flowers had died and turned to dust when the landscape watering system
had been shut off.
Southern California was a desert, transformed by the hand of man, and
when the hand of man moved on, the desert reclaimed its rightful
territory.
So much for the genius of humanity, God’s imperfect creatures. The
pavement had cracked and hoved from years of inattention, and in places
it had begun to vanish under drifts of sandy soil. His headlights
revealed tumbleweed and scraps of other desert brush, already brown
hardly six weeks after the end of the rainy season, chased westward by a
night wind that came out of the parched hills.
When he reached the tollbooths he slowed down. They stretched across
all four lanes. They had been left standing as a barrier to easy
exploration of the shuttered park, linked and closed off by chains so
heavy that simple bolt cutters could not sever them. Now the bays, once
overseen by attendants, were filled with tangled brush that the wind had
put there and trash deposited by vandals. He pulled around the booths,
bouncing over a low curb and traveling on the sun-hardened soil of the
planting beds where lush tropical landscaping would once have blocked
the way, then back to the pavement when he had broken the barrier.
At the end of the entrance road, he switched off his headlights. He
didn’t need them, and he was at last beyond the notice of any highway
patrolmen who might pull him over for driving without lights. His eyes
immediately felt more comfortable, and now if his pursuers drew too
close, they would not be able to follow him by sight alone.
He angled across the immense and eerily empty parking lot. He was
heading toward a service road at the southwest corner of the inner fence
that circled the grounds of the park property. As the Honda jolted over
the pot-holed blacktop, Vassago ransacked his imagination, which was a
busy abattoir of psychotic industry, seeking solutions for the artistic
problems presented by the child. He conceived and rejected concept
after concept. The image must stir him. Excite him.
If it was really art, he would know it; he would be moved.
As Vassago lovingly envisioned tortures for Regina, he became aware of
the other strange presence in the night and its singular rage.
Suddenly he was plunged into another psychic vision, a flurry of
elements, with one crucial new addition: he got a glimpse of Lindsey
behind the wheel of a car. . . a car phone in a man’s trembling hand.
. and then the object that instantly resolved his artistic dilemma.. .
a crucifix. The nailed and tortured body of Christ in its famous
posture of noble self-sacrifice.
He blinked away that image, glanced at the petrified girl in the car
with him, blinked her away as well, and in his imagination saw the two
combined-girl and crucifiction. He would use Regina to mock the
Cruciixion.
Yes, lovely, perfect. But not raised upon a cross of dogwood.
Instead, she must be executed upon the segmented belly of the Serpent,
under the bosom of the thirty-foot Lucifer in the deepest regions of the
funhouse, crucified and her sacred heart revealed, as backdrop to the
rest of his collection. Such a cruel and stunning use of her negated
the Deed to include her mother, for in such a pose she would alone be
his crowning achievement.
Hatch was frantically trying to contact the Orange County Sheriff’s
Department on the cellular car phone, which was having transmission
problems, when he felt the intrusion of another image. He “saw” images
of Regina disfigured in a multitude of ways, and he began to shake with
rage.
Then he was struck by a vision of a vision, it was so powerful, vivid,
and monstrous that it almost rendered him unconscious as effectively as
a skull-cracking blow from a hard-swung hammer.
He urged Lindsey to drive faster, without explaining what he had seen.
He couldn’t speak of it.
The terror was amplified by Hatch’s perfect understanding of the
statement Jeremy intended to make by the perpetration of the outrage.
Was God in error to have made His Only Begotten Child a man? Should