Between clenched teeth, lips peeled back in a grimace of pain, Nella let out a strange, low groan. She arched her back until only her shoulders and heels were in contact with the bed. She appeared to be full of violent energy, as if she were a boiler straining with excess steam pressure, and for a moment she seemed about to explode. Then she collapsed back onto the mattress, shuddered more violently than ever, and broke out in a copious sweat.
George looked at Worthy, at Loman. He clearly realized that something was very wrong, though he could not begin to understand the nature of that wrongness.
“Stop.” Loman drew his revolver as George stepped backward toward the second-floor hall.
“Come all the way in here, George, and lie down on the bed beside Nella.”
In the doorway George Valdoski froze, staring in disbelief and dismay at the revolver.
“If you try to leave,” Loman said, “I’ll have to shoot you, and I don’t really want to do that.”
“You wouldn’t,” George said, counting on decades of friendship to protect him.
“Yes, I would,” Loman said coldly.
“I’d kill you if I had to, and we’d cover it with a story you wouldn’t like. We’d say that we caught you in a contradiction, that we found some evidence that you were the one who killed Eddie, killed your own boy, some twisted sex thing, and that when we confronted you with the proof, you grabbed my revolver out of my holster. There was a struggle. You were shot. Case closed.”
Coming from someone who was supposed to be a close and treasured friend, Loman’s threat was so monstrous that at first George was speechless. Then, as he stepped back into the room, he said, “You’d let everyone think … think I did those terrible things to Eddie? Why? What’re you doing, Loman? What the hell are you doing? Who … who are you protecting?”
“Lie down on the bed,” Loman said.
Dr. Worthy was preparing another syringe for George.
On the bed Nella was shivering ceaselessly, twitching, writhing. Sweat trickled down her face; her hair was damp and tangled. Her eyes were open, but she seemed unaware that others were in the room. Maybe she was not even conscious of her whereabouts. She was seeing a place beyond this room or looking within herself; Loman didn’t know which and could remember nothing of his own conversion except that the pain had been excruciating.
Reluctantly approaching the bed, George Valdoski said, “What’s happening, Loman? Christ, what is this? What’s wrong?”
“Everything’ll be fine,” Loman assured him. “It’s for the best, George. It’s really for the best.”
“What’s for the best? What in God’s name—”
“Lie down, George. Everything’ll be fine.”
“What’s happening to Nella?”
“Lie down, George. It’s for the best,” Loman said.
“It’s for the best,” Dr. Worthy agreed as he finished filling the syringe from a new bottle of the golden fluid.
“It’s really for the best,” Loman said. “Trust me.” With the revolver he waved George toward the bed and smiled reassuringly.
18
Harry Talbot’s house was Bauhaus-inspired redwood, with a wealth of big windows. It was three blocks south of the heart of Moonlight Cove, on the east side of Conquistador Avenue, a street named for the fact that Spanish conquerors had bivouacked in that area centuries earlier, when accompanying the Catholic clergy along the California coast to establish missions. On rare occasions Harry dreamed of being one of those ancient soldiers, marching northward into unexplored territory, and it was always a nice dream because, in that adventure fantasy, he was never wheelchair-bound.
Most of Moonlight Cove was built on wooded hillsides facing the sea, and Harry’s lot sloped down to Conquistador, providing a perfect perch for a man whose main activity in life was spying on his fellow townsmen. From his third-floor bedroom at the northwest corner of the house, he could see at least portions of all the streets between Conquistador and the cove—Juniper Lane, Serra Street, Roshmore Way, and Cypress Lane—as well as the intersecting streets which ran east-west. To the north, he could glimpse pieces of Ocean Avenue and even beyond. Of course the breadth and depth of his field of vision would have been drastically limited if his house hadn’t been one story higher than most of those around it and if he hadn’t been equipped with a 60mm f/8 refractor telescope and a good pair of binoculars.