The Eyes of Darkness (3 page)

Pointing the pistol at the ceiling, she jacked a bullet into the chamber.

Taking a deep breath, she unlocked the bedroom door and eased into the hall.

Tina searched the entire house, except for Danny’s old room, but she didn’t find an intruder. She almost would have preferred to discover someone lurking in the kitchen or crouching in a closet rather than be forced to look, at last, in that final space where sadness seemed to dwell like a tenant. Now she had no choice.

A little more than a year before he had died, Danny had begun sleeping at the opposite end of the small house from the master bedroom, in what had once been the den. Not long after his tenth birthday, the boy had asked for more space and privacy than was provided by his original, tiny quarters. Michael and Tina had helped him move his belongings to the den, then had shifted the couch, armchair, coffee table, and television from the den into the quarters the boy had previously occupied.

At the time, Tina was certain that Danny was aware of the nightly arguments she and Michael were having in their own bedroom, which was next to his, and that he wanted to move into the den so he wouldn’t be able to hear them bickering. She and Michael hadn’t yet begun to raise their voices to each other; their disagreements had been conducted in normal tones, sometimes even in whispers, yet Danny probably had heard enough to know they were having problems.

She had been sorry that he’d had to know, but she hadn’t said a word to him; she’d offered no explanations, no reassurances. For one thing, she hadn’t known what she
could
say. She certainly couldn’t share with him her appraisal of the situation:
Danny, sweetheart, don’t worry about anything you might have heard through the wall. Your father is only suffering an identity crisis. He’s been acting like an ass lately, but he’ll get over it.
And that was another reason she didn’t attempt to explain her and Michael’s problems to Danny—she thought that their estrangement was only temporary. She loved her husband, and she was sure that the sheer power of her love would restore the luster to their marriage. Six months later she and Michael separated, and less than five months after the separation, they were divorced.

Now, anxious to complete her search for the burglar—who was beginning to look as imaginary as all the other burglars she had stalked on other nights—she opened the door to Danny’s bedroom. She switched on the lights and stepped inside.

No one.

Holding the pistol in front of her, she approached the closet, hesitated, then slid the door back. No one was hiding there, either. In spite of what she had heard, she was alone in the house.

As she stared at the contents of the musky closet—the boy’s shoes, his jeans, dress slacks, shirts, sweaters, his blue Dodgers’ baseball cap, the small blue suit he had worn on special occasions—a lump rose in her throat. She quickly slid the door shut and put her back against it.

Although the funeral had been more than a year ago, she had not yet been able to dispose of Danny’s belongings. Somehow, the act of giving away his clothes would be even sadder and more final than watching his casket being lowered into the ground.

His clothes weren’t the only things that she had kept: His entire room was exactly as he had left it. The bed was properly made, and several science-fiction-movie action figures were posed on the deep headboard. More than a hundred paperbacks were ranked alphabetically on a five-shelf bookcase. His desk occupied one corner; tubes of glue, miniature bottles of enamel in every color, and a variety of model-crafting tools stood in soldierly ranks on one half of the desk, and the other half was bare, waiting for him to begin work. Nine model airplanes filled a display case, and three others hung on wires from the ceiling. The walls were decorated with evenly spaced posters—three baseball stars, five hideous monsters from horror movies—that Danny had carefully arranged.

Unlike many boys his age, he’d been concerned about orderliness and cleanliness. Respecting his preference for neatness, Tina had instructed Mrs. Neddler, the cleaning lady who came in twice a week, to vacuum and dust his unused bedroom as if nothing had happened to him. The place was as spotless as ever.

Gazing at the dead boy’s toys and pathetic treasures, Tina realized, not for the first time, that it wasn’t healthy for her to maintain this place as if it were a museum. Or a shrine. As long as she left his things undisturbed, she could continue to entertain the hope that Danny was not dead, that he was just away somewhere for a while, and that he would shortly pick up his life where he had left off. Her inability to clean out his room suddenly frightened her; for the first time it seemed like more than just a weakness of spirit but an indication of serious mental illness. She
had
to let the dead rest in peace. If she was ever to stop dreaming about the boy, if she were to get control of her grief, she must begin her recovery here, in this room, by conquering her irrational need to preserve his possessions in situ.

