Dexter 3 - Dexter in the Dark (15 page)

Once again something flickered in the back of my brain and I grabbed at
it, pulled it forward into the light, and looked it over. It was King Solomon
again. Just before the part where he killed his brother for having wickedness
inside, he had built a temple to Moloch. And of course, the preferred
alternative spelling for Moloch was Molek, known as the detestable god of the
Ammonites.

This time I searched “Moloch worship,” scanning through a
dozen irrelevant Web sites before hitting a few that told me the same things:
the worship was characterized by an ecstatic loss of control and ended with a
human sacrifice. Apparently the people were whipped into a frenzy until they
didn't realize that little Jimmy had somehow been killed and cooked, not
necessarily in that order.

Well, I don't really
understand ecstatic loss of control, even though I have been to football games
at the Orange Bowl. So I admit I was curious: How did they work that trick? I
read a little closer, and found that apparently there was music involved, music
so compelling that the frenzy was almost automatic. How this happened was a
little ambiguous-the clearest reading I found, from an Aramaic text translated
with lots of footnotes, was that “Moloch sent music unto them.” I
supposed that meant a band of his priests

would march through the streets with drums and
trumpets…

Why drums and trumpets, Dexter?

Because that was what I was hearing in my sleep. Drums and trumpets
rising into a glad chorus of singing and the feeling that pure eternal joy was
right outside the door.

Which seemed like a pretty good working definition of
ecstatic loss of control, didn't it?

All right, I reasoned: just for the sake of argument,
let's say Moloch has returned. Or maybe he never went away. So a
three-thousand-year-old detestable god from the Bible was sending music in
order to, um-what, exactly? Steal my Dark Passenger? Kill young women in Miami,
the modern Gomorrah? I even dragged in my earlier insight from the museum and tried
to fit it into the puzzle: so Solomon had the original Dark Passenger, which
had now come to Miami, and, like a male lion taking over a pride, was therefore
trying to kill the Passengers already here, because, um…Why exactly?

Or was I really supposed to believe that an Old Testament bad guy was
coming out of time to get me? Wouldn't it make more sense simply to reserve
myself a rubber room right now?

I pushed at it from every side and still came up with nothing. Possibly
my brain was starting to fall apart, too, along with the rest of my life. Maybe
I was just tired. Whatever the case, none of it made sense. I needed to know
more about Moloch. And because I was sitting in front of the computer, I
wondered if Moloch had his own Web site.

It took only a moment to find out, so I typed it in, went down the list
of self-important self-pitying blogs, online fantasy games, and arcane paranoid
fantasies until I found one that looked likely. When I clicked on the link, a picture
began to form very slowly, and as it did-

The deep, powerful beat of the drum, insistent horns rising behind the
pulsing rhythm to a point that swells until it can no longer hold back the
voices which break out in anticipation of a gladness beyond knowing-it was the
music I had heard in my sleep.

Then the slow blossom of a smoldering bull's head, there in the middle
of the page, with two upraised hands beside it and the same three Aramaic
letters above.

And I sat and stared and blinked with the cursor, still feeling the
music crash through me and lift me toward the hot glorious heights of an
unknown ecstasy that promised me all the blinding delight ever possible in a
world of hidden joy. For the first time in my memory, as these passionate
strange sensations washed over and through me and finally out and away-for the
first time ever I felt something new, different, and unwelcome.

I was afraid.

I could not say why, or of what, which made it much
worse, a lonely unknown fear that roiled through me and echoed off the empty
places and drove away everything but the picture of that bull's head and the
fear.

This is nothing, Dexter,
I told myself. An animal picture and some random notes of not terribly good
music. And I agreed with myself completely-but I could not make my hands listen
to reason and move off my lap. Something about this crossover between the
supposedly unconnected worlds of sleep and waking made telling them apart
impossible, as if anything that could show up in my sleep and then appear on my

screen at work was too powerful to resist and I had no chance of
fighting it, had simply to watch as it dragged me down and under into the
flames.

There was no black, mighty voice inside me to turn me into
steel and fling me like a spear at whatever this was. I was alone, afraid,
helpless, and clueless; Dexter in the dark, with the bogeyman and all his
unknown minions hiding under the bed and getting ready to pull me out of this
world and into the burning land of shrieking, terror-filled pain.

With a motion that was far from graceful I lunged across my desk and
yanked the computer's power cord from the wall and, breathing rapidly and
looking like someone had attached electrodes to my muscles, I jerked backward
into my chair again, so quick and clumsy that the plug on the end of the cord
whipped back and snapped me on the forehead just above the left eyebrow.

