The lady looked even prettier than he remembered. Not supermodel beautiful, but pretty in a real way. Kind and gentle.
He wondered who she was. He spun a story for himself about what life would be like if this woman were his mother and if her husband were his father. He felt a little guilty for dumping Nominal Mom and Ghost Dad out of this imaginary life, but they lived make-believe, so he didn’t think they would begrudge him a fantasy family for one night.
After a while, the smile of the woman in the photo fostered a smile in Fric, which was better than catching a meme.
Later, when Fric was living with his new mom and her husband, whom he had not yet met, in a cozy cottage in Goose Crotch, Montana, where no one knew who he had once been, the gray-eyed mirror man stepped out of the shine on the side of a toaster, patted the dog on the head, and warned that it would be dangerous to *69 him. “If an angel uses the idea of a phone to call me,” Fric said, “and then if I star sixty-nine him, why would I be connected to a place like Hell instead of to Heaven?” Instead of answering the question, the man breathed a dragon’s snort of fire at him and disappeared back through the shine on the toaster. The flames singed Fric’s clothes and caused wisps of smoke to rise from him, but he wasn’t set afire. His wonderful new mother poured him another glass of lemonade to cool him off, and they continued to talk about favorite books as he ate a fat slice of the homemade chocolate cake that she had baked for him.
In a tumultuous darkness filled first with gunfire and the roar of approaching engines, then with a voice crying out of a void, Ethan turned and turned, tumbling across wet blacktop, until he turned one last time into a quiet darkness of damp tangled sheets.
Sitting up in bed, he said, “Hannah,” for in sleep, where all his psychological defenses were removed, he had recognized her voice as the one that he had heard on the telephone.
Initially, she had repeated the same cry three times, and then three times again. In sleep, he had recognized the word, his name: “Ethan…Ethan…Ethan.”
What else she had said to him, the urgent message that she had struggled to convey across the gulf between them, continued to elude him. Even in sleep, that room next door to death, he had not been close enough to Hannah to hear more than his name.
As the shrouds of sleep slipped off him, Ethan was overcome by a conviction that he was being watched.
Every child knows well the feeling of waking from a dream to the perception that the bedroom darkness grants cover to vicious fiends of innumerable descriptions and appetites. The presence of demons seemed so real that many a small hand had hesitated on a lamp switch, for fear that seeing would be even worse than the images that the fevered imagination provided; yet always the terrors evaporated in the light.
Ethan wasn’t sure that light would banish unreason this time. He sensed that what watched him were owls and crack-beaked crows, ravens and fierce-eyed hawks, that they perched not on his furniture but in somber black-and-white photographs on the walls, pictures that hadn’t hung there when he’d gone to sleep. Although hours ago the night had melted into the predawn blackness of a new day, he had no reason to suppose that Tuesday would be less stained by irrationality than Monday had been.
He didn’t reach for the lamp switch. He reclined once more, head upon his pillows, resigned to the presence of whatever the darkness might conceal.
He doubted that he would be able to doze off again. Sooner than later, however, his eyes grew heavy.
On the rim of sleep’s whirlpool, as Ethan drifted lazily around, around, he heard from time to time a tick-tick-tick that might have been the talons of sentinel crows as they shifted position on an iron fence. Or perhaps it was only claws of cold rain scratching at the windows.
As he began to revolve more rapidly around the relentless pull of black-hole gravity that was sleep, Ethan’s eyes fluttered one last time, and he noticed a small light in the lampblack gloom. The phone. Without investigation, he couldn’t with certainty identify the number of the indicator light, but he knew instinctively that it must be Line 24.
He slid off the rim of the whirlpool, into the vortex, down into whatever dreams might come.
CHAPTER 48
FREE OF ENVY, FREE OF HATRED, BUOYANT IN THE service of chaos, Corky Laputa began his day with a cinnamon-pecan roll, four cups of black coffee, and a pair of caffeine tablets.
