Part 20 (1/2)

The door eased shut again-slowly, slowly-and for Syd Jarrett, there was a fifteen-second slice of infinity when all Creation was reduced to that narrowing gap. Watching the darkness as it winnowed down to nothing. Then gone.

Then gone.

As if from a distance, he felt the world start up again without him: disaster averted, and on with the show. Somebody laughed, too loud; it was almost like a signal. All at once, the muted buzz gave way, the party resuming in earnest.

Syd just stood there. Silent. Thrumming. Paralytic with shock and pain. The jukebox came on, abrupt and staring. Billie Holiday. ”Tain't n.o.body's Business If I Do.” Underneath the boisterous relief of the crowd, the clinking gla.s.s and c.h.i.n.kling change, Syd felt his nerve endings begin to unravel, his heart crisp and shrivel inside his chest.

”Syd.” Voice first, then the hand on his shoulder. Syd recoiled from the touch, his eyes aflame.

He began to shake his head.

”C'mon, man.” He felt Jules behind him, trying to steer him back to the bar. ”You gotta let it go. . . .”

”No.” Syd growled, wrenching suddenly free. There was violence in the gesture. It was barely restrained. Jules stepped back, staring into those burning eyes.

And for the first time in ten years of friends.h.i.+p, Jules was afraid of him.

Syd smelled the fear, found it strangely exhilarating. The killing rage hurtled forth like a living force, a separate ent.i.ty with a mind and a will all its own. Yes, it said. You SHOULD be afraid. You should ALL be afraid . . .

. . . and then it struck him that no: not them. There was only one who should have such reason to fear . . .

. . . and then he was moving, hitting the door with both hands, sending it slamming back to crash against the wall as his feet smacked gravel and his eyes scanned the biting black air. Thinking sonofab.i.t.c.h, I'm gonna rip right through you. I'm gonna tear you to f.u.c.king shreds . . .

. . . and then he spotted them, at the far end of the parking lot: Vic, closing the pa.s.senger side door of a battered sedan; Nora inside, head down, shoulders slumped. They were maybe sixty feet away. Vic looked up, saw Syd coming, ignored him.

”HEY!” Syd called out, moving faster now, the killing rage singing in his blood as he crossed the parking lot.

”HEY, YOU!”.

Vic waltzed around the front of the car, heading for the driver's side. The thought that Nora was afraid made him crazy; the idea that she was scared for him sent Syd clear over the top. Syd himself felt no fear, only a terrible clarity of purpose.

”HEY!!!”.

Twenty feet now, and Vic still showed no sign of response. Adrenaline surged through Syd's system: every cell humming in antic.i.p.ation, restless for impact.

Ten feet, five. He could practically taste his blood ”MOTHERf.u.c.kER, I'M TALKIN' TO YOU!!!”

He got there just as Vic reached the driver's door. Nora called out Syd's name; it was lost beneath the roaring in his ears as his left hand snaked out, grabbed Vic's shoulder, spun him around . . .

. . . and then the air itself changed, became violent, as Vic whirled, face gone liquid and wickedly distorting, mad eyes alight with a ravening flame as the mouth grew wide and kept on growing, lips blackening and peeling back to reveal so many, many teeth . . .

. . . and the teeth, like ivory stilettos, flicking up to fill jaws far too huge to believe. Jaws that stretched and sprouted from the terrible no-longer-human face: long snout long jaws long gleaming spikes that snarled and snapped like a bear trap full of bayonets.

Syd stumbled back, his boot heels skidding on the loose-packed gravel, his tumbling a.s.s-backwards on the stony ground. Nora screamed. Syd's eyes rolled back, as the dark shape descended . . .

. . . and then Syd felt the teeth graze the soft skin of his cheek: light enough to tickle the stubble there, sharp enough to break the skin. Just a nip. A warning.

And then they stopped.

Syd's blood thudded painfully in his temples, as his eyes refocused, fixed on the figure before him. There was a disorienting moment as the form seemed to glitch and s.h.i.+ft in the darkness, like a rippling man-sized hole in the night.

Then Vic was standing by the car door again: his features his own, recognizably human. There was no mistaking the smile on his face.

”You may not believe it, punk, but this is your lucky night.

”You get to live.”

Vic hopped into the car, started it up. Syd tried to stand, couldn't. The sedan wheeled around, spun out, took off, sending back a shower of gravel and grit.

Syd coughed and sputtered as the big car pulled away, his vision blurred and blinded. He couldn't read the license or make or model, couldn't even see the back of Nora's head through the frost-encrusted window.

By the time he could see or breathe again, the sedan was but a glowing blur on the crest of the hill. And by the time he stood, it was gone completely: swallowed by the night, and the road, and the cold. Taking Nora with it.

And leaving Syd shaken. Defeated.

Alone.

24.

The next several hours were a groggy, broken man's descent: a drunken tumble down the well of madness and despair.

Syd sat near the end of the bar, his eyes staring at some distant receding horizon while his sight turned wholly inward. There was no shortage of torturous images there, no dearth of painful memories and excruciating might-have-beens. They collided in his head with a shower of sparks where his dreams of the future used to be.

And-indestructibly burning at the center of it all-was the prismatic, multifaceted image of Nora. An image that radically s.h.i.+fted from one moment to the next, depending on exactly where he stood. As the hours pa.s.sed, his mind moved constantly, viewing her from every conceivable direction. Trying to get a fix on who she actually was, the better to grasp the parameters of the vacuum she'd left behind.

There was Nora the catalytic agent and life-changing force: sweeping out the dead wood of his s.h.i.+pwrecked life, urging him to rebuild and set back out to sea. There was Nora the party animal c.u.m fertility G.o.ddess: reawakening in him a boundless, transcendent appet.i.te for life. There was Nora the vulnerable and tragic enigma, caught mysteriously weeping in the middle of the night. There was the dominant Nora, built of thunder and flame. The submissive Nora, led away on a chain.

And then there was the new face he had only seen tonight. The secretive face.

Of the Nora who lied.

And that was the bottom line here, wasn't it? That she had f.u.c.king lied to him: about her supposedly broken-up relations.h.i.+p with Vic, and G.o.d only knew what else. That Syd was ultimately nothing more than a pit stop on a long and twisted road that those two would probably be traveling forever.

The wounded part of him desperately needed to believe that was true. To think anything else was entirely too painful, pointed far too many fingers back in his direction. How could he have been so stupid, so utterly suckered by his own desperate hunger? Against his better judgment, against all sense or reason, she had breached the defenses of his little fortress of one. He had let her in.

And she, in turn, had released something within him.

And that was the point where his sanity threatened to skid completely out of control, go careening off into the uncharted abyss. Because something very weird had happened in the parking lot, and in one incandescent nightmare flash Syd had borne witness to something that he could neither accept nor deny. Acceptance was tantamount to deciding that yes, the world really was flat, after all, and there really were monsters waiting just over the edge, ready to eat you up. It was stupid. It was impossible. It was simply too much.

And if anyone had told him that three days ago, he would have laughed.

But he had seen it, and the certainty of the vision was a red-hot poker thrust into the deepest folds of his brain, igniting that long-hidden itch. Missing pieces of the lost weekend suddenly jigsaw-clicked into place. And Syd's reality, already frayed at the edges, began to unravel entirely.

As he recognized the face Vic had revealed.