Koontz, Dean R. - Hideaway

by Hideaway(Lit)

  He considered letting them descend the spillway into Hell, slipping

  behind them, killing the man, disabling the woman, and then proceeding

  with a dual crucifxion. But there was something about the husband that

  unsettled him. He couldn't put his finger on it.

  But he realized now that, in spite of his bravado, he had been avoiding

  a confrontation with the husband. In their house earlier in the night,

  when the element of surprise had still been his, he should have circled

  behind the husband and disposed of him first, before going after either

  Regina or Lindsey. Had he done so, he might have been able to acquire

  both woman and child at that time. By now he might have been happily

  engrossed in their mutilation.

  Far above, the pearly glow of light had resolved into a pair of

  flashlight beams at the brink of the spillway. After a brief

  hesitation, they started down. Because he had put his sunglasses in his

  shirt pocket, Vassago was forced to squint at the slashing swords of

  light.

  As before, he decided not to move against the man, choosing instead to

  retreat with the child. This time, however, he wondered at his

  prudence.

  A Master of the Game, he thought, must exhibit iron control and choose

  the right moments to prove Ins power and superiority.

  True. But this time the thought struck him as spineless justification

  for avoiding confrontation.

  Nonsense. He was afraid of nothing in this world.

  The flashlights were still a considerable distance away, focused on the

  floor of the spillway, not yet to the midpoint of the long incline. He

  could hear their footsteps, which grew louder and developed an echo as

  the pair advanced into the huge chamber.

  He seized the catatonic girl, lifted her as if she weighed no more than

  a pillow, slung her over his shoulder, and moved soundlessly across the

  floor of Hell toward those rock formations where he knew a door to a

  service room was hidden.

  "Oh, my God."

  "Don't look," he told Lindsey as he swept the beam of his flashlight

  across the macabre collection. "Don't look, Jesus, cover my back, make

  sure he's not coming around on us."

  Gratefully, she did as he said, turning away from the array of posed

  cadavers in various stages of decomposition. She was certain that her

  sleep, even if she lived to be a hundred, would be haunted every night

  by those forms and faces. But who was she kidding-she would never make

  a hundred. She was beginning to think she wouldn't even make it through

  the night.

  The very idea of breathing that air, reeking and impure, through her

  mouth was almost enough to make her violently ill. She did it anyway

  because it .. . . the stink.

  The darkness was so deep. The flashlight seemed barely able to

  penetrate. It was like syrup, flowing back into the brief channel that

  the beam stirred through it.

  She could hear Hatch moving along the collection of bodies, and she knew

  what he had to be doing-taking a quick look at each of them, just to be

  sure that Jeremy Nyebern was not posed among them, one living

  monstrosity among those consumed by rot, waiting to spring at them the

  moment they passed him.

  Where was Regina?

  Ceaselessly, Lindsey swept her flashlight back and forth, back and

  forth, in a wide arc, never giving the murderous bastard a chance to

  sneak up on her before she brought the beam around again. But, oh, he

  was fast.

  She had seen how fast. Flying down the hallway into Regina's room,

  slamming the door behind him, fast as if he'd flown, had wings, bat

  wings.

  And agile. Down the trumpet-vine trellis with the girl over his

  shoulder, unfazed by the fall, up and off into the night with her.

  e was Regina?

  She heard Hatch moving away, and she knew where he was going, not just

  following the line of bodies but circling the towering figure of Satan,

  to be sure Jeremy Nyebern wasn't on the other side of it. He was just

  doing what he had to do. She knew that, but she didn't like it anyway,

  not one little bit, because now she was alone with all of those dead

  people behind her. Some of them were withered and would make papery

  sounds if somehow they became animated and edged toward her, while

  others were in more horrendous stages of decomposition and sure to

  reveal their approach with thick, wet ... And what crazy' thoughts were

  these?

  They were all d'ad. Nothing to fear from them. The dead stayed dead.

  Except they didn't always, did they? No, not in her own personal

  experience, they' didn't. But she kept sweeping her light back and

  forth, back and forth, resisting the urge to turn around and shine it on

  the festering cadavers behind her. She knew she should mourn them

  rather than fear them, be angry for the abuse and loss of dignity that

  they had suffered, but she only had room at the moment for fear. And

  now she heard Hatch coming closer, around the other side of the statue,

  completing his circumnavigation, thank God. But in the next breath,

  horribly metallic as it passed through her mouth, she wondered if it was

  Hatch or one of the bodies moving. Or Jeremy. She swung around,

  looking past the row of corpses rather than at them, and her light

  showed her that it was, indeed, Hatch coming back.

