The Devil in Gray (23 page)

“
No!
” he screamed. But then her head exploded again, and she twisted around and collapsed onto the carpet. Decker was left with flesh and mucus all over his face, and fragments of bone stuck to his lips.

You bastard!” he shouted, pushing his way back into the living room. “Show yourself, you son of a bitch, where are you?”

He went back to the kitchen and the master bedroom but there was still nobody there. “I'm coming to get you!” he yelled. “I'm coming to get you and you're going to suffer for this!”

It was then that he saw himself in the mirror, naked, with his gun in his hand, but not bloodied at all. He looked at himself for a moment, and he was just about to go back to the second bedroom when Maggie reappeared, intact, unharmed, and still wearing his rapidly drying necklace.

“Decker,” she said. She went up to him and put her arms around him and held him close. “I don't know what's wrong, Decker, but I think you need some help.”

“I'm fine, I'm okay. I'm stressed, that's all.”

She shushed him by kissing her fingertips and touching his lips. “This is not the right time for us, lover man. Maybe it never was. This is the time to say that it was fun while it lasted.”

He looked into her eyes and they were darkest brown. “Yes,” he admitted. “Maybe you're right. It was fun while it lasted.”

She sat and watched him as he dressed, and then unloaded his revolver and kissed each of the bullets. “There's some kind of fire burning inside you, Decker Martin,” she said. “I hope you find a way to put it out.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

The storm broke just after eleven o'clock. Lightning walked up the James River like the Martian tripods in
The War of the Worlds
. Thunder bellowed all the way across the city from Mechanicsville to Bon Air, and the rain crashed down in such torrents that the storm drains all along Canal Street and Dock Street were gushing water and the Richmond Fire Department was called to pump out basements and cellars all along the waterfront.

John Mason left Appleby's Restaurant on East Main Street just two minutes shy of midnight, and it was still raining hard. He hadn't brought an umbrella to work that afternoon but he had looked in the lost-property closet and borrowed a ladies' umbrella with splashy red poppies on it and three broken spokes. It didn't do much to keep him dry. The rain was clattering down so fiercely that it bounced off the sidewalk and soaked the bottom of his pants.

John had celebrated his thirtieth birthday last week and the rest of the staff at Appleby's had arranged for a Strip-A-Gram. In the photographs, with a half-naked redhead perched on his knee, John looked as if he had just been electrocuted, his thin mousy hair standing up on end and his teeth clenched. The red eyes hadn't helped, either.

John liked girls, but he had always found it difficult to talk to them. Edmundo, who worked in the kitchens with him, had a gorgeous black-haired girlfriend called Rita, and the way Edmundo spoke to Rita always amazed him. Do this, Rita, do that, Rita, bring me this, bring me that, shut up your face, you za-za. And yet Rita adored Edmundo and was always nuzzling him and kissing him. John was sure that if he spoke to a girl like that he would have his face slapped, twice, once in each direction.

All the same, he was fixed to go on a date tomorrow with a girl called Stephanie, to the Theatre Virginia on Grove Avenue to see
I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change
. In actual fact Stephanie was a friend of his sister Paula and the only reason he had been invited was to make a foursome with Paula's boyfriend, Carl. John hated Carl. He was a six-foot-four-inch loudmouth who sold paneling and who was forever slapping John on the back and calling him “chief.” But he liked Stephanie. She was quiet, with large glasses, and lank brown hair, and she enjoyed walking and reading and all the other solitary activities that John did.

He hailed a taxi and it pulled into the curb and drenched him in filthy rainwater up to his knees. The cabbie looked like the late Scatman Crothers, from
The Shining
. “Hell of a night,” he said, as John climbed into the backseat, struggling to fold his broken umbrella.

“Sure is. May Street, please. Corner of Grove.”

As the cabbie drove off, John sniffed and realized that there was a strong acidic smell in the back of the taxi. What was more, the seat of his pants was soaked. He rubbed his hand on the vinyl seat and then he sniffed his fingers. Somebody had vomited in the taxi and he had sat in it.

