Dragon Tears

  Flexibility was essential because there were some situations that weren’t basic. Like this one.

  He didn’t think it was a good idea to stay together because they were up against an adversary who had weapons better than guns or submachine guns or even explosives. Ordegard had almost taken out both of them with a grenade, but this scumbag could waste them with ball lightning that he shot off his fingertips or some other bit of magic they hadn’t seen yet.

  Welcome to the ‘90s.

  If they stayed widely separated, say one of them searching the first floor while the other took the rooms upstairs, they would not only save time when time was at a premium, but they would double their chances of surprising the geek.

  Harry moved to Connie, touched her shoulder, put his lips to her ear, and barely breathed the words: “Me upstairs, you down.”

  From the way she stiffened, he knew she didn’t like the division of labor, and he understood why. They had already looked through the first floor window into the lighted kitchen and knew it was deserted. The only other light in the house was upstairs, so it was more likely than not that Ticktock was up in that other room. She wasn’t worried that Harry would botch the job if he went up alone; it was just that she had a big enough hate-on for Ticktock that she wanted to have an equal chance to be the one who put the bullet in his head.

  But there was neither time for debate nor the circumstances, and she knew it. They couldn’t plan this one. They had to ride the wave. When he moved across the foyer toward the stairs, she didn’t stop him.

  Bryan turned away from the votive eyes. He crossed the room toward the open door. His silk robe rustled softly as he moved.

  He was always aware of the time, the second and minute and hour, so he knew dawn was still a few hours away. He needn’t be in a rush to keep his promise to the bigshot hero cop, but he was eager to locate him and see to what depths of despair the man had plummeted after experiencing the stoppage of time, the world frozen for a game of hide-and-seek. The fool would know, now, that he was up against immeasurable power, and that escape was hopeless. His fear, and the awe with which he’d now regard his persecutor, would be enormously satisfying and worth relishing for a while.

  First, however, Bryan had to satisfy his physical hunger. Sleep was only part of the restorative he needed. He knew that he had lost a few pounds during the most recent creative session. The use of his Greatest and Most Secret Power always took a toll. He was famished, in need of sweets and salties.

  Stepping out of his bedroom, he turned right, away from the front of the house, and hurried along the hallway toward the back stairs that led directly down to the kitchen.

  Enough light spilled from his open bedroom door to allow him to observe himself in motion both to his left and right, reflections of the young god Becoming, a spectacle of power and glory, striding purposefully to infinity in swirls of royal red, royal red, red upon red upon red.

  Connie did not want to split off from Harry. She was worried about him.

  In the old woman’s room at the nursing home, he had looked like death warmed over and served on a paper plate. He was desperately tired, a walking mass of contusions and abrasions, and he had seen his world fall apart in little more than twelve hours, losing not merely possessions but cherished beliefs and much of his self-image.

  Of course, aside from the part about lost possessions, much the same could be said of Connie. Which was another reason she did not want to separate to search the house. Neither of them had his usual sharp edge, yet considering the nature of this perp, they needed a greater advantage than usual, so they had to separate.

  Reluctantly, as Harry moved toward the steps and then started up, Connie turned to the door on the right, off the foyer. It had a lever handle. She eased it down with her left hand, revolver in her right and in front of her. Faintest click of the latch. Ease the door inward and to the right.

  Nothing for it but to cross the threshold, clearing the doorway as fast as possible, doorways always being the most dangerous, and slipping to the left as she entered, both hands on the gun in front of her, arms straight and locked. Keeping her back to the wall. Straining her eyes to see in the deep darkness, unable to find and use the light switch without giving away the game.

  A surprising plenitude of windows in the north and east and west walls—not so many windows on the exterior, were there?—offered only minor relief from the darkness. Vaguely luminous fog pressed against the panes, like cloudy gray water, and she had the queer feeling of being under the sea in a bathysphere.

  The room was wrong. Didn’t feel right somehow. She didn’t know what it was that she sensed, what wrongness, but it was there.

