That first Wednesday in May, he p to spend eight or ten busy hours in
the study of his house on Spyglass Hill, where he had lived for almost
two years, since the loss of his family. He hoped to finish writing a
paper that he was going to deliver at a conference in San Francisco on
the eighth of May.
The big windows in the teak-paneled room looked out on Corona Del Mar
and Newport Beach below. Across twenty-six miles of gray water veined
with green and blue, the dark ides of Santa Catalina Island rose against
the sky, but they were unable to make the vast c Ocean seem any less
immense or less humbling than if they had not been there.
He did not bother to draw the drab because the panorama never distracted
him. He had bought the property because he had hoped that the luxuries
of the house and the magnificence of the view would make life seem
beautiful and worth living in spite of great tragedy. But only his work
had managed to do that for him, and so he always went directly to it
with no more than a glance out of the windows.
That morning, he could not concentrate on the white words against the
blue background on his computer screen. His thoughts were not pulled
toward Pacific vistas, however, but toward his son, Jeremy.
On that overcast spring day two years ago, when he had come home to find
Marion and Stephanie stabbed so often and so brutally that they were
beyond revival, when he had found an unconscious Jeremy impaled on the
vise-held knife in the garage and rapidly bleeding to death, Jonas had
not blamed an unknown madman or burglars caught by surprise in the act.
He had known at once that the murderer was the teenage boy slumped
against the workbench with his life dripping onto the concrete floor.
Something had been wrong with Jeremy something in him-all his life, a
difference that had become more marked and frightening as the years
passed, though Jonas had tried for so long to convince himself the boy's
attitudes and actions were manifestations of ordinary rebelliousness.
But the madness of Jonas's father, having skipped one generation, had
appeared again in Jeremy's corrupted genes.
The boy survived the extraction of the knife and the frantic ambulance
ride to Orange County General, which was only minutes away. But he died
on the stretcher as they were wheeling him along a hospital corridor.
Jonas had recently convinced the hospital to establish a special
resuscitation team. Instead of using the bypass machine to warm the
dead boy's blood, they employed it to recirculate cooled blood into his
body, hastening to lower his body temperature drastically to delay cell
deterioration I and brain damage until surgery could be performed. The
air conditioner was set all the way down at fifty, bags of crushed ice
were packed along the sides of the patient, and Jonas personally opened
the knife wound to search for-and repair-the damage that would foil
reanimation.
He might have known at the time why he wanted so desperately to save
Jeremy, but afterwards he was never able to understand his motivations
Because he was my son, Jonas sometimes thought, and was therefore my
responsibility.
But what parental responsibility did he owe to the slaughterer of his
daughter and wife?
I saved him to ask him why, to pry from him an explanation, Jonas told
himself at other times.
But he knew there was no answer that would make sense. Neither
œphilosophers nor psychologists-not even the murderers themselves had
ever, in all of history, been able to provide an adequate explanation
for a single act of monstrous sociopathic violence.
The only cogent answer, really, was that the human species was
imperfect, stained, and carried within itself the seeds of its own
destruction. The Church would call it the legacy of the Serpent, dating
back to the Garden and the Fall. Scientists would refer to the
mysteries of genetics, biochemistry, the fundamental actions of
nucleotides. Maybe they were both talking about the same thing, merely
describing it in different terms. To Jonas it seemed that this answer,
whether provided by scientists or theologians, was always unsatisfying
in precisely the same way and to the same degree, for it suggested no
solution, prescribed no preventative. Except faith in God or in the
potential of science.
Regardless of his reasons for taking the action he did, Jonas had saved
Jeremy.
The boy had been dead for eighty-one minutes, not an absolute record
even in those days, because the young girl in Utah had already been
resuscitating after being in the arms of Death for eighty minutes. But
she'd been severely hypothermic, while Jeremy had died warm, which made
the feat a record of one kind, and was'. Actually, revival after eighty
one minutes of warm death was as famous as revival after eighty minutes
of cold death. His own son and Hatch Harrison were Jonas's most amazing
subjects to date-if the first one q as a s.
For ten months Jeremy lay in a coma, feeding intravenously but able to
breathe on his own and otherwise in need of no life-support machines.
Early in that period, he was moved from the hospital to a high-quality
nursing home.
