to do is hold her beating heart in his bare hand for its last few beats,
feel the life go out of it."
"Oh, God."
"She's still alive. She has a chance. There's hope."
He believed what he said was true, had to believe it or go mad. But he
was troubled by the memory of having said those same things so often in
the weeks before cancer had finally finished with Jimmy.
Death is no fearsome mystery.
He is willing to thee andme.
He hath no secrets he can choose to trouble any good man's sleep.
Turn not thy face from Death away.
Care not he takes our breath away.
Fear him not, he is not thy master, rushing at thee faster, faster.
Not thy master but servant to the Maker of thee, what or Who created
Death, created thee is the only mystery.
THE BOOK Of COUNTED SORROWS Jonas Nyebern and Kari Dovell sat in
armchairs before the big windows in the darkened living room of his
house on Spyglass Hill, looking at the millions of lights that glimmered
across Orange and Los Angeles counties.
The night was relatively clear, and they could see as far as Long Hatch
Harbor to the north. Civilization sprawled like a luminescent fungus,
devouring all.
A bottle of Robert Mondavi chenin blanc was in an ice bucket on the
floor between their chairs. It was their second bottle. They had not
eaten dinner yet. He was talking too much.
They had been seeing each other socially once or twice a week for more
than a month. They had not gone to bed together, and he didn't think
they ever would. She was still desirable, with that odd combination of
grace and awkwardness that sometimes reminded him of an exotic
long-legged crane, even if the side of her that was a serious and
dedicated physician could never quite let the woman in her have full
rein. However, he doubted she even expected physical intimacy. In any
case, he didn't believe he was capable of it. He was a haunted man; too
many ghosts waited to bedevil him if happiness came within his reach.
What each of them got from the relationship was a friendly ear,
patience, and genuine sympathy without maudlin excess.
That evening he talked about Jeremy, which was not a subject conducive
to romance even if there had been any prospect of it. Mostly he worried
over the signs of Jeremy's congenital madness that he'd failed to
realize-admit-were signs.
Even as a child Jeremy had been unusually quiet, invariably preferring
solitude to anyone's company. That was explained away as simple
shyness. From the earliest age he seemed to have no interest in toys,
which was written off to his indisputably high intelligence and a
too-serious nature. But now all those untouched model airplanes and
games and balls and elaborate Erector sets were disquieting indications
that his interior fantasy life had been richer than any entertainment
that could be provided by Tonka, Mattel, or Lionel.
"He was never able to receive a hug without stiffening a little," Jonas
remembered. "When be returned a kiss for a kiss, he always planted his
lips on the air instead of your cheek."
"Lots of kids have difficulty being demonstrative," Kari insisted. She
lifted the wine bottle from the ice, leaned out, and refilled the glass
he held.
"It would seem like just another aspect of his shyness. Shyness and
self effacement aren't faults, and you couldn't be expected to see them
that way."
"But it wasn't self-effacement," he said miserably. "It was an
inability to feel, to care."
"You can't keep heating up like this, Jonas."
"What if Marion and Stephanie weren't even the first?"
"They must have been."
"But what if they weren't?"
"A teenage boy might be a killer, but he's not going to have the
sophistication to get away with murder for any length of time."
"What if he's killed someone since he slipped away from the rehab
hospital?"
"He's probably been victimized himself Jonas."
"No. He's not the victim type."
"He's probably dead."
"He's out there somewhere. Because of me."
Jonas stared at the vast panorama of lights. Civilization lay in all
its glimmering wonder, all its blazing glory, all its bright tenor.
As they approached the San Diego Freeway, Interstate 5, Hatch said,
"South. He's gone south."
Lindsey flipped on the turn signal and caught the entrance ramp just in
time.
At first she had glanced at Hatch whenever she could take her eyes off
the road, expecting him to tell her what he was seeing or receiving from
the man they were trailing. But after a while she focused on the
highway whether she needed to or not, because he was sharing nothing
with her.
She suspected his silence simply meant he was seeing very little, that
the link between him and the killer was either weak or flickering on and
off.
She didn't press him to include her, because she was afraid that if she
distracted him, the bond might be broken altogether-and Regina lost.
Hatch continued to hold the crucifix. Even from the corner of her eye,
Lindsey could see how the fingertips of his left hand ceaselessly traced
the contours of the cast-metal figure suffering upon the faux dogwood
cross.