Anyone who would bring the social order to ruin must embrace anything that gives him an additional edge, even at the risk of destroying his stomach lining and instigating chronic intestinal inflammation. Fortunately for Corky, periodically consuming massive quantities of caffeine seemed to increase the bitter potency of his bile without causing acid indigestion or other regrettable symptoms.
Washing down caffeine with caffeine, he stood at his kitchen window, smiling at the low somber sky and at the trailing beard of night fog that had not entirely been shorn away by the blunt gray dawn. Bad weather was again his co-conspirator.
The current pause in the rain would be brief. Rushing in fast on the heels of the departing tempest, a new and reportedly stronger storm would wash the city and justify the wearing of rain gear, regardless of how elaborate it might be.
Corky had already reloaded the weatherproof interior pockets of his yellow vinyl slicker, which hung now from a hook in the garage.
He carried his last cup of coffee upstairs to the guest room, where he finished it while informing Stinky Cheese Man that his beloved daughter, Emily, was dead.
The previous night he’d reported the final torture and savage murder of Rachel, Stinky’s wife, who was still alive, of course, and not in Corky’s custody. The invented details were so imaginative and vivid that Stinky had been reduced to uncontrollable tears, to sobs that sounded weirdly inhuman—and quite disgusting—coming from his withered voice box.
Although crushed by despair, Stinky had not suffered the heart attack for which Corky had been hoping.
Rather than coddle the man with a sedative, Corky had introduced a powerful hallucinogenic through a port in the IV line. His hope was that Stinky would be unable to sleep and would pass the darkest hours between midnight and dawn in a hell of drug-induced visions featuring his brutalized wife.
Now, regaling his guest with an even more outrageous tale of the many crude violations and cruel acts of violence visited upon young Emily, Corky grew weary of the tears and anguish that were replayed here yet again. Under the circumstances, a massive cardiac infarction didn’t seem too much to ask, but Stinky would not cooperate.
For a man who supposedly loved his wife and daughter more than life itself, Stinky’s determination to survive was unseemly now that he’d been told that his family was nothing more than rotting meat. Like most traditionalists, with all their loudly expressed belief in language and meaning and purpose and principle, Stinky was probably a fraud.
Now and then, Corky glimpsed rage underlying Stinky’s grief. Into the man’s eyes came hatred hot enough to sear with a look, but then at once vanished under pools of tears.
Perhaps Stinky clung to life only for the hope of revenge. The guy was delusional.
Besides, hatred only destroys the hater. By the example of her wasted life, Corky’s mother had proved the truth of that contention.
With facility and efficiency, Corky changed infusion bags after doctoring the new one with a drug that would induce a semiparalytic state. Stinky had so little muscle tissue left that an artificially induced paralysis seemed unnecessary, but Corky was loath to let anything to chance.
Ironically, to serve chaos well, he needed to be well organized. He required a strategy for victory and the carefully planned tactics necessary to fulfill that strategy.
Without strategy and tactics, you weren’t a true agent of chaos. You were just Jeffrey Dahmer or some crazy lady who kept a hundred cats and filled her yard with unsightly piles of junk, or a recent governor of California.
Five years ago, Corky had learned how to give injections, how to insert a cannula in
a vein, how to handle the equipment related to an IV setup, how to catheterize either a man or a woman…. Since then, he had enjoyed a few opportunities, as with Stinky Cheese Man, to practice these skills; consequently, he used these instruments and devices with a facility that any nurse would admire.
In fact, he’d been trained by a nurse, Mary Noone. She had the face of a Botticelli Madonna and the eyes of a ferret.
He’d met Mary at a university mixer for people interested in utilitarian bioethics. Utilitarians believed that every life could be assigned a value to society and that medical care should be rationed according to that assigned value. This philosophy supported the killing, by neglect, of the physically handicapped, Down-syndrome children, people over sixty with medical problems requiring expensive treatment like dialysis and bypass surgery, and many others.