For several minutes I did nothing but breathe and watch as the sweat
rolled off my face and plopped onto my desk. I had no idea why I had leaped off
my chair like a gaffed barracuda and yanked the cord out of the wall, beyond
the fact that for some reason it had felt like I had to do it or die, and I
couldn't understand where that notion came from, either, but come it had,
barreling out of the new darkness between my ears and crushing me with its
urgency.

And so I sat in my quiet office and gaped at a dead screen, wondering
who I was and what had just happened.

I was never afraid. Fear was an emotion and Dexter did not have them.
To be afraid of a Web site was so far beyond stupid and pointless that there
were no adjectives for it. And I did not act irrationally, except when
imitating human beings.

So why had I pulled the plug, and why were my hands trembling, all from
a cheerful little tune and a cartoon cow?

There were no answers, and I was no longer sure I
wanted to find them.

I drove home, convinced that I was being followed, even though the
rearview mirror stayed empty the whole way.

image

The other really was quite special, resilient in a way that the Watcher
had not seen in quite some time. This was proving to be far more interesting
than some of the ones in the past. He began to feel something that might even
be called kinship with the other. Sad, really. If only things had worked out
differently. But there was a kind of beauty to the inevitable fate of the
other, and that was good, too.

Even this far behind the other's car, he could see the signs of nerves
starting to fray: speeding up and slowing down, fiddling with the mirrors.
Good. Uneasy was just the beginning. He needed to move the other far beyond
uneasy, and he would. But first it was essential to make sure the other knew
what was coming. And so far, in spite of the clues, he did not seem to have
figured it out.

Very well, then. The Watcher
would simply repeat the pattern until the other recognized just what sort of
power was after him. After that, the other would have no choice. He would come
like a happy lamb to the slaughter.

Until then, even the watching had purpose. Let him
know he was watched. It would do him no good, even if he saw the face watching
him.

Faces can change. But the watching would not.

OF COURSE THERE WAS NO SLEEP FOR ME THAT NIGHT. THE
next day, Sunday, passed in a haze of fatigue and anxiety. I took Cody and
Astor to a nearby park and sat on a bench while I tried to make sense of the
pile of uncooperative information and conjecture I had come up with so far. The
pieces refused to come together into any kind of picture that made sense. Even
if I hammered them into a semi-coherent theory, it told me nothing that would
help me understand how to find my Passenger.

The best I could come up with was a sort of
half-formed notion that the Dark Passenger and others like it had been hanging
around for at least three thousand years. But why mine should flee from any
other was impossible to say-especially since I had encountered others before
with no more reaction than raised hackles. My notion of the new daddy lion
seemed particularly far-fetched in the pleasant sunlight of the park, against
the background of the children twittering threats at one another. Statistically
speaking, about half of them had new daddies, based on the divorce rate, and
they seemed to be thriving.

I let despair wash over me, a feeling that seemed slightly absurd in
the lovely Miami afternoon. The Passenger was gone, I was alone, and the only
solution I could come up with was to take lessons in Aramaic. I could only hope
that a chunk of frozen wastewater from a passing airplane would fall on my head
and put me out of my misery. I looked up hopefully, but there, too, I was out
of luck.

Another semi-sleepless night, broken only by a
recurrence of the strange music that came into my sleep and woke me as I sat up
in bed to go to it. I had no idea why it seemed like such a good idea to follow
the music, and even less idea where it wanted to take me, but apparently I was
going anyway. Clearly I was falling apart, sliding rapidly downhill into gray,
empty madness.

Monday morning a dazed and battered Dexter staggered
into the kitchen, where I was immediately and violently assaulted by Hurricane
Rita, who charged at me waving a huge stack of papers and CDs. “I need to
know what you think,” she said, and it struck me that this was something
she definitely did not need to know, considering the deep bleakness of my
thoughts. But before I could summon even a mild objection she had hurled me
into a kitchen chair and began flinging the documents around.

“These are the flower arrangements that Hans wants to use,”
she started, showing me a series of pictures that were, in fact, floral in
nature. “This is for the altar. And it's maybe a little too, oh, I don't
know,” she said desperately. “Is anybody going to make jokes about
too much white?”

Although I am known for a finely tuned sense of humor, very few jokes
based on the color white sprang to mind, but before I could reassure her on the
subject, Rita was already flipping the pages.

“Anyway,” she said, “this is the individual table
setting. Which hopefully goes with what Manny Borque is doing. Maybe we should
get Vince to check it with him?”