“Stop!” he shouted, rapping on the partition.

The cabbie said, “What?”

“I said stop! Somebody's puked on the seat!”

“Somebody's what?”

At last the cabbie pulled into the curbside again. John climbed out and said, “Somebody's puked on the seat. For Pete's sake, look at my pants.”

“Shit,” the cabbie said. “Just started my shift, too. Why don't folks keep their previously enjoyed food to themselves?”

John had to walk the rest of the way home. The umbrella refused to open and in any case he didn't really care if he got any wetter than he already was. Every time he breathed in he caught the sharp smell of vomit—alcohol and seafood and tomatoes.

Home was a second-story apartment he shared with his widowed mother on May Street, at the back of an ugly, squarish, brown-brick building that had been built in the 1900s as a hostel for disturbed children. John let himself in and trudged up the steep dark stairs. He had to feel his way because the lightbulb on the landing had gone again. The building's super was a shriveled monkey of a man and probably the most argumentative person that John had ever known. He would refuse to change lightbulbs because the sun was going to come up in only a few hours, and they wouldn't be needed anymore.

John opened the door to his mother's apartment. The living room was gloomy and smelled of dead-flower water. The kitchen door was a few inches ajar and as usual John's mother had left the portable television flickering with the sound turned off. He took off his soaking-wet shoes and left them on the welcome mat behind the door. Then he tippytoed across the carpet to the kitchen. His mother had left a plate of chocolate-chip cookies on the table and a note saying
Please take my yellow dress to the cleaners tomorrow
.

On the TV screen, Vincent Price was desperately trying to escape the fire in
House of Wax
. John switched it off and went along the corridor toward the bathroom.

“Johnsy?” his mother called. “You're home late.”

“I couldn't get a cab.”

“You're not wet, are you?”

He opened the door to his mother's bedroom. She was sitting up in bed with a white scarf on her head so that she looked as if she had been having chemotherapy. She was a very thin woman, with an almond-pale face and smudges of grief under her eyes. She always gave the impression that if anybody touched her they would cause her actual physical pain.

“You're
drenched
,” she said. “Get out of those clothes and run yourself a nice hot bath.”

Lightning flashed behind the brown floral drapes, and then almost immediately the house was shaken by deafening thunder, as if somebody had tipped a mahogany wardrobe down the stairs.

“Some storm, huh?” John said. “The whole of Dock Street was flooded.”

“What did you have to eat tonight? You ate, didn't you?”

“Sure, I had fried chicken.”

“You and your fried chicken. Your father loved his fried chicken, too.”

“Right—I'd better take a bath.” His pants were sticking to him and he didn't want to get into one of those long reminiscences about his father. He had only been seven when his father was killed, and he could barely remember him. He knew what he
looked
like, of course: There were photographs everywhere. But what he had
felt
like, and
smelled
like, and what his voice had actually sounded like, he couldn't bring to mind. His father didn't even visit him in dreams.

He always wore his father's Marine Corps ring, but it had never imparted any feeling of what kind of man his father had been.

“Can I bring you anything?” he asked his mother.

She smiled and shook her head. “I've taken my tablets already. You get yourself to bed.”

John went to the bathroom and disgustedly pulled down his pants. The rain had washed off most of the half-digested food, but there were still flecks of crab and fragments of tomato on them and he put them in the basin and sluiced them in tepid water. At the same time he turned on the old-fashioned brass faucets to run a bath. He would have preferred a shower, but the washer had worn out and the super hadn't gotten around to fixing it. “You think washers grow on trees?”

While the bath was running, he went into his bedroom. It was a long, narrow room, with a single sawed-oak bed with a dark brown candlewick throw and his pajamas neatly folded on the pillow. All along the wall beside the bed were photographs of classic automobiles—Hudson Hornets and Chevrolet Bel Airs and Packard Hawks—as well as pennants for Richmond's soccer team, the Kickers. John had once stuck up a picture of Pamela Anderson in a wet T-shirt, but his mother had looked at it with such a disappointed expression that he had taken it down.

