John Saul (48 page)
Authors: Guardian
Tags: #Horror, #General, #Fiction, #Psychological, #Divorced Women, #Action & Adventure, #Romance, #Suspense, #Idaho
Had he subconsciously known even then that he would include her in the project? He would have to consider that.
It had been she who first smiled at him, then come over and asked if she could join him. As he recalled it now, she said something she seemed to consider witty, about them not taking up any more room on the planet than they absolutely had to, and he produced the expected smile for her. But instead of inviting her to sit down, he pleaded work, and she left.
For the next ten minutes he’d tried to figure out why she looked familiar, but it hadn’t finally come to him until he opened his own paper to the editorial section and his eye had been caught by one of the columns:
How Much Longer?
Police Fiddle While Seattle Dies
Another week has passed, and the Special Task Force set up by the Seattle Police Department in cooperation with the King County Sheriff’s Office and the Washington State Patrol seems no closer than ever to an arrest in connection with the series of bodies that has turned up in the foothills of the Cascades over the past five years. Indeed, thus far all the police seem to have determined is that all the victims appear to have been killed by the same person, a conclusion anyone who has seen the bodies couldn’t easily have missed.
Yet when I talked to several members of the task force this week …
It hadn’t been the story that had caught the man’s eye so much as the accompanying photograph of the column’s author.
Anne Jeffers.
That was why the woman he’d spoken to a few minutes earlier had seemed familiar: she looked very much like the newswoman. He’d sat staring at the photograph for several seconds, considering.
The woman had been in her early forties, of medium height, with the same kind of even features reflected in the photograph. The woman’s hair had appeared to be of a similar dark shade, too, though Anne Jeffers’s was somewhat shorter.
Was it possible it had actually been Anne Jeffers he’d spoken to?
A patient man, he’d finished his coffee, refolded his paper, and gone on about his business. But he kept his eyes open, and a few days later, when he spotted the woman from the coffee shop, he realized that she was not Anne Jeffers, nor was she anyone else he knew.
Discreetly, he’d followed her.
She lived not far from the university, in an old Spanish-Moorish-style apartment building the man had always liked.
Afterward, he made a point of walking by the building every few days. He’d seen the woman several times, and nodded to her.
The dance had begun.
It had gone on for several weeks, the two of them circling around each other in a strange pavane that was almost like a courtship.
They began nodding to each other, then saying hello.
He had begun to absorb the routines of her life, and found her—as he found most people—to be pathetically predictable.
Today, for instance, being a bright and cheerful Sunday, he was almost certain the woman would take lunch in a bag and go to bask in the rare warmth on the lawn of the university, where she would pretend to be reading a book while actually watching for a man—nearly any man, he had discovered—to show interest in her.
Today he would be the man to show interest.
Today the dance would end.
He left his car at home that morning, taking the motor home he’d bought four years ago, when the study had commenced. Perfect for field trips, he often drove it into the mountains even on weekends when he wasn’t working on his research, parking it near any one of hundreds of babbling streams while he indulged himself in his only passion outside of his project: fly-fishing.
Today he drove the motor home up to the university, parked it in the nearly deserted depths of the cavernous garage, and locked it. Taking his own lunch and two bottles of lemon-flavored sparkling water with him, he climbed the stairs to the surface and started across the lawn toward the spot that was the woman’s favorite.
Half an hour later, after she’d consumed half the contents of the bottle of sparkling water he offered her, she frowned, then shook her head.
“Something wrong?” the man asked, his gentle voice freighted with benevolent concern.
“I—I’m not sure,” the woman replied. “Suddenly I feel—” She hesitated, then stood up. “I’d better get home!”
The man scrambled to his feet and began gathering both their things. “Maybe I should drive you,” he suggested.
The woman started to decline his offer, but a second later, changed her mind. He could see that the color had begun to fade from her lips.
“If you could …” she began, but then, feeling lightheaded and dizzy, her voice faded.
