toward him as if the attraction was an autonomic function of his body to
the same extent that the beating of his heart, the production and
maintenance of his blood supply, and the functioning of internal organs
were autonomic functions proceeding entirely without need of conscious
volition.
Still half embraced by sleep, he wonders if he can apply that sixth
sense with conscious intention and reach out to find the false father
any time he wishes.
Dreamily, he imagines himself to be a figure sculpted from iron and
magnetized. The other self, hiding somewhere out there in the night, is
a similar figure. Each magnet has a negative and positive pole. He
imagines his positive is aligned with the false father’s negative.
Opposites attract.
He seeks attraction, and almost at once he finds it. Invisible waves of
force tug lightly at him, then less lightly.
West. West and south.
As during his frantic and compulsive drive across more than half the
country, he feels the power of the attractant grow until it is like the
ponderous gravity of a planet pulling a minor asteroid into the fiery
promise of its atmosphere.
West and south. Not far. A few miles.
The pull is exigent, strangely pleasant at first but then almost
painful. He feels as if, were he to get out of the car, he would
instantly levitate off the ground and be drawn through the air at high
speed directly into the orbit of the hateful false father who has taken
his life.
Suddenly he senses that his enemy is aware of being sought and perceives
the lines of power connecting them.
He stops imagining the magnetic attraction. Immediately he retreats
into himself, shuts down. He isn’t quite ready to re-engage the enemy
in combat and doesn’t want to alert him to the fact that another
encounter is only hours away.
He closes his eyes.
Smiling, he drifts into sleep.
Healing sleep.
At first his dreams are of the past, peopled by those he has
assassinated and by the women with whom he has had sex and on whom he
has bestowed post-coital death. Then he is enraptured by scenes that
are surely prophetic, involving those whom he loves–his sweet wife, his
beautiful daughters, in moments of surpassing tenderness and gratifying
submission, bathed in golden light, so lovely, all in a lovely golden
light, flares of silver, ruby, amethyst, jade, and indigo.
, Marty woke from a nightmare with the feeling that he was being
crushed. Even when the dream shattered and blew away, though he knew
that he was awake and in the motel room, he could not breathe or move so
much as a finger. He felt small, insignificant, and was strangely
certain he was about to be hammered into billions of disassociated atoms
by some cosmic force beyond his comprehension.
Breath came to him suddenly, implosively. The paralysis broke with a
spasm that shook him from head to foot.
He looked at Paige on the bed beside him, afraid that he had disturbed
her sleep. She murmured to herself but didn’t wake.
He got up as quietly as possible, stepped to the front window,
cautiously separated the drapery panels, and looked out at the motel
parking lot and Pacific Coast Highway beyond. No one moved to or from
any of the parked cars. As far as he remembered, all of the shadows
that were out there now had been out there earlier. He saw no one
lurking in any corner. The storm had taken all the wind with it into
the east, and Laguna was so still that the trees might have been painted
on a stage canvas. A truck passed, heading north on the highway, but
that was the only movement in the night.
In the wall opposite the front window, draperies covered a pair of
sliding glass doors beyond which lay a balcony overlooking the sea.
Through the doors and past the deck railing, down at the foot of the
bluff, lay a width of pale beach onto which waves broke in garlands of
silver foam. No one could easily climb to the balcony, and the sward
was deserted.
Maybe it had been only a nightmare.