"Yes. Mother and brother. Set the example." Jonas knew he had already
drunk too much. He took another long sip of his wine anyway.
Turning from the night view, he said, "And you know what makes it all so
absurd, pathetically absurd? If you read that damn book, which I did
afterward, trying to understand, and if you're not psychotic and
disposed to believe it, you'll see right away that Nicene isn't
reporting what he saw in Hell. He's taking his inspiration from a
source as stupidly obvious as it is stupidly ridiculous. Kari, his Hell
is nothing more than the Evil Empire in the Star Wars movies, somewhat
changed, expanded upon, filmed through the lens of religious myth, but
still Star Wars." A bitter laugh escaped him. He it with more wine.
"His demons are nothing more than hundred-foot-tall versions of Darth
Vader, for God's sake.
Read his description of Satan and then go look at whichever film Jabba
the Hut was a part of. Old Jabba the Hut is a ringer for Satan, if you
believe this lunatic." One more glass of chenin blanc, one more glass.
"Marion and Stephanie died-" A sip. Too long a sip. Half the glass
gone.
"-died so Jeremy could get into Hell and have great, dark, anti-heroic
adventures in a fucking Darth Vader costume."
He had offended or unsettled her, probably both. That had not been his
intention, and he regretted it. He wasn't sure what his intention had
been.
Maybe just to unburden himself He had never done so before, and he
didn't know why he'd chosen to do so tonight-except that Morton Redlow's
disappearance had scared him more than anything since the day he had
found the bodies of his wife and daughter.
Instead of pouring more wine for herself, Kari rose from her armchair.
"I think we should get something to eat.
"Not hungry," he said, and heard the slur of the inebriate in his voice.
"Well, maybe we should have something."
"We could go out somewhere," she said, taking the wine glass from his
hand and putting it on the nearest end table. Her face was quite lovely
in the ambient light that came through the view windows, the golden
radiance from the web of cities below. "Or call for pizza."
"How about steaks? I've got some fillets in the freezer."
"That'll take too long."
"Sure won't. Just thaw em out in the microwave, throw em on the grill.
There's a big Gaggenau grill in the kitchen."
"Well, if that's what you'd like."
He met her eyes. Her gaze was as clear, penetrating, and forthright as
ever, but Jonas saw a greater tenderness in her eyes than before. He
supposed it was the same concern she had for her young patients; part of
what made her a first-rate pediatric physician. Maybe that tenderness
had always been there for him, too, and he had just not seen it until
now. Or perhaps this was the first time she how desperately he needed
nurNrmg.
"Thank you, Kari."
"For what?"
"For being you," he said. He put his arm around her shoulders as he
walked her to the kitchen.
Mixed with the visions of gargantuan machines and dark seas and colossal
demonic figures, Hatch received an array of images of other types.
Choiring angels. The Holy Mother in prayer. Christ with the Apostles
at the Last Supper, Christ in Gethsemane, Christ in agony upon the
cross, Christ ascending.
He recognized them as paintings Jonas Nyebern might have collected at
one time or another. They were different periods and styles from those
he had seen in the physician's office, but in the same spirit. A
connection was made, a braiding of wires in his subconscious, but he
didn't understand what it meant yet.
And more visions: the Ortega Highway. Glimpses of the nightscapes
unrolling on both sides of an eastward-bound car. Instruments on a
dashboard. Oncoming headlights that sometimes made him squint. And
suddenly Regina. Regina in the backsplash of yellow light from that
same instrument panel. Eyes closed. Head tipped forward. Something
wadded in her mouth and held in place by a scarf.
She opens her eyes.
Looking into Regina's terrified eyes, Hatch broke from the visions like
an underwater swimmer breaking for air. "She's alive!"
He looked at Lindsey, who shifted her gaze from the highway to him.
"But you never said she wasn't."
Until then he did not how little faith he'd had in the girls continued
existence.
Before he could take heart from the sight of her gray eyes gleaming in
the yellow dashboard light of the killer's car, Hatch was hit by new
clairvoyant visions that pummeled him as hard as a series of blows from
real fists: Contorted figures loomed out of murky shadows. Human forms
in bizarre positions. He saw a woman as withered and dry as tumbleweed,
another in a repugnant state of putrefaction, a mad face of
indeterminate sex, a bloated green-black hand raised in horrid
supplication. The collection. His collection. He saw Regina's face
again, eyes open, revealed in the dashboard lights. So many ways to
disfigure, to mutilate, to mock God's work. Regina. Poor baby. Don't
be afraid, Okay? Don't be afraid. We're only going to an amusement
park You know, like Disneyland, like Magic Mountain? How nicely will
she fit in my collection. Corpses as performance art, held in place by
wires, rebar, blocks of wood. He saw frozen screams, silent forever.
