Reading about yourself twenty years before was bittersweet, Artie thought. Charlie had been something of a naive writer at the start, but he hadn’t missed much. He’d had a flair for characterization and description, even if his vocabulary had been that of a teenager, and he had been a meticulous chronicler of times and places. The later diaries were undoubtedly more sophisticated, but Artie couldn’t believe they’d be as interesting to read.
You forgot so much: the characters drifting in and out of the coffee shop, a lot of students and a thick scattering of hippies. The early members of the Club would sit around a little table in back, sipping coffee and picking out which of the younger patrons might be interested in joining and those whom they wanted to ask. Arch—was anybody still named Archibald?—had been a jock from State and laughed a lot when they asked him to join, thinking they were putting him on. When he was convinced they were serious, he said he thought it would be a hoot. He had been the first to reach the top of the north tower of the bridge.
Arch. Gone now, a boobytrap in ’Nam. Screamed his lungs out until they got him to an evac unit and then he slipped away from an overdose of morphine. What
the hell, it was front-line medical and everybody was so scared they were pissing in their pants; you couldn’t blame them for occasional mistakes. Arch probably wouldn’t have made it anyway.
A friend of Arch’s had enlisted with him, and after being mustered out dropped in at the coffee shop to tell somebody, anybody, what had happened. How long had it been since he’d thought of Arch now? Ten years? Fifteen? If he ever wanted to feel guilty about something, he could always pick on that.
And the other members as they had drifted in. Mitchell Levin, toothy and nerdy and wearing John Lennon glasses even back then. Smart, the kind who bragged about it. His family had lived in the St. Francis Wood district and he’d gone to a private high school and bragged about that, too. But what you saw wasn’t what you got. He’d had a wicked sense of humor, had taken martial arts classes along with Shakespeare and the History of the Renaissance, was fond of camping trips, and even had a small gun collection back then, carefully hidden from his father, who was one of the city’s leading cardiologists.
Artie smiled to himself. Maybe it was because Mitch had been a fan of the Three Stooges that they’d gotten along so well. It had been strictly serendipity when they’d met up in ’Nam and he’d asked to be transferred to Mitch’s unit. Intelligence was better than front-line duty, but then, to Artie’s regret, the friendship had turned formal. It had been “Sergeant, I’d like you to do this” and “Yes, sir” unless things were really hairy and there was no time for bullshit. He’d been damned glad once the war was over and the friendship got back to normal. Or had it?
Larry Shea had been your typical average guy, so average they’d debated whether to ask him to join. He’d wanted to be a doctor even back then and had found a pigeon in Golden Gate Park with a busted wing, set it, and nursed the bird back to health. There
was no debate after that; everybody wanted him in, even Mitch. Charlie Allen had been Larry’s buddy and Larry had campaigned hard for him. For his part, Charlie had a flair for making himself useful. And he bugged them, showing up on escapades whether he was asked or not, dogging their footsteps no matter where they went. Finally it had been easier to ask him in than to try to keep him out.
Lyle had won the women’s vote. He was somewhat surly, somewhat mysterious, and overwhelmingly sexy. A star of State’s wrestling team, a below-average student, probably because he was a pothead but nobody had really objected to that—if you wanted a lid, Lyle could always turn you on to one.
The women had been something else. Mary had a stocky build and was somewhat self-conscious about it. She had been a music buff even back then, though she had no favorite among the rock groups—she liked them all. Her idea of a good time was to hang out at a rock concert, any rock concert. Somebody had reported seeing her going to the opera one night, but the idea was so outrageous that nobody had believed it.
She also loved art, and that was when Artie had become interested. She not only liked it, she studied it, and when he went to the museum with her it was like having his own private docent to explain the artists and their paintings. Mary had been his opposite, Artie thought. She had been energetic and extroverted. He had been fairly quiet, a bookworm with the saving grace of cycling and playing handball so he wasn’t stoop-shouldered by age twenty.
It was Mary who had introduced him to sex, though he realized later that she had taken pity on him. He had tormented himself about masturbation; he hadn’t been willing to admit that he was hormonally driven and had instead blamed it on his lack of enough courage to approach a girl. Mary had figured out the cause
behind his occasional moody silences and invited him over for dinner when her roommates were away for the weekend, suggesting they play cards afterwards.
