Dean Koontz - Your Heart Belongs To Me

As Ryan watched her walk away from him, he wondered who she was when she wasn’t on the job for Wilson Mott. Might the cold gray gaze be most indicative of the real woman-or might the musical laugh and elfin eyes be the truth of her?

He was no longer confident that he could discover the essential truth of anyone.

He returned to the Mercedes sedan, where George Zane waited.

On the way back to the hotel, seen through the tinted windows, the world seemed to change subtly but continuously before Ryan’s weary eyes-flattened by sunlight, bent by shadow, every surface harder than he remembered it, every edge sharper-until it seemed that this was not the Earth to which he had been born.

From the hotel, using his cell rather than the disposable phone, Ryan Perry called Samantha because he had promised to do so in the few lines he had written on her kitchen notepad the previous night.

He was relieved to get her voice mail. He claimed to have flown to Denver on unexpected business and said he would be home Tuesday.

He also said he loved her, and it sounded like the truth to him.

Although he rarely drank wine before dinner, he ordered a half bottle of Lancaster Cabernet Sauvignon with his room-service lunch.

He had intended to visit the casino where Rebecca Reach worked as a blackjack dealer. He wanted to get a look at her in the flesh.

Although he hadn’t intended to play at her table, it now seemed unwise even to observe her from a distance. If she had read her daughter’s article in Vanity Fair, she had seen photos of Ryan.

Perhaps Rebecca remained in contact with her daughter, contrary to what Samantha had said, in which case she must not catch a glimpse of Ryan here when he claimed to be in Denver.

After lunch, he hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door. Relaxed by the wine, he stretched out fully clothed on the bed.

Hard desert light pressed at the edges of the closed draperies, but the room was cool, shadowy, narcoleptic.

He dreamed of the city under the sea. Lurid light streamed through the abyss, projecting tormented shadows across shrines, towers, palaces, up bowers of sculptured ivy and stone flowers.

Drifting along strangely lit yet dark streets, he moved less like a swimmer than like a ghost. Soon he realized he was following a spectral figure, a pale something or someone.

When his quarry glanced back, she was Ismay Clemm; the paleness was her nurse’s uniform. Ryan had an urgent question, though he could not remember it. Throughout his dream, he never drew close enough to Ismay for his voice to carry to her through the drowned streets.

Daylight was waning beyond the draperies when he woke. In a lake of darkness, the suite’s furniture loomed like gray islands.

Whether or not the soft insistent rapping had awakened him, Ryan heard it now. The disorientation that accompanied the sudden disembarkation from a dream slowly ebbed, until he identified the adjoining chamber as the source of the sound.

In the living room, he switched on a lamp, and the rapping drew him to the door. He put one eye to the lens that gave him a wide view of the public corridor, but no one stood out there.

Now that Ryan was fully awake, the tap-tap-tap seemed to come from a living-room window that offered an expansive view of the Las Vegas Strip.

At the horizon, the blood-drop sun pressed on jagged mountains, swelled, burst, and streamed red across the western heavens.

Here on the eleventh floor, nothing cast itself against the window except the blinking lights and throbbing neon of the casinos that, with nightfall, used luminous titillation and sham glamour to lure the moneyed herd in the street toward penury.

Turning from the window, Ryan heard the soft knock coming from a different direction. He followed it to the bathroom door, which he had left closed.

The door could only be latched from the inside. No one would be in there, knocking to be let out.

Hesitantly, with an increasing sense that he was in jeopardy, he stepped into the bathroom, switched on the light, and blinked in the dazzle of bright reflections.

A new hollow, sonorous quality to the sound suggested that it might be issuing from a drainpipe. After he opened the shower door and then bent to each of the two sinks, he still could not identify the source.

Drawn back into the bedroom, Ryan now thought the tap-tap-tap came from the big plasma-screen TV, although he had never switched it on.

You must not listen, child.

The sudden deterioration of his health had left him emotionally vulnerable. He began to wonder about his mental stability.

On the nightstand, the disposable cell phone rang.

When Ryan answered it, George Zane said, “The way is clear for your second visit. I’ll be out front in half an hour with the car.”

Ryan pressed END, put down the phone, and waited for the rapping sound to begin again.

The persistent silence didn’t quell his unfocused anxiety. He had not let anyone into the suite, yet he felt that he was no longer alone.

Resisting the irrational urge to search every corner and closet, he took a quick shower. When steam clouded the glass door, he wiped it away to maintain a clear view of the bathroom.

Dressed and ready for the night, he felt neither refreshed nor less concerned about the possible presence of another in the suite. Surrendering to paranoia, he searched closets, behind furniture.

He tried the sliding door to the balcony. Locked. No one was out there anyway.

In the spacious foyer, he glanced at his reflection in the mirror above the console. Although he half expected someone to appear in the suite behind him, no one did.

Spencer Barghest, indicted twice for murder in Texas and twice found innocent, lived in a middle-class neighborhood of single-story ranch houses.

After George Zane drove past the address to park half a block away and across the street from the Barghest residence, Ryan walked back to the house.

The warm night air was so dry that it would not support the fragrances of trees and flowering shrubs, only the generic alkaline scent of the desert upon which the city had encroached but over which it had not triumphed.

Landscape spotlights, fixed high in lacy melaleucas, cast on the front walkway leaf shadows so crisp they ought to have crunched underfoot.

Light glowed behind the curtained windows, and the nameless brunette with the soft mouth and the stony eyes greeted him before he could ring the bell.

Inside, as the woman closed the door behind them, Ryan said, “How long do I have?”

“Three or four hours at least. He’s out to dinner with Rebecca Reach.”

“They take that long for dinner?”

“Dinner and horizontal dancing at her place. According to our sources, Barghest is a Viagra cowboy. There’s not a day he doesn’t take a dose and ride.”

“Dr. Death is a Don Juan?”

“You’re giving him too much credit. He’s a slut.”

“What if they come back here?”

“They won’t. Maybe a few nut-case women find this decor arousing, but most don’t. Rebecca’s one who doesn’t.”

In the living room, she showed him what she meant. In addition to the expected furniture, there were two dead men, one dead woman, all naked.

Having read a newspaper story about exhibitions of cadaver art touring fine museums and galleries and universities nationwide, Ryan knew at once that these were not sculptures, not mere representations of dead people. They were painstakingly preserved corpses.

These dead had been treated with antibacterial solutions, drying agents, and numerous preservatives. Thereafter they were submerged in polyurethane, which sealed them in an airtight glaze that prevented decomposition, and were strapped to armatures supporting them in various postures.