it crackling off her smooth pale skin, like an overcharge of
electricity.
He wondered how he might arrange her death to best symbolize her flaws.
Soon he had a couple of good ideas.
She was with a group of about six men and four women, though she did not
seem to be attached to any one of them. Vassago was trying to decide on
an approach to her when, not entirely to his surprise, she approached
him. He supposed their encounter was inevitable. They were, after all,
the two most dangerous people at the dance.
Just as the band took a break and the decibel level fell to a point at
which the interior of the club would no longer have been lethal to cats,
the blonde came to the bar. She pushed between Vassago and another man,
ordered and paid for a beer. She took the bottle from the bartender,
turned sideways to face Vassago, and looked at him across the top of the
open bottle, from which wisps of cold vapor rose like smoke.
She said, "You blind?"
"To some things, Miss."
She looked incredulous. "Miss?"
He shrugged.
"Why the sunglasses?" she asked.
"I've been to Hell."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Hell is cold, dark."
"That so? I still don't get the sunglasses."
"Over there, you learn to see in total darkness."
"This is an interesting line of bullshit."
"So now I'm sensitive to light."
"A real different line of bullshit."
He said nothing.
She drank some beer, but her eyes never left him.
He liked the way her throat muscles worked when she swallowed.
After a moment she said, "This your usual line of crap, or do you just
make it up as you go?"
He shrugged again.
"You were watching me," she said.
""So?"
"You're right. Every asshole in here is watching me most of the time."
He was studying her intensely blue eyes. What he thought he might do
was cut them out, then reinsert them backward, so she was looking into
her own skull. A comment on her self-absorbtion.
In the dream Hatch was talking to a beautiful but incredibly
cold-looking blonde. Her flawless skin was as white as porcelain, and
her eyes were like polished ice reflecting a clear winter sky. They
were standing at a bar in a strange establishment he had never seen
before. She was looking at him across the top of a beer bottle that she
held and brought to her mouth as she might have held a phallus.
But the taunting way she drank from it and licked the glass rim seemed
to be as much a threat as it was an erotic invitation. He could not
hear a thing she said, and he could hear only a few words that he spoke
himself: .... . been to Hell... cold, dark..
sensitive to light.. ." The blonde was looking at him, and it was
surely he who was speaking to her, yet the words were not in his own
voice.
Suddenly he found himself focusing more intently on her arctic eyes, and
before he knew what he was doing, he produced a switchblade knife and
flicked it open. As if she felt no pain, as if in fact she was dead
already, the blonde did not react when, with a swift whip of the knife,
he took her left eye from its socket. He rolled it over on his
fingertips, and replaced it with the blind end outward and the blue lens
gazing inward. Hatch sat up. Unable to breathe. Heart hammering.
He swung his legs out of bed and stood, feeling as if he had to run away
from something. But he just gasped for breath, not sure where to run to
find shelter, safety.
They had fallen asleep with a bedside lamp on, a towel draped over the
shade to soften the light while they made love. The room was well
enough lit for him to see Lindsey lying on her side of the bed in a
tangle of covers.
She was so still, he thought she was dead. He had the crazy feeling
that he'd killed her. With a switchblade.
Then she stirred and mumbled in her sleep.
He shuddered. He looked at his hands. They were shaking.
Vassago was so enamored of his artistic vision that he had the impulsive
desire to reverse her eyes right there, in the bar, with everyone
watching.
He restrained himself "So what do you want?" she asked, after taking
another swallow of beer.
He said, "Out of what?"
"Out of me."
"What do you think?"
"A few thrills," she said.
"More than that."
"Home and family?" she asked sarcastically.
He didn't answer right away. He wanted time to think. This one was not
easy to play, a different sort of fish. He did not want to risk saying
the wrong thing and letting her slip the hook. He got another beer,
drank some of it.
Four members of a backup band approached the stage. They were going to
play during the other musicians' break. Soon conversation would be
impossible again. More important, when the crashing music began, the
energy level of the club would rise, and it might exceed the energy
level between him and the blonde. She might not be as susceptible to
the suggestion that they leave together.
