…. . there’s never been anyone I called Mom or Dad. It’s a very new
thing.”
Lindsey smiled. “I understand, honey. I really do. And so will Hatch
if it takes time.”
In the blazing Haunted House, as the cries for help and the screams of
agony swelled louder, a strange object appeared in the firelight. A
single rose. A black rose. It floated as if an unseen magician was
levitating it.
Vassago had never encountered anything more beautiful in the world of
the living, in the world of the dead, or in the realm of dreams. It
shimmered before him, its petals so smooth and soft that they seemed to
have been cut from swatches of the night sky unspoiled by stars. The
thorns were exquisitely sharp, needles of glass. The green stem had the
oiled sheen of a serpent’s skin. One petal held a single drop of blood.
The rose faded from his dream, but later it returned-and with it the
woman named Lindsey and the auburn-haired girl with the soft-gray eyes.
Vassago yearned to possess all three: the black rose, the woman, and the
girl with the gray eyes.
After Hatch freshened up for dinner, while Lindsey finished getting
ready in the bathroom, he sat alone on the edge of their bed and read
the article by S. Steven Honell in Arts American. He could shrug off
virtually any insult to himself, but if someone slammed Lindsey, he
always reacted with anger. He couldn’t even deal well with reviews of
her work that she thought had made valid criticisms. Reading Honell’s
vicious, snide, and ultimately stupid diatribe dismissing her entire
career as “wasted energy,” Hatch grew angrier by the sentence.
As had happened the previous night, his anger erupted into fiery rage
with volcanic abruptness. The muscles in his jaws clenched so hard, his
teeth ached. The magazine began to shake because his hands were
trembling with fury. His vision blurred slightly, as if he were looking
at everything through shimmering waves of heat, and he had to blink and
squint to make the fuzzy-edged words on the page resolve into readable
print.
As when he had been lying in bed last night, he felt as if his anger
opened a door and as if something entered him through it, a foul spirit
that knew only rage and hate. Or maybe it had been with him all along
but sleeping, and his anger had roused it. He was not alone inside his
own head. He was aware of another presence, like a spider crawling
through the narrow space between the inside of his skull and the surface
of his brain.
He tried to put the magazine aside and calm down. But he kept reading
because he was not in full possession of himself Vassago moved through
the Haunted House, untroubled by the hungry fire, because he had planned
an escape route. Sometimes he was twelve years old, and sometimes he
was twenty. But always his path was lit by human torches, some of whom
had collapsed into silent melting heaps upon the smoking floor, some of
whom exploded into flames even as he passed them.
In the dream he was carrying a magazine, folded open to an article that
angered him and seemed imperative he read. The edges of the pages
curled in the heat and threatened to catch fire. Names leaped at him
from the pages. Lindsey. Lindsey Sparling. Now he had a last name for
her. He felt an urge to toss the magazine aside, slow his breathing,
calm down. Instead he stoked his anger, let a sweet flood of rage
overwhelm him, and told himself that he must know more. The edges of
the magazine pages curled in the heat. Honell. Another name.
Steven Honell. Bits of burning debris fell on the article. StevenS.
Honell. No. The 5 first. 5. Steven Honell. The paper caught fire.
Honell. A writer. A barroom. Silverado Canyon. In his hands, the
magazine burst into flames that flashed into his lab He shed sleep like
a fired bullet shedding its brass jacket, and sat up in his dark
hideaway. Wide awake. Excited. He knew enough now to find the woman.