With gestures, he complained vigorously of severe eye pain and sensitivity to bright light. An ophthalmological examination revealed a curious—indeed, inexplicable—degeneration of the irises. The contractile membrane seemed to have been partially eaten away. The sphincter pupillae—the muscle causing the iris to contract, thereby shrinking the pupil and admitting less light to the eye—had all but atrophied. Also, the dilator pupillae had shrunk, pulling the iris wide open. And the connection between the dilator muscle and oculomotor nerve was fused, leaving the eye virtually no ability to reduce the amount of incoming light. The condition was without precedent and degenerative in nature, making surgical correction impossible. The boy was provided with heavily tinted, wraparound sunglasses. Even then he preferred to pass daylight hours only in rooms where metal blinds or heavy drapes could close off the windows.
Incredibly, Jeremy became a favorite of the staff at the rehabilitation hospital to which he was transferred a few days after awakening at the nursing home. They were inclined to feel sorry for him because of his eye affliction, and because he was such a good-looking boy who had fallen so low. In addition, he now had the sweet temperament of a shy child, a result of his IQ loss, and there was no sign whatsoever of his former arrogance, cool calculation, and smouldering hostility.
For over four months he walked the halls, helped the nurses with simple tasks, struggled with a speech therapist to little effect, stared out the windows at the night for hours at a time, ate well enough to put flesh on his bones, and exercised in the gym during the evening with most of the lights off. His wasted body was rebuilt, and his straw-dry hair regained its luster.
Almost ten months ago, when Jonas was beginning to wonder where Jeremy could be placed when he was no longer able to benefit from physical or occupational therapy, the boy had disappeared. Although he had shown no previous inclination to roam beyond the grounds of the rehabilitation hospital, he walked out unnoticed one night, and never came back.
Jonas had assumed the police would be quick to track the boy. But they had been interested in him only as a missing person, not as a suspected murderer. If he had regained all of his faculties, they would have considered him both a threat and a fugitive from justice, but his continued—and apparently permanent—mental disabilities were a kind of immunity. Jeremy was no longer the same person that he had been when the crimes were committed; with his diminished intellectual capacity, inability to speak, and beguilingly simple personality, no jury would ever convict.
A missing-person investigation was no investigation at all. Police manpower had to be directed against immediate and serious crimes.
Though the cops believed that the boy had probably wandered away, fallen into the hands of the wrong people, and already been exploited and killed, Jonas knew his son was alive. And in his heart he knew that what was loose in the world was not a smiling dullard but a cunning, dangerous, and exceedingly sick young man.
They had all been deceived.
He could not prove that Jeremy’s retardation was an act, but in his heart he knew that he had allowed himself to be fooled. He had accepted the new Jeremy because, when it came right down to it, he could not bear the anguish of having to confront the Jeremy who had killed Marion and Stephanie. The most damning proof of his own complicity in Jeremy’s fraud was the fact that he had not requested a CAT scan to determine the precise nature of the brain damage. At the time he told himself the fact of the damage was the only thing that mattered, not its precise etiology, an incredible reaction for any physician but not so incredible for a father who was unwilling to come face-to-face with the monster inside his son.
And now the monster was set free. He had no proof, but he knew. Jeremy was out there somewhere. The old Jeremy.
For ten months, through a series of three detective agencies, he had sought his son, because he shared in the moral, though not the legal, responsibility for any crimes the boy committed. The first two agencies had gotten nowhere, eventually concluding that their inability to pick up a trail meant no trail existed. The boy, they reported, was most likely dead.
The third, Morton Redlow, was a one-man shop. Though not as glitzy as the bigger agencies, Redlow possessed a bulldog determination that encouraged Jonas to believe progress would be made. And last week, Redlow had hinted that he was onto something, that he would have concrete news by the weekend.
The detective had not been heard from since. He had failed to respond to messages left on his phone machine.
