He’d calculated the dose so that he would be peaking right around the time when the murder was complete, and he’d returned to the safety of his own hidden car to bask in the afterglow, relishing and reliving each perfectly executed moment. He kept a notebook in his glove box, and that’s where he would compose his next epic letter for the local newspaper, describing the killing in glorious detail and taunting the hapless authorities.
If he was lucky, he might even get to watch the discovery of the bodies, and the investigation in process. That was his favorite part, watching the police and their pathetic, ineffectual flailing. It was like watching insects drowning in a gob of his spit.
It was time.
He was ready.
He pulled on his gloves, then slid the gun from his waistband and strode purposefully over to the passenger-side door of the Lynx.
The windows were down, and an infuriatingly banal pop song was bubbling out of the radio. The girl was wearing an unflattering, baggy floral print dress that looked like she’d borrowed it from a maiden aunt. Up close, it was clear that her blond bouffant was a cheap wig. Its coarse, synthetic texture was deeply disturbing to Allan’s chemically enhanced mind, reminiscent of dead insect legs and abandoned cocoons.
The shadows around his ankles struck up a high-pitched keening. Something was wrong.
Run, the shadows cried.
The girl turned toward him in horrible, unnatural slow motion and he was frozen, riveted, unable to look away.
“Police,” she said. “Drop your weapon.”
There was a gun in her thick, hairy hand. She wasn’t a girl at all. She was a man. A police officer. And so was her cocky date. Both of them were staring him down with steely eyes as cold and professional as the bores of their guns.
He was the one who’d let himself get too cocky, and now he would have to pay for his arrogance.
2
Walter looked longingly into the cooler, at a bottle of grape Nehi. Its gracious, almost feminine shape shimmered with lush condensation and he was suddenly convinced that this particular bottle contained an elixir of perfect, exquisite refreshment the likes of which had never been experienced by mere mortals. Its mysterious deep purple hue seemed profoundly significant.
Ordinary purple was at the very bottom of the CIE 1931 color space chromaticity diagram, and represented one of the limits of human color perception. Yet this purple seemed to contain elusive, twisting glints of a color that was just beyond the normal range. If he were to ingest such a color, he felt sure that it would instantly bond itself to the rhodopsin inside the photoreceptor cells of his retina, and endow him with a new, unprecedented kind of vision.
He reached for the bottle and it slipped, mercurylike, out of his grasp. Taunting him.
“Note,” Bell said, writing in a small red notebook. “Initial onset of hallucinogenic effect observed at...” He looked down at his watch. “10:17 p.m.”
“Fifty-four minutes from ingestion,” Walter said. “That’s almost twenty minutes faster than the previous formula.”
He looked back at the seductive bottle of grape Nehi and saw that it had transformed into a small, purpleskinned woman with white, finger-waved hair and a hat shaped like a bottle cap. She undulated gracefully amid the ice cubes, seemingly unaffected by the cold beneath her tiny bare feet. The other bottles became women, too, and within minutes the entire cooler had become a miniature Busby Berkeley musical number, complete with synchronized swimming in the water from the melted ice.
While such a hallucination was cute and charming, it wasn’t particularly significant, or unusual. Walter needed to focus, to meditate and look inward, to try and elevate his consciousness to a higher level.
He turned away from the cooler and looked out over the surface of Reiden Lake.
* * *
A searing beam of light from a stealthy police zeppelin flooded the scene, half blinding Allan and causing a nauseating burst of agitated color around the edges of everything. His mounting anxiety was amplifying and intensifying the effect of the acid, but he had to keep it together. Had to use his superior intellect to beat these animals.
He knew what he had to do.
He dropped the gun and held up his hands.
“That’s it,” the cop in the wig said, reaching for the handle of the Lynx’s door. “Now go on and back up. Nice and slow.”
“Yes, sir,” Allan said, smirking inside.
This was his chance.
He did as he was ordered, but cheated his step toward the overlook. There was a low log rail edging the parking area, then a thirty-foot drop down an eroding bank to the sand dunes and sawgrass of the small public beach below.
The two undercover cops started shouldering out of the car. For a split second, their attentions were divided. Their guns lost their aim in the shuffle.
Allan jumped.
A lesser man, a weaker man, might have broken his leg falling down that cliff. Or maybe even his neck.
Allan was not a lesser man.
He was in peak physical condition. Strong, powerful, and at the top of his game. Even in his altered state, he maintained perfect balance and presence of mind. As heavy as he was, he could be as graceful as a cat when he needed to be.
The slope wasn’t entirely vertical—more like an eighty-five percent grade, he judged. He went down facing inward, hands crossed in front of his eyes and the steel toe tips of his combat boots digging into the crumbly clay to slow his descent. Still, it was a hard landing, buckling his knees and jarring his brain, and he crouched, gasping in the sawgrass for precious seconds.
His heart pounded unnaturally loud in his ears, Mandelbrot patterns spiraling in the corners of his eyes.
Not very catlike at all, he thought with irritation.
Above him, he could hear the pigs swearing. The dust kicked up by their frantic feet drifted out over the edge of the drop, transformed into glowing white ectoplasm lit by the dirigible’s searchlight. Then a bewigged head peered over the edge, silhouetted in the luminous cloud.
“Where the hell is he?” one gruff voice called.
“I can’t see a damn thing down there!” the other replied.
Just as Allan had planned. The blinding glare of the searchlight had turned the shadow of the cliff into impenetrable blackness. Within it, he was invisible.
“Come on, Charlie,” the first pig said to the other. “We gotta find a way down.”
Allan rose to his feet as the cop thudded off to the left, heading for the curving railroad-tie stair that led from the overlook to the beach. His knees sent spinning purple and red pinwheels of glowing pain into the night, lighting him up. He froze, suddenly certain that the police would be able to see his every step.
Keep it together. It’s just the acid. They can’t see you. He was the only one who could see the pain.
He limped to the right, hugging the base of the embankment and heading for cover of the pinewoods on the south edge of the beach. Before he got halfway there, the basso profundo rumble of the dirigible’s engines fired up, sending throbbing black pulses through his brain. The police blimp was on the move, edging out over the beach. His sheltering shadow began to narrow.
Then there was no more shadow except for the lurching black shape directly below him. The white beam of light smashed down on his shoulders with the weight of a waterfall, slowing him, trying to crush him to his knees.
“Stop or we’ll shoot!” a distant voice called, faint and nearly lost under the deep hum of the dirigible’s engine.
Allan glanced back the way he had come. The cops had reached the beach and were running toward him, guns out, kicking up the sand with their piggy cloven feet.