Skeletal jaws held open in eternal cries for mercy. The precious
collection. Regina, sweet baby, pretty baby, such an exquisite
acquisition.
Hatch came out of his trance, clawing wildly at his safety harness, for
it felt like binding wires, ropes, and cords He tore at the straps as a
panicked victim of premature burial might rip at his enwrapping shrouds.
He realized that he was shouting, too, and sucking breath as if in fear
of suffocation, letting it out at once in great explosive exhalations.
He heard Lindsey saying his name, understood that he was terrifying her,
but could not say anything or stop crying out for long seconds, until he
had found the release on the safety harness and cast it off.
With that, he was fully back in the Mitsubishi, contact with the madman
broken for the moment, the horror of the collection diminished though
not forgotten, not in the least forgotten. He turned to Lindsey,
remembering her fortitude in the icy waters of that mountain river the
night that she had saved him. She would need all of that strength and
more tonight.
fantasy World," he said urgently, "where they had the fire years ago,
abandoned now, that's where he's going. Jesus Christ, Lindsey, drive
like you've never driven in your life, put the pedal to the floor, the
son of a bitch, the crazy rotten son of a bitch is taking her down among
the dead!"
And they were flying. Though she could have no idea what he meant, they
were suddenly flying eastward faster than was safe on that highway,
through the last clusters of closely spaced lights, out of civilization
into ever darker realms.
&
nbsp; While she searched the refrigerator in the kitchen for the makings of a
salad, Jonas went to the garage to liberate a couple of steaks from the
chest-style freezer. The garage vents brought in the coolish night air,
which The found refreshing. He stood for a moment just inside the door
from the house, taking slow deep breaths to clear his head a little.
He had no appetite for anything except perhaps more wine, but he did not
want Kari to see him drunk. Besides, though he had no surgery scheduled
for the following day, he never knew what emergency might require the
skills of the resuscitation team, and he felt a responsibility to those
potential patients.
In his darkest hours, be sometimes considered leaving the field of
resuscitation medicine to concentrate on cardiovascular surgery. When
he saw a reanimated patient return to a useful life of work and family
and service, The knew a reward sweeter than most other men could ever
know. But in the moment of crysus, when the candidate for resuscitation
lay on the table, Jonas rarely knew anything about him, which meant he
might sometimes bring evil back into the world once the world had shed
it. That was more than a moral dilemma to him; it was a crushing weight
upon his conscience. Thus far, being a religious man-though with his
share of doubts-he had trusted in God to guide him.
He had decided that God had given him his brain and his skills to use,
and it was not his place to out-guess God and withhold his services from
any patient.
Jeremy, of course, was an unsettling new factor in the equation. If he
had brought Jeremy hack, and if Jeremy had killed innocent people... It
did not bear thinking about.
The cool air no longer seemed refreshing. It seeped into the hollows of
his spine.
Okay, dinner. Two steaks. Filet mignon. Lightly grilled, with a
little Worcestershire sauce. Salads with no dressing but a squirt of
lemon and a sprinkle of black pepper. Maybe he did have an appetite.
He didn't eat much red meat; it was a rare treat. He was a heart
surgeon, after all, and saw firsthand the gruesome effects of a high-fat
diet.
He went to the freezer in the corner. He pushed the latch-release and
put up the lid.
Within lay Morton Redlow, late of the Redlow Detective Agency, pale and
gray as if carved from marble but not yet obscured by a layer of frost.
A smear of blood had frozen into a brittle crust on his face, and there
was a terrible vacancy where his nose had been. His eyes were open.
Forever.
Jonas did not recoil. As a surgeon, he was equally familiar with the
horrors and wonders of biology, and he was not easily repulsed.
Something in him withered when he saw Redlow. Something in him died.
His heart turned as cold as that of the detective before him. In some
fundamental way, he knew that he was finished as a man. He didn't trust
God any more. Not any more. What God? But he was not nauseated or
forced to turn away in disgust.
