his shoulder against the man’s arm, pinning it to the wall, then hit the light switch. He felt dizzy, but forced himself to stay on his feet. With a fumbling grasp, he used his less injured left hand to pick up the open plastic bottle of toilet bowl cleaner on the sink counter. He put it up to where the man’s good eye was peering in — and squeezed the plastic bottle between the wall and his palm.
He didn’t think any of the chemical had hit the man — who must have seen it coming, because he jerked back, cutting Seth’s shoulder as he pulled the knife arm from beneath him. Free of this obstruction, the door slammed shut and Seth’s weight held it closed. Seth dropped the cleaner even as he struggled with the lock, his fingers slippery and barely functioning. He managed to grab a towel, to hold it against his neck, but soon he could not stand. The pain was intense, and he felt himself weakening, his own blood warm and sticky and dampening his shirt. He wedged himself between the hull and the door, even as the attacker began slamming against it.
The door shook beneath the blows. It would give, Seth thought. He tried to yell, but found he couldn’t make a sound.
The pounding stopped. The small room swam before him. Seth bent forward, trying to fight the feeling of faintness. No sooner had he moved than the wood where he had rested his head splintered inward with a bang — split by a small ax. The attacker must have taken it from their camping gear. The man yanked the ax from the wood. Seth tried to drag himself away from the door before the second blow came, but found he could not. He brought his hands back to the towel at his throat, wondering if the ax’s third blow would slice into his back.
Suddenly, he heard music — not music, really, but a short series of tones, a repetitive, insistent, three-note call — the sound of a pager or of an alarm on an electronic watch.
Seth heard the sound cut off. He waited, every muscle tense, for the ax to strike again — but the third blow never came.
Over the next few minutes, Seth drifted in and out of awareness, but a low rumbling made him open his eyes. The other boat was leaving.
He began to feel cold and sleepy. He must get up and help Mandy now, he thought, but in his pain and light- headed confusion, he could not locate the door latch. Still holding the towel against his neck, he groped along the wall with one hand and managed to turn on the light. He found the latch just as he lost consciousness.
2
Monday, June 4, 1:56 A.M.
Las Piernas
Wearing rubber gloves, the Looking Glass Man checked all the blinds. On a less eventful evening, this last night of using this apartment would have filled him with a sense of regret. It was so perfectly suited to his needs — at the back of the building, over the carport, where no one would notice his footsteps across the floor late in the evening. The woman in the only adjoining apartment worked the graveyard shift. Still, he moved quietly.
The old television set was off; he had never watched it. The stove was clean but cold; he had never cooked on it. The meager, outdated furnishings in the apartment bore the marks of previous owners and tenants. The next tenant would not see any sign of his use of it. There was nothing he was so careful of as where he left signs of his presence.
He evenly sprayed disinfectant over the surface of the gray Formica table-top, then wiped it with a white paper towel, moving his gloved hand in controlled, overlapping circles. He placed the towel in a white plastic bag.
When he was certain the surface of the table was dry, he took out a notebook with a stiff, cardboard cover. It was the sort of notebook one could find in any college bookstore, a black-and-white-marbled cover binding graph paper, used by science students to record experiments.
Inside, on the first page, he had written a quotation:
“God is in the details.”
The quotation was from a famous architect — Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who had designed the Seagram Building in New York. The Looking Glass Man considered himself to be a kind of architect, too. When he had started the first of these notebooks, at the age of sixteen, the entries had been so benign — nothing more than recorded observations of little social experiments, his attempts to monitor the reactions of others to certain stimuli. But even then, perhaps intuitively, he had placed the quotation on the first page of the notebook. He now had many of these notebooks and had written this same quotation at the front of all of them. His faith in the importance of details was unshakable.
He turned to a blank page, and using a mechanical pencil, began to record data in block letters. Each letter took up one square of the graph paper’s grid, the tip of the pencil lead never crossing a blue line. He wrote a heading, ANTI-INTERFERENCE, then noted the date and time for a series of events, from the time he boarded the fishing vessel
He left a row of empty squares beneath the last of these, then wrote:
TIME ELAPSED IN CRITICAL MODE: 18 M 51 S
FATALITIES: 3
RATING: 4
AREAS FOR IMPROVEMENT: TOO SLOW W/ THIRD VIC; NEARLY SUSTAINED INJURY FROM CORROSIVE, WHICH WOULD HAVE REQUIRED MEDICAL TREATMENT. SUCH TREATMENT MIGHT HAVE BEEN REMARKED ON BY PHYSICIANS AND LATER CONNECTED TO CRIME SCENE. TOO EMOTIONAL. SLOPPY!
He paused, then lifted the pencil, turning it upside down so that he could see the tip, and gently turned the pencil barrel so that the lead was at the proper length. He then continued to write.
COMMENTS: DID NOT LIKE WORKING WITH CHILDREN. NEVER WILL FORGIVE RANDOLPH FOR FORCING THIS SOLUTION. HOWEVER, MUST NOT THINK OF THIS. MUST CONSIDER THE NUMBER OF CHILDREN SAVED BY THE DEATHS OF THESE TWO ADOLESCENTS. SHOULD BE ABLE TO CONTINUE NOW. SMALL SACRIFICE, ALL CONSIDERED.
He reread what he had written, checking for errors. He found none. Accurate records were so important. If one were to truly evaluate the effectiveness of his activities, one could not rely on memory. He knew the discovery of any of the more recent notebooks by others would greatly increase his chances of being prosecuted for certain of the activities recounted in them. It was a risk he had to take, though, in order to proceed in an orderly manner.
His hands began to perspire beneath the gloves. He disliked the sensation it caused.
He retracted the pencil lead, closed the notebook, and put it and the pencil into a briefcase. He went into the bathroom, fought off a sudden nausea, then quickly went back to work. He emptied the remaining disinfectant into the toilet and flushed it twice. He put the empty bottle into the white plastic bag.
