by John Saul
In an instant Ryan’s expression clouded. “I hate macaroni and cheese,” he announced.
“Then you can have some fish,” Caroline replied, glancing quickly at Tony. “You can have anything you want.”
“I want spaghetti,” Ryan said. He turned toward Tony, and when he spoke again, Caroline could hear the challenge in his voice. “My dad made the best spaghetti you ever tasted.”
Caroline opened her mouth to say something, but Tony spoke first. “I wish I’d gotten to try it. And how do you know you hate my macaroni and cheese when you haven’t even tried it?”
“I know,” Ryan insisted. He turned to his mother. “Do I have to eat this?”
Caroline hesitated, then made up her mind. It was now, or never. “Yes,” she said. “You do. You at least have to taste it.” For a second she thought he was going to refuse, but then he picked up his spoon, reached out and plunged it into the macaroni and cheese, blew on the steaming spoonful of pasta, and finally stuck it in his mouth.
“There. I tasted it, all right? And I hate it.” Getting up from the table, he walked out of the dining room and slammed the door behind him.
“I’m sorry,” Caroline said, getting to her feet and starting after her son, but once again, as he had in the kitchen, Tony stopped her.
“I’ll take care of this,” he said quietly. “It seems like I’m the one he has a problem with, so I’m the one that had better go talk to him.”
Without waiting for a reply, he followed Ryan out of the dining room. Heading up the stairs, he walked down the hall to Ryan’s closed door, and knocked softly.
No response.
He rapped harder. “May I come in?”
A single muffled word came through the thick wood: “No!”
Tony tried the knob, found the door locked, and reached into his pocket. A few seconds later he twisted the key in the lock, opened the door, and stepped inside, closing the door behind him.
Ryan glared at him from the bed. “This is my room,” he said. “You can’t come in here.”
Tony moved across the room. “This may be your room, but this is my apartment, and I shall go where I please.” His eyes locked onto Ryan’s, and his voice took on a hard edge. “And perhaps your father allowed you to act this way, but I shall not.”
“I don’t have to do what you say,” Ryan said, but the tremble in his voice betrayed the fear that was suddenly building inside him.
Tony Fleming sat down on the bed and laid his hand heavily on the boy’s shoulder. “You and I,” he said so softly that Ryan had to strain to hear his words, “can get along very well. I like you, Ryan. I really do.” His fingers tightened on Ryan’s shoulder the way they had earlier clamped onto his wrist. His voice dropped even lower, and his eyes bored into the boy’s. “But I do not like the way you are behaving. I do not like the way you’re talking, either to me, or to your mother.”
“I don’t have—” But before he could finish what he was saying, Anthony’s fingers closed even tighter, turning Ryan’s words into a squeal of pain.
“You have to do exactly what I tell you,” Tony instructed him. “Whether you like it or not, I am your stepfather, and you are living in my home. You can make this a good thing for yourself, or a bad thing for yourself. But you are not going to do anything—or say anything—that is going to upset your mother. Is that clear?”
A shiver went through Ryan as he looked up into his stepfather’s eyes. They had gone dead flat, and something about their emptiness frightened him far more than anything Anthony Fleming had said. He nodded mutely.
“Good.” Tony Fleming’s hand dropped away from Ryan’s shoulder. “Then let’s go back downstairs, and enjoy our dinner.”
Understanding that his stepfather’s words were not a suggestion but a command, Ryan got up from the bed and followed Tony Fleming back to the dining room. But for the rest of the evening, he spoke not another word.
“Did you have a good talk with Tony?” Caroline asked as she said goodnight to him a couple of hours later.
Ryan wanted to tell her exactly what had happened, wanted to show her where his stepfather’s fingers had dug into his shoulder. But even as the words formed in his mind, he remembered the strange dead look he’d seen in Tony’s eyes, and knew he would tell his mother nothing. “Yes,” he whispered. “It was okay.”
“Then everything’s fine,” Caroline said, bending down and kissing Ryan’s forehead.
The light clicked off.
His mother left the room.
And Ryan was left alone in the dark, certain that despite his mother’s words, everything was not fine at all.
CHAPTER 17
The man across the street from Andrea Costanza’s building was almost invisible in the darkness of the unlit doorway of a small cutlery shop that had closed hours earlier, its windows protected by roll-down shutters, its door by a heavy iron accordion grille that was securely fastened with a heavy padlock. The street was quiet—no one had passed by in the last fifteen minutes, and only a single taxi had appeared, dropping its fare three doors down, then continuing on its way. Several times the man had left the doorway to walk along the sidewalk, checking the building from every angle.
An old building, eight floors.
No doorman.
An outer door leading to a vestibule where there was a bank of mailboxes, a panel of buttons, and a small speaker.
No security camera, at least not that he could see.
According to the panel of buzzers, Andrea Costanza lived on the fifth floor, in Apartment E.
He’d watched the building for half an hour. No one had entered; no one left. Then, in the space of ten minutes, seven people had arrived: two couples, then three single people. All of them had pressed a buzzer about a third of the way down the panel.