He finally answered her question, told her a lie about what he wanted to
do with her: "You know anybody you wish was dead?"
"Who doesn't?"
"Who is it?"
"Half the people I've ever met."
"I mean, one person in particular."
She began to understand what he was suggesting. She took another sip of
beer and lingered with her mouth and tongue against the rim of the
bottle.
"Whatis this a game or something?"
"Only if you want it to be, Miss."
"You're weird."
"Isn't that what you like?"
"Maybe you're a cop."
"You really think so?"
She stared intently at his sunglasses, though she wouldn't have been
able to see more than a dim suggestion of his eyes beyond the heavily
tinted lenses. "No. Not a cop."
"Sex isn't a good way to start," he said.
"It isn't, huh?"
"Death is a better opener. Make a little death together, then make a
little sex. You won't believe how intense it can get."
She said nothing.
The backup band was picking up the instruments on the stage.
He said, "This one in particular you'd like deadlt's a guy?"
"Yeah."
"He live within driving distance?"
"Twenty minutes from here."
"So let's do it."
The musicians began to tune up, though it seemed a pointless exercise,
considering the type of music they were going to play. They had better
play the right stuff, and they had better be good at it, because it was
the kind of club where the customers wouldn't hesitate to trash the band
if they didn't like it.
At last the blonde said, "I've got a little PCP. Want to do some with
me?"
"Angel dust? It runs in my veins."
"You got a car?"
"Let's go."
On the way out he opened the door for her.
She laughed. "You're one weird son of a bitch."
According to the digital clock on the nightstand, i
t was 1:28 in the
morning. Although Hatch had been asleep only a couple of hours, he was
wide awake and unwilling to lie down again.
Besides, his mouth was dry. He felt as if he had been eating sand. He
needed a drink.
The towel-draped lamp provided enough light for him to make his way to
the dresser and quietly open the correct drawer without waking Lindsey.
Shivering, he took a sweatshirt from the drawer and pulled it on. He
was wearing only pajama bottoms, but he knew that the addition of a thin
pajama top would not quell his chills.
He opened the bedroom door and stepped into the upstairs hall. He
glanced back at his slumbering wife. She looked beautiful there in the
soft amber light, dark hair against the white pillow, her face relaxed,
lips slightly parted, one hand tucked under her chin. The sight of her,
more than the sweatshirt, warmed him. Then he thought about the years
they had lost in their surrender to grief, and the residual fear from
the nightmare was further diluted by a flood of regret. He pulled the
door shut soundlessly behind him.
The second-floor hall was hung with shadows, but wan light rose along
the stairwell from the foyer below. On their way from the family-room
sofa to the sleigh bed, they had not paused to switch off lamps.
Like a couple of horny teenagers. He smiled at the thought.
On his way down the stairs, he remembered the nightmare, and his smile
slipped away.
The blonde. The knife. The eye.
It had seemed so real.
At the foot of the stairs he stopped, listening. The silence in the
house was unnatural. He rapped one knuckle against the newel post, just
to hear a sound. The tap seemed softer than it should have been.
The silence following it was deeper than before.
"Jesus, that dream really spooked you," he said aloud, and the sound of
his own voice was reassuring.
His bare feet made an amusing slapping sound on the oak floor of the
downstairs hall, and even more noise on the tile floor of the kitchen.
His thirst growing more acute by the second, he took a can of Pepsi from
the refrigerator, popped it open, tilted his head back, closed his eyes,
and had a long drink.
It didn't taste like cola. It tasted like beer.
Frowning, he opened his eyes and looked at the can. It was not a can
any more. It was a bottle of beer, the same brand as in the dream:
Corona.
Neither he nor Lindsey drank Corona. When they had a beer, which was
rarely, it was a Heineken.
Fear went through him like vibrations through a wire.
Then he noticed that the tile floor of the kitchen was gone. He was
standing barefoot on gravel. The stones cut into the balls of his feet.
