Koontz, Dean R. - Hideaway

by Hideaway(Lit)

  cola, either because she was not old enough to be served beer along with

  her friends or because she was not a drinker. He suspected the latter.

  She looked singularly wholesome and uncomfortable in the smoke and din

  of the tavern. Even from halfway across the room, judging by her

  reactions to her friends and her body language, Vassago could see that

  she was a shy girl struggling hard to fit in with the crowd, even though

  in her heart she knew that she would never entirely belong. The roar of

  liquor-amplified conversation, the clink and clatter of glasses, the

  thunderous jukebox music of Madonna and Michael Jackson and Michael

  Bolton, the stink of cigarettes and stale beer, the moist heat of

  college boys on the make-none of that touched her. She sat in the bar

  but existed apart from it, unstained by it, filled with more secret

  energy than that entire roomful of young men and women combined.

  She was so vital, she seemed to glow. Vassago found it hard to believe

  that the ordinary, sluggish blood of humanity moved through her veins.

  Surely, instead, her heart pumped the distilled essence of life itself.

  Her vitality drew him. It would be enormously satisfying to snuff such

  a brightly burning flame of life.

  To learn where she lived, he followed her home from the bar. For the

  next two days, he stalked the campus, gathering information about her as

  diligently as a real student might have researched a term paper.

  Her name was Margaret Ann Campion. She was a senior, twenty years old,

  majoring in music. She could play the piano, flute, clarinet, guitar,

  and almost any other instrument she took a fancy to learn. Perhaps the

  best-known and most-admired student in the music program, she was also

  widely considered to possess an exceptional talent for composition. An

  essentially shy person, she made a point of forcing herself out of her

  shell, so music was not her only interest. She was on the track team,

  the second fastest woman in their lineup, a spirited competitor; she

  wrote about music and movies for the student paper; and she was active

  in the Baptist church.

  Her astonishing vitality was evident not merely in the joy with which

  she wrote and played music, not just in the almost spiritual aura that

  Vassago had seen in the bar, but also in her physical appearance. She

  was incomparably beautiful, with the body of a silver-screen sex goddess

  and the face of a saint. Clear skin. Perfect cheekbones.

  Full lips, a generous mouth, a beatific smile. Limpid blue eyes. She

  dressed modestly in an attempt to conceal the sweet fullness of her

  breasts, the contrasting narrowness of her waist, the firmness of her

  buttocks, and the long supple lines of her legs.

  But he was certain that when he stripped her, she would be revealed for

  what he had known her to be when he had first glimpsed her: a prodigious

  breeder, a hot furnace of life in which eventually other life of

  unparalleled brightness would be conceived and shaped.

  He wanted her dead.

  He wanted to stop her heart and then hold her for hours, feeling the

  heat of life radiate out of her, until she was cold.

  This one murder, it seemed to him, might at last earn him passage out of

  the borderland in which he lived and into the land of the dead and

  damned, where he belonged, where he longed to be.

  Margaret made the mistake of going alone to a laundry room in her

  apartment complex at eleven o'clock at night. Many of the units were

  leased to financially comfortable senior citizens and, because they were

  near the University of California at Irvine, to pairs and trios of

  students who shared the rent. Maybe the tenant mix, the fact that it

  was a safe and friendly neighborhood, and the abundance of landscape and

  walkway lighting all combined to give her a false sense of security.

  When Vassago entered the laundry room, Margaret had just begun to put

  her dirty clothes into one of the washing machines. She looked at him

  with a smile of surprise but with no apparent concern, though he was

  dressed all in black and wearing sunglasses at night.

  She probably thought he was just another university student who favored

  an eccentric look as a way of proclaiming his rebellious spirit and

  intellectual superiority. Every campus had a slew of the type, since it

  was easier to dress as a rebellious intellectual than be one.

  "Oh, I'm sorry, Miss," he said, "I didn't realize anyone was in here."

  "That's okay. I'm only using just one washer," she said. "There're two

  others."

  "No, I already did my laundry, then back at the apartment when I took it

  out of the basket, I was missing one sock, so I figure it's got to be in

  one of the washers or dryers. But I didn't mean to get in your way.

  Sorry about that."

  She smiled a little broader, maybe because she thought it funny that a

  would-be James Dean, black-lad rebel without a cause, would choose to be

  so politer would do his own laundry and chase down lost socks.

  By then he was beside her. He hit her in the face-two hard, sharp

  punches that knocked her unconscious. She crumpled onto the vinyl-tile

  floor as if she were a pile of laundry.

