From the Corner of His Eye (73 page)

For reasons of mice and dust, doors at the Lampion house were never left ajar, let alone open this wide.

Holding on to the jamb with one hand, Barty leaned across the threshold, listening to the day. Birds. Softly rustling leaves. Nobody on the porch. Even trying hard to be quiet, people always made some little noise.

“Uncle Jacob?”

No answer.

After nudging the door shut with his shoulder, Barty carried the sodas out of the kitchen and forward along the hall. Pausing at the living-room archway, he said, “Uncle Jacob?”

No answer. No little noises. His uncle wasn’t here.

Evidently, Jacob had made a quick trip to his apartment over the garage and, with no thought for mice and dust, had not closed the back door.

Junior said, “You’ve caused me a lot of trouble, you know.” He’d been building a beautiful rage all night, thinking about what he’d been through because of the girl’s temptress mother, whom he saw so clearly in this pint-size bitch. “So much trouble.”

“What do
you
think about dogs?”

“What’re you drawing there?” he asked.

“Do they talk or don’t they?”

“I asked you what you’re drawing.”

“Something I saw this morning.”

Still looming over her, he snatched the pad out of her hands and examined the sketch. “Where would you have seen this?”

She refused to look at him, the way her mother had refused to look at him when he’d been making love to her in the parsonage. She began twisting a red pencil in a handheld sharpener, making sure that the shavings fell into a can kept for that purpose. “I saw it here.”

Junior tossed the pad on the floor. “Bullshit.”

“We say bulldoody in this house.”

Weird, this kid. Making him uneasy. All in white, with her incomprehensible yammering about talking books and talking dogs and her mother driving pies, and working on a damn strange drawing for a little girl.

“Look at me, Angel.”

Twisting, twisting, twisting the red pencil.

“I said look at me.”

He slapped her hands, knocking the sharpener and the pencil out of her grasp. They clattered against the window, fell onto the window-seat cushions.

When she still didn’t meet his stare, he seized her by the chin and tipped her head back.

Terror in her eyes. And recognition.

Surprised, he said, “You know me, don’t you?”

She said nothing.

“You
know
me,” he insisted. “Yeah, you do. Tell me who I am, Pixie Lee.”

After a hesitation, she said, “You’re the boogeyman, except when I saw you,
I
was hiding under the bed where you’re supposed to be.”

“How could you recognize me? No hair, this face.”

“I see.”

“See what?” he demanded, squeezing her chin hard enough to hurt her.

Because his pinching fingers deformed the shape of her mouth, her voice was compressed: “I see all the ways you are.”

Tom Vanadium was too unnerved by the Cain scare to be interested in the newspaper anymore. The strong black coffee, superb before, tasted bitter now.

He carried the mug to the sink, poured the brew down the drain—and saw the cooler standing in the corner. He hadn’t noticed it before. A medium-size, molded-plastic, Styrofoam-lined ice chest, of the type you filled with beer and took on picnics.

Paul must have forgotten something that he’d meant to take on the pie caravan.

The lid of the cooler wasn’t on as tight as it ought to have been. From around one edge slipped a thin and sinuous stream of smoke. Something on fire.

By the time he got to the cooler, he could see this wasn’t smoke, after all. It dissipated too quickly. Cool against his hand. The cold steam from dry ice.

Tom removed the lid. No beer, one head. Simon Magusson’s severed head lay faceup on the ice, mouth open as though he were standing in court to object to the prosecution’s line of questioning.

No time for horror, disgust. Every second mattered now, and every minute might cost another life.

To the phone, the police. No dial tone. Pointless to rattle the disconnect switch. The line had been cut.

Neighbors might not be home. And by the time he knocked, asked to use the phone, dialed…Too great a waste of time.

Think, think. A three-minute drive to the Lampion place. Maybe two minutes, running stop signs, cutting corners.

Tom snatched the revolver off the table, the car keys from the pegboard.

