At the door to the garage, she paused and looked back at him. “More poem tonight?”
“You bet.”
She said, “Reindeer salad . . .”
“. . . reindeer soup . . .”
"... all sorts of tasty ...”
“. . . reindeer goop,” Marty finished.
“You know what, Daddy?”
“What?”
“You’re
soooo
silly.”
Giggling, Emily went into the garage. The
ca-chunk
of the door closing behind her was the most final sound Marty had ever heard.
He stared at the door, willing himself not to rush to it and jerk it open and shout at them to get back into the house.
He heard the big garage door rolling up.
The car engine turned over, chugged, caught, raced a little as Paige pumped the accelerator before shifting into reverse.
Marty hurried out of the kitchen, through the dining room, into the living room. He went to one of the front windows from which he could see the driveway. The plantation shutters were folded away from the window, so he stayed a couple of steps from the glass.
The white BMW backed down the driveway, out of the shadow of the house and into the late-November sunshine. Emily was riding up front with her mother, and Charlotte was in the rear seat.
As the car receded along the tree-lined street, Marty stepped so close to the living-room window that his forehead pressed against the cool glass. He tried to keep his family in view as long as possible, as if they were certain to survive
anything—
even falling airplanes and nuclear blasts—if he just did not let them out of his sight.
His last glimpse of the BMW was through a sudden veil of hot tears that he barely managed to repress.
Disturbed by the intensity of his emotional reaction to his family’s departure, he turned away from the window and said savagely, “What the hell’s the matter with me?”
After all, the girls were merely going to school and Paige to her office, where they went more days than not. They were following a routine that had never been dangerous before, and he had no logical reason to believe it was going to be dangerous today—or ever.
He looked at his wristwatch. 7:48.
His appointment with Dr. Guthridge was only slightly more than five hours away, but that seemed an interminable length of time. Anything could happen in five hours.
Needles to Ludlow to Daggett.
Move, move, move.
9:04 Pacific Standard Time.
Barstow. Dry bleached town in a hard dry land. Stagecoaches stopped here long ago. Railroad yards. Waterless rivers. Cracked stucco, peeling paint. Green of trees faded by a perpetual layer of dust on the leaves. Motels, fast-food restaurants, more motels.
A service station. Gasoline. Men’s room. Candy bars. Two cans of cold Coke.
Attendant too friendly. Chatty. Slow to make change. Little pig eyes. Fat cheeks. Hate him. Shut up, shut up, shut up.
Should shoot him. Should blow his head off. Satisfying. Can’t risk it. Too many people around.
On the road again. Interstate 15. West. Candy bars and Coke at eighty miles an hour. Desolate plains. Hills of sand, shale. Volcanic rock. Many-armed Joshua trees standing sentinel.
As a pilgrim to a holy place, as a lemming to the sea, as a comet on its eternal course, westward, westward, trying to out-race the ocean-seeking sun.
Marty owned five guns.
He was not a hunter or collector. He didn’t shoot skeet or take target practice for the fun of it. Unlike several people he knew, he hadn’t armed himself out of fear of social collapse—though sometimes he saw signs of it everywhere. He could not even say that he
liked
guns, but he recognized the need for them in a troubled world.
He had purchased the weapons one by one for research purposes. As a mystery novelist, writing about cops and killers, he believed he had a responsibility to know whereof he wrote. Because he was not a gun hobbyist and had a finite amount of time to research all of the many backgrounds and subjects upon which each novel touched, minor mistakes were inevitable now and then, but he felt more comfortable writing about a weapon if he had fired it.
In his nightstand he kept an unloaded Korth .38 revolver and a box of cartridges. The Korth was a handmade weapon of the highest quality, produced in Germany. After learning to use it for a novel titled
The Deadly Twilight,
he had kept it for home defense.
