Intensity Read online

  She placed the revolver on the passenger seat, within easy reach, reluctant to let it out of her hand. As an adult, she had always relied on prudence and caution to stay out of harm’s way. She hadn’t held a gun since she’d walked out on her mother at the age of sixteen. Now she could not imagine living without a weapon at her side, and she doubted that she ever would do so again—which was a development that dismayed her.

  The engine turned over at once. The tires shrieked, and she peeled rubber getting started. Smoke bloomed from the spinning wheels, but then she shot out from behind the building and rocketed past the service islands.

  The connecting road to the freeway was deserted. The motor home was out of sight.

  At this point, 101 was a four-lane divided highway, so the motor home couldn’t have gotten across the median to turn south. The killer had to have gone north, and he couldn’t have traveled far in the little lead time that he had.

  Chyna went after him.

  At four o’clock in the morning, oncoming traffic is sparse, but each set of headlights purls through the fine hairs in Edgler Vess’s ears. This is a pleasant sound, separate from the passing roar of engines and the Doppler-shift whine of other vehicles’ tires on the pavement.

  As he drives, he eats one of the Hershey bars. The silkiness of melting chocolate on his tongue reminds him of the music of Angelo Badalamenti, and the music of Badalamenti brings to mind the waxy surface of a scarlet anthurium, and the anthurium sparks an intensely sensual recollection of the cool taste and crispness of cornichons, which for several seconds completely overwhelms the actual taste of the chocolate.

  Listening to the murmur of oncoming headlights, engaged in this free association of sensory input and memory, Vess is a happy man. He experiences life far more intensely than do other people; he is a singularity. Because his mind is not cluttered with foolishness and false emotions, he is able to perceive what others cannot. He understands the nature of the world, the purpose of existence, and the truth behind the Big Lie; because of these insights, he is free, and because he is free, he is always happy.

  The nature of the world is sensation. We drift in an ocean of sensory stimuli: motion, color, texture, shape, heat, cold, natural symphonies of sound, an infinite number of scents, tastes beyond the human ability to catalogue. Nothing but sensation endures. Living things all die. Great cities do not last. Metal corrodes and stone crumbles. Over eons, continents are reshaped, whole mountain ranges vanish, and seas run dry. The planet itself will be vaporized when the sun self-destructs. But even in the void of deep space, between solar systems, in that profound vacuum that will not transmit sound, there is nevertheless light and darkness, cold, motion, shape, and the awful panorama of eternity.

  The sole purpose of existence is to open oneself to sensation and to satisfy all appetites as they arise. Edgler Vess knows that there is no such thing as a good or bad sensation—only raw sensation itself—and that every sensory experience is worthwhile. Negative and positive values are merely human interpretations of value-neutral stimuli and, therefore, are only as enduring—which is to say, as meaningless—as human beings themselves. He enjoys the most bitter taste as much as he relishes the sweetness of a ripe peach; in fact, he occasionally chews a few aspirin not to relieve a headache but to savor the incomparable flavor of the medication. When he accidentally cuts himself, he is never afraid, because he finds pain fascinating and welcomes it as merely another form of pleasure; even the taste of his own blood intrigues him.

  Mr. Vess is not sure if there is such a thing as the immortal soul, but he is unshakably certain that if souls exist, we are not born with them in the same way that we are born with eyes and ears. He believes that the soul, if real, accretes in the same manner as a coral reef grows from the deposit of countless millions of calcareous skeletons secreted by marine polyps. We build the reef of the soul, however, not from dead polyps but from steadily accreted sensations through the course of a lifetime. In Vess’s considered opinion, if one wishes to have a formidable soul—or any soul at all—one must open oneself to every possible sensation, plunge into the bottomless ocean of sensory stimuli that is our world, and experience with no consideration of good or bad, right or wrong, with no fear but only fortitude. If his belief is correct, then he himself is building what may be the most intricate, elaborated—if not to say baroque—and important soul that has ever transcended this level of existence.