The mixer had been full of fun and witty conversation—and he and Mary Noone had clicked the moment their eyes met. They’d both been drinking Cabernet Sauvignon when they were introduced, and over refills, they had fallen in lust.
Weeks thereafter, when he had asked Mary to teach him the proper way to give an injection and how to maintain a patient on intravenous infusion, Corky had solemnly revealed that his mother’s health was rapidly declining. “I dread the day when she’ll be bedridden, but I’d rather attend to her myself than turn her over to strangers in a nursing home.”
Mary told him that he was a wonderful son, and Corky pretended to accept this compliment with humility, which was an easy pretense to maintain because he was lying about both his mother’s health and his intentions. The old bitch had been as healthy as Methuselah still six centuries short of the grave, and Corky had been toying with the idea of injecting her with something lethal while she slept.
He was pretty sure that Mary suspected the truth. Nevertheless, she taught him what he wanted to know.
Initially he believed that her willingness to educate him in these matters could be attributed to the fact that she was hot for him. Jungle cats in heat didn’t copulate with the ferocity or the frequency of Mary Noone and Corky in the few months that they had been together.
Eventually he realized that she understood his true motives and didn’t disapprove. Furthermore, he began to suspect that Mary was a self-styled Angel of Death who acted upon her utilitarian bioethics by quietly killing the patients whose lives she deemed to be of poor quality and of little value to society.
He dared not remain her sex toy under such circumstances. Sooner or later, she would be arrested and put on trial, as angels of her breed usually were. By virtue of being her lover, Corky was sure to be closely scrutinized by the police, which would put his life’s work and possibly his freedom in jeopardy.
Besides, after they had been together more than three months, Corky grew uneasy about sleeping in the same bed with Mary Noone. Although as a lover he might command a high value in horny Mary’s estimation, Corky didn’t know how much—or how little—she thought he was worth to society.
To his surprise, when he cautiously raised the issue of an amicable breakup, Mary responded with relief. Apparently, she had not been sleeping well, either.
In time he had chosen not to kill his mother by injection, but the effort to educate himself in these aspects of medical care had not been wasted.
During the years since, he had seen Mary only twice, both times at bioethics parties. The old heat was still there between them, but so was the wariness.
With an efficiency and tenderness that Mary Noone would admire, Corky finished ministering to Stinky Cheese Man.
The paralytic drug would incapacitate Stinky without making him drowsy or putting him in an altered state of consciousness. With full mental clarity, he could spend the day agonizing over the deaths of his wife and daughter.
“Now I’ve got to dispose of Rachel’s and Emily’s bodies,” Corky lied with panache that pleased him. “I’d feed their remains to hogs, if I knew where to find a hog farm.”
He remembered a recent news story about a young blonde whose body had been dumped in a sewage-treatment plant. Borrowing details from that crime, he spun for Stinky a story about the ponds of human waste for which his loved ones were bound.
Still no heart attack.
Late this evening, when he returned here with Aelfric Manheim, Corky would introduce the boy to this emaciated wretch, to prime him for the terrors that awaited him. Aelfric’s suffering would be of a somewhat different variety from what had been required of this once-arrogant lover of Dickens, Dickinson, Tolstoi, and Twain. If the stubborn drudge hadn’t died of a heart attack during the day, Corky would kill him before midnight.
Leaving Stinky to whatever strange thoughts might occupy the odd mind of a traditionalist in these circumstances, Corky donned his amply provisioned yellow slicker, locked the house, and set out into the December day in his BMW.
The new storm had already shouldered into the city. Great dragon herds of black clouds seethed from horizon to horizon, coils tangled in one colossal heaving mass, full of pent-up roars and white fire that might soon be breathed out in dazzling, jagged plumes.
A tentative drizzle fell, but cataracts were sure to follow, vertical rivers, torrents, Niagaras, a deluge.
CHAPTER 49
PROTECTED BY THE TREE OF ANGELS AND BY THE photo of the unknown pretty lady, Fric woke unharmed, with his body and soul intact.
