The Fading (42 page)

Dalton screamed and yelled and beat against the door, but after three or four minutes the blows were coming softer and Noel
was growing stronger, boosted by the taste of victory, by the knowledge that Dalton was doing everything wrong. He was too
stupid to stay calm and wait it out. He had discovered he’d been outsmarted, trapped, and now was throwing a hissy fit. And
the angrier he became, the calmer Noel was.

Good. Perfect. Go crazy in there, old man. Run yourself out of breath and hurt yourself. The sooner you expend your energy,
the sooner you’re going to collapse.

Noel didn’t want Hector to come now. He didn’t want the police or security to get involved. He wanted to watch Dalton suffer
and go down like the rabid animal he was.

At what must have been the seven- to nine-minute mark Dalton stopped battering the door. The cursing and screaming stopped.
The room went silent but for the hissing steam. Noel couldn’t be sure, but he thought the slug was on his knees, or sitting
on one of the benches, lungs heaving and choking on the humidity. Noel was tempted to open the door, but he didn’t trust
that enough time had passed. Dalton might have fainted, but could just as easily be hoarding his reserves, mustering one last
stand, waiting for Noel to walk into his blade.

He waited. Keeping his shoulder to the door, adjusting his footing, watching the roiling clouds of steam for any sign of movement.
He didn’t like sitting on the other side of the glass, knowing Dalton was probably watching him, studying him, planning. He
felt almost as trapped, and, worse, examined like a specimen on a slide. He was an open target. But if Dalton had a gun, he
would have used it by now.

More minutes passed, and Noel thought Dalton had been trapped inside the steam room, fully clothed, for at least fifteen and
maybe as many as twenty minutes. How long could a clothed, out-of-shape man survive in a steam room? Surely half an hour or
an hour, though he would be severely dehydrated and weakened, possibly on the verge of a stroke. Noel did not want to stay
here for an hour, but he knew that he would. If that’s what it took to end this, he would stay all day.

Noel watched as the last of Dalton’s blood washed down the glass, pushed by smaller beads of condensed steam to the tile floor.
He counted off another minute, two, three, and when he was ten seconds short of five, a piercing scream tore through the clouds.

Noel redoubled his stance and the screaming went higher and higher, and higher still. It was a woman’s scream, then a teen
horror movie vixen’s shattering peal, then something sexless and inhuman, a demon being
torn apart at the limbs. It almost convinced Noel the man was dying of something new in the room and he was tempted to cover
his ears, but just then a tremendous force crashed the door, the hardest one yet, as if Dalton had launched himself from the
top riser like a steroidal wrestler.

The force of it knocked Noel back on his bad foot, and his ankle gave way again. Something inside cracked and Noel growled
in agony. He fell to the slick mat and the door swung wide as Dalton tumbled out in a gasping hot sweaty ball. Noel rolled,
tried to sit up, but his hands slipped and a terrible weight fell on his chest.

He was under Dalton, waiting for the blade to plunge, but the killer came equipped with only his fists. The blows started
in, cracking into his jaw and neck and temples with frantic energy. The wet bandaged hand pawed at his face and Noel shoved
back, using his longer arms to push Dalton away as he lashed out in a series of kicks, one of which struck the killer’s gut
or groin.

Dalton grunted hard and the weight lifted. Noel scrambled across the mat, twisting and shuffling on his knees. As he was rising,
another blow caught him in the hamstring, then another in the lower back. Noel allowed himself to fall with the blows and
flung himself forward, reaching for the counter as he went down. His right hand caught on the pile of rolled towels and he
clenched one before slamming to the floor.

He spun to his right, rolling like a log two times, until
he was looking up again. Something hard stabbed into his sternum – a foot, a stomping foot – and Dalton screamed above him.

‘Take it!’ Dalton screeched. ‘Take it, take it, what you get for fucking with me!’

Noel caught the fucker’s ankle in his left hand and twisted, jerking back and forth as he flapped the towel open with his
right. He roped the towel around the limb. He yanked toward his chest until the other foot slipped and the weight left the
leg and Dalton was falling.

