Red Dragon (23 page)

His doing in another time. He must see it and remember.

Dolarhyde unlocked the back door and made his routine search of the house. When he came outside again he wore a stocking mask.

He opened the van and attached a ramp. Then he rolled out Freddy Lounds. Lounds wore nothing but his shorts and a gag and blindfold. Though he was only semiconscious, he did not slump. He sat up very straight, his head against the high back of the old oak wheelchair. From the back of his head to the soles of his feet he was bonded to the chair with epoxy glue.

Dolarhyde rolled him into the house and parked him in a corner of the parlor with his back to the room, as though he had misbehaved.

“Are you too cool? Would you like a blanket?”

Dolarhyde peeled off the sanitary napkins covering Lounds’s eyes and mouth. Lounds didn’t answer. The odor of chloroform hung on him.

“I’ll get you a blanket.” Dolarhyde took an afghan from the sofa and tucked it around Lounds up to the chin, then pressed an ammonia bottle under his nose.

Lounds’s eyes opened wide on a blurred joining of walls. He coughed and started talking.

“Accident? Am I hurt bad?”

The voice behind him: “No, Mr. Lounds. You’ll be just fine.”

“My back hurts. My skin. Did I get burned? I hope to God I’m not burned.”

“Burned? Burned. No. You just rest here. I’ll be with you in a little while.”

“Let me lie down. Listen, I want you to call my office. My God, I’m in a Striker frame. My back’s broken—tell me the truth!”

Footsteps going away.

“What am I doing here?” The question shrill at the end.

The answer came from far behind him. “Atoning, Mr. Lounds.”

Lounds heard footsteps mounting stairs. He heard a shower running. His head was clearer now. He remembered leaving the office and driving, but he couldn’t remember after that. The side of his head throbbed and the smell of chloroform made him gag. Held rigidly erect, he was afraid he would vomit and drown. He opened his mouth wide and breathed deep. He could hear his heart.

Lounds hoped he was asleep. He tried to raise his arm from the armrest, increasing the pull deliberately until the pain in his palm and arm was enough to wake him from any dream. He was not asleep. His mind gathered speed.

By straining he could turn his eyes enough to see his arm for seconds at a time. He saw how he was fastened. This was no device to protect broken backs. This was no hospital. Someone had him.

Lounds thought he heard footsteps on the floor above, but they might have been his heartbeats.

He tried to think. Strained to think.
Keep cool and think,
he whispered. Cool and think.

The stairs creaked as Dolarhyde came down.

Lounds felt the weight of him in every step. A presence behind him now.

Lounds spoke several words before he could adjust the volume of his voice.

“I haven’t seen your face. I couldn’t identify you. I don’t know what you look like. The
Tattler
, I work for
The National Tattler
, would pay a reward . . . a big reward for me. Half a million, a million maybe. A million dollars.”

Silence behind him. Then a squeak of couch springs. He was sitting down, then.

“What do you think, Mr. Lounds?”

“What do you think, Mr. Lounds?”

“I don’t know what’s happened to me.”

“Do you know Who I Am, Mr. Lounds?”

“No. I don’t want to know, believe me.”

“According to you, I’m a vicious, perverted sexual failure. An animal, you said. Probably turned loose from an asylum by a do-good judge.” Ordinarily, Dolarhyde would have avoided the sibilant /s/ in “sexual.” In the presence of this audience, very far from laughter, he was freed. “You know now, don’t you?”

Don’t lie. Think fast.
“Yes.”

“Why do you write lies, Mr. Lounds? Why do you say I’m crazy? Answer now.”

“When a person . . . when a person does things that most people can’t understand, they call him . . .”

“Crazy.”

“They called, like . . . the Wright brothers. All through history—”

“History. Do you understand what I’m doing, Mr. Lounds?”

Understand.
There it was. A chance. Swing hard. “No, but I think I’ve got an opportunity to understand, and then
all my readers could understand too.
”

“Do you feel privileged?”

“It’s a privilege. But I have to tell you, man to man, that I’m scared. It’s hard to concentrate when you’re scared. If you have a great idea, you wouldn’t have to scare me for me to really be impressed.”