As his heart began to race, he looked around the kitchen with a
desperate need to reaffirm that he was in his own house, that the world
had not just tilted into some bizarre new dimension. He let his gaze
travel over the familiar white-washed birch cabinets, the dark granite
countertops, the dishwasher, the gleaming face of the built-in
microwave, and he willed the nightmare to recede. But the gravel floor
remained. He was still holding a Corona in his right hand. He turned
toward the sink, intent on splashing cold water in his face, but the
sink was no longer there. One half of the kitchen had vanished,
replaced by a roadside bar along which cars were parked in a row, and
then-he was not in his kitchen at all. It was entirely gone. He was in
the open air of the April night, where thick fog glowed with the
reflection of red neon from a sign somewhere behind him. He was walking
along a graveled parking lot, past the row of parked cars. He was not
barefoot any more but wearing rubber-soled black Rockports.
He heard a woman say, "My name's Lisa. What's yours?"
He turned his head and saw the blonde. She was at his side, keeping
pace with him across the parking lot.
Instead of answering her right away, he tipped the Corona to his mouth,
sucked down the last couple of ounces, and dropped the empty bottle on
the gravel. "My name-" he gasped as cold Pepsi foamed from the dropped
can, and puddled around his bare feet. The gravel had disappeared. A
spreading pool of cola glistened on the peach-colored Santa Fe tiles of
his kitchen floor.
In Redlow's Pontiac, Lisa told Vassago to take the San Diego Freeway
south. By the time he traveled eastward on fog-filled surface streets
and eventually found a freeway entrance, she had extracted capsules of
what she said was PCP from the pharmacopoeia in her purse, and they had
washed them down with the rest of her beer.
PCP was an animal tranquilizer that often had the opposite of a
tranquilizing effect on human beings, exciting them into destructive
frenzies.
It would be interesting to watch the impact of the drug on Lisa, who
seemed to have the conscience of a snake, to whom the concept of
morality was utterly alien, who viewed the world with unrelenting hatred
and contempt, whose sense of personal power and superiority did not
preclude a self-destructive streak, and who was already so full of
tightly contained psychotic energy that she always seemed about to
explode. He suspected that, with the aid of PCP, she'd be capable of
highly entertaining extremes of violence, fierce storms of bloody
destruction that he would find exhilarating to watch.
"Where are we going?" he asked as they cruised south on the freeway.
The headlights drilled into a white mist that hid the world and made it
seem as if they could invent any landscape and future they wished.
Whatever they imagined might take substance from the fog and appear
around them.
"El Toro," she said.
"That's where he lives?"
"Yeah."
"Who is he?"
"You need a name?"
"No, ma'am. Why do you want him dead?"
She studied him for a while. Gradually a smile spread across her face,
as if it were a wound being carved by a slow-moving and invisible knife.
Her small white teeth looked pointy. Piranha teeth. "You'll really do
it, won't you?" she asked. "You'll just go in there and kill the guy to
prove I enoughúta want you."
"To prove nothing," he said. "Just because it might be fun. Like I
told you"
"First make some death together, then make some sex," she finIshed for
him.
Just to keep her talking and make her feel increasingly at ease with
him, he said, "Does he live in an apartment or a house?"
"Why's it matter?"
"Lots more ways to get into a house, and neighbors aren't as close."
"It's a house," she said.
"Why do you want him dead?"
"He wanted me, I didn't want him, and he felt he could take what he
wanted anyway."
"Couldn't have been easy taking anything from you."
Her eyes were colder than ever. "The bastard had to have stitches in
his face when it was over."
"But he still got what he wanted?"
"He was bigger than me."
She turned away from him and gazed a
t the road ahead.
A breeze had risen from the west, and the fog no longer eddied lazily
through the night. It churned across the highway like smoke billowing
off a vast fire, as if the entire coastline was ablaze, whole cities
incinerated and the remains smouldering.
Vassago kept glancing at her profile, wishing that he could go with her
to El Toro and see how deep in blood she would wade for vengeance.
Then he would have liked to convince her to come with him to his
hideaway and give herself, of her own free will, to his collection.
Whether she knew it or not, she wanted death. She would be grateful for
the sweet pain that would be her ticket to damnation. Pale skin almost
luminescent against her black clothes, filled with hatred so intense
Koontz, Dean R. - Hideaway Page 19