The Astral (12 page)

Instead of turning toward West Hollywood, he pulled onto the freeway headed north. She didn't question him as the myriad lights of the Valley swept by. An endless stream of cars surrounded them on either side, but inside the Porsche there was only the glow of the moment and the glorious music that carried them along—and a hand that reached across the space between them to take hers.

After a while, they left the freeway and began to climb the two-lane road that ran through Topanga Canyon. It twisted and turned, this way and then that. He was a good driver and the car seemed to sense exactly what he expected of it.

They swooped over a ridge and down again, another hairpin curve and back up, gradually traveling higher and higher into the mountains, then making their way downhill, the car like a graceful bird in its descent. They came around a wide bend and the ocean spread out below them, a seemingly endless black slate in the pale moonlight, marbled with ribbons of glittering foam.

He turned south on Pacific Coast Highway and she knew then where they were headed, and her heart began to beat a little faster with the knowledge.

CHAPTER TWELVE

It was all too obviously a man's apartment, everything dark and crowded, and had the look of one that had been lived in, comfortably, for years. A threadbare brown sofa and a much more comfortable looking leather recliner with a reading lamp beside it, and a pile of books on a nearby table. Piles of books everywhere, in fact, and crowded shelves of them as well. A reading man's room. A workstation with a computer took up most of one wall and through an open doorway she could see a corner of a rumpled bed. She tried to ignore the suggestion that planted in her mind.

“You couldn't have just moved in here,” she said.

“The last resident left pretty well most of it behind. A friend of Weitman's. He got an assignment in Berlin and took not much more than his clothes and a laptop. I just had to carry in a suitcase or two.”

Faded blue drapes covered a pair of windows. “The beach view?” she asked. She walked to them and pulled the drapes aside.

“Want me to hold your feet while you look?” Despite the joking tone of his voice, she noticed that he kept a respectful distance, making no effort to approach her or initiate anything more than a sociable visit between friends. Cold feet? Or good manners?

His description of the view had been a bit of an exaggeration, if not too great a one. Over the tops of low-slung buildings one could see a patch of moonlit ocean, without the need of dangling from the window.

She turned, surveying the room again, and finally brought her eyes back to where he still stood just inside the door.

“Well.” She left that word suspended between them.

“Catherine.” He took a cautious step in her direction and halted again. “When you said you were divorcing Walter—is that a done deal?”

“There's no decree yet. I haven't even filed. But yes, it's over. I won't be going back. I don't think, frankly, he even wants me back.”

The more fool he, Jack thought, and said aloud, “Because I'm not much of a one for poaching on another man's territory.”

She had removed her wedding ring earlier, dropping it into her jewel box with a sense of finality, and she held out her hand now for him to see the white band of skin on her finger.

“In this case, I assure you, he has forfeited all title to it.”

He hesitated for a moment longer. “I see,” he said, and then, still sounding unsure of himself, “The question, of course, is, what are we going to do now?”

She, however, was done with waiting—and with being the lady. “This,” she said simply, and crossed in three quick strides to where he was standing, threw her arms about him and, stretching slightly on tiptoe, kissed him.

She gave him full credit for losing whatever shyness had possessed him until now. He gave a little sigh that might have been a groan and kissed back, in earnest, crushing her to him.

Like a dam bursting, it flooded over her all at once, making her knees so weak that she could hardly stand and could only cling to him. Tremors of desire raced through her.

As if on cue, they moved toward the bedroom and, still locked together, fell across the unmade bed, trying to maintain their kiss and at the same time struggling with one another's clothing. She stripped his shirt over his head—that did require breaking the kiss, if only briefly, but they took advantage of that break to get her pullover off as well, and then it was jeans tugged down, hers somehow kicked off, and naked flesh ground against naked flesh.

She seemed to be swimming in a cloud of light, oddly like that other light, drifting upward, upward, ever upward. The room faded, even Jack had become only a multitude of sensations permeating her being, lifting her higher, filling her with rapture until she thought she must burst and then....

And then she did, bursting into the light that exploded within her.