  The Big Lie is that such concepts as love, guilt, and hate are real. Put Mr. Vess into a room with any priest, show them a pencil, and they will agree on its color, size, and shape. Blindfold them, hold cinnamon under their noses, and they will both identify it from the smell. But bring before them a mother cuddling her baby, and the priest will see love where Mr. Vess will see only a woman who enjoys the sensations provided by the infant—the scrubbed smell of it, the softness of its pink skin, the undeniably pleasing roundness of its simply-formed face, the musicality of its giggle; its apparent helplessness and dependence deeply satisfy her. The greatest curse of humanity’s high intelligence is that, in most members of the species, it leads to a yearning to be more than they are. All men and women, in Vess’s view, are fundamentally nothing other than animals—smart animals, indeed, but animals nonetheless; reptiles, in fact, evolved from whatever fish with legs first crawled out of the primordial sea. They are, he knows, motivated and formed solely by sensory stimuli, yet unable to admit to the primacy of physical sensation over intellect and emotion. They are even frightened of the reptile consciousness within, its needs and hungers, and they attempt to restrict its sensation seeking by using lies such as love, guilt, hate, courage, loyalty, and honor.

  This is the philosophy of Mr. Edgler Vess. He embraces his reptilian nature. The glory of him is to be found in his unmatched accretion of sensations. This is a functional philosophy, requiring its adherent to endorse neither the black-and-white values that so hamper religious persons nor the embarrassing contradictions of the situational ethics that characterize both the modern atheist and those whose religion is politics.

  Life is. Vess lives. That is the sum of it.

  Driving north on Highway 101, finishing the second of his two Hershey bars, Vess considers, not for the first time, that there is a similarity between the texture of melting chocolate and that of thickening blood.

  He recalls the restful silence of the blood pooled around Mrs. Templeton in the shower stall before he disturbed it by turning on the cold water.

  The memory of the hollow drumming in that shower makes him aware of the coldness of all the rain as yet unleashed by the pending storm toward which he is driving.

  He sees a quick blush of lightning along the face of the clouds, and he knows that it tastes like ozone.

  Above the monotonous rumble of the motor-home engine, he hears a peal of thunder, and that sound is also a vivid image in his mind: the young Asian’s eyes opening wide, wide, wide with the first crash of the shotgun.

  Even in the airless void between galaxies: the light and the darkness, color, texture, motion, shape, and pain.

  The highway rose, and the forests crowded close. On a wide curve, the headlights of the Honda swept across the flanking hills, revealing that some of the looming trees were immense spruces and pines. Soon, perhaps, redwoods.

  Chyna kept her foot down hard on the accelerator. To the best of her recollection, this was the first time she had ever broken a speed limit. She’d never been fined for a traffic violation; but she would be grateful now if a cop pulled her over.

  Her unblemished driving record resulted from her preference for moderation in all things, including the pace at which she ordinarily drove. Judging by the catastrophes that she had seen befall others, survival was closely related to moderation, and her whole life was about survival, as any nun’s life might be defined by the word faith or any politician’s by power. She seldom drank more than one glass of wine, never used drugs, engaged in no dangerous sports, ate a diet low in fat and salt and suga
r, stayed out of neighborhoods reputed to be dangerous, never expressed strong opinions, and in general was safely inconspicuous—all in the interest of getting by, hanging on, surviving.

  Against the odds, she had already survived the events of the past few hours. The killer didn’t even know that she existed. She had made it. She was free. It was over. The smart thing, the wise thing, the sane thing—the Chyna thing—to do was to let him go, just let him get away, pull off to the side of the road, stop, surrender to the shakes that she was strenuously repressing, and thank God that she was untouched and alive.

  As she drove, Chyna argued against her previous conviction, insisting that the teenage girl in the cellar, Ariel of the angelic face, wasn’t real. The photo might be of a girl whom he had already killed. The story of her incarceration might be only a sick fantasy, a psychotic’s version of a Brothers Grimm tale, Rapunzel underground, merely a mind game that he’d been playing with the two clerks.

  “Liar,” she called herself.

  The girl in the photo was alive somewhere, imprisoned. Ariel was no fantasy. Indeed, she was Chyna; they were one and the same, because all lost girls are the same girl, united by their suffering.

