The Eyes of Darkness (11 page)

Tina typed her personal access number—E013331555. Because so much material in the hotel’s files was extremely confidential information about high rollers, and because the Pyramid’s list of favored customers would be of enormous value to competitors, only approved people could obtain this data, and a record was kept of everyone who accessed it. After a moment’s hesitation the computer asked for her name; she entered that, and the computer matched her number and name. Then:

She typed in the code for the list of complimentary guests, and the machine responded at once.

Her fingers were damp. She wiped them on her slacks and then quickly tapped out her request. She asked the computer for the same information that Angela had requested a while ago. The names and addresses of VIP customers who had missed the opening of
Magyck!
—along with the wedding anniversaries of those who were married—began to appear on the screen, scrolling upward. Simultaneously the laser printer began to churn out the same data.

Tina snatched each page from the printer tray as it arrived. The laser whispered through twenty names, forty, sixty, seventy, without producing the lines about Danny that had been on the first printout. Tina waited until at least a hundred names had been listed before she decided that the system had been programmed to print the lines about Danny only one time, only on her office’s first data request of the afternoon, and on no later call-up.

She canceled this data request and closed out the file. The printer stopped.

Just a couple of hours ago she had concluded that the person behind this harassment had to be a stranger. But how could any stranger so easily gain entrance to both her house and the hotel computer? Didn’t he, after all, have to be someone she knew?

But who?

And
why
?

What stranger could possibly hate her so much?

Fear, like an uncoiling snake, twisted and slithered inside of her, and she shivered.

Then she realized it wasn’t only fear that made her quiver. The air was chilly.

She remembered the complaint that Angela had made earlier. It hadn’t seemed important at the time.

But the room had been warm when Tina had first come in to use the computer, and now it was cool. How could the temperature have dropped so far in such a short time? She listened for the sound of the air conditioner, but the telltale whisper wasn’t issuing from the wall vents. Nevertheless, the room was much cooler than it had been only minutes ago.

With a sharp, loud, electronic snap that startled Tina, the computer abruptly began to churn out additional data, although she hadn’t requested any. She glanced at the printer, then at the words that flickered across the screen.

The message blinked and vanished from the screen. The printer fell silent.

The room was growing colder by the second.

Or was it her imagination?

She had the crazy feeling that she wasn’t alone. The man in black. Even though he was only a creature from a nightmare, and even though it was utterly impossible for him to be here in the flesh, she couldn’t shake the heart-clenching feeling that he was in the room. The man in black. The man with the evil, fiery eyes. The yellow-toothed grin. Behind her. Reaching toward her with a hand that would be cold and damp. She spun around in her chair, but no one had come into the room.

Of course. He was only a nightmare monster. How stupid of her.

Yet she felt that she was not alone.

She didn’t want to look at the screen again, but she did. She had to.

The words still burned there.

Then they disappeared.

She managed to break the grip of fear that had paralyzed her, and she put her fingers on the keyboard. She intended to determine if the words about Danny had been previously programmed to print out on her machine or if they had been sent to her just seconds ago by someone at another computer in another office in the hotel’s elaborately networked series of workstations.

She had an almost psychic sense that the perpetrator of this viciousness was in the building
now
, perhaps on the third floor with her. She imagined herself leaving her office, walking down the long hallway, opening doors, peering into silent, deserted offices, until at last she found a man sitting at another terminal. He would turn toward her, surprised, and she would finally know who he was.

And then what?

Would he harm her? Kill her?

This was a new thought: the possibility that his ultimate goal was to do something worse than torment and scare her.

She hesitated, fingers on the keyboard, not certain if she should proceed. She probably wouldn’t get the answers she needed, and she would only be acknowledging her presence to whomever might be out there at another workstation. Then she realized that, if he really was nearby, he already knew she was in her office, alone. She had nothing to lose by trying to follow the data chain. But when she attempted to type in her instruction, the keyboard was locked; the keys wouldn’t depress.

The printer hummed.

The room was positively arctic.

On the screen, scrolling up:

The screen glowed with those words—then went blank.

Again, she tried to feed in her questions. But the keyboard remained frozen.

She was still aware of another presence in the room. Indeed the feeling of invisible and dangerous companionship was growing stronger as the room grew colder.

How could he make the room colder without using the air conditioner? Whoever he was, he could override her computer from another terminal in the building; she could accept that. But how could he possibly make the air grow so cold so fast?

Suddenly, as the screen began to fill with the same seven-line message that had just been wiped from it, Tina had enough. She switched the machine off, and the blue glow faded from the screen.

As she was getting up from the low chair, the terminal switched itself on.

“Get you out of where?” she demanded. “The
grave
?”

She had to get a grip on herself. She had just spoken to the computer as if she actually thought she was talking to Danny. It wasn’t Danny tapping out those words. Goddamn it,
Danny was dead!

She snapped the computer off.

It turned itself on.

A hot welling of tears blurred her vision, and she struggled to repress them. She had to be losing her mind. The damned thing
couldn’t
be switching itself on.

She hurried around the desk, banging her hip against one corner, heading for the wall socket as the printer hummed with the production of more hateful words.

Tina stooped beside the wall outlet from which the computer received its electrical power and its data feed. She took hold of the two lines—one heavy cable and one ordinary insulated wire—and they seemed to come alive in her hands, like a pair of snakes, resisting her. She jerked on them and pulled both plugs.

The monitor went dark.

It remained dark.