* * * *

Jack found himself humming an aria from Tosca in the shower. He turned off the water and stepped out of the stall. Catherine's damp towel hung neatly on the towel bar. Next time he'd suggest a shower
à deux
. He caught a glimpse of his grinning image in the bathroom mirror. All men happily in love must look like idiots, he thought, toweling himself briskly.

In the bedroom, Catherine stretched lazily, enjoying the feeling of happy satiation so long absent in her life. Absent—what was the point of kidding herself—since the last time she had been with Jack. She had only known one other man in that sense, and what had happened between her and Walter, so long ago and even then so rarely, had been so disappointingly different as to be a another experience all together.

She opened a closet door, looking for something more comfortable than her jeans and sweater, found a worn blue bathroom, and put it on.

Jack came in naked from the bathroom. He took her in his arms again, holding her close and kissing her tenderly. “I have something to ask you.”

“No one but Walter. And not for years with him,” she said.

He laughed, but she could see he liked that answer. “That wasn't the question, though. The question is, will you marry me?”

It was her turn to be surprised. “Really, you are the old fashioned sort, aren't you? You know, darling, today you don't have to marry the girl just because you slept with her.”

“But I do. I do have to marry you. I've wanted that since the first day I laid eyes on you and nothing has changed since then, except that I have wasted far too many years without you in my life. It's what you were saying earlier: I don't want to waste any more of them either.”

She shook her head and his heart sank. “You can't turn me down, Catherine. Say yes. You have to say yes.”

“Yes,” she said, and brought the grin back to his face. “But I suppose you have heard of something called bigamy?”

“As soon as you are free. The very moment the divorce is final. Although to tell the truth, I'd marry you today, tonight, and to hell with the consequences.”

She hugged him tightly. “I don't think we need be that extreme. But marriage license or no, from this day forward, I am yours, I am your wife.”

The bathrobe formed a blue puddle on the floor and they fell across the bed. This time, they made love more gently, more slowly, savoring each second, the almost mystical merging of not just their bodies but their very beings as well.

Later, wrapped in his warm embrace, she slept—and dreamed of evil, a blackness descending upon her like a cloud, enveloping her, taking the breath, the very life out of her.

She woke with a cry, sitting bolt upright in the bed. Instantly Jack sat up too, taking her in his arms. She clung to him, sobbing against his broad chest, struggling to get her heart to beat at its normal rate. He held her tightly, felt her shuddering in his arms, and murmured wordless sounds against her hair.

Finally, the sobs stopped, her breathing slowed. “Better?” he asked.

She sighed deeply. “Thanks. I'm sorry I woke you.”

“Any excuse to hold you in my arms.” He drew back slightly and looked down at her. “If that was a bad dream, it must have been a lulu.”

She met his worried gaze and managed a tremulous smile. “There's something I have to tell you,” she said.

“Something bad?”

She nodded. “It's quite a story, I'm afraid.”

It took her several minutes to marshal her thoughts. He waited patiently. Finally, she said, “This is going to sound so bizarre.”

She started with the tunnel of light when she had been shot, told him of the incidents in which she had seemed to travel to other locations, and ended with her experience with little Debbie and her mother in the shopping mall. He listened without interruption, heard her through to the end.

“Do you think I'm crazy?” she asked when she had finished her story. She tilted her head up to look into his face.

“No,” he said firmly. “The story is crazy, I'll admit that. But I have one good reason to believe you. No, make that two, the first one being that I know you are not given to making up stories. You've always been too honest for your own good, as I see it.”

“And the other reason?”

“I saw you. In my office, that day when you, what did you call it, traveled to see me. Just for a second. I thought I was going crazy, but I came in and there you were, only I could look right through you, and I blinked and you were gone.” He paused thoughtfully. “And next thing I knew, I was sitting by you at a concert.” He grinned suddenly and snapped his fingers. “You little devil, that wasn't a coincidence at all, was it?”

She smiled sheepishly. “All's fair in love and war, so they say.” She grew quickly serious again. “Jack, there's something more. Just now, when I woke up so frightened—something like that happened to me in my office as well. I think that this man, Yellow Beard, is stalking me. I don't mean physically, I mean, on an astral level.”

