The Vision Read online

  “I’m not a hopeless idiot,” she said. “I can stay out of your way.”

  He glared at her and said nothing.

  She said, “But what if I have a vision while I’m up there, something important? How will I let you know what’s going to happen?”

  “I’ll be here at the bottom of the steps—not more than sixty feet from you. You can reach me quickly if it’s necessary.”

  “I don’t know ...”

  “I’ll put it more bluntly,” Max said. “Either do what I say and go to the observation deck, or so help me God, I’m going to take a punch at you, lightly as I can, but hard enough to knock you out. Then I’ll carry you back to the Mercedes and call this whole thing off.”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  “Wouldn’t I?”

  She knew he wasn’t making idle threats.

  “I’ll do it because I love you,” he said. “I don’t want you to get killed.”

  “And I don’t want you killed,” she said.

  “Good. Then you’ll listen to me. We’ve both got a better chance of living through this if you’re not here to distract me when and if the shooting starts.”

  She was filled with conflicting emotions. “Will you kill him?”

  “If he forces me to.”

  “Don’t hesitate to do it,” she said. “Don’t give him a chance. He’s too clever. Shoot him the second you see him.”

  “The police might have something to say about that.”

  “To hell with the police.”

  “Mary, are you going upstairs? There’s not much time. Do we stay or do I carry you out of here? It’s entirely your decision, but you’ve got to make your mind up fast.”

  Partly because she saw a glimmer of truth in his argument, but mainly because she had no choice, she said, “All right.”

  They walked quickly to the archway. At the foot of the stairs he put his hands on her shoulders, and she raised her face to him. They kissed.

  “When you get to the top,” he said, “don’t stand around looking at the sights. Even at night someone on the ground might be able to see you. If the killer spots you, he might back off. You say we’ll have to have a showdown with him sooner or later. So we may as well do what we can to end it tonight.”

  “Who gets the flashlight?” she asked.

  “You keep it.”

  She was relieved, but she said, “You’ll be in the dark down here ... with him.”

  “If I switched on a flashlight when I heard him coming,” Max said, “I’d only be making a target of myself. Besides, if he isn’t aware I’m waiting for him, he’s not going to enter a pitch-black building and try to navigate through it without a flash. I’ll be able to see him by his own light.”

  She kissed him again, turned away, and climbed the eight flights of stairs alone.

  At the top she doused the flashlight and stood for a moment in the fierce wind, looking out at the parade of lighted boats on the harbor. Then she heeded Max’s advice and sat down with her back to the waist-high wall that bordered the deck.

  Darkness. Some light. Not much.

  Alone now. All alone.

  No. Not alone. Where did a thought like that come from? Max was nearby.

  The wind raced through the belfry, moaned like a human voice.

  She huddled in her leather coat and wished for a sweater.

  It would rain soon. She could smell it in the air.

  She pushed the read-out button on her digital wristwatch, and lighted numerals glowed blood-red in the dark.

  The eyes.

  She suddenly remembered the luminous, reddish eyes that she had seen in Berton Mitchell’s cottage. She could not conjure up a face to go with them. Just the eyes ... and the sound of wings ... and the feel of wings all over her ... and still the eyes, wild, inhuman.

  She remembered something else, too; remembered it with a jolt—a small voice at the back of her mind, whispery but intense: “I’m a demon and a vampire. I like the taste of blood. ”

  Someone had spoken those very words to her in Mitchell’s cottage twenty-four years ago.

  Who? Berton Mitchell himself? Who else could it have been?

  Although she tried to use her psychic talent to transform the vivid memory into a clairvoyant vision, she was not able to bring much light to the gloomy, penumbral images that swam and pulsed malignantly. The mysterious face of the creature that spoke to her remained just out of sight.

  But the inner voice grew louder. Somehow it swelled and thundered and overwhelmed her, yet remained a whisper. The harsh words came faster, even faster, and she was shaken by them. “I’m a demon and a vampire. I like the taste of blood. I’m a demon and a vampire, I like the taste of blood, I’m a demon and a vampire—”

  “Stop it!” she said.

