The Hidden Man (21 page)

He needed to steal it from her; she was
not
supposed to offer it up. She was not supposed to go limp while he carried her, and then turn into a writhing whore the moment he fell on top of her. It was her hips, the feeling of her hips, moving against him, inviting him, urging him to come to her, grinding against his crotch, not recoiling at the feel of his quick erection but immediately moving in sympathetic and harmonious circular motions against him.

She pressed her face against the side of his while she moved her body, undulating in small movements that set off explosive effects in him, and it was as if she did not realize that the side of her mouth that pressed against him placed her slack lips in contact with the sensitive skin of his neck, with the tip of her tongue just naturally resting there between both lips so that when her slow and silent body movements caused her face to slide down his wide open shirt collar, toward where his neck and shoulders met, her tongue dragged slightly, just so slightly along his skin.

He felt his entire existence focused upon the tip of her tongue and hated himself for his weakness at the same instant that he yearned to give in to it. He was outraged at her audacity and grateful down to his bones when she opened her mouth and laid the entire flat of her tongue against the skin of his neck and pressed wet and soft flesh against him, pushing into his skin with her lips and her teeth.

His body stiffened into a plank. She kept it up, while he remained helpless within the fleeting ecstasy that she yielded up to him. In that single instant, he fully understood the old-time use of the word
witch.
This woman had used invisible power to reduce him to a stumbling schoolboy. She did it in moments, did it without effort. The unforgivable whore was not even breathing hard.

Then it hit him; from that moment on, he could not prevent her from knowing that she had done him in and that her wiles had overpowered him without effort. She had denied him her intended function while he sadistically dominated her, and she had denied it by first dominating him. Nothing had gone the way it was supposed to. Now—even as he felt himself coming down from the cloud of sexual release—he could sense her smug contempt.

She knew, and of course he could sense that she knew—her big, bad, abductor could be reduced to absurdity by something so insubstantial as a female’s urgent invitations. It was backward. One of the reasons he had picked her was that he could tell she was a refined woman. She should have crumbled under his attack.

And so what did that mean for him, after this unexpected twist? Oh, that much was plain. All too plain.

She was most assuredly the type who would scream with laughter while she told her friends all about how she had exerted feminine mastery over a failed kidnapper. Her stories of a grown man who spontaneously ejaculated over a few wiggles and hip thrusts would set whole rooms into gales of laughter. She would light up parties with her tales.

Nobody would ever stop to consider
his
position. He was certain of that much. Not one of the bastards who laughed and applauded for her masterful, sluttish sexual skills would ever give a thought to how he had been left completely unfulfilled by this.

She was nothing like she was supposed to have been. From where else but the Devil could a woman get the power to plug into the very core of a man’s being and trigger it as if it’s nothing? How can any female do this in a matter of a few heartbeats, to a total stranger? She was too good for a simple thing of nature, in the way that she dominated him. The most awful thing about the act was its mercy. The relief, the relief, left him younger and lighter and faster and smarter.

It ought to have been sweet, revengingly sweet. But it was only sexual release. It did nothing whatsoever for the rage. Even with such otherworldly power, masterful power, nasty and delightful and shameful power, the rage remained unaffected. After he went slack on top of her, spent and foolish, she lay quiet beneath him. All she did was breathe. No crying, no attempts to talk. The Goddamned woman was far too smart.

Her breathing was just enough to remind him that she was still alive and delicious underneath him. Not only did she deny him her terror, she was making it plain that she was there to be taken again, if he had it in him. Her soft breathing and her utter, yielding stillness had already combined to restart the fire in him. Another minute or two of that from her, and he would find himself sexually paralyzed all over again.

How much of that humiliation was he expected to endure? He went against his own better judgment by moving her torso around so that he could look into her eyes. Her gaze shot into him and he nearly exploded.

There was so much of her in it. There was a smart woman of refinement and education, far beyond his, no doubt, and also a woman of taste. She was one who could hold her own in the company of strong and powerful men. This was a woman who surely had a number of those same strong men who would gladly shoot him full of holes if they could see him on top of her now.

All of those people seemed to look out through her eyes, straight at him. The glare was blinding. He noticed that his hands were around her throat and squeezing as hard as his muscles could contract. He squeezed as if he could cut through her neck with his thumbs and pull her head right off her shoulders.

All the while, he stared directly into the blaze of life coming from her eyes, the brilliant glow from her superiority over him.

He was the sole witness to the fact that she died in a very matter-of-fact and forthright manner, nothing abnormally disgusting, probably better than anything he could muster himself, under such circumstances. He held her gaze while her life faded away, sucking the last of the gravy from it.