Immediately, rapidly, the room began to grow warmer.

“Thank God,” she said shakily.

She started around Angela’s desk, wanting nothing more at the moment than to get off her rubbery legs and onto a chair—and suddenly the door to the hall opened, and she cried out in alarm.

Elliot Stryker halted on the threshold, surprised by her scream, and for an instant she was relieved to see him.

“Tina? What’s wrong? Are you all right?”

She took a step toward him, but then she realized that he might have come here straight from a computer in one of the other third-floor offices. Could he be the man who’d been harassing her?

“Tina? My God, you’re white as a ghost!”

He moved toward her.

She said, “Stop! Wait!”

He halted, perplexed.

Voice quavery, she said, “What are you doing here?”

He blinked. “I was in the hotel on business. I wondered if you might still be at your desk. I stopped in to see. I just wanted to say hello.”

“Were you playing around with one of the other computers?”

“What?” he asked, obviously baffled by her question.

“What were you doing on the third floor?” she demanded. “Who could you possibly have been seeing? They’ve all gone home. I’m the only one here.”

Still puzzled but beginning to get impatient with her, Elliot said, “My business wasn’t on the third floor. I had a meeting with Charlie Mainway over coffee, downstairs in the restaurant. When we finished our work a couple minutes ago, I came up to see if you were here. What’s wrong with you?”

She stared at him intently.

“Tina? What’s happened?”

She searched his face for any sign that he was lying, but his bewilderment seemed genuine. And if he were lying, he wouldn’t have told her the story about Charlie and coffee, for that could be substantiated or disproved with only a minimum of effort; he would have come up with a better alibi if he really needed one. He was telling the truth.

She said, “I’m sorry. I just . . . I had . . . an . . . an experience here . . . a weird . . .”

He went to her. “What was it?”

As he drew near, he opened his arms, as if it was the most natural thing in the world for him to hold and comfort her, as if he had held her many times before, and she leaned against him in the same spirit of familiarity. She was no longer alone.

Tina kept a well-stocked bar in one corner of her office for those infrequent occasions when a business associate needed a drink after a long work session. This was the first time she’d ever had the need to tap those stores for herself.

At her request, Elliot poured Rémy Martin into two snifters and gave one glass to her. She couldn’t pour for them because her hands were shaking too badly.

They sat on the beige sofa, more in the shadows than in the glow from the lamps. She was forced to hold her brandy snifter in both hands to keep it steady.

“I don’t know where to begin. I guess I ought to start with Danny. Do you know about Danny?”

“Your son?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Helen Mainway told me he died a little over a year ago.”

“Did she tell you how it happened?”

“He was one of the Jaborski group. Front page of the papers.”

Bill Jaborski had been a wilderness expert and a scoutmaster. Every winter for sixteen years, he had taken a group of scouts to northern Nevada, beyond Reno, into the High Sierras, on a seven-day wilderness survival excursion.

“It was supposed to build character,” Tina said. “And the boys competed hard all year for the chance to be one of those selected to go on the trip. It was supposed to be perfectly safe. Bill Jaborski was supposed to be one of the ten top winter-survival experts in the country. That’s what everyone said. And the other adult who went along, Tom Lincoln—he was supposed to be almost as good as Bill. Supposed to be.” Her voice had grown thin and bitter. “I believed them, thought it was safe.”

“You can’t blame yourself for that. All those years they’d taken kids into the mountains, nobody was even scratched.”

Tina swallowed some cognac. It was hot in her throat, but it didn’t burn away the chill at the center of her.

A year ago Jaborski’s excursion had included fourteen boys between the ages of twelve and eighteen. All of them were top-notch scouts—and all of them died along with Jaborski and Tom Lincoln.

“Have the authorities ever figured out exactly why it happened?” Elliot asked.

“Not why. They never will. All they know is
how.
The group went into the mountains in a four-wheel-drive minibus built for use on back roads in the winter. Huge tires. Chains. Even a snowplow on the front. They weren’t supposed to go into the true heart of the wilderness. Just into the fringes. No one in his right mind would take boys as young as twelve into the deepest parts of the Sierras, no matter how well prepared, supplied, and trained they were, no matter how strong, no matter how many big brothers were there to look out for them.”

Jaborski had intended to drive the minibus off the main highway, onto an old logging trail, if conditions permitted. From there they were going to hike for three days with snowshoes and backpacks, making a wide circle around the bus, coming back to it at the end of the week.

“They had the best wilderness clothing and the best down-lined sleeping bags, the best winter tents, plenty of charcoal and other heat sources, plenty of food, and two wilderness experts to guide them. Perfectly safe, everyone said. Absolutely, perfectly safe. So what the fuck went wrong?”

Tina could no longer sit still. She got up and began to pace, taking another swallow of cognac.

Elliot said nothing. He seemed to know that she had to go through the whole story to get it off her mind.

“Something sure as hell went wrong,” she said. “Somehow, for some reason, they drove the bus more than
four
miles off the main highway, four miles off and a hell of a long way
up
, right up to the damn clouds. They drove up a steep, abandoned logging trail, a deteriorated dirt road so treacherous, so choked with snow, so icy that only a fool would have attempted to negotiate it any way but on foot.”

The bus had run off the road. There were no guardrails in the wilderness, no wide shoulders at the roadside with gentle slopes beyond. The vehicle skidded, then dropped a hundred feet straight onto rocks. The fuel tank exploded. The bus opened like a tin can and rolled another hundred feet into the trees.