Koontz, Dean R. - Hideaway

by Hideaway(Lit)

  through slightly opened lips. If she , her dreams must have been pat.

  Hatch felt his heart pinch as he looked at her, for she seemed so

  desperately young. He found it hard to believe that he had ever been as

  young as Regina was just then, for youth was innocence. Having been

  raised under the hateful and oppressive hand of his father, he had

  surrendered innocence at an early age in return for an intuitive grasp

  of aberrant psychology that had permitted him to survive in a home where

  anger and brutal "discipline" were the rewards for innocent mistakes and

  misunderstandings. He knew that Regina could not be as tender as she

  looked, for life had given her reasons of her own to develop thick skin

  and an armored heart.

  Tough as they might be, however, they were both vulnerable, child and

  man. In fact, at that moment Hatch felt more vulnerable than the girl.

  If given a choice between her inability the game leg, the twisted and

  incomplete hand-and whatever damage had been done to some deep region of

  his brain, he would have opted for her physical impairments without

  hesitation. After recent experiences, including the inexplicable

  escalation of his anger into blind rage, Hatch did not feel entirely in

  control of himself. And from the time he had been a small boy, with the

  terrifying example of his father to shape his fears, he had feared

  nothing half as much as being out of control.

  I will not fail you, he promised the sleeping child.

  He looked at Lindsey, to whom he owed his lives, both of them, before

  and after dying. Silently he made her the same promise: I will not fail

  you.

  He wondered if they were promises he could keep.

  Later, in their own room, with the lights out, as they lay on their

  separate halves of the bed, Lindsey said, "The rest of the test results

  should be back to Dr. Nyebern tomorrow."

  Hatch had spent most of Saturday at the hospital, giving blood and urine

  samples, submitting to the prying of X-ray and sonogram machines.

  At one point he had been hooked up to more electrodes than the creature

  that Dr. Frankenstein, in those old movies, had energized from kites

  sent aloft in a lightning storm.

  He said, "When I spoke to him today, he told me everything was looking

  good. I'm sure the rest of the tests will all come in negative, too.

  Whatever's happening to me, it has nothing to do with any mental or

  physical damage from the accident or from be.... dead. I'm healthy,

  I'm okay."

  "Oh, God, I hope so."

  "I'm just fine."

  "Do you really think so?"

  "Yes, I really think so, I really do." He wondered how he could lie to

  her so smoothly. Maybe because the lie was not meant to hurt or harm,

  merely to soothe her so she could get some sleep.

  "I love you," she said.

  "I love you, too."

  In a couple of minutes- shortly before midnight, according to the

  digital clock at the bedside-she was asleep, snoring softly.

  Hatch was unable to sleep, worrying about what he might learn of his

  future-or lack of it-tomorrow. He suspected that Dr. Nyebern would be

  gray-faced and grim, bearing somber news of some meaningful shadow

  detected in one lobe of Hatch's brain or another, a patch of dead cells,

  lesion, cyst, or tumor. Something deadly. Inoperable. And certain to

  get worse.

  His confidence had been increasing slowly ever since he had gotten past

  the events of Thursday night and Friday morning, when he had dreamed of

  the blonde's murder and, later, had followed the trail of the killer to

  the Route 133 off-ramp from the San Diego Freeway. The weekend had been

  uneventful. The day just past, enlivened and uplifted by Regina's

  arrival, had been delightful. Then he had seen the newspaper piece

  about Cooper, and had lost control.

  He hadn't told Lindsey about the stranger's reflection that he had seen

  in the den mirror. This time he was unable to pretend that he might

  have been sleepwalking, half awake, half dreaming He had been wide

  awake, which meant the image in the mirror was an hallucination of one

  kind or another. A healthy, undamaged brain didn't hallucinate. He

  hadn't shared that terror with her because he knew, with the receipt of

  the test results tomorrow, there would be fear enough to go around.

  Unable to sleep, he began to think about the newspaper story again, even

  though he didn't want to chew on it any more. He tried to direct his

  thoughts away from William Cooper, but he returned to the subject the

  way he might have obsessively probed at a sore tooth with his tongue.

  It almost seemed as if he were being forced to think about the truck

  driver, as if a giant mental magnet was pulling his attention inexorably

  in that direction. Soon, to his dismay, anger rose in him again. Worse,

  almost at once, the anger exploded into fury and a hunger for violence

  so intense that he had to fist his hands at his sides and clench his

  teeth and struggle to keep from letting loose a primal cry of rage.

