On Christmas night, when he had stayed at his parents' house in
Bridgeport, Brendan had apparently had a dream featuring the moon, for
he had awakened his mother and father with his loud and panicky cries.
But he could remember nothing of the dream. Since then, as far as he
knew, none of his dreams had involved the moon, but were concerned
exclusively with that mysterious place full of dazzling golden light,
where he felt himself called toward some incredible revelation.
Now, as he still reached with one hand toward the glimmering frost on
the window, the vaguely phosphorescent time grew brighter, as if some
peculiar chemical reaction was at work within the ice crystals. The
moon-image changed from a milky hue to the crisper white of sun-dappled
snow, then grew even brighter, until it was a scintillant circle of
silver blazing on the glass.
Heart pounding furiously, certain he was teetering on the edge of some
astounding epiphany, Brendan continued to hold his hand toward the
window, and he gasped in shock as a shaft of light leapt out from the
frost-moon and fell across the bed. It was like the beam of a spotlight
and every bit as brilliant. As he squinted into the glare, trying to
see how such fierce incandescence could possibly originate from ordinary
hoarfrost and glass, the light changed to pale red, to darker red, to
crimson, to scarlet. Around him, the rumpled blankets shone like molten
steel, and his outstretched hand appeared to be wet with blood.
He was gripped by diji vu, absolutely convinced that he had once really
stood under a scarlet moon, bathed in its bloody glow.
Although he wanted to understand how this strange red light related to
the wondrous golden light of his dreams, although he still felt himself
being called by something unknown that waited in that radiance, he was
suddenly afraid. As the scarlet beams intensified, as his room became a
caldron of heatless red fire and red shadows, his fear grew into terror
of such power that it made him shake and sweat.
He pulled his hand back, and the scarlet light rapidly faded to silver,
and the silver dimmed as well, until the circle of frost on the window
shone with only a natural reflection of the January moon.
As darkness laid claim to his room once more, Brendan sat up and hastily
switched on the lamp. Damp with sweat, as full of the night-shakes as
any child frightened by fantasies of carnivorous goblins, he went to the
window. The icy circle was still there, a moon image in the center of
the otherwise unfrosted pane of glass.
He had wondered if the light had been but a dream or hallucination. In
a way, he almost wished it had been only that. But the frost-moon was
still there, proof that what he had seen was real, not a delusion.
Hesitantly, he touched the glass. He felt nothing unusual. Just the
bitter cold of winter pressing against the other side of the pane.
With a start, he realized that he felt the swollen rings in his palms.
He turned his hands over and watched as the stigmata faded.
He returned to bed. For a long while he sat with his back against the
headboard, with his eyes open and the light on, waiting for the courage
to lie down in darkness.
Elko County, Nevada.
Ernie stood by the tub in the bathroom, trying to recall precisely what
he had thought and felt in the early hours of Saturday, December 14,
when he had been driven by some strange impulse to open the window and
had suffered that frightening hallucination. The writer, Dominick
Corvaisis, stood by the sink, and Faye watched from the doorway.
Reflections of the ceiling light and the light above the mirror imparted
a warmth to the ceramic-tile floor, glimmered in the chrome faucets and
shower rod, gave a bright flat sheen to the plastic shower curtain, and
gradually illuminated the memories that Ernie sought.
"Light. I came in here for the light. My fear of the dark was at a
peak then, and I was trying to hide it from Faye. Couldn't sleep, so I
slipped out of bed, came here, closed the door, and just . . . just
sort of reveled in the light." He told how his gaze was drawn to the
window above the tub and how he was overcome by an irrational and urgent
need to escape. "It's hard to explain. But suddenly crazy thoughts . .
. whirled into my head. For some reason, I panicked. I thought, This
is my one chance to escape, so I'd better take it, go through that
window, head up into the hills . . . get to a ranch, get help."
"help for what?" Cor-vaisis asked. "Why did you need help? Why did you
feel you needed to escape from your own home?"
Ernie frowned. "Don't have the foggiest notion. He remembered the way
he had felt that night-the eeriness, urgency strangely mixed with
dreaminess. He pointed to the window. "I actually slid back the bolt.
Opened it. Might've crawled out, too, except I saw someone outside. On
the roof of the utility room."
"Who?" Corvaisis asked.
"Sounds silly. It was a guy in motorcycle gear. White crash helmet.
Dark visor over his face. Black gloves. In fact, he reached one hand
through the window, as if making a grab for me, and I stepped backward,
fell over the edge of the tub.