“Man to man. Man to man. You use that expression to imply frankness, Mr. Lounds, I appreciate that. But you see, I am not a man. I began as one but by the Grace of God and my own Will, I have become Other and More than a man. You say you’re frightened. Do you believe that God is in attendance here, Mr. Lounds?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you praying to Him now?”

“Sometimes I pray. I have to tell you, I just pray mostly when I’m scared.”

“And does God help you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think about it after. I ought to.”

“You ought to. Um-hmmmm. There are so many things you ought to understand. In a little while I’ll help you understand. Will you excuse me now?”

“Certainly.”

Footsteps out of the room. The slide and rattle of a kitchen drawer. Lounds had covered many murders committed in kitchens where things are handy. Police reporting can change forever your view of kitchens. Water running now.

Lounds thought it must be night. Crawford and Graham were expecting him. Certainly he had been missed by now. A great, hollow sadness pulsed briefly with his fear.

Breathing behind him, a flash of white caught by his rolling eye. A hand, powerful and pale. It held a cup of tea with honey. Lounds sipped it through a straw.

“I’d do a big story,” he said between sips. “Anything you want to say. Describe you any way you want, or no description, no description.”

“Shhhh.” A single finger tapped the top of his head. The lights brightened. The chair began to turn.

“No. I don’t want to see you.”

“Oh, but you must, Mr. Lounds. You’re a reporter. You’re here to report. When I turn you around, open your eyes and look at me. If you won’t open them yourself, I’ll staple your eyelids to your forehead.”

A wet mouth noise, a snapping click and the chair spun. Lounds faced the room, his eyes tight shut. A finger tapped insistently on his chest. A touch on his eyelids. He looked.

To Lounds, seated, he seemed very tall standing in his kimono. A stocking mask was rolled up to his nose. He turned his back to Lounds and dropped the robe. The great back muscles flexed above the brilliant tattoo of the tail that ran down his lower back and wrapped around the leg.

The Dragon turned his head slowly, looked over his shoulder at Lounds and smiled, all jags and stains.

“Oh my dear God Jesus,” Lounds said.

Lounds now in the center of the room where he can see the screen. Dolarhyde, behind him, has put on his robe and put in the teeth that allow him to speak.

“Do you want to know What I Am?”

Lounds tried to nod; the chair jerked his scalp. “More than anything. I was afraid to ask.”

“Look.”

The first slide was Blake’s painting, the great Man-Dragon, wings flared and tail lashing, poised above the Woman Clothed with the Sun.

“Do you see now?”

“I see.”

Rapidly Dolarhyde ran through his other slides.

Click. Mrs. Jacobi alive. “Do you see?”

“Yes.”

Click. Mrs. Leeds alive. “Do you see?”

“Yes.”

Click. Dolarhyde, the Dragon rampant, muscles flexed and tail tattoo above the Jacobis’ bed. “Do you see?”

“Yes.”

Click. Mrs. Jacobi waiting. “Do you see?”

“Yes.”

Click. Mrs. Jacobi after. “Do you see?”

“Yes.”

Click. The Dragon rampant. “Do you see?”

“Yes.”

Click. Mrs. Leeds waiting, her husband slack beside her. “Do you see?”

“Yes.”

Click. Mrs. Leeds after, harlequined with blood. “Do you see?”

“Yes.”

Click. Freddy Lounds, a copy of a
Tattler
photograph. “Do you see?”

“Oh God.”

“Do you see?”

“Oh my God.” The words drawn out, as a child speaks crying.

“Do you see?”

“Please no.”

“No what?”

“Not me.”

“No what? You’re a man, Mr. Lounds. Are you a man?”

“Yes.”

“Do you imply that I’m some kind of queer?”

“God no.”

“Are you a queer, Mr. Lounds?”

“No.”

“Are you going to write more lies about me, Mr. Lounds?”

“Oh no, no.”

“Why did you write lies, Mr. Lounds?”

“The police told me. It was what they said.”

“You quote Will Graham.”

“Graham told me the lies. Graham.”

