snapping out of a nightmare—except he was awake on both sides of the snap.
Marty leaned against the Taurus. He was hesitant to believe that the worst was past, waiting tensely for another inexplicable wave of paranoid terror to batter him.
He looked out from the shadowy garage at the street, which was simultaneously familiar and strange, half expecting some monstrous phantasm to rise out of the pavement or descend through the sun-drenched air, a creature inhuman and merciless, ferocious and bent upon his destruction, the invisible specter of his nightmare now made flesh.
His confidence didn’t return, and he couldn’t stop shaking, but his apprehension gradually diminished to a tolerable level, until he was able to consider whether he dared to drive. What if a similarly disorienting spasm of fear hit him while he was behind the wheel? He would be virtually oblivious of stop signs, oncoming traffic, and hazards of all kinds.
More than ever, he needed to see Dr. Guthridge.
He wondered if he should go back into the house and call a taxi. But this wasn’t New York City, streets aswarm with cabs; in southern California, the words “taxi service” were, more often than not, an oxymoron. By the time he could reach Guthridge’s office by taxi, he might have missed his appointment.
He got in the car, started the engine. With wary concentration, he backed out of the garage and into the street, handling the wheel as stiffly as a ninety-year-old man acutely aware of the brittleness of his bones and the tenuous thread of his existence.
All the way to the doctor’s office in Irvine, Marty Stillwater thought about Paige and Charlotte and Emily. By the treachery of his own weak flesh, he could be denied the satisfaction of seeing the girls become women, the pleasure of growing old at his wife’s side. Although he believed in a world beyond death where eventually he might be reunited with those he loved, life was so precious that even the promise of a blissful eternity would not compensate for the loss of a few years on this side of the veil.
From half a block away, the killer watches the car slowly back out of the garage.
As the Ford turns away from him and gradually recedes through the vinegar-gold autumn sunshine, he realizes the magnet which drew him from Kansas is in that car. Perhaps it is the dimly seen man behind the steering wheel—though it might not be a person at all but a talisman hidden elsewhere in the vehicle, a magical object beyond his understanding and to which his destiny is linked for reasons yet unclear.
The killer almost starts the Honda to follow the attractant, but decides the stranger in the Ford will return sooner or later.
He puts on his shoulder holster, slips the pistol into it, and shrugs into the leather jacket.
From the glove compartment, he removes the zippered leather case that contains his set of burglary tools. It includes seven spring-steel picks, an L-shaped tension tool, and a miniature aerosol can of graphite lubricant.
He gets out of the car and proceeds boldly along the sidewalk toward the house.
At the end of the driveway stands a white mailbox on which is stenciled a single name—STILLWATER. Those ten black letters seem to possess symbolic power. Still water. Calm. Peace. He has found still water. He has come through much turbulence, violent rapids and whirlpools, and now he has found a place where he can rest, where his soul will be soothed.
Between the garage and the property-line fence, he opens the gravity latch on a wrought-iron gate. He follows a walkway flanked by the garage on his left and a head-high eugenia hedge on his right, all the way to the rear of the house.
The shallow backyard is lushly planted. It boasts mature ficus trees and a continuation of the sideyard eugenia hedge, which screen him from the prying eyes of neighbors.
The patio is sheltered by an open-beam redwood cover through which thorny trailers of bougainvillea are densely intertwined. Even on this last day of November, clusters of blood-red flowers fringe the patio roof. The concrete floor is spattered with fallen petals, as though a hard-fought battle was waged here.
A kitchen door and large sliding glass door provide two possible entrances from the patio. Both are locked.
The sliding door, beyond which he can see a deserted family room with comfortable furniture and a large television, is further secured by a wooden pole wedged into the interior track. If he gets through the lock, he nevertheless will need to break the glass to reach inside and remove the pole.
He knocks sharply on the other door, although the window beside it reveals that no one is in the kitchen. When there is no response, he knocks again with the same result.
From his compact kit of burglary tools, he withdraws the can of graphite. Crouching before the door, he sprays the lubricant into the lock. Dirt, rust, or other contamination can bind the pin tumblers.
He trades the graphite spray for the tension tool and that pick known as a “rake.” He inserts the L-shaped wrench first to maintain the necessary tension on the lock core. He pushes the rake into the key channel as deep as it will go, then brings it up until he feels it press against the pins. Squinting into the lock, he rapidly draws the rake out, but it does not raise all of the pin tumblers to their shear point, so he tries again, and again, and finally on the sixth try the channel seems to be clear.
He turns the knob.
The door opens.
He half expects an alarm to go off, but there is no siren. A quick scan of the header and jamb fails to reveal magnetic switches, so there must not be a silent alarm, either.
After he puts the tools away and zippers shut the leather case, he steps across the threshold and softly closes the door behind him.
He stands for a while in the cool, shadowy kitchen, absorbing the vibrations, which are good. This house welcomes him. Here, his future begins, and it will be immeasurably brighter than his confused and amnesia-riddled past.
As he moves out of the kitchen to explore the premises, he does not draw the P7 from his shoulder holster. He is sure that no one is at home. He senses no danger, only opportunity.
“I need to be someone,” he tells the house, as if it is a living entity with the power to grant his wishes.
The ground floor offers nothing of interest. The usual rooms are filled with comfortable but unremarkable furniture.
Upstairs, he stops only briefly at each room, getting an overall picture of the second-floor layout before taking time for a thorough investigation. There’s a master bedroom with attached bath, walk-in closet . . . a guest bedroom . . . kids’ room . . . another bath . . .
The final bedroom at the end of the hall—which puts him at the front of the house—is used as an office. It contains a big desk and computer system, but it’s more cozy than businesslike. A plump sofa stands under the shuttered windows, a stained-glass lamp on the desk.
One of the two longest walls is covered with paintings hung in a double row, frames almost touching. Although the pieces of the collection are obviously by more than one artist, the subject matter, without exception, is dark and violent, rendered with unimpeachable skill: twisted shadows, disembodied eyes wide with terror, a Ouija board on which stands a blood-spotted trivet, ink-black palm trees silhouetted against an ominous sunset, a face distorted by a funhouse mirror, the gleaming steel blades of sharp knives and scissors, a mean street where menacing figures lurk just beyond the sour-yellow glow of street lamps, leafless trees with coaly limbs, a hot-eyed raven perched upon a bleached skull, pistols, revolvers, shotguns, an ice pick, meat cleaver, hatchet, a queerly stained hammer lying obscenely on a silk negligee and lace-trimmed bedsheet . . .
He likes this artwork.
It speaks to him.
This is life as he knows it.
Turning from the gallery wall, he clicks on the stained-glass lamp and marvels at its multi-hued luminous beauty.
In the clear sheet of glass that protects the top of the desk, the mirror-image circles and ovals and teardrops of color are still lovely but darker than when viewed directly. In some indefinable way, they are also foreboding.
Leaning forward, he sees the twin ovals of his eyes staring back at him from the polished glass. Glimmering with their own tiny reflections of the mosaic lamplight, they seem to be not eyes, in fact, but the luminous sensors of a machine—or, if eyes, then the fevered eyes of something soulless—and he quickly looks away from them before
