Hatch said, “I went somewhere when I died, right?”
“What do you mean?”
“Purgatory, Heaven, Hell — those are the basic possibilities for a Catholic, if what we say we believe turns out to be true.”
“Well … you've always said you had no near-death experience.”
“I didn't. I can't remember anything from … the Other Side. But that doesn't mean I wasn't there.”
“What's your point?”
“Maybe this killer isn't an ordinary man.”
“You're losing me, Hatch.”
“Maybe I brought something back with me.”
“Back with you?”
“From wherever I was while I was dead.”
“Something?”
Darkness had its advantages. The superstitious primitive within could speak of things that would seem too foolish to voice in a well-lighted place.
He said, “A spirit. An entity.”
She said nothing.
“My passage in and out of death might have opened a door somehow,” he said, “and let something through.”
“Something,” she said again, but with no note of inquiry in her voice, as there had been before. He sensed that she knew what he meant — and did not like the theory.
“And now it's loose in the world. Which explains its link to me — and why it might kill people who anger me.”
She was silent awhile. Then: “If something was brought back, it's evidently pure evil. What — are you saying that when you died, you went to Hell and this killer piggy-backed with you from there?”
“Maybe. I'm no saint, no matter what you think. After all, I've got at least Cooper's blood on my hands.”
“That happened after you died and were brought back. Besides, you don't share in the guilt for that.”
“It was my anger that targeted him, my anger—”
“Bullshit,” Lindsey said sharply. “You're the best man I've ever known. If housing in the afterlife includes a Heaven and Hell, you've earned the apartment with a better view.”
His thoughts were so dark, he was surprised that he could smile. He reached under the sheets, found her hand, and held it gratefully. “I love you, too.”
“Think up another theory if you want to keep me awake and interested.”
“Let's just make a little adjustment to the theory we already have. What if there's an afterlife, but it isn't ordered like anything theologians have ever described. It wouldn't have to be either Heaven or Hell that I came back from. Just another place, stranger than here, different, with unknown dangers.”
“I don't like that much better.”
“If I'm going to deal with this thing, I have to find a way to explain it. I can't fight back if I don't even know where to throw my punches.”
“There's got to be a more logical explanation,” she said.
“That's what I tell myself. But when I try to find it, I keep coming back to the illogical.”
The rain gutter creaked. The wind soughed under the eaves and called down the flue of the master-bedroom fireplace.
He wondered if Honell was able to hear the wind wherever he was — and whether it was the wind of this world or the next.
Vassago parked directly in front of Harrison's Antiques at the south end of Laguna Beach. The shop occupied an entire Art Deco building. The big display windows were unlighted as Tuesday passed through midnight, becoming Wednesday.
Steven Honell had been unable to tell him where the Harrisons lived, and a quick check of the telephone book turned up no listed number for them. The writer had known only the name of their business and its approximate location on Pacific Coast Highway.
Their home address was sure to be on file somewhere in the store's office. Getting it might be difficult. A decal on each of the big Plexiglas windows and another on the front door warned that the premises were fitted with a burglar alarm and protected by a security company.
He had come back from Hell with the ability to see in the dark, animal-quick reflexes, a lack of inhibitions that left him capable of any act or atrocity, and a fearlessness that made him every bit as formidable an adversary as a robot might have been. But he could not walk through walls, or transform himself from flesh into vapor into flesh again, or fly, or perform any of the other feats that were within the powers of a true demon. Until he had earned his way back into Hell either by acquiring a perfect collection in his museum of the dead or by killing those he had been sent here to destroy, he possessed only the minor powers of the demon demimonde, which were insufficient to defeat a burglar alarm.
He drove away from the store.
In the heart of town, he found a telephone booth beside a service station. Despite the hour, the station was still pumping gasoline, and the outdoor lighting was so bright that Vassago was forced to squint behind his sunglasses.
Swooping around the lamps, moths with inch-long wings cast shadows as large as ravens on the pavement.
The floor of the telephone booth was littered with cigarette butts. Ants teamed over the corpse of a beetle.
Someone had taped a hand-lettered OUT OF ORDER notice to the coin box, but Vassago didn't care because he didn't intend to call anyone. He was only interested in the phone book, which was secured to the frame of the booth by a sturdy chain.
He checked “Antiques” in the Yellow Pages. Laguna Beach had a lot of businesses under that heading; it was a regular shoppers' paradise. He studied their space ads. Some had institutional names like International Antiques, but others were named after their owners, as was Harrison's Antiques.
A few used both first and last names, and some of the space ads also included the full names of the proprietors because, in that business, personal reputation could be a drawing card. Robert O. Loffman Antiques in the Yellow Pages cross-referenced neatly with a Robert O. Loffman in the white pages, providing Vassago with a street address, which he committed to memory.
On his way back to the Honda, he saw a bat swoop out of the night. It arced down through the blue-white glare from the service-station lights, snatching a fat moth from the air in mid-flight, then vanished back up into the darkness from which it had come. Neither predator nor prey made a sound.
Loffman was seventy years old, but in his best dreams he was eighteen again, spry and limber, strong and happy. They were never sex dreams, no bosomy young women parting their smooth thighs in welcome. They weren't power dreams, either, no running or jumping or leaping off cliffs into wild adventures. The action was always mundane: a leisurely walk along a beach at twilight, barefoot, the feel of damp sand between his toes, the froth on the incoming waves sparkling with reflections of the dazzling purple-red sunset; or just sitting on the grass in the shadow of a date palm on a summer afternoon, watching a hummingbird sip nectar from the bright blooms in a bed of flowers. The mere fact that he was young again seemed miracle enough to sustain a dream and keep it interesting.
At the moment he was eighteen, lying on a big bench swing on the front porch of the Santa Ana house in which he had been born and raised. He was just swinging gently and peeling an apple that he intended to eat, nothing more, but it was a wonderful dream, rich with scents and textures, more erotic than if he had imagined himself in a harem of undressed beauties.
“Wake up, Mr. Loffman.”
He tried to ignore the voice because he wanted to be alone on that porch. He kept his eyes on the curled length of peel that he was paring from the apple.
“Come on, you old sleepyhead.”