by Dean Koontz
She ran after him.
The sea was forgotten, though it still thumped the beach and echoed on the flat sands.
The flowers were forgotten too. All she could think about was catching up to the stranger.
She ran into the open mouth of the waiting arbor.
She brushed the leaves aside, at the opening, felt them slither over her bare arms like the delicate wings of insects, and she stepped into unrelieved blackness.
She had thought that he would run the entire length of the arbor, into the open air again, from there across the remainder of the gardens and into the thick, sheltering pine forests of the central part of the island, much too quick for her to catch. But she had been wrong about that, very wrong.
He remained in the arbor.
He stood quite still against the lefthand wall, holding his breath, listening for pursuit.
He was waiting for her.
She did not disappoint him.
She cried out when she brushed against him, recoiled like a kitten from a snake.
She turned.
He grabbed her, whirled her around to face him once more, though in that pitch, she could only suppose they were face-to-face.
His hands let go of her arms and, in an instant, had a tight hold on her neck.
She screamed.
It was a terribly weak scream, too shallow to have carried clear over to Seawatch, much too shallow to be heard and draw any help. A useless, whispered scream...
He pressed her back against the wall of the arbor.
Hard ropy vines gouged at her back, like horns or like talons, hurting her.
Even now, even as she gagged and twisted under the pressure of his large, dry, determined hands, Sonya tried to see something of him. His face could be no more than inches away from her own, for she could feel the wash of his rapidly exhaled breaths against her forehead... But the darkness, in the final analysis, was too deep, too intense for her to discover anything at all about him. Except, of course, that he was frightened of being discovered and that his hands, his squeezing hands, were awfully large and strong.
Strangely, though his grip on her throat was decidedly uncomfortable, it was not deadly. He held her against the wall of the arbor, and he cut off most of her breath, but he delayed making that last little bit of effort that would finish her off-almost as if he had to have time to build up his courage for the kill...
She squirmed, tried to pull free of him, found that she was only making the pain at her throat worse, like a hot file scraping away at half her esophagus.
She tried to scream again.
No sound: just pain.
Okay, no screaming. She would talk to him, reason with him, ask him to please let her go so they could talk this over like reasonable human beings. But when she tried to speak softly and persuasively, she found that she had no more luck than she had had with her scream: the words remained unspoken, choked down.
Without warning, without apparent reason, he tightened his hands, moving closer, having gotten the necessary courage...
An even deeper darkness, a thousand times blacker than the pitch beneath the arbor, whirled and danced tantalizingly at the back of her mind, growing ever larger, closer, beginning to envelope her like soft raven wings-or like a shroud.
For the first time in this nightmarish encounter, Sonya was genuinely, unreservedly terrified and not merely afraid. Her terror swelled, bloomed, blossomed into the ultimate horror: the expectation of certain death...
Somehow, until this very minute, she had not been able to envision herself as a corpse, lifeless and cold and finished forever. Perhaps it was an absurd application of her overly-optimistic approach to everything in life, but she honestly had not seriously considered the possibility that she might die here, in the gardens, between the madman's hard, dry and deadly hands.
Now, of necessity, she understood.
She grabbed his wrists.
They were thick, corded with muscle.
She could not budge them.
Quickly, she slid her hands along his arms, to his biceps, trying to force him away.
Blackness: closer, closer...
She raked her nails at his face. And again. She missed both times, striking only air.
She twisted and fought, growled deep in her throat as she felt herself weakening and knew that she must not give in to that sweet, beckoning unconsciousness that, right now, seemed so welcome, so very desirable.
He was gasping for air, too, as if he were the one who was being methodically strangled to death, and he whimpered eerily, like some wounded animal, with each indrawn breath. Sonya could sense, rather than feel, the great, nervous tremors which shook the man's entire body like reverberations passing through a gong.
She knew that she had only moments left. Almost unconsciously, with the mindless desperation of a cornered animal, she raised her right foot and brought the hard, plastic heel of her loafer down solidly on the toes of his left foot, ground hard. He was wearing only canvas-topped sneakers, which afforded him no protection at all.
He cried out, let go of her with one hand as he reached for his injured foot.
She twisted, pushed hard against him, tore free.
"Hey!"
She ran, sobbing hysterically, collided with the far wall of the arbor, re-oriented herself, and made for the open end of the arbor, the way she had come.
He grabbed her shoulder and sent her stumbling into the wall again. Somehow, even hurt as he was, he was right behind her.
She pushed off the wall, out of his grip, and ran again.
Curiously, although he was no longer throttling her, Sonya felt still on the edge of unconsciousness; that formless, black cloud grew nearer, nearer still, soft and warm. She only managed to keep going because the thought of collapsing so close to escape utterly infuriated her-and from her fury, she found a few last dregs of energy.
The end of the arbor was only thirty feet away, though she would not have questioned anyone who told her that it was really a mile instead; it felt like a mile, each step a major journey. Then the air was cooler, the darkness less dark... At the end of the arbor, he caught her again, one hand on her shoulder, spun her around with a suddenness that jerked her off balance.
