He no longer could be sure he had enough time to get into the house,
kill the husband, and take the woman back to his hideaway before
sunrise.
He could not risk getting caught in the open in daylight. Though he
would not shrivel up and turn to dust like the living dead in the
movies, nothing as dramatic as that, his eyes were so sensitive that his
glasses would not provide adequate protection from full sunlight.
Dawn would render him nearly blind, dramatically affecting his ability
to drive and bringing him to the attention of any policeman who happened
to spot his weaving, halting progress. In that debilitated condition,
he might have difficulty dealing with the cop.
More important, he might lose the woman. After appearing so often in
his dreams, she had become an object of intense desire. Before, he had
seen acquisitions of such quality that he had been convinced they would
complete his collection and earn him immediate readmission to the savage
world of eternal darkness and hatred to which he belonged-and he had
been wrong. But none of those others had appeared to him in dreams.
This woman was the true jewel in the crown for which he had been
seeking. He must avoid taking possession of her prematurely, only to
lose her before he could draw the life from her at the base of the giant
Lucifer and wrench her cooling corpse into whatever configuration seemed
most symbolic of her sins and weaknesses.
As he cruised past the house for the third time, he considered leaving
immediately for his hideaway and returning here as soon as the sun had
set the following evening. But that plan had no appeal. Being so close
to her excited him, and he was loath to be separated from her again. He
felt the tidal pull of her in his blood.
He needed a place to hide that was near her. Perhaps a secret corner in
her own house. a niche in which she was unlikely to look during the
long, bright, hostile hours of the day.
He parked the Honda two blocks from their house and returned on foot
along the tree-flanked sidewalk. The tall, green-patinated streetlamps
had angled arms at the top that directed their light onto the roadway,
and only a ghost of their glow reached past the sidewalk onto the front
lawns of the silent houses. Confident that neighbors were still
sleeping and unlikely to see him prowling through shadow-hung shrubbery
around the perimeter of the house, he searched quietly for an unlocked
door, an unlatched window. He had no luck until he came to the window
on the back wall of the garage.
Regina was awakened by a scraping noise, a dull thump and a sort of
protracted squeak. Still unaccustomed to her new home, she always woke
in confusion, not sure where she was, knowing only that she was not in
her room at the orphanage. She fumbled for the bedside lamp, clicked it
on, and squinted at the glare for a second before orienting herself and
recognizing the noises that had bumped her out of sleep had been the
sounds. They had stopped when she had snapped on the light. Which
seemed even sn.
She clicked the light off and listened in the darkness, which was now
with aureoles of color because the lamp had worked like a flashbulb on
her eyes, temporarily stealing her night vision. Though the sounds did
not resume, she believed they had come from the backyard.
Her bed wascomlbrtable. The room almost seemed to be scented with the
perfume of the painted flowers. Encircled by those roses, she felt
safer than she had ever felt before.
Although she didn’t want to get up, she was also aware that the
Harrisons were having problems of some kind, and she wondered if these
sneaky sounds in the middle of the night somehow might be related to
that. Yesterday during the drive from school, as well as last night
during dinner and after the movie, she had sensed a tension in them that
they were trying to conceal from her. Even though she knew herself to
be a p around whom anyone would have a right to feel nervous, she was