  Something was also odd about the wall at her back when she brushed against it. Too smooth, cold.

  She let go of the gun with her left hand, and felt behind her. Glass. The wall was glass but it wasn’t a window because it was the wall shared with the foyer.

  For a moment Connie was confused, thinking frantically because anything inexplicable was frightening under the circumstances. Then she realized it was a mirror. Her fingers slid across a vertical seam, onto another big sheet of glass. Mirrored. Floor to ceiling. Like the south wall of the foyer.

  When she looked behind her, at the wall along which she had been slipping so stealthily, she saw reflections of the north-side windows and the fog beyond. No wonder there were more windows than there should have been. The windowless south and west walls were mirrored, so half the windows she saw were only reflections.

  And she realized what bothered her about the room. Although she had kept on the move to the left, putting herself at changing angles to the windows, she hadn’t seen silhouettes of any furniture between her and the grayish rectangles of glass. She hadn’t bumped against any piece of furniture set with its back to the south wall either.

  Both hands on the gun again, she eased toward the center of the room, wary of knocking something over and drawing attention. But inch by inch, cautious step by step, she became convinced there was nothing in her way.

  The room was empty. Mirrored and empty.

  As she neared the center, in spite of the unrelenting gloom, she was able to see a dim image of herself to her left. A phantom with her form, moving across the reflection of the fog-gray east-facing window.

  Ticktock was not here.

  A chaos of Harrys moved along the upstairs hall, gun-bearing clones in dirty rumpled suits, unshaven faces gray with stubble, tense and scowling. Hundreds, thousands, an uncountable army, they advanced abreast in a single slightly curved line, stretching forever to the left and right. In their mathematical symmetry and perfect choreography, they should have been the apotheosis of order. Even glimpsed with peripheral vision, however, they disoriented Harry, and he could not look directly either left or right without risking dizziness.

  Both walls were mirrored floor to ceiling, as were all of the doors to the rooms, creating an illusion of infinity, bouncing his reflection back and forth, reflecting reflections of reflections of reflections.

  Harry knew he should check room by room as he advanced, leaving no unexplored territory behind him, from which Ticktock might be able to move in on his back. But the sole light on the second floor was ahead, spilling out of the only open door, and chances were that the bastard who had murdered Ricky Estefan was in that lighted room and no other.

  Although he was so tired that his cop instinct had deserted him, trust his reactions to be calm and measured, Harry decided to hell with traditional procedure, go with the flow, ride the wave, and let unexplored rooms at his back. He went directly to the doorway with the light beyond, on his right.

  The mirrored wall opposite the open door would give him a look at part of the room before he had to step into the doorway and across the threshold, committing himself. He halted beside the door with his back to the mirrored wall, looking at an angle toward the wedge of the room’s interior that was reflected across the hallway in another length of mirror.
br />   All he could see was a confusion of black planes and angles, different black textures revealed by lamplight, black shapes against black backgrounds, all of it cubistic and strange. No other color. No Ticktock.

  Suddenly he realized that, because he was seeing only part of the room, anyone standing in an unrevealed portion of it but looking toward the door might be at such an angle as to see his infinite reflections bouncing from wall to wall.

  He stepped into the doorway and crossed the threshold, staying low and moving fast, his revolver held out in front of him with both hands. The hallway carpet did not continue into the bedroom. There was black ceramic tile on the floor instead, against which his shoes made noise, a click-scrape-click, and he froze within three steps, hoping to God he hadn’t been heard.

  Another dark room, much larger than the first, what should have been a living room, off the downstairs hall. More windows on the pearly luminescent fog and more reflections of windows.

  Connie had a feel for that special oddness now, and wasted less time there than she had in the den off the foyer. The three walls without windows were mirrored, and there was no furniture.

  Multiple reflections of her silhouette kept perfect time with her in the dark reflective surfaces, like ghosts, like other Connies in alternate universes briefly overlapping and barely visible.

  Ticktock evidently liked to look at himself.

