Relentless Page 6

  A premonition chilled mere anxiety into a colder fear: I knew that I would recognize my face in a jar. And when I met my dead eyes, I would cease to exist in either the dream or the waking world, but would forevermore be only a severed head drowned in formaldehyde.

  As I tried to run out of the dream, I strove not to look at the jars, but my eyes were repeatedly drawn to them. When the lights went off, the darkness was a blessing until, as I blindly progressed, I heard Shearman Waxx speak nearby: “Doom.”

  With my breath caught in my throat, I sat up in bed, in a room as dark as the lightless maze of the nightmare library. For a moment, I half believed that Waxx had spoken not in the dream but here in the waking world.

  I exhaled, inhaled, and oriented myself by the feel of the entangling sheets, by the residual smell of fabric softener, by the familiar faint whistle of forced air coming through the heating vent, by the palest blush of moonlight at the edges of the heavy draperies.

  The room was blacker than it should have been. The green numbers on my digital clock were not lit. The clock on Penny’s nightstand had been extinguished, as well.

  The luminescent numerals of the alarm-system keypad should have been visible on the wall, only a few steps from my side of the bed. They were not glowing.

  Furthermore, a tiny green indicator lamp should have confirmed that the system was powered. And a red indicator of the same size should have noted that the alarm was set on HOME mode, which meant that the motion detectors were not engaged but that all of the window and door circuits were activated to warn of any attempted intrusion. Neither the green nor the red was lit.

  The power-company service had failed. Perhaps a drunk driver had sheared off a utility pole. A transformer might have blown up. Such interruptions were rare and usually short-lived, nothing to worry about.

  As the last clouds of sleep lifted from my mind, I remembered that the security system included a backup battery that should keep it operative for three hours. And when the main power supply was cut off, as the system switched to battery, a recorded voice should announce “power failure” throughout the house.

  Apparently, the battery had gone dead. The recorded voice had never spoken.

  I cautioned myself not to leap to conclusions. Coincidence is seldom credible in a work of fiction, but it is a primary thread in the tapestry of real life. An accident at a power station was a more likely explanation than was the return of the bow-tied critic.

  From somewhere in the pitch-black bedroom, Shearman Waxx said again, “Doom.”

  The temptation was great to believe that I had passed from the dream of the library into a dream of blindness and had not yet come awake.

  As a writer, I succeed by deceiving readers into accepting that the story I’m telling is as true as their lives, that what happens to my characters should intellectually and emotionally involve them no less than they should be concerned about their real-world neighbors. But I have never been good at self-deception.

  I was awake, all right, and Waxx stood or crouched, or roamed, somewhere in the bedroom.

  My first impulse was to scream like a little girl. Fortunately, I repressed the urge. Waxx was one of those critics with crocodile genes; he would find most delicious any prey that was saturated with the pheromones of fear.

  My nightstand—like the one on the farther side of the bed—was an antique Chinese chest with numerous small drawers of different sizes. In the top drawer closest to me, I kept a flashlight, which allowed me to find my way to the bathroom at night without switching on a lamp and waking Penny.

  Each evening, before going to bed, I pulled this drawer partway out of the nightstand, so I could get the flashlight without making a disturbance. I am an incompetent handyman but a considerate husband.

  Now I groped in the darkness, found the open drawer, and reached into it. The flashlight wasn’t there.

  I knew I had not misplaced it earlier. Waxx must have removed it before he woke me.

  Penny also kept a flashlight in a drawer of her nightstand. Most likely Waxx had confiscated that one, as well.

  Evidently, he had a flashlight of his own, with which he had stealthily prowled the room as we slept. If I wanted one, I would have to take his away from him.

  Although I fully understood the wisdom of owning a gun, I didn’t keep one in the house. Penny had been raised in a virtual armory and had no objection to firearms. But I had a covenant with Death to spare others as once I had been spared.