  Later, in the dismantled Hell under the moldering funhouse, when she

  regained consciousness and found herself naked on the concrete floor and

  effectively blind in those lightless confines, tied hand and foot, she

  did not attempt to bargain for her life as some of the others had done.

  She didn't offer her body to him, didn't pretend to be turned on by his

  savagery or the power that he wielded over her. She didn't offer him

  money, or claim to understand and sympathize with him in a pathetic

  attempt to convert him from nemesis to friend. Neither did she scream

  nor weep nor wail nor curse. She was different from the others, for she

  found hope and comfort in a quiet, dignified, unending chain of

  whispered prayers. But she never prayed to be delivered from her

  tormentor and returned to the world out of which she had been torn-as if

  she knew that death was inevitable.

  Instead, she prayed that her family would be given the strength to cope

  with the loss of her, that God would take care of her two younger

  sisters, and even that her murderer would receive divine grace and

  mercy.

  Vassago swiftly came to loathe her. He knew that love and mercy were

  nonexistent, just empty words. He had never felt love, neither during

  his time in the borderland nor when he had been one of the living.

  Often, however, he had pretended to love someonlather, mother, a girl-to

  get what he wanted, and they had always been deceived. Being deceived

  into believing that love existed in others, when it didn't exist in you,

  was a sign of fatal weakness. Human interaction was nothing but a game,

  after all, and the ability to see through deception was what separated

  the good players from the inept.

  To show her that he could not be deceived and that her god was

  powerless, Vassago rewarded her quiet prayers with a long and painful

  death. At last she did scream. But her screams were not satisfying,

>   for they were only the sounds of physical agony; they did not

  reverberate with terror, rage, or despair.

  He thought he would like her better when she was dead, but even then he

  still hated her. For a few minutes he held her body against him,

  feeling the heat drain from it. But the chilly advance of death through

  her flesh was not as thrilling as it should have been. Because she had

  died with an unbroken faith in life everlasting, she had cheated Vassago

  of the satisfaction of seeing the awareness of death in her eyes. He

  pushed her limp body aside in disgust.

  Now, two weeks after Vassago had finished with her, Margaret Campion

  knelt in perpetual prayer on the floor of that dismantled Hell, the most

  recent addition to his collection. She remained upright because she was

  lashed to a length of steel rebar which he had inserted into a hole he

  had drilled in the concrete. Naked, she faced away from the giant,

  funhouse devil. Though she had been Baptist, a crucifix was clasped in

  her dead hands because Vassago liked the image of the crucifix better

  than a simple cross; it was turned upside down, with Christ's

  thorn-prickled head toward the floor. Margaret's own head had been cut

  off then re-sewn to her neck with obsessive care. Even though her body

  was turned away from Satan, she faced toward him in denial of the

  crucifix held irreverently in her hands. Her posture was symbolic of

  hypocrisy, mocking her pretense to faith, love, and life everlasting.

  Although Vassago hadn't received nearly as much pleasure from murdering

  Margaret as from what he had done to her after she was dead, he was

  still pleased to have made her acquaintance. Her stubbornness,

  stupidity, and self-deception had made her death less satisfying for him

  than it should have been, but at least the aura he had seen around her

  in the bar was quenched. Her irritating vitality was drained away.

  The only energy her body harbored was that of the multitudinous

  carrionaters that teemed within her, consuming her flesh and bent on

  reducing her to a dry husk like Jenny, the waitress, who rested at the

  other end of the collection.

  As he studied Margaret, a familiar need arose in him. Finally the need

  became a compulsion. He turned away from his collection, retracing his

  path across the huge room, heading for the ramp that led up to the

  entrance tunnel. Ordinarily, selecting another acquisition, killing it,

  and arranging it in the most aesthetically satisfying pose would have

  left him quiescent and sated for as much as a month. But after less

  than two weeks, he was compelled to find another worthy sacrifice.

  Regretfully, he ascended the ramp, out of the purifying scent of death,

  into air tainted with the odors of life, like a vampire driven to hunt

  the living though preferring the company of the dead.

  At ten-thirty, almost an hour after Harrison was resuscitated, he

  remained unconscious. His body temperature was normal. His vital signs

  were good.

  And though the patterns of alpha and beta brain waves were those of a

  man in a profound sleep, they were not obviously indicative of anything

  as deep as a coma.

  When Jonas finally declared the patient out of immediate danger and

  ordered him moved to a private room on the fifth floor, Ken Nakamura and

  Kari Dovell elected to go home. Leaving Helga and Gina with the

  patient, Jonas accompanied the neurologist and the pediatrician to the

  scrub sinks, and eventually as far as the door to the staff parking lot.

