had been shut off.
Southern California was a desert, transformed by the hand of man, and
when the hand of man moved on, the desert reclaimed its rightful
territory.
So much for the genius of humanity, God's imperfect creatures. The
pavement had cracked and hoved from years of inattention, and in places
it had begun to vanish under drifts of sandy soil. His headlights
revealed tumbleweed and scraps of other desert brush, already brown
hardly six weeks after the end of the rainy season, chased westward by a
night wind that came out of the parched hills.
When he reached the tollbooths he slowed down. They stretched across
all four lanes. They had been left standing as a barrier to easy
exploration of the shuttered park, linked and closed off by chains so
heavy that simple bolt cutters could not sever them. Now the bays, once
overseen by attendants, were filled with tangled brush that the wind had
put there and trash deposited by vandals. He pulled around the booths,
bouncing over a low curb and traveling on the sun-hardened soil of the
planting beds where lush tropical landscaping would once have blocked
the way, then back to the pavement when he had broken the barrier.
At the end of the entrance road, he switched off his headlights. He
didn't need them, and he was at last beyond the notice of any highway
patrolmen who might pull him over for driving without lights. His eyes
immediately felt more comfortable, and now if his pursuers drew too
close, they would not be able to follow him by sight alone.
He angled across the immense and eerily empty parking lot. He was
heading toward a service road at the southwest corner of the inner fence
that circled the grounds of the park property. As the Honda jolted over
the pot-holed blacktop, Vassago ransacked his imagination, which was a
busy abattoir of psychotic industry, seeking solutions for the artistic
problems presented by the child. He conceived and rejected concept
after concept. The image must stir him. Excite him.
If it was really art, he would know it; he would be moved.
As Vassago lovingly envisioned tortures for Regina, he became aware of
the other strange presence in the night and its singular rage.
Suddenly he was plunged into another psychic vision, a flurry of
elements, with one crucial new addition: he got a glimpse of Lindsey
behind the wheel of a car. . . a car phone in a man's trembling hand.
. and then the object that instantly resolved his artistic dilemma.. .
a crucifix. The nailed and tortured body of Christ in its famous
posture of noble self-sacrifice.
He blinked away that image, glanced at the petrified girl in the car
with him, blinked her away as well, and in his imagination saw the two
combined-girl and crucifiction. He would use Regina to mock the
Cruciixion.
Yes, lovely, perfect. But not raised upon a cross of dogwood.
Instead, she must be executed upon the segmented belly of the Serpent,
under the bosom of the thirty-foot Lucifer in the deepest regions of the
funhouse, crucified and her sacred heart revealed, as backdrop to the
rest of his collection. Such a cruel and stunning use of her negated
the Deed to include her mother, for in such a pose she would alone be
his crowning achievement.
Hatch was frantically trying to contact the Orange County Sheriff's
Department on the cellular car phone, which was having transmission
problems, when he felt the intrusion of another image. He "saw" images
of Regina disfigured in a multitude of ways, and he began to shake with
rage.
Then he was struck by a vision of a vision, it was so powerful, vivid,
and monstrous that it almost rendered him unconscious as effectively as
a skull-cracking blow from a hard-swung hammer.
He urged Lindsey to drive faster, without explaining what he had seen.
He couldn't speak of it.
The terror was amplified by Hatch's perfect understanding of the
statement Jeremy intended to make by the perpetration of the outrage.
Was God in error to have made His Only Begotten Child a man? Should
Christ have been a woman? Were not women those who had suffered the
most and therefore served as the greatest symbol of self-sacrifice,
grace, and innocence? God had granted women a special sensitivity, a
talent for understanding and tenderness, for caring and nurturing-then
had dumped them into a world of savage violence in which their singular
qualities made them easy targets for the cruel and depraved.
Horror enough existed in that truth, but a greater horror, for Hatch,
lay in the discovery that anyone as insane as Jeremy Nyebern could have
such a complex insight. If a homicidal sociopath could perceive such a
truth and grasp its theological implications, then creation itself must
be an asylum. For surely, if the universe were a rational place, no
madman would be able to understand any portion of it.
Lindsey reached the approach road to Fantasy World and took the turn so
fast and sharp that the Mitsubishi slid sideways and felt, for a moment,
as if it would roll. But it remained upright. She pulled hard on the
wheel, brought it around, tramped on the accelerator.