  She kept her foot pressed firmly on the accelerator, and the Honda crested a hill, and the aged motor home was on the long gradual downslope ahead, five hundred feet away. Her breath caught in her throat, and then she exhaled with a whispered, “Oh, Jesus.”

  She was approaching him at too great a speed. She eased off the accelerator.

  By the time she was two hundred feet from the motor home, she had matched speeds with it. She fell back farther, hoping that he hadn’t noticed her initial haste.

  He was driving between fifty and fifty-five miles per hour, a prudent pace on that highway, especially as they were now traveling on a stretch without a median strip and with somewhat narrower lanes than previously. He wouldn’t necessarily expect her to pass him, and he shouldn’t be suspicious when she remained behind; after all, at this sleepy hour, not every driver in California was in a blistering hurry or suicidally reckless.

  At this more reasonable speed, she didn’t have to concentrate as intently as before on the road ahead, and she quickly searched the immediate interior of the car in hopes of finding a cellular telephone. She was pessimistic about the chances that a night clerk at a service station would have a portable phone, but on the other hand, half the world seemed to have them now, not just salesmen and Realtors and lawyers. She checked the console box. Then the glove box. Under the driver’s seat. Unfortunately, her pessimism proved well founded.

  Southbound traffic passed in the oncoming lanes: a big rig with a lead-footed driver, a Mercedes close in its wake—then, following a long gap, a Ford. Chyna paid special attention to the cars, hoping that one of them would be a police cruiser.

  If she spotted a cop, she intended to get his attention with the car horn and by making a weaving spectacle of herself in his rearview mirror. If she was too late with the horn and if the cop didn’t look back and catch a glimpse of her reckless slalom, she would turn and pursue him, reluctantly letting the motor home out of her sight.

  She wasn’t hopeful about finding a cop anytime soon.

  All the luck seemed to be with the killer. He conducted himself with a confidence that unnerved Chyna. Perhaps that confidence was the only guarantor of his good luck—although even for one as rooted in reality as Chyna, it was easy to let superstition overwhelm her, attributing to him powers dark and supernatural.

  No. He was only a man.

  And now she had a revolver. She was no longer helpless.

  The worst was past.

  Lightning traveled the northern sky again, but this time it was not pale or diffused through cloud layers. The bolts were as bright as though the naked sun were breaking through from the other side of the night.

  In those stroboscopic flashes, the motor home seemed to vibrate, as if divine wrath would shatter it and its driver.

  In this world, however, retribution was left to mortal men and women. God was content to wait for the next life to mete out punishment; in Chyna’s view, this was His only cruel aspect, but in this was cruelty enough.

  Explosions of thunder followed the lightning. Although something above should have broken, nothing did, and the rain remained bottled higher in the night.

  She hoped to spot a sign for a highway patrol depot, where she could seek help, but none appeared. The nearest town of appreciable size, where she might be fortunate enough to find a police station or a cruising squad car, was Eureka, which was hardly a metropolis. And even Eureka was at least an hour away.

  As a child, flat under beds and curled in the backs of closets, perched on rooftops and balanced in the upper reaches of trees, in winter barns and on warm night beaches, she had hidden and waited out the passions and the rages of adults, always with dread but also with patience and with a Zen-like disconnection from the realities of time. Now impatience plagued her as never before. She wanted to see this man caught, manacled, harried to justice, hurt. Desperately she wanted this and without a single additional minute of delay, before he could kill again. Her own survival wasn’t currently at stake but that of a teenage girl whom she had never met, and she was surprised—and made uneasy—to discover that she could care so ferociously about a stranger.

  Perhaps she had always possessed that capacity and simply had never been in a situation that required recognition of it. But no. That was self-deception. Ten years ago, she would never have followed the motor home. Nor five years ago. Nor last year. Perhaps not even yesterday.

  Something had profoundly changed her, and it hadn’t been the brutality that she’d seen a few hours earlier at the Templeton house. Viscerally she was aware that this unsettling metamorphosis had been a long time coming, like the slow alteration in a river’s course—by imperceptible fractions of a degree, day after day. Then suddenly mere survival was not enough for her any longer; the final palisade of soil crumbled, the last stone shifted, and the destination of the river changed.

