Лоуренс Блок - Random Walk - A Novel for a New Age

“Yeah, I thought so,” the boy said. “When we’re really confused, what we generally do is we go talk to Sara.”

“I’ve heard about her,” he said. “Everybody mentions her. Do you know her?”

“Well, kind of,” the boy said. “She’s my mom. Come on, I’ll introduce you.”

She was just as she’d been described, and he wondered why he hadn’t encountered her earlier. At one time or other he’d been at the front and middle and rear of the procession, but his eyes had never taken note of this gray-haired gray-eyed woman. It was hard to believe he could have missed her. She was quite striking in appearance, and, more than that, she had a remarkable presence. You could not be near her and remain unaware of her, or unconscious of her power.

The boy introduced them and she extended her hand. He wouldn’t have known she was blind, and even now he found it hard to credit. She looked straight at him, and her eyes seemed to be focused on his. He took her hand, and the current that ran through their bodies almost brought him to his knees.

“Oh,” she said.

And he felt her mind touch his, maneuvering to get a grip, extending fingers of thought that probed his mind and soul. He resisted for an instant, then relaxed some mental sphincter and let her in.

He felt all his emotions at once, fear and relief and shame and anger and dread, so many conflicting emotions with the gain turned so high on all of them that he quite literally did not know what he was feeling. It was like listening to a radio that got every station at the same time, and played all of them at ear-splitting volume. Hearing everything, you could make out nothing.

She was holding his right hand in hers. Without letting go she turned him so that they were facing in the same direction, and she slipped her left arm around his waist. She led him through the trees and across a clearing, told him to sit down, and sat down facing him, her legs folded. She extended both hands so that they rested palms-up on her knees, and, in obedience to an unvoiced command, he put his hands in hers. Again a current ran through him, and again he felt her mind grapple with his. She was in there with him, she was accessing his memory, she was looking at his life.

She said, “You’ve never told anyone.”

“No.”

“How could you stand it?”

“You don’t understand. I enjoyed it. I loved it.”

“And you never made contact with the part of you that didn’t love it. Not until today.” Her eyes regarded him, and he had to remind himself they were sightless. “Everything you’ve felt today has been in you since the first woman you killed. You just didn’t know it until now.”

“I want to die,” he said.

“No you don’t.”

“I do!”

“If you really did you’d be dead. Oh, a part of you wishes you were dead, but a bigger part wants to live. Everybody has a death wish and everybody has a life urge. As long as the life urge is stronger, you stay alive. When the death wish is stronger, you die. Why do you think you came here? Not to die. People don’t walk with us because they want to die. They walk into life, not into death. They come here to save themselves, to heal themselves.”

“And that’s what I did?”

“Of course.”

He shook his head, then remembered she couldn’t see the gesture. He said, “No, that’s not true. I came here—”

“To kill someone.”

“Yes.”

“To kill all the women you could. All the pretty ones.”

“Yes!”

“Well, who’s missing? Where should we look for the corpses?”

“I—”

“You’re an accomplished killer and we have plenty of pretty women with us. And you’ve been walking for how many hours? Eight or nine? How many did you kill?”

“None.”

“And you still think that’s what you came for?”

He remembered what the boy had said. When you were confused, you talked to Sara. He wondered why. The more he talked with her, the greater his confusion became.

He said, “I almost killed Kimberley.”

“I don’t know her. She must be fairly new. Tell me about it.” He did, and she said, “Yes, I’m sure she’s new. If she’d been here awhile you wouldn’t even have come that close to harming her. And you didn’t really come very close, you know. In your mind, your conscious mind, you were about to strangle her. In reality you were going to give her a massage. Kimberley picked up on the reality, not your perception of it, and she welcomed the massage, and that’s what you gave her.”

“But in another minute I would have—”

“Would have what? Would have killed her? No, Mark. You did what you would have done, in a minute or in all eternity. And you couldn’t have harmed Kimberley. Not many things can harm us on this walk, you see. The cold doesn’t freeze us and the sun doesn’t burn us, and with a few rare and not unpleasant exceptions, the rain doesn’t fall on us. Something protects us. And even if it didn’t, you can’t kill someone who isn’t ready to be killed. And we’re none of us ready to die because that’s not why we came here.”

“Something you just said.”

“That you can’t kill someone who isn’t ready to be killed.”

“Yes.”

“Did you think you were the Angel of Death? A terrible swift sword, a divine scythe harvesting women in their prime? How did you choose your victims? Did they run to type? Were they all classically beautiful?”

“No.” He thought. “They were women who attracted me.”

“And?”

“There was something about them,” he said. And then he remembered Missy Flanders in Wichita Falls, something in her that had cried out to him, that wouldn’t leave him alone until he had stabbed her in her bed. He reeled a little at the memory, and when he looked up Sara was nodding at him.

He said, “Are you telling me it was their fault?”

“It was their choice ,” she said. “Is it your fault they’re dead? No. Every death is a kind of suicide; the one who dies chooses it. You were the rope they used to hang themselves.”

“But—”

“So does that mean you’re blameless? Of course not! It was your choice, time and time again, to play that role in their lives, in their deaths.”

After a long moment he said, “What’s going to happen to me?”

“What do you think should happen?”

“I suppose you’ll have to turn me over to the police.”

“And then you’ll confess, and there will be headlines in the newspapers, and a trial, and you’ll go to prison or to a hospital. Perhaps you’ll even be executed. Is that what you want?”

“Isn’t it what I deserve?”

“I don’t know what anyone deserves. The only way to find out what you deserve is to wait and see what you get. Is that why you came here, Mark?”

“Here?”

“Here. On this walk. You didn’t come here to kill anyone, whether you thought so at the time or not. You came here because you were done with killing.”

“But I couldn’t stop. Even after I let that woman go in Sioux Falls, even after I knew I was sick of it, I killed another woman. I couldn’t stop myself.”

“Maybe you came here to stop.”

“Maybe I came here to be punished.”

She laughed. “Punished? You’re already being punished. The crime was the punishment. Your punishment started eight years ago when you committed your first murder. It’s been going on all along, distancing you, isolating you from the people you love, cutting you off from all the best portions of yourself. You’ve been punishing yourself all that time and today’s the first day you’ve been able to feel it.”

“I don’t like the way it feels.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t imagine you do.”