Ticktock (21 page)

She stopped massaging his brow and pulled him around to face her again. Her murmur fell to a conspiratorial whisper: “What if I told you there are a few nights when I've had missing hours, blank spots, where I just seem to have blacked out, gone into a fugue state or something. All abductees report these missing hours, these holes in their memories where their abduction experiences have been erased or suppressed.”

“Del, dear sweet loopy Del, please don't be offended, please understand that I say this with affection: I wouldn't be surprised to hear that you had a couple of these missing hours every day of the week.”

Puzzled, she said, “Why would I be offended?”

“Never mind.”

“Anyway, I don't have them every day of the week—only one or two days a year.”

“What about ghosts?” he asked.

“What about them?”

“Do you believe in ghosts?”

“I've even met a few,” she said brightly.

“What about the healing power of crystals?”

She shook her head. “They can't heal, but they
can
focus your psychic power.”

“Out-of-body experiences?”

“I'm sure it can be done, but I like my body too much to want to leave it even for a short time.”

“Remote viewing?”

“That's easy. Pick a town.”

“What?”

“Name a town.”

“Fresno,” he said.

With bubbly confidence, she said, “I could describe any room in any building in Fresno—where I've never been in my life, by the way—and if we drove up there tomorrow, you'd see it was just like I said.”

“What about Big Foot?”

She put a hand over her mouth to stifle her giggle. “You're such a goof, Tuong Tommy. Big Foot is bullshit, invented by the tabloids to sell newspapers to gullible fools.”

He kissed her.

She kissed him too. She kissed him better than he had ever been kissed before. She had a talent for it, like throwing knives.

When at last he pulled back from her, Tommy said, “I've never met anyone remotely like you, Deliverance Payne—and I'm not sure if that's good or bad.”

“One thing's for sure. If it had been any other woman who picked you up from your burning car, you wouldn't have lived half this long.”

That was inarguably true. No other woman—no other
person
—he had ever met would have reacted with such equanimity when the demon had slammed against the window and fastened itself to the glass with its hideous suckerpads. No one else could have done the stunt driving necessary to detach the repulsive beast from the van—and perhaps no one else, even having seen the creature, would have accepted Tommy's devil-doll story so unequivocally.

“There is such a thing as fate,” she told him.

“I suppose there might be.”

“There
is.
Destiny. It's not written in stone, however. On a spiritual level, completely unconsciously, we make our destinies for ourselves.”

Bewilderment and joy swelled in Tommy, and he felt as though he were a child just beginning to unwrap a wonderful gift. “That doesn't sound as totally crazy to me as it would have an hour or two ago.”

“Of course it doesn't. I suspect that while I wasn't looking, I've made you my destiny, and it's beginning to seem as if you've made me yours.”

Tommy had no answer to that. His heart was pounding. He had never felt this way before. Even if he'd had a computer keyboard in front of him and time to think, he would not easily have been able to put these new feelings into words.

Abruptly his joyful mood and sense of impending transcendence were diminished when a strange slithering sensation crept up the hollow of his spine. He shivered.

“Cold?” she asked.

“No.”

As sometimes happens along the coast, the air temperature had bottomed out after midnight; it was rising again. The sea was an efficient heat sink that stored up the warmth of the sun during the balmy day and gradually released it after darkness fell.

The slithering in the spine came again, and Tommy said, “It's just a weird feeling….”

“Oooh, I like weird feelings.”

“…maybe a premonition.”

“Premonition? You're getting more interesting by the moment, Tuong Tommy. Premonition of what?”

He looked around uneasily at the tenebrous forms of the carousel horses. “I…don't quite…know….”

Then he suddenly became aware that his neck and shoulders were no longer sore. His headache had passed too.

Astonished, he said, “That was an incredible massage.”

“You're welcome.”

