down the flu of the master-bedroom fireplace.
He wondered if Honell was able to hear the wind wherever he was-and
whether it was the wind of this world or the next Vassago parked
directly in front of Harrison’s Antiques at the south end of Laguna
Beach. The shop occupied an entire end of the building. The big
display windows were unlighted as Tuesday slipped through midnight,
becoming Wednesday.
Steven Honell had been unable to tell him where the Harrisons lived, and
a quick check of the telephone book turned up no listed number for them.
The writer had known only the name of their business and its approximate
location on Pacific Coast Highway.
Their home address was sure to be on file somewhere in the store’s
office. Getting it might be difficult. A decal on each of the big
Plexiglas windows and another on the front door warned that they were
fitted with a burglar alarm and protected by a security company.
He had come back from Hell with the ability to see in the dark, animal
quick reflexes, a lack of inhibitions that left him capable of any act
or atrocity, and a fearlessness that made him every bit as formidable an
adversary as a robot might have been. But he could not walk through
walls, or turn his flesh into vapor into Bsshagain, or By, or perform
any of the other feats that were within the powers of the demon.
Until he had earned his way back into Hell either by acquiring a perfect
collection in his museum of the dead or by killing those he had been
sent here to destroy, he, only the minor powers of the demon deemuonde,
which were insufficient to defeat a by alarm.
He drove away from the store.
In the heart of town, he found a telephone booth beside a station.
Despite the hour, the station was still pumping gasoline, and the
outdoor lighting was so bright that Vassago was forced to squint behind
his sunglasses.
Swooping around the lamps, moths with inch-long wings cast shadows as
large as ravens on the pavement.
The floor of the telephone booth was littered with cigarette butts.
Ants teamed over the corpse of a beetle.
Someone had taped a hand-lettered OUT OF ORDER notice to the coin box,
but Vassago didn’t care because he didn’t intend to call anyone. He was
only interested in the phone book, which was secured to the frame of the
booth by a sturdy chain.
He checked “Antiques” in the Yellow Pages. Laguna Beach had a lot of
businesses under that heading; it was a regular shoppers’ paradise. He
studied their space ads. Some had institutional names like
International Antiques, but others were named after their owners, as was
Harrison’s Antiques.
A few used both first and last names, and some of the space ads also
included the full names of the proprietors because, in that business,
personal reputation could be a drawing card. RobertO. Loffman Antiques
in the Yellow Pages cross-referenced neatly with a RobertO.
Loffman in the white pages, providing Vassago with a street address,
which he committed to memory.
On his way back to the Honda, he saw a bat swoop out of the night. It
arced down through the blue-white glare from the service station lights,
snatching a fat moth from the air in mid-flight, then vanished back up
into the darkness from which it had come. Neither predator nor prey
made a sound.
Loffman was seventy years old, but in his best dreams he was eighteen
again, spry and limber, strong and happy. They were never sex dreams,
no bosomy young women parting their smooth thighs in welcome. They
weren’t power dreams, either, no running or jumping or leaping off
cliffs into wild adventures. The action was always mundane: a leisurely
walk along a beach at twilight, barefoot, the feel of damp sand between
his toes, the froth on the incoming waves sparkling with reflections of
the setting purple-red sunset; or just sitting on the grass in the
shadow of a date palm on a summer afternoon, watching a hummingbird sip
nectar from the bright blooms in a bed of flowers. The mere fact that