Koontz, Dean R. - Hideaway

by Hideaway(Lit)

  fierce heat in his gut that had nothing to do with the rum, such a

  steely tension in his chest that his heart might have been a clockwork

  mechanism with its spring wound to the breaking point. He wished that

  he had gone after the doe-eyed woman whom he had named Bambi.

  Would he have removed her ears when she was dead at last-or while she

  was still alive?

  Would she have been capable of understanding the artistic statement he

  was making as he sewed her lips shut over her full mouth? Probably not.

  None of the others had the wit or insight to appreciate his singular

  talent.

  In the nearly deserted parking lot, he stood in the rain for a while,

  letting it soak him and extinguish some of the fire of his obsession.

  It was nearly two in the morning. Not enough time remained, before

  dawn, to do any hunting. He would have to return to his hideaway

  without an addition to his collection. If he were to get any sleep

  during the coming day and be prepared to hunt with the next nightfall,

  he had to dampen his blazing creative drive.

  Eventually he began to shiver. The heat within him gave way to a

  relentless chill. He raised one hand, touched his cheek. His face felt

  cold, but his fingers were colder, like the marble hand of a statue of

  David that he'd admired in a memorial garden at Forest Lawn Cemetery

  when he had still been one of the living.

  That was better.

  As he opened the car door, he looked around once more at the rain-riven

  night. This time of his own volition, he said, "Lindsey?"

  No answer.

  Whoever she might be, she was not yet destined to cross his path.

  He would have to be patient. He was mystified, therefore fascinated and

  curious. But whatever was happening would happen at its own pace.

  One of the virtues of the dead was patience, and though he was still

  half-alive, he knew he could find within himself the strength to match

  the forbearance of the deceased.

  Early Tuesday morning, an hour after dawn, Lindsey could sleep no more.

  She ached in every muscle and joint, and what sleep she'd gotten had not

  lessened her exhaustion by any noticeable degree. She did not want

  sedatives. Unable to bear any further delay, she insisted they take her

  to Hatch's room. The charge nurse cleared it with Jonas Nyebern, who

  was still in the hospital, then wheeled Lindsey down the hall to 518.

  Nyebern was there, red-eyed and rumpled. The sheets on the bed nearest

  the door were not turned back, but they were wrinkled, as if the doctor

  had stretched out to rest at least once during the night.

  By now Lindsey had learned enough about Nyebern-some of it from him,

  much of it from the nurses to know that he was a local legend. He had

  been a busy cardiovascular surgeon, but over the past two years, after

  losing his wife and two children in some kind of horrible accident, he

  had devoted steadily less time to surgery and more to resuscitation

  medicine.

  His commitment to his work was too strong to be called mere dedication.

  It was more of an obsession. In a society that was struggling to emerge

  from three decades of self-indulgence and me-firstism, it was easy to

  admire a man as selflessly committed as Nyebern, and everyone did seem

  to admire him.

  Lindsey, for one, admired the hell out of him. After all, he had saved

  Hatch's life.

  His weariness betrayed only by his bloodshot eyes and the rumpled

  condition of his clothes, Nyebern moved swiftly to pull back the lacy

  curtain that surrounded the bed nearest the window. He took the handles

  of Lindsey's wheelchair and rolled her to her husband's bedside.

  The storm had passed during the night. Morning sun slanted through the

  slats of the Levolor blinds, striping the sheets and blankets with

  shadow and golden light.

  Hatch lay beneath that faux tiger skin, only one arm and his face

  exposed. Although his skin was painted with the same jungle-cat

  camouflage as the bedding, his extreme pallor was evident. Seated in

  the wheelchair, regarding Hatch at an odd angle through the bed railing,

  Lindsey grew queasy at the sight of an ugly bruise that spread from the

  stitched gash on his forehead. But for the proof of the cardiac monitor

  and the barely perceptible rise-and-fall of Hatch's chest as he

  breathed, she would have assumed he was dead.

  But he was alive, alive, and she felt a tightness in her chest and

  throat that presaged tears as surely as lightning was a sign of oncoming

  thunder.

  The prospect of tears surprised her, quickening her breath.

  From the moment their Honda had gone over the brink and into the ravine,

  through the entire physical and emotional ordeal of the night just

  passed, Lindsey had never cried. She didn't pride herself on stoicism;

  it was just the way she was.

  No, strike that.

  It was just the way she had to become during Jimmy's bout with cancer.

  From the day of diagnosis until the end, her boy had taken nine months

  to die, as long as she had taken to lovingly shape him within her womb.

