damned, where he belonged, where he longed to be.
Margaret made the mistake of going alone to a laundry room in her
apartment complex at eleven o’clock at night. Many of the units were
leased to financially comfortable senior citizens and, because they were
near the University of California at Irvine, to pairs and trios of
students who shared the rent. Maybe the tenant mix, the fact that it
was a safe and friendly neighborhood, and the abundance of landscape and
walkway lighting all combined to give her a false sense of security.
When Vassago entered the laundry room, Margaret had just begun to put
her dirty clothes into one of the washing machines. She looked at him
with a smile of surprise but with no apparent concern, though he was
dressed all in black and wearing sunglasses at night.
She probably thought he was just another university student who favored
an eccentric look as a way of proclaiming his rebellious spirit and
intellectual superiority. Every campus had a slew of the type, since it
was easier to dress as a rebellious intellectual than be one.
“Oh, I’m sorry, Miss,” he said, “I didn’t realize anyone was in here.”
“That’s okay. I’m only using just one washer,” she said. “There’re two
others.”
“No, I already did my laundry, then back at the apartment when I took it
out of the basket, I was missing one sock, so I figure it’s got to be in
one of the washers or dryers. But I didn’t mean to get in your way.
Sorry about that.”
She smiled a little broader, maybe because she thought it funny that a
would-be James Dean, black-lad rebel without a cause, would choose to be
so politer would do his own laundry and chase down lost socks.
By then he was beside her. He hit her in the face-two hard, sharp
punches that knocked her unconscious. She crumpled onto the vinyl-tile
floor as if she were a pile of laundry.
Later, in the dismantled Hell under the moldering funhouse, when she
regained consciousness and found herself naked on the concrete floor and
effectively blind in those lightless confines, tied hand and foot, she
did not attempt to bargain for her life as some of the others had done.
She didn’t offer her body to him, didn’t pretend to be turned on by his
savagery or the power that he wielded over her. She didn’t offer him
money, or claim to understand and sympathize with him in a pathetic
attempt to convert him from nemesis to friend. Neither did she scream
nor weep nor wail nor curse. She was different from the others, for she
found hope and comfort in a quiet, dignified, unending chain of
whispered prayers. But she never prayed to be delivered from her
tormentor and returned to the world out of which she had been torn-as if
she knew that death was inevitable.
Instead, she prayed that her family would be given the strength to cope
with the loss of her, that God would take care of her two younger
sisters, and even that her murderer would receive divine grace and
mercy.
Vassago swiftly came to loathe her. He knew that love and mercy were
nonexistent, just empty words. He had never felt love, neither during
his time in the borderland nor when he had been one of the living.
Often, however, he had pretended to love someonlather, mother, a girl-to
get what he wanted, and they had always been deceived. Being deceived
into believing that love existed in others, when it didn’t exist in you,
was a sign of fatal weakness. Human interaction was nothing but a game,
after all, and the ability to see through deception was what separated
the good players from the inept.
To show her that he could not be deceived and that her god was
powerless, Vassago rewarded her quiet prayers with a long and painful
death. At last she did scream. But her screams were not satisfying,
for they were only the sounds of physical agony; they did not
reverberate with terror, rage, or despair.
He thought he would like her better when she was dead, but even then he