Yet she had dreamed about the man in black.
And here he was. Grinning at her.
Curious about the story from which the illustration had been taken, Tina stepped to the box again to pluck out the graphic novel. It was thicker than a comic book and printed on slick paper.
As her fingers touched the glossy cover, a bell rang.
She flinched and gasped.
The bell rang again, and she realized that someone was at the front door.
Heart thumping, she went to the foyer.
Through the fish-eye lens in the door, she saw a young, clean-cut man wearing a blue cap with an unidentifiable emblem on it. He was smiling, waiting to be acknowledged.
She didn’t open the door. “What do you want?”
“Gas-company repair. We need to check our lines where they come into your house.”
Tina frowned. “On New Year’s Day?”
“Emergency crew,” the repairman said through the closed door. “We’re investigating a possible gas leak in the neighborhood.”
She hesitated, but then opened the door without removing the heavy-duty security chain. She studied him through the narrow gap. “Gas leak?”
He smiled reassuringly. “There probably isn’t any danger. We’ve lost some pressure in our lines, and we’re trying to find the cause of it. No reason to evacuate people or panic or anything. But we’re trying to check every house. Do you have a gas stove in the kitchen?”
“No. Electric.”
“What about the heating system?”
“Yes. There’s a gas furnace.”
“Yeah. I think all the houses in this area have gas furnaces. I’d better have a look at it, check the fittings, the incoming feed, all that.”
She looked him over carefully. He was wearing a gas-company uniform, and he was carrying a large tool kit with the gas-company emblem on it.
She said, “Can I see some identification?”
“Sure.” From his shirt pocket, he withdrew a laminated ID card with the gas-company seal, his picture, his name, and his physical statistics.
Feeling slightly foolish, like an easily spooked old woman, Tina said, “I’m sorry. It’s not that you strike me as a dangerous person or anything. I just—”
“Hey, it’s okay. Don’t apologize. You did the right thing, asking for an ID. These days, you’re crazy if you open your door without knowing exactly who’s on the other side of it.”
She closed the door long enough to slip off the security chain. Then she opened it again and stepped back. “Come in.”
“Where’s the furnace? In the garage?”
Few Vegas houses had basements. “Yes. The garage.”
“If you want, I could just go in through the garage door.”
“No. That’s all right. Come in.”
He stepped across the threshold.
She closed and locked the door.
“Nice place you’ve got here.”
“Thank you.”
“Cozy. Good sense of color. All these earth tones. I like that. It’s a little bit like our house. My wife has a real good sense of color.”
“It’s relaxing,” Tina said.
“Isn’t it? So nice and natural.”
“The garage is this way,” she said.
He followed her past the kitchen, into the short hall, into the laundry room, and from there into the garage.
Tina switched on the light. The darkness was dispelled, but shadows remained along the walls and in the corners.
The garage was slightly musty, but Tina wasn’t able to detect the odor of gas.
“Doesn’t smell like there’s trouble here,” she said.
“You’re probably right. But you never can tell. It could be an underground break on your property. Gas might be leaking under the concrete slab and building up down there, in which case it’s possible you wouldn’t detect it right away, but you’d still be sitting on top of a bomb.”
“What a lovely thought.”
“Makes life interesting.”
“It’s a good thing you’re not working in the gas company’s public relations department.”
He laughed. “Don’t worry. If I really believed there was even the tiniest chance of anything like that, would I be standing here so cheerful?”
“I guess not.”
“You can bet on it. Really. Don’t worry. This is just going to be a routine check.”
He went to the furnace, put his heavy tool kit on the floor, and hunkered down. He opened a hinged plate, exposing the furnace’s workings. A ring of brilliant, pulsing flame was visible in there, and it bathed his face in an eerie blue light.
“Well?” she said.
He looked up at her. “This will take me maybe fifteen or twenty minutes.”
“Oh. I thought it was just a simple thing.”
“It’s best to be thorough in a situation like this.”
“By all means, be thorough.”
“Hey, if you’ve got something to do, feel free to go ahead with it. I won’t be needing anything.”
Tina thought of the graphic novel with the man in black on its cover. She was curious about the story out of which that creature had stepped, for she had the peculiar feeling that, in some way, it would be similar to the story of Danny’s death. This was a bizarre notion, and she didn’t know where it had come from, but she couldn’t dispel it.
“Well,” she said, “I was cleaning the back room. If you’re sure—”
“Oh, certainly,” he said. “Go ahead. Don’t let me interrupt your housework.”
She left him there in the shadowy garage, his face painted by shimmering blue light, his eyes gleaming with twin reflections of fire.
Chapter Seventeen
When Elliot refused to move away from the sink to the breakfast table in the far corner of the big kitchen, Bob, the smaller of the two men, hesitated, then reluctantly took a step toward him.
“Wait,” Vince said.
Bob stopped, obviously relieved that his hulking accomplice was going to deal with Elliot.
“Don’t get in my way,” Vince advised. He tucked the sheaf of typewritten questions into his coat pocket. “Let me handle this bastard.”
