She leaned back against the wall, facing him.
"You really aren't going to, are you?" A hollow voice, sepulchral.
"Such a disappointment. Such a deep disappointment. You, my last, best hope."
It took him a moment to find his voice. "You knew I had inherited the capacity."
She indulged him. "Not when you were a child. Later I learned it's hereditary, deduced that if I had the gene, your mother probably carried it too. With your early neurological history, with what I heard from Kay about Mark, I knew to a virtual certainty. And you . . . showed potential . . . when you dealt with that pathetic mugger in San Francisco." Her voice took on a weary tone, the familiar weltschmerz.
"But of course there are degrees. And varying levels of superego suppression—you appear to be a true champion at that. So much like your father. I should have known."
Paul's thoughts scurried. One other possibility: the gun. Vivien didn't know about the gun. If he could get to the top of the stairs, ifhe could keep her in this quiescent state for a few minutes—
"So what now?" He stood up painfully, started to move away from her. A patch of sun slanting through the windows fell on the separate parts that had been Mo Ford.
"I'll have to kill you, of course. Can't have loose ends." Bottomless weariness and disappointment.
Paul took another step, limping, trying to appear vanquished, without hope. "Is that why you killed the teenagers? I take it the furnace men were 'loose ends' too?"
"There it is again: Why? How could you understand, Paulie, until you have had the experience? You couldn't possibly."
"Was it cathartic for you? Killing people who had done nothing to you?
"I take it that's why your friend the detective was here?" Vivien stopped and turned to face him, and Paul stopped too, not willing to get too close to her or reveal his destination. "Yes, the hapless furnace men are dead, down in the basement. Let us say that they were a sort of collateral damage. The first two children were collateral damage too. I had come back and they were here, invading my house, showing a complete want of respect. The big boy I chased down the road at midnight, letting him get far enough away and then catching him. Wouldn't do to have suspicious occurrences here at the house."
"What about the girl he was with?" Another apparently aimless step.
Vivien snorted. "In the woods between here and the road. She ended up spread out over rather a large area. I resented her taking physical pleasure in my fortress of loneliness." Her breathing quickened slightly. "And yes, there were others. Two teenaged boys, who felt they could come into my house, break my things. One young woman and her boyfriend, whom I ran through the woods for several miles for the pleasure of it. I left the girl's remains on the train tracks—a convenient explanation of her condition." Despite her contempt for reasons, justifications, she seemed to enjoy confessing it all to him. Revelation, self-exposure, a desperate simulacrum of closeness.
"You see," she went on, confidingly, "for a long time I held back.
After Ben, I sw^ore never again. But I was not always successful. There were times when my prison grew too confining, and I would dance alone in this house, or outside, in the garden or the woods. Isolated incidents—I could have the house repaired. Later, it seemed to me I had restrained myself long enough. I'm much more complete now, Paulie. I have found some pleasures to sustain me."
Vivien's eyes flashed. "For a time the house alone was enough. But after my first visit back, after the first boy and girl, I found that there were . . . rewards in exacting some punishment from others. Oh, God, yes, I loved dismantling them, the shattering of every taboo. The sense offreedom, Paulie, the raw intimacy of it, the sheer undeniable reality of it!
And yes, they deserved it, someone did!" Her voice had risen to a joyful certainty, but fell back into the dry, bitter tone Paul knew so well. "But even that became insufficient. After the third time it all became . . . unreal. That's when I decided to seek you out. Which plan almost succeeded but not quite. Ben trained you too well. Dear bastard Ben!"
Two steps, as if off balance. "But you had other relatives—I'm not the only one. What about Freda? What about your sons?" Too late, Paul realized that he'd made a mistake. The memory kindled the blaze in her eyes again. Vivien's head twitched on her neck, tiny seizure tremors, and the bellows of her lungs picked up their tempo.
