Koontz, Dean R. - Hideaway

by Hideaway(Lit)

  diameter, housed a massive statue of the Prince of Darkness himself.

  He was not shown from the waist down; but from his navel to the tips of

  his segmented horns, he measured thirty feet. When the funhouse had

  been in operation, the monstrous sculpture waited in a thirty-five-foot

  pit, hidden beneath the lake, then periodically surged up out of its

  lair, water cascading from it, huge eyes afire, monstrous jaws working,

  sharp teeth gnashing, forked tongue flickering, thundering a

  warning-"Abandon hope all ye who enter here! "and then laughing

  malevolently.

  Vassago had ridden the gondolas several times as a boy, when he had been

  one of the wholly alive, before he had become a citizen of the

  borderland, and in those days he had been spooked by the handcrafted

  devil, affected especially by its hideous laugh. If the machinery had

  overcome years of corrosion and suddenly brought the cackling monster to

  life again, Vassago would not have been impressed, for he was now old

  enough and sufficiently experienced to know that Satan was incapable of

  laughter.

  He halted near the base of the towering Lucifer and studied it with a

  mixture of scorn and admiration. It was corny, yes, a funhouse fake

  meant to test the bladders of small children and give teenage girls a

  reason to squeal and cuddle for protection in the arms of their smirking

  boyfriends.

  But he had to admit that it was also an inspired creation, because the

  designer had not opted for the traditional image of Satan as a

  lean-faced, sharp-nosed, thin-lipped Lothario of troubled souls, hair

  slicked back from a widow's peak, goatee sprouting absurdly from a

  pointed chin.

  Instead, this was a Beast worthy of the title: part reptile, part

  insect, part humanoid, repulsive enough to command respect, just

  familiar enough to seem real, alien enough to be awesome. Several years

  of dust, moisture, and mold had contributed a patina that softened the

  garish carnival colors and lent it the authority of one of those

  gigantic stone statues of Egyptian gods found in ancient sand-covered

  temples, far beneath the desert dunes.

  Although he didn't know what Lucifer actually looked like, and though he

  assumed that the Father of Lies would be far more heart-thrilling and

  formidable than this funhouse version, Vassago found the plastic and

  polyfoam behemoth sufficiently impressive to make it the center of the

  secret existence that he led within his hideaway. At the base of it, on

  the dry concrete floor of the drained lake, he had arranged his

  collection partly for his own pleasure and amusement but also as an

  offering to the god of terror and pain.

  The naked and decaying bodies of seven women and three men were

  displayed to their best advantage, as if they were ten exquisite

  sculptures by some perverse Michelangelo in a museum of death.

  9

  A single shallow gasp, one brief spasm of the heart muscles, and an

  involuntary nerve reaction that made his right arm twitch and his

  fingers open and close like the curling legs of a dying spider-those

  were the only signs of life the patient exhibited before settling once

  more into the still and silent posture of the dead.

  "Eighty-three degrees," Helga said.

  Ken Nakamura wondered: "Defibrillation?"

  Jonas shook his head. "His heart's not in fibrillation. It's not

  beating at all. Just wait."

  Kari was holding a syringe. "More epineplrrine?"

  Jonas stared intently at the monitors. "Wait. We don't want to bring

  him back only to overmedicate him and precipitate a heart attack."

  "Seventy-six minutes," Gina said, her voice as youthful and breathless

  and perkily excited as if she were announcing the score in a game of

  beach volleyball.

  "Eighty-four degrees."

  Harrison gasped again. His heart stuttered, sending a series of spikes

  across the screen of the electrocardiograph. His whole body shuddered.

  Then he went flatland again.

  Grabbing the handles on the positive and negative pads of the

  defibrillation machine, Ken looked expectantly at Jonas.

  "Eighty-five degrees," Helga announced. "He's in the right thermal

  territory, and he wants to come back."

  Jonas felt a bead of sweat trickle with centipede swiftness down his

  right temple and along his jaw line. The hardest part was waiting,

  giving the patient a chance to kick-start himself before risking more

  punishing techniques of forced reanimation.

  A third spasm of heart activity registered as a shorter burst of spikes

  than the previous one, and it was not accompanied by a pulmonary

  response as before. No muscle contractions were visible, either.

  Harrison lay slack and cold.

  "He's not able to make the leap," Kari Dovell said.

  Ken agreed. "We're gonna lose him."

  "Seventy-seven minutes," Gina said.

  Not four days in the tomb, like Lazarus, before Jesus had called him

  forth, Jonas thought, but a long time dead nevertheless.

  "Epinephrine," Jonas said.

