The Eyes of Darkness (2 page)

She bought a quart of nonfat milk and a loaf of whole-wheat bread that was cut thin for dieters, so each serving contained only half the calories of an ordinary slice of bread. She wasn’t a dancer anymore; now she worked behind the curtain, in the production end of the show, but she still felt physically and psychologically best when she weighed no more than she had weighed when she’d been a performer.

Five minutes later she was home. Hers was a modest ranch house in a quiet neighborhood. The olive trees and lacy melaleucas stirred lazily in a faint Mojave breeze.

In the kitchen, she toasted two pieces of bread. She spread a thin skin of peanut butter on them, poured a glass of nonfat milk, and sat at the table.

Peanut-butter toast had been one of Danny’s favorite foods, even when he was a toddler and was especially picky about what he would eat. When he was very young, he had called it “neenut putter.”

Closing her eyes now, chewing the toast, Tina could still see him—three years old, peanut butter smeared all over his lips and chin—as he grinned and said,
More neenut putter toast, please.

She opened her eyes with a start because her mental image of him was too vivid, less like a memory than like a
vision
. Right now she didn’t want to remember so clearly.

But it was too late. Her heart knotted in her chest, and her lower lip began to quiver again, and she put her head down on the table. She wept.

That night Tina dreamed that Danny was alive again. Somehow. Somewhere. Alive. And he needed her.

In the dream, Danny was standing at the edge of a bottomless gorge, and Tina was on the far side, opposite him, looking across the immense gulf. Danny was calling her name. He was lonely and afraid. She was miserable because she couldn’t think of a way to reach him. Meanwhile, the sky grew darker by the second; massive storm clouds, like the clenched fists of celestial giants, squeezed the last light out of the day. Danny’s cries and her response became increasingly shrill and desperate, for they knew that they must reach each other before nightfall or be lost forever; in the oncoming night, something waited for Danny, something fearsome that would seize him if he was alone after dark. Suddenly the sky was shattered by lightning, then by a hard clap of thunder, and the night imploded into a deeper darkness, into infinite and perfect blackness.

Tina Evans sat straight up in bed, certain that she had heard a noise in the house. It hadn’t been merely the thunder from the dream. The sound she’d heard had come as she was waking, a real noise, not an imagined one.

She listened intently, prepared to throw off the covers and slip out of bed. Silence reigned.

Gradually doubt crept over her. She
had
been jumpy lately. This wasn’t the first night she’d been wrongly convinced that an intruder was prowling the house. On four or five occasions during the past two weeks, she had taken the pistol from the nightstand and searched the place, room by room, but she hadn’t found anyone. Recently she’d been under a lot of pressure, both personally and professionally. Maybe what she’d heard tonight
had
been the thunder from the dream.

She remained on guard for a few minutes, but the night was so peaceful that at last she had to admit she was alone. As her heartbeat slowed, she eased back onto her pillow.

At times like this she wished that she and Michael were still together. She closed her eyes and imagined herself lying beside him, reaching for him in the dark, touching, touching, moving against him, into the shelter of his arms. He would comfort and reassure her, and in time she would sleep again.

Of course, if she and Michael were in bed right this minute, it wouldn’t be like that at all. They wouldn’t make love. They would argue. He’d resist her affection, turn her away by picking a fight. He would begin the battle over a triviality and goad her until the bickering escalated into marital warfare. That was how it had been during the last months of their life together. He had been seething with hostility, always seeking an excuse to vent his anger on her.

Because Tina had loved Michael to the end, she’d been hurt and saddened by the dissolution of their relationship. Admittedly, she had also been relieved when it was finally over.

She had lost her child and her husband in the same year, the man first, and then the boy, the son to the grave and the husband to the winds of change. During the twelve years of their marriage, Tina had become a different and more complex person than she’d been on their wedding day, but Michael hadn’t changed at all—and didn’t like the woman that she had become. They began as lovers, sharing every detail of their daily lives—triumphs and failures, joys and frustrations—but by the time the divorce was final, they were strangers. Although Michael was still living in town, less than a mile from her, he was, in some respects, as far away and as unreachable as Danny.

She sighed with resignation and opened her eyes.

She wasn’t sleepy now, but she knew she had to get more rest. She would need to be fresh and alert in the morning.

Tomorrow was one of the most important days of her life: December 30. In other years that date had meant nothing special. But for better or worse,
this
December 30 was the hinge upon which her entire future would swing.

For fifteen years, ever since she turned eighteen, two years before she married Michael, Tina Evans had lived and worked in Las Vegas. She began her career as a dancer—not a showgirl but an actual dancer—in the Lido de Paris, a gigantic stage show at the Stardust Hotel. The Lido was one of those incredibly lavish productions that could be seen nowhere in the world but Vegas, for it was only in Las Vegas that a multimillion-dollar show could be staged year after year with little concern for profit; such vast sums were spent on the elaborate sets and costumes, and on the enormous cast and crew, that the hotel was usually happy if the production merely broke even from ticket and drink sales. After all, as fantastic as it was, the show was only a come-on, a draw, with the sole purpose of putting a few thousand people into the hotel every night. Going to and from the showroom, the crowd had to pass all the craps tables and blackjack tables and roulette wheels and glittering ranks of slot machines, and
that
was where the profit was made. Tina enjoyed dancing in the Lido, and she stayed there for two and a half years, until she learned that she was pregnant. She took time off to carry and give birth to Danny, then to spend uninterrupted days with him during his first few months of life. When Danny was six months old, Tina went into training to get back in shape, and after three arduous months of exercise, she won a place in the chorus line of a new Vegas spectacle. She managed to be both a fine dancer and a good mother, although that was not always easy; she loved Danny, and she enjoyed her work and she thrived on double duty.

