Koontz, Dean R. - Hideaway

by Hideaway(Lit)

  seemed to be him At that moment they were one and the same. That

  aberrant thought the young man's image-a in a second or two, leaving

  Hatch staring at his reflection.

  Stunned less by the hallucination than by that momentary confusion of

  identity, Hatch gazed into the mirror and was appalled as much by what

  he saw now as by the brief glimpse of the killer. He looked apoplectic.

  His hair was disarranged. His face was red and contorted with rage, and

  his eyes were... wild. He reminded himself of his father, which was

  unthinkable, intolerable.

  He could not remember the last time he had been that angry. In fact he

  had never been in a comparable rage. Until now, he'd thought he was

  incapable of that kind of outburst or of the intense anger that could

  lead to it.

  "I... I don't know what happens" He dropped the crumpled page of the

  newspaper. It struck his desk and fell to the floor with a crisp

  rustling noise that wrought an inexplicably vivid picture in his mind

  dry brown leaves tumbling in a breeze along the cracked pavement in a

  crumbling, condemned amusement park and for just a moment he was there,

  with weeds sprouting up around him from cracks in the blacktop, dead

  leaves whipping past, the moon glaring down through the elaborate

  open-beam supports of a rollercoaster track. Then he was in his office

  again, leaning weakly against his desk.

  "Hatch"" He blinked at her, unable to speak.

  "What's wrong?" she asked, moving quickly to him. She touched his arm

  tentatively, as if she thought he might shatter from the contact-or

  perhaps as if she expected him to respond to her touch with a blow

  struck in anger.

  He put his arms around her, and hugged her tightly. "Lindsey, I'm

  sorry. I don't know what happened, what got into me."

  "It's all right."

  "No, it isn't. I was so. .. so furious."

  "You were just angry, that's all."

  "I'm sorry," he repeated miserably.

  Even if it had appeared to her to be nothing but anger, he knew that it

  had been more than that, something strange, a terrible rage. White hot.

  Psychotic. He had felt an edge beneath him, as if he were teetering on

  the brink of a precipice, with only his heels planted on solid ground.

  To Vassago's eyes, the monument of Lucifer cast a shadow even in

  absolute darkness, but he could still see and enjoy the cadavers in

  their postures of degradation. He was enraptured by the organic collage

  that he had created, by the sight of the humbled forms and the stench

  that arose from them. His hearing was not remotely as acute as his

  night vision, but he did not believe that he was entirely imagining the

  soft, wet sounds of decomposition to which he swayed as a music lover

  might sway to strains of lleethoven.

  When he was suddenly overcome by anger, he was not sure why. It was a

  quiet sort of rage at first, curiously unfocused. He opened himself to

  it, enjoyed it, fed it to make it grow.

  A vision of a newspaper Bashed through his mind. He could not see it

  clearly, but something on the page was the cause of his anger. He

  squinted as if narrowing his eyes would help him see the words.

  The vision passed, but the anger remained. He nurtured it the way a

  happy man might consciously force a laugh beyond its natural span just

  because the sound of laughter buoyed him. Words blurted from him, "Of

  all the fucking nerve!"

  He had no idea where the exclamation had come from, just as he had no

  idea why he had said the name "Lindsey" out loud in that lounge in

  Newport Beach, several weeks ago, when these weird experiences had

  begun.

  He was so abruptly energized by anger that he turned away from his

  collection and stalked across the enormous chamber, up the ramp down

  which the gargoyle gondolas had once plunged, and out into the night,

  where the moon forced him to put on his sunglasses again. He could not

  stand still. He had to move, move. He walked the abandoned midway, not

  sure who or what he was looking for, curious about what would happen

  next.

  Disjointed images flashed through his mind, none remaining long enough

  to allow contemplation: the newspaper, a book-lined den, a filing

  cabinet, a hand-written letter, a telephone.... He walked faster and

  faster, pivoting suddenly onto new avenues or into narrower passageways

  between the decaying buildings, in a fruitless search for a connection

  that would link him more clearly with the source of the pictures that

  appeared and swiftly faded from his mind.

  As he passed the roller coaster, cold moonlight fell through the maze of

  supporting crossbeams and glinted off the track in such a way as to make

  those twin ribbons of steel look like rails of ice. When he lifted his

  gaze to stare at the monolithic-and suddenly mysterious structure, an

  angry exclamation burst from him: "Pitch him into that freezIng river!"

  A woman said, Honey, lower your voice.