His gaze seemed to be turned inward, as if he were virtually unaware of
the night and the car in which he traveled.
Lindsey that her life had become as surrealistic as any of her
paintings.
Supernatural experiences were juxtaposed with the familiar mundane
world. Disparate elements filled the composition: crucifixes and guns,
psychic visions and flashlights.
In her paintings, she used surrealism to elucidate a theme, provide
insight. In real life, each intrusion of the surreal only further
confused and mystified her.
Hatch shuddered and leaned forward as far as the safety harness would
allow, as if he had seen something fantastic and frightening cross the
highway, though she knew he was not actually looking at the blacktop
ahead. He slumped back into his seat. "He's taken the Ortega Highway
exit. East. The same exit's coming up for us in a couple of miles.
East on the Ortega Highway."
Sometimes the headlights of oncoming cars forced him to squint in spite
of the protection provided by his heavily tinted glasses.
As he drove, Vassago periodically glanced at the unconscious girl in the
seat beside him, facing him. Her chin rested on her breast.
Though her head was tipped down and auburn hair hung over one side of
her face, he could see her lips pulled back by the scarf that held in
the gag, the tilt of her pixie nose, all of one closed eyelid and most
of the other such long lashes-and part of her smooth brow. His
imagination played with all the possible ways he might disfigure her to
produce the most effective offering.
She was perfect for his purposes. With her beauty compromised by her
leg and deformed hand, she was already a symbol of God's fallibility.
A trophy, indeed,
for his collection.
He was disappointed that he had failed to get the mother, but he had not
given up hope of acquiring her. He was toying with the idea of not
killing the child tonight. If he kept her alive for only a few days, he
might have an opportunity to make another bid for Lindsey. If he had
them together, able to work on them at the same time, he could present
their corpses as a mocking version of Michelangelo's Pta', or dismember
them and stitch them together in a highly imaginative obscene collage.
He was waiting for guidance, another vision, before deciding what to do.
As he took the Ortega highway off-ramp and turned east, he recalled how
Lindsey, at the drawing board in her studio, had reminded him of his
mother at her knitting on the afternoon when he had killed her. Having
disposed of his sister and mother with the same knife in the same hour,
he had known in his heart that he had paved the way to Hell, had been so
convinced that he had taken the final step and impaled himself.
A privately published book had described for him that route to damnation
Titled The Htddm, it was the work of a condemned murderer named Thomas
Nicene who had killed his own mother and a brother, and then committed
suicide. His carefully planned descent into the Pit had been foiled by
a paramedic team with too much dedication and a little luck.
Nicene was revived, healed, imprisoned, put on trial, convicted of
murder, and sentenced to death. Rule-laying society had made it clear
that the power of death, even the right to choose one's own, was not
ever to be given to an individual.
While awaiting execution, Thomas Nicene had committed to paper the
visions of Hell that he had experienced during the time that he had been
on the edge of this life, before the paramedics denied him eternity. His
writings had been smuggled out of prison to fellow believers who could
print and distribute them. Nicene's book was filled with powerful,
convincing images of darkness and cold, not the heat of classic bells,
but visions of a kingdom of vast spaces, chilling emptiness. Peering
through Death's door and the door of Hell beyond, Thomas had seen
titanic powers at work on mysterious structures.
Demons of colossal size and strength strode through night mists across
lightless continents on unknown missions, each clothed in black with a
Bowing cape and upon its head a shining black helmet with a flared rim.
He had seen dark seas crashing on black shores under starless and
moonless skies that gave the feeling of a subterranean world. Enormous
ships, windowless and mysterious, were driven through the tenebrous
waves by powerful engines that produced a noise like the anguished
screams of multitudes.
When he had read Nicene's words, Jeremy had known they were truer than
any ever inked upon a page, and he had determined to follow the great
man's example. Marion and Stephanie became his tickets to the exotic
and enormously attractive netherworld where he belonged. He had punched
those tickets with a butcher knife and delivered himself to that dark
kingdom, encountering precisely what Nicene promised. He had never
imagined that his own escape from the hateful world of the living would
be undone not by paramedics but by his own father.
