Dean Koontz - From the Corner of His Eye

Now that neither of them had a doubt that the other shared the same need and that eventually they would satisfy each other, Victoria was opting for discretion. Wise woman.

“I understand, “he said.

“You need to rest,” she advised, turning away from the bed Yes, he suspected that he would require a great deal of rest to prepare himself for this vixen. Even in her loose white uniform and stodgy rubber-soled shoes, she was an incomparably erotic figure. She would be a lioness in bed.

After Victoria had departed, Junior lay smiling at the ceiling, floating on Valium and desire. And vanity.

In this case, he was sure that vanity was not a fault, not the result of a swollen ego, but merely healthy self-esteem. That he was irresistible to women wasn't simply his biased opinion, but an observable and undeniable fact, like gravity or the order in which the planets revolved t around the sun.

He was, admittedly, surprised that Nurse Bressler was strongly compelled to come on to him even though she had read his patient file and knew that he'd recently been a veritable geyser of noxious spew, that during the violent seizure in the ambulance, he had also lost control of bladder and bowels, and that he might at any moment suffer an explosive relapse. This was a remarkable testament to the animal lust he inspired even without trying, to the powerful male magnetism that was as much a part of him as his thick blond hair.

AGNES, FROM A DREAM of unbearable loss, woke with warm tears on her face.

The hospital was drowned in the bottomless silence that fills places of human habitation only in the few hours before dawn, when the needs and hungers' and fears of one day are forgotten and those of the next are not yet acknowledged, when our flailing species briefly floats insensate between one desperate swim and another.

The upper end of the bed was elevated. Otherwise, Agnes would not have been able to see the room, for she was too weak to raise her head from the pillows.

Shadows still perched throughout most of the room. They no longer reminded her of roosting birds, but of a featherless flock, leathery of wing and red of eye, with a taste for unspeakable feasts.

The only light came from a reading lamp. An adjustable brass shade directed the light down onto a chair.

Agnes was so weary, her eyes so sore and grainy, that even this soft radiance stung. She almost closed her eyes and gave herself to sleep again, that little brother of Death, which was now her only solace. What she saw in the lamplight, however, compelled her attention.

The nurse was in was gone, but Maria remained in attendance. She the vinyl-and-stainless-steel armchair, busy at some task in the amber glow of the lamp.

“You should be with your children,” Agnes worried. Maria looked up. “My babies are sitted with my sister."

“Why are you here?"

” Where else I should be and for why? I watch you over.” As the tears cleared from Agnes's eyes, she saw that Maria was sewing. A shopping bag stood to one side of the chair, and to the other side, open on the floor, a case contained spools of thread, needles, a pincushion, a pair of scissors, and other supplies of a seamstress's trade.

Maria was hand-repairing some of Joey's clothes, which Agnes had meticulously damaged earlier in the day.

“Maria?"

“Que?"

“Widon't need to."

Two what?"

'To fix those clothes anymore."

“I fix,” she insisted.

“You know about Joey?” Agnes asked, her voice thickening so much on the name of her husband that the two syllables almost stuck unspoken in her throat.

“I know."

“Then why?"

The needle danced in her nimble fingers. “I not fix for the better English anymore. Now I fix for Mr. Lampion only."

“But he's gone."

Maria said nothing, working busily, but Agnes recognized that special silence in which difficult words were sought and laboriously stitched together.

Finally with emotion so intense that it nearly made speech impossible, Maria said, “It is ... the only thing ... I can do for him now, for you. I be nobody, not able to fix nothing important. But I fix this. I fix this."

Agnes could not bear to watch Maria sewing. The light no longer stung, but her new future, which was beginning to come into view, was as sharp as pins and needles, sheer torture to her eyes.

She slept for a while, waking to a prayer spoken softly but fervently in Spanish.

Maria stood at the bedside, leaning with her forearms against the railing. A silver-and-onyx rosary tightly wrapped her small brown hands, although she was not counting the beads or murmuring Hail Marys. I Her prayer was for Agnes's baby.

Gradually, Agnes realized that this was not a prayer for the soul of a deceased infant but for the survival of one still alive.

Her strength was the strength of stones only in the sense that she felt as immovable as rock, yet she found the resources to raise one arm, to place her left hand over Maria's bead-tangled fingers. “But the baby's dead."

“Senora Lampion, no.” Maria was surprised. “Muy enfermo but not dead."

Very ill. Very ill but not dead.

Agnes remembered the blood, the awful red flood. Excruciating pain and such fearsome crimson torrents. She'd thought her baby had entered the world stillborn on a tide of its own blood and hers.

“Is it a boy?” she asked.

“Yes, Senora. A fine boy."

“Bartholomew,” Agnes said.

Maria frowned. “What is this you say?"

“His name.” She tightened her hand on Maria's. “I want to see him."

“Muy enfermo. They have keeped him like the chicken egg."

Like the chicken egg. As weary as she was, Agnes could not at once puzzle out the meaning of those four words. Then: “Oh. He's in an incubator."

“Such eyes,” Maria said.

Agnes said, “Que?"

“Angels must to have eyes so beautiful."

Letting go of Maria, lowering her hand to her heart, Agnes said, “I want to see him.” After making the sign of the cross, Maria said, “They must to have keeped him in the eggubator until he is not dangerous. When the nurse comes, I will make her to tell me when the baby is to be safe. But I can't be leave you. I watch. I watch over."

Closing her eyes, Agnes whispered, “Bartholomew,” in a reverent voice full of wonder, full of awe.

In spite of Agnes's qualified joy, she could not stay afloat on the river of sleep from which she had so recently risen. This time, however, she sank into its deeper currents with new hope and with this magical name, which scintillated in her mind on both sides of consciousness, Bartholomew, as the hospital room and Maria faded from her awareness, and also Bartholomew in her dreams. The name staved off nightmares.

Bartholomew. The name sustained her.

AS GREASY WITH FEAR sweat as a pig on a slaughterhouse ramp, Junior woke from a nightmare that he could not remember. Something *is reaching for him-that's all he could recall, hands clutching at him out of the dark-and then he was awake, wheezing. Night still pressed at the glass beyond the venetian blind. The pharmacy lamp in the comer was aglow, but the chair that had been beside it was no longer there. It had been moved closer to Junior's bed.

Vanadium sat in the chair, watching. With the perfect control of a sleight-of-hand artist, he turned a quarter end-over-end across the knuckles of his right hand, palmed it with his thumb, caused it to reappear at his little finger, and rolled it across his knuckles again, ceaselessly.

The bedside clock read 4:37 A.M.

The detective seemed never to sleep.

“There's a fine George and Ira Gershwin song called 'Someone to Watch Over Me.'