Hideaway (36 page)

As had happened the previous night, his anger erupted into fiery rage with volcanic abruptness. The muscles in his jaws clenched so hard, his teeth ached. The magazine began to shake because his hands were trembling with fury. His vision blurred slightly, as if he were looking at everything through shimmering waves of heat, and he had to blink and squint to make the fuzzy-edged words on the page resolve into readable print.

As when he had been lying in bed last night, he felt as if his anger opened a door and as if something entered him through it, a foul spirit that knew only rage and hate. Or maybe it had been with him all along but sleeping, and his anger had roused it. He was not alone inside his own head. He was aware of another presence, like a spider crawling through the narrow space between the inside of his skull and the surface of his brain.

He tried to put the magazine aside and calm down. But he kept reading because he was not in full possession of himself.

 
 
 
Vassago moved through the Haunted House, untroubled by the hungry fire, because he had planned an escape route. Sometimes he was twelve years old, and sometimes he was twenty. But always his path was lit by human torches, some of whom had collapsed into silent melting heaps upon the smoking floor, some of whom exploded into flames even as he passed them.

In the dream he was carrying a magazine, folded open to an article that angered him and seemed imperative he read. The edges of the pages curled in the heat and threatened to catch fire. Names leaped at him from the pages. Lindsey. Lindsey Sparling. Now he had a last name for her. He felt an urge to toss the magazine aside, slow his breathing, calm down. Instead he stoked his anger, let a sweet flood of rage overwhelm him, and told himself that he must know more. The edges of the magazine pages curled in the heat. Honell. Another name. Steven Honell. Bits of burning debris fell on the article. Steven S. Honell. No. The S first. S. Steven Honell. The paper caught fire. Honell. A writer. A barroom. Silverado Canyon. In his hands, the magazine burst into flames that flashed into his face—

He shed sleep like a fired bullet shedding its brass jacket, and sat up in his dark hideaway. Wide awake. Excited. He knew enough now to find the woman.

 
 
One moment rage like a fire swept through Hatch, and the next moment it was extinguished. His jaws relaxed, his tense shoulders sagged, and his hands unclenched so suddenly that he dropped the magazine on the floor between his feet.

He continued to sit on the edge of the bed for a while, stunned and confused. He looked toward the bathroom door, relieved that Lindsey had not walked in on him while he had been... Been what? In his trance? Possessed ?

He smelled something peculiar, out of place. Smoke.

He looked at the issue of
Arts American
on the floor between his feet. Hesitantly, he picked it up. It was still folded open to Honell’s article about Lindsey. Although no visible vapors rose from the magazine, the paper exuded the heavy smell of smoke. The odors of burning wood, paper, tar, plastics ... and something worse. The edges of the paper were yellow-brown and crisp, as if they had been exposed to almost enough heat to induce spontaneous combustion.

When the knock came at the door, Honell was sitting in a rocking chair by the fireplace. He was drinking Chivas Regal and reading one of his own novels, Miss Culvert, which he had written twenty-five years ago when he was only thirty.

He re-read each of his nine books once a year because he was in perpetual competition with himself, striving to improve as he grew old instead of settling quietly into senescence the way most writers did. Constant betterment was a formidable challenge because he had been
awfully
good at an early age. Every time he re-read himself, he was surprised to discover that his body of work was considerably more impressive than he remembered it.

Miss Culvert
was a fictional treatment of his mother’s self-absorbed life in the respectable upper-middle-class society of a downstate Illinois town, an indictment of the self-satisfied and stiflingly bland “culture” of the Midwest. He had really captured the essence of the bitch. Oh, how he had captured her. Reading
Miss Culvert,
he was reminded of the hurt and horror with which his mother had received the novel on first publication, and he decided that as soon as he had finished the book, he would take down the sequel,
Mrs. Towers,
which dealt with her marriage to his father, her widowhood, and her second marriage. He remained convinced that the sequel was what had killed her. Officially, it was a heart attack. But cardiac infarction had to be triggered by something, and the timing was satisfyingly concurrent with the release of
Mrs. Towers
and the media attention it received.

