was not as thrilling as it should have been. Because she had
died with an unbroken faith in life everlasting, she had cheated Vassago
of the satisfaction of seeing the awareness of death in her eyes. He
pushed her limp body aside in disgust.

Now, two weeks after Vassago had finished with her, Margaret Campion
knelt in perpetual prayer on the floor of that dismantled Hell, the most
recent addition to his collection. She remained upright because she was
lashed to a length of steel rebar which he had inserted into a hole he
had drilled in the concrete. Naked, she faced away from the giant,
funhouse devil. Though she had been Baptist, a crucifix was clasped in
her dead hands because Vassago liked the image of the crucifix better
than a simple cross; it was turned upside down, with Christ's
thorn-prickled head toward the floor. Margaret's own head had been cut
off then re-sewn to her neck with obsessive care. Even though her body
was turned away from Satan, she faced toward him in denial of the
crucifix held irreverently in her hands. Her posture was symbolic of
hypocrisy, mocking her pretense to faith, love, and life everlasting.

Although Vassago hadn't received nearly as much pleasure from murdering
Margaret as from what he had done to her after she was dead, he was
still pleased to have made her acquaintance. Her stubbornness,
stupidity, and self-deception had made her death less satisfying for him
than it should have been, but at least the aura he had seen around her
in the bar was quenched. Her irritating vitality was drained away.

The only energy her body harbored was that of the multitudinous
carrionaters that teemed within her, consuming her flesh and bent on


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reducing her to a dry husk like Jenny, the waitress, who rested at the
other end of the collection.

As he studied Margaret, a familiar need arose in him. Finally the need
became a compulsion. He turned away from his collection, retracing his
path across the huge room, heading for the ramp that led up to the
entrance tunnel. Ordinarily, selecting another acquisition, killing it,
and arranging it in the most aesthetically satisfying pose would have
left him quiescent and sated for as much as a month. But after less
than two weeks, he was compelled to find another worthy sacrifice.

Regretfully, he ascended the ramp, out of the purifying scent of death,
into air tainted with the odors of life, like a vampire driven to hunt
the living though preferring the company of the dead.

At ten-thirty, almost an hour after Harrison was resuscitated, he
remained unconscious. His body temperature was normal. His vital signs
were good.

And though the patterns of alpha and beta brain waves were those of a
man in a profound sleep, they were not obviously indicative of anything
as deep as a coma.

When Jonas finally declared the patient out of immediate danger and
ordered him moved to a private room on the fifth floor, Ken Nakamura and
Kari Dovell elected to go home. Leaving Helga and Gina with the
patient, Jonas accompanied the neurologist and the pediatrician to the
scrub sinks, and eventually as far as the door to the staff parking lot.
They discussed Harrison and what procedures might have to be performed
on him in the morning, but for the most part they shared inconsequential
small talk about hospital politics and gossip involving mutual
acquaintances, as if they had not just participated in a miracle that
should have made such banalities impossible.

Beyond the glass door, the night looked cold and inhospitable. Rain had
begun to fall. Puddles were filling every depression in the pavement,
and in the reflected glow of the parking-lot lamps, they looked like
shattered mirrors, collections of sharp silvery shards.

Kari leaned against Jonas, kissed his cheek, clung to him for a moment.

She seemed to want to say something but was unable to find the words.

Then she pulled back, turned up the collar of her coat, and went out
into the wind-driven rain.

Lingering after Kari's departure, Ken Nakamura said, "I hope you realize
she's a perfect match for you."

Through the rain-streaked glass door, Jonas watched the woman as she
hurried toward her car. He would have been lying if he had said that he
never looked at Kari as a woman. Though tall, rangy, and a formidable
presence, she was also feminine. Sometimes he marveled at the delicacy
of her wrists, at her swan-like neck that seemed too gracefully thin to
support her head. Intellectually and emotionally she was stronger than
she looked.

Otherwise she couldn't have dealt with the obstacles and challenges that
surely had blocked her advance in the medical profession, which was
still dominated by men for whom-in some case shauvinism was less a
character trait than an article of faith.

Ken said, "All you'd have to do is ask her, Jonas."


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"I'm not free to do that," Jonas said.

"You can't mourn Marion forever."

"It's only been two years."

"Yeah, but you have to step back into life sometime."

"Not yet."

"Ever?"

"I don't know."

Outside, halfway across the parking lot, Kari DoveIl had gotten into her
car.

"She won't wait forever," Ken said.

"Goodnight, Ken."

"I can take a hint."

"Good," Jonas said.

Smiling ruefully, Ken pulled open the door, letting in a gust of wind
that spat jewel-clear drops of rain on the gray tile floor. He hurried
out into the night.

Jonas turned away from the door and followed a series of hallways to the
elevators. He went up to the fifth floor.

He hadn't needed to tell Ken and Kari that he would spend the night in
the hospital. They knew he always stayed after an apparently successful
reanimation. To them, resuscitation medicine was a fascinating new
field, an interesting sideline to their primary work, a way to expand
their professional knowledge and keep their minds flexible; every
success was deeply satisfying, a reminder of why they had become
physicians in the first place-to heal. But it was more than that to
Jonas. Each reanimation was a battle won in an endless war with Death,
not just a healing act but an act of defiance, an angry fist raised in
the face of fate. Resuscitation medicine was his love, his passion, his
definition of himself, his only reason for arising in the morning and
getting on with life in a world that had otherwise become too color less
and purposeless to endure.

He had submitted applications and proposals to half a dozen
universities, seeking to teach in their medical schools in return for
the establishment of a resuscitation-medicine research facility under
his supervision, for which he felt able to raise a sizable part of the
financing. He was well-known and widely respected both as a
cardiovascular surgeon and a reanimation specialist, and he was
confident that he would soon obtain the position he wanted. But he was
impatient. He was no longer satisfied with supervising reanimations.

He wanted to study the effects of short-term death on human cells,
explore the mechanisms of free-radicals and free radical scavengers,
test his own theories, and find new ways to evict Death from those in
whom it had already taken up tenancy.

On the fifth floor, at the nurses' station, he learned that Harrison had
been taken to 518. It was a semi-private room, but an abundance of
empty beds in the hospital insured that it would be effectively


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maintained as a private unit as long as Harrison was likely to need it.

When Jonas entered 518, Helga and Gina were finishing with the patient,
who was in the bed farthest from the door and nearest the rain-spotted
window. They had gotten him into a hospital gown and hooked him to
another electrocardiograph with a telemetry function that would
reproduce his heart rhythms on a monitor at the nurses' station. A
bottle of clear fluid hung from a rack beside the bed, feeding an IV
line into the patient's left arm, which was already beginning to bruise
from other intravenous injections administered by the paramedics earlier
in the evening; the clear fluid was glucose enriched with an antibiotic
to prevent dehydration and to guard against one of the many infections
that could undo everything that had been achieved in the resuscitation
room. Helga had smoothed Harrison's hair with a comb that she was now
tucking away in the nightstand drawer. Gina was delicately applying a
lubricant to his eyelids to prevent them from sticking together, a
danger with comatose patients who spent long periods of time without
opening their eyes or even blinking and who sometimes suffered from
diminished lachrymal-gland secretion.

"Heart's still steady as a metronome," Gina said when she saw Jonas.

"I have a hunch, before the end of the week, this one's going to be out
playing golf, dancing, doing whatever he wants." She brushed at her
bangs, which were an inch too long and hanging in her eyes. "He's a
lucky man."

"One hour at a time," Jonas cautioned, knowing too well how Death liked
to tease them by pretending to retreat, then returning in a rush to
snatch away their victory.

When Gina and Helga left for the night, Jonas turned off all the lights.

Illuminated only by the faint fluorescent wash from the corridor and the
green glow of the cardiac monitor, room 518 was replete with shadows.

It was silent, too. The audio signal on the EKG had been turned off,
leaving only the rhythmically bouncing light endlessly making its way
across the screen. The only sounds were the soft moans of the wind at
the window and the occasional faint tapping of rain against the glass.

Jonas stood at the foot of the bed, looking at Harrison for a moment.

Though he had saved the man's life, he knew little about him.

Thirty--eight years old.           Five-ten, a hundred and sixty pounds.              Brown
hair, brown eyes.

Excellent physical condition.

But what of the inner person? Was Hatchford Benjamin Harrison a good
man? Honest? Trustworthy? Faithful to his wife? Was he reasonably
free of envy and greed, capable of mercy, aware of the difference
between right and wrong?

Did he have a kind heart?

Did he love?

In the heat of a resuscitation procedure, when seconds counted and there
was too much to be done in too short a time, Jonas never dared to think
about the central ethical dilemma facing any doctor who assumed the role
of reanimator, for to think of it then might have inhibited him to the


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patient's disadvantage.          Afterward, there was time to doubt, to wonder.

Although a physician was morally committed and professionally obligated
to saving lives wherever he could, were all lives worth saving?

When Death took an evil man, wasn't it wiser and more ethically
correct-to let him stay dead?

If Harrison was a bad man, the evil that he committed upon resuming his
life after leaving the hospital would in part be the responsibility of
Jonas Nyebern. The pain Harrison caused others would to some extent
stain Jonas's soul, as well.

Fortunately, this time the dilemma seemed moot. Harrison appeared to be
an upstanding citizen-a respected antique dealer, they said-married to
an artist of some reputation, whose name Jonas recognized. A good
artist had to be sensitive, perceptive, able to see the world more
clearly than most people saw it. Didn't she? If she was married to a
bad man, she would know it, and she wouldn't remain married to him.

This time there was every reason to believe that a life had been saved
that should have been saved.

Jonas only wished his actions had always been so correct.

He turned away from the bed and took two steps to the window. Five
stories below, the nearly deserted parking lot lay under hooded pole
lamps. The falling rain churned the puddles, so they appeared to be
boiling, as if a subterranean fire consumed the blacktop from
underneath.

He could pick out the spot where Kari Dovell's car had been parked, and
he stared at it for a long time. He admired Kari enormously. He also
found her attractive. Sometimes he dreamed of being with her, and it
was a surprisingly comforting dream. He could admit to wanting her at
times, as well, and to being pleased by the thought that she might also
want him.

But he did not need her. He needed nothing                  but his work, the
satisfaction of occasionally beating Death,                 and the-"something's . out
. there The first word interrupted Jonas's                  thoughts, but the voice was
so thin and soft that he didn't immediately                 perceive the source of it.

He turned around, looking toward the open door, assuming the voice had
come from the corridor, and only by the third word did he realize that
the speaker was Harrison.

The patient's head was turned toward Jonas, but his eyes were focused on
the window.

Moving quickly to the side of the bed, Jonas glanced at the
electrocardiograph and saw that Harrison's heart was beating fast but,
thank God, slowing.

"Something's ...        out there," Harrison repeated.

His eyes were not focused on the window sill, on nothing so close as
that, but on some distant point in the stormy night.

"Just rain," Jonas assured him.

"No."




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"Just a little winter rain."

"Something bad," Harrison whispered.

Hurried footsteps echoed in the corridor, and a young nurse burst
through the open door, into the nearly dark room. Her name was Ramona
Perez, and Jonas knew her to be competent and concerned.

"Oh, Doctor Nyebern, good, you're here. The telemetry unit, his
heartbeat "Accelerated, yes, I know. He just woke up."

Ramona came to the bed and switched on the lamp above it, revealing the
patient more clearly.

Harrison was still staring beyond the rain-spotted window, as if
oblivious of Jonas and the nurse. In a voice even softer than before,
heavy with weariness, he repeated: "Something's out there." Then his
eyes fluttered sleepily, and fell shut.

"Mr.   Harrison, can you hear me?" Jonas asked.

The patient did not answer.

The EKG showed a quickly de-accelerating heartbeat: from one-forty to
one-twenty to one hundred beats a minute.

"Mr.   Harrison?"

Ninety per minute.        Eighty.

"He's asleep again," Ramona said.

"Appears to be."

"Just sleeping, though," she said.               "No question of it being a coma
now."

"Not a coma," Jonas agreed.

"And he was speaking.          Did he make sense?"

"Sort of. But hard to tell," Jonas said, leaning over the bed railing
to study the man's eyelids, which fluttered with the rapid movement of
the eyes under them. REM sleep. Harrison was dreaming again.

Outside, the rain suddenly began to fall harder than before.                      The wind
picked up, too, and keened at the window.

Ramona said, "The words I heard were clear, not slurred."

"No.   Not slurred.       And he spoke some complete sentences."

"Then he's not aphasic," she said.               "That's terrific."

Aphasia, the complete inability to speak or understand spoken or written
language, was one of the most devastating forms of brain damage
resulting from disease or injury. Thus affected, a patient was reduced
to using gestures to communicate, and the inadequacy of pantomime soon
cast him into deep depression, from which there was sometimes no coming
back.

Harrison was evidently free of that curse. If he was also free of
paralysis, and if there were not too many holes in his memory, he had a
good chance of eventually getting out of bed and leading a normal life.


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"Let's not jump to conclusions," Jonas said. "Let's not build up any
false hopes. He still has a long way to go. But you can enter on his
record that he regained consciousness for the first time at
eleven-thirty, two hours after resuscitation."

Harrison was murmuring in his sleep.

Jonas leaned over the bed and put his ear close to the patient's lips,
which were barely moving. The words were faint, carried on his shallow
exhalations. It was like a spectral voice heard on an open radio
channel, broadcast from a station halfway around the world, bounced off
a freak inversion layer high in the atmosphere and filtered through so
much space and bad weather that it sounded mysterious and prophetic in
spite of being less than half-intelligible.

"What's he saying?" Ramona asked.

With the howl of the storm rising outside, Jonas was unable to catch
enough of Harrison's words to be sure, but he thought the man was
repeating what he'd said before: "Something's ... out there Abruptly
the wind shrieked, and rain drummed against the window so hard that it
seemed certain to shatter the glass.

Vassago liked the rain. The storm clouds had plated over the sky,
leaving no holes through which the too-bright moon could gaze. The
downpour also veiled the glow of streetlamps and the headlights of
oncoming cars, moderated the dazzle of neon signs, and in general
softened the Orange County night, making it possible for him to drive
with more comfort than could be provided by his sunglasses alone.

He had traveled west from his hideaway, then north along the coast, in
search of a bar where the lights might be low and a woman or two
available for consideration. A lot of places were closed Mondays, and
others didn't appear too active that late at night, between the
half-hour and the witching hour.

At last he found a lounge in Newport Beach, along the Pacific Coast
Highway. It was a tony joint with a canopy to the street, rows of
miniature white lights defining the roof line, and a sign advertising
DANCING WED TIIRU sAT/JoIINNY WITH BIG BAND. Newport was the most
affluent city in the county, with the world's largest private yacht
harbor, so almost any establishment that pretended to a monied clientele
most likely had one.

Beginning mid-week, valet parking was probably provided, which would not
have been good for his purposes, since a valet was a potential witness,
but on a rainy Monday no valet was in sight.

He parked in the lot beside the club, and as he switched off the engine,
the seizure hit him. He felt as if he'd received a mild but sustained
electrical shock. His eyes rolled back in his head, and for a moment he
thought he was having convulsions, because he was unable to breathe or
swallow. An involuntary moan escaped him. The attack lasted only ten
or fifteen seconds, and ended with three words that seemed to have been
spoken inside his head: Something's . out ...

there ... It was not just a random thought sparked by some short
circuiting synapse in his brain, for it came to him in a distinct voice,
with the timbre and inflection of spoken words as distinguished from
thoughts. Not his own voice, either, but that of a stranger. He had an
overpowering sense of another presence in the car, as well, as if a



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spirit had passed through some curtain between worlds to visit with him,
an alien presence that was real in spite of being invisible.

Then the episode ended as abruptly as it had begun.

He sat for a while, waiting for a reoccurrence.

Rain hammered on the roof.

The car ticked and pinged as the engine cooled down.

Whatever had happened, it was over now.

He tried to understand the experience. Had those word something's out
there-been a warning, a psychic premonition? A threat? To what did it
refer?

Beyond the car, there seemed to be nothing special about the night.

Just rain. Blessed darkness. The distorted reflections of electric
lights and signs
shimmered on the wet pavement, in puddles, and in the torrents pouring
along the overflowing gutters. Sparse traffic passed on Pacific Coast
Highway, but as far as he could see, no one was on foot-and he could see
as well as any cat.

After a while he decided that he would understand the episode when he
was meant to understand it. Nothing was to be gained by brooding over
it. If it was a threat, from whatever source, it did not trouble him.

He was incapable of fear. That was the best thing about having left the
world of the living, even if he was temporarily stuck in the borderland
this side of death: nothing in existence held any terror for him.

Nevertheless, that inner voice had been one of the strangest things he
had ever experienced. And he was not exactly without a store of strange
experiences with which to compare it.

He got out of his silver Camaro, slammed the door, and walked to the
club entrance. The rain was cold. In the blustering wind, the fronds
of the palm trees rattled like old bones.

Lindsey Harrison was also on the fifth floor, at the far end of the main
corridor from her husband. Little of the room was revealed when Jonas
entered and approached the side of the bed, for there was not even the
green light from a cardiac monitor. The woman was barely visible.

He wondered if he should try to wake her, and was surprised when she
spoke: "Who're you?"

He said, "I thought you were asleep."

"Can't sleep."

"Didn't they give you something?"

"It didn't help."

As in her husband's room, the rain drove against the window with sullen
fury. Jonas could hear torrents cascading through the confines of a
nearby aluminum downspout.

"How do you feel?" he asked.



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"How the hell do you think I feel?" She tried to infuse the words with
anger, but she was too exhausted and too depressed to manage it.

He put down the bed railing, sat on the edge of the mattress, and held
out one hand, assuming that her eyes were better adapted to the gloom
than his were. "Give me your hand."

"Why?"

"I'm Jonas Nyebern. I'm a doctor. I want to tell you about your
husband, and somehow I think it'll be better if you'll just let me hold
your hand."

She was silent.

"Humor me he said.

Although the woman believed her husband to be dead, Jonas did not mean
to torment her by withholding his report of the resuscitation. From
experience, he knew that good news of this sort could be as shocking to
the recipient as bad news; it had to be delivered with care and
sensitivity.

She had been mildly delirious upon admission to the hospital, largely as
a result of exposure and shock, but that condition had been swiftly
remedied with the administration of heat and medication. She had been
in possession of all her faculties for a few hours now, long enough to
absorb her husband's death and to begin to find her way toward a
tentative accommodation of her loss. Though deep in grief and far from
adjusted to her widowhood, she had by now found a ledge on the emotional
cliff down which she had plunged, a narrow perch, a precarious stability
from which he was about to knock her loose.

Still, he might have been more direct with her if he'd been able to
bring her unalloyed good news. Unfortunately, he could not promise that
her husband was going to be entirely his former self, unmarked by his
experience, able to reenter his old life without a hitch. They would
need hours, perhaps days, in which to examine and evaluate Harrison
before they could hazard a prediction as to the likelihood of a full
recovery. Thereafter, weeks or months of physical and occupational
therapy might lie ahead for him, with no guarantee of effectiveness.

Jonas was still waiting for her hand.                At last she offered it
diffidently.

In his best bedside manner, he quickly outlined the basics of
resuscitation medicine. When she began to realize why he thought she
needed to know about such an esoteric subject, her grip on his hand
suddenly grew tight.

In room 518, Hatch foundered in a sea of bad dreams that were nothing
but disassociated images melding into one another without even the
illogical narrative flow that usually shaped nightmares. Wind-whipped
snow. A huge Ferris wheel sometimes bedecked with festive lights,
sometimes dark and broken and ominous in a night seething with rain.

Groves of scarecrow trees, gnarled and coaly, stripped leafless by
winter. A beer truck angled across a snow-swept highway. A tunnel with
a concrete floor that sloped down into perfect blackness, into something
unknown that filled him with heart-bursting dread. His lost son, Jimmy,
lying sallow-skinned against hospital sheets, dying of cancer. Water,
cold and deep, impenetrable as ink, stretching to all horizons, with no
possible escape. A naked woman, her head on backwards, hands clasping a


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crucifix...

Frequently he was aware of a faceless and mysterious figure at the
perimeter of the dreamscapes, dressed in black like some grim reaper,
moving in such fluid harmony with the shadows that he might have been
only a shadow himself. At other times, the reaper was not part of the
scene but seemed to be the viewpoint through which it was observed, as
if Hatch was looking out through the eyes of another-yes that beheld the
world with all the compassionless, hungry, calculating practicality of a
graveyard rat.

For a time, the dream took on more of a narrative quality, wherein Hatch
found himself running along a train-station platform, trying to catch up
with a passenger car that was slowly pulling away on the outbound track.
Through one of the train windows, he saw Jimmy, gaunt and hollow-eyed in
the grip of his disease, dressed only in a hospital gown, peering sadly
at Hatch, one small hand raised as he waved goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.
Hatch reached desperately for the vertical railing beside the boarding
steps at the end of Jimmy's car, but the train picked up speed; Hatch
lost ground; the steps slipped away.

Jimmy's pale, small face lost definition and finally vanished as the
speeding passenger car dwindled into the terrible nothingness beyond the
station platform, a lightless void of which Hatch only now became aware.
Then another passenger car began to glide past him (clackety-clack,
clackety-clack), and he was startled to see Lindsey seated at one of the
windows, looking out at the platform, a lost expression on her face.
Hatch called to her. "Lindsey!"but she did not hear or see him, she
seemed to be in a trance, so he began to run again, trying to board her
car (clackety-clack, clackety-clack), which drew away from him as
Jimmy's had done. "Lindsey!" His hand was inches from the railing
beside the boarding stairs.... Suddenly the railing and stairs
vanished, and the train was not a train any more.

With the eerie fluidity of all changes in all dreams, it became a roller
coaster in an amusement park, heading out on the start of a thrill ride.
(Clacketyclack.) Hatch came to the end of the platform without being
able to board Lindsey's car, and she rocketed away from him, up the
first steep hill of the long and undulant track. Then the last car in
the caravan passed him, close behind Lindsey's. It held a single
passenger. The figure in black around whom shadows clustered like
ravens on a cemetery fense sat in front of the car, head bowed, his face
concealed by thick hair that fell forward in the fashion of a monk's
hood. (Clackety-clack!) Hatch shouted at Lindsey, warning her to look
back and be aware of what rode in the car behind her, pleading with her
to be careful and hold on tight, for God's sake, hold on tight! The
caterpillar procession of linked cars reached the crest of the hill,
hung there for a moment as if time had been suspended, then disappeared
in a scream-filled plummet down the far side.

Ramona Perez, the night nurse assigned to the fifth-floor wing that
included room 518, stood beside the bed, watching her patient. She was
worried about him, but she was not sure that she should go looking for
Dr. Nyebern yet.

According to the heart monitor, Harrison's pulse was in a highly
fluctuant state. Generally it ranged between a reassuring seventy to
eighty beats per minute. Periodically, however, it raced as high as a
hundred and forty. On the positive side, she observed no indications of
serious arrhythmia.

His blood pressure was affected by his accelerated heartbeat, but he was


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in no apparent danger of stroke or cerebral hemorrhage related to
spiking hypertension, because his systolic reading was never dangerously
high.

He was sweating profusely, and the circles around his eyes were so dark,
they appeared to have been applied with actors' grease paint. He was
shivering in spite of the blankets piled on him. The fingers of his
left hand exposed because of the intravenous line spasmed occasionally,
though not forcefully enough to disturb the needle inserted just below
the crook of his elbow.

In a whisper he repeated his wife's name, sometimes with considerable
urgency: "Lindsey .. Lindsey .. Lindsey, no!"

Harrison was dreaming, obviously, and events in a nightmare could elicit
physiological responses every bit as much as waking experiences.

Finally Ramona decided that the accelerated heartbeat was solely the
result of the poor man's bad dreams, not an indication of genuine
cardiovascular destabilization. He was in no danger. Nevertheless, she
remained at his bedside, watching over him.

Vassago sat at a window table overlooking the harbor. He had been in
the lounge only five minutes, and already he suspected it was not good
hunting grounds. The atmosphere was all wrong. He wished he had not
ordered a drink.

No dance music was provided on Monday nights, but a pianist was at work
in one corner. He played neither gutless renditions of '305 and '40s
songs nor the studiedly bland arrangements of easy-listening
rock-'n'-roll that rotted the brains of regular lounge patrons. But he
spun out the equally noxious repetitive melodies of New Age numbers
composed for those who found elevator music too complex and
intellectually taxing.

Vassago preferred music with a hard beat, fast and driving, something
that put his teeth on edge. Since becoming a citizen of the borderland,
he could not take pleasure in most music, for its orderly structures
irritated him. He could tolerate only music that was atonal, harsh,
unmelodious.

He responded to jarring key changes, thunderously crashing chords, and
squealing guitar riffs that abraded the nerves. He enjoyed discord and
broken patterns of rhythm. He was excited by music that filled his mind
with images of blood and violence.

To Vassago, the scene beyond the big windows, because of its beauty, was
as displeasing as the lounge music. Sailboats and motor yachts crowded
one another at the private docks along the harbor. They were tied up,
sails furled, engines silent, wallowing only slightly because the harbor
was well protected and the storm was not particularly ferocious. Few of
the wealthy owners actually lived aboard, regardless of the size of the
craft or amenities, so lights glowed at only a few of the portholes.
Rain, here and there transmuted into quicksilver by the dock lights,
hammered the boats, beaded on their brightwork, drizzled like molten
metal down their masts and across their decks and out of their scuppers.
He had no tolerance for prettiness, for postcard scenes of harmonious
composition, because they seemed false, a lie about what the world was
really like. He was drawn, instead, to visual discord, jagged shapes,
malignant and festering forms.

With its plush chairs and low amber lighting, the lounge was too soft


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for a hunter like him.          It dulled his killing instincts.

He surveyed the patrons, hoping to spot an object of the quality
suitable for his collection. If he saw something truly superb that
excited his acquisitional fever, even the stultifying atmosphere would
not be able to sap his energy.

A few men sat at the bar, but they were of no interest to him. The
three men in his collection had been his second, fourth, and fifth
acquisitions, taken because they had been vulnerable and in lonely
circumstances that allowed him to overpower them and take them away
without being seen.

He had no aversion to killing men, but preferred women.                    Young women.

He liked to get them before they could breed more life.

The only really young people among the customers were four women in
their twenties who were seated by the windows, three tables away from
him. They were tipsy and a little giddy, hunched over as if sharing
gossip, talking intently, periodically bursting into gales of laughter.

One of them was lovely enough to engage Vassago's hatred of beautiful
things. She had enormous chocolate-brown eyes, and an animal grace that
reminded him of a doe. He dubbed her "Bambi." Her raven hair was cut
into short wings, exposing the lower halves of her ears.

They were exceptional ears, large but delicately formed. He thought he
might be able to do something interesting with them, and he continued to
watch her, trying to decide if she was up to his standards.

Bambi talked more than her friends, and she                 was the loudest of the
group. Her laugh was the loudest, as well,                  a jackass braying. She was
exceptionally attractive, but her incessant                 chatter and annoying
laughter spoiled the package. Clearly, she                  loved the sound of her own
voice.

She'd be vastly improved, he thought, if she were to be stricken deaf
and mute.

Inspiration seized him, and he sat up straighter in his chair. By
removing her ears, tucking them into her dead mouth, and sewing her lips
shut, he would be neatly symbolizing the fatal flaw in her beauty.

It was a vision of such simplicity, yet such power, that. One rum and
Coke," the waitress said, putting a glass and paper cocktail napkin on
the table in front of Vassago. "You want to run a tab?"

He looked up at her, blinking in confusion. She was a stout middle-aged
woman with auburn hair. He could see her quite clearly through his
sunglasses, but in his fever of creative excitement, he had difficulty
placing her.

Finally he said, "Tab?          Uh, no.     Cash, thank you, ma'am."

When he took out his wallet, it didn't feel like a wallet at all but
like one of Bambi's ears might feel. When he slid his thumb back and
forth across the smooth leather, he felt not what was there but what
might soon be available for his caress: delicately shaped ridges of
cartilage forming the auricula and pinna, the graceful curves of the
channels that focused sound waves inward toward the tympanic membrane.

...


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He realized the waitress had spoken to him again, stating the price of
his drink, and then he realized that it was the second time she had done
so- He had been fingering his wallet for long, delicious seconds,
daydreaming of death and disfigurement.

He fished out a crisp bill without looking at it, and handed it to her.

"This is a hundred," she said.             "Don't you have anything smaller?"

"No, ma'am, sorry," he said, impatient now to be rid of her, "that's
it."

"I'll have to go back to the bar to get this much change."

"Okay, yeah, whatever.          Thank you, ma'am."

As she started away from his table, he returned his attention to the
four young women-only to discover that they were leaving. They were
nearing the door, pulling on their coats as they went.

He started to rise, intending to follow them, but he froze when he heard
himself say, "Lindsey."

He didn't call out the name. No one in the bar heard him say it.                         He
was the only one who reacted, and his reaction was one of total
surprise.

For a moment he hesitated with one hand on the table, one on the arm of
his chair, halfway to his feet. While he was paralyzed in that posture
of indecisiveness, the four young women left the lounge. Bambi became
of less interest to him than the mysterious name- 'Lindsey"-so he sat
down.

He did not know anyone named Lindsey.

He had never known anyone named Lindsey.

It made no sense that he would suddenly speak the name aloud.

He looked out the window at the harbor. Hundreds of millions of dollars
of ego-gratification rose and fell and wallowed side to side on the
rolling water. The sunless sky was another sea above, as cold and
merciless as the one below. The air was full of rain like millions of
gray and silver threads, as if nature was trying to sew the ocean to the
heavens and thereby obliterate the narrow space between, where life was
possible.

Having been one of the living, one of the dead, and now one of the
living dead, he had seen himself as the ultimate sophisticate, as
experienced as any man born of woman could ever hope to be. He had
assumed that the world held nothing new for him, had nothing to teach
him. Now this. First the seizure in the car: Something's out there!

And now Lindsey. The two experiences were different, because he heard
no voice in his head the second time, and when he spoke it was with his
own famIliar voice and not that of a stranger. But both events were so
peculiar that he knew they were linked. As he gazed at the moored
boats, the harbor, and the dark world beyond, it began to seem more
mysterious to him than it had in ages.

He picked up his rum and Coke.             He took a long swallow of it.

As he was putting the drink down, he said, "Lindsey."


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The glass rattled against the table, and he almost knocked it over,
because the name surprised him again. He hadn't spoken it aloud to
ponder the meaning of it. Rather, it had burst from him as before, a
bit more breathlessly this time and somewhat louder.

Interesting.

The lounge seemed to be a magical place for him.

He decided to settle down for a while and wait to see what might happen
next.

When the waitress arrived with his change, he said, "I'd like another
drink, ma'am." He handed her a twenty. "This'll take care of it, and
please keep the change."

Happy with the tip, she hurried back to the bar.

Vassago turned to the window again, but this time he looked at his own
reflection in the glass instead of at the harbor beyond. The dim lights
of the lounge threw insufficient glare on the pane to provide him with a
detailed image. In that murky mirror, his sunglasses did not register
well.

His face appeared to have two gaping eye sockets like those of a
fleshless skull. The illusion pleased him.

In a husky whisper not loud enough to draw the attention of anyone else
in the lounge, but with more urgency than before, he said, "Lindsey,
no!"

He had not anticipated that outburst any more than the previous two, but
it did not rattle him. He had quickly adapted to the fact of these
mysterious events, and had begun to try to understand them. Nothing
could surprise him for long. After all, he had been to Hell and back,
both to the real Hell and the one beneath the funhouse, so the intrusion
of the fantastic into real life did not frighten or awe him.

He drank a third rum and Coke. When more than an hour passed without
further developments, and when the bartender announced the last round of
the night, Vassago left.

The need was still with him, the need to murder and create. It was a
fierce heat in his gut that had nothing to do with the rum, such a
steely tension in his chest that his heart might have been a clockwork
mechanism with its spring wound to the breaking point. He wished that
he had gone after the doe-eyed woman whom he had named Bambi.

Would he have removed her ears when she was dead at last-or while she
was still alive?

Would she have been capable of understanding the artistic statement he
was making as he sewed her lips shut over her full mouth? Probably not.

None of the others had the wit or insight to appreciate his singular
talent.

In the nearly deserted parking lot, he stood in the rain for a while,
letting it soak him and extinguish some of the fire of his obsession.

It was nearly two in the morning. Not enough time remained, before
dawn, to do any hunting. He would have to return to his hideaway


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without an addition to his collection. If he were to get any sleep
during the coming day and be prepared to hunt with the next nightfall,
he had to dampen his blazing creative drive.

Eventually he began to shiver. The heat within him gave way to a
relentless chill. He raised one hand, touched his cheek. His face felt
cold, but his fingers were colder, like the marble hand of a statue of
David that he'd admired in a memorial garden at Forest Lawn Cemetery
when he had still been one of the living.

That was better.

As he opened the car door, he looked around once more at the rain-riven
night. This time of his own volition, he said, "Lindsey?"

No answer.

Whoever she might be, she was not yet destined to cross his path.

He would have to be patient. He was mystified, therefore fascinated and
curious. But whatever was happening would happen at its own pace.

One of the virtues of the dead was patience, and though he was still
half-alive, he knew he could find within himself the strength to match
the forbearance of the deceased.

Early Tuesday morning, an hour after dawn, Lindsey could sleep no more.

She ached in every muscle and joint, and what sleep she'd gotten had not
lessened her exhaustion by any noticeable degree. She did not want
sedatives. Unable to bear any further delay, she insisted they take her
to Hatch's room. The charge nurse cleared it with Jonas Nyebern, who
was still in the hospital, then wheeled Lindsey down the hall to 518.

Nyebern was there, red-eyed and rumpled. The sheets on the bed nearest
the door were not turned back, but they were wrinkled, as if the doctor
had stretched out to rest at least once during the night.

By now Lindsey had learned enough about Nyebern-some of it from him,
much of it from the nurses to know that he was a local legend. He had
been a busy cardiovascular surgeon, but over the past two years, after
losing his wife and two children in some kind of horrible accident, he
had devoted steadily less time to surgery and more to resuscitation
medicine.

His commitment to his work was too strong to be called mere dedication.

It was more of an obsession. In a society that was struggling to emerge
from three decades of self-indulgence and me-firstism, it was easy to
admire a man as selflessly committed as Nyebern, and everyone did seem
to admire him.

Lindsey, for one, admired the hell out of him.                   After all, he had saved
Hatch's life.

His weariness betrayed only by his bloodshot eyes and the rumpled
condition of his clothes, Nyebern moved swiftly to pull back the lacy
curtain that surrounded the bed nearest the window. He took the handles
of Lindsey's wheelchair and rolled her to her husband's bedside.

The storm had passed during the night. Morning sun slanted through the
slats of the Levolor blinds, striping the sheets and blankets with
shadow and golden light.


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Hatch lay beneath that faux tiger skin, only one arm and his face
exposed. Although his skin was painted with the same jungle-cat
camouflage as the bedding, his extreme pallor was evident. Seated in
the wheelchair, regarding Hatch at an odd angle through the bed railing,
Lindsey grew queasy at the sight of an ugly bruise that spread from the
stitched gash on his forehead. But for the proof of the cardiac monitor
and the barely perceptible rise-and-fall of Hatch's chest as he
breathed, she would have assumed he was dead.

But he was alive, alive, and she felt a tightness in her chest and
throat that presaged tears as surely as lightning was a sign of oncoming
thunder.

The prospect of tears surprised her, quickening her breath.

From the moment their Honda had gone over the brink and into the ravine,
through the entire physical and emotional ordeal of the night just
passed, Lindsey had never cried. She didn't pride herself on stoicism;
it was just the way she was.

No, strike that.

It was just the way she had to become during Jimmy's bout with cancer.

From the day of diagnosis until the end, her boy had taken nine months
to die, as long as she had taken to lovingly shape him within her womb.

Every day of that dying, Lindsey had wanted nothing more than to curl up
in bed with the covers over her head and cry, just let the tears pour
forth until all the moisture in her body was gone, until she dried up
and crumbled into dust and ceased to exist. She had wept, at first.

But her tears frightened Jimmy, and she realized that any expression of
her inner turmoil was an unconscionable self-indulgence. Even when she
cried in private, Jimmy knew it later; he had always been perceptive and
sensitive beyond his years, and his disease seemed to make him more
acutely aware of everything. Current theory of immunology gave
considerable weight to the importance of a positive attitude, laughter,
and confidence as weapons in the battle against life-threatening
illness. So she had learned to suppress her terror at the prospect of
losing him. She had given him laughter, love, confidence, courage and
never a reason to doubt her conviction that he would beat the
malignancy.

By the time Jimmy died, Lindsey had become so successful at repressing
her tears that she could not simply turn them on again. Denied the
release that easy tears might have given her, she spiraled down into a
lost time of despair. She dropped weight-fifteen, twenty-seven pounds,
until she was emaciated. She could not be bothered to wash her hair or
look after her complexion or press her clothes. Convinced that she had
failed Jimmy, that she had encouraged him to rely on her but then had
not been special enough to help him reject his disease, she did not
believe she deserved to take pleasure from food, from her appearance, a
book, a movie, music, from anything. Eventually, with much patience and
kindness, Hatch helped her see that her insistence on taking
responsibility for an act of blind fate was, in its way, as much a
disease as Jimmy's cancer had been.

Though she had still not been able to cry, she had climbed out of the
psychological hole she'd dug for herself. Ever since, however, she had
lived on the rim of it, her balance precarious.



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Now, her first tears in a long, long time were surprising, unsettling.

Her eyes stung, became hot. Her vision blurred. Disbelieving, she
raised one shaky hand to touch the warm tracks on her cheeks.

Nyebern plucked a Kleenex from a box on the nightstand and gave it to
her.

That small kindness affected her far out of proportion to the
consideration behind it, and a soft sob escaped her.

"Lindsey Because his throat was raw from his ordeal, his voice was
hoarse, barely more than a whisper. But she knew at once who had spoken
to her, and that it was not Nyebern.

She wiped hastily at her eyes with the Kleenex and leaned forward in the
wheelchair until her forehead touched the cold bed railing.

Hatch's head was turned toward her.               His eyes were open, and they looked
clear, alert.

"Lindsey ."

He had found the strength to push his right hand out from under the
blankets, stretching it toward her.

She reached between the railings.              She took his hand in hers.

His skin was dry. A thin bandage was taped over his abraded palm. He
was too weak to give her hand more than the faintest squeeze, but he was
warm, blessedly warm, and alive.

"You're crying," Hatch said.

She was, too, harder than ever, a storm of tears, but she was smiling
through them. Grief had not been able to free her first tears in five
terrible years but joy had at last unleashed them. She was crying for
joy, which seemed right, seemed healing. She felt a loosening of
long-sustained tensions in her heart, as if the knotted adhesions of old
wounds were dissolving, all because Hatch was alive, had been dead but
was now alive.

If a miracle couldn't lift the heart, what could?

Hatch said, "I love you."

The storm of tears became a flood, ohgod, an ocean, and she heard
herself blubber "I love you" back at him, then she felt Nyebern put a
hand on her shoulder comfortingly, another small kindness that seemed
huge, which only made her cry harder. But she was laughing even as she
was weeping, and she saw that Hatch was smiling, too.

"It's okay," Hatch said hoarsely.              "The worst is over.         The worst is ...
behind us now.

During the daylight hours, when he stayed beyond the reach of the sun,
Vassago parked the Camaro in an underground garage that had once been
filled with electric trams, carts, and lorries used by the
park-maintenance crew. All of those vehicles were long gone, reclaimed
by creditors. The Camaro stood alone in the center of that dank,
windowless space.

From the garage, Vassago descended wide stairs-the elevators had not


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operated in years-to an even deeper subterranean level. The entire park
was built on a basement that had once contained the security
headquarters with scores of video monitors able to reveal every niche of
the grounds, a video control center that had been an even more complex
high-tech nest of computers and monitors, carpentry and electrical
shops, a staff cafeteria, lockers and changing rooms for the hundreds of
costumed employees working each shift, an emergency imlrmary, business
offices, and much more.

Vassago passed the door to that level without hesitating and continued
down to the sub-basement at the very bottom of the complex. Even in the
dry sands of southern California, the concrete walls exuded a damp lime
smell at that depth.

No rats fled before him, as he had expected during his first descent
into those realms many months ago. He had seen no rats at all,
anywhere, in all the weeks he had roamed the tenebrous corridors and
silent rooms of that vast structure, though he would not have been
averse to sharing space with them. He liked rats. They were
carrion-eaters, revelers in decay, scurrying janitors that cleaned up in
the wake of death. Maybe they had never invaded the cellars of the park
because, after its closure, the place had been pretty much stripped
bare. It was all concrete, plastic, and metal, nothing biodegradable
for rats to feed on, a little dusty, yes, with some crumpled paper here
and there, but otherwise as sterile as an orbiting space station and of
no interest to rodents.

Eventually rats might find his collection in Hell at the bottom of the
funhouse and, having fed, spread out from there. Then he would have
some suitable company in the bright hours when he could not venture out
in comfort.

At the bottom of the fourth and last flight of stairs, two levels below
the underground garage, Vassago passed through a doorway. The door was
missing, as were virtually all the doors in the complex, hauled off by
the salvagers and resold for a few bucks apiece.

Beyond was an eighteen-foot-wide tunnel. The floor was flat with a
yellow stripe painted down the center, as if it were a highway-which it
had been, of sorts. Concrete walls curved up to meet and form the
ceiling.

Part of that lowest level was comprised of storerooms that had once held
huge quantities of supplies. Styrofoam cups and burger packages,
cardboard popcorn boxes and french-fry holders, paper napkins and little
foil packets of ketchup and mustard for the many snack stands scattered
over the grounds. Business forms for the offices. Packages of
fertilizer and cans of insecticide for the landscape crew. All of
that-and everything else a small city might need-had been removed long
ago. The rooms were empty.

A network of tunnels connected the storage chambers to elevators that
led upward into all the main attractions and restaurants- Goods could be
delivered-or repairmen conveyed-throughout the park without disturbing
the paying customers and shattering the fantasy they had paid to
experience. Numbers were painted on the walls every hundred feet, to
mark routes, and at intersections there were even signs with arrows to
provide better directions:. Vassago turned right at the next
intersection, left at the one after that, then right again. Even if his
extraordinary vision had not permitted him to see in those obscure
byways, he would have been able to follow the route he desired, for by
now he knew the desiccated arteries of the dead park as well as he knew


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the contours of his own body.

Eventually he came to a sign-OUT OF ORDER beside an elevator. The doors
of the elevator were gone, as were the cab and the lift mechanism, sold
for reuse or for scrap. But the shaft remained, dropping about four
feet below the floor of the tunnel, and leading up through five stories
of darkness to the level that housed security and video control and park
offices, on to the lowest level of the funhouse where he kept his
collection, then to the second and third floors of that attraction.

He slipped over the edge, into the bottom of the elevator shaft.                       He sat
on the old mattress he had brought in to make his hideaway more
comfortable.

When he tilted his head back, he could see only a couple of floors into
the unlighted shaft. The rusted steel bars of a service ladder dwindled
up into the gloom.

If he climbed the ladder to the lowest level of the funhouse, he would
come out in a service room behind the walls of Hell, from which the
machinery operating the gondola chain--drive had been accessed and
repaired-before it had been carted away forever.

A door from that chamber, disguised on the far side as a concrete
boulder, opened into the now-dry lake of Hades, from which Lucifer
towered.

He was at the deepest point of his hideaway, four feet more than two
stories below Hell. There, he felt at home as much as it was possible
for him to feel at home anywhere. Out in the world of the living, he
moved with the confidence of a secret master of the universe, but he
never felt as if he belonged there. Though he was not actually afraid
of anything any more, a trace current of anxiety buzzed through him
every minute that he spent beyond the stark, black corridors and
sepulchral chambers of his hideaway.

After a while he opened the lid of a sturdy plastic cooler with a
Styrofoam lining, in which he kept cans of root beer. He had always
liked root beer. It was too much trouble to keep ice in the cooler, so
he just drank the soda warm. He didn't mind.

He also kept snack foods in the cooler: Mars bars, Reese's peanut butter
cups, Clark Bars, a bag of potato chips, packages of peanut-butter-and
cheese crackers, Mallomars, and Oreo cookies. When he had crossed into
the borderland, something had happened to his metabolism; he seemed to
be able to eat anything he wanted and burn it off without gaining weight
or turning soft. And what he wanted to eat, for some reason he didn't
understand, was what he had liked when he'd been a kid.

He opened a root beer and took a long, warm swallow.

He withdrew a single cookie from the bag of Oreos. He carefully
separated the two chocolate wafers without damaging them. The circle of
white icing stuck entirely to the wafer in his left hand. That meant he
was going to be rich and famous when he grew up. If it had stuck to the
one in his right hand, it would have meant that he was going to be
famous but not necessarily rich, which could mean just about anything
from being a rock-'n'-roll star to an assassin who would take out the
President of the United States. If some of the icing stuck to both
wafers, that meant you had to eat another cookie or risk having no
future at all.




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As he licked the sweet         icing, letting it dissolve slowly on his tongue,
he stared up the empty         elevator shaft, thinking about how interesting it
was that he had chosen         the abandoned amusement park for his hideaway
when the world offered         so many dark and lonely places from which to
choose.

He had been there a few times as a boy, when the park was still in
operation, most recently eight years ago, when he had been twelve,
little more than a year before the operation closed down. On that most
special evening of his childhood, he had committed his first murder
there, beginning his long romance with death. Now he was back.

He licked away the last of the icing.

He ate the first chocolate wafer.              He ate the second.

He took another cookie out of the bag.

He sipped the warm root beer.

He wished he were dead. Fully dead.                It was the only way to begin his
existence on the Other Side.

"If wishes were cows," he said, "we'd eat steak every day, wouldn't we?"

He ate the second cookie, finished the root beer, then stretched out on
his back to sleep.

Sleeping, he dreamed. They were peculiar dreams of people he had never
seen, places he had never been, events that he had never witnessed.

Water all around him, chunks of floating ice, snow sheeting through a
hard wind. A woman in a wheelchair, laughing and weeping at the same
time. A hospital bed, banded by shadows and stripes of golden sunlight.

The woman in the wheelchair, laughing and weeping. The woman in the
wheelchair, laughing. The woman in the wheelchair. The woman.

In the fields of life, a harvest sometimes comes far out of season, when
we thought the earth was old and could see no earthly reason to rise for
work at break of dawn, and put our muscles to the test.

With winter here and autumn gone, it just seems best to rest, to rest.

But under winter feels so cold, wait the dormant seeds of seasons
unborn, and so the heart does hold hope that heals all bitter lesions.

if he were an accused infidel on trial for his life during the
Inquisition.

Two priests were present in the attorney's office. Although only of
average height, Father Jiminez was as imposing as any man a foot taller,
with jet-black hair and eyes even darker, in a black clerical suit with
a Roman collar. He stood with his back to the windows. The gently
swaying palm trees and blue skies of Newport Beach behind him did not
lighten the atmosphere in the mahogany-paneled, antique-filled office
where they were gathered, and in silhouette Jiminez was an ominous
figure. Father Duran, still in his twenties and perhaps twenty-five
years younger than Father Jiminez, was thin, with ascetic features and a
pallid complexion.

The young priest appeared to be enthralled by a collection of Meiji
Period Satsuma vases, incensers, and bowls in a large display case at



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the far end of the office, but Hatch could not escape the feeling that
Duran was faking interest in the Japanese porcelains and was actually
furtively observing him and Lindsey where they sat side by side on a
Louis XVI sofa.

Two nuns were present, as well, and they seemed, to Hatch, more
threatening than the priests. They were of an order that favored the
voluminous, old-fashioned habits not seen so often these days. They
wore starched wimples, their faces framed in ovals of white linen that
made them look especially severe. Sister Immaculata, who was in charge
of St. Thomas's Home for Children, looked like a great black bird of
prey perched on the armchair to the right of the sofa, and Hatch would
not have been surprised if she had suddenly let out a screechy cry,
leapt into flight with a great flap of her robes, swooped around the
room, and dive-bombed him with the intention of pecking off his nose.

Her executive assistant was a somewhat younger, intense nun who paced
ceaselessly and had a stare more penetrating than a steel-cutting laser
beam. Hatch had temporarily forgotten her name and thought of her as
The Nun with No Name, because she reminded him of Clint Eastwood playing
The Man with No Name in those old spaghetti Westerns.

He was being unfair, more than unfair, a little irrational due to a
world-class case of nerves. Everyone in the attorney's office was there
to help him and Lindsey. Father Jiminez, the rector of St.

Thomas's Church, who raised much of the annual budget of the orphanage
headed by Sister Immaculata, was really no more ominous than the priest
in Going My Way, a Latino Bing Crosby, and Father Duran seemed
sweet-tempered and shy. In reality, Sister Immaculata looked no more
like a bird of prey than she did a stripper, and The Nun with No Name
had a genuine and almost constant smile that more than compensated for
whatever negative emotions one might choose to read into her piercing
stare.

The priests and nuns tried to keep a light conversation going; Hatch and
Lindsey were, in fact, the ones who were too tense to be as sociable as
the situation required So much was at stake. That was what made Hatch
jumpy, which was unusual, because he was ordinarily the most mellow man
to be found outside of the third hour of a beer-drinking contest. He
wanted the meeting to go well because his and Lindsey's happiness, their
future, the success of their new life depended on itWell, that was not
true, either. That was overstating the case again.

He couldn't help it.

Since he had been resuscitated more than seven weeks ago, he and Lindsey
had undergone an emotional sea change together. The long, smothering
tide of despair, which had rolled over them upon Jimmy's death, abruptly
abated. They realized they were still together only by virtue of a
medical miracle. Not to be thankful for that reprieve, not to fully
enjoy the borrowed time they had been given, would have made them
ungrateful to both God and their physicians. More than that-it would
have been stupid. They had been right to mourn Jimmy, but somewhere
along the way, they had allowed grief to degenerate into self-pity and
chronic depression, which had not been right at all.

they were more stubborn than he had thought. The important thing was
that they had been jolted and were determined to get on with their lives
at last.

To both of them, getting on with life meant having a child in the house


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again. The desire for a child was not a sentimental attempt to
recapture the mood of the past, and it wasn't a neurotic need to replace
Jimmy in order to finish getting over his death. They were just good
with kids; they liked kids; and giving of themselves to a child was
enormously satisfying.

They had to adopt. That was the hitch. Lindsey's pregnancy had been
troubled, and her labor had been unusually long and painful. Jimmy's
birth was a near thing, and when at last he made it into the world, the
doctors informed Lindsey that she would not be capable of having any
more children.

The Nun with No Name stopped pacing, pulled up the voluminous sleeve of
her habit, and looked at her wristwatch. "Maybe I should go see what's
keeping her."

"Give the child a little more time," Sister Immaculata said quietly.

With one plump white hand, she smoothed the folds of her habit. "If you
go to check on her, she'll feel you don't trust her to be able to take
care of herself. There's nothing in the ladies' restroom that she can't
deal with herself. I doubt she even had the need to use it. She
probably just wanted to be alone a few minutes before the meeting, to
settle her nerves."

To Lindsey and Hatch, Father Jiminez said, "Sorry about the delay."

"That's okay," Hatch said, fidgeting on the sofa.                    "We understand.

We're a little nervous ourselves."

Initial inquiries made it clear that a lot-a veritable army-of couples
were waiting for children to become available for adoption. Some had
been kept in suspense for two years. After being childless for five
years already, Hatch and Lindsey didn't have the patience to go on the
bottom of anyone's waiting list.

They were left with only two options, the first of which was to attempt
to adopt a child of another race, black or Asian or Hispanic. Most
would be adoptive parents were white and were waiting for a white baby
that might conceivably pass for their own, while countless orphans of
various minority groups were destined for institutions and unfulfilled
dreams of being part of a family. Skin color meant nothing to either
Hatch or Lindsey. They would have been happy with any child regardless
of its heritage. But in recent years, misguided do-goodism in the name
of civil rights had led to the imposition of an array of new rules and
regulations Agencies enforced them with mind-numbing exactitude. The
theory was that no child could be truly happy if raised outside of its
ethnic group, which was the kind of elitist nonsense and reverse
racism-that sociologists and academia formulated without consulting the
lonely kids they purported to protect.

The second option was to adopt a disabled child. There were far fewer
disabled than minority orphans-even including technical orphans whose
parents were alive somewhere but who'd been abandoned to the care of the
church or state because of their differentness. On the other hand,
though fewer in number, they were in even less demand than minority
kids. They had the tremendous advantage of being currently beyond the
interest of any pressure group eager to apply politically correct
standards to their care and handling. Sooner or later, no doubt, a
marching moron army would secure the passage of laws forbidding adoption
of a greeneyed, blond, deaf child by anyone but greened, blond, deaf


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parents, but Hatch and Lindsey had the good fortune to have submitted an
application before the forces of chaos had descended.

Sometimes, when he thought about the troublesome bureaucrats they had
dealt with six weeks ago, when they had first decided to adopt, he
wanted to go back to those agencies and throttle the social workers who
had thwarted them, just choke a little common sense into them. And
wouldn't the expression of that desire make the good nuns and priests of
St. Thomas's Home eager to commend one of their charges to his care!

"You're still feeling well, no lasting effects from your ordeal, eating
well, sleeping well?" Father Jiminez inquired, obviously just to pass
the time while they waited for the subject of the meeting to arrive, not
meaning to impugn Hatch's claim to a full recovery and good health.

Lindsey-by nature more nervous than Hatch, and usually more prone to
overreaction than he was-leaned forward on the sofa. Just a touch
sharply, she said, "Hatch is at the top of the recovery curve for people
who've been resuscitated. Dr. Nyebern's ecstatic about him, given him
a clean bill of health, totally clean. It was all in our application."

Trying to soften Lindsey's reaction lest the priests and nuns start to
wonder if she was protesting too much, Hatch said, "I'm terrific,
really. I'd recommend a brief death to everyone. It relaxes you, gives
you a calmer perspective on life."

Everyone laughed politely.

In truth, Hatch was in excellent health. During the four days following
reanimation, he had suffered weakness, dizziness, nausea, lethargy, and
some memory lapses. But his strength, memory, and intellectual
functions returned one hundred percent. He had been back to normal for
almost seven weeks.

Jiminez's casual reference to sleeping habits had rattled Hatch a
little, which was probably what had also put Lindsey on edge. He had
not been fully honest when he had implied he was sleeping well, but his
strange dreams and the curious emotional effects they had on him were
not serious, hardly worth mentioning, so he did not feel that he had
actually lied to the priest.

They were so close to getting their new life started that he did not
want to say the wrong thing and cause any delays. Though Catholic
adoption services took considerable care in the placement of children,
they were not pointlessly slow and obstructive, as were public agencies,
especially when the would-be adopters were solid members of the
community like Hatch and Lindsey, and when the adoptee was a disabled
child with no option except continued institutionalization.

The future could begin for them this week, as long as they gave the
folks from St. Thomas's, who were already on their side, no reason to
reconsider.

Hatch was a little surprised by the piquancy of his desire to be a
father again. He felt as if he had been only half-alive, at best,
during the past five years. Now suddenly all the unused energies of
that half-decade flooded into him, overcharging him, making colors more
vibrant and sounds more melodious and feelings more intense, filling him
with a passion to go, do, see, live. And be somebody's dad again.

"I was wondering if I could ask you something," Father Duran said to
Hatch, turning away from the Satsuma collection. His wan complexion and



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sharp features were enlivened by owlish eyes, full of warmth and
intelligence, enlarged by thick glasses. "It's a little personal, which
is why I hesitate."

"Oh, sure, anything," Hatch said.

The young priest said, "Some people who've been clinically dead for
short periods of time, a minute or two, report ... well ... a certain
similar experience....

"A sense of rushing through a tunnel with an awesome light at the far
end," Hatch said, "a feeling of great peace, of going home at last?"

"Yes," Duran said, his pale face brightening.                   "That's what I meant
exactly."

Father Jiminez and the nuns were looking at Hatch with new interest, and
he wished he could tell them what they wanted to hear. He glanced at
Lindsey on the sofa beside him, then around at the assemblage, and said,
"I'm sorry, but I didn't have the experience so many people have
reported."

Father Duran's thin shoulders sagged a little.                   "Then what did you
experience?"

Hatch shook his head.          "Nothing.      I wish I had.        It would be ...

comforting, wouldn't it? But in that sense, I guess I had a boring
death. I don't remember anything whatsoever from the time I was knocked
out when the car rolled over until I woke up hours later in a hospital
bed, looking at rain beating on a windowpanee-" He was interrupted by
the arrival of Salvatore Gujilio in whose office they were waiting.
Gujilio, a huge man, heavy and tall, swinging the door wide and entered
as he always did-taking big strides instead of ordinary steps, closing
the door behind him in a grand sweeping gesture. With the unstoppable
determination of a force of nature-rather like a disciplined tornado-he
swept around the room, greeting them one by one.

Hatch would not have been surprised to see furniture spun aloft and
artwork flung off walls as the attorney passed, for he seemed to radiate
enough energy to levitate anything within his immediate sphere of
influence.

Keeping up a continuous line of patter, Gujilio gave Jiminez a bear hug,
shook hands vigorously with Duran, and bowed to each of the nuns with
the sincerity of a passionate monarchist greeting members of the royal
family. Gujilio bonded with people as quickly as one piece of pottery
to another under the influence of super glue, and by their second
meeting he'd greeted and said goodbye to Lindsey with a hug.

She liked the man and didn't mind the hugging, but as she had told
Hatch, she felt like a very small child embracing a sumo wrestler. "He
lifts me off my feet, for God's sake," she'd said. Now she stayed on
the sofa instead of rising, and merely shook hands with the attorney.

Hatch rose and extended his right hand, prepared to see it engulfed as
if it were a speck of food in a culture dish filled with hungry amoebas,
which is exactly what happened. Gujilio, as always, took Hatch's hand
in both of his, and since each of his mitts was half-again the size of
any ordinary man's, it wasn't so much a matter of shaking as being
shaken.

"What a wonderful day," Gujilio said, "a special day.                      I hope for


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everyone's sake it goes as smooth as glass."

The attorney donated a certain number of hours a week to St. Thomas's
church and the orphanage. He appeared to take great satisfaction in
connecting adoptive parents with disabled kids.

"Regina's on her way from the ladies,"               Gujilio told them. "She stopped
to chat a moment with my receptionist,               that's all. She's nervous, I
think, trying to delay a little longer               until she has her courage screwed
up as far as it'll go. She'll be here                in a moment."

Hatch looked at Lindsey.           She smiled nervously and took his hand.

"Now, you understand," Salvatore Gujilio said, looming over them like
one of those giant balloons in a Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, "that
the point of this meeting is for you to get to know Regina and for her
to get to know you. Nobody makes a decision right here, today. You go
away, think about it, and let us know tomorrow or the day after whether
this is the one. The same goes for Regina. She has a day to think
about it."

"It's a big step," Father Jiminez said.

"An enormous step," Sister Immaculata concurred.

Squeezing Hatch's hand, Lindsey said, "We understand."

The Nun with No Name went to the door, opened it, and peered down the
hallway. Evidently Regina was not in sight.

Rounding his desk, Gujilio said, "She's coming, I'm sure."

The attorney settled his considerable bulk into the executive office
chair beside his desk, but because he was six-feet-five, he seemed
almost as tall seated as standing. The office was furnished entirely
with antiques, and the desk was actually a Napoleon III table so fine
that Hatch wished he had something like it in the front window of his
shop. Banded by ormolu, the exotic woods of the marquetry top depicted
a central cartouche with a detailed musical trophy over a conforming
frieze of stylized foliage. The whole was raised on circular legs with
a can thus-leaf ormolu joined by a convoluted X stretcher centered with
an ormolu urn finial, on toupie feet. At every meeting, Gujilio's size
and dangerous levels of kinetic energy room, saying, "Here she comes,"
as if she didn't want Regina to think she had been looking for her.

The sound came again.          Then again.       And again.

It was rhythmical and getting louder.

Thud- Thud.

Lindsey's hand tightened on Hatch's.

Thud Thud!

Someone seemed to be keeping time to an unheard tune by rapping a lead
pipe against the hardwood floor of the hallway beyond the door.

Puszled, Hatch looked at Father Jiminez, who was staring at the floor,
shaking his head, his state of mind not easy to read. As the sound grew
louder and closer, Father Duran stared at the half-open hall door with
astonishment, as did The Nun with No Name. Salvatore Gujilio rose from
his chair, looking alarmed. Sister Immaculata's pleasantly ruddy cheeks



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were now as white as the linen band that framed her face.

Hatch became aware of a softer scraping between each of the hard sounds.

Thud!   Sccccuuuurrrr...         Thud!     Sccccuuuurrrr..

As the sounds grew nearer, their effect rapidly increased, until Hatch's
mind was filled with images from a hundred old horror films: the-thing
from-out of the-lagoon hitching crablike toward its prey; the-thing-from
out-of-the-crypt shuffling along a graveyard path under a gibbous moon;
the-thing-from-another-world propelling itself on God-knows-what sort of
arachnoid-reptilian-horned feet.