Ten minutes later, the man crossed the street, pulled on a pair of surgical gloves, entered the vestibule and quickly punched four of the buzzers.
As the speaker crackled to life and an annoyed voice demanded to know who was there, the inner door buzzed and the man pulled it open and stepped through. A moment later it closed behind him, cutting off the sound of the voice that was still crackling through the speaker.
Ignoring the elevator, the man found the staircase and started upward. Coming to the fifth floor, he paused, listening. He could hear nothing.
He opened the fire door a crack, and listened again.
Still nothing.
He opened it a little further, and peered out. The corridor was empty.
The man could count six doors from where he stood, but the identifying letters on them were invisible. He would have no choice but to leave the shelter of the stairwell, even if only for a few seconds. But still he lingered, like a skittish animal that senses danger nearby, but can’t quite identify its source. He was just about to slip out into the hallway, when suddenly he froze. For a second he wasn’t even sure why he’d stopped, but then he heard it—a faint clanking sound. A second after that, he knew what it was: the elevator. Fading back into the stairwell, he pulled the door nearly shut, and waited. The sound grew louder, then suddenly stopped. He could hear the door being opened, but it was muffled enough that he knew the elevator had stopped on another floor.
A moment later the sound started again, and began receding as the elevator began its descent back to the lobby.
Now!
The man pulled the fire door open, slipped through, and moved quickly down the hall. Apartment E was the third one down, on the backside of the building.
Perfect.
Less than a quarter of a minute after he’d left the fire stairs, the man was back in their shelter, and once again climbing. When he came to the top he paused again, this time to pull a black ski mask from the pocket of his coat. Pulling the ski mask on, he opened the door and stepped out onto the roof.
Andrea Costanza glared at the screen of the little notebook computer she’d set up on her kitchen table. She’d already called Nate Rosenberg three ti
mes, and he’d walked her through all the steps that should have gotten her connected to her computer at the office, but no matter what she did, she couldn’t make it work.
“Do you want me to come over?” Nate asked the last time she called.
“No, I don’t want you to come over,” Andrea replied more harshly than she should have. “Oh, I’m sorry, I’m not mad at you. I’m mad at me, and I’m mad at that quack you seem to think so highly of, and I’m really, really mad at this dumb computer. I’m sure it’s something perfectly simple, and I’ll feel like a complete idiot tomorrow when you show me what I’m doing wrong. I think I’m just going to give it up, turn on the TV, and veg out for the rest of the evening. See you tomorrow.”
She’d fed Chloe, who’d expressed her usual amount of contempt for the dog food Andrea insisted on feeding her just because she happened to be a dog, and fixed her own supper, which she ate under Chloe’s accusatorial gaze, resisting the temptation to share even the smallest part of her meal with her pet.
“Feed her human food, and kill her,” the vet had warned. “Schnauzers have weak kidneys, and if you give her nothing but kibble, she’ll be fine. Anything else, and she’ll wag her tail right up until the day she dies. Which won’t take long.”
So she’d gone through the dinner ritual, with Chloe ignoring her bowl of kibble as long as there was any hope at all of begging a scrap from her mistress, then munching discontentedly while Andrea did up the dishes.
After she cleaned up the dishes, she snapped on the TV, but no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t concentrate.
The computer wouldn’t let her.
She shut it off and put it away, but ten minutes later she had it set up again on the coffee table in front of the sofa, and was endlessly repeating everything Nate Rosenberg had instructed her to do.
She called a help line, made her way through the endless tree that was supposed to save time, and sat on hold for forty-five minutes before finally talking to a man who quickly demonstrated that he knew even less about computers than she did.
Going back to the control panel, she stared stupidly at the icons that seemed to hold less and less meaning with every minute that went by. Just forget it, she told herself. Just put it away, and do something else. But even as she formed the words in her mind, she was already clicking on an icon, and suddenly there it was: a box asking her to enter her password.
When Chloe began whining, Andrea was so close to achieving her goal that she ignored the little dog until Chloe suddenly jumped up next to her mistress, planted her paws on the back of the sofa, and began to bark at the open window behind Andrea.
“For heaven’s sake, Chloe,” Andrea said, her eyes still fastened to the screen of the notebook. “There’s nothing out—”
But even as she spoke the words she saw a faint shadow pass across the screen, and she felt her skin crawl as she knew that there was, indeed, something beyond the window.
She started to turn, but it was already too late. A powerful arm slipped around her neck from the left, and she started to scream.
For the second time, she was an instant too late. The arm jerked her backward, forcing her against the back of the sofa, and closing her throat so quickly that the only sound that escaped was a muted gasp of surprise.
Her hands came up, her fingers closing on the arm, and she began thrashing, trying to free herself.
The arm held her fast, and she felt her lungs begin to burn.
