Serpent's Kiss (25 page)

    Emily Lindstrom said, "He wants to get into the tower."

    

    

    For the second time tonight, O'Sullivan saw a section of the city turned into a kind of hell by the lights of emergency vehicles.

    Hastings House had always had a quiet dignity for O'Sullivan-if you ever went crazy, this was clearly the place for them to take you-but tonight the dignity was being trampled by cops and reporters and onlookers roaming around the grounds, and by patients standing in heavily barred windows.

    From the way the officials were running around, it was clear that they had no idea where Dobyns was.

    Near the rear, at the entrance to the underground parking garage, an ambulance attendant was just closing the back doors on his boxy vehicle, three bodies having been set inside five minutes ago.

    "Hey, O'Sullivan."

    A cop named Schultz came up. In his grey suit and fashionably greasy hair (what was with everybody wanting to look like Jerry Lewis all of a sudden?), Schultz looked to be on the same diet O'Sullivan was-pancakes and malts.

    "Nice gut you've got there," Schultz said, beating him to it.

    "Yeah, like I didn't notice yours or anything," O'Sullivan said.

    "So I've put on a few pounds."

    "A few. Right."

    "I quit smoking anyway."

    "I don't even have that excuse," O'Sullivan said.

    The four redbrick buildings that made up the new section of I lastings House had always reminded O'Sullivan of the small liberal arts college he'd gone to, spending four and a half years of wasted time pleading with WASP princesses for just a glimpse of the treasure between their legs.

    "The way I get it," Schultz said, "the guy who stiffed the three staffers in the garage is the same guy who escaped from here the other night. Why the hell would he want to come back here?"

    O'Sullivan shrugged. "You think he's still here?"

    "Probably. There are a lot of places to hide."

    "Why wouldn't he run away?"

    "The police shrink thinks he probably came back here to turn himself in but then one of the guards spooked him so he killed these three guys."

    O'Sullivan felt no temptation whatsoever to mention anything about cults or serpents that slithered inside the human body.

    Schultz would never let him forget it.

    "You still going out with Candy?" O'Sullivan said.

    "Huh-uh."

    "How come?"

    "Let's just say that Candy wasn't exactly the most faithful woman I've ever known."

    "I hear you. That's how my first wife was. I'm just glad she was hittin' on all these guys before AIDS showed up."

    Somebody shouted Schultz's name. Then he was gone and O'Sullivan was thinking of what Schultz had said about Dobyns: He was probably still around here somewhere.

    For the first time that evening O'Sullivan raised his eyes to the black sky that was streaked with misty moonlight and racing grey clouds.

    

    

    The tower appeared medieval and almost majestic against the night sky.

    As they pulled into the parking lot of Hastings House, Emily said, "I'm going up to the tower."

    "What?"

    "It's the only way I can convince him to turn himself over."

    "But he'll kill you."

    "No, he won't."

    Chris shook her head. "I don't know how you can be so sure of that."

    "The incantation."

    Chris pulled the car into a parking space and shut off the engine. Before her, the grounds of Hastings House flashed with lights from the various emergency vehicles. Uniformed men and women with bullhorns and flashlights ran around the grounds. In one corner stood four men wearing flak jackets and holding rifles. This was obviously a SWAT team.

    Their leader was talking with somebody over a walkie-talkie. The men looked very military.

    "Then let me go with you," Chris said.

    "No," Emily said. "I don't want you to risk your life for me." She looked at Chris with her luminous eyes and sombre beautiful face. "I need to do this for my brother, Chris, I really do."

    "So you get up there and then what?"

    "I ask him to come with me."

    "And if he refuses?"

    "He won't refuse. He's desperate. It's worth a try."

    "It's so dangerous."

    "If I can get him to come with me, it will save a lot of lives. The police may think they'll have an easy time of capturing him, but they won't."

    Chris nodded to the SWAT team standing on the shadowy grounds in front of them. "What if they already know he's in the tower?"

    "They don't. As far as they know, nobody has ever used the tower. They think it's strictly for decorative purposes."

    "Emily-"

    But as Chris spoke, Emily's hand was already on the door handle, pressing downward.

    "I'm scared for you, Emily," Chris said.

    "Don't be," Emily said. "Be happy for me. This is what I've been waiting for ever since my brother escaped from here that night."

    Chris took her hand. "Just be careful."

    Emily smiled her sad smile. "You be careful, too." And then she started out of the car.

    "Wait a minute," Chris said.

    "What?"

    "I didn't think of this before. How're you going to get up into the tower?"

    "My brother told me the route."

    "You're sure he's up there?"

    Emily smiled again. "Positive." She patted Chris's hand. "Now I've really got to be going."

    

    

    Dobyns's hands and arms were soaked with blood as he ran up the winding stairs leading to the tower.

    In any structure that has been closed to light and warmth as long as the tower had, a dankness sets in. In Dobyns's case, this meant that his sinuses erupted.

    As he felt his way up the wall, wishing he could see better, wishing he did not still hear the sounds of the security men as they'd died, he began sneezing violently.

    
Maybe I need to buy a little Dristan tonight,
he thought.
Stop in at my favourite neighbourhood pharmacy and have them fix me up.

    Deep within his bowels, the snake moved, turning, shifting.

    Below him now, somewhere at the bottom of the stairs, he heard the wooden partition covering the window being pushed back. The window was how he got in and out of the tower. Who else knew how to slide the partition back and forth?

    His eyes searched the darkness below, uselessly.

    He stood absolutely still, listening.

