by Dean Koontz
“I’ll miss you, Alan.”
“Watch out for yourself.”
“I’ll watch out for her,” Max said.
Alan ignored him. To Mary he said, “Be careful, will you? And remember what I said.”
He went out, closing the door behind him, leaving her alone with Max.
The small, downtown tavern was dimly lit, quite busy as late evening approached, but cozy in spite of the crowd. Max and Mary sat in a corner booth, and the bartender made two perfect vodka martinis. Later they ate roast beef sandwiches and split a bottle of red wine.
When she had finished half of her large sandwich, she pushed the rest of it aside, poured a third glass of wine for herself, and said, “I wonder if Dan Goldman’s hospital bills will be covered.”
“The town carries a comprehensive insurance policy on its cops,” Max said. “Goldman got hurt in the line of duty, so he won’t be stuck for a penny of it.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“I knew you’d want me to be.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I knew you’d wonder about Goldman’s hospital bills, so I asked the mayor.”
“Even if the bills are covered,” she said, “I guess he’ll lose some pay while he’s off work.”
“No,” Max said. “I asked about that, too.”
She was surprised. “What are you—a mind reader?”
“I just know you too well. You’re the softest touch there ever was.”
“I am not. I just think we should do something nice for him.”
Max put down his sandwich. “We can buy him either a new electric range or maybe a microwave oven.”
She blinked. “What?”
“I asked some of Goldman’s buddies what he needs. Seems he’s a serious amateur chef, but his kitchen leaves a lot to be desired.”
She smiled. “We’ll get him the range and the oven, and the best set of pots and pans—”
“Hold on a minute,” Max said. “He’s got an apartment kitchen, not a restaurant. Besides, why do you think you owe him anything?”
Staring into her wine, she said, “If I hadn’t come to town, he wouldn’t have been hurt.”
“Mary Bergen, the female Atlas, carrying the world on her shoulders.” He reached across the table and took her hand. “Do you remember the first conversation we ever had?”
“How could I forget? I thought you were weird.”
The night they’d met he had been uncharacteristically shy. They’d been guests at the same party. He’d seemed at ease and self-confident with everyone but her. His approach had been so self-conscious and awkward that she felt sorry for him. He had begun with one of those analyze-yourself party games.
She smiled, remembering. “You asked me what machine I would choose to be if I could be any machine in the world. Weird.”
“The last woman who answered that question said she’d be a Rolls Royce and go to all the best places. But you said you’d be some piece of medical equipment that saves lives.”
“Was that a good answer?”
“At the time,” Max said, “it sounded phony. But now I know what you are, and I realize you were serious.”
“And what am I?”
“The kind of person who always asks for whom the bell tolls—and always cries buckets at even slightly sad movies.”
She sipped her wine. “I played the game right back at you that night, asked you what machine you’d be. Remember?”
Max nodded. He pushed his unfinished sandwich aside, picked up his wine. “I said I’d be a computer dating service so I could hook you up with me.”
She laughed girlishly. “I liked it then, and I like it now. It was a surprise finding a romantic under that big tough exterior.”
Max leaned across the table, spoke softly. “Know what machine I’d be tonight?” He pointed to the colorfully lighted juke box at the far end of the bar. “I’d be that music machine. And no matter what buttons people pushed, I’d play love songs for you.”
“Oh, Max, that’s positively saccharine.”
“But you like it.”
“I love it. After all, I’m the lady who cries buckets at even slightly sad movies.”
5
THE NIGHTMARE WOKE her, but the dream continued. For a minute after she rose up in fear from her pillows, colorful snatches of the nightmare swam in the air before her. Ethereal snapshots. Blood. Shattered bodies. Broken skulls. They were more vivid than any visions she’d ever known.
The shadows of the hotel room settled over her once more. When she grew accustomed enough to the darkness to see the outlines of the furniture, she got up.
The room was a carousel. She reached out for a brass pole that wasn’t there, for something to steady her.
When she regained her balance, she went into the bathroom. She didn’t close the door because she worried she might wake Max. For the same reason, she didn’t use the main light. Instead, she turned on the much dimmer, orange-filtered heat lamp.
In that eerie light her mirror image disturbed her: dark rings around the eyes, skin slack and damp. She was used to a reflection that was the envy of most women: silky black hair, blue eyes, fine features, a flawless complexion. Now the person looking back at her seemed a stranger, an alien.
She felt personally threatened by what she had seen. The dead bodies in the nightmare were the first parts of a chain in which she might be the final link.
She drew a glass of cold water, drank it, then another. The tumbler rattled against her teeth. She had to use both hands to hold it.
Each time she shut her eyes, she saw the same remnant of the nightmare. A dark-haired girl with one blue eye gazing sightlessly at the ceiling. The other eye swollen in a macabre wink. Face torn, bruised, misshapen.
Worst of all, Mary felt that if the blood were swabbed from that face, and if its smashed features were restored, she would know it at once.
She put the glass down, leaned against the sink.