  Kari handed the hypodermic syringe to Jonas, and he quickly administered

  the dosage through one of the same IV ports that he had used earlier to

  inject free-radical scavengers into the patient's blood.

  Ken lifted the negative and positive pads of the defibrillation machine,

  and positioned himself over the patient, ready to give him a jolt if it

  came to that.

  Then the massive charge of epinephrine, a powerful hormone extracted

  from the adrenal glands of sheep and cattle and referred to by some

  resuscitation specialists as "reanimator juice," hit Harrison as hard as

  any electrical shock that Ken Nakamura was prepared to give him.

  The stale breath of the grave exploded from him, he gasped air as if he

  were still drowning in that icy river, he shuddered violently, and his

  heart began to beat like that of a rabbit with a fox close on its tail.

  Vassago had arranged each piece in his macabre collection with more than

  casual contemplation. They were not simply ten corpses dumped

  unceremoniously on the concrete. He not only respected death but loved

  it with an ardor akin to Beethoven's passion for music or Rembrandt's

  fervent devotion to art. Death, after all, was the gift that Satan had

  brought to the inhabitants of the Garden, a gift disguised as something

  prettier; he was the Giver of Death, and his was the kingdom of death

  everlasting. Any flesh that death had touched was to be regarded with

  all the reverence that a devout Catholic might reserve for the

  Eucharist. Just as their god was said to live within that thin wafer of

  unleavened bread, so the face of Vassago's unforgiving god could be seen

  everywhere in the patterns of decay and dissolution.

  The first body at the base of the thirty-foot Satan was that of Jenny

  Purcell, a twenty-two-year-old waitress who had worked the evening shift

  in a recreation of a 1950s diner, where the jukebox played Elvis Presley

  and Chuck Berry, Lloyd Price and the Platters, Buddy Holly and Connie

  Francis and the Everly Brothers. When Vassago had gone in for a burger<
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  and a beer, Jenny thought he looked cool in his black clothes, wearing

  sunglasses indoors at night and making no move to take them off. With

  his baby-faced good looks given interest by a contrastingly firm set to

  his jaw and a slight cruel twist to his mouth, and with thick black hair

  falling across his forehead, he looked a little like a young Elvis.

  What's your name, she asked, and he said, Vassago, and she said, What's

  your first name, so he said, That's it, the whole thing, first and last,

  which must have intrigued her, got her imagination going, because she

  said, What, you mean like Cher only has one name or Madonna or Sting? He

  stared hard at her from behind his heavily tinted sunglasses and said,

  Yeah-you have a problem with that?

  She didn't have a problem. In fact she was attracted to him. She said

  he was "different," but only later did she discover just how different

  he really was.

  Everything about Jenny marked her as a slut in his eyes, so after

  killing her with an eight-inch stiletto that he drove under her rib cage

  and into her heart, he arranged her in a posture suitable for a sexually

  profligate woman. Once he had stripped her naked, he braced her in a

  sitting position with her thighs spread wide and knees drawn up. He

  bound her slender wrists to her shins to keep her upright.

  Then he used strong lengths of cord to pull her head forward and down

  farther than she could have managed to do while alive, brutally

  compressing her midriff; he anchored the cords around her thighs, so she

  was left eternally looking up the cleft between her legs, contemplating

  her sins.

  Jenny had been the first piece in his collection. Dead for about nine

  months, trussed up like a ham in a curing barn, she was withered now, a

  Indeed, in her peculiar posture, having contracted into a ball as she

  had dyed and dried out, she resembled a human being so little that it

  was difficult to think of her as ever having been a living person,

  therefore usually difficult to think of her as a dead person.

  Consequently, death Bed no longer to reside in her remrins. To Vassago,

  she had ceased to be a corpse and had become merely a curious object, an

  impersonal thing that might always have been inanimate. As a result,

  although she was a part of his collection, she was now of minimal

  interest to him.

  He was fascinated solely with death and the dead. The living were of

  interest to him only insofar as they carried the ripe promise of death

  within them.

  The patient's heart oscillated between mild and severe tachycardia, from

  a hundred and twenty to over two hundred and thirty beats per minute, a

  transient condition resulting from the epinephrine and hypothermia

  Except it wasn't acting like a transient condition. Each time the pulse

  rate declined, it did not subside as far as it had previously, and with

  each new acceleration, the EKG showed escalating arrhythmia that could

  lead only to cardiac arrest.

  No longer sweating, calmer now that the decision to fight Death had been

  made and was being acted upon, Jonas said, "Better hit him with it."

  No one doubted to whom he was speaking, and Ken Nakamura pressed the

  cold pads of the defribulation machine to Harrison's chest, bracketing

  his heart. The electrical discharge caused the patient to bounce

  violently against the table, and a sound like an iron mallet striking a

  leather sofawhom!-slammed through the room.