Gratefully, she accepted the man’s proffered arm and let him lead her down into the garage, where his motor home waited.
Even before he drove it out into the bright daylight, the woman had drifted into unconsciousness, and was now spread out on the sheet of plastic he’d placed on the floor.
He pulled out of the garage, went west two blocks, turned right up to N.E. 45th Street, and headed west to Interstate 5. Taking the highway south, he exited at Route 520, heading east toward Redmond.
After a while he wound up into the foothills, looking for the right spot.
Somewhere off the road.
Somewhere secluded.
Somewhere near a stream, so he could do a little fishing after his work was done.
Finally he found the spot: a narrow road, one he’d used before, but not for years. A half mile through the
trees and he emerged into a clearing next to a fast-moving stream. He looked around.
He was alone.
Now he began his preparations.
First, he stripped naked, folding his clothes neatly and stowing them in the drawer beneath the queen-sized berth at the motor home’s rear.
After pulling on a pair of rubber surgical gloves, he covered the bed with a sheet of plastic and moved the unconscious woman onto it.
He continued working with the sheets of plastic, methodically lining the entire interior of the motor home; one of his prime rules when carrying out an experiment was that nothing must be contaminated.
Finally he was ready.
Undressing the woman, he gazed at her naked body for a few moments, savoring the life that seemed to radiate from it even as she slept.
Her breasts moved rhythmically up and down as she breathed, and when he lay his fingers gently on her neck, he could feel the pounding of her pulse.
He laid out the tools he knew he would need, then picked up the instrument he’d purchased the day before for this specific experiment, and squeezed its trigger.
It squealed shrilly as its blade began to spin.
The man began his work.
The blade of the cordless saw sliced through skin and flesh, parting the woman’s sternum in a single quick cut up the center of her chest.
Setting the saw aside, the man spread her ribs apart and closed off the largest of her severed blood vessels with some of the surgical clamps he’d bought years before, when the research was still in its planning stages.
The worst of her bleeding stanched, the man slipped his fingers into the cavity within. He felt the woman’s lungs—still working strongly—and nodded in satisfaction.
Once more he’d succeeded in making the primary cut so perfectly that the subject’s diaphragm remained undamaged.
He slid his fingers deeper, working them around the lungs until both hands rested against the gently moving tissue. He paused, thrilling to the sensation of life pressing against his palms.
But now the woman’s breathing was beginning to falter. Time was running short.
The experiment must begin.
His fingers probed deeper, until at last he felt the familiar contours of a human heart.
Time seemed to stand still.…
When he emerged from the motor home an hour later, the man’s hands were covered with blood. More of the glimmering red fluid oozed from the body he carried in his arms, drizzling slowly down his torso and legs, dripping onto the ground he trod. He carried the body into a thicket of woods, waiting only until he was fully screened from the clearing before dropping it unceremoniously to the ground. He gazed angrily at the woman’s remains.
Her organs were all there, but no longer in their original positions, for when he’d realized that once again the experiment had failed, a dark rage of frustration had come over him, a rage he’d released by plunging his fingers furiously into the woman’s lifeless body, tearing her heart loose from its veins and arteries, then pulling more of her organs through the incision in her chest as he searched for the reason for his failure.
Now he glared down once more at the lifeless body, its chest torn open to offer the world an obscene view of the carnage within.
He turned his back and walked away, finally abandoning
the subject for whom, only an hour ago, he’d had such wonderful hopes.
Emerging from the trees back into the clearing, he went to the river and plunged in, letting the rushing water wash the blood from his skin and cool the burning rage that failure always caused him. Only when he was certain no trace of the woman’s blood remained did he emerge from the river and return to the motor home, where, still naked, he carefully began folding the sheets of plastic in upon themselves. Soon the vehicle’s interior was again pristine, all evidence of his experiment wrapped in the sheets of plastic, which in turn he placed inside a large white plastic garbage bag.
