Ricky pushed his chair back, blinking furiously—
— and the worms were gone.
Spilled wine shimmered on the table.
He halted halfway to his feet, his hands on the arms of his chair, staring in disbelief at the puddle of ruby-red port.
He was sure he had seen the worms. He wasn’t imagining things. Wasn’t drunk. Hell, he hadn’t even begun to feel the port.
Easing back into his chair, he closed his eyes. Waited a second, two. Looked. The wine still glistened on the table.
Hesitantly he touched one index finger to the puddle. It was wet, real. He rubbed his finger and thumb together, spreading the drop of wine over his skin.
He checked the Taylor’s to be sure that he hadn’t drunk more than he’d realized. The bottle was dark, so he had to hold it up to the light to see the level of the liquid within. It was a new liter, and the line of the port was just below the neck. He had poured only the two glasses.
Rattled as much by his inability to come up with an explanation as by what had happened, Ricky went to the sink, opened the cabinet below it, and got the damp dishcloth from the rack on the back of the door. At the table again, he wiped up the spilled wine.
His hands were shaking.
He was angry at himself for being afraid, even though the source of the fear was understandable. He worried that he had suffered what the doctors would call a “small cerebral incident,” a minor stroke of which the flickering hallucination of earthworms was the only sign. More than anything else during his long hospitalization, he had dreaded a stroke.
The development of blood clots in the legs and around the sutures in repaired veins and arteries was one especially dangerous potential side-effect of major abdominal surgery of the extent that he had undergone and of the protracted bed rest that followed it. If one broke free and traveled to the heart, sudden death might ensue. If it traveled instead to the brain, obstructing circulation, the result could be total or partial paralysis, blindness, loss of speech, and the horrifying destruction of intellectual capacity. His doctors had medicated him to inhibit clotting, and the nurses had put him through a program of passive exercise even when he had been required to remain flat on his back, but there hadn’t been one day during his long recovery that he hadn’t worried about suddenly finding himself unable to move or talk, unsure of where he was, unable to recognize his wife or his own name.
At least then he’d had the comfort of knowing, whatever happened, Anita would be there to take care of him. Now he had no one. From now on, he would have to face adversity alone. If silenced and badly crippled by a stroke, he would be at the mercy of strangers.
Although his fear was understandable, he also realized that it was to some extent irrational. He was healed. He had his scars, sure. And his ordeal had left him diminished. But he was no more ill than the average man on the street and probably healthier than a lot of them. More than two years had passed since his most recent surgery. His chances of suffering a cerebral embolism were now only average for a man his age. Thirty-six. Men that young rarely had debilitating strokes. Statistically, he was more likely to die in a traffic accident, from a heart attack, as the victim of violent crime, or perhaps even from being struck by lightning.
What he feared was not so much paralysis, aphasia, blindness, or any other physical ailment. What frightened him, really, was being alone, and the weirdness with the earthworms had impressed upon him just how alone he would be if anything untoward happened.
Determined not to be ruled by fear, Ricky put the port-stained dishcloth aside and righted the overturned glass. He would sit down with another drink and think it through. The answer would be obvious when he thought about it. There was an explanation for the worms, maybe a trick of light that could be duplicated by holding the glass just so, turning it just so, recreating the precise circumstances of the illusion.
He picked up the bottle of Taylor’s and tipped it toward the glass.
For an instant, though he had held it up to the light only a couple of minutes ago to check the level of the wine, he expected the bottle to disgorge oily knots of writhing earthworms. Only port poured forth.
He put down the bottle and raised the glass. As he brought it to his lips, he hesitated, repulsed by the thought of drinking out of a glass that had contained earthworms slick with whatever cold mucus they exuded.
His hand was shaking again, his brow was suddenly damp with perspiration, and he was furious with himself for being so damned silly about this. The wine slopped against the sides of the glass, glimmering like a liquid jewel.
He brought it to his lips, took a short sip. It tasted sweet and clean. He took another sip. Delicious.