Who? she thought. Who was that girl?
The distorted face would not resolve itself.
As if she craved more fear than the dream had given her, she remembered the psychopath who had died that same night: his twisted features; his marble-chip teeth; his hands pressed to the squad car windows; his whispery voice, cool as cellar air when he spoke her name.
He had been an omen, a warning to her.
But an omen of what?
There might be nothing mysterious about his knowing her name. He could have heard she was in town, even though that information was limited to a select few. He might have recognized her from the photograph that accompanied her column, although the picture was not a good one and was six years old. That was Alan’s explanation.
Although she had no good reason to disagree with Alan, she knew that his explanation was inadequate.
Maybe the madman had known her because he’d had his first (and necessarily last) telepathic experience in the instant that death seized him.
Or perhaps there was a meaning to the incident that couldn’t be defined in rational terms. When she recalled the madman’s demonic face, one thought circled through her mind: He’s a messenger from Hell, a messenger from Hell.... She didn’t know what that meant. But she didn’t dismiss the thought simply because it had a supernatural ring to it.
Through her extensive travels, through her many conversations with clairvoyants like Peter Hurkos and Gerard Croiset, through her conversations and correspondence with other psychically gifted people, she had come to think anything was possible. She’d been in homes where poltergeists were active, where dishes and paintings and bric-a-brac and heavy furniture sailed through the air and exploded against walls when no one had touched them or been near them. She hadn’t decided whether she’d seen ghosts at work or, instead, the unconscious telekinetic powers of someone in the house; but she did know that something was there. She had seen Ted Serios create his famous psychic photographs, which Time and Popular Photography and many ot
her national publications had tried unsuccessfully to debunk. He projected his thoughts onto unexposed film, and he did so under the intense scrutiny of skeptical scientists. She had seen an Indian mystic—a fakir but not a faker—do the impossible. He planted a seed in a pot of earth, covered it with a light muslin sheet, then went into a deep trance. Within five hours, while Mary watched, the seed germinated, the plant grew, and fruit appeared—several tiny mangoes. As a result of two decades of contact with the extraordinary in life, she scoffed at nothing. Until someone proved beyond doubt that all psychic and supernatural phenomena were pieces of a hoax (which no one ever would), she would put as much faith in the unnatural, supernatural, and suprarational as she did in what more dogmatic people believed to be the one, true, natural, and only world.
... messenger from Hell.
Although she was half convinced that life existed after death, she didn’t believe that it was accurately described by the Judeo-Christian myths. She didn’t accept the reality of Heaven and Hell. That was too simplistic. Yet, if she didn’t believe, why this unshakable certainty that the madman was a satanic omen? Why phrase the premonition in religious terms?
She shuddered. She was cold to her bones.
She returned to the bedroom but left on the bathroom light. She was uneasy in the dark. She put on her robe.
Max snored peacefully. She stroked his cheek with her fingertips.
He was instantly awake. “What’s the matter?”
“I’m scared. I need to talk. I can’t stand to be alone.”
He closed his hand around her wrist. “I’m here.”
“I saw something awful ... horrible.” She shuddered again.
He sat up, switched on the lamp, looked around the room.
“Visions,” she said.
Still holding her wrist, he pulled her down to the bed.
“They started when I was asleep,” she said, “and went on after I woke up.”
“Started when you were sleeping? That’s never happened before, has it?”
“Never.”
“So maybe it was a dream.”
“I know the difference.”
He let go of her wrist, pushed his hair back from his forehead. “A vision of what?”
“Dead people.”
“An accident?”
“Murder. Beaten and stabbed.”
“Where?”
“Quite a distance from here.”
“Name of the town?”
“It’s south of us.”
“That’s all you’ve got?”
“I think it’s in Orange County. Maybe Santa Ana. Or Newport Beach. Laguna Beach. Anaheim. Someplace like that.”
“How many dead?”
“A lot. Four or five women. All in one place. And...”
“And what?”
“They’re the first of many.”
“You sense that?”
“Yes.”
“Sense it psychically?”
“Yes.”
“The first of how many?”
“I don’t know.”
“You saw the killer?”
“No.”
“Pick up anything about him?”
“No.”
“Not even the color of his hair?”
“Nothing, Max.”
“Have these killings taken place yet?”
“I don’t think so. But I can’t be sure. I was so surprised by the visions that I didn’t make any attempt to hold on to them. I didn’t pursue them like I should have.”
He got out of bed and slipped into his own robe. She stood up, moved against him. “You’re shivering,” he said.
She wanted to be loved and sheltered. “It was horrible.”
“They always are.”
“This was worse than usual.”
“Well, it’s over.”
“No. Maybe it is over or shortly will be for those women. But not for us. We’re going to get tangled up in this one. Oh, God, so many bodies, so much blood. And I think I knew one of the dead girls.”
“Who was she?” he asked, holding her still closer.
“The face I saw was so badly disfigured. I couldn’t tell who she was, but she seemed familiar.”