  From the banks of mailboxes in the breezeway at the main entrance to the

  garden apartments, Vassago learned that William Cooper was in apartment

  twenty-eight. He followed the breezeway into the courtyard, which was

  lined with palms and ficuses and ferns and too many landscape lights to

  please him, and he climbed an exterior staircase to the covered balcony

  that served the second-floor units of the two-story complex.

  No one was in sight. Palm Court was silent, peaceful.

  Though it was a few minutes past midnight, lights were on in the Cooper

  apartment. Vassago could hear a television turned low.

  The window to the right of the door was covered with Levolor blinds.

  The slats were not tightly closed. Vassago could see a kitchen

  illuminated only by the low-wattage bulb in the range hood.

  To the left of the door a larger window looked onto the balcony and

  courtyard from the apartment living room. The drapes were not drawn all

  the way shut. Through the gap, a man could be seen slumped in a big

  recliner with his feet up in front of the television. this head was

  tilted to one side, his face toward the window, and he appeared to be

  asleep. A glass containing an inch of golden liquid stood beside a

  half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel's on a small table next to the

  recliner.

  A bag of cheese puffs had been knocked off the table, and some of the

  bright orange contents had scattered across the bile-green carpet.

  Vassago scanned the balcony to the left, right, and on the other side of

  the courtyard. Still d.

  He tried to slide open Cooper's living-room window, but it was either

  corroded or locked. He moved to the right again, toward the kitchen

  window, but he stopped at the door on the way and, without any real

  hope, tried it. The door was unlocked. He pushed it open, went inside

  and locked it behind him.

  The man in the recliner, probably Cooper, did not stir as Vassago

  quietly pulled the drapes all the way shut across the big living-room

  window. No one else, passing on the balcony, would be able to look

&
nbsp; inside.

  Already assured that the kitchen, dining area, and living room were

  deserted, Vassago moved catlike through the bathroom and two bedrooms

  (one without furniture, used primarily for storage) that comprised the

  rest of the apartment. The man in the recliner was alone.

  On the dresser in the bedroom, Vassago spotted a wallet and a ring of

  keys. In the wallet he found fifty-eight dollars, which he took, and a

  driver's license in the name of William X. Cooper. The photograph on

  the license was of the man in the living room, a few years younger and,

  of course, not in a drunken stupor.

  He returned to the living room with the intention of waking Cooper and

  having an informative little chat with him. Who is Lindsey? Where does

  she live?

  But as he approached the recliner, a current of anger shot through him,

  too sudden and causeless to be his own, as if he were a human radio that

  received other people's emotions. And what he was receiving was the

  same anger that had suddenly struck him while he had been with his

  collection in the funhouse hardly an hour ago. As before, he opened

  himself to it, amplified the current with his own singular rage,

  wondering if he would receive visions, as he had on that previous

  occasion. But this time, as he stood looking down on William Cooper,

  the anger Bared too abruptly into insensate fury, and he lost control.

  From the table beside the recliner, he grabbed the Jack Daniel's by the

  neck of the bottle.

  Lying rigid in his bed, hands fisted so tightly that even his blunt

  fingernails were gouging painfully into his palms, Hatch had the crazy

  feeling that his mind had been invaded. His flicker of anger had been

  like opening a door just a hairline crack but wide enough for something

  on the other side to get a grip and tear it off its hinges. He felt

  something unnameable storming into him, a force without form or

  features, defined only by its hatred and rage. Its fury was that of the

  hurricane, the typhoon, beyond mere human dimensions, and he knew that

  he was too small a vessel to contain all of the anger that was pumping

  into him. He felt as if he would explode, shatter as if he were not a

  man but a crystal figurine.

  The half-full bottle of Jack Daniel's whacked the side of the sleeping

  man's head with such impact that it was almost as loud as a shotgun

  blast.

  Whiskey and sharp fragments of glass showered up, rained down,

  splattered and clinked against the television set, the other furniture,

  and the walls. The air was filled with the velvety aroma of corn-mash

  bourbon, but underlying it was the scent of blood, for the gashed and

  battered side of Cooper's face was bleeding copiously.

  The man was no longer merely sleeping. He had been hammered into a

  deeper level of unconsciousness.

  Vassago was left with just the neck of the bottle in his hand. It

  terminated in three sharp spikes of glass that dripped bourbon and made

  him think of snake fangs glistening with venom. Shifting his grip, he

  raised the weapon above his head and brought it down, letting out a

  fierce hiss of rage, and the glass serpent bit deep into William

  Cooper's face.

