The Complete Adversary Cycle: The Keep, the Tomb, the Touch, Reborn, Reprisal, Nightworld (Adversary Cycle/Repairman Jack)

by F. Paul Wilson

  Maybe he’d never go back. He liked it here in NC. He’d fit in, and Lisl was a big part of that comfortable feeling. She made him feel good. She had her share of hang-ups, though, the most glaring being her lack of self-esteem. She was bright, warm, real, so free of pretense—a refreshing trait these days on the campus of “the new Harvard of the South.” She’d had no trouble convincing Will of her brilliance, her sweetness. Why couldn’t she see it?

  Somebody had done a real number on Lisl. The most obvious culprit was her ex-husband, but Will sensed that it went deeper than that. What were her parents like? How had they raised her? Stuck her in front of a TV? Like so many people he met these days, Lisl seemed to have been raised with no values. She was brilliant, but she lacked focus. She was incomplete, vulnerable, and lacking a vital piece: someone to love. The right someone could make it all come together for her. The wrong someone—again—could unravel her. Even if he were younger, Will knew he was one of the wrong someones.

  He wished he could help her, but didn’t know exactly what to do—pulling her closer, pushing her away, wanting to open up to her the way she had opened up to him yet knowing he couldn’t truly open up to anyone ever again.

  THREE

  1

  Lisl parked her car in her assigned space and got out. The sun was well on its way down the sky but the early September air was still warm and slightly hazy with the humidity. Hazy enough to mute and blend the various shades of green on the trees and the wild splotches of color from the bunches of mums blossoming all over the grounds. Only the aging garden apartments kept the scene from being an Impressionist’s dream.

  Brookside Gardens was a set of two-story brick apartments, occupied for the most part by young marrieds, many with kids. It could get noisy here on Saturday afternoons. But Brookside adequately suited Lisl’s needs. Her one-bedroom unit offered security and comfort, was the perfect size, and didn’t strain her bank account. What more could she ask?

  Right now? Maybe a little company. She wished Will lived nearby instead of out in the country. She had this urge to drop in on someone and plop into a chair and talk about nothing over a glass of wine. But she knew no one else well enough for that.

  That was one problem with Brookside: she had no real friends here. She didn’t fit in with the young marrieds surrounding her. Sure, they welcomed her to their parties and cookouts on holiday weekends, and she’d drink and talk and laugh with them, but she never felt at ease with them, never really felt she belonged.

  None of which was relevant tonight. She had to get herself spruced up for Dr. Rogers’ Welcome Back party.

  In the old days, it might have been called a faculty tea. Nowadays it was a cocktail party. Lisl really didn’t want to go. She’d know hardly anyone there. After all, it was the Psych department, not Math. She and Ev had only helped them with a few snags over the summer. No big thing. No reason to invite them to the party. Of course it would have been a little easier to take if Ev were going. At least she’d have someone to talk to. But Ev never went to parties.

  Lisl wasn’t a party person either. A rotten conversationalist who could think of nothing to say once she’d covered the weather and general comments about the incoming student body. Then long uncomfortable silences would follow and she and whoever she was with would slowly drift to different rooms.

  Funny, she never seemed to run out of things to say to Will.

  But no way Will could be there, so forget that. If tonight followed the usual pattern, she’d wind up alone, standing by the bookshelves, nursing a plastic tumbler of too-tart Chablis as she sneaked looks at her watch and pretended to be interested in what titles and authors were stacked on the shelf. Usually the selection was as uninteresting as she felt.

  This past summer had proved an unusually solitary one. She’d shuttled between her apartment and her office six days a week with little or no deviation in pattern. Over a long, lonely Labor Day weekend she had decided a change was in order. Time to force herself into some sort of social … what? Whirl? Her social life would never whirl. And she wasn’t sure she wanted it to. A social crawl was more her speed. She’d settle for that.

  And so the old Lisl determined to become a different Lisl, a new, improved, socializing Lisl. She would turn down no invitation to a social gathering, no matter how dreadful she thought it might be.