The slug crashed to the floor and Noel crawled up onto his attacker, until he was straddling Dalton’s belly. The towel was
still clenched in his right hand and he whipped it around now, spread it, smothering the man’s face. Noel saw the shape of
the mouth in white cotton a split second before he felt the bite on his knuckles.

He yelled and punched down with his left fist, striking something hard, maybe Dalton’s forehead, and the mouth released his
fingers. Noel punched again, three times with his right, until more red appeared in the towel. Dalton’s head floated off the
floor a moment, dazed, and Noel used the towel to render the head shape fully, mapping it, striking the center repeatedly
before twisting and looping the towel into a thick cord around the back of Dalton’s neck. He crossed the strands, yanking
the towel as tight as it would go. Dalton gagged and Noel slammed the back of his head against the floor. If they had not
been on the rubber
mat, this would have ended it, but they were and it was not over because the old professor had gone wolverine with survival
rage.

Dalton kicked and thrashed and tried to buck Noel off, and Noel rode him down like a cowboy grinding a steer into the sod.
He jerked the neck, slamming the head into the mat, raising and then dropping his full weight on Dalton’s chest, pulling the
towel ends until his arms screamed and burned.

Dalton’s legs jimmied and the man choked and choked and Noel pulled the towel ends tighter still, his arms filling with flaming
nitroglycerine. He had been winded a moment ago but now was in a surge and his arms passed through pain into an ecstasy. He
intended to pull the towel until Dalton’s head popped off like a dandelion stem.

‘I own you,’ Noel whispered. ‘I own you. I own you. I own you …’

He said it over and over, calmly, staring into the invisible mask beneath the now visible runners of blood pouring from Dalton’s
nose and the flecks of white spittle ejecting from the invisible mouth. Noel pulled the towel ends with all he had and leaned
down close, until his face was in the seizing sprinkler of blood.

‘I see you, fucker, I see you now. Are you listening, Theodore? Can you hear me inside your prison cell? You don’t see me,
you don’t ever see me. I see you. I see you now and I own you.’

Slowly, resolving in a time-lapse reel, stage by stage,
no more than a shadow at first, then a colorless shape, then as skin seen through a sun-warmed bed sheet, and finally into
wet living color, Dalton exited his fading. He was losing his control, his strength, his ability, and Shaker was the force
relieving him of it.

Fascinated, never relenting, Noel stared down in wonder as Dalton filled in, became whole, and with eerie coordinated timing,
as if one man’s color and life and life force were flowing into the other’s, Noel’s throbbing arms and clenched hands began
to seep away with the lingering liquid retreat of a sunset sky, with the slow ballet of camouflaging octopus arms sliding
into the coral den. In all his other turns, for twenty-four years, at the beginning and end of every episode, there had been
no graceful transition, no sense of easing into the pool where light could not go. He had only ever blinked, been flipped,
shut out, locked out of his life and the world. Or snapped back and paroled into the larger prison of his life with the cruelty
of a heart attack. For Noel there had never been a fading, only a switch, a brute shock, a life sentence.

But this time was different, this one was unique. He rode it, accepted it, let it come slowly and took the reins atop it,
telling it not yet, not yet, a little more, a little more, I own you. You are mine, sweet precious thing. I am your source,
I am your power, I am your Lord. You listen to me now. I am your father, you are my child, we are one. The color was him.
The light was him. The dark was him. He chose it, he chose how much, he chose when. He chose now, on his own terms, and he
knew that from this moment on, for all the reaming days of his life, the fading would serve him.

He released the towel and roared.

‘
I OWN YOU!
’

By the time he had vanished in total, Noel Shaker was standing free of all his pains, and the killer beneath him was nothing
more than a ruined old man with burst eyes, piss-stained trousers and the bloodied pig face of an errant playground bully.

Dead as dead could be done.

Hector was in the spa supply closet, crunched down in the corner beneath vats of laundry soap and stacks of toilet paper,
clutching the handle of a broom whose whiskers bristled against the door when Noel entered. His belly and lap were soaked
with blood. He had been stabbed at least three times, twice in the stomach and once under the sternum to puncture the heart.
Noel checked for a pulse and any sign of breathing.

Hector was not coming back.