It had been a strange way to spend the evening, but he’d shrugged and thought, Why not? Mary had teased him into strip poker—later insisting it was his idea, which was all part of her therapy—and when he was naked and could no longer hide his feelings, Mary had sex with him. His first impression was that she had more teeth than the shark in Jaws. It was more comfortable face-to-face, but it was all over impossibly soon. Mary went out of her way to compliment him and help build up his ego. For all of a day or two afterward he’d lorded it over the girls in the Club because he had a prick and they didn’t. Mary and he had slept together several more times after that until he figured out that for Mary it was more of a mercy fuck, and for himself it was because of loneliness. But they had been good friends ever since.
Until now.
After he had come back from ’Nam, it was Mary who had introduced him to Susan Albright, a widow with a two-year-old son. It had been love if not at first sight, then certainly by third. Ordinarily a little reserved and more thoughtful than adventurous, Susan was anything but that in bed. Mary had showed him how, but it was Susan who taught him to let go and enjoy the intricacies of lovemaking. One time when he’d held back—because, as Susan had told him afterward, of outdated “moral” reasons—she’d defiantly said, “It’s my body and I’ll do what I want with it,” then smiled and added boldly, “and so should you.”
But she soon became a lot more than a bed partner. When he walked into a room and she was there, he knew his eyes lit up and so did hers. He liked her, he finally decided. He liked the way she moved, her sense of self, how she thought and, of course, the fact that she liked him, that she seemed to like everything about
him. When he realized she had become his best friend, he asked her to marry him. She had known he would all along; the only thing she had wondered about was when.
In his own mind—though not in Charlie’s diaries—the other women seemed to play a minor role. Jenny had been the quiet goddess, the good scout who went everyplace you did and did everything you did and somehow never got her hair out of place. He couldn’t remember her using much makeup but she was still a knockout. Quiet, too quiet, and she eventually gravitated to the company of Mary, who was brash and outspoken enough for both of them.
Franny had been the plump girl, too much aware that she was overweight, too anxious to please, too eager to do whatever the group wanted to do. She could be depended upon to show up with sandwiches and cookies for whatever trip they went on, sort of a self-nominated commissary. Charlie had caught her one day in a corner of the coffee shop crying to herself about her awkwardness when it came to the men in the Club. He had felt sorry for her, and they were a couple ever after. No regrets, Charlie had written enthusiastically. He’d found a diamond in the rough that all the others had overlooked. What he didn’t admit in the diary was that Franny had figured out the road to his heart was through his stomach and, in his case, it had been a freeway.
Cathy had been the strangest one of the group. A beautiful girl who worried about her figure, worried about her complexion, worried that even in ordinary conversations she might say the wrong thing. She was driven by her insecurities and finally found a way to triumph over them, if only for a short time. She liked sex—a lot—and she was very good at it. It was in bed that she felt the most secure. It was the one place where she didn’t have to worry about doing the wrong thing, because the “wrong” thing was usually the most
exciting. And in bed, she had power over the boys.
According to Charlie’s diaries, she spent a lot of time there.
But Charlie had been curious and didn’t stop at merely reporting it. He had wanted to know why. As a fat little kid he had known what insecurity was all about—he’d had bouts of it himself—and wondered why a beautiful girl like Cathy should be insecure about anything. Her family was well off, the boys fell all over her, and she was certainly no dummy.
So, according to his diary, Charlie got himself invited over to the house for dinner and met the family. Her father had been a vice-president of Wells Fargo, her mother a socialite who went to every opera and play opening in town. She was very proud that she could call most of the singers and actors and actresses by their first names. There had been several members of the touring cast of Jesus Christ, Superstar at the house for dinner the night Charlie was there, and he had been properly impressed.
It was in Charlie’s third diary that Artie found what he was looking for.
Cathy’s great ambition in the world had been to be an actress.
But according to Charlie—Artie had no idea how he’d found out—her mother had discouraged her. Not that she disapproved of the profession, but compared to the professionals she’d met, her daughter had no talent and the mother didn’t want her disgracing the family.
The lack of approval had bled into all phases of Cathy’s life: she was no good at that, she was no good at anything.
