"We don't any more," he said finmly.
They were face-to-face, and she studied him worriedly. He knew she
thought he was walking a fine line between prudent precautions and a
sort of quiet hysteria, even treading the wrong way over that line
sometimes.
On the other hand, she hadn't had the benefit of his nightmares and
visions.
Perhaps the same thought crossed Lindsey's mind, for she nodded and
said, "Okay. I'm sorry. You're right."
He leaned back into the garage and turned off the lights. He closed the
door, engaged the deadbolt-and felt no safer, really.
She had started toward the dining room again. She glanced back as he
followed her, indicating the pistol in his hand. "Going to bring that
to the table?"
Deciding he had come down a little heavy on her, he shook his head and
bugged his eyes out, trying to make a Christopher Lloyd face and lighten
the moment: "I think some of my rigatoni are still alive. I'd like to
eat them till they're dead."
"Well, you've got the shotgun behind the Coromandel for that," she
reminded him.
"You're right!" He put the pistol on top of the refrigerator agaIn.
"And if that doesn't work, I can always take them out in the driveway
and run them over with the car!"
She pushed open the swinging door, and Hatch followed her into the
dining room.
Regina looked up and said, "Your food's getting cold."
Still making like Christopher Lloyd, Hatch said, "Then we'll get some
sweaters and mittens for them!"
Regina giggled. Hatch adored the way she giggled.
After the dinner dishes were done, Regina went to her room to study.
"Big history test tomorrow," she said.
Lindsey returned to her studio to try to get some work done. When she
sat down at her drawing board, she saw the second Browning It was still
atop the low art-supply cabinet, where Hatch had put it earlier in the
day.
She scowled at it. She didn't necessarily disapprove of guns
themselves, but this one was more than merely a handgun. It was a
symbol of their powerlessness in the face of the amorphous threat that
hung over them.
Keeping a gun ever within reach seemed an admission that they were
desperate and couldu't control their own destiny. The sight of a snake
coiled on the cabinet could not have carved a deeper scowl on her face.
She didn't want Regina walking in and seeing it.
She pulled open the first drawer of the cabinet and shoved aside some
gum erasers and pencils to make room for the weapon. The Browning
barely fit in that shallow space. Closing the drawer, she felt better.
During the long morning and afternoon, she had accomplished nothing.
She had made lots of false starts with sketches that went nowhere. She
was not even close to being ready to prepare a canvas.
Masonite, actually. She worked on Masonite, as did most artists these
days, but she still thought of each rectangle as a canvas, as though she
were the reincarnation of an artist from another age and could not shake
her old way of thinking. Also, she painted in acrylics rather than
oils.
Masonite did not deteriorate over time the way canvas did, and acrylics
retained their true colors far better thin oil-based paints.
Of course if she didn't do something soon' it wouldn't matter if she
used acrylics or cat's piss. She couldn't call herself an artist in the
first place if I. she come an a 1. couldn't up with idea that excited
her and composition that did the idea justice. Picking up a thick
charcoal pencil, she leaned over the sketch pad that was open on the
drawing board in front of her. She tried to knock inspiration off its
perch and get its lazy butt flying again.
After no more than a minute, her gaze floated off the page, up and up,
until she was staring at the window. No interesting sight waited to
distract her tonight, no treetops gracefully swaying in a breeze or even
a patch of cerulean sky. The night beyond the pane was featureless.
The black backdrop transformed the window glass into a mirror in which
she saw herself looking over the top of the drawing board.
Because it was not a true mirror, her reflection was transparent,
ghostly, as if she had died and come back to haunt the last place she
had ever known on That was an unsettling thought, so she returned her
attention to the blank page of the drawing tablet in front of her.
I After Lindsey and Regina went upstairs, Hatch walked from room to room
on the ground floor, checking windows and doors to be sure they were
secured. He had inspected the locks before. Doing it again was
potless. He did it anyway.
When he reached the pair of sliding glass doors in the family room, he
switched on the outdoor patio lights to augment the low landscape
lighting. The backyard was now bright enough for him to see most of it
although someone could have been crouched among the shrubs along the
rear fence. He stood at the doors, waiting for one of the shadows along
the perimeter of the property to shift.