Chloe’s barking had faded to a whimper, and she’d scuttled off the couch to cower against the far wall, her eyes fastened on her mistress, her body pressed to the floor. Andrea tried to reach out toward the little dog, but now her vision was blurring, and she felt her limbs weakening as her blood ran out of oxygen. With her vision starting to fail, she reached back, trying to gouge the face of her attacker, but all she felt was some kind of soft material.
The burning in her lungs worsened, and her arms fell away from the man’s head as all her instincts focused on escaping from the crushing pressure on her throat. She clawed frantically, scratching at the heavy material that covered the imprisoning arm, but even as she struggled, she felt the last of her strength ebbing away.
I’m going to die, she thought. Suddenly she felt the man’s right hand on the side of her head, cupping her ear. I’m going to die right here in—
With a quick, hard shove, the man snapped Andrea Costanza’s neck, and in an instant her hands dropped away from his arm and her body went limp.
The man held on to Andrea’s lifeless body for nearly another full minute. Only when he was certain that she was dead did he release her from his grip, and her body collapsed on the sofa like a broken doll, her arms flopped by her side, her head lolling on her shoulder. Except for the odd angle at which her head was turned, she could almost have fallen asleep.
The man, having never fully entered the room at all, eased the window to the fire escape closed, and quickly began climbing back toward the roof.
An unnatural stillness fell over the apartment, and for a long time Chloe stayed where she was, her eyes fixed on her mistress’s lifeless body. Finally she rose to her feet and padded across the floor toward Andrea. She put her forepaws on the sofa and began licking at Andrea’s hand, then climbed up to lick at her face. Only when she was exhausted from her efforts to bring her mistress back to life did the little dog finally press herself close to Andrea’s body, curl herself into a tight ball, and fall into a restless sleep.
On the floor below, the party went on, no one having seen or heard anything at all.
CHAPTER 18
Tony Fleming knew the time was near—he could feel the cravings in every cell of his body now. It was a strange kind of hunger, not centered in his belly, but raging through every part of his body, gnawing at his mind, devouring his very soul.
The soul he was certain he didn’t possess.
He shut his mind to that thought, concentrating his attention on Caroline, who lay next to him in the bed. They’d made love an hour ago, and even though his body felt weak and his mind had been distracted with the craving, he’d hidden it all from Caroline, satisfying her as perfectly as he had on that first night, when they’d slipped out of the main house and made their way down the path and through the palm trees to the beach. The tide was low, and they’d lain on the sand beneath the full moon. Caroline had worried about the children at first, begging him to go into the little cabana by the beach, but under the spell of his caresses she’d quickly forgotten her worries, surrendering herself to the ecstasy he offered. Tonight, he’d offered her that ecstasy again, and she’d writhed and moaned under his touch, arching her body toward him, gasping and pleading until finally he’d satisfied her. Then, as the craving welled up in him once again, she’d drifted into sleep, her panting breaths slowing to a steady gentle rhythm that should have lulled him into slumber, too.
But sleep would not come to him—not yet at least. So he lay in the darkness, waiting for the clock on his bedside table to strike the hour of midnight. It was a beautiful clock—an ancient crystal regulator so perfectly maintained that its brass glowed like gold and its movement needed resetting only twice a year, in spring and fall. Its ticking was so quiet as to be all but inaudible, and when its hammer fell on its chime, the sound crept through the night with the stealth of a thief.
Only if you were listening for it could you hear it at all.
Then at last it happened: the clock struck once, twice, then ten times more, and Anthony Fleming rose from the bed, bent close enough to his wife to feel her breath on his lips, then moved through the familiar darkness of the bedroom into the privacy of his bathroom. Closing the door carefully enough that the click of the latch was barely louder than the ticking of his clock, Tony turned the light on and gazed at himself in the full-length mirror that was mounted on the inside of the bathroom door.
His body still looked strong—his shoulders broad, his torso narrowing to his hips without the slightest trace of bulge or fla
b. His chest was covered with a thick mat of curling black hair, just beginning to be shot through with the same gray that was starting to show on his head, but except for those first strands of gray, he looked far younger than his years. Under the bright light of his bathroom, though, he could see far more clearly that time was taking its toll.
The tan he’d gotten on Mustique didn’t quite cover up the liver spots on his hands and arms. His skin was beginning to lose its elasticity: the faintest beginnings of wattles were starting to show on his neck, and the veins in his legs were starting to look varicose. Soon his hair would begin to thin, his muscles would lose their tone, and his eyes would sink deep into their sockets. He would start to look like his neighbors, his youth ebbing away, leaving behind nothing but a living carcass rotting from within. Would his eyes go first, leaving him blind like Helena Kensington? Or would his muscles atrophy to the point where he could no longer walk, like Lavinia Delamond?
As all the images of youth destroyed by devouring age flickered through his mind, the cravings that had stolen his sleep that night grew stronger and stronger, calling out to him.
Tempting him.
Beseeching him.
He stared into the mirror at the image of his aging body.
And knew the cravings inside him must be satisfied before it was too late, and he could satisfy them no more.
Flicking the light switch, he plunged the room—and himself—into darkness.