  She put her hands to her ears and willed the voice from her mind. Gradually it faded. When it was gone, she slumped forward, dizzy.

  “I’ll be all right,” she said softly, urgently. “It’ll be all right. No one will die. It’ll be all right. Tonight it ends. It’ll be fine after tonight.”

  Slowly the realities of the night impressed themselves upon her once more: wind, cold, darkness.

  Distracted by the memory of those luminous eyes, she hadn’t noticed the time when she pressed the button on her watch. She pressed it again.

  7:24

  Six minutes to go.

  Heavy ebony clouds, vaguely phosphorescent at their bearded edges, sailed soundlessly toward the east. The sky was silent for long minutes, a muffling blanket tented over the earth; but now it crashed and flared again.

  The wind lifted a scrap of paper from the pavement, pasted it to the windshield of the Mercedes for a few seconds, then tore it away.

  Lou shifted uneasily, leaned into the steering wheel, squinted at the purple-black shadows that flanked the pavilion. The longer he stared, the more the darkness seemed to shimmer as if it were alive. He kept seeing movement where there was none; his eyes played a hundred tricks on him. He didn’t have the proper temperament for a sentinel. He had no patience.

  He looked at his watch.

  7:29.

  Someone rapped three times, hard, on the window to his left, inches from his head.

  He jerked around.

  A familiar face peered in at him, smiled.

  Confused and somewhat embarrassed by the terror that must have been visible on his face, Lou said, “Hey! You startled me.” He felt for the latch, opened the door, and got out of the car. “What are you doing here?”

  Too late, he saw the butcher knife.

  Lights were on in most of the downstairs rooms at 440 Ocean Hill Lane, but when Rudy Holtzman rang the bell, no one answered.

  Patmore tried the door and found it wasn’t locked. He pushed it open. Wind rushed past him and swept a stack of unopened mail off the small table in the foyer.

  Patmore couldn’t see anyone in the entranceway or in the living room beyond. He leaned through the door and shouted, “Pasternak! You in there?”

  No one answered.

  “Maybe he’s dead,” Holtzman said.

  Because he was wearing civilian clothes, Patmore took a silvery badge from the pocket of his overcoat and pinned it to his lapel. He drew his service revolver from the outer coat pocket, and, holding it with the barrel pointed at the ceiling, he stepped into the house.

  Behind him, Holtzman cleared his throat and said, “We don’t have a warrant.”

  Patmore stopped, looked back at him, and said, “Rudy, your ass, get it in here.”

  Syrupy darkness. A coppery odor. Barbed wire twisting inside him.

  His tongue hurt. He’d bitten it. A coppery taste.

  He was lying on his stomach. On the macadam parking lot. Near the Mercedes. His arms flung out in supplication. Head to one side. Ear against the ground as if listening for the approach of an enemy.

  He opened his eyes but just barely. A pair of shoes were in front of his face. Inches from him. Gucci loafers. They t
urned and walked away. Toward the pavilion. In seconds they were out of sight, but he could still hear footsteps.

  He tried to raise his head. Couldn’t.

  He tried to remember how many times he’d been stabbed in the stomach. Three, maybe four times. Could have been worse. But it was surely bad enough. He was dying. He had no strength at all; and now even his weakness was draining out of him.

  I’m such an idiot, he thought bitterly. How could I have been so careless? A damned fool. The closest I’ll ever come to a brainstorm is a light drizzle.

  Should have known who the killer was. Should have known the moment the Ouija board said the target was the queen of the boat parade. She was one of his old girl friends. Seemed to get along with a woman for only a few months. So now he was going to kill one of his old girl friends. Probably had killed others. Why? No matter why. Should have known.

  He felt as if thousands of insects were crawling inside of him, stinging and biting his guts.

  He closed his eyes and thought, I don’t want to die. I won’t!

  Then: You fool. Do you think you have a choice?

  A coppery odor. Syrupy darkness.

  It didn’t look bad.