It was over too soon. All of the love and friendship that a wonderful and polished woman like that was certain to possess in her life died away into nothingness, into darkness, while he sucked on her eyes with his stare and squeezed on her neck for all that he was worth.

Right there at the end, when she appeared to realize finally that her wiles had not succeeded in getting her out of this and that she would never leave that place, he saw the fear and anger flare in her. It was so beautiful, such a life force. First the fear, a garden-variety response and to be expected, but then, tastiest of all, her moment of indignation. That flash in her eyes when she realized that everything she ever knew, all that she hoped for, was all being taken away from her. Her knowledge of what it means to be a conscious living thing was being stolen from her, by this man above her. Yes, the man whom she had just so successfully humiliated. And how much good had it done her, to toy with him that way?

His murderous rage flared and strengthened the grip in his hands until he could have twisted off the head of a wooden cigar-store Indian. He barely restrained himself from screaming into her face while he destroyed her. Instead he whispered, counting on the fact that the hearing is the last thing to go. He told her to be sure and laugh with her friends about what she did to him, when they all got together in the Afterworld.

It was a crowning moment, limited only by the dismal fact that she faded in seconds. How he would have loved to sustain that bubble of time wherein she knew that her life was going and that he was the one taking it from her. Like a crystal snifter of rare cognac, he would swirl and sniff and quaff of her mortal terror, perhaps quietly reminding her of life’s tiny moments of goodness and delight. Babies laughing, a spring rain, a lover’s touch. He would make sure she was alert enough within her fear to fully appreciate that he was stealing all of it from her. Him. Shitty, old, piece of nothing him.

The distance from the exposition gate to the Fairmont Hotel was about three miles, but he was so filled with fire and chaos that he walked like an alpine hiker. In no time he found himself closing in on the opulent six-story stone building without straining himself at all. Electric floodlights had been installed around the outside of the hotel, illuminating the place like one of the exposition’s displays.

He found a rare grotto of shadows within sight of the main entrance and hunkered down there. Fog was light and there was no rain. Experience gave him all due appreciation for that.

The nondescript man settled in to wait and observe. He knew that you learn things when you hang back and watch, sometimes things that you do not even realize you are seeking. For his lifelong curse of invisibility: to be unseen by women, unseen by potential male friends, unseen by the general public, unseen by a cursed, towel-dispensing attendant in a public toilet who seemed to intuitively understand that he would not be good for a tip—the tides were turned again. It would help him now to be such a painfully nondescript man as he knew himself to be, as he had been fated to be by cruel chance or by Divine Curse or by Satan’s personally designed torment.

And so it was good to withdraw into his small patch of shadow. He felt lucky to have it. Nonilluminated places were disappearing in that city. He was already tired of the harsh glare of electrically lighted signs and powerful outdoor spotlights that had taken over within the last couple of years.

It would be just fine, he thought, when the exposition was finally over and San Francisco could peel off her wig and makeup, strip away her restrictive girdles, and go back to being a comfortable seaside lady with soft yellow gaslights that faded to nothing in the predawn fog.

There would be no need for the city to prove anything, then. People could finally stop using so much of that harsh electric light everyplace. It would be a long sigh of relief.

The only spotlight he wanted to see was the one fixed on his father’s face while he answered for himself, while he explained his abandonment, while he bleated out a broken man’s apology, while he realized that an apology was not enough, while he saw that his life was over, while he grasped that it was the nondescript son, the invisible one, back to settle his terrible score with the flashy father’s inglorious end.

All he needed before leaving this painful life was the knowledge that his worthlessness did not mean that he had been powerless, too. He was not something that can be thrown away like table scraps.

The sense of power flashed through him. This was a big story for the newspapers. Even though most of it would die with the two of them, what remained would still be enough to cause a sensation.

He understood the publicity aspect of it clearly enough. How could he do otherwise? He had spent his invisible boyhood breathing in such talk along with his father’s cigar smoke. Today, the newspaper stories to come out of this were so vivid in his mind that he could read them like actual newsprint.

He would speak to history, after all. John Wilkes Booth was just as famous as Abraham Lincoln, or close enough. And so when it came to the great James “J.D.” Duncan, it was by the flashy father’s absence that the nondescript son would be known.

WITHIN THE HOUR

THE FAIRMONT HOTEL—HIGH ATOP NOB HILL

T
HE EXPOSITION HAD DRAWN
a healthy crowd of visitors who appeared to have few concerns about the late hour, and Shane had no desire to get pulled aside for any friendly conversation. He kept his gaze on the floor while he moved across the hotel’s grand lobby. But he kept his distance behind Duncan at no more than twenty feet or so, to avoid losing him among the milling guests.