"Oh, yes, my other relatives. My mother, unaware of the trait that ran in my father's genes. I assure you it was unintentional. Those were hard years, Paulie! She was my mother. I loved her. But one day, I was crying my heart out to her. My husband had left me, I was beginning to realize he was never coming back. And I knew my sons were lost to me. And as I wept and as my old mother comforted me, I felt it for the first time, rising in me. And when I . . . came out of the state, I was bathed in her blood! Can you even imagine the horror and the remorse? I doubt it."
Vivien was kindling again as she paced in a big circle. He saw it now:
Everything triggered her. There was no part of her mind or memory free of grief and pain and loneliness and rage, no corner of the world that didn't remind her. Her voice was rising, coming in shorter and shorter bursts as her breathing accelerated, and Paul slid another step toward the stairs. He was halfway across the room now. Once he got to the bottom of the stairs he'd need maybe four seconds to get to the top. Pick up the gun, turn, aim, two more seconds.
Only six seconds. But if she saw him start to move too soon, he'd never make it.
"And Royce. Royce whom I loved with every young mother's simplicity. Royce whose fervid little brain was so very precocious, who blamed me for his father's leaving, for my keeping him here because I loved him, who could never forgive me for that. And who from a very early age was determined to kill his brother." The thought made her turn quickly toward Paul, eyes searching his face. "You know about that, don't you? About Erik?"
"I found some papers," he muttered.
"Royce hated him. Poor Erik was a sweet boy, my darling firstborn son. And Erik was the only one who could do this dance with me. He was real. Who else would have had him, given what he was? He loved me in return."
"So you imprisoned him—"
"I sheltered him! I couldn't just farm him out to some anonymous home where they couldn't understand what was inside him, where they'd try to drug and shock it out of him. Even though he was a child, a slow child at that, we . . . understood each other!"
"Then why send him away? You had a perfect arrangement. His cell, right next to your bedroom."
"Oh, but there was Royce! And Royce was a jealous little boy, jealous of my . . . affection for his brother. And he'd figured out how his father's estate would work. I had to protect Erik. I had to send him away after all. It was a sacrifice I had to make if Erik were to live."
"How could Royce have hurt him?"
"I wasn't worried about hand-to-hand combat, Paulie," she said witheringly. "Royce liked things like razor-blade chips, remember?
Once, Paulie, sweet innocent stupid Pauhe, once I came home to find that Royce had run a garden hose from the car exhaust to the ventilator for Erik's room. If I'd been gone for five more minutes. . . . So then I sent Erik away, and then I moved him again and again—" Her voice rose in a grieving howl.
"So why didn't you turn Royce in? For killing him?"
Vivien swayed in the grip of an ecstatic grief. "If only it were that simple! Because Royce didn't kill him. You see, Erik did escape. With my help. And he did come here. And maybe he was still drugged, or they'd suppressed him so long he no longer had the reflex. But in my pleasure and excitement at having him again, I—he fell to pieces in my hands, Paulie, he came apart and there was nothing I could do." She held out her hands, left and right, a gesture of astonished helplessness. Then she looked at him, a gruesome coquettish glance. "Does that appall you? It appalls me too."
"And your killing him gave Royce the opening he needed. Ownership of the trust went to him, the waiting period for Erik's death bega
n. And five years later, you got a letter from the attorneys, this June twenty-first or twenty-second, that legal declaration of death was complete. And that's what triggered you—that's when it got too much for you. When you couldn't contain it anymore."
"You're very shrewd."
"Tell me how it worked. I mean the cycles. Every forty-four days."
"You are so perceptive! The longing, it grows on you, Paulie. You cannot know the need for release, or the pleasures of that release. At some point I recognized my own rhythm—yes, forty-four days, give or take a fewT days, I could hold it back for a time if necessary. It is easy enough to anticipate."
The true berserker, knowing her own patterns, her triggers. Becoming a connoisseur of her own catharsis. An artist of carnage. Conditioned to want the endorphin flood too, the opiate high. She knew she'd need it, and when. She knew the house was the best triggering environment, the place where all the grief and loss and hate awakened. She'd take a flight from San Francisco when she felt it coming near, wait like a spider in her darkened house for the sacrificial trespassers to come. Until even that became unreal. And when she began to realize that killing innocents was no longer sufficient, she knew that only doing the hyperkinetic, hyperdynamic dance with another berserker would be real enough. And then she telephoned Kay, succeeded in snaring Paul.