The man went back to the river and washed once more, then dried himself, dressed, and drove the motor home out of the clearing. Leaving it on the edge of the pavement, he returned to the clearing, broke a branch from a tree and swept it methodically across the ground, obliterating every tire print the motor home had left.
The branch he’d used to whisk away his tracks joined the soiled plastic sheets in the large trash bag.
As he started back down the highway, the man glanced at his watch and was pleased: there was still plenty of time to stop for an hour or so of fishing before he went home.
And as he fished, he would begin thinking about the next experiment.…
In
Black Lightning
, John Saul strikes with a novel as electrifying as a jagged bolt from a pitch-dark sky, proving once again that he is a genius at both nail-biting suspense and the spine-tingling macabre.
Just when you think you can get away—
THE HOMING
takes aim!
For a glimpse of this terrifying novel, read on …
THE HOMING
by John Saul
DAWN
PRELUDE
“You been wantin’ me the way I been wantin’ you, ain’t you, kid?”
Dawn Sanderson froze, her hand still on the half-open kitchen door. Her mother’s boyfriend, Elvis Janks, was slouched at the kitchen table, an open bottle of beer in front of him, the redness of his eyes a sure sign that the bottle on the table wasn’t his first.
Probably not even his third.
But it wasn’t the redness in his eyes that scared her—she’d seen that so many times she didn’t even pay attention to it anymore.
What scared her was the look in those two bloodshot slits, a leering gaze that seemed to slash through her clothes, ripping away her blouse and bra so he could see—
She cut the thought off, terrified that he might actually be able to read her mind, and think … what?
That she was interested in him?
Dawn knew Elvis was a drunk, but was he crazy, too? What could she ever have done to make him think she might like him? She couldn’t even see how her mother could like him, he was such a creep! His hair was greasy,
and his fingernails were always dirty, and he smelled bad, too. And not just from the beer he was always drinking.
It was like he never even took a bath.
She’d known this moment was coming. For the last two months, ever since she turned sixteen, she’d felt him watching her, staring at her when he didn’t think she was noticing. She’d even told her mother about it, but her mother hadn’t believed her, had even told her she wouldn’t believe her unless she saw something herself But Dawn knew Elvis Janks wasn’t dumb enough to let her mother see anything—whenever Mavis Sanderson was around, Elvis always acted like he didn’t notice Dawn at all.
This afternoon, though, with her mother safely at work, Elvis was looking at her in a whole new way. A way that sent shivers down her spine and made her feel sick with fear. Her heart pounding, she tried to edge out the kitchen door, but suddenly her knees threatened to buckle beneath her.
Sensing her fear, Elvis Janks rose from the table and lurched toward her, his lips twisting into a mocking sneer that only made Dawn’s terror grow. “Come on, baby,” he rasped, a rivulet of saliva dribbling from the corner of his mouth. “You know you want it as bad I wanta give it to you. ” An ugly cackle bubbled up from the thick phlegm in his throat. “You want to do it right here, or go into your mama’s bedroom?”
Legs shaking, Dawn started again to back away from him, but before she was out the door, Elvis Janks was on her. His sinewy fingers closed so hard on her wrist that a squeal of pain erupted from her throat.
The sound seemed to excite him, and as his fingernails dug even deeper into the flesh of her wrist, Dawn silently cursed her lack of control. Maybe if she hadn’t uttered the sound, he would have left her alone.
But she couldn’t help it—it felt like he was breaking her wrist!
Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Dawn clamped her jaw against the scream that was pressing up from her throat. She wanted to scream with the pain and the fear. She wanted to scream her head off.
But who would come? The house across the driveway was abandoned, and the people on the other side of the Sandersons worked all day. Besides, people around here yelled and screamed all the time, and no one paid any attention anymore. And even if they did, so what? Elvis would deny everything, and her mother would believe him instead of her, and nothing would change.
Nothing at all.
