goofy. She might be better off not talking at all; she just didn’t have
any experience at this father-kid stuff.
“Nuns?” he said. “Well, of course, they mean well. If they didn’t mean
well, they wouldn’t be nuns. They’d be maybe Mafia hitmen,
international terrorists, United States Con” He did not speed home like
a busy man with lots to do, but like somebody out for a leisurely drive.
She had not been in a car with him enough to know if that was how he
always drove, but she suspected maybe he was loafing along a little
slower than he usually did, so they could have more time together, just
the two of them. That was sweet. It made her throat a little tight and
her eyes watery. Oh, terrific. A pile of cow flop could’ve carried on
a better conversation than she was managing, so now she was going to
burst into tears, which would really cement the relationship. Surely
every adoptive parent desperately hoped to receive a mute, emotionally
unstable girl with physical problems right?
It was all the rage, don’t you know. Well, if she did cry, her
treacherous sinuses would kick in, and the old snot-faucet would start
gushing, which would surely make her even more appeming. He’d give up
the idea of a leisurely drive, and head for home at such tremendous
speed that he’d have to stand on the brakes a mile from the house to
avoid shooting straight through the back of the garage. (Please, God,
help me here. You’ll notice I thought “cow flop” not “cow shit,” so I
deserve a little meig.) They chatted about this and that. Actually,
for a while he chatted and she pretty much just grunted like she was a
subhuman out on a pass from the zoo. But eventually she realized, to
her surprise, that she was talking in complete sentences, had been doing
so for a couple of miles, and was at ease with him.
He asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up, and she just about
bent his ear clear off explaining that some people actually made a
living writing the kinds of books she liked to read and that she had
been composing her own stories for a year or two. Lame stuff, she
admitted, but she would get better at it. She was very bright for ten,
older than her years, but she couldn’t expect actually to have a career
going until she was eighteen, maybe sixteen if she was lucky. When had
Mr. Christopher Pike started publishing? Seventeen? Eighteen? Maybe
he’d been as old as twenty, but certainly no older, so that’s what she
would shoot for-being the next Mr. Christopher Pike by the time she was
twenty. She had an entire notebook full of story ideas. Quite a few of
those ideas were good even when you crossed out the embarrassingly
childish ones like the story about the intelligent pig from space that
she had been so hot about for a while but now saw was hopelessly dumb.
She was still talking about writing books when they pulled into the
driveway of the house in Laguna Niguel, and he actually seemed
interested.
She figured she might get the hang of this family thing yet.
Vassago dreamed of fire. The click of the cigarette-lighter cover being
flipped open in the dark. The dry rasp of the striker wheel scraping
against the flint. A spark. A young girls white summer dress flowering
into flames.
The Haunted House ablaze. Screams as the calculatedly spooky darkness
dissolved under licking tongues of orange light. Tod Ledderbeck was
dead in the cavern of the Millipede, and now the house of plastic
skeletons and rubber ghouls was abruptly tilled with real tenor and
pungent death.
He had dreamed of that fire previously, countless times since the night
of Tod’s twelfth birthday. It always provided the most beautiful of all
the chimeras and phantasms that passed behind his eyes in sleep.
But on this occasion, strange faces and images appeared in the flames.
The red car again. A solemnly beautiful, auburn-haired child with large
gray eyes that seemed too old for her face. A small hand, cruelly bent,