Bell was lost, gone forever, and Walter was alone.
Alone.
Then he felt a hand on his arm, pulling him roughly upward.
Walter broke the surface of the lake with the desperate gasp of a newborn, hands clutching at Bell’s soaking wet shirt.
“God damn it, Walter,” Bell said. “When you went under... Man, I thought I’d lost you.”
He hugged Walter way too hard.
“Where is...” Walter sputtered, pulling back from the embrace, coughing and spitting algae-tainted water out of his burning throat. “...that man...? Was he real?”
“I saw him, too,” Bell said. “A truly remarkable shared hallucination, unlike anything I’ve ever experienced.” He slung his arm around Walter’s shoulders, helping him to the shore. “But then, out of nowhere, the trip turned dark and heavy, with all these images of blood and murder.
“And then you went down, under the surface of the water. By the time I was able to find you and pull you out, my adrenalin must have burnt off any residual effects of the drug. Right now I feel pretty damn straight.” He shook his head. “Too straight. How about you? How do you feel?”
Walter looked around. The lake was quiet, pristine and calm. Their cheerful little Coleman lantern on the shore was burning low, nearly out of fuel. The cooler was still there, too, sitting right beside the lantern, filled with perfectly ordinary soda. No sign of any tiny women. No kind of cosmic gateway, and no one there but him and Bell.
But the gateway, the stranger, and those awful bloody visions. They’d all seemed so real.
“Belly,” Walter said. “We are never using that formula again.”
4
Allan was cold, wet and terrified, and was having an extremely hard time distinguishing reality from hallucination. At first he had imagined that he’d fallen through some kind of gateway into another dimension, but now that he was starting to come down off his trip, the very concept sounded absurd. He found himself in the same old ordinary world.
Same dirt, same trees, same lake.
He took a moment to lean against the rough bark of a massive oak tree and collect his disjointed thoughts. How much of what had happened to him that night was real, and how much was pure hallucination?
Had he imagined the couple in the car? The entire encounter with the cops? There certainly was no sign of them now. No zeppelins overhead, no prowlers on the overlook, no baying dogs. Nothing. Even the crickets had fallen silent.
As much as it humiliated him to picture himself running alone through the woods, striking out against imaginary attackers, he was certainly happy to find himself a free man.
That’s when he noticed the handcuffs.
One manacle was clamped tight around his left wrist, and the other dangled, open. The metal was cool to the touch, and as solid as the ground under his feet. He must have had some kind of encounter with the police, at some point during all that madness. He certainly hadn’t handcuffed himself.
But where the hell were they now?
And what about those two kids in the water, the ones who seemed to be able to read his mind. He could still see their faces, so vividly—particularly the soft, almost girlish face of the long-haired hippie in the baggy tweed jacket. It was as if the kid had looked right into his brain, and barged his way in to Allan’s most treasured fantasies. That sense of unexpected intimacy was more than he could take.
And he could still feel the tactile sensation when he had shoved the kid away, plunging his frizzy-haired head down into the water before bolting for the shore.
But now, he couldn’t help but wonder if he’d imagined that, too.
Clearly the only option was to return home and get some sleep. He was chilled and frazzled and running on fumes as he trudged down the long, winding deer path that would take him back to the spot where he’d hidden his car. Tomorrow, he would check the papers and scan the police band, and see if he could piece together what the hell had happened.
* * *
His car was gone.
It wasn’t just gone, it was as if it had never been there. There were no tire tracks. The place were he had parked was overrun with lanky, fragile white flowers that couldn’t possibly have grown up in the time he’d been gone.
Yet there had to be an explanation.
Could he have forgotten where he had left his car?
No, he didn’t forget things. And he could never have forgotten something like that. After all, Allan was a meticulous man, who prided himself on the attention he paid to the smallest details. His rigid adherence to each plan was what allowed him the freedom to drop acid in the midst of a murder, because he knew that no matter what happened, he could always count on the careful preparations he’d made while he was sober.
But there was no other place to hide a car on this side of the lake. He hadn’t seen it along the side of the deserted road, or at the overlook where he’d first spotted—or thought he spotted—the young couple who turned out to be cops.
No, his car must have been stolen.
The notebook.
His notebook was in the glove box of his car.
He felt a deep throbbing panic rise up in his guts. If his car had been stolen, then the notebook was stolen, too. That notebook was everything to him. It was the place were he gave voice to all his private demons and dark fantasies, and kept a meticulous record of every aspect of each one of his killings.
There was absolutely no way he could be incriminated by the contents of that notebook, because the police were far too intellectually inferior to crack his ingenious private ciphers. But just the thought of a random stranger turning those pages and holding the repository of his most private and sacred thoughts in their grubby little hands—it made him physically ill.
I’m starting to lose it.
Hands trembling, sweating, heart racing. Although he was no longer actively hallucinating, he couldn’t shake the feeling that everything around him was abnormal.
The acid he’d taken must have been tainted somehow. That was the only logical answer to explain the bizarre, impossible events of the evening. All he could do now was to find a way to get himself home safely, and ride out the rest of this awful trip until the poison had run its course. He could come back out to Reiden Lake and look for his car in the morning.
For now he just needed wheels. Any wheels.
There was one lonely vehicle parked on the side of Lakeshore Drive. It had Massachusetts plates, but looked foreign. The unfamiliar brand name on the bumper, “Chevrolet,” sounded French or something. But the design of the car wasn’t entirely unlike the kind of standard American muscle cars made by Edsel or Hobart.
But that was irrelevant. What was important was that the door wasn’t locked, and he found the keys under the driver’s side visor, so he didn’t have to figure out how to hotwire a foreign car. Lucky for him, everything else about it was relatively normal, though curiously designed.
He redlined it all the way home.
* * *
It was nearly dawn by the time he made it to his house in Remsen. He ditched the stolen car several blocks away and walked the remaining distance home, left hand in his pocket to hide the cuffs.
First things first. He went directly in to the garage, planning to remove the handcuffs with a hacksaw. But inside the garage, everything had been rearranged. His tools, which he’d kept for years hanging on a custom built pegboard on the western wall above his workbench, were gone, replaced by floor-to-ceiling shelving full of what looked like gardening supplies. Big dusty sacks of grass seed, fertilizer and vermiculite.