seat beside him, facing him. Her chin rested on her breast.
Though her head was tipped down and auburn hair hung over one side of
her face, he could see her lips pulled back by the scarf that held in
the gag, the tilt of her pixie nose, all of one closed eyelid and most
of the other such long lashes-and part of her smooth brow. His
imagination played with all the possible ways he might disfigure her to
produce the most effective offering.
She was perfect for his purposes. With her beauty compromised by her
leg and deformed hand, she was already a symbol of God’s fallibility.
A trophy, indeed, for his collection.
He was disappointed that he had failed to get the mother, but he had not
given up hope of acquiring her. He was toying with the idea of not
killing the child tonight. If he kept her alive for only a few days, he
might have an opportunity to make another bid for Lindsey. If he had
them together, able to work on them at the same time, he could present
their corpses as a mocking version of Michelangelo’s Pta’, or dismember
them and stitch them together in a highly imaginative obscene collage.
He was waiting for guidance, another vision, before deciding what to do.
As he took the Ortega highway off-ramp and turned east, he recalled how
Lindsey, at the drawing board in her studio, had reminded him of his
mother at her knitting on the afternoon when he had killed her. Having
disposed of his sister and mother with the same knife in the same hour,
he had known in his heart that he had paved the way to Hell, had been so
convinced that he had taken the final step and impaled himself.
A privately published book had described for him that route to damnation
Titled The Htddm, it was the work of a condemned murderer named Thomas
Nicene who had killed his own mother and a brother, and then committed
suicide. His carefully planned descent into the Pit had been foiled by
a paramedic team with too much dedication and a little luck.
Nicene was revived, healed, imprisoned, put on trial, convicted of
murder, and sentenced to death. Rule-laying society had made it clear
that the power of death, even the right to choose one’s own, was not
ever to be given to an individual.
While awaiting execution, Thomas Nicene had committed to paper the
visions of Hell that he had experienced during the time that he had been
on the edge of this life, before the paramedics denied him eternity. His
writings had been smuggled out of prison to fellow believers who could
print and distribute them. Nicene’s book was filled with powerful,
convincing images of darkness and cold, not the heat of classic bells,
but visions of a kingdom of vast spaces, chilling emptiness. Peering
through Death’s door and the door of Hell beyond, Thomas had seen
titanic powers at work on mysterious structures.
Demons of colossal size and strength strode through night mists across
lightless continents on unknown missions, each clothed in black with a
Bowing cape and upon its head a shining black helmet with a flared rim.
He had seen dark seas crashing on black shores under starless and
moonless skies that gave the feeling of a subterranean world. Enormous
ships, windowless and mysterious, were driven through the tenebrous
waves by powerful engines that produced a noise like the anguished
screams of multitudes.
When he had read Nicene’s words, Jeremy had known they were truer than
any ever inked upon a page, and he had determined to follow the great
man’s example. Marion and Stephanie became his tickets to the exotic
and enormously attractive netherworld where he belonged. He had punched
those tickets with a butcher knife and delivered himself to that dark
kingdom, encountering precisely what Nicene promised. He had never
imagined that his own escape from the hateful world of the living would
be undone not by paramedics but by his own father.
He would soon earn repatriation to hell. Glancing at the girl again,
Vassago remembered how she had felt when she shuddered and collapsed