Several times, he and Paige had taken the girls to an indoor shooting range to witness target practice, instilling in them a deep respect for the revolver. When Charlotte and Emily were old enough, he would teach them to use a gun, though one less powerful and with less recoil than the Korth. Firearm accidents virtually always resulted from ignorance. In Switzerland, where every male citizen was required to own a firearm to defend the country in times of trouble, gun instruction was universal and tragic accidents extremely rare.
He removed the .38 from the nightstand, loaded it, and took it to the garage, where he tucked it in the glove compartment of their second car, a green Ford Taurus. He wanted it for protection to and from his one-o’clock appointment with Dr. Guthridge.
A Mossberg 12-gauge shotgun, a Colt M16 A2 rifle, and two pistols—a Beretta Model 92 and a Smith & Wesson 5904—were stored in their original boxes inside a locked metal cabinet in one corner of the garage. There were also boxes of ammunition in every caliber required. He unpacked each weapon, which had been cleaned and oiled before being put away, and loaded it.
He put the Beretta in the kitchen, in an upper cabinet beside the stove, in front of a pair of ceramic casserole dishes. The girls would not happen upon it there before he called a family conference to explain the reasons for his extraordinary precautions—if he
could
explain.
The M16 went on an upper shelf in the foyer closet just inside the front door. He put the Smith & Wesson in his office desk, in the second drawer of the right-hand drawer bank, and slipped the Mossberg under the bed in the master bedroom.
Throughout his preparations, he worried that he was deranged, arming himself against a threat that did not exist. Considering the seven-minute fugue he had experienced on Saturday, messing around with weapons was the
last
thing he should be doing.
He had no proof of impending danger. He was operating sheerly on instinct, a soldier ant mindlessly constructing fortifications. Nothing like this had ever happened to him before. By nature he was a thinker, a planner, a brooder, and only last of all a man of action. But this was a
flood
of instinctual response, and he was swept away by it.
Then, just as he finished hiding the shotgun in the master bedroom, worries about his mental condition were abruptly outweighed by another consideration. The oppressive atmosphere of his recent dream was with him again, the feeling that some terrible weight was bearing down on him at a murderous speed. The air seemed to thicken. It was almost as bad as in the nightmare. And getting worse.
God help me, he thought—and was not sure if he was asking for protection from some unknown enemy or from dark impulses in himself.
“I need . . .”
Dust devils. Dancing on the high desert.
Sunlight sparkling in broken bottles along the highway.
Fastest thing on the road. Passing cars, trucks. The landscape a blur. Scattered towns, all blurs.
Faster. Faster. As if being sucked into a black hole.
Past Victorville.
Past Apple Valley.
Through the Cajon Pass at forty-two hundred feet above sea level.
Then descending. Past San Bernardino. Onto the Riverside Freeway.
Riverside. Carona.
Through the Santa Ana Mountains.
“I need to be . . .”
South. The Costa Mesa Freeway.
The City of Orange. Tustin. In the southern California suburban maze.
Such powerful magnetism, pulling, pulling ruthlessly.
More than magnetism. Gravity. Down into the vortex of the black hole.
Switch to the Santa Ana Freeway.
Mouth dry. A bitter metallic taste. Heart pounding fiercely, pulse throbbing in his temples.
“I need to be someone.”
Faster. As if tied to a massive anchor on an endless chain, plummeting into the lightless fathoms of a bottomless ocean trench.
Past Irvine, Laguna Hills, El Toro.
Into the dark heart of the mystery.
“. . . need . . . need . . . need . . . need . . . need . . .”
Mission Viejo. This exit. Yes.
Off the freeway.
Seeking the magnet. The enigmatic attractant.
All the way from Kansas City to find the unknown, to discover his strange and wondrous future. Home. Identity. Meaning.
Turn left here, two blocks, turn right. Unfamiliar streets. But to find the way, he needs only to give himself to the power that pulls him.
Mediterranean houses. Neatly trimmed lawns. Palm shadows on pale-yellow stucco walls.
Here.
That house.
To the curb. Stop. Half a block away.
Just a house like the others. Except. Something inside. Whatever he first sensed in faraway Kansas. Whatever draws him. Something.
