the inclined-track. enough a pair of swinging doors. Into darkness.
The doors fell shut behind The car crept forward Forward. Forward.
Abruptly it dropped as if to a bottomless pit.
Hatch cried out, and with his cry the darkness vanished. The sunny
spring day made a welcome reappearance. The parking lot. The gun shop.
” His hands were locked so tightly around the steering wheel that they
ached.
Throughout the morning, Vassago was awake more than asleep. But when he
dozed, he was back in the Millipede again, on that night of glory.
In the days and weeks following the deaths at Fantasy World, he had
without doubt proved himself a Master by exerting iron control over his
compulsive desire to kill. Merely the memory of having killed was
sufficient to release the periodic pressure that built in him.
Hundreds of times, he relived the sensuous details of each death,
temporarily quenching his hot need. And the knowledge that he would
kill again, any time he could do so without arousing suspicion, was an
additional restraint on selfindulgence.
He did not kill anyone else for two years. Then, when he was fourteen,
he drowned another boy at summer camp. The kid was smaller and weaker,
but he put up a good fight. When he was found floating facedown in the
pond, it was the talk of the camp for the rest of that month. Water
could be as good as fire.
When he was sixteen and had a driver’s license, he wasted two
transients, both hitchhikers, one in October, the other a couple of days
before Thanksgiving. The guy in November’ was just a college kid going
home for the holiday. But the other one was something else, a predator
who thought he had stumbled across a foolish and naive high-school boy
who would provide him with some thrills of his own.
Jeremy had used knives on both of them.
At seventeen, when he discovered Satanism, he couldn’t read enough about
it, surprised to find that his secret philosophy had been codified and
embraced by clandestine cults. Oh, they were relatively benign forms,
propagated by gutless wimps who were just looking for a way to play at
wickedness, an excuse for hedonism. But real believers existed, as
well, committed to the truth that God had failed to create people in his
image, that the bulk of humanity was equivalent to a herd of cattle,
that selfishness was admirable, that pleasure was the only worthwhile
goal, and that the greatest pleasure was the brutal exercise of power
over others.
The ultimate expression of power, one privately published volume had
assured him, was to destroy those who had spawned you, thereby breaking
the bonds of family “love.” The book said that one must as violently as
possible reject the whole hypocrisy of rules, laws, and noble sentiments
by which other men pretended to live. Taking that advice to heart was
what had earned him a place in Hell-from which his father had pulled him
back.
But he would soon be there again. A few more deaths, two in particular,
would earn him repatriation to the land of darkness and the damned.
The attic grew warmer as the day progressed.
A few fat flies buzzed back and forth through his shadowy retreat, and
some of them settled down forever on one or another of the alluring but
sticky webs that spanned the junctions of the rafters. Then the spiders
moved.
In the warm, closed space, Vassago’s dozing became a deeper sleep with
more intense dreams. Fire and water, blade and bullet.
Crouching at the corner of the garage, Hatch reached between two azaleas
and flipped open the cover on the landscape-lighting control box. He
adjusted the timer to prevent the pathway and shrubbery lights from
blinking off at midnight. Now they would stay on until sunrise.
He closed the metal box, stood, and looked around at the quiet,
well-groomed street. All was harmony. Every house had a tile roof in
shades of tan and sand and h, not the more stark orange-red tiles of
many older California homes. The stucco walls were cream-colored or
within a narrow range of coordinated pastels specified by the