"That's when I came running," Faye said.
"I got off the floor," Ernie said, "went back to the window, looked out
on the roof. No one there. It'd- been just . . . hallucination."
Faye said, "In extreme cases of phobia, when the sufferer is in almost
constant anxiety, hallucinations sometimes occur."
The writer stared at the opaque window above the tub, as if hoping to
find some vital secret revealed in the uneven milky texture of the
glass. At last he said, "It wasn't exactly a hallucination. I have a
hunch that what you saw, Ernie, was a . . . well, call it a
memory-flash. From the summer
before last. From the lost days. For a moment, back on December
fourteenth, your repressed memories surged toward the surface. You had
a flashback to a time when you really were a prisoner in your own home,
when you really did try to escape."
"And I was stopped by that guy on the roof of the utility room? But
what was he doing there in a motorcycle helmet?
Strange, isn't it'?"
Dom said, "A man in a decontamination suit, sent to deal with a spill of
chemicals or biological toxins, would wear an airtight helmet."
"Decontamination," Ernie said. "But if they were actually here in suits
like that, then there must've really been a spill."
"Maybe," Dom said. "We still don't know enough to decide."
Faye said, "But listen, if we all went through this experience, like you
think we did, then how come only you and Ernie and that Mr. Lomack are
suffering repercussions? How come I'm not having bad dreams and
psychological problems?"
The writer's gaze drifted back to the window. "I don't know. But those
are some of the questions we've got to answer if we've any hope of
relieving the subconscious anxiety that this experience left in us, if
we've any hope of getting on with normal lives."
&nbs
p; Connecticut to New York City.
After the money had been removed from the armored car, Jack and his men
drove only nine miles and parked the two phony Department of Highway
vans in a four-stall rented garage leased with fake IDs, where they had
left their cars. The garage was one of a long row that faced both sides
of a litter-strewn alley in a shabby neighborhood, where relaxed zoning
laws permitted intermingling of commercial and industrial facilities
with residences. The area was characterized by peeling paint, grime,
broken streetlamps, empty storefronts, and mean-looking mongrel dogs on
the loose.
They emptied the contents of the canvas bags on the oily concrete floor
of the garage and did a hasty count of the cash. They split it quickly
into five shares of approximately three hundred fifty thousand dollars
each, all in used bills that could never be traced.
Jack felt no triumph, no thrill. Nothing.
In five minutes, the gang had dispersed like dandelion fluff on a brisk
wind. Clockwork.
As Jack headed home to Manhattan, spits of snow fell in brief squalls,
though not enough to dust the highway or interfere with travel.
During the drive from Connecticut, in a strange mood, he underwent a
change he could not have anticipated. Minute by minute and mile by
mile, the grayness in him began at last to be colored by emotion; his
ennui gave way to feelings that surprised him. He would not have been
surprised by a new welling-up of grief or loneliness, for Jenny had been
dead only seventeen days. But the emotion that steadily tightened its
grip on him was guilt. The stolen money in the trunk of the car began
to weigh on his conscience as heavily as if it were the first ill-gotten
goods ever to fall into his hands.
Through eight busy years of meticulously planned and triumphantly
executed larcenies, several on an even grander scale than the armored
car, he had never experienced the mildest quiver of guilt. Until now.
He had seen himself as a just avenger. Until now.
Cruising to Manhattan. through the blustery winter night, he began to
see himself as little more than a common thief. Guilt wrapped him like
flypaper. He tried repeatedly to shake it off. It clung.
Sudden as it seemed, the guilt had actually been building for a long
time; that was where his growing dissatisfaction had been leading for
months. Disillusionment had set in noticeably with the jewelry-store
job last October, and he'd thought the changes had begun then. But now,
forced into self-analysis, he realized he had stopped getting a full
measure of pleasure from his work long ago. As he scrolled backward in
his memory, seeking the most recent job that had left him fulfilled, he
was startled to discover it was the McAllister burglary in Marin County,
north of San Francisco, the summer before last.
Ordinarily, he worked only in the East near Jenny, but Branch
Pollard-with whom he had pulled off the just-completed Guardmaster
heist-had settled in California for a while, and during that Pacific
sojourn he had spotted Avril McAllister, a sheep waiting to be sheared.
McAllister, an industrialist worth two hundred million, lived on an
eightacre estate in Marin County, protected by stone walls, a complex
electronic security system, and guard dogs. With information developed
from a half-dozen sources, Branch had determined that McAllister was a
collector of rare stamps and coins, two eminently fenceable commodities.