  Every day of that dying, Lindsey had wanted nothing more than to curl up

  in bed with the covers over her head and cry, just let the tears pour

  forth until all the moisture in her body was gone, until she dried up

  and crumbled into dust and ceased to exist. She had wept, at first.

  But her tears frightened Jimmy, and she realized that any expression of

  her inner turmoil was an unconscionable self-indulgence. Even when she

  cried in private, Jimmy knew it later; he had always been perceptive and

  sensitive beyond his years, and his disease seemed to make him more

  acutely aware of everything. Current theory of immunology gave

  considerable weight to the importance of a positive attitude, laughter,

  and confidence as weapons in the battle against life-threatening

  illness. So she had learned to suppress her terror at the prospect of

  losing him. She had given him laughter, love, confidence, courage and

  never a reason to doubt her conviction that he would beat the

  malignancy.

  By the time Jimmy died, Lindsey had become so successful at repressing

  her tears that she could not simply turn them on again. Denied the

  release that easy tears might have given her, she spiraled down into a

  lost time of despair. She dropped weight-fifteen, twenty-seven pounds,

  until she was emaciated. She could not be bothered to wash her hair or

  look after her complexion or press her clothes. Convinced that she had

  failed Jimmy, that she had encouraged him to rely on her but then had

  not been special enough to help him reject his disease, she did not

  believe she deserved to take pleasure from food, from her appearance, a

  book, a movie, music, from anything. Eventually, with much patience and

  kindness, Hatch helped her see that her insistence on taking

  responsibility for an act of blind fate was, in its way, as much a

  disease as Jimmy's cancer had been.

  Though she had still not been able to cry, she had climbed out of the

  psychological hole she'd dug for herself. Ever since, however, she had
r />   lived on the rim of it, her balance precarious.

  Now, her first tears in a long, long time were surprising, unsettling.

  Her eyes stung, became hot. Her vision blurred. Disbelieving, she

  raised one shaky hand to touch the warm tracks on her cheeks.

  Nyebern plucked a Kleenex from a box on the nightstand and gave it to

  her.

  That small kindness affected her far out of proportion to the

  consideration behind it, and a soft sob escaped her.

  "Lindsey Because his throat was raw from his ordeal, his voice was

  hoarse, barely more than a whisper. But she knew at once who had spoken

  to her, and that it was not Nyebern.

  She wiped hastily at her eyes with the Kleenex and leaned forward in the

  wheelchair until her forehead touched the cold bed railing.

  Hatch's head was turned toward her. His eyes were open, and they looked

  clear, alert.

  "Lindsey ."

  He had found the strength to push his right hand out from under the

  blankets, stretching it toward her.

  She reached between the railings. She took his hand in hers.

  His skin was dry. A thin bandage was taped over his abraded palm. He

  was too weak to give her hand more than the faintest squeeze, but he was

  warm, blessedly warm, and alive.

  "You're crying," Hatch said.

  She was, too, harder than ever, a storm of tears, but she was smiling

  through them. Grief had not been able to free her first tears in five

  terrible years but joy had at last unleashed them. She was crying for

  joy, which seemed right, seemed healing. She felt a loosening of

  long-sustained tensions in her heart, as if the knotted adhesions of old

  wounds were dissolving, all because Hatch was alive, had been dead but

  was now alive.

  If a miracle couldn't lift the heart, what could?

  Hatch said, "I love you."

  The storm of tears became a flood, ohgod, an ocean, and she heard

  herself blubber "I love you" back at him, then she felt Nyebern put a

  hand on her shoulder comfortingly, another small kindness that seemed

  huge, which only made her cry harder. But she was laughing even as she

  was weeping, and she saw that Hatch was smiling, too.

  "It's okay," Hatch said hoarsely. "The worst is over. The worst is ...

  behind us now.

  During the daylight hours, when he stayed beyond the reach of the sun,

  Vassago parked the Camaro in an underground garage that had once been

  filled with electric trams, carts, and lorries used by the

  park-maintenance crew. All of those vehicles were long gone, reclaimed

  by creditors. The Camaro stood alone in the center of that dank,

  windowless space.

  From the garage, Vassago descended wide stairs-the elevators had not

  operated in years-to an even deeper subterranean level. The entire park

  was built on a basement that had once contained the security

  headquarters with scores of video monitors able to reveal every niche of

  the grounds, a video control center that had been an even more complex

  high-tech nest of computers and monitors, carpentry and electrical

  shops, a staff cafeteria, lockers and changing rooms for the hundreds of

  costumed employees working each shift, an emergency imlrmary, business

  offices, and much more.

