John Saul - Black Lightning

She skipped to the next one, and the next one, her fascination, and her terror, growing as she read.

The truth of Richard Kraven began to emerge.

It was a truth he’d hinted at from the very beginning, offering her a single piece of the puzzle here, another one there. But the pieces had been so small, the hints so oblique, that she’d never recognized them for what they were.

The dance.

Metaphysics.

Electricity.

Life, death, insanity.

And Nijinsky.

Richard Kraven had told her about Vaslav Nijinsky himself. It was right there in one of the earliest interviews:

A.J.: Why the ballet, Mr. Kraven?

R.K.: My interest in ballet doesn’t have to do with the dance, per se, Ms. Jeffers. It’s the dancers that fascinate me.

A.J.: The dancers?

R.K.: Do you know what it takes to be a ballet dancer? Perfection. Perfection in physical discipline, and perfection in mental discipline. That is what’s fascinating. The drive toward perfection.

A.J.: But is it really possible to achieve perfection?

R.K.: There was one. Vaslav Nijinsky. Are you familiar with the name?

A.J.: He died insane, didn’t he?

R.K.: So they say, but I’m not at all sure I agree. What he did do was leap higher than anyone else, before or since. But he didn’t just leap, Ms. Jeffers. At the zenith of his leaps, he hovered above the stage.

A.J.: I’m not sure I’m following you.

R.K.: Oh, at the time they said he only appeared to hover, but according to Nijinsky himself, he truly did suspend himself above the stage. He said he learned to separate himself from his body, and when he danced, he felt as if he were in the flies above the stage, manipulating his own body as if it were a marionette on strings.

A.J.: And you believe such a thing is possible?

R.K.: Not just possible, Ms. Jeffers. I believe he did it. You see, the reason he stopped dancing was that he began to feel that he might find himself stranded outside of his own body. He said that toward the end of his career he would find the spirit of a stranger inhabiting his body when he came back, and he began to feel the time would come when the invading spirit was stronger than his own and he would not be able to repossess his own body. It is why he stopped dancing, and why he was diagnosed as schizophrenic. But what if he wasn’t schizophrenic, Ms. Jeffers? What if he wasn’t schizophrenic at all? What would it mean?

The interview had ended there. Anne had made a note to check out the story of Vaslav Nijinsky. At the time, though, it had seemed irrelevant, and she had focused on what she’d then considered more important things.

Now, she realized, there were no more important things. Not if Vaslav Nijinsky — and Richard Kraven — were right.

Her eyes went back to the note one more time, fixing on the last line:

… I’ve already chosen my partner.

If Kraven had been right, it wasn’t Glen he’d chosen today, couldn’t possibly be Glen, because he already had Glen.

Who, then?

Who might he have chosen? A terrible thought came to her, and she snatched up the phone, dialing Rayette Hoover’s number. On the fourth ring, Rayette herself picked up the phone, and Anne, her voice catching in her throat, asked to speak to her daughter. When she hung up the phone a moment later, her face was ashen, her hands trembling. But before she could say anything, Mark Blakemoor spoke as he slid his phone into the pocket of his jacket. “The R.V.’s a rental, Anne,” he said quietly. “And Glen rented it a few days ago.”

Anne nodded mutely. “But it’s not Glen,” she said, her voice choked with a sob. “It’s really him, Mark. He’s taken Heather! Oh, God, he’s taken Heather, and he’s going to kill her.”

Heather Jeffers glanced surreptitiously at her father, doing her best to appear to be staring through the windshield at the storm raging outside. When he’d picked her up at Rayette’s, she’d been surprised — usually if either she or Kevin wanted to go somewhere, they walked, took the bus, or rode with friends. She’d been even more surprised when she saw what he was driving.

“Did you and Mom buy it?” she’d asked as she gazed at the enormous vehicle.

“I leased it,” her father told her. “Your mom doesn’t even know about it yet.” When he’d told her they were going to meet her mother and brother at the Thai restaurant on Mercer Island, she hadn’t questioned it, just as she hadn’t questioned him when she asked where the rest of the family was and he’d told her, “They went over to Bellevue Square.” He’d grinned at her. “So what do you think of the R.V.?”

As he’d driven down Denny toward the entrance to I-5, she’d explored the big motor home, then returned to the passenger seat. “How can you even drive it?” she asked. “It’s so big.”

He’d looked at her, and she’d seen something funny in his eyes — they didn’t look quite right. “I can do lots of things you don’t know about,” he said, and his voice, like his eyes, seemed strange. It left her feeling weird — not exactly scared, but a bit worried — and she asked him if he was okay. When he told her — in the kind of voice he’d never let her use on Kevin — that there wasn’t anything wrong at all, she’d turned to stare out the window, and hadn’t said anything else until they were crossing Mercer Island on I-90 five minutes later.

“You want to get off at Island Crest, don’t you?” she finally asked, breaking her silence only because he didn’t seem to notice how close to the exit they were.

He hadn’t answered her. And he hadn’t gotten off at Island Crest, either. Instead he stayed on the freeway, and a minute later they left Mercer Island and were headed across the bridge to Bellevue.

“Dad! What’s wrong with you?” Heather demanded as they passed the Factoria exit without even slowing down. “You could have turned around there.”

“What makes you think I want to turn around?” her father replied. He’d looked directly at her while speaking, and with a start Heather realized he didn’t look anything like her father now. He had a weird look on his face, the kind of look she’d always imagined a crazy person would have, and when he fixed his eyes on her, it made her skin get all crawly.

“Dad, what’s going on with you?” she demanded. “How come you didn’t get off on Mercer Island?”

“Because that’s not where we’re going,” he replied.

“But you said—”

“It doesn’t matter what I said. We’re not going to Mercer Island.”

“Then where are we going?” Heather asked.

“Somewhere else. Somewhere where we can be by ourselves.”

It was those last words — somewhere we can be by ourselves — that had dissolved Heather’s growing anger into sudden fear.

By ourselves.

Why did he want them to be by themselves? But she already knew the answer to that — ever since she’d been a little girl, she’d been warned about not going anywhere with men who said they were going to take her somewhere where they’d be by themselves.

But this was her father!

Then she remembered Jolene Ruyksman, who had been in her class until last year, when she’d tried to kill herself, and it turned out that her father had been getting in bed with her since she was only four, telling her that he’d kill her if she ever told anyone what they’d been doing.

But her own father wasn’t like that — he’d never even looked at her funny, or done any of the things the counselors had warned her and her friends to watch out for when they’d talked about what had happened to Jolene.

Now she remembered something else, something her mother told her after her father had come home from the hospital. She had to get used to the idea that her father was going to be different, that he’d almost died, and that it would be a long time before he was completely recovered. But he couldn’t have changed this much, could he?