  Which was why she was determined to show up at Ed Rogers’ party tonight.

  But the most immediate problem was what to wear. These things were casual but she didn’t want to be too casual. Most of her comfortable clothes fell into the latter category; and her good stuff didn’t fit her anymore. She’d gained more poundage over the summer and had just passed the one-sixty mark.

  You’re a cow, she thought, looking in the mirror.

  She rarely looked in the mirror. What for? To check how she looked? She wasn’t all that interested. Since the divorce she hadn’t been able to dredge up much interest in anything besides her work. Certainly not much interest in men. Not after what Brian had put her through. Six years later it still hurt.

  Brian … they’d met as freshmen in calculus class at U.N.C., both of them aiming toward a B.S.—Brian a premed in biology, Lisl a math major. A tentative courtship, a growing affection blossoming into love, at least on Lisl’s part, and then sexual intimacy—the first time for Lisl. They married immediately after graduation and moved to Pendleton where Lisl went to work teaching high school math while Brian started his stint at Darnell University School of Medicine.

  Lisl supported him through most of those four years, taking occasional night courses toward her masters in math. During Brian’s fourth year in medical school she discovered that he was having an affair with one of the nurses at the hospital. That would have been bad enough, but she learned from one of the other nurses that since he had begun his in-hospital clinical training, Brian had been bedding any female employee who would have him.

  Lisl felt her throat constrict at the memory. God, it still hurt. After all this time, it still hurt.

  Lisl filed for divorce. This seemed to infuriate Brian. Apparently he had wanted to be the one to do the dumping. Lisl’s lawyer told her that he was probably terrified too, because of a recent legal precedent in which a wife who had supported her husband through medical school could demand a share of the future proceeds he reaped from that diploma.

  Lisl wanted no part of that. She only wanted out.

  But Brian made sure he had the last word.

  When all was said and done, when all the papers had been signed and notarized, Brian had caught up to her as she’d fled the attorney’s office.

  “I never loved you,” he said. “Not for a minute. Ever.” Then walked away.

  No amount of physical abuse, no tirade of vituperation, no stream of curses, no matter how long, how loud, how vile could have hurt Lisl nearly as much as those four whispered words. Although she had said nothing and had walked coolly and calmly to her car, inside she’d been shattered. Completely. Utterly.

  I never loved you.

  The words had been echoing down the empty hallways of her life ever since.

  Even now she felt her knees wobble with the hurt. And the worst part was he was still around. He lived on the other side of town and was on staff as an orthopedist at the county medical center.

  Shaking off the memories, Lisl searched deep in her closet for something to wear, but stopped when she came across a familiar-looking shoebox. She lifted the lid and found her old shell collection from childhood. She smiled at the memory of how she’d once wanted to be a marine biologist.

  Shells. Since childhood she’d assigned shells to the people in her life. She picked up a beautiful brown-striped chambered Nautilus. This was Will—big, mysterious, hiding who-knew-what in all those inner chambers; and secretive, withdrawing and snapping his lid shut whenever anyone got too close. The razor clam was Ev—thin, sharp-edged, smooth-surfaced, unadorned, what you saw was what you got. And here was Brian, a starfish, gentle
and appealing on the surface, but it survived by trapping a mollusk with its arms, boring through its shell, and sucking out the soft parts inside to leave an empty husk.

  Like me, Lisl thought, picking up a chowder clamshell—common, uncollectible, its pale, dull surface windowed by a starfish burr hole. Me.

  She lidded the box and continued her search for something to wear. She wound up squeezed into a pair of cream colored slacks topped with an oversized lightweight sweater. She felt like a sausage from the waist down but it would have to do. At least the sweater hid her muffin top. A little make-up, five minutes with the curling iron, and she was set. All she had to do was get through the evening without splitting a seam.

  Someday soon she was going to do something about these extra pounds.

