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  hissed against the blacktop and crunched under his shoes.

  He knew that the trip had been a waste and that his effort to help Honell had been ineffective. The sheriff’s department would probably treat it like just another crank call.

  When he got home, he parked in the driveway, afraid that the clatter of the garage door would wake Regina. His scalp prickled when he got out of the car. He stood for a minute, surveying the shadows along the house, around the shrubbery, under the trees. Nothing.

  Lindsey was pouring a cup of coffee for him when he walked into the kitchen.

  He took it, sipped gratefully at the hot brew. Suddenly he was colder than he had been while standing out in the night chill.

  “What do you think?” she asked worriedly. “Did they take you seriously?”

  “Pissing in the wind,” he said.

  Vassago was still driving the pearl-gray Honda belonging to Renata Desseux, the woman he had overpowered in the mall parking lot on Saturday night and later added to his collection. It was a fine car and handled well on the twisting roads as he drove down the canyon from Honell’s place, heading for more populated areas of Orange County.

  As he rounded a particularly sharp curve, a patrol car from the sheriffs department swept past him, heading up the canyon. Its siren was not blaring, but its emergency beacons splashed red and blue light on the shale banks and on the gnarled branches of the overhanging trees.

  He divided his attention between the winding road ahead and the dwindling taillights of the patrol car in his rearview mirror, until it rounded another bend upslope and vanished. He was sure the cop was speeding to Honell’s. The unanswered, interminably ringing telephone, which had interrupted his interrogation of the author, was the trigger that had set the sheriffs department in motion, but he could not figure how or why.

  Vassago did not drive faster. At the end of Silverado Canyon, he turned south on Santiago Canyon Road and maintained the legal speed limit as any good citizen was expected to do.

  8

  In bed in the dark, Hatch felt his world crumbling around him. He was going to be left with dust.

  Happiness with Lindsey and Regina was within his grasp. Or was that an illusion? Were they infinitely beyond his reach?

  He wished for an insight that would give him a new perspective on these apparently supernatural events. Until he could understand the nature of the evil that had entered his life, he could not fight it.

  Dr. Nyebern’s voice spoke softly in his mind: I believe evil is a very real force, an energy quite apart from us, a presence in the world.

  He thought he could smell a lingering trace of smoke from the heat-browned pages of Arts American. He had put the magazine in the desk in the den downstairs, in the drawer with a lock. He had added the small key to the ring he carried.

  He had never locked anything in the desk before. He was not sure why he had done so this time. Protecting evidence, he’d told himself. But evidence of what? The singed pages of the magazine proved nothing to anyone about anything.

  No. That was not precisely true. The existence of the magazine proved, to him if to no one else, that he wasn’t merely imagining and hallucinating everything that was happening to him. What he had locked away, for his own peace of mind, was indeed evidence. Evidence of his sanity.

  Beside him, Lindsey was also awake, either uninterested in sleep or unable to find a way into it. She said, “What if this killer...”

  Hatch waited. He didn’t need to ask her to finish the thought, for he knew what she was going to say. After a moment she said just what he expected:

  “What if this killer is aware of you as much as you’re aware of him? What if he comes after you... us ... Regina?”

  “Tomorrow we’re going to start taking precautions.”

  “What precautions?”

  “Guns, for one thing.”

  “Maybe this isn’t something we can handle ourselves.”

  “We don’t have any choice.”

  “Maybe we need police protection.”

  “Somehow I don’t think they’ll commit a lot of manpower to protect a guy just because he claims to have a supernatural bond with a psychotic killer.”

  The wind that had harried laurel leaves across the shopping-center parking lot now found a loose brace on a section of rain gutter and worried it. Metal creaked softly against metal.

  Hatch said, “I went somewhere when I died, right?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Purgatory, Heaven, Hell—those are the basic possibilities for a Catholic, if what we say we believe turns out to be true.”

  “Well... you’ve always said you had no near-death experience.”

  “I didn’t. I can’t remember anything from... the Other Side. But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t there.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “Maybe this killer isn’t an ordinary man.”

  “You’re losing me, Hatch.”

  “Maybe I brought something back with me.”

  “Back with you?”

  “From wherever I was while I was dead.”

  “Something?”

  Darkness had its advantages. The superstitious primitive within could speak of things that would seem too foolish to voice in a well-lighted place.