“Well,” I said.

“Oh good lord, look at the time,” she said,
and before I could speak even one more syllable she had dropped a pile of CDs in
my lap. “I've narrowed it down to six bands,” she said. “Can you
listen to these today and let me know what you think? Thanks, Dex,” she
went on relentlessly, leaning to plant a kiss on

my cheek and then heading for the door, already moving on to the next
item on her checklist. “Cody?” she called. “It's time to go,
sweetie. Come on.”

There was another three minutes of commotion, the highlights of which were
Cody and Astor sticking their heads in the kitchen door to say good-bye, and
then the front door slammed and all was silent.

And in the silence I thought I could almost hear, as I
had heard in the night, the faint echo of the music. I knew I should leap from
my chair and charge out the door with my saber clamped firmly between my
teeth-charge into the bright light of day and find this thing, whatever it was,
beard it in its den and slay it-but I could not.

The Moloch Web site had stuck its fear into me, and even though I knew
it was foolish, wrong, counterproductive, totally non-Dexter in every way, I
could not fight it. Moloch. Just a silly ancient name. An old myth that had
disappeared thousands of years ago, torn down with Solomon's temple. It was nothing,
a figment from prehistoric imaginations, less than nothing-except that I was
afraid of it.

There seemed nothing else to do except to stumble
through the day with my head down and hope that it didn't get me, whatever it
was. I was bone tired, and maybe that was adding to my sense of helplessness.
But I didn't think so. I had the feeling that a very bad thing was circling
closer with its nose full of my scent, and I could already feel its sharp teeth
in my neck. All I could hope for was to make its sport last a little longer,
but sooner or later I would feel its claws on me and then I, too, would bleat,
beat my heels in the dust, and die. There was no fight left in me; there was,
in fact, almost nothing at all left in me, except a kind of reflex humanity
that said it was time to go to work.

I picked up Rita's stack of CDs and slogged out the
door. And as I stood in the doorway of the house, turning the key to lock the
front door, a white Avalon very slowly pulled away from the curb and drove off
with a lazy insolence that cut through all my fatigue and despair and sliced
right into me with a jolt of sheer terror that rocked me back against the door
as the CDs slipped from my fingers and crashed onto the walk.

The car motored slowly up the street to the stop sign. I watched,
nerveless and numb. And as its brake lights flicked off and it started up and
through the intersection, a small piece of Dexter woke up, and it was very
angry.

It might have been the absolute bold uncaring
disrespect of the Avalon's behavior, and it might have been that all I really
needed was the jolt of adrenaline to supplement my morning coffee. Whatever it
was, it filled me with a sense of righteous indignation, and before I could
even decide what to do I was already doing it, running down the driveway to my
car and leaping into the driver's seat. I jammed the key into the ignition,
fired up the engine, and raced after the Avalon.

I ignored the stop sign, accelerated through the
intersection, and caught sight of the car as it turned right a few blocks
ahead. I went much faster than I should have and saw him turn left toward U.S.
1. I closed the gap and sped up, frantic to catch him before he got lost in the
rush-hour traffic.

I was only a block or so
back when he turned north on U.S. 1 and I followed, ignoring the squealing
brakes and the deafening chord of horn music from the other motorists. The
Avalon was about ten cars ahead of me now, and I used all my Miami driving
skills to get closer, concentrating only on the road and ignoring the lines
that separated the lanes, even failing to enjoy the wonderful creativity of the
language that followed me from the surrounding cars. The worm had turned, and
although it might not have all its teeth, it was ready for battle, however it was
that worms fought. I was angry-another novelty for me. I had been drained of
all my darkness and pushed into a bright drab corner where all the walls were
closing

in, but enough was enough. It was time for Dexter to
fight back. And although I did not really know what I planned to do when I
caught up with the other car, I was absolutely going to do it.

I was half a block back when the Avalon's driver
became aware of me and sped up immediately, slipping into the far left lane
into a space so tight that the car behind him slammed on its brakes and spun
sideways. The two cars behind it smashed into its exposed side and a great roar
of horns and brakes hammered at my ears. I found just enough room to my right to
squeak through around the crash and then over to the left again in the now-open
far lane. The Avalon was a block ahead and picking up speed, but I put the
pedal down and followed.

For several blocks the gap between us stayed about the
same. Then the Avalon caught up with the traffic that was ahead of the accident
and I got a bit closer, until I was only two cars behind, close enough to see a
pair of large sunglasses looking back at me in the side mirror. And as I surged
up to within one car length of his bumper, he suddenly yanked his steering
wheel hard to the left, bouncing his car up onto the median strip and sliding
sideways down into traffic on the other side. I was past him before I could
even react. I could almost hear mocking laughter drifting back at me as he
trundled off toward Homestead.

