When he had finished healing, the periods of coma and the gray spells would surely cease. However, that knowledge did not lift his spirits, for his muddy thought processes made it difficult for him to think ahead to a better future. His condition was eerie, unpleasant, even frightening; he felt that he was not in control of his destiny and that, in fact, he was trapped within his own body, chained to this now-imperfect, half-dead flesh.
He staggered into the bathroom, slowly showered, brushed his teeth. He kept a complete wardrobe at the cabin, just as he did at the house in Palm Springs, so he would never need to pack a suitcase when visiting either place, and now he changed into khaki pants, a red plaid shirt, wool socks, and a pair of woodsman's boots. In his strange gray haze, that morning routine required more time than it should have: He had trouble adjusting the shower controls to get the right temperature; he kept dropping the toothbrush into the sink; he cursed his stiff fingers as they fumbled with the buttons on his shirt; when he tried to roll up his long sleeves, the material resisted him as if it possessed a will of its own; and he succeeded in lacing the boots only with monumental effort.
Eric was further distracted by the shadowfires.
Several times, at the periphery of his vision, ordinary shadows burst into flames. Just short-circuiting electrical impulses in his badly damaged — but healing — brain. Illusions born in sputtering cerebral synapses between neurons. Nothing more. However, when he turned to look directly at the fires, they never faded or winked out as mere mirages might have done, but grew even brighter.
Although they produced no smoke or heat, consumed no fuel, and had no real substance, he stared at those nonexistent flames with greater fear each time they appeared, partly because within them — or perhaps beyond them — he saw something mysterious, frightening; darkly shrouded and monstrous figures that beckoned through the leaping brightness. Although he knew the phantoms were only figments of his overwrought imagination, although he had no idea what they might represent to him or why he should be afraid of them, he was afraid. And at times, mesmerized by shadowfires, he heard himself whimpering as if he were a terrorized child.
Food. Although his genetically altered body was capable of miraculous regeneration and rapid recuperation, it still required proper nutrition — vitamins, minerals, carbohydrates, proteins — the building blocks with which to repair its damaged tissues. And for the first time since arising in the morgue, he was hungry.
He shuffled unsteadily into the kitchen, shambled to the big refrigerator.
He thought he saw something crawling out of the slots in a wall plug just at the edge of vision. Something long, thin. Insectile. Menacing. But he knew it was not real. He had seen things like it before. It was another symptom of his brain damage. He just had to ignore it, not let it frighten him, even though he heard its chitinous feet tap-tap-tapping on the floor. Tap-tap-tapping. He refused to look. Go away. He held on to the refrigerator. Tapping. He gritted his teeth. Go away. The sound faded. When he looked toward the wall plug, there was no strange insect, nothing out of the ordinary.
But now his uncle Barry, long dead, was sitting at the kitchen table, grinning at him. As a child, he had frequently been left with Uncle Barry Hampstead, who had abused him, and he had been too afraid to tell anyone. Hampstead had threatened to hurt him, to cut off his penis, if he told anyone, and those threats had been so vivid and hideous that Eric had not doubted them for a minute. Now Uncle Barry sat at the table, one hand in his lap, grinning, and said, “Come here, little sweetheart; let's have some fun,” and Eric could hear the voice as clearly as he'd heard it thirty-five years ago, though he knew that neither the man nor the voice was real, and he was as terrified of Barry Hampstead as he had been long ago, though he knew he was now far beyond his hated uncle's reach.
He closed his eyes and willed the illusion to go away. He must have stood there, shaking, for a minute or more, not wanting to open his eyes until he was certain the apparition would be gone. But then he began to think that Barry was there and was slipping closer to him while his eyes were closed and was going to grab him by the privates any second now, grab him and squeeze—
His eyes snapped open.
The phantom Barry Hampstead was gone.
Breathing easier, Eric got a package of Farmer John sausage-and-biscuit sandwiches from the freezer compartment and heated them on a tray in the oven, concentrating intently on the task to avoid burning himself. Fumblingly, patiently, he brewed a pot of Maxwell House. Sitting at the table, shoulders hunched, head held low, he washed the food down with cup after cup of the hot black coffee.