THUD!

The windows seemed to rattle.

Or was that his imagination?

Sccccuuuurrrr..

A shiver went up his spine.

THUD!

He looked around at the alarmed attorney, the head-shaking priest, the
wide-eyed younger priest, the two pale nuns, then quickly back at the
half-pen door, wondering just exactly what sort of disability this child
had been born with, half expecting a startlingly tall and twisted figure
to from a laboratory where the scientists are doing some really
interesting genetic research. A shadow tilted across the threshold.

Hatch realized that Lindsey's grip on his hand had become downright
painful. And his palm was damp with sweat.

The weird sounds stopped.           A hush of expectation had fallen over the
room.

Slowly the door to the hall was pushed all the way open.

Regina took a single step inside. She dragged her right leg as if it
were a dead weight: sccccuuuurrrr. Then she slammed it down: THUD!

She stopped to look around at everyone.                 Challengingly.

Hatch found it difficult to believe that she had been the source of all
that ominous noise. She was small for a ten-year-old girl, a bit
shorter and more slender than the average kid her age. Her freckles,
pert nose, and beautiful deep-auburn hair thoroughly disqualified her
for the role of the-thing-from-the-lagoon or any other shudder-making
creature, although there was something in her solemn gray eyes that
Hatch did not expect to see in the eyes of a child. An adult awareness.
A heightened perceptivity. But for those eyes and an aura of iron
determination, the girl seemed fragile, almost frighteningly delicate
and vulnerable.

Hatch was reminded of an exquisite 18th-century Mandarin-pattern
Chinese-import porcelain bowl currently for sale in his Laguna Beach
shop.

It rang as sweetly as any bell when pinged with one finger, raising the
expectation that it would shatter into thousands of pieces if struck
hard or dropped. But when you studied the bowl as it stood on an
acrylic display base, the hand-painted temple and garden scenes


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portrayed on its sides and the floral designs on its inner rim were of
such high quality and possessed such power that you became acutely aware
of the piece's age, the weight of the history behind it. And you were
soon convinced, in spite of its appearance, that it would bounce when
dropped, cracking whatever surface it struck but sustaining not even a
small chip itself.

Aware that the moment was hers and hers alone, Regina hitched toward the
sofa where Hatch and Lindsey waited, making less noise as she limped off
the hardwood floor onto the antique Persian carpet. She was wearing a
white blouse, a Kelly-green skirt that fell two inches above her knees,
green kneesocks, black shoes-and on her right leg a metal brace that
extended from the ankle to above the knee and looked like a medieval
torture device. Her limp was so pronounced that she rocked from side to
side at the hips with each step, as if in danger of toppling over.

Sister Immaculata rose from her armchair, scowling at Regina in
disapproval. "Exactly what is the reason for these theatrics, young
lady?"

Ignoring the true meaning of the nun's question, the girl                    said, "I'm
sorry I'm so late, Sister. But some days it's harder for                     me than
others." Before the nun could respond, the girl turned to                    Hatch and
Lindsey, who had stopped holding hands and had risen from                    the sofa.

"Hi, I'm Regina.        I'm a cripple."

She reached out in greeting. Hatch reached out, too, before he realized
that her right arm and hand were not well formed. The arm was almost
normal, just a little thinner than her left, until it got to the wrist,
where the bones took an odd twist. Instead of a full hand, she
possessed just two fingers and the stub of a thumb that all seemed to
have limited flexibility.

Shaking hands with the girl felt strange distinctly strange but not
unpleasant.

Her gray eyes were fixed intently on his eyes.                   Trying to read his
reaction.

He knew at once that it would be impossible ever to conceal true
feelings from her, and he was relieved that he had not been in the least
repelled by her deformity.

"I'm so happy to meet you, Regina," he said.                  "I'm Hatch Harrison, and
this is my wife, Lindsey."

The girl turned to Lindsey and shook hands with her, as well, saying,
"Well, I know I'm a disappointment. You child-starved women usually
prefer babies young enough to cuddle-" The Nun with No Name gasped in
shock. "Regina, really!"

Sister Immaculata looked too apoplectic to speak, like a penguin that
had frozen solid, mouth agape and eyes bulging in protest, hit by an
arctic chill too cold even for Antarctic birds to survive.

Approaching from the windows, Father Jiminez said, "Mr.                    and Mrs.
Harrison, I apologize for-"

"No need to apologize for anything," Lindsey said quickly, evidently
sensing, as Hatch did, that the girl was testing them and that to have
any hope of passing the test, they must not let themselves be coopted
into an adults-against-the-kid division of sympathies.


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Regina hopped-squirmed-wriggled into the second armchair, and Hatch was
fairly certain she was making herself appear a lot more awkward than she
really was.

The Nun with No Name gently touched Sister Immaculata on the shoulder,
and the older nun eased back into her chair, still with the
frozen-penguin look. The two priests brought the client chairs from in
front of the attorney's desk, and the younger nun pulled up a side chair
from a corner, so they could all join the group. Hatch realized he was
the only one still standing. He sat on the sofa beside Lindsey again.

Now that everyone had arrived, Salvatore Gujilio insisted on serving
refreshinentPepsi, ginger ale, or Perrier-which he did without calling
for the assistance of his secretary, fetching everything from a wet bar
discreetly tucked into one mahogany-paneled corner of the genteel once.

As the attorney bustled about, quiet and quick in spite of his
immensity, never crashing into a piece of furniture or knocking over a
vase, never coming even close to obliterating one of the two Tiffany
lamps with hand-blown trumpet-flower shades, Hatch realized that the big
man was no longer an overpowering figure, no longer the inevitable
center of attention: he could not compete with the girl, who was
probably less than one-fourth his size.

"Well," Regina said to Hatch and Lindsey, as she accepted a glass of
Pepsi from Gujilio, holding it in her left hand, the good one, "you came
here to learn all about me, so I guess I should tell you about myself.
First thing, of course, is that I'm a cripple." She tilted her head and
looked at them quizzically. "Did you know I was a cripple?"

"We do now," Lindsey said.

"But I mean before you came."

"We knew you had some sort of problem," Hatch said.

"Mutant genes," Regina said.

Father Jiminez let out a heavy sigh.

Sister Immaculata seemed about to say something, glanced at Hatch and
Lindsey, then decided to remain silent.

"My parents were dope fiends," the girl said.

"Regina!" The Nun with No Name protested.                 "You don't know that for
sure, you don't know any such a thing."

"Well, but it figures," the girl said. "For at least twenty years now,
illegal drugs have been the cause of most birth defects. Did you know
that?

I read it in a book. I read a lot. I'm book crazy. I don't want to
say I'm a bookworm. That sounds icky, don't you think? But if I were a
worm, I'd rather be curled up in a book than in any apple. It's good
for a crippled kid to like books, because they won't let you do the
things ordinary people do, even if you're pretty sure you can do them,
so books are like having a whole other life. I like adventure stories
where they go to the north pole or Mars or New York or somewhere. I
like good mysteries, too, most anything by Agatha Christie, but I
especially like stories about animals, and most especially about talking
animals like in The Wind in the Willows.


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I had a talking animal once. It was just a goldfish, and of course it
was really me not the fish who talked, because I read this book on
ventriloquism and learned to throw my voice, which is neat. So I'd sit
across the room and throw my voice into the goldfish bowl." She began to
talk squeakily, without moving her lips, and the voice seemed to come
out of The Nun with No Name: "Hi, my name's Binky the Fish, and if you
try to put me in a sandwich and eat me, I'll shit on the mayonnaise.
"She returned to her normal voice and talked right over the flurry of
reactions from the religiosities around her. "There you have another
problem with cripples like me. We tend to be smart-mouthed sometimes
because we know nobody has the guts to whack us on the ass."

Sister Immaculata looked as if she might have the guts, but in fact all
she did was mumble something about no TV privileges for a week.

Hatch, who had found the nun as frightening as a pterodactyl when he'd
first met her, was not impressed by her glower now, even though it was
so intense that he registered it with his peripheral vision. He could
not take his eyes off the girl.

Regina went blithely on without pause: "Besides being smart-mouthed
sometimes, what you should know about me is, I'm so clumsy, hitching
around like Long John Silver now there was a good book-that I'll
probably break everything of value in your house. Never meaning to, of
course. It'll be a regular destruction derby. Do you have the patience
for that? I'd hate to be beaten senseless and locked in the attic just
because I'm a poor crippled girl who can't always control herself. This
leg doesn't look so bad, really, and if I keep exercising it, I think
it's going to turn out pretty enough, but I don't really have much
strength in it, and I don't feel too damned much in it, either." She
balled up her deformed right hand and smacked it so hard against the
thigh of her right leg that she startled Gujilio, who was trying to
convey a ginger ale into the hand of the younger priest, who was staring
at the girl as if mesmerized. She smacked herself again, so hard that
Hatch winced, and she said, "You see? Dead meat.

Speaking of meat, I'm also a fussy eater. I simply can't stomach dead
meat. Oh, I don't mean I eat live animals. What I am is, I'm a
vegetarian, which makes things harder for you, even supposing you didn't
mind that I'm not a cuddly baby you can dress up cute. My only virtue
is that I'm very bright, practically a genius. But even that's a
drawback as far as some people are concerned. I'm smart beyond my
years, so I don't act much like a child-"

"You're certainly acting like one now," Sister Immaculata said, and
seemed pleased at getting in that zinger.

But Regina ignored it: "-and what you want, after all, is a child, a
precious and ignorant blob, so you can show her the world, have the fun
of watching her learn and blossom, whereas I have already done a lot of
my blossoming. Intellectual blossoming, that is. I still don't have
boobs.

I'm also bored by TV, which means I wouldn't be able to join in a jolly
family evening around the tube, and I'm allergic to cats in case you've
got one, and I'm opinionated, which some people find infuriating in a
ten-year-old girl." She paused, sipped her Pepsi, and smiled at them.

"There.

I think that pretty much covers it."


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"She's never like this," Father Jiminez mumbled, more to himself or to
God than to Hatch and Lindsey. He tossed back half of his Perrier as if
chugging hard liquor.

Hatch turned to Lindsey. Her eyes were a little glazed. She didn't
seem to know what to say, so he returned his attention to the girl. "I
suppose it's only fair if I tell you something about us."

Putting aside her drink and starting to get up, Sister Immaculata said,
"Really, Mr. Harrison, you don't have to put yourself through-"
Politely waving the nun back into her seat, Hatch said, "No, no. It's
all right. Regina's a little nervous-"

"Not particularly," Regina said.

"Of course, you are," Hatch said.

"No, I'm not."

"A little nervous," Hatch insisted, 'just as Lindsey and I are.                       It's
okay."

He smiled at the girl as winningly as he could.                    "Well, let's see ....

I've had a lifelong interest in antiques, an affection for things that
endure and have real character about them, and I have my own antique
shop with two employees. That's how I earn my living. I don't like
television much myself or-"What kind of a name is Hatch?" the girl
interrupted. She giggled as if to imply that it was too funny to be the
name of anyone except, perhaps, a talking goldfish.

"My full first name is Hatchford."

"It's still funny."

"Blame my mother," Hatch said. "She always thought my dad was going to
make a lot of money and move us up in society, and she thought Hatchford
sounded like a really upper-crust name: Hatchford Benjamin Harrison. The
only thing that would've made it a better name in her mind was if it was
Hatchford Benjamin Rockefeller."

"Did he?" the girl asked.

"Who he, did what?"

"Did your father make a lot of money?"

Hatch winked broadly at Lindsey and said, "Looks like we have a gold
digger on our hands."

"If you were rich," the girl said, "of course, that would be a
consideration."

Sister Immaculata let a hiss of air escape between her teeth, and The
Nun with No Name leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes with an
expression of resignation. Father Jiminez got up and, waving Gujilio
away, went to the wet bar to get something stronger than Perrier, Pepsi,
or ginger ale. Because neither Hatch nor Lindsey seemed obviously
offended by the girls behavior, none of the others felt authorized to
terminate the interview or even further reprimand the child.

"I'm afraid we're not rich," Hatch told her. "Comfortable, yes. We
don't want for anything. But we don't drive a Rolls-Royce, and we don't


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wear caviar pajamas."

A flicker of genuine amusement crossed the girls face, but she quickly
suppressed it. She looked at Lindsey and said, "What about you?"

Lindsey blinked.        She cleared her throat.           "Uh, well, I'm an artist.          A
painter."

"Like Picasso?"

"Not that style, no, but an artist like him, yes."

"I saw a picture once of a bunch of dogs playing poker," the girl said.

"Did you paint that?"

Lindsey said, "No, I'm afraid I didn't."

"Good. It was stupid. I saw a picture once of a bull and a
bullfighter, it was on velvet, very bright colors. Do you paint in very
bright colors on velvet?"

"No," Lindsey said. "But if you like that sort of thing, I could paint
any scene you wanted on velvet for your room."

Regina crinkled up her face.            "Puli-lecese.        I'd rather put a dead cat
on the wall."

Nothing surprised the folks from St. Thomas's any more. The younger
priest actually smiled, and Sister Immaculata murmured "dead cat," not
In exasperation but as if agreeing that such a bit of macabre decoration
would, indeed, be preferable to a painting on velvet.

"My style," Lindsey said, eager to rescue her reputation after offering
to paint something so tacky, "is generally described as a blending of
neoclassicism and surrealism. I know that's quite a big mouthful"

"Well, it's not my favorite sort of thing," Regina said, as if she had a
hoot-owl's idea in hell what those styles were like and what a blend of
them might resemble. "If I came to live with you, and if I had a room
of my own, you wouldn't make me hang a lot of your paintings on my
walls, would you?" The "your" was emphasized in such a way as to imply
that she still preferred a dead cat even if velvet was not involved.

"Not a one," Lindsey assured her.

"Good."

"Do you think you might like living with us?" Lindsey asked, and Hatch
wondered whether that prospect excited or terrified her.

Abruptly the girl struggled up from the chair, wobbling as she reached
her feet, as if she might topple headfirst into the coffee table.

Hatch rose, ready to grab her, even though he suspected it was all part
of the act.

When she regained her balance, she put down her glass, from which she'd
drunk all the Pepsi, and she said, "I've got to go pee, I've got a weak
bladder. Part of my mutant genes. I can never hold myself. Half the
time I feel like I'm going to burst in the most embarrassing places,
like right here in Mr. Gujilio's office, which is another thing you
should probably consider before taking me into your home. You probably
have a lot of nice things, being in the antiques and art business, nice


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things you wouldn't want messed up, and here I am lurching into
everything and breaking it or, worse, I get a bursting bladder attack
all over something priceless.

Then you'd ship me back to the orphanage, and I'd be so emotional about
it, I'd clump up to the roof and throw myself off, a most tragic
suicide, which none of us really would want to see happen. Nice meeting
you."

She turned and wrenched herself across the Persian carpet and out of the
room in that most unlikely gaitsccccuuuurrrr... THUD!-which no doubt
sprang from the same well of talent out of which she had drawn her
goldfish ventriloquism. Her deep-auburn hair swayed and glinted like
fire.

They all stood in silence, listening to the girls slowly fading
footsteps.

At one point, she bumped against the wall with a solid thunk!                        that must
have hurt, then bravely scrape-thudded onward.

"She does not have a weak bladder," Father Jiminez said, taking a
swallow from a glassful of amber liquid. He seemed to be drinking
bourbon now. "That is not part of her disability."

"She's not really like that," Father Duran said, blinking his owlish
eyes
as if smoke had gotten in them. "She's a delightful child. I know
that's hard for you to believe right now"

"And she can walk much better than that, immeasurably better," said The
Nun with No Name. "I don't know what's gotten into her."

"I do," Sister Immaculata said. She wiped one hand wearily down her
face. Her eyes were sad. "Two years ago, when she was eight, we
managed to place her with adoptive parents. A couple in their thirties
who were told they could never have children of their own. They
convinced themselves that a disabled child would be a special blessing.

Then, two weeks after Regina went to live with them, while they were in
the pre-adoption trial phase, the woman became pregnant. Suddenly they
were going to have their own child, after all, and the adoption didn't
seem so wise."

"And they just brought Regina back?" Lindsey asked.                        "Just dumped her at
the orphanage? How terrible."

"I can't judge them," Sister Immaculata said. "They may have felt they
didn't have enough love for a child of their own and poor Regina, too,
in which case they did the right thing. Regina doesn't deserve to be
raised in a home where every minute of every day she knows she's second
best, second in love, something of an outsider. Anyway, she was broken
up by the rejection. She took a long time to get her selfconfidence
back. And now I think she doesn't want to take another risk."

They stood in silence.

The sun was very bright beyond the windows. The palm trees swayed lacy.
Between the trees lay glimpses of Fashion Island, the Newport Beach
shopping center and business complex at the perimeter of which Gujilio's
office was located.

"Sometimes, with the sensitive ones, a bad experience ruins any chance


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for them.        They refuse to try again.            I'm afraid our Regina is one of
those.

She came in here determined to alienate you and wreck the interview, and
she succeeded in singular style."

"It's like somebody who's been in prison all his life," said Father
Jiminez, "gets paroled, is all excited at first, then finds he can't
make it on the outside. So he commits a crime just to get back in.

The institution might be limiting, unsatisfying-but it's known, it's
safe."

Salvatore Gujilio bustled around, relieving people of their empty
glasses. He was still an enormous man by any standard, but even with
Regina gone from the room, Gujilio no longer dominated it as he had done
before. He had been forever diminished by that single comparison with
the delicate, pert-nosed, gray-eyed child.

"I'm so sorry," Sister Immaculata said, putting a consoling hand on
Lindsey's shoulder. "We'll try again, my dear. We'll go back to square
one and match you up with another child, the perfect child this time."

2

Lindsey and Hatch left Salvatore Gujilio's office at ten past three that
Thursday afternoon. They had agreed not to talk about the interview
until dinner, giving themselves time to contemplate the encounter and
examine their reactions to it. Neither wanted to make a decision based
on emotion, or neuance the other to act on initial impression-then live
to regret it.

of course, they had never expected the meeting to progress remotely
along the lines it had gone. Lindsey was eager to talk about it. She
assumed that their decision was already made, had been made for them by
the girl, and that there was no point in further contemplation. But
they had agreed to wait, and Hatch did not seem disposed to violate that
agreement, so she kept her mouth shut as well.

She drove their new sporty-red Mitsubishi. Hatch sat in the passenger
seat with his shades on, one arm out his open window, tapping time
against the side of the car as he listened to golden oldie rock-'n'-roll
on the radio. "Please Mister Postman" by the Marvelettes.

She passed the last of the giant date palms along Newport Center Drive
and turned left onto Pacific Coast Highway, past vinevered walls, and
headed south. The late-April day was warm but not hot, with one of
those intensely blue skies that, toward sunset, would acquire an
electric luminescence reminiscent of skies in Maxfield Parrish
paintings. Traffic was light on the Coast Highway, and the ocean
glimmered like a great swatch of silver- and gold-sequined cloth.

A quiet exuberance Bowed through Lindsey, as it had done for seven
weeks. It was exhilaration over just being alive, which was in every
child but which most adults lost during the process of growing up.

She'd lost it, too, without realizing. A close encounter with death was
just the thing to give you back the joie vivre of extreme youth.

More than two Boors below Hell, naked beneath a blanket on his stained
and sagging mattress, Vassago passed the daylight hours in sleep. His
slumber was usually filled with dreams of violated flesh and shattered
bone, blood and bile, vistas of human skulls. Sometimes he dreamed of


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dying multitudes writhing in agony on barren ground beneath a black sky,
and he walked among them as a prince of Hell among the common rabble of
the damned.

The dreams that occupied him on that day, however, were strange and
remarkable for their ordinariness. A dark-haired, dark-eyed woman in a
cherry-red car, viewed from the perspective of an unseen man in the
passenger seat beside her. Palm trees. Red bougainvillea. The ocean
spangled with light.

Harrison's Antiques was at the south end of Laguna Beach, on Pacific
Coast Highway. It was in a stylish two-story Art Deco building that
contrasted interestingly with the 18th- and 19th-century merchandise in
the big display windows.

Glenda Dockridge, Hatch's assistant and the store manager, was helping
Lew Booner, their general handyman, with the dusting. In a large
antique store, dusting was akin to the painting of the Golden Gate
Bridge: once you reached the far end, it was time to come back to the
beginning and start all over again. Glenda was in a great mood because
she had sold a Napoleon III ormolu-mounted black-lacquered cabinet with
Japanned panels and to the same customer, a 19th century Italian
polygonaf, tilt top table with elaborate marquetry inlay. They were
excellent sales-especially considering that she worked on salary against
a commission.

While Hatch looked through the day's mail, attended to some
correspondence, and examined a pair of 18th century rosewood palace
pedestals with inlaid jade dragons that had arrived from a scout in Hong
Kong, Lindsey helped Glenda and Lew with the dusting. In her new frame
of mind, even that chore was a pleasure. It gave her a chance to
appreciate the details of the antiques-the turn of a linial on a bronze
lamp, the carving on a table leg, the delicately pierced and
hand-finished rims on a set of 18th century English porcelains.

Contemplating the history and cultural meaning of each piece as she
happily dusted it, she realized that her new attitude had a distinctly
Zen quality.

At twilight, sensing the approach of night, Vassago woke and sat up in
the approximation of a grave that was his home. He was filled with a
hunger for death and a need to kill.

The last image he remembered           from his dream was of the woman from the
red car. She was not in the            car any more, but in a chamber he could not
quite see, standing in front           of a Chinese screen, wiping it with a white
cloth. She turned, as if he            had spoken to her, and she smiled.

Her smile was so radiant, so full of life, that Vassago wanted to smash
her face in with a hammer, break out her teeth, shatter her jaw bones,
make it impossible for her to smile ever again.

He had dreamed of her two or three times over the past several weeks.

The first time she had been in a wheelchair, weeping and laughing
simultaneously.

Again, he searched his memory, but he could not recall her face among
those he had ever seen outside of dreams. He wondered who she was and
why she visited him when he slept.

Outside, night fell. He sensed it coming down. A great black drape
that gave the world a preview of death at the end of every bright and


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shining day.

He dressed and left his hideaway.

By seven o'clock that early-spring night, Lindsey and Hatch were at
Zov's, a small but busy restaurant in Tustin. The decor was mainly
black and white, with lots of big windows and mirrors. The staff,
unfailingly friendly and efficient, were dressed in black and white to
complement the long room. The food they served was such a perfect
sensual experience that the monochromatic bistro seemed ablaze with
color.

The noise level was congenial rather than annoying. They did not have
to raise their voices to hear each other, and felt as if the background
buzz provided a screen of privacy from nearby tables. Through the first
two coursealamari; black-bean southey spoke of trivial things.

But when the main course was served-swordfish for both of them-Lindsey
could no longer contain herself.

She said, "Okay, all right, we've had all day to brood about it. We
haven't colored each other's opinions. So what do you think of Regina?"

"What do you think of Regina?"

"You first." ment were brighter and bolder than things were supposed to
be in real life.

She had hoped for just that reaction from him, but she hadn't known what
he would say, really hadn't had a clue, because the meeting had been ...
well, one apt word would be "daunting."

"Oh, God, I love her," Lindsey said.               "She's so sweet."

"She's a tough cookie."

"That's an act."

"She was putting on an act for us, yeah, but she's tough just the same.

She's had to be tough.          Life didn't give her a choice."

"But it's a good tough."

"It's a great tough," he agreed.              "I'm not saying it put me off.           I
admired it, I loved her."

"She's so bright."

"Struggling so hard to make herself unappealing," Hatch said, "and that
only made her more appealing."

"The poor kid.       Afraid of being rejected again, so she took the
offensive."

"When I heard her coming down the hall, I thought it was-"

"Godzilla!"

Lindsey said.

"At least.     And how'd you like Binky the talking goldfish?"

"Shit on the mayonnaise!" Lindsey said.


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They both laughed, and people around them turned to look, either because
of their laughter or because some of what Lindsey said was overheard,
which only made them laugh harder.

"She's going to be a handful," Hatch said.

"She'll be a dream."

"Nothing's that easy."

"She will be."

"One problem."

"What's that?"

He hesitated.         "What if she doesn't want to come with us?"

Lindsey's smile froze.             "She will.       She'll come."

"Maybe not."

"Don't be negative."

"I'm only saying we've got to be prepared for disappointment."

Lindsey shook her head adamantly. "No. It's going to work out. It has
to. We've had more than our share of bad luck, bad times. We deserve
better. The wheel has turned. We're going to put a family together
again.

Life is goIng to be good, it's going to be so line.                           The worst is behind
us now."

3

That Thursday night, Vassago enjoyed the conveniences of a motel room.

Usually he used one of the fields behind the abandoned amusement park as
a toilet. He also washed each evening with bottled water and liquid
soap. He shaved with a straight razor, an aerosol can of lather, and a
piece of a broken mirror that he had found in a corner of the park.

When rain fell at night, he liked to bathe in the open, letting the
downpour sluice over him. If lightning accompanied the storm, he sought
the highest point on the paved midway, hoping that he was about to
receive the grace of Satan and be recalled to the land of the dead by
one scintillant bolt of electricity. But the rainy season in southern
California was over now, and most likely would not come around again
until December. If he earned his way back into the fold of the dead and
damned before then, the means of his deliverance from the hateful world
of the living would be some other force than lightning.

Once a week, sometimes twice, he rented a motel room to use the shower
and make a better job of grooming than he could in the primitive
conditions of his hideaway, though not because hygiene was important to
him.

Filth had its powerful attractions. The air and water of Hades, to
which he longed to return, were filth of ate variety. But if he was to
move among the living and prey upon them, building the collection that
might win him readmission to the realm of the damned, there were certain
conventions that had to be followed in order not to draw undue attention


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to himself.      Among them was a certain degree of cleanliness.

Vassago always used the same motel, the Blue Skies, a seedy hole toward
the southern end of Santa Ana, where the unshaven desk clerk accepted
only cash, asked for no identification, and never booked guests in few
men who did not check in with a whore in tow. He stayed only an hour or
two, however, which was in keeping with the duration of the average
customer's use of the accommodations, and he was allowed the same
anonymity as those who, grunting and sweating, noisily rocked the
headboards of their beds against the walls in rooms adjoining his.

He could not have lived there full time, if only because his awareness
of the frenzied coupling of the sluts and their johns filled him with
anger, ahxiety, and nausea at the urgent needs and frenetic rhythms of
the living.

The atmosphere made it difficult to think clearly and impossible to
rest, even though the perversion and dementia of the place was the very
thing in which he had reveled when he had been one of the fully alive.

No other motel or boarding house would have been safe. They would have
wanted identification. Besides, he could pass among the living as one
of them only as long as their contact with him was casual. Any motel
clerk or landlord who took a deeper interest in his character and
encountered him repeatedly would soon realize that he was different from
them in some indefinable yet deeply disturbing way.

Anyway, to avoid drawing attention to himself, he preferred the
amusement park as primary quarters. The authorities looking for him
would be less likely to find him there than anywhere else. Most
important, the park offered solitude, graveyard stillness, and regions
of perfect darkness to which he could escape during daylight hours when
his sensitive eyes could not tolerate the insistent brightness of the
sun.

Motels were tolerable only between dusk and dawn.

That pleasantly warm Thursday night, when he came out of the Blue Skies
Motel office with his room key, he noticed a familiar Pontiac parked in
shadows at the back of the lot, beyond the end unit, not nose-in to the
motel but facing the office. The car had been there on Sunday, the last
time Vassago had used the Blue Skies. A man was slumped behind the
wheel, as if sleeping or just passing time while he waited for someone
to meet him.

He had been there Sunday night, features veiled by the night and the
haze of reflected light on his windshield.

Vassago drove the Camaro to unit six, about in the middle of the long
arm of the L-shaped structure, parked in front, and let himself into his
room. He carried only a change of clothes-all black like the clothes he
was wearing.

Inside the room, he did not turn on the light.                   He never did.

For a while he stood with his back against the door, thinking about the
Pontiac and the man behind the steering wheel. He might have been just
a drug dealer working out of his car. The number of dealers crawling
the neighborhood was even greater than the number of cockroaches
swarming inside the walls of that decaying motel. But where were his
customers with their quick nervous eyes and greasy wads of money?

Vassago dropped his clothes on the bed, put his sunglasses in his jacket


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pocket, and went into the small bathroom. It smelled of hastily sloshed
disinfectant that could not mask a melange of vile biological odors.

A rectangle of pale light marked a window above the back wall of the
shower. Sliding open the glass door, which made a scraping noise as it
moved along the corroded track, he stepped into the stall. If the
window had been hxed, or if it had been divided vertically into two
panes, he would have been foiled. But it swung outward from the top on
rusted hinges. He gripped the sill above his head, pulled himself
through the window, and wriggled out into the service alley behind the
motel.

He paused to put on his sunglasses again. A nearby sodium-vapor
streetlamp cast a urine-yellow glare that scratched like windblown sand
at his eyes. The glasses mellowed it to a muddy amber and clarified his
vision.

He went right, all the way to the end of the block, turned right on the
side street, then right again at the next corner, circling the motel.

He slipped around the end of the short wing of the L-shaped building and
moved along the covered walkway in front of the last units until he was
behind the Pontiac.

At the moment that end of the motel was quiet.                   No one was coming or
going from any of the rooms.

The man behind     the wheel was sitting with one arm out of the open car
window. If he      had glanced at the side mirror, he might have seen
Vassago coming     up on him, but his attention was focused on room six in
the other wing     of the L.

Vassago jerked open the door, and the guy actually started to fall out
because he'd been leaning against it. Vassago hit him hard in the face,
using his elbow like a battering ram, which was better than a list,
except he didn't hit him squarely enough. The guy was rocked but not
finished, so he pushed up and out of the Pontiac, trying to grapple with
Vassago.

He was overweight and slow. A knee driven hard into his crotch slowed
him even more. The guy went into a prayer posture, gagging, and Vassago
stepped back far enough to kick him. The stranger fell over onto his
side, so Vassago kicked him again, in the head this time. The guy was
out cold, as still as the pavement on which he was sprawled.

haired blond hooker in a miniskirt and a middle-aged guy in a cheap suit
and a bad toupee. They were coming out of the nearest room. They gaped
at the man on the ground. At Vassago. He stared back at them until
they reentered their room and quietly pulled the door shut behind them.

The unconscious man was heavy, maybe two hundred pounds, but Vassago was
more than strong enough to lift him. He carried the guy around to the
passenger side and loaded him into the other front seat.

Then he got behind the wheel, started the Pontiac, and departed the Blue
Skies.

Several blocks away, he turned onto a street of tract homes built thirty
years ago and aging badly. Ancient Indian laurels and coral trees
flanked the canted sidewalks and lent a note of grace in spite of the
neighborhood's decline. He pulled the Pontiac to the curb. He switched
off the engine and the lights.



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As no streetlamps were nearby, he removed his sunglasses to search the
unconscious man. He found a loaded revolver in a shoulder holster under
the guy's jacket. He took it for himself.

The stranger was carrying two wallets. The first, and thicker,
contained three hundred dollars in cash, which Vassago confiscated. It
also held credit cards, photographs of people he didn't know, a receipt
from a dry cleaner, a buy-ten-get-one-free punch card from a
frozen-yogurt shop, a driver's license that identified the man as Morton
Redlow of Anaheim, and insignificant odds and ends. The second wallet
was quite thin, and it proved to be not a real wallet at all but a
leather ID holder. In it were Redlow's license to operate as a private
investigator and another license to carry a concealed weapon.

In the glove compartment, Vassago found only candy bars and a paperback
detective novel. In the console between seats, he found chewing gum,
breath mints, another candy bar, and a bent Thomas Brothers map book of
Orange County.

He studied the map book for a while, then started the car and pulled
away from the curb. He headed for Anaheim and the address on Redlow's
driver's license.

When they were more than halfway there, Redlow began to groan and
twitch, as if he might come to his senses. Driving with one hand,
Vassago picked up the revolver he had taken off the man and clubbed him
alongside the head with it. Redlow was quiet again.

really like Friday afternoons, and you know why?" He didn't give anyone
a chance to express a lack of interest. "Because Thursday night we
always have beans and pea soup, so by Friday afternoon you can really
cut some ripefarts."

The other kids groaned in disgust.               Regina just ignored him.

Nerd or not, Carl was right: Thursday dinner at St. Thomas's Home for
Children was always split-pea soup, ham, green beans, potatoes in herb
butter sauce, and a square of fruited Jell-O with a blob of fake whipped
cream for dessert. Sometimes the nuns got into the sherry or just went
wild from too many years in their suffocating habits, and if they lost
control on a Thursday, you might get corn instead of green beans or, if
they were really over the top, maybe a pair of vanilla cookies with the
Jell-O.

That Thursday the menu held no surprises, but Regina would not have
cared-and might not have noticed-if the fare had included filet mignon
or, conversely, cow pies. Well, she probably would have noticed a cow
pie on her plate, though she wouldn't have cared if it was substituted
for the green beans because she didn't like green beans. She liked ham.
She had lied when she'd told the Harrisons she was a vegetarian,
figuring they would find dietary fussiness one more reason to reject her
flat-out, at the start, instead of later when it would hurt more.

But even as she ate, her attention was not on her food and not on the
conversation of the other kids at her table, but on the meeting in Mr.
Gujilio's office that afternoon.

She had screwed up.

They were going to have to build a Museum of Famous Screwups just to
have a place for a statue of her, so people could come from all over the
world, from France and Japan and Chile, just to see it. school kids


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would come, whole classes at a time with their teachers, to study her so
they could learn what not to do and how not to act. Parents would point
at her statue and ominously warn their children, "Anytime you think
you're so smart, just remember her and think how you might wind up like
that, a figure of pity and ridicule, laughed at and reviled."

Two thirds of the way through the interview, she had realized the
Harrisons were special people. They probably would never treat her as
badly as she had been treated by the Infamous Dotteriields, the couple
who accepted her and took her home and then rejected her in two weeks
when they discovered they were going to have a child of their own,
Satan's child, no doubt, who would one day destroy the world and turn
against even the Dotterfields, burning them alive with a flash of fire
from his demonic little pig eyes. (Uhh. Wishing harm to another. The
thought is as bad as the deed. Remember that for confession, Reg.)
Anyway, the Harrisons were different, which she began to realize slowly
such a screwup-and which she knew for sure when Mr. Harrison made the
crack about caviar pajamas and showed he had a sense of humor. But by
then she was so into her act that somehow she couldn't stop being an
obnoxious screwup that she wouldn't find a way to retreat and start
over. Now the Harrisons were probably getting drunk, celebrating their
narrow escape, or maybe down on their knees in a church, weeping with
relief and fervently saying the Rosary, thanking the Holy Mother for
interceding to spare them the mistake of adopting that awful girl
sight-unseen. Shitú (Oops. Vulgarity. But not as bad as taking the
Lord's name in vain. Even worth mentioning in the confessional?) In
spite of having no appetite and in spite of Carl Cavanaugh and his crude
humor, she ate all of her dinner, but only because God's policemen, the
nuns, would not let her leave the table until she cleaned her plate. The
fruit in the lime Jell-O was peaches, which made dessert an ordeal. She
couldn't understand how anyone could think that lime and peaches went
together. Okay, so nuns were not very worldly, but she wasn't asking
them to learn which rare wine to serve with roast tenderloin of
platypus, for God's sake. (Sorry, God.) Pineapple and lime Jell-O,
certainly. Pears and lime Jell, okay. Even bananas and lime Jell-O.
But putting peaches in lime Jell-O was, to her way of thinking, like
leaving the raisins out of rice pudding and replacing them with chunks
of watermelon, for God's sake.

(Sorry, God.) She managed to eat the dessert by telling herself that it
could have been worse; the nuns could have served dead mice dipped in
cheni fat-though why nuns, of all people, would want to do that, she had
no idea. Still, imagining something worse than what she had to face was
a trick that worked, a technique of self-persuasion that she had used
many and other games, or to the TV room to watch whatever slop was on
the boob tube, but as usual she returned to her room. She spent most
evenings reading. Not tonight, though. She planned to spend this
evening feeling sorry for herself and contemplating her status as a
world-class screwup (good thing stupidity isn't a sin), so she would
never forget how dumb she had been and would remember never to make such
a jackass of herself again.

Moving along the tile-floored hallways nearly as fast as a kid with two
good legs, she remembered how she had clumped into the attorney's
office, and she began to blush. In her room, which she shared with a
blind girl named Winnie, as she jumped into bed and flopped on her back,
she recalled the calculated clumsiness with which she had levered
herself into the chair in front of Mr. and Mrs. Harrison. Her blush
deepened, and she put both hands over her face.

"Reg," she said softly against the palms of her own hands, "you are the


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biggest asshole in the world." (One more item on the list for the next
confession, besides lying and deceiving and taking God's name in vain:
the repeated use of a vulgarity.) "Shit, shit, shit!" (Going to be a
long confession.) 5

When Redlow regained consciousness, his assorted pains were so bad, they
took one hundred percent of his attention. He had a violent headache to
which he could have testified with such feeling in a television
commercial that they would have been forced to open new aspirin
factories to meet the consumer response. One eye was puffed half shut.
His lips were split and swollen; they were numb and felt huge. His neck
hurt, and his stomach was sore, and his testicles throbbed so fiercely
from the knee he had taken in the crotch that the idea of getting up and
walking sent a paroxysm of nausea through him.

Gradually he remembered what had happened to him, that the bastard had
taken him by surprise. Then he realized he was not lying on the motel
parking lot but sitting in a chair, and for the first time he was
afraid.

He was not merely sitting in the chair. He was tied in it. Ropes bound
him at chest and waist, and more ropes wound across his thighs, securing
him to the seat. His arms were fixed to the arms of the chair just
below his elbows and again at the wrists.

Pain had muddied his thought processes.                 Now fear clarified them.

Simultaneously squinting his good right eye and trying to widen his
swollen left eye, he studied the darkness. For a moment he assumed he
was in a room at the Blue Skies Motel, outside of which he had been
running a surveillance in hope of spotting the kid. Then he recognized
his own living room. He couldn't see much. No lights were on. But
having lived in that house for eighteen years, he could identify the
patterns of ambient night-glow at the windows, the dim shapes of the
furniture, shadows among shadows of differing intensity, and the subtle
but singular smell of home, which was as special and instantly
identifiable to him as the odor of any particular lair to any particular
wolf in the wild.

He did not feel much like a wolf tonight. He felt like a rabbit,
shivering in recognition of its status as prey.

For a few seconds he thought he was alone, and he began to strain at the
ropes. Then a shadow rose from other shadows and approached him.

He could see nothing more of his adversary than a silhouette. Even that
seemed to melt into the silhouettes of inanimate objects, or to change
as if the kid were a polymorphous creature that could assume a variety
of forms. But he knew it was the kid because he sensed that difference,
that alienness he had perceived the first time he had laid eyes on the
bastard on Sunday, just four nights ago, at the Blue Skies.

"Comfortable, Mr.        Redlow?"

Over the past three months, as he had searched for the creep, Redlow had
developed a deep curiosity about him, trying to puzzle out what he
wanted, what he needed, how he thought. After showing countless people
the various photographs of the kid, and after spending more than a
little of his own time in contemplation of them, he had been especially
curious about what the voice would be like that went with that
remarkably handsome yet forbidding face. It sounded nothing like he had
imagined it would be, neither cold and steely like the voice of a


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machine designed to pass for human nor the guttural and savage snarling
of a beast. Rather, it was soothing, honey-toned, with an appealing
reverberant timbre.

"Mr.   Redlow, sir, can you hear me?"

Nothing in the voice indicated that the kid was being snide or mocking.

He was just a boy who had been raised to address his elders with
consideration and respect, a habit he could not cast off even under
circumstances such as these. The detective was gripped by a primitive,
superstitious feeling that he was in the presence of an entity that
could imitate humanity but had nothing whatsoever in common with the
human species.

Speaking through split lips, his words somewhat slurred, Morton Redlow
said, "Who are you, what the hell do you want?"

"You know who I am."

"I haven't a fucking clue.            You blindsided me.         I haven't seen your
face.

What are you a bat or something?              Why don't you turn on a light?"

Still only a black form, the kid moved closer, to within a few feet of
the chair. "You were hired to find me."

"I was hired to run surveillance on a guy named Kirkaby. Leonard
Kirkaby. Wife thinks he's cheating on her. And he is. Brings his
secretary to the Blue Skies every Thursday for some in-and-out."

"Well, sir, that's a little hard for me to believe, you know? The Blue
Skies is for low-life guys and cheap whores, not business executives and
their secretaries."

"Maybe he gets off on the sleaziness of it, treating the girl like a
whore.

Who the hell knows, huh? Anyway, you sure aren't Kirkaby. I know his
voice. He doesn't sound anything like you. Not as young as you,
either.

Besides, he's a piece of puff pastry.                He couldn't have handled me the
way you did."

The kid was quiet for a while. Just staring down at Redlow. Then he
began to pace. In the dark. Unhesitating, never bumping into
furniture.

Like a restless cat, except his eyes didn't glow.

Finally he said, "So what're you saying, sir?                   That this is all just a
big mistake?"

Redlow knew his only chance of staying alive was to convince the kid of
the lie-that a guy named Kirkaby had a letch for his secretary, and a
bitter wife seeking evidence for a divorce. He just didn't know what
tone to take to sell the story. With most people, Redlow had an
unerring sense of which approach would beguile them and make them accept
even the wildest proposition as the truth. But the kid was different;
he didn't think or react like ordinary people.

Redlow decided to play it tough.              "Listen, asshole, I wish I did know


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who you are or at least what the hell you look like, 'cause once this
was finished, I'd come after you and bash your fuckin' head in."

"What're you talking about?" Redlow asked.

"Burnt out."

The conversation was taking a turn Redlow didn't understand, which made
him uneasy.

"Excuse me, sir, no offense meant, but you're getting too old for this
kind of work."

Don't I know it, Redlow thought. He               realized that, aside from one
initial tug, he had not again tested              the ropes that bound him. Only a
few years ago, he would have quietly              but steadily strained against them,
trying to stretch the knots. Now he               was passive.

"You're a muscular man, but you've gone a little soft, you've got a gut
on you, and you're slow. From your driver's license, I see you're
fifty-four, you're getting up there. Why do you still do it, keep
hanging in there?"

"It's all I've got," Redlow said, and he was alert enough to be
surprised by his own answer. He had meant to say, Its all I know.

"Well, yessir, I can see that," the kid said, looming over him in the
darkness. "You've been divorced twice, no kids, and no woman lives with
you right now. Probably hasn't been one living with you for years.
Sorry, but I was snooping around the house while you were out cold, even
though I knew it wasn't really right of me. Sorry. But I just wanted
to get a handle on you, try to understand what you get out of this."

Redlow said nothing because he couldn't understand where all of this was
leading. He was afraid of saying the wrong thing, and setting the kid
off like a bottle rocket. The son of a bitch was insane. You never
knew what might light the fuse on a nutcase like him. The kid had been
through some analysis of his own over the years, and now he seemed to
want to analyze Redlow, for reasons even he probably could not have
explained.

Maybe it was best to just let him rattle on, get it out of his system.

"Is it money, Mr.        Redlow?"

"You mean, do I make any?"

"That's what I mean, ' "I do okay."

"You don't drive a great car or wear expensive clothes."

"I'm not into flash," Redlow said.

"No offense, sir, but this house isn't much."

"Maybe not, but there's no mortgage on it."

The kid was right over him, slowly leaning farther in with each
question, as if he could see Redlow in the lightless room and was
intently studying facial tics and twitches as he questioned him.

Weird. Even in the dark, Redlow could sense the kid bending closer,
closer, closer.



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"No mortgage on it," the kid said thoughtfully. "Is that your reason
for working, for a living? To be able to say you paid off a mortgage on
a dump like this?"

Redlow wanted to tell him to go fuck himself but suddenly he was not so
sure that playing tough was a good idea, after all.

"Is that what life's all about, sir? Is that all it's about? Is that
why you find it so precious, why you're so eager to hold on to it? Is
that why you life-lovers struggle to go on living just to acquire a
pitiful pile of belongings, so you can go out of the game a winner?

I'm sorry, sir, but I just don't understand that.                    I don't understand at
all."

The detective's heart was pounding too hard. It slammed painfully
against his bruised ribs. He hadn't treated his heart well over the
years, too many hamburgers, too many cigarettes, too much beer and
bourbon.

What was the crazy kid trying to talk him to death, scare him to death?

"I'd imagine you have some clients who don't want it on record that they
ever hired you, they pay in cash. Would that be a valid assumption,
sir?"

Redlow cleared his throat and tried not to sound frightened.                      "Yeah.

Sure.   Some of them."

"And part of winning the game would be to keep as much of that money as
you could, avoiding taxes on it, which would mean never putting it in a
bank."

The kid was so close now that the detective could smell his breath.

For some reason he had expected it to be sour, vile. But it smelled
sweet, like chocolate, as if the kid had been eating candy in the dark.

"So I'd imagine you have a nice little stash here in the house
somewhere.

Is that right, sir?"

A warm quiver of hope caused a diminishment of the cold chills that had
been chattering through Redlow for the past few minutes. If it was
about money, he could deal with that. It made sense. He could
understand the kid's motivation, and could see a way to get through the
evening alive.

"Yeah," the detective said.            "There's money.        Take it.     Take it and go.

In the kitchen, there's a waste can with a plastic bag for a liner.

Lift out the bag of trash, there's a brown paper bag full of cash under
it, in the bottom of the can."

Something cold and rough touched the detective's right cheek, and he
flinched from it.

"Pliers," the kid said, and the detective felt the jaws take a grip on
his flesh.

"What're you doing?"


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The kid twisted the pliers.

Redlow cried out in pain.           "Wait, wait, stop it, shit, please, stop it,
no!"

The kid stopped. He took the pliers away. He said, "I'm sorry, sir,
but I just want you to understand that if there isn't any cash in the
trash can, I won't be happy. I'll figure if you lied to me about this,
you lied to me about everything."

"It's there," Redlow assured him hastily.

"It's not nice to lie, sir.            It's not good.        Good people don't lie.

That's what they teach you, isn't it, sir?"

"Go, look, you'll see it's there," Redlow said desperately.

The kid went out of the living room, through the dining room archway.

Soft footsteps echoed through the house from the tile floor of the
kitchen.

A clatter and rustle arose as the garbage bag was pulled out of the
waste can.

Already damp with perspiration, Redlow began to gush sweat as he
listened to the kid return through the pitch-black house. He appeared
in the living room again, partly silhouetted against the pale-gray
rectangle of a window.

"How can you see?" the detective asked, dismayed to hear a faint note of
hysteria in his voice when he was struggling so hard to maintain control
of himself. He was getting old. "What are you wearing night-vision
glasses or something, some military hardware? How in the hell would you
get your hands on anything like that?"

Ignoring him, the kid said, "There isn't much I want or need, just food
and changes of clothes. The only money I get is when I make an addition
to my collection, whatever she happens to be carrying.

Sometimes it's not much, only a few dollars.                  This is really a help.

It really is. This much should last me as long as it takes for me to
get back to where I belong. Do you know where I belong, Mr. Redlow?"

The detective did not answer. The kid had dropped down below the
windows, out of sight. Redlow was squinting into the gloom, trying to
detect movement and figure where he had gone.

"You know where I belong, Mr.             Redlow?" the kid repeated.

Redlow heard a piece of furniture being shoved aside.                      Maybe an end
table beside the sofa.

"I belong in Hell," the kid said. "I was there for a while. I want to
go back. What kind of life have you led, Mr. Redlow? Do you think,
when I go back to Hell, that maybe I'll see you over there?"

"What're you doing?" Redlow asked.

"Looking for an electrical outlet," the kid said as he shoved aside
another piece of furniture. "Ah, here we go."


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"Electrical outlet?" Redlow asked agitatedly.                      "Why?"

A frightening noise cut through the darkness: zzzzrrrrrrrrrr.

"What was that?" Redlow demanded.

"Just testing, sir."

"Testing what?"

"You've got all sorts of pots and pans and gourmet utensils out there in
the kitchen, sir. I guess you're really into cooking, are you?"

The kid rose up again, appearing against the backdrop of the dim
ash-gray glow in the window glass. "The cooking was that an interest
before the second divorce, or more recent?"

"What were you testing?" Redlow asked again.

The kid approached the chair.

"There's more money," Redlow said frantically. He was soaked in sweat
now. It was running down him in rivulets. "In the master bedroom."

The kid loomed over him again, a mysterious and inhuman form. He seemed
to be darker than anything around him, a black hole in the shape of a
man, blacker than black. "In the c-closet. There's a w-w-wooden
floor." The detective's bladder was suddenly full. It had blown up like
a balloon all in an instant. Bursting. "Take out the shoes and crap.
Lift up the back f-f-floorboards." He was going to piss himself.
"There's a cash box. Thirty thousand dollars. Take it.

Please.       Take it and go."

"Thank you, sir, but I really don't need it.                     I've got enough, more than
enough."

"Oh, Jesus, help me," Redlow said, and he was despairingly aware that
this was the first time he had spoken to God-or even thought of Him in
decades.

"Let's talk about who you're really working for, sir."

"I told you-"

"But I lied when I said I believed you."

Zzzzrrrrrrrrrrrr.

"What is that?" Redlow asked.

"Testing."

"Testing what, damn it?"

"It works real nice."

"What, what is it, what 've you got?"

"An electric carving knife," the kid said.

6

Hatch and Lindsey drove home from dinner without getting on a freeway,


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taking their time, using the coast road from Newport Beach south,
listening to K-Earth 101.1 FM, and singing along with golden oldies like
"New Orleans,"

"Whispering Bells," and "California Dreamin'." She couldn't remember
when they had last harmonized with the radio, though in the old days
they had done it all the time. When he'd been three, Jimmy had known
all the words to "Pretty Woman." When he was four he could sing "Fifty
Ways to Leave Your Lover" without missing a line.

For the first time in five years, she could think of Jimmy and still
feel like singing.

They lived in Laguna Niguel, south of Laguna Beach, on the eastern side
of the coastal hills, without an ocean view but with the benefit of sea
breezes that moderated summer heat and winter chill. Their
neighborhood, like most south-county developments, was so meticulously
laid out that at times it seemed as if the planners had come to
community design with a military background. But the gracefully curving
streets, iron streetlamps with an artificial green patina, just-so
arrangements of palms and jacarandas and ficus benjaminas, and
well-maintained greenbelts with beds of colorful flowers were so
soothing to the eye and soul that the subliminal sense of regimentation
was not stIfling.

As an artist, Lindsey believed that the hands of men and women were as
capable of creating great beauty as nature was, and that discipline was
fundamental to the creation of real art because art was meant to reveal
meaning in the chaos of life. Therefore, she understood the impulse of
the planners who had labored countless hours to coordinate the design of
the community all the way down to the configuration of the steel grilles
in the street drains that were set in the gutters.

Their two-story house, where they had lived only since Jimmy's death,
was an Italian-Mediterranean model-he whole community was Italian
Mediterranean with four bedrooms and den, in cream-colored stucco with a
Mexican tile roof. Two large ficus trees flanked the front walk.

Malibu lights revealed beds of impatiens and petunias in front of
red-flowering azalea bushes. As they pulled into the garage, they
finished the last bars of "You Send Me."

Between taking turns in the bathroom, Hatch started a gas-log fire in
the family-room fireplace, and Lindsey poured Baileys Irish Cream on the
rocks for both of them. They sat on the sofa in front of the fire,
their feet on a large, matching ottoman.

All the upholstered furniture in the house was modern with soft lines
and in light natural tones. It made a pleasing contrast with-and good
backdrop for the many antique pieces and Lindsey's paintings.

The sofa was also hugely comfortable, good for conversation and, as she
discovered for the first time, a great spot to snuggle. To her
surprise, snuggling turned into necking, and their necking escalated
into petting, as if they were a couple of teenagers, for God's sake.

Passion overwhelmed her as it had not done in years.

Their clothes came off slowly, as in a series of dissolves in a motion
picture, until they were naked without quite knowing how they had gotten
that way. Then they were just as mysteriously coupled, moving together
in a silken rhythm, bathed in flickering firelight. The joyful



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naturalness of it, escalating from a dreamy motion to breathless
urgency, was a radical departure from the stilted and dutiful lovemaking
they had known during the past five years, and Lindsey could almost
believe it really was a dream patterned on some remembered scrap of
Hollywood eroticism. But as she slid her hands over the muscles of his
arms and shoulders and back, as she rose to meet each of his thrusts, as
she climaxed, then again, and as she felt him loose himself within her
and dissolve from iron to molten flow, she was wonderfully, acutely
aware that it was not a dream. In fact, she had opened her eyes at last
from a long twilight sleep and was, with this release, only now fully
awake for the first time in years. The true dream was real life during
the past half-decade, a nightmare that had finally drawn to an end.

Leaving their clothes scattered on the floor and hearth behind them,
they went upstairs to make love again, this time in the huge Chinese
sleigh bed, with less urgency than before, more tenderness, to the
accompaniment of murmured endearments that seemed almost to comprise the
lyrics and melody of a quiet song. The less insistent rhythm allowed a
keener awareness of the exquisite textures of skin, the marvelous
flexibility of muscle, the firmness of bone, the pliancy of lips, and
the syncopated beating of their hearts. When the tide of ecstasy
crested and ebbed, in the stillness that followed, the words "I love
you" were superfluous but nonetheless musical to the ear, and cherished.

That April day, from first awareness of the morning light until
surrender to sleep, had been one of the best of their lives.

Ironically, the night that followed was one of Hatch's worst, so
frightening and so strange.

By eleven o'clock Vassago had finished with Redlow and disposed of the
body in a most satisfying fashion. He returned to the Blue Skies Motel
in the detective's Pontiac, took the long hot shower that he had
intended to take earlier in the night, changed into clean clothes, and
left with the intention of never going there again. If Redlow had made
the place, it was not safe any longer.

He drove the Camaro a few blocks and abandoned it on a street of
decrepit industrial buildings where it might sit undisturbed for weeks
before it was either stolen or hauled off by the police. He had been
using it for a month, after taking it from one of the women whom he had
added to his collection. He had changed license plates on it a few
times, always stealing the replacements from parked cars in the early
hours before dawn.

After walking back to the motel, he drove away in Redlow's Pontiac. It
was not as sexy as the silver Camaro, but he figured it would serve him
well enough for a couple of weeks.

He went to a neo-punk nightclub named Rip It, in Huntington Beach, where
he parked at the darkest end of the lot. He found a pouch of tools in
the trunk and used a screwdriver and pliers to remove the plates, which
he swapped with those on a battered gray Ford parked beside him. Then
he drove to the other end of the lot and reparked.

Fog, with the clammy feel of something dead, moved in from the sea.

Palm trees and telephone poles disappeared as if dissolved by the
acidity of the mist, and the streetlamps became ghost lights adrift in
the murk.

Inside, the club was everything he liked.                 Loud, dirty, and dark.


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Reeking of smoke, spilled liquor, and sweat. The band hit the chords
harder than any musicians he'd ever heard, rammed pure rage into each
tune, twisting the melody into a squealing mutant voice, banging the
numbingly repetitious rhythms home with savage fury, playing each number
so loud that, with the help of huge amplifiers, they rattled the filthy
windows and almost made his eyes bleed.

The crowd was energetic, high on drugs of every variety, some of them
drunk, many of them dangerous. In clothing, the preferred color was
black, so Vassago fit right in. And he was not the only one wearing
sunglasses. Some of them, both men and women, were skinheads, and some
wore their hair in short spikes, but none of them favored the frivolous
flamboyancy of huge spikes and cock's combs and colorful dye jobs that
had been a part of early punk. On the jammed dance floor, people seemed
to be shoving each other and roughing each other up, maybe feeling each
other up in some cases, but no one there had ever taken lessons at an
Arthur Murray studio or watched "Soul Train."

At the scarred, stained, greasy bar, Vassago pointed to the Corona, one
of six brands of beer lined up on a shelf. He paid and took the bottle
from the bartender without the need to exchange a word. He stood there,
drinking and scanning the crowd.

Only a few of the customers at the bar and tables, or those standing
along the walls, were talking to one another. Most were sullen and
silent, not because the pounding music made conversation difficult but
because they were the new wave of alienated youth, estranged not only
from society but from one another. They were convinced that nothing
mattered except self-gratification, that nothing was worth talking
about, that they were the last generation on a world headed for
destruction, with no future.

He knew of other neo-punk bars, but this was one of only two in Orange
and Los Angeles counties-the area that so many chamber of commerce types
liked to call the Southland-that were the real thing. Many of the
others catered to people who wanted to play at the lifestyle the same
way some dentists and accountants liked to put on hand-tooled boots,
faded jeans, checkered shirts, and ten-gallon hats to go to a
country-and-western bar and pretend they were cowboys. At Rip It, there
was no pretense in anyone's eyes, and everyone you encountered met you
with a challenging stare, trying to decide whether they wanted sex or
violence from you and whether you were likely to give them either. If
it was an either-or situation, many of them would have chosen violence
over sex.

A few were looking for something that transcended violence and sex,
without a clear idea of what it might be. Vassago could have shown them
precisely that for which they were searching.

The problem was, he did not at first see anyone who appealed to him
sufficiently to consider an addition to his collection. He was not a
crude killer, piling up bodies for the sake of piling them up.

Quantity had no appeal to him; he was more interested in quality.                        A
connoisseur of death.

If he could earn his way back into Hell, he would have to do so with an
exceptional offering, a collection that was superior in both its overall
composition and in the character of each of its components.

He had made a previous acquisition at Rip It three months ago, a girl


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who insisted her name was Neon. In his car, when he tried to knock her
unconscious, one blow didn't do the job, and she fought back with a
ferocity that was exhilarating. Even later, in the bottom floor of the
funhouse, when she regained consciousness, she resisted fiercely, though
bound at wrists and ankles. She squirmed and thrashed, biting him until
he repeatedly bashed her skull against the concrete floor.

Now, just as he finished his beer, he saw another woman who reminded him
of Neon. Physically they were far different, but spiritually they were
the same: hard cases, angry for reasons they didn't always understand
themselves, worldly beyond their years, with all the potential violence
of tigresses. Neon had been five-four, brunette, with a dusky
complexion.

This one was a blonde in her early twenties, about five-seven. Lean and
rangy. Riveting eyes the same shade of blue as a pure gas flame, yet
icy.

She was wearing a ragged black denim jacket over a tight black sweater,
a short black skirt, and boots.

In an age when attitude was admired more than intelligence, she knew how
to carry herself for the maximum impact. She moved with her shoulders
back and her head lifted almost haughtily. Her self-possession was as
intimidating as spiked armor. Although every man in the room looked at
her in a way that said he wanted her, none of them dared to come on to
her, for she appeared to be able to emasculate with a single word or
look.

Her powerful sexuality, however, was what made her of interest to
Vassago. Men would always be drawn to her-he noticed that those
flanking him at the bar were watching her even now-and some would not be
intimidated. She possessed a savage vitality that made even Neon seem
timid. When her defenses were penetrated, she would be lubricious and
disgustingly fertile, soon fat with new life, a wild but fruitful brood
mare.

He decided that she had two great weaknesses. The first was her clear
conviction that she was superior to everyone she met and was, therefore,
untouchable and safe, the same conviction that had made it possible for
royalty, in more innocent times, to walk among commoners in complete
confidence that everyone they passed would draw back respectfully or
drop to their knees in awe. The second weakness was her extreme anger,
which she stored in such quantity that Vassago seemed to be able to see
it crackling off her smooth pale skin, like an overcharge of
electricity.

He wondered how he might arrange her death to best symbolize her flaws.

Soon he had a couple of good ideas.

She was with a group of about six men and four women, though she did not
seem to be attached to any one of them. Vassago was trying to decide on
an approach to her when, not entirely to his surprise, she approached
him. He supposed their encounter was inevitable. They were, after all,
the two most dangerous people at the dance.

Just as the band took a break and the decibel level fell to a point at
which the interior of the club would no longer have been lethal to cats,
the blonde came to the bar. She pushed between Vassago and another man,
ordered and paid for a beer. She took the bottle from the bartender,
turned sideways to face Vassago, and looked at him across the top of the


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open bottle, from which wisps of cold vapor rose like smoke.

She said, "You blind?"

"To some things, Miss."

She looked incredulous.          "Miss?"

He shrugged.

"Why the sunglasses?" she asked.

"I've been to Hell."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Hell is cold, dark."

"That so?     I still don't get the sunglasses."

"Over there, you learn to see in total darkness."

"This is an interesting line of bullshit."

"So now I'm sensitive to light."

"A real different line of bullshit."

He said nothing.

She drank some beer, but her eyes never left him.

He liked the way her throat muscles worked when she swallowed.

After a moment she said, "This your usual line of crap, or do you just
make it up as you go?"

He shrugged again.

"You were watching me," she said.

""So?"

