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
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, Jere
my 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