Koontz, Dean R. - Hideaway

by Hideaway(Lit)

  shot. The spread gets him. I know just which one I want.

  It's a short-barreled, pistol-grip with' She put one hand flat against

  his chest in a "stop" gesture. "You're scaring the crap out of me."

  "Good. If we're scared, we're likely to be more alert, less careless."

  "If you really think there's danger, then we shouldn't have Regina

  here."

  "We can't send her back to St. Thomas's," he said at once, as if he had

  already considered that.

  "Only until this is resolved."

  "No." He shook his head. "Regina's too sensitive, you know that, too

  fragile, too quick to interpret everything as rejection. We might not

  be able to make her understand-and then she might not give us a second

  chance."

  "I'm sure she-"

  "Besides, we'd have to tell the orphanage something.

  If we concocted some lie-and I can't imagine what it would be-they'd

  know we were stalling them. They'd wonder why. Pretty soon they'd

  start second-guessing their approval of us. And if we told them the

  truth, started jabbering about psychic visions and telepathic bonds with

  psycho killers, they'd write us off as a couple of nuts, never give her

  back to us."

  He had thought it out.

  Lindsey knew what he said was true.

  He kissed her lightly again. "I'll be back in an hour. Two at most."

  When he had gone, she stared at the gun for a while.

  Then she angrily away from it and picked up her pencil. She tore off a

  page from the big drawing tablet. The new page was blank. White and

  clean. It stayed that way.

  Nervously-chewing her lip, she looked at the window. No web. No

  spider. Just the glass pane. Treetops and blue skies beyond.

  She had never realized until now that a pristine blue sky could be The

  two screened vents- in the garage attic were provided for ventilation.

  The overhanging roof and the density of the screen mesh did not allow

  much penetration--by the sun, but some wan light entered with the vague

  currents of cool morning air.

  Vassago was untroubled by the light, in part because his nest was formed

  by piles of boxes and furniture that spared him a direct view of the

  vents. The air smelled of dry wood, aging cardboard.

  He was having difficulty getting to sleep, so he tried to relax by

  imagining what a fine fire might be fueled by the contents of the garage

  attic. His rich imagination made it easy to envision sheets of red

  flames, spirals of orange and yellow, and the sharp pop of sap bubbles

  exploding in burning rafters. Cardboard and packing paper and

  combustible memorabilia disappearing in silent rising curls of smoke,

  with a papery crackling like the manic applause of millions in some dark

  and distant theater. Though the conflagration was in his mind, he had

  to squint his eyes against the phantom light.

  Yet the fantasy of fire did not end him-perhaps because the attic would

  be filled merely with burning things, mere lifeless objects. Where was

  the fun in that?

  Eighteen had burned to death been trampled-made the Haunted House on the

  night that Tod Ledderbeck had perished in the cavern of the Millipede.

  There had been a fire.

  He had escaped all suspicion in the rocket jockey's death and the

  disaster at the Haunted House, but he'd been shaken by the repercussions

  of his night of games. The deaths at Fantasy World were at the top of

  the news for at least two weeks, and were the primary topic of

  conversation around school for maybe a month. The park closed

  temporarily, reopened to poor business, closed again for refurbishing,

  reopened to continued low attendance, and eventually succumbed two years

  later to all of the bad publicity and to a welter of lawsuits. A few

  thousand people lost their jobs.

  And Mrs. Ledderbeck had a nervous breakdown, though Jeremy figured it

  was part of her act, pretending she had actually loved Tod, the same

  hipocracy he saw in everyone.

  But other, more personal repercussions were what shook Jeremy. In the

  immediate aftermath, toward morning of the long sleepless night that

  followed his adventures at Fantasy World, he had been out of control.

  Not when he killed Tod. He knew that was right and good, a Master of

  the Game proving his mastery. But from the moment he had tipped Tod out

  of the Millipede, he had been drunk on power, banging around the park in

  a state of mind to what he imagined he'd have been like after chugging a

  six-pack or two. He had been swacked, plastered, crocked, totally

  wasted, polluted, stinko with power, for he had taken unto himself the

  role of Death and become the one whom all men feared.

  The experience was not only inebriating: it was addictive; he wanted to

  repeat it the next day, and the day after that, and every day for the

  rest of his life. He wanted to set someone afire again, and he wanted

  to know what it felt like to take a life with a sharp blade, with a

  gun,with a hammer, with his bare hands. That night he had achieved an

  early puberty, erect with fantasies of death, orgasmic at the

  contemplation of murders yet to be committed. Shocked by that first

  sexual spasm and the fluid that escaped him, he finally understood,

  toward dawn, that a Master of the Game Dot only had to be able to kill

  without fear but had to control the powerful desire to kill again that

  was generated by killing once.