"You're right.       Every asshole in here is watching me most of the time."

He was studying her intensely blue eyes. What he thought he might do
was cut them out, then reinsert them backward, so she was looking into
her own skull. A comment on her self-absorbtion.

In the dream Hatch was talking to a beautiful but incredibly
cold-looking blonde. Her flawless skin was as white as porcelain, and
her eyes were like polished ice reflecting a clear winter sky. They
were standing at a bar in a strange establishment he had never seen
before. She was looking at him across the top of a beer bottle that she
held and brought to her mouth as she might have held a phallus.

But the taunting way she drank from it and licked the glass rim seemed
to be as much a threat as it was an erotic invitation. He could not
hear a thing she said, and he could hear only a few words that he spoke
himself: .... . been to Hell... cold, dark..

sensitive to light.. ." The blonde was looking at him, and it was
surely he who was speaking to her, yet the words were not in his own
voice.



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Suddenly he found himself focusing more intently on her arctic eyes, and
before he knew what he was doing, he produced a switchblade knife and
flicked it open. As if she felt no pain, as if in fact she was dead
already, the blonde did not react when, with a swift whip of the knife,
he took her left eye from its socket. He rolled it over on his
fingertips, and replaced it with the blind end outward and the blue lens
gazing inward. Hatch sat up. Unable to breathe. Heart hammering.

He swung his legs out of bed and stood, feeling as if he had to run away
from something. But he just gasped for breath, not sure where to run to
find shelter, safety.

They had fallen asleep with a bedside lamp on, a towel draped over the
shade to soften the light while they made love. The room was well
enough lit for him to see Lindsey lying on her side of the bed in a
tangle of covers.

She was so still, he thought she was dead.                  He had the crazy feeling
that he'd killed her. With a switchblade.

Then she stirred and mumbled in her sleep.

He shuddered.      He looked at his hands.            They were shaking.

Vassago was so enamored of his artistic vision that he had the impulsive
desire to reverse her eyes right there, in the bar, with everyone
watching.

He restrained himself "So what do you want?" she asked, after taking
another swallow of beer.

He said, "Out of what?"

"Out of me."

"What do you think?"

"A few thrills," she said.

"More than that."

"Home and family?" she asked sarcastically.

He didn't answer right away. He wanted time to think. This one was not
easy to play, a different sort of fish. He did not want to risk saying
the wrong thing and letting her slip the hook. He got another beer,
drank some of it.

Four members of a backup band approached the stage. They were going to
play during the other musicians' break. Soon conversation would be
impossible again. More important, when the crashing music began, the
energy level of the club would rise, and it might exceed the energy
level between him and the blonde. She might not be as susceptible to
the suggestion that they leave together.

He finally answered her question, told her a lie about what he wanted to
do with her: "You know anybody you wish was dead?"

"Who doesn't?"

"Who is it?"

"Half the people I've ever met."



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"I mean, one person in particular."

She began to understand what he was suggesting. She took another sip of
beer and lingered with her mouth and tongue against the rim of the
bottle.

"Whatis this a game or something?"

"Only if you want it to be, Miss."

"You're weird."

"Isn't that what you like?"

"Maybe you're a cop."

"You really think so?"

She stared intently at his sunglasses, though she wouldn't have been
able to see more than a dim suggestion of his eyes beyond the heavily
tinted lenses. "No. Not a cop."

"Sex isn't a good way to start," he said.

"It isn't, huh?"

"Death is a better opener. Make a little death together, then make a
little sex. You won't believe how intense it can get."

She said nothing.

The backup band was picking up the instruments on the stage.

He said, "This one in particular you'd like deadlt's a guy?"

"Yeah."

"He live within driving distance?"

"Twenty minutes from here."

"So let's do it."

The musicians began to tune up, though it seemed a pointless exercise,
considering the type of music they were going to play. They had better
play the right stuff, and they had better be good at it, because it was
the kind of club where the customers wouldn't hesitate to trash the band
if they didn't like it.

At last the blonde said, "I've got a little PCP.                    Want to do some with
me?"

"Angel dust?      It runs in my veins."

"You got a car?"

"Let's go."

On the way out he opened the door for her.

She laughed.      "You're one weird son of a bitch."

According to the digital clock on the nightstand, it was 1:28 in the
morning. Although Hatch had been asleep only a couple of hours, he was
wide awake and unwilling to lie down again.


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Besides, his mouth was dry.            He felt as if he had been eating sand.              He
needed a drink.

The towel-draped lamp provided enough light for him to make his way to
the dresser and quietly open the correct drawer without waking Lindsey.

Shivering, he took a sweatshirt from the drawer and pulled it on. He
was wearing only pajama bottoms, but he knew that the addition of a thin
pajama top would not quell his chills.

He opened the bedroom door and stepped into the upstairs hall. He
glanced back at his slumbering wife. She looked beautiful there in the
soft amber light, dark hair against the white pillow, her face relaxed,
lips slightly parted, one hand tucked under her chin. The sight of her,
more than the sweatshirt, warmed him. Then he thought about the years
they had lost in their surrender to grief, and the residual fear from
the nightmare was further diluted by a flood of regret. He pulled the
door shut soundlessly behind him.

The second-floor hall was hung with shadows, but wan light rose along
the stairwell from the foyer below. On their way from the family-room
sofa to the sleigh bed, they had not paused to switch off lamps.

Like a couple of horny teenagers.              He smiled at the thought.

On his way down the stairs, he remembered the nightmare, and his smile
slipped away.

The blonde.      The knife.      The eye.

It had seemed so real.

At the foot of the stairs he stopped, listening. The silence in the
house was unnatural. He rapped one knuckle against the newel post, just
to hear a sound. The tap seemed softer than it should have been.

The silence following it was deeper than before.

"Jesus, that dream really spooked you," he said aloud, and the sound of
his own voice was reassuring.

His bare feet made an amusing slapping sound on the oak floor of the
downstairs hall, and even more noise on the tile floor of the kitchen.

His thirst growing more acute by the second, he took a can of Pepsi from
the refrigerator, popped it open, tilted his head back, closed his eyes,
and had a long drink.

It didn't taste like cola.            It tasted like beer.

Frowning, he opened his eyes and looked at the can. It was not a can
any more. It was a bottle of beer, the same brand as in the dream:
Corona.

Neither he nor Lindsey drank Corona.               When they had a beer, which was
rarely, it was a Heineken.

Fear went through him like vibrations through a wire.

Then he noticed that the tile floor of the kitchen was gone. He was
standing barefoot on gravel. The stones cut into the balls of his feet.

As his heart began to race, he looked around the kitchen with a


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desperate need to reaffirm that he was in his own house, that the world
had not just tilted into some bizarre new dimension. He let his gaze
travel over the familiar white-washed birch cabinets, the dark granite
countertops, the dishwasher, the gleaming face of the built-in
microwave, and he willed the nightmare to recede. But the gravel floor
remained. He was still holding a Corona in his right hand. He turned
toward the sink, intent on splashing cold water in his face, but the
sink was no longer there. One half of the kitchen had vanished,
replaced by a roadside bar along which cars were parked in a row, and
then-he was not in his kitchen at all. It was entirely gone. He was in
the open air of the April night, where thick fog glowed with the
reflection of red neon from a sign somewhere behind him. He was walking
along a graveled parking lot, past the row of parked cars. He was not
barefoot any more but wearing rubber-soled black Rockports.

He heard a woman say, "My name's Lisa.                What's yours?"

He turned his head and saw the blonde.                She was at his side, keeping
pace with him across the parking lot.

Instead of answering her right away, he tipped the Corona to his mouth,
sucked down the last couple of ounces, and dropped the empty bottle on
the gravel. "My name-" he gasped as cold Pepsi foamed from the dropped
can, and puddled around his bare feet. The gravel had disappeared. A
spreading pool of cola glistened on the peach-colored Santa Fe tiles of
his kitchen floor.

In Redlow's Pontiac, Lisa told Vassago to take the San Diego Freeway
south. By the time he traveled eastward on fog-filled surface streets
and eventually found a freeway entrance, she had extracted capsules of
what she said was PCP from the pharmacopoeia in her purse, and they had
washed them down with the rest of her beer.

PCP was an animal tranquilizer that often had the opposite of a
tranquilizing effect on human beings, exciting them into destructive
frenzies.

It would be interesting to watch the impact of the drug on Lisa, who
seemed to have the conscience of a snake, to whom the concept of
morality was utterly alien, who viewed the world with unrelenting hatred
and contempt, whose sense of personal power and superiority did not
preclude a self-destructive streak, and who was already so full of
tightly contained psychotic energy that she always seemed about to
explode. He suspected that, with the aid of PCP, she'd be capable of
highly entertaining extremes of violence, fierce storms of bloody
destruction that he would find exhilarating to watch.

"Where are we going?" he asked as they cruised south on the freeway.

The headlights drilled into a white mist that hid the world and made it
seem as if they could invent any landscape and future they wished.

Whatever they imagined might take substance from the fog and appear
around them.

"El Toro," she said.

"That's where he lives?"

"Yeah."

"Who is he?"



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"You need a name?"

"No, ma'am.      Why do you want him dead?"

She studied him for a while. Gradually a smile spread across her face,
as if it were a wound being carved by a slow-moving and invisible knife.

Her small white teeth looked pointy. Piranha teeth. "You'll really do
it, won't you?" she asked. "You'll just go in there and kill the guy to
prove I enoughúta want you."

"To prove nothing," he said.            "Just because it might be fun.            Like I
told you"

"First make some death together, then make some sex," she finIshed for
him.

Just to keep her talking and make her feel increasingly at ease with
him, he said, "Does he live in an apartment or a house?"

"Why's it matter?"

"Lots more ways to get into a house, and neighbors aren't as close."

"It's a house," she said.

"Why do you want him dead?"

"He wanted me, I didn't want him, and he felt he could take what he
wanted anyway."

"Couldn't have been easy taking anything from you."

Her eyes were colder than ever.             "The bastard had to have stitches in
his face when it was over."

"But he still got what he wanted?"

"He was bigger than me."

She turned away from him and gazed at the road ahead.

A breeze had risen from the west, and the fog no longer eddied lazily
through the night. It churned across the highway like smoke billowing
off a vast fire, as if the entire coastline was ablaze, whole cities
incinerated and the remains smouldering.

Vassago kept glancing at her profile, wishing that he could go with her
to El Toro and see how deep in blood she would wade for vengeance.

Then he would have liked to convince her to come with him to his
hideaway and give herself, of her own free will, to his collection.

Whether she knew it or not, she wanted death. She would be grateful for
the sweet pain that would be her ticket to damnation. Pale skin almost
luminescent against her black clothes, filled with hatred so intense
that it made her darkly radiant, she would be an incomparable vision as
she walked to her destiny among Vassago's collection and accepted the
killing blow, a willing sacrifice for his repatriation to Hell.

He knew, however, that she would not accede to his fantasy and die for
him even if death was what she wanted. She would die only for herself,
when she eventually concluded that termination was her deepest desire.



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The moment she began to realize what he really wanted from her, she
would lash out at him. She would be harder to control-and would do more
damage-than Neon. He preferred to take each new acquisition to his
museum of death while she was still alive, extracting the life from her
beneath the malevolent gaze of the funhouse Lucifer. But he knew that
he did not have that luxury with Lisa. She would not be easy to subdue,
even with a sudden unexpected blow. And once he had lost the advantage
of surprise, she would be a fierce adversary.

He was not concerned about being hurt. Nothing, including the prospect
of pain, could frighten him. Indeed, each blow she landed, each cut she
opened in him, would be an exquisite thrill, pure pleasure.

The problem was, she might be strong enough to get away from him, and he
could not risk her escape. He wasn't worried that she would report him
to the cops. She existed in a subculture that was suspicious and
scornful of the police, seething with hatred for them. If she slipped
out of his grasp, however, he would lose the chance to add her to his
collection.

And he was convinced that her tremendous perverse energy would be the
final offering that would win him readmission to Hell.

"You feeling anything yet?" she asked, still looking ahead at the fog,
into which they barreled at a dangerous speed.

"k little," he said.

"I don't feel anything." She opened her purse again and began rummaging
through it, taking stock of what other pills and capsules she possessed.

"We need some kind of booster to help the crap kick in good."

While Lisa was distracted by her search for the right chemical to
enhance the PCP, Vassago drove with his left hand and reached under his
seat with his right to get the revolver that he had taken off Morton
Redlow. She looked up just as he thrust the muzzle against her left
side.

If she knew what was happening, she showed no surprise.                    He fired two
shots, killing her instantly.

Hatch cleaned up the spilled Pepsi with paper towels. By the time he
stepped to the kitchen sink to wash his hands, he was still shaking but
not as badly as he had been.

Terror, which had been briefly allonsuming, made some room for
curiosity. He hesitantly touched the rim of the stainless-steel sink
and then the faucet, as if they might dissolve beneath his hand. He
struggled to understand how a dream could continue after he had
awakened. The only explanation, which he could not accept, was
insanity.

He turned on the water, adjusted hot and cold, pumped some liquid soap
out of the container, began to lather his hands, and looked up at the
window above the sink, which faced onto the rear yard. The yard was
gone. A highway lay in its place. The kitchen window had become a
windshield. Swaddled in fog and only partially revealed by two
headlight beams, the pavement rolled toward him as if the house was
racing over it at sixty miles an hour. He sensed a presence beside him
where there should have been nothing but the double ovens. When he
turned his head he saw the blonde clawing in her purse. He realized
that something was in his hand, firmer than mere lather, and he looked


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down at a revolver-the kitchen snapped completely out of existence. He
was in a car, rocketing along a foggy highway, pushing the muzzle of the
revolver into the blonde's side. With horror, as she looked up at him,
he felt his finger squeeze the trigger once, twice. She was punched
sideways by the dual impact as the ear-shattering crash of the shots
slammed through the car.

Vassago could not have anticipated what happened next.

The gun must have been loaded with magnum cartridges, for the two shots
ripped through the blonde more violently than he expected and slammed
her into the passenger door. Either her door was not properly shut or
one of the rounds punched all the way through her, damaging the latch,
because the door flew open. Wind rushed into the Pontiac, shrieking
like a living beast, and Lisa was snatched out into the night.

He jammed on the brakes and looked at the rearview mirror. As the car
began to fishtail, he saw the blonde's body tumbling along the pavement
behind him.

He intended to stop, throw the car into reverse, and go back for her,
but even at that dead hour of the morning, other traffic shared the
freeway. He saw two sets of headlights maybe half a mile behind him,
bright smudges in the mist but clarifying by the second. Those drivers
would encounter the body before he could reach it and scoop it into the
Pontiac.

Taking his foot off the brake and accelerating, he swung the car hard to
the left, across two lanes, then whipped it back to the right, forcing
the door to slam shut. It rattled in its frame but didn't pop open
again. The latch must be at least partially effective.

Although visibility had declined to about a hundred feet, he put the
Pontiac up to eighty, bulleting blindly into the churning fog. Two
exits later, he left the freeway and rapidly slowed down. On surface
streets he made his way out of the area as swiftly as possible, obeying
speed limits because any cop who stopped him would surely notice the
blood splashed across the upholstery and glass of the passenger door.

In the rearview mirror, Hatch saw             the body tumbling along the pavement,
vanishing into the fog. Then for              a brief moment he saw his own
reflection from the bridge of his             nose to his eyebrows. He was wearing
sunglasses even though driving at             night. No. He wasn't wearing them.

The driver of the car was wearing them, and the reflection at which he
stared was not his own. Although he seemed to be the driver, he
realized that he was not, because even the dim glimpse he got of the
eyes behind the tinted lenses was sufficient to convince him that they
were peculiar, troubled, and utterly different from his own eyes.

Then-he was standing at the kitchen sink again, breathing hard and
making choking sounds of revulsion. Beyond the window lay only the
backyard, blanketed by night and fog.

"Hatch?"

Startled, he turned.

Lindsey was standing in the doorway, in her bathrobe.                      "Is something
wrong?"

Wiping his soapy hands on his sweatshirt, he tried to speak, but terror
had rendered him mute.


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She hurried to him.         "Hatch?"

He held her tightly and was glad for her embrace, which at last squeezed
the words from him.

"I shot her, she flew out of the car, Jesus God Almighty, bounced along
the highway like a rag doll!"

At Hatch's request, Lindsey brewed a pot of coffee. The familiarity of
the delicious aroma was an antidote to the strangeness of the night.

More than anything else, that smell restored a sense of normalcy that
helped settle Hatch's nerves. They drank the coffee at the breakfast
table at one end of the kitchen.

Hatch insisted on closing the Levolor blind over the nearby window. He
said, "I have the feeling... something's out there ... and I don't
want it looking in at us." He could not explain what he meant by
"something."

When Hatch had recounted everything that had happened to him since
waking from the nightmare of the icy blonde, the switchblade, and the
mutilated eye, Lindsey had only one explanation to offer. "No matter
how it seemed at the time, you must not have been fully awake when you
got out of bed. You were sleepwalking. You didn't really wake up until
I stepped into the kitchen and called your name."

"I've never been a sleepwalker," he said.

She tried to make light of his objection.                 "Never too late to take up a
new affliction."

"I don't buy it."

"Then what's your explanation?"

"I don't have one."

"So sleepwalking," she said.

He stared down into the white porcelain cup that he clasped in both
hands, as if he were a Gypsy trying to foresee the future in the
patterns of light on the surface of the black brew. "Have you ever
dreamed you were someone else?"

"I suppose so," she said.

He looked hard at her. "No supposing. Have you ever seen a dream
through the eyes of a stranger? A sic dream you can tell me about?"

"Well... no.       But I'm sure I must've, at one time.                    I just don't
remember.

dreams are smoke, after all.            They fade so fast.          Who remembers them for
long?"

"I'll remember this one for the rest of my life," he said.

Although they returned to bed, neither of them could get to sleep again.

Maybe it was partly the coffee. She thought he had wanted the coffee
precisely because he hoped that it would prevent sleep, sparing him a
return to the nightmare. Well, it had worked.


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They both were lying on their backs, staring at the ceiling.

At first he had been unwilling to turn off the bedside lamp, though he
had revealed his reluctance only in the hesitancy with which he clicked
the switch. He was almost like a child who was old enough to know real
fears from false ones but not quite old enough to escape all of the
latter, certain that some monster lurked under the bed but ashamed to
say as much.

Now, with the lamp off and with only the indirect glow of distant
streetlamps piercing the windows between the halves of the drapes, his
anxiety had infected her. She found it easy to imagine that some
shadows on the ceiling moved, bat-lizard-spider forms of singular
stealth and malevolent purpose.

They talked soflly, on and on about nothing special. They both knew
what they wanted to talk about, but they were afraid of it. Unlike the
creepy lesson the ceiling and things that lived under kid's beds, it was
a real fear. Brain damage.

Since waking up in the hospital, after being sedated, Hatch had been
having bad dreams of unnerving power. He didn't have them every night.

His sleep might even be undisturbed for as long as three or four nights
in a row. But he was having them more frequently, week by week, and the
intensity was increasing.

They were not always the same, as he remembered them, but they contained
similar elements. Violence. Horrific images of naked, rotting bodies
contorted into positions. Always, the unfolded from the point of view
of a stranger, the same mysterious figure, as if Hatch were a spirit in
possession of the man but unable to control him, along for the ride.

Routinely the nightmares began or end-or began and ended-in the same
setting: an assemblage of unusual bags and other queer structures that
resisted identification, all of it unlighted and seen most often as a
series of backing silhouettes against a night sky. He also saw
cavernous rooms and mazes of concrete corridors that were somehow
revealed in spite of having no windows or artificial lighting. The
location was, he said, familiar to him, but recognition remained
elusive, for he never saw enough to be able to identify it.

Until tonight, they had tried to            convince themselves that his affliction
would be short-lived. Hatch was             full of positive thoughts, as usual.
Bad dreams were not remarkable.             Everyone had them. They were often
caused by stress. Alleviate the             stress, and the nightmares went away.

But they were not fading. And now they had taken a new and deeply
disturbing turn: sleepwalking.

Or perhaps he was beginning, while awake, to hallucinate the same images
that troubled his sleep.

Shortly before dawn, Hatch reached out for her beneath the sheets and
took her hand, held it tight. "I'll be all right. It's nothing,
really. Just a "First thing in the morning, you should call Nyebern,"
she said, her heart sinking like a stone in a pond. "We haven't been
straight with him.

He told you to let him know immediately if there were any symptoms-"

"This isn't really a symptom," he said, trying to put the best face on


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it.

"Physical or mental symptoms," she said, afraid for him-and for herself
if something was wrong with him.

"I had all the tests, most of them twice.                 They gave me a clean bill of
health. No brain damage."

"Then you've nothing to worry about, do you?                  No reason to delay seeing
Nyebern."

"If there'd been brain damage, it would've showed up right away.                       It's
not a residual thing, doesn't kick in on a delay."

They were silent for a while.

She could no longer imagine that creepy-crawlies moved through the
shadows on the ceiling. False fears had evaporated the moment he had
spoken the name of the biggest real fear that they faced.

At last she said, "What about Regina?"

He considered her question for a while. Then: "I think we should go
ahead with it, fill out the papers assuming she wants to come with us,
of course."

"And if...     you've got a problem?           And it gets worse?"

"It'll take a few days to make the arrangements and be able to bring her
home. By then we'll have the results of the physical, the tests.

I'm sure I'll be fine."

"You're too relaxed about this."

"Stress kills."

"If Nyebern finds something seriously wrong...?"

"Then we'll ask the orphanage for a postponement if we have to. The
thing is if we tell them I'm having problems that don't allow me to go
ahead with the papers tomotrow, they might have second thoughts about
our suitability. We might be rejected and never have a chance with
Regina."

The day had been so perfect, from their meeting in Salvatore Gujilio's
office to their lovemaking before the dinner and again in the massive
old Chinese sleigh bed. The future had looked so bright, the worst
behind them. She was stunned at how suddenly they had taken another
nasty plunge.

She said' "God' Hatch, I love you." In the darkness he moved close to
her and took her in his arms. Until long after dawn, they just held
each other, saying nothing because, for the moment, everything had been
said.

Later, after they showered and dressed, they went downstairs and had
more coffee at the breakfast table. Mornings, they always listened to
the radio, an all-news station. That was how they heard about Lisa
Blaine, the blonde who had been shot twice and thrown from a moving car
on the San me to Freeway the previous night-at precisely the time that
Hatch, standing in the kitchen, had a vision of the trigger being pulled
and the body tumbling along the pavement in the wake of the car.



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8

For reasons he could not understand, Hatch was compelled to see the
section of the freeway where the dead woman had been found. "Maybe
something will click," was all the explanation he could offer.

He drove their new red Mitsubishi. They went north on the coast
highway, then east on a series of surface streets to the South Coast
Plaza Shopping Mall, where they entered the San Diego Freeway heading
south.

He wanted to come upon the site of the murder from the same direction in
which the killer had been traveling the previous night. By nine-n,
rush-hour traffic should have abated, but all of the lanes were still
clogged. They made halting progress southward in a haze of exhaust
fumes, from which the car airconditioning spared them.

The marine layer that surged in from the Pacific during the night had
burned off. Trees stirred in a spring breeze, and birds swooped in
giddy arcs across the cloudless, piercingly blue sky. The day did not
seem like one in which anyone would have reason to think of death.

They passed the MacArthur Boulevard exit, then Jamboree, and with every
turn of the wheels, Hatch felt the muscles growing tenser in his neck
and shoulders. He was overcome by the uncanny feeling that he actually
had followed this route last night, when fog had obscured the airport,
hotels, office buildings, and the brown hills in the distance, though in
fact he had been at home.

"They were going to El Toro," he said, which was a detail he had not
remembered until now. Or perhaps he had only now perceived it by the
grace of some sixth sense.

"Maybe that's where she lives where he lives."

Frowning, Hatch said, "I don't think so."

As they crept forward through the snarled traffic, he began to recall
not just details of the dream but the feeling of it, the edgy atmosphere
of pending violence.

His hands slipped on the steering wheel.                    They were clammy.       He blotted
them on his shirt.

"I think in some ways," he said, "the blonde was almost as dangerous as
I. .. as he was...."

"What do you mean?"

"I don't know.          It's just the feeling I had then."

Sunshine glimmered on-and glinted off-the multitude of vehicles that
churned both north and south in two great rivers of steel and chrome and
glass. Outside, the temperature was hovering around eighty degrees. But
Hatch was cold.

As a sign notified them of the upcoming Culver Boulevard exit, Hatch
leaned forward slightly. He let go of the steering wheel with his right
hand and reached under his seat. "It was here that he went for the....
. pulled it out... she was looking in her purse for something.....

He would not have been too surprised if he had found a gun under his
seat, for he still had a frighteningly clear recollection of how fluidly


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the dream and reality had mingled, separated, and mingled again last
night.

Why not now, even in daylight? He let out a hiss of relief when he
found that the space beneath his seat was empty.

"Cops," Lindsey said.

Hatch was so caught up in the reconstruction of the events in the
nightmare that he didn't immediately realize what Lindsey was talking
about.

Then he saw black-and-whites and other police vehicles parked along the
interstate.

Bent forward, intently studying the dusty ground before them, uniformed
officers were walking the shoulder of the highway and picking through
the dry grass beyond it. They were evidently conducting an expanded
search for evidence to discover anything else that might have fallen out
of the killer's car before, with, or after the blonde.

He noticed that every one of the cops was wearing sunglasses, as were he
and Lindsey. The day was eye-stingingly bright.

But the killer had been wearing sunglasses, too, when he had looked in
the rearview mirror. Why would he have been wearing them in the dark in
dense fog, for God's sake?

Shades at night in bad weather was more than just affectation or
eccentricity. It was weird.

Hatch still had the imaginary gun in his hand, withdrawn from under the
seat. But because they were moving so much slower than the killer had
been driving, they had not yet reached the spot at which the revolver
had been fired.

Traffic was creeping bumper-to-bumper not because the rush hour was
heavier than usual but because motorists were slowing to stare at the
police. It was what the radio traffic reporters called "gawkers'
block."

"He was really barreling along," Hatch said.

"In heavy log"

"And sunglasses."

"Stupid," Lindsey said.

"No.   This guy's smart."

"Sounds stupid to me."

"Fearless." Hatch tried to settle back into the skin of the man with
whom he had shared a body in the nightmare. It wasn't easy. Something
about the killer was totally alien and simply resisted analysis. "He's
extremely cold... cold and dark inside ... he doesn't think like you
or me.

Hatch struggled to find words to convey what the killer had felt like.

"Dirty." He shook his head. "I don't mean he was unwashed, nothing like
that. It's more as ... . well, as if he was contaminated." He sighed
and gave up. "Anyway, he's utterly fearless. Nothing scares him. He


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believes that nothing can hurt him. But in his case that's not the same
as recklessness. Because... somehow he's right."

"What're you saying-that he's invulnerable?"

"No. Not exactly.         But nothing you could do to him...               would matter to
him."

Lindsey hugged herself.          "You make him sound...            inhuman."

At the moment the police search for evidence was concentrated in the
quarter of a mile just south of the Culver Boulevard eNt. When Hatch
got past that activity, traffic began to move faster.

The imaginary gun in his right hand seemed to take on greater substance.
He could almost feel the cold steel against his palm.

When he pointed the phantom revolver at Lindsey and glanced at her, she
winced. He saw her clearly, but he could also see, in memory, the face
of the blonde as she had looked up from her purse with too little
reaction time even to show surprise.

"Here, right here, two shots, fast as I... as he could pull the
trigger," Hatch said, shuddering because the memory of violence was far
easier to recapture than were the mood and malign spirit of the gunman.

"Big holes in her." He could see it so clearly.                    "Jesus, it was awful."

He was really into it. "The way she tore open. And the sound like
thunder, the end of the world." The bitter taste of stomach acid rose in
his throat. "She was thrown back by the impact, against the door,
instantly dead, but the door flew open. He wasn't expecting it to fly
open. He wanted her, she was part of his collection now, but then she
was gone, out into the night, gone, rolling like a piece of litter along
the blacktop."

Caught up in the dream memory, he rammed his foot down on the brake
pedal, as the killer had done.

"Hatch, no!"

A car, then another, then a third, swerved around them in Sashes of
chrome and sun-silvered glass, horns blaring, narrowly avoiding a
collision.

Shaking himself out of the memory, Hatch accelerated again, back into
the traffic flow. He was aware of people staring at him from other
cars.

He didn't care about their scrutiny, for he had picked up the trail as
if he were a bloodhound. It was not actually a scent that he followed.

It was an indefinable something that led him on, maybe psychic
vibrations, a disturbance in the ether made by the killer's passage just
as a shark's fin would carve a trough in the surface of the sea,
although the ether had not repaired itself with the alacrity of water.

"He considered going back for her, knew it was hopeless, so he drove on,
Hatch said, aware that his voice had become low and slightly raspy, as
if he were recounting secrets that were painful to reveal.

"Then I walked into the kitchen, and you were making an odd choking,
gasping sound," Lindsey said. "Gripping the edge of the counter tight



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enough to crack the granite.               I thought you were having a heart attack-"

"Drove very fast," Hatch said, accelerating only slightly himself,
"seventy, eIghty, even faster, anxious to get away before the traffic
behind him encountered the body." remembering that he was not merely
speculating on what the killer had done, Lindsey said, "You're
remembering more than you dreamed, past the point when I came into the
kitchen and woke you."

"Not remembering," he said huskily.

what?"

"Sensing..."

"Now?"

"Yes."

"How?"

"Somehow." He simply could not explain it better than that. "Some how,"
he whispered, and he followed the ribbon of pavement across that largely
flat expanse of land, which seemed to darken in spite of the bright
morning sun, as if the killer cast a shadow vastly larger than himself,
a shadow that lingered behind him even hours after he had gone. "Eighty
... eighty-five... almost ninety miles an hour... able to see only a
hundred feet ahead." If anything had been there in the fog, the killer
would have crashed into it with cataclysmic force. "He didn't take the
first exit, wanted to get farther away than that . .

.


kept going going...."

He almost didn't slow down in time to make the exit for State Route 133,
which became the canyon road into Laguna Beach. At the last moment he
hit the brakes too hard and whipped the wheel to the right.

The Mitsubishi slid as they departed the interstate, but he decreased
speed and Immediately regained full control.

"He got off here?" Lindsey asked.

"Yes."

Hatch followed the new road to the right.

"Did he go into Laguna?"

"I...      don't think so.

He braked to a complete halt at a crossroads marked by a stop sign. He
pulled onto the shoulder. Open country lay ahead, hills dressed in
crisp brown grass. If he went straight through the crossroads, he'd be
heading into Laguna Canyon, where developers had not yet managed to raze
the wilderness and erect more tract homes. Miles of brushland and
scattered oaks Banked the canyon route all the way into Laguna Beach.

The killer also might have turned left or right. Hatch looked in each
direction, searching for... for whatever invisible signs had guided him
that far.



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After a moment, Lindsey said, "You don't know where he went from here?"

"Hideaway."

"Huh?"

Hatch blinked, not sure why he had chosen that word.                          "He went back to
his hideaway... into the ground...."

"Ground?" Lindsey asked.              With puzzlement she surveyed the sere hills.

.....      into the darkness..."

"You mean he went underground somewhere?"

.....      cool, cool silence..."

Hatch sat for a while, staring at the crossroads as a few cars came and
went. He had reached the end of the trail. The killer was not there;
he knew that much, but he did not know where the man had gone. Nothing
more came to him-except, strangely, the sweet chocolate taste of Oreo
cookies, as intense as if he had just bitten into one.

9

At The Cottage in Laguna Beach, they had a late breakfast of homefries,
eggs, bacon, and buttered toast. Since he had died and been
resuscitated, Hatch didn't worry about things like his cholesterol count
or the longterm effects of passive inhalation of other people's
cigarette smoke. He supposed the day would come when little risks would
seem big again, whereupon he would return to a diet high in fruits and
vegetables, scowl at smokers who blew their filth his way, and open a
bottle of fine wine with a mixture of delight and a grim awareness of
the health consequences of consuming alcohol. At the moment he was
appreciating life too much to worry unduly about losing it again-which
was why he was determined not to let the dreams and the death of the
blonde push him off the deep end.

Food had a natural tranquilizing effect.                    Each bite of egg yolk soothed
his nerves.

"Okay," Lindsey said, going at her breakfast somewhat less heartily than
Hatch did, "let's suppose there was brain damage of some sort, after
all. But minor. So minor it never showed up on any of the tests. Not
bad enough to cause paralysis or speech problems or anything like that.
In fact, by an incredible stroke of luck, a one in a billion chance,
this brain damage had a freak effect that was actually beneficial. It
could've made a few new connections in the cerebral tissues, and left
you psychic."

"Bull."

"Why?"

"I'm not psychic."

"Then what do you call it?"

"Even if I was psychic, I wouldn't say it was beneficial."

Because the breakfast rush had subsided, the restaurant was not too
busy.

The nearest tables to theirs were vacant.                    They could discuss the


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morning's events without fear of being overheard, but Hatch kept
glancing around self-conciously anyway.

Immediately following his reanimation, the media had swarmed to Orange
County General Hospital, and in the days after Hatch's release,
reporters had virtually camped on his doorstep at home. After all, he
had been dead longer than any man alive, which made him eligible for
considerably more than the fifteen minutes of fame that Andy Warhol had
said would eventually be every person's fate in celebrity America.

He'd done nothing to earn his fame. He didn't want it He hadn't fought
his way out of death; Lindsey, Nyebern, and the resuscitation team had
dragged him back He was a private person, content with just the quiet of
the better antique dealers who knew his shop and traded with him
sometimes. In fact, the only respect he had was Lindsey's, he was
famous only in her eyes and only for being a good husband, that would be
enough for him. By steadfastly refusing to talk to the press, he had
finally convinced them to leave him alone and chase after whatever newly
born two-headed goat-or its equivalent-was available to fill newspaper
space or a minute of the airwaves between deodorant commercials.

Now, if he revealed that he had come back from the dead with some
strange power to connect with the mind of a psycho killer, swarms of
newspeople would d on him again. He could not tolerate even the
prospect of it. He would find it easier to endure a plague of killer
bees or a hive of Hare Krishna solicitors with collection cups and eyes
glazed by spiritual transcendence.

"If it's not some psychic ability," Lindsey persisted, "then what it?"

"I don't know."

"That's not good enough."

"It could pass, never happen again.               It could be a fluke."

"You don't believe that."

"Well.    .   .   I want to believe it."

"We have to deal with this."

"Why?"

"We have to try to understand it."

"Why?"

"Don't why' me like a five-year-old child."

"Why?"

"Be serious, Hatch.         A woman's dead.        She may not be the first.          She may
not be the last."

He put his fork on his half-empty plate, and swallowed some orange juice
to wash down the homefries. "Okay, all right, it's like a psychic
vision, yeah, just the way they show it in the movies. But it's more
than that. Creepier."

He closed his eyes, trying to think of an analogy. When he had it, he
opened his eyes and looked around the restaurant again to be sure no new
diners had entered and sat near them.



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He looked regretfully at his plate.               His eggs were getting cold.          He
sighed.

"You know," he said, "how they say identical twins, separated at birth
and raised a thousand miles apart by utterly different adopted families,
will still grow up to live similar lives?"

"Sure, I've heard of that.            So?"

"Even raised apart, with totally different backgrounds, they'll choose
similar careers, achieve the same income levels, marry women who
resemble each other, even give their kids the same names. It's uncanny.
And even if they don't know they're twins, even if each of them was told
he was an only child when he was adopted, they'll sense each other out
there, across the miles, even if they don't know who or what they're
sensing.

They have a bond that no one can explain, not even geneticists."

"So how does this apply to you?"

He hesitated, then picked up his fork.                He wanted to eat instead of
talk.

Eating was safe.        But she wouldn't let him get away with that. His eggs
were congealing.        His tranquzirers. He put the fork down again.

"Sometimes," he said, "I see through this guy's eyes when I'm sleeping,
and now sometimes I can even feel him out there when I'm awake, and it's
like the psychic crap in movies, yeah. But I also feel this ...

this bond with him that I really can't explain or describe to you, no
matter how much you prod me about it."

"You're not saying you think he's your twin or something?"

"No, not at all. I        think he's a lot younger than me, maybe only twenty
or twenty-one. And        no blood relation. But it's that kind of bond, that
mystical twin crap,       as if this guy and I share something, have some
fundamental quality       in common."

"Like what?"

"I don't know. I wish I did." He paused.                  He decided to be entirely
truthful. "Or maybe I don't."

Later, after the waitress had cleared away their empty dishes and
brought them strong black coffee, Hatch said, "There's no way I'm going
to go to the cops and offer to help them, if that's what you're
thinking."

"There is a duty here-"

"I don't know anything that could help them anyway."

She blew on her hot coffee.            "You know he was driving a Pontiac."

"I don't even think it was his."

"Whose then?"

"Stolen, maybe."

"That was something else you sensed?"


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"Yeah. But I don't know what he looks like, his name, where he lives,
anything useful."

"What if something like that comes to you?                  What if you see something
that could help the cops?"

"Then I'll call it in anonymously."

"They'll take the information more seriously if you give it to them in
person."

He felt violated by the intrusion of this psychotic stranger into his
life.

That violation made him angry, and he feared his anger more than he
feared the stranger, or the supernatural aspect of the situation, or the
prospect of brain damage. He dreaded being driven by some extremity to
discover that his father's hot temper was within him, too, waiting to be
tapped.

"It's a homicide case," he said. "They take every tip seriously in a
murder investigation, even if it's anonymous. I'm not going to let them
make headlines out of me again."

From the restaurant they went across town to Harrison's Antiques, where
Lindsey had an art studio on part of the top floor in addition to the
one at home. When she painted, a regular change of environment
contributed to fresher work.

In the car, with the sun-spangled ocean visible between some of the
buildings to their right, Lindsey pressed the point that she had nagged
him about over breakfast, because she knew that Hatch's only serious
character flaw was a tendency to be too easy-going. Jimmy's death was
the only bad thing in his life that he had never been able to
rationalize, , and put out of mind. And even with that, he had tried to
suppress it rather than face up to his grief, which is why his grief had
a chance to grow.

Given time, and not much of it, he'd begin to downplay the importance of
what had just happened to him.

She said, "You've still got to see Nyebern."

"I suppose so."

"Definitely."

"If there's brain damage, if that's where this psychic stuff comes from,
you said yourself it was benevolent brain damage."

"But maybe it's degenerative, maybe it'll get worse."

"I really don't think so," he said.               "I feel fine otherwise."

"You're no doctor."

"All right," he said. He braked for the traffic light at the crossing
to the public beach in the heart of town. "I'll call him. But we have
to see Gujilio later this afternoon."

"You can still squeeze in Nyebern if he has time for you."

Hatch's father had been a tyrant, quick-tempered, shatongued, with a


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penchant for subduing his wife and disciplining his son by the
application of regular doses of verbal abuse in the form of nasty
mockery, cutting sarcasm, or just plain threats. Anything at all could
set Hatch's father off, or nothing at all, because secretly he cherished
irritation and actively sought new sources of it. He was a man who
believed he was not destined to be happy-and he insured that his destiny
was fulfilled by making himself and everyone around him miserable.

Perhaps afraid that the potential for a murderously bad temper was
within him, too, or only because he'd had enough tumult in his life,
Hatch had consciously striven to make himself as mellow as his father
was high-strung, as sweetly tolerant as his father was narrow-minded, as
greathearted as his father was unforgiving, as determined to roll with
all of life's punches as his father was determined to punch back at even
imaginary blows. As a result, he was the nicest man Lindsey had ever
known, the nicest by light-years or by whatever measure niceness was
calculated: bunches, bucketsful, gobs. Sometimes, however, Hatch turned
away from an unpleasantness that had to be dealt with, rather than risk
getting in touch with any negative emotion that was remotely reminiscent
of his old man's paranoia and anger.

The light changed from red to green, but three young women in bikinis
were in the crosswalk, laden with beach gear and heading for the ocean.

Hatch didn't just wait for them. He watched them with a smile of
appreciation for the way they filled out their suits.

"I take it back," Lindsey said.

"What?"

"I was just thinking what a nice guy you are, too nice, but obviously
you're a piece of lecherous scum."

"Nice scum, though."

"I'll call Nyebern as soon as we get to the shop," Lindsey said.

He drove up the hill through the main part of town, past the old Laguna
Hotel. "Okay. But I'm sure as hell not going to tell him I'm suddenly
psychic. He's a good man, but he won't be able to sit on that kind of
news.

The next thing I know, my face'll be all over the cover of the National
Inquirer. Besides, I'm not psychic, not exactly. I don't know what the
hell I am-aside from lecherous scum."

"So what'll you tell him?"

"Just enough about the dreams so he'll realize how troubling they are
and how strange, so he'll order whatever tests I ought to have. Good
enough?"

"I guess it'll have to be."

In the tomb-deep blackness of his hideaway, curled naked upon the
stained and lumpy mattress, fast asleep, Vassago saw sunlight, sand, the
sea, and three bikinied girls beyond the windshield of a red car.

He was dreaming and knew he dreamed, which was a peculiar sensation.

He rolled with it.




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He saw, as well, the dark-haired and dark-eyed woman about whom he had
dreamed yesterday, when she had been behind the wheel of that same car.

She had appeared in other dreams, once in a wheelchair, when she had
been laughing and weeping at the same time.

He found her more interesting than the scantily clad beach bunnies
because she was unusually vital. Radiant. Through the unknown man
driving the car, Vassago somehow knew that the woman had once considered
embracing death, had hesitated on the edge of either active or passive
selfdestruction, and had rejected an early grave water, he saw a watery
vault, cold and suffocating, narrowly escape:'...

where after she had been more full of life, energetic, and vivid than
ever before. She had cheated death. Denied the devil. Vassago hated
her for that, because it was in the service of death that he had found
meaning to his own existence.

He tried to reach out and touch her through the body of the man driving
the car. Failed. It was only a dream. Dreams could not be controlled.
If he could have touched her, he would have made her regret that she had
turned away from the comparatively painless death by drowning that could
have been hers.

When she moved in with the Harrisons, Regina almost thought she had died
and gone to Heaven, except she had her own bathroom, and she didn't
believe anyone had his own bathroom up in Heaven because in Heaven no
one needed a bathroom. They were not all permanently constipated in
Heaven or anything like that, and they certainly didn't just do their
business out in public, for God's sake (sorry, God), because no one in
his right mind would want to go to Heaven if it was the kind of place
where you had to watch where you steps. It was just that in Heaven all
the concerns of earthly existence passed away.

You didn't even have a body in Heaven; you were probably just a sphere
of mental energy, sort of like a balloon full of golden glowing gas,
drifting around among the angels, singing the praises of God which was
pretty weird when you thought about it, all those glowing and singing
balloons, but the most you'd ever have to do in the way of waste
elimination was maybe vent a liNe gas now and then, which wouldn't even
smell bad, probably like the sweet incense in church, or perfume.

That first day in the Harrisons' house, late Monday afternoon, the
twenty-ninth of April, she would remember forever, because they were so
ruce. They didn't even mention the real reason why they gave her a
choice between a bedroom on the second floor and a den on the first
floor that could be converted into a bedroom.

"One thing in its favor," Mr.             Harrison said about the den, "is the
view.

Better than the view from the upstairs room."

He led Regina to the big windows that looked out on a rose garden ringed
by a border of huge ferns. The view war pretty.

Mrs. Harrison said, "And you'd have all these bookshelves, which you
might want to fill up gradually with your own collection, since you're a
book lover."

Actually, without ever hinting at it, their concern was that she might
find the stairs troublesome. But she didn't mind stairs so much. In
fact she liked stairs, she loved stairs, she ate stairs for breakfast.


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In the orphanage, they had put her on the first floor, until she was
eight years old and realized she'd been given ground-level
accommodations because of her clunky leg brace and deformed right hand,
whereupon she immediately demanded to be moved to the third floor. The
nuns would not hear of it, so she threw a tantrum, but the nuns knew how
to deal with that, so she tried withering scorn, but the nuns could not
be withered, so she went on a hunger strike, and finally the nuns
surrendered to her demand on a trial basis. She'd lived on the third
floor for more than two years, and she had never used the elevator.

When she chose the second-floor bedroom in the Harrisons' house, without
having seen it, neither of them tried to talk her out of it, or wondered
aloud if she were "up" to it, or even blinked. She loved them for that.

The house was gorgeouream walls, white woodwork, modern furniture mixed
with antiques, Chinese bowls and vases, everything just so.

When they took her on a tour, Regina actually felt as dangerously clumsy
as she had claimed to be in the meeting in Mr. Gujilio's office. She
moved with exaggerated care, afraid that she would knock over one
precious item and kick off a chain reaction that would spread across the
entire room, then through a doorway into the next room and from there
throughout the house, one beautiful treasure tipping into the next like
dominoes in a world championship toppling contest, two-hundred-year-old
porcelains exploding, antique furniture reduced to match sticks, until
they were left standing in mounds of worthless rubble, coated with the
dust of what had been a fortune in interior design.

She was so absolutely certain it was going to happen that she wracked
her mind urgently, room by room, for something winning to say when
catastrophe struck, after the last exquisite crystal candy dish had
crashed off the last disintegrating table that had once been the
property of the First King of France. "Oops," did not seem appropriate,
and neither did "Jesus Christ!" because they thought they had adopted a
good Catholic girl not a foulmouthed heathen (sorry, God), and neither
did "somebody pushed me," because that was a lie, and lying bought you a
ticket to Hell, though she suspected she was going to wind up in Hell
anyway, considering how she couldn't stop thinking the Lord's name in
vain and using vulgarities.

No balloon full of glowing golden gas for her.

Throughout the house, the walls were adorned with art, and Regin: noted
that the most wonderful pieces all had the same signature at the bottom
right corner: Lindsey Sparling. Even as much of a screwup as she was,
she was smart enough to figure that the name Lindsey was no coincidence
and that Sparling must be Mrs. Harrison's maiden name. They were the
strangest and most beautiful paintings Regina had ever seen, some of
them so bright and full of good feeling that you had to smile, some of
them dark and brooding. She wanted to spend a long time in front of
each of them, sort of soaking them up, but she was afraid Mr. and Mrs.
Harrison would think she was a brown-nosing phony, pretending interest
as a way of apologizing for the wisecracks she had made in Mr. Gujilio's
office about paintings on velvet.

Somehow she got through the entire house without destroying anything,
and the last room was hers. It was bigger than any room at the
orphanage, and she didn't have to share it with anyone. The windows
were covered with white plantation shutters. Furnishings included a
corner desk and chair, a bookcase, an armchair with footstool,
nightstands with matching lamp and an amazing bed.


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"It's from about 1850," Mrs. Harrison said, as Regina let her hand
glide slowly over the beautiful bed.

"English," Mr. Harrison said. "Mahogany with hand-painted decoration
under several coats of laLAuer."

On the footboard, side rails, and headboard, the dark-red and dark
yellow roses and emerald-green leaves seemed alive, not bright against
the deeply colored wood but so lustrous and dewy-looking that she was
sure she would be able to smell them if she put her nose to their
petals.

Mrs. Harrison said, "It might seem a little old for a young girl, a
little stuffy "Yes, of course," Mr. Harrison said, "we can send it over
to the store, sell it, let you choose something you'd like, something
modern. This was just furnished as a guest room."

"No," Regina said hastily. "I like it, I really do.                        Could I keep it, I
mean even though it's so expensive?"

"It's not that expensive," Mr.             Harrison said, "and of course you can
keep anything you want."

"Or get rid of anything you want," Mrs.                 Harrison said.

"Except us, of course," Mr.            Harrison said.

"That's right," Mrs. Harrison said, "I'm afraid we come with the
house." egina's heart was pounding so hard she could barely get her
breath.

Happiness. And fear. Everything was so wonderful-but surely it
couldn't last. Nothing so good could last very long.

Sliding, loovered doors covered one wall of the bedroom, and Mrs.
Harrison showed Regina a closet behind the mirrors. The hugest closet
in the world. Maybe you needed a closet that size if you were a movie
star, or if you were one of those men she had read about, who liked to
dress up in women's clothes sometimes, cause then you'd need both a
girls and boy's wardrobe. But it was much bigger than she needed; it
would hold ten times the clothes that she possessed.

With some embarrassment, she looked at the two cardboard suitcases she
had brought with her from St. Thomas's. They held everything she owned
in the world. For the first time in her life, she realized she was
poor.

Which was peculiar, really, not to have understood her poverty before,
since she was an orphan who had inherited nothing. Well, nothing other
than a bum leg and a twisted right hand with two fingers missing.

As if reading Regina's mind, Mrs.              Harrison said, "Let's go shopping."

They went to South Coast Plaza Mall. They bought her too many clothes,
books, anything she wanted. Regina worried that they were overspending
and would have to eat beans for a year to balance their budget-she
didn't like beans-but they failed to pick up on her hints about the
virtues of frugality. Finally she had to stop them by pretending that
her weak leg was bothering her.

From the mall they went to dinner at an Italian restaurant. She had
eaten out twice before, but only at a fast-food place, where the owner


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treated all the kids at the orphanage to burgers and fries. This was a
real restaurant, and there was so much to absorb that she could hardly
eat, keep up her end of the table conversation, and enjoy the place all
at the same time. The chains weren't made out of hard plastic, and
neither were the knives and forks. The plates weren't either paper or
Styrofoam, and drinks came in actual glasses, which must mean that the
customers in real restaurants were not as clumsy as those in fast-food
places and could be trusted with breakable things. The waitresses
weren't teenagers, and they brought your food to you instead of handing
it across a counter by the cash register. And they didn't make you pay
for it until after you'd eaten it!

Later, back at the Harrison house, after Regina unpacked her things,
brushed her teeth, put on pajamas, took off her leg brace, and got into
bed, both the Harrisons came in to say goodnight. Mr. Harrison sat on
the edge of her bed and told her that everything might seem strange at
first, even unsettling, but that soon enough she would feel at home,
then he kissed her on the forehead and said, "Sweet dreams, princess."

Mrs. Harrison was next, and she sat on the edge of the bed, too. She
talked for a while about all the things they would do together in the
days ahead. Then she kissed Regina on the cheek, said, "Goodnight,
honey," and turned off the overhead light as she went out the door into
the hall.

Regina had never before been good nighted, so she had not known how to
respond Some of the nuns were huggers; they liked to give you an
affectionate squeeze now and then, but none of them was a smoocher.

For as far back as Regina could remember, a flicker of the dorm lights
was the signal to be in bed within fifteen minutes, and when the lights
went out, each kid was responsible for getting tucked in himself. Now
she had been tucked in twice and kissed goodnight twice, all in the same
evening, and she had been too surprised to kiss either of them in
return, which she now knew she should have done.

"You're such a screwup, Reg," she said aloud.

Lying in her magnificent bed' with the painted roses twining around her
in the darkness, Regina could imagine the conversation they were having,
right that minute, in their own bedroom: Did she kiss you good night?

No, did she kiss you?

No.   Maybe she's a coidtuh.

Maybe she's a psyche de'non chic Yeah, like that kid in The Omen.

You know what I'm worried about?

She'll stab us to death in our sleep.

lets hide all the kitchen knives.

Better hide the power tools, too.

You still have the gun in the nightstand?

Yeah, but a gun will never stop her.

Thank God we have a crowd We'll sleep in shits.

Send her back to the orphanage tomorrow.



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"Such a screwup," Regina said.                "Shit." She sighed.             "Sorry, God."

Then she folded her hands in prayer and said softly, "Dear God, if
you'll convince the Harrisons to give me one more chance, I'll never say
shit' again, and I'll be a better person." That didn't seem like a good
enough bargain from God's point of view, so she threw in other
inducements: "I'll continue to keep an A average in school, I'll never
again put Jelly in the holy water font, and I'll give serious thought to
becoming a nun." Still not good enough. "And I'll eat beans."

That ought to do it. God was probably proud of beans. After all, He'd
made all kinds of them. Her refusal to eat green or wax or Lima or navy
or any other kind of beans had no doubt been noted in Heaven, where they
had her down in the Big Book of Insults to God-Regina, currently age
ten, thinks God pulled a real boner when He created beans. She yawned.
She felt better now about her chances with the Harrisons and about her
relationship with God, though she didn't feel better about the change in
her diet. Anyway, she slept.

2

While Lindsey was washing her face, scrubbing her teeth, and brushing
her hair in the master bathroom, Hatch sat in bed with the newspaper.

He read the science page fifft, because it contained the real news these
days.

Then he skimmed the entertainment section and read his favorite comic
strips before turning, at last, to the A section where the latest
exploits of politicians were as terrifying and darkly amusing as usual.

On page three he saw the story about Bill Cooper, the beer deliveryman
whose truck they had found crosswise on the mountain road that fateful,
snowy night in March.

Within a couple of days of being resuscitated, Hatch had heard that the
trucker had been charged with driving under the influence and that the
percentage of alcohol in his blood had been more than twice that
required for a conviction under the law. George Glover, Hatch's
personal attorney, had asked him if he wanted to press a civil suit
against Cooper or the company for which he worked, but Hatch was not by
nature litigious.

Besides, he dreaded becoming bogged down in the dull and thorny world of
lawyers and courtrooms. He was alive. That was all that mattered.

A drunk driving charge would be brought against the trucker without
Hatch's involvement, and he was satisfied to let the system handle it.

He had received two pieces of correspondence from William Cooper, the
first just four days after his reanimation. It was an apparently
sincere, if long-winded and obsequious, apology seeking personal
absolution, which was delivered to the hospital where Hatch was
undergoing physical therapy. "Sue me if you want," Cooper wrote, "I
deserve it. I'd give you everything if you wanted it, though I don't
got much, I'm no rich man. But no matter whether you sue me or if not,
I most sincerely hope you'll find it in your generous heart to forgive
me one ways or another. Except for the genius of Dr. Nyebern and his
wonderful people, you'd be dead for sure, and I'd carry it on my
conscience all the rest of my days." He rambled on in that fashion for
four pages of tightly spaced, cramped, and at tunes inscrutable
handwriting.


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Hatch had responded with a short note, assuring Cooper that he did not
intend to sue him and that he harbored no animosity toward him. He also
had urged the man to seek counseling for alcohol abuse if he had not
already done so.

A few weeks later, when Hatch was living at home again and back at work,
after the media storm had swept over him, a second letter had arrived
from Cooper. Incredibly, he was seeking Hatch's help to get his truck
driving job back, from which he had been removed subsequent to the
charges that the police had arrayed against him. "I been chased down
for driving drunk twice before, it's true," Cooper wrote, "but both them
times, I was in my car, not the truck, on my own time, not during work
hours. Now my job is gone, plus they're fixing to take away my license,
which makes life hard. enough, for one thing, how are you going to get
a new job without a license? Now that figure is, from your kind answer
to my last letter, you proved yourself a fine Christian genlleman, so if
you was to speak up on my behalf, it would be a big help.

After all, you didn't wind updead, and in fact you got a lot of
publicity out of the whole thing, which must've helped your antique
business a considerable amount."

Astonished and uncertain, furious, Hatch had read the letter without
answering it in fact he quickly put it out of his mind, because he was
surprised by how angry he grew whenever he contemplated it.

Now, according to the brief story on page three of the paper, based on a
single technical error in police procedures, Cooper's attorney had won a
dismissal of all charges against him. The article included a
one-sentence summary of the accident and a silly reference to Hatch as
"holding the record for being dead the longest time prior to a full
resuscitation," as if he had arranged the entire ordeal with the hope of
winning a place in the next edition of the Guiness Book of World Records
Other revelations in the piece made Hatch curse out loud and sit up
straight in bed, starting with the news that Cooper was going to sue his
employer for wrongful termination and expected to get his old job back
or, failing that, a substantial financial settlement. "I have suffered
considerable humiliation at the hands of my former employer, subsequent
to which I developed a serious stress-related health condition," Cooper
had told reporters, obviously disgorging an attorney-written statement
that he had memorized. "Yet even Mr. Harrison has written to tell me
that he holds me blameless for the events of that night."

Anger propelled Hatch off the bed and onto his feet.                       His face felt
flushed, and he was shaking uncontrollably.

Ludicrous. The drunken bastard was trying to get his job back by using
Hatch's compassionate note as an endorsement, which required a complete
misrepresentation of what Hatch had actually written. It was deceptive.
It was unconscionable.

"Of all the fucking nerve!" Hatch said fiercely between clenched teeth.

Dropping most of the newspaper at his feet, crumpling the page with the
story in his right hand, he hurried out of the bedroom and descended the
stairs two at a time. In the den, he threw the paper on the desk,
banged open a sliding closet door, and jerked out the top drawer on a
three-drawer filing cabinet.

He had saved Cooper's handwritten letters, and although they were not on
printed stationery, he knew the trucker had included not only a return


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address but a phone number on both pieces of correspondence. He was so
disturbed, he flicked past the correct file folder-labeled MIlls and
cursed softly but fluently when he couldn't find it, then searched
backward and pulled it out. As he pawed through the contents, other
letters slipped out of the folder and clattered to the floor at his
feet.

Cooper's second letter had a telephone number carefully hand-printed at
the top. Hatch put the disarranged file folder on the cabinet and
hurried to the phone on the desk. His hand was shaking so badly that he
couldn't read the number, so he put the letter on the blotter, in the
cone of light from the brass desk lamp.

He punched William Cooper's number, intent on telling him off.                       The line
was busy.

He jammed his thumb down on the disconnect button, got the dial tone,
and tried again. Still busy.

"Sonofabitch!" He slammed down the receiver, but snatched it up again
because there was nothing else he could do to let off steam. He tried
the number a third time, using the redial button. It was still busy, of
course, because no more than half a minute had passed since the first
time he had tried it. He smashed the handset into the cradle so hard he
might have broken the phone.

On one level he was startled by the savagery of the act, the
childishness of it. But that part of him was not in control, and the
mere awareness that he was over the top did not help him regain a grip
on himself.

"Hatch?"

He looked up in surprise at the sound of his name and saw Lindsey, in
her bathrobe, standing in the doorway between the den and the foyer.

Frowning, she said, "What's wrong?"

"What's wrong?" he asked, his fury growing irrationally, as if she were
somehow in league with Cooper, as if she were only pretending to be
unaware of this latest turn of events. "I'll tell you what's wrong.

They let this Cooper bastard off the hook! The son of a bitch kills me,
runs me off the goddamned road and kill me, then slips off the hook and
has the nerve to try to use the letter I wrote him to get his job back!"
He snatched up the crumpled newspaper and shook it at her, almost
accusingly, as if she knew what was in it. "Get his job back-so he can
run someone else off the fucking road and kill them!"

Looking worried and confused, Lindsey stepped into the den.                      "They let
him off the hook? How?"

"A technicality. Isn't that cute? A cop misspells a word on the
citation or something, and the guy walks!"

"Honey, calm down-"

"Calm down?      Calm down?" He shook the crumpled newspaper again.

"You know what else       it says here? The jerk sold his story to that
sleazy tabloid, the       one that kept chasing after me, and I wouldn't have
anything to do with       them. So now this drunken son of a bitch sells them
the story about"-he       was spraying spittle he was so angry; he flattened


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out the newspaper, found the article, read from it-"about his emotional
ordeal and his role in the rescue that saved Mr. Harrison's life." What
role did he have in my rescue? Except he used his CB to call for help
after we went off the road, which we wouldn't have done if he hadn't
been there in the first place! He's not only keeping his driver's
license and probably going to get his job back, but he's making money
off the whole damn thing! If I could get my hands on the bastard, I'd
kill him, I swear I would!"

"You don't mean that," she said, looking shocked.

"You better believe I do! The irresponsible, greedy bastard. I'd like
to kick him in the head a few times to knock some sense into him, pitch
him into that freezing riven"

"Honey, lower your void"

"Why the hell should I lower my voice in my own-"

"You'll wake Regina."

It was not the mention of the girl that jolted him out of his blind
rage, but the sight of himself in the mirrored closet door beside
Lindsey.

Actually, he didn't see himself at all. for an instant he saw a young
man with thick black hair falling across his forehead, wearing glasses,
all in black. He knew he was looking at the killer, but the killer
seemed to be him At that moment they were one and the same. That
aberrant thought the young man's image-a in a second or two, leaving
Hatch staring at his reflection.

Stunned less by the hallucination than by that momentary confusion of
identity, Hatch gazed into the mirror and was appalled as much by what
he saw now as by the brief glimpse of the killer. He looked apoplectic.
His hair was disarranged. His face was red and contorted with rage, and
his eyes were... wild. He reminded himself of his father, which was
unthinkable, intolerable.

He could not remember the last time he had been that angry. In fact he
had never been in a comparable rage. Until now, he'd thought he was
incapable of that kind of outburst or of the intense anger that could
lead to it.