When the unexpected caller knocked, a pang of resentment shot through Honell. His face puckered sourly. He preferred the company of his own characters to that of anyone who might conceivably come visiting, uninvited. Or invited, for that matter. All of the people in his books were carefully refined, clarified, whereas people in real life were unfailingly ... well, fuzzy, murky, pointlessly complex.

He glanced at the clock on the mantel. Ten past nine o’clock.

The knock sounded again. More insistent this time. It was probably a neighbor, which was a dismaying thought because his neighbors were all fools.

He considered not answering. But in these rural canyons, the locals thought of themselves as “neighborly,” never as the pests they actually were, and if he didn’t respond to the knocking, they would circle the house, peeping in windows, out of a country-folk concern for his welfare. God, he hated them. He tolerated them only because he hated the people in the cities even more, and
loathed
suburbanites.

He put down his Chivas and the book, pushed up from the rocking chair, and went to the door with the intention of giving a fierce dressing-down to whoever was out there on the porch. With his command of language, he could mortify anyone in about one minute flat, and have them running for cover in two minutes. The pleasure of meting out humiliation would almost compensate for the interruption.

When he pulled the curtain back from the glass panes in the front door, he was surprised to see that his visitor was not one of the neighbors—in fact, not anyone he recognized. The boy was no more than twenty, pale as the wings of the snowflake moths that batted against the porch light. He was dressed entirely in black and wore sunglasses.

Honell was unconcerned about the caller’s intentions. The canyon was less than an hour from the most heavily populated parts of Orange County, but it was nonetheless remote by virtue of its forbidding geography and the poor condition of the roads. Crime was no problem, because criminals were generally attracted to more populous areas where the pickings were more plentiful. Besides, most of the people living in the cabins thereabouts had nothing worth stealing.

He found the pale young man intriguing.

“What do you want?” he asked without opening the door.

“Mr. Honell?”

“That’s right.”

“S. Steven Honell?”

“Are you going to make a torture of this?”

“Sir, excuse me, but are you the writer?”

College student. That’s what he had to be.

A decade ago—well, nearly two—Honell had been besieged by college English majors who wanted to apprentice under him or just worship at his feet. They were an inconstant crowd, however, on the lookout for the latest trend, with no genuine appreciation for high literary art.

Hell, these days, most of them couldn’t even read; they were college students in name only. The institutions through which they matriculated were little more than day-care centers for the terminally immature, and they were no more likely to study than to fly to Mars by flapping their arms.

“Yes, I’m the writer. What of it?”

“Sir, I’m a great admirer of your books.”

“Listened to them on audiotape, have you?”

“Sir? No, I’ve read them, all of them.”

The audiotapes, licensed by his publisher without his consent, were abridged by two-thirds. Travesties.

“Ah. Read them in comic-book format, have you?” Honell said sourly, though to the best of his knowledge the sacrilege of comic-book adaptation had not yet been perpetrated.

“Sir, I’m sorry to intrude like this. It really took a lot of time for me to work up the courage to come see you. Tonight I finally had the guts, and I knew if I delayed I’d never get up the nerve again. I am in awe of your writing, sir, and if you could spare me the time, just a little time, to answer a few questions, I’d be most grateful.”

A little conversation with an intelligent young man might, in fact, have more charm than re-reading
Miss Culvert.
A long time had passed since the last such visitor, who had come to the eyrie in which Honell had then been living above Santa Fe. After only a brief hesitation, he opened the door.

“Come in, then, and we’ll see if you really understand the complexities of what you’ve read.”

The young man stepped across the threshold, and Honell turned away, heading back toward the rocking chair and the Chivas.

“This is very kind of you, sir,” the visitor said as he closed the door.