Now, turning away from his computer and the conference paper he was unable to work on, Jonas picked up the telephone and tried the detective again. He got the recording. But he could no longer leave his name and number, because the incoming tape on Redlow’s machine was already full of messages. It cut him off.
Jonas had a bad feeling about the detective.
He put down the phone, got up from the desk, and went to the window. His spirits were so low, he doubted they could be lifted any more by anything as simple as a magnificent view, but he was willing to try. Each new day was filled with so much more dread than the day before it, he needed all the help he could get just to be able to sleep at night and rise in the morning.
Reflections of the morning sun rippled in silver filaments through the incoming waves, as if the sea were a great piece of rippling blue-gray fabric with interwoven metallic threads.
He told himself that Redlow was only a few days late with his report, less than a week, nothing to be worried about. The failure to return answering-machine messages might only mean the detective was ill or preoccupied with a personal crisis.
But he knew. Redlow had found Jeremy and, in spite of every warning from Jonas, had underestimated the boy.
A yacht with white sails was making its way south along the coast. Large white birds kited in the sky behind the ship, diving into the sea and out again, no doubt snaring fish with each plunge. Graceful and free, the birds were a beautiful sight, though not to the fish, of course. Not to the fish.
Lindsey went to her studio between the master bedroom and the room beside Regina’s. She moved her high stool from the easel to the drawing board, opened her sketch pad, and started to plan her next painting.
She felt that it was important to focus on her work, not only because the making of art could soothe the soul as surely as the appreciation of it, but because sticking to everyday routine was the only way she could try to push back the forces of irrationality that seemed to be surging like black floodwaters into their lives. Nothing could really go too far wrong—could it?—if she just kept painting, drinking her usual black coffee, eating three meals a day, washing dishes when they needed washing, brushing her teeth at night, showering and rolling on her deodorant in the morning. How could some homicidal creature from Beyond intrude into an orderly life? Surely ghouls and ghosts, goblins and monsters, had no power over those who were properly groomed, deodorized, fluoridated, dressed, fed, employed, and motivated.
That was what she wanted to believe. But when she tried to sketch, she couldn’t quiet the tremors in her hands.
Honell was dead.
Cooper was dead.
She kept looking at the window, expecting to see that the spider had returned. But there was no scurrying black form or the lacework of a new web. Just glass. Treetops and blue sky beyond.
After a while Hatch stopped in. He hugged her from behind, and kissed her cheek.
But he was in a solemn rather than romantic mood. He had one of the Brownings with him. He put the pistol on the top of her supply cabinet. “Keep this with you if you leave the room. He’s not going to come around during the day. I know that. I feel it. Like he’s a vampire or something, for God’s sake. But it still doesn’t hurt to be careful, especially when you’re here alone.”
She was dubious, but she said, “All right.”
“I’m going out for a while. Do a little shopping.”
“For what?” She turned on her stool, facing him more directly.
&nbs
p; “We don’t have enough ammunition for the guns.”
“Both have full clips.”
“Besides, I want to get a shotgun.”
“Hatch! Even if he comes, and he probably won’t, it’s not going to be a war. A man breaks into your house, it’s a matter of a shot or two, not a pitched battle.”
Standing before her, he was stone-faced and adamant. “The right shotgun is the best of all home-defensive weapons. You don’t have to be a good 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 flimflamming 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 turned 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 ominous.
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 disappeared in silent rising curtains 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 entertain 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—or been trampled—in 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 crappy hypocrisy 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 realized 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 similar 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 not 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 of himself... 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 three 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 each 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 themselves 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 envir
onmental 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 shop 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 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 grotesqueries along the tunnel walls were mechanical beasts, not real. And as that understanding sank in, he finally recognized the familiar sound. Clackety-clack, clackety-clack. 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 senses. 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 way back.
The car passed the last mechanical monster. It reached the crest of the inclined track. Pushed through a pair of swinging doors. Into darkness. The doors fell shut behind. The car crept forward. Forward. Forward. Abruptly it dropped as if into 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 self-indulgence.
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 thrilling 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, there 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 admirable, 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