"I... I don't know what happens" He dropped the crumpled page of the
newspaper. It struck his desk and fell to the floor with a crisp
rustling noise that wrought an inexplicably vivid picture in his mind
dry brown leaves tumbling in a breeze along the cracked pavement in a
crumbling, condemned amusement park and for just a moment he was there,
with weeds sprouting up around him from cracks in the blacktop, dead
leaves whipping past, the moon glaring down through the elaborate
open-beam supports of a rollercoaster track. Then he was in his office
again, leaning weakly against his desk.

"Hatch"" He blinked at her, unable to speak.

"What's wrong?" she asked, moving quickly to him. She touched his arm
tentatively, as if she thought he might shatter from the contact-or
perhaps as if she expected him to respond to her touch with a blow
struck in anger.

He put his arms around her, and hugged her tightly. "Lindsey, I'm
sorry. I don't know what happened, what got into me."


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"It's all right."

"No, it isn't.       I was so.      ..    so furious."

"You were just angry, that's all."

"I'm sorry," he repeated miserably.

Even if it had appeared to her to be nothing but anger, he knew that it
had been more than that, something strange, a terrible rage. White hot.

Psychotic. He had felt an edge beneath him, as if he were teetering on
the brink of a precipice, with only his heels planted on solid ground.

To Vassago's eyes, the monument of Lucifer cast a shadow even in
absolute darkness, but he could still see and enjoy the cadavers in
their postures of degradation. He was enraptured by the organic collage
that he had created, by the sight of the humbled forms and the stench
that arose from them. His hearing was not remotely as acute as his
night vision, but he did not believe that he was entirely imagining the
soft, wet sounds of decomposition to which he swayed as a music lover
might sway to strains of lleethoven.

When he was suddenly overcome by anger, he was not sure why. It was a
quiet sort of rage at first, curiously unfocused. He opened himself to
it, enjoyed it, fed it to make it grow.

A vision of a newspaper Bashed through his mind. He could not see it
clearly, but something on the page was the cause of his anger. He
squinted as if narrowing his eyes would help him see the words.

The vision passed, but the anger remained. He nurtured it the way a
happy man might consciously force a laugh beyond its natural span just
because the sound of laughter buoyed him. Words blurted from him, "Of
all the fucking nerve!"

He had no idea where the exclamation had come from, just as he had no
idea why he had said the name "Lindsey" out loud in that lounge in
Newport Beach, several weeks ago, when these weird experiences had
begun.

He was so abruptly energized by anger that he turned away from his
collection and stalked across the enormous chamber, up the ramp down
which the gargoyle gondolas had once plunged, and out into the night,
where the moon forced him to put on his sunglasses again. He could not
stand still. He had to move, move. He walked the abandoned midway, not
sure who or what he was looking for, curious about what would happen
next.

Disjointed images flashed through his mind, none remaining long enough
to allow contemplation: the newspaper, a book-lined den, a filing
cabinet, a hand-written letter, a telephone.... He walked faster and
faster, pivoting suddenly onto new avenues or into narrower passageways
between the decaying buildings, in a fruitless search for a connection
that would link him more clearly with the source of the pictures that
appeared and swiftly faded from his mind.

As he passed the roller coaster, cold moonlight fell through the maze of
supporting crossbeams and glinted off the track in such a way as to make
those twin ribbons of steel look like rails of ice. When he lifted his
gaze to stare at the monolithic-and suddenly mysterious structure, an
angry exclamation burst from him: "Pitch him into that freezIng river!"


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A woman said, Honey, lower your voice.

Though he knew that her voice had arisen from within him, as an auditory
adjunct to the fragmentary visions, Vassago turned in search of her
anyway. She was there. In a bathrobe. Standing just this side of a
doorway that had no right to be where it was, with no walls surrounding
it. To the left of the doorway, to the right of it, and above it, there
was only the night. The silent amusement park. But beyond the doorway,
past the woman who stood in it, was what appeared to be the entrance
foyer of a house, a small table with a vase of flowers, a stairway
curving up to a second floor.

She was the woman he had thus far seen only in his dreams, first in a
wheelchair and most recently in a red automobile on a sun-splashed
highway. As he took a step toward her, she said, You'll wake Reg He
halted, not because he was afraid of waking Regina, whoever the hell she
was, and not because he still didn't want to get his hands on the woman,
which he did-he was so vital-but because he became aware of a
full-length mirror to the left of the Twilight-the door, a mirror
floating impossibly in the night air. It was filled with his
reflection, except that it was not him but a man he had never seen
before, his size but maybe twice his age, lean and fit, his face
contorted in rage.

The look of rage gave way to one of shock and disgust, and both Vassago
and the man in the vision turned from the mirror to the woman in the
doorway. "Lindsey, I'm sorry," Vassago said.

Lindsey.     The name he had spoken three times at that lounge in Newport
Beach.

Until now, he had not linked it to this woman who, nameless, had
appeared so often in his recent dreams.

"Lindsey," Vassago repeated.

He was speaking of his own volition this time, not repeating what the
man in the mirror was saying, and that seemed to shatter the vision.

The mirror and the reflection in it flew apart in a billion shards, as
did the doorway and the dark-eyed woman.

As the hushed and moon-washed park reclaimed the night, Vassago reached
out with one hand toward the spot where the woman had stood.

"Lindsey." He longed to touch her. So alive, she was. "Lindsey." He
wanted to cut her open and enfold her heating heart in both hands, until
its metronomic pumping slowed. .. slowed. .. slowed to a full stop.
He wanted to be holding her heart when life retreated from it and death
took possession.

As swiftly as the flood of rage had poured into Hatch, it drained out of
him. He balled up the pages of the newspaper and threw them in the
waste can beside the desk, without glancing again at the story about the
truck driver. Cooper was pathetic, a self-destructive loser who would
bring his own punishment down upon himself sooner or later; and it would
be worse than anything that Hatch would have done to him.

Lindsey gathered the letters that were scattered on the floor in front
of the filing cabinet. She returned them to the file folder labeled US
BUS.



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The letter from Cooper was on the desk beside the telephone. When Hatch
picked it up, he looked at the hand-written address at the top, above
the telephone number, and a ghost of his anger returned. But it was a
pale spirit of the real thing, and in a moment it vanished like a
revenant.

He took the letter to Lindsey and put it in the file folder, which she
reinserted into the cabinet.

Standing in moonglare and night breeze, in the shadow of the roller
coaster, Vassago waited for additional visions.

He was intrigued by what had transpired, though not surprised. He had
traveled Beyond. He knew another world existed, separated from this one
by the flimsiest of curtains. Therefore, events of a supernatural
nature did not astonish him.

Just when he began to think that the enigmatic episode had reached a
conclusion, one more vision flickered through his mind. He saw a single
page of a hand-written letter. White, lined paper. Blue ink.

At the top was a name.          William X.       Cooper.     And an address in the city
of Tustin.

"Pitch him into that freezing river," Vassago muttered, and knew somehow
that William Cooper was the object of the unfocused anger that had
overcome him when he was with his collection in the funhouse, and which
later seemed to link him with the man he had see in the mirror.

It was an anger he had embraced and amplified because he wanted to
understand whose anger it was and why he could feel it, but also because
anger was the yeast in the bread of violence, and violence was the
staple of his diet.

From the roller coaster he went directly to the subterranean garage.

Two cars waited there.

Morton Redlow's Pontiac was parked in the farthest corner, in the
deepest shadows. Vassago had not used it since last Thursday night,
when he had killed Redlow and later the blonde. Though he believed the
fog had provided adequate cover, he was concerned that the Pontiac might
have been glimpsed by witnesses who had seen the woman tumble from it on
the freeway.

He longed to return to the land of endless night and eternal damnation,
to be once more among his own kind, but he did not want to be gunned
down by police until his collection was finished. If his offering was
incomplete when he died, he believed that he would be deemed as yet
unfit for Hell and would be pulled back into the world of the living to
start another collection.

The second car was a pearl-gray Honda that had belonged to a woman named
Renata Desseux, whom he had clubbed on the back of the head in a
shopping-mall parking lot on Saturday night, two nights after the fiasco
with the blonde. She, instead of the punker named Lisa, had become the
latest addition to his collection.

He had removed the license plates from the Honda, tossed them in the
trunk, and later replaced them with plates stolen off an old Ford on the
outskirts of Santa Ana. Besides, Hondas were so ubiquitous that he felt
safe and anonymous in this one. He drove off the park grounds and out
of the county's largely unpopulated eastern hills toward the panorama of


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golden light that filled the lowlands as far south and as far north as
he could see, from the hills to the ocean.

Urban sprawl.

Civilization.

Hunting grounds.

The very immensity of southern California-thousands of square miles,
tens of millions of people, even excluding Ventura County to the north
and San Diego County to the south-was Vassago's ally in his
determination to acquire the pieces of his collection without arousing
the interest of the police. Three of his victims had been taken from
different communities in Los Angeles County, two from Riverside, the
rest from Orange County, spread over many months. Among the hundreds of
missing persons reported during that time, his few acquisitions would
not affect the statistics enough to alarm the public or alert the
anthorities.

He was also abetted by the fact that these last years of the century and
the millennium were an age of inconstancy. Many people changed jobs,
neighbors, friends, and marriages with little or no concern for
continuity in life. As a result, there were fewer people to notice or
care when any one person vanished, fewer to harass authorities into a
meaningful response.

And more often than not, those who disappeared were later discovered in
changed circumstances of their own invention. A young executive might
trade the grind of corporate life for a job as a blackjack dealer in
Vegas or Reno, and a young mother-disillusioned with the demands of an
infant and an infantile husband-might end up dealing cards or serving
drinks or dancing topless in those same cities, leaving on the spur of
the moment, blowing off their past lives as if a standard middle-class
existence was as much a cause for shame as a criminal background.

Others were found deep in the arms of various addictions, living in
cheap rat-infested hotels that rented rooms by the week to the
glassy-eyed legions of the counterculture. Because it was California,
many missing persons eventually turned up in religious communes in
Marrin County or in Oregon, worshipping some new god or new
manifestation of an old god or even just some shrewd- man who said he
was God.

It was a new age, disdaining tradition. It provided for whatever
lifestyle one wished to pursue. Even one like Vassago's.

If he had left bodies behind, similarities in the victims and methods of
murder would have linked them. The police would have realized that one
perpetrator of unique strength and cunning was on the prowl, and they
would have established a special task force to find him.

But the only bodies he had not taken to the Hell below the funhouse were
those of the blonde and the private detective. No pattern would be
deduced from just those two corpses, for they had died in radically
different ways. Besides, Morton Redlow might not be found for weeks
yet.

The only links between Redlow and the punker were the detective's
revolver, with which the woman had been shot, and his car, out of which
she had fallen. The car was safely hidden in the farthest corner of the
long-abandoned park garage. The gun was in the Styrofoam cooler with



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the Oreo cookies and other snacks, at the bottom of the elevator shaft
more than two Boors below the lnnhouse. He did not intend to use it
again.

He was unarmed when, after driving far north into the county, he arrived
at the address he had seen on the hand-written letter in the vision.

William X. Cooper, whoever the hell he was and if he existed, lived in
an attractive garden-at complex called Palm Coort. The name of the
place and the street number were carved in a decorative wooden sign,
floodlit from the front and backed by the promised palms.

Vassago drove pastPalmCourt, turned right attheoorner,aadparked two
blocks away. He didn't want anyone to remember the Honda sitting in
front of the building. He didn't flat-out intend to kill this Cooper,
just talk to him, ask him some questions about the dark-a dark-eyed
bitch named Lindsey. Ilu the was situation he did not understand, and
he to take every precaution. Besides, the truth was, these days he
killed most of the people to whom he bothered to talk with for any
length of time.

After closing the file drawer and turning off the lamp in the den, Hatch
and Lindsey stopped at Regina's room to make sure she was all right,
moving quietly to the side of her bed. The hall light, falling through
her door, revealed that the girl was sound asleep. The small knuckles
of one fisted hand were against her chin. She was breathing evenly
through slightly opened lips. If she , her dreams must have been pat.

Hatch felt his heart pinch as he looked at her, for she seemed so
desperately young. He found it hard to believe that he had ever been as
young as Regina was just then, for youth was innocence. Having been
raised under the hateful and oppressive hand of his father, he had
surrendered innocence at an early age in return for an intuitive grasp
of aberrant psychology that had permitted him to survive in a home where
anger and brutal "discipline" were the rewards for innocent mistakes and
misunderstandings. He knew that Regina could not be as tender as she
looked, for life had given her reasons of her own to develop thick skin
and an armored heart.

Tough as they might be, however, they were both vulnerable, child and
man. In fact, at that moment Hatch felt more vulnerable than the girl.

If given a choice between her inability the game leg, the twisted and
incomplete hand-and whatever damage had been done to some deep region of
his brain, he would have opted for her physical impairments without
hesitation. After recent experiences, including the inexplicable
escalation of his anger into blind rage, Hatch did not feel entirely in
control of himself. And from the time he had been a small boy, with the
terrifying example of his father to shape his fears, he had feared
nothing half as much as being out of control.

I will not fail you, he promised the sleeping child.

He looked at Lindsey, to whom he owed his lives, both of them, before
and after dying. Silently he made her the same promise: I will not fail
you.

He wondered if they were promises he could keep.

Later, in their own room, with the lights out, as they lay on their
separate halves of the bed, Lindsey said, "The rest of the test results
should be back to Dr. Nyebern tomorrow."



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Hatch had spent most of Saturday at the hospital, giving blood and urine
samples, submitting to the prying of X-ray and sonogram machines.

At one point he had been hooked up to more electrodes than the creature
that Dr. Frankenstein, in those old movies, had energized from kites
sent aloft in a lightning storm.

He said, "When I spoke to him today, he told me everything was looking
good. I'm sure the rest of the tests will all come in negative, too.

Whatever's happening to me, it has nothing to do with any mental or
physical damage from the accident or from be.... dead. I'm healthy,
I'm okay."

"Oh, God, I hope so."

"I'm just fine."

"Do you really think so?"

"Yes, I really think so, I really do." He wondered how he could lie to
her so smoothly. Maybe because the lie was not meant to hurt or harm,
merely to soothe her so she could get some sleep.

"I love you," she said.

"I love you, too."

In a couple of minutes- shortly before midnight, according to the
digital clock at the bedside-she was asleep, snoring softly.

Hatch was unable to sleep, worrying about what he might learn of his
future-or lack of it-tomorrow. He suspected that Dr. Nyebern would be
gray-faced and grim, bearing somber news of some meaningful shadow
detected in one lobe of Hatch's brain or another, a patch of dead cells,
lesion, cyst, or tumor. Something deadly. Inoperable. And certain to
get worse.

His confidence had been increasing slowly ever since he had gotten past
the events of Thursday night and Friday morning, when he had dreamed of
the blonde's murder and, later, had followed the trail of the killer to
the Route 133 off-ramp from the San Diego Freeway. The weekend had been
uneventful. The day just past, enlivened and uplifted by Regina's
arrival, had been delightful. Then he had seen the newspaper piece
about Cooper, and had lost control.

He hadn't told Lindsey about the stranger's reflection that he had seen
in the den mirror. This time he was unable to pretend that he might
have been sleepwalking, half awake, half dreaming He had been wide
awake, which meant the image in the mirror was an hallucination of one
kind or another. A healthy, undamaged brain didn't hallucinate. He
hadn't shared that terror with her because he knew, with the receipt of
the test results tomorrow, there would be fear enough to go around.

Unable to sleep, he began to think about the newspaper story again, even
though he didn't want to chew on it any more. He tried to direct his
thoughts away from William Cooper, but he returned to the subject the
way he might have obsessively probed at a sore tooth with his tongue.

It almost seemed as if he were being forced to think about the truck
driver, as if a giant mental magnet was pulling his attention inexorably
in that direction. Soon, to his dismay, anger rose in him again. Worse,


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almost at once, the anger exploded into fury and a hunger for violence
so intense that he had to fist his hands at his sides and clench his
teeth and struggle to keep from letting loose a primal cry of rage.

From the banks of mailboxes in the breezeway at the main entrance to the
garden apartments, Vassago learned that William Cooper was in apartment
twenty-eight. He followed the breezeway into the courtyard, which was
lined with palms and ficuses and ferns and too many landscape lights to
please him, and he climbed an exterior staircase to the covered balcony
that served the second-floor units of the two-story complex.

No one was in sight.         Palm Court was silent, peaceful.

Though it was a few minutes past midnight, lights were on in the Cooper
apartment. Vassago could hear a television turned low.

The window to the right of the door was covered with Levolor blinds.

The slats were not tightly closed. Vassago could see a kitchen
illuminated only by the low-wattage bulb in the range hood.

To the left of the door a larger window looked onto the balcony and
courtyard from the apartment living room. The drapes were not drawn all
the way shut. Through the gap, a man could be seen slumped in a big
recliner with his feet up in front of the television. this head was
tilted to one side, his face toward the window, and he appeared to be
asleep. A glass containing an inch of golden liquid stood beside a
half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel's on a small table next to the
recliner.

A bag of cheese puffs had been knocked off the table, and some of the
bright orange contents had scattered across the bile-green carpet.

Vassago scanned the balcony to the left, right, and on the other side of
the courtyard. Still d.

He tried to slide open Cooper's living-room window, but it was either
corroded or locked. He moved to the right again, toward the kitchen
window, but he stopped at the door on the way and, without any real
hope, tried it. The door was unlocked. He pushed it open, went inside
and locked it behind him.

The man in the recliner, probably Cooper, did not stir as Vassago
quietly pulled the drapes all the way shut across the big living-room
window. No one else, passing on the balcony, would be able to look
inside.

Already assured that the kitchen, dining area, and living room were
deserted, Vassago moved catlike through the bathroom and two bedrooms
(one without furniture, used primarily for storage) that comprised the
rest of the apartment. The man in the recliner was alone.

On the dresser in the bedroom, Vassago spotted a wallet and a ring of
keys. In the wallet he found fifty-eight dollars, which he took, and a
driver's license in the name of William X. Cooper. The photograph on
the license was of the man in the living room, a few years younger and,
of course, not in a drunken stupor.

He returned to the living room with the intention of waking Cooper and
having an informative little chat with him. Who is Lindsey? Where does
she live?

But as he approached the recliner, a current of anger shot through him,


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too sudden and causeless to be his own, as if he were a human radio that
received other people's emotions. And what he was receiving was the
same anger that had suddenly struck him while he had been with his
collection in the funhouse hardly an hour ago. As before, he opened
himself to it, amplified the current with his own singular rage,
wondering if he would receive visions, as he had on that previous
occasion. But this time, as he stood looking down on William Cooper,
the anger Bared too abruptly into insensate fury, and he lost control.

From the table beside the recliner, he grabbed the Jack Daniel's by the
neck of the bottle.

Lying rigid in his bed, hands fisted so tightly that even his blunt
fingernails were gouging painfully into his palms, Hatch had the crazy
feeling that his mind had been invaded. His flicker of anger had been
like opening a door just a hairline crack but wide enough for something
on the other side to get a grip and tear it off its hinges. He felt
something unnameable storming into him, a force without form or
features, defined only by its hatred and rage. Its fury was that of the
hurricane, the typhoon, beyond mere human dimensions, and he knew that
he was too small a vessel to contain all of the anger that was pumping
into him. He felt as if he would explode, shatter as if he were not a
man but a crystal figurine.

The half-full bottle of Jack Daniel's whacked the side of the sleeping
man's head with such impact that it was almost as loud as a shotgun
blast.

Whiskey and sharp fragments of glass showered up, rained down,
splattered and clinked against the television set, the other furniture,
and the walls. The air was filled with the velvety aroma of corn-mash
bourbon, but underlying it was the scent of blood, for the gashed and
battered side of Cooper's face was bleeding copiously.

The man was no longer merely sleeping.                He had been hammered into a
deeper level of unconsciousness.

Vassago was left with just the neck of the bottle in his hand. It
terminated in three sharp spikes of glass that dripped bourbon and made
him think of snake fangs glistening with venom. Shifting his grip, he
raised the weapon above his head and brought it down, letting out a
fierce hiss of rage, and the glass serpent bit deep into William
Cooper's face.

The volcanic wrath that erupted into Hatch was unlike anything he had
ever experienced belbee, far beyond any rage that his father had ever
achieved. Indeed, it was nothing he could have generated within himself
for the same reason that one could not manufacture sulfuric acid in a
paper cauldron: the vessel would be dissolved by the substance it was
required to contain. A high-pressure lava flow of anger gushed into
him, so hot that he wanted to scream, so white-hot that he had no time
to scream. Consciousness was burned away, and he fell into a mercifully
dreamless darkness where there was neither anger nor terror.

Vassago realized that he was shouting with wordless, savage glee.

After a dozen or twenty blows, the glass weapon had utterly
disintegrated. He finally, reluctantly dropped the short fragment of
the bottle neck still in his white-knuckled grip. Snarling, he threw
himself against the Naugahyde recliner, tipping it over and rolling the
dead man onto the bile-green carpet. He picked up the end table and
pitched it into the television set, where Humphrey Bogart was sitting in


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a military courtroom, rolling a couple of ball bearings in his leathery
hand, talking about strawberries.

The screen imploded, and Bogart was transformed into a shower of yellow
sparks, the sight of which ignited new fires of destructive fury in
Vassago. He kicked over a coffee table, tore two It Mart prints off the
walls and smashed the glass out of the frames, swept a collection of
cheap ceramic knickknacks off the mantel. He would have liked nothing
better than to have continued from one end of the apartment to the
other, pulling all the dishes out of the kitchen cabinets and smashing
them, reducing all the glassware to bright shards, seizing the food in
the refrigerator and heaving it against the walls, hammering one piece
of furniture against another until everything was broken and splintered,
but he was halted by the sound of a siren, distant now, rapidly drawing
nearer, the meaning of it penetrating even through the mist of blood
frenzy that clouded his thoughts. He headed for the door, then swinging
away from it, realizing that people might have come out into the
courtyard or might be watching from their windows. He ran out of the
living room, back the short hall, to the window in the master bedroom,
where he pulled aside the drapes and looked onto the roof over the
building-long carport. An alleyway, bordered by a block wall, lay
beyond. He twisted open the latch on the double-hung window, shoved up
the bottom hall, squeezed through, dropped onto the roof of the long
carport, rolled to the edge, fell to the pavement, and landed on his
feet as if he were a cat. He lost his sunglasses, scooped them up, put
them on again. He sprinted left, toward the back of the property, with
the siren louder now, much louder, very close. When he came to the next
flank of the eight-foot-high concrete-block wall that ringed the
property, he swiftly clambered over it with the agility of a spider
skittering up any porous surface, and then he was over, into another
alleyway serving carports along the back of another apartment complex,
and so he ran from serviceway to serviceway, picking a route through the
maze by sheer instinct, and came out on the street where he had parked,
half a block from the pearl-gray Honda. He got in the car, started the
engine, and drove away from there as sedately as he could manage,
sweating and breathing so hard that he steamed up the windows.

Reveling in the fragrant melange of bourbon, blood, and perspiration, he
was tremendously excited, so profoundly satisfied by the violence he had
unleashed that he pounded the steering wheel and let out peels of
laughter that had a shrieky edge.

For a while he drove randomly from one street to another with no idea
where he was headed. After his laughter faded, when his heart stopped
racing, he gradually oriented himself and struck out south and east, in
the general direction of his hideaway.

If William Cooper could have provided any connection to the woman named
Lindsey, that lead was now closed to Vassago forever. He wasn't
worried. He didn't know what was happening to him, why Cooper or
Lindsey or the man in the mirror had been brought to his attention by
these supernatural means. But he knew that if he only trusted in his
dark god, everything would eventually be made clear to him.

He was beginning to wonder if Hell had let him go willingly, returning
him to the land of the living in order to use him to deal with certain
people whom the god of darkness wanted dead. Perhaps he'd not been
stolen from Hell, after all, but had been sent back to life on a mission
of destruction that was only slowly becoming comprehensible.

If that were the case, he was pleased to make himself the instrument of
the dark and powerful divinity whose company he longed to rejoin, and he


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anxiously awaited whatever task he might he assigned next.

Toward dawn, after several hours in a deep slumber of almost deathlike
perfection, Hatch woke and did not know where he was. For a moment he
drifted in confusion, then washed up on the shore of memory: the
bedroom, Lindsey breathing softly in her sleep beside him, the ash-gray
first light of morning like a fine silver dust on the windowpane When he
Bed the inexplicable and inhuman fit of rage that had slammed through
him with paralytic force, Hatch stiffened with fear. He tried to
remember where that spiraling anger had led, in what act of violence it
had culminated, but his mind was blank. It seemed to him that he had
simply blacked out, as if that usually intense fury had overloaded the
circuits in his brain and blown a fuse or two.

Passed out-or blacked out? There was a fateful difference between the
two. Passed out, he might have been in bed all night, exhausted, as
still as a stone on the floor of the sea. But if he blacked out,
remaining conscious but unaware of what he was doing, in a psychotic
fugue, God alone knew what he might have done.

Suddenly he sensed that Lindsey was in grave danger.

Heart hammering against the cage of his ribs, he sat up in bed and
looked at her. The dawn light at the window was too soft to reveal her
clearly. She was only a shadowy shape against the sheets.

He reached for the switch on the bedside lamp, but then hesitated.                        He
was afraid of what he might see.

I would never hurt Lindsey, never, he thought desperately.

But he remembered all too well that, for a moment last night, he had not
been entirely himself. His anger at Cooper had seemed to open a door
within him, letting in a monster from some vast darkness beyond.

Trembling, he finally clicked the switch. In the lamplight he saw that
Lindsey was untouched, as fair as ever, sleeping with a peaceful smile.

Greatly relieved, he switched off the lamp and thought of Regina.                        The
engine of anxiety revved up again.

Ridiculous. He would no sooner harm Regina than Lindsey.                      She was a
defenseless child.

He could not stop shaking, wondering.

He slipped out of bed without disturbing his wife. He picked up his
bathrobe from the back of the armchair, pulled it on, and quietly left
the room.

Barefoot, he entered the hall, where a pair of skylights admitted large
pieces of the morning, and followed it to Regina's room. He moved
swiftly at first, then more slowly, weighed down by dread as heavy as a
pair of iron boots.

He had a mental image of the flower-painted mahogany bed splashed with
blood, the sheets sodden and red. For some reason, he had the crazy
notion that he would find the child with fragments of glass in her
ravaged face. The weird specificity of that image convinced him that he
had, indeed, done something unthinkable after he had blacked out.

When he eased open the door and looked into the girls room, she was
sleeping as peacefully as Lindsey, in the same posture he had seen her


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in last night, when he and Lindsey had checked on her before going to
bed.

No blood.        No broken glass.

Swallowing hard, he pulled the door shut and returned along the hall as
far as the first skylight. He stood in the fall of dim morning light,
looking up through the tinted glass at a sky of indeterminate hue, as if
an explanation would suddenly be writ large across the heavens.

No explanation came to him.               He remained confused and anxious.

At least Lindsey and Regina were fine, untouched by whatever presence he
had connected with last night.

He was reminded of an old vampire movie he had once seen, in which a
wizened priest had warned a young woman that the undead could enter her
house only if she invited them-but that they were cunning and
persuasive, capable of inducing even the wary to issue that mortal
invitation.

Somehow a bond existed between Hatch and the psychotic who had killed
the young blond punker named Lisa. By falling to repress his anger at
William Cooper, he had strengthened that bond. His anger was the key
that opened the door. When he indulged in anger, he was issuing an
invitation just like the one against which the priest in that movie had
warned the young woman. He could not explain how he knew this to be
true, but he did know it, all right, knew it in his bones. He just
wished to God he understood it.

He felt lost.

Small and powerless and afraid.

And although Lindsey and Regina had come through the night unharmed, he
sensed more strongly than ever that they were in great danger.

Growing greater by the day.               By the hour.

3

Before dawn, the thirtieth of April, Vassago bathed outdoors with
bottled water and liquid soap. By the first light of day, he bad safely
ensconced in the deepest part of his hideaway. Lying on his mattress,
staring up the elevator shaft, he treated himself to Oreos and warm root
beer, then to a couple of snack-size bags of Reese's Murder was always
enormously satisfying. Tremendous internal pressures were released with
the striking of a killing blow. More important, each murder was an act
of rebellion against all things holy, against commandments and laws and
rules and the irritatingly prissy systems oft employed by human beings
to support the fiction that life was precious and endowed with meamng.
Life was cheap and the point was Nothing mattered but sensation and the
swift gratification of all d which only the strong and free really
understood. After every kilhhg, Vassago felt as liberated as the wind
and mightier than any steel machine.

Until one glorious night in his twelfth year, he had been one of the
enslaved , dumbly plodding through life according to the rules of
civilization, though they made no sense to him. He pretended to love
his mother, father, sister, and a host of relatives, though he felt
nothing more for them than he did for strangers encountered on the
street.



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As a child, when he was old enough to begin thinking about such things,
he wondered if something was wrong with him, a crucial element missing
from his makeup. As he listened to himself playing the game of love,
employing strategies of false affection and shameless flattery, he was
somehow convincing others found him, for he could hear the insincerity
in his voice, could feel the fraudulence in every gesture, and was
acutely aware of the deceit behind his every loving smile. Then one day
he suddenly heard the deception in their voices and saw it in their
faces, and he knew that none of them had ever experienced love, either,
or any of the nobler sentiments toward which a civilized person was
supposed to aspire, selflessness, courage, piety, humility, and all the
rest of that dreary catechism. They were all playing the game, too.

Later he came to the conclusion that most of them, even the adults, had
never enjoyed his degree of insight, and remained unaware that other
people were exactly like them. Each person thought he was unique, that
something was missing in him, and that he must play the game well or be
uncovered and ostracized as something less than human. God had tried to
create a world of love, had failed, and had commanded His creations to
pretend to the perfection with which He had been unable to imbue them.

Perceiving that stunning truth, Vassago had taken his first step toward
freedom. Then one summer night when he was twelve, he finally
understood that in order to be really free, totally free, he had to act
upon his understanding, begin to live differently from the herd of
humanity, with his own pleasure as the only consideration. He had to be
willing to exercise the power over others which he possessed by virtue
of his insight into the true nature of the world. That night he learned
that the ability to kill without compunction was the purest form of
power, and that the exercise of power was the greatest pleasure of them
all. ...

In those days, before he died and came back from the dead and chose the
name of the demon prince Vassago, the name to which he had answered and
under which he had lived was Jeremy. His best friend had been Tod
Ledderbeek, the son of Dr. Sam Ledderbeek, a gynecologist whom Jeremy
called the "crack quack" when he wanted to rag Tod.

In the morning of that early June day, Mrs. Ledderbeek had taken Jeremy
and Tod to Fantasy World, the lavish amusement park that, against all
expectations, had begun to give Disneyland a run for its money.

It was in the hills, a few miles east of San Juan Capistrano, somewhat
out of the way-just as Magic Mountain had been a bit isolated before the
suburbs north of Los Angeles had spread around it, and just as
Disneyland had seemed to be in the middle of nowhere when first
constructed on farmland near the obscure town of Anaheim. It was built
with Japanese money, which worried some people who believed the Japanese
were going to own the whole country some day, and there were rumors of
Mafia money being involved, which only made it more mysterious and
appealing. But finally what mattered was that the atmosphere of the
place was cool, the rides radical, and the junk food almost deliriously
junky. Fantasy World was where Tod wanted to spend his twelfth
birthday, in the company of his best friend, free of parental control
from morning until ten o'clock at night, and Tod usually got what he
wanted because he was a good kid; everyone liked him: he knew exactly
how to play the game.

Mrs. Ledderbeck left them off at the front gate and shouted after them
as they raced away from the car: "I'll pick you up right here at ten
o'clock!



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Right here at ten o'clock sharp!"

After paying for their tickets and getting onto the grounds of the park,
Tod said, "What do you wanna do first?"

"I don't know.       What do you wanna do first?"

"Ride the Scorpion?"

"Yeah!"

"Yeah!"

Bang, they were off, hurrying toward the north end of the park where the
track for the Scorpion-"The Roller Coaster with a Sting!" the TV ads all
proclaimed-rose in sweet undulant terror against the clear blue sky.

The park was not crowded yet, and they didn't need to snake between
cow-slow herds of people. Their tennis shoes pounded noisily on the
blacktop, and each slap of rubber against pavement was a shout of
freedom. They rode the Scorpion, yelling and screaming as it plummeted
and whipped and turned upside down and plummeted again, and when the
ride ended, they ran directly to the boarding ramp and did it once more.

Then, as now, Jeremy had loved speed. The stomach-Bopping sharp turns
and plunges of amusement-park rides had been a childish substitute for
the violence he had unknowingly craved. After two rides on the
Scorpion, with so many sag-swooping-looping-twisting delights ahead,
Jeremy was in a terrific mood.

But Tod tainted the day as they were coming down the exit ramp from
their second trip on the roller coaster. He threw one arm around
Jeremy's shoulders and said, "Man, this is gonna be for sure the
greatest birthday anybody's ever had, just you and me."

The camaraderie, like all camaraderie, was totally fake.                     Deception.

Fraud.    Jeremy hated all that phoney-baloney crap, but Tod was full of
it.

Best friends.      Blood brothers.         You and me against the world.

Jeremy wasn't sure what rubbed him the rawest: that Tod jived him all
the time about being good buddies and seemed to think that Jeremy was
taken in by the con-or that sometimes Tod seemed dumb enough to be
suckered by his own con. Recently, Jeremy had begun to suspect that
some people played the game of life so well, they didn't know it was a
game.

They deceived even themselves with all their talk of friendship, love,
and compassion. Tod was looking more and more like one of those
hopeless jerks.

Being best friends was just a way to get a guy to do things for you that
he wouldn't do for anyone else in a thousand years. Friendship was also
a mutual defense arrangement, a way of joining forces against the mobs
of your fellow citizens who would just as soon smash your face and take
whatever they wanted from you. Everyone knew that's all friendship was,
but no one ever talked truthfully about it, least of all Tod.

Later, on their way from the Haunted House to an attraction called Swamp
Creature, they stopped at a stand selling blocks of ice cream dipped in
chocolate and rolled in crushed nuts. They sat on plastic chairs at a


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plastic table, under a red umbrella, against a backdrop of acacias and
manmade waterfalls, chomping down, and everything was fine at first, but
then Tod had to spoil it. "It's great coming to the park without
grownups, isn't it?" Tod said with his mouth full. "You can eat ice
cream before lunch, like this. Hell, you can eat it for lunch, too, if
you want, and after lunch, and nobody's there to whine at you about
spoiling your appetite or getting sick."

"It's great," Jeremy agreed.

"Let's sit here and eat ice cream till we puke."

"Sounds good to me.         But let's not waste it"

"Huh?"

Jeremy said, "Let's be sure, when we puke, we just don't spew on the
ground. Let's be sure we puke on somebody."

"Yeah!" Tod said, getting the drift right away, "on somebody who
deserves it, who's really pukeworthy."

"Like those girls," Jeremy said, indicating a pair of pretty teenagers
who were passing by. They wore white shorts and bright summery blouses,
and they were so sure that they were cute, you wanted to puke on them
even if you hadn't eaten anything and all you could manage was the dry
heaves.

"Or those old farts," Tod said, pointing to an elderly couple buying ice
cream nearby.

"No, not them," Jeremy said.            "They already look like they've been puked
on."

Tod thought that was so hilarious, he choked on his ice cream.                       In some
ways Tod was all right.

"Funny about this ice cream," he said when he stopped choking.

Jeremy bit: "What's funny about it?"

"I know the ice cream is made from milk, which comes from cows. And
they make chocolate out of cocoa beans. But whose nuts do they crush to
sprinkle over it all?"

Yeah, for sure, old Tod was all right in some ways.

But just when they were laughing the loudest, feeling good, he leaned
across the table, swatted Jeremy lightly alongside the head, and said,
"You and me, Jer, we're gonna be tight forever, friends till they feed
us to the worms. Right?"

He really believed it. He had conned himself He was so stupidly sincere
that he made Jeremy want to puke on him Instead, Jeremy said, "What're
you gonna do next, try to kiss me on the lips?"

Grinning, not picking up on the impatience and hostility aimed at him
Tod said, "Up your grandma's ass."

"Up your grandma's ass."

"My grandma doesn't have an ass."

"Yeah?    Then what's she sit on?"


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"Your face."

They kept ragging each other all the way to Swamp creature. The
attraction was hokey, not well done, but good for a lot of jokes because
of that. For a while, Tod was just wild and fun to be around.

Later, however, after they came out of Space Battle, Tod started
referring to them as "the two best rocket jockeys in the universe,"
which half embarrassed Jeremy because it was so stupid and juvenile.

It also irritated him because it was just another way of saying "we're
buddies, blood brothers, pals." They'd get on the Scorpion, and just as
it pulled out of the station, Tod would say, "This is nothing, this is
just a Sunday drive to the two best rocket jockeys in the universe."

Or they'd be on their way into World of the Giants, and Tod would throw
his arm around Jeremy's shoulder and say, "The two best rocket jockeys
in the universe can handle a fucking giant, can't we, bro?"

Jeremy wanted to say, 'you jerk, the only reason we're friends is
because your old man and mine are sort of in the same kind of work, so
we got thrown together. I hate this a-around-the shoulders shit, so
just knock it off lets have some laughs and be happy with that.

Okay?

But he did not say anything of the sort because, of course, good players
in lite never admitted that they knew it was all just a game.

If you let the other players see you didn't care about the rules and
regulations, they wouldn't let you play. Go to Jail. Go directly to
Jail. Don't pass Go. Don't have any fun.

By seven o'clock that evening, after they had eaten enough junk food to
produce radically interesting vomit if they really did decide to puke on
anyone, Jeremy was so tired of the rocket jockey crap and so irritated
by Tod's friendship rap, that he couldn't wait for ten o'clock to roll
around and Mrs. Ledderbeck to pull up to the gate in her station wagon.

They were on the Millipede, blasting through one of the pitch-black
sections of the ride, when Tod made one too many references to the two
best rocket jockeys in the universe, and Jeremy decided to kill him.

The instant the thought flashed through his mind, he knew he had to
murder his "best friend." It felt so right. If life was a game with a
zillion-page book of rules, it wasn't going to be a whole hell of a lot
of fun-unless you found ways to break the rules and still be allowed to
play. Any game was a bore if you played by the rules-Monopoly, 500
rummy, baseball. But if you stole bases, filched cards without getting
caught, or changed the numbers on the dice when the other guy was
distracted, a dull game could be a kick.

And in the game of life, getting away with murder was the biggest kick
of all.

When the Millipede shrieked to a halt at the debarkation platform,
Jeremy said, "Let's do it again."

"Sure," Tod said.

They hurried along the exit corridor, in a rush to get outside and into
line again. The park had filled up during the day, and the wait to


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board any ride was now at least twenty minutes.

When they came out of the Millipede pavillion, the sky was black in the
east, deep blue overhead, and orange in the west. Twilight came sooner
and lasted longer at Fantasy World than in the western part of the
county, because between the park and the distant sea rose ranks of high,
sun-swallowing hills. Those ridges were now black silhouettes against
the orange heavens, like Halloween decorations out of season.

Fantasy World had taken on a new, manic quality with the approach of
night. Christmas-style lights outlined the rides and buildings. White
twinkle lights lent a festive sparkle to all the trees, while a pair of
unsynchronized spotlights swooped back and forth across the snow-covered
peak of the manmade Big Foot Mountain. On every side neon glowed in all
the hues that neon offered, and out on Mars Island, bursts of brightly
colored laser beams shot randomly into the darkening sky as if fending
off a spaceship attack. Scented with popcorn and roasted peanuts, a
warm breeze snapped garlands of pennants overhead.

Music of every period and type leaked out of the pavilions, and
rock-'n'-roll boomed from the open air dance floor at the south end of
the park, and from somewhere else came the bouncy strains of Big Band
swing. People laughed and chattered excitedly, and on the thrill rides
they were screaming, screaming.

"Evil this time," Jeremy said as he and Tod sprinted to the end of the
Millipede boarding line.

"Yeah," Tod said. The Millipede was essentially an indoor roller
coaster, like Space Mountain at Disneyland, except instead of shooting
up and down and around one huge room, it whipped through a long series
of tunnels, some lit and some not. The lap bar, meant to restrain the
rider's lap, was tight enough to be safe, but if a kid was slim and
agile, he could contort himself in such a way as to squeeze out from
under it, scramble over it, and stand in the leg well. Then he could
lean against the lap bar and grip it behind his back or hook his arms
around it-riding daredevil.

It was a stupid and dangerous thing to do, which Jeremy and Tod knew.

But they had done it a couple of times anyway, not only on the Millipede
but on other rides in other parks. Kidding pumped up the excitement
level at least a thousand percent, even in pitch tunnels where it was
impossible to see what was coming next "Rocket jockeys!"

Tod said when they were halfway through the line.

He insisted on giving Jeremy a low five and then a high five, though
they looked like a couple of asshole kids. "No rocket jockey is afraid
of daredeviling the Millipede, right?"

"Right," Jeremy said as they inched through the main doors and entered
the pavilion. Shrill screams echoed to them from the riders on the cars
that shot away into the tunnel ahead According to legend (as kids'
legends went at every amusement park with a similar ride, a boy had been
killed riding daredevil on the Millipede because he'd been too tall. The
ceiling of the tunnel was high in all lighted stretches, but they said
it dropped low at one spot in a darkened passage-maybe because
airconditioning pipes through at that point, maybe because the epa made
the contractor put in another support that hadn't been planned for,
maybe because the architect was a no-brain.




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Anyway, this tall kid, sag up, smacked his head into the low part of the
ceiling, never even saw it coming, It instantly pulverized his face,
decapitated him. All the unsuspecting bozos riding behind him were
splattered with blood and brains and broken teeth.

Jeremy didn't believe it for a minute. Fantasy World hadn't been built
by guys with horse turds for brains. They had to have figured kids
would find a way to get out from under the lap bars, because nothing was
entirely kid-proof, and they would have kept the ceiling high all the
way through.

Legend also had it that the low overhang was still somewhere in one of
the dark sections of the tunnel, with bloodstains and flecks of dried
brains on and expectations. Something about being securely in the
middle of the tunnel, which was total cow flop.

For anybody riding daredevil, standing up, the real danger was that he
would fall out of the car when it whipped around a sharp turn or
accelerated Unexpectedly. Jeremy figured there were six or eight
particularly radical curves on the Millipede course where Tod Ledderbeck
might easily topple out of the car with only minimal assistance.

The line moved slowly forward.

Jeremy was not impatient or afraid. As they drew closer to the boarding
gates, he became more excited but also more confident. His hands were
not trembling. He had no butterflies in his belly. He just wanted to
do it.

The boarding chamber for the ride was constructed to resemble a cavern
with immense stalactites and stalagmites. Strange benighted creatures
swam in the murky depths of green pools, and albino mutant crabs prowled
the shores, reaching up with huge wicked claws toward the people on the
boarding platform, snapping at them but not quite long-armed enough to
snare any dinner.

Each train had six cars, and each car carried two people. The cars were
painted like segments of a Millipede; the first had a big insect head
with moving jaws and multifaceted black eyes, not a cartoon but a really
fierce monster face; the one at the back boasted a curved stinger that
looked more like part of a scorpion than the ass of a Millipede. Two
trains were boarding at any one time, the second behind the first, and
they shot off into the tunnel with only a few seconds between them
because the whole operation was computer-controled, eliminating any
danger that one train would crash into the back of another.

Jeremy and Tod were among the twelve customers that the attendant sent
to the first train.

Tod wanted the front car, but they didn't get it. That was the best
position from which to ride daredevil because everything would happen to
them first: every Plunge into darkness, every squirt of cold steam from
the wall vents, every explosion through swinging doors into whirling
lights.

Besides, part of the fun of riding daredevil was showing off, and the
front car provided a perfect platform for exhibitionism, with the
occupants of the last five cars as a captive audience in the lighted
stretches.

With the first car claimed, they raced for the sixth. Being the last to
experience every plunge and twist of the track was next-best to being



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first, because the squeals of the riders ahead of you raised your
adrenaline level train just didn't go with daredevil riding.

The lap bars descended automatically when all twelve people were aboard
An attendant came along the platform, visually inspecting to be sure all
of the restraints had locked into place.

Jeremy was relieved they had not gotten the front car, where they would
have had ten witnesses behind them. In the tomb-dark confines of the
unlit sections of tunnel, he wouldn't be able to see his own hand an
inch in front of his face, so it wasn't likely that anyone would be able
to see him push Tod out of the car. But this was a big-time violation
of the rules, and he didn't want to take any chances. Now, potential
witnesses were all safely in front of them, staring straight ahead; in
fact they could not easily glance back, since every seat had a high back
to prevent whiplash.

When the attendant finished checking the lap bars, he and signaled the
operator, who was seated at an instrument panel on a rock formation to
the right of the tunnel entrance.

"Here we go," Tod said.

"Here we go," Jeremy agreed.

"Rocket jockeys!" Tod shouted.

Jeremy gritted his teeth.

"Rocket jockeys!" Tod repeated.

What the hell.       One more time wouldn't hurt.             Jeremy yelled: "Rocket
jockeys!"

The train did not pull away from the boarding station with the jerky
uncertainty of most roller coasters. A tremendous blast of compressed
air shot it forward at high speed, like a bullet out of a barrel, with a
whoosh!

that almost hurt the ears. They were pinned against their seats as they
flashed past the operator and into the black mouth of the tunnel.

Total darkness.

He was only twelve then.           He had not died.         He had not been to Hell.

He had not come back.          He was as blind in darkness as anyone else, as
Tod.

Then they slammed through swinging doors and up a long incline of
well-lit track, moving fast at first but gradually slowing to a crawl.

On both sides they were menaced by pale white slugs as big as men, which
reared up and shrieked at them through round mouths full of teeth that
whirled like the blades in a garbage disposal. The ascent was six or
seven stories, at a steep angle, and other mechanical monsters gibbered,
hooted, snarled, and squealed at the train; all of them were pale and
slimy, with either glowing eyes or blind black eyes, the kind of
critters you might think would live miles below the surface of the
earth-if you didn't know any science at all.

That initial slope was where daredevils had to take their stand.

Though a couple of other inclines marked the course of the Millipede, no


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other section of the track provided a sufficiently extended period of
calm in which to execute a safe escape from the lap bar.

Jeremy contorted himself, wriggling up against the back of the seat,
inching over the lap bar, but at first Tod did not move. "Come on,
dickhead, you've gotta be in position before we get to the top."

Tod looked troubled.         "If they catch us, they'll kick us out of the
park-"

"They won't catch us." at the far end of the ride, the train would coast
along a final stretch of dark tunnel, giving riders a chance to calm
down. In those last few seconds, before they returned to the fake
cavern from which they had started, it was just possible for a kid to
scramble back over the lap bar and shoehorn himself into his seat.
Jeremy knew he could do it: he was not worried about getting caught. Tod
didn't have to worry about getting under the lap bar again, either,
because by then Tod would be dead; he wouldn't have to worry about
anything ever.

"I don't want to be kicked out for daredeviling," Tod said as the train
approached the halfway point on the long, long initial incline. "It's
been a neat day, and we still have a couple hours before Mom comes for
us."

Mutant albino rats chattered at them from the fake rock ledges on both
sides as Jeremy said, "Okay, so be a dorkless wonder." He continued to
extricate from the lap bar.

"I'm no dorkless wonder," Tod said defensively.

"Sure, sure."

"I'm not."

"Maybe when school starts again in September, you'll be able to get into
the Young Homemakers Club, learn how to cook, knit nice little doilies,
do flower arranging."

"You're a jerkoff, you know that?" o, you've broken my heart now,"
Jeremy said as he extracted both of his legs from the well under the lap
bar and crouched on the seat. "You girls sure know how to hurt a guy's
feelings."

"Creepaaoid."

The train strained up the slope with the hard clicking and clattering so
sacred to roller coasters that the sound alone could make the heart pump
faster and the stomach flutter.

Jeremy scrambled over the lap bar and stood in the well in front of it,
facing forward. He looked over his shoulder at Tod, who sat scowling
behind the restraint. He didn't care that much if Tod joined him or
not.

He had already decided to kill the boy, and if he didn't have a chance
to do it at Fantasy World on Tod's twelfth birthday, he would do it
somewhere else, sooner or later. Just thinking about doing it was a lot
of fun.

Like that song said in the television commercial where the Heinz ketchup
was so thick it took what seemed like hours coming out of the bottle:
An-tic-ipaaa-aa-tion. Having to wait a few days or even weeks to get


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another good chance to kill Tod would only make the killing that much
more fun. So he didn't rag Tod any more, just looked at him scornfully.

An-tic- i-paaa-aa--tion.

"I'm not afraid," Tod insisted.

"Yeah."

"I just don't want to spoil the day."

"Sure."

"Creepazoid," Tod said again.

Jeremy said, "Rocket jockey, my ass."

That insult had a powerful effect. Tod was so sold on his own
friendship con that he could actually be stung by the implication that
he didn't know how a real friend was supposed to behave. The expression
on his broad and open face revealed not only a world of hurt but a
surprising desperation that startled Jeremy. Maybe Tod did understand
what life was all about, that it was nothing but a brutal game with
every player concentrated on the purely selfish goal of coming out a
winner, and maybe old Tod was rattled by that, scared by it, and was
holding on to one last hope, to the idea of friendship. If the game
could be played with a partner or two, if it was really everyone else in
the world against your own little team, that was tolerable, better than
everyone in the world against just you. Tod Ledderbeck and his good
buddy Jeremy against the rest of humanity was even sort of romantic and
adventurous, but Tod Ledderbeck alone obviously made his bowels quiver.

Sitting behind the lap bar, Tod first looked stricken, then resolute.

Indecision gave way to action, and Tod moved fast, wriggling furiously
against the restraint.

"Come on, come on," Jeremy urged.              "We're almost to the top."

Tod squeezed over the lap bar, into the leg well where Jeremy stood.

He caught his foot in that restraining mechanism, and almost fell out of
the to take a fall. They weren't moving fast enough. At most he'd
suffer a couple of bruises.

Then they were side by side, their feet planted wide on the floor of the
car, leaning back against the restraint from under which they had
escaped, arms behind them, hands locked on the lap bar, grinning at each
other, as the train reached the top of the incline. It slammed through
swinging doors into the next stretch of lightless tunnel. The track
remained flat just long enough to crank up the riders' tension a couple
of notches. An-tic-ipaaa-aa-tion. When Jeremy could not hold his
breath any longer, the front car tipped over the brink, and the people
up there Bed in the darkness. Then in rapid succession the second and
third and fourth and fifth cars "Rocket jockeys!" Jeremy and Tod shouted
in unison.

and the final car of the train followed the others into a steep plunge,
building speed by the second. Wind whooshed past them and whipped their
hair out behind their heads.

Then came a swooping turn to the right when it was least expected, a
little upgrade to toss the stomach, another turn to the right, the track


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tilting so the cars were tipped onto their sides, faster, faster, then a
straightaway and another incline, using their speed to go higher than
ever, slowing toward the top, slowing, slowing. An-tic-ipaaation They
went over the edge and down, down, down, waaaaaay down so hard and fast
that Jeremy felt as if his stomach had fallen out of him, leaving a hole
in the middle of his body. He knew what was coming, but he was left
breathless by it nonetheless. The train did a loop-de-loop, turning
upside down. He pressed his feet tight to the floor and gripped the lap
bar behind him as if he were trying to fuse his flesh with the steel,
because it felt as if he would fall out, straight down onto the section
of the track that had led them into the loop, to crack his skull open on
the rails below. He knew centripetal force would hold him in place even
though he was standing up where he didn't belong, but what he knew was
of no consequence: what you felt always carried a lot more weight than
what you knew, emotion mattered more than intelect. Then they were out
of the loop, banging through another pair of swinging doors onto a
second lighted inclihe, using their tremendous speed to build height for
the next series of plunges and sharp turns.

Jeremy looked at Tod.

The old rocket jockey was a little green.

"No more loops," Tod shouted above the clatter of the train wheels.

"The worst is behind us."

Jeremy exploded with laughter. He thought: The worst is still ahead for
you, dickhead. And for me the best is yet to come.

An-tic-ipaaa-aa-tion.

Tod laughed, too, but certainly for different reasons.

At the top of the second incline, the rattling cars pushed through a
third set of swinging doors, returning to a grave-ark world that
thrilled Jeremy because he knew Tod Ledderbeek had just seen the last
light of his life. The train snapped left and right, swooped up and
plummeted down, rolled onto its side in a series of corkscrew turns.

Through it all Jeremy could feel Tod beside him. Their bare arms
brushed together, and their shoulders bumped as they swayed with the
movement of the train. Every contact sent a current of intense pleasure
through Jeremy, made the hairs stand up on his arms and on the back of
his neck, pebbled his skin with gooseflesh. He knew that he possessed
the ultimate power over the other boy, the power of life and death, and
he was different from the other gutless wonders of the world because he
wasn't afraid to use the power.

He waited for a section of track near the end of the ride, where he knew
the undulant motion would provide the greatest degree of instability for
daredevil riders. By then Tod would be feeling confident-the worst is
behind us-and easier to catch by surprise. The approach to the kicking
ground was announced by one of the most unusual tricks in the ride, a
three-hundred-and-sixty-degree turn at high speed, with the cars on
their sides all the way around. When they finished that circle and
leveled out once more, they would immediately enter a series of six
hills, all low but packed close together, so the train would move like
an inchworm on drugs, pulling itself up-down-up-down-up-down-up-down
toward the last set of swinging doors, which would admit them to the
cavernous boarding and disembarkation chamber where they had begun.




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The train began to tilt.

They entered the three-hundred-and-sixty-degree turn.

The train was on its side.

Tod tried to remain rigid, but he sagged a little against Jeremy, who
was on the inside of the car when it curved to the right. The old
rocket jockey was whooping like an air-raid siren, doing his best to
hype himself and get the most out of the ride, now that the worst was
behind them.

An-tic-i-paa-aa-tion.

Jeremy estimated they were a third of the way around the circle.

halfway around...        two-thirds....

The track leveled out.          The train stopped fighting gravity.

With a suddenness that almost took Jeremy's breath away, the train hit
the first of the six hills and shot upward.

He let go of the lap bar with his right hand, the one farthest from Tod.

The train swooped down.

He made a fist of his right hand.

And almost as soon as the train dropped, it swooped upward again toward
the crown of the second hill.

Jeremy swung his fist in a roundhouse blow, trusting instinct to find
Tod's face.

The train dropped.

His fist hit home, smashing Tod hard in the face, and he felt the boy's
nose split.

The train shot upward again, with Tod screaming, though no one would
hear anything special about it among the screams of all the other
passengers.

Just for a split second, Tod would probably think he'd smacked into the
overhang where, in legend, a boy had been decapitated. He would let go
of the lap bar in panic. At least that was what Jeremy hoped, so as
soon as he hit the old rocket jockey, when the train started to drop
down the third hill, Jeremy let go of the lap bar, too, and threw
himself against his best friend, grabbing him, lifting and shoving, hard
as he could. He felt Tod trying to get a fistful of his hair, but he
shook his head furiously and shoved harder, took a kick on the hid the
train shot up the fourth hill Tod went over the edge, out into the
darkness, away from the car, as if he had dropped into deep space.

Jeremy started to topple with him, grabbed frantically for the lap bar
in the seamless blackness, found it, held on down, the train swooped
down the fourth hill Jeremy thought he heard one last scream from Tod
and then a solid thunk! as he hit the tunnel wall and bounced back onto
the tracks in the wake of the train, although it might have been
imagination up, the train shot up the fifth hill with a rollicking
motion that made Jeremy want to whoop his cookies Tod was either dead
back there in the darkness or stunned, halfconscious, trying to get to
his feet down the fifth hill, and Jeremy was whipped back and forth,


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almost lost his grip on the bar, then was soaring again, up the sixth
and final hill and if he wasn't dead back there, Tod was maybe just
beginning to realize that another train was coming down, down the sixth
hill and onto the last straightaway.

As soon as he knew he was on stable ground, Jeremy scrambled back across
the restraint bar and wriggled under it, first his left leg, then his
right leg.

The last set of doors was rushing toward them in the dark. Beyond would
be light, the main cavern, and attendants who would see that he had been
daredevil riding, He squirmed frantically to pass his hips through the
gap between the back of the seat and the lap bar. Not too difficult,
really. It was easier to slip under the bar than it had been to get out
from beneath its protective grip.

They hit the swinging doors-wham!-and coasted at a steadily declining
speed toward the disembarkation platform, a hundred feet this side of
the gates through which they had entered the roller coaster. People
were jammed on the boarding platform, and a lot of them were looking
back at the train as it came out of the tunnel mouth. For a moment
Jeremy expected them to point at him and cry, "Murderer!', Just as the
train coasted up to the disembarkation gates and came to a full stop,
red emergency lights blinked on all over the cavern, showing the way to
the exits. A computerized alarm voice echoed through speakers set high
in the fake rock formations: "The Millipede has been brought to an
emergency stop. All rilers please remain in your seats-" As the lap bar
released automatically at the end of the ride, Jeremy stood on the seat,
grabbed a handrail, and pulled himself onto the disembarkation platform.

"All riders please remain in your seats until attendants arrive to lead
you out of the tunnels-" The uniformed attendants on the platforms were
looking to one another for guidance, wondering what had happened.

"-all riders remain in your seats-" From the platform, Jeremy looked
back toward the tunnel out of which his own train had just entered the
cavern. He saw another train pushing through the swinging doors.

"All other guests please proceed in an orderly fashion to the nearest
exit-" The oncoming train was no longer moving fast or smoothly. It
shuddered and tried to jump the track.

With a jolt, Jeremy saw what was jamming the foremost wheels and forcing
the front car to rise off the rails. Other people on the platform must
have seen it, too, because suddenly they started to scream, not the
we-sure-are-having-a-damned-fine-time screams that could be heard all
over the carnival, but of horror and revulsion.

"All riders remain in your seats-" The train rocked and spasmed to a
complete stop far short of the disembarkation platform. Something was
dangling from the fierce mouth of the head that protruded from the front
of the first car, snared in the jagged mandibles. It was the rest of
the old rocket jockey, a nice bite-sized piece for a monster bug the
size of that one.

"All other guests please proceed in orderly fashion to the nearest
exit-"

"Don't look, son," an attendant said compassionately, turning Jeremy
away from the gory spectacle. "For God's sake, get out of here."

The shocked attendants had recovered enough to begin to direct the


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waiting crowd toward exit doors marked with glowing red signs.

Realizing that he was bursting with excitement, giggling like a fool,
and too overcome with joy to slowly play the bereaved best friend of the
dead, Jeremy joined the exodus, which was conducted in a panicky rush,
with some pushing and shoving.

In the night air, where Christmasy lights continued to sparkle and the
laser beams shot into the black sky and rainbows of neon rippled on
every side, where thousands of customers continued their pursuit of
pleasure without the slightest idea that Death walked among them, Jeremy
sprinted away from the Millipede. Dodging through the crowds, narrowly
avoiding one collision after another, he had no idea where he was going.

He just kept on the move until he was far from the torn body of Tod
Ledderbeck.

He finally stopped at the manmade lake, across which a few Hovercraft
burred with travelers bound to and from Mars Island. He felt as if he
were on Mars himself, or some other alien planet where the gravity was
less than that on earth. He was buoyant, ready to Boat up, up, and
away.

He sat on a concrete bench to answer himself, with his back to the lake,
facing a flower-bordered promenade along which passed an endless parade
of people, and he surrendered to the giddy laughter that insistently
bubbled in him like Pepsi in a shaken bottle. It gushed out, such
effervescent giggles in such long spouts that he had to hug himself and
lean back on the bench to avoid falling off. People glanced at him, and
one couple stopped to ask if he was lost. His laughter was so intense
that he was choking with it, tears streaming down his face.

They thought he was crying, a twelve-year-old ninny who had gotten
separated from his family and was too much of a pussy to handle it.

Their incomprehension only made him laugh harder.

When the laughter passed, he sat forward on the bench, staring at his
sneakered feet, working on the line of crap he would give Mrs.
Ledderbeek when she came to collect him and Tod at ten o'clock-assuming
park officials didn't identify the body and get in touch with her before
that. It was eight o'clock. "He wanted to ride daredevil," Jeremy
mumbled to his sneakers, "and I tried to talk him out of it, but he
wouldn't listen, he called me a dickhead when I wouldn't go with him.
I'm sorry, Mrs. Ledderbeek, Doctor Ledderbeck, but he talked that way
sometimes. He thought it made him sound cool."

Good enough so far, but he needed more of a tremor in his voice: "I
wouldn't ride daredevil, so he went on the Millipede by himself. I
waited at the exit, and when all those people came running out, talking
about a body all torn and bolldy, I knew who it had to be and I. ..
and I. ..

just sort of, you know, snapped. I just snapped." The boarding
attendants wouldn't remember whether Tod had gotten on the ride by
himself or with another boy; they dealt with thousands of passengers a
day, so they weren't going to recall who was alone or who was with whom.
"I'm so sorry, Mrs. Ledderbeck, I should've been able to talk him out
of it. I should've stayed with him and stopped him somehow. I feel so
stupid, so... so helpless. How could I let him get on the Millipede?
What kind of best friend am I?"