A soft and tremulous laugh escaped him. “Asshole,” he said, and felt better for making fun of himself.
Deciding that some nuts or crackers would go well with the port, he put his glass down and went to the kitchen cabinet where he kept cans of roasted almonds, mixed nuts, and packages of Che-Cri Cheese Crispies. When he pulled the door open, the cabinet was alive with tarantulas.
Faster and more agile than he’d been in years, he backed away from the open cabinet, slamming into the counter behind him.
Six or eight of the huge spiders were climbing over cans of Blue Diamond almonds and Planters party mix, exploring the boxes of Che-Cri. They were bigger even than tarantulas should have been, larger than halved cantaloupes, jittering denizens of some arachnophobe’s worst nightmare.
Ricky squeezed his eyes shut. Opened them. The spiders were still there.
Above the drumming of his own heart and his shallow noisy breathing, he could actually hear the hairy legs of the tarantulas brushing against the cellophane on the packages of cheese crackers. The chitinous tick-tick-tick of their feet or mandibles against the stacks of cans. Low, evil hissing.
But then he realized he was misinterpreting the source of the sounds. The noises were not coming from the open cabinet across the room but from the cabinets immediately above and behind him.
He looked over his shoulder, up at the pine doors, on the other side of which should have been nothing but plates and bowls, cups and saucers. They were being forced outward by some expanding bulk, just a quarter of an inch ajar, then half an inch. Before Ricky could move, the cabinet doors flew open. An avalanche of snakes cascaded over his head and shoulders.
Screaming, he tried to run. He slipped on the wriggling carpet of serpents and fell among them.
Snakes thin as whips, snakes thick and muscular, black snakes and green, yellow and brown, plain and patterned, red-eyed, yellow-eyed, some hooded like cobras, watchful and grinning, supple tongues fluttering, hissing, hissing. Had to be dreaming. Hallucinating. A big blacksnake, at least four feet long, bit him, oh Jesus, struck at the back of his left hand, sinking its fangs deep, blood brimming, and still it might have been a dream, nightmare, except for the pain.
He had never felt pain in a dream, and certainly not like this. A sharp stinging filled his left hand, and then a sharper stabbing agony shot like an electrical charge through his wrist and all the way along his forearm to his elbow.
Not a dream. This was happening. Somehow. But where had they come from? Where?
They were all over him, sixty or eighty of them, slithering. Another one struck at him, sank fangs through his shirt sleeve and pierced his left forearm, tripling the pain in it. Another bit through his sock, raked teeth down his ankle.
He scrambled to his feet, and the snake that had bitten his arm fell away, as did the one at his ankle, but the one with its fangs through his left hand hung fast, as if it had stapled itself to him. He grabbed it, tried to jerk it loose. The flash of pain was so intense, white-hot, that he almost passed out, and still the snake was clamped tight to his bleeding hand.
A turmoil of snakes hissed and coiled around him. He didn’t see any rattlers at a glance, or hear them. He had too little knowledge to identify the other species, wasn’t sure which were poisonous, or even if any of th
em were, including the ones that had already bitten him. Poisonous or not, more of them were going to bite if he didn’t move fast.
He snatched a meat cleaver from a wall rack of knives. When he slammed his left arm down on the nearest counter, the relentless blacksnake flopped full-length across the tile counter top. Ricky swung the cleaver high, brought it down, chopped through the snake, and the steel blade rang off the ceramic surface underneath.
The hateful-looking head still held fast to his hand, trailing only a few inches of the black body, and the glittering eyes seemed td be watching him, alive. Ricky dropped the cleaver and attempted to pry open the serpent’s mouth, spring its long curved teeth out of his flesh. He shouted and cursed, furious with pain, kept prying, but it was no use.
The snakes on the floor were agitated by his shouting.
He plunged toward the archway between the kitchen and the hall, kicking snakes out of his way before they could coil and spring at him. Some were already coiled, and they struck, but his heavy, loose-fitting khaki pants foiled them.