  He said, “A spirit. An entity.”

  She said nothing.

  “My passage in and out of death might have opened a door somehow,” he said, “and let something through.”

  “Something,” she said again, but with no note of inquiry in her voice, as there had been before. He sensed that she knew what he meant—and did not like the theory.

  “And now it’s loose in the world. Which explains its link to me—and why it might kill people who anger me.”

  She was silent awhile. Then: “If something was brought back, it’s evidently pure evil. What—are you saying that when you died, you went to Hell and this killer piggy-backed with you from there?”

  “Maybe. I’m no saint, no matter what you think. After all, I’ve got at least Cooper’s blood on my hands.”

  “That happened after you died and were brought back. Besides, you don’t share in the guilt for that.”

  “It was my anger that targeted him, my anger—”

  “Bullshit,” Lindsey said sharply. “You’re the best man I’ve ever known. If housing in the afterlife includes a Heaven and Hell, you’ve earned the apartment with a better view.”

  His thoughts were so dark, he was surprised that he could smile. He reached under the sheets, found her hand, and held it gratefully. “I love you, too.”

  “Think up another theory if you want to keep me awake and interested.”

  “Let’s just make a little adjustment to the theory we already have. What if there’s an afterlife, but it isn’t ordered like anything theologians have ever described. It wouldn’t have to be either Heaven or Hell that I came back from. Just another place, stranger than here, different, with unknown dangers.”

  “I don’t like that much better.”

  “If I’m going to deal with this thing, I have to find a way to explain it. I can’t fight back if I don’t even know where to throw my punches.”

  “There’s got to be a more logical explanation,” she said.

  “That’s what I tell myself. But when I try to find it, I keep coming back to the illogical.”

  The rain gutter creaked. The wind soughed under the eaves and called down the flue of the master-bedroom fireplace.

  He wondered if Honell was able to hear the wind wherever he was—and whether it was the wind of this world or the next.

  Vassago parked directly in front of Harrison’s Antiques at the south end of Laguna Beach. The shop occupied an entire Art Deco building. The big display windows were unlighted as Tuesday passed through midnight, becoming Wednesday.

  Steven Honell had been unable to tell him where the Harrisons lived, and a quick check of the telephone book turned up no listed number for them. The w
riter had known only the name of their business and its approximate location on Pacific Coast Highway.

  Their home address was sure to be on file somewhere in the store’s office. Getting it might be difficult. A decal on each of the big Plexiglas windows and another on the front door warned that the premises were fitted with a burglar alarm and protected by a security company.

  He had come back from Hell with the ability to see in the dark, animal-quick reflexes, a lack of inhibitions that left him capable of any act or atrocity, and a fearlessness that made him every bit as formidable an adversary as a robot might have been. But he could not walk through walls, or transform himself from flesh into vapor into flesh again, or fly, or perform any of the other feats that were within the powers of a true demon. Until he had earned his way back into Hell either by acquiring a perfect collection in his museum of the dead or by killing those he had been sent here to destroy, he possessed only the minor powers of the demon demimonde, which were insufficient to defeat a burglar alarm.

  He drove away from the store.

  In the heart of town, he found a telephone booth beside a service station. Despite the hour, the station was still pumping gasoline, and the outdoor lighting was so bright that Vassago was forced to squint behind his sunglasses.

  Swooping around the lamps, moths with inch-long wings cast shadows as large as ravens on the pavement.

  The floor of the telephone booth was littered with cigarette butts. Ants teamed over the corpse of a beetle.

  Someone had taped a hand-lettered OUT OF ORDER notice to the coin box, but Vassago didn’t care because he didn’t intend to call anyone. He was only interested in the phone book, which was secured to the frame of the booth by a sturdy chain.

  He checked “Antiques” in the Yellow Pages. Laguna Beach had a lot of businesses under that heading; it was a regular shoppers’ paradise. He studied their space ads. Some had institutional names like International Antiques, but others were named after their owners, as was Harrison’s Antiques.

  A few used both first and last names, and some of the space ads also included the full names of the proprietors because, in that business, personal reputation could be a drawing card. Robert O. Loffman Antiques in the Yellow Pages cross-referenced neatly with a Robert O. Loffman in the white pages, providing Vassago with a street address, which he committed to memory.