Elvis was fumbling with her blouse, and Dawn felt his callused filthy hand touching her breast.
It was his touch that finally set off her temper, releasing the pent-up resentment that had been building in her ever since her mother had let Janks move in with them. And as anger flooded through her, so also did a renewed strength. She jerked her wrist free from Elvis Janks’s grasping fingers and hit him, slapping him hard across the face. It surprised him so much that he let go of her breast.
As he moved to grab her again, Dawn shot out the door, neither looking back nor slowing down until she was out of sight of the house.
Without making a conscious decision, Dawn knew exactly what she was going to do. She walked purposefully toward the mall ten blocks away—and the cash machine that would give her access to the secret bank account she’d been building up for almost a year, stashing away nearly all the money she earned from her baby-sitting jobs. She also realized now that she’d been moving steadily toward this decision for months.
She wasn’t acting on an angry whim, or trying to punish her mother over some petty issue.
She wasn’t failing in school, or running around with the wrong crowd, or getting into drugs.
She just didn’t want to get raped by her mother’s boyfriend, and she was certain that if she stayed around, that was exactly what would happen.
Better just to leave quietly, and begin her own life.
Dawn knew what she wanted to do—she’d known for a long time. She wanted to go to Hollywood and take acting lessons, and become an actress. Not a star—just an actress. She was pretty sure she could do it—she’d been in the school play this year, and last year, too, and everyone had told her she’d been really good.
Given a chance, and the right training, she knew she could be even better.
Good enough, maybe, to earn a living at it.
As she stood in front of the cash machine, taking out just enough money to feed herself while she hitchhiked down Interstate 5, Dawn Sanderson had already mentally left her past in Los Banos behind, and begun to make her plans for a future in Los Angeles. By the time she walked out of Los Banos, heading for the interstate ten miles to the west, her dreams were already taking shape. She would find a little apartment, and a job, and spend whatever free time she had taking acting lessons and getting her high school diploma.
Her stride quickening to keep pace with the rapid working of her mind, Dawn walked along the edge of the pavement, barely aware of the passage of time as she put mile after mile behind her. It was just starting to get dark by the time she reached the massive expanse of concrete that ran straight down the valley as far as she could see, unwavering in its southward route, absolutely featureless.
Should she start hitchhiking now, in the fading light of evening?
No.
Better to wait until morning. It would be safer then.
If she wasn’t going to be raped by Elvis Janks, she sure wasn’t going to be raped by some faceless stranger, either.
* * *
What seemed like endless hours later, Dawn looked up into the first faint light of morning. The sky was clear, but the stars, which had been twinkling above her all night long, were fading quickly as the blackness of the night was washed away by the rising sun, until finally there was only one star left.
The morning star.
She gazed at it for as long as it remained visible, feeling an odd connection with it that she didn’t quite understand until the point of light finally disappeared into the brightening of the new day.
Only when it was gone did Dawn take it as an omen.
After all, this was the first morning of a new life, and in the brightening light she realized she’d actually survived all the fears that had closed around her last night while she tried to sleep in the semishelter of a bridge over the interstate. All through the restless night, she’d awakened with every sound—every howling coyote and rumbling truck—to stare up into the vast sky while struggling to control her fear of the darkness surrounding her, and of all the unseen creatures that might be hiding in it.
Demons so close she had sometimes felt she could almost reach out and touch them.
Now, though, after making it through the dark, menacing night, and seeing the morning star, it seemed everything was going to be all right after all. And not only would she have a new life, but she’d have a new name, too!
Dawn Morningstar.
That’s what she’d change her name to the minute she got to Hollywood.
Lots better than Dawn Sanderson.
Dawn stretched her aching muscles and stood up. She was hungry, but there were no fast-food places on this part
of the interstate, and she didn’t want to waste any of her money on breakfast anyway.
That was one of the fears that had crept up on her in the night What if her bank account, which had seemed so large yesterday, wasn’t enough for her even to rent an apartment? Then what?