  Getting away with murder proved his superiority to all the other

  players, but he could not continue to get away with it if he were out of

  control, berserk, like one of those guys you saw on the news who opened

  up with a semiautomatic weapon on a crowd at a shopping mall.

  That was not a Master. That was a fool and a loser. A Master must pick

  and choose, select his targets with great care, and eliminate them with

  style.

  Now, lying in the garage attic on a pile of folded dropcloths, he

  thought that a Master must be like a spider. Choose his killing ground.

  Weave his web. Settle down, pull in his long legs, make a small and

  insignificant thing ....... and wait.

  Plenty of spiders shared the attic with him. Even in the gloom they

  were visible to his exquisitely sensitive eyes. Some of them were

  admirably industrious. Others were alive but as cunningly still as

  death. He felt an affinity for them His little brothers.

  The gun shop was a fortress. A sign near the front door warned that the

  premises were guarded by multi-system silent alarms and also, at night,

  by attack dogs. Steel bars were welded over the windows. Hatch noticed

  the door was at least three inches thick, wood but probably with a steel

  core, and that the hinges on the inside appeared to have been designed

  for use on a bathysphere to withstand thousands of tons of pressure deep

  under the sea. Though much weapons-associated merchandise was on open

  shelves, the rifles, shotguns, and handguns were in locked glass cases

  or securely chained in open wall racks.

  Video cameras had been installed near the ceiling in of the four corners

  of the long main room, all behind thick sheets of bulletproof glass.

>   The shop was better protected than- a bank. Hatch wondered if he was

  living in a time when weaponry had more appeal to thieves than did money

  itself.

  The four clerks were pleasant men with easy camaraderie among them

  selves and a folksy manner with customers. They wore straight-hemmed

  shirts outside their pants. Maybe they prized comfort. Or maybe each

  was carrying a handgun in a holster underneath his shirt, tucked into

  the small of his back.

  Hatch bought a Mossberg short-barreled, pistol-grip, pump-action 12

  gauge shotgun.

  "The perfect weapon for home-defense," the clerk told him. "You have

  this, you don't really need anything else."

  Hatch supposed that he should be grateful he was living in an age when

  the government promised to protect and defend its citizens from threats

  even so small as radon in the cellar and the ultimate environmental

  consequences of the extinction of the one-eyed, blue-tailed gnat. In a

  less civilized era-say the turn of the century-he no doubt would have

  required an armory containing hundreds of weapons, a ton of explosives,

  and a chain-mail vest to wear when answering the door.

  He decided irony was a bitter form of humor and not to his taste. At

  least not in his current mood.

  He filled out the requisite federal and state forms, paid with a credit

  card, and left with the Mossberg, a cleaning kit, and boxes of

  ammunition for the Brownings as well as the shotgun. BehInd him, the

  hop door fell shut with a heavy thud, as if he were exiting a vault.

  After putting his purchases in the trunk of the Mitsubishi, he got

  behind the wheel, started the engine-and froze with his hand on the

  gearshift.

  Beyond the windshield, the small parking lot had vanished. The gun shop

  was no longer there.

  As if a mighty sorcerer had cast an evil spell, the sunny day had

  disappeared. Hatch was in a long, eerily lighted tunnel. He glanced

  out the side windows, turned to check the back, but the illusion or

  hallucination whatever the hell it might be-enwrapped him, as realistic

  in its detail as the parking lot had been.

  When he faced forward, he was confronted by a long slope in the center

  of which was a narrow-gauge railroad track. Suddenly the car began to

  move as if it were a train pulling up that hill.

  Hatch jammed his foot down on the brake pedal. No effect He closed his

  eyes, counted to ten, listening to his heart pound harder by the second

  and unsuccessfully willing himself to relax. When he opened his eyes,

  the tunnel was still there.

  He switched the car engine off. He heard it die. The car continued to

  move.

  The silence that followed the cessation of the engine noise was brief.

  A new sound arose: clackety-clack, clackety-clack, clackety-clack.

  An inhuman shriek erupted to the left, and from the corner of his eye,

  Hatch detected threatening movement. He snapped his head toward it.

  To his astonishment he saw an utterly alien figure, a pale white slug as

  big as a man. It reared up and shrieked at him through a round mouth

  full of teeth that whirled like the sharp blades in a garbage disposal.