“Kindness is a quality of the weak and stupid, young man. I’ve other motivations.” As he reached his chair, he turned and said, “Take off those sunglasses. Sunglasses at night is the worst kind of Hollywood affectation, not the sign of a serious person.”

“I’m sorry, sir, but they’re not an affectation. It’s just that this world is so much more painfully bright than Hell—which I’m sure you’ll eventually discover.”

 
 
Hatch had no appetite for dinner. He only wanted to sit alone with the inexplicably heat-curled issue of Arts American and stare at it until, by God, he forced himself to understand exactly what was happening to him. He was a man of reason. He could not easily embrace supernatural explanations. He was not in the antiques business by accident; he had a need to surround himself with things that contributed to an atmosphere of order and stability.

But kids also hungered for stability, which included regular mealtimes, so they went to dinner at a pizza parlor, after which they caught a movie at the theater complex next door. It was a comedy. Though the film couldn’t make Hatch forget the strange problems plagued him, the frequent sound of Regina’s musical giggle did somewhat soothe his abraded nerves.

Later, at home, after he had tucked the girl in bed, kissed her forehead, wished her sweet dreams, and turned off the light, she said, “Goodnight ... Dad.”

He was in her doorway, stepping into the hall, when the word “dad” stopped him. He turned and looked back at her.

“Goodnight,” he said, deciding to receive her gift as casually as she had given it, for fear that if he made a big deal about it, she would call him Mr. Harrison forever. But his heart soared.

In the bedroom, where Lindsey was undressing, he said, “She called me Dad.”

“Who did?”

“Be serious, who do you think?”

“How much did you pay her?”

“You’re just jealous ‘cause she hasn’t called you Mom yet.”

“She will. She’s not so afraid any more.”

“Of you?”

“Of taking a chance.”

Before getting undressed for bed, Hatch went downstairs to check the telephone answering machine in the kitchen. Funny, after all that had happened to him and considering the problems he still had to sort out, the mere fact that the girl had called him Dad was enough to quicken his step and lift his spirits. He descended the stairs two at a time.

The answering machine was on the counter to the left of the refrigerator, below the cork memo board. He was hoping to have a response from the estate executor to whom he had given a bid for the Wedgwood collection that morning. The window on the machine showed three messages. The first was from Glenda Dockridge, his right hand at the antique shop. The second was from Simpson Smith, a friend and antique dealer on Melrose Place in Los Angeles. The third was from Janice Dimes, a friend of Lindsey’s. All three were reporting the same news: Hatch, Lindsey, Hatch
and Lindsey,
have you seen the paper, have you read the paper, have you heard the news
about Cooper, about that guy who ran you off the road, about Bill Cooper, he’s dead, he was killed, he was killed last night.

Hatch felt as if a refrigerant, instead of blood, pumped through his veins.

Last evening he had raged about Cooper getting off scot-free, and had wished him dead. No, wait. He’d said he wanted to hurt him, make him pay, pitch
him
in that icy river, but he hadn’t actually wanted Cooper dead. And so what if he
had
wanted him dead? He had not actually killed the man. He was not at fault for what had happened.

Punching the button to erase the messages, he thought: The cops will want to talk to me sooner or later.

Then he wondered why he was worried about the police. Maybe the murderer was already in custody, in which case no suspicion would fall upon him. But why should he come under suspicion anyway? He had done nothing.
Nothing.
Why was guilt creeping through him like the Millipede inching up a long tunnel?

Millipede?

The utterly enigmatic nature of that image chilled him. He couldn’t reference the source of it. As if it wasn’t his own thought but something he had ...
received.

He hurried upstairs.

Lindsey was lying on her back in bed, adjusting the covers around her.

The newspaper was on his nightstand, where she always put it. He snatched it up and quickly scanned the front page.

“Hatch?” she said. “What’s wrong?”

“Cooper’s dead.”

“What?”

“The guy driving the beer truck. William Cooper. Murdered.”

She threw back the covers and sat on the edge of the bed.