Koontz, Dean R. - Hideaway

by Hideaway(Lit)

  "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