“Catherine, Of course, you're frightened,” he said patiently. “Why wouldn't you be, after everything that's happened? But the two of you, sharing the same unique gift, traveling back and forth to one another? That really does stretch the imagination. What just happened to you was a nightmare, plain and simple.”

“Maybe you're right,” she said after a moment. She had to admit that what he said made sense—and the idea of Yellow Beard stalking her on an astral level certainly didn't. “But even so, that still leaves the big question: what am I to do? I can't bear it. Sometimes at night, I hear them—Becky, those other children, crying. It frightens me, terrifies me, but I must find these men. I must stop them. Surely that was why I was given this gift. Surely I have been given a mission.”

“Maybe you've just given that mission to yourself. Look, okay, I buy this business of your traveling—I have to, I've seen it for myself. But that doesn't mean it's now your job, to track these men down. That's a job for professionals. And you aren't, my darling, wonderful though you are.”

She was disappointed that he did not believe her. At the same time, though, she could see the logic of his arguments. It was just that, she felt so sure inside herself that she was right. How could she expect anyone else to understand that, though? She didn't understand it herself.

“All right, setting that aside, and I'm not saying I agree with you, there's still that, whatever you want to call it, that dream, that vision I had of Yellow Beard. You are willing to believe me, believe the astral travel business, anyway, and I am more grateful for that than you could imagine. But who else would? How could I go to Roby Chang and tell her about the changes in his appearance, without telling her I am seeing these men on an astral level?”

He frowned. “That is the problem, isn't it? How could she be expected to believe you?” He thought for a moment. “Maybe she wouldn't have to hear that part of it.”

“I don't see how it could be avoided. If I say he's changed his appearance, she's going to ask me how I know that, isn't she?”

“She can't if she doesn't know who you are.”

She gave him a puzzled look. “But how could I...?”

“There is such a thing as an anonymous tip. And I am a newsman; meaning, my sources are protected.”

She considered that for a moment, and nodded her head. “Yes. I think that might work.” She had been too close to the problem to see such an obvious solution. And what a relief, she was thinking, that she had decided to share the problem with him.

“Tomorrow. I'll call this Chang woman first thing.” Which would, he thought but did not say, neatly turn matters over to the professionals, where they belonged; and leave Catherine safely out of it. “For now, however, I have a far better idea.”

One which, as it happened, she liked too.

* * * *

In a shabby cottage miles away, Lester Paterson sat up in bed, immediately awake, eyes staring into the darkness.

He had seen them, two of them, going at it. The bitch, and a man with her. He knew the man, too, or thought he did. His face was familiar.

Who were they? Was he a threat too, or just someone she'd gotten to bang her? Why did her face keep teasing him? Even now, he could see it just off at the edge of his mind.

She had been crying when he had seen her before, that thought popped into his head. Someone he'd raped? There'd been a few of those over the years. If he wanted something, he took it, and to hell with what they did or didn't want. And some criers among the ones that he hadn't exactly raped, all that shit that women put on to make a man feel bad when he could tell they were loving it as much as he was. Hell, that was the whole point for a woman, wasn't it, to make a man feel good?

Nearby, Colley snored and farted, snored and farted. What a pig! Paterson got out of bed and padded naked into the kitchen to get a beer from the refrigerator.

No, it hadn't been sex with the woman, he was sure of that. A woman might slip his mind but his pecker never forgot.

He thought briefly of the man. There'd been a few of them from time to time too. A hole was a hole as far as he was concerned. But, no he hadn't fucked him either, he was sure of that too. He was familiar, though, he'd seen that face somewhere. Maybe a movie? He had one actor on the hook already, that little pansy O'Dell. Maybe a friend of his?

He went into the living room and switched on the television, and a dark glow seemed to blossom from it and course through him as his hand touched the knob, like he had been sent a message. Only, he couldn't read the message. It faded away from him as he tried to grab hold of it.

What he needed was to track down that bitch, and find her he would. He didn't know what was going on, but he knew she was bad for him, and what was bad for him had to be eliminated. He closed his eyes and called her image to mind. If he worked at it, he could almost be there wherever she was, like they were spirits together. If he could only figure out what was the bond between them.