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Not bad. It needed a little work, and he would have to be careful not
to overdramatize it. Tears, a breaking voice. But no wild sobs, no
thrashing around.

He was sure he could pull it off.

He was a Master of the Game now.

As soon as he felt confident about his story, he realized he was hungry.

Starving. He was literally shaking with hunger. He went to a
refreshment stand and bought a hot dog with the works-onions, relish,
chili, mustard, ketchup-and wolfed it down. He chased it with Orange
Crush. Still shaking. He had an ice cream sandwich made with
chocolate-chip oatmeal cookies for the "bread."

His visible shaking stopped, but he still trembled inside.                     Not with
fear.

It was a delicious shiver, like the flutter in the belly that he'd
experienced during the past year whenever he looked at a girl and
thought of being with her, but indescribably better than that. And it
was a little like the thrilling shiver that caressed his spine when he
slipped past the safety railing and stood on the very edge of a sandy
cliff in Laguna Beach Park, looking down at the waves crashing on the
rocks and feeling the earth crumble slowly under the toes of his shoes,
working its way back to mid-sole... waiting, waiting, wondering if the
treacherous ground would abruptly give way and drop him to the rocks far
below before he would have time to leap backward and grab the safety
railing, but still waiting ... waiting.

But this thing was better than all of those combined. It was growing by
the minute rather than dimmishing, a sensuous inner heat which the
murder of Tod had not quenched but fueled.

His dark desire became an urgent need.

He prowled the park, seeking satisfaction.

He was a little surprised that Fantasy World continued to turn as if
nothing had happened in the Millipede. He had expected the whole
operation to close down, not just that one ride. Now he realized money
was more important than mourning one dead customer. And if those who'd
seen Tod's battered body had spread the story to others, it was probably
discounted as a rehash of the legend. The level of frivolity in the
park had not noticeably declined.

Once he dared to pass the Millipede, although he stayed at a distance
because he still did not trust himself to be able to conceal his
excitement over his achievement and his delight in the new status that
he had attained.

Master of the Game. Chains were looped from stanchion to stanchion in
front of the pavilion, to block anyone attempting to gain access. A
closed for repairs sign was on the entrance door. Not for repairs to
old Tod. The rocket jockey was beyond repair. No ambulance was in
sight, which they might have thought they needed, and no hearse was
anywhere to be seen.

No police, either.        Weird.

Then he remembered a TV story about the world under Fantasy World:
catacombs of service tunnels, storage rooms, security and ride computer


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control centers, just like at Disneyland. To avoid disturbing the
paying customers and drawing the attention of the morbidly curious, they
were probably using the tunnels now to bring in the cops and
corpse-pokers from the coroner's office.

The shivers within Jeremy increased.               The desire.       The need.

He was a Master of the Game.            No one could touch him.

Might as well give the cops and corpse-pokers more to do, keep them
entertained.

He kept moving, seeking, alert for opportunity. He found it where he
least expected it, when he stopped at a men's restroom to take a leak.

A guy, about thirty, was at one of the sinks, checking himself out in
the mirror, combing his thick blond hair, which glistened with Vitalis.

He had arranged an array of personal objects on the ledge under the
mirror: wallet, car keys, a tiny aerosol bottle of Binaca breath
freshener, a half-empty pack of Dentyne (this guy had a bad-breath
fixation), and a cigarette lighter.

The lighter was what immediately caught Jeremy's attention. It was not
just a plastic Bic butane disposable, but one of those steel models,
shaped like a miniature slice of bread, with a hinged top that flipped
back to reveal a striker wheel and a wick. The way the overhead
fluorescent gleamed on the smooth curves of that lighter, it seemed to
be a supernatural object, full of its own eerie radiance, a beacon for
Jeremy's eyes alone.

He hesitated a moment, then went to one of the urinals. When he
finished and zipped up, the blond guy was still at the sink, primping
himself.

Jeremy always washed his hands after using a bathroom because that was
what polite people did. It was one of the rules that a good player
followed.

He went to the sink beside the primper. As he lathered his hands with
liquid soap from the pump dispenser, he could not take his eyes off the
lighter on the shelf inches away. He told himself he should avert his
gaze.

The guy would realize he was thinking about snatching the damn thing.

But its sleek silvery contours held him rapt. Staring at it as he the
lather from his hands, he imagined that he could hear the crisp crackle
of all-consuming flames.

Return nag his wallet to his hip pocket but leaving the other objects on
the ledge, the guy turned away from the sink and went to one of the
urinals. As Jeremy was about to reach for the lighter, a father and his
teenage son entered. They could have screwed everything up, but they
went into two of the stalls and closed the doors. Jeremy knew that was
a sign. Do it, the sign said. Take it, go, do it, do it.

Jeremy glanced at the man at the urinal, plucked the lighter off the
shelf, turned and walked out without drying his hands. No one ran after
him.

Clutching the lighter tightly in his right hand, he prowled the park,
searching for the perfect kindling. The desire in him was so intense


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that his shivers spread outward from his crotch and belly and spine,
appearing once more in his hands, and in his legs, too, which sometimes
were rubbery with excitement.

Need...

Finishing the last of the Reese's Pieces, Vassago neatly rolled the
empty bag into a tight tube, tied the tube in a knot to make the
smallest possible object of it, and dropped it into a plastic garbage
bag that was just to the left of the iceless Styrofoam cooler.

Neatness was one of the rules in the world of the living.

He enjoyed losing himself in the memory of that special night, eight
years ago, when he had been twelve and had changed forever, but he was
tired now and wanted to sleep. Maybe he would dream of the woman named
Lindsey. Maybe he would have another vision that would lead him to
someone connected with her, for somehow she seemed to be part of his
destiny; he was being drawn toward her by forces he could not entirely
understand but which he respected. Next time, he would not make the
mistake he had made with Cooper. He would not let the need overwhelm
him. He would ask questions first. When he had received all the
answers, and only then, he would free the beautiful blood and, with it,
another soul to join the inanimate throngs beyond this hateful world.

4

Tuesday morning, Lindsey stayed home to get some work done in her studio
while Hatch took Regina to school on his way to a meeting with an
executor of an estate in North Tustin who was seeking bids on a
collection of antique Wedgwood urns and vases. After lunch he had an
appointment with Dr. Nyebern to learn the results of the tests he had
undergone on Saturday. By the time he picked up Regina and returned
home late in the afternoon, Lindsey figured to have finished the canvas
she had been working on for the past month.

That was the plan, anyway, but all the fates and evil elves-and her own
psychology conspired to prevent the fulfillment of it. First of all the
coffee maker went on the fritz. Lindsey had to tinker with the machine
for an hour to find and fix the problem. She was a good tinkerer, and
fortunately the brewer was fixable. She could not face the day without
a blast of caffeine to jump-start her heart. She knew coffee was bad
for her, but so was battery acid and cyanide, and she didn't drink
either one of those, which showed she had more than her share of
self-control when it came to destructive dietary habits; hell, she was
an absolute rock!

By the time she got up to her second-floor studio with a mug and a full
thermos besides, the light coming through the north facing windows was
perfect for her purposes. She had everything she needed. She had her
paints, brushes, and palette knives. She had her supply cabinet She had
her adjustable stool and her easel and her stereo system with stacks of
Garth Brooks, Glenn Miller, and Van Halen CDs, which somehow seemed the
right mix of background music for a painter whose style was a
combination of neoclassicism and surrealism The only things she didn't
have were an interest in the work at hand and the ability to
concentrate.

She was repeatedly diverted by a glossy black spider that was exploring
the upper right-hand corner of the window nearest to her. She didn't
like spiders, but she was loath to kill them anyway. Later, she would
have to capture it in a jar to release it outside. It crept upside down


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across the window header to the left-hand corner, immediately lost
interest in that territory, and returned to the right-hand corner, where
it quivered and flexed its long legs and seemed to be taking pleasure
from some quality of that particular niche that was apprehensible only
to spiders.

Lindsey turned to her painting again. Nearly complete, it was one of
her best, lacking only a few finishing touches.

But she hesitated to open paints and pick up a brush because she was
every bit as devoted a worrier as she was an artist. She was anxious
about Hatch's health, of course-both his physical and mental health.

She was apprehensive, too, about the strange man who had killed the
blonde, and about the eerie connection between that savage predator and
her Hatch.

The spider crept down the side of the window frame to the right-hand
corner of the sill. After using whatever arachnid senses it possessed,
it rejected that nook, as well, and returned once more to the upper
right hand corner.

Like most people Lindsey considered psychics to be good subjects for
spooky movies but charlatans in real life. Yet she had been quick to
suggest clairvoyance as an explanation for what had been happening to
Hatch. She had pressed the theory more insistently when he had declared
that he was not psychic.

Now, turning away from the spider and staring frustratedly at the
unfinished canvas before her, she realized why she had become such an
earnest advocate of the reality of psychic power in the car on Friday,
when they had followed the killer's trail to the head of Laguna Canyon
Road.

If Hatch had become psychic, eventually he would begin to receive
impressions from all sorts of people, and his link to this murderer
would not be unique. But if he was not psychic, if the bond between him
and this monster was more profound and infinitely stranger than random
clairvoyant reception, as he insisted that it was, then they were
hip-deep into the unknown. And the unknown was a hell of a lot scarier
than something you could describe and define.

Besides, if the link between them was more mysterious and intimate than
psychic reception, the consequences for Hatch might be psychologically
disastrous. What mental trauma might result from being even briefly
inside the mind of a ruthless killer? Was the link between them a
source of contamination, as any such intimate biological link would have
been?

If so, perhaps the virus of madness could creep across the ether and
infect Hatch.

No. Ridiculous. Not her husband. He was reliable, levelheaded,
mellow, as sane a human being as any who walked the earth.

The spider had taken possession of the upper right-hand corner of the
window. It began to spin a web.

Lindsey remembered Hatch's anger last night when he had seen the story
about Cooper in the newspaper. The hardness of rage in his face. The
unsettling fevered look in his eyes. She had never seen Hatch like
that. His father, yes, but never him. Though she knew he worried that
he might have some of his father in him she had never seen evidence of


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it before. And maybe she had not seen evidence of it last night,
either. What she had seen might be some of the rage of the killer
leaking back into Hatch along the link that existed between them No.

She had nothing to fear from Hatch. He was a good man, the best she had
ever met. He was such a deep well of goodness that all the madness of
the blond girls killer could be dropped into him, and he would dilute it
until it was without effect.

A glistening, silky filament spewed from the spider's abdomen as the
arachnid industriously claimed the corner of the window for its lair.

Lindsey opened a drawer in her equipment cabinet and took out a small
magnifying glass, which she used to observe the spinner more closely.

Its spindly legs were prickled with hundreds of fine hairs that could
not be seen without the assistance of the lens. Its horrid,
multifaceted eyes looked everywhere at once, and its ragged maw worked
continuously as if in anticipation of the first living fly to become
stuck in the trap that it was weaving.

Although she understood that it was a part of nature as surely as she
was, and therefore not evil, the thing nevertheless revolted Lindsey.

It was a part of nature that she preferred not to dwell upon: the part
that had to do with hunting and killing, with things that fed eagerly on
the living. She put the magnifying glass on the windowsill and went
downstairs to get a jar from the kitchen pantry. She wanted to capture
the spider and get it out of her house before it was any more securely
settled.

Reaching the foot of the stairs, she glanced at the window beside the
front door and saw the postman's car. She collected the mail from the
box at the curb: a few bills, the usual minimum of two mailer
catalogues, and the latest issue of Arts America She was in the mood to
seize any excuse nottowork, which was unusual for her, because she loved
her work. Quite forgetting that she had come downstairs in the first
place for a jar in which to transport the spider, she took the mail back
up to her studio and settled down in the old armchair in the corner with
a fresh mug of coffee and Arts American.

She spotted the article about herself as soon as she glanced at the
table of contents. She was surprised. The magazine had covered her
work before, but she had always known in advance that articles were
forthcoming. Usually the writer had at least a few questions for her,
even if he was not doing a straight interview.

Then she saw the byline and winced. S. Steven Honell. She knee before
reading the first word that she was the target of a hatchet job.

Honell was a well-reviewed writer of fiction who, from time to time,
also wrote about art. He was in his sixties and had never married. A
phlegmatic fellow, he had decided as a young man to forego the comforts
of a wife and family in the interest of his writing. To write well, he
said, one ought to possess a monk's preference for solitude. In
isolation, one was forced to confront oneself more directly and honestly
than possible in the hustle bustle of the peopled world, and through
oneself also confront the nature of every human heart. He had lived in
splendid isolation first in northern California, then in New Mexico.
Most recently he had settled at the eastern edge of the developed part
of Orange County at the end of Silverado Canyon, which was part of a
series of brush-covered hills and ravines spotted with numerous


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California live oaks and less numerous rustic cabins.

In September of the previous year, Lindsey and Hatch had gone to a
restaurant at the civilized end of Silverado Canyon, which served strong
drinks and good steaks. They had eaten at one of the tables in the
taproom, which was paneled in knotty pine with limestone columns
supporting the roof. An inebriated white-haired man, sitting at the
bar, was holding forth on literature, art, and politics. His opinions
were strongly held and expressed in caustic language. From the
affectionate tolerance the curmudgeon received from the bartender and
patrons on the other bar stools, Lindsey guessed he was a regular
customer and a local character who told only half as many tales as were
told about him.

Then Lindsey recognized him. 5. Steven Honell. She had read and liked
some of his writing. She'd admired his selfless devotion to his art;
for she could not have sacrificed love, marriage, and children for her
painting, even though the exploration of her creative talent was as
important to her as having enough look to eat and water to drink.

Listening to HoneIl, she wished that she and Hatch had gone somewhere
else for dinner because she would never again be able to read the
author's work without remembering some of the vicious statements he made
about the writings and personalities of his contemporaries in letters.
With each drink, he grew more bitter, more scathing, more indulgent of
his own darkest instincts, and markedly more garrulous.

Liquor revealed the gabby fool hidden inside the legend of taciturnity;
anyone wanting to shut him up would have needed a horse veterinarian's
hypodermic full of Demerol or a .357 Magnum. Lindsey ate faster,
deciding to skip dessert and depart Honell's company as swiftly as
possible.

Then he recognized her. He kept glancing over his shoulder at her,
blinking his rheumy eyes. Finally he unsteadily approached their table.

"Excuse me, are you Lindsey Sparling, the artist?" She had known that he
sometimes wrote about American art, but she had not imagined he would
know her work or her face. "Yes, I am," she said, hoping he would not
say that he liked her work and that he would not tell her who he was. "I
like your work very much," he said. "I won't bother you to say more."
But just as she relaxed and thanked him, he told her his name, and she
was obligated to say that she liked his work, too, which she did, though
now she saw it in a light different from that in which it had previously
appeared to her. He seemed less like a man who had sacrificed family
love for his art than like a man incapable of giving that love. In
isolation he might have found a greater power to create; but he had also
found more time to admire himself and contemplate the infinite number of
ways in which he was superior to the ruck of his fellow men. She tried
not to let her distaste show, spoke only glowingly of his novels, but he
seemed to sense her disapproval. He quickly terminated the encounter
and returned to the bar.

He never looked her way again during the night. And he no longer held
forth to the assembled drinkers about anything, his attention directed
largely at the contents of his glass.

Now, sitting in the arms in her studio, holding the copy of Arts
American, and staring at Honell's byline, she felt her stomach curdle.

She had seen the great man in his cups, when he had uncloaked more of
his true self than it was his nature to reveal. Worse, she was a person


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of some accomplishment, who moved in circles that might bring her into
contact with people Honell also knew. He saw her as a threat.

One way of neutralizing her was to undertake a well-written, if unfair,
article criticizing her body of work; therafter, he could claim that any
tales she told about him were motivated by spite, of questionable true.
She knew what to expect from him in the Arts American piece, and Honell
did not surprise her. Never before had she read criticisms more vicious
yet so cunningly crafted to spare the critic accusations of personal
animosity.

When she finished, she closed the magazine and put it down gently on the
small table beside her chair. She didn't want to pitch it across the
room because she knew that reaction would have pleased Honell if he had
been present to see it.

Then she said, "To hell with it," picked up the magazine, and threw it
across the room with all the force she could muster. It slapped hard
against the wall and clattered to the floor.

Her work was important to her. Intelligence, emotion, talent, and
creativity went into it, and even on those occasions when a painting did
not turn out as well as she had hoped, no creation ever came easily.
Anguish always was a part of it. And more self-revelation than seemed
prudent.

Exhilaration and dispair in equal measure. A critic had every right to
dislike an artist if his judgement was based on thoughtful consideration
and an understanding of what the artist was trying to achieve. But this
was not genuine criticism. This was sick invective.

Bile.   Her work was important to her, and he had shit on it.

Filled with the energy of anger, she got up and paced. She knew that by
surrendering to anger she was letting Honell win; this was the response
he had hoped to extract from her with his dental-pliers criticism. But
she couldn't help it.

She wished Hatch was there, so she could share her fury with him.                        He
had a calming effect greater than a fifth of bourbon.

Her angry pacing brought her eventually to the window where by now the
fat black spider had constructed an elaborate web in the upper right
hand corner. Realizing that she had forgotten to get a jar from the
pantry, Lindsey picked up the magnifying glass and examined the silken
fillagree of the eight-legged fisherman's net, which glimmered with a
pastel mother of-pearl iridescence. The trap was so delicate, so
alluring. But the living loom that spun it was the very essence of all
predators, strong for its size and sleek and quick. Its bulbous body
glistened like a drop of thick black blood, and its rending mandibles
worked the air in anticipation of the flesh of prey not yet snared.

The spider and Steven Honell were of a kind, utterly alien to her and
beyond understanding regardless of how long she observed them. Both
spun their webs in silence and isolation. Both had brought their
viciousness into her house uniuvited, one through words in a magazine
and the other through a tiny crack in a window frame or door jamb.

Both were poisonous, vile.

She put down the magnifying glass. She could do nothing about Honell,
but at least she could deal with the spider. She snatched two Kleenex
from a box atop her supply cabinet, and in one swift movement she swept


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up the spinner and its web, crushing both.

She threw the wad of tissues in the waste can.

Though she usually captured a spider when possible and kindly returned
it to the outdoors, she had no compunction about the way she had dealt
with this one. Indeed, if Honell had been present at that moment, when
his hateful attack was still so fresh in her mind, she might have been
tempted to deal with him in some manner as quick and violent as the
treatment she had accorded the spider.

She returned to her stool, regarded the unfinished canvas, and was
suddenly certain what refinements it required. She opened tubes of
paint and set out her brushes. That wasn't the first time she had been
motivated by an unjust blow or a puerile insult, and she wondered how
many artists of all kinds had produced their best work with the
determination to rub it in the faces of the naysayers who had tried to
undercut or belittle them.

When Lindsey had been at work on the painting for ten or fifteen
minutes, she was stricken by an unsettling thought which brought her
back to the worries that had preoccupied her before the arrival of the
mail and Arts American. Honell and the spider were not the only
creatures who had invaded her home uninvited. The unknown killer in
sunglasses also had invaded it, in a way, by feedback through the
mysterious link between him and Hatch. And what if he was as aware of
Hatch as Hatch was of him? He might find a way to track Hatch down and
invade their home for real, with the intention of doing far more harm
than either the spider or Honell could ever accomplish.

5

Irreviously, Hatch had visited Jonas Nyebern in his office at Orange
County General, but that Tuesday his appointment was at the medical
building off Jamboree Road, where the physician operated his private
practice.

The waiting room was remarkable, not for its short-nap gray carpet and
standard-issue furniture, but for the artwork on its walls. Hatch was
surprised and imp by a collection of high-quality antique oil paintings
portraying religious scenes of a Catholic nature: the passion of St.

Jude, the Crucifixion, the Holy Mother, the Anmmciation, the
Resurrection, and much more.

The most curious thing was not that the collection was worth
considerable money. After all, Nyebern was an extremely successful
cardiovascular surgeon who came from a family of more than average
resources. But it was odd that a member of the medical profession,
which had taken an increasingly agnostic public posture throughout the
last few decades, should choose religious art of any kind for his office
walls, let alone such obvious denominational art that might offend
non-Catholics or nonbelievers.

When the nurse escorted Hatch out of the waiting room, he discovered the
collection continued along the hallways serving the entire suite.

He found it peculiar to see a fine oil of Jesus agony in Geane hung to
the left of a stainless-steel and white-enamel scale, and beside a chart
listing ideal weight according to height, age, and sex.

After weighing in and having his blood pressure and pulse taken, he



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waited for Nyebern in a small private room, sitting on the end of an
examination table that was covered by a continuous roll of sanitary
paper.

On one wall hung an eye chart and an exquisite depiction of the
Ascension in which the artist's skill with light was so great that the
scene became three-dimensional and the figures therein seemed almost
alive.

Nyebern kept him waiting only a minute or two, and entered with a broad
smile. As they shook hands, the physician said, "I won't draw out the
suspense, Hatch. The tests all came in negative. You've got a clean
bill of health."

Those words were not as welcome as they ought to have been. Hatch had
been hoping for some finding that would point the way to an
understanding of his nightmares and his mystical connection with the man
who had killed the blond punker. But the verdict did not in the least
surprise him. He had suspected that the answers he sought were not
going to be that easy to find.

"So your night are only that," Nyebern said, "and nothing more-just
nightmares."

Hatch had not told him about the vision of the gunshot blonde who had
later been found dead, for real, on the freeway. As he had made clear
to Lindsey, he was not going to set himself up to become a headline
again, at least not unless he saw enough of the killer to identify him
to the police, more than he'd glimpsed in the mirror last night, in
which case he would have no choice but to face the media spotlight "No
cranial pressure," Nyebern said, "no chemicoelectrical imbalance, no
sign of a shift in the location of the pineal gland-which can sometimes
lead to severe nightmares and even waking hallucinations.. ." He went
over the tests one by one, methodical as usual.

As he listened, Hatch realized that he always remembered the physician
as being older than he actually was. Jonas Nyebern had a grayness about
him, and a gravity, that left the impression of advanced age.

Tall and lanky, he hunched his shoulders and stooped slightly to
deemphasize his height, resulting in a posture more like that of an
elderly man than of someone his true age, which was fifty. At times
there was about him, as well, an air of sadness, as if he had known
great tragedy.

When he finished going over the tests, Nyebern looked up and smiled
again. It was a warm smile, but that air of sadness clung to him in
spite of it. "The problem isn't physical, Hatch."

"Is it possible you could have missed something?"

"Possible, I suppose, but very unlikely.                 W"

"An extremely minor piece of brain damage, a few hundred cells, might
not show up on your tests yet have a serious effect."

"As I said, very unlikely. I think we can safely assume that this is
strictly an emotional problem, a perfectly understandable consequence of
the trauma you've been through. Let's try a little standard therapy."

"Psychotherapy?"

"Do you have a problem with that?"


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"No."

Except, Hatch thought, it won't work.                This isn't an emotional problem.

This is real.

"I know a good man, first-rate, you'll like him." Nyebern said, taking a
pen from the breast pocket of his white smock and writing the name of
the psychotherapist on the blank top sheet of a prescription pad.

"I'll discuss your case with him and tell him you'll be calling.                       Is
that all right?"

"Yeth.    Sure.    That's fine."

He wished he could tell Nyebern the whole story. But then he would
definitely sound as if he needed therapy. Reluctantly he faced the
realization that neither a medical doctor nor a psychotherapist could
help him. His ailment was too strange to respond to standard treatments
of any kind.

Maybe what he needed was a witch doctor. Or an exorcist. He did almost
feel as if the black-clad killer in sunglasses was a demon testing his
defenses to determine whether to attempt possessing him, They chatted a
couple of minutes about things nonmedical.

Then as Hatch was getting up to go, he pointed to the painting of the
Ascension. "Beautiful piece."

"Thank you.      It is exceptional, isn't it?"

"Itaaan."

"That's right."

"Early eighteenth century?"

"Kight again," Nyebern said.            "You know religious art?"

"Not all that well.         But I think the whole collection is Italian from
the same period."

"That it is.      Another piece, maybe two, and I'll call it complete."

"Odd to see it here," Hatch said, stepping closer to the painting beside
the eye chart.

"Yes, I know what you mean," Nybern said, "but I don't have enough wall
space for all this at home. There, I'm putting together a collection of
modern religious art."

"Is there any?"

"Not much. Religious subject matter isn't fashionable these days among
the really talented artists. The bulk of it is done by hacks. But here
and there... someone with genuine talent is seeking enlightenment along
the old paths, painting these subjects with a contemporary eye.

I'll move the modern collection here when I finish this one and dispose
of it."

Hatch turned away from the painting and regarded the doctor with
professional interest. "You're planning to sell?"


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"Oh, no," the physician said, returning his pen to his breast pocket.

His hand, with the long elegant fingers that one expected of a surgeon,
lingered at the pocket, as if he were pledging the truth of what he was
saying. "I'll donate it. This will be the sixth collection of
religious art I've put together over the past twenty years, then given
away."

Because he could roughly estimate the value of the artwork he had seen
on the walls of the medical suite, Hatch was astonished by the degree of
philanthropy indicated by Nyebern's simple statement. "Who's the
fortunate recipient?"

"Well, usually a Catholic university, but on two occasions another
Church institution," Nyebern said.

The surgeon was staring at the depiction of the Ascension, a distant
gaze in his eyes, as if he were seeing something beyond the painting,
beyond the wall on which it hung, and beyond the farthest horizon. His
hand still lingered over his breast pocket.

"Very generous of you," Hatch said.

"It's not an act of generosity." Nyebern's faraway voice now matched the
look in his eyes. "It's an act of atonement."

That statement begged for a question in response, although Hatch felt
that asking it was an intrusion of the physician's privacy. "Atonement
for what?"

Still staring at the painting, Nyebern said, "I never talk about it."

"I don't mean to pry.          I just thought-"

"Maybe it would do me good to talk about it.                  Do you think it might?"

Hatch did not answer-partly because he didn't believe the doctor was
actually listening to him anyway.

"Atonement," Nyebern said again. "At.... atonement for being the son
of my father. ....... for being the father of my son."

Hatch didn't see how either thing could be a sin, but he waited, certain
that the physician would explain. He was beginning to feel like that
party-goer in the old Coleridge poem, waylaid by the distraught Ancient
Mariner who had a tale of terror that he was driven to impart to others
lest, by keeping it to himself, he lose what little sanity he still
retained.

gazing unblinking at the painting, Nyebern said, "When I was only seven,
my father suffered a psychotic breakdown. He shot and killed my mother
and my brother. He wounded my sister and me, left us for dead, then
killed himself."

"Jesus, I'm sorry," Hatch said, and he thought of his own father's
bottomless well of anger. "I'm very sorry, Doctor." But he still did
not understand the failure or sin for which Nyebern felt the need to
atone.

"Certain psychoses may sometimes have a genetic cause. When I saw signs
of sociopathic behavior in my son, even at an early age, I should have
known what was coming, should've prevented it somehow. But I couldn't



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face the truth. Too painful. Then two years ago, when he was eighteen,
he stabbed his sister to death-" Hatch shuddered.

"-then his mother," Nyebern said.

Hatch started to put a hand on the doctor's arm, then pulled back when
he sensed that Nyebern's pain could never be eased and that his wound
was beyond healing by any medication as simple as consolation.

Although he was g of an intensely personal way, the physician was not
seeking sympathy or the link of friendship from Hatch.

Suddenly he seemed almost frighteningly self-contained He was about the
tragedy because the time had come to take it out of his personal
darkness to examine it again, and he would have spoken of it to anyone
who had been in that at that time instead of Hatch-or perhaps to the
empty air itself if no one at all had been present.

"And when they were dead," Nyebern said, "Jeremy took the same knife
into the garage, a butcher knife, placed it by the handle in the vise on
my workbench stood on a stool, and fell forward, impaling himself on the
blade. He bled to death." The physician's right hand was still at his
breast pocket but he no longer seemed like a man pledging the truth of
what he said. Instead, he reminded Hatch of a painting of Christ with
the Heart revealed, the slender hand of divine grace pointing to that
symbol of sack and promise of eternity.

At last Nyebern looked away from the Ascension and met Hatch's eyes.

"Some say evil is just the consequences of our actions, no more than a
result of our will. But I believe it's that-and much more. I believe
evil is a very real force, an energy quite apart from us, a presence in
the world.

Is that what you believe, Hatch?"

"Yes," Hatch said at once, and somewhat to his surprise.

Nyebern looked down at the prescription pad in his left hand. He took
his right hand away from his breast pocket, tore the top sheet off the
pad, and gave it to Hatch. "His name's Foster. Dr. Gabriel Foster.

I'm sure he'll be able to help you."

"Thanks," Hatch said numbly.

Nyebern opened the door of the examination room and gestured for Hatch
to precede him.

In the hallway, the physician said, "Hatch?"

Hatch stopped and looked back at him.

"Sorry," Nyebern said.

"For what?"

"For explaining why I donate the paintings."

Hatch nodded.      "Well, I asked, didn't I?"

"But I could have been much briefer."

"Oh?"


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"I could have just said-maybe I think the only way for me to get into
Heaven is to buy my way."

Outside, in the sun-splashed parking lot, Hatch sat in his car for a
long time, watching a wasp that hovered over the red hood as if it
thought it had found an enormous rose.

The conversation in Nyebern's office had seemed strangely like a dream,
and Hatch felt as if he were still rising out of sleep. He sensed that
the tragedy of Jonas Nyebern's death-haunted life had a direct bearing
on his own current problems, but although he reached for the connection,
he could not grasp it.

The wasp swayed to the left, to the right, but faced steadily toward the
windshield as though it could see him in the car and was mysteriously
drawn to him. Repeatedly, it darted at the glass, bounced off, and
resumed its hovering. Tap, hover, tap, hover, tatap, hover.

It was a very determined wasp. He wondered if it was one of those
species that possessed a single stinger that broke off in the target,
resulting in the subsequent death of the wasp. Tap, hover, tap, hover,
tap-tatap. If it was one of those species, did it fully understand what
reward it would earn by its persistence? Tap, hover, tatap-tap.

After seeing the last patient of the day, a follow-up visit with an
engaging thirty-year-old woman on whom he had performed an aortal graft
last March, Jonas Nyebern entered his private office at the back of the
medical suite and closed the door. He went behind the desk, sat down,
and looked in his wallet for a slip of paper on which was written a
telephone number that he chose not to include on his Rolodex. He found
it, pulled the phone close, and punched in the seven numbers.

Following the third ring, an answering machine picked up as it had on
his previous calls yesterday and earlier that morning: "This is Morton
Redlow. I'm not in the office right now. After the beep, please leave
a message and a number where you can be reached, and I will get back to
you as soon as possible."

Jonas waited for the signal, then spoke softly. "Mr. Redlow, this is
Dr. Nyebern. I know I've left other messages, but I was under the
impression that I would receive a report from you last Friday.

Certainly by the weekend at the latest.                    Please call me as soon as
possible. Thank you." He hung up.

He wondered if he had reason to worry.

He wondered if he had any reason not to worry.

6

Regina sat at her desk in Sister Mary Margaret's French class, weary of
the smell of chalk dust and annoyed by the hardness of the plastic seat
under her butt, knowing how to say, Hello, I am an American. Can you
direct me to the nearest church where I might attend Sunday Mass?

Tres boring.

She was still a fifth-grade student at St. Thomas's Elementary School,
because continued attendance was a strict condition of her adoption.

(Trial adoption.           Nothing final yet.         Could blow up.          The Harrisons


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could decide they preferred raising parakeets to children, give her
back, get a bird. Please, God, make sure they repare that in Your
divine wisdom You designed birds so they poop a lot. Make sure they
know what a mess it'll be keeping the cage clean.) When she graduated
from St. Thomas's Elementary, she would move on to St. Thomas's High
School, because St. Thomas's had its fingers in everything. In
addition to the children's care home and the two schools, it had a
daycare center and a thrift shop. The parish was like a conglomerate,
and Father Jiminez was sort of a big executive like Donald Trump, except
Father Jiminez didn't run around with bimbos or own gambling casos.

The bingo parlor hardly counted.

(Dear God, that stuff about birds pooping a lot-that was in no way meant
as a criticism. I'm sure You had Your reasons for making birds poop a
lot, all over everythug, and like the mystery of the Holy Trinity, it's
just one of those things we ordinary humans can't ever quite understand.
No offense meant.) Anyway, she didn't mind going to St. Thomas's
School, because both the nuns and the lay teachers pushed you hard, and
you ended up learning a lot, and she loved to learn.

By the last class on that Tuesday afternoon, however, she was full up
with g, and if Sister Mary Margaret called on her to say anything in
French, she would probably confine the word for church with the word for
sewer, which she had done once before, much to the delight of the other
kids and to her own motion.(DearGod,please remember that I made myself
say the Rosary as for that boner, just to prove I didn't mean anything
by it, it was only a mistake. When the bell rang, she was the first out
of her seat and the first out of the classroom door, even though most of
the kids at St. Thomas's School did not come from St.

Thomas's Home and were not disabled in any way.

All the way to her locker and all the way from her locker to the front
exit, she wondered if Mr. Harrison would really be waiting for her, as
he had promised. She imagined herself standing on the sidewalk with
kids swarming around her, unable to spot his car, the crowd gradually
diminishing until she stood alone, and still no sign of his car, and her
waiting as the sun set and the moon rose and her wristwatch ticked
toward midnight, and in the morning when the kids returned for another
day of school, she'd just go back inside with them and not tell anyone
the Harrisons didn't want her any more.

He was there. In the red car. In a line of cars driven by other kids'
parents. He leaned across the seat to open the door for her as she
approached.

When she got in with her book bag and closed the door, he said, "Hard
day?"

"Yeah," she said, suddenly shy when shyness had never been one of her
major problems. She was having trouble getting the hang of this family
thing. She was afraid maybe she'd never get it.

He said, "Those nuns."

"Yeah," she agreed.

"They're tough."

"Tough."

"Tough as nails, those nuns."


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"Nails," she said, nodding agreement, wondering if she would ever be
able to speak more than one-word sentences again.

As he pulled away from the curb, he said, "I'll bet you could put any
nun in the ring with any heavyweight champion in the whole history of
boxing-I don't care if it was even Muhammad Ali-and she'd knock him out
in the first round."

Regina couldn't help grinning at him.

"Sure," he said. "Only Superman could survive a fight with a real hard
case nun. Batman? Fooie! Even your average nun could mop up the floor
with Batman-or make soup out of the whole gang of Teenage Mutant Ninja
Turtles."

"They mean well," she said, which was three words, at least, but sounded
goofy. She might be better off not talking at all; she just didn't have
any experience at this father-kid stuff.

"Nuns?" he said. "Well, of course, they mean well. If they didn't mean
well, they wouldn't be nuns. They'd be maybe Mafia hitmen,
international terrorists, United States Con" He did not speed home like
a busy man with lots to do, but like somebody out for a leisurely drive.
She had not been in a car with him enough to know if that was how he
always drove, but she suspected maybe he was loafing along a little
slower than he usually did, so they could have more time together, just
the two of them. That was sweet. It made her throat a little tight and
her eyes watery. Oh, terrific. A pile of cow flop could've carried on
a better conversation than she was managing, so now she was going to
burst into tears, which would really cement the relationship. Surely
every adoptive parent desperately hoped to receive a mute, emotionally
unstable girl with physical problems right?

It was all the rage, don't you know. Well, if she did cry, her
treacherous sinuses would kick in, and the old snot-faucet would start
gushing, which would surely make her even more appeming. He'd give up
the idea of a leisurely drive, and head for home at such tremendous
speed that he'd have to stand on the brakes a mile from the house to
avoid shooting straight through the back of the garage. (Please, God,
help me here. You'll notice I thought "cow flop" not "cow shit," so I
deserve a little meig.) They chatted about this and that. Actually,
for a while he chatted and she pretty much just grunted like she was a
subhuman out on a pass from the zoo. But eventually she realized, to
her surprise, that she was talking in complete sentences, had been doing
so for a couple of miles, and was at ease with him.

He asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up, and she just about
bent his ear clear off explaining that some people actually made a
living writing the kinds of books she liked to read and that she had
been composing her own stories for a year or two. Lame stuff, she
admitted, but she would get better at it. She was very bright for ten,
older than her years, but she couldn't expect actually to have a career
going until she was eighteen, maybe sixteen if she was lucky. When had
Mr. Christopher Pike started publishing? Seventeen? Eighteen? Maybe
he'd been as old as twenty, but certainly no older, so that's what she
would shoot for-being the next Mr. Christopher Pike by the time she was
twenty. She had an entire notebook full of story ideas. Quite a few of
those ideas were good even when you crossed out the embarrassingly
childish ones like the story about the intelligent pig from space that
she had been so hot about for a while but now saw was hopelessly dumb.
She was still talking about writing books when they pulled into the


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driveway of the house in Laguna Niguel, and he actually seemed
interested.

She figured she might get the hang of this family thing yet.

Vassago dreamed of fire. The click of the cigarette-lighter cover being
flipped open in the dark. The dry rasp of the striker wheel scraping
against the flint. A spark. A young girls white summer dress flowering
into flames.

The Haunted House ablaze. Screams as the calculatedly spooky darkness
dissolved under licking tongues of orange light. Tod Ledderbeck was
dead in the cavern of the Millipede, and now the house of plastic
skeletons and rubber ghouls was abruptly tilled with real tenor and
pungent death.

He had dreamed of that fire previously, countless times since the night
of Tod's twelfth birthday. It always provided the most beautiful of all
the chimeras and phantasms that passed behind his eyes in sleep.

But on this occasion, strange faces and images appeared in the flames.

The red car again. A solemnly beautiful, auburn-haired child with large
gray eyes that seemed too old for her face. A small hand, cruelly bent,
with fingers missing. A name, which had come to him once before, echoed
through the leaping flames and melting shadows in the Haunted House.

Regina...     .....     .   Regina.

The visit to Dr. Nyebern's office had depressed Hatch, both because the
tests had revealed nothing that shed any light on his strange
experiences and because of the glimpse he had gotten into the
physician's own troubled life. But Regina was a medicine for melancholy
if ever there had been one. She had all the enthusiasm of a child her
age; life had not beaten her down one inch.

On the way from the car to the front door of the house, she moved more
swiftly and easily than when she had entered Salvatore Gujilio's office,
but the leg brace did give her a measured and solemn gate. A bright
yellow and blue butterfly accompanied her every step, fluttering gaily a
few inches from her head, as if it knew that her spirit was very like
itself, beautiful and buoyant.

She said solemnly, "Thank you for picking me up, Mr.                       Harrison."

"You're welcome, I'm sure," he said with equal gravity.

They would have to do something about this "Mr. Harrison" business
before the day was out. He sensed that her formality was partly a fear
of getting too close-and then being rejected as she had been during the
trial phase of her first adoption. But it was also a fear of saying or
doing the wrong thing and unwittingly destroying her own prospects for
happiness.

At the front door, he said, "Either Lindsey or I will be at the school
for you every day-unless you've got a driver's license and would just
rather come and go on your own."

She looked up at Hatch. The butterfly was describing circles in the air
above her head, as if it were a living crown or halo. She said, "You're
teasing me, aren't you?"

"Well, yes, I'm afraid I am."


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She blushed and looked away from him as if she was not sure if being
teased was a good or bad thing. He could almost hear her inner
thoughts: Is he teasing me because he thinks I'm cute or because he
thinks I'm hopelessly stupid or something pretty close to that.

Throughout the drive home from school, Hatch had seen that Regina
suffered from her share of self-doubt, which she thought she concealed
but which, when it struck, was evident in her lovely, wonderfully
expressive face. Each time he sensed a crack in the kid's
selfconfidence, he wanted to put his arms around her, hug her tight, and
reassure her-which would be exactly the wrong thing to do because she
would be appalled to realize that her moments of inner turmoil were so
obvious to him. She prided herself on being tough, resilient, and
self-sufficient. She projected that image as armor against the world.

"I hope you don't mind some teasing," he said as he inserted the key in
the door. "That's the way I am. I could check myself into a Teasers
Anonymous program, shake the habit, but it's a tough outfit. They beat
you with rubber hoses and make you eat Lima beans."

When enough time passed, when she felt she was loved and part of a
family, her selfconfidence would be as unshakable as she wanted it to be
now. In the meantime, the best thing he could do for her was pretend
that he saw her exactly as she wished to be seen-and quietly, patiently
help her finish becoming the poised and assured person she hoped to be.

As he opened the door and they went inside, Regina said, "I used to hate
Lima beans, all kinds of beans, but I made a deal with God. If he gives
me something I specially want, I'll eat every kind of bean there is for
the rest of my life without ever complaining."

In the foyer, closing the door behind them, Hatch said, "That's quite an
offer. God ought to be impressed."

"I sure hope so," she said.

And in Vassago's dream, Regina moved in sunlight, one leg embraced in
steel, a butterfly attending her as it might a flower. A house thanked
by palm trees. A door. She looked up at Vassago, and her eyes revealed
a soul of tremendous vitality and a heart so vulnerable that the beat of
his own was quickened even in sleep.

They found Lindsey upstairs, in the extra bedroom that served as her
at-home studio. The easel was angled away from the door, so Hatch
couldn't see the painting. Lindsey's blouse was half in and half out of
her jeans, her hair was in disarray, a smear of rust-red paint marked
her left cheek, and she had a look that Hatch knew from experience meant
she was in the final fever of work on a piece that was turning out to be
everything she had hoped.

"Hi, honey," Lindsey said to Regina.               "How was school?"

Regina was flustered, as she always seemed to be, by any term of
endearment. "Well, school is school, you know."

"Well, you must like it.           I know you get good grades."

Regina shrugged off the compliment and looked embarrassed.

Repressing the urge to hug the kid, Hatch said to Lindsey, "She's going
to be a writer when she grows up."



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"Really?" Lindsey said. "That's exciting. I knew you loved books, but
I didn't realize you wanted to write "Neither did I," the girl said, and
suddenly she was in gear and off, her initial awkwardness with Lindsey
past, words pouring out of her as she crossed the room and went behind
the easel to have a look at the work in progress, "until just last
Christmas, when my gift under the tree at the home was six paperbacks.
Not books for a ten-year-old, either, but the real stuff, because I read
at a tenth-grade level, which is fifteen years old.

I'm what they call precocious. Anyway, those books made the best gift
ever, and I thought it'd be neat if someday a girl like me at the home
got my books under the tree and felt the way I felt, not that I'll ever
be as good a writer as Mr. Daniel Pinkwater or Mr. Christopher Pike.

Jeeze, I mean, they're right up there with Shakespeare and Judy Blume.

But I've got good stories to tell, and they're not all that
intelligent-pig-from-space crap.

Sorry.    I mean poop.       I mean junk.        Intelligent-pig-from-space junk.

They're not all like that."

Lindsey never showed Hatch-or anyone else-a canvas in progress,
withholding even a glimpse of it until the final brush stroke had been
applied. Though she was evidently near completion of the current
painting, she was still working on it, and Hatch was surprised that she
didn't even twitch when Regina went around to the front of the easel to
have a look. He decided that no kid, just because she had a cute nose
and some freckles, was going to be accorded a privilege he was denied,
so he also walked boldly around the easel to take a peek.

It was a stunning piece of work. The background was a field of stars,
and superimposed over it was the transparent face of an ethereally
beautiful young boy. Not just any boy. Their Jimmy. When he was alive
she had painted him a few times, but never since his death-until now. It
was an idealized Jimmy of such perfection that his face might have been
that of an angel. His loving eyes were turned upward, toward a warm
light that rained down upon him from beyond the top of the canvas, and
his expression was more profound than joy. Rapture.

In the foreground, as the focus of the work, floated a black rose, not
transparent like the face, rendered in such sensuous detail that Hatch
could almost feel the velvety texture of each plush petal. The green
skin of the stem was moist with a cool dew, and the thorns were
portrayed with such piercingly sharp points that he half believed they
would prick like real thorns if touched. A single drop of blood
glistened on one of the black petals. Somehow Lindsey had imbued the
floating rose with an aura of preternatural power, so it drew the eye,
demanded attention, almost mesmeric in its effect. Yet the boy did not
look down at the rose; he gazed up at the radiant object only he could
see, the implication being that, as powerful as the rose might be, it
was of no interest whatsoever when compared to the source of the light
above.

From the day of Jimmy's death until Hatch's resuscitation, Lindsey had
refused to take solace from any god who would create a world with death
in it. He a priest suggesting prayer as a route to acceptance and
psychological healing, and Lindsey's response had been cold and
dismissive: Prayer never works. Eat no miracles, Father. stay and the
living only wait to join them. Something had changed in her now.



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The black rose in the painting was death.                 Yet it had no power over
Jimmy.

He had gone beyond death, and it meant nothing to him. He was rising
above it. And by being able to conceive of the painting and bring it
off so flawlessly, Lindsey had found a way to say goodbye to the boy at
last,.

goodbye without regrets, goodbye without bitterness, goodbye with love
and with a sag new acceptance of the need for belief in something more
than a life that ended always in a cold, black hole in the ground.

"It's so beautiful," Regina said with genuine awe. "Scary in a way, I
don't know why... ... . but so beautiful." Hatch looked up from the
painting, met Lindsey's eyes, tried to say something, but could not
speak. Since his resuscitation, there had been a rebirth of Lindsey's
heart as well as his own, and they had confronted the mistake they had
made by losing five years to grief. But on some fundamental level, they
had not accepted that life could ever be as sweet as it had been before
that one small death; they had not-let Jimmy go. Now, meeting Lindsey's
eyes, he knew that she had actually embraced hope again without
reservation. The full weight of his little boy's death fell upon Hatch
as it had not in years, because if Lindsey could make peace with God, he
must do so as well. He tried to again, could not, looked again at the
painting, he was going to cry, and left the room.

He didn't know where he was going. Without quite remembering taking any
step along the route, he went downstairs, into the den that they had
offered to Regina as a bedroom, opened the French doors, and stepped
into the rose garden at the side of the house.

In the warm, afternoon sun, the roses were red, white, yellow, pink, and
the shade of peach skins, some only buds and some as big as saucers, but
not one of them black. The air was full of their enchanting fragrance.

With the taste of salt in the corners of his mouth, he reached out with
both hands toward the nearest rose-laden bush, intending to touch the
flowers, but his hands stopped short of them. With his arms thus
forming a cradle, he suddenly could feel a weight draped across them.

In reality, nothing was in his arms, but the burden he felt was no
mystery; he remembered, as if it had been an hour ago, how the body of
his cancer-wasted son had felt.

In the final moments before death's hateful visitation, he had pulled
the wires and tubes from Jim, had lifted him off the sweat-soaked
hospital bed, and had sat in a chair by the window, holding him close
and murmuring to him until the pale, parted lips drew no more breath.

Until his own death, Hatch would remember precisely the weight of the
wasted boy in his arms, the sharpness of bones with so little flesh left
to pad them, the awful dry heat pouring off skin translucent with
sickness, the heart-rendingfragility.

He felt all that now, in his empty arms, there in the rose garden.

When he looked up at the summer sky, he said, "Why?" as if there were
Someone to answer. "He was so small," Hatch said. "He was so damned
small."

As he spoke, the burden was heavier than it had ever been in that
hospital room, a thousand tons in his empty arms, maybe because he still
didn't want to free himself of it as much as he thought he did.


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But then a strange thing happened-the weight in his arms slowly
dmumshed, and the invisible body of his son seemed to float out of his
embrace, as if the flesh had been transmuted entirely to spirit at long
last, as if Jim had no need of comforting or consolation any more.

Hatch lowered his arms.

Maybe from now on the bittersweet memory of a child lost would be only
the sweet memory of a child loved. And maybe, henceforth, it would not
be a memory so heavy that it oppressed the heart.

He stood among the roses.

The day was warm.        The late-afternoon light was golden.

The sky was perfectly clear-and utterly mysterious.

Regina asked if she could have some of Lindsey's paintings in her room,
and she sounded sincere. They chose three. Together they hammered in
picture hooks and hung the paintings where she wanted them-along with a
foot-tall crucifix she had brought from her room at the orphanage.

As they worked, Lindsey said, "How about dinner at a really super pura
parlor I know?"

"Yeah!" the girl said enthusiastically.                 "I love pizza."

"They make it with a nice thick crust, lots of cheese."

"Pepperoni?"

"Cut thin, but lots of it."

"Sausage?"

"Sure, why not. Though you're sure this isn't getting to be a pretty
revolting pizza for a vegetarian like you?"

Regina blushed. "Oh, that. I was such a little shit that day.                         Oh,
jeeze sorry. I mean, such a ass. I mean, such a jerk."

"That's okay," Lindsey said.            "We all behave like jerks now and then."

"You don't.      Mr.    Harrison doesn't."

"Oh, just wait." Standing on a stepstool in front of the wall opposite
the bed' Lindsey pounded in a nail for a picture hook. Regina was
holding the painting for her. As she took it from the girl to hang it,
Lindsey said, "Listen, will you do me a favor at dinner tonight?"

"Favor?    Sure?"

"I know it's still awkward for you, this new arrangement.                     You don't
really feel at home and probably won't for a long time-"

"Oh, it's very nice here," the girl protested.

Lindsey slipped the wire over the picture hook and adjusted the painting
until it hung straight. Then she sat down on the stepstool, which just
about brought her and the girl eye to eye. She took hold of both of
Regina's hands, the normal one and the different one. "You're right
it's very nice here. But you and I both know that's not the same as
home. I wasn't going to push you on this. I was going to let you take


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your time, but.. . Even if it seems a liNe premature to you, do you
think tonight at dinner you could stop calling us Mr. and Mrs.
Harrison?

asked Hatch. It would be very important to him, just now, if you could
at least call him Hatch."

The girl lowered her eyes to their interlocked hands.                       "Well, I guess
... sure... that would be okay."

"And you know what? I realize this is asking more than it's fair to ask
yet, before you really know him that well. But do you know what would
be the best thing in the world for him right now?"

The girl was still staring at their hands.                  "What?"

"If somehow you could find it in your heart to call him Dad. Don't say
yes or no just now. Think about it. But it would be a wonderful thing
for you to do for him, for reasons I don't have time to explain right
here. And I promise you this, Regina-he is a good man. He will do
anything for you, put his life on the line for you if it ever came to
that, and never ask for anything. He'd be upset if he knew I was even
asking you for this. But all I'm asking, really, is for you to think
about it."

After a long silence, the girl looked up from their linked hands and
nodded. "Okay. I'll think about it."

"Thank you, Regirta." She got up from the stepstool.                       "Now let's hang
that last painting."

Lindsey measured, penciled a spot on the wall, and nailed in a picture
hook.

When Regina handed over the painting, she said, "It's just that all my
.... . there's never been anyone I called Mom or Dad. It's a very new
thing."

Lindsey smiled. "I understand, honey.                 I really do.         And so will Hatch
if it takes time."

In the blazing Haunted House, as the cries for help and the screams of
agony swelled louder, a strange object appeared in the firelight. A
single rose. A black rose. It floated as if an unseen magician was
levitating it.

Vassago had never encountered anything more beautiful in the world of
the living, in the world of the dead, or in the realm of dreams. It
shimmered before him, its petals so smooth and soft that they seemed to
have been cut from swatches of the night sky unspoiled by stars. The
thorns were exquisitely sharp, needles of glass. The green stem had the
oiled sheen of a serpent's skin. One petal held a single drop of blood.

The rose faded from his dream, but later it returned-and with it the
woman named Lindsey and the auburn-haired girl with the soft-gray eyes.

Vassago yearned to possess all three: the black rose, the woman, and the
girl with the gray eyes.

After Hatch freshened up for dinner, while Lindsey finished getting
ready in the bathroom, he sat alone on the edge of their bed and read
the article by S. Steven Honell in Arts American. He could shrug off
virtually any insult to himself, but if someone slammed Lindsey, he


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always reacted with anger. He couldn't even deal well with reviews of
her work that she thought had made valid criticisms. Reading Honell's
vicious, snide, and ultimately stupid diatribe dismissing her entire
career as "wasted energy," Hatch grew angrier by the sentence.

As had happened the previous night, his anger erupted into fiery rage
with volcanic abruptness. The muscles in his jaws clenched so hard, his
teeth ached. The magazine began to shake because his hands were
trembling with fury. His vision blurred slightly, as if he were looking
at everything through shimmering waves of heat, and he had to blink and
squint to make the fuzzy-edged words on the page resolve into readable
print.

As when he had been lying in bed last night, he felt as if his anger
opened a door and as if something entered him through it, a foul spirit
that knew only rage and hate. Or maybe it had been with him all along
but sleeping, and his anger had roused it. He was not alone inside his
own head. He was aware of another presence, like a spider crawling
through the narrow space between the inside of his skull and the surface
of his brain.

He tried to put the magazine aside and calm down. But he kept reading
because he was not in full possession of himself Vassago moved through
the Haunted House, untroubled by the hungry fire, because he had planned
an escape route. Sometimes he was twelve years old, and sometimes he
was twenty. But always his path was lit by human torches, some of whom
had collapsed into silent melting heaps upon the smoking floor, some of
whom exploded into flames even as he passed them.

In the dream he was carrying a magazine, folded open to an article that
angered him and seemed imperative he read. The edges of the pages
curled in the heat and threatened to catch fire. Names leaped at him
from the pages. Lindsey. Lindsey Sparling. Now he had a last name for
her. He felt an urge to toss the magazine aside, slow his breathing,
calm down. Instead he stoked his anger, let a sweet flood of rage
overwhelm him, and told himself that he must know more. The edges of
the magazine pages curled in the heat. Honell. Another name.

Steven Honell.       Bits of burning debris fell on the article.                 StevenS.

Honell.    No.    The 5 first.        5.   Steven Honell.        The paper caught fire.

Honell. A writer. A barroom. Silverado Canyon. In his hands, the
magazine burst into flames that flashed into his lab He shed sleep like
a fired bullet shedding its brass jacket, and sat up in his dark
hideaway. Wide awake. Excited. He knew enough now to find the woman.

One moment rage like a fire swept through Hatch, and the next moment it
was extinguished. His jaws relaxed, his tense shoulders sagged, and his
hands unclenched so suddenly that he dropped the magazine on the floor
between his feet.

He continued to sit on the edge of the bed for a while, stunned and
confused. He looked toward the bathroom door, relieved that Lindsey had
not walked in on him while he had been.. . Been what? In his trance?

Posession?

He smelled something peculiar, out of place.                  Smoke.

He looked at the issue of Arts American on the floor between his feet.

Hesitantly, he picked it up.            It was still folded open to Honell's


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article about Lindsey. Although no visible van rose from the magazine,
the paper exuded the heavy smell of smoke. The odors of burning wood,
paper, tar, plastics. and something worse. The edges of the paper were
yellow-brown and crisp, as if they had been ex to almost enough heat to
induce spontaneous combustion.

7

When the knock came at the door, Honell was sitting in a rocking chair
by the fireplace. He was drinking Chivas Regal and reading one of his
own novels, Miss Culvert, which he had written twenty-five years ago
when he was only thirty.

He re-read each of his nine books once a year because he was in
perpetual competition with himself, striving to improve as he grew old
instead of settling quietly into sea the way most writers did.

Constant betterment was a formidable challenge because he had been
awfully good at an early age. Every time he re-read himself, he was
surprised to discover that his body of work was considerably more
impressive than he remembered it.

Miss Culvert was a fictional treatment of his mother's self-absorbed
lite in the respectable upper-middle-class society of a downstate
Illinois town, an indictment of the self-satisfied and stiflingly bland
"culture" of the Midwest. He had really captured the essence of the
bitch. Oh how he had captured her. Reading Miss Culvert, he was
reminded of the hurt and horror with which his mother had received the
novel on first publication, and he decided that as soon as he had
finished the book, he would take down the sequel, Mrs. Towers, which
dealt with her marriage to his father, her widowhood, and her second
marriage. He remained convinced that the sequel was what had killed
her. Officially, it was a heart attack. But cardiac infarction had to
be triggered by something, and the timing was satisfyingly concurrent
with the release of Mrs. Towers and the media attention it received.

,1 When the unexpected caller knocked, a pang of resentment shot through
Honell. His face puckered sourly. He preferred the company of his own
characters to that of anyone who might conceivably come visiting,
uninvited. Or invited, for that matter. All of the people in his books
were carefully refined, claahed, whereas people in real lite were
unfailingly ... well, rezzy, murky, pointlessly complex.

He glanced at the clock on the mantel.                   Ten past nine o'clock.

The knock sounded again. More insistent this time. It was probably a
neighbor, which was a dismaying thought because his neighbors were all
fools.

He considered not answering. But in these rural canyons, the locals
thought of themselves as "neighborly," never as the pests they actually
were, and if he didn't respond to the knocking, they would circle the
house, peeping in windows, out of a country-folk concern for his
welfare.

God, he hated them. He tolerated them only because he hated the people
in the cities even more, and loathed suburbanites.

He put down his Chivas and the book, pushed up from the rocking chair,
and went to the door with the intention of giving a firy dressing down
to whoever was out there on the porch. With his command of language, he
could mortify anyone in about one minute flat, and have them running for



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cover in two minutes. The pleasure of meting out humiliation would
almost compensate for the interruption.

When he pulled the curtain back from the                glass panes in the front door,
he was surprised to see that his visitor                was not one of the neighbors-in
fact, not anyone he recognized. The boy                 was no more than twenty, pale
as the wings of the snowflake moths that                batted against the porch light.

He was dressed entirely in black and wore sunglasses.

Honell was unconcerned about the caller's intentions. The canyon was
less than an hour from the most heavily populated parts of Orange
County, but it was nonetheless remote by virtue of its forbidding
geography and the poor condition of the roads. Crime was no problem,
because criminals were generally attracted to more populous areas where
the pickings were more plentiful. Besides, most of the people living in
the cabins thereabouts had nothing worth stealing.

He found the pale young man intriguing.

"What do you want?" he asked without opening the door.

"Mr.    Honell?"

"That's right."

"5.    Steven Honell?"

"Are you going to make a torture of this?"

"Sir, excuse me, but are you the writer?"

College student.        That's what he had to be.

A decade ago-well, nearly two-Honell had been besieged by college
English majors who wanted to apprentice under him or just worship at his
feet. They were an inconstant crowd, however, on the lookout for the
latest trend, with no genuine appreciation for high literary art.

Hell, these days, most of them couldn't even read; they were college
students in name only. The institutions through which they matriculated
were little more than days centers for the terminally immature, and they
were no more likely to study than to By to Mars by flapping their arms.

"Yes, I'm the writer.          What of it?"

"Sir, I'm a great admirer of your books."

"Listened to them on audiotape, have you?"

"Sir?   No, I've read them, all of them."

The audiotapes, licensed by his publisher without his consent, were
abridged by two-thirds. Travesties.

"Ah. Read them in comic-book format, have you?" Honell said sourly,
though to the best of his knowledge the sacrilege of comic-book
adaptation had not yet been perpetrated.

"Sir, I'm sorry to intrude like this. It really took a lot of time for
me to work up the courage to come see you. Tonight I finally had the
guts, and I knew if I delayed I'd never get up the nerve again. I am in
awe of your writing, sir, and if you could spare me the time, just a
little time, to answer a few questions, I'd be most grateful."


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A little conversation with an intelligent young man might, in fact, have
more charm than re-reading Miss Culvert. A long time had passed since
the last such visitor, who had come to the eyrie in which Honell had
then been living above Santa Fe. After only a brief hesitation, he
opened the door.

"Come in, then, and we'll see if you really understand the complexities
of what you've read."

The young man stepped across the threshold, and Honell turned away,
heading back toward the rocking chair and the Chivas.

"This is very kind of you, sir," the visitor said as he closed the door.

"Kindness is a quality of the weak and stupid, young man. I've other
motivations." As he reached his chair, he and said, "Take off those
sunglasses. Sunglasses at night is the worst kind of Hollywood
affectation, not the sign of a serious person."

"I'm sorry, sir, but they're not an affectation. It's just that this
world is so much more painfully bright than Hell-which I'm sure you'll
eventually discover."

Hatch had no appetite for dinner. He only wanted to sit alone with the
inexplicably beat-led issue of Arts American and stare at it until, by
God, he forced himself to understand exactly what was happening to him.

He was a man of reason. He could not easily embrace supernatural
explanations. He was not in the antiques business by accident; he had a
need to surround himself with things that contributed to an atmosphere
of order and stability.

But kids also hungered for stability, which included regular mealtimes,
so they went to dinner at a pizza parlor, after which they caught a
movie at the theater complex next door. It was a comedy. Though the
film couldn't make Hatch forget the strange problems plaguing him, the
frequent sound of Regina's musical giggle did somewhat soothe his
abraded nerves.

Later, at home, after he had tucked the girl in bed, kissed her
forehead, wished her sweet dreams, and turned off the light, she said,
"Goodnight ... Dad."

He was in her doorway, stepping into the hall, when the word "dad"
stopped him. He turned and looked back at her.