  She would like to get a look at him, too, but in the flesh. Silently she returned to the downstairs hall and moved on.

  The big walk-in pantry off the kitchen was filled with cookies, hard candies, taffy, chocolates of all kinds, caramels, red and black licorice, tins of sweet biscuits and exotic cakes imported from every corner of the world, bags of cheese popcorn, caramel popcorn, potato chips, tortilla chips, cheese-flavored tortilla chips, pretzels, cans of cashews, almonds, peanuts, mixed nuts, and millions of dollars in cash stacked in tight bundles of twenty- and hundred-dollar bills.

  While he examined the sweets and salties, trying to make up his mind what he most wanted to eat, what would be the least like a meal of which Grandma Drackman would have approved, Bryan idly picked up a packet of hundred-dollar bills and riffled the crisp edges with one thumb.

  He had acquired the cash immediately after he had killed his grandmother, stopping the world with his Greatest and Most Secret Power and wandering at his leisure into all the places where money was kept in large quantities and protected by steel doors and locked gates and alarm systems and armed guards. Taking whatever he wanted, he had laughed at the uniformed fools with all their guns and their somber expressions, who were oblivious of him.

  Soon, however, he’d realized that he had little need of money. He could use his powers to take anything, not merely cash, and to alter sales and public records to create extensive legal support for his ownership if he were ever questioned. Besides, if ever he were questioned, he had only to eliminate those idiots who dared to be suspicious of him, and alter their records to insure no further investigation.

  He had stopped piling up cash in the pantry, but he still liked to riffle it under his thumb and listen to the crisp flutter, smell it, and play games with it sometimes. It felt so good to know that he was different from other people in this way, too: he was beyond money, beyond concerns related to things material. And it was fun to think that he could be the richest person in the world if he wanted, richer than Rockefellers and Kennedys, could pile up cash to fill room after room, cash and emeralds if he wanted emeralds, diamonds and rubies, anything, anything, like pirates of old in their lairs and surrounded by treasure.

  He tossed the packet of currency back on the shelf from which he’d taken it. From the side of the pantry where he kept food, he took down two boxes of Reese’s peanut butter cups and a family-size bag of Hawaiian-style potato chips, which were a lot oilier than ordinary chips. Grandma Drackman would’ve had a stroke at the very thought.

  Harry’s heart knocked so hard and fast that his ears were filled with doubletime drumming that would probably drown out the sound of approaching footsteps.

  In the black bedroom, on black shelves, scores of eyes floated in clear fluid, slightly luminous in the amber lamplight, and some were animal eyes, had to be because they were so strange, but others were human eyes, oh shit, no doubt at all about that, some brown and some black, blue, green, hazel. Unhooded by lids or lashes, they all looked scared, perpetually wide with fright. Crazily he wondered if, by looking closely enough, he would be able to see reflections of Ticktock in all the lenses of those dead eyes, the last sight each victim had seen in this world, but he knew that was impossible, and he had no desire to look that close anyway.

  Keep moving. The insane sonofabitch was here. In the house. Somewhere. Charles Manson with psychic power, for God’s sake.

  Not in the bed, sheets tossed and rumpled, but somewhere.

  Jeffrey Dahmer crossed with Superman, John Wayne Gacy with a sorcerer’s spells and magics.

  And if not in the bed, awake, oh Jesus, awake and therefore more formidable, harder to get close to.

  Closet. Check it. Just clothes, not many, mostly jeans and red robes. Move, move.

  The little creep was Ed Gein, Richard Ramirez, Randy Kraft, Richard Speck, Charles Whitman, Jack the Ripper, all the homicidal sociopaths of legend rolled into one and gifted with paranormal talents beyond measure.

  The adjoining bathroom. Through the door, no light, find it, just mirrors, more mirrors on all walls and the ceiling.