She gasped, staggered, almost fell.
He would have gone for her throat in another second, and then she would have been finished for sure. But she did not give him that second; she stamped out, twice, caught his injured foot on the second try. She did not strike it hard, but just hard enough.
He yelped, hopped to one foot, fell with a crash.
She turned and ran again.
The night air was cooler than she remembered it, really cool, almost chilly.
Her throat burned as if a fire had been set inside of it, and it was too raw to permit, yet, a cry for help.
She passed the bench where she had been sitting when the man had first appeared from the arbor, kept on going.
A dozen paces from the edge of the garden, on the verge of the open lawn where the light of Seawatch spilled more profusely, Sonya tripped on a loose stone in the walk, fell.
She tried to get up.
She could not.
Her heart racing, so winded that she could only barely get her breath, she passed out.
* * *
TEN
When she woke, she did not know where she was-though she definitely knew where she wasn't. She was not in her huge Polynesian bed on the second floor of Seawatch, not in the center of that soft, queen-sized mattress where she had spent the past eleven nights. The surface beneath her was hard and somewhat chilly.
She lay still for a long while, trying to remember what had happened and where she was. She hated, more than anything else, to wake up in a strange place and not know, for a few moments, how she had gotten there. When her parents were killed in the automobile accident, she had gone through a number of scenes like that. First, in the middle of the night, she had been moved to the neighbors' house while she s
lept, her parents already an hour or so dead, her babysitter sent home; in the morning, when she had opened her eyes, her heart had risen instantly into her throat, for she recognized nothing around her. That day, she was taken in by an aunt and woke in that house the following morning, confused, somewhat frightened, longing for the familiarity of her own bedroom with the dolls she knew so well, the scatter of knicknacks and souvenirs that instantly reassured her when she woke there among them. The day before the funeral, she was moved in with her grandmother, where she was to stay, and was faced with a third strange setting to grow accustomed to. She remembered the fear in the morning, when she opened her eyes on the unfamiliar ceiling, lying in a bed which she did not remember and was sure she'd never used before, a sense of impermanence sweeping over her like a black tide...
Suddenly, she recalled the corresponding blackness in the tunnel of the bougainvillea arbor, the blackness that had closed in on her and made her faint, and she opened her eyes like shutters flying up on two small, twin cameras.
The starry sky lay overhead.
Part of a moon.
She seemed to be alive, something she was surprised to find.
She was stretched out at the edge of the gardens, lying half across the stone walk and half in the grass, where she had fallen. One arm was flung out to her side, the other above her head so that, had she been standing, she would have looked as if she were preparing to do a flamenco dance. Despite her situation, she was amused at that thought. She moved, seemed to be all right, sat up.
That was a mistake. Her head began to throb as if there were a tiny man inside beating at her skull with a sledgehammer. A fierce pain arced over both eyebrows, and it seemed the lasting sort. Also, her throat felt swollen and raw, and she wondered if she would be able to swallow a long, cold glass of water. That drink was what she desired more than anything else on earth.
She touched the sides of her neck, carefully, gently. It was swollen, but the pain was not so terrible, more of a tenderness, like a sprained ankle or pulled muscle.
She got slowly to her feet, like an invalid doubting the effect of some new miracle drug, reached out and stopped the world from spinning around and around like a top. When it settled down, and she managed to keep her balance about as easily as a girl on a tightrope might, she turned toward Seawatch, blinked at the pale light in its windows and, with a small sigh, began the long walk across the north lawn.
It was good to be alive. She didn't know how she has escaped the man in the arbor, why he hadn't given chase and found her, but she did know it was perfectly wonderful to be alive. She hoped she could stay that way a while longer.
* * *
ELEVEN
"You didn't see anything?"
"Nothing at all, Rudolph."
"Not even a glimpse of his face?"
"No."
"Think."
"I have thought."
"When you grappled with him, what could you tell about his hair? Bald? Short? Long?"
"I didn't notice."
"Might he have had a mustache?"
"I don't think so."
"How do you know, Sonya? In your struggles, did you touch this man's face? Did you feel that he was clean shaven?"
"No."
"Then you can't really be sure about the mustache. And he might even have had a beard."
"He might have."
"How large a man was he?"
"He seemed huge."
She shuddered at the memory.
Rudolph squinted at her, as if he were ready to strike her with one of his hammy fists. Instead, he struck the top of the kitchen table, and he said, "I didn't ask you how the man seemed. I asked you how he was. Was he a large man-or was he small? Was he fat? Thin? Or merely average?"
"He wasn't fat or thin," she said. "Neither extreme. But he was quite strong, muscular."
Her voice was a thin, strained hissing, like air escaping from a pressurized spraycan. Each word pained her, made her mouth run dry and her tight throat constrict even further.
"How tall?"
"I don't know."
He grimaced.
"Well, I don't," she said.
He said, "No taller than you?"
"Taller than me, yes."
"See, you do know!"
She said nothing.
He said, "Taller than me?"