  On his way back to the Honda, he saw a bat swoop out of the night. It arced down through the blue-white glare from the service-station lights, snatching a fat moth from the air in mid-flight, then vanished back up into the darkness from which it had come. Neither predator nor prey made a sound.

  Loffman was seventy years old, but in his best dreams he was eighteen again, spry and limber, strong and happy. They were never sex dreams, no bosomy young women parting their smooth thighs in welcome. They weren’t power dreams, either, no running or jumping or leaping off cliffs into wild adventures. The action was always mundane: a leisurely walk along a beach at twilight, barefoot, the feel of damp sand between his toes, the froth on the incoming waves sparkling with reflections of the dazzling purple-red sunset; or just sitting on the grass in the shadow of a date palm on a summer afternoon, watching a hummingbird sip nectar from the bright blooms in a bed of flowers. The mere fact that he was young again seemed miracle enough to sustain a dream and keep it interesting.

  At the moment he was eighteen, lying on a big bench swing on the front porch of the Santa Ana house in which he had been born and raised. He was just swinging gently and peeling an apple that he intended to eat, nothing more, but it was a wonderful dream, rich with scents and textures, more erotic than if he had imagined himself in a harem of undressed beauties.

  “Wake up, Mr. Loffman.”

  He tried to ignore the voice because he wanted to be alone on that porch. He kept his eyes on the curled length of peel that he was paring from the apple.

  “Come on, you old sleepyhead.”

  He was trying to strip the apple in one continuous ribbon of peel.

  “Did you take a sleeping pill or what?”

  To Loffman’s regret, the front porch, the swing, the apple and paring knife dissolved into darkness. His bedroom.

  He struggled awake and realized an intruder was present. A barely visible, spectral figure stood beside the bed.

  Although he’d never been the victim of a crime and lived in as safe a neighborhood as existed these days, age had saddled Loffman with feelings of vulnerability. He had started keeping a loaded pistol next to the lamp at his bedside. He reached for it now, his heart pounding hard as he groped along the cool marble surface of the 18th-century French ormolu chest that served as his nightstand. The gun was gone.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” the intruder said. “I didn’t mean to scare you. Please calm down. If it’s the pistol you’re after, I saw it as soon as I came in. I have it now.”

  The stranger could not have seen the gun without turning on the light, and the light would have awakened Loffman sooner. He was sure of that, so he kept groping for the weapon.

  From out of the darkness, something cold and blunt probed against his throat. He twitched away from it, but the coldness followed him, pressing insistently, as if the specter tormenting him could see him clearly in the gloom. He froze when he realized what the coldness was. The muzzle of the pistol. Against his Adam’s apple. It slid slowly upward, under his chin.

  “If I pulled the trigger, sir, your brains would be all over the headboard. But I do not need to hurt you, sir. Pain is quite unnecessary as long as you cooperate. I only want you to answer one important question for me.”

  If Robert Loffman actually had been eighteen, as in his best dreams, he could not have valued the remainder of his time on earth more highly than he did at seventy, in spite of having far less of it to lose now. He was prepared to hold onto life with all the tenacity of a burrowing tick. He would answer any question, perform any deed to save himself, regardless of the cost to his pride and dignity. He tried to convey all of that to the phantom who held the pistol under his chin, but it seemed to him that he produced a gabble of words and sounds that, in sum, had no meaning whatsoever.

  “Yes, sir,” the intruder said, “I understand, and I appreciate your attitude. Now correct me if I am wrong, but I suppose the antique business, being relatively small when compared to others, is a tight community here in Laguna. You all know each other, see each other socially, you’re friends.”

  Antique business? Loffman was tempted to believe that he was still asleep and that his dream had become an absurd nightmare. Why would anyone break into his house in the dead of night to talk about the antique business at gunpoint?

  “We know each other, some of us are good friends, of course, but some bastards in this business are thieves,” Loffman said. He was babbling, unable to stop, hopeful that his obvious fear would testify to his truthfulness, whether this was nightmare or reality. “They’re nothing more than crooks with cash registers, and you aren’t friends with that kind if you have any self-respect at all.”

  “Do you know Mr. Harrison of Harrison’s Antiques?”

  “Oh, yes, very well, I know him quite well, he’s a reputable dealer, totally trustworthy, a nice man.”