  Are was Regina?

  as if in answer, a distinctive creak sliced through the heavy air.

  Doors the world over made that identical sound when their hinges were

  corroded and unoiled.

  She and Hatch swung their flashlights in the same direction. The

  over-lapping terminuses of their beams showed they had both judged the

  origin of the sound to have come from a rock formation along the far

  shore of what would have been, with water, a lake larger than the lagoon

  outside.

  She was moving before she saw it. Hatch whispered her name in an urgent

  tone that meant move after me, I'll go first. But she could no more

  have held back than she could have turned coward and retreated up the

  spill way. Her Regina had been among the dead, perhaps spared the

  direct sight of them because of her strange keeper's aversion to light,

  but among them nevertheless and so aware of them. Lindsey could not

  bear the thought of that innocent child held in this slaughterhouse one

  minute longer. Lindsey's own safety didn't matter, only Regina's.

  As she reached the rocks and plunged in among them, stabbing here with

  her light, then there, then over there, shadows leaping, she heard the

  wail of distant sirens. Sheriff's men. Hatch's phone call had been

  taken seriously. But Regina was in the hands of Death. If the girl was

  still alive, she would not last as long as it would take the cops to

  find the funhouse and get down to the lair ofLucifer. So Lindsey

  pressed deeper into the rocks, the Browning in one hand, flashlight in

  the other, turning corners recklessly, taking chances, with Hatch close

  behind her.

  She came upon the door abruptly. Metal, streaked with rust, operated by

  a push-bar rather than a knob. Ajar.


  She shoved it open and went through without even the finesse that she

  should have learned from a lifetime of police movies and television

  shows.

  She exploded across the threshold as might a mother lion in pursuit of

  the predator that had dared to drag off her cub. Stupid, she knew that

  it was stupid, that she could get herself killed, but mother lions in a

  fever of matriarchal aggression were not notably creatures of reason.

  She was operating on instinct now, and instinct told her that they had

  the bastard on the run, had to keep him running to prevent him from

  dealing with the girl as he wanted, and should press him harder and

  harder until they had him in a corner.

  Beyond the door in the rocks, behind the walls of Hell, was a

  twenty-foot-wide area that had once been crowded with machinery. It was

  now littered with the bolts and steel plates on which those machines had

  been mounted. Elaborate scaffolding, festooned with spider webs, rose

  forty or fifty feet; it provided access to other doors and crawl spaces

  and panels through which the complex lighting and effects

  equipment-cold-steam generators, laser-had been serviced.

  That stuff was gone now, stripped out and carted away.

  How long did he need to cut the girl open, seize her beating heart, and

  take his satisfaction from her death? One minute? Two? Perhaps no

  more than that. To keep her safe, they had to breathe down his

  goddamned neck.

  Lindsey swept her flashlight beam across that spider-infested

  conglomeration of steel pipes and elbow joints and tread plates. She

  quickly decided their quarry had not ascended to any hiding place above.

  Hatch was at her side and slightly behind her, staying close. They were

  breathing hard, not because they had exerted themselves but because

  their chests were tight with fear, constricting their lungs.

  Turning left, Lindsey moved straight toward a dark opening in the

  concrete-block wall on the far side of that twenty-foot-wide chamber.

  She was drawn to it because it appeared to have been boarded over at one

  time, not solidly but with enough planks to prevent anyone entering the

  forbidden space beyond without effort. Some of the nails still prickled

  the block walls on both sides of the opening, but all of the planks had

  been torn away and shoved to one side on the floor.

  Although Hatch whispered her name, warning her to hold back, she stepped

  straight to the brink of that room, shone her light into it, and

  discovered it was not a room at all but an elevator shaft. The doors,

  cab, cables, and mechanism had been salvaged, leaving a hole in the

  building as sure as an extracted tooth left a hole in the jaw.

  She pointed her light up. The shaft rose three stories, having once

  conveyed mechanics and other repairmen to the top of the funhouse. She

  swung the beam slowly down the concrete wall from above, noticing the

  ice chest, several empty cans of root beer, and a plastic garbage bag

  nearly full of trash, all arranged around a stained and battered

  mattress.

  On the mattress, huddled in a corner of the shaft, was Jeremy Nyebern.

  Regina was in his lap, held against his chest, so she could shield him

  against gunfire. He was holding a pistol, and he squeezed off two shots

  even as Lindsey spotted him down there.