She resolved to clean this place out on Thursday, New Year’s Day. Both the VIP premiere and the opening night of
Magyck!
would be behind her by then. She’d be able to relax and take a few days off. She would start by spending Thursday afternoon here, boxing the clothes and toys and posters.

As soon as she made that decision, most of her nervous energy dissipated. She sagged, limp and weary and ready to return to bed.

As she started toward the door, she caught sight of the easel, stopped, and turned. Danny had liked to draw, and the easel, complete with a box of pencils and pens and paints, had been a birthday gift when he was nine. It was an easel on one side and a chalkboard on the other. Danny had left it at the far end of the room, beyond the bed, against the wall, and that was where it had stood the last time that Tina had been here. But now it lay at an angle, the base against the wall, the easel itself slanted, chalkboard-down, across a game table. An Electronic Battleship game had stood on that table, as Danny had left it, ready for play, but the easel had toppled into it and knocked it to the floor.

Apparently, that was the noise she had heard. But she couldn’t imagine what had knocked the easel over. It couldn’t have fallen by itself.

She put her gun down, went around the foot of the bed, and stood the easel on its legs, as it belonged. She stooped, retrieved the pieces of the Electronic Battleship game, and returned them to the table.

When she picked up the scattered sticks of chalk and the felt eraser, turning again to the chalkboard, she realized that two words were crudely printed on the black surface:

She scowled at the message.

She was positive that nothing had been written on the board when Danny had gone away on that scouting trip. And it had been blank the last time she’d been in this room.

Belatedly, as she pressed her fingertips to the words on the chalkboard, the possible meaning of them struck her. As a sponge soaked up water, she took a chill from the surface of the slate. Not
dead
. It was a denial of Danny’s death. An angry refusal to accept the awful truth. A challenge to reality.

In one of her terrible seizures of grief, in a moment of crazy dark despair, had she come into this room and unknowingly printed those words on Danny’s chalkboard?

She didn’t remember doing it. If she had left this message, she must be having blackouts, temporary amnesia of which she was totally unaware. Or she was walking in her sleep. Either possibility was unacceptable.

Dear God, unthinkable.

Therefore, the words must have been here all along. Danny must have left them before he died. His printing was neat, like everything else about him, not sloppy like this scrawled message. Nevertheless, he must have done it.
Must
have.

And the obvious reference that those two words made to the bus accident in which he had perished?

Coincidence. Danny, of course, had been writing about something else, and the dark interpretation that could be drawn from those two words now, after his death, was just a macabre coincidence.

She refused to consider any other possibility because the alternatives were too frightening.

She hugged herself. Her hands were icy; they chilled her sides even through her nightgown.

Shivering, she thoroughly erased the words on the chalkboard, retrieved her handgun, and left the room, pulling the door shut behind her.

She was wide awake, but she had to get some sleep. There was so much to do in the morning. Big day.

In the kitchen, she withdrew a bottle of Wild Turkey from the cupboard by the sink. It was Michael’s favorite bourbon. She poured two ounces into a water glass. Although she wasn’t much of a drinker, indulging in nothing more than a glass of wine now and then, with no capacity whatsoever for hard liquor, she finished the bourbon in two swallows. Grimacing at the bitterness of the spirits, wondering why Michael had extolled this brand’s smoothness, she hesitated, then poured another ounce. She finished it quickly, as though she were a child taking medicine, and then put the bottle away.

In bed again she snuggled in the covers and closed her eyes and tried not to think about the chalkboard. But an image of it appeared behind her eyes. When she couldn’t banish that image, she attempted to alter it, mentally wiping the words away. But in her mind’s eye, the seven letters reappeared on the chalkboard: NOT DEAD. Although she repeatedly erased them, they stubbornly returned. She grew dizzy from the bourbon and finally slipped into welcome oblivion.