    Footsteps scraped across the sandy floor leading to the staircase that wound to the very top of the tower.

    Somebody was coming for him.

    He formed a mental image of policemen in dark uniforms and flak jackets. Guns ready. Coming up the steps.

    But no; for some reason he knew that this person coming after him was not a police officer at all.

    Someone else. Someone with a different mission entirely.

    And he chose then-just at this very moment in the cold shifting dusty shadows of the tower-to sneeze.

    The footsteps below stopped.

    Despite all the external noise seeping into the place-two-way radios on emergency vehicles; cops shouting back and forth; a distant siren-something like silence imposed itself on the tower now.

    He waited, wondering who was below.

    He touched his stomach. Beneath his hairy belly, he could feel the snake writhing.

    He started climbing the steps, higher, higher now, clear to the tower.

    Below him, the other footsteps began again, too.

    Soon enough, he would meet this person.

    

    

    Marie felt unclean. Usually, as in gym class, she liked the sensation of sweating, of cleaning her body of impurities. But tonight sweating felt different, pasty and dirty as she rolled around on the couchbed, sleeping fitfully. Earlier, she'd dreamed of the killer in the bookstore, the man coming closer, closer, and Marie grasping a gun and-

    The apartment was dark except for a night-light in the bathroom. Not even a television could be heard on this floor of the apartment house. No, there were just the incidental sounds that all houses made during the night-the furnace, the plumbing, windows rattling faintly in the wind.

    She had been to the bathroom, peeing, every fifteen minutes since her mother had gone to bed. Marie always peed when she was anxious. She couldn't sleep. Each time she closed her eyes, she saw the face of the killer. Each time she closed her eyes, she saw him in the bookstore, the knife in his hand, slashing Richie's throat-

    In the bathroom she flushed the toilet, washed her hands, and walked back to the living room. She considered turning on the television but decided it might wake her mother. And, in certain ways, her mother needed the sleep worse than she did. She had long known that, in general, she was a stronger person than her mother and had, ever since she was a young girl, felt protective toward Kathleen. Thinking of her mother now, she smiled. She was a 'good egg' (the same phrase Kathleen always used describing people she liked), lonely, frightened, fragile… and a good egg.

    Marie walked over to the front window, parted the curtains a half inch, and looked down at the apartment building's parking lot.

    There, directly beneath the mercury vapour light that swayed in the wind, sat a black-and-white police car.

    Marie felt instantly safe.

    With the back door locked, there was only one way the killer could get in-the front door-and any such attempt would immediately be stopped by the policeman sitting out there now.

    Marie spent the next few minutes looking around the neighbourhood from her eyrie. She liked late nights like this when all the houses were snug asleep and the trees blew in the wind and the moon rode the sky just the way it had for millions of years. There was a mysteriousness to the night that Marie loved. Somehow night was her friend and day her enemy-she could hide in the night, not be crippled, not be afraid, just be Marie, nobody pointing or whispering. Yes, night was her friend-

    Then she thought about the events at the bookstore and had to amend that.

    Most times, night was her friend.

    Tonight being a terrible, bloody exception.

    Suddenly, as her eyes scanned the neighbourhood, the dark houses, the deep shadows, she realised that night was now her enemy.

    Because the killer was out there. Somewhere. Hiding.

    Her gaze dropped to the police car again. If she squinted hard, she could make out the figure of a police officer sitting on the driver's side behind the steering wheel. From here, she could not tell where he was looking, or what he was doing.

    It was enough to know he was there.

    She closed the curtains and went back to the rumpled bedclothes on the couch. The sheets were damp, cold damp, from her drying sweat.

    Beneath the covers she saw the shape of the gun. She leaned down and touched it.

    In its way, her father's gun was just as reassuring as the police officer in the parking lot.

    Like her mother, Marie frequently communicated with her father, even carrying on long conversations with him. And she knew the words weren't imaginary, either. She believed in another realm of existence, an eternal realm of existence, and if your faith was true enough and deep enough, then you learned how to communicate with the people in that realm.

    She jumped when she heard the creaking noise on the fire escape.

    Without thinking, her hand wriggled down inside the covers and retrieved the gun. It felt bulky but comforting in her hand.

    The fire escape.

    That's how he'd get up here.

    He would first of all have checked the parking lot and seen the police officer and then begun to search for alternative ways into the Fane apartment.

    And the fire escape was a very logical way.

    Clutching the gun to her breasts, Marie moved soundlessly across the carpet to the window that looked down on the backyard. The iron fire escape ran at an angle across this wall.

    Marie moved up to the curtains, teased them open with one trembling finger.

    God, she wished she weren't so afraid.

    Even with her father's gun, she was shaking and dry mouthed.

    She looked down at the fire escape that zigzagged down two floors to the ground.

    There he was!

    Climbing up the steps!

    Coming right toward her!

    And then she laughed at herself. Out loud.

    She'd always had the ability to frighten herself. When she was a little girl, she'd kept her parents running into her room all night long, because she could not disabuse herself of the notion that terrible monsters lurked beneath her bed and in the closet. Her parents would turn on the lights and show her that nothing, absolutely nothing, was there, but as soon as the lights went off and they left, she got scared again because she knew the monsters were back.

    And so tonight, gazing down at the fire escape, she'd briefly imagined she'd seen the killer there.

    Knife in hand.

    Skulking-what a fine word that was, skulking-up the steps to kill her.

    She listened to the wind and watched moonlight trapped in the spring trees make patterns against the wall where the fire escape ran.