  The first slug missed both her and Hatch, but the second round tore

  through her shoulder. She was knocked against the door frame. On the

  rebound, she bent forward involuntarily, lost her balance, and fell into

  the shaft, following her flashlight, which she had already dropped.

  Going down, she didn't believe it was happening. Even when she hit

  bottom, landing on her left side, the whole thing seemed , maybe because

  she was still too numb from the impact of the bullet to feel the damage

  it had done, and maybe because she fell mostly on the mattress, at the

  far end of it from Nyebern, knocking out what wind the slug had left in

  her but breaking no bones.

  Her flashlight had also landed on the mattress, unharmed. It lit one

  gray wall.

  As if in a dream, and though unable to get her breath quite yet, Lindsey

  brought her right hand slowly around to point her gun at him.

  But she had no gun. The Browning had spun from her grip in the fall.

  During Lindsey's drop, Nyebern must have tracked her with his own

  weapon, for she was looking into it. The barrel was impossibly long,

  measuring exactly one eternity from firing chamber to muzzle.

  Beyond the gun she saw Regina's face, which was as slack as her gray

  eyes were empty, and beyond that beloved countenance was the hateful

  one, pale as milk. His eyes, unshielded by glasses, were fierce and

  strange.

  She could see them even though the glow of the flashlight forced him to

  squint. Meeting his gaze she felt that she was face-to-face with

  something alien that was only passing as human, and not well.

  Oh, wow, surreal, she thought, and knew that she was on the verge of

  passing out.

  She hoped to faint before he squeezed the trigger. Though it didn't

  matter, really. She was so close to the gun that she wouldn't live to

  hear the shot that blew her face off.

  iron rungs of the service ladder.

  Hatch stepped in beside her as the light found its way to the bottom of

  the shaft, just two floors below, where it revealed some litter, a

  Styrofoam Hatch's horror, as he watched Lindsey fall into the shaft, was

  exceeded by his surprise at what he did next.

  When he saw Jeremy track her with the pistol until she hit the mattress

  the muzzle three feet from her face, Hatch tossed his own Browning away;

  onto the pile of planks that once boarded off the shaft. He figured he

  wouldn't be able to get off a clear shot with Regina in the way. And he

  knew that no gun would properly dispatch the thing that Jeremy had

  become. He had no time to wonder at that curious thought, for as soon

  as he pitched away the Browning, he shifted the flashlight from his left

  hand to his right, and leaped into the elevator shaft without any

  expectation that he was about to do so.

  After that, everything got weird.

  It seemed to him that he didn't crash down the shaft as he should have

  done, but glided in slow motion, as if he were only slightly heavier

  than air, taking as much as half a minute to reach bottom.

  Perhaps his sense of time had merely been distorted by the profundity of

  his terror.

  Jeremy saw him coming, shifted the pistol from Lindsey to Hatch, and

  fired all eight remaining rounds. Hatch was certain that he was hit at

  least three or four times, though he sustained no wounds. It seemed

  impossible that the killer could miss so often in such a confined space.

  Perhaps the sloppy marksmanship was attributable to the gunman's panic

  and to the fact that Hatch was a moving target.

  While he was still floating down like dandelion fluff, he experienced a

  reconnection of the peculiar bond between him and Nyebern, and for a

  moment he saw himself descending from the young killer's point of view.

  What he glimpse
d, however, was not only himself but the image of some

  one-or something-superimposed over him, as if he shared his body with

  another entity. He thought he saw white wings folded close against his

  sides. Under his own face was that of a stranger-the visage of a

  warrior if ever there had been one, yet not a face that frightened him.

  Perhaps by then Nyebern was hallucinating, and what Hatch was receiving

  from him was not actually what he saw but only what he imagined that he

  saw. Perhaps.

  Then Hatch was gazing down from his own eyes again, still in that slow

  glide, and he was sure that he saw something superimposed over Jeremy

  Nyebern, too, a form and face that were part reptilian and part

  insectile.

  Perhaps it was a trick of light, the confusion of shadows and

  conflicting flashlight beams.

  He could not explain away their final exchange, however, and he dwelt

  upon it often in the days that followed: "Who are you?" Nyebern asked as

  Hatch landed catlike in spite of a thirty-foot descent.

  "Uriel," Hatch replied, though that was not a name he had heard before.

  "I am Vassago," Nyebern said.

  "I know," Hatch said, though he was hearing that name for the first

  time, as well.

  "Only you can send me back."

  "and when you get sent back by such as me," Hatch said, wondering where

  the words came from, "you don't go back a prince. You'll be a slave

  below, just like the heartless and stupid boy with whom you hitched a