Tuesday afternoon Tina watched the final dress rehearsal of
Magyck!
from a seat in the middle of the Golden Pyramid showroom.

The theater was shaped like an enormous fan, spreading under a high domed ceiling. The room stepped down toward the stage in alternating wide and narrow galleries. On the wider levels, long dinner tables, covered with white linen, were set at right angles to the stage. Each narrow gallery consisted of a three-foot-wide aisle with a low railing on one side and a curving row of raised, plushly padded booths on the other side. The focus of all the seats was the immense stage, a marvel of the size required for a Las Vegas spectacular, more than half again as large as the largest stage on Broadway. It was so huge that a DC-9 airliner could be rolled onto it without using half the space available—a feat that had been accomplished as part of a production number on a similar stage at a hotel in Reno several years ago. A lavish use of blue velvet, dark leather, crystal chandeliers, and thick blue carpet, plus an excellent sense of dramatic lighting, gave the mammoth chamber some of the feeling of a cozy cabaret in spite of its size.

Tina sat in one of the third-tier booths, nervously sipping ice water as she watched her show.

The dress rehearsal ran without a problem. With seven massive production numbers, five major variety acts, forty-two girl dancers, forty-two boy dancers, fifteen showgirls, two boy singers, two girl singers (one temperamental), forty-seven crewmen and technicians, a twenty-piece orchestra, one elephant, one lion, two black panthers, six golden retrievers, and twelve white doves, the logistics were mind-numbingly complicated, but a year of arduous labor was evident in the slick and faultless unfolding of the program.

At the end, the cast and crew gathered onstage and applauded themselves, hugged and kissed one another. There was electricity in the air, a feeling of triumph, a nervous expectation of success.

Joel Bandiri, Tina’s co-producer, had watched the show from a booth in the first tier, the VIP row, where high rollers and other friends of the hotel would be seated every night of the run. As soon as the rehearsal ended, Joel sprang out of his seat, raced to the aisle, climbed the steps to the third tier, and hurried to Tina.

“We did it!” Joel shouted as he approached her. “We made the damn thing work!”

Tina slid out of her booth to meet him.

“We got a hit, kid!” Joel said, and he hugged her fiercely, planting a wet kiss on her cheek.

She hugged him enthusiastically. “You think so? Really?”

“Think? I know! A giant. That’s what we’ve got. A real giant! A gargantua!”

“Thank you, Joel. Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

“Me? What are you thanking me for?”

“For giving me a chance to prove myself.”

“Hey, I did you no favors, kid. You worked your butt off. You earned every penny you’re gonna make out of this baby, just like I knew you would. We’re a great team. Anybody else tried to handle all this, they’d just end up with one goddamn big
mishkadenze
on their hands. But you and me, we made it into a hit.”

Joel was an odd little man: five-feet-four, slightly chubby but not fat, with curly brown hair that appeared to have frizzed and kinked in response to a jolt of electricity. His face, which was as broad and comic as that of a clown, could stretch into an endless series of rubbery expressions. He wore blue jeans, a cheap blue workshirt—and about two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of rings. Six rings bedecked each of his hands, some with diamonds, some with emeralds, one with a large ruby, one with an even larger opal. As always, he seemed to be high on something, bursting with energy. When he finally stopped hugging Tina, he could not stand still. He shifted from foot to foot as he talked about
Magyck!
, turned this way and that, gestured expansively with his quick, gem-speckled hands, virtually doing a jig.

At forty-six he was the most successful producer in Las Vegas, with twenty years of hit shows behind him. The words “Joel Bandiri Presents” on a marquee were a guarantee of first-rate entertainment. He had plowed some of his substantial earnings into Las Vegas real estate, parts of two hotels, an automobile dealership, and a slot-machine casino downtown. He was so rich that he could retire and live the rest of his life in the high style and splendor for which he had a taste. But Joel would never stop willingly. He loved his work. He would most likely die on the stage, in the middle of puzzling out a tricky production problem.