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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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!"

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

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

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.

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

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.

"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

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.

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."

"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.

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.

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.

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

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

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,

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.

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.

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

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

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.

"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.

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."

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

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

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.

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."

"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

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.

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

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

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

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

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."

"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

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

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."

"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.

"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

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.

"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

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

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

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.

...

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."

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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."

"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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

"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?"

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."

"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,

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

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.

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

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

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.

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."

"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.

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

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?"

"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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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?"

"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

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.

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.

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.

"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

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.

"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.

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

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

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."

"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!"

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.

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

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

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."

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,

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,

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

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

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

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.

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!

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

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?"

"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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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,

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

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?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?"

"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?"

"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

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?"

"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

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."

"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

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."

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."

"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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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."

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."

"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."

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.

"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.

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

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.

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."

"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.

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.

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.

"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?

"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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

"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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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!"

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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."

"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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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."

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

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

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.

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

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,

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

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,

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.