"Goodnight," he said, deciding to receive her gift as casually as she
had given it, for fear that if he made a big deal about it, she would
call him Mr. Harrison forever. But his heart soared.

In the bedroom, where Lindsey was undressing, he said, "She called me
Dad."

"Who did?"

"Be serious, who do you think?"

"How much did you pay her?"

"You're just jealous cause she hasn't called you Mom yet."

"She will.     She's not so afraid any more."



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"Of you?"

"Of taking a chance."

Before getting undressed for bed, Hatch went downstairs to check the
telephone answering machine in the kitchen. Funny, after all that had
happened to him and considering the problems he still had to sort out,
the mere fact that the girl had called him. Dad was enough to quicken
his step and raise his spirits. He climbed the stairs two at a time.

The answering machine was on the counter to the left of the
refrigerator, below the cork memo board He was hoping to have a response
from the estate executor to whom he had given a bid for the Wedgwood
collection that morning. The window on the machine showed three
messages. The first was from Glenda Dockridge, his right hand at the
antique shop. The second was from Simpson Smith, a friend and antique
dealer on Melrose Place in Los Angeles. The third was from Janice
Dimes, a friend of Lindsey's. All three were reporting the same news:
Hatch, Lindsey, Hatch and Lindsey, have you seen tv? have you read the
paper, have you heard the news about Cooper, about that guy who ran you
off the road, about Bill Cooper, he's dead he was killed he was killed
last night.

Hatch felt as if a refrigerant, instead of blood, pumped through his
veins.

last evening he had raged about Cooper getting off scot-free, and had
wished him dead. No, wait. He'd said he wanted to hurt him, make him
pay, pitch him in that icy river, but he hadn't really wanted Cooper
dead.

And so what if he had wanted him dead? He had not killed the man.                         He
was not at fault for what had happened.

Punching the button to erase the messages, he thought: The cops will
want to talk to me sooner or later.

Then he wondered why he was worried about the police. Maybe the
murderer was already in custody, in which case no suspicion would fall
upon him. But why should he come under suspicion anyway? He had done
nothing. Nothing. Why was guilt creeping through him like the
Millipede inching up a long tunnel?

He hurried upstairs.

Millipede?

The utterly enigmatic nature of that image chilled him. He couldn't
reference the source of it. As if it wasn't his own thought but
something he had... received.

Lindsey was lying on her back in bed, adjusting the covers around her.

The newspaper was on his nightstand, where she always put it.                      He
snatched it up and quickly scanned the front page.

"Hatch?" she said.        "What's wrong?"

"Cooper's dead."

"What?"

"The guy driving the beer truck.              William Cooper.        Murdered."



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She threw back the covers and sat on the edge of the bed.

He found the story on page three.              He sat beside Lindsey, and they read
the article together.

According to the newspaper, police were interested in talking to a young
man in his early twenties, with pale skin and dark hair. A neighbor had
glimpsed him fleeing down the alleyway behind the Palin Court
apartments. He might have been wearing sunglasses. At night.

"He's the same damned one who killed the blonde," Hatch said fearfully.

"The sunglasses in the rearview mirror. And now he's picking up on my
thoughts. He's acting out my anger, murdering people that I'd like to
see punished."

"That doesn't make sense.           It can't be."

"It is." He felt sick. He looked at his hands, as if he might actually
find the truck driver's blood on them. "My God, I sent him after
Cooper."

He was so appalled, so psychologically oppressed by a sense of
responsibility for what had happened, that he wanted desperately to wash
his hands, scrub them until they were raw. When he tried to get up, his
legs were too weak to support him, and he had to sit right down again.

Lindsey was shocked and horrified, but she did not react to the news
story as strongly as Hatch did.

Then he told her about the reflection of the black-dressed young man in
sunglasses, which he had seen in the mirrored door in place of his own
image, last night in the den when he had been ranting about Cooper. He
told her, as well, how he lay in bed after she was asleep, brooding
about Cooper, and how his anger suddenly exploded into artery-popping
rage.

He spoke of the sense he'd had of being invaded and overwhelmed, ending
in the blackout. And for a kicker, he recounted how his anger had
escalated unreasonably as he had read the piece in Arts American earlier
this evening, and he took the magazine out of his nightstand to show her
the inexplicably scorched pages.

By the time Hatch finished, Lindsey's anxiety matched his, but dismay at
his secretiveness seemed greater than anything else she was feeling.

"Why'd you hide all of this from me?"

"I didn't want to worry you," he said, knowing how feeble it sounded.

"We've never hidden anything from each other before.                       We've always
shared everything. Everything."

"I'm sorry, Lindsey. I..... . it's just that... these last couple
months ... the nightmares of rotting bodies, violence, fire,... and
the last few days, all this wierdness...."

"From now on," she said, "there'll be no secrets."

"I only wanted to spare yon-"

"No secrets," she insisted.



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"Okay.    No secrets."

"And you're not responsible for what happened to Cooper. Even if there
is some kind of link between you and this killer, and even if that's why
Cooper became a target, it's not your fault. You didn't know that being
angry at Cooper was equivalent to a death sentence. You couldn't have
done anything to prevent it."

Hatch looked at the heat-seared magazine in her hands, and a shudder of
dread passed through him. "But it'll be my fault if I don't try to save
Honell."

Frowning, she said, "What do you mean?"

"If my anger somehow focused this guy on Cooper, why wouldn't it also
focus him on Honell?"

Honell woke to a world of pain. The difference was, this time he was on
the receiving end of it-and it was physical rather than emotional pain.

His crotch ached from the kick he'd taken. A blow to his throat had
left his esophagus feeling like broken glass. His headache was
excruciating.

His wrists and ankles burned, and at first he could not understand why;
then he realized he was tied to the four posts of something, probably
his bed, and the ropes were chafing his skin.

He could not see much, partly because his vision was blurred by tears
but also because his contact lenses had been knocked out in the attack.

He knew he had been assaulted, but for a moment he could not recall the
identity of his assailant.

Then the young man's face loomed over him, blurred at first like the
surface of the moon through an unadjusted telescope. The boy bent
closer, closer, and his face came into focus, handsome and pale, framed
by thick black hair. He was not smiling in the tradition of movie
psychotics, as Honell expected he would be. He was not scowling,
either, or even frowning. He was expressionless-except, perhaps, for a
subtle hint of that solemn professional curiosity with which an
entomologist might study some new mutant variation of a familiar species
of insect.

"I'm sorry for this discourteous treatment, sir, after you were kind
enough to welcome me into your home. But I'm rather in a hurry and
couldn't take the time to discover what I need to know through ordinary
conversation."

"Whatever you want," Honell said placatingly. He was shocked to hear
how drastically his mellifluous voice, always a reliable tool for
seduction and expressive instrument of scorn, had changed. It was
raspy, marked by a wet gurgle, thoroughly disgusting.

"I would like to know who Lindsey Sparling is," the young man said
dispassionately, "and where I can find her."

Hatch was surprised to find Honell's number in the telephone book. Of
course, the author's name was not as familiar to the average citizen as
it had been during his brief glory years, when he had published Mss
Culvert and Mrs. Towers. Honell didn't need to be worried about
privacy these days; evidently the public gave him more of it than he
desired.


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While Hatch called the number, Lindsey paced the length of the bedroom
and back. She had made her position clear: she didn't think Honell
would interpret Hatch's warning as anything other than a cheap threat.

Hatch agreed with her.          But he had to try.

He was spared the humiliation and frustration of listening to Honell's
reaction, however, because no one answered the phone out there in the
far canyons of the desert night. He let it ring twenty times.

He was about to hang up, when a series of images snapped through his
mind with a sound like short circuiting electrical wires: a disarranged
bed quilt; a bleeding, rope encircled wrist; a pair of frightened,
bloodshot, myopic eyes. .. and in the eyes, the twin reflections of a
dark face looming close, distinguished only by a pair of sunglasses.

Hatch slammed down the phone and backed away from it as if the receiver
had turned into a rattlesnake in his hand. "It's happening now."

The ringing phone fell silent.

Vassago stared at it, but the ringing did not resume.

He returned his attention to the man who was tied spread-eagle to the
brass posts of the bed. "So Lindsey Harrison is the married name?"

"Yes," the old guy croaked.

"Now what I most urgently need, sir, is an address."

The public telephone was outside of a cony store in a shopping center
just two miles from the Harrison house. It was protected from the
elements by a Plexiglas hood and surrounded by a curved sound shield.

Hatch would have preferred the greater privacy of a real booth, but
those were hard to find these days, a luxury of less cost-conscious
times.

He parked at the end of the center, at too great a distance for anyone
in the glass-fronted convenience store to notice-and perhaps This
license number.

He walked through a cool, blustery wind to the telephone. The center's
Indian laurels were infested with the winds, and drifts of dead, tightly
curled leaves blew along the pavement at Hatch's feet. They made a dry,
scuttling sound. In the urine-yellow glow of the parking-lot ights,
they almost looked like hordes of insects, queerly mutated their
subterranean hive.

The convenience store was not busy, and everything else in the shopping
center was closed. He hunched his shoulders and head into the pay phone
sound shield, convinced he wouldn't be overheard.

He did not want to call the police from home, because he knew they had
equipment that printed out every caller's number at their end. If they
found Honell dead, Hatch didn't want to become their prime suspect.

And if his concern for Honell's safety proved to be unfounded, he didn't
want to be on record with the police as some kind of nut case or
hysteric.

Even as he punched in the number with one bent knuckle and held the
handset with a Kleenex to avoid leaving prints, he was uncertain what to


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say.

He knew what he could not say: Hi, I was dead eighty minutes, then
brought back to life, and now I have this crude but at times effective
telepathic connection to a psychotic killer, and I think I should warn
you he is about to strike again. He could not imagine the authorities
taking him any more seriously than they would take a guy who wore a
pyramid-shaped aluminum-foil hat to protect his brain from sinister
radiation and who bothered them with complaints about evil, mind-warping
extraterrestrials next door.

He had decided to call the Orange County Sheriff's Department rather
than any particular city's police agency, because the crimes committed
by the man in sunglasses fell in several jurisdictions. When the
sheriff's operator answered, Hatch talked fast, talked over her when she
began to interrupt, because he knew they could trace him to a pay phone
given enough time. "The man who killed the blonde and dumped her on the
freeway last week is the same guy who killed William Cooper last night,
and tonight he's going to murder Steven Honell, the writer, if you don't
give him protection quick, and I mean right now. Honell lives in
Silverado Canyon, I don't know the address, but he's probably in your
jurrisdiction, and He's a dead man if you don't move now."

He hung up, turned away from the phone, and headed for his car, jamming
the Kleenex into his pocket. He felt less relieved than he had expected
to, and more of a fool than seemed reasonable.

On his way back to the car, he was walking into the wind. All the
laurel leaves, sucked dry by the winds, were now blown toward him
instead of with him. They hissed against the blacktop and crunched
under his shoes.

He knew that the trip had been a waste and that his effort to help
Honell had been ineffective. The sheriff's department would probably
treat it like just another crank call.

When he got home, he parked in the driveway, afraid that the clatter of
the garage door would wake Regina His scalp prickled when he got out of
the car. He stood for a minute, surveying the shadows along the house,
around the shrubbery, under the trees. Nothing.

Lindsey was pouring a cup of coffee for him when he walked into the
kitchen.

He took it, sipped gratefully at the hot brew. Suddenly he was colder
than he had been while standing out in the night chill.

"What do you think?" she asked worriedly.                 "Did they take you
seriously?"

"Pissing in the wind," he said.

Vassago was still driving the pearl-gray Honda belonging to Renata
Desseux, the woman he had overpowered in the mall parking lot on
Saturday night and later added to his collection. It was a fine car and
handled well on the twisting roads as he drove down the canyon from
Honell's place, heading for more populated areas of Orange County.

As he rounded a fairly sharp curve, a patrol car from the sheriff's
department swept past him heading up the canyon. Its siren was not
blaring, but its emergency beacons splashed red and blue light on the
shale banks and on the gnarled branches of the overhanging trees.



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He divided his attention between the winding road ahead and the
dwindling lights of the patrol car in his rear-view mirror, until it
rounded another bend upslope and vanished. He was sure the cop was
going to Honell's. The unanswered madly ringing telephone, which had
interrupted his interrogation of the author, was the trigger that had
set the sheriff's department in motion, but he could not figure how or
why.

Vassago did not drive faster. At the end of Silverado Canyon, he turned
south on Santiago Canyon Road and maintained the legal speed limit as
any good citizen was expected to do.

8

In bed in the dark, Hatch felt his world crumbling around him.                          He was
going to be left with dust.

Happiness with Lindsey and Regina was within hisgrasp.                        Or was that an
illusion? Were they immediately beyond his reach?

He wished for an insight that would give him a new perspective on these
apparently supernatural events. Until he could understand the nature of
the evil that had entered his life he could not fight it.

Dr. Nyebern's voice spoke softly in his mind: I believe evil is a very
real force, an energy quite apart from us' a presence in the word He
thought he could smell a lingering trace of smoke from the heat-browned
pages of Arts American. He had put the magazine in the desk in the den
downstairs, in the drawer with a lock. He had added the small key to
the ring he carried.

He had never locked anything in the desk before. He was not sure why he
had done so this time. protecting evidence, he'd told himself.

But evidence of what? The singed pages of the magazine proved nothing
to anyone about anything.

No. That was not precisely true. The existence of the magazine proved,
to him if to no one else, that he wasn't merely imagining and
hallucinating everything that was happening to him. What he had locked
away, for his own peace of mind, was indeed evidence. Evidence of his
sanity.

Beside him, Lindsey was also awake, either uninterested in sleep or
unable to find a way into it. She said, "What if this killer Hatch
waited. He didn't need to ask her to finish the thought, for he knew
what she was going to say. After a moment she said just what he
expected: "What if this killer is aware of you as much as you're aware
of him?

What if he comes after you...                us...    Regina?"

"Tomorrow we're going to start taking precautions."

"What precautions?"

"Guns, for one thing."

"Maybe this isn't something we can handle ourselves."

"We don't have any choice."

"Maybe we need police protection."


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"Somehow I don't think they'll commit a lot of manpower                      to protect a guy
just because he claims to have a supernatural bond with                      a psychotic The
wind that had harried laurel leaves across the shopping                      center parking
lot now found a loose brace on a section of rain gutter                      and worried it.

Metal creaked softly against metal.

Hatch said, "I went somewhere when I died, right?"

"What do you mean?"

"Purgatory, Heaven, Hell-those are the basic possibilities for a
Catholic, if what we say we believe turns out to be true."

"Well...     you've always said you had no near-death experience."

"I didn't. I can't remember anything from...                    the Other Side.      But that
doesn't mean I wasn't there."

"What's your point?"

"Maybe this killer isn't an ordinary man."

"You're losing me, Hatch."

"Maybe I brought something back with me."

"Back with you?"

"From wherever I was while I was dead."

"Something?"

Darkness had its advantages. The superstitious primitive within could
speak of things that would seem too foolish to voice in a well-lighted
place.

He said, "A spirit.         An entity."

She said nothing.

"My passage in and out of death might have opened a door somehow," he
said, "and let something through."

"Something," she said again, but with no note of inquiry in her voice,
as there had been before. He sensed that she knew what he meant-and did
not like the theory.

"And now it's loose in the world. Which explains its link to me-and why
it might kill people who anger me."

She was silent awhile. Then: "If something was brought back, it's
evidently pure evil. What-are you saying that when you died, you went
to Hell and this killer piggy-backed with you from there?"

"Maybe. I'm no saint, no matter what you think.                     After all, I've got at
least Cooper's blood on-my hands."

"That happened after you died and were brought back.                       Besides, you don't
share in the guilt for that."

"It was my anger that targeted him my anger-"

"Bullshit," Lindsey said sharply.              "You're the best man I've ever known.


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If housing in the afterlife includes a Heaven and Hell, you've earned
the apartment with a better view."

His thoughts were so dark, he was surprised that he could smile. He
reached under the sheets, found her hand, and held it gratefully. "I
love you, too."

"Think up another theory if you want to keep me awake and interested."

"Let's just make a little adjustment to the theory we already have.

What if there's an afterlife, but it isn't ordered like anything
theologians have ever described. It wouldn't have to be either Heaven
or Hell that I came back from. Just another place, stranger than here,
different, with unknown dangers."

"I don't like that much better."

"If I'm going to deal with this thing, I have to find a way to explain
it.

I can't fight back if I don't even know where to throw my punches."

"There's got to be a more logical explanation," she said.

"That's what I tell myself.            But when I try to find it, I keep coming
back to the illogical."

The rain gutter creaked. The wind soughed under the eaves and called
down the flu of the master-bedroom fireplace.

He wondered if Honell was able to hear the wind wherever he was-and
whether it was the wind of this world or the next Vassago parked
directly in front of Harrison's Antiques at the south end of Laguna
Beach. The shop occupied an entire end of the building. The big
display windows were unlighted as Tuesday slipped through midnight,
becoming Wednesday.

Steven Honell had been unable to tell him where the Harrisons lived, and
a quick check of the telephone book turned up no listed number for them.
The writer had known only the name of their business and its approximate
location on Pacific Coast Highway.

Their home address was sure to be on file somewhere in the store's
office. Getting it might be difficult. A decal on each of the big
Plexiglas windows and another on the front door warned that they were
fitted with a burglar alarm and protected by a security company.

He had come back from Hell with the ability to see in the dark, animal
quick reflexes, a lack of inhibitions that left him capable of any act
or atrocity, and a fearlessness that made him every bit as formidable an
adversary as a robot might have been. But he could not walk through
walls, or turn his flesh into vapor into Bsshagain, or By, or perform
any of the other feats that were within the powers of the demon.

Until he had earned his way back into Hell either by acquiring a perfect
collection in his museum of the dead or by killing those he had been
sent here to destroy, he, only the minor powers of the demon deemuonde,
which were insufficient to defeat a by alarm.

He drove away from the store.




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In the heart of town, he found a telephone booth beside a station.

Despite the hour, the station was still pumping gasoline, and the
outdoor lighting was so bright that Vassago was forced to squint behind
his sunglasses.

Swooping around the lamps, moths with inch-long wings cast shadows as
large as ravens on the pavement.

The floor of the telephone booth was littered with cigarette butts.

Ants teamed over the corpse of a beetle.

Someone had taped a hand-lettered OUT OF ORDER notice to the coin box,
but Vassago didn't care because he didn't intend to call anyone. He was
only interested in the phone book, which was secured to the frame of the
booth by a sturdy chain.

He checked "Antiques" in the Yellow Pages. Laguna Beach had a lot of
businesses under that heading; it was a regular shoppers' paradise. He
studied their space ads. Some had institutional names like
International Antiques, but others were named after their owners, as was
Harrison's Antiques.

A few used both first and last names, and some of the space ads also
included the full names of the proprietors because, in that business,
personal reputation could be a drawing card. RobertO. Loffman Antiques
in the Yellow Pages cross-referenced neatly with a RobertO.

Loffman in the white pages, providing Vassago with a street address,
which he committed to memory.

On his way back to the Honda, he saw a bat swoop out of the night. It
arced down through the blue-white glare from the service station lights,
snatching a fat moth from the air in mid-flight, then vanished back up
into the darkness from which it had come. Neither predator nor prey
made a sound.

Loffman was seventy years old, but in his best dreams he was eighteen
again, spry and limber, strong and happy. They were never sex dreams,
no bosomy young women parting their smooth thighs in welcome. They
weren't power dreams, either, no running or jumping or leaping off
cliffs into wild adventures. The action was always mundane: a leisurely
walk along a beach at twilight, barefoot, the feel of damp sand between
his toes, the froth on the incoming waves sparkling with reflections of
the setting purple-red sunset; or just sitting on the grass in the
shadow of a date palm on a summer afternoon, watching a hummingbird sip
nectar from the bright blooms in a bed of flowers. The mere fact that
he was young again seemed miracle enough to sustain a dream and keep it
interesting.

At the moment he was eighteen, lying on a big bench swing on the front
porch of the Santa Ana house in which he had been born and raised. He
was just swinging gently and peeling an apple that he intended to eat,
nothing more, but it was a wonderful dream, rich with scents and
textures, more erotic than if he had imagined himself in a harem of
undressed beauties.

"Wake up, Mr.      Lob."

He tried to ignore the voice because he wanted to be alone on that
porch. He kept his eyes on the curled length of peel that he was paring
from the apple.


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"Come on, you old sleepyhead."

He was trying to strip the apple in one continuous ribbon of peel.

"Did you take a sleeping pill or what?"

To Loffman's regret, the front porch, the swing, the apple and paring
knife dissolved into darkness. His bedroom.

He struggled awake and an intruder was present.                    A barely visible,
spectral figure stood beside the bed.

Although he'd never been the victim of a crime and lived in as safe a
neighborhood as existed these days, age had saddled him with feelings of
vulnerability. He had started keeping a loaded pistol next to the lamp
at his bedside. He reached for it now, his heart pounding hard as he
groped along the cool marble surface of the 18th century French ormolu
chest that served as his nightstand. The gun was gone.

"I'm sorry, sir," the intruder said.               "I didn't mean to scare you.

Please calm down. If it's the pistol you're after, I saw it as soon as
I came in. I have it now."

The stranger could not have seen the gun without turning on the light,
and the light would have awakened Loffman sooner. He was sure of that,
so he kept groping for the weapon.

From out of the darkness, something cold and blunt probed against his
throat. He twitched away from it, but the coldness followed him,
pressing insistently, as if the specter tormenting him could see him
clearly in the gloom. He froze when he what the coldness was. The
muzzle of the pistol. Against his Adam's apple. It slid slowly upward,
under his chin.

"If I pulled the trigger, sir, your brains would be all over the
headboard But I do not need to hurt you, sir. Pain is quite unnecessary
as long as you cooperate. I only want you to answer one important
question for me."

If Robert Loffman actually had been eighteen, as in his best dreams, he
could not have valued the remainder of his time on earth more highly
than he did at seventy, in spite of having far less of it to lose now.

He was prepared to hold onto life with all the tenacity of a burrowing
tick. He would answer any question, perform any deed to save himself,
regardless of the cost to his pride and dignity. He tried to convey all
of that to the phantom who held the pistol under his chin, but it seemed
to him that he produced a gabble of words and sounds that, in sum, had
no meaning whatsoever.

"Yes, sir," the intruder said, "I understand, and I appreciate your
attitude. Now correct me if I am wrong, but I suppose the antique
business, being relatively small when compared to others, is a tight
community here in Laguna. You all know each other, see each other
socially, you're friends."

Antique business? Loffman was tempted to believe that he was still
asleep and that his dream had become an absurd nightmare. Why would
anyone break into his house in the dead of night to talk about the
antique business at gunpoint?



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"We know each other, some of us are good friends, of course, but some
bastards in this business are thieves," Loffman said. He was babbling,
unable to stop, hopeful that his obvious fear would testify to his
truthfulness, whether this was nightmare or reality. "They're nothing
more than crooks with cash registers, and you aren't friends with that
kind if you have any self-respect at all."

"Do you know Mr.        Harrison of Harrison's Antiques?"

"Oh, yes, very well, I know him quite well, he's a reputable dealer,
totally trustworthy, a nice man."

"Have you been to his house?"

"His house? Yes, certainly, on three or four occasions, and he's been
here to mine."

"Then you must have the answer to that important question I mentioned,
sir. Can you give me Mr. Harrison's address and clear directions to
it?"

Loffman sagged with relief upon realizing that he would be able to
provide the intruder with the desired information. Only fleetingly, he
considered that he might be putting Harrison in great jeopardy. But
maybe it was a nightmare, after all, and revelation of the information
would not matter. He repeated the address and directions several times,
at the intruder's request.

"Thank you, sir. You've been most helpful. Like I said, causing you
any pain is quite unnecessary. But I'm going to hurt you anyway,
because I enjoy it so much."

So it was a nightmare after all.

Vassago drove past the Harrison house in Laguna Niguel.                    Then he circled
the block and drove past it again.

The house was a powerful attractant, similar in style to all of the
other houses on the street but so different from them in some
indescribable but fundamental way that it might as well have been an
isolated structure rising out of a featureless plain. Its windows were
dark, and the landscape lighting had evidently been turned off by a
timer, but it could not have been more of a beacon to Vassago if light
had blared from every window.

As he drove slowly past the house a second time, he felt its immense
gravity pulling him. His immutable destiny involved this place and the
vital woman who lived within.

Nothing he saw suggested a trap. A red car was parked in the driveway
instead of in the garage, but he couldn't see anything ominous about
that.

Nevertheless, he decided to circle the block a third time to give the
house another thorough looking over.

As he turned the corner, a lone silvery moth darted through his
headlight beams, refracting them and briefly glowing like an ember from
a great fire. He remembered the bat that had swooped into the service
station lights to snatch the hapless moth out of the air, eating it
alive.

Long after midnight, Hatch had finally dozed off.                    His sleep was a deep


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mine, where veins of dreams flowed like bright ribbons of minerals
through the otherwise dark walls. None of the dreams was pleasant, but
none of them was grotesque enough to wake him.

Currently he saw himself standing at the bottom of a ravine with
ramparts so steep they could not be climbed. Even if the slopes had
risen at an angle that allowed ascent, they would not have been
scaleable because they were composed of a curious, loose white shale
that crumbled and shifted treacherously. The shale radiated a soft
calcimine glow, which was the only light, for the sky far above was
black and moonless, deep but starless. Hatch moved restlessly from one
end of the long narrow ravine to the other, then back again, filled with
apprehension but unsure of the cause of it.

Then he realized two things that made the fine hairs tingle on the back
of his neck. The white shale was not composed of rock and the shells of
millions of ancient sea creatures; it was made of human skeletons,
punctured and compacted but recognizable here and there, where the
articulated bones of two fingers survived compression or where what
seemed a small animal's burrow proved to be the empty eye socket in a
skull. He became aware, as well, that the sky was not empty, that
something circled in it, so black that it blended with the heavens, its
leathery wings working silently. He could not see it, but he could feel
its gaze, and he sensed a hunger in it that could never be satisfied.

In his troubled sleep, Hatch turned and murmured anxious, wordless
sounds into his pillow.

Vassago checked the car clock. Even without its cog numbers, he knew
instinctively that dawn was less than an hour away.

He no longer could be sure he had enough time to get into the house,
kill the husband, and take the woman back to his hideaway before
sunrise.

He could not risk getting caught in the open in daylight. Though he
would not shrivel up and turn to dust like the living dead in the
movies, nothing as dramatic as that, his eyes were so sensitive that his
glasses would not provide adequate protection from full sunlight.

Dawn would render him nearly blind, dramatically affecting his ability
to drive and bringing him to the attention of any policeman who happened
to spot his weaving, halting progress. In that debilitated condition,
he might have difficulty dealing with the cop.

More important, he might lose the woman. After appearing so often in
his dreams, she had become an object of intense desire. Before, he had
seen acquisitions of such quality that he had been convinced they would
complete his collection and earn him immediate readmission to the savage
world of eternal darkness and hatred to which he belonged-and he had
been wrong. But none of those others had appeared to him in dreams.
This woman was the true jewel in the crown for which he had been
seeking. He must avoid taking possession of her prematurely, only to
lose her before he could draw the life from her at the base of the giant
Lucifer and wrench her cooling corpse into whatever configuration seemed
most symbolic of her sins and weaknesses.

As he cruised past the house for the third time, he considered leaving
immediately for his hideaway and returning here as soon as the sun had
set the following evening. But that plan had no appeal. Being so close
to her excited him, and he was loath to be separated from her again. He
felt the tidal pull of her in his blood.


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He needed a place to hide that was near her. Perhaps a secret corner in
her own house. a niche in which she was unlikely to look during the
long, bright, hostile hours of the day.

He parked the Honda two blocks from their house and returned on foot
along the tree-flanked sidewalk. The tall, green-patinated streetlamps
had angled arms at the top that directed their light onto the roadway,
and only a ghost of their glow reached past the sidewalk onto the front
lawns of the silent houses. Confident that neighbors were still
sleeping and unlikely to see him prowling through shadow-hung shrubbery
around the perimeter of the house, he searched quietly for an unlocked
door, an unlatched window. He had no luck until he came to the window
on the back wall of the garage.

Regina was awakened by a scraping noise, a dull thump and a sort of
protracted squeak. Still unaccustomed to her new home, she always woke
in confusion, not sure where she was, knowing only that she was not in
her room at the orphanage. She fumbled for the bedside lamp, clicked it
on, and squinted at the glare for a second before orienting herself and
recognizing the noises that had bumped her out of sleep had been the
sounds. They had stopped when she had snapped on the light. Which
seemed even sn.

She clicked the light off and listened in the darkness, which was now
with aureoles of color because the lamp had worked like a flashbulb on
her eyes, temporarily stealing her night vision. Though the sounds did
not resume, she believed they had come from the backyard.

Her bed wascomlbrtable. The room almost seemed to be scented with the
perfume of the painted flowers. Encircled by those roses, she felt
safer than she had ever felt before.

Although she didn't want to get up, she was also aware that the
Harrisons were having problems of some kind, and she wondered if these
sneaky sounds in the middle of the night somehow might be related to
that. Yesterday during the drive from school, as well as last night
during dinner and after the movie, she had sensed a tension in them that
they were trying to conceal from her. Even though she knew herself to
be a p around whom anyone would have a right to feel nervous, she was
sure that she was not the cause of their edginess.

Before going to sleep, she had prayed that their troubles, if they had
any, would prove to be minor and would be dealt with soon, and she had
reminded God of her selfless pledge to eat beans of all varieties.

If there was any possibility the sneaky noises were related to the
Harrisons' uneasy state of mind, Regina supposed she had an obligation
to check it out. She looked up and back at the above her bed, and
sighed. You couldn't rely on Jesus and Mary for everything. They were
busy people. They had a universe to run. God helped those who helped
themselves.

She slipped out from under the covers, stood, and made her way to the
window, leaning against furniture and then the wall. She was not
wearing her leg brace, and she needed the support.

The window looked onto the small backyard behind the garage, the area
from which the suspicious noises had seemed to come. Night-shadows from
the house, trees, and shrubs were unrelieved by moonlight. The longer
Regina stared, the less she could make out, as if the darkness were a
sponge soaking up her ability to see. It became easy to believe that


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every impenetrable pocket of gloom was alive and watchful.

The garage window had been unlocked but difficult to open. The hinges
at the top were corroded, and the frame was paint-sealed to the jamb in
places. Vassago made more noise than he intended, but he didn't think
he had been loud enough to draw the attention of anyone in the house.

Then just as the paint cracked and the hinges moved to granthimaccess, a
light had appeared in another window on the second floor.

He had backed away from the garage at once, even though the light went
off again even as he moved. He had taken cover in a stand of six-foot
eugenia bushes near the property fence.

From there he saw her appear at the obsidian window, more visible to
him, perhaps, than she would have been if she had left the lamp on. It
was the girl he had seen in dreams a couple of times, most recently with
Lindsey Harrison. They had faced each other across a levitated black
rose with one drop of blood glistening on a velvet petal.

Regina.

He stared at her in disbelief, then with growing excitement. Earlier in
the night, he had asked Steven Honell if the Harrisons had a daughter,
but the author had told him that he knew only of a son who had died
years ago.

Separated from Vassago by nothing but the night air and one pane of
glass, the girl seemed to float above him as if she were a vision. In
reality she was, if anything, lovelier than she had been in his dreams.

She was so exceptionally vital, so full of life, that he would not have
been surprised if she could walk the night as confidently as he did,
though fora reason different from his; she seemed to have within her all
the light she needed to illuminate her path through any darkness.

He drew back farther into the eugenias, convinced that she pose the
power to see him as clearly as he saw her.

A trellis covered the wall immediately below her window. A lush trumpet
vine with purple flowers grew up the sturdy lattice to the windowsill,
and then around one side almost to the eaves. She was like some
princess locked in a tower, pining for a prince to climb up the vine and
rescue her.

The tower that served as her prison was life itself, and the prince for
whom she waited was Death, and that from which she longed to be rescued
was the curse of existence.

Vassago said softly, "I am here for you," but he did not move from his
hiding place.

After a couple of minutes, she turned away from the window.

vanished.

A void lay behind the glass where she had stood.

He ached for her return, one more brief look at her.

Regina.

He waited five minutes, then another five.                  But she did not come to the
window again.


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At last, aware that dawn was closer than ever, he crept to the back of
the garage once more. Because he had already freed it, the window swung
out silently this time. The opening was tight, but he eeled through
with only the softest scrape of clothes against wood.

Lindsey dozed in half-hour and hour naps throughout the night, but her
sleep was not restful. Each time she woke, she was sticky with
perspiration, even though the house was cool. Beside her, Hatch issued
murmured protests in his sleep.

Toward dawn she heard noise in the hall and rose up from her pillows to
listen. After a moment she identified the sound of the toilet flushing
in the guest bathroom. Regina.

She settled back on her pillows, oddly soothed by the fading sound of
the toilet. It seemed like such a mundane-not to say ridiculous-thing
from which to take solace. But a long time had passed without a child
under her roof. It felt good and right to hear the girl engaged in
ordinary domestic business; it made the night seem less hostile. In
spite of their current problems, the promise of happiness might be more
real than it had been in years.

In bed again, Regina wondered why God had given people bowels and
bladders. Was that really the best possible design, or was He a little
bit of a comedian?

She remembered getting up at three o'clock in the morning at the
orphanage, needing to pee, encountering a nun on the way to the bathroom
down the hall, and asking the good sister that very question.

The nun, Sister Sarafina, had not been startled at all. Regina had been
too young then to know how to startle a nun; that took years of games
and practice. Sister Sarafina had responded without pause, suggesting
that perhaps God wanted to give people a reason to get up in the middle
of the night so they would have another opportunity to think of Him and
be grateful for the life He had granted them. Regina had smiled and
nodded, but she had figured Sister Sarafina was either too tired to
think straight or a little dim-witted. God had too much class to want
His children thinking about Him all the time while they were sitting on
the pot. Satisfied from her visit to the bathroom, she snuggled down in
the covers of her painted mahogany bed and tried to think of an
explanation better than the one the nun had given her years ago. No
more curious noises arose from the backyard, and even before the vague
light of dawn touched the windowpanees, she was asleep again.

Kigh, decorative windows were set in the big sectional doors, admitting
just enough light from the streetlamps out front to reveal to Vassago,
without his sunglasses, that only one car, a black Chevy, was parked in
the threes garage. A quick inspection of that space did not reveal any
hiding place where he might conceal himself from the Harrisons and be
beyond the reach of sunlight until the next nightfall.

Then he saw the cord dangling from the ceiling over one of the empty
parking stalls. He slipped his hand through the loop and pulled
downward gently, less gently, then less gently still, but always
steadily and smoothly, until the trapdoor swung open. It was well oiled
and soundless.

When the door was all the way open, Vassago slowly unfolded the three
sections of the wooden ladder that were fixed to the back of it. He
took plenty of time, more concerned with silence than with speed.


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He climbed into the garage attic. No doubt there were vents in the
eaves, but at the moment the place appeared to be sealed tight.

With his sensitive eyes, he could see a finished floor, lots of
cardboard boxes, and a few small items of furniture stored under
dropcloths. No windows. Above him, the underside of rough roofing
boards were visible between open rafters. At two points in the long
rectangular chamber, light fixtures dangled from the peaked ceiling; he
did not turn on either of them.

Cautiously, quietly, as if he were an actor in a slow-motion film, he
stretched out on his belly on the attic floor, reached down through the
hole, and pulled up the folding ladder, section by section. Slowly,
silently, he secured it to the back of the trapdoor. He eased the door
into place again with no sound but the soft spang of the big spring that
held it shut, closing himself off from the threes garage below.

He pulled a few of the dropcloths off the furniture. They were
relatively dust free. He folded them to make a nest among the boxes and
then settled down to await the passage of the day.

Regina.       Lindsey.      I am with you.

1

Lindsey drove Regina to school Way morning. When she got back to the
house in Laguna Niguel, Hatch was at the kitchen table, cleaning and
oiling the pair of Browning 9mm pistols that he had acquired for home
security.

He had purchased the guns five years ago, shortly after Jimmy's cancer
had been diagnosed as termmal. He had professed a sudden concern about
the crime rate, though it never had been-and was not then-particularly
high in their part of Orange County. Lindsey had known, but had never
said, that he was not afraid of burglars but of the disease that was
stealing his son from him; and because he was helpless to fight off the
cancer, he secretly longed for an enemy who could be dispatched with a
pistol.

The Brownings had never been used anywhere but on a firing range. He
had insisted that Lindsey learn to shoot alongside But neither of them
had even taken target practice in a year or two.

"Do you really think that's wise?" she asked, indicating the pistols.

He was tight-lipped.            "Yes."

"Maybe we should call the police."

"We've already discussed why we can't."

"Still, it might be worth a try."

"They won't help us.            Can't."

She knew he was right.             They had no proof that they were in danger.

"Besides," be said, keeping his eyes on the pistol as he worked a
tubular brush in and out of the barrel, "when I first started cleaning
these, I turned Ion the TV to have some company. Morning news."

The small set, on a pull-out swivel shelf in the end-most of the kitchen
cabinets, was off now.


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Lindsey didn't ask him what had been on the news. She was afraid that
she would be sorry to hear it-and was convinced that she already knew
what he would tell her.

Finally looking up from the pistol, Hatch said, "They found Steven
Honell last night. Tied to the four corners of his bed and beaten to
death with a fireplace poker."

At first Lindsey was too shocked to move. Then she was too weak to
continue standing. She pulled a chair out from the table and settled
into it.

For a while yesterday, she had hated Steven Honell as much as she had
ever hated anyone in her life. More. Now she felt no animosity for him
whatsoever. Just pity. He had been an ill man, concealing his
insecurity from himself behind a pretense of contemptuous superiority.

He had been petty and vicious, perhaps worse, but now he was dead; and
death was too great a punishment for his faults.

She folded her arms on the table and put her head down on them. She
could not cry for Honeil, for she had liked nothing about him-except his
talent. If the extinguishing of his talent was not enough to bring
tears' it did at least cast a pall of despair over her.

"Sooner or later," Hatch said, "the son of a bitch is going to come
after us. Lindsey lifted her head even though it felt as if it weighed
a thousand pounds. "But why?"

"I don't know. Maybe we'll never know why, never understand it.                        But
somehow he and I are linked, and eventually he'll come."

"Let the cops handle him." she said, painfully aware that there was no
help for them from the authorities but stubbornly unwilling to let go of
"Cops can't find him." Hatch said grimly. "He's smoke."

"He won't come," she said, willing it to be true.

"Maybe not tomorrow. Maybe not next week or even next month. But as
sure as the sun rises every morning, he'll come. And we'll be ready for
"Will we?" she wondered.

"Very ready."

"Remember what you said last night."

He looked up from the pistol again and met her eyes.                       "What?"

"That maybe he's not just an ordinary man, that he might have hitchhiked
back with you from... somewhere else."

"I thought you dismissed that theory."

"I did.    I can't believe it.          But do you?       Really?"

Instead of answering, he resumed cleaning the Browning.

She said, "If you believe it, even half believe it, put any credence in
it at all-then what good is a gun?"

He didn't reply.

"How can bullets stop an evil spirit?" she pressed, feeling as if her


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memory of waking up and taking Regina to school was just part of a
continuing dream, as if she was not caught in a real-life but in a
nightmare. "How can something from beyond the grave be stopped with
just a gun?"

"It's all I have," he said. Like many doctors, Jonas Nyebern did not
maintain office hours or perform surgery on Wednesday. However, he
never spent the afternoon golfing, sailing, or playing cards at the
country club. He used Wednesdays to catch up on paperwork, or to write
research papers and case studies related to the Resuscitation Medicine
Project at Orange County General.

That first Wednesday in May, he p to spend eight or ten busy hours in
the study of his house on Spyglass Hill, where he had lived for almost
two years, since the loss of his family. He hoped to finish writing a
paper that he was going to deliver at a conference in San Francisco on
the eighth of May.

The big windows in the teak-paneled room looked out on Corona Del Mar
and Newport Beach below. Across twenty-six miles of gray water veined
with green and blue, the dark ides of Santa Catalina Island rose against
the sky, but they were unable to make the vast c Ocean seem any less
immense or less humbling than if they had not been there.

He did not bother to draw the drab because the panorama never distracted
him. He had bought the property because he had hoped that the luxuries
of the house and the magnificence of the view would make life seem
beautiful and worth living in spite of great tragedy. But only his work
had managed to do that for him, and so he always went directly to it
with no more than a glance out of the windows.

That morning, he could not concentrate on the white words against the
blue background on his computer screen. His thoughts were not pulled
toward Pacific vistas, however, but toward his son, Jeremy.

On that overcast spring day two years ago, when he had come home to find
Marion and Stephanie stabbed so often and so brutally that they were
beyond revival, when he had found an unconscious Jeremy impaled on the
vise-held knife in the garage and rapidly bleeding to death, Jonas had
not blamed an unknown madman or burglars caught by surprise in the act.
He had known at once that the murderer was the teenage boy slumped
against the workbench with his life dripping onto the concrete floor.
Something had been wrong with Jeremy something in him-all his life, a
difference that had become more marked and frightening as the years
passed, though Jonas had tried for so long to convince himself the boy's
attitudes and actions were manifestations of ordinary rebelliousness.
But the madness of Jonas's father, having skipped one generation, had
appeared again in Jeremy's corrupted genes.

The boy survived the extraction of the knife and the frantic ambulance
ride to Orange County General, which was only minutes away. But he died
on the stretcher as they were wheeling him along a hospital corridor.

Jonas had recently convinced the hospital to establish a special
resuscitation team. Instead of using the bypass machine to warm the
dead boy's blood, they employed it to recirculate cooled blood into his
body, hastening to lower his body temperature drastically to delay cell
deterioration I and brain damage until surgery could be performed. The
air conditioner was set all the way down at fifty, bags of crushed ice
were packed along the sides of the patient, and Jonas personally opened
the knife wound to search for-and repair-the damage that would foil
reanimation.


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He might have known at the time why he wanted so desperately to save
Jeremy, but afterwards he was never able to understand his motivations
Because he was my son, Jonas sometimes thought, and was therefore my
responsibility.

But what parental responsibility did he owe to the slaughterer of his
daughter and wife?

I saved him to ask him why, to pry from him an explanation, Jonas told
himself at other times.

But he knew there was no answer that would make sense. Neither
œphilosophers nor psychologists-not even the murderers themselves had
ever, in all of history, been able to provide an adequate explanation
for a single act of monstrous sociopathic violence.

The only cogent answer, really, was that the human species was
imperfect, stained, and carried within itself the seeds of its own
destruction. The Church would call it the legacy of the Serpent, dating
back to the Garden and the Fall. Scientists would refer to the
mysteries of genetics, biochemistry, the fundamental actions of
nucleotides. Maybe they were both talking about the same thing, merely
describing it in different terms. To Jonas it seemed that this answer,
whether provided by scientists or theologians, was always unsatisfying
in precisely the same way and to the same degree, for it suggested no
solution, prescribed no preventative. Except faith in God or in the
potential of science.

Regardless of his reasons for taking the action he did, Jonas had saved
Jeremy.

The boy had been dead for eighty-one minutes, not an absolute record
even in those days, because the young girl in Utah had already been
resuscitating after being in the arms of Death for eighty minutes. But
she'd been severely hypothermic, while Jeremy had died warm, which made
the feat a record of one kind, and was'. Actually, revival after eighty
one minutes of warm death was as famous as revival after eighty minutes
of cold death. His own son and Hatch Harrison were Jonas's most amazing
subjects to date-if the first one q as a s.

For ten months Jeremy lay in a coma, feeding intravenously but able to
breathe on his own and otherwise in need of no life-support machines.

Early in that period, he was moved from the hospital to a high-quality
nursing home.

During those months, Jonas could have petitioned a court to have the boy
removed from the intravenous feed. But Jeremy would have perished from
starvation or dehydration, and sometimes even a comatose patient might
suffer pain from such a crewel death, depending on the depth of his
stupor. Jonas was not prepared to be the cause of that pain. More
insidiously, on a level so deep that even he did not it until much
later, he suffered from the egotistic notion that he still might extract
from the boy supposing the boy ever woke an explanation of sociopathic
behavior that had eluded all other seekers in the history of mankind.
Perhaps he thought he would have greater insight owing to his unique
experience with the madness of his father and his son, orphaned and
wounded bythellrst, widowed by the second. In any event he paid the
nursing-home bills. And every Sunday afternoon, he sat at his son's
bedside, staring at the pale, placid face in which he could see so much
of himself.


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After ten months, Jeremy regained consciousness. Brain damage had left
him aphasic, without the power to speak or read. He had not known his
name or how he had gotten to be where he was. He reacted to his face in
the mirror as if it were that of a stranger, and he did not recognize
his father. When the police came to question him, he exhibited neither
guilt nor comprehension. He had awakened as a dullard, his intellectual
capacity severely reduced from what it had been, his attention span
short, easily confused.

With gestures, he complained vigorously of severe eye pain and
sensitivity to bright light. An ophthalmological examination revealed a
curious indeed, inexplicable-degeneration of the irises. The
contractile membrane seemed to have been partially eaten away. The
sphincter pupillae-the muscle causing the iris to contract, thereby
shrinking the pupil and admitting less light to the eye-had all but
atrophied.

Also, the dilator pupillae had sluunk, pulling the iris wide open. And
the connection between the dilator muscle and oculomotor nerve was
fused, leaving the eye virtually no ability to reduce the amount of
incoming light. The condition was without precedent and degenerative in
nature, making surgical correction impossible. The boy was provided
with heavily tinted, wraparound sunglasses. Even then he preferred to
pass daylight hours only in rooms where metal blinds or heavy drapes
could close off the light. Incredibly, Jeremy became a favorite of the
staff at the rehabilitation hospital to which he was transferred a few
days after awakening at the nursing home. They were inclined to feel
sorry for him because of his eye affliction, and because he was such a
good-looking boy who had fallen so low. In addition, he now had the
sweet temperament of a shy child, a result of his IQ loss, and there was
no sign whatsoever of his former arrogance, cool calculation, and
smouldering hostility.

For over four months he walked the halls, helped the nurses with simple
tasks, struggled with a speech therapist to little effect, stared out
the windows at the night for hours at a time, ate well enough to put
flesh on his bones, and exercised in the gym during the evening with
most of the lights off. His wasted body was rebuilt, and his straws
hair regained its Almost ten months ago, when Jonas was beginning to
wonder where Jeremy could be placed when he was no longer able to
benefit from physical or occupational therapy, the boy had disappeared.

Although he had shown no previous inclination to roam beyond the grounds
of the rehabilitation hospital, he walked out unnoticed one night, and
never came back.

Jonas had assumed the police would be quick to track the boy. But they
had been interested in him only as a missing person, not as a suspected
murderer. If he had regained all of his faculties, they would have
considered him both a threat and a fugitive from justice, but his
continued-and apparently permanent-mental disabilities were a kind of
immunity.

Jeremy was no longer the same person that he had been when the crimes
were committed; with his diminished intellectual capacity, inability to
speak, and beguilingly simple personility, no jury would ever convict.

A missing-person investigation was no investigation at all. Police
manpower had to be directed against immediate and serious crimes.

Though the cops believed that the boy had probably wandered away, fallen


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into the hands of the wrong people, and already been exploited and
killed, Jonas knew his son was alive. And in his hear the knew that
what was loose in the world was not a sniveling dullard but a cunning,
dangerous, and exceedingly sick young man.

They had all been deceived.

He could not prove that Jeremy's retardation was an act, but in his
heart he knew that he had allowed himself to be fooled. He had accepted
the new Jeremy because, when it came right down to it, he could not bear
the anguish of having to confront the Jeremy who had killed Marion and
Stephanie. The most damning proof of his own complicity in Jeremy's
fraud was the fact that he had not requested a CAT scan to determine the
precise nature of the brain damage. At the time he told himself the
fact of the damage was the only thing that mattered, not its precise
etiology, an incredible reaction for any physician but not so incredible
for a father who was unwilling to come face-to-face with the monster
inside his son.

And now the monster was set free.              He had no proof, but he knew.

Jeremy was out there somewhere.             The old Jeremy.

For ten months, through a series of three detective agencies, he had
sought his son, because he shared in the moral, though not the legal,
responsibility for any crimes the boy committed. The first two agencies
had gotten nowhere, eventually concluding that their inability to pick
up a trail meant no trail existed. The boy, they reported, was most
likely dead.

The third, Morton Redlow, was a one-man shop. Though not as glitzy as
the bigger agencies, Redlow possessed a bulldog determination that
encouraged Jonas to believe progress would be made. And last week,
Redlow had hinted that he was onto something, that he would have
concrete news by the weekend.

The detective had not been heard from since.                  He had failed to respond
to messages left on his phone machine.

Now, turning away from his computer and the conference paper he was
unable to work on, Jonas picked up the telephone and tried the detective
again. He got the recording. But he could no longer leave his name and
number, because the incoming tape on Redlow's machine was already full
of messages. It cut him off.

Jonas had a bad feeling about the detective.

He put down the phone, got up from the desk, and went to the window.

His spirits were so low, he doubted they could be lifted any more by
anything as simple as a magnificent view, but he was willing to try.

Each new day was filled with so much more dread than the day before it,
he needed all the help he could get just to be able to sleep at night
and rise in the morning.

Reflections of the morning sun rippled in silver filaments through the
incoming waves, as if the sea were a great piece of rippling blue-gray
fabric with interwoven metallic threads.

He told himself that Redlow was only a few days late with his report,
less than a week, nothing to be worried about. The failure to return 1-
answering-machine messages might only mean the detective was ill or


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preoccupied with a personal crisis.

But he knew. Redlowe had found Jeremy and, in spite of every warning
from Jonas, had underestimated the boy.

A yacht with white sails was making its way south along the coast.

Large white birds kited in the sky behind the ship, diving into the sea
and out again, no doubt snaring fish with each plunge. Graceful and
free, the birds were a beautiful sight, though not to the fish, of
course. Not to the fish.

Lindsey went to her studio between the master bedroom and the room
beside Regina's. She moved her high stool from the easel to the drawing
board, opened her sketch pad, and started to plan her next painting.

She felt that it was important to focus on her work, not only because
the making of art could soothe the soul as surely as the appreciation of
it, but because sticking to everyday routine was the only way she could
try to push back the forces of irrationality that seemed to be surging
like black floodwaters into their lives. Nothing could really go too
far wrong-could it?-if she just kept painting, drinking her usual black
coffee, eating three meals a day, washing dishes when they needed
washed, brushing her teeth at night, showering and rolling on her
deodorant in the morning. How could some homicidal creature from Beyond
intrude into an orderly life?

Surely ghouls and ghosts, goblins and monsters, had no power over those
who were properly groomed, deodorieed, fluoridated, dressed, fed,
employed, and motivated.

That was what she wanted to believe. But when she tried to sketch, she
couldn't quiet the tremors her hands.

Honell was dead.

Cooper was dead.

She kept looking at the window, erg to see that the spider had returned.
But there was no scurrying black form or the lacework of a new web. Just
glass. Treetops and blue sky beyond.

After a while Hatch stopped in.             He hugged her from behind, and kissed
her cheek.

But he was in a solemn rather than romantic mood. He had one of the
Brownings with him. He put the pistol on the top of her supply cabinet.

"Keep this with you if you leave the room. He's not going to come
around during the day. I know that. I feel it. Like he's a vampire or
something, for God's sake. But it still doesn't hurt to be careful,
especially when you're here alone."

She was dubious, but she said, "All right."

"I'm going out for a while.            Do a little shopping."

"For what?" She turned on her stooL facing him more directly.

"We don't have enough ammunition for the guns "Both have full clips."

"Besides, I want to get a shotgun."

"Hatch!    Even if he comes, and he probably won't, it's not going to be a


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war. A man breaks into your house, it's a matter of a shot or two, not
a pitched battle."

Standing before her, he was stone-faced and adamant. "The right shotgun
is the best of all home-defensive weapons. You don't have to be a good
shot. The spread gets him. I know just which one I want.

It's a short-barreled, pistol-grip with' She put one hand flat against
his chest in a "stop" gesture. "You're scaring the crap out of me."

"Good.    If we're scared, we're likely to be more alert, less careless."

"If you really think there's danger, then we shouldn't have Regina
here."

"We can't send her back to St.             Thomas's," he said at once, as if he had
already considered that.

"Only until this is resolved."

"No." He shook his head. "Regina's too sensitive, you know that, too
fragile, too quick to interpret everything as rejection. We might not
be able to make her understand-and then she might not give us a second
chance."

"I'm sure she-"

"Besides, we'd have to tell the orphanage something.

If we concocted some lie-and I can't imagine what it would be-they'd
know we were stalling them. They'd wonder why. Pretty soon they'd
start second-guessing their approval of us. And if we told them the
truth, started jabbering about psychic visions and telepathic bonds with
psycho killers, they'd write us off as a couple of nuts, never give her
back to us."

He had thought it out.

Lindsey knew what he said was true.

He kissed her lightly again.            "I'll be back in an hour.          Two at most."

When he had gone, she stared at the gun for a while.

Then she angrily away from it and picked up her pencil. She tore off a
page from the big drawing tablet. The new page was blank. White and
clean. It stayed that way.

Nervously-chewing her lip, she looked at the window. No web. No
spider. Just the glass pane. Treetops and blue skies beyond.

She had never realized until now that a pristine blue sky could be The
two screened vents- in the garage attic were provided for ventilation.

The overhanging roof and the density of the screen mesh did not allow
much penetration--by the sun, but some wan light entered with the vague
currents of cool morning air.

Vassago was untroubled by the light, in part because his nest was formed
by piles of boxes and furniture that spared him a direct view of the
vents. The air smelled of dry wood, aging cardboard.

He was having difficulty getting to sleep, so he tried to relax by
imagining what a fine fire might be fueled by the contents of the garage


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attic. His rich imagination made it easy to envision sheets of red
flames, spirals of orange and yellow, and the sharp pop of sap bubbles
exploding in burning rafters. Cardboard and packing paper and
combustible memorabilia disappearing in silent rising curls of smoke,
with a papery crackling like the manic applause of millions in some dark
and distant theater. Though the conflagration was in his mind, he had
to squint his eyes against the phantom light.

Yet the fantasy of fire did not end him-perhaps because the attic would
be filled merely with burning things, mere lifeless objects. Where was
the fun in that?

Eighteen had burned to death been trampled-made the Haunted House on the
night that Tod Ledderbeck had perished in the cavern of the Millipede.

There had been a fire.

He had escaped all suspicion in the rocket jockey's death and the
disaster at the Haunted House, but he'd been shaken by the repercussions
of his night of games. The deaths at Fantasy World were at the top of
the news for at least two weeks, and were the primary topic of
conversation around school for maybe a month. The park closed
temporarily, reopened to poor business, closed again for refurbishing,
reopened to continued low attendance, and eventually succumbed two years
later to all of the bad publicity and to a welter of lawsuits. A few
thousand people lost their jobs.

And Mrs. Ledderbeck had a nervous breakdown, though Jeremy figured it
was part of her act, pretending she had actually loved Tod, the same
hipocracy he saw in everyone.

But other, more personal repercussions were what shook Jeremy. In the
immediate aftermath, toward morning of the long sleepless night that
followed his adventures at Fantasy World, he had been out of control.

Not when he killed Tod. He knew that was right and good, a Master of
the Game proving his mastery. But from the moment he had tipped Tod out
of the Millipede, he had been drunk on power, banging around the park in
a state of mind to what he imagined he'd have been like after chugging a
six-pack or two. He had been swacked, plastered, crocked, totally
wasted, polluted, stinko with power, for he had taken unto himself the
role of Death and become the one whom all men feared.

The experience was not only inebriating: it was addictive; he wanted to
repeat it the next day, and the day after that, and every day for the
rest of his life. He wanted to set someone afire again, and he wanted
to know what it felt like to take a life with a sharp blade, with a
gun,with a hammer, with his bare hands. That night he had achieved an
early puberty, erect with fantasies of death, orgasmic at the
contemplation of murders yet to be committed. Shocked by that first
sexual spasm and the fluid that escaped him, he finally understood,
toward dawn, that a Master of the Game Dot only had to be able to kill
without fear but had to control the powerful desire to kill again that
was generated by killing once.

Getting away with murder proved his superiority to all the other
players, but he could not continue to get away with it if he were out of
control, berserk, like one of those guys you saw on the news who opened
up with a semiautomatic weapon on a crowd at a shopping mall.

That was not a Master. That was a fool and a loser. A Master must pick
and choose, select his targets with great care, and eliminate them with


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style.

Now, lying in the garage attic on a pile of folded dropcloths, he
thought that a Master must be like a spider. Choose his killing ground.

Weave his web. Settle down, pull in his long legs, make a small and
insignificant thing ....... and wait.

Plenty of spiders shared the attic with him. Even in the gloom they
were visible to his exquisitely sensitive eyes. Some of them were
admirably industrious. Others were alive but as cunningly still as
death. He felt an affinity for them His little brothers.

The gun shop was a fortress. A sign near the front door warned that the
premises were guarded by multi-system silent alarms and also, at night,
by attack dogs. Steel bars were welded over the windows. Hatch noticed
the door was at least three inches thick, wood but probably with a steel
core, and that the hinges on the inside appeared to have been designed
for use on a bathysphere to withstand thousands of tons of pressure deep
under the sea. Though much weapons-associated merchandise was on open
shelves, the rifles, shotguns, and handguns were in locked glass cases
or securely chained in open wall racks.

Video cameras had been installed near the ceiling in of the four corners
of the long main room, all behind thick sheets of bulletproof glass.

The shop was better protected than- a bank. Hatch wondered if he was
living in a time when weaponry had more appeal to thieves than did money
itself.

The four clerks were pleasant men with easy camaraderie among them
selves and a folksy manner with customers. They wore straight-hemmed
shirts outside their pants. Maybe they prized comfort. Or maybe each
was carrying a handgun in a holster underneath his shirt, tucked into
the small of his back.

Hatch bought a Mossberg short-barreled, pistol-grip, pump-action 12
gauge shotgun.

"The perfect weapon for home-defense," the clerk told him.                     "You have
this, you don't really need anything else."

Hatch supposed that he should be grateful he was living in an age when
the government promised to protect and defend its citizens from threats
even so small as radon in the cellar and the ultimate environmental
consequences of the extinction of the one-eyed, blue-tailed gnat. In a
less civilized era-say the turn of the century-he no doubt would have
required an armory containing hundreds of weapons, a ton of explosives,
and a chain-mail vest to wear when answering the door.

He decided irony was a bitter form of humor and not to his taste.                        At
least not in his current mood.

He filled out the requisite federal and state forms, paid with a credit
card, and left with the Mossberg, a cleaning kit, and boxes of
ammunition for the Brownings as well as the shotgun. BehInd him, the
hop door fell shut with a heavy thud, as if he were exiting a vault.

After putting his purchases in the trunk of the Mitsubishi, he got
behind the wheel, started the engine-and froze with his hand on the
gearshift.

Beyond the windshield, the small parking lot had vanished.                     The gun shop


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was no longer there.

As if a mighty sorcerer had cast an evil spell, the sunny day had
disappeared. Hatch was in a long, eerily lighted tunnel. He glanced
out the side windows, turned to check the back, but the illusion or
hallucination whatever the hell it might be-enwrapped him, as realistic
in its detail as the parking lot had been.

When he faced forward, he was confronted by a long slope in the center
of which was a narrow-gauge railroad track. Suddenly the car began to
move as if it were a train pulling up that hill.

Hatch jammed his foot down on the brake pedal. No effect He closed his
eyes, counted to ten, listening to his heart pound harder by the second
and unsuccessfully willing himself to relax. When he opened his eyes,
the tunnel was still there.

He switched the car engine off.             He heard it die.         The car continued to
move.

The silence that followed the cessation of the engine noise was brief.

A new sound arose: clackety-clack, clackety-clack, clackety-clack.

An inhuman shriek erupted to the left, and from the corner of his eye,
Hatch detected threatening movement. He snapped his head toward it.

To his astonishment he saw an utterly alien figure, a pale white slug as
big as a man. It reared up and shrieked at him through a round mouth
full of teeth that whirled like the sharp blades in a garbage disposal.
An identical I beast shrieked from a niche in the tunnel wall to his
right, and more of them ahead, and beyond them other monsters of other
forms, gibbering, hooting, snarling, squealing as he passed them.

In spite of his disorientation and terror, he realized that the
grotesque figures along the tunnel walls were mechanical beasts, not
real. And as that understanding sank in, he finally recognized the
familiar sound. Clackety clack, clacketyk. He was on an indoor roller
coaster, yet in his car, moving with decreasing speed toward the high
point, with a precipitous fall ahead.

He did not argue with himself that this couldn't be happening, did not
try to shake himself awake or back to his . He was past denial. He
understood that he did not have to believe in this experience to insure
its continuation; it would progress whether he believed in it or not, so
he might as well grit his teeth and get through it.