  An identical I beast shrieked from a niche in the tunnel wall to his

  right, and more of them ahead, and beyond them other monsters of other

  forms, gibbering, hooting, snarling, squealing as he passed them.

  In spite of his disorientation and terror, he realized that the

  grotesque figures along the tunnel walls were mechanical beasts, not

  real. And as that understanding sank in, he finally recognized the

  familiar sound. Clackety clack, clacketyk. He was on an indoor roller

  coaster, yet in his car, moving with decreasing speed toward the high

  point, with a precipitous fall ahead.

  He did not argue with himself that this couldn't be happening, did not

  try to shake himself awake or back to his . He was past denial. He

  understood that he did not have to believe in this experience to insure

  its continuation; it would progress whether he believed in it or not, so

  he might as well grit his teeth and get through it.

  Being past denial didn't mean, however, that he was past fear. He was

  scared shitless.

  Briefly he considered opening the car door and getting out. Maybe that

  would break the spell. But he didn't try it because he was afraid that

  when he stepped out he would not be in the parking lot in front of the

  gun shop but in the tunnel, and that the car would continue uphill

  without him.

  Losing contact with his little red Mitsubishi might be like slamming a

  door on reality, consigning himself forever to the vision, with no way

  out, no The car" the last mechanical monster. It reached the crest of

  the inclined-track. enough a pair of swinging doors. Into darkness.

  The doors fell shut behind The car crept forward Forward. Forward.

  Abruptly it dropped as if to a bottomless pit.

  Hatch cried out, and with his cry the darkness vanished. The sunny

  spring day made a welcome reappearance. The parking lot. The gun shop.

  " His hands were locked so tightly around the steering wheel that they

  ached.

  Throughout the morning, Vassago was awake more than asleep. But when he

  dozed, he was back in the Millipede again, on that night of glory.

  In the days and weeks following the deaths at Fantasy World, he had

  without doubt proved himself a Master by exerting iron control over his

  compulsive desire to kill. Merely the memory of having killed was

  sufficient to release the periodic pressure that built in him.

  Hundreds of times, he relived the sensuous details of each death,

  temporarily quenching his hot need. And the knowledge that he would

  kill again, any time he could do so without arousing suspicion, was an

  additional restraint on selfindulgence.

  He did not kill anyone else for two years. Then, when he was fourteen,

  he drowned another boy at summer camp. The kid was smaller and weaker,

  but he put up a good fight. When he was found floating facedown in the

  pond, it was the talk of the camp for the rest of that month. Water

  could be as good as fire.

  When he was sixteen and had a driver's license, he wasted two

  transients, both hitchhikers, one in October, the other a couple of days

  before Thanksgiving. The guy in November' was just a college kid going

  home for the holiday. But the other one was something else, a predator

  who thought he had stumbled across a foolish and naive high-school boy

  who would provide him with some thrills of his own.

  Jeremy had used knives on both of them.

  At seventeen, when he discovered Satanism, he couldn't read enough about

  it, surprised to find that his secret philosophy had been codified and

  embraced by clandestine cults. Oh, they were relatively benign forms,

  propagated by gutless wimps who were just looking for a way to play at

  wickedness, an excuse for hedonism. But real believers existed, as

  well, committed to the truth that God had failed to create people in his

  image, that the bulk of humanity was equivalent to a herd of cattle,

  that selfishness was admirabl
e, that pleasure was the only worthwhile

  goal, and that the greatest pleasure was the brutal exercise of power

  over others.

  The ultimate expression of power, one privately published volume had

  assured him, was to destroy those who had spawned you, thereby breaking

  the bonds of family "love." The book said that one must as violently as

  possible reject the whole hypocrisy of rules, laws, and noble sentiments

  by which other men pretended to live. Taking that advice to heart was

  what had earned him a place in Hell-from which his father had pulled him

  back.

  But he would soon be there again. A few more deaths, two in particular,

  would earn him repatriation to the land of darkness and the damned.

  The attic grew warmer as the day progressed.

  A few fat flies buzzed back and forth through his shadowy retreat, and

  some of them settled down forever on one or another of the alluring but

  sticky webs that spanned the junctions of the rafters. Then the spiders

  moved.

  In the warm, closed space, Vassago's dozing became a deeper sleep with

  more intense dreams. Fire and water, blade and bullet.

  Crouching at the corner of the garage, Hatch reached between two azaleas

  and flipped open the cover on the landscape-lighting control box. He

  adjusted the timer to prevent the pathway and shrubbery lights from

  blinking off at midnight. Now they would stay on until sunrise.