  They discussed Harrison and what procedures might have to be performed

  on him in the morning, but for the most part they shared inconsequential

  small talk about hospital politics and gossip involving mutual

  acquaintances, as if they had not just participated in a miracle that

  should have made such banalities impossible.

  Beyond the glass door, the night looked cold and inhospitable. Rain had

  begun to fall. Puddles were filling every depression in the pavement,

  and in the reflected glow of the parking-lot lamps, they looked like

  shattered mirrors, collections of sharp silvery shards.

  Kari leaned against Jonas, kissed his cheek, clung to him for a moment.

  She seemed to want to say something but was unable to find the words.

  Then she pulled back, turned up the collar of her coat, and went out

  into the wind-driven rain.

  Lingering after Kari's departure, Ken Nakamura said, "I hope you realize

  she's a perfect match for you."

  Through the rain-streaked glass door, Jonas watched the woman as she

  hurried toward her car. He would have been lying if he had said that he

  never looked at Kari as a woman. Though tall, rangy, and a formidable

  presence, she was also feminine. Sometimes he marveled at the delicacy

  of her wrists, at her swan-like neck that seemed too gracefully thin to

  support her head. Intellectually and emotionally she was stronger than

  she looked.

  Otherwise she couldn't have dealt with the obstacles and challenges that

  surely had blocked her advance in the medical profession, which was

  still dominated by men for whom-in some case shauvinism was less a

  character trait than an article of faith.

  Ken said, "All you'd have to do is ask her, Jonas."

  "I'm not free to do that," Jonas said.

  "You can't mourn Marion forever."

  "It's only been two years."

  "Yeah, but you have to step back into life sometime."

  "Not yet."

  "Ever?"

  "I don't know."

  Outside, halfway across the parking lot, Kari DoveIl had gotten into her

  car.

  "She won't wait forever," Ken said.

  "Goodnight, Ken."

  "I can take a hint."

  "Good," Jonas said.

  Smiling ruefully, Ken pulled open the door, letting in a gust of wind

  that spat jewel-clear drops of rain on the gray tile floor. He hurried

  out into the night.

  Jonas turned away from the door and followed a series of hallways to the

  elevators. He went up to the fifth floor.

  He hadn't needed to tell Ken and Kari that he would spend the night in

  the hospital. They knew he always stayed after an apparently successful

  reanimation. To them, resuscitation medicine was a fascinating new

  field, an interesting sideline to their primary work, a way to expand

  their professional knowledge and keep their minds flexible; every

  success was deeply satisfying, a reminder of why they had become

  physicians in the first place-to heal. But it was more than that to

  Jonas. Each reanimation was a battle won in an endless war with Death,

  not just a healing act but an act of defiance, an angry fist raised in

  the face of fate. Resuscitation medicine was his love, his passion, his

  definition of himself, his only reason for arising in the morning and

  getting on with life in a world that had otherwise become too color less

  and purposeless to endure.

  He had submitted applications and proposals to half a dozen

  universities, seeking to teach in their medical schools in return for

  the establishment of a resuscitation-medicine research facility under

&nb
sp; his supervision, for which he felt able to raise a sizable part of the

  financing. He was well-known and widely respected both as a

  cardiovascular surgeon and a reanimation specialist, and he was

  confident that he would soon obtain the position he wanted. But he was

  impatient. He was no longer satisfied with supervising reanimations.

  He wanted to study the effects of short-term death on human cells,

  explore the mechanisms of free-radicals and free radical scavengers,

  test his own theories, and find new ways to evict Death from those in

  whom it had already taken up tenancy.

  On the fifth floor, at the nurses' station, he learned that Harrison had

  been taken to 518. It was a semi-private room, but an abundance of

  empty beds in the hospital insured that it would be effectively

  maintained as a private unit as long as Harrison was likely to need it.

  When Jonas entered 518, Helga and Gina were finishing with the patient,

  who was in the bed farthest from the door and nearest the rain-spotted

  window. They had gotten him into a hospital gown and hooked him to

  another electrocardiograph with a telemetry function that would

  reproduce his heart rhythms on a monitor at the nurses' station. A

  bottle of clear fluid hung from a rack beside the bed, feeding an IV

  line into the patient's left arm, which was already beginning to bruise

  from other intravenous injections administered by the paramedics earlier

  in the evening; the clear fluid was glucose enriched with an antibiotic

  to prevent dehydration and to guard against one of the many infections