  She frightened herself. This reckless caring.

  More lightning, more ferocious than before, revealed redwood trees so massive that they reminded her of cathedral spires. The steeple-shattering light was followed by quakes of thunder as violent as any shift in the San Andreas. The sky fissured, and rain fell.

  In the first instant, the drops were fat and milky white in the headlights, as if the night were an extinguished chandelier in which were suspended an infinite number of rock-crystal pendants. They shattered into the windshield, against the hood, across the blacktop.

  On the highway ahead, the motor home began to disappear into the downpour.

  In seconds the drops dwindled drastically in size even as they increased in number. They became silver gray in the headlamps, and fell not straight down as before but at an angle in the punishing wind.

  Chyna switched the windshield wipers to their highest setting, but the motor home continued to slip rapidly away into the storm as visibility declined. The killer was not lowering his speed in respect of the worsening weather; he was accelerating.

  Afraid to let him out of her sight for as much as a second, Chyna closed the gap between them to about two hundred feet. She was worried that he would attach the correct significance to her maneuver and realize that somehow she was onto him.

  Southbound traffic had been sparse to begin with, but now it declined in direct proportion to the power of the escalating storm, as though most motorists had been washed off the highway.

  No headlights appeared in the rearview mirror either. The psychotic in the motor home had set a pace that no one but Chyna was likely to match.

  She felt almost as alone with him here in the open as she had been inside his abattoir on wheels.

  Then, as enough time passed to make the lonely lanes of blacktop and the dreary cataracts of rain less threatening than monotonous, the killer suddenly surprised her. With a quick touch of his brakes, without bother
ing to use a turn signal, he angled to the right onto an exit lane.

  Chyna fell back somewhat, again concerned that he would become suspicious, seeing her take the same exit. Because theirs were the only two vehicles in sight, she could not be inconspicuous. But she had no choice other than to follow him.

  By the time she reached the end of the ramp, the motor home had vanished into the rain and thin mist, but from the ramp entrance, she had seen it turn left. In fact, the two-lane road led only west, and a sign indicated that she was already within the boundaries of Humboldt Redwood State Park.

  In addition, three communities lay ahead: Honeydew, Petrolia, and Capetown. She’d never heard of any of them, and she was sure that they were little more than wide places in the road, where she would find no police.

  Leaning forward over the steering wheel, squinting through the rain-smeared windshield, she drove into the park, eager to catch up with the killer again, because he might live in or near one of those three small towns. She was wise to let him out of sight for a minute, so he wouldn’t think that she was too eager to stay on his tail. But soon she would need to reestablish visual contact before he reached the far side of the park and, perhaps thereafter, turned off the county road onto a driveway or a private lane.

  The deeper the road wound among the heaven-reaching trees, the less forcefully the rain beat against the Honda. The storm was not diminishing at all, but the huge ramparts of redwoods sheltered the pavement from the worst of the deluge.

  On this narrower, twisting route, it wasn’t possible to maintain the pace they had kept on Highway 101. Furthermore, the killer apparently had decided that he no longer needed to make good time, perhaps because he’d put what seemed a safe distance between himself and the dead men at the service station, and when Chyna caught up with him in hardly more than a minute, he was driving under the posted speed limit.

  Now, closer than she’d been before, she noticed that the motor home didn’t have license plates. California—and some other states, for all she knew—didn’t issue temporary plates for a newly purchased vehicle, and it was legal to drive without the tags until they came in the mail from the Department of Motor Vehicles. Or perhaps before going to the Templetons’ house, the killer had removed his plates rather than risk a witness with a good memory.

  Easing off the accelerator, Chyna glanced at the speedometer—and spotted a red warning light. The fuel-gauge needle was below the EMPTY mark.

  She had no idea how long the warning light had been burning, because she’d been concentrating intently on the motor home and the dangers of the slick pavement. The car might have a gallon or two in the tank—or even now be running on its last pint.

  Trailing the killer to his home base was no longer an option.

  The meaning of redwoods is not grandeur, beauty, peace, or the timelessness of nature. The meaning of redwoods is power.