He was afraid they would slither over his shoes, under a pants cuff, up and under one of the legs of his khakis. But he reached the hall safely.
The snakes were behind him and not pursuing. Two tarantulas had fallen out of the snack cabinet into the herpetological nightmare on the floor, and the snakes were fighting over them. Frantically kicking arachnid legs vanished under rippling scales.
Thump!
Ricky jumped in surprise.
Thump!
Until now he hadn’t associated the strange noise, which had plagued him earlier in the evening, with the spiders and snakes.
Thump!
Thump!
Someone had been playing games with him then, but this was not a game any more. This was deadly serious. Impossible, as fantastic as anything in a dream, but serious.
Thump!
Ricky couldn’t pinpoint the source of the pounding or even tell for sure if it came from above or below him. Windows reverberated, and echoes of each blow vibrated hollowly in the walls. He sensed that something was coming, worse than spiders or snakes, something he did not want to encounter.
Gasping, with the head of the blacksnake still dangling from his left hand, Ricky turned away from the kitchen toward the front door at the end of the hall.
His twice-bitten arm throbbed horribly with each beat of his trip-hammering heart. No good, dear Jesus, a racing heart spread the poison faster, if there was any poison. What he had to do was calm down, take deep slow breaths, walk instead of run, go to a neighbor’s house, call 911, and get emergency medical attention. THUMP!
He could have used the telephone in his bedroom, but he didn’t want to go in there. He didn’t trust his own house any more, which was nuts, yes, crazy, but he felt the place had come alive and turned against him. THUMP, THUMP, THUMP!
The house shook as if riding the back of a bucking earthquake, almost knocking him down. He staggered sideways, bounced against the wall.
The ceramic statue of the Holy Virgin toppled off the hall table that he had set up as a shrine like all of the shrines his mother had kept in her home. Since being gutshot, he had been reduced by fear to his mother’s choice of armor against the cruelties of the world. The statue crashed to the floor, shattered at his feet.
The heavy red-glass container with the votive candle bounced on the table, causing goblin shadows to dance across the wall and ceiling.
THUMPTHUMPTHUMPTHUMP!
Ricky was two steps from the front door when the oak flooring creaked ominously, pushed upward, and cracked almost as loudly as a thunderclap. He stumbled backward.
Something smashed out of the crawlspace under the bungalow, shattering the floor as if it were an eggshell. For a moment the blizzard of dust and splinters and jagged boards made it impossible to glimpse what had been born into the hallway.
Then Ricky saw a man in the hole, feet planted in the earth about eighteen inches under the floor of the house. In spite of standing below Ricky, the guy loomed, immense and threatening. His untamed hair and beard were tangled and dirty, and the visible portions of his face were grossly scarred. His black raincoat billowed like a cape around him as a draft whistled out of the crawlspace and up through the broken boards.
Ricky knew he was looking at the vagrant who had appeared to Harry out of a whirlwind. Everything about him fit the description — except his eyes.
When he glimpsed those grotesque eyes, Ricky froze midst the fragments of the Holy Virgin, paralyzed by fear and by the certainty that he had gone mad. Even if he had kept backing away or had turned and tried to run for the rear door, he would not have escaped, for the vagrant clambered out of the hole and into the hall as lightning-quick as any striking serpent. He seized Ricky, swept him off the floor with such unhuman power that any resistance was pointless, and slammed him against the wall hard enough to crack the plaster and his spine.
Face to face, washed by the vagrant’s foul breath, Ricky gazed into those eyes and was too terrified to scream. They were not the pools of blood that Harry had described. They were not really eyes at all. Nestled in the deep sockets were two snake heads, two small yellow eyes in each, forked tongues fluttering.
Why me? Ricky wondered.
As if they were a pair of jack-in-the-box fright figures, the snakes sprang from the vagrant’s sockets and bit Ricky’s face.