  I assumed Shearman Waxx possessed a gun—as well as a butcher knife, a switchblade, an axe, a chain saw, a power drill with an assortment of bits, and a wood chipper.

  Within reach, I had a couple of pillows and a bedside lamp.

  As far as I could tell, Penny still slept. I saw no value in waking her at once.

  Until Waxx switched on his light and revealed his position, he and I were equally blind. Because I knew the bedroom so much better than he did, the darkness counted slightly to my advantage.

  He had heard me sit up in bed and gasp for breath when I broke out of my dream. But the noises I’d made might as likely have been those of a man thrashing at the sheets and turning over in his troubled sleep.

  The first doom seemed to me to have been spoken in the lightless aisles of the dream library, and Waxx could not be sure that I heard him say it the second time.

  Letting out a soft groan, then murmuring wordlessly, I pretended to be negotiating a nightmare. Using this anxious muttering as cover, I eased off the bed and, falling silent, crouched beside it.

  Breathing through my open mouth, I made no slightest sound. If I decided to move, I felt confident that my pajamas were too soft to betray me with a rustle.

  Although silent to the intruder’s ears, I was not quiet to my own. My heart knocked like a savage fist upon all the doors of my defenses, chasing out my expectations of civilization and letting in the fear of anarchy and barbaric violence.

  If Waxx made subtle sounds, I was not certain that I could hear them above this inner drumming. The rhythmic pressure waves of hard-pumped blood raised surf sounds in the nautilus turns of my inner ears.

  The longer Waxx waited to speak again, the more I wondered what his game might be. I had no doubt that he had come here to harm us. That he wanted first to terrorize us seemed obvious, as well. But his boldness, the risks he took, and his eerie patience in the dark gave me the impression that his purpose was more complex than the psychotic thrill of torment and murder.

  Before he spoke again, and especially before he switched on a flashlight, I needed to put some distance between myself and the bed. He would expect to find me there, and when he did not, when his light revealed his position but not mine, I might be able to catch him off guard, rushing at him from the side or from behind as he initially regarded the tangle of abandoned sheets.

  Crouched and barefoot, in a slow-motion shamble that required tension in every muscle and that tested balance, I ape-walked toward where I expected to find an armchair. It ought to be just to the right of that point on the wall where the alarm-system keypad should have been softly glowing.

  Shoulders slumped, arms low, I let my fingertips slide lightly, soundlessly across the carpet. If a knee buckled or a muscle cramped, I could steady myself with my hands.

  I feared making a sound less than I dreaded colliding with Waxx in the blackness. My strategy would then be worthless, though I would still surprise him and might be able to overpower him before he shot or stabbed me.

  I am five feet eleven and in acceptable physical condition. But I did not delude myself that his formidable bulk would prove to be flab. He would be difficult to take down.

  In retrospect, I realize that in my desperation, I thought I could plot the scene as if I were writing fiction. Suspense novels are not my genre. Fate had dropped me into a real-life tale of peril, however, and because I lacked tough-guy experience, I had fallen back on imagination and craftsmanship to sculpt this narrative toward a twist that would not leave m
e dead in an early chapter.

  Blinded, I nevertheless found the armchair where I expected it would be, which gave me hope that I remained the protagonist and had not become a supporting character destined for a bloody end in Part 1.

  Elsewhere in the room, his position impossible to fix from a single word, the critic said quietly, “Hack.”

  He might be describing what he intended to do to me with an axe or cleaver, but I suspected that instead the word was intended as an insult, a judgment of my writing skills.

  Separating the first armchair from another was an art-deco sideboard. The highly lacquered amboina wood felt cool against my fingertips as I aped onward.

  Our sleigh bed stood against the east wall of the room. Logic suggested that Waxx had positioned himself at the foot of the bed, where his flashlight, when he switched it on, could cover both me and Penny.

  Now near the south wall, I hoped to circle to the west, where I most likely would be behind him when at last he revealed himself.