In fact, no pain lingered in any muscle in his body, not even in those that he had bruised when he had been tackled on the concrete patio. He was not sleepy, either, and his eyes no longer itched and burned as before. Indeed, he felt wide-awake, energetic, and better than he had felt before this entire pursuit had begun.

Frowning at Del in the gloom, he said, “Hey, how did—”

Scootie interrupted, thrusting his head between them and whining fearfully.

“It's coming,” Del said, rising from the chariot.

Tommy snatched the Mossberg off the carousel floor.

Already Del was easing between the horses, using them for cover but moving closer to the edge of the platform for a better view of the promenade.

Tommy joined her behind a great black stallion with bared teeth and wild eyes.

Standing almost on point and utterly still, like a hunting dog in a field where a pheasant had been spotted in the brush, Scootie stared east along lamplit Edgewater Avenue, past Anchors Away Boat Rentals and Original Harbor Cruises toward Balboa Beach Treats. Except for his smaller size, he might have been one of the carved animals waiting in mid-stampede for sunshine and for the riders who would come with it.

“Let's get out of here,” Tommy whispered.

“Wait.”

“Why?”

“I want to see it better,” she said, indicating the three-globe streetlamp past which the fat man would have to come. Her words were almost as faint as exhalations.

“
I
have no desire to see it better.”

“Anyway, we have the guns. We can knock it down again.”

“We might not be lucky this time.”

“Scootie can try to misdirect it.”

“You mean lead it away from us?”

Del didn't reply.

Ears pricked, head held high, Scootie was clearly ready to do whatever his mistress demanded of him.

Maybe the dog
could
outrun the creature. Although the thing posing as the portly Samaritan apparently was a supernatural entity, immortal and ultimately unstoppable, it too seemed bound by some of the laws of physics, which was why the hard impact of high-caliber ammunition could halt it, knock it down, delay it; consequently, there was no reason to assume that it could move as fast as Scootie, who was smaller, lower to the ground, and designed by nature for speed.

“But the thing won't be lured away by the dog,” Tommy whispered. “Del, it isn't interested in the dog. It only wants me…and maybe you now.”

“Hush,” she said.

In the wintry light from the frosted globes on the nearest lamp, the falling rain appeared to be sleet. The concrete walkway glistened as though coated with ice.

Beyond the light, the rain darkened to tarnished silver and then to ash gray, and out of the grayness came the fat man, walking slowly along the center of the deserted promenade.

At Tommy's side, Scootie twitched but made no sound.

Holding the shotgun in both hands, Tommy hunched lower behind the carousel stallion. In the windless night, he stared out at the promenade past the perpetually wind-tossed tail of the carved horse.

At the other end of the leaping stallion, Del shrank herself too, watching the Samaritan from under the horse's neck.

Like a dirigible easing along the ground toward its berth, the fat man advanced as if he were drifting rather than walking, making no splashing sounds on the puddled pavement.

Tommy felt the night grow chillier, as though the demon moved in clouds of cold sufficiently powerful to damp the effect of the harbor's slow release of the day's stored heat.

At first the Samaritan-thing was only a gray mass in the gray static of the rain, but then its image cleared as it came forth into the lamplight. It was slightly larger than before, but not as large as it should have been if, indeed, it had devoured two men, every scrap of flesh and splinter of bone.

Realizing how absurd it was to try to rationalize the biology of a supernatural entity, Tommy wondered again if his sanity had fled sometime earlier in the night.

The Samaritan-thing still wore the raincoat, though that garment was punctured and torn, apparently by gunfire. The hood lay rumpled at the back of its neck, and its head was exposed.

The thing's face was human but inhumanly hard and perhaps no longer capable of gentler expressions, and at a distance the eyes seemed to be human as well. Most likely this was the moon-round face of the fat man who had stopped to lend assistance at the scene of the Corvette crash. The mind and soul of the fat man were long gone, however, and the thing wearing his form was an entity of such pure hatred and savagery that it could not prevent its true nature from darkling through even the soft features of a face well suited to smiles and laughter.

