mountains.'
'The Himalayas,' he said, joining her. 'Yes, we are northeast of Darjeeling in the foothills of the Himalayas, somewhere near the old Bhutan border in Sikkim.'
'I didn't know you knew so much geography.' Ari turned a fresh, enthusiastic face to her father. The sun lit her hair with golden fire. She was trying very hard to draw her father out and cheer him up in the hope that he would abandon his moody despondency. To see him sunk so deep in his depression hurt her more than anything their abductors could have done to her. 'Tell me more.'
'I don't know much more. I was only here briefly-with your mother before you were born.'
'I never knew that. You said-'
'I know what I said.' He smiled devilishly. 'There is a lot parents don't talk about in front of their children. They lead double lives, my dear.'
'Really. I always suspected as much. But now the truth comes out. You've got to tell me all about it.'
Her father sighed, as if sifting through the various recollections of a long and burdensome life for one remnant of a memory saved from some long-ago time. 'There's not much to tell,' he said at last. 'It was not much of a trip.'
'I don't believe that. Two people-young and in love, frolicking in these secret hills.'
A faint smile touched his lips as he warmed to the memory. 'Yes, there was something of that. But there was a sadness, too. Your mother wanted so very much to show me the town where they had lived and the seminary where her father had taught all those Years. She wanted me to see where she had come from, she said.
'But when we reached Darjeeling something happened to her; she became moody and unhappy. We stayed only a few days and looked around, but she couldn't bring herself to show me all she had planned. It was like she couldn't bear to be here. She became very depressed-that was the first hint of her trouble.
'After we left we never spoke of the trip again, though I could tell that it was often on her mind. She seemed to regard the trip as a fiasco, but I didn't feel that way at all. It was years later, of course, before I began to suspect there was more to it than a holiday ruined by unpleasant memories.'
Ari remembered the story her mother had told-it seemed years ago now, but only one day by the clock-and how she sat at her elbow as one in a trance, drinking in every word. 'Did she never tell you about the Dream Thief?'
Her father gave her an odd look. 'What do you know about it?'
Ari described her visit to the asylum with Spence and Adjani and how her mother had rallied during the visit and had, in one flash of lucidity, described what happened to her in the wild hills. Ari told the story word for word the way her mother had told it, while her father sat with a look of rapt attention on his face.
'Yes,' he said when she had finished. 'I've never heard it quite that way, but that's pretty much the way I've pieced it together over the years-from little things she'd say. Not that she every really tried to hide it; I don't think she was aware of it. She had blocked it out completely. But sometimes she'd slip; her subconscious would send out a plea for understanding.'
He turned to look at the faraway line of mountains heaving their mighty shoulders skyward. An expression of deepest grief came over his features. Tears gathered at the corners of his eyes and trickled down his broad cheeks. Ari took his hand and pressed it hard. She lifted her other hand to his face. He took the hand and kissed the palm and held it against his lips for a moment. When he spoke again his voice was thick with sorrow. 'All these years I thought it was the fantasy of a troubled mind. I never dreamed it could be real.
'The best doctors in the world agreed with me-the treatments, the drugs, the horrible nights of pain when she'd cry out in terror… but it was real, Ari. And it drove her insane.'
The air suddenly seemed colder and Ari wrapped her arms around herself and stepped away from the balcony.
Yes, it was real. And it had turned its attention to her, and had brought her within these walls a prisoner. Would she be able to withstand? She wondered, thinking of the one who had escaped, yet the memory of it had eaten away at her sanity until nothing remained but the shell of a formerly beautiful woman.
'Daddy, I'm scared,' Ari said, trembling.
He took his daughter in his arms and held her tightly. 'I know, dearest. I know.'
'What are we going to do?'
'There is not much we can do, Ari. Only pray.'
'I've never stopped praying, Daddy. But pray for us now -and for Spence, too. I think he may need it more than we do.'
8
… SPENCES HELD THE FLAME in his hands. It burned lightly, fluttering yellow in the soft night breeze. He brought the candle, made of woven cloth and plant fibers dipped in wax, close to his face and felt its warmth lick him.
Beyond the small circle of his light he could see nothing. The night sat like an impenetrable wall all around him. Above, no star gleamed, no moon shed its light-all was dark and Spence was alone in the darkness.
The only thing holding the awful smothering blackness at bay was the little, crudely formed torch in his hand. That a light so small could keep out the dark seemed a miracle.
He had never thought about it before, had never seen this miracle performed. But he witnessed it now, and he marveled at it. Even the tiniest spark was stronger than all the mighty forces of the night.
Strange, he thought, that it should be that way.
Suddenly a quick gust of wind whipped at the flame, and though Spence cupped his hand around it at almost the same instant, it was too late. He saw the flame wink out as the darkness it had been holding back leaped in to devour him.
Like some immense, amorphous creature, the darkness absorbed him into itself. He could sense its exultation at conquering him-a thrill of excitement seemed to course through it as it tightened its grasp on him. He knew, with a horror that exceeded any he had ever felt, that it meant to crush him into nothingness. Already he could feel the suffocating blackness, clamped like an iron fist over him, beginning to squeeze him.
The mind that controlled the darkness, that was itself the heart and soul of darkness, reached out toward him. He recoiled from the contact as if from the slithering touch of a reptile's polished skin. His blood ran cold.
He had touched a mind of utter chaos and depravity, and it made him feel weak and insignificant in its presence. It meant to kill him, but for no better reason than that it meant to kill all things that possessed even the faintest glimmer of light in them.
A long, aching cry tore from his throat, full of helplessness and bleak despair. In that cry he heard all the bitter disappointment and hate and injustice he had ever experienced-the sum total of all his deepest fears and failures.
And he heard the cry lose itself in the darkness, becoming part of it, strengthening it. Spence knew then that the despair and the hate and all the other black nameless fears belonged not to himself-although he had held them and nourished them in his innermost being; they belonged instead to the darkness that covered him now, were part of it, were one with it. Long had they fought within him to extinguish his spark, that portion of light that was his.
Now they had gone back to strengthen the darkness from which they were sprung. Now it would at last crush him.
Spence felt his strength to resist slacken, running away like water. That the darkness should prevail over him was the most monstrous insanity he could conceive. To be snuffed out like his poor candle flame seemed to him the final, unanswerable injustice. And for what? For possessing a tiny gleam of light that he had never asked for, nor sought.
'No!' The shout was defiance. 'No, no, no!' He heard his cries die in the darkness.
Then he heard a sound that pierced him like an ice dagger. It seemed to hollow him out, disemboweling him, slashing at his heart. The sound was laughter, originating from within the cruel mocking heart of darkness.
He would be annihilated with the insolent laughter still booming in his brain; his last thoughts would be of the