“It had to be a dream,” he said reassuringly. “The visions don’t come to you out of the blue. You’ve always had to concentrate, focus your attention in order to pick them up. Like when you start tracking a killer, you have to handle something that belonged to his victim before you can receive images of him.”
He was telling her what she already knew, soothing her in the manner of a father explaining to his still frightened young daughter that the ghosts she had seen in the dark bedroom were only the draft-stirred curtains she could now see with all the lights on.
Actually it didn’t matter to her what he said. Just hearing him speak and feeling him close, Mary grew calm.
“Even when you’re searching for a lost ring or necklace or brooch,” Max said, “you have to see the box or drawer where it was kept. So what you saw tonight had to be a dream because you didn’t seek it.”
“I feel better.”
“Good.”
“But not because I believe it was a dream. I know it was a vision. Those women were real. They’re either dead by now or they soon will be.” She thought of the brutally beaten faces and she said, “God help them.”
“Mary—”
“It was real,,” she insisted, letting go of his hand and sitting on the mattress. “And it’s going to involve us.”
“You mean the police will ask for your help?”
“More than that. It’s going to affect us ... intimately. It’s the start of something that’ll change our lives.”
“How can you know that?”
“The same way I know everything else about it. I sense it psychically.”
“Whether or not it’s going to change our life,” he said, “is there any way we can help those women?”
“We know so little. If we called the police, we couldn’t tell them anything worthwhile.”
“And since you don’t know what town it will happen in, which police department would we call? Can you pick up the vision again?”
“No use trying. It’s gone.”
“Maybe it’ll return spontaneously, just the way it came the first time.”
“Maybe.” The possibility chilled her. “I hope not. As it is, I’ve got too many nasty visions in my life. I don’t want them to start flashing on me when I’m not prepared, when I’m not asking for them. If that became a regular thing, I’d end up in a madhouse.”
“If there isn’t anything we can do about what you saw,” Max said, “then we have to forget about it for tonight. You need a drink.”
“I had some water.”
“Would I ever suggest water? I meant something with more bite.”
She smiled. “At this hour of the morning?”
“It’s not morning. We went to bed early, remember. And we’ve been asleep only half an hour or so.”
She looked at the travel clock. Eleven-ten. “I thought I’d been conked out for hours.”
“Minutes,” he said. “Vodka and tonic?”
“Scotch, if you’re having it.”
He went to the small breakfast table by the window. The liquor bottles, glasses, and ice were there. In spite of his size, he was not awkward. He moved like a wild animal—fluidly, silently. Even the preparation of drinks was a study in grace when Max did it.
If everyone were like him, Mary thought, the word “clumsy” wouldn’t exist.
He sat beside her on the edge of the bed. “Will you be able to get back to sleep?”
“I doubt it.”
“Drink up.”
She sipped the Scotch. It burned her throat.
“What are you worrying about?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
“You’re worrying about the vision.”
“Not at all.”
“Look, worry accomplishes nothing,” he
said. “And whatever you do, don’t think about a blue giraffe standing in the center of a giant custard pie.”
She stared at him, incredulous.
Grinning, he said, “What are you worrying about now?”
“What else? A blue giraffe in a custard pie.”
“See? I stopped you from worrying about the vision.”
She laughed. He had such a stern, forbidding face that his humor always came as a surprise.
“Speaking of blue,” he said, “you look perfect in that robe.”
“I’ve worn it before.”
“And every time you wear it you’re breathtaking. Perfect.”
She kissed him. She explored his lips with her tongue, then teasingly drew back.
“You look perfect in it, but you’d look even better out of it.” He put his drink beside her on the nightstand and untied the sash that was knotted at her waist, opened the long blue robe.
A pleasant tremor passed through her. The cool air caressed her bare skin. She felt soft, vulnerable; she needed him.
With his heavy hands, now light as wings, he traced lazy circles on her breasts, cupped them, pressed them together, gently massaged them. He got on his knees before her, nuzzled her cleavage and kissed her nipples.
She took his head in her hands, pushed her fingers through his lush, shining hair.
Alan was wrong about him.
“My lovely Max,” she said.
He moved his lips down her taut belly as she lay back, kissed her thighs, delicately licked the warm center of her. He slipped his hands under her buttocks, lifted slightly.
After many minutes during which her murmurs rose and fell, rose and fell again like the enigmatic susurration of the sea, he raised his head and said, “I love you.”
“Then love me.”
He took off his robe and joined her on the bed.
Agreeably exhausted, they separated at midnight, but the spell was not broken. Still enchanted, eyes closed, she drifted. In some ways she was more intensely aware of her body than she had been during intercourse.
Within minutes, however, memories of the vision returned to her: bloodied and crumpled faces. With her eyes closed, the backs of her lids were like twin projection screens on which she saw nothing but carnage.
She opened her eyes and the dark room appeared to crawl with strange shapes. Although she didn’t want to disturb Max, she couldn’t keep herself from tossing and turning.