Nevertheless, he started up, more than a little bit exhilarated and surprised at his own daring in having come even this far. Tonight he had begun to discover a new Alex Doyle inside the old one. There was a Doyle who could overcome the cowardliness when faced with a responsibility for the well-being of those he loved, when more than his own pride was affected.
He was not set upon when he came off the last step and into the northwest corner of the courtyard overlook. There was no one waiting for him. He was greeted by lightless windows, concrete, and red doors.
Again he experienced the strange feeling that he was the last man alive in the motel indeed, that he was the last man in the world. He did not know if the fantasy was based on megalomania or paranoia, but the sense of isolation was complete.
Then Alex saw the stranger again. Shapeless, shadow-swathed, mist-draped, the man stood at the extreme north end of the promenade, at the head of the stairs which went down to the parking lot behind the motel Complex. Another blue safety bulb behind another wire cage did nothing to illuminate the phantom. He took the first step, seemed to turn and look back at Doyle, took the second step, then the third, disappeared once more.
It's almost as if he wants me to follow him, Alex thought.
He went north along the promenade and down the rain-washed steps.
Twelve
Four mercury-vapour arc lamps towered over the parking area behind the Rockies Motor Hotel, making the night above them twice as dark as it was elsewhere, but somewhat illuminating the rows of cars beneath. The irritating, fuzzy purple light glinted dully in the falling raindrops and in the water that flushed across the black macadam. It made stark shadows. It leeched the color out of everything it touched, transforming the once-bright cars into depressing, green-brown look-alikes.
Doyle, tinted a light purple himself, stood on the walk at the bottom of the stairwell and looked left and right along the lot.
The stranger was nowhere in sight.
Of course, the man might be hidden between two of the cars, crouched expectantly . . . But if the chase were to degenerate into a game of hide-and-seek in a playground of two or three hundred automobiles, they could waste all night darting around the silent machines and in and out of the shadows between them.
He supposed he had come to the end of it now; there was nothing to be gained by this expedition, after all. He was not going to get a look at the man or at the rented Automover. He would have no description or license number to work with or to give to the police - if it came to that. Therefore, he might as well go back to the room, get out of these wet clothes, towel off, and . . .
But he could not walk away from the challenge quite as easily as that. if he were not exactly drunk with courage, he was at least somewhat inebriated with his own appreciation for his new-found bravery. This brand-new Alex Doyle, this suddenly responsible Doyle, this Doyle who was capable of coping with and perhaps even overcoming his long-held fear, fascinated and pleased him immensely. He wanted to see just how far this previously unknown, even unsuspected, but certainly welcome strength would carry him, how deep this vein which he had tapped.
He went looking for the stranger.
The vending-machine room at the back of the motel complex did not have any doors on its two entrances. Cold white light fanned out in twin semicircles from both narrow archways, dispelling the sickly purple glow of the mercury-vapor lamps overhead.
Doyle went to the doorway and peered inside.
The room was well lighted and appeared untenanted. However, there were a number of blind spots formed by the bulky machines, a dozen places where a man could hide.
He stepped across the raised threshold.
The room was about twenty feet by ten feet. It contained twelve machines, which stood against the two longest walls and faced one another like teams of futuristic heavyweight prize fighters waiting for the bell to ring and the match to begin: three humming soda machines that could dispense six different flavors of bottled and canned refreshment; two squat cigarette machines; one cracker and cookie vendor full of stale and half-stale goods; two candy machines with an especially twenty-first-century look about them; a coffee and hot chocolate dispenser with stylized cups of steaming brown liquid painted on the mirrored front along with the bold legend Sugar Cream Marshmallow; a vendor of peanuts, potato chips, pretzels, and cheese popcorn; and an ice machine which rattled noisily, continually, spitting newly made cubes into a shiny steel storage bin.
He walked slowly down the room, flanked by the murmuring dispensers, looking into the niche between each pair of them, expecting someone to jump out at him any second now. His tension and fear were qualitatively different from what he had known in the past; they were almost beneficial, clean, purgative. He felt a great deal like a small boy prowling through a most forbidden -, decaying graveyard on Halloween night, a rag bag of conflicting emotions.
But the stranger was not in the room.
Doyle went outside again into the wind and rain, no longer much concerned with the bad weather, a man caught up in his own changes.
He walked along the parked cars, hoping to find the stranger kneeling between two of them. But he crossed from the end of one north-south wing to the end of the other north-south wing without noticing any movement or unlikely shadows.
He was just about to call it quits when he saw the weak light spilling out of the half opened maintenance-room door. He had passed this way less than five minutes ago when he had been on his way to the vending machines, and this door had not been open then.
And it was hardly an hour when the motel janitor would be coming to work Alex put his back to the wet concrete wall, his head resting in the center of the neatly stenciled black-and-white sign which was painted there (MAINTENANCE AND SUPPLIES—MOTEL EMPLOYEES ONLY), and listened for movement inside the room.
A minute passed in silence.
Cautiously he reached out and pushed the oversized metal door all the way open. It swung inward without a sound, and an equally soundless gray light came out.