  “Have you been to his house?”

  “His house? Yes, certainly, on three or four occasions, and he’s been here to mine.”

  “Then you must have the answer to that important question I mentioned, sir. Can you give me Mr. Harrison’s address and clear directions to it?”

  Loffman sagged with relief upon realizing that he would be able to provide the intruder with the desired information. Only fleetingly, he considered that he might be putting Harrison in great jeopardy. But maybe it was a nightmare, after all, and revelation of the information would not matter. He repeated the address and directions several times, at the intruder’s request.

  “Thank you, sir. You’ve been most helpful. Like I said, causing you any pain is quite unnecessary. But I’m going to hurt yo
u anyway, because I enjoy it so much.”

  So it was a nightmare after all.

  Vassago drove past the Harrison house in Laguna Niguel. Then he circled the block and drove past it again.

  The house was a powerful attractant, similar in style to all of the other houses on the street but so different from them in some indescribable but fundamental way that it might as well have been an isolated structure rising out of a featureless plain. Its windows were dark, and the landscape lighting had evidently been turned off by a timer, but it could not have been more of a beacon to Vassago if light had blazed from every window.

  As he drove slowly past the house a second time, he felt its immense gravity pulling him. His immutable destiny involved this place and the vital woman who lived within.

  Nothing he saw suggested a trap. A red car was parked in the driveway instead of in the garage, but he couldn’t see anything ominous about that. Nevertheless, he decided to circle the block a third time to give the house another thorough looking over.

  As he turned the corner, a lone silvery moth darted through his headlight beams, refracting them and briefly glowing like an ember from a great fire. He remembered the bat that had swooped into the service-station lights to snatch the hapless moth out of the air, eating it alive.

  Long after midnight, Hatch had finally dozed off. His sleep was a deep mine, where veins of dreams flowed like bright ribbons of minerals through the otherwise dark walls. None of the dreams was pleasant, but none of them was grotesque enough to wake him.

  Currently he saw himself standing at the bottom of a ravine with ramparts so steep they could not be climbed. Even if the slopes had risen at an angle that allowed ascent, they would not have been scalable because they were composed of a curious, loose white shale that crumbled and shifted treacherously. The shale radiated a soft calcimine glow, which was the only light, for the sky far above was black and moonless, deep but starless. Hatch moved restlessly from one end of the long narrow ravine to the other, then back again, filled with apprehension but unsure of the cause of it.

  Then he realized two things that made the fine hairs tingle on the back of his neck. The white shale was not composed of rock and the shells of millions of ancient sea creatures; it was made of human skeletons, splintered and compacted but recognizable here and there, where the articulated bones of two fingers survived compression or where what seemed a small animal’s burrow proved to be the empty eye socket in a skull. He became aware, as well, that the sky was not empty, that something circled in it, so black that it blended with the heavens, its leathery wings working silently. He could not see it, but he could feel its gaze, and he sensed a hunger in it that could never be satisfied.

  In his troubled sleep, Hatch turned and murmured anxious, wordless sounds into his pillow.

  Vassago checked the car clock. Even without its confirming numbers, he knew instinctively that dawn was less than an hour away.

  He no longer could be sure he had enough time to get into the house, kill the husband, and take the woman back to his hideaway before sunrise. He could not risk getting caught in the open in daylight. Though he would not shrivel up and turn to dust like the living dead in the movies, nothing as dramatic as that, his eyes were so sensitive that his glasses would not provide adequate protection from full sunlight. Dawn would render him nearly blind, dramatically affecting his ability to drive and bringing him to the attention of any policeman who happened to spot his weaving, halting progress. In that debilitated condition, he might have difficulty dealing with the cop.

  More important, he might lose the woman. After appearing so often in his dreams, she had become an object of intense desire. Before, he had seen acquisitions of such quality that he had been convinced they would complete his collection and earn him immediate readmission to the savage world of eternal darkness and hatred to which he belonged—and he had been wrong. But none of those others had appeared to him in dreams. This woman was the true jewel in the crown for which he had been seeking. He must avoid taking possession of her prematurely, only to lose her before he could draw the life from her at the base of the giant Lucifer and wrench her cooling corpse into whatever configuration seemed most symbolic of her sins and weaknesses.

  As he cruised past the house for the third time, he considered leaving