  Back in the black bedroom, heading toward the door, stepping as silently as possible on the black ceramic tiles, Harry didn’t want to look again at the floating eyes but couldn’t stop himself. When he glanced at them again, he realized Ricky Estefan’s eyes must be among those in the jars, though he couldn’t identify which pair they were, couldn’t, under the current circumstances, even remember what color Ricky’s eyes had been.

  He reached the door, crossed the threshold, into the upstairs hall, dizzied by infinite images of himself, and from the corner of his eye he saw movement to his left. Movement that was not another Harry Lyon. Coming straight at him and not from out of a mirror, either, coming low. He swiveled toward it, bringing the revolver around, pressure on the trigger, telling himself it had to be a headshot, a headshot, only a headshot would be sure to stop the bastard.

  It was the dog. Tail wagging. Head cocked.

  He almost killed it, mistaking it for the enemy, almost alerted Ticktock that someone was in the house. He let up on the trigger a fraction of an ounce short of the pressure needed to squeeze off a shot, and would have made the mistake of cursing the dog aloud if his voice hadn’t caught in his throat.

  Connie kept listening for gunfire from the second floor, hoping Harry had found Ticktock asleep and would scramble his brain with a couple of rounds. The continued silence was beginning to worry her.

  After quickly checking out another mirrored chamber opposite the living room, Connie was in what she assumed would have been the dining room in an ordinary house. It was easier to inspect than the other areas she’d been through, because a band of fluorescent-quality light came under the door from the adjoining kitchen, dispelling some of the gloom.

  One wall featured windows, and the other three were mirrored. No furniture, not one stick. She supposed he never ate in the dining room, and he was certainly not the sort of sociable guy who would entertain a lot.

  She started to return through the archway to the downstairs hall, then decided to go directly to the kitchen from the dining room. Having looked into the kitchen from an outside window, she knew Ticktock wasn’t there, but she had to sweep it again, just to be sure, before joining Harry upstairs.

  Carrying two boxes of Reese’s peanut butter cups and one bag of chips, Bryan left the light burning in the pantry and went into the kitchen. He glanced at the table but didn’t feel like eating there. Heavy fog pressed at the windows, so if he went outside to the patio, he would have no view of the breaking surf on the beach below
, which was the best reason for eating out there.

  He was happiest, anyway, when the votive eyes watched him; he decided to go upstairs and eat in the bedroom. The glossy white-tile floor was sufficiently polished to reflect the red of his robe, so it seemed as if he walked through a thin, constantly evaporating film of blood as he crossed the kitchen toward the rear stairs.

  After pausing to wag his tail at Harry, the dog hurried past him to the end of the hall. It stopped and peered down into the back stairwell, very alert.

  If Ticktock was in any of the upstairs rooms that Harry had not yet checked, the dog surely would have shown interest in that closed door. But he had trotted by all of them to the end of the hall, so Harry joined him there.

  The narrow stairwell was an enclosed spiral, curving down and around and out of sight like stairs in a lighthouse. The concave wall on the right was paneled with tall narrow mirrors that reflected the steps immediately in front of them; because each was angled slightly toward the one before it, every subsequent panel also partly reflected the reflection in the previous one. Because of the weird funhouse effect, Harry saw his full reflection in the first couple of panels on the right, then fractionally less of himself in each succeeding panel, until he did not appear at all in the panel just this side of the first turn in the stairwell.

  He was about to start down the steps when the dog stiffened and nipped a mouthful of trouser cuff to restrain him. By now he knew the dog well enough to understand that the attempt to hold him back meant there was danger below.

  But he was hunting danger, after all, and had to find it before it found him; surprise was their only hope. He tried to jerk loose of the dog without making any noise or causing it to bark, but it held fast to his cuff.

  Damn it.

  Connie thought she heard something just before she entered the kitchen, so she paused on the dining-room side of the door and listened closely. Nothing. Nothing.

  She couldn’t wait forever. It was a swinging door. Cautiously, she pulled it toward her, easing around it, rather than pushing the door in where it would block part of her view.

  The kitchen appeared deserted.

