Leaving Sam the Sham, Bryan next looked in upon the bigshot hero jackass and, by association, his bitch-cop partner. They were i n the hero’s Honda, pulling into the driveway of a contemporary house with weathered-cedar siding and lots of big windows, high in the hills. They were talking. Couldn’t hear what they were saying.
Animated. Serious. The two cops got out of the car, unaware that they were being observed. Bryan looked around. He recognized the neighborhood because he had lived all his life in Laguna Beach, but he didn’t know to whom the house belonged.
In a few minutes he would visit Lyon and Gulliver more directly.
Finally he tuned in on Janet Marco and her ragamuffin child, where they were huddled in their dilapidated Dodge in the parking lot beside the Methodist Church. The boy appeared to be asleep on the back seat. The mother was behind the steering wheel, slumped down in the seat and against the driver’s door. She was wide awake, keeping a watch on the night around the car.
He had promised to kill them at dawn, and intended to meet his self-imposed deadline. Dealing with them and two cops, after recently expending so much energy to torment and waste Enrique Estefan, would be taxing. But with a nap or two between now and sunrise, with a couple of bags of potato chips and some cookies and possibly another sundae, he believed he would be able to crush all of them in ways that would be wonderfully satisfying.
Ordinarily he would manifest himself through a golem at least two or three times during the last six hours of the mother’s and son’s lives, harassing them to bring the sharpest possible edge to their terror. Killing was pure pleasure, intense and orgiastic. But the hours — and sometimes days — of torment that preceded most of his killings were almost as much fun as the moment when, at last, blood flowed. He was excited by the fear the cattle showed, by the horror and awe that he engendered in them; he was thrilled by their stunned disbelief and hysteria when they failed in their pathetic attempts to hide or run, as they all did sooner or later. But with Janet Marco and her boy, he would have to forego the foreplay, visit them only once more, at dawn, when they would receive a bill of pain and blood for having polluted the world with their presence.
Bryan needed to conserve his energy for the bigshot cop. He wanted the great and mighty hero to suffer more torment than usual. Humble him. Break him. Reduce him to a begging, sniveling baby. There was a coward in the hotshot hero. Cowards hid in all of them. Bryan intended to make the coward crawl on his belly, reveal what a weakling he really was, a jellyfish, nothing but a fraidy-cat hiding behind his badge and gun. Before he killed the two cops, he was going to run them to exhaustion, take them apart piece by piece, and make them wish they had never been born.
He stopped far-seeing and withdrew from the Dodge in the church parking lot. He returned his full consciousness to his body on the master-bedroom balcony.
High waves tilted out of the lightless west and crashed onto the shore below, reminding Bryan Drackman of the gleaming highrises in the cities of his dreams, which toppled to the pull of his power and drowned millions of screaming people in tides of glass and splintered steel.
When he had completed his Becoming, he would never need to rest again or preserve energy. His power would be that of the universe, endlessly renewable and beyond measure.
He returned to the black bedroom and slid the balcony door shut behind him.
He slipped off his red robe.
Naked, he stretched out on the bed, head propped up on two goose-down pillows in black silk cases.
A few slow, deep breaths. Close the eyes. Make the body limp. Clear the mind. Relax.
In less than a minute he was ready to create. He projected a substantial measure of his consciousness to the side yard of the modern house with weathered-cedar siding and big windows, high in the hills, where the cop’s Honda stood in the driveway.
The nearest streetlamp was half a block away. Shadows were everywhere and deep.
In the deepest, a section of the lawn began to churn. The grass folded into the earth beneath it as if an invisible tilling machine was at work, and the dirt boiled up with only a soft, wet sound like thick cake batter being folded over a rubber spatula. All of it — grass, soil, stones, dead leaves, earthworms, beetles, a cigar box containing the feathers and crumbled bones of a pet parakeet buried by a child long ago — rose in a swarthy, seething column as tall and broad as a large man.
Out of that mass, the hulking figure took shape from the top down. The hair appeared first, tangled and greasy. Then the beard. A mouth cracked open. Crooked, discolored teeth sprouted. Lips with oozing sores.
One eye opened. Yellow. Malevolent. Inhuman.
11
He is in a dark alley, padding along, seeking the scent of the thing-that-will-kill-you, knowing he’s lost it but sniffing for it anyway because of the woman, because of the boy, because he’s a good dog, good.
Empty can, metal smell, rust. Puddle of rainwater, drops of oil shining on top. Dead bee floating in the water. Interesting. Not as interesting as a dead mouse but interesting.
Bees fly, bees buzz, bees hurt you like a cat can hurt you, but this bee is dead. First dead bee he’s ever seen. Interesting, that bees can die. He can’t remember ever seeing a dead cat, either, so now he wonders if cats can die like bees.
Funny to think maybe cats can die.
What could kill them?
They can go straight up trees and places nothing else can go, and slash your nose with their sharp claws so fast you don’t see it coming, so if something is out there that kills cats, it can’t be good for dogs either, not good at all, something quicker than cats and mean.
Interesting.
He moves along the alley.
Somewhere in a people place, meat is cooking. He licks his chops because he’s still hungry.
Piece of paper. Candy wrapper. Smells good. He puts a paw on it to hold it down, and licks it. The wrapper tastes good. He licks, licks, licks, but that’s all of it, not much, just a little sweet on the paper. That’s the way it usually is, a few licks or bites and then it’s all gone, seldom as much as he wants, never more than he wants.
He sniffs the paper just to be sure, and it sticks to his nose, so he shakes his head, flinging the paper free. It swoops up into the air and then floats along the alley on the breeze, up and down, side to side, like a butterfly. Interesting. All of a sudden alive and flying. How can that be? Very interesting. He trots after it, and it floats up there, so he jumps, snaps at it, misses, and now he wants it, really wants it, has to have it, jumps, snaps, misses. What’s going on here, what is this thing? Just a paper and now it’s flying like a butterfly. He really really really needs it. He trots and jumps and snaps and gets it this time, chews on it, but it’s only paper, so he spits it out. He stares at it, stares and stares at it, waiting, watching, ready to pounce, not going to be fooled, but it doesn’t move any more, dead as the bee.
Policeman-wolf-thing! The thing-that-will-kill-you.
That strange and hateful scent suddenly comes to him on a breeze from the sea, and he twitches. He sniffs, seeking. The bad thing is out in the night, standing in the night, somewhere near the sea.
He follows the odor. At first it is faint, almost fading away at times, but then it grows stronger. He begins to get excited. He is getting closer, not yet really close, but a little closer all the time, moving from alley to street to park to alley to street again. The bad thing is the strangest, most interesting thing he has ever smelled, ever.