But her mother’s disapproval hadn’t dampened her ambitions. She’d decided she needed a guru when it came to acting and she’d found one in the Club, one who’d played bit parts when touring companies filled out their casts with locals. One who had already made
inroads in the suburban theater scene playing juveniles.
The laugh-a-minute cutup, everybody’s friend, one who knew by heart every play on Broadway since the Depression and could regale you for hours on end with anecdotes that he’d plucked out of actors’ biographies and tell-all books about Broadway and Hollywood.
One who even then was talking about starting his own theater company.
Dave Chandler.
But hardly anybody had known about Cathy’s secret desire. She had kept her ambitions under wraps until she was “ready,” and in Charlie’s estimation—he’d caught her in a minor role in a play Chandler had directed for summer stock—she was never going to be ready. A year later she finally bit the bullet, acknowledged her lack of talent, and married Larry Shea, the runner-up for her affections. Whatever else he was, Chandler wasn’t the marrying sort.
Had she ever gotten over Chandler, to whom she had undoubtedly given heart, body, and soul? Charlie Allen’s precise handwriting indicated that he didn’t think so and expressed sympathy for Larry.
Artie put the diary aside and walked over to the window, watching the first signs of sleet whirl around a street lamp outside. There wasn’t any doubt that Chandler had been Cathy’s first true love. And when she’d fled her home in the Oakland hills last week and wound up house-sitting for friends in the city, Chandler had to have been the one she’d called when the loneliness had gotten to be too much for her. She hadn’t been afraid of him; she had trusted him implicitly.
It never occurred to her that the man with whom she had carried on a love affair for years, and in whom she’d probably confided everything about her life—and Larry’s as well, including his latest project—was a Hound from Hell for another species. Somebody who
regarded her with all the affection that a spectator regards a chimpanzee in the zoo.
Jesus.
It had been Dave all along, the one Artie would have voted least likely. Except that somebody had tried to dissolve Chandler’s face with acid. It didn’t make sense, but there was only one way to find out.
It was chilly in the room but he could feel the flop sweat start then. He and Mitch had been trying for days to find out who the Hound might be. Now he knew and he was the only one left who could go after it. Mitch had deserted him, and Charlie didn’t even know what was going on.
He took a deep breath, held it for a moment, then let it out slowly and pushed everything else out of his mind. It was like going on night patrol in ’Nam, and God knew he had gone on enough of those. You never knew what was out there, who was waiting, but he had always managed to make it back. Mitch had once said that maybe whoever was the Hound should be afraid of him.
Maybe he was overmatched. But, with a little luck, maybe he wasn’t.
And who was he kidding?
It was three in the morning, the witching hour for the city. The theaters had let out hours before, the bars had long closed, the Marina was deserted except for the occasional 7-Eleven. Artie had the cab circle the block twice to check who was on the street, then got out around the corner. There was a small side entrance leading to a walkway between Chandler’s building and the one next door. It wasn’t difficult to break the small lock and walk to the back. No dogs, no alarms.
Chandler’s studio was three flights up.
Artie took his time climbing the stairs, slowly putting his weight on each tread so the squeak of wood
wouldn’t give away his presence. There were two apartments opening off the back porch, and he hesitated for a long moment, trying to decide which one was Dave’s. There was a litter box outside of one door, waiting to be emptied in the morning. Did Dave keep cats? He couldn’t remember any, then found a wooden slat on the porch and carefully dug into the box. It definitely hadn’t been for a kitten, so the chances it was for a pet Chandler had recently acquired dropped considerably.
He worked with the lock of the other door for a minute, a simple eyebolt-and-latch affair, and managed to lift the latch with the thin blade of his pocketknife. The Manhattan mania for half a dozen dead bolts and chain locks hadn’t hit this part of the Marina yet. There had been a time when almost nobody in San Francisco locked their doors and hardly anybody was ripped off, a far more innocent era that was now one with the ages.
He opened the door and slipped through, closing it noiselessly behind him. With good luck he’d find Chandler asleep; with bad luck he was probably in his theater/office watching an old movie.
He started down the long hallway that led to the front of the apartment. The office and home theater were about in the middle. It was gloomy but not completely dark; the door to the office/theater was open and the glow from the television screen suffused into the corridor enough so Artie could just make out the framed photographs and posters on the wall. Dave had been acting all of his life and was mediocre in most roles but superb in the most important one he had ever played: that of the Homo sapiens “Dave Chandler.”
