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 s
erved 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.
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
glass
es 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.