“Do you know Mr. Harrison of Harrison’s Antiques?”
“Oh, yes, very well, I know him quite well, he’s a reputable dealer,
totally trustworthy, a nice man.”
“Have you been to his house?”
“His house? Yes, certainly, on three or four occasions, and he’s been
here to mine.”
“Then you must have the answer to that important question I mentioned,
sir. Can you give me Mr. Harrison’s address and clear directions to
it?”
Loffman sagged with relief upon realizing that he would be able to
provide the intruder with the desired information. Only fleetingly, he
considered that he might be putting Harrison in great jeopardy. But
maybe it was a nightmare, after all, and revelation of the information
would not matter. He repeated the address and directions several times,
at the intruder’s request.
“Thank you, sir. You’ve been most helpful. Like I said, causing you
any pain is quite unnecessary. But I’m going to hurt you anyway,
because I enjoy it so much.”
So it was a nightmare after all.
Vassago drove past the Harrison house in Laguna Niguel. Then he circled
the block and drove past it again.
The house was a powerful attractant, similar in style to all of the
other houses on the street but so different from them in some
indescribable but fundamental way that it might as well have been an
isolated structure rising out of a featureless plain. Its windows were
dark, and the landscape lighting had evidently been turned off by a
timer, but it could not have been more of a beacon to Vassago if light
had blared from every window.
As he drove slowly past the house a second time, he felt its immense
gravity pulling him. His immutable destiny involved this place and the
vital woman who lived within.
Nothing he saw suggested a trap. A red car was parked in the driveway
instead of in the garage, but he couldn’t see anything ominous about
that.
Nevertheless, he decided to circle the block a third time to give the
house another thorough looking over.
As he turned the corner, a lone silvery moth darted through his
headlight beams, refracting them and briefly glowing like an ember from
a great fire. He remembered the bat that had swooped into the service
station lights to snatch the hapless moth out of the air, eating it
alive.
Long after midnight, Hatch had finally dozed off. His sleep was a deep
mine, where veins of dreams flowed like bright ribbons of minerals
through the otherwise dark walls. None of the dreams was pleasant, but
none of them was grotesque enough to wake him.
Currently he saw himself standing at the bottom of a ravine with
ramparts so steep they could not be climbed. Even if the slopes had
risen at an angle that allowed ascent, they would not have been
scaleable because they were composed of a curious, loose white shale
that crumbled and shifted treacherously. The shale radiated a soft
calcimine glow, which was the only light, for the sky far above was
black and moonless, deep but starless. Hatch moved restlessly from one
end of the long narrow ravine to the other, then back again, filled with
apprehension but unsure of the cause of it.
Then he realized two things that made the fine hairs tingle on the back
of his neck. The white shale was not composed of rock and the shells of
millions of ancient sea creatures; it was made of human skeletons,
punctured and compacted but recognizable here and there, where the
articulated bones of two fingers survived compression or where what
seemed a small animal’s burrow proved to be the empty eye socket in a
skull. He became aware, as well, that the sky was not empty, that
something circled in it, so black that it blended with the heavens, its
leathery wings working silently. He could not see it, but he could feel
its gaze, and he sensed a hunger in it that could never be satisfied.
In his troubled sleep, Hatch turned and murmured anxious, wordless
sounds into his pillow.
Vassago checked the car clock. Even without its cog numbers, he knew
instinctively that dawn was less than an hour away.