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.
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.
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
n
asty 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,