  Jonas looked at the electrocardiograph just as Kari read the meaning of

  the spikes of light moving across the display: "Still two hundred a

  minute but the rhythm's there now ... steady ... steady."

  Similarly, the electroencephalograph showed alpha and beta brain waves

  within normal parameters for an unconscious man.

  "There's self-sustained pulmonary activity," Ken said.

  "Okay," Jonas decided, "let's respirate him and make sure he's getting

  enough oxygen in those brain cells."

  Gina immediately put the oxygen mask on Harrison's face.

  "Body temperature's at ninety degrees," Helga reported.

  The patient's lips were still somewhat blue, but that same deathly hue

  had faded from under his fingernails.

  Likewise, his muscle tone was partially restored. His flesh no longer

  had the flaccidity of the dead. As feeling returned to Harrison's

  defiled extremities, his punished nerve endings excited a host of tics

  and twitches.

  His eyes rolled and jiggled under his closed lids, a sure sign of REM

  sleep. He was dreaming.

  "One hundred and twenty beats a minute," Kari said, "and declining ...

  completely rhythmic now ... very steady."

  Gina consulted her watch and let her breath out in a whoosh of

  amazement. "Eighty minutes."

  "Sonofabitch," Ken said wonderingly, "that beats the record by ten."

  Jonas hesitated only a brief moment before checking the wall clock and

  making the formal announcement for the benefit of the tape recorder:

  "Patient successfully resuscitated as of nine-thirty-two Monday evening,

  March fourth."

  A murmur of mutual congratulations accompanied by smiles of relief was

  as close as they would get to a triumphant cheer of the sort that might

  have been heard on a real battleground. They were not restrained by

  modesty but by a keen awareness of Harrison's tenuous condition. They

  had won the battle with Death, but their patient had not yet regained

  consciousness. Until he was awake and his mental performance could be

  tested and evaluated, there was a chance that he had been reanimated

  only to live out a life of anguish and frustration, his potential

  tragically circumscribed by irreparable brain damage.

  Enraptured by the spicy perfume of death, at home in the subterranean

  bleakness, Vassago walked admiringly past his collection. It encircled

  one-third of the colossal Lucifer.

  Of the male specimens, one had been taken while changing a flat tire on

  a lonely section of the Ortega Highway at night. Another had been

  asleep in his car in a public-beach parking lot. The third had tried to

  pick up Vassago at a bar in Dana Point. The dive hadn't even been a gay

  hangout; the guy had just been drunk, desperate, lonely-and careless.

  Nothing enraged Vassago more than the sexual needs and excitement of

  others. He had no interest in sex any more, and he never raped any of

  the women he killed. But his disgust and anger, engendered by the mere

  perception of sexuality in others, were not a result of jealousy, and

  did not spring from any sense that his impotency was a curse or even an

  unfair burden. No, he was glad to be free of lust and longing. Since

  becoming a citizen of the borderland and accepting the promise of the

  grave, he did not regret the loss of desire. Though he was not entirely

  sure why the very thought of sex could sometimes throw him into a rage,

  why a flirtatious wink or a short skirt or a sweater stretched across a

  full bosom could incite him to torture and homicide, he suspected that

  it was because sex and life were inextricably entwined. Next to

  self-preservation, the sex dr
ive was, they said, the most powerful human

  motivator. Through sex, life was created. Because he hated life in all

  its gaudy variety, hated it with such intensity, it was only natural

  that he would hate sex as well.

  He preferred to kill women because society encouraged them, more than

  men, to flaunt their sexuality, which they did with the assistance of

  makeup, lipstick, alluring scents, revealing clothes, and coquettish

  behavior. Besides, from a woman's womb came new life, and Vassago was

  sworn to destroy life wherever he could. From women came the very thing

  he loathed in himself: the spark of life that still sputtered in him and

  prevented him from moving on to the land of the dead, where he belonged.

  Of the remaining six female specimens in his collection, two had been

  housewives, one a young attorney, one a medical secretary, and two

  college students. Though he had arranged each corpse in a manner

  fitting the personality, spirit, and weaknesses of the person who had

  once inhabited it, and though he had considerable talent for cadaver

  art, making especially clever use of a variety of props, he was far more

  pleased by the effect he had achieved with one of the students than with

  all of the others combined.

  He stopped walking when he reached her.

  He regarded her in the darkness, pleased by his work.

  Margaret...

  He first saw her during one of his restless late-night rambles, in a

  dimly lighted bar near the university campus, where she was sipping diet