Relentless (8 page)

“Clearly, he’s arrogant and eccentric,” she said. “Some little thing you said set him off.”

“All I did was apologize for Milo nearly peeing on him.”

“He misinterpreted something. So he’s had his payback. Probably the worst he’ll do now is trash every book you ever write.”

“Swell.” I locked eyes with her. “You really think it’s over?”

She hesitated but then said, “Yes.”

As a truth detector, her double-barreled gaze works both ways. When she did not blink, I knew she was being a straight shooter.

“Cubby, he thinks you were spying on him, you violated his personal space. So he violated yours. Now, sweetie, let it go.”

I sighed. “I will. I’ll let it go.”

Penny’s smile could power a small city.

Together, we prepared salads, ravioli, and meatballs. Milo never knew that we had indulged in cookies and milk before dinner. But I’m
pretty sure Lassie, with her exceptional sense of smell, detected the truth on our breath, because her mismatched eyes said
guilty
.

Later that night, I had difficulty falling asleep. When at last I slept, I found myself in another lost-and-alone dream: the infinite library with the winding aisles.

I had been prowling those byways for a while, in anticipation of a momentous discovery, when a serpentine turn in the stacks brought me to a place where the shelves held no books. Displayed instead, in big jars sealed with corks and wax, was a collection of severed heads in preservative fluid.

From floor to ceiling, onward past another turn and another, men and women peered out of their glass ossuaries, eyes wide but fixed. None wore an expression of agony or horror. Instead, they appeared to be either astonished or contemplative.

These bodiless multitudes, breathless in formaldehyde, disturbed me for obvious reasons but also for a reason I could not identify. As I began to realize that I knew them—or at least some of them—my heart raced in rebellion against the pending revelation.

Suspecting that the way ahead would never bring me again to any books, but only to additional heads in jars, I turned back toward the true library out of which I had wandered. Although I hurried farther than I had come, I found only heads behind me.

I first recognized Charles Dickens, bearded behind a curve of glass, and then Truman Capote. Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Heinlein, Zane Grey, Raymond Chandler. The creator of Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs. Virginia Woolf. Somerset Maugham. Mickey Spillane.

A premonition chilled mere anxiety into a colder fear: I knew that I would recognize my face in a jar. And when I met my dead eyes, I would cease to exist in either the dream or the waking world, but would forevermore be only a severed head drowned in formaldehyde.

As I tried to run out of the dream, I strove not to look at the jars, but my eyes were repeatedly drawn to them. When the lights went off, the darkness was a blessing until, as I blindly progressed, I heard Shearman Waxx speak nearby: “Doom.”

With my breath caught in my throat, I sat up in bed, in a room as dark as the lightless maze of the nightmare library. For a moment, I half believed that Waxx had spoken not in the dream but here in the waking world.

I exhaled, inhaled, and oriented myself by the feel of the entangling sheets, by the residual smell of fabric softener, by the familiar faint whistle of forced air coming through the heating vent, by the palest blush of moonlight at the edges of the heavy draperies.

The room was blacker than it should have been. The green numbers on my digital clock were not lit. The clock on Penny’s nightstand had been extinguished, as well.

The luminescent numerals of the alarm-system keypad should have been visible on the wall, only a few steps from my side of the bed. They were not glowing.

Furthermore, a tiny green indicator lamp should have confirmed that the system was powered. And a red indicator of the same size should have noted that the alarm was set on HOME mode, which meant that the motion detectors were not engaged but that all of the window and door circuits were activated to warn of any attempted intrusion. Neither the green nor the red was lit.

The power-company service had failed. Perhaps a drunk driver had sheared off a utility pole. A transformer might have blown up. Such interruptions were rare and usually short-lived, nothing to worry about.

As the last clouds of sleep lifted from my mind, I remembered that the security system included a backup battery that should keep it operative for three hours. And when the main power supply was cut off,
as the system switched to battery, a recorded voice should announce “power failure” throughout the house.

Apparently, the battery had gone dead. The recorded voice had never spoken.

I cautioned myself not to leap to conclusions. Coincidence is seldom credible in a work of fiction, but it is a primary thread in the tapestry of real life. An accident at a power station was a more likely explanation than was the return of the bow-tied critic.

From somewhere in the pitch-black bedroom, Shearman Waxx said again, “Doom.”

   The temptation was great to believe that I had passed from the dream of the library into a dream of blindness and had not yet come awake.

As a writer, I succeed by deceiving readers into accepting that the story I’m telling is as true as their lives, that what happens to my characters should intellectually and emotionally involve them no less than they should be concerned about their real-world neighbors. But I have never been good at
self
-deception.

I was awake, all right, and Waxx stood or crouched, or roamed, somewhere in the bedroom.

My first impulse was to scream like a little girl. Fortunately, I repressed the urge. Waxx was one of those critics with crocodile genes; he would find most delicious any prey that was saturated with the pheromones of fear.

My nightstand—like the one on the farther side of the bed—was an antique Chinese chest with numerous small drawers of different
sizes. In the top drawer closest to me, I kept a flashlight, which allowed me to find my way to the bathroom at night without switching on a lamp and waking Penny.