Maybe he was wrong. Maybe the guy would never come after them. In
which case, in a month or two or three, Hatch would most likely be
certifiably mad from the tension of waiting. He almost thought it would
be better if the creep came now and got it over with.
He moved on to the breakfast nook and examined those windows. They were
still locked.
Regina returned to her bedroom and prepared her corner desk for home
work. She put her books to one side of the blotter, pens and felt-tip
Hi-Liter to the other side, and her notebook in the middle, everything
squared-up and neat.
As she got her desk set up, she worried about the Harrisons. Something
was wrong with them.
Well, not wrong in the sense that they were thieves or enemy spies or
counterfeiters or murderers or child-eating cannibals. For a while
she'd had an idea for a novel in which this absolute screwup girl is
adopted by a couple who are child-eating cannibals, and she finds a pile
of child bones in the basement, and a recipe file in the kitchen with
cards that say things like Roast Girl-and Girl soup, with instructions
like one tender young girl, unsalted, one onion, chopped; one pound
carrots, diced In the story the girl goes to the authorities, but they
will not believe her because she's widely known as a screwup and a
teller of tall tales.
Well, that was fiction, and this was real liiie, and the Harrisons
seemed perfectly happy eating pizza and pasta and hamburgers.
She clicked on the fluorescent desk lamp.
Though there was nothing wrong with the Harrisons themselves, they
definitely had problems, because they were tense and trying hard to hide
it. Maybe they weren't able to make their mortgage payments, and the
bank was going to take the house, and all three of them would have to
move back into her old room at the orphanage. Maybe they had discovered
that Mrs. Harrison had a sister. she'd never heard about before, an
evil twin like all those p
eople on television shows were always
discovering they had. Or maybe they owed money to the Mafia and
couldn't pay it and were going to get their legs broken.
Regina withdrew a dictionary from the bookshelves and put it on the
desk.
If they had a bad problem, Regina hoped it was the Mafia thing, because
she could handle that pretty well. The Harrisons' legs would get better
eventually, and they'd learn an important lesson about not borrowing
money from loansharks. Meanwhile, she could take care of them, make
sure they got their medicine, check their temperatures now and then, I'd
bring them dishes of ice cream with a little animal cookie stuck in the
top of each one, and even empty their bedpans (Gross!) if it came to
that. She knew a lot about nursing, having been on the receiving end of
so much of it at various times over the years.
(DearGod, if their big problem is life, could have a miracle here and
get the problem changed to the Mafia, so they'll keep me and we'll be
happy? In exchange for the miracle, I'd even be willing to have my legs
broken, too. At least talk it over with the guys at the Mafia and see
what they say.) When the desk was fully prepared for homework, Regina
decide that she needed to be more comfortable in order to study.
Having changed out of her parochial-school uniform when she had gotten
home, she was wearing gray corduroy pants and a lime-green, long-sleeve
cotton sweater. Pajamas and a robe were much better for studying.
Besides, her leg brace was making her itch in a couple of places, and
she wanted to take it off for the day.
When she slid open the mirrored closet door, she was face-to-face with a
crouching man all in black and wearing sun glasses.
On yet one more tour of the downstairs, Hatch decided to turn off the
lamps and chandeliers as he went. With the landscape and exterior house
lights all ablaze but the interior dark, he would be able to see a
prowler without being seen himself.
He concluded the patrol in the unlighted den, which he had decided to
make his p guard station. Sitting at the big desk in the gloom, he
could look through the double doors into the front foyer and cover the
foot of the stairs to the second floor. If anyone tried to enter
through a den window or the French doors to the rose garden, he would
know at once.
If the intruder breached their security in another room, Hatch would
nail the guy when he tried to go upstairs, because the spill of
second-floor hall light illuminated the steps. He couldn't be
everywhere at once, and the den seemed to be the most strategic
position.
He put both the shotgun and the handgun on top of the desk, within easy
reach. He couldn't see them well without the lights on, but he could
grab either of them in an instant if anything happened. He practiced a
few times, sitting in his swivel chair and facing the foyer, then
abruptly reaching out to grab the Browning, this time the Mossberg
12-gauge, Browning, Browning, Mossberg, Browning, Mossberg, Mossberg.
Every time, maybe because his reactions were heightened by adrenalihe,
his right hand swooped through darkness and with precise motions came to
rest upon the handgrip of the Browning or the stock of the Mossberg,
whichever was wanted.
