onto the pile of planks that once boarded off the shaft. He figured he
wouldn’t be able to get off a clear shot with Regina in the way. And he
knew that no gun would properly dispatch the thing that Jeremy had
become. He had no time to wonder at that curious thought, for as soon
as he pitched away the Browning, he shifted the flashlight from his left
hand to his right, and leaped into the elevator shaft without any
expectation that he was about to do so.
After that, everything got weird.
It seemed to him that he didn’t crash down the shaft as he should have
done, but glided in slow motion, as if he were only slightly heavier
than air, taking as much as half a minute to reach bottom.
Perhaps his sense of time had merely been distorted by the profundity of
his terror.
Jeremy saw him coming, shifted the pistol from Lindsey to Hatch, and
fired all eight remaining rounds. Hatch was certain that he was hit at
least three or four times, though he sustained no wounds. It seemed
impossible that the killer could miss so often in such a confined space.
Perhaps the sloppy marksmanship was attributable to the gunman’s panic
and to the fact that Hatch was a moving target.
While he was still floating down like dandelion fluff, he experienced a
reconnection of the peculiar bond between him and Nyebern, and for a
moment he saw himself descending from the young killer’s point of view.
What he glimpsed, however, was not only himself but the image of some
one-or something-superimposed over him, as if he shared his body with
another entity. He thought he saw white wings folded close against his
sides. Under his own face was that of a stranger-the visage of a
warrior if ever there had been one, yet not a face that frightened him.
Perhaps by then Nyebern was hallucinating, and what Hatch was receiving
from him was not actually what he saw but only what he imagined that he
saw. Perhaps.
Then Hatch was gazing down from his own eyes again, still in that slow
glide, and he was sure that he saw something superimposed over Jeremy
Nyebern, too, a form and face that were part reptilian and part
insectile.
Perhaps it was a trick of light, the confusion of shadows and
conflicting flashlight beams.
He could not explain away their final exchange, however, and he dwelt
upon it often in the days that followed: “Who are you?” Nyebern asked as
Hatch landed catlike in spite of a thirty-foot descent.
“Uriel,” Hatch replied, though that was not a name he had heard before.
“I am Vassago,” Nyebern said.
“I know,” Hatch said, though he was hearing that name for the first
time, as well.
“Only you can send me back.”
“and when you get sent back by such as me,” Hatch said, wondering where
the words came from, “you don’t go back a prince. You’ll be a slave
below, just like the heartless and stupid boy with whom you hitched a
ride.”
Nyebern was afraid. It was the first time he had shown any capacity for
fear. “And I thought I was the spider.”
With strength, agility, and economy of motion that Hatch had not known
he possessed he grabbed Regina’s belt in his left hand, pulled her away
from Jeremy Nyebern, set her aside out of harm’s way, and brought the
crucifix down like a club upon the madman’s head. The lens of the
attached flashlight shattered, and the casing burst open, spilling
batteries.
He chopped the crucifix hard against the killer’s skull a second time,
and with the third blow he sent Nyebern to a grave that had been twice
earned.
The anger Hatch felt was righteous anger. When he dropped the crucifix
when it was all over, he felt no guilt or shame. He was nothing at all
like his father.
He had a strange awareness of a power leaving him, a presence he had not
known was there. He was a mission accomplished, restored. All things
were now in their rightful places.
Regina was unresponsive when he spoke to her. Physically she seemed