James Patterson - Thriller - Stories to Keep You Up All Night

Lily with her hard, lean body and bright cornflower-blue eyes. She rode horses like a man but made love like a woman. In the privacy of their bedroom, she was soft, her voice gooey enough to get him to do anything gladly. He was the only one to see this side of her-not even their son, Christopher, had an inkling. He was acutely, almost painfully aware of the nature of her gift to him, but then his love for her ran so deep and strong that the first moment he had seen her take the stage for an audition at college he had been struck by a bolt of physical pain that had nearly felled him.

He was in the theater arts program then, learning the ins and outs of makeup design. Within a week, he would be painting her face for the stage, making her look older so that she could better fit the role she had won at the audition. She was a fine actress, even then, raw and untrained, for she had been born with the mind and the heart to recite lines as if they were her own thoughts and feelings.

He loved his work. The characters he created were for him more real than the actors themselves, whom he found vain and boring. When he was required to simulate blood or wounds he found novel ways of execution, for he dreamed of the violence that had caused these traumas, lived it, imagined it in such vivid detail that he never failed to win accolades from the faculty directors who over the four years came and went like clockwork.

Applying makeup to Lily was akin to making love to her. He felt strongly that he was transforming her not only outside but inside as well. She was, through him, becoming another person, an unknown quantity. At those times he felt a peculiar form of intimacy that was transcendent. He felt as if he was killing her, only to have her splendidly resurrected when she made her appearance on stage.

At first, she hadn't seemed interested in him, or at least she had contrived to remain aloof. That was her reputation, he had learned. More than one of his friends and acquaintances had counseled him to steer clear of her. Perversely, their warnings had only served to make him want her more. Desire was like a flood-tide inside him, threatening to sweep him away.

"You want me, you may think you want me," she had said to him in those early days, "but I know what you want."

She had startled him, but like everything she said or did, hidden inside the shock of her words was the truth: she had been interested enough in him to do the research. She did not strike him as the kind of person to waste her time on things that didn't matter to her. He was right. Six months after graduation they were engaged.

By that time, he had switched from makeup to set design, wanting to re-create reality in the largest sense possible. He had become bored by the tiny tasks involved in remaking faces. He required a bigger canvas for his imagination. In his widely hailed designs could be detected not only symbols from the playwrights' work, but for every major character. It was as if he had imagined each character, carefully hiding the most potent part of him somewhere in plain sight.

A year after that, they had a June wedding. It was beautiful- or, rather, Lily was beautiful in her shimmering satin gown with ephemeral tulle sleeves. There was, however, a flaw that marred the perfection. During the reception, he had gone to relieve himself and, upon returning, had seen Lily in close conversation with his cousin, Will. What enraged him beyond all reason was Will's hand rested on Lily's bare forearm. The white tulle of her sleeve had been drawn back like the intimate curtain in a boudoir, revealing that which should not be caressed by any outsider. It was unthinkable.

It took the best man and three of the ushers to wrench him off his cousin, whose face was by then a bloody pulp. Will couldn't even stand on his own, a fact that created a fierce elation in him as he was bound backward across the dance floor.

The band had been playing "We Are Family," and now they resumed, the first several bars as shaky as Will.

He stands spread-legged in front of the laboring air conditioner, which he is quite certain has had no Freon in it for years. At least the air, hot as it is, is moving. Lurid neon colors seep through the blades of the jalousie despite his best efforts to smother the outside world. There is a pool in the concrete courtyard below, or at any rate he thinks there is, remembering a blue-black oval he passed upon his arrival several days-or is it weeks?-ago. He could, he thinks, go down to the courtyard and fling his sweating body into the water. But perhaps that, too, is lukewarm like the water out of the faucet and he would sweat all the more with his exertions. In any case, he knows he will not take the chance. He is in his bunker now, the final resting place from which he has challenged his enemies to take him feetfirst.

Christopher was born six months after the wedding, but he wasn't a preemie. No, his birth was dead on time. He was a handsome child, with none of the gnomelike qualities many newborns exhibit. He had hair as blond as his mother's and her pink apple-blossom cheeks, but he had his father's musculature and sturdy build and, over the years, would grow into a larger, handsomer version of the man who had made him.

That is how he has always thought of himself in relation to his son, as if Lily was a mere receptacle for his seed, as if her genes had played no role in Christopher's physical or emotional makeup. Jesus, he hopes that is so.

And yet… He thinks of the day when Christopher found one of his early stage sets-a marvelous one-eighth size of colored cardboard, bits of wood and metal he'd done for the last act of Death of a Salesman. Christopher was-let's see-ten or eleven. The boy had plucked his old dog-eared copy off the shelf in his den-studio and had called his parents in to witness his performance. He'd played the part of Biff and he wasn't half-bad. Lily had encouraged him, of course, and for a while he'd taken acting lessons just as she had. But even then Christopher thought for himself. The chaos of acting, the publicness of performance proved too stressful. It was computers that fascinated him; he loved their precision and logic. For his first real project, he created software to change stage sets so that his father could fashion ever more intricate and complicated interiors and exteriors, cleverly mimicking reality in ways never before possible.

It was little wonder that this project-an artistic triumph, though with limited commercial value-led to a closeness with his son he could never have imagined. It was also the reason, he was convinced, that Christopher confided in him, rather than in the male companions his own age.

"They don't understand me, they don't have a clue as to who I am," Christopher told him one day.

And on others, during long walks, he confessed to his father his various love affairs. "They're all doomed, from the start," he said, "because even when I'm with them I can see how it's going to end, and this throws me into an agony of despair."

"Then, why don't you stop?" he had said.

"Because I can't," Christopher replied. "The first blush is transporting, there's no other feeling like it in the world."

He had been startled to discover that Christopher kept tokens of all his affairs-locks of hair, a few beads, an anklet, even the crushed butt of a cigarette on which was imprinted in pink the lips of his former beloved. He accepted this fetishism because he understood it, deeply and completely, but of course he never told Lily.

And then there was the time when he'd found Christopher standing at the open window of his room. It was in the dead of night, when the world was quiet and far away.

"What are you doing?" he asked his son.

"I'm imagining what it would be like to jump."

"Jump?" he had said, not quite understanding yet.