  Harry tugged again, with no better result than he’d gotten before; the dog held tight.

  Glancing nervously down the mirrored stairs again, Harry had the terrible feeling that Ticktock was down there and was going to get away, or more likely encounter Connie and kill her, all because the dog wouldn’t let him slip down and behind the perp. So he rapped the dog smartly on the top of the head with the barrel of his revolver, risking its yelp of protest.

  Startled, it let go of him, thankfully didn’t bark, and Harry stepped out of the hallway, onto the first stair. Even as he started to descend, he saw a flash of red in the mirror at the farthest curve of the first spiral, another red flash, a billow of red fabric.

  Before Harry could register the meaning of what he had seen, the dog shot past him, nearly knocking him off his feet, and it plunged into the stairwell. Then Harry saw more red like a skirt and a red sleeve and part of a bare wrist and a hand, a man’s hand, holding something, somebody coming up, maybe Ticktock, and the dog hurtling toward him.

  Bryan heard something, looked up from the boxes of candy in his hands, and saw a pack of snarling dogs erupting toward him, down the staircase, all identical dogs. Not a pack, of course, only one dog reflected repeatedly in the angled mirrors, revealed in advance of its attack, not yet even visible in the flesh. But he only had time to gasp before the beast flew around the curve in front of him. It was moving so fast that it lost its footing and bounced off the concave outer wall. Bryan dropped the candy, and the dog regained enough purchase on the stairs to launch itself at him, crashing into his chest and face, both of them falling backward, the dog snapping and snarling, end over end.

  Snarling, a startled cry, and the thump-crash of falling bodies caused Connie to turn away from the open pantry door where shelves were stacked with bundles of cash. She spun toward the arch beyond which the back stairs curved upward out of sight.

  The dog and Ticktock spilled onto the kitchen floor, Ticktock flat on his back and the dog on top of him, and for an instant it looked as if the dog was going to tear out the kid’s throat. Then the dog squealed and was flung away from the kid, not thrown by hands or booted with a foot, but sent with a pale flash of telekinetic power, hurled across the room.

  It was going down, holy God, right there and then, but going down all wrong. She wasn’t close enough to jam the muzzle of her revolver against his skull and pull the trigger, she was about eight feet away, but she fired just the same, once even as the dog was in the air, again as the dog slammed into the front of the refrigerator. She hit the perp both times, because he didn’t even realize she was in the kitchen until the first shot took him, maybe in the chest, the second in the leg, and he rolled off his back, onto his stomach. She fired again, the bullet spanged off the tile, spraying up ceramic chips, and from his prone position Ticktock held one hand toward her, the palm spread, that strange flash as with the dog, and she felt herself airborne, then slammed into the kitchen door hard enough to shatter all the glass in it and send shockwaves of pain up her spine. Her gun flew out of her hand, and her corduroy jacket was suddenly on fire.

  As soon as the snarling dog exploded past Harry and scrambled-bounced-leaped out of sight around the first curve in the narrow spiral staircase, Harry followed, taking the steps two at a time. He fell before he reached the turn, cracked one of the mirrors with his head, but didn’t tumble all the way to the bottom, came up wedged at the midpoint of the well, with one leg twisted under him.

  Dazed, he looked around frantically for his weapon, discovered it was still clutched in his hand. He clambered to his feet and continued down, dizzy, one hand braced against the mirrors to keep his balance.

  The dog squealed, gunshots boomed, and Harry spiraled down, into the last turn, to the foot of the stairs in time to see Connie catapulted backward, crashing into the door, on fire. Ticktock was lying on his stomach, directly in front of the stairs, facing out toward the kitchen, and Harry leaped off the last step, landed hard on red silk stretched taut across the kid’s back, jammed the muzzle hard against the base of the kid’s skull, saw the gunmetal suddenly glow green and felt the start of what might have been a swift and terrible heat in his hand, but pulled the trigger. The explosion was muffled, like firing into a pillow, the green glow disappeared in the instant it first arose, and he squeezed