of stairs, nearer to full consciousness, where she could better appreciate her plight. Although he could control her at higher levels of awareness, there was a slim but real chance that an involuntary cry of terror or despair would escape her, just loud enough to wake pensioners and parakeets downstairs.
He waited.
The bathwater grew darker as it cooled, though the color that Susan lent to it was hot.
She sat in silence, no more touched by emotion than the tub that contained her, and the doctor was, therefore, shocked to see a single tear track down her face.
He leaned forward, disbelieving, certain that it must be mere water or perspiration.
When the drop had descended the length of her face, another — larger than the first, enormous — welled from the same eye, and there could be no question that this was the genuine article.
Here was more entertainment than he had expected. Fascinated, he monitored the descent of the tear over the elegant swell of her high cheekbone, into the pocket of her cheek, to the corner of her ripe mouth, and then toward the line of her jaw, where it arrived diminished but large enough to quiver like a pendulous jewel.
This second tear was not followed by a third. The dry lips of Death had kissed away the excess moisture in her eyes.
When Susan’s mouth sagged open, as though with awe, the second — and last — tear trembled and fell from her delicate jaw into the bathwater, with the faintest detectable
Green eyes growing gray. Rosy skin borrows color…from the razor blade.
He rather liked that one.
Leaving the lights on, of course, Ahriman picked up her soiled underwear from the hamper lid and stepped out of the bathroom, into the bedroom, where he retrieved the videotape.
In the living room, he paused to enjoy the subtle scent of citrus potpourri seeping from the ceramic jars. He had always meant to ask Susan where she’d purchased this particular melange, so that he could acquire some for his own home. Too late.
At the kitchen door, fingers safely wrapped in Kleenex, he twisted the thumbturn on the only lock that she had engaged following his arrival. Outside, after quietly pulling the door shut, he used the spare key from the secretaire to engage both dead bolts.
He could do nothing about the security chain. This one detail should not make the authorities unduly suspicious.
The night and the fog, his conspirators, still waited for him, and the surf had grown louder since last he’d heard it, masking what little noise his shoes made on the rubber treads of the stairs.
Again, he reached his Mercedes without encountering anyone, and on the pleasant drive home, he found the streets only slightly busier than they had been forty-five minutes earlier.
His hilltop house stood on two acres in a gated community: a sprawling, futuristic, artful stack of square and rectangular forms, some in polished poured-in-place concrete and others clad in black granite, with floating decks, deep cantilevered roofs, bronze doors, and floor-to-ceiling windows so massive that birds were knocked unconscious against them not just one at a time but in flocks.
The place had been built by a young entrepreneur who had been made improbably rich from the IPO of his Internet retailing company. By the time it was completed, he had become enamored of Southwest architecture and had begun building a forty-thousand-square-foot faux adobe pile in the pueblo style, somewhere in Arizona. He’d offered this residence for sale without moving into it.
The doctor parked in the eighteen-car subterranean garage and took the elevator up to the ground floor.
The rooms and hallways were of grand proportions, with polished black granite floors. The antique Persian rugs — in lustrous shades of teal, peach, jade, ruby — were exquisitely patinaed by lifetimes of wear; they seemed to float upon the black granite as if they were magic carpets in flight, the blackness beneath them not stone, but the deep abyss of night.
In corridors and major chambers, lights came on to preset scenes as he entered, triggered by motion sensors managed by thousand-year universal clocks. In smaller rooms, lamps answered to vocal commands.
The young internet billionaire had computerized all the house systems in obsessive detail. When he had seen
In his lacewood-paneled study, the doctor phoned his office and left a voice-mail message for his secretary, asking her to cancel and reschedule his ten-and eleven-o’clock appointments to next week. He would be in after lunch.
There were no patient sessions filled on the second half of his Wednesday calendar. He had left his afternoon open for Dustin and Martine Rhodes, who would call in the morning, desperate for help.
Eighteen months ago, the doctor had realized that Martie could be one of his key toy soldiers in a marvelous game more elaborate than any he had played heretofore. Eight months ago, he served his witches’ brew of drugs to her in coffee, with a chocolate biscotto on the side, and programmed her during three of Susan’s office visits, as Susan herself had long previously come under his thrall.
Since then, Martie had awaited use, unaware that she’d been added to Ahriman’s collection.
Tuesday morning, eighteen hours ago, when Martie came to the office with Susan, the doctor at last put her into play, escorting her down into her mind chapel, where he implanted the suggestion that she could not trust herself, that she was a grave danger to herself and others, a monster capable of extreme violence and unspeakable atrocities.
After he wound her up and sent her off with Susan Jagger, she must have had an interesting day. He looked forward to hearing the gaudy details.
He had not yet used Martie sexually. Although she was not as beautiful as Susan, she was quite attractive, and he looked forward to seeing just how completely and deliciously sordid she could be if she really tried. She was not yet in sufficient misery to have much erotic appeal for him.
Soon.
Now, he was in a dangerous mood — and knew it. The personality regression he underwent during intense play sessions didn’t reverse instantly upon conclusion of the games. Like a deep-sea diver rising through the fathoms at a measured pace to avoid the bends, Ahriman ascended toward full adulthood in decompressive stages. He was not entirely man or boy at the moment, but in emotional metamorphosis.
At the corner bar in his study, he poured a bottle of Coke — the classic formula — into a cut-crystal Tom Collins glass, added a thick squirt of cherry syrup and ice, stirring the concoction with a long-handled sterling-silver spoon. He tasted it and smiled. Better than Tsingtao.
Exhausted yet restless, he walked the house for a while, after instructing the computer to precede him neither with blazes of light nor with softly luminous preset scenes. He wanted darkness in those spaces that had a view, and a single lamp dimmed so far as to be nearly extinguished in those chambers that did not benefit from the nighttime panorama of Orange County.
On the vast flatlands below these hills, although most of the county’s multitudes were still asleep, millions of lights glimmered even at this hour. View windows admitted just enough ambient light for the doctor to make his way with catlike surety, and he found the golden glow appealing.
Standing at a huge sheet of glass in the dark, basking in the incoming radiance, gazing at this urban sprawl that lay before him like the biggest playset in the world, he knew how God would feel, looking down on Creation, if there had been a god. The doctor was a player, not a believer.
Sipping cherry Coke, he roamed room to room, along passageways and galleries. The huge house was a labyrinth in more ways than one, but eventually he returned to the living room.
Here, more than eighteen months ago, he acquired Susan. On the day that escrow closed, he had met her here to receive the house keys and the thick operating manual for the computerized systems. She was surprised to find him with two champagne flutes and a chilled bottle of Dom Perignon. From the day they’d met, the doctor had been careful never to suggest that his interest in her went beyond her real-estate expertise; even with champagne in hand, he had struck a note of such erotic indifference that she didn’t feel she, a married woman, was being romanced. Indeed, from the moment he’d met her and decided to have her, he had scattered hints, like breadcrumbs to a pigeon, that he was gay. Because he was so happy with his spectacular new house and because she wasn’t displeased by the fat commission she’d earned, she saw no harm in celebrating with a glass of