  Though he knew that her voice had arisen from within him, as an auditory

  adjunct to the fragmentary visions, Vassago turned in search of her

  anyway. She was there. In a bathrobe. Standing just this side of a

  doorway that had no right to be where it was, with no walls surrounding

  it. To the left of the doorway, to the right of it, and above it, there

  was only the night. The silent amusement park. But beyond the doorway,

  past the woman who stood in it, was what appeared to be the entrance

  foyer of a house, a small table with a vase of flowers, a stairway

  curving up to a second floor.

  She was the woman he had thus far seen only in his dreams, first in a

  wheelchair and most recently in a red automobile on a sun-splashed

  highway. As he took a step toward her, she said, You'll wake Reg He

  halted, not because he was afraid of waking Regina, whoever the hell she

  was, and not because he still didn't want to get his hands on the woman,

  which he did-he was so vital-but because he became aware of a

  full-length mirror to the left of the Twilight-the door, a mirror

  floating impossibly in the night air. It was filled with his

  reflection, except that it was not him but a man he had never seen

  before, his size but maybe twice his age, lean and fit, his face

  contorted in rage.

  The look of rage gave way to one of shock and disgust, and both Vassago

  and the man in the vision turned from the mirror to the woman in the

  doorway. "Lindsey, I'm sorry," Vassago said.

  Lindsey. The name he had spoken three times at that lounge in Newport

  Beach.

  Until now, he had not linked it to this woman who, nameless, had

  appeared so often in his recent dreams.

  "Lindsey," Vassago repeated.

  He was speaking of his own volition this time, not repeating what the

  man in the mirror was saying, and that seemed to shatter the vision.

  The mirror and the reflection in it flew apart in a billion shards, as

  did the doorway and the dark-eyed woman.

  As the hushed and moon-washed park reclaimed the night, Vassago reached

  out with one hand toward the spot where the woman had stood. />
  "Lindsey." He longed to touch her. So alive, she was. "Lindsey." He

  wanted to cut her open and enfold her heating heart in both hands, until

  its metronomic pumping slowed. .. slowed. .. slowed to a full stop.

  He wanted to be holding her heart when life retreated from it and death

  took possession.

  As swiftly as the flood of rage had poured into Hatch, it drained out of

  him. He balled up the pages of the newspaper and threw them in the

  waste can beside the desk, without glancing again at the story about the

  truck driver. Cooper was pathetic, a self-destructive loser who would

  bring his own punishment down upon himself sooner or later; and it would

  be worse than anything that Hatch would have done to him.

  Lindsey gathered the letters that were scattered on the floor in front

  of the filing cabinet. She returned them to the file folder labeled US

  BUS.

  The letter from Cooper was on the desk beside the telephone. When Hatch

  picked it up, he looked at the hand-written address at the top, above

  the telephone number, and a ghost of his anger returned. But it was a

  pale spirit of the real thing, and in a moment it vanished like a

  revenant.

  He took the letter to Lindsey and put it in the file folder, which she

  reinserted into the cabinet.

  Standing in moonglare and night breeze, in the shadow of the roller

  coaster, Vassago waited for additional visions.

  He was intrigued by what had transpired, though not surprised. He had

  traveled Beyond. He knew another world existed, separated from this one

  by the flimsiest of curtains. Therefore, events of a supernatural

  nature did not astonish him.

  Just when he began to think that the enigmatic episode had reached a

  conclusion, one more vision flickered through his mind. He saw a single

  page of a hand-written letter. White, lined paper. Blue ink.

  At the top was a name. William X. Cooper. And an address in the city

  of Tustin.

  "Pitch him into that freezing river," Vassago muttered, and knew somehow

  that William Cooper was the object of the unfocused anger that had

  overcome him when he was with his collection in the funhouse, and which

  later seemed to link him with the man he had see in the mirror.

  It was an anger he had embraced and amplified because he wanted to

  understand whose anger it was and why he could feel it, but also because

  anger was the yeast in the bread of violence, and violence was the

  staple of his diet.

  From the roller coaster he went directly to the subterranean garage.

  Two cars waited there.

  Morton Redlow's Pontiac was parked in the farthest corner, in the

  deepest shadows. Vassago had not used it since last Thursday night,

  when he had killed Redlow and later the blonde. Though he believed the

  fog had provided adequate cover, he was concerned that the Pontiac might

  have been glimpsed by witnesses who had seen the woman tumble from it on

  the freeway.

  He longed to return to the land of endless night and eternal damnation,

  to be once more among his own kind, but he did not want to be gunned

  down by police until his collection was finished. If his offering was

  incomplete when he died, he believed that he would be deemed as yet

  unfit for Hell and would be pulled back into the world of the living to

  start another collection.