  Wondering at Waxx’s failure to take quick and deadly action after penetrating the house so effectively, I halted at the second armchair, suddenly fearful of proceeding. I began to suspect that I had missed something, that the implicit meaning of the moment was different from what I imagined it to be.

  This happens often when writing fiction. Outlines are a waste of time. If you give your characters free will, they will grow in ways you never anticipated, and they will take the story places you could not have predicted, raising themes you might or might not have intended to explore. Characters shape events; events illuminate the characters. The people in a story begin as seeds, become buds, and blossom in ways that surprise the author, precisely as real people frequently surprise him with their intentions and capacities.

  As I crouched by the second armchair, Shearman Waxx electrocuted me.

  Out of the darkness, something thrust against the nape of my neck—two metal pegs, positive and negative poles. Before I could flinch away, hot needles stitched the length of my spine and then sewed through every branch of my peripheral nervous system to toes, to fingertips, to scalp.

  My eyes rolled back in my skull, dazzled by an inner vision of gold and crimson fireworks, and I dropped out of my crouch. Facedown on the carpet, I twitched as a puppeteer jerked on the threads that the needles had sewn through me.

  The words that came from me were none that I intended, slurred and meaningless.

  Although coherent speech eluded me, I clearly heard Penny, who had been awakened by my cry.

  “Cubby?” The click-click of her lamp switch. “What’s happening?”

  I resisted the twitching, but spasmed all the more for my resistance.

  Yet I marshalled the clarity of mind and tongue to tell her what seemed most important: “He can see in the dark.”

  The bronze hardware on her nightstand rattled as Penny jerked open drawers in search of the flashlight that Waxx had confiscated.

  She let out a thin shriek, like the plaint a bird in flight might issue if pierced by an arrow. The hard knock of her fall suggested that she might have struck her head on furniture.

  The physical effects of the shock faded quickly. The twitching diminished to a nervous trembling, which was not a consequence of extreme voltage but an expression of my terror at Penny’s suffering.

  From full collapse, I rose onto all fours, then to my knees, my mind a jigsaw-puzzle box full of fragmented thoughts from which I could not fit together a defensive tactic.

  The word Taser sizzled into my mind. And Waxx Tasered me again.

  I fell from my knees onto my right side. My skull rapped the floor. I bit my tongue, tasted blood.

  For a moment, I thought Waxx was tearing at my pajama shirt, but the clawing hands were mine. I tried to close them into fists.

  Stuttering Penny’s name, infuriated by my inability to protect her, I tried to jackknife off my side, onto my knees. The post-shock spasms facilitated this change of position. Probing the darkness, I found an armchair, used it for support, got to my feet.

  I cursed myself that I was not prepared for this—not for Waxx in particular, but for someone lethal in the night. I knew well the capacity for cruelty in the human heart.

  A groan of convulsive misery came from Penny as she was Tasered a second time.

  A homicidal rage, of which I would never have imagined myself capable, focused me. Murderous fury more than terror cracked the dam of adrenaline, flooding me with sudden strength, animal determination.

  I moved unsteadily toward where I thought Penny might be.

  As invisible as the wind—and like the wind revealed only by his effects—Waxx came in from my left side, stinging me in the neck. The shocks were no longer hot but as cold as driven sleet.

  Although I struck him, it seemed to be a glancing blow. My legs buckled, and I knew I would not get another chance to hit him.

  As I struggled to stay on my hands and knees, he bent down and Tasered me a fourth time, again on the nape of the neck.

  I lay prone and shaking, a coiled snake of nausea flexing in my gut. My mouth flooded with saliva, and I thought I would vomit.

  He Tasered me again before the previous shock had begun to wear off. I wondered if the effects were cumulative, if enough of them could fry the nerves, induce a stroke, cause death.

  He spoke only one more word to me: “Scribbler.”

  For a while, I seemed to be floating in the blackness of deep space, the floor under me no longer a floor but a spiral galaxy slowly turning.