Vivien had begun to vibrate again, triggered by the memories.
"But what I don't understand," he said quickly, "is why. Why would you do this to yourself? Why would you wreck your own house?"
Vivien's face had taken on the look ofa wrathful mask, a mix of rage and sorrow. "You really don't understand, do you? What a naive, fortunate httle man you are! I had been happily married. I had two sons. I had a house, a life. And then it was all taken away! Everyone I loved. And here I lived, a prisoner in this house, unable to go away from it. Solitary confinement, Paulie. Forty-five years of solitary confinement will do that to a person. Don't you see? This is a prison!" She gestured in a circle at the ravaged house. "This is a prison! It's a cage of grief and loss and sorrow and betrayal! This"—she struck her temples with two hands, struck herself in the chest—"this is a prison!"
She had turned again, facing toward the far end of the room, beginning her acceleration to full-blown HHK/HHD. She didn't seem to notice the momentary change in the light of the room. Paul was puzzled by it briefly until he realized what the dull flash had been: A car had come into the circular driveway, passing the tall front windows and reflecting sunlight up into the raftered heights of the ceiling.
Lia and Mark had arrived.
68
HE FELT THE PANIC start to shake him, took several steps toward the stairs. He was only a dozen feet away now. If he could make it to the bottom, if she would just turn away from him one more time, it was possible. It had all come together, the whole ghastly pattern clear at last. The only problem remaining now was how to survive.
From outside came the muffled chunk of a car door, then another. They had gotten out of the car. Paul saw the flick of Vivien's eyes as she noticed it, and he realized he was out of time.
He bounded for the stairs and made it to the landing when Vivien hit him from behind, buckling his legs and sending him smashing against the oak wainscoting of the wall. He spun and struck at her and was surprised to connect with her cheek, actually turning her head. In that instant he broke free of her and lunged up the second flight of stairs. He caught the gun in one hand before she grabbed him from behind and dragged him back down.
She swung him through the banister and out into the air of the room. Balustrades and lengths of banister flew, and then he was bouncing and rolling on the main floor. The gun was gone from his grip, lost. His conscious thoughts were a tinny, small voice in the deep rumble ofhis own metabolism, of the chemical and neurological detonation in him.
Vivien began to descend the stairs, back straight, regal, chest pumping, on her face an expression of disappointment beyond words. She was coming to execute him.
And then Lia and Mark were coming in from the dining room doorway.
"Paul? Are you here?" Lia called, her voice a strange drawl. Her movements were eerily slow, graceful but ponderous. Paul realized that his metabolic rate was vastly greater than hers, everything but Vivien existed in a separate, much slower time scheme. In slow motion Lia turned and saw him across the room. A look of startled concern began to cross her face. She was wearing blue jeans and her rubber-bottomed L.L. Bean boots, and her hair was tied up and off to one side with a red scarf and she was very beautiful. And Mark was holding her hand, looking uncertain. A pale child with an array of complex feelings in his eyes as he saw the ragged, dust-covered creature that was his father. A beautiful child. The whole scene was eerily gorgeous, as perfect and luminous as a stained-glass window.
Above them, Vivien smiled. She had realized who Lia and Mark were. What potentials lay therein.
He realized it just as she did: the ultimate trigger.
And then thought vanished. The dam that had held every yearning and hunger and anger bulged and broke and the dark ecstasy came over him, the unmixed, uncompromised purity of being just one thing, one impulse and sensation and intention, unconflicted, unrestrained.
Vivien was coming down the stairs toward them. A noise like a waterfall filled Paul's head. He found himself in motion, Lia and Mark moving glacially, still staring at where he had been. He passed them and collided with Vivien just as she came off* the stairs onto the floor.