The attractant.
Inside.
Waiting.
A wordless cry of triumph escapes him, and he shudders violently with relief. He no longer needs to seek his destiny. Although he does not yet know what it may be, he is certain that he’s found it, and he sags in his seat, his sweaty hands slipping off the steering wheel, pleased to be at the end of the long journey.
He is more excited than he has ever been, filled with curiosity; however, released at last from the iron grip of compulsion, he loses his sense of urgency. His trip-hammering heart decelerates to a more normal number of beats per minute. His ears stop ringing, and he is able to breathe more deeply and evenly than he has for at least fifty miles. In startlingly short order, he is as outwardly calm and self-contained as he was in the big house in Kansas City, where he gratefully shared the tender intimacies of death with the man and woman in the antique Georgian bed.
By the time Marty took the keys to the Taurus off the kitchen pegboard, stepped into the garage, locked the door to the house, and pushed the button to raise the automatic garage door, his awareness of impending danger was so acute and harrowing that he was on the edge of blind panic. In the feverish thrall of paranoia, he was convinced that he was being hunted by an uncanny enemy who employed not merely the usual five senses but paranormal means, a truly crazy notion, for God’s sake, straight out of the
National Enquirer,
crazy yet inescapable because he actually could
feel
a presence . . . a violent stalking presence that was conscious of him, pressing him, probing. He felt as if a viscous fluid was squirting into his skull under tremendous pressure, compressing his brain, squeezing consciousness out of him. A very real physical effect was part of it, too, because he was as weighed down as a deep-sea diver under a crushing tonnage of water, joints aching, muscles burning, lungs reluctant to expand and accept new breath. Extreme sensitivity to every stimulant nearly incapacitated him: the hard clatter of the rising garage door was ear-splitting; intruding sunlight seared his eyes; and a musty odor—ordinarily too faint to be detected—exploded like a poisonous cloud of spores out of a corner of the garage, so pungent that it made him nauseous.
In an instant, the seizure passed, and he was in full control of himself. Although it had seemed as if his skull would burst, the internal pressure relented as abruptly as it had grown, and he no longer teetered on the brink of unconsciousness. The pain in his joints and muscles was gone, and the sunlight didn’t sting his eyes. It was like snapping out of a nightmare—except he was awake on both sides of the snap.
Marty leaned against the Taurus. He was hesitant to believe that the worst was past, waiting tensely for another inexplicable wave of paranoid terror to batter him.
He looked out from the shadowy garage at the street, which was simultaneously familiar and strange, half expecting some monstrous phantasm to rise out of the pavement or descend through the sun-drenched air, a creature inhuman and merciless, ferocious and bent upon his destruction, the invisible specter of his nightmare now made flesh.
His confidence didn’t return, and he couldn’t stop shaking, but his apprehension gradually diminished to a tolerable level, until he was able to consider whether he dared to drive. What if a similarly disorienting spasm of fear hit him while he was behind the wheel? He would be virtually oblivious of stop signs, oncoming traffic, and hazards of all kinds.
More than ever, he needed to see Dr. Guthridge.
He wondered if he should go back into the house and call a taxi. But this wasn’t New York City, streets aswarm with cabs; in southern California, the words “taxi service” were, more often than not, an oxymoron. By the time he could reach Guthridge’s office by taxi, he might have missed his appointment.
He got in the car, started the engine. With wary concentration, he backed out of the garage and into the street, handling the wheel as stiffly as a ninety-year-old man acutely aware of the brittleness of his bones and the tenuous thread of his existence.
All the way to the doctor’s office in Irvine, Marty Stillwater thought about Paige and Charlotte and Emily. By the treachery of his own weak flesh, he could be denied the satisfaction of seeing the girls become women, the pleasure of growing old at his wife’s side. Although he believed in a world beyond death where eventually he might be reunited with those he loved, life was so precious that even the promise of a blissful eternity would not compensate for the loss of a few years on this side of the veil.
From half a block away, the killer watches the car slowly back out of the garage.