  The volcanic wrath that erupted into Hatch was unlike anything he had

  ever experienced belbee, far beyond any rage that his father had ever

  achieved. Indeed, it was nothing he could have generated within himself

  for the same reason that one could not manufacture sulfuric acid in a

  paper cauldron: the vessel would be dissolved by the substance it was

  required to contain. A high-pressure lava flow of anger gushed into

  him, so hot that he wanted to scream, so white-hot that he had no time

  to scream. Consciousness was burned away, and he fell into a mercifully

  dreamless darkness where there was neither anger nor terror.

  Vassago realized that he was shouting with wordless, savage glee.

  After a dozen or twenty blows, the glass weapon had utterly

  disintegrated. He finally, reluctantly dropped the short fragment of

  the bottle neck still in his white-knuckled grip. Snarling, he threw

  himself against the Naugahyde recliner, tipping it over and rolling the

  dead man onto the bile-green carpet. He picked up the end table and

  pitched it into the television set, where Humphrey Bogart was sitting in

  a military courtroom, rolling a couple of ball bearings in his leathery

  hand, talking about strawberries.

  The screen imploded, and Bogart was transformed into a shower of yellow

  sparks, the sight of which ignited new fires of destructive fury in

  Vassago. He kicked over a coffee table, tore two It Mart prints off the

  walls and smashed the glass out of the frames, swept a collection of

  cheap ceramic knickknacks off the mantel. He would have liked nothing

  better than to have continued from one end of the apartment to the

  other, pulling all the dishes out of the kitchen cabinets and smashing

  them, reducing all the glassware to bright shards, seizing the food in

  the refrigerator and heaving it against the walls, hammering one piece

  of furniture against another until everything was broken and splintered,

  but he was halted by the sound of a siren, distant now, rapidly drawing

  nearer, the meaning of it penetrating even through the mist of blood

  frenzy that clouded his thoughts. He headed for the door, then swinging

  away from it, realizing that people might have come out into the

  courtyard or might be watching from their windows. He ran out of the

  living room, back the short hall, to the window in the master bedroom,

  where he pulled aside the drapes and looked onto the roof over the

  building-long carport. An alleyway, bordered by a block wall, lay

  beyond. He twisted open the latch on the double-hung window, shoved up

  the bottom hall, squeezed through, dropped onto the roof of the long

  carport, rolled to the edge, fell to the pavement, and landed on his

  feet as if he were a cat. He lost his sunglasses, scooped them up, put

  them on again. He sprinted left, toward the back of the property, with

  the siren louder now, much louder, very close. When he came to the next

  flank of the eight-foot-high concrete-block wall that ringed the

  property, he swiftly clambered over it with the agility of a spider

  skittering up any porous surface, and then he was over, into another

  alleyway serving carports along the back of another apartment complex,

  and so he ran from serviceway to serviceway, picking a route through the

  maze by sheer instinct, and came out on the street where he had parked,

  half a block from the pearl-gray Honda. He got in the car, started the

  engine, and drove away from there as sedately as he could manage,

  sweating and breathing so hard that he steamed up the windows.

  Reveling in the fragrant melange of bourbon, blood, and perspiration, he

  was tremendously excited, so profoundly satisfied by the violence he had

  unleashed that he pounded the steering wheel and let out peels of

  laughter that had a shrieky edge.

  For a while he drove randomly from one street to another with no idea

  where he was headed. After hi
s laughter faded, when his heart stopped

  racing, he gradually oriented himself and struck out south and east, in

  the general direction of his hideaway.

  If William Cooper could have provided any connection to the woman named

  Lindsey, that lead was now closed to Vassago forever. He wasn't

  worried. He didn't know what was happening to him, why Cooper or

  Lindsey or the man in the mirror had been brought to his attention by

  these supernatural means. But he knew that if he only trusted in his

  dark god, everything would eventually be made clear to him.

  He was beginning to wonder if Hell had let him go willingly, returning

  him to the land of the living in order to use him to deal with certain

  people whom the god of darkness wanted dead. Perhaps he'd not been

  stolen from Hell, after all, but had been sent back to life on a mission

  of destruction that was only slowly becoming comprehensible.

  If that were the case, he was pleased to make himself the instrument of

  the dark and powerful divinity whose company he longed to rejoin, and he

  anxiously awaited whatever task he might he assigned next.

  Toward dawn, after several hours in a deep slumber of almost deathlike

  perfection, Hatch woke and did not know where he was. For a moment he

  drifted in confusion, then washed up on the shore of memory: the

  bedroom, Lindsey breathing softly in her sleep beside him, the ash-gray

  first light of morning like a fine silver dust on the windowpane When he

  Bed the inexplicable and inhuman fit of rage that had slammed through

  him with paralytic force, Hatch stiffened with fear. He tried to

  remember where that spiraling anger had led, in what act of violence it