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
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 b
ars 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