Bruno let himself into the rambling Victorian mansion and searched the musty, dust-filmed, spider-webbed rooms which stank of mildew that thrived on the drapes and carpets. The house was crammed full of antique furniture and art glass and statuary and many other things, but it did not hold anything sinister. The woman was not here, either.
He didn’t know whether that was good or bad. On the one hand, she hadn’t moved in, hadn’t taken over in his absence. That was good. He was relieved about that. But on the other hand–where the hell was she?
His confusion was rapidly getting worse. His powers of reasoning began to fail him hours ago, but now he couldn’t trust his five senses, either. Sometimes he thought he heard voices, and he pursued them through the house, only to realize it was his own mumbling that he heard. Sometimes the mildew didn’t smell like mildew at all, but like his mother’s favorite perfume; but then a moment later it smelled like mildew again. And when he looked at familiar paintings that had hung on these walls since his childhood, he was unable to perceive what they were depicting; the shapes and colors would not resolve themselves, and his eyes were baffled by even the most simple pictures. He stood before one painting that he knew to be a landscape with trees and wildflowers, but he was not able to see those objects in it; he could only remember that they were there; all he saw now were smears, disjointed lines, blobs, meaningless forms.
He tried not to panic. He told himself that his bizarre confusion and disorientation were merely the results of his not having slept all night. He’d driven a long way in a short time, and he was understandably weary. His eyes were heavy, gritty, red and burning. He ached all over. His neck was stiff. All he needed was sleep. When he woke, he would be clear-headed. That was what he told himself. That was what he had to believe.
Because he had searched the house from bottom to top, he was now in the finished attic, the big room with the sloped ceiling, where he had spent so much of his life. In the chalky glow of his flashlight, he could see the bed in which he had slept during the years he’d lived in the mansion.
Himself was already on the bed. Himself was lying down, eyes closed, as if sleeping. Of course, the eyes were sewn shut. And the white nightgown was not a nightgown; it was a burial gown that Avril Tannerton had put on him. Because himself was dead. The bitch had stabbed and killed him. Himself had been stone-cold dead since last week.
Bruno was too enervated to vent his grief and rage. He went to the king-size bed and stretched out on his half of it, beside himself.
Himself stank. It was a pungent, chemical smell.
The bedclothes around himself were stained and damp with dark fluids that were slowly leaking out of the body.
Bruno didn’t care about the mess. His side of the bed was dry. And although himself was dead and would never speak again or laugh again, Bruno felt good just being near himself.
Bruno reached out and touched himself. He touched the cold, hard, rigid hand and held it.
Some of the painful loneliness abated.
Bruno did not feel whole, of course. He would never feel whole again, for half of him was dead. But lying there beside his corpse, he did not feel all alone either.
Leaving the flashlight on to dispel the darkness in the shuttered attic bedroom, Bruno fell asleep.
***
Dr. Nicholas Rudge’s office was on the twentieth floor of a skyscraper in the heart of San Francisco. Apparently, Hilary thought, the architect either had never heard of the unpleasant term “earthquake country,” or he had made a very good deal with the devil. One wall of Rudge’s office was glass from floor to ceiling, divided into three enormous panels by only two narrow, vertical, steel struts; beyond the window lay the terraced city, the bay, the magnificent Golden Gate Bridge, and the lingering tendrils of last night’s fog. A quickening Pacific wind was tearing the gray clouds to tatters, and blue sky was becoming more dominant by the minute. The view was spectacular.