operator. She took his message, which baffled her. Although the
operator seemed sincere in her promised to pass it on to the doctor,
Hatch was not confident that his definition of “immediately” and hers
were materially the same.
He saw all the connections so clearly now, but he knew he could not have
seen them sooner. Jonas’s question in the office on Monday took on a
new significance: Did Hatch, he asked, believe that evil was only the
result of the acts of men, or did he think that evil was a real force, a
presence that walked the world? The story Jonas had told of losing wife
and daughter to a homicidal, psychopathic son, and the son himself to
suicide, connected now to the vision of the woman knitting.
The father’s collections. And the son’s. The Satanic aspects to the
visions were what one might expect from a bad son in mindless rebellion
against a father to whom religion was a center post of life. And
finally-he and Jeremy Nyebern shared one obvious link, miraculous
resurrection at the hands of the same man.
“But how does that explain anything?” Lindsey demanded, when he told her
only a little more than he had told the physician’s-service operator.
“I don’t know.”
He couldn’t think about anything except what he had seen in the last
visions, less than half of which he understood. The part he had
comprehended, the nature of Jeremy’s collection, filled him with fear
for Without having seen the collection as Hatch had seen it, Lindsey was
fixated, instead, on the mystery of the link, which was somewhat
explained-yet not explained at all-by learning the identity of the
killer in sunglasses. “What about the visions? How do they fit the
damned composition?” she insisted, trying to make sense of the
supernatural in perhaps not too different a way from that in which she
made sense of the world by reducing it to ordered images on Masonite.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“The link that’s letting you follow him-”
“I don’t know.”
She took a turn too wide. The car went off the pavement, onto the
gravel shoulder. The back end slid, gravel spraying out from beneath
the tires and rattling against the undercarriage. The guardrail flashed
close, too close, and the car was shaken by the hard bang-bang-bang of
sheet metal taking a beating. She seemed to bring it back under control
by a sheer effort of will, biting her lower lip so hard it appeared as
if she would draw blood.
Although Hatch was aware of Lindsey and the car and the reckless speed
they were keeping along that sometimes dangerously curved highway, he
could not turn his mind from the outrage he had seen in the vision.
The longer he thought about Regina being added to that grisly
collection, the more his fear was augmented by anger. It was the hot,
uncontainable anger he had seen so often in his father, but directed now
against something deserving of hatred, against a target worthy of such
seething rage.
As he watched the entrance road to the abandoned park, Vassago glanced
away from the now lonely highway, to the girl who was bound and gagged
in the other seat. Even in that peculiar light he could see that she
had been straining at her bonds. Her wrists were chafed and beginning
to bleed. Little Regina had hopes of breaking free, striking out or
escaping, though her situation was so clearly hopeless. Such vitality.
She thrilled him.
The child was so special that he might not need the mother at all, if he
could think of a way to place her in his collection that would result in
a piece of art with all the power of the various mother-daughter
tableaux that he had already conceived.
He had been unconcerned with speed. Now, after he turned off the
highway onto the park’s long approach road, he accelerated, eager to
return to the museum of the dead with the hope that the atmosphere there
would inspire him.
Years ago, the four-lane entrance had been bordered by lush flowers,
shrubbery, and groupings of paims. The trees and larger shrubs had been
dug up, potted, and hauled away ages ago by agents of the creditors. The