Not Regina. No way was Jeremy going to be permitted to realize his
decadent vision with that lamb of innocence. Hatch was prepared to die
to prevent it.
Fear and fury flooded him in equal torrents. The plastic casing of the
cellular-phone handset creaked in his right fist as though the pressure
of his grip would crack it as easily as if it had been an eggshell.
Tollbooths appeared ahead. Lindsey braked indecisively, then seemed to
notice the tire tracks through the drifting, sandy earth at the same
time Hatch saw them. She whipped the car to the right, and it bounced
over the concrete border of what had once been a flower bed.
He had to rein in his rage, not succumb to it as his father had always
done, for if he didn't remain in control of himself, Regina was as good
as dead. He tried to place the emergency 911 call again. Tried to hold
fast to his reason. He must not descend to the level of the walking
filth through whose eye she had seen the bound wrists and frightened
eyes of his child.
The surge of rage pouring back across the telepathic wire excited
Vassago, pumped up his own hatred, and convinced him that he must not
wait until both the woman and the child were within his grasp. Even the
prospect of the single crucifixion brought him such a richness of
loathing and revulsion that he knew his artistic concept was of
sufficient power. Once realized through the death of the gray-eyed
girl, his art would reopen the doors of Hell to him.
He had to stop the Honda at the entrance to the service road, which
appeared to be blocked by a padlocked gate. He had broken the massive
padlock long ago. It only hung through the hasp with the appearance of
effectiveness. He got out of the car, opened the gate, drove through,
got out again and closed it.
Behind the wheel once more, he decided not to leave the Honda in the
underground garage or go to the museum of the dead through the
catacombs. No time. God's slow but persistent paladins were closing in
on him. He had so much to do, so much, in so few precious minutes.
It wasn't fair. He needed time. Every artist needed tine. To save a
few minutes, he was going to have to drive along the wide pedestrian
walkways, between the rotting and empty pavilions, and park in front of
the funhouse, take the girl across the dry lagoon and in by way of the
gondola doors, through the tunnel with the chain-drive track still in
the concrete floor and down into Hell by that more direct route.
While Hatch was on the phone with the sheriff's department, Lindsey
drove into the parking lot. The tall lamp poles shed no light. Vistas
of empty blacktop faded away in every direction. Straight ahead a few
hundred yards stood the once glittery but now dark and decaying castle
through which the paying customers had entered Fantasy World. She saw
no sign of Jeremy Nyebern's car, and not enough dust on the acres of
unprotected, windswept pavement to track him by his tire prints.
She drove as close to the castle as she could get, halted by a long row
of ticket booths and crowd-control stanchions of poured concrete.
They looked like massive barricades on a heavily defended beach to
prevent enemy tanks from being put ashore.
When Hatch slammed down the handset, Lindsey was not sure what to make
of his end of the conversation, which had alternated between pleading
and angry insistence. She didn't know whether the cops were coming or
not, but her sense of urgency was so great, she didn't want to take time
to ask him about it She just wanted to move, move. She threw the car
into park the moment it braked to a full stop, didn't even bother to
switch off the engine or the headlights. She liked the headlights, a
little something against the cloying night. She flung open her door,
ready to go in on foot.
But he shook his head, no, and picked up his Browning from the floor at
his feet.
"What?" she demanded.
"He went in by car somehow, somewhere. I think I'll find the creep
quicker if we stay on his trail, go in the way he went in, let myself
open to this bond between us. Besides, the place is so damned huge,
we'll get around it faster in a car."
She got behind the wheel again, popped the Mitsubishi into gear, and
said, "Where?"
He hesitated only a second, perhaps a fraction of a second, but it
seemed that any number of small helpless girls could have been
slaughtered in that interlude before he said, "Left, go left, along the
fence."
2
Vassago parked the car by the lagoon, cut the engine, got out, and went
around to the girls side. Opening her door, he said, "Here we are,
angel.
An amusement park, just like I promised you. Isn't it fun? Aren't you
amused?"
He swung her around on her seat to bring her legs out of the car. He
took his switchblade from his jacket pocket, snapped the well-honed
knife out of the handle, and showed it to her.
Even with the thinnest moon, and although her eyes were not as sensitive
as his, she saw the blade. He saw her see it, and he was thrilled by
the quickening of terror in her face and eyes.