He would soon earn repatriation to hell. Glancing at the girl again,
Vassago remembered how she had felt when she shuddered and collapsed
limply in his fierce embrace. A shiver of delicious anticipation
whizzed through He had considered killing his father to learn if that
act would win him back his citizenship in Hades. But he was wart' of
his old man. Jonas Nyebern was a rule-giver and seemed to shine with an
inner light that Vassago found forbidding. His earliest memories of his
father were wrapped up in images of Christ and angels and the Holy
Mother and miracles, scenes from the paintings that Jonas collected and
with which their home had always been decorated. And only two years
ago, his father had rest him in themnnner of Jesus raiimgcold
Consequently, he thought of Jonas not merely as the enemy but as a
figure of power, an embodiment of those bright forces that were opposed
to the will of Hell. His father was no doubt protected, untouchable,
living in the loathsome grace of that other deity.
-His hopes, then, were pinned on the woman and the girl. One
acquisition made, the other pending.
He drove east past endless tracts of houses that had sprung up in the
six years since Fantasy World had been abandoned, and he was grateful
to the very perimeter of his special hideaway, which still lay miles
beyond the last of the new communities. As the peopled hills passed by,
as the land grew steadily less hospitable though still inhabited,
Vassago drove more slowly than he would have done any other night.
He was waiting for a vision that would tell him if he should kill the
child upon arrival at the park or wait until the mother was his, as
well.
Turning his head to look at her once more, he discovered she was
watching him. Her eyes shone with the reflected light from the
instrument Jonas returned to the living room with the box of items he
had saved panel. He could see that her fear was great.
"Poor baby," he said. "Don't be afraid. Okay? Don't be afraid.
We're just going to an amusement park, that's all. You know, like
Disneyland, like Magic Mountain?"
If he was unable to acquire the mother, perhaps he should look for
another child about the same size as Regina, a particularly pretty one
with four strong, healthy limbs. He could then remake this girl with
the arm, hand, and leg of the other, as if to say that he, a mere
twenty-year-old expatriate of Hell, could do a better job than the
Creator. That would make a fine addition to his collection, a singular
work of art.
He listened to the contained thunder of the engine. The hum of the
tires on the pavement. The soft whistle of wind at the windows.
Waiting for an epiphany. Waiting for guidance. Waiting to be told what
thin he should do. Waiting, waiting, a vision to behold.
Even before they reached the Ortega Highway off-ramp, Hatchreviewed a
flurry of images stranger than anything he had seen before. None lasted
longer than a few seconds, as if he were watching a film with no
narrative structure. Dark seas crashing on black shores under starless
and moonless skies. Enormous ships, windowless and mysterious, driven
through the tenebrous waves by powerful engines that produced a noise
like the anguished screaming of multitudes. Colossal demonic figures, a
hundred feet tall, striding through alien landscapes, black capes
flowing behind them, heads encased in black helmets as shiny as glass.
Titanic, half-glimpsed machines at work on monumental structures of such
odd design that purpose and function could not even be guessed.
Sometimes Hatch saw that hideous landscape in eerily vivid detail, but
sometimes he saw only descriptions of it in words on the
printed pages
of a book. If it existed, it must be on some far world, for it was not
of this earth.
But he was never sure if he was receiving pictures of a real place or
one that was merely imagined. At times it seemed as vividly depicted as
any street in Laguna but at other times seemed tissue-paper Jeremy's
room, and put it down beside his armchair. He withdrew from the box a
small, shoddily printed volume titled The Htdaen and gave it to Kari,
who examined it as if he had handed her an object encrusted with filth.
"You're right to wrinkle your nose at it," he said, picking up his glass
of wine and moving to the large window. "It's nonsense. Sick and
twisted but nonsense. The author was a convicted killer who claimed to
have seen Hell. His description isn't like anything in Dante, let me
tell you. Oh, it possesses a certain romance, undeniable power. In
fact, if you were a psychotic young man with delusions of grandeur and a
bent for violence, with the unusually high testosterone levels that
usually accompany a mental condition like that, then the Hell he
describes would be your ultimate wet dream of power. You would swoon
over it. You might not be able to get it out of your mind. You might
for it, do anything to be a pert of it, achieve damnation."
Kari put the book down and wiped her fingertips on the sleeve of her
blouse. "This author, Thomas Nicene-you said he killed his mother."