He took no satisfaction in his preparedness, because he knew he could
not remain vigilant twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. He had
to sleep and eat. He had not gone to the shop today, and he could take
off a few days more, but he couldn't leave everything to Glenda and Lew
indefinitely; sooner or later he would have to go to work.
Realistically, even with breaks to eat and sleep, he would cease to be
an effective watchman long before he needed to return to work.
Sustaining a high degree of mental and physical alertness was a draining
enterprise. In time he'd have to consider hiring a guard or two from a
private security firm and he didn't know how much that would cost. More
important, he didn't know how reliable a hired guard would be.
He doubted he would ever have to make that decision, because the bastard
was going to come soon, maybe tonight. On a primitive level, a vague
impression of the man's intentions Bowed to Hatch along whatever
mystical bond they shared. It was like a child's words spoken into a
tin can and conveyed along a string to another tin can, where they were
reproduced as dim sounds, most of the coherency lost due to the poor
quality of the conductive material but the essential tone still
perceptible.
The current message on the psychic string could not be heard in any
detail, but the primary meaning was clear: Coming... I'm coming... I'm
Probably after midnight. Hatch sensed that their encounter would take
place between that dead hour and dawn. It was now exactly 7:46 by his
watch.
He withdrew his ring of car and house keys from his pocket, found the
desk key that he had added earlier, opened the locked drawer, and took
out the heat-darkened, smoke-scented issue of Arts American, letting the
keys dangle in the lock. He held the magazine in both hands in the
dark, hoping the feel of it would, like a talisman, amplify his magical
vision and allow him to see precisely when, where, and how the killer
would arrive.
Mingled odors of fire and destruction one so bitterly pungent that they
were nauseating, others merely ashy-rose from the crisp pages.
Vassago clicked off the fluorescent desk lamp. He crossed the girls
room to the door, where he also switched off the ceiling light.
He put his hand on the doorknob but hesitated, reluctant to leave the
child behind him. She was so exquisite, so vital. He knew the moment
he had pulled her into his arms that she was the caliber of acquisition
that would complete his collection and win him the eternal reward he
sought.
Stifling her cry and cutting off her breathing with one gloved hand, he
had swept her into the closet and crushed her against him with his
strong arms. He had held her so fiercely that she could barely squirm
and couldn't kick against anything to draw attention to her plight.
When she had passed out in his arms, he had been almost in a swoon and
had been overcome by the urge to kill her right there. In her closet.
Among the soft piles of clothes that had fallen off the hangers above
them.
The scent of freshly laundered cotton and spray starch. The warm
fragrance of wool. And girl. He wanted to wring her neck and feel her
life energy pass through his powerful hands, into him, and through him
to the land of the dead.
He had taken so long to shake off that overpowering desire that he
almost had killed her. She fell silent and still. By the time he
unclamped his hand from her nose and mouth, he thought he had smothered
her. But when he put his ear to her parted lips, he could hear and feel
faint exhalations. A hand against her chest rewarded him with the solid
thud of her slow, strong heartbeat.
Now, looking bac
k at the child, Vassago repressed the need to kill by
promising himself that he would have satisfaction long before dawn.
Meanwhile, he must be a Master. Exercise control.
Control.
He opened the door and studied the second-floor hallway beyond the girls
room. Deserted. A chandelier was aglow at the far end, at the head of
the stairs, in front of the entrance to the master bedroom, producing
too much light for his comfort if he had not had his sunglasses. He
still needed to squint.
He must butcher neither the child nor the mother until he had both of
them in the museum of the dead, where he had killed all the others who
were part of his collection. He knew now why he had been drawn to
Lindsey and Regina. Mother and daughter. Bitch and young-bitch. To
regain his place in Hell, he was expected to commit the same act that
had won him damnation in the first place: the murder of a mother and her
daughter. As his own mother and sister were not available to be killed
again, Lindsey and Regina had been selected.
Standing in the open doorway, he listened to the house. It was silent.
He knew the artist was not the girls birth mother. Earlier, when the
Harrisons were in the dining room and he slipped into the house from the
garage, he'd had time to poke around in Regina's room. He'd found
mementoes with the orphanage name on them, for the most part cheaply
printed drama programs handed out at holiday plays in which the girl had