He saw the folded note clutched in Redlow's stiff right hand. The dead
man let go of it easily, for his fingers had contracted during the
freezing process, shrinking away from the paper around which the killer
had pressed them.
Numbly, he unfolded the letter and immediately recognized his son's neat
penmanship. The post-coma aphasia had been faked. His retardation was
an immensely clever ruse.
The note said, Dear D: For a proper burial, they'll need to know where
to find his nose. Look on his back end He stuck it in my business, so I
stuck it in his. If he'd had any manners, I would have treated him
better.
I'm sorry, sir, that this behavior distresses you so.
Lindsey drove with utmost urgency, pushing the Mitsubishi to its limits,
finding every planning flaw in a highway not always designed for speed.
There was little traffic as they moved deeper into the east, which
stacked the odds in their favor when once she crossed the center line in
the middle of a too-tight turn.
Having snapped on his safety harness again, Hatch used the car phone to
get Jonas Nyebern's office number from information, then to call the
number itself, which was answered at once by a physician's-service
operator. She took his message, which baffled her. Although the
operator seemed sincere in her promised to pass it on to the doctor,
Hatch was not confident that his definition of "immediately" and hers
were materially the same.
He saw all the connections so clearly now, but he knew he could not have
seen them sooner. Jonas's question in the office on Monday took on a
new significance: Did Hatch, he asked, believe that evil was only the
result of the acts of men, or did he think that evil was a real force, a
presence that walked the world? The story Jonas had told of losing wife
and daughter to a homicidal, psychopathic son, and the son himself to
suicide, connected now to the vision of the woman knitting.
The father's collections. And the son's. The Satanic aspects to the
visions were what one might expect from a bad son in mindless rebellion
against a father to whom religion was a center post of life. And
finally-he and Jeremy Nyebern shared one obvious link, miraculous
resurrection at the hands of the same man.
"But how does that explain anything?" Lindsey demanded, when he told her
only a little more than he had told the physician's-service operator.
"I don't know."
He couldn't think about anything except what he had seen in the last
visions, less than half of which he understood. The part he had
comprehended, the nature of Jeremy's collection, filled him with fear
for Without having seen the collection as Hatch had seen it, Lindsey was
fixated, instead, on the mystery of the link, which was somewhat
explained-yet not explained at all-by learning the identity of the
killer in sunglasses. "What about the visions? How do they fit the
damned composition?" she insisted, trying to make sense of the
supernatural in perhaps not too different a way from that in which she
made sense of the world by reducing it to ordered images on Masonite.
"I don't know," he said.
"The link that's letting you follow him-"
"I don't know."
She took a turn too wide. The car went off the pavement, onto the
gravel shoulder. The back end slid, gravel spraying out from beneath
the tires and rattling against the undercarriage. The guardrail flashed
close, too close, and the car was shaken by the hard bang-bang-bang of
sheet metal taking a beating. She seemed to bring it back under control
by a sheer effort of will, biting her lower lip so hard it appeared as
if she would draw blood.
Although Hatch was aware of Lindsey and the car and the reckless speed
they were keeping along that sometimes dangerously curved highway, he
could not turn his mind from the outrage he had seen in the vision.
The longer he thought about Regina being added to that grisly
collection, the more his fear was augmented by anger. It was the hot,
unconta
inable anger he had seen so often in his father, but directed now
against something deserving of hatred, against a target worthy of such
seething rage.
As he watched the entrance road to the abandoned park, Vassago glanced
away from the now lonely highway, to the girl who was bound and gagged
in the other seat. Even in that peculiar light he could see that she
had been straining at her bonds. Her wrists were chafed and beginning
to bleed. Little Regina had hopes of breaking free, striking out or
escaping, though her situation was so clearly hopeless. Such vitality.
She thrilled him.
The child was so special that he might not need the mother at all, if he
could think of a way to place her in his collection that would result in
a piece of art with all the power of the various mother-daughter
tableaux that he had already conceived.
He had been unconcerned with speed. Now, after he turned off the
highway onto the park's long approach road, he accelerated, eager to
return to the museum of the dead with the hope that the atmosphere there
would inspire him.
Years ago, the four-lane entrance had been bordered by lush flowers,
shrubbery, and groupings of paims. The trees and larger shrubs had been
dug up, potted, and hauled away ages ago by agents of the creditors. The
flowers had died and turned to dust when the landscape watering system
Koontz, Dean R. - Hideaway Page 44