CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

The hustler’s mouth dropped open in a stupefying scream that never came. He breathed in to form the scream, and the fire plunged into his mouth and down his throat and it felt as if it were in his own lungs, burning and searing tender vital tissue.

The hustler twisted once, convulsively, and toppled.

The monitor hissed like a thousand serpents and the screen replayed the instant again and again, the man’s death flickering across the screen while the image broke and re-formed, broke and re-formed, like momentary interruptions of transmission during a thunderstorm.

Dying. Dead. Dying. Dead. Again and again.

And now the scene was interspersed with similar scenes in which the man at the center was not the boy.

First there was one man, dark and young and once arrogant but now broken in spirit and body. Then another man joined the first; this one was not so young, not so arrogant. This man had suffered more than any of them. Something about him suggested years, decades of torturous non-existence imprisoned through the perverted will of one brilliantly insane woman.

The episodes wound around each other, cutting back and forth among the three with a dizzying speed. Each time Alan appeared, his image was sharper, crisper, more defined—and the other two watched his agonies as if through them they could find even minimal ease from their own. The three drew closer and closer to the center of the screen, the figure circling them exactly the way the phantom was circling Alan’s now lifeless body.

Finally the three men blended into one, and the shadows that filled the room swirled and spun and the air reeked the acrid tang of burning flesh; and the ghastly remnants of Alan’s body were engulfed in flickering blue and the figure swept through the flames with her hands and pulled the fire into her, onto her, laving her arms and breasts and shoulders with the living flame that reveled in the essence of death.

She turned toward where Payne lay unconscious on the floor. Her lips—even more substantial now, thin and cruel and tight—curled in a parody of a smile. She moved toward him, gliding more than walking.

She bent over to touch him, to re-enter him permanently and forever.

Or at least until that body grew old and withered and diseased and it was time to find yet another.

The screen crackled.

She looked up at it.

It showed a new scene. Someone—that damned busybody woman that didn’t know when to leave well enough alone—was on the porch, reaching out to ring the bell.

Time froze for an instant, then the figure faded visibly.

Streams of electrical fire tore from her flesh and were pulled back into the lenses of the cameras; the rest of her body dissipated into insubstantiality like a fog bank on a bright, hot morning and was absorbed silently by the dead-white walls.

On the screen, the woman’s outstretched finger came closer to the black button staring out from the monk’s cowl of the doorbell.

When the bell buzzed, the living room suddenly flared with light and then the lights died completely.