He had wanted to walk out together, but in the showman’s hugely fearful condition, he seemed convinced that someone could be trying to follow him. Shane was already realizing that he had made a mistake in telling J.D. about the strange customer in the restaurant who had stared so hard at him.

For his part, Shane felt equal mixtures of irritation and foolishness while they crossed the lobby. No one there showed any trace of potential for hostility, and despite Duncan’s fame, nobody paid the slightest attention when he passed among them. A sense of celebration was sweeping the entire city, and these late-night guests were in the mood to stay out into the wee hours. Long-skirted ladies tittered while their derby-topped escorts swirled the air with fat cigars.

He finally made his way past most of them and trailed Duncan between the towering set of double columns that prevailed over both sides of the main door. Then they were out into the night. The voices of the guests faded as soon as they were on the walkway leading out to the street. Duncan turned to the right and immediately headed away from the hilltop. Shane casually followed, deliberately looking off in another direction. As far as he could tell, nobody had recognized the master mesmerist or shown any interest in him.

As soon as they passed the reach of the hotel’s exterior lighting, the rest of the area was dark enough, given the late hour and a typical fog bank. Shane was tired of the game already, but he dutifully craned his neck in all directions. Not only was there nobody tagging behind Duncan, there was nobody else visible out there at all. The night revelers were all back up at the posh hotel; the dark streets knew how late it was.

They were not completely out of sight of the hotel, though, so he let Duncan pull even farther ahead, just to be certain that he avoided making the frenzied man feel “crowded.” He had no desire for a repeat of the scene back in Duncan’s fancy suite. They barely got past the small talk while Shane waited for J.D. to get ready to leave for the theatre to meet Randall.

It was clear that the moment was not going to get any more comfortable, so Shane went right ahead and related his memory of the lone male customer, the one who had watched Duncan so closely back at the restaurant. He only presented Duncan with the facts, and had not gotten around to his conclusion. But with just that much, Duncan’s anxiety seemed to completely overtake him.

Shane felt a quick rush of guilt when he realized that he was studying the man instead of helping him. The guilt was just strong enough to cloud his judgment—he cooperated when Duncan suddenly demanded that they talk on the way to the theatre. The showman specified that they should get all the way outside the hotel, away from any potential eavesdroppers, and that they must appear to leave separately.

Shane only cooperated to remain on the showman’s good side long enough to check out his theory. But if the theory turned out to be correct—even though he had to admit that it was based on nothing more than Shane’s cursed vision—it proved that Duncan had been covering up an important secret all along, one that explained his fears.

And he might not tell the truth about any of it.

Shane pretended to brush dust from his boots while he walked along, barely breaking stride, and managed to get a clear look behind and to both sides. There was not a soul in sight but Duncan himself, who suddenly spun around to face him. His eyes were wild, gazing out in all directions, as if he were searching for an avenue of escape.

Shane hurried down the hill toward him, but stopped a few yards away when Duncan whipped his arm out straight, holding up the flat of his palm.

“Halt! Shhh!” Duncan’s face became a mask of concentration. “Did you hear that?”

“What?”

“Shhh!”

Shane stepped close and whispered. “What?”

“Out there. It’s the buildings—sounds echo off the buildings. You hear it? Try to tell where a bouncing sound first starts, I don’t know, it’s more than I can do. The echoes are what keep tripping me up; otherwise I could point right at it.”

“Good. Point at what?”

At that, Duncan turned to him, heavy-lidded with disdain. He spoke slowly.

“Point. At. The. Source. Of. The. Footsteps.”

Shane had never heard more sarcasm squeezed into fewer words.

“The only footsteps I have heard are ours, Mr. Duncan.”

“Shhh!” Duncan jumped up into a fighting stance, gasping with intense emotion, eyes wide, nostrils flared. He held the flat of both hands out at the sides of his ears, straining his hearing to the limit. “That!
That
is precisely what I am talking about, Mr. Nightingale.
That! That! That!
”

“Mr. Duncan, do you hear me, sir?” But Duncan was on the move again. Shane stepped up the pace and easily fell in alongside of him.

“Look, Mr. Duncan, tell me what’s going on. It’s safe for you to speak.”

“If that were true, we would not be out here.”

“I’ve been checking ever since we left your room, Mr. Duncan, and I’m telling you, I really don’t think that anybody is following.”