As the thing moved more directly into the pale light, no more than forty feet away, Tommy saw that it cast
three
distinct shadows, when he might have expected that, like a vampire, it would cast none. For a moment he thought that the shadows were a freakish effect of the three globes on the old streetlamp, but then he noted that they stretched across the wet pavement at angles unrelated to the source of illumination.

When he returned his attention to the creature's face, he saw its pudgy features change. A far leaner and utterly different face metamorphosed on the rotund body; the nose became more hawkish, the jawline jutted, and the ears flattened tighter to the skull. The rain-soaked mop of thick black hair crinkled into lank blond curls. Then a third countenance replaced the second: that of a slightly older man with brush-cut, iron-gray hair and the square features of the quintessential army drill sergeant.

As he watched the Samaritan's moon-round visage reappear, Tommy suspected that the other two faces were those of the unlucky men whom the creature had slaughtered a short while ago on the patio behind that harbor-side house. He shuddered—and feared that the demon would hear the chattering of his teeth even at a distance of forty feet, even through the screening tattoo of the rain.

The beast stepped to the center of the lightfall from the lamp, where it stopped. Its eyes were dark and human one moment, radiant green and unearthly the next.

Because Scootie's flank was against Tommy's left leg, he felt the dog shiver.

From the center of the promenade, the creature surveyed the Fun Zone around it, beginning with the carousel, which was elevated two feet above the public walkway and partially screened by a low, green wrought-iron fence. The terrible eyes, serpent bright and serpent mean, seemed to fix on Tommy, and he could sense the beast's hellish hunger.

The old carousel was crowded with shadows that outnumbered the riders who, for decades, had mounted its tail-chasing steeds, so it seemed unlikely that Tommy and Del and Scootie could be seen in such blackish shelter, as long as they remained still. Yet the hateful demon looked upon the world through extraordinary eyes, and Tommy became convinced that it had spotted him as easily as it would have if he had been standing in noontime sun.

But the creature's gaze slid away from him. The demon studied Bay Burger to the west, then looked north across the promenade to the dark Ferris wheel and the Fun Zone Boat Company.

It knows we're nearby,
Tommy thought.

Opposite the elevated carousel were lush palm trees gracing an open-air dining terrace with views of boat docks and the harbor beyond. Turning its back to the horses, the demon slowly surveyed the fixed tables, benches, trash containers, empty bicycle racks, and dripping trees.

On the terrace, two additional three-globe lampposts shed more of the icy light that seemed, in this strange night, to reveal less than it should. The area was well-enough illuminated, however, for the creature to ascertain, at a glance, that its prey was not hiding there. Nevertheless, it spent an inordinate amount of time studying the terrace, as if doubting its own eyes, as if it thought that Tommy and Del were able, chameleon-like, to assume the visual character of any background and effectively disappear.

Finally the beast looked west again along the promenade and then focused once more on the carousel. Its radiant gaze traveled over the shadowed horses only briefly before it turned to stare east, back the way it had come, as if it suspected that it had passed their hiding place.

It seemed confused. Indeed, its frustration was almost palpable. The thing sensed that they were close, but it could not catch their scent—or whatever more exotic spoor it tracked.

Tommy realized that he was holding his breath. He let it out and inhaled slowly through his open mouth, half convinced that even a breath drawn too sharply would instantly attract the hunter's attention.

Considering that the creature had tracked them many miles across the county to the New World Saigon Bakery and later had found them again at Del's house, its current inability to detect them from only forty feet away was baffling.

The creature turned to the carousel.

Tommy held his breath again.

The serpent-eyed Samaritan raised its plump hands and moved its flattened palms in circles in the rain-filled air, as though wiping off a dirty pane of glass.

Seeking psychic impressions, some sign of us, trying to get a clearer view,
Tommy thought.

He tightened his grip on the Mossberg.

Round and round, round and round, the pale hands moved, like radar dishes, seeking signals.