Shhhhh.
Hypok closed his eyes and inhaled the smells — the girl, the blanket, the faint fecal aroma of Moloch. He pressed the cable controls: shoot, shoot, shoot. The Item had a soapier smell than Collette and Valeen, though Valeen’s old clothes undercut that freshness with the dank richness of time. This is close to how it was back then: the scent of the available female, the dark liquid power of his instincts, the punishing reality of the maternal nearby, overhead, perhaps, like a bird of prey:
Collette: Let’s inspect Genie again.
Valeen: Genie, are you asleep yet?
Gene: (groans as if in sleep, turning onto his back)
Collette: Everybody be real quiet now.
Oooooooh...
All the nascent power returns to him in the memory, along with all the power of his subsequent years. The past has crawled forward to swallow the present, and together, this thirty-year span of desire resides in Hypok with all the sharpness and immediacy of a spark. He feels present in the past and present in the moment because it is all just one huge thing, a chain of hours linked to make a life. He begins to undulate in his good skin. He peers out at Moloch and groans as if in sleep: here you are, you hateful bitch if you can see me. Then he closes his eyes again and knows that she’ll never beat him with the belt for what his sisters loved to do, will never lock him away in the small cold room with the loaf of bread and the jug of water, will never humiliate him for his shyness, punish him for his breath, ridicule him for his skin or pound him for his desires again. Moloch has blessed him with that. So he undulates in his beautiful skin, the power of the years gathering. He feels beneath his scaled hand the body he has always needed. He doesn’t even need to see it. There it is: the object of all desire. He will never be that body. It will always be another. To possess it would mean to inject it with his life, and offer it to Moloch. This is the direction of his years, the shape of his destiny. He has been here before and he has lost his courage. He has been here before and not lost it. He wonders if he is truly ready to attain the summit again. He opens his eyes. Moloch stares at him from the tree. Shoot, shoot, shoot.
Brittany could still see through the airhole she was meant to breathe through. Dead Gopher Man was covered in silver scales like a fish and lying just a few feet away from her. His back was to her and his whole body was moving, slowly and rhythmically, like he was swimming in slow motion. He made noises every few seconds, but nothing she could understand. It was kind of moaning, kind of talking. She heard this funny sound above her every once in a while — kind of a short click with a rattle after it. Two or three times. Then it stopped. His hand was still on her back and she could see his arm extending back toward her, covered in the shimmering scales. She could see just a tiny bit of the dress he had put on her and she knew it wasn’t one of hers. Beyond Dead Gopher Man this slow dark shape moved through a tree. Dead Gopher Man kept moving, faster now but still evenly — what was he doing?
Brittany closed her eyes as hard as she could and tried to scream and shook herself into a Dream Bust. She shook so hard she thought her bones would come undone. But the scream wouldn’t get out past the tape and she realized why the Dream Bust had failed her today: because the scream was the most important part; it frightened away everything else in the dream, but she couldn’t do it because of the tape.
Suddenly she was on her back and she felt two strong hands on her arms pinning her down and she couldn’t see past the hood but when he spoke she knew he was just inches from her face. His voice was a quick, foul hiss:
Stop it! Mother’s watching!
Thirteen
Marcine Browne ushered me into her office at Bright Tomorrows. It was 9:55 A.M. She was mid-thirties, dressed and made up with pride, red haired and quite attractive. She flicked on the lights and pointed to a chair in front of a desk.
“Can I get you some coffee?”
“I’d rather not waste your time,” I said.
“Can I get me some coffee?”
She was back in five minutes with two cups. They were white mugs with BRIGHT TOMORROWS emblazoned across them in optimistic red script. She looked at the bandage on my face as she offered me the coffee.
“Thank you,” I said. “Ms. Browne, I’m the lead investigator for the Sheriff’s Crimes Against Youth unit. We’re small, we work hard and we believe that children in our society need protection.”
I waited a beat. I like to let the importance of what we do sink in.
“All right.”
“Can I speak frankly with you?”
“Please do.”
“Have you heard of The Horridus?”
“Yes.”
“He took his third girl from a condo in Irvine, about four hours ago. The condo is three miles from here. The girl is missing, her mother is ready to break down and I’ve failed them. She’s five years old, and somewhere out in this county of 2.6 million souls, he’s got her.”
She said nothing. I liked her face.
“The Horridus named himself. It’s the Latin root for rough. He’s living through what the FBI calls an escalating fantasy. That means he’s got a vision, a goal in his imagination. It isn’t something he can just go out and start doing. It’s something he has to work up to. That’s what the abductions are — practice runs for the real thing. Who knows, maybe this time, it will be the real thing. Rough.”
I paused but she said nothing. I was reassured by the intelligence in her face, though I knew my chances of getting what I wanted from Marcine Browne were somewhere between slim and none.
I was pleased that she was finally unable to resist the bait.
“I think this is absolutely terrible,” she said. “I feel awful. I’m not a mother myself, but I can imagine how it would feel, to have that happen to your daughter. What would the ‘real thing’ be?”
“You really want to know?”
“Yes.”
“He’ll rape and kill them. Probably in that order. It’s a matter of time. Right now, it might be a matter of minutes.”
I let this sink in. She looked at me with her lovely green eyes. “Investigator Naughton, why are you here?”
“I need your help.”
“How?”
One of Marcine Browne’s co-workers stuck her head in the door and said good morning. She smiled brightly at me, no doubt the lure-the-new-male-membership smile. Marcine asked her to shut the door, please.
The quiet in the office was just what I wanted. What Marcine did in the next few minutes would be between herself and her soul, and the soul is best heard in silence.
“We know, very generally, what he looks like. We have some general indications as to his age, what he drives, what kind of a house he lives in and what kind of a past he has. We have some suspicions — founded on the opinions of people who profile unknown subjects for a living — about what kind of work he does, how he behaves socially, what his interests are.”