Dusty turned his attention once more to what Martie had told him of her day. As he worried at each bizarre event and quirky detail, he was overcome by the peculiar conviction that what had happened to his wife was somehow associated with what happened to his brother. He sensed parallel oddities in both events, though the precise nature of the connections eluded him. Undeniably, this was the strangest day of his life, and instinct told him that Skeet and Martie had not unraveled simultaneously by mere coincidence.
In one corner of the room, Valet was curled on his bed, a large skeepskin-covered pillow, but he remained awake. He lay with his chin propped on one paw, intently watching his mistress sleeping in the golden lamplight.
Because Martie had never failed to keep a commitment and thus had banked a lot of moral capital, Susan didn’t feel aggrieved when the promised phone call failed to come in by eleven o’clock; however, she was uneasy. She placed her own call, got an answering machine, and grew worried.
No doubt Martie had been rocked and mystified by Susan’s claim of a phantom rapist to whom locked doors were no impediment. She’d asked to be given some time to think. But Martie wasn’t prone either to waffle or to be unnecessarily diplomatic. By now she would have arrived at some considered advice — or would have called to say she needed more convincing if she were to believe this tall, tall story.
“It’s me,” Susan told the answering machine. “What’s wrong? You okay? You think I’m nuts? It’s all right if you do. Call me.”
She waited a few seconds, then hung up.
Most likely, Martie would not have suggested a course of action with more potential for success than the camcorder sting, so Susan went forward with her preparations.
She placed a half-full glass of wine on the nightstand, not to be drunk, but as a prop.
She settled into bed with a book, sitting up against a pile of pillows. She was too nervous to read.
For a while she watched an old movie on TV,
Although Susan was preternaturally alert, she recalled other nights when apparent insomnia had abruptly given way to unnaturally deep sleep — and to victimization. If she was secretly being drugged, she couldn’t predict when the chemicals might kick in, and she did not want to wake up to discover that she had been violated
At midnight, she went to the Biedermeier pedestal, slipped one finger into the ivy under the little ming tree, started the videotape rolling, and returned to bed. If she was still awake at one o’clock, she would rewind the cassette and start recording from the beginning, and again at two and three o’clock, so in the event that she slept, there would be less of a chance that the tape would run out before the creep entered the room.
She switched off the television, the better to support the fell-asleep-while-reading scenario, but also because it might mask sounds arising elsewhere in the apartment.
After less than a minute of silence, as she was about to pick up the book, the telephone rang. Assuming that Martie was calling, Susan answered. “Hello?”
“This is Ben Marco.”
As though Ben Marco were a magic mason whose very voice could conjure stone and mortar, sudden walls of granite seemed to enclose Susan’s heart, confining it, pressing upon auricles and ventricles. Even as her heart rapped frantically against its prison, her mind opened as if it were a house from which the roof had been torn away by a cyclone; suddenly as wispy as dust and cobwebs, her thoughts dispersed on an updraft, and into her head, from the black infinity above, sifted a whispering darkness, an irresistible Presence that glided, as invisible and cold as a haunting spirit, first through the attic of her mind and then down, down into deeper regions.
“I’m listening,” Susan told Ben Marco.
At once her racing heart began to settle, and in her blood, the insectile twitching of fear subsided.
He said, “The winter storm—”
“The storm is you,” she replied.
“—hid in the bamboo grove—”
“The grove is me.”
“—and quieted away.”
“In the quiet, I will learn what is wanted,” Susan said.
Beautiful, really.
With the litany of the rules completed, Susan Jagger was awash in a sea of quiet: the apartment profoundly silent around her, all hushed within her, as soundless as the lifeless void must have been only an instant before Creation, when God had not yet said,
When the winter storm spoke again, his soft deep voice seemed not to come from the telephone but from within Susan. “Tell me where you are.”
“In bed.”
“I believe you’re alone. Tell me if I’m correct.”
“You are.”
“Let me in.”
“Yes.”
“Quickly.”
Susan put down the phone, got out of bed, and hurried through the dark apartment.
In spite of her quickened pace, her heartbeat continued to grow slower: strong, steady, calm.
In the kitchen, the only light was green and pale, issuing from the numerals on the digital clocks in the microwave and in the oven. The inky shadows didn’t hinder her. For too many months, this small apartment had been her world; and she was as intimately familiar with it as if she’d been raised here blind since birth.
A chair was wedged firmly under the doorknob. She removed it and slid it aside, and the wooden legs squeaked faintly on the tile floor.
The slide bolt at the end of the brass security chain rasped out of the slot in the latch plate. When she let go, the links rattled against the door casing.
She disengaged the first dead bolt. The second.
She opened the door.
A storm he was, and wintry, too, waiting on the landing at the head of the stairs, quiet now but filled with the rage of hurricanes, a fury usually well hidden from the world but always churning in him, revealed in his most private moments, and as he crossed the threshold into the kitchen, forcing her backward, shoving the door shut behind him, he clamped one strong hand around her slender throat.
30
The left and right common carotid arteries, providing the principal blood supply to the neck and head, arise directly from the aorta, which itself arises from the upper surface of the left ventricle. Having so recently departed the heart, the blood surging through both vessels is particularly rich in oxygen and is driven with force.
Hand cupped around the front of Susan’s throat, fingers spread along the left side of her neck, the pad of his thumb pressed just under her jawbone and over her right carotid, Dr. Mark Ahriman held her thus for perhaps a minute, enjoying the strong, steady throb of her pulse. She was so wonderfully full of life.
If he’d wanted to strangle her to death, he could have done so without fear of resistance. In this altered state of consciousness, she would stand, docile and unprotesting, while he choked the life out of her. She would ease to her knees when she could no longer stand, and then fold quietly into a graceful mound on the floor as her heart stuttered to a stop, apologizing with her eyes for being unable to die on her feet and, therefore, requiring him to kneel with her as he finished the job.
In fact, while dying, Susan Jagger would favor Dr. Ahriman with whatever attitude and expression he