  Vassago passed the door to that level without hesitating and continued

  down to the sub-basement at the very bottom of the complex. Even in the

  dry sands of southern California, the concrete walls exuded a damp lime

  smell at that depth.

  No rats fled before him, as he had expected during his first descent

  into those realms many months ago. He had seen no rats at all,

  anywhere, in all the weeks he had roamed the tenebrous corridors and

  silent rooms of that vast structure, though he would not have been

  averse to sharing space with them. He liked rats. They were

  carrion-eaters, revelers in decay, scurrying janitors that cleaned up in

  the wake of death. Maybe they had never invaded the cellars of the park

  because, after its closure, the place had been pretty much stripped

  bare. It was all concrete, plastic, and metal, nothing biodegradable

  for rats to feed on, a little dusty, yes, with some crumpled paper here

  and there, but otherwise as sterile as an orbiting space station and of

  no interest to rodents.

  Eventually rats might find his collection in Hell at the bottom of the

  funhouse and, having fed, spread out from there. Then he would have

  some suitable company in the bright hours when he could not venture out

  in comfort.

  At the bottom of the fourth and last flight of stairs, two levels below

  the underground garage, Vassago passed through a doorway. The door was

  missing, as were virtually all the doors in the complex, hauled off by

  the salvagers and resold for a few bucks apiece.

  Beyond was an eighteen-foot-wide tunnel. The floor was flat with a

  yellow stripe painted down the center, as if it were a highway-which it

  had been, of sorts. Concrete walls curved up to meet and form the

  ceiling.

  Part of that lowest level was comprised of storerooms that had once held

  huge quantities of supplies. Styrofoam cups and burger packages,

  cardboard popcorn boxes and french-fry holders, paper napkins and little

  foil packets of ketchup and mustard for the many snack stands scattered

  over the grounds. Business forms for the offices. Packages of

  fertilizer and cans of insecticide for the landscape crew. All of

  that-and everything else a small city might need-had been removed long

  ago. The rooms were empty.

  A network of tunnels connected the storage chambers to elevators that

  led upward into all the main attractions and restaurants- Goods could be

  delivered-or repairmen conveyed-throughout the park without disturbing

  the paying customers and shattering the fantasy they had paid to

  experience. Numbers were painted on the walls every hundred feet, to

  mark routes, and at intersections there were even signs with arrows to

  provide better directions:. Vassago turned right at the next

  intersection, left at the one after that, then right again. Even if his

  extraordinary vision had not permitted him to see in those obscure

  byways, he would have been able to follow the route he desired, for by

  now he knew the desiccated arteries of the dead park as well as he knew

  the contours of his own body.

  Eventually he came to a sign-OUT OF ORDER beside an elevator. The doors

  of the elevator were gone, as were the cab and the lift mechanism, sold

  for reuse or for scrap. But the shaft remained, dropping about four

  feet below the floor of the tunnel, and leading up through five stories

  of darkness to the level that housed security and video control and park

  offices, on to the lowest level of the funhouse where he kept his

  collection, then to the second and third floors of that attraction.

  He slipped over the edge, into the bottom of the elevator shaft. He sat

  on the old mattress he had brought in to make his hideaway more

  comfortable.

  When he tilted his head back, he could see only a couple of floors into

  the unlighted shaft. The rusted steel b
ars of a service ladder dwindled

  up into the gloom.

  If he climbed the ladder to the lowest level of the funhouse, he would

  come out in a service room behind the walls of Hell, from which the

  machinery operating the gondola chain--drive had been accessed and

  repaired-before it had been carted away forever.

  A door from that chamber, disguised on the far side as a concrete

  boulder, opened into the now-dry lake of Hades, from which Lucifer

  towered.

  He was at the deepest point of his hideaway, four feet more than two

  stories below Hell. There, he felt at home as much as it was possible

  for him to feel at home anywhere. Out in the world of the living, he

  moved with the confidence of a secret master of the universe, but he

  never felt as if he belonged there. Though he was not actually afraid

  of anything any more, a trace current of anxiety buzzed through him

  every minute that he spent beyond the stark, black corridors and

  sepulchral chambers of his hideaway.

  After a while he opened the lid of a sturdy plastic cooler with a

  Styrofoam lining, in which he kept cans of root beer. He had always

  liked root beer. It was too much trouble to keep ice in the cooler, so

  he just drank the soda warm. He didn't mind.

  He also kept snack foods in the cooler: Mars bars, Reese's peanut butter

  cups, Clark Bars, a bag of potato chips, packages of peanut-butter-and

  cheese crackers, Mallomars, and Oreo cookies. When he had crossed into

  the borderland, something had happened to his metabolism; he seemed to