He had an insatiable appetite for a while, and the very act of eating made him feel more truly alive than anything he'd done since he'd been reborn. Biting, chewing, tasting, swallowing — by those simple actions, he was brought further back among the living than at any point since he'd stepped in the way of the garbage truck on Main Street. For a while, his spirits began to rise.
Then he slowly became aware that the taste of the sausage was neither as strong nor as pleasing as when he had been fully alive and able to appreciate it; and though he put his nose close to the hot, greasy meat and drew deep breaths, he was unable to smell its spicy aroma. He stared at his cool, ash-gray, clammy hands, which held the biscuit-wrapped sausage, and the wad of steaming pork looked more alive than his own flesh.
Suddenly the situation seemed uproariously funny to Eric: a dead man sitting at breakfast, chomping stolidly on Farmer John sausages, pouring hot Maxwell House down his cold gullet, desperately pretending to be one of the living, as if death could be reversed by pretense, as if life could be regained merely by the performance of enough mundane activities — showering, brushing his teeth, eating, drinking, crapping — and by the consumption of enough homely products. He must be alive, because they wouldn't have Farmer John sausages and Maxwell House in either heaven or hell. Would they? He must be alive, because he had used his Mr. Coffee machine and his General Electric oven, and over in the corner his Westinghouse refrigerator was humming softly, and although those manufacturers' wares were widely distributed, surely none of them would be found on the far shores of the river Styx, so he must be alive.
Black humor certainly, very black indeed, but he laughed out loud, laughed and laughed — until he heard his laughter. It sounded hard, coarse, cold, not really laughter but a poor imitation, rough and harsh, as if he were choking, or as if he had swallowed stones that now rattled and clattered against one another in his throat. Dismayed by the sound, he shuddered and began to weep. He dropped the sausage-stuffed biscuit, swept the food and dishes to the floor, and collapsed forward, folding his arms upon the table and resting his head in his arms. Great gasping sobs of grief escaped him, and for a while he was immersed in a deep pool of self-pity.
The mice, the mice, remember the mice bashing against the walls of their cages…
He still did not know the meaning of that thought, could not recall any mice, though he felt that he was closer to understanding than ever before. A memory of mice, white mice, hovered tantalizingly just beyond his grasp.
His gray mood darkened.
His dulled senses grew even duller.
After a while, he realized he was sinking into another coma, one of those periods of suspended animation during which his heart slowed dramatically and his respiration fell to a fraction of the normal rate, giving his body an opportunity to continue with repairs and accumulate new reserves of energy. He slipped from his chair to the kitchen floor and curled fetally beside the refrigerator.
* * *
Benny turned off Interstate 10 at Redlands and followed State Route 30 to 330. Lake Arrowhead lay only twenty-eight miles away.
The two-lane blacktop cut a twisty trail into the San Bernardino Mountains. The pavement was hoved and rough in some spots, slightly potholed in others, and frequently the shoulder was only a few inches wide, with a steep drop beyond the flimsy guardrails, leaving little leeway for mistakes. They were forced t
o slow considerably, though Benny piloted the Ford much faster than Rachael could have done.
Last night Rachael had spilled her secrets to Benny — the details of Wildcard and of Eric's obsessions — and she had expected him to divulge his in return, but he had said nothing that would explain the way he had dealt with Vincent Baresco, the uncanny way he could handle a car, or his knowledge of guns. Though her curiosity was great, she did not press him. She sensed that his secrets were of a far more personal nature than hers and that he had spent a long time building barriers around them, barriers that could not easily be torn down. She knew he would tell her everything when he felt the time was right.