7
Between Laguna Beach and Dana Point, Harry drove so fast that even Connie, lover of speed and risk-taking, braced herself and made wordless noises of dismay when he took some of the turns too sharply. They were in his own car, not a department sedan, so he didn’t have a detachable emergency beacon to stick on the roof. He didn’t have a siren either; however, the coast highway was not heavily used at ten-thirty on a Tuesday night, and by pounding the horn and flashing the headlights, he was able to clear a way through what little obstructive traffic he encountered.
“Maybe we should call Ricky, warn him,” she said, when they were still in south Laguna.
“Don’t have a car phone.”
“Stop at a service station, convenience store, somewhere.”
“Can’t waste the time. I figure his phone won’t work anyway.”
“Why won’t it?”
“Not unless Ticktock wants it to work.”
They shot up a hill, rounded a curve too fast. The rear tires dug up gravel from the shoulder of the highway, sprayed it against the undercarriage and fuel tank. The right rear bumper kissed a metal guardrail, and then they were back on the pavement, rocketing onward without having braked.
“So let’s call Dana Point Police,” she said.
“The way we’re moving, if we don’t stop to call, we’ll be there before they could make it.”
“We might be able to use the backup.”
“Won’t need backup if we’re too damned late and Ricky’s dead when we get there.”
Harry was sick with apprehension and furious with himself. He had endangered Ricky by going to him earlier in the day. He couldn’t have known the heap of trouble he was bringing down on his old friend at the time, but later he should have realized Ricky was a target when Ticktock had promised first everything and everyone you love.
Sometimes it was hard for a man to admit he loved another man, even in a brotherly way. He and Ricky Estefan had been partners, through some tight scrapes together. They were still friends, and Harry loved him. It was that simple. But the American tradition of macho self-reliance mitigated against admitting as much.
Bullshit, Harry thought angrily.
The truth was, he found it difficult to admit he loved anyone, male or female, even his parents, because love was so damned messy. It entailed obligations, commitments, entanglements, the sharing of emotions. When you admitted to loving people, you had to let them into your life in a more major way, and they brought with them all of their untidy habits, indiscriminate tastes, muddled opinions, and disorganized attitudes.
As they roar
ed across the Dana Point city line, the muffler clanging against a bump in the road, Harry said, “Jesus, sometimes I’m an idiot.”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” Connie said.
“A really screwed-up specimen.”
“We’re still in familiar territory.”
He had only one excuse for not realizing that Ricky would become a target: since the fire at his condo less than three hours ago, he had been reacting instead of acting. He’d had no other option. Events had moved so fast, and were so weird, one piece of strangeness piled atop another, that he hadn’t time to think. A poor excuse, but he clung to it.
He didn’t even know how to think about bizarre crap like this. Deductive reasoning, every detective’s most useful tool, was not adequate to deal with the supernatural. He’d been trying inductive reasoning, which was how he’d come up with the theory of a sociopath with paranormal powers. But he wasn’t good at it because inductive reasoning seemed, to him, the next thing to intuition, and intuition was so illogical. He liked hard evidence, sound premises, logical deductions, and neat conclusions tied up in ribbons and bows.
As they turned the corner into Ricky’s street, Connie said, “What the hell?”
Harry glanced at her.
She was staring into her cupped hand.
“What?” he asked.
Something was cradled in her palm. Voice quavering, she said, “I didn’t have this a second ago, where the hell did it come from?”
“What is it?”
She held it up for him to see as he pulled under the streetlamp in front of Ricky’s house. The head of a ceramic figurine. Broken off at the neck.
Scraping the tires against the curb, he braked to a hard stop, and his safety harness jerked tight across his chest.
She said, “It was like my hand snapped shut, spasmed shut, and this was in it, out of nowhere, for God’s sake.”
Harry recognized it. The head of the Virgin Mary that had been at the center of the shrine on Ricky Estefan’s hall table.
Dragon Tears Page 19
