“It’s all changed now, all changed, and no going back.”
“What’s changed?”
“I’m not who I used to be. I can hardly remember what I used to be
like, the kind of man I was. It’s lost.”
I felt he was talking as much to himself as to me, grieving aloud for
this loss of self that he imagined.
“I don’t have anything to lose. Everything that matters has been taken
from me. I’m a dead man walking, Snow. That’s all I am. Can You
imagine how that feels?”
“No.”
“Because even You, with your shitty life, hiding from the day, coming
out only at night like some slug crawling out from under a rock-even
You have reasons to live.”
Although the chief of police was an elected official in our town, Lewis
Stevenson didn’t seem to be concerned about winning my vote.
I wanted to tell him to go copulate with himself. But there is a
difference between showing no fear and begging for a bullet in the
head.
As he turned his face away from me to gaze at the white sludge of fog
sliding thickly across the windshield, that cold fire throbbed in his
eyes again, a briefer and fainter flicker than before yet more
disturbing because it could no longer be dismissed as imaginary.
Lowering his voice as though afraid of being overheard, he said, “I
have terrible nightmares, terrible, full of sex and blood.”
I had not known exactly what to expect from this conversation; but
revelations of personal torment would not have been high on my list of
probable subjects.
“They started well over a year ago,” he continued. “At first they came
only once a week, but then with increasing frequency.
And at the start, for a while, the women in the nightmares were no one
I’d ever seen in life, just pure fantasy figures. They were like those
dreams You have during puberty, silken girls so ripe and eager to
surrender . . . except that in these dreams, I didn’t just have sex
with them.
His thoughts seemed to drift with the bilious fog into darker
territory.
Only his profile was presented to me, dimly lit and glistening with
sour sweat, yet I glimpsed a savagery that made me hope that he would
not favor me with a full-face view.
Lowering his voice further still, he said, “In these dreams, I beat
them, too, punch them in the face, punch and punch and punch them until
there’s nothing left of their faces, choke them until their tongues
swell out of their mouths. . . .”
As he had begun to describe his nightmares, his voice had been marked
by dread. Now, in addition to this fear, an unmistakable perverse
excitement rose in him, evident not only in his husky voice but also in
the new tension that gripped his body.
hungry whisper that would haunt
“Lately,” he continued in a hungry whisper that would haunt my sleep
for the rest of my life, “these dreams all focus on my granddaughter.
Brandy. She’s ten. A pretty girl. A very pretty girl.
So slim and pretty. The things I do to her in dreams. All the things
I do. You can’t imagine such merciless brutality. Such exquisitely
vicious inventiveness. And when I wake up, I’m beyond exhilaration.
Transcendent. In a rapture. I lie in bed, beside my wife, who sleeps
on without guessing what strange thoughts obsess me, who can’t possibly
ever know, and I thrum with power, with the awareness that absolute
freedom is available to me any time I want to seize it.
Any time. Next week. Tomorrow. Now.”
Overhead, the silent laurel spoke as, in quick succession, at least a
double score of its pointed green tongues trembled with too great a
weight of condensed fog. Each loosed its single watery note, and I
twitched at the sudden rataplan of fat droplets beating on the car,
half surprised that what streamed down the windshield and across the
hood was not blood.
In my jacket pocket, I closed my right hand more tightly around the
Glock.
After what Stevenson had told me, I couldn’t imagine any circumstances
in which he could allow me to leave this car alive.