She resolutely put the thought out of her mind, stood up and brushed the dirt and leaves off her clothes. What should she do first? Start hitchhiking south, or try to find a place to wash up?
The decision made itself when she realized that it was so early there was practically no traffic on the highway.
Hunger gnawing at her stomach, Dawn began trudging southward. Far in the distance she could just make out what looked like a gas station, where at least she could rinse the worst of the dirt off her hands and face, and maybe get a cup of coffee to see her through the morning.
And maybe a doughnut, too.
She was still a mile from the exit leading to the gas station when she heard a car slow down behind her. A moment later it passed her, then pulled off onto the shoulder. By the time she drew even with it, a man had gotten out.
“You okay?” he asked.
Instantly, all the training Dawn had grown up with, all the admonitions she’d heard never to speak to a stranger, rose up in her mind, and for a moment she was tempted not even to reply, but to simply walk past the car and keep going until she got to the gas station.
But then what?
If she wouldn’t even speak to an ordinary-looking man who was asking her if she was all right, how was she ever going to hitchhike?
She stopped a few yards short of the car and eyed the man cautiously, reassuring herself that he looked just like anyone else, like hundreds of men she’d seen in Los Banos every day of her life.
“I’m trying to get to that gas station,” she said finally. “I slept under the bridge back there last night.”
The man glanced back at the overpass, which was barely visible in the distance. “Running away?”
Dawn hesitated, then shrugged. She’d never been very good at lying, and besides, what was the point? Still, she didn’t think she was so much running away as simply leaving home. “Sort of, I guess. I just decided it was time to move to Los Angeles.”
“Did your folks agree?” the man asked.
“I don’t have any folks,” Dawn replied, deciding it wasn’t quite a lie, since her father had died before she was born, and her mother was far more interested in Elvis Janks than in her.
The stranger seemed to accept her words. “Well, if you want a ride, I can get you to the gas station. I got to fill up anyway.” He got back into the car and glanced at Dawn.
She hesitated, and a second later the man shrugged. The car started forward, pulling quickly away as it moved back into the traffic lane.
“Wait!” Dawn called, breaking into a run as she dashed after the fast-accelerating car. For a second she was certain the man had neither seen nor heard her, but then the car slowed again. She caught up with it, and when it stopped, pulled the passenger door open and slid inside. “I guess I better take what I can get, huh?” she asked.
The man grinned at her, then started up again and turned his attention back to the road. Less than a minute later, just as he had promised, he pulled off at the exit and into the gas station. “Use the bathroom while I fill up, ” he told her. “And I’ll get us both some coffee.”
Ten minutes later, when she came out of the women’s room, he was waiting behind the wheel, the engine idling. The scent of fresh coffee drifted from the open window. Sliding back into the passenger seat, she found a steaming
plastic cup perched on the dashboard in front of her, along with a doughnut. “Thought you might be hungry,” the man said as he pulled back onto the southbound lanes of I-5.
“Thanks,” Dawn said, biting hungrily into the doughnut, and washing it down with gulps of the hot coffee.
A few minutes later, just when the coffee should have been doing its work in reviving her, Dawn realized that she was feeling sleepy.
So sleepy she could hardly keep her eyes open.
“Wow,” she said, trying to shake the gathering fog from her head. “What did you do, put something in my coffee?”
The man next to her said nothing. Slowly, he turned his head to look at her.
The expression on his face had changed.
His eyes glittered oddly. A vein throbbed in his forehead.
His hand reached out to her.
Dawn Sanderson raised her own hand, tried to fend him off, tried to pull away from him.
But the sleepiness was closing on her, and her whole body felt heavy.
So heavy she couldn’t move.
As a blackness even darker than last night’s closed around her, Dawn Sanderson knew that she had made a terrible mistake.
Elvis Janks would only have raped her.
This man, she knew, was going to do worse.
Far worse.…