have given up when he persevered, and although he knew that his caution and fear were justified by all that he had experienced and survived, he hated himself nonetheless.
Cursing himself, he disengaged the lock, opened the door, found the light switch. He stepped across the threshold.
The garage was wide enough for two cars, and his blue Mitsubishi was parked on the far side. The half nearest the house was occupied by his long workbench, racks of tools, cabinets filled with supplies, and the gas- fired forge in which he melted small ingots of silver to pour into the jewelry and buckle molds that he created.
The rataplan of the rain was louder here because there was no drop ceiling and the garage roof was not insulated. A damp chill rose off the concrete floor.
No one was in the nearer half of the large chamber. None of the storage cabinets had a compartment big enough to hide a man.
With the.38 in hand, he circled the car, looked inside it, even eased down onto his creaking knees and peered under it. Nobody was hiding there.
The exterior man-size door of the garage was locked from the inside. So was the only window, which in any case was too small to admit anyone older than five.
He wondered if the noise had originated on the roof. For a minute, two minutes, he stood beside the car, staring up at the rafters, waiting for the thump to come again. Nothing. Just the rain, rain, rain, an unceasing tattoo.
Feeling foolish, Ricky returned to the house and locked the connecting door. He took the revolver into the kitchen with him and put it on the built-in secretary beside the telephone.
The flames under both the pasta and sauce had gone out. For a moment he thought the gas service had failed, but then he saw that the knobs in front of both burners were in the OFF position.
He knew they had been on when he left the kitchen. He turned them on again, and blue flames came to life with a
Somebody was playing games with him.
He returned to the secretary, picked up the gun, and considered searching the house again. But he had already inspected every inch of the place, and knew for certain that he was alone.
Following a brief hesitation, he searched it again — with the same result as the first time.
When he returned to the kitchen, no one had turned off the gas.
The sauce was boiling so rapidly, it had begun to stick to the bottom of the pot. He put the gun aside. He speared a piece of rigatoni with a large fork, blew on it to cool it, tasted. It was slightly overcooked but okay.
He drained the pasta into a colander in the sink, shook the colander, dumped the pasta on a plate, and added sauce.
Somebody was playing games with him.
But who?
8
Rain drizzled through the leafy oleander bushes, encountered the layers of plastic garbage bags that Sammy had draped across the packing crate, and drained off the plastic into the vacant lot or out into the alleyway. Under the rags that served as bedding, the floor of the crate was also lined with plastic, so his humble home was relatively dry.
Even if he had been sitting in water up to his waist, Sammy Shamroe might not have noticed, for he had already finished one double-liter jug of wine and had started a second. He was feeling no pain — or at least that’s what he told himself.
He had it pretty good, really. The cheap wine kept him warm, temporarily purged him of self-hatred and remorse, and put him in touch with certain innocent feelings and naive expectations of childhood. Two fat blueberry-scented candles, salvaged from someone else’s garbage and anchored now in a pie pan, filled his sanctuary with a pleasant fragrance and a soft light as cozy as that from an antique Tiffany lamp. The close walls of the packing crate were comforting rather than claustrophobic. The ceaseless chorus of the rain was lulling. But for the candles, perhaps it had been something like this in the sac of fetal membranes: snugly housed, suspended weightless in amniotic fluid, surrounded by the soft liquid roar of Mother’s blood rushing through her veins and arteries, not merely unconcerned about the future but unaware of it.
Even when the ratman pulled aside the hanging rug that served as a door over the only opening in the crate, Sammy was not delivered from his imitation prenatal bliss. Deep down, he knew that he was in trouble, but he was too whacked to be afraid.
The crate was eight feet by six, as large as many walk-in closets. Bearish as he was, the ratman still could have squeezed in across from Sammy without knocking over the candles, but he remained crouched in the doorway, holding back the rug with one arm.
His eyes were different from what they had always been before. Shiny black. Without any whites at all. Pinpoint yellow pupils in the center, glowing. Like distant headlights on the night highway to Hell.
“How’re you doing, Sammy?” the ratman asked in a tone of voice that was uncharacteristically solicitous. “You getting along okay, hmmmmm?”
Though a surfeit of wine had so numbed Sammy Shamroe’s survival instinct that he couldn’t get back in touch with his fear, he knew that he
The ratman said, “Just wanted you to know, I won’t be stopping around for a while. Got new business. Overworked. Got to deal with more urgent matters first. When it’s over, I’ll be exhausted, sleep for a whole day, around the clock.”
Being temporarily fearless did not mean that Sammy had become courageous. He dared not speak.
“Did you know how much this exhausts me, Sammy? No? Thinning out the herd, disposing of the lame and the diseased — it’s no piece of cake, let me tell you.”
When the ratman smiled and shook his head, shining beads of rainwater were flung off his beard. They spattered Sammy.
Even in the comforting womb of his wine haze, Sammy retained enough awareness to be amazed by the ratman’s sudden garrulousness. Yet, as amazing as it was, the huge man’s monologue was curiously reminiscent of something he had heard before, a long time ago in another place, though he could not recall where or when or from whom. It wasn’t the gravelly voice or the words themselves that brought Sammy to the edge of deja vu, but the tonal quality of the ratman’s revelations, the eerie earnestness, the cadences of his speech.
“Dealing with vermin like you,” the ratman said, “is draining. Believe me. Draining. It’d be so much easier if I could waste each of you the first time we meet, make you spontaneously combust or make your head explode. Wouldn’t that be nice?”
“But to fulfill my destiny,” the ratman said, “to become what I am required to become, I have to show you my wrath, make you quiver and be humbled before me, make you understand the meaning of your damnation.”
Sammy remembered where he had heard this sort of thing before. Another street person. Maybe eighteen months ago, two years ago, up in Los Angeles. A guy named Mike, had a messiah complex, thought he was chosen by God to make the world pay for its sins, finally went over the top with the concept, knifed three or four people who were lined up outside an art-house theater that was showing a re-released director’s cut of
“Do you know what I am becoming, Sammy?”
Sammy just clutched his remaining two-liter jug.
“I am becoming the new god,” said the ratman. “A new god is needed. I have been chosen. The old god
