Veil

me.'

Veil laughed. 'You won't be denied, will you?'

'Aha. Remember that everyone has secrets that may be of value to someone else. I have my own. If you'll tell me what you're after, I may tell you something that you'll find even more interesting that the cave behind the waterfall.'

'Like what?'

'You first,' Tompkins replied without smiling.

'A few days ago a man tried to kill me. It's important to me to find out why that happened. It's also important to Pilgrim, because the incident occurred on the grounds of the Institute. He suggested that I use this hospice as a base of operations while I try to find some answers.'

'Why not let the police handle it?'

'It's not the kind of thing the police handle well. It's personal, may have roots that go deep into my past, and is just something that I'm best equipped to deal with myself.'

'This is getting more and more intriguing,' Tompkins said, raising his eyebrows slightly.

'Maybe so, but I'll have to ask you to be satisfied with what I've just given you—at least for now.'

'You think the answers you're looking for could be in the Army compound?'

'It's possible. Perry, you said that you were responsible for my being invited to the Institute. What did you mean?'

'Pilgrim didn't tell you?'

'I'm beginning to think there are a great many things Colonel Pilgrim hasn't told me.'

Tompkins grunted. 'I've been here six months. I subscribe to about a dozen art magazines, and three months ago I read an article about you in American Artist. The piece had photographs of you and your work. I'd never heard of you and never seen your work, but that article made quite an impression on me—to say the least. I took it to Pilgrim. He took one look at what you were doing, and I knew he was going to invite you here.'

'He said so?'

'No, he didn't say so. But I knew.'

'I don't understand what you're saying, Perry. Why should my work make such an impression on you? And why should it be so important to Pilgrim?'

Tompkins smiled thinly as he walked across the room to a curtained alcove. 'No one else but Dr. Solow and Pilgrim has ever seen these, Veil,' he said as he pulled aside the curtain to reveal a deep, three-walled alcove hung with at least two dozen oil paintings of various sizes.

Veil stared at the paintings and suddenly felt short of breath. All of the paintings resembled eerie landscapes, but no such geography had ever existed on Earth. Walls of thick, swirling gray rose up on either side of an arrow- straight strip that was the color of steel. The corridor stretched to infinity and a horizon that was a shimmering, electric blue. The steel-colored strip and horizon were dazzling in their bold brightness, but it was the brushwork in the gray that formed the walls that finally gripped the senses, as it provided the continuing theme of the paintings. If one looked directly at the gray areas, little could be discerned but the technique of the artist combining intricate, fine-line work with gobs of paint from a palette knife to produce an illusion of churning motion.

However, the brightness of the strip and horizon kept drawing the eye back to the center of the picture—and it was then that a viewer's peripheral vision began to register ghostly, many-hued shapes moving in the mist. It was work that came fully to life only when viewed out of the corner of the mind's eye; in the hands of a master like Perry Tompkins, the illusion was unrelievedly haunting and stunning in its power. In an instant Veil perceived all the things he had been doing wrong and understood what techniques he could use to correct them.

'They're beautiful,' Veil whispered. He still felt as if someone were standing on his chest. He cleared his throat, spoke louder. 'They're different from anything you've ever done before. But why should you want to copy my work— even if you can do it a hundred times better?'

'Ah, but I didn't say I'd been copying your work; I said I'd seen it in American Artist. I also said it had impressed the hell out of me, and now you understand why. For some reason I got the notion to do these things not long after I arrived here. I did one, thought it was a rather clever illusion, and put it aside in order to go back to the other things I'd been doing. This wouldn't let me go; I kept coming back to do different versions.'

'Do you dream?' Veil asked, his voice hoarse and barely audible.

'Sleep like a baby. These are the visions that—for the last few months, at least—occur to me when I'm awake. At first I thought it was mental fallout from chemotherapy, but I'd been off that for weeks when I started these. Now I've been off drugs for months, and still these visions come. You do your work from dreams, don't you?'

Veil, still transfixed by the paintings, slowly nodded. 'You say that Pilgrim and Dr. Solow have seen these?'

'Yes, but no one else.'

'Did you show the article to Dr. Solow?'

'No—only Pilgrim. He may have shown it to her, but I have no way of knowing. He's never returned the magazine, and he asked me very pointedly not to mention the article to anyone else.'

Veil tried to think of something to say, but couldn't. It was as if he had been struck dumb by the canvases; the paintings held him like some great magnet that was pulling his soul apart and threatening to suck him down the endless corridor and into one of the swirling gray walls where he would disappear forever. He became dimly aware of Tompkins standing beside him, pressing a glass into his hand. He raised the glass to his lips, drank all of the Scotch.

'Rather interesting, isn't it?' the dying artist continued dryly. 'As far as I know, you and I are the only two people in the world who independently ended up painting virtually identical landscapes of a place that doesn't even exist.'

Chapter 14

______________________________

There were no locks on any door in the hospice.

Shortly after two A.M. veil entered the building housing Sharon's offices. He closed the door behind him and switched on the flashlight he had found in the utility closet in his chalet. Aiming the beam at the floor, he walked around the computer, which he did not know how to operate, and went to the bank of filing cabinets placed against the far wall. He pulled open the A drawer and selected a folder at random to see what it contained. It was the file of a woman by the name of Hilda Amery, a Lazarus Person who had been at the hospice for a four-week period two years before. Her file consisted of the transcript of an intake interview conducted by Sharon, a number of lengthy anecdotal reports by and about the woman, and a record of the dying she had counseled.

Veil checked a few other files and found them essentially the same, with medical histories and treatment records added to the files of those men and women who had come to the hospice to die.

Next he pulled open the P drawer. He quickly scanned the name tags, but did not find what he was looking for. He was about to close the drawer when, on an impulse, he pushed the hanging files forward on their metal tracks and shone his light into the bottom of the drawer. A sealed manila envelope was wedged beneath the folders. Resting the flashlight on top of the cabinet, he took out the envelope and tore it open. Inside was a single, unlabeled tape cassette.

Veil searched through the drawers beneath the computer console until he found a portable cassette player. He inserted the tape cartridge and turned on the machine, then switched off the flashlight and sat down in the darkness to listen.

'Mark. Project code: Lazarus. Subject number fifty-three. Assigned cross-reference index number—'

'Don't assign this an index number, Sharon.'

Jonathan Pilgrim's voice sounded curiously distant and flat, as if he were extremely fatigued.