From the Corner of His Eye (72 page)

An hour later, when Barty decided he wanted a soda, he switched off the book and asked Angel if she would like something to drink.

“The orange stuff,” she said. “I’ll get it.”

Sometimes Barty could be fierce in his independence—his mother told him so—and now he rebuffed Angel too sharply. “I don’t want to be waited on. I’m not helpless, you know. I can get sodas myself.” By the time he reached the doorway, he felt sorry for his tone, and he looked back toward where the window seat must be. “Angel?”

“What?”

“I’m sorry. I was rude.”

“Boy, I sure know that.”

“I mean just now.”

“Not just now, either.”

“When else?”

“With Miss Pixie and Miss Velveeta.”

“Sorry about that, too.”

“All right,” she said.

As Barty stepped across the threshold into the upstairs hall, Miss Pixie Lee said,
“You’re sweet, Barty.”

He sighed.

“WOULD YOU LIKE TO BE MY BOYFRIEND?” asked Miss Velveeta, who had thus far shown no romantic inclinations.

“I’ll think about it,” Barty said.

Along the hall, every step measured, he stayed near the wall farthest from the staircase.

In his mind, he carried a blueprint of the house more precisely drawn than anything that might have been prepared by an architect. He knew the place to the inch, and he adjusted his pace and all his mental calculations every month to compensate for his steady growth. So many paces from here to there. Every turn and every peculiarity of the floor plan committed indelibly to memory. A journey like this was a complicated mathematical problem, but being a math prodigy, he moved through his home almost as easily as when he had enjoyed sight.

He didn’t rely on sounds to help him find his way, though here and there one served as a marker of his progress. Twelve paces from his room, a floorboard squeaked almost inaudibly under the hallway carpet, which told him that he was seventeen paces from the head of the stairs. He didn’t need that muffled creak to know exactly where he was, but it always reassured him.

Six paces past that marker floorboard, Barty had the strangest feeling that someone was in the hallway with him.

He didn’t rely, either, on a sixth sense to detect obstacles or open spaces, which some blind people claimed to have. Sometimes instinct told him that in his path was an object that ordinarily would not have been there; but as often as not, it went undetected, and unless he was using his cane, he tripped over it. The sixth sense was greatly overrated.

If someone were here in the hallway with him, it couldn’t be Angel, because she would be chattering enthusiastically in one voice or another. Uncle Jacob would never tease him like this, and no one else was in the house.

Nevertheless, he stepped away from the wall, and with his hands extended to full arm’s length, he turned, feeling the lightless world around him. Nothing. No one.

Shaking off this peculiar case of the spooks, Barty proceeded toward the stairs. Just when he reached the newel post, he heard the faint creak of the marker floorboard behind him.

He turned, blinking his plastic eyes, and said, “Hello?”

No one answered.

Houses made settling noises all the time. That was one reason why he couldn’t rely much on sound to guide him through the darkness. A noise he thought had been made by the weight of his tread might as easily have been produced by the house itself as it adjusted to the weather or to its age.

“Hello?” he said again, and still no one answered.

Convinced that the house was playing tricks on him, Barty went downstairs, step by measured step, to the foyer and the ground-floor hall.

As he passed the living-room archway, he said, “Watch out for tidal waves, Uncle Jacob.”

Captivated by catastrophe, so lost in his book that he might as well have stepped magically inside of it and closed the covers after himself, Uncle Jacob didn’t answer.

Barty paced off the downstairs hallway to the kitchen, thinking about Dr. Jekyll and the hideous Mr. Hyde.

Chapter 81

LEFT HAND ON
the banister, right hand with knife tucked close to his side and ready to thrust, Tom Vanadium climbed cautiously but quickly to the upper floor, glancing back twice to be sure that Cain didn’t slip in behind him.

Along the hall to his room. Fast and low through the doorframe. Wary of the closet door standing two inches ajar.

All the way to the nightstand, he expected to discover that the revolver had been taken from the drawer. Yet here it was. Loaded.

He dropped the knife and snatched up the handgun.

Almost thirty years from the seminary—even farther from it if measured by degrees of lost innocence, by miles of rough experience—Tom Vanadium set out to kill a man. Given the chance to disarm Cain, given the opportunity to merely wound him, he would nevertheless go for the head shot or the heart shot, play jury and executioner, play God, and leave to God the judgment of his stained soul.

Room to room through the upstairs. Checking closets. Behind furniture. Bathrooms. In Paul’s private spaces. No Cain.

Down the stairs, through the ground floor, quickly, soundlessly, breath held at times, listening for the other’s breathing, listening for the softest squeak of rubber-soled shoes, although the hard clack of cloven hoofs and a whiff of sulfur would not have been surprising. At last he went to the kitchen, full circle from the shiny quarter on the breakfast table to the quarter again. No Cain.