Five years ago, however, on her twenty-eighth birthday, she began to realize that she had, if she was lucky, ten years left as a show dancer, and she decided to establish herself in the business in another capacity, to avoid being washed up at thirty-eight. She landed a position as choreographer for a two-bit lounge revue, a dismally cheap imitation of the multimillion-dollar Lido, and eventually she took over the costumer’s job as well. From that she moved up through a series of similar positions in larger lounges, then in small showrooms that seated four or five hundred in second-rate hotels with limited show budgets. In time she directed a revue, then directed and produced another. She was steadily becoming a respected name in the closely knit Vegas entertainment world, and she believed that she was on the verge of great success.

Almost a year ago, shortly after Danny had died, Tina had been offered a directing and co-producing job on a huge ten-million-dollar extravaganza to be staged in the two-thousand-seat main showroom of the Golden Pyramid, one of the largest and plushest hotels on the Strip. At first it had seemed terribly wrong that such a wonderful opportunity should come her way before she’d even had time to mourn her boy, as if the Fates were so shallow and insensitive as to think that they could balance the scales and offset Danny’s death merely by presenting her with a chance at her dream job. Although she was bitter and depressed, although—or maybe because—she felt utterly empty and useless, she took the job.

The new show was titled
Magyck!
because the variety acts between the big dance numbers were all magicians and because the production numbers themselves featured elaborate special effects and were built around supernatural themes. The tricky spelling of the title was not Tina’s idea, but most of the rest of the program was her creation, and she remained pleased with what she had wrought. Exhausted too. This year had passed in a blur of twelve- and fourteen-hour days, with no vacations and rarely a weekend off.

Nevertheless, even as preoccupied with
Magyck!
as she was, she had adjusted to Danny’s death only with great difficulty. A month ago, for the first time, she’d thought that at last she had begun to overcome her grief. She was able to think about the boy without crying, to visit his grave without being overcome by grief. All things considered, she felt reasonably good, even cheerful to a degree. She would never forget him, that sweet child who had been such a large part of her, but she would no longer have to live her life around the gaping hole that he had left in it. The wound was achingly tender but healed.

That’s what she had thought a month ago. For a week or two she had continued to make progress toward acceptance. Then the new dreams began, and they were far worse than the dream that she’d had immediately after Danny had been killed.

Perhaps her anxiety about the public’s reaction to
Magyck!
was causing her to recall the greater anxiety she had felt about Danny. In less than seventeen hours—at 8:00 P.M., December 30—the Golden Pyramid Hotel would present a special, invitational, VIP premiere of
Magyck!
, and the following night, New Year’s Eve, the show would open to the general public. If audience reaction was as strong and as positive as Tina hoped, her financial future was assured, for her contract gave her two and one-half percent of the gross receipts, minus liquor sales, after the first five million. If
Magyck!
was a hit and packed the showroom for four or five years, as sometimes happened with successful Vegas shows, she’d be a multimillionaire by the end of the run. Of course, if the production was a flop, if it failed to please the audience, she might be back working the small lounges again, on her way down. Show business, in any form, was a merciless enterprise.

She had good reason to be suffering from anxiety attacks. Her obsessive fear of intruders in the house, her disquieting dreams about Danny, her renewed grief—all of those things might grow from her concern about
Magyck!
If that were the case, then those symptoms would disappear as soon as the fate of the show was evident. She needed only to ride out the next few days, and in the relative calm that would follow, she might be able to get on with healing herself.

In the meantime she absolutely
had
to get some sleep. At ten o’clock in the morning, she was scheduled to meet with two tour-booking agents who were considering reserving eight thousand tickets to
Magyck!
during the first three months of its run. Then at one o’clock the entire cast and the crew would assemble for the final dress rehearsal.

She fluffed her pillows, rearranged the covers, and tugged at the short nightgown in which she slept. She tried to relax by closing her eyes and envisioning a gentle night tide lapping at a silvery beach.

She sat straight up in bed.

Something had fallen over in another part of the house. It must have been a large object because, though muffled by the intervening walls, the sound was loud enough to rouse her.

Whatever it had been . . . it hadn’t simply fallen. It had been knocked over. Heavy objects didn’t just fall of their own accord in deserted rooms.

She cocked her head, listening closely. Another and softer sound followed the first. It didn’t last long enough for Tina to identify the source, but there was a stealthiness about it. This time she hadn’t been imagining a threat. Someone actually was in the house.

As she sat up in bed, she switched on the lamp. She pulled open the nightstand drawer. The pistol was loaded. She flicked off the two safety catches.

For a while she listened.

In the brittle silence of the desert night, she imagined that she could sense an intruder listening too, listening for
her
.

She got out of bed and stepped into her slippers. Holding the gun in her right hand, she went quietly to the bedroom door.

She considered calling the police, but she was afraid of making a fool of herself. What if they came, lights flashing and sirens screaming—and found no one? If she had summoned the police every time that she imagined hearing a prowler in the house during the past two weeks, they would have decided long ago that she was scramble-brained. She was proud, unable to bear the thought of appearing to be hysterical to a couple of macho cops who would grin at her and, later over doughnuts and coffee, make jokes about her. She would search the house herself, alone.