But I refused to let him go. It was not that catching the other car
might give me some answers, although that was probably true. And I was not
thinking of justice or any other abstract concept. No, this was pure indignant
anger, rising from some unused interior corner and flowing straight out of my
lizard brain and down to my knuckles. What I really wanted to do was pull this
guy out of his rotten little car and smack him in the face. It was an entirely
new sensation, this idea of inflicting bodily harm in the heat of anger, and it
was intoxicating, strong enough to shut down any logical impulses that might be
left in me and it sent me across the median in pursuit.

My car made a terrible crunching noise as it bounced up onto the median
and then down on the other side, and a large cement truck missed flattening me
by only about four inches, but I was off again, heading after the Avalon in the
lighter southbound traffic.

Far ahead of me there were several spots of moving white color, any one
of which might have been my target. I stomped down on the gas and followed.

The gods of traffic were kind to me, and I zipped through the steadily
moving cars for almost half a mile before I hit my first red light. There were several
cars in each lane halted obediently at the intersection and no way around
them-except to repeat my car-crunching trick of banging up onto the median
strip. I did. I came down off the narrow end of the median and into the
intersection just in time to cause severe inconvenience to a bright yellow
Hummer that was foolishly trying to use the roads in a rational way. It gave a
manic lurch to avoid me, and very nearly succeeded; there was only the lightest
of thuds as I bounced neatly off its front bumper, through the intersection,
and onward, followed by yet another blast of horn music and yelling.

The Avalon would be a quarter of a mile ahead if it
was still on U.S. 1, and I did not wait for the distance to grow. I chugged on
in my trusty, banged-up little car, and after only half a minute I was in sight
of two white cars directly ahead of me-one of them a Chevy SUV and the other a
minivan. My Avalon was nowhere to be seen.

I slowed just for a
moment-and out of the corner of my eye I saw it again, edging around behind a
grocery store in a strip mall parking lot off to the right. I slammed my foot
down onto the gas pedal and slewed across two lanes of traffic and into the
parking lot. The driver of the other car saw me coming; he sped up and pulled
out onto the street running perpendicular to U.S. 1, racing away to the east as
fast as he could go. I hurried through the parking lot and followed.

He led me through a residential area for a mile or so, then around
another corner and past a park where a day-care program was in full swing. I
got a little closer-just in time to see a woman holding a baby and leading two
other children step into the road in front of us.

The Avalon accelerated up and onto the sidewalk and the woman continued
to move slowly across the road looking at me as if I was a billboard she
couldn't read. I swerved to go behind her, but one of her children suddenly
darted backward right in front of me and I stood on the brake. My car went into
a skid, and for a moment it looked as if I would slide right into the whole
slow, stupid cluster of them as they stood there in the road, watching me with
no sign of interest. But my tires bit at last, and I managed to spin the wheel,
give it a little bit of gas, and skid through a quick circle on the lawn of a
house across the street from the park. Then I was back onto the road in a cloud
of crabgrass, and after the Avalon, now farther ahead.

The distance stayed about the same for several more
blocks before I got my lucky break. Ahead of me the Avalon roared through
another stop sign, but this time a police cruiser pulled out after it, turned
on the siren, and gave chase. I wasn't sure if I should be glad of the company
or jealous of the competition, but in any case it was much easier to follow the
flashing lights and siren, so I continued to slog along in the rear.

The two other cars went through a quick series of turns, and I thought
I might be getting a little closer, when suddenly the Avalon disappeared and
the cop car slid to a halt. In just a few seconds I was up beside the cruiser
and getting out of my car.

In front of me the cop was running across a
close-cropped lawn marked with tire tracks that led around behind a house and
into a canal. The Avalon was settling down into the water by the far side and,
as I watched, a man climbed out of the car through the window and swam the few
yards to the opposite bank of the canal. The cop hesitated on our side and then
jumped in and swam to the half-sunk car. As he did, I heard the sound of heavy
tires braking fast behind me. I turned to look.

A yellow Hummer rocked to a stop behind my car and a
red-faced man with sandy hair jumped out and started to yell at me. “You
cocksucker son of a bitch!” he hollered. “You dinged up my car! What
the hell you think you're doing?”

Before I could answer, my cell phone rang. “Excuse me,” I
said, and oddly enough the sandy-haired man stood there quietly as I answered
the phone.