  My sense of time had been temporarily short-circuited. When I discovered that I had the capacity to crawl, and in fact to rise to my feet, I did not know whether one minute or ten had passed since my last Tasering.

  I was surprised to be alive. If, like a cat, I had nine lives, I had used up eight of them one night a long time ago.

  The taste of blood remained from my bitten tongue, yet when I called Penny’s name, my voice broke as if my mouth and throat were not only dry but desiccated.

  She did not answer.

  Waxx must have taken Penny with him, to what purpose I could imagine, to what end I refused to consider.

  One moment more of blindness was intolerable. Faint moonglow at the edges of the blackout draperies led me to the windows. I found the cord, revealed the glass, the night, the looming lunar face.

  “Cubby?”

  Either she had been unconscious when I called to her or she had not heard me because my voice was even weaker than I thought.

  After the unrelieved gloom, the merest moonlight was sunshine to my eyes, and I saw her pulling herself to her feet at the dresser.

  I went to her, speechless with gratitude. Her breath against my throat, the graceful curve of her back under my right hand, and the sweet smell of her hair were poetry that words could never equal.

  She said the only thing worth saying: “Thank God.”

  On the nightstands, the digital clocks came back to life and began flashing to indicate that they needed to be reset.

  The alarm keypad brightened. A yellow indicator light announced a functioning system, and a red bulb confirmed that it was armed.

  The recorded voice that reported on status changes remained silent, as though the alarm had never been disabled.

  Neither Penny nor I said “Milo,” but we hurried to his room, switching on lights as we went.

  As my hand closed on the knob, a growl rose from the far side of the door. Lassie greeted us with raised hackles and bared teeth. As if we were not the real Penny and Cubby but evil replicants, she continued to threaten violence if we crossed the threshold.

  Dogs have a sense of shame, in fact stronger than most people do these days. Penny played to it, disappointment in her voice: “Growling at me but not one bark to warn us about that lunatic?”

  Lassie stopped growling but continued to bare her teeth.

  “Not one bark for the lunatic?” Penny repeated.

  The dog’s flews quivered with what seemed
to be embarrassment and relaxed to cover her teeth. Her tail wagged tentatively.

  I came to Lassie’s defense: “She was ready to protect Milo. Good girl.”

  The boy lay in bed, snoring softly. He didn’t wake when Lassie sprang onto the mattress and curled beside him.

  “Stay here,” I whispered. “I’ll search the house.”

  Voice hushed but adamant, Penny said, “Not alone. Call the cops.”

  “It’s all right. He’s gone. I’m just making sure.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Call the cops.”

  “And tell them what? Did you see Waxx?”

  “No. But—”

  “I didn’t see him, either.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “He said something, a word.”

  “Three words. Doom. Hack. Scribbler.”

  She bristled. “He called you a hack?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He should die hard. Point is—you heard him speak at the restaurant.”

  “Only one word. I hardly know his voice.”

  “But you know this was him.”

  “Evidence, Penny. Isn’t any.”

  She pointed to a pair of red marks on her left forearm, like two spider bites. “The Taser.”

  “That’s not enough. That’s nothing. How often did he sting you?”

  “Twice. You?”

  “Five, maybe six times.”

  “I’d like to castrate him.”

  “That doesn’t sound like the creator of the Purple Bunny books.”

  “Call the cops,” she insisted.

  “He’ll say we made it up, to get back at him for his review.”

  “He didn’t review me. Why am I going to lie about him?”

  “For me. That’s what they’ll say. You know the media—if you give them a stick, they love to knock you down.”

  I couldn’t say there was an event in my past about which I never told her. If I made accusations about Waxx that he denied, tabloid TV would start digging. They probably wouldn’t be able to learn who I had been, as a child, but I didn’t want to test their skills.

  I said, “Besides, I have a feeling like … he wants us to call the cops.”