But MacDonald had had no doubt, on talking to King’s base, that they had finally decided that the pressure was too great to take any more risks. They had Frawley to do the grisly work that had to be done to make her virtually unrecognizable, yet eminently identifiable to a pathologist. The fact that she didn’t know this made her sacrifice and her obvious affection for him all the more poignant.
She was a wild, intensely erotic lover, who seemed to know just what he wanted done and where and how to do it, although she could have had no experience whatsoever. She would not allow penetration of her own body, but she brought him pleasure so intense that when they were done he was thoroughly convinced of her true wishes.
There was no spell or supernatural magic—at least, he was pretty sure there wasn’t—but there were other ways of communicating than speech and writing. She wanted him to marry her or kill her, but in either way to release her from Hell’s bondage, and he had clearly given her his choice.
* * *
Maria seemed startled that he would actually marry Angelique, conditions or not, and it seemed as if she was fighting back a tinge of jealousy. She certainly didn’t have to tell Angelique of Greg’s decision, and she half suspected some sorcery was involved no matter what the protestations. When they’d awakened in mid-evening, they’d called the Bishop at the other motel and told him, and he had been absolutely delighted.
The remnant of the mountain storms had caught up with them as Maria went and picked up Whitely in the van and took him back to her motel. “Why so glum, my dear? It’s a happy solution and a happy occasion.”
“Yeah, well, what kind of marriage can it be? She keeps looking and being like that forever, with no kind of funny powers at all, and she becomes a thing—a sex slave, and he’ll need her ’cause he can’t do it with anybody else. They’ll have to always live in hiding in someplace like Africa or Brazil, afraid that every shadow will contain the Dark Man. Some kind of life.”
“I talked to him at length on the telephone. He doesn’t see her that way any more. He’s in love. He’s willing to pay the price.”
“Yeah, sure. She can make you do or feel or believe anything—for a while. But once it’s done those spells won’t work any more and he’ll be stuck and so will she.”
“You believe it’s magic, then? Perhaps it is, but perhaps it isn’t her kind of magic. Do you think she wants this, truly?”
“I don’t know. She wants him, that’s for sure, but she also wants Daddy. She never had one, but since she got paralyzed she’s always had somebody to push her around, feed her, change her, do all that for her. I think she’d do most anything to have him as her old self, whole and white, if you know what I mean, for she hates the way she is and she hates the idea of being that way for the rest of her life. The only thing that makes it O.K. for her is that she gets Daddy and someone to be wholly dependent on for the rest of her life. She’ll still need special care and he won’t be able to live without her, if you know what I mean. No, I’m not real happy.”
“You’d prefer her dead, then?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes I think it would be best for everybody. At least it would be only her and not two of them being screwed up. But, no, I really love her, Bishop. I don’t want her dead.”
It was not to be a fancy sort of ceremony, if only because no one had much in the way of fancy things to wear. Whitely used an abbreviated Catholic service, which was very close to the rite of his own church, with Maria doing the basic translation. As the ceremony progressed, the wind whipped up outside and they could hear lightning and thunder, unusual for this area at this time of the year.
The service seemed to please Angelique. The clergyman pronounced them husband and wife and blessed them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and it was over. Whitely seemed relaxed and pleased by it, but he was also ever mindful of the business at hand.
“I regret not having rings nor cake, but those can come later. I think now, though, we’d best end this tension. Bless you both. Maria—you may take me back to the motel now and I will see how much expense money Pip has lost in the casino.”
For Angelique, the moment was particularly emotional. When the priest had run through the ceremony, which she could follow by form though she couldn’t understand the specific words and phrases, she’d felt a sense of distance, of unreality, but when he’d pronounced them married and blessed them, she’d felt a sudden inward rush and a concentration of spiritual power from him to the two of them and she knew that this choice was right.
For MacDonald, the whole thing had been calming somehow, had given him an inner peace he’d never really known before. There was nothing spiritual about it to him, but for now he really wanted her and he did not wish to think about tomorrow.