If Chandler were really the Hound.
Artie caught himself wishing desperately for Mitch Levin. With Mitch along, he’d have a decent chance. Without Mitch, he didn’t stand much of one at all unless he caught Chandler by surprise and didn’t make
the fatal mistake of waiting. But what was he going to do, walk in and shoot Chandler where he sat? So far it was all surmise. If he were wrong, he’d spend the rest of his life regretting it. If he were right, then it was either him or Chandler—and he would have to be damned fast.
The Hound had come very close in the library. The next time, it wouldn’t miss. He, Mitch, and Charlie Allen, all friends of Larry Shea’s, were the only three left. And maybe Chandler, if he were wrong.
But he knew instinctively he wasn’t.
A movement to his left caught his eye and he whirled. There was nothing there but one of the posters, the one of the beach scene in From Here to Eternity. But Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr were naked—and moving.
Artie swore quietly to himself. His hand holding the automatic was suddenly slick with sweat.
“It’d be easier if you turned on the lights, Artie. The switch is on the wall, a foot ahead to your right.”
Artie froze, then reached out and flipped it on. The lights weren’t blinding, as they had been in Mary’s house. They were just about as bright as they would be in a theater auditorium before the feature started.
“Come on in, Artie—have a seat. Popcorn?” Chandler turned off the DVD player and the television screen flashed blue, then turned black.
I said you’d come to me, monkey … .
It was only a wisp of a thought, just enough to convince Artie he’d made no mistake. He should have shot Chandler when he came in the door but he’d hesitated a fraction of a second too long. Now he couldn’t move a muscle.
Chandler was sitting behind his desk like he had been two days before. Artie stared. His voice was normal but his face was still covered with white ointment,
though it obviously didn’t hurt so much now because Chandler was smiling at him. Artie caught his breath. Chandler had disguised his voice the last time he and Levin had seen him. Now it was the familiar voice and a face he couldn’t quite see.
Like Watch Cap at the skating rink.
“No sense in keeping this shit on any longer, though some of the neighbors might think I’ve made a miraculous recovery. But it wasn’t for them, it was for you and Mitch.” Chandler wiped at the ointment with a makeup towel. The red-furrowed, pink mask was peeping out at Artie now, and Chandler started peeling it off in strips. He had never gone to the emergency room, Artie thought. If he had, it would have been reported and Schuler would have been all over them the next day.
Then Artie stiffened. Under the makeup were raw, red scratches. The signs of Cathy’s fight for life.
“I thought for sure I wouldn’t fool you guys—you knew I was an actor, you knew I’d lived with makeup all my life. If you were watching a movie with special effects or a blue screen, you’d know it immediately. I guess this was just too simple.” He looked at Artie in mock amazement. “And I was sure I’d blown it in the restaurant when I said I’d had lunch with Larry and he told me about his article for Science. Hell, you guys knew I wasn’t that tight with Larry. Cathy told me about the article, what was in it.” He shook his head. “A real no-no.”
“What are you going to do?” Artie tried to keep the question casual but didn’t succeed.
“What am I going to do? With you?” Chandler made a temple of his fingers and leaned back in his chair, his fingers directly beneath his chin. “How’s your health, Artie?”
Artie could feel the sweat pop in his armpits and on his forehead.
“Fine. Why?”
Chandler shrugged. “Perfectly healthy people with normal checkups have heart attacks all the time. They’re unpredictable. Little flaws in the pump or the circulatory system that doctors never catch beforehand. Fairly decent way to go, all things considered.”
“And my body?” Artie asked.
Chandler glanced at his watch. “They’re hardly going to find it here. I think the appropriate place for you to die would be home in bed, all tucked in and peaceful. A quick, painless exit from this world and the only people you’ll be able to tell about me and mine will be those in the next.”
“Mitch—”
“Levin? I’ll catch up with him. I’m surprised you trusted him so much, Artie. You had almost as much to fear from him as you did from me. In one sense, even more.”
He’d known it all along, Artie thought, he just hadn’t wanted to admit it.
“He’s one of you, one of the Hounds.”
Chandler looked surprised. “Not one of ours, Artie. One of yours. You mean to tell me you never knew? And I thought he was one of your best friends.” He studied Artie a moment. “You’re something of a Hound yourself”—he shrugged, contemptuous—“but not a very good one. More of a hare.”