He looked out of the window. Rainwater was spouting from a broken gutter into the darkened yard below. There was a dazzling flash of lightning and another crash of thunder. It felt as if the storm were right above his head.

He went back into the bathroom and climbed cautiously into the bathtub. Apart from having to walk most of the way home he had worked a double shift today and he felt bone-tired. He lay back and stared at the ceiling. What would his father have thought of him, if he could see him now? A chef in a family diner, instead of a captain in the marines. Pecan pie instead of
semper fi
.

He soaped his hair and plunged himself under the water to rinse it, his eyes screwed tight shut and his fingers in his ears. As he came up for air, he saw that the bathroom door was wide open.

Odd, he thought. He never left the bathroom door open. His mother wasn't the kind of woman who would sit on the toilet talking to him while he had a bath. In fact she appeared to find sex and nudity not just embarrassing but deeply distasteful. She called it “that sort of thing.” John occasionally wondered how he had managed to be conceived at all.

“Mom?” he called out, but there was no answer. She always took two Seconals when she went to bed, so she was probably dead to the world by now.

He stood up in the bath and reached over to the door to close it. But as he did so he was suddenly taken by the feeling that there was somebody standing in the doorway. He couldn't see anybody, but he thought he could hear steady, slightly harsh breathing. It was difficult to be sure, because the bathwater was still slopping from side to side, and thunder was still rumbling over the rooftop, but he could sense a tension in the air, a
nearness
.

He lowered his left hand to cover himself. “Who's there?” he said, half expecting his mother to appear.

No answer. But the sensation that somebody was standing very close to him was even stronger now. He moved his hand toward the door, waving it from side to side as if he were feeling his way in the dark.

There was an immense explosion of thunder, and at the same time something sharp and pointed jabbed him in the right eye, bursting his eyeball. He let out a high-pitched scream and fell backward into the bath with a loud slap of water, knocking his head against the tiles. He grabbed the handrail and tried to sit up, his hand cupping his eye, and he felt a large blob of optic jelly slither between his fingers and slide down his cheek. The pain was unbearable—as if somebody had stuck a red-hot poker into his eye socket.

“
God-oh-God-oh-God-oh-God
,” he babbled, trying to climb out of the bath. “
Mom! Mom! Help me! My eye!
”

He managed to twist himself around and get himself up on one knee, but then he was roughly pushed back down again, and he actually felt hands gripping him, hands in coarse leather gloves.

“
Get off me!
” he screamed. “
Jesus, get off me!
”

But one of the hands gripped his hair and his head was forced under the bathwater. He could hear the watery clonking of his knees against the side of the tub as he struggled to get free, and the crackling of his hair being wrenched out by the roots, but the hand wouldn't let him go. His whole head felt as if it were caving in.

Just when he thought he couldn't hold his breath for a second longer, the hand pulled him up again. He gasped and spluttered and opened his remaining eye, expecting to see who was trying to drown him, but there was still nobody there.

“
Let me go, let me go, let me go!
” he begged, and there was a moment's pause. He tried again to sit up, but then something sharp stuck into his left eye, too, and everything went black.

“
I'm blind!
” he screamed. “
You've blinded me!
”

He thrashed in the bath from side to side, kicking and yammering and letting out whoops of agony. He clawed at the air, trying to find his assailant, trying to climb out, but every time he found the handrail his fingers were pried away from it and he was pushed back into the water.

“What do you want?” he gibbered, and then whooped again because his eyes hurt so much.

There was no answer. He tried one more time to get out of the bath, but when he was forced back yet again, he cowered in the water with his hands over his face and just prayed that this was all a nightmare and that he hadn't been blinded after all and that he would soon wake up and it would be morning.

He thought the water felt hotter than it had before, but that was probably because his injuries had made him more sensitive. Soon, however, he realized that it actually
was
hotter. Not only that, it was increasing in heat as quickly as the water in a kettle. He sat up and reached blindly for the faucets, but when he found them they were both turned off. The water was heating up spontaneously, and it was already scalding his buttocks and his legs.