During those months, Jonas could have petitioned a court to have the boy
removed from the intravenous feed. But Jeremy would have perished from
starvation or dehydration, and sometimes even a comatose patient might
suffer pain from such a crewel death, depending on the depth of his
stupor. Jonas was not prepared to be the cause of that pain. More
insidiously, on a level so deep that even he did not it until much
later, he suffered from the egotistic notion that he still might extract
from the boy supposing the boy ever woke an explanation of sociopathic
behavior that had eluded all other seekers in the history of mankind.
Perhaps he thought he would have greater insight owing to his unique
experience with the madness of his father and his son, orphaned and
wounded bythellrst, widowed by the second. In any event he paid the
nursing-home bills. And every Sunday afternoon, he sat at his son's
bedside, staring at the pale, placid face in which he could see so much
of himself.
After ten months, Jeremy regained consciousness. Brain damage had left
him aphasic, without the power to speak or read. He had not known his
name or how he had gotten to be where he was. He reacted to his face in
the mirror as if it were that of a stranger, and he did not recognize
his father. When the police came to question him, he exhibited neither
guilt nor comprehension. He had awakened as a dullard, his intellectual
capacity severely reduced from what it had been, his attention span
short, easily confused.
With gestures, he complained vigorously of severe eye pain and
sensitivity to bright light. An ophthalmological examination revealed a
curious indeed, inexplicable-degeneration of the irises. The
contractile membrane seemed to have been partially eaten away. The
sphincter pupillae-the muscle causi
ng the iris to contract, thereby
shrinking the pupil and admitting less light to the eye-had all but
atrophied.
Also, the dilator pupillae had sluunk, pulling the iris wide open. And
the connection between the dilator muscle and oculomotor nerve was
fused, leaving the eye virtually no ability to reduce the amount of
incoming light. The condition was without precedent and degenerative in
nature, making surgical correction impossible. The boy was provided
with heavily tinted, wraparound sunglasses. Even then he preferred to
pass daylight hours only in rooms where metal blinds or heavy drapes
could close off the light. Incredibly, Jeremy became a favorite of the
staff at the rehabilitation hospital to which he was transferred a few
days after awakening at the nursing home. They were inclined to feel
sorry for him because of his eye affliction, and because he was such a
good-looking boy who had fallen so low. In addition, he now had the
sweet temperament of a shy child, a result of his IQ loss, and there was
no sign whatsoever of his former arrogance, cool calculation, and
smouldering hostility.
For over four months he walked the halls, helped the nurses with simple
tasks, struggled with a speech therapist to little effect, stared out
the windows at the night for hours at a time, ate well enough to put
flesh on his bones, and exercised in the gym during the evening with
most of the lights off. His wasted body was rebuilt, and his straws
hair regained its Almost ten months ago, when Jonas was beginning to
wonder where Jeremy could be placed when he was no longer able to
benefit from physical or occupational therapy, the boy had disappeared.
Although he had shown no previous inclination to roam beyond the grounds
of the rehabilitation hospital, he walked out unnoticed one night, and
never came back.
Jonas had assumed the police would be quick to track the boy. But they
had been interested in him only as a missing person, not as a suspected
murderer. If he had regained all of his faculties, they would have
considered him both a threat and a fugitive from justice, but his
continued-and apparently permanent-mental disabilities were a kind of
immunity.
Jeremy was no longer the same person that he had been when the crimes
were committed; with his diminished intellectual capacity, inability to
speak, and beguilingly simple personility, no jury would ever convict.
A missing-person investigation was no investigation at all. Police
manpower had to be directed against immediate and serious crimes.
Though the cops believed that the boy had probably wandered away, fallen
into the hands of the wrong people, and already been exploited and
killed, Jonas knew his son was alive. And in his hear the knew that
what was loose in the world was not a sniveling dullard but a cunning,
dangerous, and exceedingly sick young man.
They had all been deceived.
He could not prove that Jeremy's retardation was an act, but in his
heart he knew that he had allowed himself to be fooled. He had accepted
the new Jeremy because, when it came right down to it, he could not bear
the anguish of having to confront the Jeremy who had killed Marion and
Stephanie. The most damning proof of his own complicity in Jeremy's
fraud was the fact that he had not requested a CAT scan to determine the
precise nature of the brain damage. At the time he told himself the
fact of the damage was the only thing that mattered, not its precise
etiology, an incredible reaction for any physician but not so incredible
for a father who was unwilling to come face-to-face with the monster
inside his son.