She looked at him as he stood-six feet four inches or better. "Not so tall as you," she said.
"Around six feet?"
"Maybe."
"Think. You can't be sure?"
"No."
"For God's sake, Rudolph!" Bill Peterson snapped.
The bodyguard looked at him, waiting patiently for the rest of his outburst.
Peterson said, "The girl has had an absolutely horrible experience. You can see that she's in pain, and she's still frightened. On top of all that, she's tired. Yet you continue to act as if what she has to tell you is vital to-"
"It is vital," Saine said. His voice was firm, cold, final, and he nodded his burly head in the manner of a wise man who, having spoken, expects no expressions of doubt or contradiction.
"I'm okay," Sonya told Peterson. She tried to smile at him, though that expression caused her a twinge of pain beneath the chin, and she reached out to squeeze his hand.
"Six feet tall, then," Saine said, musing over what little data they had managed to puzzle out. "That's something, anyway."
"Damn little," Bill said. "I'm around six feet tall, as are Henry and Kenneth Blenwell. And if Sonya misjudged by a couple of inches either way -quite an easy, understandable error to make considering the situation that she was in-we could include both you and Leroy Mills."
"Ah, yes," Saine said. "But we have eliminated the women." He had a rueful smile on his face. "Unless, of course, one of them is in league with the man who attacked Sonya."
"And you forget," Peterson said, "that whoever this man is, he's most likely an outsider, a stranger, perhaps someone we've never seen. In which case, your guess at his height is even more worthless."
Saine gave Peterson one last, close scrutiny, then turned back to Sonya to resume the questioning. "Did this man in the garden say anything to you?"
"Nothing."
"Not a single word in all that time?"
She hesitated.
He saw the hesitation, leaned across the table and said, "Well?"
Sonya said, "I believe he shouted at me, when I first stamped on his foot and broke away from him."
"What did he shout?"
"A single word-something like 'Stop' or 'Hey.'"
"You didn't recognize his voice?"
"I wasn't thinking about that, just then. He might have been someone I know, and he might not have been. It's hard to say-from a single word."
"His clothes?"
"I didn't see them."
"You said he was wearing tennis shoes."
"I think he was, canvas tops of some kind."
"Not much help," Peterson said. "Nearly everyone in the tropics owns at least one pair of sneakers." He looked at Rudolph Saine and said, "I'm wearing socks and loafers right now, if you want to check."
"I know you are," Saine said. "I already checked."
"You're a tough case," Peterson told him.
"I have to be."
"If you suspect everyone in Seawatch, Bill said, "why don't you line us all up against the wall, like they do in the movies-then make us take our shoes off? If one of us has a bloody set of toes, then..." He snapped his fingers. "Voila! The case is solved!"
Saine shrugged his massive shoulders, unmoved by the suggestion, which Peterson had made half in sarcasm. "If the man was wearing socks and sneakers," Saine said, "it is unlikely that Miss Carter drew blood. His toes may be bruised-and they may be unscarred. Even if I were to find evidence of such an injury on one of you, what good would that evidence do me? You may have hurt yourself in some other manner... Such flimsy 'evidence' would never be admissable in court."
"Still," Peterson sa
id, "at least you'd have some idea who-"
"Yes," Saine agreed. "And the man I suspected would know he was suspected. He would lay low. He would become even more careful than he has been to date. If he finally did kill the children, he would have himself protected with a cast iron alibi, because he would know that nothing else but cast iron would stop me from moving against him."
"In other words, you want to give him enough rope to hang himself," Peterson said.
Saine said nothing.
"Isn't that-sort of playing with the children's lives?"
Saine said, "Mr. Dougherty trusts my judgment. This is my job, not yours. You must rest easy and not let it worry you so." He smiled a non-smile.
Sonya squeezed Bill's hand all the harder, to let him know that, if he were arguing with Saine for her sake or because he was angry with the bodyguard's treatment of her, none of this was necessary. She was tired of anger, raised voices, so much suspicion. She would just as soon get the questions and answers done with, no matter how pointless they might seem, so that she could go upstairs and get into bed-perhaps with an icebag at her throat.
Bill seemed to take the hint, for he did not respond to Saine this time. He just sat there at the table, beside her, staring across at the big man, looking angry but powerless.
Saine said, "Was this man wearing a watch, Sonya?"
"No."
"Any rings?"
"I don't know."
"His hands were around your throat for a long time, as you tell the story. Now, surely, you'd know whether or not he was wearing any rings. A ring would gouge at your skin, more than likely. At the very least, it would make an especially painful point."
"It all hurt so much, I didn't notice if one place hurt more than another," she said. She rubbed her throat lightly. The swelling had gone down a bit, but the bruises had begun to appear, brown-purple and ugly. She hated for everyone to see her like this. She caught a glance from Leroy Mills who was sitting on a chair by the refrigerator; he blushed, looked down at his hands. He seemed as embarrassed by her bruises as she was.
"Was he left- or right-handed, Sonya?" Rudolph Saine asked.