For a while they just stood there, then turned and hugged and kissed, and ran their hands soothingly over each other’s bodies. Words were unnecessary. She had a tense excitement tingd with real fear inside her, and she wanted to prolong this moment.
As the storm raged on, the lights flickered several times, then went out entirely. They hardly noticed, as they began to undress each other. The room was in near darkness in spite of the early evening hour thanks to the blackout.
“Quite a touching performance,” said the Dark Man.
They both jumped, and as they did the lights flickered again and came on, and for the first time Greg MacDonald was face to face with the Dark Man. That is, if face to face was the term for it, since the looming shape near the door was more the animated negative of a man without any features. It was eerie, like a cinematic special effect, but he cast a nebulous shadow on the wall and in his hand he held something not at all blacked out.
“This is a Hallenger S-27 automatic pistol,” the Dark Man pointed out. “It carries a twenty shot capacity in two parallel magazines and, while not well balanced, can spray all twenty throughout this room in less than one second. I can also fire one individually, Mr. MacDonald. It may not kill you, but if it doesn’t the spin on it will keep you hospitalized for months.”
Damn! MacDonald swore to himself, everything except the specter in front of him fading from his mind. Finally I’m face to face with the bastard and I don’t even have my pants on!
Angelique just stared at him in horror, her joy and commitment crumbling within her.
“How did you find us?” MacDonald asked the strange enemy. He was trying to place the voice, but, while it might be electronically altered, it really didn’t sound like anyone he’d ever met or known.
“It was extremely difficult, I admit,” the dark one replied. “Frankly, we felt we had blown it. Your organization is far more efficient than we had dreamed or planned on, Mr. MacDonald. Of course, there were twin objects to the exercise. One was allowing Angelique to both sink into savagery and see what it was like to exist like that in the modem world. To dismantle the last of her civilized ego, as it were, showing the futility of flight and leading to this moment, where we demonstrate the futility of true escape. The second was the hope that she would lead us to parts of your organization, which we’d been otherwise unable to find or penetrate. Still, you led us a merry chase. When that seaplane vanished into thin air after leaving Ensenada air space, we were thrown into a panic. The odds were good after time passed that even if we found you, it would be too late for our ends. I’m very happy to see that it is not so. We would not have been so hesitant to act.”
“I’ll bet. And yet you did track us down, even to this place.”
“Believe me, we did not and could not. When we missed you at the house and discovered no one left knew where you were going or even what direction, it was almost as bad. We had to sit, and wait, and keep the pressure on, and, sure enough, it broke. Oh, don’t worry about our little Angelique here being kept in the dark, as it were. She understands what I say as well as you—although not what you say, sadly.”
There was a sharp double knock on the motel room door that startled them but didn’t faze the Dark Man. He reached over and turned the knob on the door, but MacDonald already had figured out who was there before Maria walked back in, looking quite wet and not at all happy about it. For Angelique, though, it was a crushing blow, worse in a way than the appearance of the Dark Man.
She closed the door behind her and stood there next to the Dark Man, looking at the pair on the bed with a grim expression.
“Miss Iscariot, I believe,” MacDonald said with a sneer. “If you were his all along, why wait until the last moment? Just rubbing it in?”
“I wasn’t—his,” she replied, sounding nervous and miserable. “I just—figured it all out—that’s all. After I saw— her—in that parking lot, I realized just what she had become and what I had become. There’s an eight hundred number you can call that will route your call to the Institute. You know that. After I called you, I thought and thought, and then I called it.”
“Pretty lousy response time for you, Blob Boy, isn’t it? It took you almost three hours to hit the house.”
“A message routing problem of sorts. It took a while to get the information to the right people, round them up, and get them in the right place to act without official interference. Still, you acted with even more efficiency than we did. That cost us. Then we had to wait. Wait until our little Maria decided to call again—either the number or the house. She finally called the house this morning from here. After that, it was mostly a matter of timing.”