he was, and eased back down to the pillow. He lay on his back, in the dark, staring at the shadowy ceiling, listening to Hilary's rhythmic breathing.
He had bolted from sleep to escape a nightmare. It was a brutal, grisly dream filled with mortuaries and tombs and graves and coffins, a dream that was somber and heavy and dark with death. Knives. Bullets. Blood. Worms coming out of the walls and wriggling from the staring eyes of corpses. Walking dead men who spoke of crocodiles. In the dream, Tony's life had been threatened half a dozen times, but on each occasion, Hilary had stepped between him and the killer, and every time she had died for him.
It was a damned disturbing dream.
He was afraid of losing her. He loved her. He loved her more than he could ever tell her. He was an articulate man, and he was not the least bit reluctant to express his emotions, but he simply did not have the words to properly describe the depth and quality of his feeling for her. He didn't think such words existed; all of the ones he knew were crude, leaden, hopelessly inadequate. If she were taken from him, life would go on, of course--but not easily, not happily, not without a great deal of pain and grief.
He stared at the dark ceiling and told himself that the dream had not been anything to worry about. It had not been an omen. It had not been a prophecy. It was only a dream. Just a bad dream. Nothing more than a dream.
In the distance, a train whistle blew two long blasts. It was a cold, lonely, mournful sound that made him pull the covers up to his chin.
***
Bruno decided that Katherine might be waiting for him in the house that Leo had built.
He left his own house and crossed the vineyards. He took the knife and flashlight with him.
In the first pale light of dawn, while most of the sky was still blue-black, while the valley lay in the fading penumbra of the night, he went to the clifftop house. He did not go up by way of the cable car because, in order to board it, he would have to go into the winery and climb to the second floor, where the lower tramway station occupied a corner of the building. He dared not be seen in there, for he figured the place was now crawling with Katherine's spies. He wanted to sneak up on the house, and the only route by which he could do that was the stairs on the face of the cliff.
He started climbing rapidly, two steps at a time, but before he went very far, he discovered that caution was essential. The staircase was crumbling. It had not been kept in good repair, as the tramway had been. Decades of rain and wind and summer heat had leeched away much of the mortar that bound the old structure together. Small stones, pieces of virtually every one of the three hundred and twenty steps, broke off under his feet and clattered to the base of the cliff. Several times, he almost lost his balance, almost fell backwards, or almost pitched sideways into space. The safety railing was decayed, dilapidated, missing whole sections; it would not save him if he stumbled against it. But slowly, cautiously, he followed the switchback path of the staircase, and in time he reached the top of the cliff.
He crossed the lawn, which had gone to weeds. Dozens of rose bushes, once carefully tended and manicured, had sent thorny tentacles in all directions and now sprawled in tangled, flowerless heaps.
Bruno let himself into the rambling Victorian mansion and searched the musty, dust-filmed, spider-webbed rooms which stank of mildew that thrived on the drapes and carpets. The house was crammed full of antique furniture and art glass and statuary and many other things, but it did not hold anything sinister. The woman was not here, either.
He didn't know whether that was good or bad. On the one hand, she hadn't moved in, hadn't taken over in his absence. That was good. He was relieved about that. But on the other hand--where the hell was she?
His confusion was rapidly getting worse. His powers of reasoning began to fail him hours ago, but now he couldn't trust his five senses, either. Sometimes he thought he heard voices, and he pursued them through the house, only to realize it was his own mumbling that he heard. Sometimes the mildew didn't smell like mildew at all, but like his mother's favorite perfume; but then a moment later it smelled like mildew again. And when he looked at familiar paintings that had hung on these walls since his childhood, he was unable to perceive what they were depicting; the shapes and colors would not resolve themselves, and his eyes were baffled by even the most simple pictures. He stood before one painting that he knew to be a landscape with trees and wildflowers, but he was not able to see those objects in it; he could only remember that they were there; all he saw now were smears, disjointed lines, blobs, meaningless forms.
He tried not to panic. He told himself that his bizarre confusion and disorientation were merely the results of his not having slept all night. He'd driven a long way in a short time, and he was understandably weary. His eyes were heavy, gritty, red and burning. He ached all over. His neck was stiff. All he needed was sleep. When he woke, he would be clear-headed. That was what he told himself. That was what he had to believe.
Because he had searched the house from bottom to top, he was now in the finished attic, the big room with the sloped ceiling, where he had spent so much of his life. In the chalky glow of his flashlight, he could see the bed in which he had slept during the years he'd lived in the mansion.
Himself was already on the bed. Himself was lying down, eyes closed, as if sleeping. Of course, the eyes were sewn shut. And the white nightgown was not a nightgown; it was a burial gown that Avril Tannerton had put on him. Because himself was dead. The bitch had stabbed and killed him. Himself had been stone-cold dead since last week.
Bruno was too enervated to vent his grief and rage. He went to the king-size bed and stretched out on his half of it, beside himself.
Himself stank. It was a pungent, chemical smell.
The bedclothes around himself were stained and damp with dark fluids that were slowly leaking out of the body.
Bruno didn't care about the mess. His side of the bed was dry. And although himself was dead and would never speak again or laugh again, Bruno felt good just being near himself.
Bruno reached out and touched himself. He touched the cold, hard, rigid hand and held it.
Some of the painful loneliness abated.
Bruno did not feel whole, of course. He would never feel whole again, for half of him was dead. But lying there beside his corpse, he did not feel all alone either.
Leaving the flashlight on to dispel the darkness in the shuttered attic bedroom, Bruno fell asleep.
***
Dr. Nicholas Rudge's office was on the twentieth floor of a skyscraper in the heart of San Francisco. Apparently, Hilary thought, the architect either had never heard of the unpleasant term