Being past denial didn't mean, however, that he was past fear.                       He was
scared shitless.

Briefly he considered opening the car door and getting out. Maybe that
would break the spell. But he didn't try it because he was afraid that
when he stepped out he would not be in the parking lot in front of the
gun shop but in the tunnel, and that the car would continue uphill
without him.

Losing contact with his little red Mitsubishi might be like slamming a
door on reality, consigning himself forever to the vision, with no way
out, no The car" the last mechanical monster. It reached the crest of
the inclined-track. enough a pair of swinging doors. Into darkness.

The doors fell shut behind The car crept forward Forward.                     Forward.



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Abruptly it dropped as if to a bottomless pit.

Hatch cried out, and with his cry the darkness vanished. The sunny
spring day made a welcome reappearance. The parking lot. The gun shop.

" His hands were locked so tightly around the steering wheel that they
ached.

Throughout the morning, Vassago was awake more than asleep. But when he
dozed, he was back in the Millipede again, on that night of glory.

In the days and weeks following the deaths at Fantasy World, he had
without doubt proved himself a Master by exerting iron control over his
compulsive desire to kill. Merely the memory of having killed was
sufficient to release the periodic pressure that built in him.

Hundreds of times, he relived the sensuous details of each death,
temporarily quenching his hot need. And the knowledge that he would
kill again, any time he could do so without arousing suspicion, was an
additional restraint on selfindulgence.

He did not kill anyone else for two years. Then, when he was fourteen,
he drowned another boy at summer camp. The kid was smaller and weaker,
but he put up a good fight. When he was found floating facedown in the
pond, it was the talk of the camp for the rest of that month. Water
could be as good as fire.

When he was sixteen and had a driver's license, he wasted two
transients, both hitchhikers, one in October, the other a couple of days
before Thanksgiving. The guy in November' was just a college kid going
home for the holiday. But the other one was something else, a predator
who thought he had stumbled across a foolish and naive high-school boy
who would provide him with some thrills of his own.

Jeremy had used knives on both of them.

At seventeen, when he discovered Satanism, he couldn't read enough about
it, surprised to find that his secret philosophy had been codified and
embraced by clandestine cults. Oh, they were relatively benign forms,
propagated by gutless wimps who were just looking for a way to play at
wickedness, an excuse for hedonism. But real believers existed, as
well, committed to the truth that God had failed to create people in his
image, that the bulk of humanity was equivalent to a herd of cattle,
that selfishness was admirable, that pleasure was the only worthwhile
goal, and that the greatest pleasure was the brutal exercise of power
over others.

The ultimate expression of power, one privately published volume had
assured him, was to destroy those who had spawned you, thereby breaking
the bonds of family "love." The book said that one must as violently as
possible reject the whole hypocrisy of rules, laws, and noble sentiments
by which other men pretended to live. Taking that advice to heart was
what had earned him a place in Hell-from which his father had pulled him
back.

But he would soon be there again. A few more deaths, two in particular,
would earn him repatriation to the land of darkness and the damned.

The attic grew warmer as the day progressed.

A few fat flies buzzed back and forth through his shadowy retreat, and
some of them settled down forever on one or another of the alluring but
sticky webs that spanned the junctions of the rafters. Then the spiders


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moved.

In the warm, closed space, Vassago's dozing became a deeper sleep with
more intense dreams. Fire and water, blade and bullet.

Crouching at the corner of the garage, Hatch reached between two azaleas
and flipped open the cover on the landscape-lighting control box. He
adjusted the timer to prevent the pathway and shrubbery lights from
blinking off at midnight. Now they would stay on until sunrise.

He closed the metal box, stood, and looked around at the quiet,
well-groomed street. All was harmony. Every house had a tile roof in
shades of tan and sand and h, not the more stark orange-red tiles of
many older California homes. The stucco walls were cream-colored or
within a narrow range of coordinated pastels specified by the
"Covenants, Conventions a Restrictions" that came with the grant deed
and mortgage. Lawns were green and recently mown, flower beds were well
tended, and trees were neatly trimmed. It was difficult to believe that
unspeakable violence could ever intrude from the outer world into such
an orderly, upwardly mobile community, and inconceivable that anything
supernatural could stalk those streets.

The neighborhood's normalcy was so solid that it seemed like encircling
stone ramparts crowned with battlements.

Not for the first time, he thought that Lindsey and Regina might be
perfectly safe there-but for him. If madness had invaded this fortress
of normalcy, he had opened the door to it. Maybe he was mad himself;
maybe his weird experiences were nothing as grand as psychic visions,
merely the hallucinations of an insane mind. He would bet everything he
owned on his sanity-though he also could not dismiss the slim
possibility that he would lose the bet. In any event, whether or not he
was insane, he was the conduit for whatever violence might rain down on
them, and perhaps they would be better off if they went away for the
duration, put some distance between themselves and him until this crazy
business was over. Sending them away seemed wise and responsible-except
that a small voice deep inside him spoke against that option. He had a
terrible hunch-or was it more than a hunch?-that the killer would not be
coming after him but after Lindsey and Regina.

If they went away somewhere, just Lindsey and the girl, that homicidal
monster would follow them, leaving Hatch to wait alone for a showdown
that would never happen.

All right, then they had to stick together.                  Like a family.      Rise or
fall as one.

Before leaving to pick Regina up at school, he slowly circled the house,
looking for lapses in their defenses. The only one he found was an
unlocked window at the back of the garage. The latch had been loose for
a long time, and he had been meaning to fix it. He got some tools from
one of the garage cabinets and worked on the mechanism until the bolt
seated securely in the catch.

As he'd told Lindsey earlier, he didn't think the man in his visions
would come as soon as tonight, probably not even this week, maybe not
for a month or longer, but he would come eventually. Even if that
unwelcome visit was days or weeks away, it felt good to be prepare 2

Vassago woke.

Without opening his eyes, he knew that night was coming.                     He could feel



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the oppressive sun rolling off the world and slipping over the edge of
the horizon. When he did open his eyes, the last fading light coming
through the attic vents confirmed that the waters of the night were on
the rise.

Hatch found that it was not exactly easy to conduct a normal domestic
life while waiting to be stricken by a terrifying, maybe even bloody,
vision so powerful it would blank out reality for its duration. It was
hard to sit in your pleasant dining room, smile, enjoy the pasta and
Parmesan bread, make with the light banter, and tease a giggle from the
young lady with the solemn gray eyes-when you kept thinking of the
loaded shotgun secreted in the corner behind the Coromandel screen or
the handgun in the adjacent kitchen atop the refrigerator, above the
line of sight of a small girls eyes.

He wondered how the man in black would enter when he came. At night,
for one thing. He only came out at night. They didn't have to worry
about him going after Regina at school. But would he boldly ring the
bell or knock smartly on the door, while they were still up and around
with all the lights on, hoping to catch them off-guard at a civilized
hour when they might assume it was a neighbor come to call? Or would he
wait until they were asleep, lights off, and try to slip through their
defenses to take them unaware?

Hatch wished they had an alarm system, as they did at the store. When
they sold the old house and moved into the new place following Jimmy's
death, they should have called Brinks right away. Valuable antiques
graced every room. But for the longest time after Jimmy had been taken
from them, it hadn't seemed to matter if anything-or every Uungse was
taken as well.

Throughout dinner, Lindsey was a trooper. She ate a mound of rigatoni
as if she had an appetite, which was something Hatch could not manage,
and she filled his frequent worried silences with natural-sounding
patter, doing her best to preserve the feeling of an ordinary night at
home.

Regina was sufficiently observant to know something was wrong. And
though she was tough enough to handle nearly anything, she was also
infected with seemingly chronic self-doubt that would probably lead her
to interpret their uneasiness as dissatisfaction with her.

Earlier Hatch and Lindsey had discussed what they might be able to tell
the girl about the situation they faced, without alarming her more than
was nary. The answer seemed to be: nothing. She had been with them
only two days. She didn't know them well enough to have this crazy'
stuff thrown at her. She'd hear about Hatch's bad dreams, his walking
hallucinations, the heat-browned magazine, the murders, all of it, and
figure she had been entrusted to a couple of lunatics.

anyway the kid didn't really need to be warned at this stage.                      They
could look out for her; it was what they were sworn to do.

Hatch found it difficult to believe that just three days ago the problem
of his repetitive nightmares had not seemed significant enough to delay
a trial adoption. But Honell and Cooper had not been dead then, and
supernatural forces seemed only the material of popcorn movies and
National Enquirer stories.

Halfway through dinner he heard a noise in the kitchen. A click and
scrape. Lindsey and Regina were engaged in an intense conversation
about whether Nancy Drew, girl detective of countless books, was a


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"dorkette," which was Regina's view, or whether she was a smart and
savvy girl for her times but just old-fashioned when you looked at her
from a more modern viewpoint. Either they were too engrossed in their
debate to hear the noise in the kitchen-or there had been no noise, and
he had imagined it.

"Excuse me," he said, getting up from the table, "I'll be right back."

He pushed through the swinging door into the large kitchen and looked
around suspiciously. The only movement in the deserted room was a faint
ribbon of steam still unraveling from the crack between the tilted lid
and the pot of hot spaghetti sauce that stood on a c pad on the counter
beside the stove.

Something thumped softly in the Sped family room, which opened off the
kitchen. He could see part of that room from where he-stood but not all
of it. He stepped silently across the kitchen and through the archway,
taking the Browning 9 MM off the top of the refrigerator as he went.

The family room was also deserted. But he was sure that he had not
imagined that second noise. He stood for a moment, looking around in
bafflement.

His skin prickled, and he whirled toward the short hallway that led from
the family room to the foyer inside the front door. Nothing. He was
alone.

So why did he feel as if someone was holding a nice cube against the
back of his neck?

He moved cautiously into the hallway until he came to the coat closet.

The door was closed.         Directly across the hall was the powder room.

That door was also shut. He felt drawn toward the foyer, and his
inclination was to trust his hunch and move on, but he didn't want to
put either of those closed doors at his back.

When he jerked open the closet door, he saw at once that no one was in
there. He felt stupid with the gun thrust out in front of him and
pointing at nothing but a couple of coats on hangers, playing a movie
cop or something. Better hope it wasn't the final reeL Sometimes, when
the story required it, they killed off the good guy in the end.

He checked the powder room, found it also empty, and continued into the
foyer. The uncanny feeling was still with him but not as strong as
before. The foyer was deserted. He glanced at the stairs, but no one
was on them.

He looked in the living room. No one. He could see a corner of the
dining-room table through the archway at the end of the living room.

Although he could hear Lindsey and Regina still discussing Nancy Drew,
he couldn't see them.

He checked the den, which was also off the entrance foyer.                     And the
closet in the den. And the kneehole space under the desk.

Back in the foyer, he tried the front door.                  It was locked, as it should
have been.

No good. If he was this jumpy already, what in the name of God was he
going to be like in another day or week? Lindsey would have to pry him


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off the ceding just to give him his morning coffee each day.

Nevertheless, reversing the route he had just taken through the house,
he stopped in the family room to try the sliding glass doors that served
the patio and backyard. They were locked with the burglar-foiling bar
inserted properly in the floor track.

In the kitchen once more, he tried the door to the garage. It was and
unlocked, again he felt as if spiders were crawling on his scalp.

He eased the door open. The garage was dark. He fumbled for the
switch, clicked the lights on. Banks of big fluorescent tubes dropped a
flood of harsh light straight down the width and breadth of the room,
virtually eliminating shadows, revealing nothing out of the ordinary.

Stepping over the threshold, he let the door ease shut behind him.

He cautiously walked- the length of the room with the large roll-up
sectional doors on his right, the backs of the two cars on his left.

The middle stall was empty.

His rubber-soled Rockports made no sound. He expected to surprise
someone crouched along the far side of one of the cars, but no one was
sheltering behind either of them. At the end of the garage, when he was
past the Chevy, he abruptly dropped to the floor and looked under the
car. He could see all the way 11 across the room, beneath the
Mitsubishi, as well. No one was hiding under either vehicle. As best
as he could tell, considering that the tires provided blind spots, no
one appeared to be circling the cars to keep out of his sight.

He got up and turned to a regular door in the end wall. It served the
side yard and had a thumb-turn dead-bolt lock, which was engaged. No
one could get in that way.

Returning to the kitchen door, he stayed to the back of the garage. He
tried only the two storage cabinets that had tall doors and were large
enough to provide a hiding place for a grown man. Neither was occupied.

He checked the window latch he had repaired earlier in the day.                       It was
secure, the bolt seated snugly in the vertically mounted hasp.

Again, he felt foolish. Like a grown man engaged in a boy's game,
fancying himself a movie hero.

How fast would he have reacted if someone had been hiding in one of
those tall cabinets and had flung himself outward when the door opened?

Or what if he had dropped to the floor to look under the Chevy, and
right there had been the man in black, face-to-face with him, inches
away?

He was glad he hadn't been required to learn the answer to either of
those unnerving questions. But at least, having asked them, he no
longer felt foolish, because indeed the man in black might have been
there.

Sooner or later the bastard would be there. Hatch was no less than ever
about the inevitability of a confrontation. Call it a hunch, call it a
premonition, call it Christmas turkey if you liked, but he knew that he
could trust the small warning voice within him.

As he was passing the front of the Mitsubishi, he saw what a- to be a


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dent on the hood. He stopped, sure that it must be a trick of light,
the shadow of the pulled that hung from the ceiling trap. It was
directly over the hood. He swatted the dangling cord, but the mark on
the car didn't leap and dance as it would have done if it had been just
the cord shadow.

Leaning over the grille, he touched the smooth sheet metal and felt the
depression, shallow but as big as his hand. He sighed heavily. The car
was still new, and already it needed a session in the body shop.

Take a brand new car to the mall, and an hour after it's out of the
showroom, some damn fool would park beside it and slam open his door
into yours. It never failed.

He hadn't noticed the dent either when he had come home this afternoon
from the gun shop or when he'd brought Regina back from school.

Maybe it wasn't as visible from inside the car, behind the steering
wheel; maybe you had to be out in front, looking at it from the right
angle. It sure seemed big enough to be seen from anywhere.

He was trying to figure how it could have happened-somebody must have
been passing by and dropped something on the car-when he saw the
footprint. It was in a gossamer coating of beige dust on the red paint,
the sole and part of the heel of a walking shoe probably not much
different from the ones he was wearing. Someone had stood on or walked
across the hood of the Mitsubishi.

It must have happened outside St. Thomas's School, because it was the
kind of thing a kid might do, showing off to friends. Having allowed
too much time for bad traffic, Hatch had arrived at St. Tom's twenty
minutes before classes let out. Rather than wait in the car, he'd gone
for a walk to work off some excess nervous energy. Probably, some
wise-ass and his buddies from the adjacent high school-the footprint was
too big to belong to a smaller kid-sneaked out a little ahead of the
final bell, and were showing off for each other as they raced away from
the school, maybe leaping and clambering over obstacles instead of going
around them, as if they'd escaped from a prison with the bloodhounds
close on Their "Hatch?"

Startled out of his train of thought just when it to be leading
somewhere, he spun around toward the voice as if it did not sound
familiar to him, which of course it did.

Lindsey stood in the doorway between the garage and kitchen.                      She looked
at the gun in his hand, met his eyes. "What's wrong?"

"I "Thought I heard something."

"And?"

"Nothing." She had startled him so much that he had forgotten the
footprint and dent on the car hood. As he followed her into the
kitchen, he said, "This door was open. I locked it earlier."

"Oh, Regina left one of her books in the car when she came home from
school. She went out just before dinner to get it."

"You should have made sure she locked up."

"It's only the door to the garage," Lindsey said, heading toward the
dining room.



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He put a hand on her shoulder to stop her, turned her around. "It's a
point of vulnerability," he said with perhaps more anxiety than such a
minor breach of security warranted.

"Aren't the outer garage doors locked?"

"Yes, and this one should be locked, too."

"But as many times as we go back and forth from the kitchen"-they had a
second refrigerator in the garage it's just convenient to leave the door
unlocked. We've always left it unlocked."

"We don't any more," he said finmly.

They were face-to-face, and she studied him worriedly. He knew she
thought he was walking a fine line between prudent precautions and a
sort of quiet hysteria, even treading the wrong way over that line
sometimes.

On the other hand, she hadn't had the benefit of his nightmares and
visions.

Perhaps the same thought crossed Lindsey's mind, for she nodded and
said, "Okay. I'm sorry. You're right."

He leaned back into the garage and turned off the lights.                     He closed the
door, engaged the deadbolt-and felt no safer, really.

She had started toward the dining room again. She glanced back as he
followed her, indicating the pistol in his hand. "Going to bring that
to the table?"

Deciding he had come down a little heavy on her, he shook his head and
bugged his eyes out, trying to make a Christopher Lloyd face and lighten
the moment: "I think some of my rigatoni are still alive. I'd like to
eat them till they're dead."

"Well, you've got the shotgun behind the Coromandel for that," she
reminded him.

"You're right!" He put the pistol on top of the refrigerator agaIn.

"And if that doesn't work, I can always take them out in the driveway
and run them over with the car!"

She pushed open the swinging door, and Hatch followed her into the
dining room.

Regina looked up and said, "Your food's getting cold."

Still making like Christopher Lloyd, Hatch said, "Then we'll get some
sweaters and mittens for them!"

Regina giggled.       Hatch adored the way she giggled.

After the dinner dishes were done, Regina went to her room to study.

"Big history test tomorrow," she said.

Lindsey returned to her studio to try to get some work done. When she
sat down at her drawing board, she saw the second Browning It was still
atop the low art-supply cabinet, where Hatch had put it earlier in the
day.



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She scowled at it. She didn't necessarily disapprove of guns
themselves, but this one was more than merely a handgun. It was a
symbol of their powerlessness in the face of the amorphous threat that
hung over them.

Keeping a gun ever within reach seemed an admission that they were
desperate and couldu't control their own destiny. The sight of a snake
coiled on the cabinet could not have carved a deeper scowl on her face.

She didn't want Regina walking in and seeing it.

She pulled open the first drawer of the cabinet and shoved aside some
gum erasers and pencils to make room for the weapon. The Browning
barely fit in that shallow space. Closing the drawer, she felt better.

During the long morning and afternoon, she had accomplished nothing.

She had made lots of false starts with sketches that went nowhere.                         She
was not even close to being ready to prepare a canvas.

Masonite, actually. She worked on Masonite, as did most artists these
days, but she still thought of each rectangle as a canvas, as though she
were the reincarnation of an artist from another age and could not shake
her old way of thinking. Also, she painted in acrylics rather than
oils.

Masonite did not deteriorate over time the way canvas did, and acrylics
retained their true colors far better thin oil-based paints.

Of course if she didn't do something soon' it wouldn't matter if she
used acrylics or cat's piss. She couldn't call herself an artist in the
first place if I. she come an a 1. couldn't up with idea that excited
her and composition that did the idea justice. Picking up a thick
charcoal pencil, she leaned over the sketch pad that was open on the
drawing board in front of her. She tried to knock inspiration off its
perch and get its lazy butt flying again.

After no more than a minute, her gaze floated off the page, up and up,
until she was staring at the window. No interesting sight waited to
distract her tonight, no treetops gracefully swaying in a breeze or even
a patch of cerulean sky. The night beyond the pane was featureless.

The black backdrop transformed the window glass into a mirror in which
she saw herself looking over the top of the drawing board.

Because it was not a true mirror, her reflection was transparent,
ghostly, as if she had died and come back to haunt the last place she
had ever known on That was an unsettling thought, so she returned her
attention to the blank page of the drawing tablet in front of her.

I After Lindsey and Regina went upstairs, Hatch walked from room to room
on the ground floor, checking windows and doors to be sure they were
secured. He had inspected the locks before. Doing it again was
potless. He did it anyway.

When he reached the pair of sliding glass doors in the family room, he
switched on the outdoor patio lights to augment the low landscape
lighting. The backyard was now bright enough for him to see most of it
although someone could have been crouched among the shrubs along the
rear fence. He stood at the doors, waiting for one of the shadows along
the perimeter of the property to shift.

Maybe he was wrong.         Maybe the guy would never come after them.                In


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which case, in a month or two or three, Hatch would most likely be
certifiably mad from the tension of waiting. He almost thought it would
be better if the creep came now and got it over with.

He moved on to the breakfast nook and examined those windows.                      They were
still locked.

Regina returned to her bedroom and prepared her corner desk for home
work. She put her books to one side of the blotter, pens and felt-tip
Hi-Liter to the other side, and her notebook in the middle, everything
squared-up and neat.

As she got her desk set up, she worried about the Harrisons.                      Something
was wrong with them.

Well, not wrong in the sense that they were thieves or enemy spies or
counterfeiters or murderers or child-eating cannibals. For a while
she'd had an idea for a novel in which this absolute screwup girl is
adopted by a couple who are child-eating cannibals, and she finds a pile
of child bones in the basement, and a recipe file in the kitchen with
cards that say things like Roast Girl-and Girl soup, with instructions
like one tender young girl, unsalted, one onion, chopped; one pound
carrots, diced In the story the girl goes to the authorities, but they
will not believe her because she's widely known as a screwup and a
teller of tall tales.

Well, that was fiction, and this was real liiie, and the Harrisons
seemed perfectly happy eating pizza and pasta and hamburgers.

She clicked on the fluorescent desk lamp.

Though there was nothing wrong with the Harrisons themselves, they
definitely had problems, because they were tense and trying hard to hide
it. Maybe they weren't able to make their mortgage payments, and the
bank was going to take the house, and all three of them would have to
move back into her old room at the orphanage. Maybe they had discovered
that Mrs. Harrison had a sister. she'd never heard about before, an
evil twin like all those people on television shows were always
discovering they had. Or maybe they owed money to the Mafia and
couldn't pay it and were going to get their legs broken.

Regina withdrew a dictionary from the bookshelves and put it on the
desk.

If they had a bad problem, Regina hoped it was the Mafia thing, because
she could handle that pretty well. The Harrisons' legs would get better
eventually, and they'd learn an important lesson about not borrowing
money from loansharks. Meanwhile, she could take care of them, make
sure they got their medicine, check their temperatures now and then, I'd
bring them dishes of ice cream with a little animal cookie stuck in the
top of each one, and even empty their bedpans (Gross!) if it came to
that. She knew a lot about nursing, having been on the receiving end of
so much of it at various times over the years.

(DearGod, if their big problem is life, could have a miracle here and
get the problem changed to the Mafia, so they'll keep me and we'll be
happy? In exchange for the miracle, I'd even be willing to have my legs
broken, too. At least talk it over with the guys at the Mafia and see
what they say.) When the desk was fully prepared for homework, Regina
decide that she needed to be more comfortable in order to study.

Having changed out of her parochial-school uniform when she had gotten



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home, she was wearing gray corduroy pants and a lime-green, long-sleeve
cotton sweater. Pajamas and a robe were much better for studying.

Besides, her leg brace was making her itch in a couple of places, and
she wanted to take it off for the day.

When she slid open the mirrored closet door, she was face-to-face with a
crouching man all in black and wearing sun glasses.

On yet one more tour of the downstairs, Hatch decided to turn off the
lamps and chandeliers as he went. With the landscape and exterior house
lights all ablaze but the interior dark, he would be able to see a
prowler without being seen himself.

He concluded the patrol in the unlighted den, which he had decided to
make his p guard station. Sitting at the big desk in the gloom, he
could look through the double doors into the front foyer and cover the
foot of the stairs to the second floor. If anyone tried to enter
through a den window or the French doors to the rose garden, he would
know at once.

If the intruder breached their security in another room, Hatch would
nail the guy when he tried to go upstairs, because the spill of
second-floor hall light illuminated the steps. He couldn't be
everywhere at once, and the den seemed to be the most strategic
position.

He put both the shotgun and the handgun on top of the desk, within easy
reach. He couldn't see them well without the lights on, but he could
grab either of them in an instant if anything happened. He practiced a
few times, sitting in his swivel chair and facing the foyer, then
abruptly reaching out to grab the Browning, this time the Mossberg
12-gauge, Browning, Browning, Mossberg, Browning, Mossberg, Mossberg.

Every time, maybe because his reactions were heightened by adrenalihe,
his right hand swooped through darkness and with precise motions came to
rest upon the handgrip of the Browning or the stock of the Mossberg,
whichever was wanted.

He took no satisfaction in his preparedness, because he knew he could
not remain vigilant twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. He had
to sleep and eat. He had not gone to the shop today, and he could take
off a few days more, but he couldn't leave everything to Glenda and Lew
indefinitely; sooner or later he would have to go to work.

Realistically, even with breaks to eat and sleep, he would cease to be
an effective watchman long before he needed to return to work.

Sustaining a high degree of mental and physical alertness was a draining
enterprise. In time he'd have to consider hiring a guard or two from a
private security firm and he didn't know how much that would cost. More
important, he didn't know how reliable a hired guard would be.

He doubted he would ever have to make that decision, because the bastard
was going to come soon, maybe tonight. On a primitive level, a vague
impression of the man's intentions Bowed to Hatch along whatever
mystical bond they shared. It was like a child's words spoken into a
tin can and conveyed along a string to another tin can, where they were
reproduced as dim sounds, most of the coherency lost due to the poor
quality of the conductive material but the essential tone still
perceptible.

The current message on the psychic string could not be heard in any


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detail, but the primary meaning was clear: Coming...                       I'm coming...   I'm
coming...

Probably after midnight. Hatch sensed that their encounter would take
place between that dead hour and dawn. It was now exactly 7:46 by his
watch.

He withdrew his ring of car and house keys from his pocket, found the
desk key that he had added earlier, opened the locked drawer, and took
out the heat-darkened, smoke-scented issue of Arts American, letting the
keys dangle in the lock. He held the magazine in both hands in the
dark, hoping the feel of it would, like a talisman, amplify his magical
vision and allow him to see precisely when, where, and how the killer
would arrive.

Mingled odors of fire and destruction one so bitterly pungent that they
were nauseating, others merely ashy-rose from the crisp pages.

Vassago clicked off the fluorescent desk lamp. He crossed the girls
room to the door, where he also switched off the ceiling light.

He put his hand on the doorknob but hesitated, reluctant to leave the
child behind him. She was so exquisite, so vital. He knew the moment
he had pulled her into his arms that she was the caliber of acquisition
that would complete his collection and win him the eternal reward he
sought.

Stifling her cry and cutting off her breathing with one gloved hand, he
had swept her into the closet and crushed her against him with his
strong arms. He had held her so fiercely that she could barely squirm
and couldn't kick against anything to draw attention to her plight.

When she had passed out in his arms, he had been almost in a swoon and
had been overcome by the urge to kill her right there. In her closet.

Among the soft piles of clothes that had fallen off the hangers above
them.

The scent of freshly laundered cotton and spray starch. The warm
fragrance of wool. And girl. He wanted to wring her neck and feel her
life energy pass through his powerful hands, into him, and through him
to the land of the dead.

He had taken so long to shake off that overpowering desire that he
almost had killed her. She fell silent and still. By the time he
unclamped his hand from her nose and mouth, he thought he had smothered
her. But when he put his ear to her parted lips, he could hear and feel
faint exhalations. A hand against her chest rewarded him with the solid
thud of her slow, strong heartbeat.

Now, looking back at the child, Vassago repressed the need to kill by
promising himself that he would have satisfaction long before dawn.

Meanwhile, he must be a Master.             Exercise control.

Control.

He opened the door and studied the second-floor hallway beyond the girls
room. Deserted. A chandelier was aglow at the far end, at the head of
the stairs, in front of the entrance to the master bedroom, producing
too much light for his comfort if he had not had his sunglasses. He
still needed to squint.



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He must butcher neither the child nor the mother until he had both of
them in the museum of the dead, where he had killed all the others who
were part of his collection. He knew now why he had been drawn to
Lindsey and Regina. Mother and daughter. Bitch and young-bitch. To
regain his place in Hell, he was expected to commit the same act that
had won him damnation in the first place: the murder of a mother and her
daughter. As his own mother and sister were not available to be killed
again, Lindsey and Regina had been selected.

Standing in the open doorway, he listened to the house.                    It was silent.

He knew the artist was not the girls birth mother. Earlier, when the
Harrisons were in the dining room and he slipped into the house from the
garage, he'd had time to poke around in Regina's room. He'd found
mementoes with the orphanage name on them, for the most part cheaply
printed drama programs handed out at holiday plays in which the girl had
held minor roles. Nevertheless, he had been drawn to her and Lindsey,
and his own master apparently judged them to be suitable sacrifices.

The house was so still that he would have to move as quietly as a cat.

He could manage that.

He glanced back at the girl on the bed, able to see her better in the
darkness than he could see most of the details of the too-bright
hallway.

She was still unconscious, one of her own scarves wadded in her mouth
and another tied around her head to keep the gag in place. Strong
lengths of cord, which he had untied from around storage boxes in the
garage attic, tightly bound her wrists and ankles.

Control.

Leaving Regina's door open behind him he eased along the hallway,
staying close to the wall, where the plywood sub-flooring under the
thick carpet was least likely to creak.

He knew the layout. He had cautiously explored the second floor while
the Harrisons had been finishing dinner.

Beside the girls room was a guest bedroom.                  It was dark now.      He crept
on toward Lindsey's studio.

Because the main hallway chandelier was directly ahead of him, his
shadow fell in his wake, which was fortunate. Otherwise, if the woman
happened to be looking toward the hall, she would have been warned of
his approach.

He inched to the studio door and stopped.

Standing with his back flat to the wall, eyes straight ahead, he could
see between the balusters under the handrail of the open staircase, to
the foyer below. As far as he could tell, no lights were on downstairs.

He wondered where the husband had gone. The tall doors to the master
bedroom were open, but no lights were on in there. He could hear small
noises coming from within the woman's studio, so he figured she was at
work. If the husband was with her, surely they would have exchanged a
few words, at least, during the time Vassago had been making his way
along the hall.

He hoped the husband had gone out on an errand.                    He had no particular


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need to kill the man.          And any confrontation would be dangerous.

From his jacket pocket, he withdrew the supple leather sap, filled with
lead shot, that he had appropriated last week from Morton Redlow, the
detective. It was an extremely effective-looking blackjack. It felt
good in his hand. In the pearl-gray Honda, two blocks away, a handgun
was tucked under the driver's seat, and Vassago almost wished he had
brought it. He had taken it from the antique dealer, Robert Lofiman, in
Laguna Beach a couple of hours before dawn that morning.

But he didn't want to shoot the woman and the girl. Even if he just
wounded and disabled them, they might bleed to death before he got them
back to his hideaway and down into the museum of death, to the altar
where his offerings were arranged. And if he used a gun to remove the
husband, he could risk only one shot, maybe two. Too much gunfire was
bound to be heard by neighbors and the source located. In that quiet
community, once gunfire was identified, cops would be crawling over the
place in two minutes.

The sap was better.         He hefted it in his right hand, getting the feel of
it.

With great care, he leaned across the doorjamb.                    Tilted his head.

Peeked into the studio.

She sat on the stool, her back to the door. He recognized her even from
behind. His heart galloped almost as fast as when the girl had
struggled and passed out in his arms. Lindsey was at the drawing board,
charcoal pencil in her right hand. Busy, busy, busy. Pencil making a
soft snaky hiss as it worked against the paper.

No matter how determined she was to keep her attention firmly on the
problem of the blank sheet of drawing paper, Lindsey looked up
repeatedly at the window. Her creative block crumbled only when she
surrendered and began to draw the window. The uncurtained frame.

Darkness beyond the glass. Her face like the countenance of a ghost
engaged in a haunting. When she added the spider web in the upper
right-hand corner, the concept jelled, and suddenly she excited. She
thought she might title it The Web of Life and Death, and use a surreal
series of symbolic items to knit the theme into every corner of the
canvas. Not canvas, Masonite. In fact, just paper now, only a sketch,
but worth pursuing.

She repositioned the drawing tablet on the board, setting it higher.

Now she could just raise her eyes slightly from the page to look over
the top of the board at the window, and didn't have to keep raising and
lowering her head.

More elements than just her face, the window, and the web would be
required to give the painting depth and interest. As she worked she
considered and rejected a score of additional images.

Then an image a- almost magically in the glass above her own reflection:
the face that Hatch had described from nightmares. Pale.

A shock of dark hair.          The sunglasses.

For an instant she thought it was a supernatural event, an apparition in
the glass. Even as her breath caught in her throat, however, she
realized that she was seeing a reflection like her own and that the


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killer in Hatch's dreams was in their house, leaning around the doorway
to look at her. She repressed an impulse to scream. As soon as he
realized she had seen him, she would lose what little advantage she had,
and he would be all over her, slashing at her, pounding on her,
finishing her off before Hatch even got upstairs. Instead, she sighed
loudly and shook her head as if displeased with what she was getting
down on the drawing paper.

Hatch might already be dead.

She slowly put down her charcoal pencil, letting her fingers rest on it
as if she might decide to pick it up again and go on.

If Hatch wasn't dead, how else could this bastard have gotten to the
second floor? No. She couldn't think about Hatch being dead, or she
would be dead herself, and thin Regina. Dear God, Regina.

She reached toward the top drawer of the supply cabinet at her side, and
a shiver went through her as she touched the cold chrome handle.

Reflecting the door behind her, the window showed the killer not just
leaning around the jamb but stepping boldly into the open doorway.

He paused arrogantly to stare at her, evidently relishing the moment.

He was unnaturally quiet. If she had not seen his image in the glass,
she would have had no awareness whatsoever of his presence.

She pulled open the drawer, felt the gun under her hand.

Behind her, he crossed the threshold.

She drew the pistol out of the drawer and swung around on her stool in
one motion, bringing the heavy weapon up, clasping it in both hands,
pointing it at him. She would not have been entirely surprised if he
had not been there, and if her first impression of him only as an
apparition in the windowpanee had turned out to be correct. But he was
there, all right, one step inside the door when she drew down on him
with the Browning.

She said, "Don't move, you son of a bitch."

Whether he thought he saw weakness in her or whether he just didn't give
a damn if she shot him or not, he backed out of the doorway an-into the
hall even as she swung toward him and told him not to move.

"Stop, damn it!"

He was gone. Lindsey would have shot him without hesitation, without
moral compunction, but he moved so incredibly fast, like a cat springing
for safety, that all she would have gotten was a piece of the doorjamb.

Shouting for Hatch, she was off the high stool and leaping for the door
even as the last of the killers black shoe, his left foot-vanished out
of the door frame. But she brought herself up short, thinking he might
not have gone anywhere, might be waiting just to the side of the door,
expecting her to come through in a panic, then stepping behind her and
pound her across the back of the head or push her into the stair railing
and over and out and down onto the foyer floor. Regina. She couldn't
delay. He might be going after Regina. A hesitation of only a second,
then she crashed through her fear and through the open door, all- this
time shouting Hatch's Looking to her right as she came into the hall,
she saw the guy going for Regina's door, also open, at the far end. The


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room was dark beyond when there ought to have been lights, Regina
studying. She didn't have time to stop and aim. Almost squeezed the
trigger. Wanted to pump out bullets in the hope that one of them would
nail the bastard. But Regina's room was so dark, and the girl could be
anywhere. Lindsey was afraid that she would miss the killer and blow
away the girl, bullets flying through the open doorway.

So she held her fire and went after the guy, screaming Regina's name now
instead of Hatch's.

He disappeared into the girls room and threw the door shut behind him, a
bell of a slam that shook the house. Lindsey hit that barrier a second
later, bounced off it. Locked. She heard Hatch shouting her name-thank
God, he was alive, he was alive-but she didn't stop or turn around to
see where he was. She stepped back and kicked the door hard, then
kicked it again. It was only a privacy latch, lIimsy, it ought to pop
open easily, but didn't.

She was going to kick it again, but the killer spoke to her through the
door. His voice was raised but not a shout, menacing but cool, no panic
in it, no fear, just businesslike and a liNe loud, terrifyingly smooth
and calm: "Get away from the door, or I'll kill the little bitch."

Just before Lindsey began to shout his name, Hatch                   was sitting at the
desk in the den, lights off, holding Arts American                   in both hands. A
vision hit him with an electric sound, the crackle                   of a current jumping
an are, as if the magazine were a live power cable                   that he had gripped
in his bare hands.

He saw Lindsey from behind, sitting on the high stool in her office, at
the drawing board, working on a sketch. Then she was not Lindsey any
more. Suddenly she was another woman, taller, also seen from behind but
not on the stool, in an armchair in a different room in a strange house.

She was knitting. A bright skein of yarn slowly unraveled from a
retaining bowl on the small table beside her chair. Hatch thought of
her as "mother," though she was nothing whatsoever like his mother. He
looked down at his right hand, in which he held a knife, immense,
already wet with blood. He approached her chair. She was unaware of
him. As Hatch, he wanted to cry out and warn her. But as the user of
the knife, through whose eyes he was seeing everything, he wanted only
to savage her, tear the life out of her, and thereby complete the task
that would free him. He stepped to the back of her armchair. She
hadn't heard him yet. He raised the knife high. He struck. She
screamed. He struck. She tried to get out of the chair. He moved
around her, and from his point of view it was like a swooping shot in a
movie meant to convey flight, the smooth glide of a bird or bat. He
pushed her back into the chair, struck. She raised her hands to protect
herself. He struck. He struck. And now, as if it was all a loop of
film, he was behind her again, standing in the doorway, except she
wasn't "mother" any more, she was Lindsey again, sitting at the drawing
board in her upstairs studio, reaching to the top drawer of her supply
cabinet and pulling it open. His gaze rose from her to the window.

He saw himself-pale face, dark hair, sun glasses and knew she had seen
him. She spun around on the stool, a pistol coming up, the muzzle aimed
straight at his chest "Hatch!"

His name, echoing through the house, shattered the link. He shot up
from the desk chair, shuddering, and the magazine fell out of his hands.

"Hatch!"


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Reaching out in the darkness, he unerringly found the handgrip of the
Browning, and raced out of the den. As he crossed the foyer and climbed
the stairs two at a time, looking up as he went, trying to see what was
happening, he heard Lindsey stop shouting his name and start screaming
"Regina!" Not the girl Jesus, please, not the girl.

Reaching the top of the stairs, he thought for an instant that the
slamming door was a shot But the sound was too distinct to be mistaken
for , and as he looked back the hall he saw Lindsey bounce off the door
to Regina's room with another crash. As he ran to join her, she kicked
the door, kicked again, and then she stumbled back from it as he reached
her.

"lemme try," he said, pushing her.

"No!   He said back off or he'll kill her."

For a couple of seconds, Hatch stared at the door, literally shaking
with frustration. Then he took hold of the knob, tried to turn it
slowly. But it was locked, so he put the muzzle of the pistol against
the base of the knob plate.

"Hatch," Lindsey said plaintively, "he'll kill her."

He thought of the young blonde taking two bullets in the chest, flying
backward out of the car onto the freeway, tumbling, tumbling along the
pavement into the fog. And the mother suffering the massive blade of
the butcher knife as she dropped her knitting and struggled desperately
for her life.

He said, "He'll kill her anyway, turn your face away," and he pulled the
trigger.

Wood and thin metal dissolved into splinters. He grabbed the brass
knob, it came off in his hand, and he threw it aside. When he shoved on
the door, it creaked inward an inch but no farther. The cheap lock had
disintegrated. But the shank on which the knob had been seated was
still bristling from the wood, and something must have been wedged under
the other knob on the inside. He pushed on the shank with the palm of
his hand, but that didn't provide enough force to move it; whatever was
wedged against the other side-most likely the girls desk chair-was
exerting upward pressure, thereby holding the shank in place.

Hatch gripped the Browning by its barrel and used the butt as a hammer.

Cursing, he pounded the shank, driving it inch by inch back through the
door.

Just as the shank flew free and clattered to the floor inside, a vivid
series of images flooded through Hatch's mind, temporarily washing away
the upstairs hall. They were all from the killer's eyes: a weird angle,
looking up at the side of a house, this house, the wall outside Regina's
bedroom.

The open window. Below the sill, a tangle of trumpet-vine running A
hornlike flower in his face. Latticework under his hands, splinters
digging into his skin. Clutching with one hand, searching with the
other for a new place to grip, one foot dangling in space, a weight
bearing down hard over his shoulder. Then a creaking, a splitting sound
A sudden sense of perilous looseness in the geometric web to which he
clung Hatch was snapped back to reality by a brief, loud noise from
beyond the door: clattering and splintering wood, nails popping loose


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with tortured screeches, scraping, a crash.

Then a new wave of psychic images and sensations surged through him.

Falling. Backward and out into the night. Not far, hitting the ground,
a brief flash of pain. Rolling once on the grass. Beside him, a small
huddled form, lying still. Scuttling to it, seeing the face.

Regina.    Eyes closed.        A scarf tied across her mouth "Regina!" Lindsey
cried.

When reality clicked into once again, Hatch was already sag his shoulder
against the bedroom door. The brace on the other side fell away. The
door shuddered open. He went inside, slapping the wall with one hand
until he found the light switch. In the sudden glare, he stepped over
the fallen desk chair and swung the Browning right, then left. The room
was empty which he already knew from his vision.

At the open window he looked out at the collapsed trellis and tangled
vines on the lawn below. There was no sign of the man in sunglasses or
of Regina.

"Shit!" Hatch hurried back across the room, grabbing Lindsey, turning
her around, pushing her through the door, into the hall, toward the head
of the stairs. "You take the front, I'll take the back, he's got her,
stop him, 1 go, go." She didn't resist, picked up at once on what he was
saying, and flew down the steps with him at her heels.

"Shoot him, bring him down, aim for the legs, can't worry about hitting
Regina, he's getting away!"

In the foyer Lindsey reached the front door even as Hatch was coming off
the bottom step and turning toward the short hallway. He dashed into
the family room, then into the kitchen, peering out the back windows of
the house as he ran past them. The lawn and patios were well lighted,
but he didn't see anyone out there.

He tore open the door between the kitchen and the garage, stepped
through, switched on the lights. He raced across the three stalls,
behind the cars, to the exterior door at the far end even before the
last of the fluorescent tubes had stopped flickering and come all the
way on.

He disengaged the dead-bolt lock, stepped out into the narrow side yard,
and glanced to his right. No killer. No Regina. The front of the
house lay in that direction, the street, more houses facing theirs from
the other side. That was part of the territory Lindsey already was
covering.

His heart knocked so hard, it seemed to drive each breath out of his
lungs before he could get it all the way in.

She's only ten, only tea He turned left and ran along the side of the
house, around the corner of the garage, into the backyard, where the
fallen trellis and trumpet vines lay in a heap.

So small, a little thing.           God, please.

Afraid of stepping on a nail and disabling himself, he skirted the
debris and searched frantically along the perimeter of the property,
plunging recklessly into the shrubbery, probing behind the tall
eugenias.



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No one was in the backyard.

He reached the side of the property farthest from the garage, almost
slipped and fell as he skidded around the corner, but kept his balance.

He thrust the Browning out in front of him with both hands, covering the
walkway between the house and the fence. No one there, either.

He'd heard nothing from out front, certainly no , which meant Lindsey
must be having no better luck than he was. If the killer had not gone
that way, the only other thing he could have done was scale the fence on
one side or another, escaping into someone else's property.

Turning away from the front of the house, Hatch surveyed the seven
foot-high fence that encircled the backyard, separating it from the
abutting yards of the houses to the east, west, and south.

Developers and Realtors called it a fence in southern California,
although it was actually a wall, concrete blocks reinforced with steel
and covered with stucco, capped with bricks, painted to match the
houses. Most neighborhoods had them, guarantors of privacy at swimming
pools or barbecues. Good fences make good neighbors, make strangers for
neighbor and make it damn easy for an intruder to scramble over a single
barrier and vanish from one part of the maze into another.

Hatch was on an emotional wire-walk across a chasm of despair, his
balance sustained only by the hope that the killer couldn't move fast
with Regina in his arms or over his shoulder. He looked east, west,
south, frozen by indecision.

Finally he started toward the back wall, which was on their southern
flank. He halted, gasping and bending forward, when the mysterious
connection between him and the man in sunglasses was re-established.

Again Hatch saw through the other man's eyes, and in spite of the
sunglasses the night seemed more like late twilight. He was in a car,
behind the steering wheel, leaning across the console to adjust the
unconscious girl in the passenger seat as if she were a mannequin.

Her wrists were lashed together in her lap, and she was held in place by
the safety harness.

After arranging her auburn hair to cover the scarf that crossed the back
of her head, he pushed her against the door, so she slumped with her
face turned away from the side window. People in passing cars would not
be able to see the gag in her mouth. She appeared to be sleeping.
Indeed she was so pale and still, he suddenly wondered if she was dead.
No point in taking her to his hideaway if she was already dead.

Might as well open the door and push her out, dump the little bitch
right there. He put his hand against her cheek. Her skin was
wonderfully smooth but seemed cool.

Pressing his fingertips to her throat, he detected her heartbeat in a
carotid artery, thumping strongly, so strongly. She was so alive, even
more vital than she had seemed in the vision with the butterfly flitting
around her head. He had never before made an acquisition of such value,
and he was grateful to all the powers of Hell for giving her to him. He
thrilled at the prospect of reaching deep within and clasping that
strong young heart as it twitched and thudded into final stillness, all
the while staring into her beautiful gray eyes to watch life pass out of
her and death enter Hatch's cry of rage, anguish, and terror broke the
psychic connection.


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He was in his backyard again, holding his right hand up in front of his
face, staring at it in horror, as if Regina's blood already stained his
trembling fingers.

He turned away from the back fence, and sprinted along the east side of
the house, toward the front.

But for his own hard breathing, all was quiet. Evidently some of the
neighbors weren't home. Others hadn't heard anything, or at least not
enough to bring them outside.

The serenity of the community made him want to scream with frustration.

Even as his own world was falling apart, however, he realized the
appearance of normality was exactly that-merely an appearance, not a
reality. God knew what might be happening behind the walls of some of
those houses, horrors equal to the one that had overcome him and Lindsey
and Regina, perpetrated not by an intruder but by one member of a family
upon another. The human species pose a knack for creating monsters, and
the beasts themselves often had a talent for hiding away behind
convincing masks of sanity.

When Hatch reached the front lawn, Lindsey was nowhere to be seen.

He hurried to the walkway, through the open door-and discovered her in
the den, where she was standing beside the desk, making a phone call.

"You find her?" she asked.

"No.    What're you doing?"

"Calling the police."

Taking the receiver out of her hand, dropping it onto the phone, he
said, "By the time they get here, listen to our story, and start to do
something, he'll be gone, he'll have Regina so far away they'll never
find her-until they stumble across her body someday."

"But we need help-" Snatching the shotgun off the desk and pushing it
into her hands, he said, "We're going to follow the bastard. He's got
her in a car. A Honda, I think."

"You have a license number?"

"No."

"Did you see if-"

"I didn't actually see anything," he said, jerking open the desk drawer,
plucking out the box of 12-gauge ammunition, handing that to her as
well, desperately aware of the seconds ticking away. "I'm connecting
with him, it flickers in and out, but I think the link is good enough,
strong enough."

He pulled his     ring of keys from the desk lock, in which he had left them
dangling when     he had taken the magazine from the drawer. "We can stay
on his ass if     we don't let him get too far ahead of us." Hurrying into
the foyer, he     said, "But we have to move."

"Hatch, wait!"

He stopped and swiveled to face her as she followed him out of the den.



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She said, "You go, follow them if you think you can, and I'll stay here
to talk to the cops, get them started-" Shaking his head, he said, "No.

I need you to drive. These... these visions are like being punched, I
sort of black out, I'm disoriented while it's happening. There's no way
I won't run the car right off the damn road.

Put the shotgun and the shells in the Mitsubishi." Climbing the stairs
two at a time, he shouted back to her: "And get flashlights."

"Why?"

"I don't know, but we'll need them."

He was lying. He had been somewhat surprised to hear himself ask for
flashlights, but he knew his subconscious was driving him at the moment,
and he had a hunch why flashlights were going to be essential.

In his nightmares over the past couple of months, he had often moved
through cavernous rooms and a made of concrete corridors that were
somehow revealed in spite of having no windows or artificial lighting.

One tunnel in particular, sloping down into perfect blackness, into
something unknown, him with such dread that his heart swelled and
pounded as if it would burst. That was why they needed
flashlights-because they were going where he had previously been only in
dreams or in visions, into the heart of the nightmare.

He was all the way upstairs and entering Regina's room before he that he
didn't know why he had gone there. Stopping just inside the threshold,
he looked down at the broken doorknob and the overturned desk chair,
then at the closet where clothes had fallen off the hangers and were
lying in a pile, then at the open window where the night breeze had
begun to stir the drapenes.

Something... something important.                Right here, right now, in this room,
something he needed.

But what?

He switched the Browning to his left hand, wiped the damp palm of his
right hand against his jeans. By now the son of a bitch in the
sunglasses had started the car and was on his way out of the
neighborhood with Regina, probably on Crown Valley Parkway already.

Every second counted.

Although he was beginning to wonder if he had flown upstairs in a panic
rather than because there was anything he really needed, Hatch decided
to trust the compulsion a little further. He went to the corner desk
and let his gaze travel over the books, pencils, and a notebook. The
bookcase next to the desk. One of Lindsey's paintings on the wall
beside it.

Come on, come on. Something he needed... needed as badly as the
flashlights, as badly as the shotgun and the box of shells.

Something.

He turned, saw the crucifix, and went straight for it. He scrambled
onto Regina's bed and wrenched the cross from the wall behind it.

Off the bed and on the floor again, heading out of the room and along



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the hall toward the stairs, he gripped the icon tightly, fisted his
right hand around it. He realized he was holding it as if it were not
an object of religious symbolism and veneration but a weapon, a hatchet
or cleaver.

By the time he got to the garage, the big sectional door was rolling up.

Lindsey had started the car.

When Hatch got in the passenger's side, Lindsey looked at the crucifix.

"What's that for?"

"We'll need it."

Backing out of the garage, she said, "Need it for what?"

"I don't know."

As the car rolled into the street, she looked at Hatch curiously. "A
crucifix.?", "I don't know, but maybe it'll be useful. When linked with
him he was he felt thankful to all the powers of Hell, that's how it
went through his mind, thankful to all the powers of Hell for giving
Regina to him." He pointed left. "That way."

Fear had aged Lindsey a few years in the past ten minutes. Now the
lines in her face grew deeper still as she threw the car in gear and
left.

"Hatch, what are we dealing with here, one of those Satanists, those
crazies, guys in these cults you read about in the paper, when they
catch one of them, they find severed heads in the refrigerator, bones
buried under the front porch?"

"Yeah, maybe, something like that." At the intersection he said, "Left
here. Maybe something like that... but worse, I think."

"We can't handle this, Hatch."

"The hell we can't," he said sharply. "There's no time for anybody else
to handle it. If we don't, Regina's dead."

They came to an intersection with Crown Valley Parkway, which was a wide
four- to six-lane boulevard with a garden strip and trees planted down
the center. The hour was not yet late, and the parkway was busy, though
not crowded.

"Which way?" Lindsey asked.

Hatch put his Browning on the floor.               He did not let go of the crucifix.

He held it in both hands. He looked left and right, left and right,
waiting for a feeling, a sign, something. The headlights of passing
cars washed over them but brought no revelations.

"Hatch?" Lindsey said worriedly.

Left and right, left and right.             Nothing.      Jesus.

Hatch thought about Regina. Auburn hair. Gray eyes. Her right hand
curled and twisted like a claw, a gift from God. No, not from God.

Not this time. Can't blame them all on God.                   She might have been right:
a gift from her parents, drug-users' legacy.


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A car pulled up behind them, waiting to get out onto the main street.

The way she walked, determined to the limp. The way she never cn her
deformed hand, neither ashamed nor proud of it, just accepting. Going
to be a writer. Intelligent pigs from outer space.

The driver waiting behind them blew his horn.

"Hatch?"

Regina, so small under the weight of the world, yet always standing
straight, her head never bowed. Made a deal with God. In return for
something precious to her, a promise to eat beans. And Hatch knew what
the precious thing was, though she had never said it, knew it was a
family, a chance to escape the orphanage.

The other driver blew his horn again.

Lindsey was shaking.            She started to cry.

A chance.        Just a chance.        All the girl wanted.           Not to be alone any
more.

A chance to sleep in a painted bed with flowers. a chance to love, be
loved, grow up. The small curled hand. The small sweet smile. Good
night. .

.     Dad The driver behind them blew his horn insistently.

"Right," Hatch said abruptly.                "Go right."

With a sob of relief, Lindsey turned right onto the parkway. She drove
faster than she usually did, changing lanes as traffic required,
crossing the southern flatlands toward the distant food and the
night-shrouded mountains in the east.

At first Hatch was not sure that he had done more than guess at what
direction to take. But soon conviction came to him. The boulevard led
east between endless tracts of houses that speckled the hills with
lights as if they were thousands of memorial flames on the tiers of
immense votivedle racks, and with each mile he sensed more strongly that
he and Lindsey were following in the wake of the beast.

Because he had agreed there would be no more secrets between them,
because he thought she should know-and could handle-a full understanding
of the extremity of Regina's circumstances, Hatch said, "What he wants
to do is hold her beating heart in his bare hand for its last few beats,
feel the life go out of it."

"Oh, God."

"She's still alive.            She has a chance.         There's hope."

He believed what he said was true, had to believe it or go mad. But he
was troubled by the memory of having said those same things so often in
the weeks before cancer had finally finished with Jimmy.

Death is no fearsome mystery.

He is willing to thee andme.

He hath no secrets he can choose to trouble any good man's sleep.



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Turn not thy face from Death away.

Care not he takes our breath away.

Fear him not, he is not thy master, rushing at thee faster, faster.

Not thy master but servant to the Maker of thee, what or Who created
Death, created thee is the only mystery.

THE BOOK Of COUNTED SORROWS Jonas Nyebern and Kari Dovell sat in
armchairs before the big windows in the darkened living room of his
house on Spyglass Hill, looking at the millions of lights that glimmered
across Orange and Los Angeles counties.

The night was relatively clear, and they could see as far as Long Hatch
Harbor to the north. Civilization sprawled like a luminescent fungus,
devouring all.

A bottle of Robert Mondavi chenin blanc was in an ice bucket on the
floor between their chairs. It was their second bottle. They had not
eaten dinner yet. He was talking too much.

They had been seeing each other socially once or twice a week for more
than a month. They had not gone to bed together, and he didn't think
they ever would. She was still desirable, with that odd combination of
grace and awkwardness that sometimes reminded him of an exotic
long-legged crane, even if the side of her that was a serious and
dedicated physician could never quite let the woman in her have full
rein. However, he doubted she even expected physical intimacy. In any
case, he didn't believe he was capable of it. He was a haunted man; too
many ghosts waited to bedevil him if happiness came within his reach.
What each of them got from the relationship was a friendly ear,
patience, and genuine sympathy without maudlin excess.

That evening he talked about Jeremy, which was not a subject conducive
to romance even if there had been any prospect of it. Mostly he worried
over the signs of Jeremy's congenital madness that he'd failed to
realize-admit-were signs.

Even as a child Jeremy had been unusually quiet, invariably preferring
solitude to anyone's company. That was explained away as simple
shyness. From the earliest age he seemed to have no interest in toys,
which was written off to his indisputably high intelligence and a
too-serious nature. But now all those untouched model airplanes and
games and balls and elaborate Erector sets were disquieting indications
that his interior fantasy life had been richer than any entertainment
that could be provided by Tonka, Mattel, or Lionel.

"He was never able to receive a hug without stiffening a little," Jonas
remembered. "When be returned a kiss for a kiss, he always planted his
lips on the air instead of your cheek."

"Lots of kids have difficulty being demonstrative," Kari insisted. She
lifted the wine bottle from the ice, leaned out, and refilled the glass
he held.

"It would seem like just another aspect of his shyness. Shyness and
self effacement aren't faults, and you couldn't be expected to see them
that way."

"But it wasn't self-effacement," he said miserably.                        "It was an
inability to feel, to care."



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"You can't keep heating up like this, Jonas."

"What if Marion and Stephanie weren't even the first?"

"They must have been."

"But what if they weren't?"

"A teenage boy might be a killer, but he's not going to have the
sophistication to get away with murder for any length of time."

"What if he's killed someone since he slipped away from the rehab
hospital?"

"He's probably been victimized himself Jonas."

"No.   He's not the victim type."

"He's probably dead."

"He's out there somewhere.            Because of me."

Jonas stared at the vast panorama of lights. Civilization lay in all
its glimmering wonder, all its blazing glory, all its bright tenor.

As they approached the San Diego Freeway, Interstate 5, Hatch said,
"South. He's gone south."

Lindsey flipped on the turn signal and caught the entrance ramp just in
time.

At first she had glanced at Hatch whenever she could take her eyes off
the road, expecting him to tell her what he was seeing or receiving from
the man they were trailing. But after a while she focused on the
highway whether she needed to or not, because he was sharing nothing
with her.

She suspected his silence simply meant he was seeing very little, that
the link between him and the killer was either weak or flickering on and
off.

She didn't press him to include her, because she was afraid that if she
distracted him, the bond might be broken altogether-and Regina lost.

Hatch continued to hold the crucifix. Even from the corner of her eye,
Lindsey could see how the fingertips of his left hand ceaselessly traced
the contours of the cast-metal figure suffering upon the faux dogwood
cross.

His gaze seemed to be turned inward, as if he were virtually unaware of
the night and the car in which he traveled.

Lindsey that her life had become as surrealistic as any of her
paintings.

Supernatural experiences were juxtaposed with the familiar mundane
world. Disparate elements filled the composition: crucifixes and guns,
psychic visions and flashlights.

In her paintings, she used surrealism to elucidate a theme, provide
insight. In real life, each intrusion of the surreal only further
confused and mystified her.

Hatch shuddered and leaned forward as far as the safety harness would


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allow, as if he had seen something fantastic and frightening cross the
highway, though she knew he was not actually looking at the blacktop
ahead. He slumped back into his seat. "He's taken the Ortega Highway
exit. East. The same exit's coming up for us in a couple of miles.

East on the Ortega Highway."

Sometimes the headlights of oncoming cars forced him to squint in spite
of the protection provided by his heavily tinted glasses.

As he drove, Vassago periodically glanced at the unconscious girl in the
seat beside him, facing him. Her chin rested on her breast.

Though her head was tipped down and auburn hair hung over one side of
her face, he could see her lips pulled back by the scarf that held in
the gag, the tilt of her pixie nose, all of one closed eyelid and most
of the other such long lashes-and part of her smooth brow. His
imagination played with all the possible ways he might disfigure her to
produce the most effective offering.

She was perfect for his purposes. With her beauty compromised by her
leg and deformed hand, she was already a symbol of God's fallibility.

A trophy, indeed, for his collection.

He was disappointed that he had failed to get the mother, but he had not
given up hope of acquiring her. He was toying with the idea of not
killing the child tonight. If he kept her alive for only a few days, he
might have an opportunity to make another bid for Lindsey. If he had
them together, able to work on them at the same time, he could present
their corpses as a mocking version of Michelangelo's Pta', or dismember
them and stitch them together in a highly imaginative obscene collage.

He was waiting for guidance, another vision, before deciding what to do.

As he took the Ortega highway off-ramp and turned east, he recalled how
Lindsey, at the drawing board in her studio, had reminded him of his
mother at her knitting on the afternoon when he had killed her. Having
disposed of his sister and mother with the same knife in the same hour,
he had known in his heart that he had paved the way to Hell, had been so
convinced that he had taken the final step and impaled himself.

A privately published book had described for him that route to damnation
Titled The Htddm, it was the work of a condemned murderer named Thomas
Nicene who had killed his own mother and a brother, and then committed
suicide. His carefully planned descent into the Pit had been foiled by
a paramedic team with too much dedication and a little luck.

Nicene was revived, healed, imprisoned, put on trial, convicted of
murder, and sentenced to death. Rule-laying society had made it clear
that the power of death, even the right to choose one's own, was not
ever to be given to an individual.

While awaiting execution, Thomas Nicene had committed to paper the
visions of Hell that he had experienced during the time that he had been
on the edge of this life, before the paramedics denied him eternity. His
writings had been smuggled out of prison to fellow believers who could
print and distribute them. Nicene's book was filled with powerful,
convincing images of darkness and cold, not the heat of classic bells,
but visions of a kingdom of vast spaces, chilling emptiness. Peering
through Death's door and the door of Hell beyond, Thomas had seen
titanic powers at work on mysterious structures.



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Demons of colossal size and strength strode through night mists across
lightless continents on unknown missions, each clothed in black with a
Bowing cape and upon its head a shining black helmet with a flared rim.

He had seen dark seas crashing on black shores under starless and
moonless skies that gave the feeling of a subterranean world. Enormous
ships, windowless and mysterious, were driven through the tenebrous
waves by powerful engines that produced a noise like the anguished
screams of multitudes.

