F Paul Wilson - Secret History 02 (53 page)

           
"He must have every opera by
every diva whoever warbled a note."

           
"You like opera?" Rob
said, coming over to her side.

           
"Can't stand it." But as
she stood there with her hand on the record rack, she thought she heard an
operatic voice wailing faintly in the back of her mind. She shook her head and
it was gone. She moved to his classical section.

           
"He's got composers I've never
even heard of," she said.

           
"No ZZ Top?"

           
"Not a one."

           
"Guess there's no accounting
for taste." He put a hand on her arm. "Let's go. I've got to get
back."

           
"I want to look around some
more," Kara said. "It's safe, don't you think?"

           
"Nobody here but us. You really
want to stay?"

           
"I want to check out his study,
see if he's got any papers that will give me a clue as to what he was all about—and
why he left it all to me."

           
"You sure you want to
know?"

           
"I think so."

           
Kara didn't say so, but she was
still half-convinced that Gates had somehow used her body. She wanted to find a
way to contact the person who had sent her that warning note. She wouldn't rest
easy until she knew for sure.

           
Rob had her follow him down to the
front door.

           
"Make sure you keep it locked
while you're here, and turn on the alarm when you leave."

           
"Yes sir!"

           
"Now—when can we get together
tonight? We've got a lot of talking to do, and some decisions to make."

           
She'd known this was coming.

           
"How about after dinner? Meet
me at Ellen's and we can go someplace."

           
"Ellen knows?"

           
Kara nodded. "Ellen, my mother,
and Bert. They're the only ones. And Kelly, of course."

           
Rob's eyes were intense as they
bored into hers.

           
"Of course. Everyone but me.
And Jill. We've got to figure out when to tell her."

           
"Yes. I know."

           
Kara wasn't looking forward to
tonight's discussion.

           
Rob hovered outside until she had
locked the door behind him, then waved good-bye and hurried off.

           
As she turned away from the door,
Kara felt her arms and legs give way, as if someone had severed all their
nervous connections. As she went down, a voice spoke in her mind.

           
"At last! I thought he'd
never
leave!"

 
 

           
Rob was cruising Manhattan.

           
I'm
a father! Jill's my daughter!

           
The two thoughts kept echoing in
tandem off the inner walls of his skull. They'd kept him awake, kept him wired.
Which was why he was up and out and doing something he never did: driving
around the city.

           
He cruised the avenues, using Harlem
or the Park as his uptown boundaries, and Canal Street downtown. Traffic was
light. He drove at a leisurely pace, staying in the center lanes to let the
cabs and everyone else in a hurry slip by on either side. The street lights
glimmered on his windshield and off the passing cars, the neon from the various
store fronts refracted through the steam rising from the street vents. The city
had its own brand of beauty. He felt enough at peace with himself tonight to
enjoy it. He smiled. Stopping to smell the roses, Manhattan style.

           
He wished he could have got together
with Kara tonight but she had called around 4:30 or so to tell him that she
wasn't feeling well. She seemed to have picked up an intestinal virus or
something and was going to spend the rest of the afternoon and evening in bed.

           
Probably the best idea. She hadn't
sounded well at all. Rob had been tempted to drop by Ellen's and hang around
with Jill anyway but had canceled the idea. He was afraid he might start crying
again.

           
Christ, hadn't that been a scene this
afternoon! He didn't know where it had come from but all of a sudden he'd been
bawling like a wimp. And in front of Kara, too. Embarrassing as all hell,
although it hadn't seemed to bother her in the least.

           
Anyway, his throat tended to get
tight every time he thought of Jill, so maybe it was better if he hung loose on
his own tonight.

           
He was tooling up Sixth into Chelsea
when impulse pulled him left onto Twenty-first. He was glad he no longer had to
camp out here every night. He came to a complete stop in front of Gates' house.

           
The lights were on.

           
That wasn't so strange, really. If
Kara hadn't been feeling well, she probably hurried back to Ellen's without
bothering to turn them off.

           
He wondered if she'd locked the
door.

           
Rob double-parked and ran up the
steps. He tried the door. Rattled it. Good. She'd locked it behind her. But
through the glass he spotted the green light glowing on the alarm panel. She'd
forgotten that. He rattled the door again, then walked back to his car. He'd
have to remind her about the alarm. It would be a sin to let vandals get hold
of that library, or that fabulous stereo rig.

           
He put the car in gear and started
rolling again, thinking about instant fatherhood.

           
Kara wanted to scream but had no
voice, wanted to run, crawl, claw a path away from here but had no limbs, none
at least that would obey her. And what good would blind flight do? The horror
was within her, all around her, it permeated her flesh, it encapsulated her
like a steel bubble.

           
Horror, gut-wrenching panic, rage—they'd
been her world since this afternoon. And they were with her even now, but they
were under control. She could almost say she was calmer now—as calm as a
madwoman in a straitjacket. She had to hold on. That was all she could do. She
could feel her sanity jittering on its already frayed tether, blindly straining
to pull free and flee into the waiting darkness.

           
After the horrors of the past ten
hours it was a wonder that she retained any control at all.

           
She knew a few things. She knew it
was night, and knew she was in the dining room. She could smell and hear, she
could taste her dry mouth but could not move her tongue or lips, could see but
was incapable of moving her eyes. She'd been a prisoner within her own body since
this afternoon.

           
This afternoon…

           
Now that her body was in one of its
quiet periods, the insane events of the afternoon and evening rushed back in a
flood…

           
At first she had simply lain there
on the floor inside the door. The voice didn't speak again. Eventually she
became convinced that she had suffered a massive stroke; some sort of brain
aneurysm had ruptured.

           
But then she started to move.

           
First the fingers of the right hand,
then the left, moving independently of her volition, without her permission,
rippling up and down like a pianist playing rapid scales. Then the arms bent,
the knees straightened. She sat up. Kara had a sense of the muscles moving but
she was exerting no effort, she felt no strain.

           
The terror was building inside her.
Her body was like a runaway machine. A moment ago she had been pleading with
her limbs to move, now she was trying to stop them. Her body turned over onto
its hands and knees and began crawling down the hall.
Where am I going
?

           
Her body crawled into the big dining
room. It headed straight for the couch and pulled itself up onto the cushions.
She was panting but had no feeling of breathlessness.

           
And then the voice spoke again.

           
"There! That's better! A
cushion is much preferable to a hard floor any day, don't you think,
Kara?"

           
She tried to scream but still she
had no voice.

           
"Don't be afraid, Kara. You're
in no danger."

           
Panic swirled around her again. She
felt as if she were sealed inside a tight cubicle of foot-thick glass, banging
frantically, desperately on the walls with no one to hear her but this
disembodied voice.

           
Where was it coming from? It sounded
like…

           
Then her eyes closed.

           
Kara panicked. She was in total
darkness. It was like being blind. She fought to raise her lids but they might
as well have been someone else's for all the response she elicited.

           
The last thing she remembered seeing
was the gold mantle clock over the fireplace. It had read 3:20. Through the
darkness she heard faint noises from the street outside—horns, trucks shifting
gears. She had always hated the incessant street sounds of New York for keeping
her awake, for intruding on her concentration. Now she loved them. They proved
that she was still alive. And she heard the clock's chime—once on the half
hour, once for each hour of the day on the hour.