Each evening, before going to bed, I pulled this drawer partway out of the nightstand, so I could get the flashlight without making a disturbance. I am an incompetent handyman but a considerate husband.

Now I groped in the darkness, found the open drawer, and reached into it. The flashlight wasn’t there.

I knew I had not misplaced it earlier. Waxx must have removed it before he woke me.

Penny also kept a flashlight in a drawer of her nightstand. Most likely Waxx had confiscated that one, as well.

Evidently, he had a flashlight of his own, with which he had stealthily prowled the room as we slept. If I wanted one, I would have to take his away from him.

Although I fully understood the wisdom of owning a gun, I didn’t keep one in the house. Penny had been raised in a virtual armory and had no objection to firearms. But I had a covenant with Death to spare others as once I had been spared.

I assumed Shearman Waxx possessed a gun—as well as a butcher knife, a switchblade, an axe, a chain saw, a power drill with an assortment of bits, and a wood chipper.

Within reach, I had a couple of pillows and a bedside lamp.

As far as I could tell, Penny still slept. I saw no value in waking her at once.

Until Waxx switched on his light and revealed his position, he and I were equally blind. Because I knew the bedroom so much better than he did, the darkness counted slightly to my advantage.

He had heard me sit up in bed and gasp for breath when I broke out of my dream. But the noises I’d made might as likely have been
those of a man thrashing at the sheets and turning over in his troubled sleep.

The first
doom
seemed to me to have been spoken in the lightless aisles of the dream library, and Waxx could not be sure that I heard him say it the second time.

Letting out a soft groan, then murmuring wordlessly, I pretended to be negotiating a nightmare. Using this anxious muttering as cover, I eased off the bed and, falling silent, crouched beside it.

Breathing through my open mouth, I made no slightest sound. If I decided to move, I felt confident that my pajamas were too soft to betray me with a rustle.

Although silent to the intruder’s ears, I was not quiet to my own. My heart knocked like a savage fist upon all the doors of my defenses, chasing out my expectations of civilization and letting in the fear of anarchy and barbaric violence.

If Waxx made subtle sounds, I was not certain that I could hear them above this inner drumming. The rhythmic pressure waves of hard-pumped blood raised surf sounds in the nautilus turns of my inner ears.

The longer Waxx waited to speak again, the more I wondered what his game might be. I had no doubt that he had come here to harm us. That he wanted first to terrorize us seemed obvious, as well. But his boldness, the risks he took, and his eerie patience in the dark gave me the impression that his purpose was more complex than the psychotic thrill of torment and murder.

Before he spoke again, and especially before he switched on a flashlight, I needed to put some distance between myself and the bed. He would expect to find me there, and when he did not, when his light revealed his position but not mine, I might be able to catch him off guard, rushing at him from the side or from behind as he initially regarded the tangle of abandoned sheets.

Crouched and barefoot, in a slow-motion shamble that required tension in every muscle and that tested balance, I ape-walked toward where I expected to find an armchair. It ought to be just to the right of that point on the wall where the alarm-system keypad should have been softly glowing.

Shoulders slumped, arms low, I let my fingertips slide lightly, soundlessly across the carpet. If a knee buckled or a muscle cramped, I could steady myself with my hands.

I feared making a sound less than I dreaded colliding with Waxx in the blackness. My strategy would then be worthless, though I would still surprise him and might be able to overpower him before he shot or stabbed me.

I am five feet eleven and in acceptable physical condition. But I did not delude myself that his formidable bulk would prove to be flab. He would be difficult to take down.

In retrospect, I realize that in my desperation, I thought I could plot the scene as if I were writing fiction. Suspense novels are not my genre. Fate had dropped me into a real-life tale of peril, however, and because I lacked tough-guy experience, I had fallen back on imagination and craftsmanship to sculpt this narrative toward a twist that would not leave me dead in an early chapter.

Blinded, I nevertheless found the armchair where I expected it would be, which gave me hope that I remained the protagonist and had not become a supporting character destined for a bloody end in Part 1.

Elsewhere in the room, his position impossible to fix from a single word, the critic said quietly, “Hack.”

He might be describing what he intended to do to me with an axe or cleaver, but I suspected that instead the word was intended as an insult, a judgment of my writing skills.

Separating the first armchair from another was an art-deco sideboard. The highly lacquered amboina wood felt cool against my fingertips as I aped onward.

Our sleigh bed stood against the east wall of the room. Logic suggested that Waxx had positioned himself at the foot of the bed, where his flashlight, when he switched it on, could cover both me and Penny.

Now near the south wall, I hoped to circle to the west, where I most likely would be behind him when at last he revealed himself.

Wondering at Waxx’s failure to take quick and deadly action after penetrating the house so effectively, I halted at the second armchair, suddenly fearful of proceeding. I began to suspect that I had missed something, that the implicit meaning of the moment was different from what I imagined it to be.

This happens often when writing fiction. Outlines are a waste of time. If you give your characters free will, they will grow in ways you never anticipated, and they will take the story places you could not have predicted, raising themes you might or might not have intended to explore. Characters shape events; events illuminate the characters. The people in a story begin as seeds, become buds, and blossom in ways that surprise the author, precisely as real people frequently surprise him with their intentions and capacities.

As I crouched by the second armchair, Shearman Waxx electrocuted me.