offensive.”
“When I heard her coming down the hall, I thought it was-”
“Godzilla!”
Lindsey said.
“At least. And how’d you like Binky the talking goldfish?”
“Shit on the mayonnaise!” Lindsey said.
They both laughed, and people around them turned to look, either because
of their laughter or because some of what Lindsey said was overheard,
which only made them laugh harder.
“She’s going to be a handful,” Hatch said.
“She’ll be a dream.”
“Nothing’s that easy.”
“She will be.”
“One problem.”
“What’s that?”
He hesitated. “What if she doesn’t want to come with us?”
Lindsey’s smile froze. “She will. She’ll come.”
“Maybe not.”
“Don’t be negative.”
“I’m only saying we’ve got to be prepared for disappointment.”
Lindsey shook her head adamantly. “No. It’s going to work out. It has
to. We’ve had more than our share of bad luck, bad times. We deserve
better. The wheel has turned. We’re going to put a family together
again.
Life is goIng to be good, it’s going to be so line. The worst is behind
us now.”
3
That Thursday night, Vassago enjoyed the conveniences of a motel room.
Usually he used one of the fields behind the abandoned amusement park as
a toilet. He also washed each evening with bottled water and liquid
soap. He shaved with a straight razor, an aerosol can of lather, and a
piece of a broken mirror that he had found in a corner of the park.
When rain fell at night, he liked to bathe in the open, letting the
downpour sluice over him. If lightning accompanied the storm, he sought
the highest point on the paved midway, hoping that he was about to
receive the grace of Satan and be recalled to the land of the dead by
one scintillant bolt of electricity. But the rainy season in southern
California was over now, and most likely would not come around again
until December. If he earned his way back into the fold of the dead and
damned before then, the means of his deliverance from the hateful world
of the living would be some other force than lightning.
Once a week, sometimes twice, he rented a motel room to use the shower
and make a better job of grooming than he could in the primitive
conditions of his hideaway, though not because hygiene was important to
him.
Filth had its powerful attractions. The air and water of Hades, to
which he longed to return, were filth of ate variety. But if he was to
move among the living and prey upon them, building the collection that
might win him readmission to the realm of the damned, there were certain
conventions that had to be followed in order not to draw undue attention
to himself. Among them was a certain degree of cleanliness.
Vassago always used the same motel, the Blue Skies, a seedy hole toward
the southern end of Santa Ana, where the unshaven desk clerk accepted
only cash, asked for no identification, and never booked guests in few
men who did not check in with a whore in tow. He stayed only an hour or
two, however, which was in keeping with the duration of the average
customer’s use of the accommodations, and he was allowed the same
anonymity as those who, grunting and sweating, noisily rocked the
headboards of their beds against the walls in rooms adjoining his.
He could not have lived there full time, if only because his awareness
of the frenzied coupling of the sluts and their johns filled him with
anger, ahxiety, and nausea at the urgent needs and frenetic rhythms of
the living.
The atmosphere made it difficult to think clearly and impossible to
rest, even though the perversion and dementia of the place was the very
thing in which he had reveled when he had been one of the fully alive.
No other motel or boarding house would have been safe. They would have
wanted identification. Besides, he could pass among the living as one
of them only as long as their contact with him was casual. Any motel
clerk or landlord who took a deeper interest in his character and
encountered him repeatedly would soon realize that he was different from