“You were just angry, that’s all.”
“I’m sorry,” he repeated miserably.
Even if it had appeared to her to be nothing but anger, he knew that it
had been more than that, something strange, a terrible rage. White hot.
Psychotic. He had felt an edge beneath him, as if he were teetering on
the brink of a precipice, with only his heels planted on solid ground.
To Vassago’s eyes, the monument of Lucifer cast a shadow even in
absolute darkness, but he could still see and enjoy the cadavers in
their postures of degradation. He was enraptured by the organic collage
that he had created, by the sight of the humbled forms and the stench
that arose from them. His hearing was not remotely as acute as his
night vision, but he did not believe that he was entirely imagining the
soft, wet sounds of decomposition to which he swayed as a music lover
might sway to strains of lleethoven.
When he was suddenly overcome by anger, he was not sure why. It was a
quiet sort of rage at first, curiously unfocused. He opened himself to
it, enjoyed it, fed it to make it grow.
A vision of a newspaper Bashed through his mind. He could not see it
clearly, but something on the page was the cause of his anger. He
squinted as if narrowing his eyes would help him see the words.
The vision passed, but the anger remained. He nurtured it the way a
happy man might consciously force a laugh beyond its natural span just
because the sound of laughter buoyed him. Words blurted from him, “Of
all the fucking nerve!”
He had no idea where the exclamation had come from, just as he had no
idea why he had said the name “Lindsey” out loud in that lounge in
Newport Beach, several weeks ago, when these weird experiences had
begun.
He was so abruptly energized by anger that he turned away from his
collection and stalked across the enormous chamber, up the ramp down
which the gargoyle gondolas had once plunged, and out into the night,
where the moon forced him to put on his sunglasses again. He could not
stand still. He had to move, move. He walked the abandoned midway, not
sure who or what he was looking for, curious about what would happen
next.
Disjointed images flashed through his mind, none remaining long enough
to allow contemplation: the newspaper, a book-lined den, a filing
cabinet, a hand-written letter, a telephone…. He walked faster and
faster, pivoting suddenly onto new avenues or into narrower passageways
between the decaying buildings, in a fruitless search for a connection
that would link him more clearly with the source of the pictures that
appeared and swiftly faded from his mind.
As he passed the roller coaster, cold moonlight fell through the maze of
supporting crossbeams and glinted off the track in such a way as to make
those twin ribbons of steel look like rails of ice. When he lifted his
gaze to stare at the monolithic-and suddenly mysterious structure, an
angry exclamation burst from him: “Pitch him into that freezIng river!”
A woman said, Honey, lower your voice.
Though he knew that her voice had arisen from within him, as an auditory
adjunct to the fragmentary visions, Vassago turned in search of her
anyway. She was there. In a bathrobe. Standing just this side of a
doorway that had no right to be where it was, with no walls surrounding
it. To the left of the doorway, to the right of it, and above it, there
was only the night. The silent amusement park. But beyond the doorway,
past the woman who stood in it, was what appeared to be the entrance
foyer of a house, a small table with a vase of flowers, a stairway
curving up to a second floor.
She was the woman he had thus far seen only in his dreams, first in a
wheelchair and most recently in a red automobile on a sun-splashed
highway. As he took a step toward her, she said, You’ll wake Reg He
halted, not because he was afraid of waking Regina, whoever the hell she