Artie decided to try to bluff it out.
“You can’t just give me a heart attack at will … .”
Chandler leaned across the desk and stared at him, his blue eyes hypnotic.
“Try and lift your right arm, Artie—the one holding your automatic.”
Artie tried again. His right arm was as limp as spaghetti—he couldn’t budge it.
“How do you do that?” He was more curious than frightened now.
“I can’t tell you how, Artie. The best I can do is give you an example. Your species does it all the time, but
mostly when you’re kids. You’re in a crowd at a theater or a store and just for fun you concentrate on the back of somebody’s head and eventually they turn around in annoyance, wondering who in hell has been staring at them. A rather simplistic example of controlling somebody else with your mind. Give yourself thirty-five thousand years and you might become quite good at it. Even to the point of controlling somebody’s autonomic nervous system.”
“That’s impossible,” Artie said.
“Is it? A species can change a lot in thirty-five thousand years. You can learn to do a bunch of impossible things in that amount of time.”
“And you pass it on, I suppose.”
Chandler half smiled. “You have books, we have racial memory. They each have their advantages.”
“Too bad you don’t have a conscience,” Artie said.
“Hey, good B-movie line, Artie. I’m impressed.” Then, indignantly: “And you do? Jesus Christ, you were in ’Nam. Bad things happen in wars; that’s the nature of them. You gave out medals for a lot worse than anything I’ve done. And whether you care to admit it or not, we’re in a war. You and yours against me and mine. Like the IRA and the Brits, Hamas and the Israelis. You want a declaration of war? Hell, nobody declares them anymore.”
“War,” Artie said, feeling stupid.
Chandler looked surprised.
“War, Artie. The one that started thirty-five thousand years ago. You won all the battles back then but now it’s our turn.”
What did you do when the enemy looked like you, sounded like you, and wasn’t wearing a uniform? It would be worse than the Civil War, much worse. You’d never know where the front lines were until it was too late.
“Cathy and the kids,” Artie said slowly.
Chandler’s handsome face was shadowed.
“Cathy knew more than the rest of you, and she knew it first. Whatever I did, no matter how much I stopped the leaks—Paschelke, Hall, Lyle—she was the important one who’d gotten away. I never would have found her if she’d stayed hidden. But then she called and asked me to come over.” He shook his head. “I couldn’t believe my luck.”
“First you laid her, then you killed her,” Artie said in disgust.
“I slept with the enemy and you think that was a bad thing.” Chandler looked amused. “Everything’s fair in love and war, Artie—it was love for her and war for me. I’m probably species amoral but then, we’re not all alike any more than you’re all alike. But I didn’t rape her—she asked. I think she lived half her life in bed. They may be different species, but donkeys don’t refuse to screw mares. And I’m sure they both enjoy it.”
“And the boys?”
“They knew me, they saw me come down the stairs, and I had no idea how much they might have heard about Larry’s project around the house. The stakes were too high; I couldn’t take the chance. I did what was necessary.”
He studied Artie’s expression. “Okay, I see I’m still a monster. And you an ex-military man! Didn’t the army ever give you a course in ethics? Or maybe it’s morals, I’m always confusing the two—or maybe I’ve got the wrong word entirely. Say your platoon is lying in ambush along a roadside, waiting for the enemy. A young boy who doesn’t know you’re there starts across the road and doesn’t see the first enemy tank coming—don’ t ask me why he doesn’t hear it. Do you jump up and save the kid, thus giving away your position and endangering all your men, or do you let the tank run the poor kid down? Maybe it’s a bad analogy, but you see what I mean.”
Artie sat there, silent. Chandler suddenly hit the top
of the desk with the flat of his hand, his face grim.
“Don’t talk to me about innocent bystanders, Banks! Nobody gives a shit about innocent bystanders in a war! How many women and children died in Dresden and Hiroshima and London? Tell me whether it makes a difference if you kill them face-to-face or from ten thousand feet up! I’d like to think that matters to your species, that you couldn’t kill if it had to be done face-to-face. If it did, you would have had far fewer wars, wouldn’t you? But then there were the ovens, and face-to-face it turned out nobody was exempt. Or go back to Agincourt, when Henry the Fifth had his soldiers slaughter the helpless French prisoners. Did you applaud in the movie when the English won? But that’s right—they didn’t show the slaughter of the prisoners, did they? Maybe if they had, the applause wouldn’t have been quite so loud.”