Bob retreated to the table, and Elliot turned his attention to the larger intruder.
Vince held the pistol in his right hand and made a fist with his left. “You really think you want to tangle with me, little man? Hell, my fist is just about as big as your head. You know what this fist is going to feel like when it hits, little man?”
Elliot had a pretty good idea of what it would feel like, and he was sweating under his arms and in the small of his back, but he didn’t move, and he didn’t respond to the stranger’s taunting.
“It’s going to feel like a freight train ramming straight through you,” Vince said. “So stop being so damn stubborn.”
They were going to great lengths to avoid using violence, which confirmed Elliot’s suspicion that they wanted to leave him unmarked, so that later his body would bear no cuts or bruises incompatible with suicide.
The bear-who-would-be-a-man shambled toward him. “You want to change your mind, be cooperative?”
Elliot held his ground.
“One good punch in the belly,” Vince said, “and you’ll be puking your guts out on your shoes.”
Another step.
“And when you’re done puking your guts out,” Vince said, “I’m going to grab you by your balls and drag you over to the table.”
One more step.
Then the big man stopped.
They were only an arm’s length apart.
Elliot glanced at Bob, who was still standing at the breakfast table, the packet of syringes in his hand.
“Last chance to do it the easy way,” Vince said.
In one smooth lightning-fast movement, Elliot seized the measuring cup into which he had poured four ounces of vinegar a few minutes ago, and he threw the contents in Vince’s face. The big man cried out in
surprise and pain, temporarily blinded. Elliot dropped the measuring cup and seized the gun, but Vince reflexively squeezed off a shot that breezed past Elliot’s face and smashed the window behind the sink. Elliot ducked a wild roundhouse punch, stepped in close, still holding on to the pistol that the other man wouldn’t surrender. He swung one arm around, slamming his bent elbow into Vince’s throat. The big man’s head snapped back, and Elliot chopped the exposed Adam’s apple with the flat blade of his hand. He rammed his knee into his adversary’s crotch and tore the gun out of the bear-paw hand as those clutching fingers went slack. Vince bent forward, gagging, and Elliot slammed the butt of the gun against the side of his head, with a sound like stone meeting stone.
Elliot stepped back.
Vince dropped to his knees, then onto his face. He stayed there, tongue-kissing the floor tiles.
The entire battle had taken less than ten seconds.
The big man had been overconfident, certain that his six-inch advantage in height and his extra eighty pounds of muscle made him unbeatable. He had been wrong.
Elliot swung toward the other intruder, pointing the confiscated pistol.
Bob was already out of the kitchen, in the dining room, running toward the front of the house. Evidently he wasn’t carrying a gun, and he was impressed by the speed and ease with which his partner had been taken out of action.
Elliot went after him but was slowed by the dining-room chairs, which the fleeing man had overturned in his wake. In the living room, other furniture was knocked over, and books were strewn on the floor. The route to the entrance foyer was an obstacle course.
By the time Elliot reached the front door and rushed out of the house, Bob had run the length of the driveway and crossed the street. He was climbing into a dark-green, unmarked Chevy sedan. Elliot got to the street in time to watch the Chevy pull away, tires squealing, engine roaring.
He couldn’t get the license number. The plates were smeared with mud.
He hurried back to the house.
The man in the kitchen was still unconscious and would probably remain that way for another ten or fifteen minutes. Elliot checked his pulse and pulled back one of his eyelids. Vince would survive, although he might need hospitalization, and he wouldn’t be able to swallow without pain for days to come.
Elliot went through the thug’s pockets. He found some small change, a comb, a wallet, and the sheaf of papers on which were typed the questions that Elliot had been expected to answer.
He folded the pages and stuffed them into his hip pocket.
Vince’s wallet contained ninety-two dollars, no credit cards, no driver’s license, no identification of any kind. Definitely not FBI. Bureau men carried the proper credentials. Not CIA, either. CIA operatives were loaded with ID, even if it was in a phony name. As far as Elliot was concerned, the absence of ID was more sinister than a collection of patently false papers would have been, because this absolute anonymity smacked of a secret police organization.
Secret police. Such a possibility scared the hell out of Elliot. Not in the good old U.S. of A. Surely not. In China, in the new Russia, in Iran or Iraq — yes. In a South American banana republic — yes. In half the countries in the world, there were secret police, modern gestapos, and citizens lived in fear of a late-night knock on the door. But not in America, damn it.
Even if the government had established a secret police force, however, why was it so anxious to cover up the true facts of Danny’s death? What were they trying to hide about the Sierra tragedy? What really had happened up in those mountains?
Tina.
Suddenly he realized she was in as much danger as he was. If these people were determined to kill him just to stop the exhumation, they would have to kill Tina. In fact, she must be their primary target.
He ran to the kitchen phone, snatched up the handset, and realized that he didn’t know her number. He quickly leafed through the telephone directory. But there was no listing for Christina Evans.
He would never be able to con an unlisted number out of the directory-assistance operator. By the time he called the police and managed to explain the situation, they might be too late to help Tina.