  2

  Lisl noticed him as soon as she walked through the front door. She’d never seen him before. Not tall—no more than five foot ten, she guessed—and very slim. Hardly prepossessing physically, yet he was the first man she noticed. His movements were smooth, relaxed, and graceful. With his neat mustache, Latin coloring accentuated by perfectly pressed white slacks and shirt that fit as if they’d been made just for him—and perhaps they had—he stood out in the crowd of paunchy, shaggy, patch-sleeved academics like a prince among peasants. This man had style.

  He was handing drinks to a pair of faculty wives who were blatantly gushing over him. As he turned from them, his eyes brushed past her, then returned. He smiled and gave her a tiny bow. Unaccountably, Lisl blushed, pleased that he had picked her out for a personal welcome.

  Probably does that to every woman who comes through the door, she thought as he turned away to speak to someone.

  Lisl sidled through the press of guests in the living room, nodding, smiling, saying hello to the faces she recognized. Her immediate goal was the bar—a card table laden with beer, jug wine, soda, mixers, and a few bottles of hard liquor. Lisl didn’t drink much, but a half-filled glass in her hand made her look and even feel like someone who belonged.

  As she moved, she noticed from the corner of her eye that the stylish unknown seemed to be watching her. Who was he?

  At the bar she found the host—portly, jovial Calvin Rogers, an aging Puck who sported a goatee to offset the hair he was losing on top. He held up a glass and smiled.

  “Hi! Want a drink?”

  Lisl could see by his expression that he knew her face but couldn’t quite connect it with a name.

  “Sure.”

  “Wine, beer, or booze?”

  “A white wine, please.”

  “Great!” As he poured from a two-liter bottle of Almaden he said, “House rule: I make you the first; after that you’re on your own.”

  “Fine,” Lisl said. “No limit?”

  He raised his eyebrows and grinned.

  “Oh, it’s going to be one of those nights, is it?”

  Lisl laughed. “Not really.” She hesitated a moment, debating whether she should ask him, then decided to plunge ahead. “Say, I see some new faces here.”

  “Yeah. I invited a couple of the new graduate students.”

  She glanced at the dark young man. “Really.”

  “That’s Losmara,” Rogers said, following her gaze. “Rafael. Bit older than our usual grad student, but something of a dude, isn’t he? Brilliant mind, though. Brilliant. Comes out of Arizona State, which isn’t exactly a heavy-hitter in psychology, but he sent this proposal for a paper outlining a cybernetic model for schizophrenia that just blew me away. I knew right then this was a guy who was going somewhere. And wherever he was going, I wanted him to come from here. I couldn’t offer him money—I understand his family’s half as rich as Croesus—so I played coy and conned him into choosing Darnell for his doctorate. Figured he might teach the rest of us something before he’s through. I invited him and the other grads tonight to make them feel more at home with the department.”

  “That’s nice of you.”

  He smiled and handed her the glass of wine. “I’m a nice guy. Or so they tell me.”

  Lisl wandered the cramped living room-dining room area, looking for someone she knew. She avoided the bookshelves, figuring she’d have plenty of time later to inspect them. One full circuit and she found herself standing alone by the sliding glass door that opened onto the backyard.

  This wasn’t working. Without a single other person from her own department, she felt more out of place than usual. She looked around and envied all these people with the knack for conversation. Nobody else seemed to be having problems. They all made it look so easy. Why couldn’t she just stop by a group, listen in for a while, and then join the conversation?

  Because I can’t.

  She stepped out onto the small flagstone patio. After examining what few of Cal’s roses hadn’t been eaten by beetles, she turned to go back inside.

  And found the dark grad student next to her.

  “Hello,” he said. His voice was velvet, deep but soft, melodious. His teeth were so white under the dark mustache, his eyes almost luminous in the dark. “I hear you’re from Math.”

  So simple. So perfect.