“That was war—”
“And what the hell do you call this?”
For a brief moment, Artie was back on the path by the river’s edge, a member of the Tribe watching a Flat Face hold a young boy over the river and cut his throat.
“One of our racial memories,” Chandler said. “Some things we wish we could forget but can’t.”
“That was thousands of years ago—”
“Not to us. If you’re cursed with racial memories, it might as well have been yesterday, Banks.”
“You have plans—” Artie started, desperate to stall.
“In the short run? To see that you have a heart attack—back home, safely in bed. It could be a lot worse. Artie. In the long run?” Chandler thought for a moment. “I’m not sure—not my department. But it’s time for your species to go; nature made a mistake and it’s time to rectify it. Frankly, I don’t think it will be that hard. Your society is so interconnected that, technologically speaking, one man could bring it all down. But in what part of the machinery should he throw his wrench? It’ll probably be something along biological
lines—you’re more vulnerable than you might think.”
Artie didn’t say anything and Chandler looked amused.
“Do you honestly believe your world can totter on for another thousand years? You know it can’t, no way. Another hundred? Would you bet on it? A few years ago your Pat Robertson gave it all of five—five years to the end of your world! He’s probably more correct than he thinks.”
Chandler had become preoccupied with his arguments and Artie could feel a little strength flow back into his arm. He was careful not to move a muscle.
“We’ve been in tight spots before—”
“Meaning Homo sapiens? Come on, Banks, be real. The Black Plague nearly did you in, and that was only a few hundred years ago. You’ve survived this long only because you’ve been separated by oceans and your technology was primitive. You’ve tried to substitute political systems for wars and what’s been the result? There hasn’t been a year since World War Two without one. And each political system is convinced it’s the best and anxious to convert the political heathen—by force, if necessary. Wasn’t it Churchill who said that as a system democracy was crap, it was just better than any of the others?”
Artie could feel the butt of the gun in his hand and casually rested his finger on the trigger.
“What was it like, pretending to be human?”
“You mean pretending to be one of you?” Chandler leaned back in his chair, the light from the lamp illuminating the shadows of his face and reflecting off his vividly blue eyes. Artie was startled. He had never really looked at Chandler before, probably because nobody ever takes a clown seriously. Except for his slightly buck teeth, Chandler was one of the handsomest men he had ever seen. Cathy must have been obsessed with him.
“Fun, in a way. You learn what buttons to push and
you can have almost anything you want from anybody if your stomach is strong enough. You saw the photographs in the hallway? They’re special, Artie—I slept with all of them. They’re handsome or pretty, all of them famous, and most of you have wet dreams about them. But to be honest, few of them are any good in bed—or at much of anything else. I remember going to a party at a film convention in Vegas and by two in the morning everybody was either dead drunk or balling their brains out in the various bedrooms. I wandered into one looking for a place to crash and here was one of the biggest movie stars in the country screwing some hooker from the Strip. A big education for me, Artie. Take away the soft lights and the music and the romantic camera angles and what you’ve got left are smells and sweat and grunting. No whispered endearments, no tender moments. Just two animals rolling around on satin sheets rather than in the dirt.” He laughed. “I know what you’re going to say—‘Hey, they’re only human!’ I couldn’t agree more.”
“Not as romantic as you and Cathy?” Artie said sarcastically. His finger was on the trigger and he had angled the barrel up just enough so he could catch Chandler in the groin.
Chandler shrugged.
“I suppose I meant something to her, but I never encouraged her. She fed her own fantasies. But she was a danger to us, Banks. She could have been responsible for the deaths of thousands—”
Artie tried to pull the trigger and his hand jumped slightly in the attempt. His fingers suddenly froze.
Chandler’s face changed then. No longer smiling, no longer casually amused or arrogant. It was hard, furious, all angles and hollows, the lips thin bands against his large white teeth, which showed in a snarl. It was like somebody had morphed Chandler’s face and White Beard’s when the old chief had been angry
and his heavy brows had become like stone, his eyes slitted and rimmed with red.
you shouldn’t have tried that … .