Besides, the industrialist was a gambler who went to Vegas three times a
year, usually dropping a quarter of a million each visit, but sometimes
winning big; he always took his winnings in cash to avoid the taxman,
and some of that cash was surely in the mansion. Branch needed Jack's
sense of strategy and expertise in electronics, and Jack needed a change
of scenery, so they pulled it off with the help of a third man.
After considerable planning, getting onto the estate and into the house
went smoothly. They were prepared with an electronic listening device
that could detect the soft tick of a safe's tumblers and amplify them,
which made deducing the combination mere child's play, but as insurance
they also took a full set of safe-cracking tools and a plastic
explosive. The problem was that Avril McAllister had no mere safe. He
had a damn vault. The industrialist was so certain of the vault door's
inviolability that he'd made no effort to conceal it with a sliding
partition or tapestry; it was in one wall of the immense game room, a
massive stainless-steel portal as big as anything in a first-class bank.
The listening device Jack had brought was not sensitive enough to detect
the movement of tumblers through twenty inches of stainless steel. The
plastic explosive would have peeled any safe, but the vault was
They left the estate with no stamps or coins, but with sterling silver,
a complete collection of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett first
editions, a few jewels that Mrs. McAllister carelessly left out of the
vault, and a handful of other items, which they fenced for only sixty
thousand dollars, split three ways. The take was by no means a
pittance, but it was far less than anticipated, insufficient to cover
their expenses and to make their time, planning, and risks worthwhile.
In spite of this debacle, Jack had gotten a kick out of the job. Once
they had safely fled the McAllister estate, he and Branch had seen the
humor in the catastrophe and had been able to laugh about it. They
spent two days relaxing in the California sun; then, on a whim, Jack
took his twenty thousand to Reno to see if he could do better at craps
and blackjack than he had done at burglary. Twenty-four hours after
checking into Harrah's, he checked out, the twenty thousand having grown
to an amazing $107,455. The exquisite symmetry of bad-luck money
bringing good luck was enormously appealing. Deciding to extend his
vacation, he rented a car and drove back to New York, all the way across
the country, in a splendid mood, eager to see Jenny.
Now, more than eighteen months later, as he entered Manhattan on his
return trip from Connecticut, Jack realized that, curiously, the fiasco
at the McAllister estate had been the last enterprise to provide
untainted satisfaction. At that point he had begun a long journey from
dead-end amorality all the way across the moral spectrum until he had
become, once more, capable of guilt.
But why? What had initiated the change in him? What continued to power
it? He had no answers.
All he knew was that he was no longer able to think of himself as a
melancholy and romantic bandit with a just mission to redress the wrongs
done to him and to his beloved wife. He was merely a thief. For eight
years he had been deluding himself. Now he saw himself for what he
really was, and the sudden insight was devastating.
He had not merely become a man without purpose. Worse, without
realizing it, he had been lacking a worthwhile purpose for eight years.
&
nbsp; He drove aimlessly through the streets of Manhattan, going nowhere in
particular, unwilling to return straightaway to the apartment.
He soon found himself on Fifth Avenue, approaching St. Patrick's, and on
impulse he pulled to the curb, parked illegally before the main doors of
the immense cathedral. He got out of the car, went around to the trunk,
opened it, and pulled half a dozen banded stacks of twenty-dollar bills
from the plastic garbage bag.
It was foolhardy to leave the car illegally parked in so prominent a
location when its trunk contained more than a third of a million dollars
in stolen money, an illegally obtained device like SLICKS, and guns. If
a cop stopped to give him a ticket and became suspicious and demanded to
search the car, Jack would be finished. But he had ceased to care. In
some ways, he was a dead man who still walked, just as Jenny had been a
dead woman who still breathed.
Though not a Catholic, he pulled open one of the sculpted bronze doors
of St. Patrick's, went inside, into the nave, where a handful of people
knelt in the front pews, praying or saying the rosary, and where an old
man was lighting a votive candle even at this hour. Jack stood for a
moment looking up at the elegant baldachin above the main altar. Then he
located the poor-boxes, removed the bundles of twenty-dollar bills from
inside his winter jacket, broke the paper bands that bound them, and
stuffed the money into the containers as if he were jamming garbage into
trash receptacles.
Outside again, as he was descending the granite steps, he stopped
abruptly and blinked at the night-draped cityscape, for something was