excitement over his achievement and his delight in the new status that
he had attained.
Master of the Game. Chains were looped from stanchion to stanchion in
front of the pavilion, to block anyone attempting to gain access. A
closed for repairs sign was on the entrance door. Not for repairs to
old Tod. The rocket jockey was beyond repair. No ambulance was in
sight, which they might have thought they needed, and no hearse was
anywhere to be seen.
No police, either. Weird.
Then he remembered a TV story about the world under Fantasy World:
catacombs of service tunnels, storage rooms, security and ride computer
control centers, just like at Disneyland. To avoid disturbing the
paying customers and drawing the attention of the morbidly curious, they
were probably using the tunnels now to bring in the cops and
corpse-pokers from the coroner’s office.
The shivers within Jeremy increased. The desire. The need.
He was a Master of the Game. No one could touch him.
Might as well give the cops and corpse-pokers more to do, keep them
entertained.
He kept moving, seeking, alert for opportunity. He found it where he
least expected it, when he stopped at a men’s restroom to take a leak.
A guy, about thirty, was at one of the sinks, checking himself out in
the mirror, combing his thick blond hair, which glistened with Vitalis.
He had arranged an array of personal objects on the ledge under the
mirror: wallet, car keys, a tiny aerosol bottle of Binaca breath
freshener, a half-empty pack of Dentyne (this guy had a bad-breath
fixation), and a cigarette lighter.
The lighter was what immediately caught Jeremy’s attention. It was not
just a plastic Bic butane disposable, but one of those steel models,
shaped like a miniature slice of bread, with a hinged top that flipped
back to reveal a striker wheel and a wick. The way the overhead
fluorescent gleamed on the smooth curves of that lighter, it seemed to
be a supernatural object, full of its own eerie radiance, a beacon for
Jeremy’s eyes alone.
He hesitated a moment, then went to one of the urinals. When he
finished and zipped up, the blond guy was still at the sink, primping
himself.
Jeremy always washed his hands after using a bathroom because that was
what polite people did. It was one of the rules that a good player
followed.
He went to the sink beside the primper. As he lathered his hands with
liquid soap from the pump dispenser, he could not take his eyes off the
lighter on the shelf inches away. He told himself he should avert his
gaze.
The guy would realize he was thinking about snatching the damn thing.
But its sleek silvery contours held him rapt. Staring at it as he the
lather from his hands, he imagined that he could hear the crisp crackle
of all-consuming flames.
Return nag his wallet to his hip pocket but leaving the other objects on
the ledge, the guy turned away from the sink and went to one of the
urinals. As Jeremy was about to reach for the lighter, a father and his
teenage son entered. They could have screwed everything up, but they
went into two of the stalls and closed the doors. Jeremy knew that was
a sign. Do it, the sign said. Take it, go, do it, do it.
Jeremy glanced at the man at the urinal, plucked the lighter off the
shelf, turned and walked out without drying his hands. No one ran after
him.
Clutching the lighter tightly in his right hand, he prowled the park,
searching for the perfect kindling. The desire in him was so intense
that his shivers spread outward from his crotch and belly and spine,
appearing once more in his hands, and in his legs, too, which sometimes
were rubbery with excitement.
Need…
Finishing the last of the Reese’s Pieces, Vassago neatly rolled the
empty bag into a tight tube, tied the tube in a knot to make the
smallest possible object of it, and dropped it into a plastic garbage
bag that was just to the left of the iceless Styrofoam cooler.
Neatness was one of the rules in the world of the living.