up the sunshine, gold and russet reflections painted the windows, the
place was silent, seemingly serene.
To the right, he could see a section of the street. The houses on the
other side of the block were also Mediterranean in style, stucco with
clay-tile roofs, gilded by late-afternoon sun, filigreed by overhanging
queen-palm fronds. Quiet, well landscaped, planned to the square inch,
their neighborhood–and indeed the entire town of Mission Viejo seemed
to be a haven from the chaos that ruled so much of the rest of the world
these days.
He closed the shutters, entirely blocking the sun.
Apparently the only danger was in his mind, a figment of the same active
imagination that had made him, at last, a reasonably successful mystery
novelist.
Yet his heart was beating faster than ever.
Marty walked out of his office into the second-floor hall, as far as the
head of the stairs. He stood as still as the newel post on which he
rested one hand.
He wasn’t certain what he expected to hear. The soft creak of a door,
stealthy footsteps? The furtive rustles and clicks and muffled thumps
of an intruder slowly making his way through the house?
Gradually, as he heard nothing suspicious and as his racing heart grew
calmer, his sense of impending disaster faded. Anxiety became mere
uneasiness.
“Who’s there?” he asked, just to break the silence.
The sound of his voice, full of puzzlement, dispelled the portentous
mood. Now the hush was only that of an empty house, devoid of menace.
He returned to his office at the end of the hall and settled in the
leather chair behind his desk. With the shutters tightly closed and no
lamps on except the one with the stained-glass shade, the corners of the
room seemed to recede farther than the dimensions of the walls allowed,
as if it were a place in a dream.
Because the motif of the lamp shade was fruit, the protective glass on
the desk top reflected luminous ovals and circles of cherry-red,
plum-purple, grape-green, lemon-yellow, and berry-blue. In its polished
metal and Plexiglas surfaces, the cassette recorder, which lay on the
glass, also reflected the bright mosaic, glimmering as if encrusted with
jewels. When he reached for the recorder, Marty saw that his hand
appeared to be sheathed in the pebbly, iridescent rainbow skin of an
exotic lizard.
He hesitated, studying the faux scales on the back of his hand and the
phantom jewels on the recorder. Real life was as layered with illusion
as any piece of fiction.
He picked up the recorder and pressed the rewind button for a second or
two, seeking the last few words of the unfinished letter to his editor.
The thin, high-speed whistle-shriek of his voice in reverse issued like
an alien language from the small, tinny speaker.
When he thumbed the play button, he found that he had not reversed far
enough, “. . . I need . . . I need . . . I need . ..”
Frowning, he switched the machine to rewind, taking the tape back twice
as far as before.
But still, “. . . I need . . . I need . ..”
Rewind. Two seconds. Five. Ten. Stop. Play.
. . . I need . . . I need . . . I need . ..”
After two more attempts, he found the letter, “. . . so I should be able
to have the final draft of the new book in your hands in about a month.
I think this one is . . . this one is . . . uh . . . this one . ..”
The dictation stopped. Silence unreeled from the tape and the sound of
his breathing.
By the time the two-word chant finally began to issue from the speaker,
Marty had leaned forward tensely on the edge of the chair, frowning at
the recorder in his hand. .
. . . I need . . . I need . ..”
He checked his watch. Not quite six minutes past four o’clock.
Initially the dreamy murmur was the same as when he’d first come to his
senses and heard soft chanting like the responses to an interminable,