The door’s two locks appeared intact, which meant Dalton had talked his way in, or that Hector chose the wrong moment to attempt
an escape. Noel took the keys from Hector’s pocket, leaving the body as he had found it. He locked the main entrance and returned
to the spa.

The clock in the lounge read 6.52 a.m. In less than ten minutes the spa would be officially open for guests. They would linger
for a few minutes, then pound on the door, then call the front desk to complain.

Keeping himself in the bubble, which was no longer a bubble but a wide array of tentacles he visualized and
used to snake the walls and doors in a thousand directions, until he had spun a web that would blind anyone who walked into
it, at least to him, Noel showered in one of the stalls, using the body wash dispenser to fill his palms and rid himself of
Theodore Dalton. He looked at his fingers, thought of prints, then remembered something important.

He went back to the steam room and found what he was looking for on the blood-smeared floor. Dalton’s knife. Had the professor,
in his panic, lost it in here? Could he really have been so sloppy? Or had he given it up? Why would he forgo such an advantage?
Was it possible that some part of the man, even on a subconscious level, was ready for the game to end?
The hunt grows tiring
.
Sometimes I feel like a cat stuck on my eighth life.
Is this what he had wanted from Noel? Someone to take his place? Relieve him of duty?

Noel carried the knife out and wrapped it in the dead man’s hand, using the fingers to smudge the handle, and left it where
it belonged.

At the row of sinks in the long vanity, he used a disposable razor and the cream provided to clean up six days’ worth of stubble.
He gargled and rinsed with the mouthwash and helped himself to a cold bottle of water. He wrapped a towel around his waist,
faded it and walked back to the rain shower room.

He collected his clothes and shoes and carried them out, confident nothing would slip and reveal itself as he pushed a shield
ahead and behind and to each side of himself as he exited and strolled back to the grand
staircase. He walked barefoot, limping slightly, through the halls, past the front desk, into the casino among dozens of people
and he thought,
all of you
.

He slipped the clothing into a random trash receptacle.

Still wearing nothing more than the towel, shivering in the resort’s climate control, he wound his way back to the twenty-four-hour
sundry shop and waited until the clerk turned around to restock the shelf behind her counter with more cigarettes. He pulled
a green Caesars Palace t-shirt and black drawstring vacation pants from the rack, absorbed them, and spotted a peg hung with
cheap flip-flops. He took a guess at the size and quietly carried his new outfit back to the casino and into the nearest restroom.
He dropped the towel in one of the stalls, put on his new clothes and re-entered the visible world by thinking,
OK, now
.

He reached for the bathroom stall door, realized he needed money, and thought,
not yet
. He was veiled again before finishing the thought, his mind working like a hyperactive mirror that absorbed light as fast
as he could think it, as fast as light could travel, as fast as perception could be manipulated. In the wake of the killing
and with the rush of his newfound confidence, he was not concerned with numbers, crowds. He felt ready to blind all of Las
Vegas.

He walked onto the casino floor and studied the tables. A grizzled couple in Western shirts, hats and cowboy boots were having
a decent run at roulette. Noel watched them for a moment, walked behind the
croupier, waited for the woman to lean forward to flick the ball and grabbed a tall stack of lavender chips marked $100. He
put them in his pants pocket, waited a moment for her to bend over again to rake the losing chips from the felt and took another
stack.

He repeated this method at six more tables, spreading the take among roulette, blackjack and craps.

He returned to the bathroom, dropped his shield and carried the mass of chips to the cashier cage in his full personage. The
black woman with braids and red lipstick he had seen earlier this morning smiled and counted him out. He thanked her and walked
away with $9000 and change.

He walked back to the gift shop and bought a Caesars beach tote. He made sure no one was watching at the moment he turned
it on again, taking the bag with him.

At the bar that had been his original destination yesterday morning, he waited until no one was looking in his direction and
flipped the switch. The safari man, the brave lion-taming lady, their little red pup tent and the Jeep. Julie’s Adventure
People set was looking a little dusty up on the glass shelf above the register, but it was still here, even the monkeys. He
climbed over the bar – it was closed and no one was on duty, though this wouldn’t have stopped him – and delivered the toy
set into his bag, and climbed back out.