Perhaps these two months of frustration had brought him to this: hair-trigger nerves, fevered imagination, and anticipation distilled into dread.

He might have felt properly foolish if he had not suffered so much personal experience of Enoch Cain. This was a false alarm, but considering the nature of the enemy, it wasn’t a bad idea to put himself through a drill from time to time.

Laying the gun on the newspaper, he dropped into the chair. He picked up his coffee. The search of the house had been conducted with such urgency that the java was still pleasantly hot.

Holding the mug in his right hand, Tom picked up the coin and rolled it across the knuckles of his left. Paul’s quarter, after all. A two-bit temptation to panic.

As gifted with physical grace as with good looks, Junior stepped into the bedroom doorway, lithely and with feline stealth. He leaned against the jamb.

Across the room, the girl on the window seat showed no awareness of his arrival. She sat sideways to him in the niche, with her back against one wall, knees drawn up, a big sketch pad braced against her thighs, working intently with colored pencils.

Through the big window beyond her, the charry branches of the massive oak tree formed a black cat’s cradle against the sky, leaves quivering slightly, as though nature herself trembled in trepidation of what Junior Cain might do.

Indeed, the tree inspired him. After he shot the girl, he would open the window and toss her body into the oak. Let Celestina find her there, randomly pierced by branches in a freestyle crucifixion.

His daughter, his affliction, his millstone, granddaughter of the boil-giving voodoo Baptist…

After a surgeon had lanced fifty-four boils and cut the cores from the thirty-one most intractable (shaving the patient’s head to get at the twelve that were festering on his scalp), and after three days of hospitalization to guard against staphylococcus infection, and after he had been turned back into the world as bald as Daddy Warbucks and with the promise of permanent scarring, Junior visited the Reno library to catch up with current events.

Reverend White’s murder received significant coverage throughout the nation, especially in West Coast papers, because of its perceived racial motivation and because it involved the burning of a parsonage.

Police identified Junior as the prime suspect, and newspapers featured his photograph in most stories. They referred to him as “handsome,” “dashing,” “a man with movie-star good looks.” He was said to be well known in San Francisco’s avant-garde arts community. He got a thrill when he discovered that Sklent was quoted as calling him “a charismatic figure, a deep thinker, a man with exquisite artistic taste…. so clever he could get away with murder as easily as anyone else might get away with double-parking.” “It’s people like him,” Sklent continued, “who confirm the view of the world that informs my painting.”

Junior found the acclaim gratifying, but the widespread use of his photograph was a high price to pay even for the recognition of his contribution to art. Fortunately, with his bald head and pocked face, he no longer resembled the Enoch Cain for whom the authorities were searching. And they believed that the bandages on his face, at the church, had been merely an exotic disguise. One psychologist even speculated that the bandages had been an expression of the guilt and shame he felt on a subconscious level. Yeah, right.

For Junior, 1968—the Chinese Year of the Monkey—would be the Year of the Plastic Surgeon. He would require extensive dermabrasion to restore the smoothness and tone to his skin, to be as irresistibly kissable as he had been before. While at it, he would need surgery to make subtle changes in his features. Tricky. He didn’t want to trade perfection for anonymity. He must take care to ensure that his postsurgery look, when he let his hair grow in and perhaps dyed it, would be as devastating to women as his previous appearance.

According to the newspapers, the police also credited him with the murders of Naomi, Victoria Bressler, and Ned Gnathic (whom they had connected to Celestina). He was wanted, too, for the attempted murder of Dr. Walter Lipscomb (evidently Ichabod), for the attempted murder of Grace White, and for assault with intent to kill Celestina White and her daughter, Angel, and for the assault on Lenora Kickmule (whose foxtail-bedecked Pontiac he had stolen in Eugene, Oregon).

He had visited the library primarily to confirm that Harrison White was unquestionably dead. He’d shot the man four times. Two bullets in the gas tank of the stolen Pontiac destroyed the parsonage and should have incinerated the reverend. When you were dealing with black magic, however, you could never be too cautious.

After poring through enough sensational newspaper accounts to be convinced that the curse-casting reverend was undeniably dead, Junior had acquired four pieces of surprising information. Three were of vital importance to him.

First, Victoria Bressler was listed as one of his victims, although as far as he knew, the authorities still had every reason to attribute her murder to Vanadium.

Second, Thomas Vanadium received no mention: Therefore, his body hadn’t been found in the lake. He still ought to be under suspicion in the Bressler case. And if new evidence cleared him of suspicion, then his disappearance should have been mentioned, and he should have been listed as another possible victim of the Shamefaced Slayer, the Bandaged Butcher, as the tabloids had dubbed Junior.

