Prentice shrugged. Jeff was a big boy. He could call him later and explain. 'Sure. Let's head for Malibu.'
Jeff was just coming back in from the parking lot when Drandhu bustled up, stethoscope in hand. 'Ah, Mr. Teitelbaum, there you are! Do you mind if we go and talk to Mr. Kenson a little more?'
'Sure, whatever. I got some questions for him. If he can be reasonably civil for about five minutes.'
'He said something… disturbing?'
'He pissed me off is what he did. But come on. Probably Tom went back to Kenson's room.'
Just outside Kenson's room Jeff noticed a short, stocky guy with a kind of Howdy Doody look about him, and big earlobes, walking along toward them carrying a canvas bag. He smiled sunnily at them and continued on past.
There were shouts and curses from Kenson's room. Inside, they found a fat, mustached male nurse trying to hold Kenson down. 'Doctors orders, you're supposed to take it easy, pal -'
But Kenson was going into convulsions, moving with an energy that Jeff would have thought impossible, given Kenson's condition. Coming closer, Jeff was sickened, seeing Kenson was foaming at the mouth, jaws snapping open and shut clack-clack-clack, arms flailing, legs randomly kicking. His bowels letting go, judging from the stink and the stain spreading down the sheet. And the tape recorder was gone from the IV stand.
'Who put that bandage on his head?' Drandhu snapped. 'No one was to have put any bandages there – had no need at all…!'
Kenson gave a final shudder and lay back, gasping, eyes rolling wildly, rigid now. The nurse stepped back, protesting, 'Look I didn't touch his head, I just heard him flapping around in' here and -'
'Yes, yes, just get out of the way -' Drandhu snapped, moving around behind Kenson. He unwound the bandage.
Not knowing why, Jeff was drawn to stand behind Drandhu when he removed the bandage entirely…
The top of, Kenson's skull had been freshly sawed away. And his brain exposed. And his brain was squirming.
Someone had taken the top of his head off and introduced vermin into his brain. Real maggots – not the ethereal variety. Spiders. Centipedes. Large black and. red ants. Dozens of them, thrashing and chewing their way through his brain.
Kenson gave a final spasm and died, as Jeff turned away and threw up on the male nurse.
12
Near Malibu
Mitch tried to remember coming here, and couldn't.
As far as he knew, he'd always been in the fog room. There was just a bed, and there was Eurydice, and that was all. There were no walls. Just the fog around the bed. If he looked up from Eury's heaving, sweat and blood- sticky breasts, and if he stared at the fog for a moment, it resolved into shadows that fanned out like shapes in a kaleidoscope; they were man-shaped shadows, and they were caressing themselves and dancing in a stupid sort of way. And then they were fog again as a jolt of punishment pushed his attention back to Eury and he pumped into her and the Reward came and he knew the things on the other side of the fog were feeding but it felt good, it felt very good so it was not to be argued with, you were not to notice the suffering on Eury's face, the look of a terrified lost child, you just got into the pain and then you didn't have to notice the other hurt, the one that couldn't be expressed, the final pain, the pain at the root of whatever it was that made Mitch himself…
Just keep at it and after a while maybe it would end.
But he was pretty sure it wasn't going to end till they were both dead…
A Highway near Malibu
The BMW took the curves at fifty, but Lissa was a better driver than Jeff. Nothing much was bothering Prentice, anyway. He felt dreamy. Even the pain in his hand from the gash was gone, completely faded. He was strapped into a bucket seat, letting the damp wind lick his ears and stream his hair, looking up at the few stars visible through knot-holes in the ceiling of clouds.
Lissa was amazing. She had only to touch him and he was transported. Maybe it was being in love. Hadn't Kenson said something about her? He couldn't remember what it was, now.
'Oh Hell,' Lissa said.
He looked at the road ahead. A wispy gray broom of rain swept down the highway toward them. And they still had the top down on the car.
In seconds the rain was on them, even as Lissa reached back to unsnap the accordion top, and hit the switch to close it over them. It came up a little too high and caught the wind, didn't clasp properly. Lissa cursed, trying to close the convertible top with one hand as she drove with the other.
'Maybe we'd better pull over,' Prentice said vaguely, as the chilly rain off the sea began to patter down over them. He tried to help her with the top.
But she snapped, 'Don't touch it! It's cranky, it has to be done just right… goddamn it… And we don't have time to pull over…'
What was the hurry, he wondered. It was as if she were trying to get him there before…
Before what? And what had put that thought into his head?
The rain splashed down his face now, and he felt odd, as if he were just waking up out here in her car. He remembered getting in with her and driving out here but till now it hadn't seemed quite real.
What was real? Suddenly he found himself thinking that maybe some of what Kenson had told them was real. And just as suddenly the story Lissa had told him about 'Xedrine' seemed improbable. Contrived.
It was as if the dash of cold rain water and Lissa's distraction had slipped him from a noose he hadn't been aware of till he was free of it.
How did I get here? he wondered. He'd been determined to avoid Lissa and Arthwright. How could he have believed that bogus story about the drug treatment centre? How could he have got in her car after all that Kenson had said about her?
And why, he wondered, was Lissa the one who was to bring him – and not Arthwright?
Lissa had been assigned to him, he thought. (Did he think it? Or was it Amy's thought?) He was a natural for Lissa. He was the type that went for her specialized bait.
He was the type. That seemed a key, somehow. A type is compulsive about something.
It had started long before Lissa's effortless seduction of him. He seemed to see an unbroken linkage of cause and effect stretching back to his days living with Amy, in New York.
It began with his need to blindly chase girls. Why had he started cheating on Amy? Was it just her sickness? Or had that been a handy rationale? Some of the time he'd been happy with her – and he'd been frightened by his happiness with Amy.
The car swerved on the newly slick road, threatening to spin, but Lissa kept it on track, and now they'd come to a straight stretch. She used the opportunity to close the convertible roof the rest of the way. Absently, Prentice helped her lock it in place.
There'd been something missing in his life with Amy – something more than the stability sacrificed to her erratic behavior. He'd missed the sense of validation that came from new seductions, new relationships. He remembered something a male character in one of his scripts had said: JACK
Women to me are doorways. They're a way into another would – an alien country where the landscape is made up of each woman's distinctive personality, her tastes, her desires, the way she feels under my hands and the way she feels about my hands… And me, I'm an explorer, is all. I can't be satisfied with exploring only one frontier…
He remembered, too, what Amy's reaction had been, reading that. 'An explorer? That's a comfortable euphemism for it.'
Euphemism for philanderer. For a guy who needed to have affairs. Who needed that periodic input of reassurance that he got from making a new girl. But there was something else, underlying the urge. A concealed anger against all women.
Riding passively along in the BMW, distantly aware that Lissa was saying something to him, trying to snag his