  Inviting, actually.

  He floated in the inviting darkness. He sank down and down, away from the pain, away from everything.

  Curious, John Patmore paged through the spiral-bound notebook that lay open beside the Ouija board on the dining room table. The ruled pages were filled with neat, feminine handwriting that he supposed belonged to Mary Bergen.

  Mostly she had recorded questions and answers that appeared to be connected with the case she claimed to be investigating. In the middle of the notebook, however, there was a page that contained only five hastily scrawled words: Mary! Run for your life!

  The same message was repeated in the center of the following page. And then on a third.

  Under the third warning there were more questions and answers:

  When did I write these warnings?

  Don’t know.

  What do I mean by them?

  Don’t know.

  Who am I afraid of?

  Don’t know, don’t know, don’t know!

  Am I going crazy?

  Maybe.

  Where can I run to?

  Nowhere.

  Strange.

  It made him nervous.

  There was a note pad at the other side of the Ouija board. Patmore began leafing through it.

  A-L-L-O-U-R-Y-E-S-T-E-R-D-A-Y-S ALL OUR YESTERDAYS B-E-A-U-T-I-F-U-L

  BEAUTIFUL T-H-E-A-I-R-I-S-B-E-A-U-T-I-F-U-L THE AIR IS BEAUTIFUL

  He glanced at the Ouija board, at the trivet, then down at the note pad again. He remembered working a board with his mother when he was a boy. He began to read every other line of the transcript.

  When he finished, he thought of Erika Larsson and realized she matched the description of the girl whose death Mary Bergen had predicted. Reluctantly, he admitted to himself that perhaps the clairvoyant was not a fake after all. “Holtzman!”

  Rudy Holtzman returned from the far end of the house. “No one’s here.”

  “Max Bergen intends to kill the queen of the boat parade.”

  Blinking in surprise, Holtzman said, “What? Jenny Canning?”

  “Apparently Mary Bergen doesn’t realize her husband’s the man she’s after.” Patmore looked at his watch. “We might be too late.” He ran through the cluttered living room, out the front door.

  Marie Sanzini.

  Unbidden, the name came to Mary.

  Marie Sanzini.

  Marie Sanzini was one of the nurses killed in Anaheim—and suddenly her name was familiar. Mary knew it, but she didn’t know where she’d heard it before. Marie. Marie Sanzini. It teased her.

  She closed her eyes, tried to see the woman’s face, but it eluded her.

  She thumbed the button on her watch.

  7:33.

  No signal from Lou.

  Was tonight just another wild-goose chase?

  Standing in absolute blackness, Max began to feel that he was closed inside a coffin. Then he heard the coffee shop doors grating noisily on their hinges, and his claustrophobia was replaced by an even more elemental fear. Quietly, he stepped out of the archway into the arcade, the gun in his right hand.

  A hundred feet away a man with a flashlight came out of the curved corridor that served the restaurant and gift shops. He kept the beam pointed at the floor ahead of him; behind it he, too, was in darkness.

  Mustn’t have come across the parking lot, Max thought. Lou hadn’t blown the car horn. Must have sneaked between two buildings farther north along the harbor, and then down the boardwalk.

  Max intended to wait until they were only fifty feet apart before ordering the killer to stop. Fifty feet would give him safety, room to maneuver. And if he’s fifty feet from the corridor, Max thought, I’ll have time to pull off a few good shots if the bastard tries to dodge out of sight.

  Seventy feet now.

  Sixty.

  Fifty.

  The killer spoke first, a hoarse, whispered: “Max?”

  Shocked at being called by name, Max took one step into the darkness and asked, “Who’s there?”

  The man kept walking, hidden behind the light.

  Forty feet.

  “Who’s there?” Max demanded.

  Again, a forced whisper: “It’s me. Lou. ”

  Thirty feet.

  Max lowered his gun. “Lou? For God’s sake, it’s only a few minutes past seven-thirty. We can’t quit yet.”

  Lou said, still whispering, “Trouble. ”

  Twenty feet.