"I'm going to free your legs so you can walk," he told her, turning the
blade slowly, slowly, so a quicksilver glimmer trickled liquidly along
the cuttingedge. "If you're stupid enough to kick me, if you think you
can catch my head maybe and knock me silly long enough to get away, then
you're silly, angel. It won't work, and then I'll have to cut you to
teach you a lesson. Do you hear me, precious? Do you understand?"
She emitted a muffled sound through the wadded scarf in her mouth, and
the tone of it was an acknowledgement of his power.
"Good," he said. "Good girl. So wise. You'll make a fine Jesus, won't
you? A really fine little Jesus."
He cut the cords binding her ankles, then helped her out of the car.
She was unsteady, probably because her muscles had cramped during the
trip, but he did not intend to let her dawdle. seizing her by one arm,
leaving her wrists bound in front of her and the gag in place, he pulled
her around the front of the car to the retaining wall of the funhouse
lagoon.
The retaining wall was two feet high on the outside, twice that on the
inside where the water once had been. He helped Regina over it, onto
the dry concrete floor of the broad lagoon. She hated to let him touch
her, even though he still wore gloves, because she could feel his
coldness through the gloves, or thought she could, his coldness and damp
scream, not with the gag in her mouth. If she tried to scream she only
choked on it and had trouble breathing, so she had to let him help her
over the wall. Even when he didn't touch her bare hand with his gloved
one, even when he gripped her arm and there was also her sweater between
them, the contact made her belly quiver so badly that she thought she
was going to vomit, but she fought that urge because, with the gag in
her mouth, she would choke to death on her own regurgitation.
Through ten years of adversity, Regina had developed lots of tricks to
get her through bad times. There was the think of something-worse
trick, where she endured by imagining what more terrible circumstances
might befall her than those in which she actually found herself Like
thinking of eating dead mice dipped in chocolate when she felt sorry for
herself about having to eat lime Jelly with peaches. Like thinking
about being blind on top of her other disabilities. After the awful
shock of being rejected during her first trial adoption with the
Dotterfields, she had often spent hours with her eyes closed to show
herself what she might have suffered if her eyes had been as faulty as
her right arm. But the think of something-worse trick wasn't working
now because she couldn't think of anything worse than being where she
was, with this stranger dressed all in black and wearing sung at night,
calling her "baby" and "precious." None of her other tricks were
working, either.
As he pulled her impatiently across the lagoon, she dragged her right
leg as if she could not move fast. She needed to slow him down to gain
time to think, to find some new trick.
But she was just a kid, and tricks didn't come that easy, not even to a
smart kid like her, not even to a kid who had spent ten years devising
so many clever tricks to make everyone think that she could take care of
herself, that she was tough, that she would never cry. But her trick
bag was finally empty, and she was more afraid than she had ever been.
He dragged her past big boats like the gondolas in Venice of which she
had seen pictures, but these had dragon prows from Viking ships. With
the stranger pulling impatiently on her arm, she limped past a fearful
snarling serpent's head bigger than she was.
Dead leaves and moldering papers
had blown down into the empty pool.
In the nocturnal breeze, which occasionally gusted heartily, that trash
eddied around them with the hiss-splash of a ghost sea.
"Come on, precious one," he said in his honey-smooth but unkind voice,
"I want you to walk to your Golgotha just as He did. Don't you think
that's fitting? Is that so much to ask? Hmmm? I'm not also insisting
that you carry your own cross, am I? What do you say, precious, will
you move your ass?"
She was scared, with no fine tricks left to hide the fact, no tricks
left to hold back her tears, either. She began to shake and cry, and
her right leg grew weak for real, so she could hardly remain standing
let alone move as fast as he demanded.
In the past, she would have turned to God at a moment like this, would
have talked to Him, talked and talked, because no one had talked to God
more often or more bluntly than she had done from the time she was just
little. But she had been talking to God in the car, and she had not
heard Him listening. Over the years, all their conversations had been
one-sided, yes, but she had always heard Him listening, at least, a hint
of his great slow steady breathing. But now she knew He couldn't be
listening because if He was there, hearing how desperate she was, He
would not have failed to answer her this time. He was gone, and she
didn't know where, and she was alone as she had never been.
When she was so overcome by tears and weakness that she could not walk
at all, the stranger scooped her up. He was very strong. She was
unable to resist, but she didn't hold on to him either. She just curled