  The second car was a pearl-gray Honda that had belonged to a woman named

  Renata Desseux, whom he had clubbed on the back of the head in a

  shopping-mall parking lot on Saturday night, two nights after the fiasco

  with the blonde. She, instead of the punker named Lisa, had become the

  latest addition to his collection.

  He had removed the license plates from the Honda, tossed them in the

  trunk, and later replaced them with plates stolen off an old Ford on the

  outskirts of Santa Ana. Besides, Hondas were so ubiquitous that he felt

  safe and anonymous in this one. He drove off the park grounds and out

  of the county's largely unpopulated eastern hills toward the panorama of

  golden light that filled the lowlands as far south and as far north as

  he could see, from the hills to the ocean.

  Urban sprawl.

  Civilization.

  Hunting grounds.

  The very immensity of southern California-thousands of square miles,

  tens of millions of people, even excluding Ventura County to the north

  and San Diego County to the south-was Vassago's ally in his

  determination to acquire the pieces of his collection without arousing

  the interest of the police. Three of his victims had been taken from

  different communities in Los Angeles County, two from Riverside, the

  rest from Orange County, spread over many months. Among the hundreds of

  missing persons reported during that time, his few acquisitions would

  not affect the statistics enough to alarm the public or alert the

  anthorities.

  He was also abetted by the fact that these last years of the century and

  the millennium were an age of inconstancy. Many people changed jobs,

  neighbors, friends, and marriages with little or no concern for

  continuity in life. As a result, there were fewer people to notice or

  care when any one person vanished, fewer to harass authorities into a

  meaningful response.

  And more often than not, those who disappeared were later discovered in

  changed circumstances of their own invention. A young executive might

  trade the grind of corporate life for a job as a blackjack dealer in

  Vegas or Reno, and a young mother-disillusioned with the demands of an

  infant and an infantile husband-might end up dealing cards or serving

  drinks or dancing topless in those same cities, leaving on the spur of

  the moment, blowing off their past lives as if a standard middle-class

  existence was as much a cause for shame as a criminal background.

  Others were found deep in the arms of various addictions, living in

  cheap rat-infested hotels that rented rooms by the week to the

  glassy-eyed legions of the counterculture. Because it was California,

  many missing persons eventually turned up in religious communes in

  Marrin County or in Oregon, worshipping some new god or new

  manifestation of an old god or even just some shrewd- man who said he

  was God.

  It was a new age, disdaining tradition. It provided for whatever

  lifestyle one wished to pursue. Even one like Vassago's.

  If he had left bodies behind, similarities in the victims and methods of

  murder would have linked them. The police would have realized that one

  perpetrator of unique strength and cunning was on the prowl, and they

  would have established a special task force to find him.

  But the only bodies he had not taken to the Hell below the funhouse were

  those of the blonde and the private detective. No pattern would be

  deduced from just those two corpses, for they had died in radically

  different ways. Besides, Morton Redlow might not be found for weeks

  yet.

  The only links between Redlow and the punker were the detective's

  revolver, with which the woman had been shot, and his car, out of which

  she had f
allen. The car was safely hidden in the farthest corner of the

  long-abandoned park garage. The gun was in the Styrofoam cooler with

  the Oreo cookies and other snacks, at the bottom of the elevator shaft

  more than two Boors below the lnnhouse. He did not intend to use it

  again.

  He was unarmed when, after driving far north into the county, he arrived

  at the address he had seen on the hand-written letter in the vision.

  William X. Cooper, whoever the hell he was and if he existed, lived in

  an attractive garden-at complex called Palm Coort. The name of the

  place and the street number were carved in a decorative wooden sign,

  floodlit from the front and backed by the promised palms.

  Vassago drove pastPalmCourt, turned right attheoorner,aadparked two

  blocks away. He didn't want anyone to remember the Honda sitting in

  front of the building. He didn't flat-out intend to kill this Cooper,

  just talk to him, ask him some questions about the dark-a dark-eyed

  bitch named Lindsey. Ilu the was situation he did not understand, and

  he to take every precaution. Besides, the truth was, these days he

  killed most of the people to whom he bothered to talk with for any

  length of time.

  After closing the file drawer and turning off the lamp in the den, Hatch

  and Lindsey stopped at Regina's room to make sure she was all right,

  moving quietly to the side of her bed. The hall light, falling through

  her door, revealed that the girl was sound asleep. The small knuckles

  of one fisted hand were against her chin. She was breathing evenly