Doyle looked inside. Directly across the large room, a second door, also metal and also oversized, stood wide open to the rain. Beyond it was a section of the amoeboid parking lot. Good enough. The stranger had been here and had already gone.
He went into the room and looked around. It was slightly larger than the place that contained the vending machines. Toward the back, along the wall, were barrels of industrial cleaning compounds: soaps, abrasives, waxes, furniture polish. There were also electric floor waxers and buffers, a forest of long-handled mops and brooms and window washing sponges. Two riding lawn mowers stood in the middle of the room with a host of gardening tools and huge coils of transparent green plastic hose. At the front, closer to the doors, were the workbenches, carpentry tools, a standing jigsaw, and even a small wood lathe. To Doyle's right, the entire wall was covered with pegboard; the silhouettes of dozens of tools had been painted on the pegboard and the tools themselves hung over their own black outlines. The gardening ax was missing, but everything else was clean and hung neatly in place.
The barrels of cleaning compounds were too widely spaced and too small to effectively conceal a man, especially a man as tall and broad-shouldered as the one whom he had seen crossing the courtyard earlier in the night.
Doyle walked farther into the room and was halfway to the second door, only fifteen feet from it when he suddenly understood the full implications of the missing ax on the pegboard. He almost froze in place. Then, warned by some sixth sense, he crouched and turned with more speed and agility than he had ever shown in his life.
Looming immediately behind him, nightmarishly large, the wild-eyed blond man raised both hands and swung the gardening ax.
Thirteen
Not once in his entire thirty years had Alex Doyle been in a fight - not a fist fight, wrestling match, or even a juvenile push-and-shove. He had never dealt out physical punishment to anyone, and neither had he taken any himself. Whether coward or genuinel
y committed pacifist or both, he had always managed to avoid controversial subjects in casual discussions, had avoided arguments and taking sides and forming relationships which might conceivably have led to violence. He was a civilized man. His few friends and acquaintances had always been as gentle as he was himself, and often even gentler. He was singularly unprepared to handle a raging maniac who was wielding a well-sharpened gardener's ax.
However, instinct served where experience failed. Almost as if he had been combat-trained, Alex fell backward, away from the glittering blade, and rolled across the grease-stained cement floor until he came up hard against the two riding lawn mowers.
His intellectual acceptance of the situation lagged far behind his automatic physical-emotional realization of the danger. He had heard the ax whistle past, inches from his head, and he knew what it would have done to him if it had found its mark . . . Yet, it was inconceivable that anyone could want to take his life, especially in such a sudden bloody fashion. He was Alex Doyle. The man without enemies. The man who had walked softly and carried no stick at all—the man who had often sacrificed his pride to save himself from just this sort of madness.
The stranger moved fast.
Dazed as he was, numb with surprise at the suddenness and extreme ferocity of the attack, Alex still saw the man coming.
The stranger lifted the ax.
“Don't!” Doyle said. He barely recognized his own voice. He had not lost all of his new-found courage. However, it was now tempered by a healthy fear which put it in the proper perspective.
The five-inch razored blade swept up, reached the top of its arc in one smooth movement, almost a precision instrument in those strong hands. Sharp slivers of light danced brightly on the cutting edge. The blade hesitated up there, high and cold and fantastic—and then it fell.
Alex rolled.
The ax dropped in his wake. It made the moist air whistle once again, and it thudded into a solid rubber tire on one of the lawn mowers, splitting the deep tread.
Doyle came to his feet, and once more powered by a mindless drive for self-preservation, vaulted over one of the workbenches, clearing the four-foot width with more ease then he would ever have thought possible. He stumbled, though, and nearly fell flat on his face when he came down on the other side.
Behind him, the madman cursed: a curiously wordless, low grunt of anger and frustration.
Doyle turned, fully expecting the ax to cleave either his head or the surface of the wooden bench behind him. He had, at last, come to terms with his predicament. He knew that he might die here.
Across the room, the stranger hunched his ' r broad shoulders and put all his strength into them, wrenched the blade free of the solid, uninflated tire in which it had become wedged. He turned, his wet shoes scraping unpleasantly on the concrete floor, and he clutched the ax in both hands as if it were some sacred and all-powerful talisman which would ward off evil magic and protect the bearer from the work of malevolent sorcerers. There was something of the superstitious savage in this man, especially in and around those enormous dark-ringed eyes . . .
Those same eyes now located Doyle. Incredibly, the stranger bobbed his head and smiled.
Alex did not return the smile.
He could not return it. He was almost physically ill with premonitions of death, and he wished that he had never left the room.
He was still too far away from the doors to make a run for either of them. Before he could have crossed the open floor and gained the threshold, he would almost certainly have felt the ax blade bite down between his shoulder blades . . .
Rain dripping from his clothes, the stranger moved in on Doyle, quiet and swift for such a large man. The noises which he had made outside, on the steps and promenades, could not have been accidental. He had been luring Alex along those shadowy corridors, drawing him to a place where he might be trapped.
A place like this.
