He kept walking, and waiting for it to happen.
Then, with a single step, he walked into another world.
One second he was in the darkness of his own backyard, and the next…
Tonight it was a bedroom from what might have been a French mansion. It was maybe from around the year 1890 or so, he thought. But he was no student of historical furnishings; it just looked like something from a movie set…French mansion, 1890, white candles of many sizes burning all around, heavy purple drapes at the window, an opulent canopied bed also purple, on the wall a large tapestry of a woman offering an apple to a unicorn, about eight feet above his head a chandelier with a dozen more lighted candles in it. Under his shiny shoes, a thick, red rug, had been thrown down upon a hardwood floor. The walls were made of polished wood and across the room was a single door.
The summons at the back of his neck was still throbbing a little. His body felt as if it had been stretched and then compressed. His bones ached. His clothes smelled faintly burnt, as did his flesh. At the pit of his stomach was the same queasiness, and he was sweating again. He looked at the drapes that hid the window and wondered what he would see if he moved them aside. The last time, the room had been all-white, futuristic, with pulsing rays of light crisscrossing the ceiling. He wondered if they had somehow captured old movies and were watching them for ideas, or if they were reading minds or if…whatever they were doing, they were very good at creating these elaborate fantasies.
Jefferson Jericho stood waiting. He decided to take a backward step, to see if he would return from whence he came. He took the step but no, he did not return. God was punishing him big time, he thought. Big time for putting New Eden together in a series of Ponzi schemes. Big time for his calculations and deceptions and desires. If he saw something—or someone—he wanted, he took it. That was his way. And if God had wanted to punish him for that, he thought, then why had God given him the tongue and personality to talk anyone into doing anything he wanted, and why had God given him the will to find an outlet for his raging sexual fevers at every opportunity, and why had God given him this firm body and handsome face that could cause investors to open their wallets without question and teenage virgins to open their legs as if hypnotized by his glowing male persona?
The thing was, he was good. Good at every damned thing he did. Good at planning, at money management, at public speaking, at persuasion, at sex. Very good at that. Very inventive, and always wanting to experiment on new flesh. And if God was punishing him for all this, then why had God made so many frustrated women who were looking for the kind of thrills he enjoyed giving? Why had God made so many gullible people who listened, but did not hear, and so gave Jefferson Jericho just the challenge he desired to pick their pockets clean?
And everything had been so easy. Since the rainy Monday fourteen years ago at the car lot in Little Rock, Arkansas, when the shimmering rainbow had come out and the thirty-year-old Number One Salesman Of The Month Leon Kushman had stared at it from the window in his cramped little office and had a revelation.
To Hell with selling cars. If a man wants to make himself some real money, he gives the people rainbows.
What he does is…he creates a religion.
He rolls the dice for high stakes, and he gets people to believe in the words that flow from his mouth like a torrent of sweet wine.
I can do that, Leon Kushman decided. Me, the son of a failed furniture salesman who wrecked our family and went out feet first on a week-long alcohol binge in a cheap little motel.
By God, I can rise above. I can give them rainbows…I can make them high rollers, masters of their own destinies. Well…let’s say they will think of themselves in that way…but isn’t that what a good leader does?
Yes. Yes. Regina will go for it, and she might have some good ideas too.
Yes!
The door across the room slowly opened, like a tease.
Jefferson Jericho felt the sweat bead on his forehead. He felt a cold shiver travel the length of his spine. He couldn’t help it; his six-foot-two-inch, husky body trembled with fear.
She had come to play with her toy.
Twelve.
She came into the room elegantly, dressed in a gown of black and gold. Tonight she was a brunette…long black hair in curly ringlets, her eyes pale blue under arched brows, her full, lush lips wet with a promising smile. She had been blonde last time, except she had had Asiatic almond-shaped brown eyes and heavy breasts. The time before that…brown hair in a ponytail, tawny flesh, petite, something between a Brazilian beach girl and a California Gidget. He understood that she was trying on different skins just as he might try on different clothes to match his mood. But surely they were watching movies, in some strange theater in the sky, and their inspiration came from the world’s shadowplays.
“My Jefferson,” she said, and maybe he imagined a slight hiss in that name, or maybe not. She approached him in what was nearly a gliding motion. Suddenly she was standing before him as if frames had been removed from the scene. She was as tall as he tonight, and nearly too slim. Her eyelashes were very thick. He wondered if they were also reading the fashion magazines of the 1970s and storing the images away for later use.
She was beautiful, in this disguise. Yet Jefferson knew that sometimes the disguises slipped, and when that happened he felt the fear curdle within himself and something abhorrent stir in the most primitive part of his being. As he looked into her face he thought that her eyes were too pale. They were almost white, and the pupils were more catlike than round. As soon as he thought this, the color of her eyes became more warmly blue and the slits of the pupils rounded.
“Is that more pleasing?” she asked, in a voice that mixed a husky taunt with a little girl’s high, soft register.
Sometimes, also, she couldn’t get the voice right at first.
He thought he said yes. He didn’t know for sure, because this was all dreamlike to him and blurred around the edges and very often he only heard himself speak as if in an echo from an unfathomable distance.
“You are looking much pleasing yourself,” she told him. She fingered the knot of his necktie. Her fingers were maybe a little bit too long and the nails looked like white plastic. “Much pleasing for me to look upon.” The face came closer to his and the intense blue eyes peered deeply, as if choosing a starting point for dissection. “My Jefferson, come to play with his harlot.” Her mouth gave a twitch. “I mean to say…starlet.”
Yes, he thought he answered. Starlet.
Her hands—had the fingers corrected themselves?—fluttered to his face and slowly ran over his cheeks and down to his jawline. Her smile never changed, but it was a cunningly human smile, with cunningly perfect human teeth behind the lips. What most unnerved him was that she never blinked. Never. And maybe she couldn’t, because even though he sometimes thought Please blink…please blink in a kind of panic-edged plea, she did not, and she didn’t mention it though he knew she was always reading his mind.
He could feel her in there, exploring. Always curious. Lifting up the rocks of his life and observing what scuttled from beneath. She knew everything about him, had likely known from their very first meeting. When was that? Time was rubbery, a foreign object. Two months after that day with Regina and the pistol? When he, Alex Smith, Doug Hammerfield and Andy Warren had taken one of the pickup trucks out of New Eden to try to find gasoline somewhere. That night in late June, when the sky was streaked with blue lightning and after a few miles heading south Doug said nervously from the backseat, “Jeff…we’d better turn around. We’ve gone too far. Don’t you think?”