And now the monster was set free. He had no proof, but he knew.
Jeremy was out there somewhere. The old Jeremy.
For ten months, through a series of three detective agencies, he had
sought his son, because he shared in the moral, though not the legal,
responsibility for any crimes the boy committed. The first two agencies
had gotten nowhere, eventually concluding that their inability to pick
up a trail meant no trail existed. The boy, they reported, was most
likely dead.
The third, Morton Redlow, was a one-man shop. Though not as glitzy as
the bigger agencies, Redlow possessed a bulldog determination that
encouraged Jonas to believe progress would be made. And last week,
Redlow had hinted that he was onto something, that he would have
concrete news by the weekend.
The detective had not been heard from since. He had failed to respond
to messages left on his phone machine.
Now, turning away from his computer and the conference paper he was
unable to work on, Jonas picked up the telephone and tried the detective
again. He got the recording. But he could no longer leave his name and
number, because the incoming tape on Redlow's machine was already full
of messages. It cut him off.
Jonas had a bad feeling about the detective.
He put down the phone, got up from the desk, and went to the window.
anything as simple as a magnificent view, but he was willing to try.
Each new day was filled with so much more dread than the day before it,
he needed all the help he could get just to be able to sleep at night
and rise in the morning.
Reflections of the morning sun rippled in silver filaments through the
incoming waves, as if the sea were a great piece of rippling blue-gray
fabric with interwoven metallic threads.
He told himself that Redlow was only a few days late with his report,
less than a week, nothing to be worried about. The failure to return 1-
answering-machine messages might only mean the detective was ill or
preoccupied with a personal crisis.
But he knew. Redlowe had found Jeremy and, in spite of every warning
from Jonas, had underestimated the boy.
A yacht with white sails was making its way south along the coast.
Large white birds kited in the sky behind the ship, diving into the sea
and out again, no doubt snaring fish with each plunge. Graceful and
free, the birds were a beautiful sight, though not to the fish, of
course. Not to the fish.
Lindsey went to her studio between the master bedroom and the room
beside Regina's. She moved her high stool from the easel to the drawing
board, opened her sketch pad, and started to plan her next painting.
She felt that it was important to focus on her work, not only because
the making of art could soothe the soul as surely as the appreciation of
it, but because sticking to everyday routine was the only way she could
try to push back the forces of irrationality that seemed to be surging
like black floodwaters into their lives. Nothing could really go too
far wrong-could it?-if she just kept painting, drinking her usual black
coffee, eating three meals a day, washing dishes when they needed
washed, brushing her teeth at night, showering and rolling on her
deodorant in the morning. How could some homicidal creature from Beyond
intrude into an orderly
life?
Surely ghouls and ghosts, goblins and monsters, had no power over those
who were properly groomed, deodorieed, fluoridated, dressed, fed,
employed, and motivated.
That was what she wanted to believe. But when she tried to sketch, she
couldn't quiet the tremors her hands.
Honell was dead.
Cooper was dead.
She kept looking at the window, erg to see that the spider had returned.
But there was no scurrying black form or the lacework of a new web. Just
glass. Treetops and blue sky beyond.
After a while Hatch stopped in. He hugged her from behind, and kissed
her cheek.
But he was in a solemn rather than romantic mood. He had one of the
Brownings with him. He put the pistol on the top of her supply cabinet.
"Keep this with you if you leave the room. He's not going to come
around during the day. I know that. I feel it. Like he's a vampire or
something, for God's sake. But it still doesn't hurt to be careful,
especially when you're here alone."
She was dubious, but she said, "All right."
"I'm going out for a while. Do a little shopping."
"For what?" She turned on her stooL facing him more directly.
"We don't have enough ammunition for the guns "Both have full clips."
"Besides, I want to get a shotgun."
"Hatch! Even if he comes, and he probably won't, it's not going to be a
war. A man breaks into your house, it's a matter of a shot or two, not
a pitched battle."
Standing before her, he was stone-faced and adamant. "The right shotgun
is the best of all home-defensive weapons. You don't have to be a good