Now only the wooden bench separated them.
“Who are you?” Doyle asked.
The stranger was no longer smiling when he stopped on the other side of the waisthigh bench. In fact, he was frowning intensely, even wincing, as if he were being cruelly pinched or jabbed with pins. What was it, what was on his mind? More than murder, now? He was annoyed considerably by something; that much was obvious. His mouth was set in a tight, straight, grim line, and he appeared to be struggling desperately to choke back a reaction to an inner pain.
“What do you want from us?” Doyle asked.
The man only glared at him.
“We've never hurt you.”
No answer.
“You don't even know us, do you?”
Even though his voice was weak, an involuntary whisper, and even though the terror that it betrayed might have goaded the madman into even bolder action, Doyle had to ask the questions. All of his life he had been able to settle other people's anger with sympathetic words, and now it became essential that he elicit some response - at least contrition - from this man. “What have you to gain by hurting me?”
The madman swung the ax horizontally this time, from right to left, trying to chop Doyle's torso from his legs.
It was close. His long arms had sufficient reach and strength to make the trick work, even with the bench between them. But Doyle saw it coming just in time to avoid it. He scrambled backward, out of the murderous arc.
Then he tripped over a large metal toolbox which he had not noticed. He windmilled his arms in a hopeless attempt to recover, lost his balance altogether. The room tilted around him. In that instant Doyle knew that he probably did not have a chance of getting out of this place alive. He was not going to return to Room 318, where Colin waited for him, was never going to finish the drive to San Francisco or see the new furniture in the new house or begin his wonderful new job with the agency or make love to Courtney again. Never. Falling, he saw the tall blond man start around the end of the workbench.
He did not stay down on the floor any measurable length of time, not even a second. The moment he hit, he pushed to his feet and staggered backward, trying to keep out of the madman's reach for at least one more precious minute.
In three short steps, however, he backed straight into the pegboard wall where the tools were hung.
Even as Doyle realized that he had nowhere left to run, the stranger stepped in front of him and swung the ax from right to left.
Doyle crouched.
The blade skimmed the pegboard above his head.
Rising even as he heard the ax whine by him, Doyle grabbed a heavy claw hammer which dangled from a hook on the wall. He had it in his hand when he was knocked sideways and down by a blow from the ax.
The hammer clattered across the floor.
But losing the hammer, Doyle thought, was the least of his troubles. The oppressive, pulsing pain in his side and chest made him all but helpless. Had he been cut up? Torn open? The pain . . . pain was terrible, the worst he had ever endured. But please, God, no . . . Please, please, not this. Not death. Not all the blood and having to lie in all the blood while the ax rose and fell and methodically dismembered him. Not death, dammit. Anything else. All he could see on the other side of death was nothingness, perpetual blackness; and the vision was so complete and vivid and horrifying that he never even recognized the incongruity and futility of praying to a God in whose existence he did not believe. Just: God, God, please . . . Not this. Anything but this. Please . . .
All of this flashed through his mind in a fraction of a second, before he realized that he had not been caught by the ax blade. Instead, he had been hit on the backswing of the first blow. He had taken the head of the ax, the three-inch-wide top of it, just below the ribs on his right side. There had been enough force in the blow to knock the wind out of him and to leave him with a welt and eventually a bruise. But that was all. There was no torn flesh. No blood.
But where was the madman—and the ax?
Doyle looked up, blinked tears out of his eyes.
The str
anger had dropped the weapon. He was pressing the palms of his hands against his temples, grimacing furiously. Perspiration had popped out on his forehead and was trickling down his reddened face.
Gasping for breath, Alex clambered to his feet and leaned back against the wall, too weak and pain-racked to move any farther.
The stranger saw him. He bent down to pick up the ax, but stopped short of it. He gave a strangled cry, turned, and stumbled out of the room, out into the night and the rain.
For a long while, as he struggled to regain his breath and to overcome the pain which stitched his side, Alex was certain that he had been granted only a temporary reprieve. It made no sense for this stranger to walk away from a job so nearly finished. The man had desperately needed to kill Doyle. There had been nothing playful or joking about him. Each time that he had swung that ax, he had intended to sever flesh and spill blood. Certainly, he was insane. And the insane were unpredictable. But it was likewise true that a madman's violent compulsions were not easily or rapidly dissipated.
Yet the man did not return.
The pain in Doyle's side gradually eased until he could stand erect, could walk. His breath came much less raggedly than it had, although he could not inhale too deeply without amplifying the pain. His heartbeat softened and slowed.
And he was left alone.
He walked slowly to the door, his right hand pressed to his side, and he leaned against the frame for a moment, then stepped outside. The rain and wind struck him with more force than ever, chilling him.
The parking lot was deserted. The green brown cars sparkled with water, all still and unremarkable.
He listened to the night.
The only sounds were the steady drumming of the rain and the fluting of the wind along the building.
It seemed almost as if the events in the maintenance room had been nothing but a bad dream. If he had not had the pain in his side to convince him of its reality, he might have gone back to look for the ax and the other signs of what had happened.