Part 25 (2/2)

And she moved to him, as if some invisible tide pushed her toward the dead man.

8.

Julie's eyes opened, suddenly.

Got her bearings: she was in Diamond's apartment.

It was mid-afternoon.

An overwhelming pounding behind her eyes, as if she had a terrible headache that had just erupted. She glanced straight ahead at the long, vertical mirror on the front of the bathroom door. Her face-her eyes were bloodshot, she'd been crying-and Michael Diamond sat in a chair next to her. He looked up, at her staring at his reflection.

Only it wasn't his face in the mirror.

It was a blur of grays and blues.

It was the face of the man in Apartment 66S. His body was different. She saw him as if he were naked, standing in the mirror. Covered with burns. Covered as if most of his body had been consumed in a fire.

Chapter Twenty.

1.

”You're the boy,” she gasped. ”You're the boy who burned. The boy didn't die. He didn't. He lived. It's you you.” Her throat clutched as she said it, and she pushed herself up on the ma.s.sage table, drawing the towel more tightly around her.

”Julie?” he asked.

She looked at him, and he was normal again, then into the mirror and he was also Michael Diamond, dressed, rising now from his chair.

She dressed quickly, feeling a pulse of horror within her body. Diamond may have been speaking, but she didn't hear a word. She just knew that if she didn't leave his apartment, she would scream, or she'd want to jump out a window. She felt the urgency of it, as if something was coming toward her, some shrieking insanity swooping down from shadows. She thought of Amanda, with her caged animal beauty, her fierce attack, and wondered if she hadn't experienced what was going on in her mind. If she hadn't begun to see people's faces as blurs of gray and blue. She felt as if she'd been infected with something, some awful poison, something that had begun eating away at her sanity.

She raced down the stairs, not caring if she tripped and fell, and out into the street. She was disoriented, and couldn't remember where her car was parked. She wandered through the village, her heart seeming to beat a thousand times a minute. She felt as if she would die at any moment, and she was about to let it happen, she was about to let the anxiety and breathlessness within her win.

As she rounded a corner at Bleecker and Cornelius, she saw a crowd gathered around what must have been an accident. She felt drawn to it, and went to the group of people, who all stood still, watching the delivery boy, on the street, his bicycle mangled. Several feet ahead, on the road, a taxicab, with its driver standing half in and half out of the car, door swung open, looking sh.e.l.l-shocked.

The boy had been knocked off his bike, and his head was twisted unnaturally around. His left arm was bent over his right shoulder. He looked as if he were no more than seventeen years old.

His Chinese food he'd been delivering lay in mashed white cartons beyond the small crowd.

The sound of the ambulance, rounding the corner. She looked in the boy's eyes, she had to, she wanted to see what death was again, she wanted to believe it was final, and that whatever had been that boy was now gone, irretrievably.

Then she felt a tender cracking, as if inside her skull, and for a moment, she wondered if this was what a brain aneurysm began with-a slight cracking sound- and then, she heard her husband's voice.

” I would never leave you, Julie I would never leave you, Julie,” he said. ”Death is everywhere. But not where I am. Do you want me inside you?”

2.

She dropped by Joe and Rick's place.

”Jesus, Jules. You're white as a sheet. And that's something I never thought I'd ever get to say out loud,” Joe said after he opened the door.

”I'm losing my mind,” she said.

3.

After she told him everything, Joe said, ”He might as well have raped you, Julie. He told you to take your clothes off? You did it? You went along with it? How do you know he didn't hypnotize you or something and then do something awful to you while you were under? You've got to be more careful. G.o.d, should we call the cops?” Realizing his tone, he calmed a bit. ”No, we call them, how is it going to look? Julie? Do you really think he killed Hut? I mean, that you happen to read his books. You happen to go to his studio. You happen to...”

”I know it sounds crazy, Joe. But you believe in this stuff. What if he had psychic talent to draw me to him? I mean, what is the extent of this kind of thing?”

”It sounds like something I've never heard of. I mean, if I believed that...”

”What about the burns I saw? In the mirror?”

”I don't know,” he said, and for the first time ever in their friends.h.i.+p, she thought she detected a flicker of distance in him. As if he were looking at her in such a way that he needed to see her as damaged. As deranged.

”Joe, I'm not crazy. I know I'm not. I saw him. I think he did what he said-he streamed into me. And when I came out of it, too suddenly, I saw him for a split second. He told me that I couldn't be inside him unless he first opened me. He said it. And that's what it was. I saw inside him. That's what I saw with the burns. But...if he were burned as a kid, how could he look so...normal?”

Joe thought a moment, and said, ”I worked with a woman once who had been in a car crash. Eighty percent of her body had burned. Five years later, with a lot of surgery, she looked better than she ever had. I guess, maybe if you saw him naked, you'd see the burn. If...if you really saw something that was real. Julie, now don't get p.i.s.sed off at me or anything, but if you saw this for just a second, couldn't it maybe have been some kind of hangover from what he did to you? Like waking too fast from a dream?”

”Joe,” she said. ”I saw things. Things I've forgotten. Things that...he unlocked inside me. And then, I thought I heard him. Inside me. But not from me. Maybe it was crazy. Maybe it was my mind on hyperspeed. But I saw him.”

”Diamond?”

”No,” she said. ”Hut.”

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