Artie felt like somebody had jumped on his chest, knocking the wind out of him. He couldn’t breathe and he started to struggle in his chair, then felt his sphincter give way and realized he had shit in his pants. His heart was going crazy and he could feel it tumble into a fast, erratic beating.
your species or mine, monkey—you think I ever had a choice?
Artie forced the chair sidewise and managed to fall to the floor and for just a moment felt the pressure on his heart lessen and his hand loosen up. He managed to get off one shot and heard it shatter the front of the television set. But nobody would hear it outside the soundproofed room. The pressure abruptly returned and his vision started to fade, the room turning black. He was going to die right then and there. It was more than his heart now; it felt like something was tearing up his insides. His stomach was spasming with cramps and somebody’s hands were squeezing the rest of his guts. In the distance he heard screaming and realized with mild surprise that it was himself.
He managed to roll behind a couch and for a second was free. He could feel a sly probing in the air around him and tried to crawl for the doorway. Then Chandler caught him again and Artie felt himself being squeezed like somebody might squeeze a balloon. It felt like his head was blowing up to a monstrous size and he could look down on the room and see himself lying on the floor and Chandler sitting calmly behind his desk, staring at him. He had no sensation of a body at all.
This was it.
Then there was the faint sound of another shot and he was back on the floor, acutely aware of his own stink. There was no pressure on his chest or guts, but he ached as if he’d run a marathon. On top of everything
else, he was going to be sick from sheer exhaustion. It took a moment for him to realize he hadn’t managed to get off a second shot after all. Somebody else—
“Artie!”
He was being helped off the floor and onto a chair. It took a moment for his eyes to focus.
“Charlie,” he mumbled. “What the hell …”
He looked over at Chandler, who was slumped back in his chair, his eyes a dull watery blue with no life in them at all. Artie watched the blood pump from Chandler’s chest onto his desk and then simply flow over his shirt and down to the floor.
Artie desperately wanted to get out of his clothes; he needed to shower badly. He looked up at Charlie Allen, staring in sick fascination at Chandler slumped in his chair.
“What the hell was he, Artie?”
“A hero to his own kind,” Artie muttered. “To us, a homicidal maniac. Maybe we all are, depending on which side we’re on.”
Allen didn’t know what he was talking about. “I listened to him for a couple of minutes. He never saw me—he was concentrating on you.”
Artie took a breath. His heart had slowed, but it didn’t seem by much.
“How did you know I was here? You must have reread your diaries after all—you must have figured it out.”
Allen shook his head. “I never had time to go through them. But when I got home Franny and I started talking and she told me all about Cathy and Chandler. She was pretty hurt back then, pretty envious. She remembered everything. She insisted Cathy was still tight with Chandler. After you read the diaries, I figured you’d come right over here. Dave was a night person; he’d still be up.”
Artie held his head; he had the start of a whopper
of a headache. He couldn’t think straight. Not everything Charlie was saying made sense but he couldn’t argue with his timing.
Charlie was looking at him with an almost belligerent expression on his face. “I’m not going to be left out this time, Artie. Larry and Cathy were friends of mine.”
“He killed Cathy and the boys.”
Charlie nodded sadly. “I heard him.”
“Your gun,” Artie said. Charlie was still holding it. “I didn’t know you owned one.”
Charlie looked down, surprised. His hand immediately started to tremble and he put the gun on the desk. “It isn’t mine. I found it in the library months ago. Somebody had left it there, believe it or not. So I stuck it in my desk—too late to turn it in, the guard had gone home—and forgot about it. Until tonight.”
He stepped closer to Chandler to look at him, and Artie was afraid Charlie was going to be sick.
“You didn’t do a bad thing, Charlie, you—”
“Don’t worry about me. Larry Shea was one of my best friends. So was Cathy. She played around but she was still a good person.” He reached out to touch Chandler, his hand jerking back when he made contact. “I don’t know how he did … what he did, I didn’t understand a lot of what he was talking about.” He glanced back at Artie, his face grim. “You’re going to have to tell me, Artie. I’m serious—you owe me.”
“Someday,” Artie said. Then: “Take me home, Charlie. I need to shower down. I stink.”
Charlie glanced around the room, frowning. Something had just occurred to him.
“Where’s Mitch? I thought he’d be here with you.”