“Did you not just hear—”

“No, sir! No. I don’t hear a thing out here except for us, and I don’t see a soul out here except for you and me. And I have to tell you, sir—”

“Shhh!” Duncan spun around, hands cupped to both ears, straining.

Shane felt a cold spike of dread when he realized the intensity of Duncan’s fear. The man’s sense of alert watchfulness was like nothing he had ever seen.

Shane stepped close to him and placed his arm around the man’s shoulder. Duncan recoiled at the touch; all the muscles of his upper body were tensed as hard as iron. His focus remained fixed out in space, staring, straining to hear.

“Mr. Duncan, listen to me. Please try to listen.” He had no idea if anything was coming across to him or not.

“You can’t,” J.D. muttered, still far away.

“I what?”

“Can’t see him. Never see him. Maybe, maybe he isn’t even real. I mean, he’s real, all right, but not the kind of real that you can see, that’s all.”

J.D.’s gaze darted from shadow to shadow, ready to spy out an intruder at any turn. Shane sighed and shook his head. Could Duncan’s abiding fear be the product of something so prosaic as a derelict father and an illegitimate son?

It made no sense. Duncan behaved like a man who believes he is being stalked by a demon, a fearsome thing dispatched to come for him and pull him down to Hell.

Shane remembered peering through the tiny slit between the top of the pantry door and the doorframe inside the Nightingale house. One thin split of vision was granted out into the kitchen, where the killer was working himself into a frenzy of murder that resembled nothing so much as a prolonged and hugely violent sexual climax. He held nothing back from his madness, and Shane had been forced to marinate in it for thirty-six hours without moving from the tiny space. The hiding place was only feet and sometimes inches away from the Nightingale family women while they ended their earthly existences in mindless pain and horror.

It was forces like that that called for the sort of dread that Duncan displayed. Not some unwanted son who turns up out of a dust storm. Even if the kid landed on Duncan’s doorstep with his hand already out for contributions, that would hardly be the glimpse into Hell that Duncan’s mannerisms implied.

Shane reached out with both hands and firmly took him by his tensed shoulders. He concentrated on getting through to him.

“I’d bet anything that he is your son, Mr. Duncan. Now, that in itself is none of my business. But sir, if he is the cause of the threat that you have been feeling, and feeling so strongly that you arranged for a police guard, then we have to talk this out.”

Shane watched Duncan’s eyes shift to meet his. They looked as if they were boiling under the surface. He thought that Duncan might be feeling a thin connection to him, but there was no way to be certain of it.

“Tell me, Mr. Duncan—that you haven’t gotten yourself this worked up over having a son outside of marriage? Sir, in today’s society, that’s not necessarily—”

“Shhh!” Duncan clapped one hand over Shane’s mouth and spun in a full circle, pulling Shane around with him until he realized what he was doing and let go. Shane yanked himself backward, gasping in surprise.

“Glass!” Duncan continued. “Did you hear it? I did. It’s the elixir! Sharpens hearing! But it was glass, no doubt. A big piece, a long shard being picked up off the ground, maybe a piece of a broken window. You know that sound, eh? Like a broadsword slowly pulled from the scabbard. Faint, yes! So faint! But I heard it, plus I heard the first three echoes, plus I felt the next four that were too faint to hear. There’s the elixir for you! Ha!”

“Mr. Duncan, that’s it, now. I didn’t hear any glass and I have not seen any long-lost sons.”

Something triggered Duncan with the reference to long-lost sons. He turned to Shane. He could not speak or meet Shane’s eyes, so he looked over his shoulder instead.

“Mr. Duncan, the man I saw is fully grown. Whatever kind of a life that he has, it’s his own. He doesn’t have to move into your life in any way that’s harmful to you.”

“I can’t escape him. I was never going to be able to escape him. I only hoped that someone could slow him down long enough to give me time to finish my work.” He gasped, as if something surprised him.

Still focusing over Shane’s shoulder, he added, barely audible, “You can’t escape him.”

“I don’t need to escape him, sir. Neither do you.”

“It’s too late for me.”

With that, Duncan finally met Shane’s gaze straight on. He spoke with a quiver in his voice that was so powerful, Shane could hardly understand him.

“And now you can’t escape him, either.”

A strong male arm whipped around Shane’s face from behind while a knee slammed into his backbone with such force that it numbed his legs and turned them to rubber. The forceful grip tilted his face backward while the man’s other arm slapped the edge of a long shard of glass up under Shane’s chin. The man moved with such force that for an instant, it seemed a sure thing that the attacker was about to sever his neck.