Briefly he stood in terrible indecision, incapacitated by the prospect of losing Tina. He thought of her slightly crooked smile, her eyes as quick and deep and cool and blue as a pure mountain stream. The pressure in his chest grew so great that he couldn’t get his breath.
Then he remembered her address. She had given it to him two nights ago, at the party after the premiere of Magyck! She didn’t live far from him. He could be at her place in five minutes.
He still had the silencer-equipped pistol in his hand, and he decided to keep it.
He ran to the car in the driveway.
Chapter Eighteen
Tina left the repairman from the gas company in the garage and returned to Danny’s room. She took the graphic novel out of the carton and sat on the edge of the bed in the tarnished-copper sunlight that fell like a shower of pennies through the window.
The magazine contained half a dozen illustrated horror stories. The one from which the cover painting had been drawn was sixteen pages long. In letters that were supposed to look as if they had been formed from rotting shroud cloth, the artist had emblazoned the title across the top of the first page, above a somber, well-detailed scene of a rain-swept graveyard. Tina stared at those words in shocked disbelief.
THE BOY WHO WAS NOT DEAD
She thought of the words on the chalkboard and on the computer printout: Not dead, not dead, not dead…
Her hands shook. She had trouble holding the magazine steady enough to read.
The story was set in the mid-nineteenth century, when a physician’s perception of the thin line between life and death was often cloudy. It was the tale of a boy, Kevin, who fell off a roof and took a bad knock on the head, thereafter slipping into a deep coma. The boy’s vital signs were undetectable to the medical technology of that era. The doctor pronounced him dead, and his grieving parents committed Kevin to the grave. In those days the corpse was not embalmed; therefore, the boy was buried while still alive. Kevin’s parents went away from the city immediately after the funeral, intending to spend a month at their summer house in the country, where they could be free from the press of business and social duties, the better to mourn their lost child. But the first night in the country, the mother received a vision in which Kevin was buried alive and calling for her. The vision was so vivid, so disturbing, that she and her husband raced back to the city that very night to have the grave reopened at dawn. But Death decided that Kevin belonged to him, because the funeral had been held already and because the grave had been closed. Death was determined that the parents would not reach the cemetery in time to save their son. Most of the story dealt with Death’s attempts to stop the mother and father on their desperate night journey; they were assaulted by every form of the walking dead, every manner of living corpse and vampire and ghoul and zombie and ghost, but they triumphed. They arrived at the grave by dawn, had it opened, and found their son alive, released from his coma. The last panel of the illustrated story showed the parents and the boy walking out of the graveyard while Death watched them leave. Death was saying, “Only a temporary victory. You’ll all be mine sooner or later. You’ll be back someday. I’ll be waiting for you.”
Tina was dry-mouthed, weak.
She didn’t know what to make of the damned thing.
This was just a silly comic book, an absurd horror story. Yet… strange parallels existed between this gruesome tale and the recent ugliness in her own life.
She put the magazine aside, cover-down, so she wouldn’t have to meet Death’s wormy, red-eyed gaze.
The Boy Who Was Not Dead.
It was weird.
She had dreamed that Danny was buried alive. Into her dream she incorporated a grisly character from an old issue of a horror-comics magazine that was in Danny’s collection. The lead story in this issue was about a
boy, approximately Danny’s age, mistakenly pronounced dead, then buried alive, and then exhumed.
Coincidence?
Yeah, sure, just about as coincidental as sunrise following sunset.
Crazily, Tina felt as if her nightmare had not come from within her, but from without, as if some person or force had projected the dream into her mind in an effort to—
To what?
To tell her that Danny had been buried alive?
Impossible. He could not have been buried alive. The boy had been battered, burned, frozen, horribly mutilated in the crash, dead beyond any shadow of a doubt. That’s what both the authorities and the mortician had told her. Furthermore, this was not the mid-nineteenth century; these days, doctors could detect even the vaguest heartbeat, the shallowest respiration, the dimmest traces of brain-wave activity.
Danny certainly had been dead when they had buried him.
And if, by some million-to-one chance, the boy had been alive when he’d been buried, why would it take an entire year for her to receive a vision from the spirit world?
This last thought profoundly shocked her. The spirit world? Visions? Clairvoyant experiences? She didn’t believe in any of that psychic, supernatural stuff. At least she’d always thought she didn’t believe in it. Yet now she was seriously considering the possibility that her dreams had some otherworldly significance. This was sheer claptrap. Utter nonsense. The roots of all dreams were to be found in the store of experiences in the psyche; dreams were not sent like ethereal telegrams from spirits or gods or demons. Her sudden gullibility dismayed and alarmed her, because it indicated that the decision to have Danny’s body exhumed was not having the stabilizing effect on her emotions that she had hoped it would.
Tina got up from the bed, went to the window, and gazed at the quiet street, the palms, the olive trees.
She had to concentrate on the indisputable facts. Rule out all of this nonsense about the dream having been sent by some outside force. It was her dream, entirely of her making.
The Eyes of Darkness Page 13