They rebounded from each other, and then she was moving again, not toward Paul but toward Lia and Mark. Her flailing body would cut them to pieces like a wood chipper. They had only partially turned, faces beginning to take on expressions of alarm and confusion. Paul reached Vivien, hitting her with his whole body, knocking her against and through the great main door. He followed her through the ragged opening as splinters of oak and broken hinges flew slowly out and drifted toward the ground. When he burst into the sunlight, she was already upright again, charging back. Her red eyes glowed, a smile gripped her face.
Paul's legs felt like coiled springs. He could feel the muscles in his chest and shoulders, a glorious strength, as if he were made of living steel. Euphoria spread through him, a glowing warmth that seemed to expand outward from his arteries into every muscle and even his bones. The endorphins, natural opiates, like an injection of morphine. Better, more ecstatic by far, a single white fire of purpose burned in him, obliterating everything else, burning him clean. Simplicity. Unity. To be one thing, one urge. A white electric fire burned in every nerve and brain cell.
As she'd wanted. The dance she'd wanted to share for so long.
Then he plowed into her again and they grappled on the terrace. He felt her body hard against his, the only solid thing in a ghostly world, resisting him. They spun into the marble balustrade, which gave way and toppled into the driveway, and the unreality of it struck him with a killing fear: The world is insubstantial as mist and you, my enemy, are the only real thing. Then the neurochemical avalanche obliterated all feeling.
He pivoted her and flung her into the driveway. She landed on her feet on the gravel. As she charged him again, her eyes never left his, knowing him, seeing the state blossom fully in him, and he caught a glimpse of-the pretty young woman in the photographs. A blood-red look of deep communion, the bride lifting her veil at the altar, lustrous with desire and gratitude. A state of cruel grace.
For a moment a shred of conscious thought kept him back from the forbidden thing that she so wanted, and then he was holding her again, caressing her and feeling her bones start to break, and he took her body apart as if it were a scarecrow, just wet straw and brittle twigs and rags.
Reverent, grateful, hating her, he reached into her and let her out of the prison that had contained her.
The world began to gain density. The driveway began to feel solid beneath him, the pull of gravity began to be perceptible again. He looked at his bare red arms and the steam rising from Vivien's body
.
The dead leaves in the oak trees began slowly to move, to accelerate their vibration in a slight breeze as his metabolism slowed toward normal. Momentarily dizzy, he closed his eyes, and despite the nauseating smell of blood felt the paradoxical joy still in him. The afterglow of the unity and the euphoria caused by the endorphins coursing in his veins.
"Lia?" he called. His voice came out a hoarse bark. He tried it again.
"Lia? Please take Mark into the kitchen. Call the police from the kitchen phone."
There was no answer. He went up the terrace stairs and peered into the big room. Lia and Mark weren't in view. The house was a shambles once more, destroyed by his battle with Vivien, and the tension began to rise in him again. The last few minutes of the fight were hazy in his memory. Maybe they'd been hurt, maybe he'd—
And then he found them in the kitchen.
Lia stood at the far end of the room, holding Mark's face to her chest with one hand, the .38 levelled at Paul's face as he came through the door. Mark's shoulders were shaking and his arms clung to Lia's waist.
"We've got to call the police," he said. Relief poured over him at the sight of them.
"I already did," Lia said.
"You're both okay?" He started toward them, wanting to comfort them, enfold them.
"Stop," Lia said. It came out quietly but with tremendous force.
"Don't come any closer." She took a step backward. Her eyes were diamond bright, her alertness at laser intensity.
"Lia, it's me, Paul!"
"I don't know who it is. I don't think you know who you are. Stay back."
Paul wished that Mark would turn to face him, then realized that with Vivien's blood soaking him, his eyes no doubt still engorged with blood, his clothes just rags, he wasn't a sight Mark should see. He'd seen far too much already. The overwhelming desire to comfort Mark had no possible outlet. Pain lanced through the euphoric haze, and Paul thought: 77n'5 is how it feels to become human again.