Slamming through the door, letting it bang shut behind him hard enough to crack the glass, crossing the porch, Tom took the beauty of the day like a fist in the gut. It was too blue and too bright and too gorgeous to harbor death, and yet it did, birth and death, alpha and omega, woven in a design that flaunted meaning but defied understanding. It was a
blow
, this day, a hard blow, brutal in its beauty, in its simultaneous promises of transcendence and loss.

The car stood in the driveway. As dead as the phone.

Lord, help me here. Give me this one, just this one, and I’ll follow thereafter where I’m led. I’ll always thereafter be your instrument, but please, please, GIVE ME THIS CRAZY EVIL SONOFABITCH!

Three minutes by car, maybe two without stop signs. He could just about run it as fast as drive it. He had a bit of a gut on him. He wasn’t the man he used to be. Ironically, however, after the coma and the rehab, he wasn’t as heavy as he had been before Cain sunk him in Quarry Lake.

I see all the ways you are.

The girl was creepy, no doubt about it, and Junior felt now precisely as he had felt on the night of Celestina’s exhibition at the Greenbaum Gallery, when he had come out of the alleyway after disposing of Neddy Gnathic in the Dumpster and had checked his watch only to discover his bare wrist. He was missing something here, too, but it wasn’t merely a Rolex, wasn’t a thing at all, but an insight, a profound
truth.

He let go of the girl’s chin, and at once she scrunched into the corner of the window seat, as far away from him as she could get. The knowing look in her eye wasn’t that of an ordinary child, not that of a child at all. Not his imagination, either. Terror, yes, but also defiance, and this knowing expression, as though she could see right through him, knew things about him that she had no way of knowing.

He fished the sound-suppressor from a jacket pocket, drew the pistol from his shoulder holster, and began to screw the former to the latter. He misthreaded it at first because his hands had begun to shake.

Sklent came to mind, perhaps because of the strange drawing on the girl’s sketch pad. Sklent at that Christmas Eve party, only a few months ago but a lifetime away. The theory of spiritual afterlife without a need for God. Prickly-bur spirits. Some hang around, haunting out of sheer mean stubbornness. Some fade away. Others reincarnate.

His precious wife had fallen from the tower and died only hours before this girl was born. This girl…this vessel.

He remembered standing in the cemetery, downhill from Seraphim’s grave—although at the time he’d known only that it was a Negro being buried, not that it was his former lover—and thinking that the rains would over time carry the juices of the decomposing Negro corpse into the lower grave that contained Naomi’s remains. Had that been a half-psychic moment on his part, a dim awareness that another and far more dangerous connection between dead Naomi and dead Seraphim had already been formed?

When the sound-suppressor was properly attached to the pistol, Junior Cain leaned closer to the girl, peered into her eyes, and whispered,
“Naomi, are you in there?”

Near the top of the stairs, Barty thought he heard voices in his bedroom. Soft and indistinct. When he stopped to listen, the voices fell silent, or maybe he only imagined them.

Of course, Angel might have been playing around with the talking book. Or, even though she’d left the dolls downstairs, she might have been filling the time until Barty’s return by having a nice chat with Miss Pixie and Miss Velveeta. She had other voices, too, for other dolls, and one for a sock puppet named Smelly.

Granted that he was only three going on four, nevertheless Barty had never met anyone with as much cheerful imagination as Angel. He intended to marry her in, oh, maybe twenty years.

Even prodigies didn’t marry at three.

Meanwhile, before they needed to plan the wedding, there was time for an orange soda and a root beer, and more of
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

He reached the top of the stairs and proceeded toward his room.

After two years of rehabilitation, Tom had been pronounced as fit as ever, a miracle of modern medicine and willpower. But right now he seemed to have been put back together with spit and string and Scotch tape. Arms pumping, legs stretching, he felt every one of those eight months of coma in his withered-and-rebuilt muscles, in his calcium-depleted-and-rebuilt bones.

He ran gasping, praying, feet slapping the concrete sidewalk, frightening birds out of the purple brightness of blossom-laden jacarandas and out of Indian laurels, terrorizing a tree rat into a lightning sprint up the bole of a phoenix palm. The few people he encountered reeled out of his way. Brakes shrieked as he crossed intersections without looking both ways, risking cars and trucks and rhinoceroses.