They traveled only a mile on Route 330 and were still twenty miles from Running Springs when he apparently decided that, in fact, the time had come. As the road wound higher into the sharply angled mountains, more trees rose up on all sides — birches and gnarled oaks at first, then pines of many varieties, tamarack, even a few spruce — and soon the pavement was more often than not cloaked in the velvety shadows of those overhanging boughs. Even in the air-conditioned car, you could feel that the desert heat was being left behind, and it was as if the escape from those oppressive temperatures buoyed Benny and encouraged him to talk. In a darkish tunnel of pine shadows, he began to speak in a soft yet distinct voice.
“When I was eighteen, I joined the Marines, volunteered to fight in Vietnam. I wasn't antiwar like so many were, but I wasn't prowar either. I was just for my country, right or wrong. As it turned out, I had certain aptitudes, natural abilities, that made me a candidate for the Corps' elite cadre: Marine Reconnaissance, which is sort of the equivalent of the Army Rangers or Navy Seals. I was spotted early, approached about recon training, volunteered, and eventually they honed me into as deadly a soldier as any in the world. Put any weapon in my hands, I knew how to use it. Leave me empty-handed, and I could still kill you so quick and easy you wouldn't know I was coming at you until you felt your own neck snap. I went to Nam in a recon unit, guaranteed to see plenty of action, which is what I wanted — plenty of action — and for a few months I was totally gung ho, delighted to be in the thick of it.”
Benny still drove the car with consummate skill, but Rachael noticed that the speed began to drop slowly as his story took him deeper into the jungles of Southeast Asia.
He squinted as the sun found its way through holes in the tree shadows and as spangles of light cascaded across the windshield. “But if you spend several months knee-deep in blood, watching your buddies die, sidestepping death yourself again and again, seeing civilians caught repeatedly in the cross fire, villages burned, little children maimed… well, you're bound to start doubting. And I began to doubt.”
“Benny, my God, I'm sorry. I never suspected you'd been through anything like that, such horror—”
“No point feeling sorry for me. I came back alive and got on with my life. That's better than what happened to a lot of others.”
Oh, God, Rachael thought, what if you hadn't come back? I would have never met you, never loved you, never known what I'd missed.
“Anyway,” he said softly, “doubts set in, and for the rest of that year, I was in turmoil. I was fighting to preserve the elected government of South Vietnam, yet that government seemed hopelessly corrupt. I was fighting to preserve the Vietnamese culture from obliteration under communism, yet that very same culture was being obliterated by the tens of thousands of U.S. troops who were diligently Americanizing it.”
“We wanted freedom and peace for the Vietnamese,” Rachael said. “At least that's how I understood it.” She was not yet thirty, seven years younger than Benny; but those were seven crucial years, and it had not been her war. “There's nothing so wrong with fighting for freedom and peace.”
“Yeah,” he said, his voice haunted now, “but we seemed to be intent on creating that peace by killing everyone and leveling the whole damn country, leaving no one to enjoy whatever freedom might follow. I had to wonder… Was my country misguided? Downright wrong? Even possibly… evil? Or was I just too young and too naive, in spite of my Marine training, to understand?” He was silent for a moment, pulling the car through a sharp right-hand turn, then left just as sharply when the mountainside angled again. “By the time my tour of duty ended, I'd answered none of those questions to my satisfaction… and so I volunteered for another tour.”
“You stayed in Nam when you could have gone home?” she asked, startled. “Even though you had such terrible doubts?”
“I had to work it out,” he said. “I just had to. I mean, I'd killed people, a lot of people, in what I thought was a just cause, and I had to know whether I'd been right or wrong. I couldn't walk away, put it out of my mind, get on with my life, and just forget about it. Hell, no. I had to work it out, decide if I was a good man or a killer, and then figure what accommodation I could reach with life, with my own conscience. And there was no better place to work it out, to analyze the problem, than right there in the middle of it. Besides, to understand why I stayed on for a second tour, you've got to understand me, the me that existed then: very young, idealistic, with patriotism as much a part of me as the color of my eyes. I loved my country, believed in my country, totally believed, and I couldn't just shed that belief like… well, like a snake sheds skin.”
They passed a road sign that said they were sixteen miles from Running Springs and twenty-three miles from Lake Arrowhead.