Over the center of the library, the elaborate stained-glass dome brightened with the dawn, but the colors were muted because the early light fell weak and gray.
After studying the photograph of his dream mother for a moment, Fric folded it and returned it to a back pocket of his jeans.
He got up from the armchair. He yawned and stretched. He took a moment to be amazed that he was alive.
At the back of the library, he removed the bracing chair from under the knob of the powder-room door. He did not, however, enter that mirrored space to use the facilities.
Following a quick look around to be certain that he remained unobserved, he peed on the potted palm that he had begun to kill the previous evening. The experience was satisfying for him, but surely not for the tree.
He could think of no water closet in the mansion that could be reached without going through a bathroom with mirrors.
This unconventional toileting would be all right for a while, but only as long as he could stand up to do what needed to be done. The moment sitting was required, he would be in trouble.
If the rain ended at last—or if it didn’t—he might venture outside to the grouping of deodar cedars beyond the rose garden. There he could do what bears did in the woods, by which he didn’t mean hibernate or guzzle honey from bee hives.
Security guards would see him going to and from the cedars. Fortunately, no cameras were positioned inside that little grove.
If anyone asked why he’d gone out in the rain to the woods, he would say without hesitation that he’d been bird watching. He must remember to take with him a pair of binoculars for cover.
No one would doubt his story. People expected a geeky-looking kid like him to be a bird watcher, a math whiz, a builder of plastic model-kit monsters, a secret reader of body-building magazines, and a collector of his own boogers, among other things.
With his toilet strategy now devised, he plugged in the library phone, which he had unplugged the previous night. He expected his line to ring at once, but it didn’t.
He dragged the armchair away from the Christmas tree and returned it to its proper position. After turning out the lights, he left the library.
As he closed the door, some of the dangling angels glimmered softly in the gloom, barely touched by storm light filtering through the stained-glass dome.
Moloch was coming.
Preparations must be made.
He went down the main stairs, across the rotunda, and along the hall to the kitchen. En route, he switched off the lights that he had left on during the night.
The post-dawn stillness in the gr
eat house was deeper even than the silence that, during the long night, had made it seem like such a perfect haunt for ghosts of all intentions.
In the kitchen, passing a window, he noticed a lull in the rain, and he glimpsed the grove of cedars in the distance. At the moment, however, he felt no urge to engage in any bird watching.
Usually Fric avoided the kitchen on days when Mr. Hachette, the diabolical chef, was on the job. Here be the lair of the beast, where the many ovens could not help but bring to mind Hansel and Gretel and their close call, where you were reminded that a rolling pin was also a wicked bludgeon, where you expected to discover that the knives and the cleavers and the meat forks were engraved with the words PROPERTY OF THE BATES MOTEL.
This morning, the territory was safe because Mr. Hachette—late of the Cordon Bleu school of culinary arts and more recently released from an equally prestigious asylum—would not be present to prepare breakfast for either family or staff. He would begin his day skulking from the farmers’ market to a series of specialty shops, selecting—and arranging for the delivery of—the fruits, vegetables, meats, delicacies, and no doubt poisons needed to prepare the series of holiday feasts that he had planned with his usual sinister secrecy. Mr. Hachette would not arrive at Palazzo Rospo before noon.
Although short, Fric could nevertheless reach the faucets at the kitchen sink. He adjusted the water until it was pleasantly warm.
If the kitchen had featured a mirror, he wouldn’t have dared to bathe here. You were so vulnerable when you were taking a bath, all defenses down.
The stainless-steel fronts of the six refrigerators and the numerous ovens had a brushed rather than a polished finish. They didn’t serve as mirrors and were therefore unlikely to offer cheap and easy travel to spirits good or evil.
Fric stripped off his shirt and undershirt, but nothing more. He was not an exhibitionist. Even if he had been an exhibitionist, the kitchen didn’t seem like a suitable place to exhibit.