  “What trouble?” Max asked. “What do you mean?”

  Ten feet.

  Suddenly Max knew it wasn’t Lou Pasternak.

  The killer jerked the flashlight up, in the direction of Max’s voice, temporarily blinding him.

  Although for an instant he could see nothing, Max raised the gun and pulled the trigger. Once. Twice. The shots crashed like cannon fire in the huge, high-ceilinged room.

  Simultaneous with the explosion, perhaps even a fraction of a second prior to it, the flashlight spun up and up, out to the right.

  I hit him! Max thought.

  Even before he completed the thought, the knife ripped into him, rammed out of the darkness and into him, felt like the blade of a shovel, enormous, devastating, so devastating that he dropped the gun, feeling pain like nothing he’d ever known, and he realized that the killer had pitched the flashlight aside as a diversion, hadn’t really been hit at all, and the knife was withdrawn from him, and then shoved hard into him again, deep into his stomach, and he thought of Mary and his love for Mary and about how he was letting her down, and he grappled with the killer’s head in the dark, got handfuls of short hair, but the bandage came off his finger and the cut was wrenched open again and he felt that pain separate from all the others, and he cursed the sharp edge on the car’s jack, and the flashlight hit the floor ten feet away, spun around, cast lunatic shadows, and the knife ripped loose from him again, and he reached for the hand that held it, but he missed, and the blade got him a third time, explosive pain, and he staggered back, the man all over him, the blade plunging again, high this time, into his chest, and he realized that the only way he could hope to survive now was to play dead, so he fell, fell hard, and the man stumbled over him, and he heard the man’s rapid breathing, and he lay very still, and the man went for the flashlight and came back and looked down at him, stood over him, kicked him in the ribs, and he wanted to cry out but didn’t, didn’t move and didn’t breathe, even though he was screaming inside for breath, so the man turned away and went toward the arch, and then there were footsteps on the tower stairs, and, hearing them, he felt like such a useless ass, outsmarted, and he knew he wasn’t going to be able to recover his gun and climb those stairs and rescue Mary because stuff like that was for the movies, pain was pulverizing him, he was leaking all over the floor, dripping lik
e a squeezed fruit, but he told himself he had to try to help her and that he wasn’t going to die, wasn’t going to die, wasn’t going to die, even though that was exactly what he seemed to be doing.

  She stood up when the shots were fired. She went to the head of the tower stairs, and within a minute she heard footsteps.

  “Max?”

  No answer.

  “Max?”

  Just footsteps coming up.

  She backed away from the stairs, across the observation deck, until her buttocks encountered the low wall.

  Wicka-wicka-wicka!

  Marie Sanzini.

  She saw Marie’s face, and she knew it.

  Rochelle Drake. She knew Rochelle, too.

  Erika Larsson. That was the name of the fuzzy-haired blonde—the delicate, ethereal woman who had been in the vision in the mirror at Lou’s place.

  Mary had known them all along, but she had forced the knowledge into her subconscious. If she cared to pursue it, the answer was there now, waiting. But she still didn’t want to face the truth. Couldn’t face it.

  She reminded herself of her announced determination to find her own strength, her own solutions to the problems of life. Defeated already? But she couldn’t shame herself; right now, she would accept perpetual weakness and dependence and continued ignorance of the past for a chance to get out of here.

  From the stairwell: the slow ascent of footsteps.

  “No,” she said desperately. She pressed back against the low wall, eyes fixed on the entrance to the stairs. “I don’t want to know.” Her voice was high, tremulous. “Oh, God. No. Please!”

  Lightning slashed the sky, sharp and bright. Thunder cracked. At last the storm broke: scattered pellets of rain testing the earth; then a sudden downpour; stinging, eroding sheets of water slanting in from the ocean.

  The wind drove the rain under the overhang of the belfry roof. Fat droplets pummeled the back of her leather coat, soaking her long black hair. But she didn’t care if she got wet. The only thing that worried her now was the past, for it kept coming back to her against her will: