Black Lightning

by John Saul

  Not so long now. Soon it would all happen. Soon he would hold Anne Jeffers in the palms of his hands. Soon … soon …

  CHAPTER 23

  “All right, here are the rules.” Gordy Farber leaned forward in his chair and pointed a pencil at Glen as if he were a recalcitrant ten-year-old rather than a forty-three-year-old architect. “You can go home today, but that doesn’t mean you can go back to the kind of life you were living before, understand?”

  Glen rolled his eyes toward the ceiling and began parroting the instructions Farber had already laid out in such great detail that Glen felt as if they were branded onto his eyelids. “No going to the office, get plenty of rest, eat healthy meals, and get plenty of exercise.” As Farber reddened slightly, Glen grinned. “Shall I also take Geritol every day?”

  “It wouldn’t hurt,” Farber groused as he shifted his attention to Anne, who had taken the day off to get Glen settled back into the house after almost two weeks in the hospital. “I’m counting on you to make sure he doesn’t cheat. If he behaves himself, I don’t see any reason to worry about a repeat of this little incident.” He swung back to Glen and once more assumed the stern demeanor of a schoolmaster. “On the other hand, if you go back to sitting at a drawing table all day, eating nothing but hamburgers and french fries for lunch, and sucking up twenty-five cups of coffee a day, I can almost guarantee you’ll be back here within a year. Or less. Assuming they even get you this far next time.”

  “What about the stairs?” Anne asked. “Should he really be going up and down them all the time?”

  “If you didn’t have them in the house, I’d make him go buy a stair-climbing machine,” Farber replied. “I don’t want him out running right off the bat, but there’s no problem with stairs, and I want him to start walking at least a mile a day.” Glen uttered an exaggerated groan, which Farber ignored, forging ahead with the lecture he’d given heart patients so often he could do it in his sleep. “And as for sex,” he finished, finally touching on the subject most of his patients wanted to know about first, “as far as I’m concerned, it’s one of the healthier forms of exercise available, so feel free. Any questions?”

  Glen hesitated. Should he mention the memory lapse he’d had last Saturday? Even as he formulated the question in his mind, he knew he wouldn’t. After all, it had only happened the one time, and he was sure it was nothing more than a brief side effect of one of the drugs they’d been stuffing into him. All he really needed was to get out of here, get home, and start living his life again. “How could there be?” he asked, standing up. “Is that it?”

  Farber came around from behind his desk, accompanying the Jefferses to the door. “Just keep an eye on yourself. If anything seems strange, or not right, let me know. And if you experience any pains in your chest or arms, don’t write it off to heartburn. Get over here right away. And, most important, don’t either of you start feeling like Glen’s some kind of invalid. He’s not. Just go home and get on with your lives.”

  A few minutes later, when Anne slid her car into the parking space she was lucky enough to find right in front of their house, Glen got out and automatically opened the back door to begin transferring his suitcase, and the box full of the clutter that had migrated into his hospital room over the last ten days, back into his home.

  Just as automatically, Anne started to tell him to let her do it, that he should go inside and take it easy. But even as her lips parted to utter the words, Glen seemed to sense them coming. Their eyes met, they were both silent for a split second, then they began to laugh.

  “Tell you what,” Glen offered. “You take the suitcase, and I’ll take the box. Deal?”

  “Deal,” Anne agreed.

  As he stepped through the front door a minute later and set the box on the table in the foyer, Glen uttered a contented sigh. No more hospital bed, no more monitors, no more nurses waking him up to give him sleeping pills. Then Boots came hurtling down the stairs like a little black and white missile to throw himself at Glen’s legs, his high-pitched yap instantly eliciting a jungle scream from Hector, who was at least still confined to his cage in Kevin’s room. Kumquat, of course, wasn’t interested enough in his arrival even to wander through the foyer. As he tried to calm the excited dog, Glen smiled almost ruefully at Anne. “Maybe I should have stayed in the hospital after all. Didn’t Farber say something about getting a lot of rest?”

  “Want me to take you back?” Anne countered.

  By way of an answer, Glen picked up the suitcase Anne had set at the foot of the stairs and started up to the second floor. Halfway up, as the parrot stopped squalling, he turned back, eyeing Anne speculatively. “How often,” he asked, “do we have the house to ourselves in the middle of the day?”

  Anne’s brow knit worriedly as she instantly read his meaning. “Do you really think we ought to?”

  “Didn’t Gordy say it was the healthiest form of exercise he knows?”

  “He said it was one of the healthiest,” Anne corrected. But she was already starting up the stairs.

  Dropping the suitcase to the floor as they entered the master bedroom, Glen put his arms around Anne, drawing her close. Her familiar aroma filled his nostrils as he nuzzled her neck, and he felt her shudder with anticipation as his lips began nibbling toward her own. A moment later they were on the bed, his fingers working feverishly at the single row of buttons that ran up the back of her dress. Then he was pulling it off her shoulders, and she was helping him slide it down over her hips. As his fingers touched her bare skin, a sensation went through him he’d never felt before. Her skin seemed to tingle under his touch, as if somehow an electrical charge were running through her.

  Now she was undressing him, too, and wherever her fingers touched his flesh, the same tingling sensation coursed through him, making his whole body hum in a way he couldn’t remember ever experiencing.

  He groaned softly as he slipped her bra loose and his palm covered her naked breast. Her flesh seemed almost to vibrate under his touch, and when her hand slid beneath his boxer shorts to close on his already hardened flesh, he had to struggle to control himself in the face of the climax that threatened to overwhelm him.

  Had it been that long since they’d made love, that every touch seemed new and different?

  Or was it the drugs they’d given him?

  Suddenly he remembered years ago, when he and Anne had smoked a joint before making love. Everything felt different that night, and he’d had the unnerving sensation that he was making love to a stranger, to a woman he’d never met before. The feeling had frightened him. After that night he’d given up the drug, and since then he’d always felt a comforting familiarity in their lovemaking, so that beyond the excitement and exhilaration of the act itself, he’d also felt a sense of safety—almost of coming home—as their bodies enveloped one another.

  Today, though, there was an electricity running from her body into his own that made not only his flesh tingle, but his very being throb with excitement.

  He pulled her closer to him, pressing his flesh against hers, feeling his skin thrill to the touch of her own. It was as if every fiber of his being was suddenly tuned to her, every nerve in his body vibrating under the energy she exuded.

  It was as though her very life force were flowing into him, and he felt he was absorbing it through his fingers, his palms, every part of him that touched any part of her.

  He began moving, his hands roaming over her, his limbs writhing around her until finally he was inside her, feeling as if he were searching for her very soul. He thrust deep, straining to touch some part of her that still remained just beyond his reach. He pulled her still closer, feeling the life force within her, struggling to clutch to himself the source of that tingling energy that flowed from her body into his. Their bodies moved together then, the rhythm building, the tempo increasing. Glen could feel her arms tightening around his neck, her legs twisting around his thighs, pulling him closer, deeper, as if she wanted to draw him inside of her t
o the point where their very lives merged into one.

  He felt his groin tighten, felt the electricity between them build once more, and this time he made no attempt to postpone the climax that quickly engulfed him. Gasping, he felt himself surging into her, and as the heat in his groin poured into her body, he felt the strange electrical charge on her skin begin to fade. He drew her even closer, trying to prolong the sensation, desperate to keep her energy flowing toward him, but it was too late.

  As his climax faded, so also did the tingling of her skin, and at last the urgency of his grip on her began to relax. His breath escaped him in an explosive gasp, and first one of his arms fell away from her, then the other. His breathing, which had come in great heaving pants only moments before, eased slowly into its normal rhythm, and he felt himself begin to sink into the soft gray depths of sleep.

  As she heard Glen’s breathing drift into the gentle whisper of sleep, Anne lay still, part of her wishing merely not to waken him, but another part of her not wanting to move until she understood what had just happened between them.

  Glen’s lovemaking today had contained an element she’d never experienced before, and though part of her had been excited by it—even thrilled by it—another part of her had been almost frightened. There was something different about him just now; a desperation. It was almost as if he were trying to reach within her, to grasp something, to draw something from her that she wasn’t giving him.

  Finally leaving the bed, she moved into the bathroom and stared at herself in the mirror. Faint red marks were beginning to show on her body where Glen’s fingers had dug into her flesh.

  Involuntarily, she shuddered.

  She took a shower, dried herself off, and began dressing.

  On the bed, Glen lay naked, his arms spread, his legs akimbo, his eyes closed in sleep.

  He was thinner than he’d been before he went into the hospital, and there was an unhealthy pallor to his face.

  That would change. Within a week or two he would be back to his normal 180 pounds, and a few hours in the sun would bring the color back to his skin.

  But what about inside?

  What about that desperation she felt from him when they’d made love? Would that go away, too?

  She leaned over and kissed him gently on the forehead, but he didn’t stir. Before she left the room, she covered him with a blanket, but even as she started out the door she turned to look back at him.

  He was still Glen, still her husband.

  But he was different.

  The heart attack had not only damaged his body; it seemed to have altered his spirit as well.

  As she left the house and started toward her office at the Herald, Anne told herself that as his body recovered from the trauma it had undergone, Glen’s personality would heal as well.

  The next time they made love, everything would be as it had once been.

  But what if nothing between them was ever quite the same again?

  To that question, she had no answer.

  CHAPTER 24

  On the morning after his release from the hospital, Glen Jeffers came awake slowly, just for a moment feeling the same cloudy disorientation he’d experienced so often during those first few days after the heart attack, when his mind, fogged with drugs, had refused to recognize his surroundings. But this morning his mind cleared quickly, and he luxuriated in the feeling of awakening in his own pajamas, in his own bed, in his own house. And it had been his wife who had awakened him briefly a while ago to kiss him good-bye, rather than one of the nurses arriving abruptly to strap a sphygmomanometer around his arm, insert a thermometer under his tongue, or stick a clip on his finger to check his oxygen absorption.

  Home.

  He was home, and he was alone.

  He stretched languorously, listening to the silence of the house. How long had it been since he’d enjoyed this kind of quiet?

  He could barely even remember.

  Of course, it had been quiet in the hospital, but it was a different kind of quiet: the hospital held the sepulchral silence of illness, rather than the peaceful quiet of home. In the hospital he had always been aware of someone coughing or moaning in the adjoining rooms. This morning he could only hear Hector muttering to himself from the perch in his cage in Kevin’s room. And from beyond the house Glen heard only the chirping of more birds, a distinct improvement over the steady drone of traffic that had laid a continual noisy siege to the hospital.

  Feeling at peace, he got up, slipped into his bathrobe, shoved his feet into his comfortably dilapidated slippers, and went downstairs, following the heavenly scent of fresh-brewed coffee into the kitchen, where a note in Anne’s handwriting was propped up against the coffee maker:

  You shouldn’t drink this at all, so try to hold it down to one cup.

  It was at the very moment that his eyes fell on the note that he first had the strange sensation that he wasn’t alone in the house after all. It was as if he were being watched: the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end, and he felt himself tensing. But when he turned around, the kitchen was empty; not even Boots was there. The odd feeling passed, and he reached into the cupboard, took out the largest mug he could find, and filled it to the rim. Moving to the kitchen table, he sat down. A moment later Kumquat, obviously assuming he held no ill will against her disinterest at his homecoming yesterday, darted in from the dining room and leapt into his lap. Stroking the cat with one hand, he pulled the front section of the morning’s Herald over and gazed at the article prominently displayed at the top of the page to which the paper had been opened.

  Police Report No Progress

  in Capitol Hill Slaying

  Nearly a week after the discovery of the body of Shawnelle Davis in her Capitol Hill apartment, Seattle police report that there are still no suspects in the slaying of the thirty-two-year-old prostitute.

  Although police investigators admit that the killing bears certain resemblances to those attributed to Richard Kraven, they are currently ruling out the possibility that this may be a copy-cat crime, despite suggestions that the execution of Kraven himself might have inspired the killing. According to Detective Mark Blakemoor …

  Glen pushed the paper aside, not bothering to finish the story even though he was absolutely certain his wife had written it. Why was Anne still harping on Richard Kraven? The man was dead, for God’s sake! Picking up the sports section, he scanned the headlines, then turned to the business section. Buried in a lower corner of the second page he found a small story noting that not only had work on the Jeffers Building continued to progress during his illness, but they were actually two days ahead of schedule. He reread the short article, wondering if the implication that the work was progressing better with him out of the picture was intended or inadvertent, then decided that it wasn’t there at all, that he was just being oversensitive. Still, a call to the office after he’d had a shower couldn’t really be considered work, could it?

  Abandoning both the paper and the mug of coffee, he started toward the stairs, but once again the peculiar feeling that someone else was in the house came over him. This time he went through the downstairs rooms, feeling more and more foolish as each one proved to be as empty as it should have been. Still, even when he finally went upstairs to the bathroom, he found himself glancing through the open doors to the kids’ rooms, just to be sure.

  Nothing.

  He stripped off his robe and pajamas in the master bedroom and went into the bathroom. Turning on the shower, he waited until steam was pouring out of the stall, then adjusted the temperature so it was just off the scalding point. With a sigh of pleasure he stepped into the stinging spray, lathered himself luxuriantly, then let the steaming water sluice over him, relaxing his muscles as it washed the last of the hospital odor from his skin. Only when he felt the water beginning to cool and realized he’d nearly exhausted the heater’s supply did he shut off the faucets, step out onto the cold marble tiles of the bathroom floor and begin toweling himself dry
. After taking a swipe at the steamy mirror on the bathroom door, he tossed the soggy towel toward the hamper that stood next to the sink, missed, but let it lay where it fell as he caught a smeared glimpse of himself in the still mostly fogged mirror.

  He’d lost at least ten pounds while he was in the hospital, and it wasn’t a ten pounds he was happy to have gone. In fact, he’d spent months gaining those pounds, exercising, running, doing all the right things. Now they were gone, and he was nearly back to the skinny frame he’d hated so much during the first thirty years of his life, before he’d discovered working out.

  Well, he’d just have to start over, regain the weight, and retone the muscles that had gone flaccid while he lay in the hospital bed.

  Turning away from the full-length mirror, he moved to the sink, brushed his teeth, then used his hand to wipe a small patch of the mirror above the sink. Bending close, he examined his reflection.

  Christ! He looked like a homeless person: his cheeks had hollowed, his eyes were sunken, and the laugh lines around them were threatening to turn into genuine wrinkles. Worst of all, the stubble on his cheeks and jowls had taken on a gray cast he’d never noticed before.

  That, at least, he could fix right now.

  Opening the medicine cabinet, he picked up the shaver Heather and Kevin had given him for his last birthday and switched it on.

  Suddenly, the sensation that he was no longer alone—that someone else was not only in the house, but in the bathroom itself—became overpowering. Every muscle in his body tensing, Glen readied himself to whirl around to confront whoever was there. But even as he turned, the shock struck him, and he tumbled once more into the kind of blackness that had yawned beneath him on the day of his heart attack. In less than a second he was unconscious.

  * * *

  The Experimenter gazed at the razor that had dropped into the sink as Glen Jeffers had fallen into unconsciousness.