When he had read Nicene's words, Jeremy had known they were truer than
any ever inked upon a page, and he had determined to follow the great
man's example. Marion and Stephanie became his tickets to the exotic
and enormously attractive netherworld where he belonged. He had punched
those tickets with a butcher knife and delivered himself to that dark
kingdom, encountering precisely what Nicene promised. He had never
imagined that his own escape from the hateful world of the living would
be undone not by paramedics but by his own father.

He would soon earn repatriation to hell. Glancing at the girl again,
Vassago remembered how she had felt when she shuddered and collapsed
limply in his fierce embrace. A shiver of delicious anticipation
whizzed through He had considered killing his father to learn if that
act would win him back his citizenship in Hades. But he was wart' of
his old man. Jonas Nyebern was a rule-giver and seemed to shine with an
inner light that Vassago found forbidding. His earliest memories of his
father were wrapped up in images of Christ and angels and the Holy
Mother and miracles, scenes from the paintings that Jonas collected and
with which their home had always been decorated. And only two years
ago, his father had rest him in themnnner of Jesus raiimgcold
Consequently, he thought of Jonas not merely as the enemy but as a
figure of power, an embodiment of those bright forces that were opposed
to the will of Hell. His father was no doubt protected, untouchable,
living in the loathsome grace of that other deity.

-His hopes, then, were pinned on the woman and the girl.                     One
acquisition made, the other pending.

He drove east past endless tracts of houses that had sprung up in the
six years since Fantasy World had been abandoned, and he was grateful
that the spawning multitudes of lite-loving hypocrites had not pressed
to the very perimeter of his special hideaway, which still lay miles
beyond the last of the new communities. As the peopled hills passed by,
as the land grew steadily less hospitable though still inhabited,
Vassago drove more slowly than he would have done any other night.

He was waiting for a vision that would tell him if he should kill the
child upon arrival at the park or wait until the mother was his, as
well.

Turning his head to look at her once more, he discovered she was
watching him. Her eyes shone with the reflected light from the
instrument Jonas returned to the living room with the box of items he
had saved panel. He could see that her fear was great.

"Poor baby," he said.          "Don't be afraid.         Okay?     Don't be afraid.

We're just going to an amusement park, that's all.                     You know, like
Disneyland, like Magic Mountain?"

If he was unable to acquire the mother, perhaps he should look for
another child about the same size as Regina, a particularly pretty one


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with four strong, healthy limbs. He could then remake this girl with
the arm, hand, and leg of the other, as if to say that he, a mere
twenty-year-old expatriate of Hell, could do a better job than the
Creator. That would make a fine addition to his collection, a singular
work of art.

He listened to the contained thunder of the engine. The hum of the
tires on the pavement. The soft whistle of wind at the windows.

Waiting for an epiphany. Waiting for guidance. Waiting to be told what
thin he should do. Waiting, waiting, a vision to behold.

Even before they reached the Ortega Highway off-ramp, Hatchreviewed a
flurry of images stranger than anything he had seen before. None lasted
longer than a few seconds, as if he were watching a film with no
narrative structure. Dark seas crashing on black shores under starless
and moonless skies. Enormous ships, windowless and mysterious, driven
through the tenebrous waves by powerful engines that produced a noise
like the anguished screaming of multitudes. Colossal demonic figures, a
hundred feet tall, striding through alien landscapes, black capes
flowing behind them, heads encased in black helmets as shiny as glass.

Titanic, half-glimpsed machines at work on monumental structures of such
odd design that purpose and function could not even be guessed.

Sometimes Hatch saw that hideous landscape in eerily vivid detail, but
sometimes he saw only descriptions of it in words on the printed pages
of a book. If it existed, it must be on some far world, for it was not
of this earth.

But he was never sure if he was receiving pictures of a real place or
one that was merely imagined. At times it seemed as vividly depicted as
any street in Laguna but at other times seemed tissue-paper Jeremy's
room, and put it down beside his armchair. He withdrew from the box a
small, shoddily printed volume titled The Htdaen and gave it to Kari,
who examined it as if he had handed her an object encrusted with filth.

"You're right to wrinkle your nose at it," he said, picking up his glass
of wine and moving to the large window. "It's nonsense. Sick and
twisted but nonsense. The author was a convicted killer who claimed to
have seen Hell. His description isn't like anything in Dante, let me
tell you. Oh, it possesses a certain romance, undeniable power. In
fact, if you were a psychotic young man with delusions of grandeur and a
bent for violence, with the unusually high testosterone levels that
usually accompany a mental condition like that, then the Hell he
describes would be your ultimate wet dream of power. You would swoon
over it. You might not be able to get it out of your mind. You might
for it, do anything to be a pert of it, achieve damnation."

Kari put the book down and wiped her fingertips on the sleeve of her
blouse. "This author, Thomas Nicene-you said he killed his mother."

"Yes. Mother and brother. Set the example." Jonas knew he had already
drunk too much. He took another long sip of his wine anyway.

Turning from the night view, he said, "And you know what makes it all so
absurd, pathetically absurd? If you read that damn book, which I did
afterward, trying to understand, and if you're not psychotic and
disposed to believe it, you'll see right away that Nicene isn't
reporting what he saw in Hell. He's taking his inspiration from a
source as stupidly obvious as it is stupidly ridiculous. Kari, his Hell
is nothing more than the Evil Empire in the Star Wars movies, somewhat


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changed, expanded upon, filmed through the lens of religious myth, but
still Star Wars." A bitter laugh escaped him. He it with more wine.
"His demons are nothing more than hundred-foot-tall versions of Darth
Vader, for God's sake.

Read his description of Satan and then go look at whichever film Jabba
the Hut was a part of. Old Jabba the Hut is a ringer for Satan, if you
believe this lunatic." One more glass of chenin blanc, one more glass.

"Marion and Stephanie died-" A sip.               Too long a sip.          Half the glass
gone.

"-died so Jeremy could get into Hell and have great, dark, anti-heroic
adventures in a fucking Darth Vader costume."

He had offended or unsettled her, probably both. That had not been his
intention, and he regretted it. He wasn't sure what his intention had
been.

Maybe just to unburden himself He had never done so before, and he
didn't know why he'd chosen to do so tonight-except that Morton Redlow's
disappearance had scared him more than anything since the day he had
found the bodies of his wife and daughter.

Instead of pouring more wine for herself, Kari rose from her armchair.

"I think we should get something to eat.

"Not hungry," he said, and heard the slur of the inebriate in his voice.

"Well, maybe we should have something."

"We could go out somewhere," she said, taking the wine glass from his
hand and putting it on the nearest end table. Her face was quite lovely
in the ambient light that came through the view windows, the golden
radiance from the web of cities below. "Or call for pizza."

"How about steaks?        I've got some fillets in the freezer."

"That'll take too long."

"Sure won't.      Just thaw em out in the microwave, throw em on the grill.

There's a big Gaggenau grill in the kitchen."

"Well, if that's what you'd like."

He met her eyes. Her gaze was as clear, penetrating, and forthright as
ever, but Jonas saw a greater tenderness in her eyes than before. He
supposed it was the same concern she had for her young patients; part of
what made her a first-rate pediatric physician. Maybe that tenderness
had always been there for him, too, and he had just not seen it until
now. Or perhaps this was the first time she how desperately he needed
nurNrmg.

"Thank you, Kari."

"For what?"

"For being you," he said. He put his arm around her shoulders as he
walked her to the kitchen.

Mixed with the visions of gargantuan machines and dark seas and colossal
demonic figures, Hatch received an array of images of other types.


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Choiring angels. The Holy Mother in prayer. Christ with the Apostles
at the Last Supper, Christ in Gethsemane, Christ in agony upon the
cross, Christ ascending.

He recognized them as paintings Jonas Nyebern might have collected at
one time or another. They were different periods and styles from those
he had seen in the physician's office, but in the same spirit. A
connection was made, a braiding of wires in his subconscious, but he
didn't understand what it meant yet.

And more visions: the Ortega Highway. Glimpses of the nightscapes
unrolling on both sides of an eastward-bound car. Instruments on a
dashboard. Oncoming headlights that sometimes made him squint. And
suddenly Regina. Regina in the backsplash of yellow light from that
same instrument panel. Eyes closed. Head tipped forward. Something
wadded in her mouth and held in place by a scarf.

She opens her eyes.

Looking into Regina's terrified eyes, Hatch broke from the visions like
an underwater swimmer breaking for air. "She's alive!"

He looked at Lindsey, who shifted her gaze from the highway to him.

"But you never said she wasn't."

Until then he did not how little faith he'd had in the girls continued
existence.

Before he could take heart from the sight of her gray eyes gleaming in
the yellow dashboard light of the killer's car, Hatch was hit by new
clairvoyant visions that pummeled him as hard as a series of blows from
real fists: Contorted figures loomed out of murky shadows. Human forms
in bizarre positions. He saw a woman as withered and dry as tumbleweed,
another in a repugnant state of putrefaction, a mad face of
indeterminate sex, a bloated green-black hand raised in horrid
supplication. The collection. His collection. He saw Regina's face
again, eyes open, revealed in the dashboard lights. So many ways to
disfigure, to mutilate, to mock God's work. Regina. Poor baby. Don't
be afraid, Okay? Don't be afraid. We're only going to an amusement
park You know, like Disneyland, like Magic Mountain? How nicely will
she fit in my collection. Corpses as performance art, held in place by
wires, rebar, blocks of wood. He saw frozen screams, silent forever.

Skeletal jaws held open in eternal cries for mercy. The precious
collection. Regina, sweet baby, pretty baby, such an exquisite
acquisition.

Hatch came out of his trance, clawing wildly at his safety harness, for
it felt like binding wires, ropes, and cords He tore at the straps as a
panicked victim of premature burial might rip at his enwrapping shrouds.

He realized that he was shouting, too, and sucking breath as if in fear
of suffocation, letting it out at once in great explosive exhalations.

He heard Lindsey saying his name, understood that he was terrifying her,
but could not say anything or stop crying out for long seconds, until he
had found the release on the safety harness and cast it off.

With that, he was fully back in the Mitsubishi, contact with the madman
broken for the moment, the horror of the collection diminished though
not forgotten, not in the least forgotten. He turned to Lindsey,
remembering her fortitude in the icy waters of that mountain river the


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night that she had saved him.             She would need all of that strength and
more tonight.

fantasy World," he said urgently, "where they had the fire years ago,
abandoned now, that's where he's going. Jesus Christ, Lindsey, drive
like you've never driven in your life, put the pedal to the floor, the
son of a bitch, the crazy rotten son of a bitch is taking her down among
the dead!"

And they were flying. Though she could have no idea what he meant, they
were suddenly flying eastward faster than was safe on that highway,
through the last clusters of closely spaced lights, out of civilization
into ever darker realms.

While she searched the refrigerator in the kitchen for the makings of a
salad, Jonas went to the garage to liberate a couple of steaks from the
chest-style freezer. The garage vents brought in the coolish night air,
which The found refreshing. He stood for a moment just inside the door
from the house, taking slow deep breaths to clear his head a little.

He had no appetite for anything except perhaps more wine, but he did not
want Kari to see him drunk. Besides, though he had no surgery scheduled
for the following day, he never knew what emergency might require the
skills of the resuscitation team, and he felt a responsibility to those
potential patients.

In his darkest hours, be sometimes considered leaving the field of
resuscitation medicine to concentrate on cardiovascular surgery. When
he saw a reanimated patient return to a useful life of work and family
and service, The knew a reward sweeter than most other men could ever
know. But in the moment of crysus, when the candidate for resuscitation
lay on the table, Jonas rarely knew anything about him, which meant he
might sometimes bring evil back into the world once the world had shed
it. That was more than a moral dilemma to him; it was a crushing weight
upon his conscience. Thus far, being a religious man-though with his
share of doubts-he had trusted in God to guide him.

He had decided that God had given him his brain and his skills to use,
and it was not his place to out-guess God and withhold his services from
any patient.

Jeremy, of course, was an unsettling new factor in the equation. If he
had brought Jeremy hack, and if Jeremy had killed innocent people... It
did not bear thinking about.

The cool air no longer seemed refreshing.                 It seeped into the hollows of
his spine.

Okay, dinner. Two steaks. Filet mignon. Lightly grilled, with a
little Worcestershire sauce. Salads with no dressing but a squirt of
lemon and a sprinkle of black pepper. Maybe he did have an appetite.

He didn't eat much red meat; it was a rare treat. He was a heart
surgeon, after all, and saw firsthand the gruesome effects of a high-fat
diet.

He went to the freezer in the corner.                He pushed the latch-release and
put up the lid.

Within lay Morton Redlow, late of the Redlow Detective Agency, pale and
gray as if carved from marble but not yet obscured by a layer of frost.

A smear of blood had frozen into a brittle crust on his face, and there


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was a terrible vacancy where his nose had been.                    His eyes were open.

Forever.

Jonas did not recoil. As a surgeon, he was equally familiar with the
horrors and wonders of biology, and he was not easily repulsed.

Something in him withered when he saw Redlow.                   Something in him died.

His heart turned as cold as that of the detective before him. In some
fundamental way, he knew that he was finished as a man. He didn't trust
God any more. Not any more. What God? But he was not nauseated or
forced to turn away in disgust.

He saw the folded note clutched in Redlow's stiff right hand. The dead
man let go of it easily, for his fingers had contracted during the
freezing process, shrinking away from the paper around which the killer
had pressed them.

Numbly, he unfolded the letter and immediately recognized his son's neat
penmanship. The post-coma aphasia had been faked. His retardation was
an immensely clever ruse.

The note said, Dear D: For a proper burial, they'll need to know where
to find his nose. Look on his back end He stuck it in my business, so I
stuck it in his. If he'd had any manners, I would have treated him
better.

I'm sorry, sir, that this behavior distresses you so.

Lindsey drove with utmost urgency, pushing the Mitsubishi to its limits,
finding every planning flaw in a highway not always designed for speed.

There was little traffic as they moved deeper into the east, which
stacked the odds in their favor when once she crossed the center line in
the middle of a too-tight turn.

Having snapped on his safety harness again, Hatch used the car phone to
get Jonas Nyebern's office number from information, then to call the
number itself, which was answered at once by a physician's-service
operator. She took his message, which baffled her. Although the
operator seemed sincere in her promised to pass it on to the doctor,
Hatch was not confident that his definition of "immediately" and hers
were materially the same.

He saw all the connections so clearly now, but he knew he could not have
seen them sooner. Jonas's question in the office on Monday took on a
new significance: Did Hatch, he asked, believe that evil was only the
result of the acts of men, or did he think that evil was a real force, a
presence that walked the world? The story Jonas had told of losing wife
and daughter to a homicidal, psychopathic son, and the son himself to
suicide, connected now to the vision of the woman knitting.

The father's collections. And the son's. The Satanic aspects to the
visions were what one might expect from a bad son in mindless rebellion
against a father to whom religion was a center post of life. And
finally-he and Jeremy Nyebern shared one obvious link, miraculous
resurrection at the hands of the same man.

"But how does that explain anything?" Lindsey demanded, when he told her
only a little more than he had told the physician's-service operator.

"I don't know."


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He couldn't think about anything except what he had seen in the last
visions, less than half of which he understood. The part he had
comprehended, the nature of Jeremy's collection, filled him with fear
for Without having seen the collection as Hatch had seen it, Lindsey was
fixated, instead, on the mystery of the link, which was somewhat
explained-yet not explained at all-by learning the identity of the
killer in sunglasses. "What about the visions? How do they fit the
damned composition?" she insisted, trying to make sense of the
supernatural in perhaps not too different a way from that in which she
made sense of the world by reducing it to ordered images on Masonite.

"I don't know," he said.

"The link that's letting you follow him-"

"I don't know."

She took a turn too wide. The car went off the pavement, onto the
gravel shoulder. The back end slid, gravel spraying out from beneath
the tires and rattling against the undercarriage. The guardrail flashed
close, too close, and the car was shaken by the hard bang-bang-bang of
sheet metal taking a beating. She seemed to bring it back under control
by a sheer effort of will, biting her lower lip so hard it appeared as
if she would draw blood.

Although Hatch was aware of Lindsey and the car and the reckless speed
they were keeping along that sometimes dangerously curved highway, he
could not turn his mind from the outrage he had seen in the vision.

The longer he thought about Regina being added to that grisly
collection, the more his fear was augmented by anger. It was the hot,
uncontainable anger he had seen so often in his father, but directed now
against something deserving of hatred, against a target worthy of such
seething rage.

As he watched the entrance road to the abandoned park, Vassago glanced
away from the now lonely highway, to the girl who was bound and gagged
in the other seat. Even in that peculiar light he could see that she
had been straining at her bonds. Her wrists were chafed and beginning
to bleed. Little Regina had hopes of breaking free, striking out or
escaping, though her situation was so clearly hopeless. Such vitality.

She thrilled him.

The child was so special that he might not need the mother at all, if he
could think of a way to place her in his collection that would result in
a piece of art with all the power of the various mother-daughter
tableaux that he had already conceived.

He had been unconcerned with speed. Now, after he turned off the
highway onto the park's long approach road, he accelerated, eager to
return to the museum of the dead with the hope that the atmosphere there
would inspire him.

Years ago, the four-lane entrance had been bordered by lush flowers,
shrubbery, and groupings of paims. The trees and larger shrubs had been
dug up, potted, and hauled away ages ago by agents of the creditors. The
flowers had died and turned to dust when the landscape watering system
had been shut off.

Southern California was a desert, transformed by the hand of man, and
when the hand of man moved on, the desert reclaimed its rightful


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territory.

So much for the genius of humanity, God's imperfect creatures. The
pavement had cracked and hoved from years of inattention, and in places
it had begun to vanish under drifts of sandy soil. His headlights
revealed tumbleweed and scraps of other desert brush, already brown
hardly six weeks after the end of the rainy season, chased westward by a
night wind that came out of the parched hills.

When he reached the tollbooths he slowed down. They stretched across
all four lanes. They had been left standing as a barrier to easy
exploration of the shuttered park, linked and closed off by chains so
heavy that simple bolt cutters could not sever them. Now the bays, once
overseen by attendants, were filled with tangled brush that the wind had
put there and trash deposited by vandals. He pulled around the booths,
bouncing over a low curb and traveling on the sun-hardened soil of the
planting beds where lush tropical landscaping would once have blocked
the way, then back to the pavement when he had broken the barrier.

At the end of the entrance road, he switched off his headlights. He
didn't need them, and he was at last beyond the notice of any highway
patrolmen who might pull him over for driving without lights. His eyes
immediately felt more comfortable, and now if his pursuers drew too
close, they would not be able to follow him by sight alone.

He angled across the immense and eerily empty parking lot. He was
heading toward a service road at the southwest corner of the inner fence
that circled the grounds of the park property. As the Honda jolted over
the pot-holed blacktop, Vassago ransacked his imagination, which was a
busy abattoir of psychotic industry, seeking solutions for the artistic
problems presented by the child. He conceived and rejected concept
after concept. The image must stir him. Excite him.

If it was really art, he would know it; he would be moved.

As Vassago lovingly envisioned tortures for Regina, he became aware of
the other strange presence in the night and its singular rage.

Suddenly he was plunged into another psychic vision, a flurry of
elements, with one crucial new addition: he got a glimpse of Lindsey
behind the wheel of a car. . . a car phone in a man's trembling hand.

.     and then the object that instantly resolved his artistic dilemma.. .

a crucifix. The nailed and tortured body of Christ in its famous
posture of noble self-sacrifice.

He blinked away that image, glanced at the petrified girl in the car
with him, blinked her away as well, and in his imagination saw the two
combined-girl and crucifiction. He would use Regina to mock the
Cruciixion.

Yes, lovely, perfect.             But not raised upon a cross of dogwood.

Instead, she must be executed upon the segmented belly of the Serpent,
under the bosom of the thirty-foot Lucifer in the deepest regions of the
funhouse, crucified and her sacred heart revealed, as backdrop to the
rest of his collection. Such a cruel and stunning use of her negated
the Deed to include her mother, for in such a pose she would alone be
his crowning achievement.

Hatch was frantically trying to contact the Orange County Sheriff's
Department on the cellular car phone, which was having transmission


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problems, when he felt the intrusion of another image. He "saw" images
of Regina disfigured in a multitude of ways, and he began to shake with
rage.

Then he was struck by a vision of a vision, it was so powerful, vivid,
and monstrous that it almost rendered him unconscious as effectively as
a skull-cracking blow from a hard-swung hammer.

He urged Lindsey to drive faster, without explaining what he had seen.

He couldn't speak of it.

The terror was amplified by Hatch's perfect understanding of the
statement Jeremy intended to make by the perpetration of the outrage.

Was God in error to have made His Only Begotten Child a man? Should
Christ have been a woman? Were not women those who had suffered the
most and therefore served as the greatest symbol of self-sacrifice,
grace, and innocence? God had granted women a special sensitivity, a
talent for understanding and tenderness, for caring and nurturing-then
had dumped them into a world of savage violence in which their singular
qualities made them easy targets for the cruel and depraved.

Horror enough existed in that truth, but a greater horror, for Hatch,
lay in the discovery that anyone as insane as Jeremy Nyebern could have
such a complex insight. If a homicidal sociopath could perceive such a
truth and grasp its theological implications, then creation itself must
be an asylum. For surely, if the universe were a rational place, no
madman would be able to understand any portion of it.

Lindsey reached the approach road to Fantasy World and took the turn so
fast and sharp that the Mitsubishi slid sideways and felt, for a moment,
as if it would roll. But it remained upright. She pulled hard on the
wheel, brought it around, tramped on the accelerator.

Not Regina. No way was Jeremy going to be permitted to realize his
decadent vision with that lamb of innocence. Hatch was prepared to die
to prevent it.

Fear and fury flooded him in equal torrents. The plastic casing of the
cellular-phone handset creaked in his right fist as though the pressure
of his grip would crack it as easily as if it had been an eggshell.

Tollbooths appeared ahead. Lindsey braked indecisively, then seemed to
notice the tire tracks through the drifting, sandy earth at the same
time Hatch saw them. She whipped the car to the right, and it bounced
over the concrete border of what had once been a flower bed.

He had to rein in his rage, not succumb to it as his father had always
done, for if he didn't remain in control of himself, Regina was as good
as dead. He tried to place the emergency 911 call again. Tried to hold
fast to his reason. He must not descend to the level of the walking
filth through whose eye she had seen the bound wrists and frightened
eyes of his child.

The surge of rage pouring back across the telepathic wire excited
Vassago, pumped up his own hatred, and convinced him that he must not
wait until both the woman and the child were within his grasp. Even the
prospect of the single crucifixion brought him such a richness of
loathing and revulsion that he knew his artistic concept was of
sufficient power. Once realized through the death of the gray-eyed
girl, his art would reopen the doors of Hell to him.



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He had to stop the Honda at the entrance to the service road, which
appeared to be blocked by a padlocked gate. He had broken the massive
padlock long ago. It only hung through the hasp with the appearance of
effectiveness. He got out of the car, opened the gate, drove through,
got out again and closed it.

Behind the wheel once more, he decided not to leave the Honda in the
underground garage or go to the museum of the dead through the
catacombs. No time. God's slow but persistent paladins were closing in
on him. He had so much to do, so much, in so few precious minutes.

It wasn't fair. He needed time. Every artist needed tine. To save a
few minutes, he was going to have to drive along the wide pedestrian
walkways, between the rotting and empty pavilions, and park in front of
the funhouse, take the girl across the dry lagoon and in by way of the
gondola doors, through the tunnel with the chain-drive track still in
the concrete floor and down into Hell by that more direct route.

While Hatch was on the phone with the sheriff's department, Lindsey
drove into the parking lot. The tall lamp poles shed no light. Vistas
of empty blacktop faded away in every direction. Straight ahead a few
hundred yards stood the once glittery but now dark and decaying castle
through which the paying customers had entered Fantasy World. She saw
no sign of Jeremy Nyebern's car, and not enough dust on the acres of
unprotected, windswept pavement to track him by his tire prints.

She drove as close to the castle as she could get, halted by a long row
of ticket booths and crowd-control stanchions of poured concrete.

They looked like massive barricades on a heavily defended beach to
prevent enemy tanks from being put ashore.

When Hatch slammed down the handset, Lindsey was not sure what to make
of his end of the conversation, which had alternated between pleading
and angry insistence. She didn't know whether the cops were coming or
not, but her sense of urgency was so great, she didn't want to take time
to ask him about it She just wanted to move, move. She threw the car
into park the moment it braked to a full stop, didn't even bother to
switch off the engine or the headlights. She liked the headlights, a
little something against the cloying night. She flung open her door,
ready to go in on foot.

But he shook his head, no, and picked up his Browning from the floor at
his feet.

"What?" she demanded.

"He went in by car somehow, somewhere. I think I'll find the creep
quicker if we stay on his trail, go in the way he went in, let myself
open to this bond between us. Besides, the place is so damned huge,
we'll get around it faster in a car."

She got behind the wheel again, popped the Mitsubishi into gear, and
said, "Where?"

He hesitated only a second, perhaps a fraction of a second, but it
seemed that any number of small helpless girls could have been
slaughtered in that interlude before he said, "Left, go left, along the
fence."

2

Vassago parked the car by the lagoon, cut the engine, got out, and went


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around to the girls side.           Opening her door, he said, "Here we are,
angel.

An amusement park, just like I promised you.                  Isn't it fun?      Aren't you
amused?"

He swung her around on her seat to bring her legs out of the car. He
took his switchblade from his jacket pocket, snapped the well-honed
knife out of the handle, and showed it to her.

Even with the thinnest moon, and although her eyes were not as sensitive
as his, she saw the blade. He saw her see it, and he was thrilled by
the quickening of terror in her face and eyes.

"I'm going to free your legs so you can walk," he told her, turning the
blade slowly, slowly, so a quicksilver glimmer trickled liquidly along
the cuttingedge. "If you're stupid enough to kick me, if you think you
can catch my head maybe and knock me silly long enough to get away, then
you're silly, angel. It won't work, and then I'll have to cut you to
teach you a lesson. Do you hear me, precious? Do you understand?"

She emitted a muffled sound through the wadded scarf in her mouth, and
the tone of it was an acknowledgement of his power.

"Good," he said. "Good girl. So wise.                   You'll make a fine Jesus, won't
you? A really fine little Jesus."

He cut the cords binding her ankles, then helped her out of the car.

She was unsteady, probably because her muscles had cramped during the
trip, but he did not intend to let her dawdle. seizing her by one arm,
leaving her wrists bound in front of her and the gag in place, he pulled
her around the front of the car to the retaining wall of the funhouse
lagoon.

The retaining wall was two feet high on the outside, twice that on the
inside where the water once had been. He helped Regina over it, onto
the dry concrete floor of the broad lagoon. She hated to let him touch
her, even though he still wore gloves, because she could feel his
coldness through the gloves, or thought she could, his coldness and damp
skin, which made her want to scream. She knew already that she couldn't
scream, not with the gag in her mouth. If she tried to scream she only
choked on it and had trouble breathing, so she had to let him help her
over the wall. Even when he didn't touch her bare hand with his gloved
one, even when he gripped her arm and there was also her sweater between
them, the contact made her belly quiver so badly that she thought she
was going to vomit, but she fought that urge because, with the gag in
her mouth, she would choke to death on her own regurgitation.

Through ten years of adversity, Regina had developed lots of tricks to
get her through bad times. There was the think of something-worse
trick, where she endured by imagining what more terrible circumstances
might befall her than those in which she actually found herself Like
thinking of eating dead mice dipped in chocolate when she felt sorry for
herself about having to eat lime Jelly with peaches. Like thinking
about being blind on top of her other disabilities. After the awful
shock of being rejected during her first trial adoption with the
Dotterfields, she had often spent hours with her eyes closed to show
herself what she might have suffered if her eyes had been as faulty as
her right arm. But the think of something-worse trick wasn't working
now because she couldn't think of anything worse than being where she
was, with this stranger dressed all in black and wearing sung at night,


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calling her "baby" and "precious." None of her other tricks were
working, either.

As he pulled her impatiently across the lagoon, she dragged her right
leg as if she could not move fast. She needed to slow him down to gain
time to think, to find some new trick.

But she was just a kid, and tricks didn't come that easy, not even to a
smart kid like her, not even to a kid who had spent ten years devising
so many clever tricks to make everyone think that she could take care of
herself, that she was tough, that she would never cry. But her trick
bag was finally empty, and she was more afraid than she had ever been.

He dragged her past big boats like the gondolas in Venice of which she
had seen pictures, but these had dragon prows from Viking ships. With
the stranger pulling impatiently on her arm, she limped past a fearful
snarling serpent's head bigger than she was.

Dead leaves and moldering papers had blown down into the empty pool.

In the nocturnal breeze, which occasionally gusted heartily, that trash
eddied around them with the hiss-splash of a ghost sea.

"Come on, precious one," he said in his honey-smooth but unkind voice,
"I want you to walk to your Golgotha just as He did. Don't you think
that's fitting? Is that so much to ask? Hmmm? I'm not also insisting
that you carry your own cross, am I? What do you say, precious, will
you move your ass?"

She was scared, with no fine tricks left to hide the fact, no tricks
left to hold back her tears, either. She began to shake and cry, and
her right leg grew weak for real, so she could hardly remain standing
let alone move as fast as he demanded.

In the past, she would have turned to God at a moment like this, would
have talked to Him, talked and talked, because no one had talked to God
more often or more bluntly than she had done from the time she was just
little. But she had been talking to God in the car, and she had not
heard Him listening. Over the years, all their conversations had been
one-sided, yes, but she had always heard Him listening, at least, a hint
of his great slow steady breathing. But now she knew He couldn't be
listening because if He was there, hearing how desperate she was, He
would not have failed to answer her this time. He was gone, and she
didn't know where, and she was alone as she had never been.

When she was so overcome by tears and weakness that she could not walk
at all, the stranger scooped her up. He was very strong. She was
unable to resist, but she didn't hold on to him either. She just curled
her arms against her chest, made small fists of her hands, and pulled
away within herself.

"Let me carry my little Jesus he said, "my sweet little lamb,It will be
my privilege to carry you." There was no warmth in his voice in spite of
the way he was talking. Only hatred and scorn. She knew that tone, had
heard it before. No matter how hard you tried to fit in and be
everybody's friend, some kids hated you if you were too different, and
in their voices you heard this same thing, and shrank from it.

He carried her through the open, broken, rotting doors into a darkness
that made her feel so small.

Lindsey didn't even bother getting out of the car to see if the gate
could be opened. When Hatch pointed the way, she jammed the accelerator


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to the floor. The car bucked, shot forward. They crashed onto the
grounds of the park, demolishing the gate and sustaining more damage to
their already battered car, including one shattered headlight.

At Hatch's direction, she followed a service loop around half the park.

On the left was a high fence covered with the gnarled                      and bristling
remnants of a vine that once might have concealed the                      chainlink entirely
but had died when the irrigation system had been shut                      off. On the right
were the backs of rides that had been too permanently                      constructed to be
dismantled easily. There were also buildings fronted                       by fantastic
facades held up by angled supports that could be seen                      from behind.

Leaving the service road, they drove between two structures and onto
what had once been a winding promenade along which crowds had moved
throughout the park. The largest Ferris wheel she had ever seen,
savaged by wind and sun and years of neglect, rose in the night like the
bones of a leviathan picked clean by unknown carrion-eaters.

a car was parked beside what appeared to be a drained pool in front of
an emmense structure.

"The funhouse," Hatch said, for he had seen it before through other
eyes.

It had a roof with multiple peaks like a three-ring circus tent, and
disintegrating stucco walls. She could view only one narrow aspect of
the structure at a time, as the headlights swept across it, but she did
not like any part of what she saw. She was not by nature a
superstitious person although she was fast becoming one in response to
recent experience-but she sensed an aura of death around the funhouse as
surely as she could have felt cold air rising off a block of ice.

She parked behind the other car. A Honda. Its occupants had departed
in such a hurry that both front doors were open, and the interior lights
were on.

Snatching up her Browning and a flashlight, she got out of the
Mitsubishi and ran to the Honda, looked inside. No sign of Regina.

She had discovered there was a point at which fear could grow no
greater. Every nerve was raw. The brain could not process more input,
so it merely sustained the peak of terror once achieved. Each new
shock, each new terrible thought did not add to the burden of fear
because the brain just dumped old data to make way for the new. She
could hardly remember anything of what had happened at the house, or the
surreal drive to the park; most of it was gone for now, only a few
scraps of memory remaining, leaving her focused on the immediate moment.

On the ground at her feet, visible in the spill of light from the open
car door and then in her flashlight beam, was a four-foot length of
sturdy cord. She picked it up and saw that it had once been tied in a
loop and later cut at the knot.

Hatch took the cord out of her hand.               "It was around Regina's ankles.

He wanted her to walk."

"Where are they now?"

He pointed with his flashlight across the drained lagoon, past the three
large gray canted gondolas with prodigious mastheads, to a pair of
wooden doors in the base of the funhouse. One sagged on broken hinges,


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and the other was open wide. The flashlight was a four-battery model,
just strong enough to cast some dim light on those far doors but not to
penetrate the terrible darkness beyond.

Lindsey took off around the car and scrambled over the lagoon wall.

Though Hatch called out, "Lindsey, wait," she could not delay another
moment-and how could he?-with the thought of Regina in the hands of
Nyebern's resurrected, psychotic son.

As Lindsey crossed the lagoon, fear for Regina still far outweighed any
concern she might have for her own safety. However, realizing that she
herself, must survive if the girl were to have any chance at all, she
swept' the flashlight beam side to side, side to side, wary of an attack
from behind one of the huge gondolas.

Old leaves and paper trash danced in the wind, for the most part
waltzing across the floor of the dry lagoon, but sometimes spinning up
in columns and churning to a faster beat. Nothing else move Hatch
caught up with her by the time she reached the funhouse entrance. He
had delayed only to use the cord she had found to bind his flashlight to
the back of the crucifix. Now he carry both in one hand, pointing the
head of Christ at anything upon which he directed the light.

That left his right hand free for the Browning 9mm. He had left the
Mossberg behind. If he had tied the flashlight to the 12-gauge, he
could have brought both the handgun and the shotgun. Evidently he felt
that the crucifix was a better weapon than the Mossberg.

She didn't know why he had taken the icon from the wall of Regina's
room. She didn't think he knew, either. They were wading hip deep in
the big muddy river of the unknown, and in addition to the cross, she
would have welcomed a necklace of garlic, a vial of holy water, a few
silver bullets, and anything else that might have helped.

As an artist, she had always known that the world of the five senses,
solid and secure, was not the whole of existence, and she had
incorporated that understanding into her work. Now she was merely
incorporating it into the rest of her life, surprised that she had not
done so a long time ago.

With both flashlights carving through the darkness in front of them,
they entered the funhouse.

All of Regina's tricks for coping were not exhausted, after all.                       She in
vented one more.

She found a room deep inside her mind, where she could go and close the
door and be safe, a place only she knew about, in which she could never
be found. It was a pretty room with peach-colored walls, soft lighting,
and a bed covered with painted flowers. Once she had entered, the door
could only be opened again from her side. There were no windows.

Once she was in that most secret of all retreats, it didn't matter what
was done to the other her, the physical Regina in the hateful world
outside.

The real Regina was sale in her hideaway, beyond fear and pain, beyond
tears and doubt and sadness. She could hear nothing beyond the room,
most especially not the wickedly soft voice of the man in black. She
could see nothing beyond the room, only the peach walls and her painted
bed and soft light, never darkness. Nothing beyond the room could
really touch her, certainly not his pale quick hands which had recently


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shed their gloves.

Most important, the only smell in her sanctuary was the scent of roses
like those painted on the bed, a clean sweet fragrance. Never the
stentch of dead things. Never the awful choking odor of decomposition
that could bring a sour saliva gushing into the back of your throat and
nearly strangle you when your mouth was full of crushed scarf. Nothing
like that, no, never, not in her secret room, her blessed room, her deep
and safe and solitary haven.

Something had happened to the girl.               The singular vitality that had made
her so appealing was gone.

When he put her on the floor of Hell, with her back against the base of
the towering Lucifer, he thought she'd passed out. But that wasn't it.

For one thing, when he crouched in front of her and put his hand against
her chest, he felt her heart leaping like a rabbit whose hindquarters
were already in the jaws of the fox. No one could possibly be
unconscious with a thundering heartbeat like that.

Besides, her eyes were open. They were staring blindly, as if she could
find nothing upon which to fix her gaze. Of course, she could not see
him in the dark as he could see her, couldn't see anything else for that
matter, but that wasn't the reason she was staring through him. When he
flicked the eyelash over her right eye with his fingertip, she did not
flinch, did not even blink. Tears were drying on her cheeks, but no new
tears welled up.

Catatonic. The little bitch had blanked out on him, closed her mind
down, become a vegetable. That didn't suit his purpose at all. The
value of the offering was in the vitality of the subject. Art was about
energy, vibrancy, pain, and terror. What statement could he make with
his little grand Christ if she could not experience and express her
agony?

He was so angry with her, just so spitting angry, that he didn't want to
play with her any more. Keeping one hand on her chest, above her
rabbity heart, he took his switchblade from his jacket pocket and popped
it open.

Control.

He would have opened her then, and had the intense pleasure of feeling
her heart go still in his grip, except that he was a Master of the Game
who knew the meaning and value of control. He could deny himself such
transitory thrills in the pursuit of more meaningful and enduring
rewards.

He hesitated only a moment before putting the knife away.

He was better than that.

His lapse surprised him.

Perhaps she would come out of her trance                by the time he was ready to
incorporate her into his collection. If                 not, then he felt sure that the
first driven nail would bring her to her                senses and transform her into
the radiant work of art that he knew she                had the potential to be.

He turned from her to the tools that were piled at the point where the
art of his collection currently ended. He had hammers and screwdrivers,
wrenches and pliers, saws and a miter box, a battery-powered drill with


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an array of bits, screws and nails, rope and wire, brackets of all
kinds, and everything else a handyman might need, all of it purchased at
Sears when he had realized that properly arranging and displaying each
piece in his collection would require the construction of some clever
supports and, in a couple of cases, thematic backdrops.

His chosen medium was not as easy to work with as oil paints or
watercolors or clay or sculptor's granite, for gravity tended to quickly
distort each effect that he achieved.

He knew he was short on time, that on his heels were those who did not
understand his art and would make the amusement park impossible for him
by morning. But that would not matter if he made one more addition to
the collection that rounded it out and earned him the approbation he
sought.

Haste, then.

The first thing to do, before hauling the girl to her feet and bracing
her in a standing position, was to see if the material that composed the
segmented, reptilian belly and chest of the funhouse Lucifer would take
a nail. It seemed to be a hard rubber, perhaps soft plastic.

Depending on thickness, brittleness, and resiliency of the material, a
nail would either drive into it as smoothly as into wood, bounce off, or
bend. If the fake devil's hide proved too resistant, he'd have to use
the battery-powered drill instead of the hammer, two-inch screws instead
of nails, but it shouldn't detract from the artistic integrity of the
piece to lend a modern touch to the reinactment of this ancient ritual.

He hefted the hammer. He placed the nail.                   The first blow drove it a
quarter of the way into Lucifer's abdomen.                  The second blow slammed it
halfway home.

So nails would work just fine.

He looked down at the girl, who still sat on the floor with her back to
the base of the statue. She had not reacted to either of the hammer
blows. He was disappointed but not yet desparing.

Before lifting her into place, he quickly collected everything he would
need. A couple of two-by-fours to serve as braces until the acquisition
was firmly fixed in place. Two nails. Plus one longer and more
wickedly pointed number that could fairly be called a spike. The
hammer, of course.

Hurry. Smaller nails, barely more than tacks, a score of which could be
placed just-so in her brow to represent the crown of thorns. The switch
blade, with which to recreate the spear wound attributed to the taunting
Centurion. Anything else? Think. Quickly now. He had no vinegar or
sponge to soak it in, therefore could not offer that traditional drink
to the dying lips, but he didn't think the absence of that detail would
in any way detract from the composition.

He was ready.

Hatch and Lindsey were deep in the gondola tunnel, proceding as fast as
they dared, but slowed by the need to shine flashlights into the deepest
reaches of each niche and room-size display area that opened off the
flanking walls. The moving beams caused black shadows to fly and dance
off concrete stalactites and stalagmites and other manmade rock
formations, but all of those dangerous spaces were empty.



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Two solid thuds, like hammer blows, echoed to them from farther in the
funhouse, one immediately after the other. Then silence.

"He's ahead of us somewhere," Lindsey whispered, "not real close.                        We
can move faster."

Hatch agreed.

They proceeded along the tunnel without scanning all the deep recesses,
which once had held clockwork monsters. Along the way, the bond between
Hatch and Jeremy Nyebern was established again. He sensed the madman's
excitement, an obscene and palpitating need. He received, as well,
disconnected images: nails, a spike, a hammer, two lengths of two
by-four, a scattering of tacks, the slender steel blade of a knife
popping out of its spring-loaded ban......

His anger mixing with his fear, determined not to let the disorienting
visions impede his advance, he reached the end of the horizontal tunnel
and stumbled a few steps down the incline before he realized that the
angle of the floor had changed radically under his feet.

The first of the odors hit him.             Drifting upward on a natural draft.

He gagged, heard Lindsey do the same, then tightened his throat and
swallowed hard.

He knew what lay below. At least some of it. Glimpses of the
collection had been among the visions that had pounded him when he had
been in the car on the highway. If he didn't get an iron grip on
himself--and stifle his repulsion now, he would never make it all the
way into the depths of this hellhole, and he had to go there in order to
save Regina.

Apparently Lindsey understood, for she found the will to repress her
retching, and she followed him down the steep slope.

The first thing to attract Vassago's attention was the glow of light
high up toward one end of the cavern, far back in the tunnel that led to
the spillway. The rapid rate at which the light grew brighter convinced
him that he would not have time to add the girl to his collection before
the intruders were upon him.

He knew who they were. He had seen them in visions as they, evidently,
had seen him. Lindsey and her husband had followed him all the way from
Laguna Niguel. He was just beginning to recognize that more forces were
at work in this affair than had appeared to be the case at first.

He considered letting them descend the spillway into Hell, slipping
behind them, killing the man, disabling the woman, and then proceeding
with a dual crucifxion. But there was something about the husband that
unsettled him. He couldn't put his finger on it.

But he realized now that, in spite of his bravado, he had been avoiding
a confrontation with the husband. In their house earlier in the night,
when the element of surprise had still been his, he should have circled
behind the husband and disposed of him first, before going after either
Regina or Lindsey. Had he done so, he might have been able to acquire
both woman and child at that time. By now he might have been happily
engrossed in their mutilation.

Far above, the pearly glow of light had resolved into a pair of
flashlight beams at the brink of the spillway. After a brief
hesitation, they started down. Because he had put his sunglasses in his


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shirt pocket, Vassago was forced to squint at the slashing swords of
light.

As before, he decided not to move against the man, choosing instead to
retreat with the child. This time, however, he wondered at his
prudence.

A Master of the Game, he thought, must exhibit iron control and choose
the right moments to prove Ins power and superiority.

True. But this time the thought struck him as spineless justification
for avoiding confrontation.

Nonsense.     He was afraid of nothing in this world.

The flashlights were still a considerable distance away, focused on the
floor of the spillway, not yet to the midpoint of the long incline. He
could hear their footsteps, which grew louder and developed an echo as
the pair advanced into the huge chamber.

He seized the catatonic girl, lifted her as if she weighed no more than
a pillow, slung her over his shoulder, and moved soundlessly across the
floor of Hell toward those rock formations where he knew a door to a
service room was hidden.

"Oh, my God."

"Don't look," he told Lindsey as he swept the beam of his flashlight
across the macabre collection. "Don't look, Jesus, cover my back, make
sure he's not coming around on us."

Gratefully, she did as he said, turning away from the array of posed
cadavers in various stages of decomposition. She was certain that her
sleep, even if she lived to be a hundred, would be haunted every night
by those forms and faces. But who was she kidding-she would never make
a hundred. She was beginning to think she wouldn't even make it through
the night.

The very idea of breathing that air, reeking and impure, through her
mouth was almost enough to make her violently ill. She did it anyway
because it .. . . the stink.

The darkness was so deep. The flashlight seemed barely able to
penetrate. It was like syrup, flowing back into the brief channel that
the beam stirred through it.

She could hear Hatch moving along the collection of bodies, and she knew
what he had to be doing-taking a quick look at each of them, just to be
sure that Jeremy Nyebern was not posed among them, one living
monstrosity among those consumed by rot, waiting to spring at them the
moment they passed him.

Where was Regina?

Ceaselessly, Lindsey swept her flashlight back and forth, back and
forth, in a wide arc, never giving the murderous bastard a chance to
sneak up on her before she brought the beam around again. But, oh, he
was fast.

She had seen how fast. Flying down the hallway into Regina's room,
slamming the door behind him, fast as if he'd flown, had wings, bat
wings.



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And agile. Down the trumpet-vine trellis with the girl over his
shoulder, unfazed by the fall, up and off into the night with her.

e was Regina?

She heard Hatch moving away, and she knew where he was going, not just
following the line of bodies but circling the towering figure of Satan,
to be sure Jeremy Nyebern wasn't on the other side of it. He was just
doing what he had to do. She knew that, but she didn't like it anyway,
not one little bit, because now she was alone with all of those dead
people behind her. Some of them were withered and would make papery
sounds if somehow they became animated and edged toward her, while
others were in more horrendous stages of decomposition and sure to
reveal their approach with thick, wet ... And what crazy' thoughts were
these?

They were all d'ad.         Nothing to fear from them.             The dead stayed dead.

Except they didn't always, did they? No, not in her own personal
experience, they' didn't. But she kept sweeping her light back and
forth, back and forth, resisting the urge to turn around and shine it on
the festering cadavers behind her. She knew she should mourn them
rather than fear them, be angry for the abuse and loss of dignity that
they had suffered, but she only had room at the moment for fear. And
now she heard Hatch coming closer, around the other side of the statue,
completing his circumnavigation, thank God. But in the next breath,
horribly metallic as it passed through her mouth, she wondered if it was
Hatch or one of the bodies moving. Or Jeremy. She swung around,
looking past the row of corpses rather than at them, and her light
showed her that it was, indeed, Hatch coming back.

Are was Regina?

as if in answer, a distinctive creak sliced through the heavy air.

Doors the world over made that identical sound when their hinges were
corroded and unoiled.

She and Hatch swung their flashlights in the same direction. The
over-lapping terminuses of their beams showed they had both judged the
origin of the sound to have come from a rock formation along the far
shore of what would have been, with water, a lake larger than the lagoon
outside.

She was moving before she saw it. Hatch whispered her name in an urgent
tone that meant move after me, I'll go first. But she could no more
have held back than she could have turned coward and retreated up the
spill way. Her Regina had been among the dead, perhaps spared the
direct sight of them because of her strange keeper's aversion to light,
but among them nevertheless and so aware of them. Lindsey could not
bear the thought of that innocent child held in this slaughterhouse one
minute longer. Lindsey's own safety didn't matter, only Regina's.

As she reached the rocks and plunged in among them, stabbing here with
her light, then there, then over there, shadows leaping, she heard the
wail of distant sirens. Sheriff's men. Hatch's phone call had been
taken seriously. But Regina was in the hands of Death. If the girl was
still alive, she would not last as long as it would take the cops to
find the funhouse and get down to the lair ofLucifer. So Lindsey
pressed deeper into the rocks, the Browning in one hand, flashlight in
the other, turning corners recklessly, taking chances, with Hatch close
behind her.


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She came upon the door abruptly. Metal, streaked with rust, operated by
a push-bar rather than a knob. Ajar.

She shoved it open and went through without even the finesse that she
should have learned from a lifetime of police movies and television
shows.

She exploded across the threshold as might a mother lion in pursuit of
the predator that had dared to drag off her cub. Stupid, she knew that
it was stupid, that she could get herself killed, but mother lions in a
fever of matriarchal aggression were not notably creatures of reason.

She was operating on instinct now, and instinct told her that they had
the bastard on the run, had to keep him running to prevent him from
dealing with the girl as he wanted, and should press him harder and
harder until they had him in a corner.

Beyond the door in the rocks, behind the walls of Hell, was a
twenty-foot-wide area that had once been crowded with machinery. It was
now littered with the bolts and steel plates on which those machines had
been mounted. Elaborate scaffolding, festooned with spider webs, rose
forty or fifty feet; it provided access to other doors and crawl spaces
and panels through which the complex lighting and effects
equipment-cold-steam generators, laser-had been serviced.

That stuff was gone now, stripped out and carted away.

How long did he need to cut the girl open, seize her beating heart, and
take his satisfaction from her death? One minute? Two? Perhaps no
more than that. To keep her safe, they had to breathe down his
goddamned neck.

Lindsey swept her flashlight beam across that spider-infested
conglomeration of steel pipes and elbow joints and tread plates. She
quickly decided their quarry had not ascended to any hiding place above.

Hatch was at her side and slightly behind her, staying close. They were
breathing hard, not because they had exerted themselves but because
their chests were tight with fear, constricting their lungs.

Turning left, Lindsey moved straight toward a dark opening in the
concrete-block wall on the far side of that twenty-foot-wide chamber.

She was drawn to it because it appeared to have been boarded over at one
time, not solidly but with enough planks to prevent anyone entering the
forbidden space beyond without effort. Some of the nails still prickled
the block walls on both sides of the opening, but all of the planks had
been torn away and shoved to one side on the floor.

Although Hatch whispered her name, warning her to hold back, she stepped
straight to the brink of that room, shone her light into it, and
discovered it was not a room at all but an elevator shaft. The doors,
cab, cables, and mechanism had been salvaged, leaving a hole in the
building as sure as an extracted tooth left a hole in the jaw.

She pointed her light up. The shaft rose three stories, having once
conveyed mechanics and other repairmen to the top of the funhouse. She
swung the beam slowly down the concrete wall from above, noticing the
ice chest, several empty cans of root beer, and a plastic garbage bag
nearly full of trash, all arranged around a stained and battered
mattress.



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On the mattress, huddled in a corner of the shaft, was Jeremy Nyebern.

Regina was in his lap, held against his chest, so she could shield him
against gunfire. He was holding a pistol, and he squeezed off two shots
even as Lindsey spotted him down there.

The first slug missed both her and Hatch, but the second round tore
through her shoulder. She was knocked against the door frame. On the
rebound, she bent forward involuntarily, lost her balance, and fell into
the shaft, following her flashlight, which she had already dropped.

Going down, she didn't believe it was happening. Even when she hit
bottom, landing on her left side, the whole thing seemed , maybe because
she was still too numb from the impact of the bullet to feel the damage
it had done, and maybe because she fell mostly on the mattress, at the
far end of it from Nyebern, knocking out what wind the slug had left in
her but breaking no bones.

Her flashlight had also landed on the mattress, unharmed.                     It lit one
gray wall.

As if in a dream, and though unable to get her breath quite yet, Lindsey
brought her right hand slowly around to point her gun at him.

But she had no gun.         The Browning had spun from her grip in the fall.

During Lindsey's drop, Nyebern must have tracked her with his own
weapon, for she was looking into it. The barrel was impossibly long,
measuring exactly one eternity from firing chamber to muzzle.

Beyond the gun she saw Regina's face, which was as slack as her gray
eyes were empty, and beyond that beloved countenance was the hateful
one, pale as milk. His eyes, unshielded by glasses, were fierce and
strange.

She could see them even though the glow of the flashlight forced him to
squint. Meeting his gaze she felt that she was face-to-face with
something alien that was only passing as human, and not well.

Oh, wow, surreal, she thought, and knew that she was on the verge of
passing out.

She hoped to faint before he squeezed the trigger. Though it didn't
matter, really. She was so close to the gun that she wouldn't live to
hear the shot that blew her face off.

iron rungs of the service ladder.

Hatch stepped in beside her as the light found its way to the bottom of
the shaft, just two floors below, where it revealed some litter, a
Styrofoam Hatch's horror, as he watched Lindsey fall into the shaft, was
exceeded by his surprise at what he did next.

When he saw Jeremy track her with the pistol until she hit the mattress
the muzzle three feet from her face, Hatch tossed his own Browning away;
onto the pile of planks that once boarded off the shaft. He figured he
wouldn't be able to get off a clear shot with Regina in the way. And he
knew that no gun would properly dispatch the thing that Jeremy had
become. He had no time to wonder at that curious thought, for as soon
as he pitched away the Browning, he shifted the flashlight from his left
hand to his right, and leaped into the elevator shaft without any
expectation that he was about to do so.



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After that, everything got weird.

It seemed to him that he didn't crash down the shaft as he should have
done, but glided in slow motion, as if he were only slightly heavier
than air, taking as much as half a minute to reach bottom.

Perhaps his sense of time had merely been distorted by the profundity of
his terror.

Jeremy saw him coming, shifted the pistol from Lindsey to Hatch, and
fired all eight remaining rounds. Hatch was certain that he was hit at
least three or four times, though he sustained no wounds. It seemed
impossible that the killer could miss so often in such a confined space.

Perhaps the sloppy marksmanship was attributable to the gunman's panic
and to the fact that Hatch was a moving target.

While he was still floating down like dandelion fluff, he experienced a
reconnection of the peculiar bond between him and Nyebern, and for a
moment he saw himself descending from the young killer's point of view.

What he glimpsed, however, was not only himself but the image of some
one-or something-superimposed over him, as if he shared his body with
another entity. He thought he saw white wings folded close against his
sides. Under his own face was that of a stranger-the visage of a
warrior if ever there had been one, yet not a face that frightened him.

Perhaps by then Nyebern was hallucinating, and what Hatch was receiving
from him was not actually what he saw but only what he imagined that he
saw. Perhaps.

Then Hatch was gazing down from his own eyes again, still in that slow
glide, and he was sure that he saw something superimposed over Jeremy
Nyebern, too, a form and face that were part reptilian and part
insectile.

Perhaps it was a trick of light, the confusion of shadows and
conflicting flashlight beams.

He could not explain away their final exchange, however, and he dwelt
upon it often in the days that followed: "Who are you?" Nyebern asked as
Hatch landed catlike in spite of a thirty-foot descent.

"Uriel," Hatch replied, though that was not a name he had heard before.

"I am Vassago," Nyebern said.

"I know," Hatch said, though he was hearing that name for the first
time, as well.

"Only you can send me back."

"and when you get sent back by such as me," Hatch said, wondering where
the words came from, "you don't go back a prince. You'll be a slave
below, just like the heartless and stupid boy with whom you hitched a
ride."

Nyebern was afraid. It was the first time he had shown any capacity for
fear. "And I thought I was the spider."

With strength, agility, and economy of motion that Hatch had not known
he possessed he grabbed Regina's belt in his left hand, pulled her away
from Jeremy Nyebern, set her aside out of harm's way, and brought the



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crucifix down like a club upon the madman's head. The lens of the
attached flashlight shattered, and the casing burst open, spilling
batteries.

He chopped the crucifix hard against the killer's skull a second time,
and with the third blow he sent Nyebern to a grave that had been twice
earned.

The anger Hatch felt was righteous anger. When he dropped the crucifix
when it was all over, he felt no guilt or shame. He was nothing at all
like his father.

He had a strange awareness of a power leaving him, a presence he had not
known was there. He was a mission accomplished, restored. All things
were now in their rightful places.

Regina was unresponsive when he spoke to her. Physically she seemed
unharmed. Hatch was not worried about her, for somehow he knew that
none of them would suffer unduly for having been caught up in...

whatever they had been caught up in.

Lindsey was unconscious and bleeding.                   He examined her wound and felt It
was not too serious.

Voices arose two floors above. They were calling his name. The
authorities had arrived. Late as always. Well, not always.

Sometimes.        ..    one of them was there just when you needed him.

3

The story of the three blind men examining the elephant is widely known.
The first blind man feels only the elephant's trunk and thereafter
confidently describes the beast as a great snakelike creature, similar
to a python. The second blind man feels only the elephant's ears and
announces that it is a bird that can soar to great heights. The third
blind man examines only the elephant's fringe-tipped, fly-shading tail
and "sees" an animal that is curiously like a bottle brush.

So it is with any experience that human beings share. Each participant
perceives it in a different way and takes from it a different lesson
than do his or her compatriots.

In the years following the events at the abandoned amusement park, Jonas
Nyebern lost interest in resuscitation medicine. Other men took over
his work and did it well.

He sold at auction every piece of religious art in the two collections
that he had not yet completed, and he put the money in savings
instruments that would return the highest possible rate of interest.

Though he continued to practice cardiovascular surgery for a while, he
no longer found any satisfaction in it. Eventually he retired young and
looked for a new career in which to finish out the last decades of his
life.

He stopped attending Mass. He no longer believed that evil was a force
in itself, a real presence that walked the world. He had found that
humanity itself was a source of evil sufficient to explain everything
that was wrong with the world. conversely, he decided humanity was its
own and only-salvation.



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He became a veterinarian.           Every patient seemed deserving.

He never married again.

He was neither happy nor unhappy, and that suited him fine.

Regina remained within her inner room for a couple of days, and when she
came out she was never quite the same. But then no one ever is quite
the same for any length of time. Change is the only constant.

It's called growing up.

She addressed them as Dad and Mom, because she wanted to, and because
she meant it. Day by day, she gave them as much happiness as they gave
her.

She never set off a chain reaction of destruction among their antiques.

She never embarrassed them by getting inappropriately sentimental,
bursting into tears, and thereby activating the old snot faucet: she
unfailingly produced tears and snot only when they were called for.

She never mortified them by accidentally flipping an entire plate of
food into the air at a restaurant and over the head of the President of
the United States at the next table. She never accidentally set the
house on fire, never farted in polite company, and never scared the
be-jesus out of smaller neighborhood children with her leg brace and
curious right hand. Better still, she stopped worrying about doing all
those things (and more), and in time she did not even use the tremendous
energies that she once had wasted upon such unlikely concerns.

She kept writing. She got better at it. When she was just 14, she won
a national writing competition for teenagers. The prize was a rather
nice watch and a check for five hundred dollars. She used some of the
money for a subscription to Publishers Weekly and a complete set of the
novels of William Makepeace Thackeray. She no longer had an interest in
writing about intelligent pigs from outer space, largely because she was
learning that more curious characters could be found all around her,
many of them native Californians.

She no longer talked to God.            It seemed childish to chatter at Him.

Besides, she no longer needed His constant attention. For a while she
had thought He had gone away or had never existed, but she had decided
that was foolish. She was aware of him all the time, winking at her
from the flowers, serenading her in the song of a bird, smiling at her
from the fury face of a kitten, touching her with a soft summer breeze.

She found a line in a book that she thought was apt, from Dave Tyson
Gentry: "True friendship comes when silence between two men is
comfortable." Well, who was your best friend, if not God, and what did
you really need to say to Him or He to you when you both already knew
the most-and only important thing, which was that you would always be
there for each other.

Lindsey came through the events of those days less changed than she had
expected. Her paintings improved somewhat, but not tremendously. She
had never been dissatisfied with her work in the first place. She loved
Hatch no less than ever, and could not possibly have loved him more.

One thing that made her cringe, which never had before, was hearing
anyone say, "The worst is behind us now." She knew that the worst was
never behind us. The worst came at the end. It was the end, the very


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fact of it. Nothing could be worse than that. But she had learned to
live with the understanding that the worst was never behind her-and
still find joy in the day at hand.

As for God-she didn't dwell on the issue. She raised Regina in the
Catholic Church, attending Mass with her each week, for that was part of
the promise she had made St. Thomas's when they had arranged the
adoption. But she didn't do it solely out of duty. She figured that
the Church was good for Regina-and that Regina might be good for the
Church, too. Any institution that counted Regina a member was going to
discover itself changed by her at least as much as she was changed-and
to its everlasting benefit. She had once said that prayers were never
answered, that the living lived only to die, but she had progressed
beyond that attitude. She would wait and see.

Hatch continued to deal successfully in antiques. Day by day his life
went pretty much as he hoped it would. As before, he was an easy-going
guy.

He never got angry. But the difference was that he had no anger left in
him to repress. The mellowness was genuine now.

From time to time, when the patterns of life seemed to have a grand
meaning that just barely eluded him, and when he was therefore in a
philosophical mood, he would go to his den and take two items from the
locked drawer.

One was the heat-browned issue of Arts American.

The other was a slip of paper he had brought back from the library one
day, after doing a bit of research. Two names were written on it, with
an identifying line after each. "Vassago-according to mythology, one of
the nine crown princes of Hell." Below that was the name he had once
claimed was his own: "Urie-according to mythology, one of the archangels
serving as a personal attendant to God."

He stared at these things and considered them carefully, and always he
reached no firm conclusions. Though he did decide, if you had to be
dead for eighty minutes and come back with no memory of the Other Side,
maybe it was because eighty minutes of that knowledge was more than just
a glimpse of a tunnel with a light at the end, and therefore more than
you could be expected to handle.

And if you had to bring something back with you from Beyond, and carry
it within you until it had concluded its assignment on this side of the
veil, an archangel wasn't too shabby . . .

the end.




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