Thief Of Souls

“You have to hear this,” she said, turning up the volume.

“Bad news?” asked Winston.

“Just listen.”

The radio spat forth a strange news report between bursts of static: BZZZ BZZZ. . . “freak tornado hurled the cabin cruiser” . . . BZZZ BZZZ. . . “multiple inju­ries” . . . BZZZ BZZZ . . . “Pacific Coast Highway” . . . BZZZ BZZZ . . . “closed in both directions.”

Okoya beamed. “I’ll bet your friend Michael did that.”

Winston had to admit, it did have all the signs of a Michael Lipranski weather pattern. But what troubled him in was the fact that Okoya was so quick to figure it out. Now their companion knew everything about them, but they knew nothing about Okoya. If there was any skill Okoya had perfected, it was that of being a mirror, reflecting back at Tory and Winston their own sordid histories, while evading most conversations about himself.

They continued their journey, cresting the rocky hill ahead, to reveal yet more hills before them, as Winston expected . . . but this time, something was different.

“Looks like we’re getting somewhere,” Okoya said.

On the ridge of the next hill stood a high chain-link fence, far more daunting than any of the half­hearted barbed-wire they had climbed through. This fence meant business.

“Great,” said Tory. “What’s next? The Great Wall of China?”

But Winston wasn’t listening to her; his eyes were focused ahead on a distant hilltop covered with dense trees far different than the dry scrub that claimed the land around it. There was a building within those trees as well. A large one.

“I know where Dillon is,” said Winston, trying to catch his breath from the climb.

“In that house over there?” Tory asked.

“House?! Don’t you know what that is?”

“Maybe you should tell us,” said Okoya.

Winston kept his eyes locked on the distant hilltop, letting the shiver have its way with his spine. “That’s Hearst Castle,” he said. “Dillon’s in Hearst Castle.”

9. Sidestroke

Newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst built a shrine to himself in the golden hills of San Simeon, California: a glorious castle rising on a hilltop, ten miles from the Pacific shore.

In this palace, the billionaire wined and dined the stars of the twenties and thirties, as well as European royalty. He filled the place top to bottom with million-dollar trinkets . . . and when he died, he didn’t take it with him. Now the bizarre sprawling expanse of Hearst Castle fed the tourist economy of California’s central coast.

But as of today, it served a completely new purpose. And tourists would not be getting in.

Dillon Cole paced the floor of William Randolf Hearst’s private suite, thinking and reviewing, calcu­lating and obsessing, focusing and refocusing all of his attentions on the events exploding around him.

It had been five days since he had been carried from the Columbia River, in the hands of those he had fixed . . . and yet somehow he felt he had never left the river. He was still caught in its waters, floundering—drowning in a current out of his control. What he wanted—what he needed—was to get in control of the events spinning around him. He did not want to be worshiped by the stifling crowds drawn to him. He did not want them spreading word of his miraculous acts, and gaining converts to a cult dedicated to the service of Dillon Cole. But his power of cohesion was all too strong, and these people had enveloped him like a tidal wave.

Then a simple lesson in survival came to him.

You never swim against a current.

To survive, you forge a diagonal, slicing sideways until you’re clear from danger. So he stopped fighting the needy souls around him, and instead began a slow, sideways crawl.

Once again, he focused his attention on fixing, with a renewed passion. He didn’t resist the followers press­ ing in around him. He let them do what they wanted to do, and when they told him they were taking him to a worthier place, he allowed this siege of the castle—for if his current of followers was determined to carry him to higher ground, fighting them would do no good. Sidestroke. He had to keep reminding himself that re­gardless of what they did, his own focus could not be compromised. He had to keep his energies trained on his repair work. Only by diligent repair could he hope to stave off the insidious downward spiral he now sensed everywhere in the world around him. There were times he prayed to have that burden of sight lifted from him; for to be able to feel all those hairline frac­tures spreading in the fabric of civilization, was a prescience no one should have to endure.

This morning like every morning, he scoured the newspapers brought to him by his followers, with hopes of finding the nature of the reckoning to come. Al­though he could sense those fractures in the bulwarks, he still didn’t know their cause. There had to be clues—a series of smaller events that might point out to him the form that the great unraveling would take. Would it be a wound that slowly leaked out the world’s life-blood, or would it be a massive hemorrhage from which there could be no recovery?

If the great unraveling had a face—if it had a form—he knew he could beat it. If it were a creature that flew in on dark wings, like his own spirit of destruction, Dillon would find a way to grapple with it. . . . But this new sense of doom had no form—it was just a feeling that colored everything he saw in a deepening shade of gray. How could he fight a feeling?

He wasn’t quite sure, but at least he knew he wouldn’t have to fight it alone. The others were com­ing. All four of them. He could see their faces in his mind so clearly—he could almost hear their voices. They were close now—he was certain of it. Their help would buffer his own growing sense of futility. With the live of them together again, it would be almost like having Deanna alive again. Almost.

The piles of newspapers were of no help today, and so he dared to take a look at the sports pages—not because he expected to find something earth-shattering there, but because it was something enjoyable, and as he looked through the stats and articles of a hundred teams he had lost track of over the past year, it occurred to him that he could not remember when he had last taken the time for simple human pleasure. He had once been an athletic kid, but he hadn’t as much as put on a pair of Rollerblades since he was thirteen. He used to live on Rollerblades before the world had heaved itself onto his shoulders. Days when his hair was a brighter shade of orange, and his parents were alive to worry about the stupid things he did.

A knock resounded from the heavy wooden doors of his museum gallery of a bedroom, and he snapped the sports pages closed, as if taking some time for himself was a criminal activity. The door creaked open, to ad­mit Carol Jessup—the woman whose daughter Dillon had “fixed.” She carried a tray of food, and although she was at least ten years his senior, she acted as if Dillon were the elder.

“I brought you something to eat,” she said. “We thought you might be hungry.”

A chorus of anguished wails blew in the door from elsewhere in the castle. People bellowing in pain. The high stone walls drained the life out of those screams, turning them into the hollow baying of ghosts.

Carol forced a smile, despite the awful sounds.

“More work for you,” she said. “They’re being brought to the Gothic Study—would you like to see?”

“No!” snapped Dillon. “I’ll see enough of them later.”

The woman put down the tray. “If there’s anything you need—anything at all.. .”

“Yeah,” said Dillon. “How about a pair of Rollerblades, and a retake of the last four years?”

“Excuse me?”

“Never mind,” he told her. “Thanks for the food. You can go now.”

She nodded her head respectfully and quietly turned to leave, then turned back to him. “Oh, one more thing,” she said. “Three youngsters arrived, claiming to be friends of yours.”

Dillon snapped his eyes to the woman so severely, she gasped and took a step back.

“What?! Where are they?” He had sensed they were close, but hadn’t realized how close.

“Well . . . uh . . . we’ve been questioning them,” she stammered. “They do seem suspicious . . .”

Dillon stormed toward the door. “Where are they?”