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
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 f
allen. 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