  As he drives, Edgler Vess rolls down the window beside him and draws deep breaths of the cold air, which is rich with the fragrance of redwoods, which is a scent of power. This power flows into him with the fragrance, and his own power is thus enhanced.

  Redwoods are power because their great size is unmatched by any other trees, because they are ancient—many of these very specimens dating back centuries before the birth of Jesus Christ—because their extraordinary bark, as thick as armor and high in tannin, makes them all but impervious to insects, disease, and fire. They are power because they endure while all around them dies; men and animals pass among them and pass forever away; birds alight in their high branches and seem freer than anything rooted in rock and soil, but eventually, in a sudden quietness of the heart, the birds swoon off the sturdy limbs and thump to the ground or plummet from the sky, and the trees still soar; on the shadowed floors of these groves, sun-shy ferns and rhododendrons flourish season after season, but their immortality is illusory, for they too die, and new generations of their species rise in the decomposing remains of the old. Christ expired on a cross of dogwood, the prince of peace and prophet of love, but in the span of His life, not one of these trees had been brought down by any storm; though they cared not about peace and knew nothing of love, they had endured. Busily engaged on his endless harvests, Death casts frenetic shadows among the indifferent redwoods, a ceaseless flickering that dances across their massive trunks with no effect, like the dark equivalent of leaping firelight on hearthstones.

  Power is living while others inevitably perish. Power is cool indifference to their suffering. Power is taking nourishment from the deaths of others, just as the mighty redwoods draw sustenance from the perpetual decomposition of what once lived, but lived only briefly, around them. This is also part of the philosophy of Edgler Foreman Vess.

  Through the open window, he breathes in the scent of redwoods, and the molecules of their fragrance adhere to the surface cells of his lungs, and the power of millennia is conveyed therefrom into his freshly oxygenated blood, pumps through his heart, reaches to every extremity of him, filling him with strength and energy.

  Power is God, God is nature, nature is power, and the power is in him.

  His power is ever increasing.

  If he worshiped, he would be an ardent pantheist, committed to the belief that all things are sacred, every tree and every flower and every blade of grass, every bird and every beetle. The world is full of pantheists these days; he would be at home among them if he were to join their ranks. When everything is sacred, nothing is. For him, that is the beauty of pantheism. If the life of a child is equal to the life of a bluegill or a barn owl, then Vess may kill attractive little girls as casually as he might crush a scorpion underfoot, with no greater moral offense though with considerably more pleasure.

  But he worships nothing.

  As he rounds a curve into a straightaway flanked by redwoods of even greater girth than any he has previously seen, stark white bones of lightning crack through the black skin of the sky. A roar of thunder like a bellow of rage shudders the air.

  Rain washes the smell of lightning down through the night. Two scents of power, lightning and redwoods—electricity and time, fierce heat and stolid endurance—are offered to him now, and he inhales deeply with pleasure.

  Taking this county road through the redwoods, along the coast, and reconnecting with Highway 101 south of Eureka will add between half an hour and an hour to his travel time, depending on the pace he sets and the strength of the storm. But as eager as he is to get home to Ariel, he could not have resisted the power of the redwoods.

  Headlights appear behind him, visible in the angled side mirror. A car. For nearly an hour, one followed him on the freeway, hanging at a distance. This must be a different vehicle, because this driver is more aggressive than the one on the freeway, closing the distance between them at high speed.

  Recklessly, the car—a Honda—pulls around the motor home, into the lane reserved for oncoming traffic, though this is not a passing zone. There is no other traffic, and they are on a straightaway, but the Honda has insufficient distance to complete the maneuver before the next blind turn in the road, especially on the treacherous rain-slick blacktop.

  Vess reduces speed.

  The racing Honda pulls alongside him.

  Looking down through the windshield of the car, Vess has barely a glimpse of the person behind the steering wheel, because the rain and the high-speed windshield wipers inhibit his view. Nothing more than a suggestion of a deep-red shirt or sweater. A pale hand on the wheel. The wrist is slender enough to indicate that the driver is most likely a woman. She appears to be alone. Then the car moves far enough forward so that Vess is looking down on the roof, and the windshield is out of sight.