“Will you tell the truth now? About Me. My Work. My Becoming. My
Art
, Mr. Lounds. Is this Art?”

“Art.”

The fear in Lounds’s face freed Dolarhyde to speak and he could fly on sibilants and fricatives; plosives were his great webbed wings.

“You said that I, who see more than you, am insane. I, who pushed the world so much further than you, am insane. I have dared more than you, I have pressed my unique seal so much deeper in the earth, where it will last longer than your dust. Your life to mine is a slug track on stone. A thin silver mucus track in and out of the letters on my monument.” The words Dolarhyde had written in his journal swarmed in him now.

“I am the Dragon and you call me
insane
? My movements are followed and recorded as avidly as those of a mighty guest star. Do you know about the guest star in 1054? Of course not. Your readers follow you like a child follows a slug track with his finger, and in the same tired loops of reason. Back to your shallow skull and potato face as a slug follows his own slime back home.

“Before Me you are a slug in the sun. You are privy to a great Becoming and you recognize nothing. You are an ant in the after-birth.

“It is in your nature to do one thing correctly: Before Me you rightly tremble. Fear is not what you owe Me, Lounds, you and the other pismires.
You owe Me awe.
”

Dolarhyde stood with his head down, his thumb and forefinger against the bridge of his nose. Then he left the room.

He didn’t take off the mask,
Lounds thought.
He didn’t take off the mask. If he comes back with it off, I’m dead. God, I’m wet all over.
He rolled his eyes toward the doorway and waited through the sounds from the back of the house.

When Dolarhyde returned, he still wore the mask. He carried a lunch box and two thermoses. “For your trip back home.” He held up a thermos. “Ice, we’ll need that. Before we go, we’ll tape a little while.”

He clipped a microphone to the afghan near Lounds’s face. “Repeat after me.”

They taped for half an hour. Finally, “That’s all, Mr. Lounds. You did very well.”

“You’ll let me go now?”

“I will. There’s one way, though, that I can help you better understand and remember.” Dolarhyde turned away.

“I want to understand. I want you to know I appreciate you turning me loose. I’m really going to be fair from now on, you know that.”

Dolarhyde could not answer. He had changed his teeth.

The tape recorder was running again.

He smiled at Lounds, a brown-stained smile. He placed his hand on Lounds’s heart and, leaning to him intimately as though to kiss him, he bit Lounds’s lips off and spit them on the floor.

Dawn in Chicago, heavy air and the gray sky low.

A security guard came out of the lobby of the
Tattler
building and stood at the curb smoking a cigarette and rubbing the small of his back. He was alone on the street and in the quiet he could hear the clack of the traffic light changing at the top of the hill, a long block away.

Half a block north of the light, out of the guard’s sight, Francis Dolarhyde squatted beside Lounds in the back of the van. He arranged the blanket in a deep cowl that hid Lounds’s head.

Lounds was in great pain. He appeared stuporous, but his mind was racing. There were things he must remember. The blindfold was tented across his nose and he could see Dolarhyde’s fingers checking the crusted gag.

Dolarhyde put on the white jacket of a medical orderly, laid a thermos in Lounds’s lap and rolled him out of the van. When he locked the wheels of the chair and turned to put the ramp back in the van, Lounds could see the end of the van’s bumper beneath his blindfold.

Turning now, seeing the bumper guard . . . Yes! the license plate. Only a flash, but Lounds burned it into his mind.

Rolling now. Sidewalk seams. Around a corner and down a curb. Paper crackled under the wheels.

Dolarhyde stopped the wheelchair in a bit of littered shelter between a garbage Dumpster and a parked truck. He pulled at the blindfold. Lounds closed his eyes. An ammonia bottle under his nose.

The soft voice close beside him.

“Can you hear me? You’re almost there.” The blindfold fold off now. “Blink if you can hear me.”

Dolarhyde opened his eye with a thumb and forefinger. Lounds was looking at Dolarhyde’s face.

“I told you one fib.” Dolarhyde tapped the thermos. “I don’t
really
have your lips on ice.” He whipped off the blanket and opened the thermos.