  Small talk. Rafe—that was how he introduced himself—seemed to be a natural at it. Relaxed, exuding self-confidence, he gave her the feeling that no subject could be inconsequential if he was discussing it. They stood side by side for a while, then moved to the redwood bench by the picnic table. Rafe had a lot of questions about campus life at Darnell, especially as it related to graduate students. Since Lisl had earned her own doctorate here, she had a good store of knowledge on the subject.

  He listened. Really listened. Whatever Lisl had to say, her insights, her opinions, all seemed important to him. A part of her was on edge, ready for the brush-off, waiting for him to smile, excuse himself, and move on after he’d learned what he wanted to know. But Rafe stayed by her side, asking more questions, drawing her out, freshening her wine when he replenished his own bourbon and water. He left her from time to time, but only briefly.

  Lisl found him stimulating. He exuded maleness, almost like a scent, a pheromone. Whatever it was, she knew she was responding to it. This would never go anywhere, but it was exciting to be with him. He was making the party for her.

  Throughout the evening she noticed inquisitive glances from other women as they passed in and out through the patio door. She could almost read their minds: What was the most interesting-looking man at the party doing with that frump?

  Good question.

  Idly, she sorted through the pretzels in the bowl between them on the picnic table, and picked out one to eat.

  “Do you always do that?” Rafe said, his gaze flicking back and forth between the pretzel in her hand and her eyes.

  “Do what?”

  “Take the broken ones.”

  Lisl looked at the pretzel. Well, half a pretzel—a loop and a half. She vaguely remembered picking out broken ones all evening. She always picked out the broken ones.

  “I guess I do. Is that significant?”

  He smiled. A warm smile, showing off those white, even teeth.

  “Could be. What matters is why.”

  “I guess I don’t want to see them go to waste. Everybody grabs the whole ones and leaves the broken ones. They’re like old maids. When the night’s over they’ll probably get thrown away. So those are the ones I take.”

  “In other words, you’re existing on other people’s leftovers.”

  “I wouldn’t call it existing—”

  “Neither would I.” Rafe pulled an unbroken three-ring from the bowl and offered it to her. His voice was suddenly serious. “Never be satisfied with leftovers.”

  Intrigued and fascinated by his intensity, Lisl took the pretzel and laughed. A bit too shrilly, she thought.

  “It’s just a pretzel.”

  “No. It’s a decision, a statement. A paradigm of life, and how one chooses to live it.”

  “I think you’re reading too much into this.” But what else could she expect fro
m a Psych grad. “Life is a little more complex than a bowl of pretzels.”

  “Of course it is. It’s a bowl of choices. A series of choices you make from moment to moment from the time you are volitional until you die. Each choice you make mirrors what you are inside. They say where you’ve been, they tell where you’re going.”

  His intensity was a tiny bit intimidating, yet exciting, stirring something within her.

  “Okay,” she said, not wanting to argue yet unwilling to let him get off without a qualifier. “But pretzels?”

  Rafe picked another whole three-ring from the bowl and took a savage bite out of it.

  “Pretzels.”

  Laughing, Lisl took a big bite of her own.

  Yes. One very intense man.

  3

  Too soon the crowd began to thin. People were leaving so early. This had to be the shortest party Lisl had ever been to. She glanced at her watch and was shocked to see 1:06 on its face.

  Impossible. She’d just got here. But a check with the mantel clock inside confirmed it.

  “I guess I’d better be going,” she told Rafe.

  He smiled. “I’m sorry for monopolizing all your time.”

  Monopolizing her time—that was a laugh.

  “Don’t worry. You didn’t.”

  “You have a ride?” he said, his eyes holding hers.

  “Yes.”

  For an instant she wished she didn’t. But as much as she wanted to continue their party-long conversation, driving off with him would look like she’d been picked up, and that would be all over the Math department before she arrived Monday morning.

  “Good,” he said, “because I feel obligated to give Doctor Rogers a hand cleaning up.”

  “Of course.”

  Lisl had difficulty picturing Rafe Losmara, dressed all in white as he was, emptying ashtrays and rinsing glasses. But the fact that he was cheerfully willing to pitch in said something about him.