Third, Celestina had a
daughter.
Not a boy named Bartholomew. Seraphim’s baby had been a girl. Named Angel. This confused Junior as much as it stunned him.

Bressler but no Vanadium. A girl named Angel. Something was wrong here. Something was rotten.

Fourth and last, he was surprised that Kickmule was a legitimate surname. This information wasn’t of immediate importance to him, but if ever his Gammoner and Pinchbeck identities were compromised and he required false ID in a new name, he would call himself Eric Kickmule. Or possibly Wolfgang Kickmule. That sounded really tough. No one would mess with a man named Kickmule.

As to the distressing matter of Seraphim’s
daughter,
Junior at first decided to return to San Francisco to torture the truth out of Nolly Wulfstan. Then he realized that he’d been referred to Wulfstan by the same man who had told him that Thomas Vanadium was missing and was believed to be Victoria Bressler’s killer.

So after waiting two months for the superhot Harrison White case to cool down, Junior returned instead to Spruce Hills, traveled bald and pocked and passing as Pinchbeck, under the cover of night.

Then quickly from Spruce Hills to Eugene by car, from Eugene to Orange County Airport by a chartered aircraft, from Orange County to Bright Beach in a stolen ’68 Oldsmobile 4–4–2 Hurst, while the advantage of surprise remained with him. Carrying a newly acquired, silencer-fitted 9-mm pistol, spare magazines of ammunition, three sharp knives, a police lock-release gun, and one piece of steaming luggage, Junior had arrived late the previous evening.

He had quietly let himself into the Damascus house, where he stayed the night.

He could have killed Vanadium while the cop slept; however, that would be far less satisfying than engaging in a little psychological warfare and leaving the devious bastard alive to suffer remorse when two more children died under his watch.

Besides, Junior was reluctant to kill Vanadium, for real this time, and risk discovering that the detective’s filthy-scabby-monkey spirit would in fact prove to be a relentless haunting presence that gave him no peace.

The prickly-bur ghosts of two little children didn’t concern him. At worst, they were spiritual gnats.

This morning, Damascus had left the house early, before Vanadium came downstairs, which was perfect for Junior’s purposes. While the maniac cop was finishing his shave and shower, Junior crept upstairs to check his room. He discovered the revolver in the second of the three places that he expected it to be, did his work, and returned the weapon to the nightstand drawer in precisely the position that he had found it. Narrowly avoiding an encounter with Vanadium in the hall, he retreated to the ground floor. After some fussing over the most effective placement, he left the quarter and the luggage—just as Vanadium, the human stump, clumped down the stairs. Junior experienced an unexpected delay when the detective spent half an hour making phone calls from the study, but then Vanadium went into the kitchen, allowing him to slip out of the house and complete his work.

Then he came directly here.

Angel, on the window seat, wore nothing but white. White sneakers and socks. White pants. White T-shirt. Two white bows in her hair.

To look entirely like her name, she needed only white wings. He would give her wings: a short flight out the window, into the oak.

“Did you come to hear the book that talks?” the girl asked.

She hadn’t looked up from her sketching. Although Junior thought she hadn’t seen him, she’d apparently been aware of him all along.

Moving out of the doorway, into the bedroom, he said, “What book would that be?”

“Right now, it’s talking about this crazy doctor.”

In her features, the girl entirely resembled her mother. She was nothing whatsoever like Junior. Only the light brown shade of her skin provided evidence that she hadn’t been derived from Seraphim by parthenogenesis.

“I don’t like the old crazy doctor,” she said, still drawing.

“I wish it was about bunnies on vacation—or maybe a toad learns to drive a car and has adventures.”

“Where’s your mother this morning?” he asked, for he’d expected to have to shoot his way through a lot more than one adult to reach both children. The Lipscomb house had proved empty, however, and fortune had given him the boy and girl together, with one guardian.

“She’s drivin’ the pies,” Angel said. “What’s your name?”

“Wolfgang Kickmule.”

“That’s a silly name.”

“It’s not silly at all.”

“My name’s Pixie Lee.”

Junior reached the window seat and stared down at her. “I don’t believe that’s true.”

“Truer than true,” she insisted.

“Your name’s not Pixie Lee, you little liar.”

“Well, it’s sure not Velveeta Cheese. And don’t be rude.”

The various flavors of canned soda were always racked in the same order, allowing Barty to select what he wanted without error. He got orange for Angel, root beer for himself, and closed the refrigerator.

Retracing his path across the kitchen, he caught a faint whiff of jasmine from the backyard. Funny, jasmine here inside. Two paces later, he felt a draft.

He halted, made a quick calculation, turned, and moved toward where the back door ought to be. He found it half open.