Rachael said, “So you stayed in Nam another whole year?”
He sighed wearily. “As it turned out… two years.”
* * *
In his cabin high above Lake Arrowhead, for a time that he could not measure, Eric Leben drifted in a peculiar twilight state, neither awake nor asleep, neither alive nor dead, while his genetically altered cells increased production of enzymes, proteins, and other substances that would contribute to the healing process. Brief dark dreams and unassociated nightmare images flickered through his mind, like hideous shadows leaping in the bloody light of tallow candles.
When at last he rose from his trancelike condition, full of energy again, he was acutely aware that he had to arm himself and be prepared for action. His mind was still not entirely clear, his memory threadbare in places, so he did not know exactly who might be coming after him, but instinct told him that he was being stalked.
Sure as hell, someone'll find this place through Sarah Kiel, he told himself.
That thought jolted him because he could not remember who Sarah Kiel was. He stood with one hand on a kitchen counter, swaying, straining to recall the face and identity that went with that name.
Sarah Kiel…
Suddenly he remembered, and he cursed himself for having brought the damn girl here. The cabin was supposed to be his secret retreat. He should never have told anyone. One of his problems was that he needed young women in order to feel young himself, and he always tried to impress them. Sarah had been impressed by the five-room cabin, outfitted as it was with all conveniences, the acres of private woods, and the spectacular view of the lake far below. They'd had good sex outside, on a blanket, under the boughs of an enormous pine, and he had felt wonderfully young. But now Sarah knew about his secret retreat, and through her others — the stalkers whose identities he could not quite fix upon — might learn of the place and come after him.
With new urgency, Eric pushed away from the counter and headed toward the door that opened from the kitchen into the garage. He moved less stiffly than before, with more energy, and his eyes were less bothered by bright light, and no phantom uncles or insects crept out of the corners to frighten him; the period of coma had apparently done him some good. But when he put his hand on the doorknob, he stopped, jolted by another thought:
Sarah can't tell anyone about this place because Sarah is dead, I killed her only a few hours ago…
A wave of horror washed over Eric, and he held fast to the doorknob as if to anchor himself and prevent the wave from sweeping him away into permanent darkness, madness. Sud
denly he recalled going to the house in Palm Springs, remembered beating the girl, the naked girl, mercilessly hammering her with his fists. Images of her bruised and bleeding face, twisted in terror, flickered through his damaged memory like slides through a broken stereopticon. But had he actually killed her? No, no, surely not. He enjoyed playing rough with women, yes, he could admit that, enjoyed hitting them, liked nothing more than watching them cower before him, but he would never kill anyone, never had and never would, no, surely not, no, he was a law-abiding citizen, a social and economic winner, not a thug or psychopath. Yet he was abruptly assaulted by another unclear but fearful memory of nailing Sarah to the wall in Rachael's house in Placentia, nailing her naked above the bed as a warning to Rachael, and he shuddered, then realized it had not been Sarah but someone else nailed up on that wall, someone whose name he did not even know, a stranger who had vaguely resembled Rachael, but that was ridiculous, he had not killed two women, had not even killed one, but now he also recalled a garbage dumpster, a filthy alleyway, and yet another woman, a third woman, a pretty Latino, her throat slashed by a scalpel, and he had shoved her corpse into the dumpster..
No. My God, what have I made of myself? he wondered, nausea twisting his belly. I'm both researcher and subject, creator and creation, and that has to've been a mistake, a terrible mistake. Could I have become… my own Frankenstein monster?
For one dreadful moment, his thought processes cleared, and truth shone through to him as brightly as the morning sun piercing a freshly washed window.
He shook his head violently, pretending that he wanted to be rid of the last traces of the mist that had been clouding his mind, though in fact he was trying desperately to rid himself of his unwelcome and unbearable clarity. His badly injured brain and precarious physical condition made the rejection of the truth an easy matter. The violent shaking of his head was enough to make him dizzy, blur his vision, and bring the shrouding mists back to his memory, hindering his thought processes, leaving him confused and somewhat disoriented.
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